Category Archives: writing

Tempus Vuggin’ Fugit

A guy is playing a distorted electric guitar through a wah-wah pedal– some groovy rock and roll guitar, as the freaks used to say.  I remember doing that, over a simple three chord vamp highly conducive to every possible bluesy invention.   4-14-06 it says next to the title of the song.  Eleven years ago yesterday! Jesus, tempus really do fugit.  

I am walking up a long, steep hill from the Hudson River to a graduation party.   My mother, now dead almost seven years, was alive and I was talking to her on the phone as I walked.  It was June, sunny and humid, and I didn’t notice how hot, until I arrived at the party soaked to the skin.  My host gave me an iced drink, a mojito, maybe.  It was cold and delicious and I was dehydrated, it went down in a couple of draughts.  I had another.  I just about emptied the sun-room, walking in glistening as if just doused with a fire hose pumping sweat.   Two remained, a mother and her son.  The woman asked how I was doing.  As I began the third cold mojito it all flooded out. Talk about fire hoses.  

My mother was toward the end of her long death, my daily calls to her in Florida the highlight of her days, my visits even more so.   I’d just spent a solid month with her, every waking hour, the second two weeks in New York.  Towards the end of that month I had to take care of several court cases and an imperious young judge solemnly read me the redundant letter of the law, although I’d already done everything in anyone’s power to protect an old man from eviction, had, in fact, indefinitely put off the eighty year-old’s inevitable eviction.  

The young judge was performing for two law students he had on the bench with him, to show them what a judge’s day is like, how he conducts business.  As the law students looked on the young judge read our agreement and agreed I’d done everything anyone could have done in this case, that the stipulation was not only reasonable and well-drawn, but the terms where generous, under the circumstances of the $13,000 in rent arrears.   He refused to sign off on it, though, which is what I needed him to do so I could dash off to the NYCHA part and get out of court before it closed for the lunch recess.

“Judge, with all respect, I don’t have any other arrows here in my quiver.   The only thing APS can do for him is get him an Article 81 Guardian.  The guardianship application will stay the Housing Court proceeding until someone can place him in alternative housing.  I wish there was another plan, but he has no income, is not a U.S. citizen, owes over $13,000 in arrears.   We can’t get a grant to pay the arrears, Article 81 is, sadly, the only option.”

 

“Yet,” said the judge seriously, “you didn’t bother to ever meet with the tenant to find out what his preferences might be?”  

“Judge, again, with respect, this tenant is not a U.S. citizen and he has no income.  Technically, APS should not even be taking his case, which I should not mention on the record, except that Josh is a good man and won’t make an issue of it.   I didn’t meet him because his preferences are not at issue here.  If he said, for example, that he wants to move to Hawaii and have APS get him airfare and several months rent in Hawaii, how would I be able to do anything but what I am doing to protect his interests?”

“So, you refuse to meet with the tenant you are representing, or bother to even find out what he might want,” said the judge, for the record.

“Judge, again, how does what he wants enter this discussion?   He hasn’t paid rent in over a year and has no money.  The only way to prevent his immediate homelessness is by having APS apply for an Article 81 guardianship.  I will undoubtedly write an Order to Show Cause, maybe two, before they complete the Article 81, but when the time comes, I will do that.”   Josh nodded, told the judge the same thing.

The judge began digging through a pile of papers on his desk there on the bench.  He dug for a while, as I looked at Josh, and tried to keep my face as composed as possible.  The court room clock now read 12:20, if I didn’t wrap things up here soon I’d have to come back to court at 2 pm to adjourn my last case.

My mother was waiting for me in Queens for lunch.  I had five cases on the calendar and was done with all of them, but this case and one in the NYCHA part that could be quickly adjourned with a stip I’d sign and have the NYCHA attorney submit for us both.  I had one foot out the door as Josh and I wrapped up the stip, it was about 11:20, I was in good shape for getting to my mother in Queens by 1:15 or so to take her for lunch.  Not after an almost hour wait to have this important judge allocute the stipulation between two attorneys.

The stip Josh and I wrote could not have been improved by the most eloquent and exacting jurist.  The judge himself was not disputing that.  The agreement covered everything, the landlord was owed a tremendous and exact sum, and that, in light of the impossibility of the tenant ever paying (the only way to end a nonpayment eviction proceeding staying in the premises) a judgment of possession would issue to the landlord and a warrant of eviction would also issue forthwith, to be stayed thirty days, or maybe it was even 45 days, for APS to complete its application for the Article 81.   Everyone knew this sporting agreement meant my having to make at least one emergency application, two months from now, to stop the scheduled eviction.  

It was around 12:30 when the judge found what he was looking for, a memo from his boss.   The court officer took two copies from the judge and handed one to me and one to Josh.  The copies were so degraded it was hard to make out the words on them.   The judge struggled to read his own greyed out copy and finally found the language he read aloud.  The memo advised judges, in light of the vulnerability of tenants represented by Guardians ad Litem, particularly the crop of new GALs without legal expertise, to make sure their robe was extra long in the back.  

“To cover their asses,” I clarified to the college boy, when he raised his eyebrows quizzically.  His mother nodded, horrified but very interested in the jarring collision that was about to happen in Part A of the New York City Housing Court.

(to be continued, as tempus fucking fugit)

Book Idea page 2

The devil, of course, is always in the details, and the pertinent one is always waiting, to do its damnedest at the most perfect possible moment.   As my mother drank coffee in Queens and waited for me to take her to lunch there was one devil waiting to emit a sulphurous “kitchy koo!”.  In hindsight I should have been expecting it, although ‘should’ has always been a dodgy word in the courthouse and hindsight is hindsight.   I tell mother and son something to this effect as I describe the court’s intention in creating the Guardian ad Litem program.   A little history can be found here.  

The short version is that the right to counsel is only guaranteed in criminal cases where you face the jeopardy of imprisonment for  a year or more if convicted.   The right of an indigent to have a court-appointed lawyer was an innovation of our Constitution, but it covered only those threatened with prison time.  The Framers, who some hold in the same reverence religious Christians reserve for the authors of the Gospels, did not foresee a time when millions of Americans would live in rented homes that could be taken from them for a variety of infractions, forcing them to join the vast invisible army of the homeless.  The law, in its majestic equality, regards as a trifle the right of rich and poor alike to be defended against homelessness, to echo Anatole France.

I described how New York City paid a lot of money to the family of Eleanor Bumpurs, a woman who was killed, in effect, for being mentally ill and owing less than four hundred dollars in subsidized rent for her public housing apartment.  She was riddled with bullets at her front door when she reacted to armed NYC officials by raising a large kitchen knife.   The tragedy got a lot of media play.  The new Housing Court, bastard step-child of the New York City Civil Court,  decided that protection was needed for tenants like Ms. Bumpurs.  It was an excellent decision.    In the early years, lawyers did most of the Guardian ad Litem work.   This had the effect of providing capable court-appointed lawyers for indigent, vulnerable tenants facing eviction.  

I see the college kid nodding earnestly, like he’s acknowledging this is God’s work. His mother raises her eyebrows and nods encouragingly too. I quickly disabuse them of this God’s work business.   I explain that the reason I call it Piss Boy work is because some Housing Court judges, hearing officers really, with jurisdiction only over who has the right to possess disputed parcels of rental property and enforcing certain codes about the conditions in that property, view the court-appointed lawyers on the list who stand in the shoes of tenants as hamstrung losers lacking ambition.  Those judges sometimes treat the Guardian ad Litem accordingly.

Any lawyer making a decent living would not put himself on the list, certainly not for more than a case or two a year.   Anybody with any ambition would not appear regularly to stand in the filthy, worn shoes of New York City’s most vulnerable tenants, and the canny grifters who sometimes pose as those tenants.  What could be said of a subsistence lawyer appearing exclusively in this low and ill-paid role?   Whatever one might say about Housing Court judges, most of whom are fine people, each had demonstrated determination and ambition or they would not be on the bench.  

Civil Court Judges in New York City are chosen by the Democratic party machine, like in the days of Tammany Hall.   A certain political background is required, and making connections of a certain kind.   I carried the piss bucket long enough to see several court attorneys, and even a Legal Aid lawyer I’d shot the shit with a few times, suddenly attired in robes, sitting on the bench, smiling graciously as I said “congratulations, your Honor,” the first time I saw them as judges.  

Once in a while one of these smiling political appointees would show another side, the dog kicker side mentioned earlier.  A judge can’t generally get away with openly kicking an attorney appearing in front of him in his role as an attorney.  Attorneys are careful not to cross the line where they can be kicked.  There is no such line for the Guardian ad Litem (GAL), one learns belatedly.   Cross a line or not, for the GAL a cranky judge gets a free kick.  Just part of the game.

So, anyway, Josh and I finish writing up the stipulation.  It provides that the landlord will wait thirty days to serve the eviction notice, and will inform the GAL before he does, and the landlord will not contest an Order to Show Cause, meaning more time will automatically be granted, if needed, for APS to take the only action available, while the GAL serves the marshal with papers halting the eviction.  The terms were generous, Josh was a decent guy very familiar with the drill.  

It was the best deal anyone could hope for in the situation.  The aged tenant in question didn’t have much of a leg to stand on.  To put it more accurately, he had no leg to stand on.  He was an illegal alien who lived in the apartment with several adult family members, all indigent, none of them able to get any kind of public assistance.  They owed the landlord something like $13,000 at that point.  APS was going to apply for a guardian of the person to figure out how to relocate the old man.   The application for the guardian under Article 81 of the New York Mental Hygiene Law….

“You’re shitting me, there’s a New York State Mental Hygiene Law?” said the woman.

I shit you not, ma’am, a clean mind is a good mind in New York State.  Anyway, the Article 81 filing in Supreme Court would stay the eviction proceeding in Housing Court for up to a year, put it in a deep freeze, while they determined if the old man was legally incapacitated under New York State law, appointed a guardian of the person and that person, or agency, figured out the details of the impossible.  Josh was consenting to all this instead of pressing the judge to get justice for his client the landlord.  It was 11:15 and my mother was waiting for me in Queens.  I was glad to be almost done in court, it was well-worth agreeing to petition the court for more time for the inept APS to act.    

Except that on this early summer day the young judge in this particular courtroom, an ambitious former court attorney who had jumped several more senior candidates on the list, was performing for several law students who were with him on the bench.   The stip Josh and I had signed gave him the chance to demonstrate how a judge went about his business in a GAL case.  His court attorney informed Josh and me that the judge intended to allocute the stip. Meaning we’d have to wait to be called so he could read aloud on the record, allocute, what we had written and signed.  

Generally allocution is only done in a case where one party needs the agreement explained to them by the judge so that everybody’s ass is legally covered against the charge that the unrepresented party had been tricked by the other party’s lawyer into signing a deal they did not understand, an agreement against their best interests.  No matter that this agreement was written and signed by two attorneys, and that it was the only possible deal, outside of immediate eviction, the judge was doing it the way it should, technically, be done, since one of the lawyers was playing the part of a non-lawyer.  The Court Attorney asked us to take a seat and brought the file up to the judge.  

I later had the occasion to learn that this young judge had been admitted to practice law the same day that I had been, April Fool’s Day eight or nine years earlier.   We’d taken the oath in unison in the impressive old Appellate courthouse off Madison Avenue, then headed in opposite directions, him to court attorney and judge, me the other way.  

I was also informed that he’d been one of “Shelly’s boys”, a protege or personal friend of Sheldon Silver, then Speaker of the New York Assembly, a powerful New York Democrat who a few years later would fall steeply from his powerful position as kingmaker in New York State politics and wind up disbarred for his multiple felony convictions.  As far as I know the disgraced Silver is still free on bail waiting to appeal his long jail sentence, as befits a powerful corrupt man convicted of using his position to steal millions.  Silver’s fall was a dramatic one, well worth a footnote [1].  

All I knew at the time was that this seemingly mild-mannered and bespectacled young judge was seemingly mild-mannered and wore glasses.  I had no idea, as I sat next to Josh on that long wooden bench, how much shit was poised to hit the fan, nor how hard and far flung that shit would spatter for the humble Piss Boy.

(stay tuned for part 3)

[1]  from Wikipedia:

Silver’s trial lasted for much of November 2015.[43][44] On November 30, 2015, a unanimous jury found Silver guilty on all seven counts, triggering automatic expulsion from the Assembly.[45] The New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, which handles judicial and attorney misconduct, affirmed his automatic disbarment for felony conviction.[46]

On May 3, 2016, federal judge Valerie E. Caproni of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York sentenced Silver to 12 years in jail, and ordered him to pay $5.3 million in ill-gotten gains and $1.75 million in additional fines. Silver received two prison terms: 12 years for six criminal counts against him and 10 years on the seventh, to run concurrently.[47][48] As of January 2017,[49] he remained free on bail, pending an appeal based on the U.S. Supreme Court‘s decision in McDonnell v. United States that reversed the corruption conviction of a former Virginia Governor.[50]

Personal life

Silver and his wife Rosa, a former special needs schoolteacher, have four adult children.[51][52] According to court papers unsealed during the sentencing phase of his trial, Silver was alleged to have had two extra-marital affairs, both of which were connected to his Albany position.[53]

By the time he became Speaker of the Assembly, he was known to play basketball with other high-ranking officials, including former Governor Mario Cuomo and former Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi.[54]

Two weeks after Silver’s criminal conviction, his son-in-law Marcello Trebitsch was sentenced to prison for a separate multimillion-dollar crime, also prosecuted by Bharara’s office.[55]

 

Book Idea

You don’t sell the biography of an unknown man, part scholarly idealist, part monster, as a first book.  Complicated book, complicated story.   How do you give the elevator pitch?  It’s about how much a person can change, how much a person can take, what finally breaks a person, how much we can truly forgive.  It’s about history, and the constant, maddening spinning of what children think of as fact.  It’s about taking a year, or a decade, or several decades, to digest something that is indigestible, although experienced in some form by millions.

We’d better be going to a very high floor in this elevator if I’m going to finish the pitch.  If it takes more than twenty words to summarize, you lose the sale.  If you can’t sell it you don’t get paid.  Simple.  Keep it simple.   The man was a monster who never gained monetizable notoriety for it, died recanting his monstrousness to the son who forgave him.  Fuck it, too simple.  So here’s a book idea for a first book, the better to sell what would become the second book:

Man trying to take care of his dying mother long distance, speaking to her daily from New York.   She hates it in Florida, especially now that she’s a widow.   The man works as a Piss Boy in the New York City Housing Court, carrying the piss bucket for judges, who are actually, technically, hearing officers in black robes.    Death is taking its time with the old woman, has been toying with her for decades.  A million cancer cells when they opened her up, the remission, unfortunately, not as complete as they assured her it was when they gave her the five year clean bill of health a few months earlier.  It is now two decades after they found those million cancer cells, husband and nineteen year-old poodle both gone, the mother’s death the leisurely hobby of an inconstant cancer.  

I am walking up the long hill from the train station by the river, in a river town ten miles north of New York City.  It is a warm late June day, in fact it is a hot, sunny day, the sky perfect for a picture postcard of the town.  I am walking to the home of old friends for a party celebrating their oldest son’s graduation from college.  I talk to my mother on the Motorola Razr as I climb.  I do not notice my Hawaiian shirt becoming wet with sweat, or that my cargo shorts are also getting wet, as are my socks.  I amuse my mother a few times, and as it is a long walk up the steep, winding hill, and this conversation is the highlight of her day, I am not in a hurry as I make my way up the vertical sidewalk. 

Arriving at the party I bid my mother goodbye, snap the phone shut and am greeted in the yard by an old friend who hugs and kisses me before recoiling.  “Oh, God, all the make-up just ran off the side of my face!” she says, her face dripping on one side, and I notice, for the first time, that I am soaking wet.  It is like I’ve just emerged from long swim in an ocean of sweat.   I am soaked to the skin, down to my socks.  My host hands me an icy mixed drink in a tall glass, tells me to drink.  I do, it’s delicious.  I shake the graduate’s hand with a wet hand, probably hand him a damp card with a check inside.  I head inside out of the sun, a second tall, iced mixed drink in my hand, and within a minute, everyone in the room is gone, suddenly excusing themselves.  

Two people remain, a woman in a chair and her college aged son, on the couch.  The woman asks me how I’m doing, and as my host hands me a plate of food and a third drink, I begin, in a  twisting torrent, to tell the woman and her son exactly how I’m doing.  The intertwined stories come out in a flood, my mother’s slow wasting death, my many trips to Florida, my mother’s recent two week stay in New York, during which I had to tend to a backlog of my cases in the court.  How, in hindsight, it had been a mistake to bring her back to New York with me after a two week trip to Florida, how I should have taken a break as all my friends suggested, the call from my mother shortly after my birthday, a few days after our month together, complaining bitterly that I don’t love her because I sent her away just before my birthday.  I took a fork full of food, and described my work as a Piss Boy, and the recent, infuriating threat to even that livelihood.  The woman and her son found this funny.

Well, obviously, I said, I don’t find as much mirth in it as you seem to.  Most of these judges are OK, but from time to time, always at the worst possible moment, one of them will insist on pissing into a bucket that is already gleaming right along the line of the brim with the collected urine of a dozen other jurists.  “Your Honor,” you will say, “give me just a moment to dump the bucket, I’ll be right back.”  Making this request is not really an option, of course, for someone designated piss boy.  Then I explain about the designation.  

“I thought you were a lawyer,” says the college boy with a smile.

I tell the boy that I am, and then recount the story my mother tells of a man she had some business with.  She’d asked my legal advice, and I’d given it to her firmly and simply as I could.  I told her exactly what she needed to tell him.  She somehow told him exactly the opposite of what I’d coached her to say.   She protested that her son the lawyer had told her to say exactly what she had said.   “Your son must be the dumbest lawyer in New York,” said the man, not unreasonably.   Now, in the context of that story it’s up for debate, in the context of my life story, he has a pretty strong case.

I described how virtually all of my work is standing in the shoes of tenants deemed unable to adequately defend themselves against eviction.  I am in court not as their lawyer, but as them.  They have already appeared in court and the judge has decided, or an inept agency called Adult Protective Services has moved the court, in the manner of an implausibly costive bowel movement, that the tenant cannot effectively advocate for themself.   It may be because of some mental problem, or a strong personality quirk, or physical infirmity, advanced age– it just has to be an articulable suspicion that the person needs someone else to play the part of them for the legal proceeding that could render them homeless.

So, at any given time, I am standing in the broken backed, smelly, perforated shoes of twenty or thirty such poor devils.  I’d say 75% truly need the help, and appreciate it, and the other 25% are professional grifters who get thousands in back rent paid on their behalf every few years so they can spend all their money on booze, or prostitutes, or whatever it is that makes their lives worth living.  One crazy old guy lived with a crack addicted hooker and the two of them, for whatever reason, moved their bowels into plastic bags that were left all over the vermin infested apartment.  In court, the part of this insane bastard, who was not required to show up in court at all, was played by me, over the course of many months.   My pay for this court-appointed role play was a flat $600, whether I appeared once or a dozen times.  Most often I had to show up at least four or five times.   

As a result of this quirky system that required me to do an ongoing tap dance while the overwhelmed agency dithered, and the interminable delays in Adult Protective Services providing services, which caused me to appear month after month after month on most of these sad cases, some judges regarded me with a certain distaste.  Articulate, capable and despicable.  In the way that certain bitter people come home after a bitter day and kick their cringing dog, lawyers that were in my line of court-appointed work were available for booting, whenever the pressure mounted on certain of these judges, those least endowed with what we think of as judicial temperament.  

“Why would you kick a talking dog?” I wondered, slowly shaking my head as I finished my plate of food and polished off that third strong drink.

The college lad, a bright and engaging young man, was waiting eagerly for the rest of the story.  The woman also looked with a bright and interested expression, and so I continued, describing my mother waiting for me for lunch, as I rushed to Manhattan Housing Court to tend to a half dozen cases.  In the ordinary course of things I’d find the landlord’s attorney, we’d scrawl an agreement called a stip, short for ‘stipulation’, setting forth the reason we needed to come back four weeks later, and one of us would file the stip in the courtroom where the expedited special proceeding was making its snail-like progress, complete with slime trail.  

I’d put all my Bronx cases off for the same date, all of the Manhattan ones, all of the Brooklyn ones.  On a good day, I could find everyone I was looking for, get the stips filed, and be out of the courthouse in an hour or two.  On a bad day, I’d encounter some asshole who would not agree to my reasonable terms and demand a hearing in front of a judge.  There was rarely a time the judge did not agree to postpone the case again for Adult Protective Services (APS) to complete its laggardly work.   In cases where the judge’s impatience for maddening APS got the best of her, I’d be forced, a week or a month later, to write and serve an emergency motion to the court to stop the marshall from proceeding with the eviction.  I wrote dozens of these over the years.  

My mother was waiting in Queens as I dashed into the city to take care of my cases. It was on something like day 25 of my 29 straight days with mom.  My mother was needy, she was dying, she was lonely.  She would be dead less than a year later.  I was the light of her life, if such could be said.  She was waiting for me to take her for lunch.  I had two more cases to adjourn and I could head back out to Queens.  It was around 11:00.  

Things were looking good, no tenants were in the picture and I’d disposed of the first four cases quickly.    I didn’t have to wrangle with the Giant Squid, the brilliantly insane tenant in the Bronx who hadn’t paid rent in a decade and who would eventually sue me personally.  I wouldn’t be accosted by the carping, annoying Paul Small or bellicose retarded George who insisted on his right to smoke crack and enjoy the company of prostitutes in the apartment at his deceased mother’s nursing home, and who would file a blank disciplinary complaint against me with the First Department after I prevented his eviction and settled his case. The First Department takes such complaints seriously, even if blank.  

It was around 11:15, Josh, my friendly adversary, and I were signing the stip and one of us would hand it in.  I just had to run down to the NYCHA part on the first floor and that would be quick.  Then, out the closest door, a dash to the train and I’d be on my way back to Queens and my impatiently waiting mother.

(to be continued)

Writing in “Public”

Here’s the thing about being one of the fifty million “content creators” out here, opining in the public space that is the internet: it feels like taking a stand.   I put my stories and arguments out here to give the several people who read them, friends and strangers, my honest thoughts and feelings, set out as clearly as I can set them out.  

The craft, writing clearly and, when called for, choosing the right words to move the reader, is the same for the blahgger as for the professional writer.  Standards vary, of course, but good writing is the same whether you read it in a book or here on the ‘internets’.  

The problem with reading things on the internet is that you are often in the hands of people who are, how to put this delicately, contemptible morons.   It may be easy or hard to click away, sometimes they suck you in by the sheer shock of their violence, like the tweets of our new troll-in-chief.

Writing “in public” serves another important purpose for me, someone who feels a rising urge to be paid for writing.  It holds me to a higher standard than writing emails, or keeping a notebook.   Before I hit “publish” I have to carefully consider every word I’ve set down.  I also have to comb through the words several times to make sure they are disentangled and say exactly what I mean them to.

Are they all in the right order?  Are there extra words that are not only unnecessary but distracting, or disruptive to the flow or mood? Typos?  Have I ended at exactly the right place?  Included all the detail to make the story understandable without burdening the reader with unneeded side-stories?   When I feel the piece is clean, and says clearly what I intended to say, I put it up for others to read.

The next question, and one entirely distinct from writing well and the considerations involved in doing that, is: how to build a wide enough internet audience so that I have a “platform”?   Publishers nowadays want an assurance that you are already popular enough to invest in before they publish your work.  

If your blog is read by 100,000 people a day, and you have that many “followers”, you have a robust platform and are well on your way. Having a million followers means, no matter how well or badly you may write, that you have the ability to get people to click on your words, which sounds exactly like “cah-ching!”  If your blahg is seen by a handful of people a week, a publishing corporation would be foolish to give you a large advance, no matter how intriguing or compelling your book might otherwise seem to be.

I am not writing this piece to whine about the obstacles in front of me as I try to reorganize, cut and prepare the next draft of the 750 page monster memoir of my idealistic monster dad.  There will be plenty of time for that whining when the time comes.   I am explaining some of the reasons I, and many others, write on the ‘internets’.  

There is love of writing, a good in itself.  There’s the satisfaction of having communicated something clearly, a nice feeling to have every day.  Then there is the pursuit of a livelihood from writing, also an excellent  thing– the livelihood more than the pursuit, of course.  These are three different things– love of writing, writing well and selling writing– none dependent on the others, and it is good to keep that in mind.

I heard two very clever English chaps, reading their own audiobook about how they sell a million words a year on the internet, between them, and make very good money following the principles that made them the tireless and successful self-promoters they are. Being a good writer, says this smooth-talker, is but one part of the equation; the other part, astute business sense and energetic and ingenious self-promotion, being the more crucial part for making money as a writer.  

These fellows had a solid, and perhaps indispensable, grounding in professional advertising, copy-writing, did it freelance for years, made enough money to keep them going until they cracked the lucrative fine art storytelling market they are wizards in now.  Writing ads and writing wildly popular fiction are different genres of writing of course, but the principles are the same. 

These ingenious chaps put together a solid “platform” based on catering to the demographics of their target audience– fans of a certain type of fiction.  They then built a thirsty, twelve-mouthed “funnel” to draw others into their network and soon were creating daily interest for over a million people.  Now they had something publishers were drooling for a piece of.  But not so fast!   They were able to keep virtually all the profits by monetizing their platform themselves, as well as half of their dozen voracious funnels.  $0.005 a hit on one their funnels comes out to $1,500 a day, money that comes in handy for cross-platform promotion.

You see, old boy, this is how we do it, and with a bit of verve and elan, you can do the same, no matter how well you might think you write.  We cater to the buyers in a professionally engaging way, we build the infrastructure to produce and distribute our virtual wares, we have professional designers create beautiful covers for our virtual works– and don’t skimp on this part, readers DO judge books by their covers, at least at the cash register, and we publish what we want them to devour, leave the story at a dramatic cliff-hanging spot at the end of each book to create a frenzy for the sequel, and we keep all the profits.  This is how you do it.  

Or, you can sit alone tapping out the most beautiful prose your talent allows.  You might be an amazing writer with fantastically rich stories to tell, even valuable stories, who can say?  If this is the case, and you are not devoting as much time to monetizing your talent as you are to writing every day, you are like the batter who can consistently hit a 95 mph fastball 500 feet– in a batting cage somewhere in suburbia, with nobody to jump up and cheer or offer you the million dollar bonus your rare, work-honed skill and god-given ability would otherwise command in the marketplace of sluggers.

Clarifying Why I Prefer Transparency

I wrote Note on How Far You Should Go in telling a story mainly to reiterate my belief that the reader should be given all the info necessary to put everything together to get the full impact of the story.  The writer should include every useful specific detail so the reader can understand and digest exactly what they are reading.

I feel the same way about conversation, particularly with the people we’re closest to.  Would you rather have the pertinent background to a story, if told concisely, or be left wondering how you might feel about details left out or glossed over?  

Information, it seems to me, is the key to grappling with anything tricky.  Can you fully trust an information source that is guarded in deciding what information you will need for your understanding of the complex thing on the table between you? 

That is the essence of my beef with writing that provides a simple happy ending to an emotionally complicated situation.   I think of one I read, by an otherwise excellent writer, where he reports being deeply, desperately depressed for the first time in his life, after the end of his long marriage.  I’m interested immediately.

Then, instead of describing his particular depression, which might have been fascinating to have his unique take on, he sketched out a generic depression in a few lines to stand in for how unbearably painful it was.  Then he quickly and sure-footedly moved on to the abrupt end of his depression, thankfully a merciful 48 hours later (though if felt like a year), when he met the new love of his life and the world was bright and fresh again.  

My thought was “give me a fucking break” when it could have as easily been “beautifully rendered”, because this writer was capable of rendering it beautifully, if he hadn’t been writing a light piece to be sold for a Reader’s Digest-type publication.

I have the same beef with parents who keep essential truths from their children, perhaps thinking they’re sparing them the worst while leaving them with no clue into the seething rage around them at the dinner table.  Daddy won’t admit it, but he was caught fucking the former baby sitter, mommy saw it on the nanny cam; dad sticks to his imbecilic story that it was simply malicious trick photography by a hacker intent on sowing discord. 

Mom is enraged, the kids have no clue that she has good reason to be mad– as much about the childishly implausible denial as the infidelity with young woman a few years older than their daughter. Everyone keeps awkwardly mum as mom smolders and seethes, pounding the pots on the stove, slamming the oven door shut.  

To me, the teenaged kids don’t deserve to be kept in the dark as to why mom is not unreasonable to be hurt and angry.  Mom doesn’t deserve to be seen as irrationally enraged, neither does dad deserve to shrug at the kids and smile ironically whenever mom turns away like he’s the victim too, but it’s a sadly typical case.

Barack Obama leaves a bad taste for a similar reason.  He is a smooth obfuscater who speaks eloquently of the necessity, in a democracy, of free and open information for citizens, while he withholds information the People have a right to know, denies more Freedom of Information requests than even Cheney, threatens journalists and other citizens who report things he doesn’t want public.  For maximum chilling effect, he brandishes the rarely-used 1917 Espionage Act which was designed, in a mania of patriotic wartime fervor, to imprison and even execute wartime traitors during the War to End All Wars.  

I watch the president do a great comedic turn at his final National Press Club’s White House Correspondents’ dinner and then turn serious to thank his partners in transparency, the millionaire stars of the mass media, the ones who help him keep all Americans exquisitely informed with all the details we citizens of a democracy need to make intelligent choices.  

I get that candidate Obama had a great selling point in his election fight against the non-transparent heirs to Cheney’s unprecedented reign of secrecy.  I get that politics is complicated and that all candidates lie.  I don’t get why he keeps counter-factually insisting that he’s run a transparent administration.  The facts say he has not.  

As he goes on congratulating his partners in the corporate media and speaking of this era of unprecedented government transparency they are partners in, I immediately picture the New-Speak talking Martians in Mars Attacks, saying “we come in peace” and reducing the person they’ve greeted to a charred skeleton.  My smile turns to a sneer and I say to the screen “OK, man, you need to just shut the fuck up now.”

I believe that a writer in a free society should be as true to his or her thoughts and feelings, and what she/he knows, as possible.  It may not be the best way to sell a book, necessarily, but, for me, it makes for the most interesting and rewarding reading.

I suppose that conviction comes from a childhood where the whole story was never told, where you had almost no chance to put together the larger puzzle from the few perplexing pieces given.

That childhood, and my experience as an adult in our simplified blue hat/red hat advertising-driven democracy, have given me a lifelong distaste for half-truth, untruth, self-justifying rationale, saying what you think you should say, or what you think needs to be said, lies of omission, withholding of needed facts, the disconnect between feeling and expression, between knowledge and responsibility. 

That was my main point in that piece on what a writer should write and how far they should go to properly tell a story, though I don’t know that I expressed it very clearly or succinctly in that previous post.  

Keret and Steek

Two women whose literary opinions I esteem told me to get Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years.  I eventually did.  I now recommend it to you, delightful short essays, each two or three pages long, each one a gem.  I found myself laughing out loud.   It felt strange to recall I once had a sense of humor, was not always this ball of aggravated nerve endings who sits clenched before you today.

Upstairs, or across the air shaft, the Human Theremin just began practicing her shaky soprano trill.  That high strung register is my least favorite range of the human voice, and her repetitive exercise is, I’m pretty sure, the most hideous use for that shrill tone.   She sounds like a Victorian hysteric swooning, over and over and over.   But I digress.  

The other day I was on the phone with my cellphone provider, T-Mobile.   They had problems with their service, and with their customer service, and sent me texts nobody could explain, and then abruptly cut off my internet service and data.   I spent hours on the phone with their representatives who were busy helping other customers but apparently there was no help for my situation.  

In the car one evening, I was finally talking to someone intelligent and proactive over at T-Mobile.   She was very nice, very smart, had looked at the mishmash of my recent customer service calls, apologized for the series of apparent screw-ups and network failures and told me she’d solved all the problems, zeroed out the balance, restored the improperly disabled data and internet services, was very sorry for my agggg….

“Hello?” I said “Sharayah?”  

Seconds later I had a free T-Mobile Msg:  

We apologize, your call with Sharayah (23530) from T-Mobile just dropped.  You will receive a call back shortly. Thanks for your patience.    

I read it out loud to Sekhnet, who’d heard the end of my delightful call with Sharayah.  

“Assholes,” she said, and I pointed out that they were a German company and, therefore, most likely, Nazi assholes.  

She’d had similar problems with her provider, Verizon, and we concluded once more that the corporate personality leaves a lot to be desired whether that corporation is Nazi, American or transnational.

An hour or two later the patience that T-Mobile politeness bots had thanked me for was gone.  I texted back “Hello?”  

T-Mobile was once again lightning fast with a response:

Sorry, this service is temporarily unavailable.  Please try again later.  

This too I read aloud to Sekhnet, with predicable results.  I probably used the word “motherfuckers” in some connection to these automated Nazi dickheads.   Thinking back, a lot of what happened later was simply my fault– I’d wound her up.    

A couple of hours later I called T-Mobile again, again from the car.  This time Sekhnet was driving.  After a very short wait, no more than five minutes (recent hold times had been up to an hour, due to the super popular iPhone’s recent emergence on the T-Mobile Nazi network),  I had another lovely, very sympathetic T-Mobile representative on the line.  

She was the second coming of Sharayah and she was able to read me all of Sharayah’s notes.   I should not be experiencing this problem, she told me reassuringly, it was a stupid error… someone had simply not inputted the proper order.  She began to apologize as she typed more notes on my account.  Suddenly Sekhnet, hearing my silence, had had enough.  

“T-Mobile sucks!” she barked, almost as loud as that inconsolable Tourretic German Shepherd next door.  “Tell them their service is complete shit!  What a bunch of fucking useless assholes… their fucking network is a piece of shit!   Fuck them!  Fuck T-Mobile!”  

It was hard to hear the kind young woman on the line apologizing to me over this outpouring of righteous passion.  

I asked the girl at T-Mobile for a second.  I told Sekhnet, with carefully modulated snappishness, that I was on the phone with T-Mobile.  Then I added, in a stage whisper straight into the phone, that a very nice, intelligent woman at T-Mobile was straightening everything out for me, the long tech nightmare was, hopefully, almost over.  

Then suddenly it all got to me, the restraint I’d been showing in recent days when two long-time acquaintances had revealed themselves as rabid by tag teaming me with snarling emails about what a wimp I was to complain about some innocent and completely inadvertent repetitive ass-dicking.   “As if any of us had never been, figuratively, fucked up the ass!” their terse emails strongly implied.

Suddenly I wanted to be compensated for this long ordeal with fucking T-Mobile.   Reparations was all I could think about.  I told this woman I wanted money refunded to me.  I suggested a month’s fees would be about right, as a sign of good faith from T-Mobile.  

She wasn’t authorized to do it, but said I was right to feel that way, she’d feel the same way — and she thought T-Mobile did owe me some money.  I appreciated her saying that, they so rarely do.  She told me she’d have to get a supervisor, someone who could give me some money.  She promised she’d stay on the line until one picked up, but then forgot to put me on silent hold as she had thoughtfully done, at my request, when she’d put me on a brief hold moments earlier to find Sharayah’s notes.  

A few blaring bars composed by the humorless Josef Mengele, MD, played over and over.  Then Josh was on the line.  Josh was a supervisor, very grateful that I’d been a loyal T-Mobile customer for twelve years.  He was eager, he told me, to make me completely happy.  

I told him my story in some detail and then spoke the only language these Nazis understand: money.  I wanted monetary compensation for my recent run around, in light of my twelve years of, heretofore, thankless loyalty to T-Mobile.  He said he understood.  He then offered me ten dollars off my next bill.

“Josh, if we were friends, and I’d done something very aggravating to you that had cost you many hours of your life to fix, and I offered you ten dollars, would you consider that fair, or an adequate show of friendship?”  I asked the supervisor.  

“Yes, I would,” he said cheerfully.  

“Well, you’re a much nicer person that I am, Josh,” I said with ill-disguised bitterness, with malice actually. “To me ten dollars from a multi-national corporation feels like someone peeing on me.”  

Josh then affably pointed out that the internet and data services I received from T-Mobile, and had not been able to use for only the last few days, were provided free, as a courtesy by T-Mobile.  

I countered that the generous 500 MB of data per month were part of the plan I paid T-Mobile $50 a month for, therefore it was hard for me to see the service as free.  We discussed this pointlessly for a moment or two.  Then I cut him off.  

“OK, I understand you’re not authorized to offer a customer more than $10 on behalf of the corporation.  I’ll take it.  Talk to you later, Josh,” I said, and rung off.  

“You were very mean to him,” Sekhnet said.  You’d hardly know, from her reasonable, parental tone, that she’d been barking like Obi, the long-eared Tourretic next door, only moments earlier.  

“And you’re no Etgar Keret,” she will point out when I read this to her.  

“Steek,” I will say, suavely extending a paw,  “James Steek, Keret veh Steek.” 

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.

Anger and “The Insula”

Last word.

I will keep this simple.  I’ve heard (granted from a historian Bill Moyers interviewed) that there’s a specific part of the human brain, located in the primitive, survival-oriented region that’s sometimes referred to as the lizard or reptile brain, where anger is experienced.  Let’s call it the insula (or insular cortex), and assume, for our purposes here, that feeling anger is one of its primary functions.  

When the insula is engaged for anger, all bodily engines are mobilized for fight or flight.   Cortisol and adrenaline, already coursing through the system, are ready to be released in a flood, as soon as the insula gives the command.  The ability to see nuance and make distinctions disappears, along with the ability to compromise.  All the person with the glowing insula can see is rage and the enemy in the upcoming battle.  There is a clear evolutionary survival advantage to this hyper-focus.

It explains why it seems impossible for an angry person to acknowledge certain things that may seem easily seen.  An angry person, told that his ignoring three requests for a comment was hurtful, cannot process that information.   You would think anybody who had been ignored several consecutive times would feel hurt, at least slighted.  You’d think it would be an easy matter to put yourself in the other person’s place and feel and express regret for not doing the decent, human thing for a friend.  If your insula is glowing, and you never learned how to calm it, it is actually biologically impossible to do any of those things.

First of all, you will say, I don’t remember ever having ignored you, so I couldn’t have done it on purpose and you’re the aggressor for blaming me.  Second, you say I ignored you but it’s quite possible I responded to you, I think I did, and you just, for whatever reason, maybe to feel justified in your irrational rage, blocked it out.  Third, I don’t even remember if I even read the thing you asked me to comment on, it made no lasting impression in any case, so what’s the fuss about?  Fourth, you’re a fucking hypocrite, I sent you something you never responded to, even though I realize now I must have somehow sent it to an address where it never reached you.  Fifth, I will need your unconditional surrender before any peace negotiations can begin. Blah blah blah.

The effective thing to say, if you meant to have a sincere and lasting peace, and friendship, with the other, would be more like:  

Of course I’d be hurt if you did that to me, anyone would.  A friend should not have to beg another friend for feedback on a project they had a long, animated conversation about.  This is especially true between two writers who have discussed one of their projects. Three separate requests should have been enough.  It’s not necessary to send me the email string to prove I never uttered a peep in response.  It was wrong of me to question your veracity on that, I was angry and feeling desperate.   I was an asshole not to get back to you, a jerk to insist you should have contacted me for feedback a fourth time, and a fifth if necessary, and I apologize.   It’s not as though I’m working two full-time jobs and am overwhelmed by work, I’m semi-retired.  I understand it was hurtful, I didn’t mean to do it and I hope you will forgive me. Would it help if I read it now and gave you some notes you might be able to work with?  

The insula, glowing, knows only how to continue the do-or-die fight for survival.  God bless the reptile brain, when fight is needed.  Hard to be friends with an angry reptile, though.  I speak from long experience.

 

NOTE:

The frontal insula is where people sense love and hate, gratitude and resentment, self-confidence and embarrassment, trust and distrust, empathy and contempt, approval and disdain, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, atonement and guilt.

The NY Times printed this, on June 2, 2007.  (source)

 

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.