In the Dept. of Outrageous Dinner Conversation, the award for most consistently strange and amazing, and often in-bad-taste anecdotes goes to our friend S, who arrived last night from Los Angeles, with her most recent lover, N.

If I were tweeting you this, in 140 characters, less the URL, the message might be something like, “one woman broad-squad wants (her own) penis for her 50th”.

S’s husband, D, who stayed with us a few months ago, knows about his wife and N and one of the revelations from last night was that S has recently been going to a therapist specializing in polyamorous relationships. Indeed, two therapists. One she goes to with her husband; the other with her lover. The common thread is that S loves both men, and actually there are others but I’ll get to that, and so the goal is to help these two men understand both her needs and her nature, as well as the awkward situation they find themselves in.

So far therapy has not been effective. When S goes off on one of her erotic adventures she does not say where she is going or with whom and, if pressed, may respond with a half lie or some banter from the therapists or does a little ideo-philosophic number on why it’s okay to be secretive AND polyamorous — although I always thought the hope and promise of being polyamorous was that you could be open. Anyway, as she goes out the door her husband says to her, “I know you’re going off with that Nazi, pseudo-intellectual, scumbag, fuck-face. I hope you have a good time.”

She always does.

By the same token the therapy has not worked for N who has no regard for D. “Well admit it he’s the classic, hippy-Jew-aristocrat, with a lot of money and absolutely no talent. I can’t understand what you see in him.”

S sees everything in her husband and loves him as best she can. They’ve been married for nearly 20 years. And if you met him you would say, how could she not love him? Although she is independent financially, still he provides her with access to material worlds, houses on this coast and that, exotic vacations — in sum real and imagined properties she would not have otherwise. But more important her husband is a really good guy. He’s very kind and also steady and reliable and full of dry humor, and if he hadn’t gotten caught up in allure of New York investment banking for so many years, maybe S would never have discovered her polyamorous needs.

Actually, that’s not true. My wife who has known S since college days will tell you that she was always like that but more so now.

By way of 9 to 5, S works for one of the top literary agencies in New York. She plays the viola in a traveling string quartet. Ten years ago she wanted to learn German — to explore her roots — and so went to Heidelberg, studied at the university and for a year volunteered at a methadone clinic.

My wife insists S is a “serious person”, which means someone who 1) reads books; 2) cares about literature, regardless of culture and can hold a discussion about literature for two and a half hours without moving; and 3) and most important, S reads poetry but doesn’t write it. For my wife that’s a slam-dunk indication that S is a serious person, along with the fact that S will say or do anything, which my wife has begun to do lately, in earnest.

And you understand S doesn’t do or say these outrageous things entirely for effect. It’s just her way of being, and so last night at dinner, the rest of us floating in North Sea Vodka, she broke a much-needed silence by saying, “my 50th birthday is coming up and I’m hoping to get a penis.”

My first thought was, ‘but you already have at least three that I know of, how many more do you need?’

I put that thought in a smile.

“No,” she said. “I want a penis, I want to know what that’s like. I really do. Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to have a vagina?

She said it as though the only possible answer was, “Of course I have, and I’m dying to experience the whole feemo, femmi, amazonio, cockamamie, hygienic business of being a woo-man…. Just as described by Charlotte Roche in Wetlands…”

That was roughly my answer.

“Oh you’ve read Wetlands,” she said, eyes lighting up and becoming oval, which I read somewhere recently means, for a woman, you want to be fucked.

I shook my head. Actually, part way through the book review I nearly threw up.

That made no sense to her at all. Why would reading all about the bodily liquidity of a woman not be interesting?

It just isn’t, I said. Nothing to do with women. I just think there should be a bare minimum of mystery, that’s all.

Meanwhile, N was paying close attention and even though he had not read the book or the review fully agreed with his polyamorotic obsession.

Incidentally, N is a professor of advanced languages at an Ivy league university and a consultant to various organizations that can benefit from his study. He’s in his late 30’s, quick witted, chatty, and always keen to talk about Israeli politics. He’s also German, as are nearly all of S’s lovers. His father was taken prisoner at Stalingrad and his grandmother on his mother’s side was Jewish. Several years ago he officially converted to Judaism and since then has spent considerable time in Israel. He considers himself anti-Zionist, which puts him at odds with S’s parents who both over-the-top Zionists.

With S’s parents, did you say? I did. He met them recently. Although introduced as a friend, S’s mother said to her, very slyly, ‘this is your fellow-traveler friend that you went to Jerusalem with last year?”

Exactly.

N would have you believe he is a comrade-in-arms with the working class. Perhaps, he was growing up, but not now. He lives in a rooftop penthouse in downtown Los Angeles, in the Rampart District, which if you know about such places, is well known as ground zero for corrupt LA sheriff’s deputies. I once wrote a story about a deputy nearly killed by his fellows, literally run down on his motorcycle by deputies in cars, because as an under cover agent in the department he had found some dirty dealings.

Which has nothing to do with N, although I find it vaguely ironic that he is at once comrade and constable. He lives in a rotten neighborhood, but in a penthouse. He says he doesn’t like cops but consults for some law enforcement agencies. He’s from the working class but he’s beginning to cool on Obama because of the new tax rates (From 33% to 36% for those making more than $250,000 a year).

At one point I asked him about Obama’s position on directing the American economy, and culture, away from growth and spending toward saving and investment. “Well, you see this is where I don’t know. I’m just over this threshold and I’m a little worried. I don’t think you should be taxed to death.”

This from a man who had said earlier that he was to the left of Obama and if forced to choose between being subservient to big business or big government would side with big government. All this said, I liked the man, and much I always assume women pick lovers who are much different than their husbands I found him very much like her husband, only younger and more forceful.

But I had to laugh when the question of S’s other lover came up. Call him Y, a 20-something, prize winning short story writer. In fact, S doesn’t like his writing but is attracted to his lack of sexual experience.

“That sniveling little slave,” said N. “No talent whatsoever. I just don’t see it.” And there was a long silence. Which was broken when S said she wanted a penis on her 50th. She was quite serious and said she’d even looked into having an operation.

The way she said it, so longingly, as though her life would be complete — “I want my own penis”. I don’t know why but I immediately thought of a brand new, 1957 red Thunderbird floating down the Sunset Strip, at midnight, with Whiskey-a-go-go at full blast.

I ran into Arty while circling the polo fields this morning. "Arthur Strife" we call him because his last name rimes roughly with strife and life. For him the two are synonymous. There's always some calamity with his children or one of his ex-wives. He would like you to think he comes to the track to run off his frustration but really he comes to talk about it.

"Did you read the New York Times Sunday Magazine last week?" he asked.

I had not.

"You got to read it. They had an article on SeekingArrangement dot com."

I don't know what that is.

"It's a website for sugar daddy's looking for little side dish. But boy is it expensive."

So this is where you find each other.

"Correcto. And then $3,000 to $5,000 a month. And that's in a recession."

Sounds like alimony to me.

"Correcto. That was my very first thought, but then of course you can stop it at any time, although I wasn't quite clear on how that works. I mean what if the side dish wants to blackmail you with your main dish. You know what I mean?"

Uh huh, I said. And then Arty stopped running, which means he wants you to be his therapist and grant approvals.

"But see it's not just sugar daddies looking for sugar," he said.

What are the other possibilities?"

He was so glad I showed interest.

"Well, you have 'sugar daddy', 'sugar baby' (female); and 'sugar daddy' (male)." He made the quote signs each time with his chubby fingers. "But then you also have 'sugar mommy'."

What's that?

"Well that's what's interesting. It's kind of eclectic. You have your Mistress Cruella who whips the shit out of you and for that you pay, get this, are you ready for this, I couldn't believe this number... Twenty-thousand dollars... Not for a life time of abuse, not for a year of abuse, but every month. 'Are you fuckin' kidding me?' I said. And in a recession."

But Artie you're not looking for abuse are you? I thought we'd finished with that.

"Well, yes, but see here's what else there is under sugar mommy. They have women who actually want to be your mommy. And of course they don't charge as much."

How much do they charge?

"Maybe a grand a month if you don't take up too much time. More time and you pay maybe 2 grand. But even then you're actually getting something."

You mean you're getting 'mommy sex'. What is that? You recreate coming out of the womb? Something like that?

"Sure, you could get that. But I'm looking for a different kind of mommy. Sure, sex has to be there, definitely. But I'm looking for someone that you can go to for...."

Emotional stuff...

"I know this going to sound strange. But I'm just thinking of someone who knows you, you know what I mean, who can talk to you and make your lunch and make sure you've done all your errands, but in a nice way, and can pay your bills and make you a really good peanut butter and jelly sandwich and tell you jokes, reassure you if you've had a bad dream, which I'm having more and more lately, be optimistic about the economy, and then, and this really important, they remember who you were when you were growing up. I've told my wife all these things about my childhood but she doesn't remember a thing..."

But Artie, do you remember anything about her childhood?

"Absolutely, when she ran away, her first boyfriend. All that. But I'm talking about the nuances. Like when I used to go shopping for shoes with my Dad. Very important themes in my life."

I completely understand.

"So I found someone who might be able to do it."

You're kidding.

"I think I have."

When are you going to see her?

"Soon. I'm getting together all my old picture albums, books I used to read, journals, some old vinyl records, short pants I had when I was five. Did you ever see 8 1/2. that scene where he's having this fantasy of being at dinner with all of his mistresses and his wife, who is wife and mother at the same time, is managing it all." He shook his head as though to say, "idn' that the truth? "That's my fantasy," he said and ran on.

Barbara Simpson is a radio talk show host on KSFO, a San Francisco radio station that features a complete line of conservative hosts, beginning with Rush Limbaugh and ending, you could say, with Ms. Simpson and Brian Sussman, who is actually the more outrageous of the two.

The other day Ms. Simpson, who describes herself as 'the babe in the bunker', railed against the Obamas in Europe, accusing them not least of showing bad manners with the Queen of England and other heads of state. I wrote an email criticizing her criticism and raising some questions about things Ms. Simpson has written. Here's part of what I wrote...

But do you ever question what you're doing or what the effect is? It was particularly troubling to read this, especially in the context of other things you've said and written (about President Obama)....

"In his political ivory tower he cannot see that by taking
American independence and love of freedom for granted,
he's sowing the seeds of a revolution against him and
his politics.

"Someone, somewhere, told him he was untouchable.

"That someone was wrong."

That sounds vaguely threatening. And again, political views aside, inappropriate. Why? Because you give comfort and encouragement to people of slim mind and scruple. I'm not for the fairness doctrine, but when you say these things and write these things, with no sense of how they become part of the steroid driving people these days,
then I'm beginning to think it is time to shut off the spigot.

Ms. Simpson answered, in part, by asking... "you're just full of questions. i have just one: why do you listen?"

I responded (Sunday, April 5).

Barbara,

Here's an AP portrait of Richard Poplawski who shot and killed three police officers yesterday....

— 23 years old, caucasian.

— Feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon."

— had an Internet talk show but that wasn't successful.

— had an AK-47 rifle and several powerful handguns, including a .357 Magnum.

— had been laid off from his job at a glass factory earlier this year.

— had been upset about losing his job.

— lived in a neighborhood of well-kept single-family houses and manicured lawns is home to many police officers, firefighters, paramedics and other city workers.

Here's what little is known about Jiverly Wong....

— often mocked for his inability to speak English, was taking language classes at the association until dropping out in the first week of March.

— slipped into despair after recently losing his job at a local factory.

Here's the unemployment rate in California...

— 10.1% in January 2009; will march upward until at least the end of the year, economists predicted (March 9).

Here's an excerpt from an October 1991 New York Times article about mass murders in the U.S....

Dr. Fox, who defines mass murder as the killing of four or more people, said there were now an average of two mass murders a month in this country. Most are in Texas, California and Florida, heavily populated states with a large influx of migrants searching for new jobs or families after disappointments or frustrations elsewhere.

It is this kind of unhappy, angry people, almost always middle-aged white men in their 30's or 40's, who are most likely to become mass murderers, said Dr. Fox, the dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern and a co-author of "Mass Murder," (Plenum Publishing, 1985) widely considered the most authoritative study of this type of crime.

Typically mass murderers are men with no previous criminal record or history of mental illness, said Dr. Marvin E. Wolfgang, professor of criminology and law at the University of Pennsylvania, and their killings "are not really planned."

Like Mr. Hennard, they may be rude to their neighbors and have occasional outbursts that frighten people, but that is true of thousands of people around the country and offers no clue that they will become mass murderers, added Dr. Fox.

"What is really striking is our complete inability to predict this kind of violence," said Deborah Denno, a criminologist and an associate professor of law at Fordham University.

What seems to happen with men who become mass murderers, Dr. Fox said, is that after a prolonged period of being lonely, frustrated and filled with rage, "There is some precipitating event, often a catastrophe in their lives," which drives them over the edge. It may be getting divorced or losing their jobs, Dr. Fox said.

Here are my questions to you?

Forget Jiverly Wong for a moment, since I would guess you don't have a high percentage of immigrants listening to KSFO. Particularly those that have recently arrived and don't speak English well. I hope I'm right. Pray to Mary, mother of God, if I'm not. But how many of your listeners fit the profile of Richard Poplawski? And how many of those that fit the profile are close to a tipping point? And how many of those close to a tipping point get fed their mistrust and hatred from you, in large measure or small? Or any of the other people on 'hate radio'? And then put aside killings, how many domestic violence cases do you suppose go unreported that could be attributed to anger fanned by your program? How many women have been slapped or humiliated, or punched or God knows what, because of the emotions you keep on simmer? How many times is the proximate cause of domestic violence something people have heard on these shows?

Which leads to the question, what responsibility do you have to this community? You might say, 'well, we are the government in exile.' 'We're the loyal opposition.' But you're certainly not in the same league as say, George Will or William F. Buckley, who kept and keep a high standard of discourse. Or what about Marc Ambinder? Your intention is not to have a thoughtful, reasoned discussion. Your intention is not to help conservatives join in a genuine public dialogue... The intention is to accentuate differences, to rile up, to make money on people's anger and their baser instincts. The things that Poplawski told his friends were all things you hear on your show, they're ideas you've written about yourself. You give encouragement and license to these people.... You endorse their fear.

And then to throw gasoline on the fire — you oppose gun control. That's the real madness. Tell that to the wives and children of the seven police officers killed in the last two weeks in this country. What possible justification is there for anyone to own an AK-47?

And you don't deny these things.....

You said that you were ashamed and embarrassed by the Obamas in Europe, for their lack of manners. Which I found very amusing since they have come to represent the best of America — the smart, urbane, friendly, and confident people that we can be. People with "no side" as they say in the South. And people all over the world are responding. As opposed to the fearful, sneering, arrogant stupidity that became America's brand under W. Now, you can feel great about being an America again. Now, we're back in the driver's seat.

And then as you kept going on and on all I could think was, 'but you're so far off the mark; the truth is, you should be deeply ashamed and embarrassed for yourself." But then how could you? You don't have that kind of self-knowledge. It doesn't occur to you that you need to take responsibility for these things you're saying and that your friends and colleagues are saying.....

But how are you going to feel, how are any of you going to feel at KSFO, if some local Poplawski goes nuts?

Finally, an answer to your question? Why do I listen? If it's all so shameful, why do I listen? It's a good question and the answer is evolving. I began listening originally out of curiosity. Like watching the fat lady or some misshapened poor bastard at the county fair. More than that, the expression of hatred is compelling. Hitler knew that. The radio priest of the Great Depression, Fr. Charles Coughlin, knew that. You know that. And that you know and still do it is compelling. I suppose it's the intellectual equivalent of watching fake wrestling. But then you wonder, the audience may not always know the difference between entertainment and sincere political belief, but does the talk show host know?

Rush Limbaugh used to know the difference, but now he's lost his humor and meshed the two together. His imitators have done the same because the economic model is so successful.

In any case, now I've begun listening in earnest. Because it's time to challenge what you're doing. Think of it as a backlash to the backlash. And it's not about free speech anymore. That argument is void. It's about falsely shouting 'fire' in a crowded movie theater. It's the equivalent to drunk driving or gross negligence, or as I'm afraid we're going to find out one of these days, manslaughter. I can even see a day where in civil court a talk show host might be sued for promoting untruths or half-truths leading to a death. Or deaths.

The Fair Claire

Claire
Originally uploaded by macnamband

Marina & Claire

Marina & Claire
Originally uploaded by macnamband

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.

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?

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....

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....

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.

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.

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."

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.

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)

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.

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!

Head shot

Head shot
Originally uploaded by macnamband

Photo by Jacobovitz (http://jacobovitz.smugmug.com/)

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.

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....