Mar 29, 2009
Mar 2, 2009
The landlord arrives to plug up the air vents, which stream cigarette smoke from the downstairs tenant like stacks on the Lusitania. Afterward, the landlord wants a word: the word is he wants to raise the rent. After all, it's been a year and a half. I ask him if that's such a good idea, under the circumstances, with rents going down in many parts of the city. I also tell him that my wife is already looking for a new place and that if we move he will sorely miss the tremendous subsidy we've been putting into the backyard garden. "Well, you're getting something out of it," he says. Of course, I say, but the long term benefit is to you. No?"
He agrees. And we both pause to mark an agreement. I don't mention that I am keeping his secret, which is that he rents a small room off the garage illegally.
He moves into the kitchen. I invite him to sit down, have some tea. He sits down. Water will do.
We've talked two or three times before. We have hardly any relationship. Out of nowhere he unearths a piece of his life story. He is second generation Chinese. He has spent 30 years in real estate. He knows all the tricks in selling houses. He should have made more money over the years but for one reason or another he hasn't. He is defensive about appearing rich, and insists that even by the new Obama guidelines he is not rich. He concedes he makes more than $250,000 a year (from his many properties) but he owes more than $250,000 in expenses. The new stimulus will only cover properties up to $350,000; but in San Francisco, a special dispensation allows the limit to go up to $417,000. But what property could you find for that amount in San Francisco. So you see, he tells me, I am not a rich man. I'm just like you. He elaborates, he draws a portrait of a man who is anything but what he seems.
"You know about my wife, right?" he asks.
I don't.
He goes on to tell her story, how for years she has been fighting a brain tumor and thank god for the moment it's in remission. But you can't imagine, he says.
I can't.
The rain is coming down; the whole word seems like it's coming down. "You know," he says. "Sometimes lately I even consider...."
He doesn't finish. What is it you consider, I say.
"Suicide.... Suicide. Oh of course I would never do it. Absolutely no way But this is where I am. Even that thought. You see. That's how bad it is."
He stands up abruptly. We shake hands. He leaves. Ten minutes later he returns, to say that he recently received a ticket because we had left the garbage cans in plain view. What do you mean, I ask. I look down the street. By every house you can see the blue, black and green plastic cans. No, he says they are finally pressing an old city ordinance. All cans must be out of view.
And so this is what the city has come to. And what of the landlord. He wants to kill himself, he wants to raise the rent, he wants the garbage cans out of sight. His wife has a brain tumor. In which order should these things be listed to suggest who this man really is....
Later in the evening I receive a note from a good friend. "Right now I am depleting my already depressed "retirement accounts" -- by summer I will probably be homeless. Just to make sure you understand how serious the situation has become." He goes on to talk about how precarious his job is, how he's become a moth on his boss's palm and his boss has no interest in moths.
"To tell you the honest truth, if I lose that outlet, I'll become suicidal."
Suicide thoughts are on the wind. They're blowing every which way. And here we are, not even at the hard part yet.
He agrees. And we both pause to mark an agreement. I don't mention that I am keeping his secret, which is that he rents a small room off the garage illegally.
He moves into the kitchen. I invite him to sit down, have some tea. He sits down. Water will do.
We've talked two or three times before. We have hardly any relationship. Out of nowhere he unearths a piece of his life story. He is second generation Chinese. He has spent 30 years in real estate. He knows all the tricks in selling houses. He should have made more money over the years but for one reason or another he hasn't. He is defensive about appearing rich, and insists that even by the new Obama guidelines he is not rich. He concedes he makes more than $250,000 a year (from his many properties) but he owes more than $250,000 in expenses. The new stimulus will only cover properties up to $350,000; but in San Francisco, a special dispensation allows the limit to go up to $417,000. But what property could you find for that amount in San Francisco. So you see, he tells me, I am not a rich man. I'm just like you. He elaborates, he draws a portrait of a man who is anything but what he seems.
"You know about my wife, right?" he asks.
I don't.
He goes on to tell her story, how for years she has been fighting a brain tumor and thank god for the moment it's in remission. But you can't imagine, he says.
I can't.
The rain is coming down; the whole word seems like it's coming down. "You know," he says. "Sometimes lately I even consider...."
He doesn't finish. What is it you consider, I say.
"Suicide.... Suicide. Oh of course I would never do it. Absolutely no way But this is where I am. Even that thought. You see. That's how bad it is."
He stands up abruptly. We shake hands. He leaves. Ten minutes later he returns, to say that he recently received a ticket because we had left the garbage cans in plain view. What do you mean, I ask. I look down the street. By every house you can see the blue, black and green plastic cans. No, he says they are finally pressing an old city ordinance. All cans must be out of view.
And so this is what the city has come to. And what of the landlord. He wants to kill himself, he wants to raise the rent, he wants the garbage cans out of sight. His wife has a brain tumor. In which order should these things be listed to suggest who this man really is....
Later in the evening I receive a note from a good friend. "Right now I am depleting my already depressed "retirement accounts" -- by summer I will probably be homeless. Just to make sure you understand how serious the situation has become." He goes on to talk about how precarious his job is, how he's become a moth on his boss's palm and his boss has no interest in moths.
"To tell you the honest truth, if I lose that outlet, I'll become suicidal."
Suicide thoughts are on the wind. They're blowing every which way. And here we are, not even at the hard part yet.
Mar 1, 2009
At the end of a personal era, in the late 1970s, in early May perhaps, I took the elevator up to what seemed like the 500th floor of the AIG building, down at 70 Pine, all of lower Manhattan at your feet. The city was the starlight room of the world then, and the brag was still true that 'til you fought in the garden you ain't fought; but of course at the same time, the city was lowlit, a Plato's Retreat, with its gritty Jersey crowd and older women leading braces of younger men to private rooms — a city of people fucking you left and right, and you doing the same to them.
Of all the financial companies, Citibank was known for that. That's where you went to work if you enjoyed using a shiv and getting one in return.
All the while, the city's middle class was leaving; as it always seems to be. The economy was in shambles. MBAs unable to get on Wall Street took banking jobs on Water Street. Everyone got pushed down a notch. If you had an MA but not an MBA you might well end up in Insurance, which was then low caste finance and the wild west of careers.
Natalie Cole lived downstairs in our apartment building, which was on 94th and Riverside Drive. That was the edge of the known world in some respects, for some people. You paid a lot of money to ride the elevator, clinking and clanking, up and down with pimps and addicts and forensics in general. Nevertheless, the neighborhoood had tremendous charm: The year before, on July 4th the Tall Ships dropped anchor out the window, in the Hudson River. It was hot as bejesus and I kept rolling to Martha and the Vandellas singing Heat Wave, which had come out 15 years earlier, in September, 1963, the year I went off to boarding school and this personal era began.
The startle of that day in 1977 or 8, that day in May, was that you might not be able to write off a two martini lunch. That was bad news for people, including my friend, Bill G. who at nearly every lunch would have five double vodkas and tonic. I saw it day after day. Or else two litres of Saki. And then would go back to his office, sell $5 million in reinsurance, and dream up some new risk to sell. His claim to fame was Ransom insurance.
I'd just returned from a prolonged business trip to Saudi Arabia and London. I was working as a Casualty underwriter for American International Underwriters, the international arm of the American International Group (AIG), which in those days was all Hank Greenberg, all the time. He was the business primate of the moment, the matinee masshia of insurance and reinsurance.
The trip had not gone well. Bad right from the start. the plan was for my boss and I to go to Athens, meet an business contact and I would go on to Saudi Arabia to secure more business. We flew out of New York on March 15, passing through Rome the next day, the day Aldo Moro was kidnapped.
The next day, we were in Athens, having lunch below the Acropolis with a Palestinian insurance broker. This was six days after what has since been called the Coastal Road Massacre in which a woman lead a band of Palestinian terrorists in a small boat to Tel Aviv, highjacked a bus and got into a shootout with police. Thirty-eight people were killed, a dozen were children.
Over lunch I was in the delicate position of balancing the Palestinian and my boss, a Jew from New Jersey. Art was in the Hank Greenberg mold and although less refined, every bit as creative, energetic, street smart and determined. He made it clear that his ethnicity was to be secret and he also made clear how much he despised Arabs.
Inevitably, the conversation at lunch turned to the bus massacre. The Palestinian was defensive; he offered the standard defense, a history of victimhood, an argument I knew very well — the argument arc of Sykes-Picot, the McMahon Correspondence, Deir Yassin, the killing of Count Bernadette. I knew all the arguments. I was a sympathizer.
"You agree with me, don't you?" he said at one point. "I can tell you agree with me." I went back to my plate, trying to ease fish flesh off the bone.
Finally I shook my head. "No, I don't agree, you can't justify a massacre with history. Perhaps, understand it but you can't justify it, even your history...."
I tried to be forthright, and not to sound disingenuously diplomatic, but the Palestinian frowned.
"I thought you knew something about our culture, but clearly you don't." He went on and on about how I was like all Americans, how they think they know about the Palestinian cause but they don't.
In the cab afterward, my boss was furious. "Why did you get into an argument with this man?" he asked. "You idiot."
The next day he returned to New York. I and another person from AIU, went on to Riyadh and Jeddah. At each stop, casualty business was promised, tea was provided, and the backgammon was endless as you waited to be seen by someone from the royal family. After that I spent a month in Croydon, England, that blandest of financial capitals. I oversaw how the middle east operation was running. There were problems. The business, mostly in Saudi Arabia, had been built on uncertain and unreliable agreements, high commissions, and never a clear understanding of what the profits and losses were. Now that business was tight
I returned to New York and one day had lunch with an executive at the parent company, AIG. I gave an appraisal of what the Saudi business was and what it might be. After lunch I followed the man up to his office, on the 500th floor, with New York at your feet, with David Rockerfeller's office just across the sky, a few blocks away.
It was the middle of the afternoon; even with tinted windows the sun off the city made you squint. The man went behind his desk to retrieve some documents he wanted me to look at. He also wanted to hear more of my report. But after a moment he suddenly turned reflective. He asked how interested I was in the insurance business. I answered properly, diplomatically. I tried to err on the side of diplomacy, no matter how it came out, no matter how disingenuous I might sound.
But once again I misjudged. "I would have thought you were too smart for this," he said and added, "How old are you anyway?"
I told him. He paused for a long while and then explained how 20 years earlier he'd gotten caught up in the allure of Hank Greenberg's famous promise to make anyone that joined him at the AIG a millionaire. And now this man was a millionaire.
He paused again and then brushed his eyes with his pocket linen. At first, I thought perhaps he was having some sort of allergic reaction. Then I realized he was weeping.
"I'll tell you this," he went on. "I mean I don't know you. Who the hell are you? I don't know what you want. But if you've got anything else you'd rather do in your life, I would suggest you do it."
He wiped his eyes, and then looking out at the grandeur of lower Manhatten he added, "You don't want to spend your life here doing this....Nothing good will come of it."
I left his office and several months later left AIG. His advice turned out to be the right encouragement at the right moment.
But I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to stay on and all these years later be in a company that symbolizes such power run amok, such brilliance squandered, such greed run to ground. Who would you be? What role would you have played? What would you tell the young man coming up?
Of all the financial companies, Citibank was known for that. That's where you went to work if you enjoyed using a shiv and getting one in return.
All the while, the city's middle class was leaving; as it always seems to be. The economy was in shambles. MBAs unable to get on Wall Street took banking jobs on Water Street. Everyone got pushed down a notch. If you had an MA but not an MBA you might well end up in Insurance, which was then low caste finance and the wild west of careers.
Natalie Cole lived downstairs in our apartment building, which was on 94th and Riverside Drive. That was the edge of the known world in some respects, for some people. You paid a lot of money to ride the elevator, clinking and clanking, up and down with pimps and addicts and forensics in general. Nevertheless, the neighborhoood had tremendous charm: The year before, on July 4th the Tall Ships dropped anchor out the window, in the Hudson River. It was hot as bejesus and I kept rolling to Martha and the Vandellas singing Heat Wave, which had come out 15 years earlier, in September, 1963, the year I went off to boarding school and this personal era began.
The startle of that day in 1977 or 8, that day in May, was that you might not be able to write off a two martini lunch. That was bad news for people, including my friend, Bill G. who at nearly every lunch would have five double vodkas and tonic. I saw it day after day. Or else two litres of Saki. And then would go back to his office, sell $5 million in reinsurance, and dream up some new risk to sell. His claim to fame was Ransom insurance.
I'd just returned from a prolonged business trip to Saudi Arabia and London. I was working as a Casualty underwriter for American International Underwriters, the international arm of the American International Group (AIG), which in those days was all Hank Greenberg, all the time. He was the business primate of the moment, the matinee masshia of insurance and reinsurance.
The trip had not gone well. Bad right from the start. the plan was for my boss and I to go to Athens, meet an business contact and I would go on to Saudi Arabia to secure more business. We flew out of New York on March 15, passing through Rome the next day, the day Aldo Moro was kidnapped.
The next day, we were in Athens, having lunch below the Acropolis with a Palestinian insurance broker. This was six days after what has since been called the Coastal Road Massacre in which a woman lead a band of Palestinian terrorists in a small boat to Tel Aviv, highjacked a bus and got into a shootout with police. Thirty-eight people were killed, a dozen were children.
Over lunch I was in the delicate position of balancing the Palestinian and my boss, a Jew from New Jersey. Art was in the Hank Greenberg mold and although less refined, every bit as creative, energetic, street smart and determined. He made it clear that his ethnicity was to be secret and he also made clear how much he despised Arabs.
Inevitably, the conversation at lunch turned to the bus massacre. The Palestinian was defensive; he offered the standard defense, a history of victimhood, an argument I knew very well — the argument arc of Sykes-Picot, the McMahon Correspondence, Deir Yassin, the killing of Count Bernadette. I knew all the arguments. I was a sympathizer.
"You agree with me, don't you?" he said at one point. "I can tell you agree with me." I went back to my plate, trying to ease fish flesh off the bone.
Finally I shook my head. "No, I don't agree, you can't justify a massacre with history. Perhaps, understand it but you can't justify it, even your history...."
I tried to be forthright, and not to sound disingenuously diplomatic, but the Palestinian frowned.
"I thought you knew something about our culture, but clearly you don't." He went on and on about how I was like all Americans, how they think they know about the Palestinian cause but they don't.
In the cab afterward, my boss was furious. "Why did you get into an argument with this man?" he asked. "You idiot."
The next day he returned to New York. I and another person from AIU, went on to Riyadh and Jeddah. At each stop, casualty business was promised, tea was provided, and the backgammon was endless as you waited to be seen by someone from the royal family. After that I spent a month in Croydon, England, that blandest of financial capitals. I oversaw how the middle east operation was running. There were problems. The business, mostly in Saudi Arabia, had been built on uncertain and unreliable agreements, high commissions, and never a clear understanding of what the profits and losses were. Now that business was tight
I returned to New York and one day had lunch with an executive at the parent company, AIG. I gave an appraisal of what the Saudi business was and what it might be. After lunch I followed the man up to his office, on the 500th floor, with New York at your feet, with David Rockerfeller's office just across the sky, a few blocks away.
It was the middle of the afternoon; even with tinted windows the sun off the city made you squint. The man went behind his desk to retrieve some documents he wanted me to look at. He also wanted to hear more of my report. But after a moment he suddenly turned reflective. He asked how interested I was in the insurance business. I answered properly, diplomatically. I tried to err on the side of diplomacy, no matter how it came out, no matter how disingenuous I might sound.
But once again I misjudged. "I would have thought you were too smart for this," he said and added, "How old are you anyway?"
I told him. He paused for a long while and then explained how 20 years earlier he'd gotten caught up in the allure of Hank Greenberg's famous promise to make anyone that joined him at the AIG a millionaire. And now this man was a millionaire.
He paused again and then brushed his eyes with his pocket linen. At first, I thought perhaps he was having some sort of allergic reaction. Then I realized he was weeping.
"I'll tell you this," he went on. "I mean I don't know you. Who the hell are you? I don't know what you want. But if you've got anything else you'd rather do in your life, I would suggest you do it."
He wiped his eyes, and then looking out at the grandeur of lower Manhatten he added, "You don't want to spend your life here doing this....Nothing good will come of it."
I left his office and several months later left AIG. His advice turned out to be the right encouragement at the right moment.
But I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to stay on and all these years later be in a company that symbolizes such power run amok, such brilliance squandered, such greed run to ground. Who would you be? What role would you have played? What would you tell the young man coming up?
Feb 26, 2009
There's a boy who I've come to adopt, if not legally, in some other senses. He's already 15 or he's almost 15, depending on which certificates you've seen and believe. His father lives abroad, in Georgia. The two of them haven't seen each in years. Every year the boy is going to visit his father next summer. But then next summer comes and the trip is called off. His mother does what she can to survive. Perhaps, she is training to be an accountant; I don't know. She speaks very good English. She is exceptionally pretty and stylish. She always wears dark glasses. I've seen her eyes just once. She and her son live in a small run down apartment, in the Western Addition.
This boy is a very good soccer player, not on his way to the national team perhaps but very talented. He's strong, fast and quick. He's played in several state cups. You notice him right away; he's got a long ponytail. And he's relentlessly slaloming through a defense or running down a forward. He's also mouthy and quick to blame a teammate. I've told him to cool that and he's trying but his first instinct is to find fault. As a result he's unpopular with certain parents, particularly those who don't like his public rebuke of their sons. 'C'mon, what are you doing?' he'll say. 'Pass me the ball.' Some of these parents roll their eyes and curse him under their breath. "Ball hog," they'll say. "Shut up," they even shout out.
But then very often he'll save the game, he'll come up with the winning goal or the tying goal, and then what can anyone say? They don't like him, but he wins games and these are parents who need a winning team.
Many of the other boys go to exclusive private schools. One of the fathers drives a Maserati. One of the boys has a nanny, a late 20-something man, long and thin, who arrives with his charge and picks him up. The boy has that perm-a-press confident smile that you sometimes see on the faces of the entitled.
So the social differences are great. This boy goes to a large public school, which worries his mother no end. And who knows how well he is doing. One time he tells me he's getting all As; the next time it's Cs and Ds. He has problems speaking proper English; my wife helps him. He doesn't like Science but he loves History and sometimes at the dinner table he'll engage us. The other day he wanted to describe the battle of Stalingrad and wanted to know whatever we knew. One minute he takes pride in his Russian connection and teh next he'll say how he loathes the Russians, particularly after the fighting last summer.
So this boy and my son have been together for years and in recent months they've drawn ever closer. They have little in common and yet they see themselves as outcasts who have found this soccer theater to play in.
All was fine until the other day when the team manager began looking into his birth records. This manager is on the board of one of the leagues and serves on the disciplinary committee. She often has to decide what to do with kids and coaches who try to get kids to play up or down illegally. If caught, a player or coach can be suspended for up to two years. This would be a killshot for the coach in this case who depends heavily on income from players to make ends meet.
What the manager was able to confirm was that this boy was born not on 12/6 but on 6/12. Officials had been told over the years that this was merely a European affectation and that all was in good order. But the manager had the original document in Russian translated and found that the June birthday was the real one, which meant the boy would have to play on an underp-16 team, not the under-15 team, with all his friends, and with a record of success he was unlikely to have if he played up.
The woman came to me and asked what to do. I suggested nothing be done and the coach agreed. If he had gone this far then let it go. After all, only three of us knew the truth. The manager said that was impossible and after many calls back and forth and much headbanging she decided that if she gave up her position as manager (her son is on the team) then she could look the other way.
That seemed to be her position. The boy was relieved; his mother was relieved, at least partly. The coach was relieved. I was relieved.
But then a few days later the manager decided she could not stick with her decision. She talked to the boy still again, to find out why it was so important to stay on this team, especially when the older team needed plaers. She spoke to his mother twice. She wanted a moral conviction but she couldn't find it and couldn't pretend not to know the truth.
There were other factors. She didn't particularly like the mother. She wondered if the boy wanted to stay with his team only because he would have so much more success. She kept worrying that the boy would be found out and then what?
What's wrong with that, I asked. Even if that's true that he wants to stay on this team to succeed... Why not. The one solid structure he has in his life is this team. Why not let him have it? Why not risk this?
I'll call you back she said. That was a week ago. Nothing has been decided. And a moral question hangs in the air, a question that could be answered either way. There's morality at both ends.
It was the coach who first suggested 'doing nothing.' What an odd alternative I thought at first but I've come to accept the idea, for the first time in my life, that you could refuse to decide such a matter....
This boy is a very good soccer player, not on his way to the national team perhaps but very talented. He's strong, fast and quick. He's played in several state cups. You notice him right away; he's got a long ponytail. And he's relentlessly slaloming through a defense or running down a forward. He's also mouthy and quick to blame a teammate. I've told him to cool that and he's trying but his first instinct is to find fault. As a result he's unpopular with certain parents, particularly those who don't like his public rebuke of their sons. 'C'mon, what are you doing?' he'll say. 'Pass me the ball.' Some of these parents roll their eyes and curse him under their breath. "Ball hog," they'll say. "Shut up," they even shout out.
But then very often he'll save the game, he'll come up with the winning goal or the tying goal, and then what can anyone say? They don't like him, but he wins games and these are parents who need a winning team.
Many of the other boys go to exclusive private schools. One of the fathers drives a Maserati. One of the boys has a nanny, a late 20-something man, long and thin, who arrives with his charge and picks him up. The boy has that perm-a-press confident smile that you sometimes see on the faces of the entitled.
So the social differences are great. This boy goes to a large public school, which worries his mother no end. And who knows how well he is doing. One time he tells me he's getting all As; the next time it's Cs and Ds. He has problems speaking proper English; my wife helps him. He doesn't like Science but he loves History and sometimes at the dinner table he'll engage us. The other day he wanted to describe the battle of Stalingrad and wanted to know whatever we knew. One minute he takes pride in his Russian connection and teh next he'll say how he loathes the Russians, particularly after the fighting last summer.
So this boy and my son have been together for years and in recent months they've drawn ever closer. They have little in common and yet they see themselves as outcasts who have found this soccer theater to play in.
All was fine until the other day when the team manager began looking into his birth records. This manager is on the board of one of the leagues and serves on the disciplinary committee. She often has to decide what to do with kids and coaches who try to get kids to play up or down illegally. If caught, a player or coach can be suspended for up to two years. This would be a killshot for the coach in this case who depends heavily on income from players to make ends meet.
What the manager was able to confirm was that this boy was born not on 12/6 but on 6/12. Officials had been told over the years that this was merely a European affectation and that all was in good order. But the manager had the original document in Russian translated and found that the June birthday was the real one, which meant the boy would have to play on an underp-16 team, not the under-15 team, with all his friends, and with a record of success he was unlikely to have if he played up.
The woman came to me and asked what to do. I suggested nothing be done and the coach agreed. If he had gone this far then let it go. After all, only three of us knew the truth. The manager said that was impossible and after many calls back and forth and much headbanging she decided that if she gave up her position as manager (her son is on the team) then she could look the other way.
That seemed to be her position. The boy was relieved; his mother was relieved, at least partly. The coach was relieved. I was relieved.
But then a few days later the manager decided she could not stick with her decision. She talked to the boy still again, to find out why it was so important to stay on this team, especially when the older team needed plaers. She spoke to his mother twice. She wanted a moral conviction but she couldn't find it and couldn't pretend not to know the truth.
There were other factors. She didn't particularly like the mother. She wondered if the boy wanted to stay with his team only because he would have so much more success. She kept worrying that the boy would be found out and then what?
What's wrong with that, I asked. Even if that's true that he wants to stay on this team to succeed... Why not. The one solid structure he has in his life is this team. Why not let him have it? Why not risk this?
I'll call you back she said. That was a week ago. Nothing has been decided. And a moral question hangs in the air, a question that could be answered either way. There's morality at both ends.
It was the coach who first suggested 'doing nothing.' What an odd alternative I thought at first but I've come to accept the idea, for the first time in my life, that you could refuse to decide such a matter....
Jan 20, 2009
And just like that, we begin moving away from the culture of me toward the culture of our. Not in a socialist sense, dare one use the word. But simply in the sense of being easier with each other. Repression days are over. The Reagan era is finally over. And for a moment you can see through all the illusions, our deformities are not nearly so encrusted as we had thought. But then, you suppose, the new transparency, the new genuineness and fearlessness will itself become commodified.
By Khaldun's clock, we are a few minutes past the half hour....
By Khaldun's clock, we are a few minutes past the half hour....
Jan 17, 2009
On one of the last nights of the Reagan era the three of us go to see Slumdog Millionaire. We try to catch the 8 o'clock, down on Van Ness. We're only able to find a parking space on Eddy Street, and as it turns out, at the beginning of a night full of ironies, under the Victorian brow of 850, the law offices of the former DA — "The boss", a Willie Stark character, but at the same time a liberal populist and an Irish warrior. His greatest moment, aside from fighting his belated arch enemy, Da Mayor, was going after corruption in the city's police department and putting brass heads on sticks in front of the Hall. I was one of his men, one of the little king's men as it were.
We get sushi on the corner and argue over whether to leave a $4 or $5 tip, for a $30 dinner. We hurry up the street. The others are saying, "why so fast? There's not going to be a line. Everybody's seen it."
We get to the theater; the line is out the door. I step in and stumble into a fight with my doppelganger. "You're trying to cut in line," he says. I say, "which line is that?" And I go on. The guy behind him, a Latino, sides with me. My dop turns away; I pat him on the shoulder. "Don't touch me," he says. "With a ten foot pole," I say. Jabber-jabber.
Meanwhile, I become blood brothers with the Latino. "Hey, Friday night, right?" he's saying. "Something's always wrong. Your wife, your kids... But you got a job? Right? Maybe not for much longer, but tonight you. Am I right? So let's all just chill."
'You're absolutely right.' Jabber-jabber.
Finally, we get to the front of the line: Slum Dogs is sold out. Me and my dop have misjudged. The Latino has anticipated; his movie doesn't play for an hour. I take it as a sign: The era of get-whatever-you-want-at-the-last-minute is over. I see everything as metaphor, sign and my delusions at the same time. Meanwhile, Dop is looking like it's my fault he missed the movie. "Shall we go piss around a fire hydrant?" I'm thinking?
I look for the others. I see them running off in shame, like an informer's family in Gaza.
I don't say to them, 'Okay, forgive me my trespass, but you see, we needed to hurry. We need to hurry in general. Our dysfunction is catching up with us. The last minute won't do anymore.'
* * *
I trail behind as we wander back down the street, past sleepers in the alcoves, past stores 'closed forever', past where the boss had his campaign headquarters.
Those were the days. After last supper at Max's Opera Cafe in December, 2003, on runoff-election eve, we saddled up one more time, right here, in a flat-bed truck, with a boom box on boom, and rolled out through the Tenderloin, down Eddy, up Franklin, yelling up at curtained condo windows, reaching out to people in black tie on their way to the symphony, and then through Pacific Heights, wailing on megaphone-mantras about how folks should vote for the real progressive. Which was to say, looking back, vote for nostalgia and great American novels and damn the torpedoes. But people didn't want a character, much less an older white iconoclast. They didn't want the petty corruption around him. They wanted the black girl with her glamor and competence, with her fair trade, cultural blend, with her sexy youth and academic perfumes, with her ability to anticipate and to expect, and her pretty speeches, her Faustian ambition, and the secret assurance that Big Daddy, Willy-Jesus would always back her.
Now, even the boss has come round to support her, and nearly everyone who opposed her, although good rumor has it that she's pissed off Very-God-of-Very-God, Begotten-not-made, Lord Jack Davis no end. A little financial shenanigan he's not willing to overlook.
Truth is the boss was tired after two terms. Tired and unwilling to pay any more of his own money for the run. And beaten down by the dead weight of 850 Bryant, by the Hall itself, by that reichstag of sanctimony and corruptions, large and small — along with asbestos in the ceilings, along with black widows and coral snakes, according to legend. Even dead bodies in the heating ducts.
But before you get to legend what about all those tall, Bleak-House gray, tin storage cabinets, hidden in every nook and so filled with files that you couldn't cram in one more motion to delay? You wonder how many cases were miss-filed in those cabinets and because of that folks got freed or never found or never charged or sent back to prison, or got lost in witness protection.... It happened.
People will tell you, and quite seriously — clerks and deputies, even some attorneys, people who have worked in the hall for a long time — they'll tell you how the Hall is haunted, how they know someone who worked for someone who told them that they heard human screams coming through the pipes, which could have been forensics in the old jail, in for a night on the town as it were. But there was more: Things going wrong for no good reason. Hatreds and betrayals out of nowhere. Good, honest people turned to sloths and satyrs. Not to mention the natural paranoia that runs through that kind of place. And what about all the seductions, among people you wouldn't imagine. Fucking on desk tops, with the door open. Blow jobs underneath. Come-ons from the person standing next to you in front of the women's bathroom mirror. From your immediate superior even. Even coke, in the old days.
All that and then throw in the standard deviation of deviance that you find in this city, the priests and politicians trolling for tots, the man who burned his girl friend's breasts with an iron, the man who murdered Polly Klaas, Noel & Knoeller (weird and weirder), Charles Ng and Leonard Lake, all the gangstas, the run o' the mill and the state-of-the-art.... It was all true or true enough to be true, every depravity and fuckup. Boss didn't want to admit it that night at the Opera Plaza cafe, but he'd had enough of the Hall of Horrors. I do know that no one who worked there for long ever lead much of a happy life afterward, and no DA ever got out without being soiled in some way.
These days it's all very professional, all tidied up. Sure, the madame gets the investigators to take her around, which is petty and theft, but otherwise you can eat off the linoleum floors. Still, people will tell you, privately of course, that they greatly miss the boss and the old days, when there was a real passion to prosecute and the office was brimming with new projects, and every day had a high noon.
* * *
We stop at Eddy Street. We have a choice: go back to the car, just half a block away, or go down to Opera Plaza. Perhaps, there's something there we haven't seen. No one wants to go home. We go to Opera Plaza. There's nothing playing, beyond an indy comedy. The last one we saw was horrific: unintelligible, scriptless, souless. If you're going to make a movie, you need something to say. A sexually frustrated girl talking to a boy who works in a video store for two hours is not enough.
We stop at the bookstore. The new fiction seems flat. The old fiction is old fiction. The nonfiction is Terry Gross. We know it all....
We go back to Eddy Street. The car is parked in heavy shadow across from the Rodeway Inn. We've been gone less than an hour. The back window is broken in. Everything has been taken. Two computers, two disk drives, a memory stick — and you wonder how that could be, how could people be so stupid — all that memory, plus school books, an I-pod, toiletries, 'the things they carried' in the demimonde of middle class-nam.
Days later you don't want to take inventory of what's been lost. Otherwise, you're drawn to the Cadillac-feel of blood-lust hate, where you go house-to-house, decrepit room by decrepit room, rounding up suspects, looking at forged papers, looking at the treasure of stolen goods and identities. Where you say to some poor bastard wearing a black stocking on his head: Are you fuckin' kidding me? No, seriously. You can't even make a good forgery.' You shoot some of them in the head. Others, you hang out the window by their heels until they tell you something you already knew. Then you let go and don't wait to see splat.
We call 553-0123. I never forget that number. I give the voice some details. 'You have these options', Voice says, 'Have somebody come out, or walk to the nearest station, or file online.'
Have somebody come out, I say.
'There's two in front of you,' Voice says.
'Okay, I'll wait.'
But I don't. I look in bushes, thinking maybe they stove it for later. I walk around the block and find a black guy with white bone fragments in his face, a performance artist fella, heavy jewelry, make up. Reminds me of the tribal man in Behind The Green Door. He's got a bag; for a minute I think it belongs to us. He calms me down. Sure look in that, he says, but it's not yours. Okay okay. We talk. He motions me over, doesn't want others at the bus stop to hear what he has to say. Happens all the time he says, they come from Fillmore or down there. He points to the Tenderloin.
I used to live there, what is it now? Sixteen years ago. I know it well. He tells me some streets to look on: gotta look for guys in alleyways, look at the spreads on the street. Probably too late now, but you could also try UN plaza, but later. They always got hot stuff over there.
He points the way but I know it and so cross Van Ness, and head into the Tenderloin, which was as you may know named after the wild-eyed, out-of-town johnnies down out of the Gold country to get laid and mindless.
Friday night streets are buzzed. Eyes and bodies darting every which way. Lot of offers. I pass a couple in a doorway. "What you want? Boys, girls, two in one." I'm moving and they don't like it. "little boys," the woman says. "Probably wants little boys."
Who was the car dealer up on Van Ness that used to come here for little boys? His name's on the tip of my tongue.
Turn a corner and there's a dozen kids, black and brown, baseball caps and burly. There's a girl on a hood. I think she's getting cocked. Freely? I don't know. As I pass bodies turn to wall. Scene is blocked out. Ok, I get it, I gotta go round. I don't care. Do what you will.
I find a couple spreads, but there's nothing, old clothes, little boxes of nothing, odds so odd, ends so ended that you can't imagine what they might be worth. All of it for half a penny? Okay, I'll go fat sam, I'll give you a penny for the whole load. It's like the things you throw in a kitchen utility drawer, right down to mislaid screws, half burned candles, twine, screw driver heads, dead batteries, an eighth of an inch nail. As though to say, 'here's anything I can find, here's every object I can get my hands on... you want it?'
It's the long tale, money 1.0. Ebay circa the beginning of the 16th Century.
I go on. Fewer spreads that I would have thought. Check this alley, this doorway, this trash can, this clothing pile in the street between two cars. And then slowly it's occurring to me that I might not pull this off. I've done this before. Years ago, a friend lost in the wilderness and before that a girl murdered. On that one I went looking for suspects on an absolute whim, on the long fingered gestures of a UCLA 'sensitive.'
Suddenly, I'm on Jones Street. Now I'm close to a building where I once lived. For a moment I think about going to it. But out of nowhere, a cop shop. This is since I was here. I step in. Sergeant's behind one inch-thick glass. Off to the right, behind the glass, in a door way, plain clothes drink coffee. I tell the sgt about my theft and search, how I called in. He shakes his head.
Okay, I say, I'm not asking you to break a coffee clutch. But I did notice three black and whites double parked outside, and I know it's not shift change. So I assume it's a slow night. But here's my problem, we're these middle class folks from the outer Sunset — where all the gardens are cement and all the immigrants listen to Suss and the boys in white hoods — and through every fault of our own we made the mistake of coming downtown for a movie, and now we've had a little break in. Some stuff that's actually quite valuable. Now, I'm not asking you to do anything,except give me some hints about places I might go look for stolen goods.
Head shakes, mouth goes down, eyes follow. "I'm sorry," comes out the metal speaker about head high. "Not much I can do there."
"Just some ideas on where to look."
"Can't really tell you that..."
"Anybody else here can tell me that...."
"You kinda just have to look."
"Sorry to bother."
He wants to know if I've reported it. Hell yes! I say. Well, he says, then there's three options. A, B, and C.
'Okay, I got that already,' I say. 'They already told me that.'
"Whatya want us to do?"
"Find me the Maltese Falcon." That's all I can think of.
"You come round the back, I'll write it up," he says.
"No, I told you, I'm already on a list. Plus it's nearly a mile back to where the car is and then drive down here. By then it's day after tomorrow. But it's okay. I'll do it myself. Fuck us all, I'll do it myself."
I'm out the door over to UN Plaza, past where the Scientologists used to get you cleared.
* * *
I worked for a woman once who paid a fortune to get cleared. I called her Big Baby Blonde or just Big Blonde, like Big Blue, a human computer-cipher of all things useless and inane, and tragic. Finally, she got sick of getting Scientologically screened and cleared and rescreened and recleared, and sick from it, and asked me to be an intermediary.
The pscyho-tologists were viscous trying to get her to keep paying every month and there was always a new program, a new level to reach. And if you didn't pay on time you got a lawyer's threat the next week. 'How cleared can she get?' I kept asking them. 'Three months of clearing three times a week hasn't made much difference. She was already wacho before she started this. How much more wacho do you want her to be?'
True and through. This woman was bi-and-tri-polared and ized. And mean as hell. The office manager and accountant was Chinese, a delightful woman who always worked like she was in a rice paddy in a bad year. It was a bad year, actually two. So the boss woman would say to her, "you know what? You need more here." And she would hold her breasts out as though she was offering Turkey on Thanksgiving. "You need bigger tits." The Chinese woman would die right there in front of us. Afterward, she would come into my office and just shake her head. "My family needs me to do this," she would say. And then there she was the next day. She could have filed for emotionally sodomy but she never did.
Still, as much of a bitch as Big Baby Blonde could be, she could also be as charming and gracious and generous as the person you most admire. So it fell to me to keep her personalities in order. I chose to do that. Sometimes, I hated myself; sometimes, not.
She was always asking me to find her a new psychiatrist, even after I'd exhausted the yellow pages, or a new photographer. No one had more photos of herself than this woman. She had the local society paparazzi shooting her every which way, always in "moon shadow" or just shadow and then that was gauzed and the result was airbrushed and in the end you could make out what looked like a pretty blonde late at night. While her images floated in the pan the Photog gave her the plate and she closed one nostril and sniffed like there was no tomorrow. One time she coughed and blew $5,000 into the shag. Clean it up she shrieked. I got her a drink and told Photoberger over and over it would come to smithereens. I know, he said. But he did nothing. I did nothing. We were all fascinated by her self-destruction.
Twice, I took her to the emergency room after she overdosed. From cocaine, meth, dope, dill off the shelf, tranquilizers, pain killers — anything little and red, or little and blue, anything that came in a white plastic bottle with a doctor's order. Placebos had the same effect as the real thing, her mind was that devout, that ravenous.
She was a big woman, as in horses, and blonde, as in Wagner at full volume. Somebody used to call her Sweedissimo. Her father sold used TVs, her mother went nuts and ended up in a nut house outside Sacramento. Big Baby Blonde said to me, "my mother is insane, do you think I'm insane?" I told her, no, I don't think you're insane. Which was half true.
"But I know this," I told her, "you need serious help and you know that. You're in trouble."
I know, she would say and then throw her arms around me.
She had long arms and a huge head — huge — and then her mouth would open and you'd think this woman was a boa constrictor. Plus she was bionic; everything was implanted. She got a lift from very last Dr. Plastica between San Francisco and San Jose. Slept with some of them for surgery and that was not a fair trade for either.
She'd come back from these surgeries and one cheek was hollow; the other, convex. Or one eye was lower than the other. Or else her tits were out of whack. She'd get out of the hospital and go right up to I. Magnin and without a thought spend $1,500 on a pencil leather skirt. Or she'd lease a new car. She loved Buicks. I told her those weren't cool, too Presbyterian. Those are cars for brunettes, I said. Get something else. But she liked a big car, and if it wasn't just the right color she's go get a new car and have it painted silver. She loved silver. You're nuts, I would tell her. 'Want to get fired?' she'd say, licking a wad of cash like it was candy. And then she'd drive to the office in her new car, with that lazy-boy-on-Sunday feel of plush, and in her new face, chubby with silicon, lips on permanent pucker. It all gave her a bad smell, which she tried to cover over in expensive perfumes.
The Chinese woman couldn't stand it and wore a hospital mask and, when asked, claimed she had pneumonia. "Very fatal if you catch it," she'd say and Big Baby Blonde would back off.
Years later, after my time with her, I heard Big Baby Blonde had gone to Eureka, had a child and then died from an overdose. She was found, along with her daughter, a few months old, in a cuddle. The baby was still alive. They'd been like that for two days. I don't know what happened to the child. Or who the father was. He never claimed that girl as far as I know.
She had eclectic taste in men. One was a fighter pilot that she got from her best friend. She had an Egyptian banker, and he may have been the daddy as well as a Warbucks. She loved dentists; in fact, doctors or all kinds, and Larry Ellison wannabes. I scouted several of those, went through their resumes, had drinks. One, a small time banker, with big a view from his condominium and porn on the side tables, was accused of date raping a debutante. Sometimes, I would interview them over drinks. Ask them about their lives. Often, I suggested to her that one or another was not a good match. Sometimes, she took my advice. They all spent the night but were gone by day break.
She was the consummate trophy girl who never found a man with a glass case that big.
* * *
So I passed the building where the Scientologists used to clear and entered UN Plaza. A drizzle had set in. There was a fistfight off to my right. The men looked young and homeless. One of them kicking the shit out of another one. Once upon a time I would have stepped in, out of idiocy. I'm no strong man, but through force of will I could do that. But not now. I walked past, didn't look, marched past like a good German.
There was nothing there. No spreads. No people at all. It occurred to me that I was too late or too early. I thought, well I'll come back at 3 a.m. But then I thought, no, what's the point. Let it go.
And isn't that what life is about? Isn't that the point?
I stayed with that thought and made some U-turns and wandered down Market. All of a sudden, I passed an old dirty movie store on Taylor Street. Another block and that was where I lived for a time. On the corner. It was half way house for Fed folks coming down from stir. And big stir, like Leavenworth. They'd bring in hookers by the boat load, leading them up the stairs, by the hand, as though on the way to a cotillion.
Bottom two floors were for people out of marriage and money. I was there more than six months, less than a year. A tiny room, and what a delight it was, those were good times, in half the size of a small studio. Wash basin in one corner. A bath and shower you could put in your pocket. Something like a carpeted, well-appointed prison cell. The one window looked out on the roof and up at the rest of the building. You had a bird's eye view of seagulls sleeping and shitting.
Original Joe's was across the street. Angelo Viducic was the consummate waiter, moving among the leather banquettes, hawking the creamed spinach or the spaghetti alfredo. He was a Croat and his most famous story was one he heard from his brother about what a Serbian army unit did to a young Muslim couple, two Bozniaks, caught outside the city of Sarajevo. The Serbs took the couple to the top of a hill, above a mosque. They chained the young man to the wheel of a loaded gas tanker. They made him look in the rear view mirror so he could see his wife with a gun to her head. And then the Serbs gave him the choice, you drive this truck into the mosque or we shoot your wife. Which is it going to be? It was the former and of course then they raped the wife and shot her anyway.
So Angelo said. He shook his head. He wanted to go home and fight but he didn't. He had endless other stories, and not just about the Balkans but about life in the restaurant. The place was always filled with cops and politicos. The whispering was just what you thought it was. Felons plea bargaining, cops setting up stings, pols dishing dirt, folks from the suburbs talking about how this was the best steak they ever had.
Years later I went there once with the boss and a journo at the Ex tried to blackmail him. 'Give me the inside scoop and we won't run shit about your office.' I couldn't believe what I was hearing and went into a righteous uproar. The boss patted my arm. Calm down, he said. And then he leaned in to the jerk and made a deal of sorts, although it didn't last.
Outside Original Joe's, there was a narrow parking lot and from time to time you'd see neighborhood girls bobbing up and down in the open sun roofs of pimpmobiles, posting the night away like rich girls riding their horses up to the moon. One time a man stood out on a third story ledge across the street and threatened to jump but some of us got up there and yelled at him to come in. "You won't kill yourself," somebody said, "you'll just bounce and get a lot of broken bones." The guy thought about that, put that to his real mind, and came in.
The Palestinians who ran the corner mart were always getting robbed. They had travel posters of the beach at Aquaba on the walls. All they could talk about was how the Israelis had taken their land and how one day there going home to Ramallah and Hebron, but they were already home and they knew it.
The man who owned the porno store kept a four-foot baby monitor lizard in his window. Sometimes, he'd feed it live mice and people would gather round. You'd see the transsexuals making their way home to the Ambassador hotel. You knew they were transsexuals because they said so and if they were drunk they would tell what they were getting and for how much. They were all waiting for 'the operation.' Most were getting vaginas. I knew a few of those people. When they got scared and high they'd walk along a narrow ledge on the fourth floor of the Ambassador, no ropes, no hopes, just wondering if a breeze would come along and knock them off I suppose.
You'd see the tourists from the East Bay coming out of the Golden Gate theater around 11 p.m., walking back to their cars, looking over their shoulders, less dazzled by the show than by the excitement of being in a bad part of town, and the rock bands loading up their buses across the street from the theater. Sure there were shootings at the SROs around the corner on Turk Street, and over on Eddy Street a baby fell down four flights and landed in a trash can, everything you ever read in the tabloids happened in that neighborhood, and the Franciscan priest at St. A's was dating a black hematologist guy over in Oakland, everybody was fucking of fucked. But on Taylor Street, between Turk and Eddy, it was like living in the shire county of Kent.
We get sushi on the corner and argue over whether to leave a $4 or $5 tip, for a $30 dinner. We hurry up the street. The others are saying, "why so fast? There's not going to be a line. Everybody's seen it."
We get to the theater; the line is out the door. I step in and stumble into a fight with my doppelganger. "You're trying to cut in line," he says. I say, "which line is that?" And I go on. The guy behind him, a Latino, sides with me. My dop turns away; I pat him on the shoulder. "Don't touch me," he says. "With a ten foot pole," I say. Jabber-jabber.
Meanwhile, I become blood brothers with the Latino. "Hey, Friday night, right?" he's saying. "Something's always wrong. Your wife, your kids... But you got a job? Right? Maybe not for much longer, but tonight you. Am I right? So let's all just chill."
'You're absolutely right.' Jabber-jabber.
Finally, we get to the front of the line: Slum Dogs is sold out. Me and my dop have misjudged. The Latino has anticipated; his movie doesn't play for an hour. I take it as a sign: The era of get-whatever-you-want-at-the-last-minute is over. I see everything as metaphor, sign and my delusions at the same time. Meanwhile, Dop is looking like it's my fault he missed the movie. "Shall we go piss around a fire hydrant?" I'm thinking?
I look for the others. I see them running off in shame, like an informer's family in Gaza.
I don't say to them, 'Okay, forgive me my trespass, but you see, we needed to hurry. We need to hurry in general. Our dysfunction is catching up with us. The last minute won't do anymore.'
* * *
I trail behind as we wander back down the street, past sleepers in the alcoves, past stores 'closed forever', past where the boss had his campaign headquarters.
Those were the days. After last supper at Max's Opera Cafe in December, 2003, on runoff-election eve, we saddled up one more time, right here, in a flat-bed truck, with a boom box on boom, and rolled out through the Tenderloin, down Eddy, up Franklin, yelling up at curtained condo windows, reaching out to people in black tie on their way to the symphony, and then through Pacific Heights, wailing on megaphone-mantras about how folks should vote for the real progressive. Which was to say, looking back, vote for nostalgia and great American novels and damn the torpedoes. But people didn't want a character, much less an older white iconoclast. They didn't want the petty corruption around him. They wanted the black girl with her glamor and competence, with her fair trade, cultural blend, with her sexy youth and academic perfumes, with her ability to anticipate and to expect, and her pretty speeches, her Faustian ambition, and the secret assurance that Big Daddy, Willy-Jesus would always back her.
Now, even the boss has come round to support her, and nearly everyone who opposed her, although good rumor has it that she's pissed off Very-God-of-Very-God, Begotten-not-made, Lord Jack Davis no end. A little financial shenanigan he's not willing to overlook.
Truth is the boss was tired after two terms. Tired and unwilling to pay any more of his own money for the run. And beaten down by the dead weight of 850 Bryant, by the Hall itself, by that reichstag of sanctimony and corruptions, large and small — along with asbestos in the ceilings, along with black widows and coral snakes, according to legend. Even dead bodies in the heating ducts.
But before you get to legend what about all those tall, Bleak-House gray, tin storage cabinets, hidden in every nook and so filled with files that you couldn't cram in one more motion to delay? You wonder how many cases were miss-filed in those cabinets and because of that folks got freed or never found or never charged or sent back to prison, or got lost in witness protection.... It happened.
People will tell you, and quite seriously — clerks and deputies, even some attorneys, people who have worked in the hall for a long time — they'll tell you how the Hall is haunted, how they know someone who worked for someone who told them that they heard human screams coming through the pipes, which could have been forensics in the old jail, in for a night on the town as it were. But there was more: Things going wrong for no good reason. Hatreds and betrayals out of nowhere. Good, honest people turned to sloths and satyrs. Not to mention the natural paranoia that runs through that kind of place. And what about all the seductions, among people you wouldn't imagine. Fucking on desk tops, with the door open. Blow jobs underneath. Come-ons from the person standing next to you in front of the women's bathroom mirror. From your immediate superior even. Even coke, in the old days.
All that and then throw in the standard deviation of deviance that you find in this city, the priests and politicians trolling for tots, the man who burned his girl friend's breasts with an iron, the man who murdered Polly Klaas, Noel & Knoeller (weird and weirder), Charles Ng and Leonard Lake, all the gangstas, the run o' the mill and the state-of-the-art.... It was all true or true enough to be true, every depravity and fuckup. Boss didn't want to admit it that night at the Opera Plaza cafe, but he'd had enough of the Hall of Horrors. I do know that no one who worked there for long ever lead much of a happy life afterward, and no DA ever got out without being soiled in some way.
These days it's all very professional, all tidied up. Sure, the madame gets the investigators to take her around, which is petty and theft, but otherwise you can eat off the linoleum floors. Still, people will tell you, privately of course, that they greatly miss the boss and the old days, when there was a real passion to prosecute and the office was brimming with new projects, and every day had a high noon.
* * *
We stop at Eddy Street. We have a choice: go back to the car, just half a block away, or go down to Opera Plaza. Perhaps, there's something there we haven't seen. No one wants to go home. We go to Opera Plaza. There's nothing playing, beyond an indy comedy. The last one we saw was horrific: unintelligible, scriptless, souless. If you're going to make a movie, you need something to say. A sexually frustrated girl talking to a boy who works in a video store for two hours is not enough.
We stop at the bookstore. The new fiction seems flat. The old fiction is old fiction. The nonfiction is Terry Gross. We know it all....
We go back to Eddy Street. The car is parked in heavy shadow across from the Rodeway Inn. We've been gone less than an hour. The back window is broken in. Everything has been taken. Two computers, two disk drives, a memory stick — and you wonder how that could be, how could people be so stupid — all that memory, plus school books, an I-pod, toiletries, 'the things they carried' in the demimonde of middle class-nam.
Days later you don't want to take inventory of what's been lost. Otherwise, you're drawn to the Cadillac-feel of blood-lust hate, where you go house-to-house, decrepit room by decrepit room, rounding up suspects, looking at forged papers, looking at the treasure of stolen goods and identities. Where you say to some poor bastard wearing a black stocking on his head: Are you fuckin' kidding me? No, seriously. You can't even make a good forgery.' You shoot some of them in the head. Others, you hang out the window by their heels until they tell you something you already knew. Then you let go and don't wait to see splat.
We call 553-0123. I never forget that number. I give the voice some details. 'You have these options', Voice says, 'Have somebody come out, or walk to the nearest station, or file online.'
Have somebody come out, I say.
'There's two in front of you,' Voice says.
'Okay, I'll wait.'
But I don't. I look in bushes, thinking maybe they stove it for later. I walk around the block and find a black guy with white bone fragments in his face, a performance artist fella, heavy jewelry, make up. Reminds me of the tribal man in Behind The Green Door. He's got a bag; for a minute I think it belongs to us. He calms me down. Sure look in that, he says, but it's not yours. Okay okay. We talk. He motions me over, doesn't want others at the bus stop to hear what he has to say. Happens all the time he says, they come from Fillmore or down there. He points to the Tenderloin.
I used to live there, what is it now? Sixteen years ago. I know it well. He tells me some streets to look on: gotta look for guys in alleyways, look at the spreads on the street. Probably too late now, but you could also try UN plaza, but later. They always got hot stuff over there.
He points the way but I know it and so cross Van Ness, and head into the Tenderloin, which was as you may know named after the wild-eyed, out-of-town johnnies down out of the Gold country to get laid and mindless.
Friday night streets are buzzed. Eyes and bodies darting every which way. Lot of offers. I pass a couple in a doorway. "What you want? Boys, girls, two in one." I'm moving and they don't like it. "little boys," the woman says. "Probably wants little boys."
Who was the car dealer up on Van Ness that used to come here for little boys? His name's on the tip of my tongue.
Turn a corner and there's a dozen kids, black and brown, baseball caps and burly. There's a girl on a hood. I think she's getting cocked. Freely? I don't know. As I pass bodies turn to wall. Scene is blocked out. Ok, I get it, I gotta go round. I don't care. Do what you will.
I find a couple spreads, but there's nothing, old clothes, little boxes of nothing, odds so odd, ends so ended that you can't imagine what they might be worth. All of it for half a penny? Okay, I'll go fat sam, I'll give you a penny for the whole load. It's like the things you throw in a kitchen utility drawer, right down to mislaid screws, half burned candles, twine, screw driver heads, dead batteries, an eighth of an inch nail. As though to say, 'here's anything I can find, here's every object I can get my hands on... you want it?'
It's the long tale, money 1.0. Ebay circa the beginning of the 16th Century.
I go on. Fewer spreads that I would have thought. Check this alley, this doorway, this trash can, this clothing pile in the street between two cars. And then slowly it's occurring to me that I might not pull this off. I've done this before. Years ago, a friend lost in the wilderness and before that a girl murdered. On that one I went looking for suspects on an absolute whim, on the long fingered gestures of a UCLA 'sensitive.'
Suddenly, I'm on Jones Street. Now I'm close to a building where I once lived. For a moment I think about going to it. But out of nowhere, a cop shop. This is since I was here. I step in. Sergeant's behind one inch-thick glass. Off to the right, behind the glass, in a door way, plain clothes drink coffee. I tell the sgt about my theft and search, how I called in. He shakes his head.
Okay, I say, I'm not asking you to break a coffee clutch. But I did notice three black and whites double parked outside, and I know it's not shift change. So I assume it's a slow night. But here's my problem, we're these middle class folks from the outer Sunset — where all the gardens are cement and all the immigrants listen to Suss and the boys in white hoods — and through every fault of our own we made the mistake of coming downtown for a movie, and now we've had a little break in. Some stuff that's actually quite valuable. Now, I'm not asking you to do anything,except give me some hints about places I might go look for stolen goods.
Head shakes, mouth goes down, eyes follow. "I'm sorry," comes out the metal speaker about head high. "Not much I can do there."
"Just some ideas on where to look."
"Can't really tell you that..."
"Anybody else here can tell me that...."
"You kinda just have to look."
"Sorry to bother."
He wants to know if I've reported it. Hell yes! I say. Well, he says, then there's three options. A, B, and C.
'Okay, I got that already,' I say. 'They already told me that.'
"Whatya want us to do?"
"Find me the Maltese Falcon." That's all I can think of.
"You come round the back, I'll write it up," he says.
"No, I told you, I'm already on a list. Plus it's nearly a mile back to where the car is and then drive down here. By then it's day after tomorrow. But it's okay. I'll do it myself. Fuck us all, I'll do it myself."
I'm out the door over to UN Plaza, past where the Scientologists used to get you cleared.
* * *
I worked for a woman once who paid a fortune to get cleared. I called her Big Baby Blonde or just Big Blonde, like Big Blue, a human computer-cipher of all things useless and inane, and tragic. Finally, she got sick of getting Scientologically screened and cleared and rescreened and recleared, and sick from it, and asked me to be an intermediary.
The pscyho-tologists were viscous trying to get her to keep paying every month and there was always a new program, a new level to reach. And if you didn't pay on time you got a lawyer's threat the next week. 'How cleared can she get?' I kept asking them. 'Three months of clearing three times a week hasn't made much difference. She was already wacho before she started this. How much more wacho do you want her to be?'
True and through. This woman was bi-and-tri-polared and ized. And mean as hell. The office manager and accountant was Chinese, a delightful woman who always worked like she was in a rice paddy in a bad year. It was a bad year, actually two. So the boss woman would say to her, "you know what? You need more here." And she would hold her breasts out as though she was offering Turkey on Thanksgiving. "You need bigger tits." The Chinese woman would die right there in front of us. Afterward, she would come into my office and just shake her head. "My family needs me to do this," she would say. And then there she was the next day. She could have filed for emotionally sodomy but she never did.
Still, as much of a bitch as Big Baby Blonde could be, she could also be as charming and gracious and generous as the person you most admire. So it fell to me to keep her personalities in order. I chose to do that. Sometimes, I hated myself; sometimes, not.
She was always asking me to find her a new psychiatrist, even after I'd exhausted the yellow pages, or a new photographer. No one had more photos of herself than this woman. She had the local society paparazzi shooting her every which way, always in "moon shadow" or just shadow and then that was gauzed and the result was airbrushed and in the end you could make out what looked like a pretty blonde late at night. While her images floated in the pan the Photog gave her the plate and she closed one nostril and sniffed like there was no tomorrow. One time she coughed and blew $5,000 into the shag. Clean it up she shrieked. I got her a drink and told Photoberger over and over it would come to smithereens. I know, he said. But he did nothing. I did nothing. We were all fascinated by her self-destruction.
Twice, I took her to the emergency room after she overdosed. From cocaine, meth, dope, dill off the shelf, tranquilizers, pain killers — anything little and red, or little and blue, anything that came in a white plastic bottle with a doctor's order. Placebos had the same effect as the real thing, her mind was that devout, that ravenous.
She was a big woman, as in horses, and blonde, as in Wagner at full volume. Somebody used to call her Sweedissimo. Her father sold used TVs, her mother went nuts and ended up in a nut house outside Sacramento. Big Baby Blonde said to me, "my mother is insane, do you think I'm insane?" I told her, no, I don't think you're insane. Which was half true.
"But I know this," I told her, "you need serious help and you know that. You're in trouble."
I know, she would say and then throw her arms around me.
She had long arms and a huge head — huge — and then her mouth would open and you'd think this woman was a boa constrictor. Plus she was bionic; everything was implanted. She got a lift from very last Dr. Plastica between San Francisco and San Jose. Slept with some of them for surgery and that was not a fair trade for either.
She'd come back from these surgeries and one cheek was hollow; the other, convex. Or one eye was lower than the other. Or else her tits were out of whack. She'd get out of the hospital and go right up to I. Magnin and without a thought spend $1,500 on a pencil leather skirt. Or she'd lease a new car. She loved Buicks. I told her those weren't cool, too Presbyterian. Those are cars for brunettes, I said. Get something else. But she liked a big car, and if it wasn't just the right color she's go get a new car and have it painted silver. She loved silver. You're nuts, I would tell her. 'Want to get fired?' she'd say, licking a wad of cash like it was candy. And then she'd drive to the office in her new car, with that lazy-boy-on-Sunday feel of plush, and in her new face, chubby with silicon, lips on permanent pucker. It all gave her a bad smell, which she tried to cover over in expensive perfumes.
The Chinese woman couldn't stand it and wore a hospital mask and, when asked, claimed she had pneumonia. "Very fatal if you catch it," she'd say and Big Baby Blonde would back off.
Years later, after my time with her, I heard Big Baby Blonde had gone to Eureka, had a child and then died from an overdose. She was found, along with her daughter, a few months old, in a cuddle. The baby was still alive. They'd been like that for two days. I don't know what happened to the child. Or who the father was. He never claimed that girl as far as I know.
She had eclectic taste in men. One was a fighter pilot that she got from her best friend. She had an Egyptian banker, and he may have been the daddy as well as a Warbucks. She loved dentists; in fact, doctors or all kinds, and Larry Ellison wannabes. I scouted several of those, went through their resumes, had drinks. One, a small time banker, with big a view from his condominium and porn on the side tables, was accused of date raping a debutante. Sometimes, I would interview them over drinks. Ask them about their lives. Often, I suggested to her that one or another was not a good match. Sometimes, she took my advice. They all spent the night but were gone by day break.
She was the consummate trophy girl who never found a man with a glass case that big.
* * *
So I passed the building where the Scientologists used to clear and entered UN Plaza. A drizzle had set in. There was a fistfight off to my right. The men looked young and homeless. One of them kicking the shit out of another one. Once upon a time I would have stepped in, out of idiocy. I'm no strong man, but through force of will I could do that. But not now. I walked past, didn't look, marched past like a good German.
There was nothing there. No spreads. No people at all. It occurred to me that I was too late or too early. I thought, well I'll come back at 3 a.m. But then I thought, no, what's the point. Let it go.
And isn't that what life is about? Isn't that the point?
I stayed with that thought and made some U-turns and wandered down Market. All of a sudden, I passed an old dirty movie store on Taylor Street. Another block and that was where I lived for a time. On the corner. It was half way house for Fed folks coming down from stir. And big stir, like Leavenworth. They'd bring in hookers by the boat load, leading them up the stairs, by the hand, as though on the way to a cotillion.
Bottom two floors were for people out of marriage and money. I was there more than six months, less than a year. A tiny room, and what a delight it was, those were good times, in half the size of a small studio. Wash basin in one corner. A bath and shower you could put in your pocket. Something like a carpeted, well-appointed prison cell. The one window looked out on the roof and up at the rest of the building. You had a bird's eye view of seagulls sleeping and shitting.
Original Joe's was across the street. Angelo Viducic was the consummate waiter, moving among the leather banquettes, hawking the creamed spinach or the spaghetti alfredo. He was a Croat and his most famous story was one he heard from his brother about what a Serbian army unit did to a young Muslim couple, two Bozniaks, caught outside the city of Sarajevo. The Serbs took the couple to the top of a hill, above a mosque. They chained the young man to the wheel of a loaded gas tanker. They made him look in the rear view mirror so he could see his wife with a gun to her head. And then the Serbs gave him the choice, you drive this truck into the mosque or we shoot your wife. Which is it going to be? It was the former and of course then they raped the wife and shot her anyway.
So Angelo said. He shook his head. He wanted to go home and fight but he didn't. He had endless other stories, and not just about the Balkans but about life in the restaurant. The place was always filled with cops and politicos. The whispering was just what you thought it was. Felons plea bargaining, cops setting up stings, pols dishing dirt, folks from the suburbs talking about how this was the best steak they ever had.
Years later I went there once with the boss and a journo at the Ex tried to blackmail him. 'Give me the inside scoop and we won't run shit about your office.' I couldn't believe what I was hearing and went into a righteous uproar. The boss patted my arm. Calm down, he said. And then he leaned in to the jerk and made a deal of sorts, although it didn't last.
Outside Original Joe's, there was a narrow parking lot and from time to time you'd see neighborhood girls bobbing up and down in the open sun roofs of pimpmobiles, posting the night away like rich girls riding their horses up to the moon. One time a man stood out on a third story ledge across the street and threatened to jump but some of us got up there and yelled at him to come in. "You won't kill yourself," somebody said, "you'll just bounce and get a lot of broken bones." The guy thought about that, put that to his real mind, and came in.
The Palestinians who ran the corner mart were always getting robbed. They had travel posters of the beach at Aquaba on the walls. All they could talk about was how the Israelis had taken their land and how one day there going home to Ramallah and Hebron, but they were already home and they knew it.
The man who owned the porno store kept a four-foot baby monitor lizard in his window. Sometimes, he'd feed it live mice and people would gather round. You'd see the transsexuals making their way home to the Ambassador hotel. You knew they were transsexuals because they said so and if they were drunk they would tell what they were getting and for how much. They were all waiting for 'the operation.' Most were getting vaginas. I knew a few of those people. When they got scared and high they'd walk along a narrow ledge on the fourth floor of the Ambassador, no ropes, no hopes, just wondering if a breeze would come along and knock them off I suppose.
You'd see the tourists from the East Bay coming out of the Golden Gate theater around 11 p.m., walking back to their cars, looking over their shoulders, less dazzled by the show than by the excitement of being in a bad part of town, and the rock bands loading up their buses across the street from the theater. Sure there were shootings at the SROs around the corner on Turk Street, and over on Eddy Street a baby fell down four flights and landed in a trash can, everything you ever read in the tabloids happened in that neighborhood, and the Franciscan priest at St. A's was dating a black hematologist guy over in Oakland, everybody was fucking of fucked. But on Taylor Street, between Turk and Eddy, it was like living in the shire county of Kent.
Jan 14, 2009
It is the perfectly balanced moral dilemma. Add up the moral arguments on both sides and the bubble hangs exactly in the middle of the level.
When should Israel stop its assault on the government of Gaza? After Hamas has been exterminated, to use that word carefully, or after Hamas has been "educated?" Read Thomas Friedman on that alternative. How much blood from Palestinian children does it take to permanently taint Israel's soul? How many Hamas rockets does it take to express the death-wish nature of Islamic extremism? Who is more driven to self-destruction, those who have a Masada complex or those who have the complex of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab?
We know that sons beaten by their fathers beat their sons, and their sons beat more sons. But so what?
Does the Ḥusayn-McMahon correspondence matter anymore? Or the Sikes-Picot agreement or the Balfour Declaration or the Hoover commission, or UN Resolution 242 or the first Intifada?
And what about all those old rifs: 'Well but the Palestinians weren't doing anything with the land'. 'Yes, but remember who drove the milk truck into the bottom of the King David hotel and killed Count Bernadette.' 'You would never have such sympathies if you had seen the flesh of those killed by a suicide bomber?' 'If only Rabin hadn't been assassinated.' 'If only Fatah had won the last election.' 'If only George Bush had had a mind to put to the peace. If only Iran had been vanquished by Iraq in 1984. If only Israel could be a bi-national state and we could move on beyond the addicts and their habits of violence.
If only...
Eventually, the killing will die down, amnesia and apathy will set in, hatred will masticize, Ibn Khaldun's clock will strike 25 minutes after the hour. Libraries will fill up with more books.
And all the while you wonder how it is that the moderates have been so left out of the solution. Everything is in the hands of settlers and bombers. It's time to give voice to people on both sides, to the 'civil society' whose first priority is not land or pride, but merely peace. Obama's gift will be if he can draw these people to the table and isolate the fanatics.
When should Israel stop its assault on the government of Gaza? After Hamas has been exterminated, to use that word carefully, or after Hamas has been "educated?" Read Thomas Friedman on that alternative. How much blood from Palestinian children does it take to permanently taint Israel's soul? How many Hamas rockets does it take to express the death-wish nature of Islamic extremism? Who is more driven to self-destruction, those who have a Masada complex or those who have the complex of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab?
We know that sons beaten by their fathers beat their sons, and their sons beat more sons. But so what?
Does the Ḥusayn-McMahon correspondence matter anymore? Or the Sikes-Picot agreement or the Balfour Declaration or the Hoover commission, or UN Resolution 242 or the first Intifada?
And what about all those old rifs: 'Well but the Palestinians weren't doing anything with the land'. 'Yes, but remember who drove the milk truck into the bottom of the King David hotel and killed Count Bernadette.' 'You would never have such sympathies if you had seen the flesh of those killed by a suicide bomber?' 'If only Rabin hadn't been assassinated.' 'If only Fatah had won the last election.' 'If only George Bush had had a mind to put to the peace. If only Iran had been vanquished by Iraq in 1984. If only Israel could be a bi-national state and we could move on beyond the addicts and their habits of violence.
If only...
Eventually, the killing will die down, amnesia and apathy will set in, hatred will masticize, Ibn Khaldun's clock will strike 25 minutes after the hour. Libraries will fill up with more books.
And all the while you wonder how it is that the moderates have been so left out of the solution. Everything is in the hands of settlers and bombers. It's time to give voice to people on both sides, to the 'civil society' whose first priority is not land or pride, but merely peace. Obama's gift will be if he can draw these people to the table and isolate the fanatics.
Jan 13, 2009
TOJINBO, Japan (AFP) — Retired policeman Yukio Shige is still on patrol, walking daily along the Tojinbo cliff, one of the best-known suicide spots in Japan where he pursues a private mission to prevent people leaping.
Shige's method of persuading someone to stay alive is quite simple, he said.
When he spots a person standing on the edge of the cliff, he talks to them gently and brings them back to his cafe, where he serves them warm rice cake.
"You can see what the person is here for just by looking at the way they stand on the edge," he said. "Most of them look relieved and soon break down in tears when I just say hi."
Shige, 64, said he had no idea until just before his retirement in 2004 how many people jump to their deaths from the sheer rocky cliff of Tojinbo, which faces the crashing waves of the Sea of Japan (East Sea).
"I've seen as many as 10 dead bodies being recovered in one month," he said.
"I was just stunned by this, but what struck me even more was that people here said it was normal for this place."
Upon retiring, he opened a small cafe near the cliff edge and established a non-profit group to support people coming to Tojinbo in distress.
Since then he has patrolled along some 1.4 kilometres (0.87 miles) of the rocky cliff almost every day, scouring the precipice with binoculars.
He and his supporters say they have prevented 167 people from leaping in the past four years and eight months.
Now, however, he worries that the number of people wanting to commit suicide will grow as the global economic crisis threatens to hit Japan hard.
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, with more than 30,000 people killing themselves every year since 1998.
In recent years, one of the main chosen methods has been burning charcoal in cars to die of carbon monoxide poisoning, as well as mixing bath salts and detergent to create a deadly gas, a method widely available on the Internet.
Police data from 2007 show depression was Japan's number one cause for suicide, followed by illness and debt.
In Tojinbo alone, 257 people leapt to their deaths in the decade to 2007, with many others attempting but failing to die, Shige said.
Authorities have long neglected the issue as killing oneself tends to be considered a personal problem.
Nevertheless, in the face of such huge numbers, the Japanese government created a law in 2006 for the first time acknowledging suicide as a social challenge and encouraging local authorities to provide counselling and support to those who attempted to kill themselves.
Still, Shige notes, Tojinbo's city authorities have not put up a single fence or warning sign along the cliff, nor responded to his incessant calls for an official counselling centre near the edge.
Before retiring to Tojinbo, Shige spent most of his 42-year career as a detective, chasing crimes such as underground gambling and drug violations.
Five years ago, the last before his retirement, he was assigned to a police station covering Tojinbo cliff in central Fukui prefecture.
While shocked to see the place as a chosen suicide spot, he was further distressed by the gruesome realisation that Tojinbo's local economy relies on this fact to support and promote its tourism industry.
"Guides on the ferry would make sure to introduce this place as a big suicide spot while crowds of visitors come here in buses bearing the sign 'The Mystery Tour'," Shige said in disgust.
"I asked tour guides to stop advertising Tojinbo as a suicide spot, but a local town assembly member once told me tourists would never come to a place like this otherwise. 'So why don't you leave it alone,' he said."
Noting that local stores sell T-shirts with slogans reading "I'm tired of living" or "I live in hell," Shige said: "I would say this place has solicited people's suicides."
He fears that without funding for his own non-profit efforts he and his partner, Misako Kawagoe, will find it difficult to continue their mission.
In the first year after they started the group, it went 1.2 million yen (13,000 dollars) into the red. It also posted losses for the next two years.
Five years ago, while still a policeman, Shige spotted an elderly couple sitting on a bench for hours watching waves breaking on the cliff.
They said they had come to kill themselves because, after shutting down their Tokyo bar, they were left with a debt of two million yen they had no way of paying off.
"I persuaded them to keep trying and promised that the local social security office would take care of them," Shige said.
But he later heard that after a distressing round of begging trips to various government offices, they had gone elsewhere and hanged themselves.
"Public help is the last resort for people like them," he said. "I promised myself I wouldn't stop until the government starts moving."
Shige and Kawagoe often travel home with the people they talk out of suicide. And when people have no home to go to, the pair find them somewhere to live and give them money until they can get by on their own.
While Shige is the frontman in the operation, Kawagoe has her own reasons to help people on the edge.
"I myself lost my parents in suicides when I was 15," said Kawagoe. "My father hanged himself and my mother later swallowed pesticide to follow him. Both times I found their bodies.
"I had never disclosed this to anyone. But when Mr Shige asked me to join his work, I thought I had to face it," she said.
"I learned many people have their own problems. I just cannot let them go alone," she said.
Shige fears the current economic turmoil could push more people towards suicide, especially with tens of thousands of contract workers being laid off across the country.
Due to the global downturn, Japanese firms including leading automakers have downgraded their earnings, cut jobs and stopped factory lines as demand falls for exports.
"We are concerned that the number of people who try to commit suicide here may rapidly grow," he said in a petition submitted to the local mayor and the tourism association, urging them to take action.
In November alone, he said, four out of six people he saved from suicide said they wanted to die because they could not find a job.
"To be honest, this is not easy work physically or financially. I could quit even tomorrow," Shige said with a cynical smile. "But I will never stop until the government finally does something."
Shige's method of persuading someone to stay alive is quite simple, he said.
When he spots a person standing on the edge of the cliff, he talks to them gently and brings them back to his cafe, where he serves them warm rice cake.
"You can see what the person is here for just by looking at the way they stand on the edge," he said. "Most of them look relieved and soon break down in tears when I just say hi."
Shige, 64, said he had no idea until just before his retirement in 2004 how many people jump to their deaths from the sheer rocky cliff of Tojinbo, which faces the crashing waves of the Sea of Japan (East Sea).
"I've seen as many as 10 dead bodies being recovered in one month," he said.
"I was just stunned by this, but what struck me even more was that people here said it was normal for this place."
Upon retiring, he opened a small cafe near the cliff edge and established a non-profit group to support people coming to Tojinbo in distress.
Since then he has patrolled along some 1.4 kilometres (0.87 miles) of the rocky cliff almost every day, scouring the precipice with binoculars.
He and his supporters say they have prevented 167 people from leaping in the past four years and eight months.
Now, however, he worries that the number of people wanting to commit suicide will grow as the global economic crisis threatens to hit Japan hard.
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, with more than 30,000 people killing themselves every year since 1998.
In recent years, one of the main chosen methods has been burning charcoal in cars to die of carbon monoxide poisoning, as well as mixing bath salts and detergent to create a deadly gas, a method widely available on the Internet.
Police data from 2007 show depression was Japan's number one cause for suicide, followed by illness and debt.
In Tojinbo alone, 257 people leapt to their deaths in the decade to 2007, with many others attempting but failing to die, Shige said.
Authorities have long neglected the issue as killing oneself tends to be considered a personal problem.
Nevertheless, in the face of such huge numbers, the Japanese government created a law in 2006 for the first time acknowledging suicide as a social challenge and encouraging local authorities to provide counselling and support to those who attempted to kill themselves.
Still, Shige notes, Tojinbo's city authorities have not put up a single fence or warning sign along the cliff, nor responded to his incessant calls for an official counselling centre near the edge.
Before retiring to Tojinbo, Shige spent most of his 42-year career as a detective, chasing crimes such as underground gambling and drug violations.
Five years ago, the last before his retirement, he was assigned to a police station covering Tojinbo cliff in central Fukui prefecture.
While shocked to see the place as a chosen suicide spot, he was further distressed by the gruesome realisation that Tojinbo's local economy relies on this fact to support and promote its tourism industry.
"Guides on the ferry would make sure to introduce this place as a big suicide spot while crowds of visitors come here in buses bearing the sign 'The Mystery Tour'," Shige said in disgust.
"I asked tour guides to stop advertising Tojinbo as a suicide spot, but a local town assembly member once told me tourists would never come to a place like this otherwise. 'So why don't you leave it alone,' he said."
Noting that local stores sell T-shirts with slogans reading "I'm tired of living" or "I live in hell," Shige said: "I would say this place has solicited people's suicides."
He fears that without funding for his own non-profit efforts he and his partner, Misako Kawagoe, will find it difficult to continue their mission.
In the first year after they started the group, it went 1.2 million yen (13,000 dollars) into the red. It also posted losses for the next two years.
Five years ago, while still a policeman, Shige spotted an elderly couple sitting on a bench for hours watching waves breaking on the cliff.
They said they had come to kill themselves because, after shutting down their Tokyo bar, they were left with a debt of two million yen they had no way of paying off.
"I persuaded them to keep trying and promised that the local social security office would take care of them," Shige said.
But he later heard that after a distressing round of begging trips to various government offices, they had gone elsewhere and hanged themselves.
"Public help is the last resort for people like them," he said. "I promised myself I wouldn't stop until the government starts moving."
Shige and Kawagoe often travel home with the people they talk out of suicide. And when people have no home to go to, the pair find them somewhere to live and give them money until they can get by on their own.
While Shige is the frontman in the operation, Kawagoe has her own reasons to help people on the edge.
"I myself lost my parents in suicides when I was 15," said Kawagoe. "My father hanged himself and my mother later swallowed pesticide to follow him. Both times I found their bodies.
"I had never disclosed this to anyone. But when Mr Shige asked me to join his work, I thought I had to face it," she said.
"I learned many people have their own problems. I just cannot let them go alone," she said.
Shige fears the current economic turmoil could push more people towards suicide, especially with tens of thousands of contract workers being laid off across the country.
Due to the global downturn, Japanese firms including leading automakers have downgraded their earnings, cut jobs and stopped factory lines as demand falls for exports.
"We are concerned that the number of people who try to commit suicide here may rapidly grow," he said in a petition submitted to the local mayor and the tourism association, urging them to take action.
In November alone, he said, four out of six people he saved from suicide said they wanted to die because they could not find a job.
"To be honest, this is not easy work physically or financially. I could quit even tomorrow," Shige said with a cynical smile. "But I will never stop until the government finally does something."
Jan 8, 2009
A close friend was laid off today. I went to see him. His lover was out of the country, to visit her mother. My friend's apartment was in shambles, as though to say, "It's not that I haven't thought about cleaning up, or that I haven't tried, or even that there's just no point — because everything I was or am or ever will be is a mess. I don't really believe that about myself, although I may say it. No, this chaos is simply to suggest that I have less and less interest in place and time. I'm not thinking much about the material world anymore."
The one piece of art in the room is a tall, oil painting, maybe 4 feet high by 3 feet, a parody of Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World. But details are missing: there is no barn next to the farm house as in the original, and this in not meant to be the Olson House in Cushing, Maine, nor even in Brandywine Valley, Pennsylvannia, where Wyeth did so many paintings. That's a small irony as it turns out. Nor is this a paraplegic's world, not in the strict sense. And this "Christina" is looking not at the farm house but over her shoulder, at us. And it's not Christina at all but Patty Hearst, wearing a beret. It's Patty Hearst's world, in the Spring of 1974, when she sought refuge with SLA friends in a little hamlet 25 miles from Scranton, in northwest, Pennsylvannia. The painting, itself, is a reminder to my friend of better times, those years ago when he could rough house through his world, and optimism was 10 cents a barrel.
So now all these years later we sit among debris in his apartment, eating pizza, letting the gin run down, whiling away his pain, and watching the national championship. Between downs we discuss how the Internet is a forlorn opportunity; how perhaps information itself will cease to be collected or analyzed for a time; how disconnected people are from each other, "the habit of disconnection" we call it; how difficult it is at 60-years old to keep on reinventing yourself, particularly when you are a writer — in an age when even a thoughtfully worked opinion has no monetary value and no matter how good you are the long tail is not nearly enough to live on.
We also discuss Tebow and Bradford, the stars of the evening. My friend has an aversion to Tebow's Christian roots, his 'baby-in-a-basket-floating-down-the-Nile' story, and his Christlike appeal to sportcasters and "anyone who has spent five minutes with him." My friend much prefers Bradford, the everyman, with Asian eyes, who hasn't saved anybody or lived an exotic life, who in his early 20s is just a kid with a great arm who gets it done. My friend respects that, the anonymity, the blue collar heroism (and the blue collar blues), the quiet competence, rather than all the matinee-idol folderol.
For my part I like Tebow; I like his charisma and his confidence. I like his ferocity and left-hand-is-the-dreamer drive. I even like his anger and we discuss that as well, how men are so angry and why that is. "I don't see you as angry," my friend says to me and I'm thinking how even after all these years we don't know each other well, and even now, even after acknowledging the need to be connected, I can't. I won't. I'd rather watch Tebow punish a free safety.
Meanwhile, my friend's friends call to say how sorry they are to hear the news. Someone from the company calls to say they can't believe it: how is it possible they did this to you? What's going on in the world? They go on and on about how much pain they are in now to hear this.
My friend is nearly weeping at this outpouring. My friend who has nurtured and supported people no end, who has saved my life twice, who, in fact, is more like Tebow in temperament than Bradford, and who is now saddled with the thought that he has double-failed. By being laid off he has not only failed himself and his children, he has caused someone else genuine pain. We go through that. I tell him it's nonsense, don't get carried away. Don't.
Meanwhile, Tebow is taking over the game. At one point he rolls out to his left, and, on the run, throws a ball right on the mark, between defenders, to the only coordinates where the ball can be caught. I marvel at the beauty of it; at the excellence, at the hope in that ball.
I am aware of my sentimentality. My mind devours the sight, and you would say, for lack of something more nutritious.
Still, as time runs out, the victory is compelling. Tebow has come from behind, overcome two picks and willed his way and the team's way to victory. Meanwhile, Bradford can't even get on the field and when he does, his go-to man catches a big-down ball twenty yards down the field, only to have it ripped out of his hands and intercepted by a safety.
Tebow has a way of surviving in the jungle. Bradford, for all of his sheer talent, and he has amazing numbers tonight, even with his Heisman he gets lost. He is not quite up to the challenge and yet It's nothing to do with him really: it's just the night and the loaded-craps odds of an interception at the goal line, and another goal line stand that shouldn't have been. What can you say?
What can you say, other than now the day's doldrums are complete. For my friend: lost game, lost job. Not-a-Through-Street signs wherever you look. I look at him out of the corner of my eye, his gray hair sailing through his fingers, shaking his head, eyes at the TV, you can hear the defeat-mechanism humming away, he looks as lost as I can only imagine that paralyzed Japanese fisherman must have felt, the one who fell off his boat the other day trying to catch a squid and treaded water for 15 hours until help arrived.
And yet it turns out the fisherman never doubted he'd be found. His friends said later they never worried. He had no defeat mechanism. He was in the moment and so survived.
"I'll give it two months," my friend says. "I have enough to make it that far. But if I don't... well then it's done. It's just done."
I do not follow up. I don't ask what 'done' means. I put my glass down on the counter. Better the ambiguity than a junniper-berry threat that either invites self-ridicule the next morning or worse sets off a reliable fuse.
But later I'm left with the warning. What do I need to take from that? What's the danger here?
"We'll start again tomorrow," I say returning the hug and going out the door, believing myself as much as I can.
The one piece of art in the room is a tall, oil painting, maybe 4 feet high by 3 feet, a parody of Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World. But details are missing: there is no barn next to the farm house as in the original, and this in not meant to be the Olson House in Cushing, Maine, nor even in Brandywine Valley, Pennsylvannia, where Wyeth did so many paintings. That's a small irony as it turns out. Nor is this a paraplegic's world, not in the strict sense. And this "Christina" is looking not at the farm house but over her shoulder, at us. And it's not Christina at all but Patty Hearst, wearing a beret. It's Patty Hearst's world, in the Spring of 1974, when she sought refuge with SLA friends in a little hamlet 25 miles from Scranton, in northwest, Pennsylvannia. The painting, itself, is a reminder to my friend of better times, those years ago when he could rough house through his world, and optimism was 10 cents a barrel.
So now all these years later we sit among debris in his apartment, eating pizza, letting the gin run down, whiling away his pain, and watching the national championship. Between downs we discuss how the Internet is a forlorn opportunity; how perhaps information itself will cease to be collected or analyzed for a time; how disconnected people are from each other, "the habit of disconnection" we call it; how difficult it is at 60-years old to keep on reinventing yourself, particularly when you are a writer — in an age when even a thoughtfully worked opinion has no monetary value and no matter how good you are the long tail is not nearly enough to live on.
We also discuss Tebow and Bradford, the stars of the evening. My friend has an aversion to Tebow's Christian roots, his 'baby-in-a-basket-floating-down-the-Nile' story, and his Christlike appeal to sportcasters and "anyone who has spent five minutes with him." My friend much prefers Bradford, the everyman, with Asian eyes, who hasn't saved anybody or lived an exotic life, who in his early 20s is just a kid with a great arm who gets it done. My friend respects that, the anonymity, the blue collar heroism (and the blue collar blues), the quiet competence, rather than all the matinee-idol folderol.
For my part I like Tebow; I like his charisma and his confidence. I like his ferocity and left-hand-is-the-dreamer drive. I even like his anger and we discuss that as well, how men are so angry and why that is. "I don't see you as angry," my friend says to me and I'm thinking how even after all these years we don't know each other well, and even now, even after acknowledging the need to be connected, I can't. I won't. I'd rather watch Tebow punish a free safety.
Meanwhile, my friend's friends call to say how sorry they are to hear the news. Someone from the company calls to say they can't believe it: how is it possible they did this to you? What's going on in the world? They go on and on about how much pain they are in now to hear this.
My friend is nearly weeping at this outpouring. My friend who has nurtured and supported people no end, who has saved my life twice, who, in fact, is more like Tebow in temperament than Bradford, and who is now saddled with the thought that he has double-failed. By being laid off he has not only failed himself and his children, he has caused someone else genuine pain. We go through that. I tell him it's nonsense, don't get carried away. Don't.
Meanwhile, Tebow is taking over the game. At one point he rolls out to his left, and, on the run, throws a ball right on the mark, between defenders, to the only coordinates where the ball can be caught. I marvel at the beauty of it; at the excellence, at the hope in that ball.
I am aware of my sentimentality. My mind devours the sight, and you would say, for lack of something more nutritious.
Still, as time runs out, the victory is compelling. Tebow has come from behind, overcome two picks and willed his way and the team's way to victory. Meanwhile, Bradford can't even get on the field and when he does, his go-to man catches a big-down ball twenty yards down the field, only to have it ripped out of his hands and intercepted by a safety.
Tebow has a way of surviving in the jungle. Bradford, for all of his sheer talent, and he has amazing numbers tonight, even with his Heisman he gets lost. He is not quite up to the challenge and yet It's nothing to do with him really: it's just the night and the loaded-craps odds of an interception at the goal line, and another goal line stand that shouldn't have been. What can you say?
What can you say, other than now the day's doldrums are complete. For my friend: lost game, lost job. Not-a-Through-Street signs wherever you look. I look at him out of the corner of my eye, his gray hair sailing through his fingers, shaking his head, eyes at the TV, you can hear the defeat-mechanism humming away, he looks as lost as I can only imagine that paralyzed Japanese fisherman must have felt, the one who fell off his boat the other day trying to catch a squid and treaded water for 15 hours until help arrived.
And yet it turns out the fisherman never doubted he'd be found. His friends said later they never worried. He had no defeat mechanism. He was in the moment and so survived.
"I'll give it two months," my friend says. "I have enough to make it that far. But if I don't... well then it's done. It's just done."
I do not follow up. I don't ask what 'done' means. I put my glass down on the counter. Better the ambiguity than a junniper-berry threat that either invites self-ridicule the next morning or worse sets off a reliable fuse.
But later I'm left with the warning. What do I need to take from that? What's the danger here?
"We'll start again tomorrow," I say returning the hug and going out the door, believing myself as much as I can.
Dec 26, 2008
She and my wife see each other once a week. Every other month we go to their house for dinner. We used to go back and forth but they haven’t come to see us in more than a year, not since her husband was badly injured in a head-on collision. The accident happened on the Golden Gate Bridge, in a terrible fog late at night. As a result he suffers from relentless headaches and hallucinations and rarely leaves his wheelchair. He spends a lot of time in his chair, out in his garden, all bundled up. A few weeks ago he wheeled himself out after dinner and literally spent the whole night outside. His wife fell asleep and forgot that he couldn't get back in the house by himself. When she found him at first light he was still asleep. She woke him up. "I've been with angels," he said. "I have. I've seen them."
This couple lives in Sausalito, above Richardson Bay, in a 70-year-old wooden house covered over in Navy blue bougainvillea, and with a crow’s nest view of Angel Island. Off to the right, Alcatraz. This is the metaphor for the woman’s life. She lives alternately on the summit of Angel Island and in ‘the hole’ at Alcatraz. She’s always felt that, her life is either high or low. And after her husband’s collision she felt she’d been thrown permanently in the hole.
His care has been intensive and expensive. They had no proper insurance. They talked about it, they looked into it, but they never signed on a dotted line. Now, it's too late. And then after thee crash on the bridge there was the crash on Wall Street. All their investments “calved”, as her husband put it, thinking of the times they used to take the inland cruise up to Glacier Bay to watch glaciers sheer.
And now, as often happens in this situation, the rotting undercarriage of their marriage is exposed. For example, after the accident she suddenly felt the dead weight of his presence. For years he had belittled her in public or ignored her in private, or talked about how 'we' had done this or that, referring to their finances, when actually she had done those things. She had always excused these things, hadn't seen them against the camouflage of endless activity. Now all of a sudden she sees every- thing and she's become openly bitter. When she looks into his face and sees his jaw agape — that look older men get when they see death coming and turn into children — she can't help but turn away and pull away. It's not only seeing his fear but feeling her own. And she knows that, and she compensates for it. She's very wise. But a starving heart, no matter how wise, can’t exist on humanity, alone.
A few months ago she took a lover. Two of her friends, including my wife, encouraged her. Absolutely, they said, just what the doctor ordered. Get laid, you’ll feel great, it’ll be much easier to deal with your husband and we won’t have to feel sorry for you. Off you go.
But it wasn’t so easy. This woman is still a sexpot, everybody would tell you that, but she hadn’t had sex in 10 years. You assume she must have been exaggerating, but apparently not. And you’re thinking, ‘you mean she couldn’t even please herself?' Apparently not. Even in the imaginarium all God’s creation had become extinct. Or so she claimed.
The other problem was that despite appearances this city has a low inventory of qualified heterosexual lovers, married or not. This was not always true but it is now. Actually, I think it was always true, but the standards have always been low What’s left is elderly runners, neuters, men in their 30s who want you to tell them bedtime stories, museum guides, bar hoppers from the Spanish American war, psychologists — and their patients and those devilish little dervishes who call themselves realtors, not to mention an army of men who prefer virtual women to the real thing.
So it took some time. Also, our friend didn’t want to go with a stranger. She didn’t want to go to bars. She was deathly afraid of disease. Her two confidantes told her it was probably best to find a married man, for a lot of reasons, but they weren’t willing to volunteer their own husbands even for a night and they didn’t seem to mind if this meant undermining some other family.
She thought of handy men but there were no handy men. Just ‘mental men’. She didn’t want a professional, but she was also reluctant to go off with an ‘artist.’ She wanted to have conversations she’d never had before. She was introduced to a book seller and for a moment that seemed promising but he was not that interesting phsycially and finally she didn’t like his book store or the people, largely from Berkeley, who came to the poetry readings he organized. She wanted someone who was both different but also grounded and earthy.
Suddenly, out of the sky fell a stunt pilot. That’s how she described him initially, but upon further inspection he turned out to be a Navy washout, from the Vietnam era. After the war he got work as a crop-duster for an agro-business down in the Central Valley and may have done some barnstorming and once he claimed he put the plane on auto and went out on the wing and sat in a chair. Somehow, he got the money to start a little flight school up in the wine country. This was in the 1980s. He’s been a one-man band ever since. Then he got his hands on some old gliders. On weekends, he gets engineers from Silicon Valley up in the gliders and he stuffs matrons and their children into an old bi-plane and buzzes the mud baths.
And that’s how they met. Her husband suggested they go up beyond the vineyards for a mud bath and then after lunch they saw a glider being pulled down the runway at a small grass field. "You’ve got to do that," he told her. She was reluctant. He insisted, and so while he sat way down there in the parking lot, looking up from his wheelchair, she went riding off in the thermals.
***
By the way, her husband is a painter. He does those abstract paintings you find in corporate conference rooms and outside the bathrooms in banks and insurance companies. For years he did commissions for Wells Fargo. He also has some paintings hanging in the corridors of Goldman Sachs, in New York.
“A lot of money to throw around in those days,” I said to him the other night after one those spectacular drops in the market. “And look what they did with it
.” Then it occurred to me that might sound like a criticism of his work. “That lifestyle those people lead,” I added.
“The money was good.”
“I’ll bet.”
“It was all another time, wasn’t it? Just living. So much fun and didn’t everything seem prettier to you?”
The man’s mind is gone. What do you say?
“What do you think of Ms. Palin, speaking of pretty”?
“Isn’t she the best? I love her.” He can’t enough of Sarah Palin.
“But doesn’t it bother you that she for example she’d never heard of the Bush doctrine.”
“I don’t know what that is.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I couldn’t answer that question. But you have other people for that. But don’t you think she’s sexy? She’s really sexy.”
I suppose.
“I’d like to spend the night with her.”
He was far too sincere and seemed oblivious to his wife right next to him cutting up a roast.
“But what’s the sexy part?” I asked. “She doesn’t seem that smart.”
“She looks a lot like my first wife,” he said and went on to describe his first wife in far too much detail.
His second wife stopped cutting and just let the knife rest deep in the meat. “Well, I think we can get her back,” she said, “but isn’t she in a nursing home somewhere?”
“She’d take better of me that you ever did.”
“Really? Really. Well you haven’t seen anything yet.” And now she was eviscerating the roast.
***
So here is a woman who after ten years is having sex again. She’s back on Angel Island. But what good is it doing? She used to be the kindest, most thoughtful woman you ever met. Do anything for you, do anything for her husband. Never a mistaken word. Now, she’s like a puppy. All she can talk about is the stunt flyer’s stunts. They’ve become ‘The Insatiables.” Three times in a ‘session.’ And now he’s trying to get her to do it in the bi-plane. She says her nipples are always hard. Thank god she doesn’t have children to take care of. Thank God for long afternoons, particularly when her husband’s Swedish nurse comes.
And this is the pillow talk the have. "Did you hear that Sharon Stone was going to have her son’s feet be filled with botox to stop foot odor? Amazing, isn’t it?" They laugh and laugh and then he’s spreading her legs all over again. Later, they talk about McCain and Obama and how Palin is such an idiot. And she’s delighted to hear he thinks Palin is homely. Then out of one conversation into each other and then into another conversation and out of each other. Over and over. She cannot believe the pleasure. It’s as though they were children all over again. It’s as though she’s no longer tied to earth. It's as though the material world, this house where once she wanted to finish out her life, is all now absolutely nothing. Even as her husband sits by one of his paintings, his hand gnarled, his eyes fixed, panting, as though it were a hot day. (to be continued)
This couple lives in Sausalito, above Richardson Bay, in a 70-year-old wooden house covered over in Navy blue bougainvillea, and with a crow’s nest view of Angel Island. Off to the right, Alcatraz. This is the metaphor for the woman’s life. She lives alternately on the summit of Angel Island and in ‘the hole’ at Alcatraz. She’s always felt that, her life is either high or low. And after her husband’s collision she felt she’d been thrown permanently in the hole.
His care has been intensive and expensive. They had no proper insurance. They talked about it, they looked into it, but they never signed on a dotted line. Now, it's too late. And then after thee crash on the bridge there was the crash on Wall Street. All their investments “calved”, as her husband put it, thinking of the times they used to take the inland cruise up to Glacier Bay to watch glaciers sheer.
And now, as often happens in this situation, the rotting undercarriage of their marriage is exposed. For example, after the accident she suddenly felt the dead weight of his presence. For years he had belittled her in public or ignored her in private, or talked about how 'we' had done this or that, referring to their finances, when actually she had done those things. She had always excused these things, hadn't seen them against the camouflage of endless activity. Now all of a sudden she sees every- thing and she's become openly bitter. When she looks into his face and sees his jaw agape — that look older men get when they see death coming and turn into children — she can't help but turn away and pull away. It's not only seeing his fear but feeling her own. And she knows that, and she compensates for it. She's very wise. But a starving heart, no matter how wise, can’t exist on humanity, alone.
A few months ago she took a lover. Two of her friends, including my wife, encouraged her. Absolutely, they said, just what the doctor ordered. Get laid, you’ll feel great, it’ll be much easier to deal with your husband and we won’t have to feel sorry for you. Off you go.
But it wasn’t so easy. This woman is still a sexpot, everybody would tell you that, but she hadn’t had sex in 10 years. You assume she must have been exaggerating, but apparently not. And you’re thinking, ‘you mean she couldn’t even please herself?' Apparently not. Even in the imaginarium all God’s creation had become extinct. Or so she claimed.
The other problem was that despite appearances this city has a low inventory of qualified heterosexual lovers, married or not. This was not always true but it is now. Actually, I think it was always true, but the standards have always been low What’s left is elderly runners, neuters, men in their 30s who want you to tell them bedtime stories, museum guides, bar hoppers from the Spanish American war, psychologists — and their patients and those devilish little dervishes who call themselves realtors, not to mention an army of men who prefer virtual women to the real thing.
So it took some time. Also, our friend didn’t want to go with a stranger. She didn’t want to go to bars. She was deathly afraid of disease. Her two confidantes told her it was probably best to find a married man, for a lot of reasons, but they weren’t willing to volunteer their own husbands even for a night and they didn’t seem to mind if this meant undermining some other family.
She thought of handy men but there were no handy men. Just ‘mental men’. She didn’t want a professional, but she was also reluctant to go off with an ‘artist.’ She wanted to have conversations she’d never had before. She was introduced to a book seller and for a moment that seemed promising but he was not that interesting phsycially and finally she didn’t like his book store or the people, largely from Berkeley, who came to the poetry readings he organized. She wanted someone who was both different but also grounded and earthy.
Suddenly, out of the sky fell a stunt pilot. That’s how she described him initially, but upon further inspection he turned out to be a Navy washout, from the Vietnam era. After the war he got work as a crop-duster for an agro-business down in the Central Valley and may have done some barnstorming and once he claimed he put the plane on auto and went out on the wing and sat in a chair. Somehow, he got the money to start a little flight school up in the wine country. This was in the 1980s. He’s been a one-man band ever since. Then he got his hands on some old gliders. On weekends, he gets engineers from Silicon Valley up in the gliders and he stuffs matrons and their children into an old bi-plane and buzzes the mud baths.
And that’s how they met. Her husband suggested they go up beyond the vineyards for a mud bath and then after lunch they saw a glider being pulled down the runway at a small grass field. "You’ve got to do that," he told her. She was reluctant. He insisted, and so while he sat way down there in the parking lot, looking up from his wheelchair, she went riding off in the thermals.
***
By the way, her husband is a painter. He does those abstract paintings you find in corporate conference rooms and outside the bathrooms in banks and insurance companies. For years he did commissions for Wells Fargo. He also has some paintings hanging in the corridors of Goldman Sachs, in New York.
“A lot of money to throw around in those days,” I said to him the other night after one those spectacular drops in the market. “And look what they did with it
.” Then it occurred to me that might sound like a criticism of his work. “That lifestyle those people lead,” I added.
“The money was good.”
“I’ll bet.”
“It was all another time, wasn’t it? Just living. So much fun and didn’t everything seem prettier to you?”
The man’s mind is gone. What do you say?
“What do you think of Ms. Palin, speaking of pretty”?
“Isn’t she the best? I love her.” He can’t enough of Sarah Palin.
“But doesn’t it bother you that she for example she’d never heard of the Bush doctrine.”
“I don’t know what that is.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I couldn’t answer that question. But you have other people for that. But don’t you think she’s sexy? She’s really sexy.”
I suppose.
“I’d like to spend the night with her.”
He was far too sincere and seemed oblivious to his wife right next to him cutting up a roast.
“But what’s the sexy part?” I asked. “She doesn’t seem that smart.”
“She looks a lot like my first wife,” he said and went on to describe his first wife in far too much detail.
His second wife stopped cutting and just let the knife rest deep in the meat. “Well, I think we can get her back,” she said, “but isn’t she in a nursing home somewhere?”
“She’d take better of me that you ever did.”
“Really? Really. Well you haven’t seen anything yet.” And now she was eviscerating the roast.
***
So here is a woman who after ten years is having sex again. She’s back on Angel Island. But what good is it doing? She used to be the kindest, most thoughtful woman you ever met. Do anything for you, do anything for her husband. Never a mistaken word. Now, she’s like a puppy. All she can talk about is the stunt flyer’s stunts. They’ve become ‘The Insatiables.” Three times in a ‘session.’ And now he’s trying to get her to do it in the bi-plane. She says her nipples are always hard. Thank god she doesn’t have children to take care of. Thank God for long afternoons, particularly when her husband’s Swedish nurse comes.
And this is the pillow talk the have. "Did you hear that Sharon Stone was going to have her son’s feet be filled with botox to stop foot odor? Amazing, isn’t it?" They laugh and laugh and then he’s spreading her legs all over again. Later, they talk about McCain and Obama and how Palin is such an idiot. And she’s delighted to hear he thinks Palin is homely. Then out of one conversation into each other and then into another conversation and out of each other. Over and over. She cannot believe the pleasure. It’s as though they were children all over again. It’s as though she’s no longer tied to earth. It's as though the material world, this house where once she wanted to finish out her life, is all now absolutely nothing. Even as her husband sits by one of his paintings, his hand gnarled, his eyes fixed, panting, as though it were a hot day. (to be continued)
Nov 11, 2008
Isn't it perfect? Isn't it just what you would expect? Bush's aids have been ranting all day about how the President was betrayed by leaks from Obama, following their meeting yesterday. And what was so secret? That Bush is willing to exchange his support for a GM bailout in return for democratic congressional support for free-trade agreements with Columbia and two other Latin American countries. A bailout is fine for his chums on Wall Street, in the financial sector, but not the companies employing thousands of blue collar workers. Save Wall St.; let Main Street smolder.
Or so it would seem. Meanwhile, who knows where the bailout money is going. Who knows how certain companies are being rewarded, others not. It's the divving up in the backroom, before the place is raided.
In the end, it really wasn't that Bush sat on Cheney's knee, it was that Bush had no moral sense or moral courage to speak of.
Or so it would seem. Meanwhile, who knows where the bailout money is going. Who knows how certain companies are being rewarded, others not. It's the divving up in the backroom, before the place is raided.
In the end, it really wasn't that Bush sat on Cheney's knee, it was that Bush had no moral sense or moral courage to speak of.
Nov 10, 2008
Of course, now there is all this hoopla. Finally, we can feel good about ourselves as Americans. But it's not all good. Already, something is starting to happen. Have you talked to women lately about their dream life?
Here's what's happening: they're all dreaming of Obama. They're massaging his back, they're walking with him off down the beach. Or, although they're reluctant to say this, they're making love to him. And you think, 'well what about Michelle?' These women don't give a damn about Michelle. Sure, they like her dresses, but they want her man.
And you understand, the dream is not about fucking him; it's about making love to him. It's about having his babies, it's about consoling him after a bad day at the office. This is what we're talking about. What's happening is they're falling deeply in love. For some, it's the first time in years. It's beyond Freudian. It's beyond matinee idols and icons. We'll need a new term. The Obama-fication of the American woman. Or maybe you could say, the refeminization of America. It means that American women have been won over, made over, and taken over. Even the ones that voted for McCain. You can hear it in their voices and the glazed eyes when they hear him. If he's anywhere in your house, on TV, on a magazine cover, if someone says so much as "oh, I think I'll switch on the light..." They hear that "O" and they're suddenly all tuned in, all the rabbit ears are up.
I'll bet you any money this is going to be a campaign issue long before the next election cycle. Hannity, el Rushbow, Brian the 'whether man' and the boys in white hoods, they'll have a word on this any day now. And you see how insidious it is: if you make so much as a peep, if you saying anything at all to a woman under the trance, even just a passing joke — they cut you off. "Why don't you go play tennis." Or, "Why don't you go work in the garden?" Or, "Isn't there a football game on?" They can't stand the sight of you. You've been erased and replaced. Rich or poor doesn't matter. It's like a sci-fi movie. It's like Obama is a pod person who has penetrated the female psyche.
And so what will happen? The therapist's office are going to be filled with a flood of dispirited, angry, jealous, and frustrated men. If you thought men were in decline, if you thought their best day was past, just wait. You remember the movie with the title from that Hopi term, Koyanaskatsi, "Life out of balance". That's what's happening on a vast psychological plain. But you won't realize the consequences until it's too late.
Now my wife is talking about starting "Obama's Mammas", a philanthropic group that would meet regularly to take on well meaning projects. Creative projects, of course, and launched with the hope that maybe she'll get to go to the White House one day. And once she gets in to those quarters, watch out. It's the good liberal gone berserk.
Get him out of there!
Here's what's happening: they're all dreaming of Obama. They're massaging his back, they're walking with him off down the beach. Or, although they're reluctant to say this, they're making love to him. And you think, 'well what about Michelle?' These women don't give a damn about Michelle. Sure, they like her dresses, but they want her man.
And you understand, the dream is not about fucking him; it's about making love to him. It's about having his babies, it's about consoling him after a bad day at the office. This is what we're talking about. What's happening is they're falling deeply in love. For some, it's the first time in years. It's beyond Freudian. It's beyond matinee idols and icons. We'll need a new term. The Obama-fication of the American woman. Or maybe you could say, the refeminization of America. It means that American women have been won over, made over, and taken over. Even the ones that voted for McCain. You can hear it in their voices and the glazed eyes when they hear him. If he's anywhere in your house, on TV, on a magazine cover, if someone says so much as "oh, I think I'll switch on the light..." They hear that "O" and they're suddenly all tuned in, all the rabbit ears are up.
I'll bet you any money this is going to be a campaign issue long before the next election cycle. Hannity, el Rushbow, Brian the 'whether man' and the boys in white hoods, they'll have a word on this any day now. And you see how insidious it is: if you make so much as a peep, if you saying anything at all to a woman under the trance, even just a passing joke — they cut you off. "Why don't you go play tennis." Or, "Why don't you go work in the garden?" Or, "Isn't there a football game on?" They can't stand the sight of you. You've been erased and replaced. Rich or poor doesn't matter. It's like a sci-fi movie. It's like Obama is a pod person who has penetrated the female psyche.
And so what will happen? The therapist's office are going to be filled with a flood of dispirited, angry, jealous, and frustrated men. If you thought men were in decline, if you thought their best day was past, just wait. You remember the movie with the title from that Hopi term, Koyanaskatsi, "Life out of balance". That's what's happening on a vast psychological plain. But you won't realize the consequences until it's too late.
Now my wife is talking about starting "Obama's Mammas", a philanthropic group that would meet regularly to take on well meaning projects. Creative projects, of course, and launched with the hope that maybe she'll get to go to the White House one day. And once she gets in to those quarters, watch out. It's the good liberal gone berserk.
Get him out of there!
Nov 5, 2008
After Ohio came in I went down the street to get a bottle of champagne. On the corner of 46th and Judah, a woman and a man stood at the bush shelter. In their 40s give or take. As I passed, the woman stopped me. She had glass in her eyes. Meth maybe or just dope? "Have you got..." she started to say. I cut her off and asked if she'd voted. "McCain," she said. I nodded and turned.
She followed me and grabbed my hand. "Who did you vote for?" I told her.
She was dressed up. She looked over her shoulder. The man with her was standing a few yards away, in the shadows. He was not dressed up. He was skinny, poor white looking. He wore thick bifocals and low sneakers. "My husband doens't know," she said.
Know what?
"Actually, when I got in the booth I went for Obama. My husband's a big McCain fan, he made me promise."
Did you?
"Yea, I did, but you know when I got in there I just had to pick Obama."
Why?
"Because he's smarter. We want someone smart, don't we? My husband listens to that Hannity and those people and he's got all this misinformation."
How do you know it is?
"Oh, I know it is."
I didn't believe her.
"He listens all the time. Every day. He'll drag me to the radio and make me listen too. He's like a fanatic. I can't stand it anymore."
The husband was looking our way but I couldn't tell how much he could hear."
Was she a trick, I wondered. The glass in her eyes was clearing up. She asked my name. I asked hers.
"Diane," she said. "It's gonna be better isn't it? With him."
I said it was. I turned the corner, dropped in the Korean place, and got the best bottle of champs they had, which wasn't saying much.
She followed me and grabbed my hand. "Who did you vote for?" I told her.
She was dressed up. She looked over her shoulder. The man with her was standing a few yards away, in the shadows. He was not dressed up. He was skinny, poor white looking. He wore thick bifocals and low sneakers. "My husband doens't know," she said.
Know what?
"Actually, when I got in the booth I went for Obama. My husband's a big McCain fan, he made me promise."
Did you?
"Yea, I did, but you know when I got in there I just had to pick Obama."
Why?
"Because he's smarter. We want someone smart, don't we? My husband listens to that Hannity and those people and he's got all this misinformation."
How do you know it is?
"Oh, I know it is."
I didn't believe her.
"He listens all the time. Every day. He'll drag me to the radio and make me listen too. He's like a fanatic. I can't stand it anymore."
The husband was looking our way but I couldn't tell how much he could hear."
Was she a trick, I wondered. The glass in her eyes was clearing up. She asked my name. I asked hers.
"Diane," she said. "It's gonna be better isn't it? With him."
I said it was. I turned the corner, dropped in the Korean place, and got the best bottle of champs they had, which wasn't saying much.
Nov 3, 2008
You are in an old rambling house used as an office for a family-run newspaper. The house is chock full of furniture and books and debris. The floors groan. You're being interviewed. This is the second time. The last time everything went smoothly. You're talking with the editor who is explaining what will be asked. The problem is that this is not your subject. You try to explain it. This doesn't make sense, you're saying.
When you were here before you were sleeping with a dark-haired woman, who suddenly left last night. You think of her, stretched out on a divan, so sexy, so sure of herself. She was everyone's one night love. And then suddenly she's betting on love with someone from long ago. You're thinking that as much as she thinks it will work out, it won't. She'll be back to her old tricks. But you keep remembering her nostalgically.
Meanwhile, the interview is about to start. You are going on camera. Thank God, it’s tape so if you make a mistake you can correct it. You imagine how you will look in the camera. There is a problem with your clothing. The editor-in-chief is an environmentalist. He’s wearing a hat with a claim check in the brim. Like an old-fashioned bookie. After the interview, you go for a stroll in the gardens around the house. Not unlike Rodin's house. There are sculptures here and there.
There’s also a sailboat in a canal. The boat must be 40 feet. A sloop. You’re looking at some plants along the bank. Then, you’re in the water, standing waist-deep in the canal. It's a sulky, gray afternoon. The water is pitch black and cool. There are people on the boat. Suddenly, it catches fire. There's an explosion. But was anyone killed? Maybe just sound and smoke. Someone on the bank to the right has a loudspeaker. They’re explaining to the survivors that they will now experience a series of torments: plague, pestilence, date-rape drugs, rattle snakes in their beds, cutting remarks, things from the devil's trunk.
You get out of there, get to the front of the house. There's a road, traffic going by. You step out and try to stop a man in a low, burnished-steel sports car. This is just tin you think as you get up to it. Just tin. How could you drive this? The man is bald and wearing glasses. You need a ride. You commandeer his imagination with your fear. Ok, he says. Maybe, he doesn't even say that. You jump in. You keep looking at the tin dashboard. The car is like an old MGB. How odd. Must be a collector, you're thinking. Then, Thank God. There's a policeman/soldier on the side of the road. He's got a machine gun with a scope. He's dressed in blue. You hop out and approach him....
When you were here before you were sleeping with a dark-haired woman, who suddenly left last night. You think of her, stretched out on a divan, so sexy, so sure of herself. She was everyone's one night love. And then suddenly she's betting on love with someone from long ago. You're thinking that as much as she thinks it will work out, it won't. She'll be back to her old tricks. But you keep remembering her nostalgically.
Meanwhile, the interview is about to start. You are going on camera. Thank God, it’s tape so if you make a mistake you can correct it. You imagine how you will look in the camera. There is a problem with your clothing. The editor-in-chief is an environmentalist. He’s wearing a hat with a claim check in the brim. Like an old-fashioned bookie. After the interview, you go for a stroll in the gardens around the house. Not unlike Rodin's house. There are sculptures here and there.
There’s also a sailboat in a canal. The boat must be 40 feet. A sloop. You’re looking at some plants along the bank. Then, you’re in the water, standing waist-deep in the canal. It's a sulky, gray afternoon. The water is pitch black and cool. There are people on the boat. Suddenly, it catches fire. There's an explosion. But was anyone killed? Maybe just sound and smoke. Someone on the bank to the right has a loudspeaker. They’re explaining to the survivors that they will now experience a series of torments: plague, pestilence, date-rape drugs, rattle snakes in their beds, cutting remarks, things from the devil's trunk.
You get out of there, get to the front of the house. There's a road, traffic going by. You step out and try to stop a man in a low, burnished-steel sports car. This is just tin you think as you get up to it. Just tin. How could you drive this? The man is bald and wearing glasses. You need a ride. You commandeer his imagination with your fear. Ok, he says. Maybe, he doesn't even say that. You jump in. You keep looking at the tin dashboard. The car is like an old MGB. How odd. Must be a collector, you're thinking. Then, Thank God. There's a policeman/soldier on the side of the road. He's got a machine gun with a scope. He's dressed in blue. You hop out and approach him....
Nov 1, 2008
Down at Philz Coffee on 24th Street. Saturday morning. A homeless man hiding under a blanket, on a torn-up leather sofa. Just the man’s face: scared, dreary-eyed. He looks like a GI on the cover of a winter issue of Life in 1944. Next to to him, a shin-high, white short-haired dog licks the floor. In among the hiss and belch of the coffee-maker and the chatter, Philz's got his music going: violins, accordions, a Lebanese singer. Ya-habbibi. I’m 13 again. I'm in the backseat of a taxi running down the bluffs above Ababa. At the far end of a life later I’m here, a face in someone else's memory of magazine photos. The neighborhood is lining up at the counter. Tattooed, dread-locked kids, mostly.
Phil is at the maker, dealing out lattes and medical advice: coffee cures all. No money, drink coffee. No boyfriend, drink coffee. It will give you the self you’ve been missing, it'll get you back on the road to success. He spots me, takes a break. He’s wearing blue jeans; button-down, striped shirt; a detective’s harrow brimmed hat. Like they wear in Queens. He’s small but broad shouldered. Fearless body language. You wouldn’t want to fight him unless you had to. His employees know better. When he’s not behind the counter he’s in what was once a freezer, now his office, big enough for two and a TV with four different camera views of the café. He watches his employees carefully. He sees everything. Once he saw me do him good turn. He never forgets a good turn.
I ask him who he’s voting for. The answer is a smile, a slinty-eyed, souky smile. He shakes his head. It’s all charm, no answers. It’s in his blood not to say. You never know who might be listening. And of course it’s not good business to say such things in public. Phil’s family got here in the early 1900s, from the West Bank. When did he get here? I don’t know. He doesn't say. But a thick accent. He knows all the Palestinians in the neighhood, including Mustafa and his brother over at B & W garage. There a lot of small businesses around the city run by Palestinians. The DA courts them closely at reelection time.
I press him on his political choice. He shakes his head. I berate him a little. Why be coy? What’s to figure out? He leans forward; he’s going to tell me the truth. I lean in. “Do you see this girl over here with the tattoos on the back of her leg?" He flicks his head. I see her. She’s fat-calved and up all night, and not a good night at that. She’s trying to drink the coffee, get back up to the road to success, but she can barely hold the cup. She looks like one of these Amy Winehouses not wanting to go back to rehab.
"She's famous."
"But who you voting for?" I ask again. He shakes his head. "Oh then you must be voting for McCain."
He leans in again. The smile is gone. You don't want to fool with Phil now. "You don't know who I'm voting for. I could be voting for Obama. But I'm worried about what will happen to him. You know what I'm talking about."
Yes, of course, I'm thinking. Of course. I know what you're talking about.
Phil is at the maker, dealing out lattes and medical advice: coffee cures all. No money, drink coffee. No boyfriend, drink coffee. It will give you the self you’ve been missing, it'll get you back on the road to success. He spots me, takes a break. He’s wearing blue jeans; button-down, striped shirt; a detective’s harrow brimmed hat. Like they wear in Queens. He’s small but broad shouldered. Fearless body language. You wouldn’t want to fight him unless you had to. His employees know better. When he’s not behind the counter he’s in what was once a freezer, now his office, big enough for two and a TV with four different camera views of the café. He watches his employees carefully. He sees everything. Once he saw me do him good turn. He never forgets a good turn.
I ask him who he’s voting for. The answer is a smile, a slinty-eyed, souky smile. He shakes his head. It’s all charm, no answers. It’s in his blood not to say. You never know who might be listening. And of course it’s not good business to say such things in public. Phil’s family got here in the early 1900s, from the West Bank. When did he get here? I don’t know. He doesn't say. But a thick accent. He knows all the Palestinians in the neighhood, including Mustafa and his brother over at B & W garage. There a lot of small businesses around the city run by Palestinians. The DA courts them closely at reelection time.
I press him on his political choice. He shakes his head. I berate him a little. Why be coy? What’s to figure out? He leans forward; he’s going to tell me the truth. I lean in. “Do you see this girl over here with the tattoos on the back of her leg?" He flicks his head. I see her. She’s fat-calved and up all night, and not a good night at that. She’s trying to drink the coffee, get back up to the road to success, but she can barely hold the cup. She looks like one of these Amy Winehouses not wanting to go back to rehab.
"She's famous."
"But who you voting for?" I ask again. He shakes his head. "Oh then you must be voting for McCain."
He leans in again. The smile is gone. You don't want to fool with Phil now. "You don't know who I'm voting for. I could be voting for Obama. But I'm worried about what will happen to him. You know what I'm talking about."
Yes, of course, I'm thinking. Of course. I know what you're talking about.
Oct 25, 2008
During the White Coat ceremony for the class of 2012, held in the Unitarian church on Federal Hill in Providence, the dean of the medical school assures students they will be both challenged and rewarded, and that this is not the same conventional preparation you find at certain other stodgy old medical schools. He won’t name those but students believe he is referring to Harvard and Stanford, where he has been and which are focused on research rather than practice.
The next speaker is an adjunct professor of Community Health. He offers a reflection, which is that the White Coat is finally a pretentious reference to a hierarchical, and patriarchal approach to medicine that is no longer useful or appropriate. And yet the coast symbolizes a commitment to the higher virtures of the profession and oneself.
After the ceremony, 98 of the 99 students in the class of 2012 receive their short jackets, with an italicized name sewn in and a gold nickel-sized medallion with the image of Hippocrates. The missing student has been acting strangely it’s not a great surprise that he is missing. Each student has his or her photo taken with the dean. This is to go in the personal file and to be used in promotional materials. When the dean puts his arm around the candidates some of women follow their first instinct and put their arm around his waist, but then they quickly sense inappropriateness and withdraw.
After the ceremony there is a reception across the street in the
The next speaker is an adjunct professor of Community Health. He offers a reflection, which is that the White Coat is finally a pretentious reference to a hierarchical, and patriarchal approach to medicine that is no longer useful or appropriate. And yet the coast symbolizes a commitment to the higher virtures of the profession and oneself.
After the ceremony, 98 of the 99 students in the class of 2012 receive their short jackets, with an italicized name sewn in and a gold nickel-sized medallion with the image of Hippocrates. The missing student has been acting strangely it’s not a great surprise that he is missing. Each student has his or her photo taken with the dean. This is to go in the personal file and to be used in promotional materials. When the dean puts his arm around the candidates some of women follow their first instinct and put their arm around his waist, but then they quickly sense inappropriateness and withdraw.
After the ceremony there is a reception across the street in the
Oct 24, 2008
You have a plane to catch; the cab is late. In the Internet ad the company promises to be prompt. 'We're always on time.' Now they're late, coming on 10 minutes. You get in, you let the driver have it. Maybe too much. In a flash he turns around, he's screaming: "Get out of this cab. Get the fuck out, get the fuck out of my cab." And he makes a move to get out and come around the throw you out.
Have I gone so far to get this, you think. Should I get out? No, there isn't time. The cabbie is still on fire. 'Look,' you say, 'taking out your cell phone. Here's the choice. Either I call the police and talk about old times or you take me to the airport. It's your choice.'
You have the phone open, you're ready to push buttons. The driver turns back to the road. His eyes are in the rear view. The light changes, he's off. But not finished. "You fuckin' assholes — Obama, McCain, you're all part of the international conspiracy. I know your game. You faggots."
He actually mentions the UN and black helicopters circling above the city. I'm happy that we've gone from late-rage to multinational conspiracies. This is something I can deal with. And wasn't John D. Rockerfeller involved? And didn't this somehow include the Masons? Mohammed V is a mason or so I read. For a moment I'm back in Morocco; everything is alright.
You ask the cabbie if he really believes these things. He absolutely does. "And Paul Pot; that's where it all started. He was one of them."
The 'killing fields' you think. And then you look at the eyes and yes those could be Cambodian. This is all about Cambodia. All these things are adding up.
The cab arrives at the terminal. Being the passive-aggressive you are, and heavy on the aggressive but now remorseful, you apologize. You are very sincere. You see now that he is a tall man and his eye are Asian but not necessarily Cambodian. Who knows what he is.
"My father died last week," he says but provides no details except that he ran the taxi company. Now you feel like cold shit. You keep apologizing. You're older; you try to play the role of wise elder.
What's the fare you ask. You've already decided to give him a big tip. But then he tells you the fare is nearly $10 more than what was quoted on the phone when you made the reservation. You pay it plus a tip. Maybe, you got it wrong. Maybe this is not the company you called. You get out. Now you don't know. Maybe it was all a sham. Your sentimentality betrayed you again. But there's no time to worry about it; he's back in his killing fields, you've got other plots.
Have I gone so far to get this, you think. Should I get out? No, there isn't time. The cabbie is still on fire. 'Look,' you say, 'taking out your cell phone. Here's the choice. Either I call the police and talk about old times or you take me to the airport. It's your choice.'
You have the phone open, you're ready to push buttons. The driver turns back to the road. His eyes are in the rear view. The light changes, he's off. But not finished. "You fuckin' assholes — Obama, McCain, you're all part of the international conspiracy. I know your game. You faggots."
He actually mentions the UN and black helicopters circling above the city. I'm happy that we've gone from late-rage to multinational conspiracies. This is something I can deal with. And wasn't John D. Rockerfeller involved? And didn't this somehow include the Masons? Mohammed V is a mason or so I read. For a moment I'm back in Morocco; everything is alright.
You ask the cabbie if he really believes these things. He absolutely does. "And Paul Pot; that's where it all started. He was one of them."
The 'killing fields' you think. And then you look at the eyes and yes those could be Cambodian. This is all about Cambodia. All these things are adding up.
The cab arrives at the terminal. Being the passive-aggressive you are, and heavy on the aggressive but now remorseful, you apologize. You are very sincere. You see now that he is a tall man and his eye are Asian but not necessarily Cambodian. Who knows what he is.
"My father died last week," he says but provides no details except that he ran the taxi company. Now you feel like cold shit. You keep apologizing. You're older; you try to play the role of wise elder.
What's the fare you ask. You've already decided to give him a big tip. But then he tells you the fare is nearly $10 more than what was quoted on the phone when you made the reservation. You pay it plus a tip. Maybe, you got it wrong. Maybe this is not the company you called. You get out. Now you don't know. Maybe it was all a sham. Your sentimentality betrayed you again. But there's no time to worry about it; he's back in his killing fields, you've got other plots.
Oct 15, 2008
Six weeks ago someone stole the Vote For Obama sign in front of our house. The sign was one of those wire-hanger frames that you stick in the ground. One morning we noticed the sign had disappeared and later found it torn up and thrown in a neighbor's bush. I talked to her. We stood in front of her house. She's also an Obama supporter. She wondered if there might be a connection with a group home recently established down the street. She pointed at it; there was a kid out front. Did he live in the house? I don't know. He was black. If he did live in the house, why would he steal an Obama sign?
I repaired the sign and set it up again. Then yesterday it disappeared. This time I couldn't find it. A small thing but unsettling. A political crime, of passion. But who would care? They must have heard the race was tightening, I thought.
Then it occurred to me that it might have been one of the Vietnamese families on the street. On either side we have Vietnamese neighbors. On one side, an older couple. He was in the South Vietnamese military; he told me that. Very distinguished. His wife, also very distinguished. Often, in the backyard I see her on her deck practicing her golf swing. She's very accomplished. Very fluid swing. And powerful. Once, she advised me where to plant some things. She's used to power. They drive an older black Lexus. Not long ago am ambulance and firetrucks pulled up. I didn't see what happened, but I'm guessing he may have had a heart attack. Whenever I talk to him he says he's for Obama. Who know? I like him. I don't think he did it. I can almost say, he didn't do it.
But on the other side the Vietnamese are evidently poor. The kids own Hondas: motorcycles and cars. They repair them late at night. Their friends come over to get repairs. I told them once that at 11 p.m. it would be nice if they could stop reving their engines. They stopped. Once, the grandmother was out sweeping tree leaves and seeds off the sidewalk. I thanked her, but I don't know if she got the message, she didn't speak English. Another time the man of the house, if that's what he was, said he wanted to cut some branches off the tree that goes with our house. So there would be fewer leaves and seeds on the sidewalk. It's nearly the only tree on the block, I think of it as gold. I told him I would do any cutting. He said, well what about the landlord? I said, I'll do any cutting. He got the message.
A woman used to come out of the house in a terry cloth bathrobe and smoke cigarettes. She had a small dog. She would stand out at night or in the early morning smoking. I smiled, she smiled. Once, in the backyard, the owner and I had another little disagreement. He was putting up a new fence and let some wood and bricks fall on some plants. It's hard to grow plants here because the soil is so bad. It's just sand. He cleaned up the debris. He said something about how wasn't I happy he was putting up a new fence. I said, wouldn't it be great if everyone had an opening in their fence so we could all walk through each other's gardens. He thought that was funny.
Not a day goes by I don't find cigarette butts in our yard. He stands up on the roof sometimes, he's going to add a room. He smokes and I'm assuming flicks his butts down on our yard. It's nothing to him. Or maybe it is. Maybe, it's like spitting at someone's feet.
But then lately I keep finding pennies all over the yard, particularly near his fence. Pennies? Good luck, I always thought. But maybe it's something else. Pennies as in several dollars worth. They've become particularly noticeable since the rains have returned.
Then, I read about Vietnamese support for McCain. He knows their pain. He knows what Ho Chi Minh could do, when he wasn't reading Jefferson and Lenin. I don't know. Could be this man. And so the challenge is not to press my suspicions, let it go. Whatever it is.
I repaired the sign and set it up again. Then yesterday it disappeared. This time I couldn't find it. A small thing but unsettling. A political crime, of passion. But who would care? They must have heard the race was tightening, I thought.
Then it occurred to me that it might have been one of the Vietnamese families on the street. On either side we have Vietnamese neighbors. On one side, an older couple. He was in the South Vietnamese military; he told me that. Very distinguished. His wife, also very distinguished. Often, in the backyard I see her on her deck practicing her golf swing. She's very accomplished. Very fluid swing. And powerful. Once, she advised me where to plant some things. She's used to power. They drive an older black Lexus. Not long ago am ambulance and firetrucks pulled up. I didn't see what happened, but I'm guessing he may have had a heart attack. Whenever I talk to him he says he's for Obama. Who know? I like him. I don't think he did it. I can almost say, he didn't do it.
But on the other side the Vietnamese are evidently poor. The kids own Hondas: motorcycles and cars. They repair them late at night. Their friends come over to get repairs. I told them once that at 11 p.m. it would be nice if they could stop reving their engines. They stopped. Once, the grandmother was out sweeping tree leaves and seeds off the sidewalk. I thanked her, but I don't know if she got the message, she didn't speak English. Another time the man of the house, if that's what he was, said he wanted to cut some branches off the tree that goes with our house. So there would be fewer leaves and seeds on the sidewalk. It's nearly the only tree on the block, I think of it as gold. I told him I would do any cutting. He said, well what about the landlord? I said, I'll do any cutting. He got the message.
A woman used to come out of the house in a terry cloth bathrobe and smoke cigarettes. She had a small dog. She would stand out at night or in the early morning smoking. I smiled, she smiled. Once, in the backyard, the owner and I had another little disagreement. He was putting up a new fence and let some wood and bricks fall on some plants. It's hard to grow plants here because the soil is so bad. It's just sand. He cleaned up the debris. He said something about how wasn't I happy he was putting up a new fence. I said, wouldn't it be great if everyone had an opening in their fence so we could all walk through each other's gardens. He thought that was funny.
Not a day goes by I don't find cigarette butts in our yard. He stands up on the roof sometimes, he's going to add a room. He smokes and I'm assuming flicks his butts down on our yard. It's nothing to him. Or maybe it is. Maybe, it's like spitting at someone's feet.
But then lately I keep finding pennies all over the yard, particularly near his fence. Pennies? Good luck, I always thought. But maybe it's something else. Pennies as in several dollars worth. They've become particularly noticeable since the rains have returned.
Then, I read about Vietnamese support for McCain. He knows their pain. He knows what Ho Chi Minh could do, when he wasn't reading Jefferson and Lenin. I don't know. Could be this man. And so the challenge is not to press my suspicions, let it go. Whatever it is.
On Monday night, when Eric Wright picked off Eli Manning and took off for a 94-yard touch, the width of your nose from the sideline, like he was Nik Wallenda hustling down a high wire, and then the last five yards doing the old Deon Sanders carrioca prance, with right hand up in bebop mock protest and look-at-me delight, I went right back to 1999, when Wright was on the San Francisco Seahawks, the pride of the Filmore. Coach Greg was God to those kids and they'll never have a better coach. D was split out to the right, and second Q, and you can't believe how those kids ran the table, right to the Western regional championship in Reno. They shucked the bejesus out of a team from Alaska. 42 to 7, something like that. D caught a touch and I think threw for one, to the starting Q, or maybe it was just a great pass over the middle. Memory doesn’t serve but caught and threw is the point and Eric Wright probably got the game ball. I assume he did, although they had some other great players on that team.
The night before the game, in a cheap room high up over slotland, they all had a pillow fight and on the way up 80 in the bus, D, who was one of only two caucs on the team, won the football trivia contest. One of the questions was not, ‘What was the pop song the 49ers listened to in the team bus over and over on the way to their first super bowl?’ “This is it” by Kenny Loggins is the answer. But it was like that. After all, the bus is the best and worst of playing sports. It was the best that trip.
And the end of an era. The 49ers went 3 and 12 that year. All the greats had left the year before. The old expectations were being quietly discarded. Still, the dotcom bust was out of sight. Those kids from nowhere were still going down to Mooses’ and buying $350 bottles of wine, to go with hamburgers and fries. It was all cool and selfish. Just like now. And Da Mayor was getting the Chinese girls to wash his hair and sometimes caught a blow job from an available blonde in the backseat of a limo. He was also getting City Hall guilded up to look like the seat of the empire. And even then you didn’t have know Ozymandius to know how this was gonna turn out.
Now? Sentimentality is settling in. D is experiencing his first ‘last’ and the awful realization that something you once took for granted is now gone, something you would die ten times in a row to get back is gone. Meanwhile, another bust is in the air. The city is wobbly and nervous.
If you want to see how far the place has fallen, speaking of football, look at the 49ers. The Yorks have run the franchise down a rat hole. From top to bottom it’s gone amateur. JTO’ isn’t going to bring back this franchise. He'll give you a series, maybe even a game, but that's it. No more promise than roma girls with their good fortunes on neon signs out in the avenues. The city is quieting down and you think, well maybe it’ll do it some good.' But I doubt it.
And all the while I’m remembering playing tennis with my father on Samuel Goldwyn’s tennis court, that last time, in the late afternoon, in the smog and splendor, and afterwards he ate a quart of vanilla ice cream and out on the patio, on the rear deck of the Titanic, as he would say, we drank martinis like it was going out of style.
The night before the game, in a cheap room high up over slotland, they all had a pillow fight and on the way up 80 in the bus, D, who was one of only two caucs on the team, won the football trivia contest. One of the questions was not, ‘What was the pop song the 49ers listened to in the team bus over and over on the way to their first super bowl?’ “This is it” by Kenny Loggins is the answer. But it was like that. After all, the bus is the best and worst of playing sports. It was the best that trip.
And the end of an era. The 49ers went 3 and 12 that year. All the greats had left the year before. The old expectations were being quietly discarded. Still, the dotcom bust was out of sight. Those kids from nowhere were still going down to Mooses’ and buying $350 bottles of wine, to go with hamburgers and fries. It was all cool and selfish. Just like now. And Da Mayor was getting the Chinese girls to wash his hair and sometimes caught a blow job from an available blonde in the backseat of a limo. He was also getting City Hall guilded up to look like the seat of the empire. And even then you didn’t have know Ozymandius to know how this was gonna turn out.
Now? Sentimentality is settling in. D is experiencing his first ‘last’ and the awful realization that something you once took for granted is now gone, something you would die ten times in a row to get back is gone. Meanwhile, another bust is in the air. The city is wobbly and nervous.
If you want to see how far the place has fallen, speaking of football, look at the 49ers. The Yorks have run the franchise down a rat hole. From top to bottom it’s gone amateur. JTO’ isn’t going to bring back this franchise. He'll give you a series, maybe even a game, but that's it. No more promise than roma girls with their good fortunes on neon signs out in the avenues. The city is quieting down and you think, well maybe it’ll do it some good.' But I doubt it.
And all the while I’m remembering playing tennis with my father on Samuel Goldwyn’s tennis court, that last time, in the late afternoon, in the smog and splendor, and afterwards he ate a quart of vanilla ice cream and out on the patio, on the rear deck of the Titanic, as he would say, we drank martinis like it was going out of style.
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