Bloody Brilliant

Another month winds down, neither furious lion nor lovable lamb, just one long, intermittent drizzle under an ever-brightening sky, the scent of lilacs on the office walk, the greasy slide of intrepid earthworms underfoot. Spring is a process. We have a goodly ways to go, but at least there is no turning back now. The sensible laws of physics are subverted: as the daylight reaches further into the evening, each day seems shorter than the previous, simply because the things that delight always seem to end sooner than the things that oppress. By my calculations, the month of March will have lasted a little longer than three-and-a-half days, depending on how you spent St. Pat’s Day, and/or how your NCAA tournament bracket fared through the usual upsets and heroics. I am reminded by one of my faithful readers, who number well into the teen, that I’ve written little here this month. I have my excuses to be sure, but none of them withstand even my own charitable scrutiny. Chagrined, I blog. Think of me as an earthworm, and tread carefully. 

This morning’s theme is credulity. It’s on my mind, and likely yours, plunged as we’ve been so far this past cussed decade and then some into a state of perpetual political campaigning, and thus a condition of constant, too often jaw-dropping, disbelief. From Weapons of Mass Distraction to bloated grand jury outfielders; from screeching she-devil Tweets to the sorry, sordid specter of Wall Street; from the once-stunning horrors of Gitmo to the ho-hum slaughters of the Stryker Brigade, we are plunged into what seems to be a Century of Deceit—perhaps an inevitable stage in a culture with a long, uneasy relationship with the truth. Whereas some of we gray hairs can recall a time when bald-faced fabrications from military and political leaders raised an indignant outcry, I’ve resigned myself to the reality that, at least in the realm of public officials, high-paid entertainers and all forms of media, from the networks to the networked, we nowadays expect, indeed even demand, to be lied to. Imagine for a moment that you have turned on some sort of local or (especially) national news—the radio, the TV, your favorite website. Imagine believing, with a willing absence of serious reservations, what you read, see or hear there. It is as easy to imagine a stroll across the surface of Neptune. And as likely to happen to you, or to me, our lifetimes. 

This week may mark the turn of a calendar page, but let’s face up to it: every day is April Fool’s Day, anymore. The notion of the day itself seems anachronistic, as though we still need to set aside a date for prank playing and truth-twisting. It’s like celebrating Take a Bath Day, or Drive to Work Day: it might have made cultural sense at one time, but Foolery of all sorts has become our daily meat and drink, and the joke is always on us. 

In 1980 and ’81 I had occasion, as elsewhere mentioned in these entries, to spend some quiet months near and frequently in a small fishing village on the west coast of Ireland. The place was a short walk from the Atlantic shore, which on the West coast of Clare is generally a rough and rocky place, suited much more to mussel beds than to sun bathers. Squalls occur hourly, the waves tend to the house-tall and growly persuasion, and the salt spray on even a relatively calm day can strip a three-day beard down to baby soft and tender if the wind is blowing stiff enough. Irish weather being as predictable as, well, Irish weather, the year of my residence enjoyed a stretch of strange, summer-like conditions toward the end of March and then some. Temperatures soared into the 60s, reportedly topping seventy on the few brief strands of actual sand, just south of the Cliffs of Moher, famous in tourist literature as a spot for pictures and picnics, and among Irish musicians for a double jig of the same name. 

Have you ever been in a famously dark and gray place when the sun makes a rare but strong appearance? It’s not unlike a lion’s cage when the keeper tosses in a few live rabbits. Discipline takes a backseat. Primal urges nudge polite conventions aside. In the lion’s cage, it’s a brief, furry blood bath followed by burps and a few tawny naps. In the west of Ireland the reaction is a sight uglier: Schools let out at noontime. Shops and offices close. Taverns open early and risk fines by staying open late. Thin, short and revealing clothes make their way out of deep mothballs, in most cases to no advantage whatever on the part of their wearers. Pork-fed flesh blooms in the little towns like pale, pink fungus, here waddling into a grocer’s, there idly pillowed on a bus stop bench. Disturbingly tiny men and woman of uncertain age, though surely older even than the dank, black stones, appear at the tumbledown doorways of thatched stone hovels one had heretofore taken as abandoned livestock sheds. They wear filthy gray tatters and tall navvy boots, men and women both. All that tells them apart are the dark, frayed shawls of the one versus the flat caps and high-cheekbone whiskers of the other, like weird, bottom sets of eyebrows, wisps of simian flair on faces as knotty as the bark of the single, wind-battered tree in the sorry yard, its leaves spare and shivery, dropping like waning years onto the barren dirt. The poor souls stare at the bright, foreign orb in the unfamiliar blue, cross themselves and shuffle back indoors, slamming thick wooden doors behind them. Sometimes God himself plays tricks.

The early 1980s. I try to rate, or even to recall them, in terms of credulity. It’s hard to remember much about the geopolitical situation, being as I was a young man intent on little besides fiddle music, Guinness and Irish lasses, none of whom (the lasses I mean) had the remotest interest in me. So I was intent on music and Guinness, then, but certainly not foreign affairs—at least not until poor Jimmy Carter tried to send a Special Forces team into Iran to rescue the hostages taken after the end of the Shah. I recall sitting at a bar somewhere in Clare in January 1981 and glancing at a grizzled farmer three stools away reading the Irish Times half-page photo with caption: “Carter Defeated in Iran,” showing a tearful President, his head half-buried in his hand, fresh with the news of the rescue debacle. (Can you believe that we once had a president who was strong enough to weep publicly? After Jimmy we had chuckling Ronnie, then twitchy George the First, and don’t forget squeaky Bill; then oh if only we could forget smirking Boy George, and now we seem to have blinking Barack. It’s difficult to imagine any of them reacting to anything out of unbridled emotion, at least not without checking first with their PR staffs.) The developments in the mid-East got my attention principally because I was still draftable, having missed the Vietnam call-up by a matter of months but still vulnerable, contemplating a shift in my ex-pat status to that of illegal alien. News, however, was hard to come by on the west coast of Ireland. This was long before the Internet—shoot, Bill Gates was still programming DOS in a basement someplace—and international newspapers weren’t available short of a half-day hitchhike to Galway or Cork. The Times would have to suffice, and to say of this venerable publication that it tended (and for all I know tends still) to rate the selling power of a bold-faced headline over the prosaic necessity of fact-checked reporting is like saying that Rush Limbaugh sort of likes to hear his own voice. (The eruption of Mt. St. Helen’s, some four months later, was announced by a headline proclaiming that the Northwest U.S. had been destroyed, with an accompanying graphic showing the impact from BC to Northern California to practically the Mississippi. I milked the opportunity for sympathy pints for a couple of hours before I felt compelled to suggest that some exaggeration might be at play, thereby ruining a perfect Irish evening of alcoholic commiseration and Total Tragedy Immersion. Youth can be so cruel.) 


It’s perversely gratifying to recognize, thirty years down the road from Clare, that I have my fingers pressed as firmly now as I did them to the pulse of popular culture and opinion. In Loughrea, County Galway, searching for a reclusive fiddle legend (whose wife greeted me, when I finally found his cottage, as though I was a leprous tax collector with the plague), I learned in a pub for the first time that Ronald Reagan was running for the Presidency. The Galway drinkers were understandably alarmed, but I was quick to assure them that in America we often have non-serious candidates announce a run for public office solely on the basis of their popularity and name recognition, and the mere fact that they are wealthy enough to toss their hat into the ring, but that these forays—including Reagan’s—were not serious candidacies, but merely the whims of the bored and wealthy. Ronald, I assured them, was a “B” movie actor who’d been a celebrity governor, but not even the crackpot far right would suggest that he be seriously considered for national public office. As we struggle still, three decades later, to dig ourselves out of the economic and cultural sink hole into which middle-finger Reaganomics cast us with its signature swagger, I might spend another rainy morning noting the success of my myriad other prophecies on the political front. But I doubt I could stomach the exercise. All I can say in my Galway defense is hey, I was young. Optimistic. Memories of Watergate were fresh. I still thought things could change.

I suppose it was my sunny disposition that took me to the beach near the Cliffs one of those rare warm spring mornings. I had a book with me, as I always did back then and generally do now. I suspect it was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which I’d checked out of the Lisdoonvarna Library shortly after Christmas but not yet returned, determined as I was to read it, as Mann himself suggested (presumably in jest), at least a couple of times back-to-back in order to glean its essence completely, and also because the Lisdoonvarna Library was approximately the size of the health food section of your average American Mini-Mart. There just weren’t an awful lot of choices. I can’t remember if I made it all the way through the book twice, but at the least the one reading stuck with me more than a lot of other things I spent time on that year—countless reels and jigs, for instance, or even my own sporadic Irish journals, which I lit on fire, one page at a time, in my small coal stove the night before I returned to America, determined to let my Clare memories age with me, and not be fixed artificially in the thin, mottled amber of a young man’s myopic perspective. (Yes of course I have regretted this, a thousand times at least.) I remember dear Hans Castorp, and his seven years at theBerghof , engaged almost accidentally in his peculiar, insular coming-of-age at a tuberculosis sanatorium, the patients of which conveniently represented the various passions, peeves and persuasions of pre-WWI Europe. I recall being slowed down, though not completely stymied, by its long passages in French, which I had not studied since high school, but which oddly came back to me in bursts just sufficient to comprehend the gist of endless conversations between Hans and the long-suffering Madame Chauchat. And I have a pretty clear memory of reflecting on how my year among the bogs might serve as the basis of a sort of down-market, late 20th century kunstlerroman, an artist’s coming-of-age novel, set on my own odd Magic Mountain high above the gray-green Atlantic, isolated as I was from familiar society and cast not among a privileged parlor room of ailing savants but in the company of fishermen, barkeeps, turf-diggers, dairy farmers, greyhound racers and itinerant fiddler players. (Thankfully this reflection never matured into an actual writing project.) I enjoyed such musings sprawled on the coarse sands of a Doolin beach, my back propped against a rock, book in hand, a couple of apples and a block of yellow cheese in my knapsack alongside a half-loaf of brown soda bread, which I had learned as a survival skill to make, along with a decent pot of tea, within days of my arrival in the country months before. I had food, I had Hans, I had the sun and salt spray. There were two pubs within a mile’s walk where I was no stranger. I was twenty-four, with a lifetime ahead of me. I was a happy guy.

Except that I was troubled. I had a radio back in my “caravan,” an elegant word for my singularly inelegant dwelling, a single-wide trailer parked in a driveway next to my landlady’s house about five miles from the beach. I’d brought the radio from the States, unsure whether I would find any use for it, and was pleased to find that I got at least the national station, Radio Eirann, loud and clear, along with fleeting, polyglot snatches from near and far, dependent on the time of day, the direction of the prevailing winds and ye gods knows what else. There was at the time a great deal of traditional Irish music available on the station, much of whose broadcasting was in Irish, a language that was all but dead at the time, living then (and now, I expect) mostly among revivalists and romantic die-hards in mostly remote rural areas deemed by the Irish government to constitute the “Gaeltacht.” I had come to the country determined to learn its native tongue, a quest I abandoned after perhaps three days of intensive study, when I recognized the utter pointlessness of the endeavor—even more pointless, it seemed to me then and does still, than stuffing my young head full of reels and jigs, which in my rough, palsied renditions over the years have offered at least fat targets of derision, if not actual entertainment, among fellow aficionados. I was pleased to learn that many of Radio Eirann’s broadcasts were in English—the ones, I expect, that they actually expected people might listen to. Among them were the usual hodge-podge of talk, call-in and panel shows, not appreciably different in substance or staging than those I might have heard at the time back in Ohio, my last U.S. residence before moving abroad. Experts debated experts, smarmy hosts asked loaded questions, regular folk called to commend, condemn and contradict whoever was sitting in the hot seat du jour. Devoid as this sparring was of any taint of the predictable Ds v. Rs dynamics I’d left behind me in Buckeye land, it was novel enough to me to serve as acceptable background entertainment while I munched my standard breakfast of rashers and boiled eggs.

This morning, though, my little radio had commanded my full attention. A panel of perhaps a half-dozen people was being interviewed by an excitable host regarding a recent beach find, reported at no great distance from where I was planning to spend my lazy day, of a dead, adult mermaid. Yeah, you read it write: a mythical girl with a tail. I sat at my little table on one of those trailer-type booth seats, letting my tea steep, nibbling a bread crust, watching the quiet street and the patchy fields beyond, boxed by fences built of heavy stones, slick with the winter’s rotted moss. The sky, unusually, was a deep, cobalt infinity, rather than the usual low ceiling of tomorrow’s filthy puddles. An old man in tweed pedaled by on a bicycle that probably had rusted long before Winston Churchill smoked his first stogie. He was followed uncertainly by a three-legged mutt who lived in the town, whose name, if he had one, I never heard anyone say. I looked at my radio. They were still talking about the discovery. There weren’t a lot of the sort of details one would expect: where it (she?) was found and by whom, how the locals were reacting, what the international scientific community had to say. I found myself assuming that these subjects must have been covered earlier, before I’d flipped the station on. The speakers were both sensationalistic and oddly matter-of-fact. They mentioned famous mermaid sightings in literature both classical and modern. They spoke of the number of species yet undiscovered in the ocean’s black depths. They mused that this might be a specimen washed by errant tides from some distant, warmer clime, then contradicted this hypothesis by remarking on how fresh and intact was the creature’s skin, according to first-hand observation, apparently by one of the panelists themselves. This remark led, as both my tea and I grew cold, to a light-hearted, speculative discussion about the potential health and beauty products that might be derived from the scaly, oily flesh of a mammalian/piscatorial creature. One of the speakers, has it happened, was a dermatologist. The others were zoologists, biologists and a British anthropologist with the slightest of stutters, who shared a few funny anecdotes about mermaid encounters in the folktales of coastal peoples from the Arctic to Cape Horn. Someone mentioned the Yeti. The word “remarkable” was overused. An intermission was announced. The next broadcaster, a newsman, spoke Irish. I downed a cup of cold tea, put the rest of my breakfast in my bag and set off for the beach.

And now I sat, nothing between me and the coast of Newfoundland except an ocean filled with—well, what? I knew there were weird damned things down there. A merchant sailor friend had described the sighting of a dead whale shark in the Pacific, a thing the size of a couple of barges end-to-end that could be smelled across five nautical miles. I’d read about the colorless, sightless creatures of the deepest volcanic rifts, and of their bug-eyed, phosphorescent cousins, looking like something drawn by a Disney animator on an opium bender. I knew that there were stingrays and giant squid and octopuses with arms twice the length of a living room. I knew that there were critters with sharp teeth, with poisonous barbs, with ink-shooting jets that blackened the water and stung the eyes of predators. I knew that legends abounded of sea dragons and serpents, even in lakes far from Loch Ness. I hurt my head in the sun, straining to remember every snippet of detail I’d gathered from the radio, particularly before the reality of their topic had sunk in fully. They had not mentioned, after all, exactly what the thing looked like. Did it have a humanoid, if not an actual human, torso? Luxuriant hair as well as scales? Smooth, naked flesh above the waist? Had any more been sighted nearby?

That’s when I did it. I’m haunted still by my actions. I was quite alone, you understand, on this stretch of strand. A couple of day-fishing boats were barely visible on the horizon. To my right I could just make out the distant Aran Islands, a bit blurred in a mid-day haze rising off the still waters. No one was there to see me as I furtively brought a flat hand to my brow, shielding my eyes as I slowly, almost reluctantly, scanned the horizon. I was just looking, I told myself, at the ocean; not for anything. Just, you know, looking. TheMountain lay splayed on the sand by my pack. My apple and cheese were forgotten. There was no sense trying to fool myself. Young though that former self may seem to me now, I was, plainly and simply at the time a grown man looking for mermaids. No I’m not no I’m not no I’m not I’m just looking at the water. No, I was looking for mermaids. Or perhaps a mermaid. I didn’t know what the hell the radio mermaid looked like, so I couldn’t have described to anyone exactly what I was seeking. Reason and logic tied themselves into a tight knot, deep in my skull, kind of toward the back, and smugly went on strike as I tortured what few snippets I’d gleaned from the broadcast to come up with an explanation I could tolerate without ripping off my clothes and running naked and screaming into the waves, never to return. 

Perhaps some new, strange, mermaid-looking creature indeed had washed ashore. Perhaps the ravages of wind and waves had transformed something common—or even mutant—into such a startling facsimile of a mythical fin-gal that it had been dubbed accordingly and the term already had stuck; a little etymological hand-stand that had occurred while I was up on the Mountain with Hans, seeing his generation symbolically through the fictional eyes of dead strangers speaking foreign tongues, instead of down in the town where I might have caught some gossip, something on the street or in a smoky public house.. Perhaps a couple of millennia of folklore had its basis on something a man could find stuck in the wet rocks on an Irish coastline. Perhaps its scales really could be used for—finally, I stopped myself. The sun can punish a man darn quick if he’s not used to its rays. I had been reading books since I was four years old. I’d excelled at schools and filled a shoebox with good report cards and achievement badges. I’d graduated from a hoity-toity college and won a prestigious fellowship. And I was sitting on the ground looking out at a calm gray ocean in hopes of seeing a mermaid. I couldn’t conjure an appropriate reaction in the local vernacular, but an old Ohio expression came all too readily to mind: Fuckin’ A. Literally this means nothing other than an expression of recognition, generally of the completely befuddled or at least severely uncomprehending variety, so it seemed perfect for the moment. Unbidden, I then imagined that an Irish neighbor might say, of a man on the beach keeping out a weather eye for mermaids, that he was balmy. A Clare man of a certain class—the one I spent most of my time in—would add a modifier: Fuckin’ balmy. An inner voice then addressed me clearly: Fuckin’ A, you’re fuckin’ balmy. All right, then. Balmy I must be. I gathered my things and checked my pocket watch. The village pubs were open. I visited them each, at length, in turn.

Of course I didn’t forget the incident. Nor did I mention it aloud. That night I spun the radio dial back and forth by the light of a ten-pence candle, seeking some other word, some reference or story or allusion to the discovery the panel had addressed. Nothing. I slept uneasily, troubled in my dreams that I did not know how to say “mermaid” to Madame Chauchat in French. (C’est la sirene. Silly moi.) The next morning I was up early with the kettle on the boil and the radio leaching the life from a fresh set of batteries. All the programming was in Irish, men’s and women’s voices, even an interview with a young, lilting lass. She could have been a mermaid herself, for all I could tell. I kicked myself for abandoning my studies of the language. I was confused and alone.

Some weeks passed. The sun returned to the Mediterranean, or wherever it lives. (We’ve never been close.) Our Irish rains returned. My confusion abated some, or more likely was crowded out by some competing confusion; some disturbing letter from home, or more bad news about Iran, or the “B” part of some devilish jig I’d heard from Tommy Peoples on his last trip through town. On Easter Sunday night, a couple of weeks later, I went to my local pub, less for the music that night than simply for a pint and some company, whatever language it was speaking. With the rigors of Holy Week behind them the crowd was loud and feisty. The dull, foundational roar of normal pub chatter was interrupted here by the bark of mean laughter, there by a heart-felt oath. There were a couple of scuffles, in which young lads were separated by older mates. I sat along the wall at a long table, chatting idly to Noel, a local fellow I knew, the man who drove the daily bus to Shannon airport and back. He was a fiend for crossword puzzles, and likely was working one that evening, digging an elbow into me companionably from time to time, muttering a clue through his thick red beard; something academic he thought I might know, having pegged me early on as one of the town’s few constant readers besides himself, Yank though I was. Between nudges I found myself eavesdropping on two young women on the other side of the table, a few places away. They were exactly the sort of young Irish lasses who moved my imagination but seldom my lips, as I was desperately shy and painfully aware that my status as an American was, even back then, an invisible but daunting hurdle to overcome before most folks would consent to take me or my other countrymen seriously in a social situation. I’d lived in my caravan long enough to have cleared the barrier with most of the town people, but these were city girls—Ennis, or even Galway—and to them, without a bunch of explanation, I was just another early spring tourist who butchered their language like the guys they watched on M*A*S*H. But they were pleasing to look at, and their accents were lovely, and so I snuck both looks and listens while Noel muttered along. I heard something like this:

You heard the show on Radio Eirann? The one the first of April?

I did surely. I laughed ‘til I nearly had to go.

I heard they got calls. People who took it for real.

No! They can’t! Oh Jesus!

Hundreds of them. From all over.

Not just jokers themselves then? People actually thought?

I heard it last week. They played some of the calls. That was rather mean I thought.

I think its brilliant. Can you imagine it? People phoning in?

The prettier of the two, a dark-haired Daughter of Erin with a constellation of freckles across her nose simply pleading to be counted by a fiddler’s finger tip, caught me looking their direction. In a flash I realized that she was no stranger, but the girl who worked the chip stand in the town square I’d been to several times in the fall before it had closed up, even on weekends, for the spring. I’d heard it would reopen after Easter. She must have returned from wherever she wintered to work there. She smiled at me in half-recognition, which still was a far site better from the look I’d expected.

You heard it, then she said.

I shrugged, feigning incomprehension.

The April Fool show? On the national radio yet? About the mermaids?

The way she said “mermaid” in her west Clare brogue made me wish instantly that she was one, and that I was a fisherman, and that I had a little thatched cottage in a cove where she and I… But I simply shook my head, both to clear it and to boldface lie to her . I had no other plausible option.

No, I wish I had. I just heard about it.

Bloody brilliant, she said.

I gave up a long time ago making excuses for myself. As magical as life was that year on the Emerald Isle, I guess I was always ready for more. Or maybe I was just trying to prolong some childhood faith in the improbable-but-not-absolutely-theoretically-uncategorically-impossible-in-all-of-its-manifestations; the same desperate clinging that had me defending my Santa Claus belief well beyond the age where such devotion makes one an obvious target for slings and arrows, and not just metaphorically. Did I believe? I still can’t say for sure. Maybe for a minute. Did I want to? Hell, yes. Still do.

It’s a genetic trait, I guess. When my second son Peter was quite young, almost three I’ll guess, still in a car seat behind me, we drove once to drop his older brother Colin off at school. As we cruised home on North Seattle’s residential streets, a man jogged by pushing a baby-stroller made for triplets, or at least for three small babies. The stroller was empty, as Dad obviously had just delivered his kids to daycare and was getting his daily run in on the trip. Peter gazed in wonder as we passed.

What’s that? he asked.

It looks like a stroller for triplets.

What are triplets?

Well, you know what twins are, right?

Yeah.

Well, triplets are like twins, only…

He interrupted me, his eyes wide with wonder.

They’re invisible? he asked.

I thought for a moment.

Exactly, I said. 

And we were together for an instant, on that sunny Clare beach, for a moment I’ll cherish forever.

Last Monday I went to the office supply store. I needed a component for our home wireless system. The details not only are not important, but recalling them just might make me weep like Jimmy Carter. [It’s been that sort of week, with respect to Man (me) versus Machine (all things digital)] Suffice it to say that I was and am relatively clueless regarding the technology I was attempting to upgrade, so I swallowed my foolish male old-guy pride and approached one of the gangly, pierced, tire-eyed, socially maladjusted teenagers who staff such places. I explained my dilemma. He nodded with a sagacity that belied his pimply years. He explained that, when I first had “gone wireless” (a phrase he pronounced with the slightest hiccup, the way you or I might say to another adult, “when you finally learned to control your bladder”)—anyway, apparently I had purchased, you know, THIS generation of the appropriate gizmo, though even THAT generation had been available, albeit at quite a price bump, at the time. But now, due to bandwidth and package size (pardon me, fart face?) and countless other restrictions he clearly despaired of explaining to me, it was clear that THE OTHER generation, the newest one of course, was the only system that would meet my needs. It came in five models, from Fairly Cheap to Fuck That Noise. I landed squarely in the middle, and headed for the parking lot with my purchase in a flimsy plastic bag.

In the middle of the lot I stopped. What mealy-mouthed bullshit had he just fed to me? And why had I swallowed it like caviar, and accepted even more? (By which I refer to the optional “buyer’s protection plan,” codified in a six-page brochure to which banana-breath stapled my receipt, and which, thirty-six scant hours later, I could not locate if I knew it contained the Secret to Eternal Life.) 

For a second—a mere long, weary second—I was back on the beach again. But there were no mermaids this time. No three-year old son. No strollers. No triplets. There was not even Hans Castorp to remind me that as gullible as I may be—no, as credulous—a much nicer word—I was not, at least for the moment, tubercular. There was just me and the long, strangely sticky shadow of the salesman. I thought then, more briefly still, of the seemingly awe-struck radio host on that April Fool’s talk show so long ago. And I wondered what if —just what if—he’d believed in mermaids, too?

All together now (regular readers have practice):

Whan that Aprille with its shoures soote…

Happy Real Spring. You can believe in it. Trust me.

In the Backwash of Fennario

Since last I blogged the world did not end as predicted. (Camping down thirty-love.) While I was on the road and sick in bed my younger son toured the U.S. and Canada with a rock band, my elder son returned from Michigan to Seattle to be a summer law clerk, Donald Trump was publically humiliated so many times that his hair went to live with Ivana, Sarah Palin moved to Arizona where hopefully she will campaign successfully for secession, several popular uprisings in the Mideast were brutally repressed by the usual subjects, Osama Bin Ladin was relocated from a tony suburb of Abottabad to a pestilent ghetto in Hades (where he is apartment-hunting for Ratko Mladic, who will join him soon), non-apocalyptic but nonetheless nasty weather patterns destroyed many flat parts of North America, my newly-planted vegetable garden entered that long nightmare of sodden stasis we Northwesterners know as “spring,” the Mariners improbably stumbled their way to a .500+ record and an Australian college student discovered the disposition of the mysterious “missing mass” of the universe, which I had assumed was in my basement under the corner table with the darkroom stuff. 


Other things doubtless happened too while I was virtually away, but it's been a funny couple of months in my world. April, I dimly recall, was a travel whirl. I spent not one weekend in Seattle, though I did manage visits to Philadelphia, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Whidbey Island and someplace else I’m forgetting. May has been a month of illness—an allergy-inspired cold, bronchitis, antibiotics, insomnia, fever and a persistent cough that lingers still. I look forward to a healthier June. 


Let’s talk about Los Angeles. Growing up in Ohio, which is or is not Appalachia, the Rust Belt or the Midwest depending on which direction you’re facing when you’re there, I imagined Los Angeles to be a synthetically decaying, exotically corrupt, coastally distant incarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah—a place where people with impossibly white teeth lived frivolous, sinful lives under an interminable sun so painful to their drug-dilated irises that they were required to wear sunglasses even while indoors having sex in the dark. While I eventually discovered that my estimation was indeed quite accurate, I have learned since that there are bad things, too, about L.A. I passed through briefly in my mid-twenties, but all I remember about the city is leaving with the distinct impression that I hadn’t really seen it. Years later my elder son attended college at Loyola Marymount, just about the same time that I conceived the bone-headed notion of writing a novel set in the Los Angeles of the 1930s. So I spent a fair chunk of time there over a several year span, researching, exploring, eating and sitting in traffic, and I came to develop a genuine fondness for the place, not at all as an insider but rather as a semi-regular oddball tourist with a pocketful of quirky agendas. I haven’t visited Disneyland or Universal Studios, haven’t taken in a Lakers game or seen the Dodgers play, haven’t spied on the houses of movie stars or gorged on fried chicken at Knott’s Berry Farm. But they practically know me at the La Brea Tar Pits, I’ve fed pints of blood to the outsized mosquitos of the Ballona Wetlands and I’ve left more shoe leather on the sidewalks of the “historic downtown” area than most city residents I know. Oh, and I tend to frequent Venice Beach—a guilty pleasure over which I feel no guilt. While my great-grandchildren may experience the sci-fi (to me) thrills of commercial space travel, I expect to live out my life within the Earth’s thinning atmosphere. So I seldom pass up an opportunity to observe alien life forms. Certain of the Venice regulars defy taxonomy. I cannot resist them.


I visit the Rancho La Brea Pits in order to stand face-to-face with Time. I know, I know, a quick visit to the mirror ought to suffice, but I can hardly grant big “T” capitalization to the puny temporal passage that has turned my hair the color of Victorian davenport stuffing and added Venerable Pounds of Wisdom to my youthful stick-figure frame. My transformation reflects the passage not of Time, but of mere years. The tar pits are a much longer story: 30,000 years, more or less, those being Pleistocene years, which while no longer or shorter than stand-at-the-mirror years, collectively stood for the last of four of the great Ice Ages of that period. The tar—la brea—is just that; asphaltum, heavy oil that rose to the surface ten thousands of years ago and formed sticky pools that filled with leaves, dirt and puddles; inviting oases in the forests. In would walk critters (indeed they still do, where the pits are open)—birds, rodents, sloths, mastodons—that then would get stuck in the underlying goo. Some fought their way out. The less fortunate attracted predators—bears, lions, sabre-tooth cats and so on—and they too would become entrapped. For millennia their bones have filled the hardened asphaltum beneath the site, smack in the middle of L.A.’s Miracle Mile. Holes dug during early excavations in the first years of the last century have filled up with the oozy stuff, as well as bubbling methane and stinky dark water. The tar seeps out of the ground randomly, so landscapers at the George C. Page Museum place orange warning cones where it accumulates enough to ruin a pair of tourist’s shoes, or a field-trip preschooler’s face. They keep the grass mowed short.


Paleontologists have pulled more than a million bones out of the La Brea. That’s a lot of critters. The most common large mammal excavated has been the Dire Wolf. If there is a better name for the Creature with Teeth You Don’t Want to Meet at Midnight, I don’t want to hear it. As large as they are in our imaginations, informed or not by the eponymous poker player of the over-performed Grateful Dead song, they really weren’t a heck of a lot bigger than a modern gray wolf. Okay, a little bigger. But more than being large, they were dire. It’s a word we don’t use lightly, reserved generally for circumstances, warnings, poverty and straits, but nothing else that chews its food and bears its young alive. (Excepting Newt Gingrich. There’s a dire piece of effing work if ever there was one. But I digress.) 


There are many thousands of Dire Wolf skeletons in the Rancho La Brea pits. In the Museum stands a long wall lined floor-to ceiling with glass cases in which are displayed a fraction of the Dire skulls dug out of the tar. Rows upon rows of dead wolves grinning (direly) at sticky-footed passersby, wondering perhaps in one collectively petrified woebegone wolf–brain what cruel whims of evolution allowed these noisy, clueless, overfed creatures to parade endlessly by while their best wolfish memories still stink like a fresh-laid driveway in a heat wave. Here on the wall, then, and in the nearby exhibits, is a rudimentary User’s Guide to Time: Millions of bones and fossils and jumbled bits of an ancient landscape somewhat cooler and leafier than the Los Angeles Valley today. Thousands of sabre-tooth cats, legions of hapless birds, armies of little twitchy whiskered things with different sorts of tails. Mastodons. Bison. Antelope. Camels. Horses. Deer. Three species of Ground Sloth. In a cubic meter of tar there might be hundreds or even thousands of bones, tumbled together like the paleontological puzzle they are, awaiting—well, nothing. They would have been frozen and forgotten below ground forever, were it not for their chance discovery and subsequent painstaking extraction, cleaning, identification and (sometimes) reassembly. The bones are a rich mahogany brown, tinted by millennia of oily submersion. The digging continues. When it is over, for whatever reason in whatever uncertain future faces the City of Angels, there will be millions more bones still left in the earth.


There’s a demographic oddity to the distribution of vertebrate species at La Brea: the remains of predators outnumber those of prey. The hard-working folks at the Page Museum speculate that this is due to the periodic congregation of carnivores responding en masse to the clamorous death struggles of each haplessly mired victim, especially the bigger creatures like bison and elk. (Think of the behavior of vultures, say, or hyenas. Or banks.) It’s estimated that the astonishing mass of fossilized fauna in the pits, Dire Wolves and all, would have required such a feeding frenzy only every ten or twenty years, in between which they continued to receive contributions of smaller birds, mice, bugs and slithery things, all tangled together like the random junk in an end table drawer. Such a frequency would comfortably account for the volume of large mammalian fossils left behind.


That’s all it took: One big party every decade or two, and now a wall of skulls to marvel at, with thousands more packed in straw somewhere in a sub-basement, as lost to memory as if they’d never come out of the ground.. That’s Time. Thirty thousand years is hardly a blink in the history of the planet, of course. A comprehensive understanding of the age of the Earth eludes me, stare as I might at mountain ranges, riverbeds and roadside stratigraphy. As much as I love all things geology I can’t quite get my brain around the movement of a glacier or the transformation of a rough rocky coast into a white sandy beach. But staring at the black La Brea pond just a few feet from Wilshire Boulevard, I begin in my own puny way to grasp what scientists mean when they talk about an Age, or even an Epoch. In my most receptive moments I can close my eyes and feel, just for an instant, a temperate breeze, and smell the rich hummus shadows under towering oaks and cedars. There is something thrashing in the woods nearby. The bewildered bellow of a startled ungulate. The sharp scent of warm-blooded fear. Bright eyes flashing in the bushes. Then the primal, bloodthirsty shriek of an elementary school teacher telling Jason to give Jessica her juice box. And presto, I’m back in the present, and it’s time for a drive out to Venice, and a plate of plantain fitters with a cold Heineken at the Mercedes Cuban Grill. It’s an excellent place to kill some time, though not, by any stretch, to kill any Time at all.


But I’m a long way now from Los Angeles. The sun beckons here on Whidbey Island. Maybe it’s really Spring now. Hell, it’s damned near June. I thnk I’ll shake off the time-zoned cobwebs of April and the misery blankets of May, and go outside and play. I'll watch where I step, though. If it feels the least bit sticky, I'm outta there.

The Worst Thing

One of the alleged benefits of growing older, along with all the marvelous new pains, odors, lapses, and funerals that punctuate one’s latter middle age, is the growing ability to take the “long view” of human foibles and follies.  I suppose there is some truth to this.  My views of children, teens and fledgling adults, for example, certainly are markedly different, having both been and raised all of the above, than they were when I was a young pup myself.   And grey hairs provide a certain leveling perspective on one’s assessment of the Big News of the Moment, whether it be economic, cultural, military, athletic, whatever. It’s not so much a matter of “been there, done that” (which always sounds to me like a four year old insisting on ALL the rides at the park) as it is a cousin of “nothing new under the sun,” (nihil novi sub sole, for our Latin readers) which the author of Ecclesiastes—maybe King Solomon, maybe not—wrote not while yawning but to illuminate his cheery theme of “all is vanity.”  It’s a perspective that rings truer as the year-pages turn, in ways both reassuring and deflating.  I may be especially prone to an air-ship view of at least modern U.S. history, spending as much time as I do (for various reasons) immersed in the literature, newspapers, magazines and ephemera of the last American century and a half.   A newspaper from the 1890s, whether a small-town rag or the New York Times, reads astonishingly similar to its offspring today, with just enough differences in language, humor and grocery prices to keep me glued to library microfilm machines far longer than my lower back would prefer.  But such immersion also has taught me, with all apologies to Edmund Burke, that whether we know history or not we still repeat it, with the unfortunate tendency to keep making the same mistakes over and over again. 

New or old, it’s the dizzy unpredictability of history in the making that gets us out of bed every day.  The order, nuance, context and resolution of events are the stuff both of the moment and of endless post-analysis, from our daily loves and losses to the vagaries of Wall Street, NATO, the American League or the mad Middle Eastern potentate du jour.   Some things, of course, are both planned and bewitchingly spontaneous, awaiting each new cast of characters to add a fresh act to narratives that are years, decades or centuries in the making.   And little in American culture is as unpredictably predictable as the Presidential campaign season, which these days runs a full eighteen months and more.  Confronting as I am the starting block of the coming race, combined with the “long view” afforded by the passage of (for me) ten preceding such seasons, I once again am presented with what has become one of my thorniest recurring adult dilemmas: How in Heaven’s Name to Avoid It.  

In other words:  Aiyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

People who genuinely enjoy the political process fill me with a mixture of wonder, admiration and mistrust, in varying proportions depending on the individual.  My father-in-law, rest his inquisitive soul, was the sort of wise, informed student of American history and government that only those born on “foreign” soil can be, in his case Budapest in the 1930s, from where, as an adolescent Jew, he was wisely spirited away with his mother to Hartford.  Pete loved all the flips and ferment of an election at any level, especially the national.  A long-time resident of suburban Alexandria, Virginia, he was a box seat booster of Life Within the Beltway.   To him no dance was more elegant or exciting than the clumsy choreography of democracy in action; every night it tried its stuff on stage yet one more time, fat thighs, clubfeet, hairy armpits and all.  It pained me not to share his enthusiasms.  (It may have pained him too, though I tried hard to play the part of a fellow fan, albeit from a cheap seat view.)   His recall of past elections, in his lifetime and before, was encyclopedic, and his passion for the minutest intrigue of whatever tomfoolery was afoot on the Hill at the moment was almost—at least in my case—contagious.

But I couldn’t go there with him, wherever “there” was.  I still can’t.  It’s a question of detachment, I think, or rather of my inability to detach my deep distaste for the unsavory realities of campaigning from the political and philosophical debates underlying the theatrics.  Curiously, this is very much a present-tense aversion.  Apart from old newspapers I’m an avid history book reader, from the Roman Empire to 20^th century America.  I can wallow delightedly in blow-by-snarky-blow accounts of past contests and calumny, giggling wide-eyed at the stunning abuses of power and reason that have accompanied every battle for political ascendancy since the first prehistoric cave caucus.  But I can’t turn on CNN for ten minutes without wanting to pack a suitcase, my fiddle, a couple of bottles of Early Times and a box of old novels, and go live off-the grid in blessed, safe solitude until the dust clears.  The daily prospect of watching well-dressed people on their Very Worst Behavior smothers the brightest candle of my soul under an itchy blanket of gloom.   For some people, watching their wanna-be-leaders lie is, I suppose, like watching a hot young batting prospect strike out: it’s all part of the game.  For me it’s like watching a toxic cloud block the sun on a sunny morning.  Because I expect better behavior?  Of course not; I’m not that naïve.  Because I want to know the truth?  No, no—a candidate is the last person I’d ask for the accurate time of day, let alone a straight answer to a hard question.  Because duplicity debases the democratic process?  That’s a nice idea, but even a cursory glance at said process reveals that it is sustained by falsehoods as much as by facts.  No, I can’t quite get my mental arms around my aversions.  Maybe it’s a question more of aesthetics that of ethics.  For me, a political campaign is just a goddamned ugly thing.

The aforementioned Pete saw things differently.  He was an insider, after all.  As a government worker and then consultant (in urban planning) for a long professional life amid committees and councils, he managed both to insist on the strictest standards of honesty and competence among the civil servant class, and also not to expect more than mere mortals might be expected to deliver.  He had an enviable ability to look past, if not always over, even the most egregious histrionics and peer instead into the fundamental differences at issue.  When candidate A would insist on “Meet the Press” or the “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour” that candidate B was a tax-evading, philandering, draft-dodging, position-flipping, hypocritical, socialist, un-American, family-wrecking dog turd, causing me (and others) to shake our heads and turn our attention to the daily crossword or another beer, Pete instead would divine an earnest debate about the Federal Reserve or some pending piece of legislation the rest of us had never heard of:  That’s what they were talking about?  I’ve taken non-baseball friends to games and seen them react in a similar fashion.  Where I see a perfectly executed hit and run, where the lefty’s slider breaks early to a free-swinging D.H. and he finds the gap in right center notwithstanding that the shift is on, they see a bunch of guys mostly milling around, adjusting their cups and spitting ‘baccy juice on the grass.  You’ve got to know the game.

But it’s not just ignorance that keeps me under the covers.  My personal politics certainly comes into play.   This being an incumbent-challenge year, the hopeful G.O.P. usurpers are trotting out their entire spring training squad; veterans, draftees, walk-ons and bat boys, in a pre-primary free-for-all of declarations, withdrawals and fence-sitting.  Already we have had at least one would-be contender toss his hat into the ring, only to retrieve it sheepishly days later when he realized—amazingly enough for the first time—that even his staunchest supporters not only were laughing hysterically at him, but had been for years and years.  I’d harbored some hope that Donald would hold the door open for some of his loonier party-mates to exit gracefully, but no such luck so far, as the field of flying elbows includes possibly the least qualified contenders since old Ross Perot coerced Admiral James Stockdale to be his running mate in the 1992 debates.  (Remember him? “Who am I?  Why am I here?”)

What a motley crew has assembled in our virtual backyard for this surreal summer picnic!  We have Sarah of course, a homophobic, illiterate, sociopathic former small town mayor who already has failed colossally at governing and campaigning, and whose platform is utterly mysterious other than an implicit promise to replace the letter “g” with an apostrophe in all English gerunds. We have Mitt, a homophobic, somersaulting Mormon and recovering health care architect who travels with a team of crack physical therapists who must try each night to release him from whatever knot he’s tied himself into that day.  We have Tim, a homophobic, pathological liar whose vision of America is drawn from one-panel cartoons in 1950’s men’s barbershop magazines, and who shamelessly reversed his strong stand in favor of addressing climate change when the G.O.P. bosses told him to.  We have Michele, a homophobic, smarmy, shrill, strident rewriter of American history whose confidence in her own grasp of government is so meager that she won’t go head-to-head with a fifth grader on a civics test.  We have Ron, a homophobic, racist, feeble-minded libertarian who, if elected president, has sworn privately to abolish the office immediately in favor of key constitutional principles that he has developed by clipping words from his favorite articles and amendments, affixing them to magnets and trying out different combinations on his refrigerator.  We have Frothy Rick, the country’s preeminent homophobe, a misogynistic, intellectually stunted, amoral creature so odious and despised by so many millions of decent people that he seems almost a shoe-in for a hard run at the nomination.  We have “Buddy,” a homophobic, turncoat opportunist who so far has managed to take pretty much all positions on all issues.  We have John, a homophobic, former failed U.S. ambassador to the U.N., a bombastic, throw-back, neo-con hawk who has spent his Harold-Camping-like career predicting apocalyptic invasions by whatever country his bosses at the time (G.W. Bush, Don Rumsfeld, etc.) told him was a threat, and who has been a certifiable nut case since the Goldwater campaign.   And of course we have Newt, a homophobic, racist, hypocritical, philandering piece of shit—and that’s what his friends say about him.

And of course we have the sitting POTUS, who announced mysteriously and rather ominously just yesterday that he really doesn’t care if he serves a second term or not.

It’s going to be a long summer.

Seriously, it hurts to watch.  Perhaps the pain simply is the realization that, as comically pathetic as is Michele on the stump, Sarah at a turkey farm or Newt taking a glitter bath, there are people in the country, even outside of talk-show media, who take them seriously. This isn’t a matter of differences in terms of political viewpoint, big vs. small government, tax relief, deficit reduction or even the meaningless catch phrase “family values.”  It’s a gob-smacking realization that there are voting Americans who are willing to accept, even for a moment, the proposition that a blithering idiot might properly hold the highest office in the land.   It’s depressing as hell to contemplate, but it’s true.

The afore-mentioned Pete passed away in 2001, some months before the attack on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and (presumably) White House.  He did not live to see the post-9/11 world, nor our contrived rush to brutal, protracted war on a country that had nothing to do with the attacks, by an administration that had been waiting for an “opportunity” to create a military presence in the Near East ever for almost ten years.  It would have saddened him.  Despite the shenanigans he’d witnessed in his own tenure in and around Washington, Pete held fast to some quaint, pre-modern ideals about public service, honesty, bipartisanship, cooperation and the common good that seem today almost risible.  When he graduated from Yale in the 1950s, even the most paranoid, black-listing young McCarthy-ite could not foresee that the Republican Party would, within his or her own lifetime, establish the Tripartite Anathema of Empathy, Education and Equality that dominates it today.  Pete and his classmates saw government as a noble calling, not an oppressive evil, as it has been recast by the tea-baggers and their ilk, willfully ignorant and dismissive as they are of history, complexity and the evidence of their own befogged senses.  Perhaps his dogged optimism would have survived the likes of the Wisconsin union pogrom, or the Arizona state-sponsored attack on people who aren’t white.  I wonder.

Whatever his reaction to these latter days, he’d make sure it was delivered with not only a smile, but with at least twenty questions, in patented Pete style.  For he was the consummate listener—genuinely interested in every viewpoint, joke, anecdote, new story, observation and restaurant recommendation within earshot.   In the presence of those who did not, for whatever reason, respond immediately to his warm embrace and twinkling eyes with an urge to tell their life stories, he always had a handful of questions at the ready, to draw them from their shells.  More than once I saw him at a dinner party, seated next to a perfect stranger, or even a group of them, break the entre-course silence by asking casually (and irresistibly), “Hi, my name is Pete.  I was wondering:  What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life?”  Somehow he managed to put this query forth with a completely straight face, a seeming genuine interest, a dollop of comforting good nature and—flashing behind his thick black glasses—a promise that, if one simply was willing to play along and spill out a tale, a rollicking discussion—perhaps even evening—would follow. Open another bottle of Pinot and sit back.  We’re going to hear some doozies.

Speaking of 9/11, it has occurred to me more than once that, had Pete lived into 2002 and beyond, the newly (and so, so unfortunately) named Department of Homeland Security, not to mention the Pentagon and the CIA, could have saved themselves untold millions of dollars and a lot of credibility had they simply employed him to conduct interrogations of Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects.  No need for Guantanamo, waterboarding and all that:  we could have gathered all the intelligence we needed simply by inviting “enemy combatants” to a nice, low-cholesterol dinner with Pete.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed playing coy?  No problem; my father-in-law could have taken care of him over a decent antipasti.

So Khali, I was wondering—what’s the worst thing you ever did?

(Awkward pause.  The mozzarella is passed.  Some oil?  Yes, thank you.  Coals to Newcastle, eh?  Nervous laughter. Then:)

Well, when I was a young boy at the madrassa….

Yes?  (Helping himself to bread.)

Well, I used to steal copies of girlie magazines from my uncle who’d lived in America and show them to the boys in the bathroom for three dinar a peek. 

Gosh, that doesn’t seem so bad.  In Hungary we used to hide in the basement heating ducts at school so we could look up the girl’s skirts when they came in.

(Gruff male laughter.  Olives?  Yes please.)

That’s the worst thing, really?

Oh, and I beheaded Daniel Pearl.  But that was years later.  I still feel terrible about the magazines.

Sure, that’s understandable.  Boys will be boys.

It would have been a cinch.  And Pete, being a huge fan of dinner parties and ethnic restaurants, would have been happy to interrogate all 775 Gitmo detainees.  He also loved to travel, and so might have been persuaded to ask a few questions at the notorious off-shore “”black sites” as well.  All he’d have been doing was his duty.

I miss Pete.  He liked bread.  When I conjure his image, whatever the remembered or imagined setting, I see him eating bread: sourdough, rye, French, olive, cibatta, wheat, whatever.  He’d tear it in chunks and munch them thoughtfully while he listened to the story, opinion or confession his conversational companion found him or herself telling.  One of his favorite party tricks was to single out any self-identified Republican in the group he was in and take them aside for a few questions over a half-loaf and a glass of wine.  He’d start with simple questions about human freedom and dignity, move onto the economy, a couple of history and foreign affairs queries, maybe touch on race relations, the environment, education and women’s rights.  At the end of the talk, without fail, his subject would realize that in fact, they were a Democrat—and indeed that they had been one all along, but never before had possessed the logical framework to think things through properly.  I believe he could have pulled this off quite successfully with David Brooks, George Will or even John Boehner.  Shit, he might have done it with Bill Buckley, back in the day.   It was a real treat to watch.

Could he have managed it with this summer’s White House hopefuls?  Nah.  They’re long past the stage of honest self-assessment.  I suppose that once one has announced one’s presidential candidacy, it goes without saying that one shuts down one’s mind to new ideas, or any real examination of one’s espoused beliefs.  (If you’re elected, of course, Bob’s your uncle:  You can say anything.  Alas, we have much recent evidence of this.)  Still, it’s fun to imagine him trying to get Frothy Rick himself to recognize whatever threads of actual humanity may still dangle from the charred and tattered wreckage of his soul.  That would be political theater you might actually get me to watch.

But absent Pete, I just can’t do it.   An opportunity for me to view a candidate debate, news conference or stump speech is as appealing as, and in my view pretty much akin to, being invited to watch an afternoon at an abattoir, or an especially acrimonious marital spat.   It’s enough—no, more than enough—to imagine it.  All that will be new or surprising are the details—the order, the nuance, the context—but wait, isn’t that what I said that history is all about?  Am I actually admitting that I’d rather read about it later than watch it happen in front of my eyes?  I guess I am.  It’s so much less cringe-producing.  Maybe I’m squeamish.  Or maybe I just have better things to do.

At least until October there’s always baseball to follow instead.  And after that?

Ayieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…