A Trumpist Wants to Slap My Face While Wearing a Leather Codpiece!

Brad (R), with a friend

Pete Castle was briefly the guitarist in my band The Pits 41 years ago, until he allowed some hair-metal hotshots to poach him for their own project. Then, in 2015, we played together anew, in The Romanovs. He’s a remarkable musician. When, out of sheer perversity, we decided to append Robbie Krieger’s guitar solo from The Doors’ “Light My Fire” to our re imagining of The Zombies’ “Tell Her No”, he played it flawlessly without ever having tried to, his fingers and mind’s ear working in tandem perfectly. He has a beautiful Muslim Indonesian wife these days, and a house, very near where he grew up — and thus very near to where I too grew up — with a small swimming pool, and is a staunch apologist for Donald Trump, whose personality he finds appalling, but whose policies (to whatever Donald Trump may be said to have policies) he believes will ultimately benefit America. He is as far from the usual Trump apologist as you can get. He reads in depth about the issues, and can discuss things, as most Trumpists cannot, in an informed, non-visceral way. I enjoy jousting with him on Facebook. 

In the course of said jousting, I have of course encountered in his threads a number of more traditional Trumpists, belligerent idiots, and occasionally enjoyed trying to get under their skin as well, none more than one Brad V—, whom I believe to embody many of the worst attributes of Trumpism, and to stand a few feet to the right of Alex Jones politically.

I felt bad about myself a couple of exchanges ago. Every time he spewed some mindless Trumpian jingoism in one of Pete’s threads, I mocked, and infuriated him, never more than when he asserted that it had clearly been Barack Obama’s intention to destroy the country, as I apparently wanted to destroy it myself. I said something snide, but later realised that running roughshod over him intellectually was no less distasteful than a big muscular 14-year-old bully physically intimidating a small classmate. In a spirit of conciliation, I sent him this private message the following day: I’m going to make a sincere effort to understand your point of view, without name-calling or sarcasm. How do you feel about the very high incidence of gun violence in our country? How do you feel about Trump's campaign to defund the arts? What leads you to imagine that the country is any less mine than yours, and that I want it destroyed? What I actually want is for my country to live up to its own branding, and be a place of compassion.

I then pointed out that, according to Facebook, we’d grown up very near each other, and wondered if he remembered, for instance, Woody’s Smorgasbord, on Sepulveda Blvd., where one could put his own condiments — in whatever quantities he wished! — on his charbroiled hamburger. I theorised that both our dads had probably eaten lunch at Joe Petrelli’s, a few blocks south on Sepulveda. 

I thought Brad's ignoring me voided our non-engagement pact. So when I wandered onto another of Pete’s threads last night, about gun control, and saw that Brad had posted the meme you see here, and declared, Hestonishly, that the only way anyone was going to disarm him was if he were dead. I said, approximately, “Go get ‘em, Brad! The American Way of Life has nothing to fear so long as patriots like you are here to protect it.”

Whereupon Brad pointed out that for six years he had Defend[ed] Our Liberty (capitals mine) by flying A-6 Intruder attack jets off aircraft carriers for the United States Navy. I wondered against whom exactly he had been defending said liberty — the Viet Cong? The Grenadians? The Iraqis, who hadn’t actually been involved in 9/11, but who cared when there were fortunes (like Dick fucking Cheney’s) to be made if “we” invaded their country? Whereupon Brad, apparently displeased, said, “Go fuck yourself,” told me how much he wished he were able to slap my smug face, and called me a piece of shit.

I pointed out that “go fuck yourself” and “[you’re a] piece of shit” are what one might expect from an unprecocious third grader. Did Brad not recognise them as not only witless, but also really…corny? As for the slapping part, I wished I’d said that I liked the idea, provided he wore his black leather codpiece, or pointed out that wanting to lash out physically is something most people stop doing at around age seven, but it was late, and I was tired. 

Today I tried to find the thread so I could quote brave, patriotic Brad verbatim, only to find it deleted. But we will look horns another day, he and I. His truth goes marching on!

Mr. Rubenstein Saves 8th Grade Math!

Miles isn’t exactly Dave Chapelle, but if you don’t laugh at his jokes, he’ll make you cry for it. He’ll seek you out at lunchtime, him and his little posse of troublemakers, and embarrass you, or even hurt you, like that time they like converged on Carl Sobel, the smartest boy in our class, and took his sack lunch away from him. Miles took a big bite out of the sandwich, chewed for a while, and then told Isaí and Jin Soo, his two like lieutenants, to hold Carl, and spat his mouthful of chewed sandwich in Carl’s face, and said, “Your mother can’t cook any better than she can suck dick,” and his whole little group of thugs laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. But Miles was just getting started. He chewed another mouthful, and then spat it into his hand and rubbed it all over Carl’s chest. 

Him and Jin Soo are in my math class. Some day, if somebody asks me why I’m really terrible at math, I’ll explain that Miles and Jin Soo were in my math class. My dad says that President Trump seems to see every speech as a chance to do like a standup comedy routine, and that’s how Miles sees Mr. Rubenstein’s math class. If we’re studying fractions, to give you some idea, Miles will raise his hand and ask Mr. Rubenstein if he agrees that frictions are necessary to come, and everybody except Mr. Rubeinstein better laugh. If Mr. Rubenstein tries to pretend not to notice Miles’s raised hand, Miles will loudly annoy one of our classmates who sits near him. LIke maybe he’ll tap Ronnie Bateman, the shyest kid in the world, who sits right in front of him, on the head with his pencil and say, “Yo, Master Bateman, what up, dawg?” or, “Yo, Ronnie, what’s this I hear about your having the biggest collection of gay porn in the whole school, and you having Mr. Rubenstein over to watch it with you?” Mr. Rubenstein tried sending Miles to the principal a couple of times early in the school year, but whatever Mr. Fowler said to Miles didn’t work. Miles was heard bragging that if Principal Fowler gave him shit, he’d have him fired. His mom’s like a councilwoman or something. 

A lot of us got a good laugh out of President Trump’s idea that teachers ought to be given guns in case some lunatic comes onto campus with an AR-15, or whatever. Miles was heard saying that if anybody came onto campus while he too was on it, he’d stick the gun’s barrel up his (it’s never a girl, is it?) ass and then pull the trigger. 

A lot of times after lunch, you can smell alcohol on Miles and his posse’s breath. He reeked of it on Monday. I sit three rows away from him, right next to the window, and even I could smell it. Mr. Rubenstein probably could too. He looked half nervous and half disgusted, and all frustrated because Mr. Fowler doesn’t like have his back. He sighed and said, “Well, today we’re back to decimals.” 

Miles belched really, like superhumanly, loudly. Everyone laughed, except Mr. Rubenstein. You had to admit it was pretty funny. “I seen you and your wife — at least I assumed she’s your wife — at Walmart on Sunday afternoon, Ruby. Not exactly Scarlett Johnson, is she? I’d give her maybe a 3. But I don’t imagine a lot of 8’s and 9’s are lined up to party with a dweeb like you.”

There wasn’t a lot of laughter at that. Even high school kids have a sense of decency. You can rag on a classmate’s girlfiend or boyfriend, but not a teacher’s. If looks could kill, Mr. Rubenstein’s would have killed Miles. “Its Johansson,” Mr. R said, super quietly. “Scarlett Johansson. And I really would shut up if I were you, Miles.”

“Oh,” Miles snickered, “is that so? And if I fuckin’ don’t? You going to come over and bore me to death talking about decimals or some such shit that we’re never going to use out in the real world?”

Mr. R took his keyring off one of the belt loops of his pants, unlocked the drawer of his desk, and produced a gun, just a little pistol, not like those you see cops or gangbangers using on TV, i think  you’d call it. Several of the kids like gasped. “No,” Mr. R said, “what I’m going to do is use this.” His face was scary — all like bright red, as though every drop of blood in his body was in it.

“Oh,” Miles said mockingly, “I’m like terrified. What have you got there, nine millimeters? You couldn’t stop a fuckin’ chihuahua with that thing, dawg.|“ 

I think he was expecting everybody to laugh, but the only person who did, not very convincingly, was Isaí.

“Why don’t we give your theory a test” Mr. R said, redder than ever, and shaking. Everybody gasped again as he pointed his little gun at Miles, who, to give credit where due, still wasn’t like intimidated or whatever. He stood up and whacked himself hard on the chest, like a gorilla or whatever. “I’m fuckin’ waiting, dickweed,” he said. “Let’s see what you got.”

He didn’t have to wait long. Mr. R pulled his trigger, and his little gun made a sort of pathetic popping sound, kind of like the sound someone imitating a champagne bottle being opened makes with his finger in his cheek. Ronnie Bateman yelped. Mr. R wasn’t very weapon-adept, to use President Trump’s phrase. He’d missed Miles completely.  

And Mr. Rubenstein is supposed to like protect me if somebody like Nikolas Cruz comes to my math class with an AR-15? Yeah. Right.

Her Potbellied Stud in Canada

Linda wakes at 8:40 and notes, with great ambivalence, that she’s still apparently alive. No one she knows gets up this late, but none go to bed after 1 a.m. every night, as she does. The first moments of wakefulness, before the ambivalence sets in, are usually the best of the whole day for her. After almost eight hours of her being in it, her bed is the warmest, most comfortable place on earth. But then she remembers last night, and there’s no bed on earth cozy enough to enable her to push the harsh words she and Joe snarled at each other out of her mind. “Don’t do this!” she tells herself, but of course she does it anyway — starts rehearsing her rebuttals to the cruel things Joe is likely to say again today. 

They spoke last night, at a high volume, of their pulling the plug on their marriage, as Linda has indeed pulled it a couple of times before. After five years together, she thought she could no longer bear the professional frustration she was suffering in Joe's native New Zealand, and returned to Vancouver, only to find that, without him, she felt as though a part of her had been amputated. Four more years passed, and then Joe was in his car crash, which left him paralysed below the waist, almost comatose with depression, and both incapable of and uninterested in sex. Linda, 41, at the time, decided that she had only one life, and told Joe she was going back to Vancouver, just for three weeks this time, for a week of sexual tourism with an old boyfriend, Carl. She’d hoped the sexual tourism part might make Joe laugh. It did not. She’d had the best sex of her life with Carl, though no other part of their relationship had been terrific. Joe was hurt and furious, but agreed, after hours of roared and shrieked recriminations back and forth, that it wasn’t fair that Linda should have to reconcile herself to never fucking again because of his paralysis. For the two weeks before she left for Seattle, though, the dread of losing her made him forget his gracious accession, and it seemed to Linda as though they did nothing but shriek at each other, and then sob, holding onto to each other for dear life.

Arriving in Seattle, Linda learned that Joe had figured out Carl’s identity via Facebook, and had sent him what Carl thought might be the cruellest message in the history of digital communication. Linda used that as an excuse not to fuck Carl after all. He’d grown himself a belly, unseen during their Facebook Messenger video chats, and bellies turned Linda off no less than horrid personal hygiene. She wrote Joe every morning from the Starbucks where she had coffee after her morning run, telling him she adored him. When he hadn’t replied after 11 days, she smoked some very potent weed with Carl — weed had always made her horny — and fucked him, belly or no belly, and it was pretty close to sensational. 

She nonetheless returned to New Zealand, as she’d promised she would. She arrived home to find Joe drunk and pointedly not speaking to her, but the two of them were able after several days to pretend that none of it had happened. Joe emerged from his depression and started making a lot of phone calls and sending a lot of emails, and returned to work as an investment counsellor. He got a high-end mobility scooter. He got his Subaru SUV customised so that he Linda didn’t have to drive him around. Linda was home all day alone with his chocolate Lab Barney. She’d never been an animal person, didn’t particularly bond with Barney, and sometimes resented being responsible for him. Joe looked into taking Barney to the office with him, but his boss declined. 

Within six months, Joe was his firm’s most in-demand counsellor. Linda — and Barney — saw less and less of him, as at least three nights a week he’d take new or prospective clients out to dinner after being all day at the office. The night Joe came home not in his own car, but in a taxi (he’d had three vodka martinis), Barnaby had shat on the living room rug while Linda was up in her study working. She told Joe she’d never wanted to be a dogsitter, and would appreciate Joe’s making other arrangements for Barney’s care if he was going to continue to be so busy with work. Joe infuriated her by pointing out that Barney wouldn’t have soiled the living room rug if Linda had remembered to let him into the garden periodically. He wondered what sort of asshole can’t muster some love for a dog as lovely as Barney, and if it might be time to draw a line under their relationship. Linda assured him she had indeed done let Barney out, and suggested that Joe fuck himself. She pointed out that his half-sister Cherie, with her knack for psychodramatising every get-together, wasn’t the only mean drunk in his family, and Joe told her maybe she ought to go back to her potbellied stud in Canada. Linda couldn’t help but laugh at that, though she didn’t want to give Joe the satisfaction, and it could have been that wonderful moment when two people who mostly love each other laugh together at the fact of their fighting, but Linda laughed alone. 

Hot Trailer Park Sex in the White House!

Last spring, President Trump welcomed to the White House three of his most avid celebrity supporters, the alleged musician Ted Nugent, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, and trailer trash icon Kid Rock. The three posed mockingly in front of a portrait of Secretary Hillary Clinton, the corrupt liberal monster Mr. Trump had vanquished some months before, but not yet locked up. Mr. Trump then showed them one of the very important documents he is required to pretend each day to have skimmed. Mr. Trump, who rarely compliments other men on their wives or girlfriends for fear of their thinking themselves superior to him, told Mr. Rock, “I’d have hit that, like a bitch,” referring to Mr. Rock’s short-term spouse Pamela Anderson. Most observers assumed that after lunch — two Big Macs, a Filet-o-Fish, fries, and a chocolate malt for the president, moose moussaka for Gov. Palin, venison tartare for Mr. Nugent, and beef jerky and a quart of Olde English 800 for Mr. Rock — the famous threesome let Mr. Trump get back to the important business of restoring America’s greatness, but Mendel Illness has now learned differently. 

Mr. Trump displays his important documents.

It's widely known that the White House has a number of guest bedrooms named after such presidents as Abraham Lincoln, Gaylord Perry, and Ronald Reagan, but until now only a few insiders have been aware of the existence of two erotic playrooms in which the president is able to “let off steam” after an exhausting morning of declining to read very important documents and being rimmed by Vice President Pence. 

The older of the playrooms, apparently installed by President Chester A. Arthur during his brief, undistinguished presidency late in the 19th century, is named after the Marquis de Sade. The newer, a condition of Laura Bush not leaving husband George W. after he invaded Iraq, was originally known as The Naughty Room, but Karen (Mother) Pence has renamed it The 50 Shades of Gray Room. Both facilities are equipped with big Costco-sized jars of lubricant, handcuffs, rope, riding crops, vibrators of every conceivable size and shape (all manufactured in America, course), and showers. The de Sade, the “heavier duty” of the two, also has a selection of violet wands, which President Nixon is understood to have enjoyed Secretary of State Kissinger's using on him in the stress-filled days before his resignation. 

President Trump’s three celebrity visitors opted for the de Sade, Gov. Palin’s understanding being that the prose in 50 Shades of Gray was dismal, and its theme ungodly, and seemed to believe that the de Sade had been named after the Nigerian British jazz-ish singer to whose Diamond Life album Gov. Palin and future husband Todd had enjoyed “making out” back when Gov. Palin was one of the University of Idado’s hottest airheads. President Trump told Mssrs. Nugent and Rock that he could have a carload of underaged poontang, to use the Nugentian locution, delivered within the hour, but it turned out that the two putative musicians could hardly wait to get their hands on Gov. Palin. 

President Trump is commonly likened to the fictional hero of the book and movie Being There, Chance the Gardener, and, sure enough, asked his guests if they’d mind his watching them “party” through the Vice President Dan Quayle Peephole. “Dude,” Mr. Nugent is reported to have chuckled, “your house, your rules!” He and Mr. Rock then spit-roasted Gov. Palin at some length while Mr. Trump groped Mr. Nugent’s young wife Shemane Deziel — whose name suggests transgenderedness — Gov. Palin’s lovely imbecile daughter Willow, and Mr. Rock’s brunette fiancee, whose name no one caught. The younger, even lovelier, Palin had only weeks before emerged from a Twitter shitstorm after her handsome older brother Track was arrested for kicking the bejesus out of handsome father Todd, and I once amused the late Creem writer and wit J. Kordosh by bemoaning the Palins not having twin boys named Trig and Calculus. 

While living in Los Angeles in 2013, I briefly conspired to start a country band to be called The Violet Wanderers, and composed, as its debut single, a Loretta Lynn-styled lament called “(I Can Taste) Her Pussy On Your Cock”, the demo of which I’ll be pleased to send those who provide their email addresses. 

Rock Has One Foot in the Grave, and Four Toes of the Other

When I lived in Los Angeles earlier this decade, I played in a band for which I spent many hours a day trying to secure gigs, and not getting any. I was horrified that club bookers were still using the pay-to-play scam that scandalised the city in the late 1970s. I fled LA and returned to the UK, where I own a house and have a spouse, imagining that getting gigs couldn’t possibly be harder than in LA. It was. In two years, I got us booked twice into SW London’s sole surviving original music venue, the Half Moon in Putney, We earned £76 the first night, when Dame Zelda, who has many friends, was in the band, and not a penny the second night, after Dame Zelda had rededicated herself to karaoke. On a Tuesday night after a Monday bank holiday, we drew 21 people in a venue in which only those who draw 25 or more get a tiny portion of the gate. 

I came to understand that if you want to play for pay in SW London, you’d better be either a covers band or a tribute act. No one under 45 (except the first bass player’s daughters) was glimpsed at any of our few gigs. 

But it isn’t only that punters (that is, fans) seemed to have lost interest in anything they hadn’t liked back when they were 19. It was also that so few wanted to play original music. Back in LA in the 1970s, one would place an ad in the Musicians Wanted section of The Recycler and his phone would ring off the hook for days. In SW London late in the second decade of the century, I have placed ads and heard from no one (except the odd Bulgarian disco dolly who’ll be happy to audition if I’ll pay her airfare from Sofia) for literal weeks at a time. 

No one seems to want to be in a band anymore. Everyone wants either to be a famous DJ, or to win X Factor and instantly become rich ’n’ famous.

Why audiences are growing ever greyer — if they’ve any hair at all — is no great mystery. It’s the sacred responsibility of every new generation to pronounce the music of the generation that preceded it lame and embarrassing, although there will invariably be a snarky few who embrace older music for approximately the same reason hipsters drink Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. There are still a hundred bald-spot-and-grey-ponytail bands in SW London who believe what the world really needs is yet another version of "Hoochie Coochie Man" or "Smokestack Lightnin'". 

As in so many other things, it’s the Rolling Stones who are to blame for rock’s demise. When I first saw The Who, at the Fillmore in San Francisco, they had one — count him! — grizzled roadie, who  probably could have gotten their amplifiers, drums, guitars, and stage clothing into a single transit van, and it was the best show I’ve ever seen. But by the mid-70s, one felt cheated if, for the big finale, the headlining group's lead singer didn’t slide down the world’s largest phallus into a pool of writhing Lori Maddox lookalikes in fishnet body stockings. 

Big phalluses and writhing nymphets cost money, and concert tickets got ever more expensive. Even the groups who couldn’t be troubled to stage a spectacle noted that they were actually selling lots more records than the Rolling Stones, and hiked up their own prices. If you went to concerts, you didn’t have a lot of money left over to go see original local bands, even while other entertainment options were improving geometrically. Where there had once been nine television channels among which to choose, there were now channels beyond counting, and Netflix. How, for someone in his or her 40s or 50s or beyond, could going to some cramped beer-reeking club to hear an original band compare to reclining in one’s La-Z-Boy and watching the latest Netflix original in high-def?

There was also the problem of rock having branded itself as the music of youthful rebellion — specifically, of querulousness, petulance and narcissism,.Behold the Donald Trump of musical genres! For every palpably good-hearted, altruistic Bruce Springsteen, there seemed to be two Axl Roses, entitled little twerps with chips on their shoulders bigger than their feet (spot that Beatles reference!), or irredeemably…damaged Kurt Cobains. Heroin addiction was glamorised, and alcoholism. Ron Wood, Slash, and Keith Richards, with cigarettes dangling from their lips as they play their guitars, are presented as paragons of cool, rather than as flirting with emphysema. 

How many person-hours have been wasted over the years by audiences waiting for Mick Jagger to feel that his makeup is just right? Such narcissists as he introduced a whole new idea into popular entertainment — that the audience was there to make the entertainer feel good, and not vice versa. Has there been a more ghastly moment in recent popular music history than that at which Jagger discovered that not everyone at Altamont regarded him as God Jr., to use the late Bill Graham’s wonderful coinage, and gaped helplessly as the truly monstrous (as opposed to faux satanic) actually killed people?

At a party, someone who’s drunk too much too quickly and begun behaving outrageously will enjoy lots of attention until everyone begins to find him tiresome. Much the same happened with rock over the many decades that it ruled the pop music. And now, as it fades away, it has nothing but itself to blame, unless you count us, whom psychotherapists would call enablers.

The Boy All Others Wished In Vain They Were

There was a guy at my high school, Abbott Ricard who was academically brilliant — the legend had it that he’d never received anything other than an A in anything, be it French or physics — and the most notable athlete Santa Monica High School had produced in a decade. The Los Angeles Times ranked him as the metropolitan area’s premier quarterback in both his junior and senior years, and he anchored “our” 440 and 880 relay teams in track. He was the sort of classmate shy, miserable, not athletically gifted boys such as I ordinarily detest and mock, except that there was no detesting him, because he was even kinder and more generous than brilliant and athletic. 

We hadn’t been at Samohi for two weeks before he rescued Billy Wills, Growing up in my family, I’d thought I’d witnessed some world-class cruelty (my mother’s, to my dad), but it turned out I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. At lunchtime, Roger Bowman and other Auto Shop badasses would converge on Billy like the plague descending on medieval Europe. One guy, to Billy’s right, would distract Billy, while Roger, on Billy’s left, would spit into his milk, or onto his food. The Auto Shop boys’ girlfriends were thought to conceal razorblades in their enormous Ronettes-ish hair, so not even the football or wrestling teams intervened. 

Abbott did. He walked right into the eye of the storm one lunchtime our second week on campus, pleasantly asked Roger if he could “borrow” Bllly for a few minutes, and walked Billy away from his tormentors while everyone gaped in amazement and almost passed out from the shame of not having done as Abbot was doing. Very quickly, the most popular kids embraced poor Billy as a sort of de facto mascot. Among the nice kids from north of Wilshire Blvd., being nice to Billy became the done thing.

Satisfied that Billy Wills was now in good hands, Abbott took to having his lunch in the school cafeteria, on the periphery of which he would ask isolated misfits of all shapes and sizes if the seat opposite them was free, as it of course invariably was. Kids who’d never been seen to smile — kids at whom one hesitated to look because they smelled, say, or ate that which they extracted from their own nostrils  — were seen laughing for the first time in anyone’s memory.  Ab was said to have received full athletic scholarship offers from 16 universities, including both USC and UCLA.

In the summer between our junior and senior years, he got a job washing cars at a used car lot on a grotty stretch of Lincoln Blvd. near where he lived. When a couple of punks hopped up on marihuana tried to rob the lot’s owner, Abbott scared them away, and at summer’s end, his grateful employer gave him a bonus — a ’56 Pontiac Chieftain that needed a lot of work. It turned out to be that auto mechanics was another of those things at which Ab was naturally sensational, and his uncle, who owned an Earl Scheib franchise, painted the car for him. 

Except for the Ronettes-haired ones, probably every girl at Santa Monica High School longed to ride beside him in it to the big winter dance, but Ab was already spoken for — by Diane Geller, one of the misfits into whose lives he’d let a little sunshine in the school cafeteria. Diane was fat, monobrowed, and a booger-eater, with greasy hair and bad breath, but Ab reportedly treated her as though she were Shelley Fabares. (The chances of my going to a school dance in those days — or even talking to a girl — were approximately those of the Auto Shop alpha becoming a nun.)

I never actually spoke to Ab either, though we had English together our first semester of 12th grade, and he always smiled at me when we passed each other in the hall. One of our first projects for that English class was to write an essay about a new friend we’d made over the summer. I, as was my natural inclination, had spent it lying alone on the beach down the hill from my parents’ house, and wrote about a friend I made up. Ab, on the other hand, wrote about how he had come to regard as a dear friend one of the elderly shut-ins he kept company every week. 

We had to read our essays aloud. Mine, naturally, didn’t exactly hold my classmates spellbound. There was a lot of whispering as I read, but I didn’t flatter myself by imagining that it was to do with my writing. Ab couldn’t get through his own essay. He got choked up at the end and had to stop, just short of bursting into tears, because he’d found out the day before that his elderly friend had passed away. A couple of the girls burst into the tears Ab had denied himself, and even Bruce Schechter, the class clown, could think of nothing hilarious to say. Indeed, it looked as though the colour had been drained from him.

At lunchtime, I keyed the passenger door of Ab’s Pontiac Chieftain.