In the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit now that in between ceasing to be a performing musician, to overstate the case, and resuming my career as one of the English-speaking world’s most beloved writers about music, I worked for five unforgettable months as a pimp.
I owed my knowing a lot of whores to my exercise regimen. Living just around the corner at the time from Carlos ‘n’ Charlie’s, where men in shirts with very long pointed collars and golddigging gals with Farrah Fawcett hair did lots of sniffling, I ran every evening up to Fairfax, and then down to Melrose, down to La Cienega, and back up to Sunset, commonly, thanks to the miracle of radio headphones, to the beat of Irene Cara's "Fame." As any visitor to West Hollywood who drives a stick shift knows, the La Cienega hill is very steep, and running up it made me feel full of what Tom Wolfe has described as rude animal health, the auto exhaust emissions be damned. I'm going to live forever; I'm going to learn how to fly!
There would commonly be a pride of whores at the top, standing around in their excruciating footwear hoping for passing motorists to invite them to the prom. A couple of the more sarcastic ones took to applauding each night as I staggered gasping and drenched into their midst, and one Tuesday evening, when my girlfriend had plans to go out amyl nitrate dancing with gay friends, I asked if they might want to grab a cup of coffee or something. Sha’quwan’aa, the most truculent, urged me to get the fuck out of her face before she whupped me upside the head; she was offended that I’d expect them, whores though they may have been, to want to be seen with someone so disheveled from exertion. Three others, though, said why not. It wasn’t as though Tuesday were one of their big nights.
We went to the coffee shop adjoining the Tropicana Motel down on Santa Monica Blvd., I and Jeanette, Barbara (whom I was to call Babs, as everyone did), and Temp’Este. When I asked the latter if Temp'Este were her real name, she sneered and said, “What are you, a cop?” All they wanted to talk about was how much they disliked their respective pimps, whose integrity they questioned, and whose expressions of love they’d come to doubt. “How can me and Jeanette both be his No. 1 Bitch?” a tearful Babs wondered. Apparently their pimp had bestowed this honorific on both girls, out of each other’s hearing. They had no weeks paid vacation their first, or any other, year.
Temp’Este was by far the least attractive of the three. Her face suggested a partially melted candle. She had a very weak chin, and rotten posture. I assumed she’d reached her adult height of around 5-10 early in adolescence, when to stand out was to be ridiculed, and had taught herself to slouch. Because of her height, she wore the least sexy shoes, and I couldn’t envision her being a terrific earner, but how could I invite the other two to let me step in as their business manager without asking her too?
All three young women were excited about the idea, especially on discovering that I was perfectly happy with my Austin Marina, and had no interest in a Cadillac in a color that doesn’t occur in nature; my understanding is that MTV hadn't yet invented the expression “pimp my ride.” The girls seemed unable to believe their ears when I revealed my plans for profit-sharing, full medical and dental insurance, and child care; between them, they already had five children. Temp’Este got tearful as she recounted the savage beating her pimp had given her when she implored him a little too insistently to let her put a My Child Is an Honor Student at [Withheld] Avenue School sticker on the rear bumper of his '77 El Dorado.
Speaking of Irene Cara and rude animal health, by the way, imagine my delight on discovering that Richard Butler of Psychedelic Furs isn't our only lapsed pop star here in Beacon. Cara, who, in a good light, looks only a few months older than when her name was on every American lip, is now the most popular server at the new Dominican restaurant on Main Street, in spite of often being too busy signing autographs to get folks' dinners in front of them while still piping hot.
To be continued!
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Green Ambrosia
A National Public Radio news bulletin warning that the pernicious fungal disease downy mildew has been ravaging basil in parts of the country has me thinking about pesto, which I regard, along with aioli and sushi, as one of personkind’s most wonderful culinary achievements.
Having grown up on a diet that vividly communicated both my mother’s distaste for cooking and her feeling that if you found an inexpensive restaurant that didn’t give you food poisoning, you should never risk going to another one, ever, I had never encountered pesto before The Kiddo, who’d stopped taking hallucinogens years before, rhapsodized one night about the remarkable green pizza he’d eaten in Westwood Village. The foregoing was such a long sentence that only now am I able to explain that I refer only to my mother’s aversion to the kitchen because in the era of my childhood an American man was no more likely to cook than to kiss another man full on the lips while fondling his buttocks; it was understood to be women’s work, you see. And the safe, inexpensive restaurant to which I refer, as attentive readers will surely recall, was the Chatam (which seemed to lack an h) on Westwood Blvd., whose pretensions to class included having a menu printed in the Olde English typeface.
Those same attentive readers will note that the Italian restaurant where The Kiddo had savored the amazing green pizza was none other than that in which I and the two other members of the 1930 Four had dined the first night I smoked marijuana, and then scooted on the bill. To my considerable relief, they didn’t seem to recognize me (from around a decade before) when I went back to try the green pizza for myself.
Ambrosia, my friends, in the classical sense. Swoon time. Delicious — and sensual! — beyond imagining.
Culinary scholars (now there’s a job I wish existed, and that I’d prepared for) agree that pesto was originally devised in the vicinity of Genova (English speakers don’t like the v, for reasons unknown to me), so Missus the First, to whom I wasn’t yet wed at the time, and I made a beeline for it in the spring of 1982 when we wandered around Italy. We found a very inexpensive, very pleasant pensione — the eyes of whose proprietress said, “If only (the future) Missus the First weren’t with you, big boy, how dolce a vita we could have,” in an alluring accent — and so stayed and stayed and stayed, eating much of the sauce for which the region is known. My impression was that every ristorante, trattoria, and even tavola calda made a gigantic tub of the stuff every morning, but when I requested it one afternoon on a pizza, the proprietor looked at me as though I’d asked him to step on the pizza before baking it. I can only imagine that he was discombobulated by the great allure of my future bride.
A decade and more later, while living in San Francisco’s utterly charmless Sunset district, my daughter and I, on one of our nocturnal traipses, discovered an eerily Chatamesque restaurant with an Olde English menu ‘way up by 19th Avenue, right across Noriega Street from Fujiyama-ya, with its famous florid Irish waiter, which in turn was two doors from the Bashful Bull snack bar with it famous (literally!) rotting moosehead. In a ‘hood as dreary as the Sunset, you find amusement where you can.
It doesn’t seem fair, does it? One of the prettiest words in the language, sewage, refers to the most disgusting stuff, and does not Downy (or, better, Downi) Mildew sound like a cheerleader so wholesomely gorgeous that even her seemingly asexual algebra teacher has to hurry each morning to the male faculty restroom for a few minutes' privacy after her class?
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
Having grown up on a diet that vividly communicated both my mother’s distaste for cooking and her feeling that if you found an inexpensive restaurant that didn’t give you food poisoning, you should never risk going to another one, ever, I had never encountered pesto before The Kiddo, who’d stopped taking hallucinogens years before, rhapsodized one night about the remarkable green pizza he’d eaten in Westwood Village. The foregoing was such a long sentence that only now am I able to explain that I refer only to my mother’s aversion to the kitchen because in the era of my childhood an American man was no more likely to cook than to kiss another man full on the lips while fondling his buttocks; it was understood to be women’s work, you see. And the safe, inexpensive restaurant to which I refer, as attentive readers will surely recall, was the Chatam (which seemed to lack an h) on Westwood Blvd., whose pretensions to class included having a menu printed in the Olde English typeface.
Those same attentive readers will note that the Italian restaurant where The Kiddo had savored the amazing green pizza was none other than that in which I and the two other members of the 1930 Four had dined the first night I smoked marijuana, and then scooted on the bill. To my considerable relief, they didn’t seem to recognize me (from around a decade before) when I went back to try the green pizza for myself.
Ambrosia, my friends, in the classical sense. Swoon time. Delicious — and sensual! — beyond imagining.
Culinary scholars (now there’s a job I wish existed, and that I’d prepared for) agree that pesto was originally devised in the vicinity of Genova (English speakers don’t like the v, for reasons unknown to me), so Missus the First, to whom I wasn’t yet wed at the time, and I made a beeline for it in the spring of 1982 when we wandered around Italy. We found a very inexpensive, very pleasant pensione — the eyes of whose proprietress said, “If only (the future) Missus the First weren’t with you, big boy, how dolce a vita we could have,” in an alluring accent — and so stayed and stayed and stayed, eating much of the sauce for which the region is known. My impression was that every ristorante, trattoria, and even tavola calda made a gigantic tub of the stuff every morning, but when I requested it one afternoon on a pizza, the proprietor looked at me as though I’d asked him to step on the pizza before baking it. I can only imagine that he was discombobulated by the great allure of my future bride.
A decade and more later, while living in San Francisco’s utterly charmless Sunset district, my daughter and I, on one of our nocturnal traipses, discovered an eerily Chatamesque restaurant with an Olde English menu ‘way up by 19th Avenue, right across Noriega Street from Fujiyama-ya, with its famous florid Irish waiter, which in turn was two doors from the Bashful Bull snack bar with it famous (literally!) rotting moosehead. In a ‘hood as dreary as the Sunset, you find amusement where you can.
It doesn’t seem fair, does it? One of the prettiest words in the language, sewage, refers to the most disgusting stuff, and does not Downy (or, better, Downi) Mildew sound like a cheerleader so wholesomely gorgeous that even her seemingly asexual algebra teacher has to hurry each morning to the male faculty restroom for a few minutes' privacy after her class?
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Shopping With the Poor
I went to the gym slightly earlier today because I’d finished the design project I’d been working on down here in the basement, where it’s dark and gloomy and 15 degrees cooler than anywhere else in the house, and a swell place to hide from the punishing heat-‘n’-humidity.
When I arrived, I had a brief interaction with the tired-looking blonde woman behind the desk who held up the scanner thing for me. She mumbled, “How you doing?” and I mumbled back, “OK.” It wasn’t two o’clock yet and already I’d interacted with a fellow human! When the software recognized the bar code on the little plastic tag on my keychain, the female robot cooed, “Welcome!” in that weirdly hearty way of hers, but I’m not counting that as an interaction.
I spent my traditional 30 minutes on the stationary bicycle, with the resistance set pretty high, while continuing to enjoy David Finkel’s harrowing book about Iraq, The Good Soldiers, if enjoy is the right word. If what I’m reading is difficult or boring, it seems as though I must pedal for hours, but I was past 24 minutes today before even thinking to see how much longer I had to go.
Many of the people at Planet Fitness pretend to be obsessive-compulsive when they finish with a particular machine. They grab a spray bottle and paper towels and scrub away as though surgery’s going to be performed on it. The only part of the stationary bike I touch is the seat (oh, all right, and a couple of the buttons on the keypad). My own neuroses don’t include OCD, so I neither spray nor wipe. Now it can be told.
I proceeded over to one of the pecs machines, which is painful for me because of my titanium right shoulder, and did only two sets of 16 reps rather than my traditional three because my shoulder hated it even more than usual. I went over to Dollar Tree, which I enjoy thinking of as Idolatry, and headed for the book section because last week I there found Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, which absolutely took my breath away, and all for a buck. I dropped three interesting-looking novels that had originally sold for no less than $23.95 each into my green plastic basket, which also came to contain a can of Del Monte’s delicious (if sweetened) mushroom spaghetti sauce, orange juice, and a spray bottle of orange degreaser.
Every day when I go into the kitchen to cook, I remember my second girlfriend, Marie, telling me that only a brief visit to my kitchen high above Sunset Blvd. made clear that I wasn’t able to adequately look after myself. Grease, you see. I am mortified by how greasy my microwave and stovetop are, and have had at ‘em with detergent, ammonia, and vinegar, all to no avail. Hence the orange degreaser, you see.
The cashier, another fellow human with whom I interacted, and all in the course of less than an hour, rang up my purchases and said I owed her $8.49. As Idolatry prides itself on selling everything for a dollar, and I’d bought six items, I thought something was fishy. It turned out I’d been charged $3 for one of the books. She solicited the help of her supervisor, and rang up two more bargain-hunters’ extensive purchases while I waited and waited.
Her supervisor was the ugliest woman in New York, with a personality to match. Do you suppose she smiled at me or uttered even a syllable of apology? Seeing that I’d put my purchase on my debit card, all she said was “shit!” I suppose if you're going to shop where the poor shop, you should expect to be treated with contempt. Her cell phone rang while she was pounding angrily on the keyboard, and she wound up handing me the two bucks and change I was owed without a syllable of apology, vividly reminding me of Ms. Patricia Carwell, the X-ray scanner attendant at Chicago’s Midway Airport whose fervent surliness inspired me to write a letter of complaint in 2008 to both Mayor Daley and the Transportation Security Administration.
I’m back home and in front of my computer now, and anticipate no further tastes of the milk of human kindness this afternoon. But there’s a Netflix DVD in the mailbox with three new (to me) episodes of the sublime Friday Night Lights, so I'll probably live through it, albeit not indefinitely.
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
When I arrived, I had a brief interaction with the tired-looking blonde woman behind the desk who held up the scanner thing for me. She mumbled, “How you doing?” and I mumbled back, “OK.” It wasn’t two o’clock yet and already I’d interacted with a fellow human! When the software recognized the bar code on the little plastic tag on my keychain, the female robot cooed, “Welcome!” in that weirdly hearty way of hers, but I’m not counting that as an interaction.
I spent my traditional 30 minutes on the stationary bicycle, with the resistance set pretty high, while continuing to enjoy David Finkel’s harrowing book about Iraq, The Good Soldiers, if enjoy is the right word. If what I’m reading is difficult or boring, it seems as though I must pedal for hours, but I was past 24 minutes today before even thinking to see how much longer I had to go.
Many of the people at Planet Fitness pretend to be obsessive-compulsive when they finish with a particular machine. They grab a spray bottle and paper towels and scrub away as though surgery’s going to be performed on it. The only part of the stationary bike I touch is the seat (oh, all right, and a couple of the buttons on the keypad). My own neuroses don’t include OCD, so I neither spray nor wipe. Now it can be told.
I proceeded over to one of the pecs machines, which is painful for me because of my titanium right shoulder, and did only two sets of 16 reps rather than my traditional three because my shoulder hated it even more than usual. I went over to Dollar Tree, which I enjoy thinking of as Idolatry, and headed for the book section because last week I there found Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, which absolutely took my breath away, and all for a buck. I dropped three interesting-looking novels that had originally sold for no less than $23.95 each into my green plastic basket, which also came to contain a can of Del Monte’s delicious (if sweetened) mushroom spaghetti sauce, orange juice, and a spray bottle of orange degreaser.
Every day when I go into the kitchen to cook, I remember my second girlfriend, Marie, telling me that only a brief visit to my kitchen high above Sunset Blvd. made clear that I wasn’t able to adequately look after myself. Grease, you see. I am mortified by how greasy my microwave and stovetop are, and have had at ‘em with detergent, ammonia, and vinegar, all to no avail. Hence the orange degreaser, you see.
The cashier, another fellow human with whom I interacted, and all in the course of less than an hour, rang up my purchases and said I owed her $8.49. As Idolatry prides itself on selling everything for a dollar, and I’d bought six items, I thought something was fishy. It turned out I’d been charged $3 for one of the books. She solicited the help of her supervisor, and rang up two more bargain-hunters’ extensive purchases while I waited and waited.
Her supervisor was the ugliest woman in New York, with a personality to match. Do you suppose she smiled at me or uttered even a syllable of apology? Seeing that I’d put my purchase on my debit card, all she said was “shit!” I suppose if you're going to shop where the poor shop, you should expect to be treated with contempt. Her cell phone rang while she was pounding angrily on the keyboard, and she wound up handing me the two bucks and change I was owed without a syllable of apology, vividly reminding me of Ms. Patricia Carwell, the X-ray scanner attendant at Chicago’s Midway Airport whose fervent surliness inspired me to write a letter of complaint in 2008 to both Mayor Daley and the Transportation Security Administration.
I’m back home and in front of my computer now, and anticipate no further tastes of the milk of human kindness this afternoon. But there’s a Netflix DVD in the mailbox with three new (to me) episodes of the sublime Friday Night Lights, so I'll probably live through it, albeit not indefinitely.
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Hobbies of Hotties
Most of the time I’ve been writing For All In Tents and Porpoises, it’s seemed that nobody’s reading it. It’s disheartening, but no one said life would easy, or even endurable. So imagine my surprise when someone who turned out to be an avid reader, if not a public Follower, phoned me with a job offer the day after I complained here about my problems with Facebook.
You may recall that Facebook had taken, nearly every time I sent someone a friend request, to bellowing Warning! You are engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users. Facebook's systems determined that you were going too fast when adding friends. You must significantly slow down. Further misuse of site features may result in a temporary block or your account being permanently disabled. You may recall further that my friend-adding ability had been suspended for up to 96 hours at a time because of my implacable gregariousness.
My caller took pains to point out that he wasn’t an actual Facebook employee, but an independent subcontractor, one of tens of thousands Facebook hires around the world each month. I was to understand that the views he expressed weren’t Facebook’s, but his own. It sounded as though he were either reading a prepared statement, or reciting one he’d memorized, and as though he might be winking. In any event, he was in the business of recruiting people to visit in person those who’d persisted in abusing their Facebook privileges for purposes of persuading them to reconsider their behavior.
Reading between the lines, I understood that my role was to be directly analogous to that of the slick-haired, toothpick-chewing guy who presents himself in slightly too-fashionable attire at a restaurant or bar, say, and muses to the owner, “Nice little place you got here. I’d hate to see it burned to the ground some night.”
My prospective employer — I’ll call him “Matt” — arranged for me to visit his tailor to be fitted for a Carlo Bruttini suit, for which he would pay. I would, though, have to arrange for my own pomade and facial scar. When I pointed out that I have an ugly scar from my shoulder replacement surgery 15 years ago, he pointed out that it would suffice only if I wore a wifebeater for my “visitations,” but that casual wear was strictly forbidden. With apparent disgust, he told me he’d consider waiving the facial scar requirement in my case if I’d get an ugly prison tattoo on my neck. This I arranged to do.
I and three other recruits — two Russians and an Albanian — had a little training session at which we learned, when conducting our visitations, to ask our reluctant hosts for a glass of orange or other citric juice, not because it’s packed with vitamins C and D, but because its acidity causes immobilizing discomfort when tossed in one’s eyes.
The first guy I visited, Norman K—, looked every inch an average joe in his protuberant gut, stubble, and backwards Mets cap, though “Matt” knew him to be posing on Facebook as Britaeni, a 19-year-old hotty whose principal hobby, from the look of it, was taking self-portraits with her cell phone. “She” had nearly 2200 friends, most of them under 20 and good at neither spelling nor punctuation, though I'm well aware of the argument that textmsgspeak, like African American speech, has its own unique grammar. He had no orange juice, nor grapefruit, nor even lemonade. What he had, of course, was beer — Coors — whose blinding ability turned out to be woefully deficient. Tossing it in his face only made him furious, and I was reminded that a beer belly doesn’t mean someone isn’t strong. He put me through the window of his utility room, broke my left arm in two places, and my nose, and my jaw, knocked out one tooth and loosened three others, and gave me a concussion. I had all I could do, in my significantly impaired state, to talk him out of trying to break off an old Rawlings wooden tennis racquet in my rectum.
I have decided, in view of this experience, to allow Facebook and its subcontractors to soldier on without me, and to see if I can regain my old job with either the Census Bureau or Larry Flynt Publications.
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
You may recall that Facebook had taken, nearly every time I sent someone a friend request, to bellowing Warning! You are engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users. Facebook's systems determined that you were going too fast when adding friends. You must significantly slow down. Further misuse of site features may result in a temporary block or your account being permanently disabled. You may recall further that my friend-adding ability had been suspended for up to 96 hours at a time because of my implacable gregariousness.
My caller took pains to point out that he wasn’t an actual Facebook employee, but an independent subcontractor, one of tens of thousands Facebook hires around the world each month. I was to understand that the views he expressed weren’t Facebook’s, but his own. It sounded as though he were either reading a prepared statement, or reciting one he’d memorized, and as though he might be winking. In any event, he was in the business of recruiting people to visit in person those who’d persisted in abusing their Facebook privileges for purposes of persuading them to reconsider their behavior.
Reading between the lines, I understood that my role was to be directly analogous to that of the slick-haired, toothpick-chewing guy who presents himself in slightly too-fashionable attire at a restaurant or bar, say, and muses to the owner, “Nice little place you got here. I’d hate to see it burned to the ground some night.”
My prospective employer — I’ll call him “Matt” — arranged for me to visit his tailor to be fitted for a Carlo Bruttini suit, for which he would pay. I would, though, have to arrange for my own pomade and facial scar. When I pointed out that I have an ugly scar from my shoulder replacement surgery 15 years ago, he pointed out that it would suffice only if I wore a wifebeater for my “visitations,” but that casual wear was strictly forbidden. With apparent disgust, he told me he’d consider waiving the facial scar requirement in my case if I’d get an ugly prison tattoo on my neck. This I arranged to do.
I and three other recruits — two Russians and an Albanian — had a little training session at which we learned, when conducting our visitations, to ask our reluctant hosts for a glass of orange or other citric juice, not because it’s packed with vitamins C and D, but because its acidity causes immobilizing discomfort when tossed in one’s eyes.
The first guy I visited, Norman K—, looked every inch an average joe in his protuberant gut, stubble, and backwards Mets cap, though “Matt” knew him to be posing on Facebook as Britaeni, a 19-year-old hotty whose principal hobby, from the look of it, was taking self-portraits with her cell phone. “She” had nearly 2200 friends, most of them under 20 and good at neither spelling nor punctuation, though I'm well aware of the argument that textmsgspeak, like African American speech, has its own unique grammar. He had no orange juice, nor grapefruit, nor even lemonade. What he had, of course, was beer — Coors — whose blinding ability turned out to be woefully deficient. Tossing it in his face only made him furious, and I was reminded that a beer belly doesn’t mean someone isn’t strong. He put me through the window of his utility room, broke my left arm in two places, and my nose, and my jaw, knocked out one tooth and loosened three others, and gave me a concussion. I had all I could do, in my significantly impaired state, to talk him out of trying to break off an old Rawlings wooden tennis racquet in my rectum.
I have decided, in view of this experience, to allow Facebook and its subcontractors to soldier on without me, and to see if I can regain my old job with either the Census Bureau or Larry Flynt Publications.
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Acid in His Eyes
Sports kowtow to the oddest conventions. While 10,000 fans stamp their feet, scream, and wave things behind the backboard, a 17-year-old son or daughter of the inner city will be asked to decide a basketball league championship by either making or missing a free throw. Before a 35-year-old golfer, a son of the affluent suburbs, putts, he will expect rapt silence from all around him, as too will his counterpart at a tennis match.
Poor folks: sink or swim in spite of all hell breaking loose around you. Rich folks: mum is the word.
In football, one who has scored a touchdown — or, in recent years, intercepted a pass, or sacked a quarterback — will gloat madly, and, indeed, often perform elaborate predetermined dance routines intended in large part to increase the bettered opponent’s humiliation. In baseball, though, if one who has just hit the ball over the fence runs too slowly around the bases, he is adjudged to have rubbed his opponents’ nose in their deficient virility. A base runner attempting to steal a base when his team has a comfortable lead late in the game can result in mayhem. The delicate sensibilities of the team behind must be scrupulously respected.
In baseball, one may be struck in a sensitive area by a pitch traveling at nearly 100 miles per hour, but if he does the natural, human, reflexive thing and rubs the traumatized region area to try to ease his agony, he is seen as what Ty Cobb, the fervently sociopathic greatest star of the dead-ball era, would have called a mollycoddle. Even one who recognizes that chewing tobacco can cause cancer of the pharynx, not to mention eukoplakia, recession of the gums. bone loss around the teeth, abrasion of the teeth, and foul breath is required to slobber implacably or risk being seen as no less a sipper of pink tea than one who’d rub a spot off which a fastball had just bounced.
I thought of these things the other day while watching Brazil’s World Cup victory over Ivory Coast. In the 87th minute, with the score 3-1, Brazil, and virtually all hope lost, the Ivorian Abdul Kader Keita hurtled toward Brazil’s brilliant midfielder Kaká, who reflexively held up his right arm to defend himself. Running gently into said arm, Keita fell to the ground writhing as though Kaká had sprayed battery acid in his eyes. The referee, noting his great anguish, gave Kaká his second yellow card (sort of like a personal foul in basketball, but much more grievous) of the game, which meant that he was automatically ejected, and will be banned from Brazil’s next game, against (reasonably) mighty Portugal.
Which is to say that because of Keita’s ridiculous display, the world will be deprived of the pleasure of seeing two of the sport’s greatest players (Portugal has Cristiano Ronaldo, you see) leading their respective countries on the same pitch.
So here’s the question. Professional athletes are forever being told that winning isn’t the best thing, but the only thing. If an American baseball player — one who wouldn’t, for fear of appearing unmanly, rub the spot where a 95-mph fastball had just hit him — writhe agonizedly around in the infield dirt if it meant the ejection of the opposing team’s best player? Food for thought!
Kaká, by the way, is pronounced with the second syllable emphasized, as witness the accent mark. Nobody likes a wisenheimer.
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
Poor folks: sink or swim in spite of all hell breaking loose around you. Rich folks: mum is the word.
In football, one who has scored a touchdown — or, in recent years, intercepted a pass, or sacked a quarterback — will gloat madly, and, indeed, often perform elaborate predetermined dance routines intended in large part to increase the bettered opponent’s humiliation. In baseball, though, if one who has just hit the ball over the fence runs too slowly around the bases, he is adjudged to have rubbed his opponents’ nose in their deficient virility. A base runner attempting to steal a base when his team has a comfortable lead late in the game can result in mayhem. The delicate sensibilities of the team behind must be scrupulously respected.
In baseball, one may be struck in a sensitive area by a pitch traveling at nearly 100 miles per hour, but if he does the natural, human, reflexive thing and rubs the traumatized region area to try to ease his agony, he is seen as what Ty Cobb, the fervently sociopathic greatest star of the dead-ball era, would have called a mollycoddle. Even one who recognizes that chewing tobacco can cause cancer of the pharynx, not to mention eukoplakia, recession of the gums. bone loss around the teeth, abrasion of the teeth, and foul breath is required to slobber implacably or risk being seen as no less a sipper of pink tea than one who’d rub a spot off which a fastball had just bounced.
I thought of these things the other day while watching Brazil’s World Cup victory over Ivory Coast. In the 87th minute, with the score 3-1, Brazil, and virtually all hope lost, the Ivorian Abdul Kader Keita hurtled toward Brazil’s brilliant midfielder Kaká, who reflexively held up his right arm to defend himself. Running gently into said arm, Keita fell to the ground writhing as though Kaká had sprayed battery acid in his eyes. The referee, noting his great anguish, gave Kaká his second yellow card (sort of like a personal foul in basketball, but much more grievous) of the game, which meant that he was automatically ejected, and will be banned from Brazil’s next game, against (reasonably) mighty Portugal.
Which is to say that because of Keita’s ridiculous display, the world will be deprived of the pleasure of seeing two of the sport’s greatest players (Portugal has Cristiano Ronaldo, you see) leading their respective countries on the same pitch.
So here’s the question. Professional athletes are forever being told that winning isn’t the best thing, but the only thing. If an American baseball player — one who wouldn’t, for fear of appearing unmanly, rub the spot where a 95-mph fastball had just hit him — writhe agonizedly around in the infield dirt if it meant the ejection of the opposing team’s best player? Food for thought!
Kaká, by the way, is pronounced with the second syllable emphasized, as witness the accent mark. Nobody likes a wisenheimer.
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
Monday, June 21, 2010
Fathers Day
It’s Fathers Day, and the only felicitations I’ve received have been from a dear friend. I don’t expect to hear from my daughter, who was similarly preoccupied on Fathers Day in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. Our estrangement used to bother me beyond my ability to express, but the pain has turned over the years into a dull ache, kind of like those in my knee and ankle. What bothers me very much more is the realization of what a rotten son I was, albeit not one who cut off contact with my parents for eight days, never mind eight years.
There wasn’t a time in his life when my dad wasn’t generous with me, and I let him die in the hellhole of a convalescent hospital to which my mother had banished him after the stroke that left him unable to walk. My grandmother, her mother, was also a patient there, at least until a couple of months after my dad was admitted, when she died. What a morale-booster for my dad!
He wanted to go home, but my mother wouldn’t allow it; she was sure there’d be a fire, and that she’d be unable to get him to safety. My parents weren’t the type of people to consider having the house modified to enable my dad, in his wheelchair, to get in and out of it on his own power. I didn’t know what he was going to do at home anyway, other than suffer my mother’s rage. I’d pleaded with him not to retire from Hughes Aircraft after hearing that his plans both began and ended with Playing a Little Golf.
Given that he was an implacable attention hound, I encouraged him to take an acting class at Santa Monica College, but it didn’t seem to suit him. He’d not bother to learn his lines for scenes he was supposed to perform with another class member, and he or she would want to strangle him. I think his greatest pleasure was going out in front of the house, on the loneliest street in the Lower 48, to smoke a cigarette. Heartbreakingly slim pickin’s.
I think, since I have no tie or socks to open and pretend to be delighted with, that I’ll torture myself a bit, and remember one of the saddest moments of the last year of his life. He shared a room with a poor old devil who, at 92, had very little of either his vision or hearing left, and who rarely had the strength to get out of bed. Another real morale-booster! I phoned my dad one Saturday afternoon from my home in San Francisco. He was heartbreakingly delighted to hear from me, but we were cut off. When I rang back, the poor old devil answered. As I struggled in vain to understand who I was or whom I wanted to speak to, I could hear my dad, unable to get out of his own bed, trying to get the guy to hand the phone over, cursing him, pleading with him. It tore my heart out.
But why stop there? A few weeks before my mother’s death two and a half years ago, I visited her at the (infinitely nicer) convalescent hospital in which she lived, if you could call what she was doing living; Alzheimer’s had taken just about everything it’s capable of taking. She didn’t communicate in any way, and gave no sign that she knew I was there. But then some sort of security alarm — one indicating that someone had gone out an emergency exit or something — began screeching at regular intervals, and I could feel her terror. I held her, and told her everything was OK, but the alarm wouldn’t stop. It seemed to take them forever to figure out how to turn the goddamned thing off. I wanted to find the person responsible and strangle him or her, but how could I leave my mother?
I was a rotten son, and what goes around comes around. My estrangement from my daughter is fitting payback (or at least was for the first year or two, after which the punishment came to be less and less proportionate to my crimes, whatever they may have been). I still love my daughter enough to wish I could communicate to her that, just as I have, she’ll surely reap what she’s sowing.
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
There wasn’t a time in his life when my dad wasn’t generous with me, and I let him die in the hellhole of a convalescent hospital to which my mother had banished him after the stroke that left him unable to walk. My grandmother, her mother, was also a patient there, at least until a couple of months after my dad was admitted, when she died. What a morale-booster for my dad!
He wanted to go home, but my mother wouldn’t allow it; she was sure there’d be a fire, and that she’d be unable to get him to safety. My parents weren’t the type of people to consider having the house modified to enable my dad, in his wheelchair, to get in and out of it on his own power. I didn’t know what he was going to do at home anyway, other than suffer my mother’s rage. I’d pleaded with him not to retire from Hughes Aircraft after hearing that his plans both began and ended with Playing a Little Golf.
Given that he was an implacable attention hound, I encouraged him to take an acting class at Santa Monica College, but it didn’t seem to suit him. He’d not bother to learn his lines for scenes he was supposed to perform with another class member, and he or she would want to strangle him. I think his greatest pleasure was going out in front of the house, on the loneliest street in the Lower 48, to smoke a cigarette. Heartbreakingly slim pickin’s.
I think, since I have no tie or socks to open and pretend to be delighted with, that I’ll torture myself a bit, and remember one of the saddest moments of the last year of his life. He shared a room with a poor old devil who, at 92, had very little of either his vision or hearing left, and who rarely had the strength to get out of bed. Another real morale-booster! I phoned my dad one Saturday afternoon from my home in San Francisco. He was heartbreakingly delighted to hear from me, but we were cut off. When I rang back, the poor old devil answered. As I struggled in vain to understand who I was or whom I wanted to speak to, I could hear my dad, unable to get out of his own bed, trying to get the guy to hand the phone over, cursing him, pleading with him. It tore my heart out.
But why stop there? A few weeks before my mother’s death two and a half years ago, I visited her at the (infinitely nicer) convalescent hospital in which she lived, if you could call what she was doing living; Alzheimer’s had taken just about everything it’s capable of taking. She didn’t communicate in any way, and gave no sign that she knew I was there. But then some sort of security alarm — one indicating that someone had gone out an emergency exit or something — began screeching at regular intervals, and I could feel her terror. I held her, and told her everything was OK, but the alarm wouldn’t stop. It seemed to take them forever to figure out how to turn the goddamned thing off. I wanted to find the person responsible and strangle him or her, but how could I leave my mother?
I was a rotten son, and what goes around comes around. My estrangement from my daughter is fitting payback (or at least was for the first year or two, after which the punishment came to be less and less proportionate to my crimes, whatever they may have been). I still love my daughter enough to wish I could communicate to her that, just as I have, she’ll surely reap what she’s sowing.
[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]
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