A Midnight Monte Cristo

In the summer, the nights could be so hot that I took to storing my pillows in the refrigerator during the day and only removing them just before bed. The cool touch of the fabric never lasted for more than a few minutes in the balmy night air, but the momentary relief more than justified the diurnal struggle to replace a carton of milk or a summer sausage in the cramped confines of the icebox.

The time that Webber arrived at my house looking for a place to store his last remaining fifth of potable bourbon it was so hot that the label peeled from the bottle of its own accord. A tequila or port man, I could be counted on not to imbibe the sweet dark, liquor while he was at work, and certainly his family had no cause to suspect me of hiding his contraband, so I was often his cache man in this way in those days.

At the door, I nodded my assent and Webber went to cram the bottle into my fridge, tucking it into the fold of the goose-feather pillow.

Dunn was over already and had some lines he wanted me to look at.

I was happy for him. It had been several weeks since I had been able to get anything on paper and I went pouring over his thin, recalcitrant penmanship, barely suppressing my envy.

But, following my personal mandate to reveal whatever might be concealed by more or less confident men, I immediately mentioned my envy to Dunn and he laughed that great, ejaculating laugh of his that it took me several years to believe was not a fake.

Webber ambled out onto the veranda and leaned against the entryway, eating pecans that he picked in twos and threes from his pocket. He had had some success with a dusky brunette in the previous week and I asked him about her. He deflected the question, which meant he had either slept with her or hadn’t. He stuffed another pecan in his mouth and Dunn scratched my cat - the white one - under the chin.

I told Dunn the lines were good; something about cars and rivering waterways. I resolved to Joyceify some of my own stuff and see what came of it.

We discussed without seriousness the merits of some cafés within walking distance and finally decided to drink the bourbon and be done with it.

Later, some puritan girls came by and we pretended to make sexual overtures at them and they pretended to be offended. Webber smoked his Monte Cristo cigar and Dunn spoke jubilantly of eggs, and after comparing a nondescript couple walking by on the sidewalk to a Duras novel, he admonished them to “look it up sometime.”

Eventually Webber had to get home and Dunn, too, said his goodbyes and ambled off in the wrong direction - drunk into his Falstaff persona. I shut my door to the sound of him screaming at invisible suburbanites or submarines, I could not tell which.

The girls had left hours or minutes before and I fell asleep on the sofa trying to play my old ukulele, the one missing the top string.

The last thing I remember was deciding that I would remember the astonishing idea I had for a short story without writing it down. In the morning I had forgotten all but the memory of the idea.

Doctor Turdingston, I Presume

I spent the day here at home. Chiara and her sister and the car went shopping. At midday, while watering the plants, I spent about half an hour investigating a strange and terrible smell outside my front door.

My first thought was that someone (a hobo?) had thrown a human turd onto my porch early in the morning and it had been sitting in the sun all day. I peered expectantly under the stairs that lead to our front door, behind the potted plants, even beneath the doormat. I went to the bottom of the landing and searched in the bushes with a long stick I broke off of a tree just for the occasion.

I never found anything. But the acrid, wet smell was in my nostrils and I convinced myself I could smell it in the house. I went out on the balcony on the far side of the flat and found it waiting for me. I put my face close to the seam between window and wall and found it sneaking in through the open and uncloseable space.

By this time I was sure it was no turd on the doorstep (on the roof?). Perhaps some kind of sewer concern? I looked expectantly at the faces of passersby outside the apartment, but I found nothing - not a trace - of the horrible expressions one expects to see on a person who has, while out for a pleasant stroll, just come across a human turd (or its attendant stench) in a public place.

Eventually I closed all the windows - despite the heat - and tried to read a book or watch the game on television. Every once in a while, like a dog that hears someone at the door, I would perk up and sniff at the air because I thought the smell had snuck up behind me while I was unguarded. Sometimes I was sure that I could smell it on my skin.

Later, when Chiara came home, she said she couldn’t smell anything.

The Summer of Archimedes

If you give me a long enough spatula, I will flip any burger in the world.

The Endless Breakfast

At yet another in that long, unbroken series of latenight meals with Chris and Eric that marked that great lost period of our lives, Chris had removed his shoes and would periodically (for emphasis or for the pleasure of the sound itself) bang them down on the tabletop. When other patrons glanced in our direction with curiosity or pity, frustration or amusement, Chris would respond with some typically understated bon mot. My favorite was “What? That’s the way I do it!” but the frequent ejaculatory and self-congratulatory shouts of “Comedy Gold!” were also welcome.

When the waitress came to insist that we be quiet lest she be forced to ask us to leave, Chris assented readily to her request and even promised a generous tip for her trouble. As she walked away, he turned to us and said - at a volume impossible for her not to overhear - “Just because she’s heavyset doesn’t mean we have to listen to her.”

Eric, perhaps aware of the awkwardness of the situation even through his inebriated haze, slid under the table and out the other side. He stumbled to the restroom, where, if he is to be believed, he peed in the sink, but vomited in the urinal.

Another time, Eric had a plate of hashbrowns sent to another table where two rather homely girls were sitting. After asking the obvious question of the waiter, they followed the answering index finger and looked over at our table. I smiled sheepishly. Eric sat drunk and stony-faced, unable to focus his gaze, and Chris raised his fork in salute and smiled broadly.

Later, when Eric (more sober now) noticed that the girls had never touched his gifted hashbrowns, he arose huffily and walked over to their table, snatched the plate from them with a snort and returned to our booth, where he ravenously devoured the unwanted and now cold hashed browns.

There were other nights and other diners and other pancakes and other friends. Those days have become, for me, the watered down and unproductive reflections of echoes of the Lost Generation’s café nights – a moveable feast that I barely registered passing by.

Had I known, I would have paid more attention.

The Heavy Head

Two nights ago I dreamed of Steve and his wife Nichole. They had a baby, a girl. She had an enormous head - far too big for her tiny body - and it was heavy like a bowling ball.

I remember distinctly from the dream that the baby’s head was difficult to hold or support with only one hand because of its great weight and one was fearful of allowing the poor thing to slip from your arms and go crashing through the floor and into a lower room.

The baby spent most of her time in bed, propped up against multiple pillows carefully arranged to prevent lateral movement, watching television.

The giant watermelon-sized head itself was remarkable because, although it was perfectly formed, the baby’s face occupied only a small area in the center of the thing. The face was normal, more or less, though tiny in the extreme and the right eyelid drooped lazily.

In this dream, I conversed with the baby, sat with her on the bed, and found her to be in every way a delightful child. Her intelligence was undimmed by her condition and she was well behaved. I was fondly disposed towards the girl - the heavy head - in the dream.

But, my god, the weight of that head.

It left an imprint on me like the imprint of a shotput on a pile of freshly folded underwear.

The Steve McQueen of the Uniform Commercial Code

Three years of law school, thirty some odd exams, untold thousands of dollars, immeasurable vats of hate, and it is only now that I realize I should have been digging a tunnel out of here all along.

Now I must escape an exam or two and then my (ill-fated) motorcycle jump over the fence.

I’ll be damned if those fuckers are gonna take me alive (or in a gown and tam).

So screw graduation.

I’m going to go sit in my room, throw a baseball against the Goddamned wall, and prepare a series of mnemonic devices to help me remember the remedies available to a seller involved with a breaching buyer in a sale of goods when both parties are merchants specializing (or holding themselves out as experts) in the field of said goods.

Cue the fucking theme music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYjnMfgzgcM

Maybe He Ate Pennies

Chiara, Nicoli, and I went with Nathan and his brother Dan to see their apartment.

It was the sort of apartment building in the sort of neighborhood where no one sees or wants to see their neighbors, but they hear every footfall creaking on the old crunchy carpet upstairs as they come home at four in the morning. It was the sort of place about which jokes are made about cooking smells though no one is cooking. I don’t know that it was so, but in my memory everything was brown or tan colored inside.

We were told on the landing outside the door that Dan’s vicious yet independently minded lovebird, Dothead, had been accidentally left outside of his cage over the long Christmas and New Year’s Holiday and Dan had no idea how he had fared.

On this somewhat ominous note, Dan turned the key in the door and we entered into the anticipation of Dothead’s demise. Would Dan react with anger? Sadness? Bemusement? Would he chuckle?

However, the question was, thankfully, unanswered and unnecessary, as, after a moment’s inspection, little Dothead was found, no worse for wear, on top of the television.

He was retrieved (easily done since he loves to sit on any part of a person if they offer it to him and are sure not to expose any flesh - which will drive him into a murderous and bloody frenzy) and placed back in his wire cage, where he seemed content.

“Maybe he ate pennies,” remarked Dan with a sweeping gesture towards the dining table, strewn with loose change in uneven piles. It was the scene of some boozy power game from the old year - playing cards stuck together with beer, an oldish box of Uncle Ben’s, wads of soiled paper napkins, and a small bowl of ceramic shards collected during Dan’s studies abroad.

The irony may have struck Dothead while alone that, while he enjoyed unprecedented freedom unmolested in the apartment and could, say, masturbate in front of the television or discuss his to do list with himself in a southern accent, he could not get to his water or food as the only source of both remained inside his cage. And though the door to the cage was slightly ajar, it looked undisturbed.

I asked Nathan for a soda.

“Coffee or Booze,” he said, the beginnings of a shiteating grin playing around his face.

I asked for water, then.

“Coffee or Booze!” came the reply.

I felt like neither; so we played poker.

Later, after Dan was at the bottom of a bottle of Greg Norman label Shiraz, he tried to explain to me the origins of his ceramic collection: “This one is Roman, This one I found in the Thames, This one is Nabatean.”

Perhaps sensing that we weren’t as interested as we really ought to have been, he left for his bedroom in a hurry with a bottle of bourbon under his arm. For some minutes we didn’t see him and continued our game, betting frivolously with the sticky pile of other people’s pennies.

Nicoli, though technically more skilled at the game, lost miserably to Chiara, who (she said) had never played.

When Dan finally returned, he had a sheaf of his poetry in his hand and he sat down to read them to us, one by one.

Somewhat to my surprise, his poems were intensely maudlin. Personal recitations of pain and fear, peppered with epithets and conventional rhymes, but expressing (awkwardly for a mixed crowd of friends) a real anguish and even anxiety. The trope of a deceitful woman was hard to miss, as was the charming aphasia with which he (purposefully?) misspelled commonplace words to the point of rendering them almost meaningless. His tongue, swollen and made slothful by wine, often refused to cooperate with him.

If anyone saw these poems (he pronounced them “pomes”) printed out on paper, they would expect a sort of coffee-house, angst-ridden, weepy-eyed affair if they were to be read aloud. But instead, Dan seemed to find the entire enterprise of pouring out his human soul to us hilarious. He was practically rolling on the floor when he read to us about his trammeled heart and withered ability to love (like those time-travelers he once described to me).

At Nathan’s suggestion, Chiara was handed the pile of poems and read the remainder to us in her lilting accent, misplaced stresses, and phonetic renderings of unfamiliar words.

This, all agreed, really crystallized the experience.

Nicoli eventually left, and Chiara and I felt the inexorable pull toward the end of the evening. On the way home I asked Chiara what she thought of Dan’s poetry. In that way she has which I usually ascribe to the language barrier, but may in fact be an expression of her (to me) asymmetric mind, she answered my rhetorical question with another:

“What do they eat?”

I expected this was a reference to the Webber family’s notorious gassiness – an arch reference to the cacophony of flatulence always attendant to a Webbernacht, but it turned out to be literally meant. She was perplexed by their apparent lack of foodstuffs.

“Maybe they are the ones who are eating pennies,” she offered.

I complimented her on her gerund and fiddled with the radio. In his apartment, Dan threw up.

In Praise of Dr. Megavolt

Dr. Megavolt is a guy who wears a sort of tin-foil suit of armor and a birdcage for a helmet. He stands on top of what looks like an ice cream truck with an enormous Tesla coil on top. They turn on the Tesla coil and Dr. Megavolt wrassles the lightning. The ambient electricity is strong enough to raise the hairs on your scalp and to cause an unconnected fluorescent light tube (held aloft by a schlub assistant) to incandesce. You can feel the fillings in your head.

When I saw him at Burning Man in 1999, he fought the lightning from the coil for a few minutes and then shuffled to the side of the truck where he leaned over the edge and said to one of his technicians:

“Hey guys . . . I can still feel it.”

This moment of whiny humanity produced in me an abiding love for the idiotic stunt of Dr. Megavolting.

I saw the poor sap yesterday at the Coachella festival. He looked no worse for wear, but who knows? Inside those metal bars and iron cage, maybe there is a middle-aged guy struggling with his divorce or with worries about his receding hairline and expanding middle. Maybe the electricity has fundamentally altered the way he sees himself or how he feels about things. Who would he be if he weren't Dr. Megavolt?

In any case, Megavolt answers the call of the bell. He straps on that birdcage, climbs awkwardly on top of his ice cream truck and throws down with the great talons of hair-raising electricity that arc from the buzzing and screaching Tesla coil. If that ain’t a man, I dunno what is.

Gary Cooper for the new millennium: Dr. Megavolt.

In Praise of Fat Elvis

Bejumpsuited, Chestal hairs breathing free!

What fool would choose your earlier, easier, milquetoastier incarnation. That Elvis is the Elvis of the nostalgic; of the weak.

No, give me the operatic, the melodramatic, the bombastic Elvis. The Elvis of "Suspicious Minds" and "In the Ghetto" and "Burning Love." Give me the avatar of rock n' roll pathos and excess. Give me the hunka hunka himself, apotheosis of the American id.

That svelte proto-Elvis was consumed, like the newborn Olympians, sacrificed to that final, monolithic Elvis and his sequined destiny and his windmilling arms and his rhinestone encrusted belt.

Crouch down and be counted as one of the mighty.

Here are your flared pants and your floral leis. Here are the scarves, drenched in your salty, buttery sweat. Here are the heaviest sideburns. Here is the fried peanut butter ball you asked for.

Sic transit gloria mundi? Not if you die on the toilet LIKE A ROCK STAR.

Never for me that narrow hip shaking army joiner. No, for me the splayed legs and billowing cape, spread like a thunderbird in laboring flight, one arm raised above your head like Michelangelo's Christ the Redeemer.

All hail Fat Elvis. He was more MORE.

If this suit wasn't too tight, indeed . . .

From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee!

The Chase - Day Five

Call me Lazy-as-Shit.

It has been nearly a week and still no sign of the paper I’m supposed to complete by Tuesday. Morale runs low and even the distractions are wearing thin. Today, while ostensibly preparing a gloss on the Scylla and Charybdis named Nollan and Dolan, I drifted magnetically to the pile of magazines on the sofaback table.

After half of an article (about frogs), I grew so faint and insubstantial that it became necessary to take a thirty-five minute shower - though my hair was clean. Only Starbuck remains to give faith in my enterprise, and he at exorbitant prices and somewhat middling quality. I think he uses too much sugar in his mochas.

Internet internet everywhere, but ne’er a drop of research.

Spied an albatross dancing in the currents spun off by my desk here in the loft. Looked a bit like an outline, sketched on a yellowpad. Shot it.

Spent an hour or so composing monkey-grams to my friends. May have been a bit hasty with the albatross.

To Queequeg, in the guise of my wife: hell is an idea first born of a required essay due during finals week and repeated by the act of watching reality television.

To produce a mighty essay, you must choose a mighty theme. I have - unfortunately - chosen "art exactions in Culver City."

There, nailed to the mast, glinting in the sun, is the coin I would spend. Let us call this coin “Studying for my Comparative Legal Systems exam on Wednesday” and let us imagine that winning this coin (by filling the white paper marked “Local Goverment Essay” with six, double-spaced pages of text) is something I would like.

But the coin is nailed to the mast like Ulysses before the sirens, and I, working the oars but futilely above the slapping waves, have stuffed my ears with video games and Tivo and Springsteen albums.

(Here let us imagine an entire chapter about chowder)

But lo! A cry from the crow’s nest! A spouting, fragrant, introductory paragraph! Deploy the boats before he sounds!

Toward thee I roll, Great, Breeching, Snow-White Paper, scarred only superficially with the scrawlings of essays begun and deleted by others.

And I go down with the Leviathan, to the watery hell he keeps called “Westlaw” and “Lexis” and for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at Law School.

Like Satan, this paper will not sink until it has dragged a living part of my week along with it and helmeted itself with it. And even should I succeed in the coming days and hours by extruding something thick and oily like a paper onto the printed page and lashing it to my boat, it’ll probably only be eaten by the red-tipped, correctionist sharks that savage exams on the way back to grades.

God help me if the devious-cruising Rachel of Alcohol doesn’t pick up this surviving orphan and bring him back to Port.

Musings While Watching The Birds in bed with Chiara

“I wonder if it is supposed to be a sly play on words that the film The Birds is really almost entirely about women.
The awkward pauses, glances, and conversations between Tippi Hedren (the poor man’s Grace Kelly) and Suzanne Pleshette (the rich man’s Stockard Channing) chew the scenery in a way that the titular animals never do except in that final scene.

Jessica Tandy and Pleschette and Hedren spend their catty energy almost entirely on the attentions of hamburger-in-suit Rod Taylor. The women fight almost resignedly for this hunk of middle age while the passions of the (actual) birds rise to a fever pitch.

Bird attacks almost always follow conversations with or about Mitch, Taylor’s character, our great jutting jaw-and-chin. One is left to ponder whether this biblical plague visited upon the inhabitants of sleepy Bodega Bay is really little more than a manifestation of the prefeminist fear that a powered class of men felt when forced, for the first time, to truly face up to the power of femininity unbridled.

Women, it should be said, have often been associated with birds - in slang and in mythology – both to celebrate their otherworldliness (from the male perspective) and to denigrate it.

And, the only safe haven when the birds stage their first attack is in the Tides Restaurant, named for that mysterious and powerful force of nature that, like women are supposed to be, is ruled by the moon.

Inside we find, huddled and angry, the women of Bodega Bay, who see Tippi as the cause of it all. Is this because she is a liberated (though idle) woman? Or is it because – perhaps as in all Hitchcock films – the female lead is really a cipher for female sexuality, a subject feared as much by the women of Bodega Bay as by the men? Is it that Mitch, as the only male in the town of any import, is so jealously guarded as a source of lantern jaw and broad shouldering?

In the end, when our heroes beat that slow, sinister retreat, is Hitchcock suggesting a détente with the surging power of the feminine? Is it meant as a kind of terrible rebuke of feminism, that it can be figured as a scourge from which none will escape, run as they may?”

He wondered (aloud) as his hand wandered (allowed) up her skirt. She continued to watch the movie.

Property Law is for the Birds

I am supposed to be reading for Property. Chiara came upstairs and seemed very suspicious.

I am banking on her still imperfect English to have made her rapid identification of pornography hidden on a tab at the bottom of a computer screen (and masked by an overlaid CNN.com) all but impossible.

To distract her I did a kind of a dance in my chair. I threw small objects at her playfully and told her to leave me alone so I could finish my studying. I told her if she would leave me alone I would finish my reading and then we could watch The Birds, which I rented today.

Later, while Tippi is in the phone booth, I will confess all of this and laugh and laugh.

I learned that from you, Eric.

Reflections on Seeing a Photograph of My Father

My father has the largest calves I have ever seen on a man of his hair coloring. My calves are weak and svelte and can barely manage to propel me up stairs. I often yearn for an ottoman while sitting in chairs. I am the diminution of a man who watches Sci-Fi channel original movies and gives awkward reminiscences about meals he has eaten to waiters. My father has no opposable thumbs. He cannot reach his thumb to touch his little finger. To touch the other fingers causes him physical discomfort. I had a long argument with him once over the process through which tea is accomplished. He insisted that it was not composed of particulates of leaves, but rather was created through some alchemy of hot water and plant extracts. He also added, almost as an ad hominem, that the words ‘dissolve’ and ‘melt’ had identical meanings when applied to sugar in coffee. I could have spit. I could have pulled off my own head like a tick. But the girls called me from the pool and insisted I swim. My father read an article from a food magazine to his travel magazine.