Park City: My Father Explains a T-shirt

On Main Street last night, while taking an after dinner stroll, my father pulled Chiara and I over to a shop window and directed us to look inside. He pointed out a t-shirt on a mannequin and read its slogan to us with glee:

“Bike Naked . . . Show Off Your Rear Suspension”

I rolled my eyes and moved on up the street. Chiara (perhaps she was in shock) just stared at the shirt in the window while my father jostled her lightly, a silly grin playing around his John Ashcroft head.

“Get it? Get it?”

Chiara raised her delicate eyebrows and shrugged.

“You know bicycles have rear suspension?” My father went on, smirking. Chiara nodded and assented that she did, though I think she had no idea what he had asked her.

“And so, get it? ‘Bike Naked. Show Off Your Rear Suspension’?”

Chiara: “I theenk so.”

My Father: “Hahaha! That’s really clever. Rear suspension. Don’t you think that’s clever, Jeff?”

Me, from up the street, not looking: “Clever.”

He then nudged Chiara again and repeated himself.

“I think that’s really clever. Show Off Your Rear Suspension. You want a shirt like that, Jeff?”

“No.” I said, my eyes clinging by their fingernails to stay inside my head.

But I should have said ‘yes’ you will tell me.

You’re right, of course.

Park City: My Father and the Steak Diane

One of the things you do when visiting the family for the Christmas holiday is to bring your family out into public so that you can feel embarrassed not just at home, but in a variety of places.

While dining the other night at a restaurant in Park City, my father spotted Steak Diane on the menu. Like a bite of Proust’s madeleine, this sent him into a kind of reverie.

“It was while your mother and I were living in Northridge,” it began.

“We were driving to Sequoia or somewhere. Anyway, we were near Modesto or Fresno and we were hungry.”

“We were driving through this small town at night, and on either side of us there were scores of car dealerships - and I mean fancy car dealerships - Lincoln, Cadillac, Oldsmobile . . .”

(Chuckles from my sister and I. My father oblivious.)

“We followed the road until we found a little restaurant and stopped for dinner. We both ordered the Steak Diane. Maybe that was the first time I ever had it. The waiter brought it to the table on a cart and it was served flambé. He rolled up the sleeves of his tuxedo jacket and cut our steak right there at the table. It was decadent and it was just delicious. I always remember that.”

Later, after Tim and Chiara had been convinced (how?) by this story to order the Steak Diane, my father lamented the inferiority of the Steak Diane served to them - which did not come flambé.

“This just isn’t Steak Diane,” he said with a shake of his head.

Barbarian Musings

It’s this time of year, when the mercury falls and the thermostat rises, that I often reflect on beards gone by.

The Christmas Beard is the gift I have to give myself every year, but I’ve neglected myself once again. I miss my beard. I should have shaved off the rest of me instead.

There are two sorts of people in the world, of course: people who like beards . . .

And women.

Women in the audience should know a curious thing: wearing a real beard provides almost the exact same sensation as wearing a false beard held on by cosmetic glue. Should any of you ever wish to experience an hour or two of facial hair, simply purchase a kit from your costume shop. You won’t be disappointed. Or you will be. In either event, you will have magnified your knowledge of beards.

Under a beard, one forgets oneself. Or, anyway, one forgets the contours of one’s chin and jaw - which is the same thing.

When you cut away the beard from the rest of you, you reveal mostly regret; a pasty, raw, unfamiliar kind of regret that you’d just as soon cover with bristles.

Oh well.

Don’t shampoo your beard in the shower, imagining that it would benefit form the process as does the longer, softer hair of your scalp. It only makes your beard itch more, I’ve found.

A beard is the scaffolding upon which a mustache is constructed.

A beard is the camouflage that conceals your true purpose. Then, like the sculptor sees in the stone the statue’s final form, you find the final courage to carve the mustache from the hairy medium.

But mustaches are an advanced maneuver and should not be attempted lightly or with much hope of happiness or success. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

It feels weird to brush beards out, away from your face. It hurts, but in the way that chewing on a canker or worrying a hangnail hurts. That is to say: it hurts in the way you cannot quite stop yourself from doing, though you know you will regret it.

It doesn’t really keep you warm, a beard, but it cuts the wind. It denies you the pleasure of a cool pillow on your face. This is a thing you learn to miss.

It gives you something to do when you are thinking about something. Stroking a beard while musing or concentrating is a terrible cliché. Like most terrible clichés, it works.

Everyone should grow a full beard at least once in their life. That so many will not is a kind of tragedy. Beards are to the male experience what childbirth is to the female.

Maybe haircuts would be a better fit there.

In any case, as the narrator in Cheever's The Swimmer had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not throw themselves into pools, so I have an abiding distaste for those who shave every morning. And a special hell is reserved for those who ignore the grain of the ingrowing beard by shaving against it.

You might surprise yourself by growing a beard an entirely different color from the hair on your head.

Also, with a beard, you’ll look better in a baseball cap, but worse in a collared shirt, but better in a crewneck sweater, but worse in a sportcoat. These are the wages of beards.

When you finally do buckle under the pressure from the women in your life and shave your beard away, you will feel a sickly regret and loathe your puffy face and ill-defined cheekbones, not to mention your gullibility and the ease with which you folded under pressure. You’ll want nothing so much as to pluck the hairs one by one from the sink and glue them back to your face.

It will take a while to tan the bottom part of your face. People will notice.

Siena: Black Market Pizza

In Siena, on Banchi di Sopra, just above the Piazza del Campo, is where one may find black market pizza.

If you go there at night, say after one or two o’clock in the morning, you can find the open door that leads to the back room of a closed bakery.

Inside are the ovens. Hot. With them are the night bakers. The night bakers are scroungy, scruffy men who wear little but a thick coat of flour and their underwear, which may or may not have been made from dough.

If you signal - just so - to the Head Baker (you’ll know him by the ashing cigarette he hangs from his lip) he might come over and regard you menacingly. This is a good start.

The thing to do is to hold up a number of fingers and then to say that number in Italian as best you can. If all goes well, the Head Baker will sputter something from behind his cigarette and shuffle back toward the ovens to turn up the volume on the radio (which is playing schmaltzy Italian pop songs). He’ll say something to the men who work under him and then retrieve some fresh dough from the man-sized mound that sits on one side of a long counter. He’ll shape this dough into as many little pizzas - pizzette - as he thinks you asked him for. Now you wait outside.

Sit on the sidewalk. Drink from the bottle you picked up earlier in the evening but have not yet finished. Listen to the argument between a man and a woman and a vespa somewhere uptown, echoing through the warren of streets and alleyways.

Finally, after he gets just the right amount of cigarette ash and sweat worked into the pizzas, the Head Baker sets them in the oven for just long enough to wake up the bacteria and convince the cheese that melting is something that exists, but isn't meant for it, not in this lifetime anyway. Then he’ll find you outside and hand you the pizzas wrapped in parchment paper.

He’ll qoute you a number. It doesn’t matter if its the same number it was last night, or even twenty minutes ago; it’s the price and you pay it. He puts the money into his (dough?) shorts and sticks out his bottom lip and chin while he raises his shoulders just a touch. He grunts at you and you get the hint: What are you still standing there for?

You leave and eat your black market pizza on the piazza.

It won’t taste very good to your tongue. It tastes fantastic to the part of you that wants it to.

If you go back to the bakery in the morning there’ll be no sign of the night bakers. The door to the oven room will be shut. The woman at the counter that you approach through the front will grudgingly sell you cold pizzette for less than you paid last night.

But you won’t enjoy it half so much.

A Mitzvah on the Undercover Jew

Wednesday. I’m over in La Brea with the wife.

We've just come from Olvera Street where I've bought as many Dia De Los Muertos artifacts as I could stuff in the trunk of the car.

The haul: papier-mâché skeletons (Chiara calls them ‘skeletors’), sugar skulls, and ceramic, skeletal mariachis.

We went over to La Brea to shop for Moroccan lamps.

We pull up right outside the shop. It must be some Jewish holiday (Sukkot?), because everywhere we look there are Hassidim in groups of five and six milling about on the street. I’m curious in an abstract way, but think little of it. Mostly I’m trying to haggle with the proprietor of the lamp shop without standing close enough to him to smell his underarms (which, in charming fits of over-gesticulation, he exposes to me frequently).

So I’m outside the shop, looking in the window, having just completed our purchase, when a roving fellow in black carrying a bundle of myrtle and palm fronds and willow branches in one hand and a large lemon in the other stops me with a hale cry.

“Any Jews here?!” the gentleman shouts.

I spin and face him, surprised and maybe delighted.

“No,” I say, smiling quizzically, “unfortunately not.”

“No Jews? You sure?” he purses his lips.

“You kidding?” I say, spreading my arms to allow him to take me in, “In this sportcoat and these flip flops?”

“You could have been undercover Jews,” He offers with narrowed eyes and a sly expression. He turns to leave.

“Sorry, only Goyim here,” I say with a shrug, and he turns back on a pivot.

“Make up your mind! Are you Jews or not?”

But before I can answer him, he’s placed a yarmulke on my head and handed me the sheaves and fronds. He stands in front of me and says to repeat after him.

So I do.

It takes a while and I’m conscious of the way my gentile tongue is sluggish and unsure, savaging the unfamiliar words he’s having me recite, but it’s kinda fun, and just when I think it’s done he hands me the gigantic lemon and has me go through a whole new thing.

At the end, I’m to knock the lemon and the other plants together and we exchange “l’chaims” and he takes me by the shoulders and says to me “That’s a mitzvah on you.”

So as a somewhat naive goy, I’m pretty excited.

Productive day: I bought Day of the Dead decorations, haggled for antique Moroccan lamps, and had a mitzvah put on me.

There are days I really love Los Angeles.

Oppenheimer's Horn, or, the Sax Perilous

Is there any instrument quite so dangerous as the common saxophone? Is there any musical device more deadly when misapplied or more affirming when used wisely?

A trumpet is almost always welcome - bright, forceful, and gregarious - it is the vivacious coed of noise, brilliant and beloved.

A saxophone (already of the moodier woodwind family) is another creature altogether. It does not play well with others, preferring to solo and to warble and waddle through scales that swoop dramatically from low to high and high to low. Many is the song that has had to hold on with white knuckles while the sax uncoils and sonically elbows the other instruments out of the way. One is always fearful that the whole thing will bobble out of alignment.

Thing is, when used sparingly and judiciously, the saxophone solo can be plaintive and triumphant and anguished and sexy. But when used recklessly, when used with abandon, or without a firm hand insistent on restraint, the sax solo is an aural oilslick, spreading and seeping into every corner of a song and leaving mold cheese in the corners.

A badly deployed sax solo can be a melismatic tumor.

A well deployed saxophone riff can be a joyful wail, at once more complicated and more human that all but the finest cornetist can coax from his or her instrument.

A Clarence Clemons may be worth a hundred Kenny Gorelicks, but am I wrong to cringe with anxiety when the first blast or burp of a sax pours into a ballad (or even a jump number)?

I would place the saxophone under glass and give, among living musicians, Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison the only keys. Those who would like to borrow the saxophone for a song here or there would have to appeal to them. Jazz musicians would have free access, but would need to sign out and file the proper forms stating their intent and indemnifications in the event of a cheese-spill.

The soprano sax would be declared a violation of human rights.

Beatles, Like Hands, Are Often Taken From Us Prematurely

Today, while in line at the pharmacy to pick up my prescription for twenty Percocets needed for yet another kidney stone, I stood behind a shopping cart with a little tow-headed boy in the basket. He could not have been more than five. He said “hi” and I said “hello.”

The rest of the conversation:

Boy (plucking at his sweatshirt, which was grey and emblazoned with a large, orange letter B): “This is my shirt”

Me: “I know it. The letter B.”

Boy: “Yeah, B.”

Me: “Stand for anything?”

Boy: (looks down at his chest, looks back at me, says nothing).

Me: “I know. It’s because you like the Beatles so much, right? Because of that song ‘Letter B.’”

I could be misremembering, but I swear an audible groan escaped the lips of the woman in line behind me.

I felt I was a condescending and patronizing ass, making jokes at the expense of a little kid’s ignorance of sixties pop music just to amuse myself. And I thought I had probably scared him off altogether, ruining what promised to be a fun little vignette.

The mom has made one or two glances at me and they weren’t of the ‘oh how cute’ variety. I frantically began to read earnestly from the ingredient list of whatever balm or salve I could grab from the shelf to my immediate left.

Instead, after a lengthy pause:

Boy: “You know, we only have two of the Beatles left.”

Me (stunned): “Yes, I know. Two.”

Boy: “One died of cancer.”

Me: “George Harrison.”

Boy: “George Harrison. Brain cancer, maybe.”

Me: “Yeah, that’s right. And the other one?” (I make a gun with my hand and affect a face that says ‘s.o.l., huh?’)

Boy: “He was shot.”

Me: “Pretty sad.”

Boy: “Yeah.”

Me: “Who do you think will be next?”

Boy: “Paul.”

Me: “Yeah, just our luck. We’ll end up with Ringo.”

Boy: “Ringo. Just our luck. My mom is getting medicine for my throat.”

Me: “Sore throat? They’re terrible.”

Boy (withdrawing his arm into his shirt, leaving the sleeve limp): “I lost my hand.”

Me: “I don’t think they make medicine for that.”

Boy: “No. They don’t. But I lost my hand.”

And then the mom turned around, her business with the pharmacist complete, and gave me a peculiar look. I told the kid good luck with his sore throat and stepped up to the counter to get my opiates.

The woman behind the counter suggested that the young boy ought to run for president, that at least he might have cancelled his vacation a bit earlier than three days after the hurricane.

I paid for my pills and went to sit in my car where I read from my book by James M. Cain. I would have loved to discuss the story with that kid.

The Time for Waffles

Is Now!

I Discuss Houseplants in a Hot Tub (Much to My Consternation)

Chiara asks me to go with her to the apartment complex’s hot tub sometimes. She calls it the jacuzzi, which she pronounces “Yah-Kootsie.” I usually decline for one of several stock reasons: that it will be crowded, that it is too late, that I just showered.

Last night, feeling a bit down on myself for not having left the house all day, I accepted her offer on the condition that, if it were full of assholes, we could leave.

I should have been more specific.

We arrived and thought that we were alone. The lights of the hot tub itself were off and none of the usual flotsam associated with pool-goers was to be found on any of the chaise-longues (sunscreen, wadded t-shirts, sunglasses, Da Vinci Codes).

It was only after we began our slide into the burbling water that we realized we had company - hiding, submerged nearly to the head, in the shadows on the far side of the hot tub.

It being too late to back out with any kind of plausible excuse, I said good evening and slurped over to the far side of the hot tub with Chiara, arranging myself so as to have my back more or less toward the gentleman. He seemed nice enough, but who needs conversation with that kind Heffnerian overtones?

This guy clearly didn’t see it that way.

Guy: “No swimming for you two, huh?”

Chiara: “No, it’s cold!”

Guy, looking at me now: “Well, you made the right choice. A sign of maturity, I’d say.”

Me: “Yes.”

A pregnant pause.

Me: “It is pleasant to sit in warm water, isn’t it?”

Guy: “Yes.”

So now I think I’ve awkwarded my way out of any further smalltalk. I even begin - as a sort of preemptive strike against any further chattiness - a conversation with Chiara about quotidian and personal details of our life together that could not possibly invite third party commentary.

I bring up the houseplants and my earlier visit to the nursery in search of the large indoor palm tree I am still angling for. I tell Chiara about how, after I had asked five or fifteen well thought out and important questions of the woman helping me (“How much water should I give it?” “How much light does it need?” “Does it have a smell when you cut the leaves?“), she rather snarkily replied that there were “really no such things as indoor plants.”

The man from the other side of the Jacuzzi, his face shaded by the night like a sweaty Bloefeld, volunteered that he bought an indoor plant just the other day, at Costco.

I nodded. But thinking he may not have seen me, I said “yeah?”

Guy: “It should live for a hundred years.”

Me: “Wow!”

Guy: “Wanna know why?”

Me: “Sure.”

Guy: “It’s a silk plant.”

And now I want him to die.

Luckily, just then some kids jump into the hot tub and distract the guy. “Is it better in here?” he asks of them.

Kid 1: “Yeah.”

Guy: “How much better?”

Kid 1: “Like 110%

Guy: “And it took you how many years to figure that out?”

Kid 1: “Um, like fourteen.”

Guy: “And how old are you?”

Kid 1: “Sixteen.”

And now I kinda love this kid.

Guy, to Kid 1: “Got your permit yet?”

Kid 1: “Yeah. Two months ago.”

Guy: “See any bad drivers?”

Kid 1: “Yeah. I saw some today!”

Guy: “That’s good. Because if you don’t see any. . .you’re probably the bad driver.”

Me: Barf.

I embark on a description to Chiara of my genuine respect for the gardening staff here at the complex. Some of their birds of paradise are twelve feet tall and thriving. Ours is slowly dying after having spent six months in some kind of botanic coma; ours always looks like it is about to cough.

Anyway, the fucking guy has overheard me and smells blood in the water again. The kids have gone back to the main pool.

Guy: “You ever been in the model units they got here?”

Me: “No, why?”

Guy: “They have plants in those that never die.”

Me: “Why’s that?”

Guy: “They’re silk.”

Me: “You got me.”

And I got out of the water and went to the main pool to swim angry laps.

The only other notable moment from last night was, after the guy had finally left, a young couple arrived at the hot tub. They were comprised of a handsome frat guy type with a shaved chest and his curiously overweight and frumpy girlfriend who carried all of their stuff.

The frat guy gets in to the hot tub and she hands him a beer. He sits there, drinking it while she perches on a pool chair on the other side of the Jacuzzi.

They do not speak to one another until he asks her to give him another beer and she complies. She is not drinking. I think he has agreed to sleep with her out of pity or as some last-ditch attempt to thwart his onrushing homosexuality. I imagine he propositioned her, but insisted that she provide the atmosphere.

By which he meant Corona.

I would have liked to stay to see what became of them, but the hot tub had more or less fizzled out and my enjoyment was prunier than my hands.

An Argument Concerning Houseplants

Chiara and I had an argument today about houseplants. The crushing weight of the domesticity is not lost on me.

I’m not proud of myself. At one point I believe I actually said that she hated all living things.

This because she rather misliked my plan to purchase an indoor palm.

We sulked and traded the occasional barb for the better part of the afternoon. After the worst of it, she went to watch the home and garden channel on television (I ache with pleasure at the possibility that she sat through a landscaping show where they extolled the virtues of the single trunked kentia palm), and I retreated to the bedroom to read a novel I don’t care for.

This was not really resolved until I came into the living room an hour later and found her wheedling away at our small space heater with a screwdriver.

Mostly the space heater is used to placate the cat when it complains bitterly about the cooler evenings in winter or to warm Chiara’s feet while she hunches over on the sofa to watch plastic surgery programs which send me scurrying out of the room, nauseated.

Thing is, she isn’t repairing it or anything; she wants to vacuum inside the thing.

This is part of her larger vacuum crusade.

Some of the items that I have seen her vacuum in our time spent together: the bed, her clothes, my clothes, me, the cat, books, the out of doors, the insides of shoes, the leaves of plants.

I have learned not to question her wisdom on these matters.

Wordlessly, I helped her to separate the housing of the machine and to clean the accumulated dust of a decade of use out of the corners and electrical whorls and from behind the surprisingly sharp fan blades.

When we finally managed to put it all back together and turn it on, it caught fire, melting the electrical wiring inside and leaving our living room smelling acridly of burnt plastic.

She laughed and bit her finger and raised her eyebrows contritely. I shrugged and we went into the bedroom to escape the smell and to watch a truly disgusting Jessica Simpson biopic.

I still don’t know if I can buy my palm tree. I’m afraid to ask.