Category Archives: personal

The Excitable Optimism of Sekhnet

From time to time Sekhnet, who meets countless people during the course of her work gathering news for a national network, reports a fascinating conversation she had that relates to my life and plans.  She brings me a business card, or contact info written on a scrap of paper and urges me to call them.   Often things come to grief, since I am not always quick to make these potential contacts.   That most have so far been in vain is no excuse for my glass-half-empty pessimism.    

She heard a bright and funny man give a fantastic talk on becoming pitch perfect at sales meetings, during interviews of any and all kinds.  He pointed out that people have one chance to make a good first impression and clinch the deal, and that there are a hundred ways to blow it.  Read his book, aptly titled “Pitch Perfect” and you can weed out many of these ways, have a crisp phrase ready, delivered in the same winning style you see before you today, saying exactly enough to make your point crisply, and not one phrase more.  

Being pitch perfect is the difference between getting a major donation, or any kind of big yes, and getting that gassy baby smile and limp handshake at the end of a meeting too long by crucial moments.  The man’s talk and style were both excellent, she enjoyed it and found it valuable.  She bought his book, which I read cover to cover.  It was excellent.  

I took the next step and contacted his office to make an appointment for the four hour personalized master class.   It was, not surprisingly, $4,000.  I explained that I represented a small, money-strapped non-profit and was cheerfully told the tiny non-profit rate was $3,600.   My silence was met by an offer to do the half course, more than 60% as good as the full one, for only $2,000, certainly our budget could manage that.  

Well, I thought, the $2,00o, a quarter of our operating fund, could go for that or for two new animation set-ups.  I thanked her, even as a bit of bile was coming up in the back of my throat.

Sometimes helpful people, hearing my idea for the child-run interactive animation workshop, have suggested I pitch the idea on Shark Tank to get funding.   Shark Tank is a show where business owners try to strike deals to get funding from a group of wealthy sharks who evaluate the ideas looking for monster profits.

Experience has taught me the difference between what I was trying to sell and something an angel investor in the Shark Tank would salivate over. In Shark Tank the family that invented the fantastically lucrative Squatty Potty was looking for millions to take their product, a short plastic foot stool that made passing stools as easy and pleasant as operating a soft serve machine, to the next level, international super sales.   The investors were looking for a credible sign that every million they put in would have a good chance of turning into ten million for them.  It is straightforward.    

If the idea is to transform a boring public school classroom into a fun ninety minute imagination-fueled, problem-solving, peer-teaching playground where kids have the final say on every aspect of the product they are producing, a short bit of stop-motion animation, a process that leaves them collaborative, energized and engaged in learning and teaching, no angel investor worth his dorsal fin will so much as stop circling to sniff that particular patch of water for blood.  

“Sounds like a great idea, you got funding?  What’s your marketing budget?”   These are the first two questions anyone bright and practical asks when I finish my brief answer to “so, what have you been up to since last year?”  

“You have to find fellow idealists,” Sekhnet has always told me.  

I was referred to a non-profit called idealist.org, signed up.  Was invited to a mixer at a bar.   Went and met the people who worked for idealist.org.  They explained all the benefits of being a member.  I joined.  I haven’t had an email from them, or anyone else on the site, in years.  

I had an email from two guys who founded a nice outfit to introduce non-conformists with big society-improving ideas, a mutual help organization for idealistic types.  They would match people up according to their skills, interests and needs.  The first rule, when you met, was to listen to the other person’s idea and needs first and think about how you could help.  In the end, their emails stopped coming too.  It was a great idea, but I guess they didn’t have funding or an adequate marketing budget or business plan.

Having lunch with the sister of an old friend the subject of the nonprofit came up.  She thought it was a great project and then told me about a woman she’d recently met, a dynamic older woman, who was on the inside of Mayor Di Blasio’s Department of Education.  She was a great lady, and good friends with this woman’s good friend.  She shepherded many great new programs through the Education Department’s doors, knew how to get them funded and contracted as pilot programs, that was her speciality.  She was, literally the perfect person for me to meet.  In fact, we’d meet for Dim Sum, with the mutual friend, and I could run the idea by her at an informal meeting, that would be best.  

That offer turned into the old can-do idealist’s phone number being texted to me, followed by a series of supportive follow-up texts asking if I’d contacted her yet.  Presumably I was supposed to set up the informal Dim Sum meeting where the no pressure chat could unfold.  I called her a couple of times, introduced myself in short, hopefully well-pitched voice mails, I texted her this and then  this.   We never met for Dim Sum, nor did I ever hear back from her.  

It reminded me of the introduction I’d had a year earlier to the director of a large arts non-profit, with a twenty million dollar annual budget.  I was told this woman, a good friend of a close friend of mine, would love my idea and her well-funded organization could definitely help.  If our mutual friend had been present at the meeting, things might have gone better, the well-funded nonprofit could definitely have helped.  As it turned out, I was chided for my defeatist attitude before the meeting, felt dread on the way to the meeting, and the results afterwards were the opposite of helpful.    

Sekhnet remains undaunted.  Her mechanic’s daughter, it turns out, by pure whimsical chance, works at a nonprofit that features creative programs for public school children in Queens.  This friendly young woman was very excited about the student-run animation workshop, gave Sekhnet her card.  Sekhnet has learned about such things, knows that I’m currently concentrating on a book about the life and times of a man nobody’s ever heard of, and told the young idealist that it might be a while, but that I would get in touch with her.  

The same goes for the twenty-one year old idealist she spoke to in the computer department at Costco the other day.   He works at Costco and is completing a business degree at Baruch.  He and his brother love stop-motion, are idealists, think a student-run animation workshop for young kids sounds amazing and want to help.  Plus, he’s getting the business education to help with funding and marketing.  Win-win-win.  He was cautioned that it may take a while to hear from me.  

Thanksgiving I hear Sekhnet piping at me from across the room, calling me by my Christian name, if I was a Christian.  I never know what the deal is when I hear her urgently piping “Eliot!”   She’s talking with a smiling, friendly woman who it turns out works for Simon and Schuster.   She works in HR, hiring and firing like a demon, but she has found her home in publishing, after years in electronic media, and loves being around book people. She reads like a fiend since she’s been working there.  Sekhnet informs her I’ve written a book, I get a big smile.  

“It’s a manuscript, a first draft, around 700 pages.  It’s like wrestling with an anaconda at the moment, but I’m really enjoying it,” I say to the big smile.  

“I love book people,” she tells me, with that beautiful smile.  

I describe the idea that gets me out of bed every day, excited to write: a three-dimensional portrait of a great idealist who was also a monster, and how he rose from dire poverty to live the American Dream, a historian passionately involved in the historical events of his lifetime.  A dreamer and a destroyer of dreams.

I tell her that one day, as I was writing about his painful childhood, the skeleton of my father sat up in his grave to bitterly dispute something I’d just written.  I’d dismissed it at the time, went with it, had the chat, figured I could cut it later.  Then found him popping up again and again and now much of the ms. is an ongoing dialogue with the opinionated skeleton, a talk I look forward to every day.  

The smile continued as she told me it sounded cool, and that this kind of soul-searching memoir is currently a very hot genre and that if I find the right agent things could go well with this idea.  She then told us of a website where you can do a detailed search, by genre , of agents, and that no publisher will accept anything unless submitted by an agent.  Sekhnet jotted down the name of the website where I could find the highly specialized agent I will need to find.

I then told her everything I knew and felt about Jim Dale’s deightful audiobook performance of the marvelous Harry Potter books.  I promised her that she would love it, based on everything she’d told us about the books she liked best, then smiled, curtsied to Sekhnet, and went to have another muffin.  

Anatomy of an If-pology

For those sickened, as I was, by the recent extended recitation of my personal hurt over perceived mistreatment by a long-time writer friend, as I slowly processed the complicated toxins, please be forewarned.   This is the final bit.   Unless you’re interested in a dissection of an if-pology, please click away to something more diverting.

Here is a cool one I recommend, by a talented and philosophical cartoonist.  This one is also neat. 

For the fully annotated if-pology, which I offer in the hope it might be useful if you ever find yourself discomfited by an oddly unsatisfying apology, please read on.

Below is a writer friend’s apology, followed by my notes. You will find my take clarifying or proof that I am indeed the thin-skinned, vicious prig I was recently taken for.  

The writer had been hurt by something I posted here, felt personally and deliberately attacked and betrayed.   He assumed the worst of me after his outraged ex-wife forwarded the link to a poem I’d sent her.   You can be the judge of how entitled to his rage he was, the offending post is here too.  His tart email ended “I think you will agree we’re done here”.  

My relatively mild reply apparently surprised him, he thereafter wrote this apology, after reminding me again that I’d done something terrible to him that was kind of hard to forgive. Sadly, I find it irresistible as an example of a  textbook if-pology:

so let’s go back to april.(1)

i recall after our getting together you sending me some material and, as i remember, i read and responded to at least some  of it.(2)

it’s possible that i didn’t read it all, or perhaps i did and simply failed to respond.(3)

i simply don’t remember.(4)

but either way, it’s on me, and i am truly sorry because to you this was much more than a casual oversight. (5)

but, shit, man, all you had to do was call or drop me a folo-up note in may or june. (6)

i did not know you were hurt until i read that screed yesterday. (7)

i had some idea you might be pissed at me when you didn’t respond to my invite to the giants game in sept, (but, again, it appears now that i mis-sent that email).(8)

seems we currently have three choices:

1) we could cease and desist from all further communication as of this afternoon;

2) we could keep on emailing each other, which would likely create even more misunderstanding;

3) or the two of us could get together and see if we can work this out and maybe remain friends going forward.

 #2 doesn’t work for me. i’m okay with #1 if that’s what you like, but i’d be amenable to #3 if you are.   let me know your preference.(9)

NOTES

1) in April we’d had a lovely four hour chat over dinner, the final hour or so about the manuscript I’m working on, which was then 300 pages, about my tragic, aggravating father’s life.   I’d mentioned I’d just posted some sections on a brand new website I was working on and he expressed great interest in reading it. 

2) I never heard a word back about any of it.  Our email string on the subject contains no reference by my friend to any of the pages I’d sent or any comment about the brand new Book of Irv website which I was regularly updating with new photos and pieces. The email string includes two or three subsequent links to other pieces I’d sent him.

 “as i remember, i read and responded to at least some of it” implies I that I could well be mistaken in my belief that he never replied.

The only other email I had from him in the days after was the mysterious:

from the late, great New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton, speaking of his novels and screenplays: “Although I have not exactly been published or produced, I have had some things professionally typed.”

3) This note, and notes 4-8, are from his P.O.V.

I acknowledge the possibility that you might be right and I might be mistaken.  I’ll allow it’s possible I might have never given you any response.

4) it goes without saying, in light of this remark, that whatever you wrote clearly didn’t make that much of an impression on me one way or the other.   Nor did your website contain anything that notable or memorable.

5) “Either way” whether you hyper-sensitively, nay hysterically, blocked out that I actually had replied, which I believe I probably did, or whether, as you say, I never replied, it’s on me.  

“To you” is the key qualifier to this otherwise 100% sincere if-pology since, to you, being ignored, as you imagine you were, was hurtful.  

Granted, of course, that not everyone would have reacted this way, but since you did, I am truly, truly sorry.  

The oversight was casual in any event, you oversensitive fucking irrationally angry twat.

6) This “but” points out how easily you could have prevented this hurt and hostility on your part. Shit, man, if I didn’t reply to three or four requests for my feedback, you should have just sent me five, six or seven like anyone else would have done.  Clearly, jerk-off, I didn’t do it on purpose, if I even did it at all, which I reserve the right to argue I never even did.  

7)  This highly offensive post, as I already told you now three or four times, was a screed (a lengthy rant) an aggressive and unprovoked attack, a clear and unambiguous personal public betrayal.   Open to debate how vicious or unfair the screed was, perhaps, but you cannot deny that I was very hurt by it, hurt enough to write you off as the intentionally vicious fuck you clearly are.  

8) It may be fair to ask, if a simple folo-up would have solved any misunderstanding after you didn’t hear back from me, why I assumed you were mad at me for not replying to my email you, I regrettably admit, probably never received, why I didn’t just call or resend the invite instead of assuming you’d  silently rejected the invitation I mis-sent and never followed up on.  

But surely, someone as sensitive as you apparently are to a casual and unintentional slight, can see why I felt you were acting pissily when I never heard back from you to the email invite I sent but I guess you never got.  

It may also be fair to concede that you never failed to reply to anything I ever sent you, at the address where we exchanged numerous emails over the years.  

But that is not the point here anyway, you are the vicious asshole here, not me.

9) Me speaking now:   I wrote back proposing choice 4– I would call him whenever he liked and we could talk.  A phone call was not fully acceptable to him, presumably it would be hard for me to adequately grovel unless we met in person.  

And then, sub silentio, as the old Latins used to say, he added:

and for the record, I will never tell you what I think of that book you are optimistically working on, needy butt cheek.

After chewing things over, and in consideration of his clearly offended manhood, I opted for option 5, which was basically an elegant, silent restatement of his option 1.

Blog

I don’t know all the reasons a person sits down regularly and puts their thoughts, feelings, pictures, sounds out on to the internet.  Not everybody does this, though many millions do.  Here are a few of the small rewards that make me do it most days of the week.

By putting things up on the “internets” (one of President Dubya’s many great phrases) I exert myself, cheerfully, to make my writing fit for “publication”.  I have to polish it to a certain standard before I hit “publish”.  I don’t put it up for the perusal of friends and strangers until the writing is as clear and flowing as I can make it.  

I read it over many times as I write, combing out sloppy, confusing writing whenever I find myself ensnared in it.  When I read it again on-line, I often go back and make small changes to make every sentence as good as I can.  I am exacting about saying exactly what I mean to say.  My writing has improved since I’ve been putting it on-line regularly.

Before putting something on-line I have to decide if I stand behind every part of it.  I’m an opinionated bastard, no question.  I don’t like to argue these days, though I haven’t lost the ability — I’ll use my words if pushed against the wall– but I still need to express my point of view, what I’ve learned from six decades of ass-kickings.  So that aspect of not being a damn chicken-shit bastard and actually standing behind what I sell is another important part of this almost daily ritual.  

The previous sentence contains an inside reference.  I get to explain it here, since there’s nobody telling me to stick to the script, and I’m free to digress, another reason I love this particular forum.  I don’t like to leave the reader hanging any more than I like to be left hanging.  

If you think about it, nobody should be left hanging, though most of us quite often are, almost always when it comes to the services we purchase from the grasping artificial humans called corporations, those omnipresent psychopaths that rule the global and local economy.  Or by the actual workings of our idealistic and inspiring democracy, now that I think about it.

Chicken-shit bastard, then.  Years ago a friend in Tennessee sent me a tape of prank calls made by a hippie who lived in a fairly rural area near Knoxville in the 1970s or 1980s. The recordings circulated widely on cassette tapes and were very popular throughout that part of the country.  The creative caller is still remembered fondly by those of us who heard his witty provocations.  Sadly, he died young, of a terrible disease, I think.  Happily, he left us his calls to people like Ed at Ed’s Auto.

He put on a thick rural southern accent (since he knew Ed and had bought auto parts at his store) and told Ed a long, cock and bull story about how Ed needed to pay for massive repairs on his car under some far-fetched and insane theory.   “Bullshit,” said Ed.   “Maybe I’ll replace the damn rims, I’m not paying to rebuild your entire fucking car.”  Things escalated quickly between the skillful manipulator and his carefully chosen macho southern victims. Rages were whipped up effortlessly, followed by mutual threats of catastrophic ass-whuppings.   

In my favorite moment on the tape, and my father’s too — the old man had howled at the skill of this provocateur in whipping up the manful rage of his victims — the caller gently calms the irate store owner down after insanely provoking him.  It’s a beautiful, human moment.  

“Whell, shit…” he says soothingly “you don’t have to get all mad about it… shoot…”.  They both laugh.  There is almost a sigh as the store owner finally feels heard by this prick who was just mercilessly provoking him. He lets his guard down, it’s just two humans talking for a few seconds. The store owner’s relief that the insane unprovoked attack is over is palpable.   You clearly hear him relax on the recording.  

Then the caller starts back in, in a reasonable enough tone “well… it just seems to me like a damn chicken shit bastard ought to stand behind what he sells”.  Which sets the store owner’s rage instantly back on full boil, his voice goes up an octave, impolite invitations to exchange fisticuffs are hollered and the fight is immediately back on.

So, just to recap: I ain’t no damn chicken shit bastard, if you catch my damn drift.  I mean what I say and I say what I mean.  I’m not here to be a damn go-go dancer for you.

There is also the pleasure of putting thoughts and feelings together, telling a story coherently, making a sometimes complicated point plainly.   There is the technical satisfaction of using words to do this, and the emotional satisfaction of reading back the clear expression of something that took a lot of effort to render in words.

There is the thought, sometimes, of the words reaching the ideal reader, sitting at a computer somewhere in the world, perhaps in the middle of the night.  In Kurt Vonnegut’s case it was his sister, who he always had in mind as he wrote to his eventual audience of millions of strangers.  

I have no actual person in mind as I type, except maybe myself, the writing needs to be clear and interesting to me, the reader, but my mother’s face when she handed me back something I wrote and told me it was “wonderful” would not be a bad one to think of from time to time.   The idea of having my thoughts and feelings reach and touch someone I’ve never met, in the form of carefully arranged words: pretty cool.  

There is the fantasy aspect, one that probably motivates many bloggers, instagrammers, spammers, lunch photo sharers, facebookers, selfie snappers, snapchatters.  The fantasy is that I am already a great writer, with a big reserve of interesting and important things to say, and that I’m giving away brilliant products of my disciplined imagination for free.  I sometimes imagine, after posting a given piece, that certain readers are going to be moved.   And that, in the end, I will sell my work widely and talk nonchalantly to people like Terry Gross and Leonard Lopate about it.

It’s a fantasy of fame, I suppose, shared by billions with computers and cellphone cameras.  That this fantasy is shared by, literally, millions and millions who are not great writers, who have little, or nothing interesting to say, does nothing to dim this vision for the rest of us brilliant fantasists.  For all anyone knows, many of us are right.  Who’s to say in this vast, virtual marketplace of unsold ideas?    

There is also the human need to talk and be heard when our feelings are stirred up.  If we talk to friends, or even email them, about some of these unpleasantly stirred feelings, we can place unintended and sometimes terrible burdens on them.  I recently was surprised to be put through a familiar trauma by a person of my long acquaintance who I, naively, in hindsight, considered a friend.   I wrote about it endlessly here, in several iterations, before I was able to come to some rather obvious conclusions about the best course of action.  It took me literally a few days, and a few thousand words here, to calm down.

Had I restricted my processing to these pages, which can be read, scanned or skipped, I’d have done a great kindness to the couple of harried friends I vented to.  I’d put each of them in a tough spot– agree with the reasonableness of my hurt feelings or risk my already free-flowing anger flowing to you.   It comes to this: we expect our friends to extend the benefit of the doubt to us.  It’s kind of a minimum expectation of a friend, that they won’t rush forward with a sturdy rope when an angry mob gathers howling for our blood. 

Sometimes a long-time friend, hurt for whatever reason, will accuse you of doing just that to them.  Then it is a contest– who has really done the other wrong?   The friendliest thing to do is put yourself in the other person’s situation and realize: shit, I’d have felt the same way if someone had done that to me.   This realization should be followed by an apology and a promise to do better in the future.  

Taking ownership of causing a friend’s hurt requires honesty, maturity and a humility not everyone always has.  Sometimes it’s easier to just go: well, you complain about me, but after I didn’t keep my promise YOU NEVER RETURNED THE MISSED CALL FROM ME THAT I KNOW YOU FUCKING GOT!  

The details of this kind of situation, I promise you, are always ugly. Better to process them where they can be taken in quietly or ignored, once they are set out as objectively  as the writer can.  So writing here has a therapeutic and practical value, sometimes, and spares friends the worst of my hurt when I am stung.

Then there is the zone I am in while composing one of these posts.  The focus is on one thing, one thought.  It is also something I enjoy as I work and that I do as well as I can.  In this zone of concentration I do what everyone in the world does after they head off to do their chosen work.  All of the daily annoyances and distractions, the many small things that conspire and are sometimes merciless in combination, disappear.  The need to focus on doing good work quiets the clamor of the many tiny demons.  

Whatever else I may be thinking or feeling, I need to focus my full attention on this pair of shoes that needs to be re-soled for the long-time customer who is coming in to pick them up at five.  My reputation and livelihood rest on making an excellent repair and getting the comfortable old shoes back to the customer when I promised her she’d have them.  She’ll be passing my shop after a shit day and her perfectly repaired shoes, delivered when I told her they would be ready, will be one good thing that will happen to her today.  

Of course, here there is no shop, no customer, nothing but the things I have noted above.  Which makes it more beautiful in a way, and more pure.  I am fixing this invisible shoe because I love the work.

Enough, Elie

“You know, if you read those last few posts of yours, you appear to be a man obsessed.  Jesus, Elie, some fuck doesn’t send you back a comment on your manuscript, I mean, boo fucking hoo, welcome to the monkey house,” said the skeleton with a yawn, or pantomiming a scream.

I’m aware of that, dad.  It’s not that the fuck didn’t send me back a comment.  It’s that he then did what you always did, what that insane former judge once did when he unleashed a torrent of rage on me when he suddenly felt vulnerable.

“Uh oh,” said the skeleton, with mock terror.  

I’ve got to keep this brief, at the risk of nauseating my two or three loyal readers.  The fuck didn’t send back a comment.  It kind of made sense.  He’s a distracted guy who cranks out short 1,000 word pieces for $250 a shot, keeps ’em light.  He’s a craftsman, an excellent writer, a great raconteur and, also, a long-time professional writer.  

I was hoping for his feedback, he’s a very smart guy and he expressed what seemed like genuine fascination with the Book of Irv project, but when I didn’t get any feedback, after a few tries, I moved along with the writing, as you know.  There was no point to keep asking him for something he clearly wasn’t ready, or willing, to give.  I kept writing.

“Nursing a grudge,” said the skeleton.  

Sure, if you like.  I suppose I concluded he wasn’t that much of a friend after the third time I asked for his notes and heard nothing back from him.  

“Not an unreasonable conjecture,” said the skeleton.

When I got an email from him recently asking if I was pissed at him for some reason because I’d ignored an email he sent, one it turned out I never got because he’d accidentally sent it to a phantom mailbox, and, although he never followed up when he didn’t hear back (as he’d chided me for not doing),  he felt a little hurt, the irony of it was too beautiful to ignore.  The irony was fucking gorgeous, dad.

My appreciation of that irony, which I did my best to capture in 1,000 words, was apparently forwarded to him by his ex, mortally offended on his behalf and feeling betrayed that I had, apparently, been vicious by referring to the fact that he didn’t need the $250, although I expected, if he’d been honest, he’d concede he’d have been annoyed to have it plucked from his hand by his editor friend, as the fellow had done to me, accepting a piece and later rejecting it.

“I’ll pretend I followed all that.  This guy’s ex-wife was offended on her former husband’s behalf and sent him the piece that also offended, nay, infuriated him?” said the skeleton.  

Bingo.  I suppose my callous observation that he doesn’t need the $250 was my treacherous betrayal.  I was supposed by this snide crack, I surmise, to have brutally laid bare what must never be spoken of.  It would be obvious to even a casual reader what “doesn’t need the $250” really means, and it certainly wasn’t just merely to illustrate his lack of empathy toward a friend who’d gotten slightly screwed.  Nobody, apparently, is supposed to know the shameful secret that this guy is sitting on a shitload of cash, stocks, bonds, etc. I guess, somewhere in the twenty, thirty million dollar range as of twenty years ago.

You know, he’s a salt of the earth working man, who has always worked hard for a living, sometimes in low-paid jobs to make ends meet, this fortune he long ago inherited is a closely held, and apparently humiliating, secret that has nothing to do with anything and it’s certainly not his long-time good friends’ fucking business nor his ex-wife’s business to run her fucking mouth about, whatever the original context may have been for her disclosure.

“Uh, OK,” said the skeleton, understandably beginning to lose interest in the whole thing.  

I kept writing about the details of the situation the last few days, after furious, terse emails from both of them decrying my vicious, unprovoked hatchet job.  It was my only  way to process  it.  Writing allowed the cortisol and adrenaline coursing through my system to dissipate.  I had to dissect exactly what the flood of fight or flight chemicals was caused by, and sorting my thoughts and editing them was the only way I could do that.   As I got a better understanding of the reason I felt as hurt as I did, the situation began to make more sense.  I was finally able to calm down and come to a reasonable resolution of the whole thing.  

“And the flood of stress hormones was caused by me?” said the skeleton.  

No, dad, you’re cool now.  It was caused by the guy’s immediate and enraged reaction when I finally asked him why he’d never commented on the pages I sent him.  He aggressively blamed me for being hurt without cause, told me anybody but an asshole would have just followed up again, and was enraged that I had been so unkind to him.  His tart email ended: That being said, i think you’ll agree that you and I are done here.  Then his ex jumped in, too incensed to use her words, and started clawing at my eyes.

“Sounds fair enough,” said the skeleton of my father, “they sound completely nuts.  Fuck ’em.”

Not with your dick, dad.

Knots

When I was a sprout, in the late sixties or early seventies, a brief period of creativity when there seemed to be wonderful possibilities for the human and natural world, there was a book called Knots.  It was written by a Scottish psychiatrist named R. D. Laing, about whom Wikipedia offers this great line:  Many former colleagues regarded him as a brilliant mind gone wrong but there were some who thought Laing was somewhat psychotic.

As I recall the short book was a series of poetic vignettes about things like Complementary Schismogenesis (“creating of division”), somewhat gnarly psychological concepts involved in relationships, laid out, with some wit, in simple, down to earth scenarios, or dialogues.  As I dimly remember the book, they were more elegant versions of things like:

Guy is very sensitive to being ignored, interprets silence as anger.   He writes a play about the pain of being ignored, asks his friend the playwright if he’ll have a look.  Playwright cheerfully agrees, takes the manuscript and never writes back about Guy’s play.  Guy asks the playwright three times for his feedback.   Each time he gets a short, witty reply unrelated to his play.

Months pass.  Guy gets another unrelated note from the playwright, complaining that Guy is now ignoring him.  Guy writes an arguably nasty poem about the playwright, or at least one the playwright might find insulting.   Playwright’s attention is called to the poem, which is tacked to a small door around the back, by a troll.  The poem infuriates him, he seethes about the unprovoked attack, attacks Guy as an oversensitive jerk for not simply asking a fourth time when he didn’t hear back the first three times. 

“Plus,” says the playwright, “I said I’d look at his fucking play, I didn’t promise I’d say anything about it, Jesus.”

Complimentary Schismogenesis, I am told, is when two opposites are locked in some kind of conflict, neither getting what they need out of the arrangement, the attempts of each to resolve it, coming from opposite orientations, only make the problem more intractable, tighten the knot.   The schism continues to deepen as the two struggle cluelessly in opposite directions to heal the underlying fissure.

If we assume everyone is somewhat fucked up, damaged by life, laboring under certain sometimes vexing disabilities, friends are those whose asshole side we are able to overlook.  The friend has other lovable qualities we value that counterbalance the bad tendencies we all have.  We extend the benefit of the doubt to friends, a benefit we do not readily confer on random people we encounter.  

I told a friend recently that whatever other problems we may have had with each other over the years, we both are confident that neither of us would, seeing the other strapped in the electric chair, throw the switch before insisting that every single witness had a chance to speak.  He agreed.

I got a short, infuriated email today, keeping it simple, telling me I must agree that I’m dead to the writer of the email.  I read it to an old friend who immediately suggested I call the guy and see if I could placate him.  I told him I’ve already written back, trying to be gentle, comparing the guy’s hasty, angry email to an arrow let fly in a spasm of anger, an arrow that can’t be called back.  I told him I’d replied as mildly as I could and wasn’t sure there was anything to be achieved by calling this angry fellow who had already done the prosecutor, witness, judge and jury bit in very short order.

During the call to my friend I had an email back from the infuriated man.  I was reluctant to read it so soon after his “you’re dead to me” note.  Curiosity finally got the best of me.  He placed conditions on our possibly remaining friends, reminding me again that, in his opinion, I had attacked him viciously.  As for what I claimed he had done, he certainly hadn’t meant to do it, if he even did do it, which he was not prepared to admit.  Plus, if I was hurt by his behavior, it was my own fault for not telling him he was being an insensitive jerk since obviously he hadn’t been aware of it.

It got me thinking about the nature of friendship, whether friends ever get the right to have a temper tantrum, ignore your needs and rant angrily at you until they are satisfied.  I suppose there are certain friends who have earned the right to do that one time, maybe twice, for good cause, and get a pass.  Then, since they are good friends, they calm down and apologize for their outpouring of anger, and are able to see the situation from your point of view and promise to try to do better in the future.

I have to think about this proposed detente more, since my general policy is once somebody shows me raw rage, that savage inability to empathize that is characteristic of righteous fury, there is really no coming back from that.

Or, rather, without an honest and mutually vulnerable exchange, there is only the possibility of returning to a false and fragile peace, ready to be set ablaze the next time a spark comes near the short, highly flammable  fuse. Another chance to prove to yourself, and intimates, that you have mastered the urge to strike back in kind, a fairly paltry reward for a very strenuous bit of forbearance.

Getting to the Heart of Things

We live in a largely superficial society, sadly enough.  Authentic emotion is often suppressed in favor of putting on the smiling face of the winner.  The only emotions everyone in America is free to express are happiness and rage, which is a fucking shame. We are warned not to advertise that you feel sad, unless the provocation is extreme and obvious.  In the case of a death, or mass murder, nobody could blame you for feeling sadness.  In fact, you’d be a monster not to be sad in the aftermath of a tragedy.  

But sadness for no real cause?  They have medications for that.  Only a loser is sad for no reason.    That all this is clearly bullshit designed to foster the inauthentic, unexaminable life of the acquisitive consumer has nothing to do with it.   Drive a winner car and you’ll feel better about yourself.  Pretending you’re not a loser is half the battle, the constant commercial assures us.  

I have a friend who’s an excellent writer.  He was a professional writer for many years, a deep thinker and a man of deep feelings.  It seems to be part of his professional credo that the deepest feelings do not belong in writing one does for pay.    He advised me to keep it light when I was sending things to his friend, the gatekeeper for an online publisher, for $250 a pop.   He writes a 1,000 word anecdote in an hour, eats lunch, gives the piece a final polish and by dinnertime he gets the thumbs up and a check for $250.  Of the fifty or so he’s sent in, only one has ever been rejected and none has ever needed to be revised in any way.

I scored on the first two I sent in, and it was great, even if my pieces were a bit darker than most of the others posted on the on-line magazine. Even as a few of my thoughts were muddled by a clumsy editor trying to earn his keep.  Then the hoop I had to jump through for my $250 was made smaller and smaller.  

The third piece I sent was accepted for publication, and I smiled as I tallied another $250 score in my notebook.  Weeks went by and I didn’t see it on-line, nor was there any check.  I inquired.  “Oh, I could have sworn I emailed you that I reconsidered, we’re not using it. Beautifully written and powerful, but, oddly, too personal for a personal anecdote.”

My writer friend told me over dinner to shrug it off, keep ’em light.  He keeps ’em light, but I wonder how easily he’d shrug off having the $250 snatched back after the piece was accepted.   He doesn’t need the money, so there’s that, but, still, it didn’t sit right with me that he’d feel nothing about having $250 plucked out of his pocket.

Later the two of us had dinner and I described the Book of Irv to him.  He’d had family traumas aplenty, but his father was apparently a good and gentle soul who always treated him well.  He told me it was a fascinating project, trying to conjure the complicated wonderful, monstrous Dreaded Unit father I had described to him over the years.  

As we said goodbye he told me he was looking forward to reading some of the manuscript.  I told him I’d send him the link to several selections, which I did when I got home.  I sent the earliest incarnation of the Book of Irv site (link) and told him how much I looked forward to his take on it.  I thought this piece (link) in particular, about my father asking me hopelessly for Detroit Tiger scores all through my childhood, would resonate with him.  He is a huge sports fan, currently writing a book on college basketball.

The next email I had from him read: 

from the late, great New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton, speaking of his novels and screenplays:”Although I have not exactly been published or produced, I have had some things professionally typed.”

Outside of that zen koan, I never heard a word back about the pages I’d sent him.

In fairness to him, he is famous for being an affable space cadet. Once, in a restaurant, his wife’s chair fell backwards, she almost fell with it, and he didn’t seem to notice, absorbed as he was finishing his anecdote.  Good natured obliviousness is one of his known characteristics.  I figured he was just being himself and I later sent him a few other Irv pieces, asking what he thought.  I  never heard a peep.  

Our email conversation petered out after he wrote, of my comparing my frustration trying to get a reply from a promising business contact who was not responding to root canal:

“Have to disagree — based on 30 yrs of extreme periodontistry, molars and their double roots are worse.”

We’d had a good laugh over dinner last April recalling Mel Brooks’ genius definition of tragedy and comedy.  “Tragedy is when I break my fingernail, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die.”

I was truly at a loss to account for his silence about my work.  Since we rarely talk more than once or twice a year, I put it out of my head and kept writing.

Yesterday I wrote a piece about sports and sent it to him, hoping the note found him well and telling him the piece made me think of him, a one time competitive tennis player and a seasoned teller of tales I have always enjoyed swapping yarns with.

To my surprise, he wrote back instantly, telling me he assumed I was angry with him since I’d never written back to his several emails.  I checked and the last emails I had from him were things he forwarded, months ago.  I wrote telling him this and he replied that he must have sent the personal emails I’d ignored to the wrong address.

I don’t often write poems, but sometimes they seem the most direct way to process and express a specific thing.  On the subway an hour later I found myself writing:

Funny as my broken fingernail,
your fatal manhole, 
me mad at you
because silent?
Huh?
The silence started here, 
when I last wrote you in April,
not to be thin-skinned
about it.
I just figured
you were by far
the tougher guy.

Besides, I’m in deep
conversation
with the dead
while you,
disinclined for the dark stuff,
pursue real-world business,
things that can be put cleanly on a ledger.

ii  
I am drawn
as by the earth’s powerful magnet
to the darker core
of the thing itself.  
Pretentious, perhaps, to say
to those who enjoy light,
simplicity,
a bracing lack of confusion.  

Odd, how unlike the
nightmare some seem to fear,
this probing in the darkness
feels to me,
when it is going well.  

Others, I am assured,
resist this
sort of thing
with all their strength.  

Me, I yield
to a greater curiosity
pulling my thoughts like gravity,
pushing inside of the thing,
the thing that struggles, wild,
never to reveal
its entire mystery.

My Proudest Sports Moment

Sports is a metaphor for a lot of things, many of them fairly mundane if not moronic.  But one very beautiful and meaningful thing is sportsmanship.  Playing fair, and cleanly, and being a good teammate, is no small metaphor for how a person should always try to live, even as it is largely a neglected art on the professional level where trash talk and loudly stinking millionaire egotism has become the norm in our sickened unto the death society.

Top personal contender for my proudest sports moment was a long, grueling contest I had on a paddle ball court in Queens with an Israeli who kept assuring his friend, waiting to play the winner on the only court available, that he’d beaten me many times, that I was shit, that he’d kick my ass easily, that I was lucky as a bitch every time I made a good shot.   In his defense, he said all this in Hebrew and had no idea I understood everything he was saying.  

He soon had me down 9-2 in a 15 point game, then 12-3.   Then I just got sick of hearing his bullshit and wound up beating him in triple or quadruple overtime.  You have to win by two when the game is tied at 14, 15, 16, etc. and in the end I did.   He was like a wet, wrung-out rag as his friend started on to the court to play me.

I graciously gave them the court, but not before turning to my opponent, putting a hand on his shoulder, and telling him in flowing colloquial Hebrew “this happened to you, sweetheart, because it wasn’t enough for you to play the game and win– you wanted to annihilate me….”.  The look on his face was indescribable and his friend had a very hard time not pissing himself as he fell over in hysterics.  I waved goodbye and walked off, feeling like a true champion.  I remember feeling like Bruce Lee.

But that was an ego-gratifying event in a sport I had decent skill in.   The true number one moment in my life playing sports was this one, years later, with much less personal glory in it for me, but much more illustrative of the way I have always tried to live.

I taught a semester of French (a language I mangle badly) at the Frederick Douglass Academy, a public middle school in East Harlem, directly across the East River from Yankee Stadium.   I was hired because the dynamic principal, Lorraine Monroe, hated her French teacher and wanted to get rid of him.  I’d been working in every kind of weather (there were many blizzards that winter) as a sub at the attached elementary school, been screwed by the moron principal of the other place, who reneged on her offer of a full time job, and I went to the other side of the building to say goodbye to Ms. Monroe.

“Widaen, do you speak French by any chance?” she asked me.  I told her I was taking a French translation test at CCNY in a few weeks to complete my Masters requirements.  That was good enough for her.

I rehearsed the line I delivered with a Gallic shrug when the French department chair asked me how my French was.    “Le Francais n’est pas exactement mon metier, you know,” here I gave the nonchalant little shrug and added what I didn’t know how to say in French “but I can get by”.  He nodded, good enough for him.  I was hired for an extended joke term as French teacher for several classes of 8th and 9th graders.

At the school there were several Teach for America teachers, America’s brightest and most idealistic young graduates, who taught for a year or two in inner city schools before going on to their graduate studies and lucrative and fabulous medical, legal, financial careers.  

Toward the end of the year there was a school sports day and Lorraine Monroe walked her entire school and staff a couple of miles across Harlem to the State Park built on top of the sewage treatment plant on the Hudson River in West Harlem.   The Park was impressive, a giant running track, many basketball courts, both indoor and outdoor, a weight room, tennis courts, an indoor pool.   This particular day the air flow was moving the right way and it did not smell like the million tons of human waste being processed directly under us.  In fairness to the many Harlemites who had protested its construction, on many days the whole neighborhood now does smell like shit.

When we got to the track, one of the young Teach for America guys, a tennis pro, I’d heard, challenged me to a foot race. He was ten years younger than me, and wiry, but the kids seemed to want to see the race, so I said ‘sure’.  I was amazed by the number of kids who were noisily rooting for me as we ran.   He claimed he won, but if he did, it was by less than a step.  A surprisingly slow motherfucker for a young tennis pro, I remember thinking.  I probably said as much to him at the time.

But that was not the great sports moment.  It came an hour or two later, when I walked into a gym where a full court basketball game was going on.  For some reason the tennis pro and an even more athletic Teach for America guy were on one team, the other team was all kids.  The team with the two adults was beating them something like 45-6 when I stepped on to the court for the side that was having its ass kicked.  

I don’t recall taking a single shot, or pulling down a single board, and I never was a very good basketball player.    I just fell into the point guard role.  I kept calmly talking sense, distributing the ball, pointing out a guy who wasn’t covered, getting everyone back on defense.  

In a very short time the game was tied.  I remember the way my teammates changed their demeanor, from whipped dogs to the clearly better team.  I remember the shock on the two young superstar teacher’s faces as the seesaw pivoted, the cautious way they started to play, the shots they were suddenly bricking.  

I don’t remember the final outcome.  I think I probably left before the end of the game, rotated back out and left the gym, never found out who won or lost, I truly didn’t give a shit. 

It remains my proudest sports moment.

Dog Days

The dog days of summer, dear diary, are heavily upon us here in New York City.   The radio warns of a fourth straight day of heat alert, real-feel temperatures again well above 100 with humidity to melt you.  Keep your pets inside, air-conditioner on high, the expert on the radio advises.   Check on the old people next door, make sure they have not parboiled.   The city opens “cooling centers” where sweat-soaked, stinking citizens can come and recover in super-cooled public rooms scattered around the more working class neighborhoods.

I am a complainer by nature, so it will surprise no-one to hear me bitch about lifting my head from a wet pillow, unpeeling myself from the wet sheets and picking up the thermometer I’d dragged up to the bedroom late last night.  I smirked as I read “95”.    I nodded grimly, this all figures, I said to myself, possibly out loud, as I began to mutter and staggered downstairs to get something to drink to restore some of the lost hydration I’d left soaking the bed.

A pair of bare feet at the bottom of the stairs startled me, I caught the next mumbled syllable in my throat.  It was Sekhnet, waiting for a call-back from work, stretched out near the cat, both of them vaguely in the warm wind of a tower fan, the only thing standing between any of us and certain death from heat stroke.   There is a tower fan next to me now as I write, bringing semi-cool air to my left armpit and side, wicking away the freely flowing sweat. I dare not write much longer, for fear of burning out this laptop in the 95 degree heat up here.  

Sekhnet was somber there on the living room floor.  We’d trapped three feral kittens the last few days, had them neutered by a vet a friend recommended, with certificates from a nonprofit making each wild animal’s care come in at not much more than a hundred and thirty dollars.  The two I picked up at the vet’s yesterday, after their hysterectomies, cried all the way home.  It was pitiful.  I was glad Sekhnet wasn’t there, her sobs would have drowned out the wails of the miserable little cats.

These feral cats have brutal, short lives in Sekhnet’s garden, though she cares for them like they were her own pets.  An old one lives to be two or three.  We have seen many generations now, and each generation has ended badly, dead kittens found here and there virtually every season, the older ones simply disappearing.  A dead kitten was found today, one of the almost full-grown males from Mama Kitten’s previous litter.  The grey, tiger striped corpse was found under the Chan’s apricot tree.  Sekhnet had Joe open the contractor bag so she could identify the dead cat.

“Scratchy,” she told me, and urged me not to mention it to the younger brother of the neighbor next door if I see him across the garden fence, to let his older brother tell him when he gets home from work.   The younger brother is a sad, limited man.  He has some kind of mental problems that erupt in screams sometimes, once in a while the cops are called in.   Not much danger of me running into the brother, or anyone else, as I won’t be spending more than a moment out there today, and certainly not a second at the garden fence.

“Mama Kitten had her litter, as I told you she was,” said Sekhnet, “she came by today and she’s not pregnant any more.”  Mama Kitten had her first litter at the age of six or seven months.  Three kittens, two of whom survived, one of whom survives today (the third is the corpse in Joe Chan’s contractor bag).  The runt of that litter, cute, spunky Dobbie (named for his long ears which made him look like J.K. Rowling’s house elf) made a nice meal for a red-tailed hawk, as far as we can tell.

We watched the two surviving kittens of that first litter eventually drive Mama Kitten out of the garden and take the turf for themselves.  Talk about ungrateful fucking offspring.  Talk about the cruelty of nature.  (Talk about a metal laptop heating almost to frying pan temperature…).  She’d come around to visit, always affectionate– rare in a feral cat.  She’d come to trust Sekhnet and me, would rub her face on our legs, let us pet her one stroke as she’d walk the length of her body under our hand.  

One day, as all the feral mother cats around here have always done, she came to the garden to introduce her new kittens to their benefactor, Sekhnet.  She marched four of them past, three with white faces like Dobbie’s, one who looked like her tiny twin.  Of those four, three survived (one disappeared a week or two ago, probably lunch for a red-tail).  All three have now been neutered (though it seems the runt may not be up for the challenge of survival– not having taken a bite since returning from the vet’s yesterday, staying out of sight) and…

“Mama Cat came by, skinny again,” reported Sekhnet somberly.  In a nest somewhere nearby she has her next litter, four or more adorable little doomed kittens born on a very muggy day in hell.   Mama Kitten was the one we were trying to trap, to have her spayed and the embryonic kittens aborted, but she was too wary, too close to giving birth by the time we arranged with our friends to come by with the traps and expertise in how to catch the ferals so they could be released back into the wild in a way that would not increase their already too large numbers.  

“She loved the turkey, which is what we should bait the trap with, once she reappears with her new batch of kids, once they’re weaned,” said Sekhnet.  “She hated the sardines though, she gave me a very dirty look and jumped back when I offered them.   Mini-Me ate the sardines, though Mama Kitten hissed at me for offering them to her.”  

The mother kitten began hissing at her kids when she became pregnant again, making sure they were on their own before she brought the next batch into the world.  So far this beautiful little cat, now little more than a year old, maybe a year and a half at most, has given birth to seven kittens that we’ve seen and several more newborns, tiny and suckling somewhere behind a garage, waiting to become Sekhnet’s adorable little charges.

Meanwhile, it is about a hundred degrees and only two of her last batch of four kittens is accounted for, the one who looks like her and the one still at the vet’s.  Hearty, brave and recently spayed, the little alpha kitten who looks like her has been up and around, eating with her usual gusto.   Her sister, skinny and withdrawn, traumatized by her trip to the vet, did not eat yesterday and has not been seen today.  The blue-eyed Dobbie-looking sibling, who turns out to be a boy, I will pick up at the vet’s tomorrow.  He will probably cry the whole way home, like his sisters cried yesterday.  Luckily, Sekhnet will be at work and not in the car, crying along with the cat.

Well, diary dear, I’d better shut this machine down, before it fries itself.  I ought to hop into the shower and drink another liter of seltzer, if I know what’s good for me.  Stay cool!

 

Putting a bow on the story

The art of persuasion, selling,  winning over, converting, is the art of great storytelling.  We love good stories, live by ’em, we need stories to make sense of a largely incomprehensible universe.   I heard a master storytelling salesman at work the other night at the Democratic Convention, weaving a long, compelling story about his wife.   Former president William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton, considered by many our first black president until one with 50% African blood was elected.

“Also considered the finest Republican president of the twentieth century,” said the skeleton.  

“To hear him tell the story, he and his brilliant wife have always been humble servants of the People, selflessly doing everything they could to make sure the tide kept rising and that the rising tide lifted all boats.  He has that down home Elvis charm, calls people ‘man’ and has a deft touch with humor and pathos.  Blacks loved him when he was their president, he spoke their language to them, played the saxophone.  Shucks, he was a charming southern white boy who was completely comfortable with blacks, clearly liked and even admired ’em.

“Meantime, in the name of compromise (and in the worst sense of the word) he did the bidding of some rabidly bad people, over and over again.   Welfare ‘reform’, his 1994 crime bill*, with three strikes and mandatory sentencing, and NAFTA did more to make things harder for blacks than anything Reagan, a president who clucked at racism, had done.  Not to mention the farcical and emblematic “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell”.

“I recall we had a chat about then governor Bill Clinton’s return to Arkansas, during his first presidential campaign, to oversee the execution of some brain damaged killer on death row, a shooter who’d turned his gun on himself and blown most of his brains out without actually dying,” said the skeleton.  “Show them the Times article to refresh their recollection, to tell it to those too young to remember.”

Well, we’ve talked about the psychopath test for president.  You don’t qualify to run for the office unless you demonstrate that, among other things, like lying convincingly, you can kill when needed, for the good of the country, of course. Plus, you have many Americans who believe in an eye for an eye, literally, death for those who kill, and they need to be satisfied that their president will unflinchingly see justice done. 

“Kill whoever you like, if you’re the president, as long as you tell the story properly, or keep the killing properly secret like your current president’s kill list.  Admittedly, sometimes the president has to be willing to kill, but much of the time it hurts more than it helps.  Framing the story of the killing is the most important part, if you do that, kill away, man.  

“You remember on TV we used to see those numbers like insanely lopsided basketball scores, the kill numbers they’d show every night during dinner?   US: 19  Viet Cong: 345.   Low score meant you won.  So piles of dead Vietnamese would be added up, and if any of the dead were males between the ages of 15 and 50, you had dead Viet Cong for the tally.  William Westmoreland and Robert MacNamara’s people came up with that body count system.  Great for morale, it told the story, every night, of our irresistibly mounting victory.  What did you guys yell when unfair teams were chosen: slaughter sides!!!

“How about Agent Orange?  You remember that amazing stuff, defoliant, highly concentrated herbicide, I think it was also called Dioxin.  They called the destruction of jungle and crops ‘Operation Ranch Hand’ — how cool is that?  Spray it from a bunch of airplanes and it dissolves all plant life underneath.  Neat.  Except that it may have killed almost half a million civilians and caused birth defects in probably many more than that, plus what it did to many American boys.   Luckily for us, about half of those Vietnamese killed were males between the age of 15 and 50, like the many terrorists we’re secretly killing today in the president’s brilliant and legally complex drone war.  

“These are the hard calls a president has to make, Elie.  Would Clinton have won that election if he couldn’t go back to Arkansas and sign the death warrant for a severely brain-damaged person’s lethal injection?  He probably would have lost his own state, like Gore would eight years later.”  The skeleton looked around, weary.  

“But, look, you started off talking about telling a story and now we’re talking about psychopath presidents.  You know what telling a good story involves?  Seeing the whole story before you start to tell it and not getting lost in digressions that detract from the story you want to tell.  

“You need to have a good beginning, to hook your listener, an interesting story-line that’s easy to follow and a satisfying pay-off at the end.   The story has to hang together as an organic whole.   People have to know why you told the story and everything you need for people to grasp and digest the story should be explained as you go.  

“You should never have to go back and add something you belatedly realize you’ll need for the punchline.   You need to see the whole picture you want to paint before you lift your brush to start painting.

“Which places you in an unenviable position here, telling my story.  What is my story even about?  I was born in poverty, had certain ideals, worked my ass off, had a certain amount of luck, accumulated enough money that when I died my son could take a year off to write my biography.  What kind of story is that?  

“Hey, I got it, here’s your story: the loser’s son, at the end of the final withered branch of a family tree rather crudely pruned by hate-filled Ukrainians, anti-Semitic Poles, Nazis and Belarusians, in his mad hubris, thinking anyone in the world actually gives a shit about another anonymous loser.  The story could actually be about you, you know, the meta-story, with the story of me kind of floating by in the background, like a hallucination.  

“We see the author sitting in an unbelievably depressing rented one-bedroom apartment, with decaying walls, etc. cracked ceiling, bathroom floor disintegrated.  All around are papers, some beautiful, most not, but a colorful jumble that defies description.  Why is he in his underwear in front of a fan at 2 pm? Is this a mental patient, tapping away as he stares at the computer screen with no expression?”

Point taken, I should put on some pants, although it’s 88.3 degrees in here at the moment.   Here’s the story in a nutshell for you, then.

The cards dealt to you were a daunting hand.  You were born poor, Jewish, at the dawn of the Great Depression, less than twenty years before the organized mass-murder of poor Jews.   The human helplessness that is the birthright of every human being who does not get help was laid heavily on you, over and over.  The small town you grew up in was anti-Semitic.  You wore a jacket with a Jewish star on it because your mother insisted, as only a few years later Hitler would insist all Jews do.  Drafted into the army’s air force in 1942…

“Blah, blah, blah, I don’t see a story here.  No hook.  Next!” said the skeleton in the manner of a distracted record company executive forced to listen to his mother’s friend’s son’s demo.

 “Ha! You remember that, don’t you, you rascal, Robbie’s big break, when Caroline got the A & R guy son of her friend to listen to his cassette.  It was like your letter from that nice girl at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux way back when:  I don’t see the hook.  Robbie learned, eventually, to put the hook way up front.  He told you about the ‘elevator pitch’, right, you’ve got to be able to put the hook into them within a short elevator ride, you have maybe fifteen seconds.”

Yep, yep.  And in fairness to the gatekeepers, everyone thinks they have a book in them, that their life should be a book.  Most books, like most lives, and particularly the imagined but unwritten books of most lives, are dull, stupid, vain, too predictably depressing to be bought and sold.   I have to package you and sell you, simple as that.

“What’s your fucking story?  Give me the angle.  What’s your fucking elevator pitch, bitch?”

I was raised by a brilliant, funny father who was full of self-hatred.   He fought me from the time I was a baby and the fight continued up until the last night of his life.  On that night he told me, for the first time, that he was sorry he’d been….

“Time’s up, bitch, we’re at my floor.  Nice meeting you.  If you want to blow me some time, set it up with my secretary.  Otherwise, have a nice day and most excellent life,” said the skeleton, his face as vacant, inscrutable and mad-looking as Andy’s.

 

NOTES

* Again, we’re dealing in a story element, a passing example of how Clinton was the best Republican president in recent history.  For those purposes the 1994 Crime Bill works nicely, it contains some heinous provisions that played a part in increasing American’s off-the-hook, disproportionately poor and black prison population.  But fairness dictates telling the rest of the story, a snippet of which follows, more of which can be read here:

The trend toward increased incarceration began in the early 1970s, and quadrupled in the ensuing four decades. A two-year study by the National Research Council concluded that the increase was historically unprecedented, that the U.S. far outpaced the incarceration rates elsewhere in the world, and that high incarceration rates have disproportionately affected Hispanic and black communities. The report cited policies enacted by officials at all levels that expanded the use of incarceration, largely in response to decades of rising crime.

“In the 1970s, the numbers of arrests and court caseloads increased, and prosecutors and judges became harsher in their charging and sentencing,” the report states. “In the 1980s, convicted defendants became more likely to serve prison time.”

Indeed, this trend continued with tough-on-crime policies through the 1990s as well, but to lay the blame for the incarceration trend entirely, or even mostly, at the feet of the 1994 crime bill ignores the historical trend…

…So while it may go too far to blame the 1994 crime bill for mass incarceration, it did create incentives for states to build prisons and increase sentences, and thereby contributed to increased incarceration.

 

Four for Nothing

There was a middle aged black musician who came to the school where I worked in Morningside Depths years ago. He was there to teach the kids the fundamentals of music.  He spent most of the time teaching them to count and to read music.  I don’t recall much music being made by the group, but I do remember him bringing the group to attention for each exercise by smartly announcing “four for nothing”.  This meant four bars of some kind of intro before the actual piece would start.  You can hear examples of this all the time, I could sing you five of them now, these “four for nothing” bits.

Four for nothing.

1)

At seventeen I saw “Enter the Dragon”, the only Hollywood film starring the immortal Bruce Lee.  I saw it with a group of friends in a Jerusalem movie theatre.  It was intoxicating.  My friends and I left the cinema flooded with youthful strength and with the amazing possibilities contained in the human body and spirit.  We walked the streets imitating Bruce Lee, doing his graceful, stealthy walk from the scene where he spies on Han’s evil operations.  We did Lee’s catlike war cry, stopping to take heroic poses from various scenes in the movie.  I remember feeling like I could lift up or overturn cars.  We were all devastated to find out later that Bruce Lee had died, just before his greatest movie was released, just as he was about to become an international superstar.  He was already a superstar all over Asia, we learned.  I have seen Enter the Dragon perhaps six or seven times since, and I am never disappointed.

A few years later, at City College, I enrolled in a gymnastics class, hoping to learn to do the amazing handspring Bruce Lee had done, bounding into the air off his powerful arms and doing two or three flips in the air before landing with catlike nonchalance to bow to the judges.  There was a sign in the City College gym I remember.  It said: practice good hand stands every where.  This was excellent advice if you wanted to develop the strength and balance to do a handspring.  I was never able to do a good hand stand anywhere, the version I did required a wall nearby to brace my feet.  

I was too naive to realize that one does not enroll in a course that meets once or twice a week and expect to master something that people who do it have been doing every day since early childhood.  It is not enough to be young and fit to learn to do a backflip or handspring.  One thing needed for doing flips in the air is fearlessness.  Another is complete confidence.

I have the image of Simba Perkins, a Harlem nine year-old, balanced on a metal hand rail above a cement courtyard.  Simba was in my third grade class.  When he saw me getting to my car outside the school he called out my name and told me to watch.  Before I could get the words “Simba, don’t!” out of my mouth, the kid launched himself into the air, flipped upside down in the air high above the bar and landed lightly on the cement, smiling like Bruce Lee.  

You could have taken a photo of the fearless boy, with a very fast shutter, and caught him upside down, his back straight, his head pointing directly to the deadly cement six or eight feet below his head.  The still image would be of a boy about to spend his life in a wheelchair with a spinal injury, if he survived the shattering trauma to his skull.  Simba, of course, had done countless back flips.  He never had any fear or hesitation.

I had both and could not overcome the instinct to tuck my head when I went into any position where I might land on my spine.  This is exactly the opposite of what one needs to do to perform a handspring.  It was only by an act of mercy that the teacher passed me after I did my version of a floor routine, in the middle of a gym full of leaping, hand standing, back flipping gymnasts who were good enough sports not to laugh or otherwise show their pity for my game but sad attempts.

2) 

My uncle, a meticulous man, bought a blood pressure monitor.  It was a good one, top of the line, automatic, with a computer interface to keep track of your blood pressure and pulse readings.   He placed a post-it on the monitor where he wrote the date of the purchase.  All this soon became very ironic, and poignant, when, two or three days later, he had a massive stroke.  He spent the remaining time he had on this planet in a wheel chair.  Every time he had to urinate someone needed to hold a jar for him to pee in, the other hand guiding his penis.  The only time this wasn’t done was during his several trips to the hospital for intensive care, when, presumably, they inserted a catheter into the slowly dying man’s urinary tract.

I acquired the brand new blood pressure monitor, which he had no further use for, and took readings of my own borderline high blood pressure for a year or two.  Eventually a doctor friend convinced me to take the drug she and another friend of ours take to control elevated blood pressure.  She informed me that, after a certain age, when the blood pressure is elevated on a regular basis, diet and exercise will no longer have much effect.  I told her I wasn’t worried about having a stroke and she told me to worry about the permanent damage to my heart and liver the high blood pressure was already causing.  I got a prescription soon after and, although on half the dose she takes, my blood pressure has been in a healthy range ever since. 

“116 over 74,” said my former doctor, impressed.  

“White coat syndrome,” I told him.

 

3)

One summer afternoon about thirty years ago, in the early days of a romance with a pretty young woman ten years younger than me, we went shopping in Jackson Heights for every kind of ripe fruit we could find.  We borrowed my parents’ house in Queens where we made an enormous fruit salad in the kitchen, with mangos, melons, cherries, pineapple, oranges, strawberries, peaches, plums.  My parents were away for a few days, I don’t recall where, but there was no chance of their returning home.   It was a warm day, but not hot, and we stripped off our t-shirts and shorts as we made the fruit salad.  Then, as the sun began to set we took the huge bowl of fruit salad out into the backyard and sat naked in the grass to eat it.  

As we started to eat the fruit salad darkness fell.  Next door the flood light in my neighbor’s driveway cast enough light to see us clearly by, especially once it got dark.  Long stripes of shadow from the picket fence fell across the grass, halfway to where we were.  Beyond the shadows, just light.  I remember being slightly paranoid that my long-time neighbors, a young widow and her two beautiful daughters, could come outside or drive up at any moment, and there would be no way to hide, but the memory of that delicious fruit salad in the grass stirs me to this day.

4) 

Schoolyard, Bronx, 1972 or 1973.  I’d been playing guitar a year or two by then, and there was a genius at the school I went to, a school for science nerds.  Neither me nor this genius were science nerds, in fact, he had almost no interest in any of his classes, even the English and History classes that sometimes engaged me.  He was only interested in playing the guitar.  So disinterested was he in his scholastic studies that he had failed sophomore English.  I passed him once as his young English teacher was detaining him at the classroom door to implore him to give her some way to pass him,  a Junior, failing sophomore English for the second time.  He motioned for me to wait for him, so I heard her plea.

“Frank, you’re obviously very bright, and verbal, and you can write very well, but you have turned in absolutely no work this term and I cannot pass you.  I also don’t want to fail you….” she was clearly at a loss.  My friend shrugged and indicated that he and I were about to have an important conversation and that he needed to be excused.

 “What do you do all the time?” she finally asked him, “clearly you don’t spend any time doing my assignments.  What do you do?”

“I play guitar,” he said.  

“You must be good,” she said.  

“I am,” he said, with great understatement.  

She thought for a moment and came up with an idea only a young English teacher at that moment in history could have thought of.  “OK, bring in your guitar and play for the class and I’ll write it up and maybe I can pass you for that.”  He agreed quickly and we walked off to have lunch.  

Let’s say it was during lunch that same day, in the school yard.  I showed him my version of the intro to Stairway to Heaven, a delicate bit long passed into cliche, now banned in all music stores. He took the guitar, strummed the heroic variations on the D chord that presage the heavy electric guitar solo, and launched into Jimmy Page’s unforgettable solo.  He played it again when I asked, and I soon mastered that cool little intro and the opening of Page’s solo.  It was a great thrill.

A few days later I cut my fourth period class to be on hand during his guitar recital for the idealistic young English teacher.  To her credit, the teacher did not even ask who I was or what I was doing there.  I could have been the guy’s agent, for all she knew.  The desks were all pulled to the sides of the room and the chairs were arranged in a circle.  Frank sat in the middle, with a guy named Allen Saul on backing guitar.  I’d never seen Frank play with Allen, but Allen turned out to be a fine accompanist.   Frank began to play.  The English teacher looked on as though falling in love.  With tears in her eyes, and not looking away from Frank, she scrawled a note and sent a kid out into the hall with it.    

A few minutes later the chairman of the music department and both music teachers were standing by the door of the room, listening to Frank, clearly moved by his playing.  When he was done the chairman announced they’d had no idea they had a student of his caliber at the school and gave Frank basically the keys to the city.  “Come by when you get a chance and we’ll give you the key to a practice room.  Our resources are at your disposal, whatever we can do for you, whatever you need, we will be happy to do our best to provide it for you.”  

Then it was the English teacher’s turn, and words were clearly failing her as she attempted to tell Frank how moved she was by his playing, how, she too, would do anything Frank needed her to do.  Frank was clearly embarrassed by all this adulation and so, when a friend of his gave him, literally, a Bronx cheer, Frank leaped over the chairs and got his friend by the neck and they tumbled to the ground in a clatter of desks, playfully fake fighting.  

“Frank!!!” called the English teacher, like Dave Saville calling “Alvin!!!” when the cartoon chipmunk got out of control.  Perfect bit of real-life imitating art, Hollywood style.

A few days later, having absented myself from a trigonometry or physics class, I ran into Frank in the hall.  He asked if I had a minute.  I did.  He took me up a narrow stairway I’d never seen into a bank of rooms I’d never seen.  Using a key he opened a door and we went into a room just a little bigger than an upright piano.  

We sat on the piano bench and he played a line on the guitar.  It was a lightning fast bit of a solo from John McLaughlin’s wonderful acoustic album My Goal’s Beyond.   It was an extremely complicated bit of improvisation that Frank had easily copped from the record.  He played it on guitar, then took his right hand and played it perfectly on the piano.

My eyes popped wide open.  “How long have you been playing the piano?” I asked him.

He told me it had been a few days, and counted off the days since they’d given him the key to a practice room.  “About a week,” he said.

“How the hell can you do that?” I asked the sixteen year-old genius.  

“I have no idea,” he said, “and I can’t explain it, but, it’s exactly like playing the guitar, if that makes any sense.”