At Ocean Pizza you can’t hear anything over the hum of the cold drinks refrigerator. You can’t hear anything over the screaming of the couple on reality TV. And just now the owners are having it out; a Greek couple. Something bad has happened and they’re snarling it up. You can’t hear anything. There’s only one customer, an old man sitting under a dirty mural with some tagging somebody tried to wash out. This place is not clean or well lighted. A waiter is sitting at an angle in a booth. If it weren’t for the noise you could hear him sleeping. BTW, the booths appear in good shape. The one new thing in the whole place. Everything else is worn. But the booths look like they’ve been redone. The plastic table tops are red to match, and some weird paisley design like there was just a surgery here and nobody cleaned up the blood yet. “Whatiya want?” the owner’s wife wants to know. The only customer gives an order. It's all he can do to get the words out. Pizza boxes are stacked up against the front window. Oven’s nearly covered over in newspaper clippings from Greek newspapers. There’s a fan set in a panel over the front door. The blades move, but just barely. Like the single screw of a disabled submarine. It’s also cold as hell outside. The waitress/wife is Sandy. Her sister is the psychic next door at Ocean Psychic. All the fortunes are good. “You’re going to get some money… You didn’t know that? It’s coming. I can’t tell you when without doing some more work? Can you come back tomorrow? This is serious. You’re going to receive a lot of money. You’ll never have to work again.” Sandy takes the order and doesn’t say, thank you, and she doesn’t linger. She puts the order down on the counter. “Those people are stupid you got,” she says to her husband in English. It’s a running conversation. It goes on all night. He picks up the order and says something in Greek. “I gotta go,” his wife says in English. “Where you gotta go,” he says in Greek. She tells her husband what to do. There’s only one customer. Wednesday night in August. City College is closed. It’s nearly 9:30. Brett Favre just got traded to the Jets. Man comes outta the kitchen. “No fuckin’ way,” he says. “No fuckin’ way. They’d give him $25 million not to play. Can you imagine? I’d take the $25 million and not play. You got everything, why would you play. You take the $25 million and play with that. Fuckin’ play with yourself and take the $25 million.” All of a sudden it’s time to close. Everybody’s speaking Greek. The last customer is rushed out. He doesn't want to go; he was hoping to stay in place, stay hidden. But they won't let him. You can’t hear anything but the place is definitely closing.

No popular film better describes America's obsession with fear, despair and veiled hopes then The Dark Knight. That the film is garbled and uneven, often just silly, doesn't dilute the rapture. This beleaguered Batman is, in his muddled way, quintessentially American, from a long legacy of cinematic heros such as old man Hearst in Citizen Kane; the John Wayne character in Red River; Butch Casidy; Cool Hand Luke. Or what about Patton, even Thelma and Louise. All films in which the hero or tandem is not only brash and contra but also reckless, sometimes suicidal.

This summer it's as though we cannot indulge our disillusionment enough. Can't get enough of failed heros barely making it, just as we are barely making it. In the last two months three hits (and the coming James Bond film seems on exactly the same tack) feature deeply disturbed men, which is its own subconscious story, men who are either ridiculously clumsy, drug-ridden or soul-ragged and thoroughly cynical. And for whom taking vengeance is always the temptation...

If Hollywood has a forefinger on society's neck, and you can argue the point many ways, then maybe the studios are getting a pulse here. But how exactly do you read it?

For sure the country has had it with conventional heroes, and now the spin cycle of revere-and-despise runs ever quicker, especially for those people who are supposed to be heroes: the presidential candidates. John McCain has gone from war hero to maverick to a senescent crackpot. Barack Obama, whose chances of becoming president always seem simultaneously locked and unlockable, has gone from underdog to 'the leader for our time' and now back down to, as Sean Hannity puts it — that AM matinee idol for the faint of thought — The Annointed One. Code for 'elitest nigger'. For Panther-X, pinko sympathizer.

Right wing sarcasticas have feasted on the idea that Sen. Obama would suggest Americans pump up their tires and get tuneups to defend against the oil shortage. Forgetting that it will take years to get oil out of American ground, that it will take time just to build the ships needed to drill. Hannity was deeply disturbed at Obama's suggestion and noted that he had never even seen what was under the hood of his Escalade. "Do cars even get tuneups anymore?" he asked.

As an aside Rush Limbaugh was entranced by the story of the Gulf sheik who flew his Lamborghini, the same model as in Batman, to London for an oil change: $10,000 for an oil change. Limbaugh is a big time car aficionado himself, but the reason he loved the story was because it pissed off so many conservationists. "Don't you just love that?" he kept saying.

Reagan conservatives howl when Obama describes McCain's candidacy as cynical, but how else to describe it...

But isn't it interesting how this Batman catches the vibes. Coming from a country that seems plum tuckered out from fear, real and imagined, and just too much reality IV. Now, everything and everyone is under suspicion; no perception or belief is secure. What you thought was true at noon may be the just the opposite by the time you drive home from work. How do you keep your balance in such a situation?

You don't. You assume everything is false, you become lost in the stars, you become paranoid, you become even more cynical than you were, or you pretend to be, all the time hoping that something real will come your way.

Meanwhile, Batman himself seems tired of it all. He's had to do a few flip flops of his own. He's become more and more 'political'. He's also become familiar and so derided. He has few people to back him up. No Robin, no girl friend. He has only his valet and a business colleague, who is up to here with Batman's willingness to suspend constitutional guarantees to get his demon. At the end of The Dark Knight, Batman reminds you of Orestes in Sartre's Les Mouches, forever pursued by flies, a criminal on the run from his incestuous relationship with truth.

The Nolans, the film's directors and writers, have invented a prototype of a new neurotically-efficient hero. It's not enough to have super strength or super intentions, the new hero has to sacrifice himself for the greater good, which is an image we can believe in, even if falsed up, made over; even if the image we believe is nothing behind it.

How cynical is that? Our new hero, to feel genuine, to us as well as to himself, needs to live the appearance of a lie in order to protect an out-of-hope society, so down on itself that it can be trusted only with an appearance. That's cynical. No?

One of the notable scenes in this film is a hospital blowing up, with the joker-terrorist standing in front of the Emergency room sign. The film's one virtue is just this scene and that message: there is no institution that will help you get healthy these days. If you want help, you're going to have to do it yourself, using whatever creativity and instinct you can muster.

"You could do it," he was saying. This was my friend I sometimes run into at the Polo Fields. Lately, he's been depressed. "You could actually do it," he kept saying. "What?" I asked. Usually, I don't take his depressions seriously but this time clearly something was the matter.

"What is it?"

He stopped to tell me. The dust swirled at our feet in the late afternoon as it does there on the track.

"I read an article the other day that those people who jump off the bridge, and survive obviously, have this moment of terrible regret. They realize the mistake and that moment of anguish is unholy."

I thought of those people dropping out of the World Trade Center, hand in hand.

"And I remember, do you remember this? The story about the orchid grower, the orchid man from South San Francisco, you know, worked in that place that sells orchids. I can't remember the name. And so he went to the bridge with his young daughter, threw her over and jumped after her. Can you imagine that? Can't you imagine the howling of that man. And the mother who jumped and her son who years later jumped. And that whole business about looking at the city instead of the ocean, because how could you face the nothingness of that, how could go through with it without the comfort of a city view. I know all that. I've read all the stories. I get it. And still. I have lately less to go on. You remember that man I told you about?"

I knew right away who he was talking about.

"Just got up early one morning and shot himself, with his wife upstairs and his son, everybody just about to get up, and what about the damage he's caused. If he knew that, he would never have done it. I know all that. I get all that."

"'But still' you're saying."

"'But still,' I'm saying."

"Talk to me," I said.

"I can't. That's the problem. It's no use. I can't."

So we just stood there, for a very long time. Everything going down. As though you were in the trough waiting for the bow to come up and the boat to follow. But it's the moment of not knowing, that horribly beautiful moment of not knowing whether it will come up.

What would you call it? An unease, a nameless worry. Even as Sen. Obama wraps up his trip, which would appear to be a great success — he showed he could play the role of statesman and in some way it seemed he already had the job... Still, the speech in Berlin seemed a little off to my ear. He made solid points, he added all the proper retorts to his critics, he made sure to balance criticism of America with his love for America, and he was almost back to his old glory toward the end in describing the challenge of working together toward a shared destiny. But the speech was no reprise of John F. Kennedy's speech. It did not match his Philadelphia race speech. It seemed flat, overly edited. Perhaps, this is because we've heard this message so many times before. But no, there was something else. A tightness. The fear of being ahead not behind. And then add the latest reports of how his press spokespeople have begun to alienate the press. If the choice for a press spokesperson is between acting as a bridge to the press or as a maxie prison guard, his corps has picked the latter. And that always backfires.

It's that football metaphor: how your home team, forever the underdog, is suddenly in the super bowl, and they're ahead by say 3 points, which is about what it is. But the second half has just started and you have the sense they've lost something, they're not making the plays, they're thinking more about what's at stake than how to play the game, how "to do all the things that got you here."

At the Moffet courts, he is the court pro, as it were. There is no official pro. The people who come there every day, the old guard, these old Chinese men and Cullen, who cut and dink and play every point as though it's their last, they don't like him because he seems haughty, because he can humiliate you and after he hits a winner he claps for himself.

He was awaiting a student and motioned to me to come on the court. He is slender, Vietnamese, in his 50s, perhaps. I couldn't say. He wore a white baseball cap and old-fashioned white tennis trousers.

He moves very well back and forth along the baseline and hits the way players did in the 1950s, the likes of Tony Trabert and Pancho Conzales and Hoad and Rosewall. He's from that time. He comes from the old Vietnam I expect. I'll bet you he grew up on a large plantation. He hits a backhand with one arm, not two. He drops the head of his racquet on his forehand but without much topspin. The comes low and hard. You have to be on your back foot to get a good return.

He works the angles as you would expect but never comes to the net. Whenever he hits a shot he grunts and many times yells out, "yea." And so whether you are rallying with him or playing against him every shot feels like a put away. When he hits a winner, he claps for himself, his hand against the strings. We rallied for a few minutes and then he said, in a high voice, nearly a scream, "You want to play." It was not as a question.

We began.

The other day I got a note from K, the ex-wife of a serial killer named D. He's been on death row at San Q for more than 20 years. I wrote about D years ago, trying to raise questions about his case.

K writes me from time to time and just the other day, with no seque, to say that she was "fascinated by the Jesse Jackson kerfuffle": "His comment, as far as I'm concerned, was bright green envy showing itself."

K got her divorce from D in the mid 90s. They were married on death row and divorced after nearly 10 years? Or maybe it was less. In any case, a marriage of convenience for both. The advantage to the wife, as that old prison adage goes, 'you always know where your husband is at night.' For him, she became his 'gopher' and go-to girl. She believed he was innocent and so justified the bargain.

I had also gotten involved with D's case in the belief that he might be innocent. Guilty of many crimes but not murdering 6 young prostitutes in the spring of 1980. I have told you this story. The trial was a sham. The defense attorney was too drunk to make the case. The jury convicted a man who seemed to be exactly what the prosecution claimed. But was he?

Was he the killer or the woman he lived with occasionally, Carol — a slovenly wreck of a woman, a nurse by day, a devilina by night — who had done the murders with her other acquaintance, Jack. In court, Carol was cast as a defenseless widow from the San Fernando Valley, in the clutches of a panting satyr — which was true about D. In fact, she was defenseless and in a separate trial after D's was convicted in the murder of Jack whom she shot, stabbed and decapitated. She admitted that and also admitted being in a car with D when he killed one of his victims. One of D's crimes involved a girl who had also been decapitated but no one did a forensic analysis to see if the two decapitations had anything in common. And then there was a bloody scalp in Jack's van... Who did that belong to? In the end, were the real killers, Jack and Carol, or D and Carol.

I interviewed Carol twice. She was down east of Los Angeles, in a correctional facility for women. She has since died by the way. Of diabetes. And general collapse. Her spirit is pressed against the bottom of a slag heap in some uninhabitable industrial area in New Jersey.

She and I spent two long sessions together. Alone, in a room. The second time we were abandoned by prison staff who went home at 5 on the nose, forgetting that Carol and I were in a small room off a far hallway in the administration building. This second time I wanted to get the goods on her once and for all, and it came down to whether she would confess that she had been in the car Doug claimed they were in, or the one she had claimed. The difference was vital. Even if she said she couldn't remember or changed her story; that would be enough to encourage efforts for a new trial, which was never had.

And at one point she did seem to admit that the murder had occurred, if I remember correctly and I may not, in the Buick not in the compact. Her story had always involved the compact, and her story was that D was in the driver's seat with a prostitute giving him a blow job and took the gun from Carol who was sitting in the back seat. I always thought the idea that any man, much less D, would shoot a woman with his penis in her mouth, was madness. Especially, D who was a satyr and a coward. He worshipped sexual pleasure, loved prostitutes and was insatiable but not kinky to that point.

His story was that he was in the backseat getting a blow job, a birthday present from Carol, that much was kinky, and that Carol suddenly pulled out a gun and shot the girl. The body was never found. But Carol remembered the whole incident very well, and after seeming to cry for a moment about the murder, suddenly began laughing and purring about what "beautiful tits" the victim had.

There was no darker persona than Carol's and to be around her was to infect yourself with her broken personalities.

Nevertheless, in the end, I got Carol's very damaging story on tape. Carol sat there, trying to seduce me, promising me still more information, careening along with one lens fallen out of her glasses, and so the one eye was magnified, the other with no lens, tiny, a slit. The owl and rat, I always thought.

I got back that night and K insisted I give her the tape with this very damaging story. Later, that night she went to listen to it in her car stereo. Then left the tape in the player which was stolen before the next morning. The loss of that tape was a disaster, and all these years later, although I have all the rest of the interview, I can't remember the details of Carol's admission. I remember that she slipped up and that what she said was very damaging, but that's all.

For her part, K no longer cares about whether D is innocent or not. She last saw him in 1996 and that was enough.

As a close black friend said, and she was in no mood, "has it occurred to anyone that the reason Jesse Jackson might have said any of this was because he was exactly the kind of person Barack Obama was referring to in these sermons? Exactly the kind! Endlessly cheated on his wife, had a child out of wedlock with his aid — and then gave her $40,000 in cash out of rainbow coalition funds — and has generally been as irresponsible as a man can be. What is there to figure out?"

Another husband has been reported "unavailable". There's been a whole slew lately. Gone limp, eyes lost that oval look of anticipation, lips reduced to solid yellow lines. Apparently, he has been this way for the last ten years, which came as a surprise to me. I thought his warranty was still good. Who better lived the illusion of the endless bon vivant, drinking, carousing, from one end of the earth to the other. He's a travel writer by profession, now abandoned in the Sierra of his mind. He has arguments: a series of operations; various organs are on the fritz. Run down to his bed, left to listen to traffic and the gardener doing what was always his job. Left to hate himself for being infirm, for being what he always was.

So naturally his wife is disconsolate, with no illusion home. The last lovemaking is not still to come, which whether good or bad, would be memorable for that alone. Any promise has hope in it. But now the last time was so long ago she cannot remember any details, nor does she want to remember. And so what to do?

She has her devices, as she refers to them, and those have provided the jittery part of what she requires but nothing for the slower sensation of skin itself. Lately, she goes for long walks in the park, to keep her enviable shape and to seek refuge in routine. She begins and ends at the rose garden, where she re-examines all the varities, notes the irony of 'Love's Promise' and marvels at how all the roses resemble vaginas within vaginas. And always, like a dope addict, she inhales the scent of 'Marmelaide skies'. On the way out she pauses before the statue of Thomas Masyrk, her one link to an emmigrant past. She is always put off by his look. The bronze and shadow, with hair flat against the head, as though Thomas just got out of the shower. He looks like a 12-year-old boy just getting out of the shower, she thinks. And he looks somber, like her husband actually. He does not look like all the knowledge he discovered provided much hope. He looks like he could say something cruel as easily as something wise.

Her friends have suggested she take a lover. But who? There is the hunky handyman, but married. There is the waiter, around the corner on Lyon Street, but what if he's gay? A woman friend, who's had a lot of experience with this, suggests a certain website where it's easy to find friendly black men. She can tell you 'til the cows come home about black men, how only they know how to touch, how to move, how to prolong. This afficionado is single herself, just now bemoaning the marriage of her ex to a younger, and much worse — an exceptionally wealthy woman.

If this is the era when women are supposed to take over the world, I haven't seen it. Where's the gaiety, when's the party?

For this woman I'm talking about the idea of taking on a black lover is too intense. She doesn't have the cultural stamina for that. And of course what she really needs is someone to just hold her. For a month straight and then maybe some sex, well definitely some sex then. And from there she wants more than a casual affair. She wants to fall in love, to be a Lina and 'swept away in the blue sea of August.'

There was another similar story I heard the other day. From a much older woman. Fifteen years ago her husband ran off with another woman, a showgirl, a skier, a tennis player, who made it clear, there were no strings attached. Oh boy, he liked it that way, and so he never married her. But now he's 90 and the showgirl skier is in her fifties and she also wants another run down the mountain. Not to mention a little heritage fund, a little money for the help please, for the service of it all. I'm getting this, you understand, from the scorned. She describes how at parties, because she had children and they had children and so there are endless events, and when the other woman arrives filled with bangles and smiles, the old and older wife cannot bear the sight. But she wants me to know the secret glee she feels when she catches the trophy wife in a private moment, eyes falling on her trophy and thinking of how heavy it is.

We reached Nevada City in the late afternoon, and after tea in her garden, with a dozen koi in a pond, we went to the fairgrounds to see the fireworks. M wanted to show us where she'd sung in the local singing group the night before. The place was covered in bodies on blankets, everyone counting down the light. There were booths full of frosties and fries, a woman giving free hugs, an Elvis impersonator and kids darting every which way like ideas in an ill mind. People wore half clothes; they had thick calves and they were uniformly fat. A jabba-the-hut-of-a-man sat in his wheel chair, surly looking, with oxygen streaming into one nostril. We watched the Elvis become Roy Orbison but the songs were too slow, not 45 but 78. This is the country and slow is in, slow is good. Slow is what you need. We sat down on some bleachers and fell back on the empty row behind, M's 85-year-old head on my arm. Wow, we all said. Whoa! Look at that. Just before the show started a DJ with long scraggly white hair and a military cap put on God Save America and God Bless America and The Stars and Stripes Forever. A boy sped by on roller shoes. Girls tried to get each other to dance. There was some line dancing and then a pretty woman did the macarama all by herself, looking neither happy or sad or confident or embarrassed. M kept saying, wasn't this the way it was always supposed to be. Didn't we feel America's heart beating. I said, of course, but I didn't feel that at all. People looked half happy, just a little bewildered. How could it be otherwise with all the Yukons and F150s in the parking lot and local gas near $5. But then out of it all stepped a six-year-old girl, Marilyn Monroe when she was still Norma Jeane Mortenson, a rabbit out of a hat, so blonde, so wistful, dancing around with her American flag on a stick, and in the strobe light, a lithe creature of beauty and talent and possibility. A ghost. And then the fireworks, right over head, red glare and all, until finally an orgy of sound and color, what women are supposed to see when they climax, a truly magnificent expression of bombs bursting. And suddenly it all ended; the bodies drew up their blankets and disappeared.

Time machines on the loose

You could start this way, for example.... Just before the boss got stabbed, he stood on a soap box on 6th Street, running for his life, surrounded by lieutenants. "My office has not only prosecuted the violent offenders who have made this corridor infamous," he said, in that compressed sometimes whiney voice, and holding his right arm high sbove his head, which was very painful for him to do, "but we have also reached out to those who are the victims of crime." ...

Now, four years later, the corridor is quieter. The old DA's office has long been closed and succeeding businesses have come and gone. Instead of six cops up and down the street, there were two, having a smoke in a doorway, two young women, caps up, foreheads revealed, like Brodrick Crawfords on a break. "The baby shower on Tuesday," one was saying. Up the street, distinguished crackheads, in braids and bangles, with army pants and saddling up, an urban air cavalry bound for someplace or other. "We got wings, let's fly," they said.

The corridor seemed thinned out, and tuckered out. A couple of palm trees lended a glancing respectability. And the furniture still hangs on the sides of an abandonned hotel there on Mission. The arty side of downtown's noiriest enclave. The old bar where boss used to visit, in deference to some IRA types that gave to the fund is no more. The pawn shop was closed, maybe closed up, I couldn't tell.

I rounded the corner, to Market Street, turned south, southwest, whatever that is, walking along the west side of hte street, past the old strip-joint, house of dildo and cock rings. On the outside speakers, the most beautiful violin concerto you ever heard. My first thought was Chopin then Brahms. Went inside to find out what it was. The place was in that light of all adult places, neonic, pale, bad air, and that forever quality, as though all adult sex, men-on-the lam places are connected, every single one through place and time, from San Francisco to Times Square 40 years ago, one continuum, you can come up in a strip mall in North Dakota or a pleasure hut in Austin, one vast underground Dungeon-11 of tapes and magazines, paraphenalia, weapons, hurt-mes / hurt-yous, cum and comed and done and you'll be back, we're 24/7.

"What is that?" I asked. "That music outside." Bald man was reaching down behind the glass counter trying to get some feng shui going with the cock rings. A mutty little blonde man was closest. He was in the register. "What'd you say?" he said with a snarl. "The music outside, what is that?" He never looked at me. "Jazz," he said. Not in here, I said. Outside. "Outside? How the fuck should I know?" He's counting gold in the drawer. "The corporation," he said. "What corporation," I said.

"I don't what-the-fuck corporation, you wanna buy somehtin'?"

Channeling George Carlin, I thought. Well that makes sense. He's in the air still. On a Terry Gross retrospective that played the day after he died he said he was never afraid of anything once he decided that everything had come from a single atom, a single element. Therefore, everything is related, therefore everything is yourself. Therefore, why would you be afraid of yourself?

Something like that.

"No, I don't want to buy anything," I said. But that was what I was trying to remember: When the corridor had some attitude.

Looking out the black-eyed window, at the fountain display. Ten gushings in a row, in a bell-curved line; water rising suggestively, foolishly. Beyond, willow trees ruffling, like the burkas of women in first love. Troubled. The Canadian geese have all left. In their place: FedEx, USPS. And just now a yellow fire engine, and then an American Medical Response van… I see it all from behind the black glass. I am the courtyard voyeur, toggling back and forth between world news on my monitor, and then, through a glass darkly as it were, life in the courtyard. See these two men talking, privately, going on about a scandal in their office? I hear everything. Sometimes, a woman will come up and do her face; I am just inches away. Sometimes, I kiss her. Or a man on the phone pondering a question about his mortgage. "You can't take my house away", he's saying. “You'll still exist,” I tell him but what good is that? “We are all fish in each other’s tanks,” I'm thinking. Once, an older man approached. So intently did he look I thought he’d seen me. Then, I thought, ‘no, he’s seeing through me. I stood up and matched him, looked right back, feeling that I could see through him. Perhaps, the two seeings are linked in a helix of entwining personas. But now wait! What's this? Yellow jacketed firemen flying out the building across the courtyard pushing a rattling cart. Man on his back, IV bottle swinging, hustling him inside the back of the van, one door closes, but not the other. I can just make him out in shadows in the ambu, my wall eye, back and forth, between news of warring with Iran and the man in the van, and Iran and the van... What a carousel, no? What an internet we weave, with the ‘ulance trundling off down the road, under the yachty round gaze of Oracle HQ, servers all afire....

Oh you ancient continent, you;
your face is drifting again.
Oval's gone, top's flattened out,
In no time, the whole mass unclenched from life itself.
And none to remember origin's shape.
The oldest geographers, your own, won't have a clue.
Look at it! Mouth closed, eyes closing.
"Hello in there; hello all you dark places."
Looking in, across the table,
Through the seen of your reader glasses,
Those owl eyes and frightened...
I'd say, 'fearful of all the migrations.'
No? Am I not right?
But I'd also say, 'Where's your stuff, where's your gitty-up?'
So the bottom of your pants are rolled, so what?
"Get up. Can you hear me? Get up."

A Small Dissent

(Letter sent in reply to a plea for more money to fund an end-of-the-year 8th grade party that went over budget.)

Dear E,

First, I want to thank you for all the work you’ve done on behalf of this class over the last 8 years. You both have been exemplary. The community is so lucky to have you and you deserve many thanks.

But at this last moment, I disagree with you on something and if you’ll indulge a long rickety ramble perhaps you might come to agree with me, at least in part. Incidentally, I’m speaking for myself; Barbara has her own views of this, and her own way of handling the choices you’re offering.

I was inclined to say nothing, partly because I had nothing to do with this whole affair, the party, and so who am I to say? But when you come to ask for $6,000 to $7,000 to cover costs then you’ve drawn me out. And it’s a lesson: I should have paid more attention, should have pressed for more discussion much sooner. But we leave the house at 7 a.m. and return at 7 p.m. and I just don’t have the energy to get involved. I know others with the same schedule do get involved. You, for one, and I cannot match it. I am at my limit.

Nevertheless, my argument is this. This was a misbegotten idea from the start, one not thought through, neither the means nor the end. Nor was it the result of a carefully developed consensus but rather the heady good will of a few. Now, it’s too late to change the outcome, but it’s not too late to object. And it’s not too late to discuss it and make sense of it.

In the end, I will make a very modest donation, but nothing close to $250. And I will not attend the dinner. Think of it less as a protest than simply an unwillingness to join in something that doesn’t ring true to me, that doesn’t seem in keeping with the nature of this school or this class, or anything I believe in.

B has not made a decision whether to attend.

Incidentally, it’s become an interesting family dilemma. Is it better to go along with the crowd and not risk leaving Dash in what he might feel to be an awkward position, with one or both of his parents not at the dinner… Or, is it better to make our own decisions and let him live with that. Which might seem heartless except that I would rather leave him with the memory of parents who stand up for what they believe in, even something so small as this, and then let him make his own decision.

I come to this obstinance less from my own parents, who had a dotty record of rebellion, than experiences I had in a large Catholic family with whom I spent much time as a child. Children get their moral sensibilities where they can. One moment always comes to mind. On a Sunday in 1961 or 2, the family went to mass. I was 14 and went along although not a Catholic. After his sermon, Father Mcskullduggery, which is what we called him, demanded the whole congregation stand up and pledge they would honor and follow a Catholic prohibition on seeing certain movies. The matriarch of this family I was with, Grace Huffman (the mother of the actress Felicity Huffman, by the way), refused to stand up and sat with all of her nine children beside her in the pew. Actually, one or two stood up, because they were their mother’s children and felt the need to protest the protest.

“This choice belongs to me, not to the Church, not to any institution,” she told us afterward in the car. “You can make your own decisions but this is what I’m doing.”

I tell you this to say that however heartless it sounds frankly I don’t care about Dash’s feelings on the matter (his mother disagrees). In any case Dash has told me he thinks the party is a silly idea and claims others do too. He’s particularly angered that the party was closed to his former classmates. But that’s for him to work out and I should add that he didn’t get his feelings about the party from me. As I say I never really thought about it. Anyway, I think he’s reached the age where he can figure out what he stands for. Indeed, I’ve seen him do that already.

Let me belabor the point for just a moment. My argument against this ‘celebration’ is that it doesn’t seem to be for the graduates so much as for the parents. And what is it that the parents are celebrating? I don’t know. Whatever it is, is this the way to do it? Incidentally, My son, Dylan, graduated from David Weber’s 8th grade class in 1999. One of the parents gave a dance party with two salsa instructors. The cost was not more than $500, if that. And if I’m not mistaken, monies raised by that class went to the high school endowment to help with tuitions.

The point of the party aside, the tone of your message is as though ‘what is $250?’ ‘We had a budget overrun of $6,000 and we’ll all just pony up the difference’. As though this is discretionary money. ‘Sell a few cards, say 10 at $25 a piece or 25 at $10 a piece and you’re done’. How hard is that? But you see it is not discretionary money to us. And the idea of selling more cards at some exorbitant rate is silly. And for what?

Then I look at my children and what they need just now. Dylan has accepted a job offer in Los Angeles that begins on July 15th, an offer that will enable him to do what he’s long wanted to do but the job only pays $12 an hour. He needs some start up money to get going, to live a while until he can make it work. Should I give $250 to him or to this project. My daughter (who has served in the Peace Corps in Togo and as the country director of Doctors of the World in Kenya), has just been accepted at Brown medical school, to follow in the footsteps of Paul Farmer. Cost is $60,000 a year, less scholarships. Living cost in Providence is $15,000 a year. Should I give $250 to you or to her?

At least one member of this 8th grade class needs money to go to the high school next year. The child I’m thinking of has been with this class for years. She’s a star by any measure Would it be better for her, for the school, and for myself, to give her this money, or to give it to you?

And then what about the teachers? If they were so important, perhaps they should have come before the party. It’s a matter of priorities, no? Barbara, who is a teacher, might also argue that giving teachers money in this way, while obviously needed, changes the very special, nearly sacred relationship between a teacher and her students. Reduces the transaction to something that’s not in the true nature of what’s being exchanged. It’s a tricky matter best left to her to articulate.

Finally, and this was Barbara’s point the other night, considering all the horror in the world lately, from Darfur to Sichuan, would this money you’re spending so much time earning and collecting mean more to those people, in their time of need, or to this class, and it’s time of need? A quite different need. One wonders what would have been the wisdom of the 8th grade crowd? Left to themselves what would they have done with this money?

In sum, the question is, which would be the more meaningful memory for this class, and for a Waldorf school class? Which would give them a greater sense of empowerment, even beyond the satisfaction of having done ‘the right thing.’ Which better establishes a standard of social awareness (and no, this is not too early an age to start that awareness and it doesn't matter what the do in high school)... Which is it? A dinner party with a pretty view, and a party that is finally exclusive not inclusive, or aid to people in need. People where hopelessness is the view.

You see what I mean? As a matter of choice, what does this money mean? What’s the intention here? What is this really about?

I always thought one of the values of Waldorf was that it was an ‘alternative’ education, that it wasn’t about keeping up with the Joneses, that it wasn’t about appearances, that it wasn’t about ‘finery’, or about buildings and gyms, which is what it always seems to come to. There’s always that discrepancy between alternative and traditional. Always that fear of going too far off the path. Always the sense of a divided, tentative identity. As an aside, I was asking someone the other day, a person who could answer such a question among a certain crowd, well how is Waldorf thought of. “Nobody really knows. It’s just sort of under the radar.” And then he turned to me, “I mean there’s some sort of cult thing underneath, right?”

Fear of that perception is always one of the factors that drive this education toward the middle. Which is why many Waldorf schools are caught in a tug of war. Nobody is willing to address what this education is really about or who Steiner was and what he was about — outside the confines of Waldorf. And so when you say you’re having a party at the Art Institute my very first thought is that it’s an attempt to forge an understandable and acceptable identity on this class and on this school. It's a message in a bottle. “Ah yes, that’s the place where children interested in the arts go. Isn’t it nice.”

“It’s safe,” is the message. “Now, we’re like everyone else.”

Meanwhile, Steiner himself is saying, “We shouldn’t ask: what does a person need to know or be able to do in order to fit into the existing social order? …. The new generation should not just be made to be what the present society wants it to become.”

As Henry Barnes explained it to me one pretty afternoon many years ago, in his ever wise and sweet way, standing in his garden full of German irises, the consummate Waldorf teacher, of history by the way, the grand old man of Waldorf….. as he explained, one of the main purposes of this education is to impart the confidence that you can transcend the limits of rational knowledge by using a blend of the purest reasoning, imagination, moral intuition and will.

I don’t think this party is in line with that. I don’t think there are any meanings in this celebration that have much worth beyond the moment. If these kids weren’t seeing each other in a few months, I suppose you could make some argument. Even then… But considering all the things you could do with $6,000 or $7,000 ‘more’, which seems so strange to me in light of the other monies that have been raised, beyond what was needed for the trip... In any case, I think these kids deserve more than this, something to suggest a more highly tuned ambition, a deeper view of the world, something more creative if nothing else, and something more in line with the hope of this education — and if you’ll forgive the apparent contradiction with Steiner’s desire, something to go with the times, with the notion of real change…..

I realize nothing can be changed but there it is.

Under One Roof

(Japan 6/2/08) A homeless woman who sneaked into a man's one story house in Shime, Fukuoka Prefecture, and lived undetected in his closet for a year has been arrested after the man became suspicious when he noticed his food mysteriously disappearing. He installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone. When he saw someone in his house, he suspected a burglar and called police.

But when police arrived they found no sign of a forced entry. No broken windows, no broken lock. When they got inside there was no sign that the house had been ransacked. They looked high and low and eventually found Tatsuko Horikawa, 58, hiding in the top compartment of the 57-year-old man's closet. She was arrested for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from Kasuya Police Station said.

"We searched the house . . . checking every- where someone could possibly hide," police spokesman Itakura said. "When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side."

The man lived alone in the one-story house and was not using the room with the shelf closet where the women was living. The height of the shelf closet is only 50 cm. Horikawa had moved a thin mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman "neat and clean."

Horikawa was taken to a jail facility where she was interrogated. At first, she said nothing but after several days she began to tell her story. She told police that she had come from the north looking for work. She said her husband had thrown her out of the house because he had lost his job and she wouldn't give him proper attention. She lived on the streets but when the cold set in she sought out houses in the area, and gained access through unlocked doors. She said that she did not mind living in such a cramped space and even had a sense of protection from the enclosure. "I have lived all my life on shelves", she told police.

She described how she could hear the owner of the house and learned his habits quickly. "He must be a very dull man," she said. "He never did anything. He came home, he fixed his dinner, and went to sleep. That's not much of a life. All the time I wondered, 'what's he thinking about?' No television, no radio. I never heard him speak a single word, although once I think he may have been weeping. I couldn't tell, you know, everything was muffled. Once I thought he had left for the day, I got confused what day it was, and I was almost discovered. He was sitting in a chair in his main room, staring into space. But I only saw his back. In fact, I have never seen him. If he came in here right now and accused me I wouldn't recognize him. No, not a sound from the man. He was like a mouse. 'Perhaps he is lonely,' I thought. 'Maybe he would like someone to talk to.' I thought of exposing myself, but I couldn't take a chance. I saw his mail every day. He got postal cards from Hiroshima. It sounded like his mother. She was still taking treatments for radiation. I wondered about that. You know they say the children of those people are a little crazy. I would say we made a good pair. I am sorry he felt I took something. I cleaned up his room. Did he tell you that things seemed a little neater than usual? I even did his laundry sometimes and took care to make sure he was would not notice. I never took any money, although I could have. Yes, so we lived like that. It was not bad. There are worse lives I can tell you for sure."

"Wife No. 1: Say Cheese"

The Anonymous Years
Originally uploaded by macnamband

Billary's Slip

If you hadn't seen her naked all these months, in those yellow-fin, fat-lady pants suits, if you hadn't listened to her plastic weep, and watched her tongue hanging out and white-lathered with ambition, and working up her own manogyny, you'd assume it was just coincidence. And now with this latest drama, you'd assume that "Hill's" mention of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, in the context of how a campaign can change in June, was just another example of political lips shaped like a torn pocket. Not a Hush-Hush Sweet Charlotte mind.

And perhaps it was just coincidence. Or perhaps it's just that Ms. Billary is so entwined in the zeitgeist of American political history that she cannot help herself, she cannot not bring to mind those subterranean desires that reveal us all as Manchurian candidates, hair-triggered to respond to the slightest mention of violence. As though this whole society is one vast organic suicide bomber.

But what if it's something else? The most horrifying suggestion is that she understands on some very deep level that by throwing the association of Obama and RFK together she'll spook the electorate. "Mamma knows best, don't you go out with that man. He'll come to a bad end. Yes he will." And of course why would we want to go through that all over again. And we all know that Obama has received threats, we all know he's a target, we all know -- I've heard it myself and wrote about it just a few months ago -- how many in the black community would rather he not run at all than to endure just the thought of his coffin carried through the streets of Washington.

It's hard to imagine that Hillary doesn't get this. But then perhaps she has this double, this 'other' Hillary who peeks out from out of that gabardine-minded heart and keeps the attention coming. That's the thing you have to fear. Maybe we should just let her become president because otherwise, she'll keep having these temper tantrums, and these psychotic episodic outpourings that will get more and more perverse and loud. And dangerous.

The Bicycle Thief Revisisted

This is the scene when the father and his son, having lost their one good lead to the bicycle thief — and after the father has suffered the excrutiating sensation of having punished his child one moment and thought he was dead the next — and now to make up for things they go to an expensive restaurant. The father has almost no money left. He is at wit's end. There is a boy from a wealthy family at the next table. Father and son are throw fate to the wind. The next day their lives will unravel just a littl more, leading up to the climax. To the moment when the father realizes his son's love is all he has, and will ever need.

Puck

Puck, photo by Vilmos Zsigmond, originally uploaded by macnamband.

Photo by Vilmos Zsigmond

The Nanny

He picks up Bobby from soccer practice. The first time I saw him he came right up to me, from across the field. Twenty-five, 6'4" maybe, stringy. English short-hair was part of the initial impression. I thought he had an accent but later I couldn't hear it. "Hi, I'm Olivier," he said. "I'm Bobby's nanny." Congratulations, I thought. Bobby is 14. I wouldn't have thought he needed a nanny.

And it was odd that Olivier would introduce himself that way. If I'd been in his place I would have tried to pass myself off as a friend of the family or at the least as an unidentified walking object that accompanied Bobby. I just wouldn't have used that word, "nanny". But Olivier seemed to think nothing of it. "I'm Bobby's nanny." As though "I'm Bobby's uncle". There was that sort of intimacy. A revelation. Almost in the vein of, "I'm Bobby's therapist."

Bobby, by the way, is always "Bobby". Never Bob. Or Robert. He's seems like a good enough kid. He's friendly although he can be derisive. You can see that for a long time he was a Bobby, not clearly boy or girl, but now he's out of that, he's a Bob. He has a deep voice for 15, he's tall for his age, he's in P, clearly. At tournaments, between games, he reads far more than any of the other players. As you would expect, he goes to one of the exclusive schools. He has that nurtured, self confidence you find in those children.

Meanwhile, Olivier waits for the practice to end. He pushes the soccer balls into a corner of the goal. He talks briefly on his cell phone. If a parent of one of the other players arrives he talks to them. You suspect he's lonely. Sometimes, he wears dark, wrap-around sunglasses. As though to say, "I'm Bobby's nanny and I'm armed and sort of dangerous in a way...."

Yes, so Olivier is part bodyguard. Bobby could be kidnapped after all. It's happened in this city. There was that boy that was 7 or 8, kidnapped from a bus stop, and then eight years later he got free. It could happen, although with Bobby, you get the sense he could see it coming. He would struggle. He's tuned in to what might happen to him. He's been warned that his priviledge makes him a target.

And so Olivier has a grand purpose. Not just the mundane, especially when Bobby's mother offers his services, say to pick up other kids to go to practice. She will write in an email, "Okay, have him stand on the northeast corner of Presidio and Sacramento and look for Olivier in my gold Lexus."

A Clean, Well Heated Room

At the Crown Plaza down the peninsula, a local Montessori elementary school celebrates its 10th anniversary. The theme tonight is "Vienna" and during the silent auction you are encouraged to waltz. The school director has put up tall gaudy mirrors around the room to suggest elegance in the midst of 'hotelance'. What would you call it? The room holds 350 people, all Chinese tonight, all parents and their children from Burlingame and Hillsborough promenading around the dance floor, girls in white dresses; boys in white shirts and bow ties. The children are all cute in the way children are who seem more like miniature adults. Everyone is smiling. Every parent has a camera. The director is trying to speak but the sound system is poor. The dinner is buffet. People waltz but no one knows the steps. The dancers are stiff. They work from a box step; there’s no whirling, no dervishing. No mistakes. Everything is under control.

The biggest student in the room is in the 9th grade. He's a burly child with a furrowed brow. I’m sitting across from his mother who has come with her estranged husband. They are not Chinese. Her hair is down. She is not wearing a long dress but more a cocktail dress. Which is to say, I suppose, that she has a certain sexuality and she wants you to see it. Going out at night is a chance for sexual expression, no matter the occasion. Her husband is burly like his son. He wears one of those tuxedos with a collar reminiscent of a pastor. No bow tie, just a white collar, shaped like a trapazoid. He’s a landscape contractor, his Ford 150 is outside. The son has learning disabilities, but you might not guess that if you were not his teacher. He always seems serious,always looking down, trying to figure something out, get things organized. You very rarely see him laugh. Yet he likes acting. If you get him out of from under himself, he comes to life. Tonight, he looks composed in his white shirt and bow tie. He seems confident.

Some years ago, when the boy was much younger, his mother went into a rage one night and set fire to the house where they all lived. The house burned right to the ground. Nothing left. Her husband and son barely escaped. Later, the mother went away, but whether to jail or to an institution or to stay with relatives, no one knows. Or no one will say. The Chinese are above all, discreet. The mother now lives by herself. She refers to ‘my son’ whenever she talks about him. The word 'son' is in bold as it were, as though to say, 'he's mine, I don't care what I did or what you think'. She seems pleasant enough, but she watches everyone at the table closely. No doubt she wonders what people know of her life and whether they are judging her. Our eyes catch and they don’t unhook easily.