The Fortress of Not So Solitude

I do my best thinking in the shower.

Really. I find something about the experience conducive to clear, organized thought. Maybe it is the hot water, or the white noise of same, or maybe it is simply being in a small room without distractions - like a deprivation chamber.

Like in Altered States.

It could be that the act of showering has been repeated so many times that it requires no thought whatsoever anymore and that rote quality itself frees my mind for other things. Maybe a Freudian would tell me that it approximates the warmth and wetness of the womb and thus unconsciously calms me.

In any case: I do my best thinking in the shower.

I come up with ideas for the Great American Novel, I practice speeches to the United Nations General Assembly, I imagine solutions to the problems of the Iraqi constitution, I invent inventions.

All while I am shampooing my hair!

I have even extended the range of this effect by studying in the outer chamber of our bathroom. I can’t study in the loft because that is where all the books are and the computer. I can’t study downstairs because that is where Chiara and the television are. So, I move my books and papers onto the bathroom counter, turn on the overhead heater (for the noise - it drowns out the Oprah Chiara is inevitably watching) and get cracking.

The shower (and the bathroom) is like my Fortress of Solitude - it is white, it is quiet, and nobody is allowed in.

The problem with having a Fortress of Solitude is that Lois Lane knows all about it.

Chiara doesn’t seem to respect my study-system. I swear she follows me around the house to check up on me, and few of my activities perplex her more than studying while standing up in the bathroom. Moreover, she hasn’t the least concern for my privacy.

To me, the shower is like my inner sanctum. She isn’t supposed to be in the room unless there is to be shower sex.

Now look, I’ve dated women who wanted an open-door policy in the bathroom; girls who either wanted me to do everything without privacy and/or girls who, themselves, wanted to expose their bathroom activities to me.

I’m not a believer in it.

And, in point of fact, neither is Chiara. It is only that, for her, these other, academic, functions of the bathroom are not deserving of the same privacy.

And, to top it all off, she is constantly grooming me when I am in my Fortress of Solitude. It is like having a gorilla for a wife. I’ll be shaving, let’s say, and she’ll come up behind me and inspect my shoulders for the stray hairs that occasionally try to colonize that otherwise bare expanse of skin. If she finds one, she’ll pluck at it with tweezers until she gets it out. If I have dried my hair, she’ll start stroking down cowlicks and flyaways. If I am getting dressed (she watches me do that, too), she will pluck at places where the fabric is pilling, or tug at where the material has bunched.

God help me if she finds a clogged pore on my face.

And I am nearly always being lint-rolled.

Now I know why they usually build Fortresses of Solitude in the middle of Ice-bound, antipodal plains.

Of course, maybe Superman has stray hairs on his shoulders.

The End of Elephants

In the small town of St. Thomas, in Ontario, there is a massive (and life-sized) statue of an African elephant. This is because St. Thomas is where, on September 15, 1885, Jumbo the Elephant died after being hit by a steam locomotive.

Jumbo had an interesting life, for anyone, elephant or human. He was born free, sometime around 1861, in the Sudan. The French, who then controlled the Sudan, captured Jumbo as a young elephant and brought him by rail to Cairo, where he was sold and then taken by boat and then again by rail to Paris, where they exhibited him in the Jardin des Plantes near the railway station. He was probably chained.

In 1865 he was given to the London Zoo. More boats on the ocean and trains chugging across unfamiliar landscapes.

In London, he became a favorite among children for the remarkable docility he showed. Even though by this time he was far and away the largest elephant ever held in captivity (standing some four meters tall), and though he had never been trained to do it, he routinely allowed visitors to the zoo to ride on his back. In fact, he so impressed one particular visitor with his demeanor and ever-increasing size, that he ended up being sold again for the tidy sum of $10,000 - to P.T. Barnum. This transaction was made over the public protestations of Queen Victoria herself, who had taken rather a fancy to Jumbo, it seems.

Jumbo then became the star attraction in the Barnum and Bailey circus. He became so famous that his name (a corruption of the Swahili word for ‘hello’) became a household word. His name has survived in the English language to this day as a descriptor for anything gigantic.

He was an icon of the early industrial age, traveling all over the globe in an era when most humans never went far beyond their hometowns. He was, very nearly, the most famous anything in the world. People waited in line for hours just to see him and feel awe.

In 1885, while being led onto his car on the circus train along with the smallest elephant in the circus, Tom Thumb, Jumbo was struck by an unscheduled (and yes, speeding) locomotive coming from the other direction.

Later, P.T. Barnum would claim that Jumbo’s final living act was to grasp Tom Thumb with his trunk and throw him twenty yards away, out of the path of the hurtling train.

The beast of iron and wheels met the “mountain of bone and brawn” and was completely derailed - was, in fact, so damaged that it had to be scrapped - but Jumbo too was crushed, and his six and one half ton body was badly broken.

It took 160 men working together to drag his body into the ditch alongside the rails where he finally died.

Jumbo’s handler, Matthew Scott, stood guard over the fallen giant all night, waiting for the heavy machines to arrive which would be able to lift Jumbo’s immense corpse onto the train that would take him away.

When Scott finally collapsed from exhaustion, scores of eager souvenir-hunters rushed the body with knifes, hoping to hack off a piece of history. Scott had been fighting them off for more than ten hours and wept pitifully when they finally overwhelmed him.

Jumbo's bones now reside in the New York Museum of Natural History. His skin was stuffed and displayed at Tufts University (whose mascot Jumbo still is) until it was consumed by fire in 1975.

Jumbo is only the most famous in the surprisingly long roster of famous elephants killed in tragic circumstances far from their homes. To wit:

Abul-Abbas, the famed elephant of Charlemagne, who died of pneumonia after swimming the Rhine in the winter of 810.

Hanno the Blessed, elephant of Pope Leo X, who died after he was given a laxative by the Pope’s doctors in 1516.

Topsy, who was fed a lit cigarette by her trainer in 1903 at Coney Island’s Luna Park and then went on a rampage in which she killed three men. Topsy was electrocuted to death by Thomas Edison, who wanted to use the opportunity to further his war with Westingouse and Tesla and alternating current. Edison filmed it for his propaganda. You can watch the film he shot on YouTube, but is is graphic and it will stay with you.

Mary, the circus elephant who, in 1916, finally reacted to years of physical abuse by throwing her trainer against a drink stand and then deliberately crushing his skull with her foot. She was hung. On the first attempt she snapped the chain meant to hang her and fell to the ground, breaking her hip. They strung her up and tried again - this time successfully.

And perhaps not finally, but less depressingly, there is the still living Ruby, the famous painting elephant of the Phoenix Zoo, who once had a painting of hers sell for more than $10,000 - the price of one Jumbo.

An Obit for Old Adwaita

I read today that the oldest animal on earth died last week In Calcutta. He was a tortoise called Adwaita. In Bengali, his name meant ‘The Only’.

He was - they think - some 256 years old.

He was born in the Seychelles but was captured there by British sailors and brought to India, where he was presented - along with three of his brothers - to Robert Clive, the man who forged the British Raj in India for the East India Company. This would have been sometime in the 1750s or 60s.

For one hundred and some-odd years, Adwaita lived on the sprawling estate of the Adventurer, Robber Baron, Statesman, Opium Eater, and Suicide, Robert Clive.

Eventually, Adwaita outlived his three brothers, Clive, and the British Empire.

In 1876, he was moved to the Calcutta Zoo, where he lived the life of a bachelor until his death last Wednesday.

About a month ago, his massive shell cracked and he developed a wound that wouldn’t heal. His keepers came to feed him one morning and found him collapsed under his own weight. They will preserve his shell and use carbon dating techniques on it to ascertain his age with more certainty than was possible while he lived.

Having had, at one time, a pet tortoise of my own (Shellbert, by handle), maybe this all hit me harder than it otherwise might have.

Shellbert hibernated nearly all the time. He was usually buried somewhere in the garden - his preferred situs for his project of endless sleep. When he reappeared occasionally, we’d ply him with strawberries, which he ate with abandon. You could hold them in front of him and he would rush at them with a speed you would not expect from such a slow little creature.

Strawberries are a tortoise's favorite thing in the whole world, in my experience.

One day he simply disappeared. Either he had buried himself yet again in the flowerbed and we simply didn't see him on the days he happened to emerge or he had escaped our backyard for the wide world. I think about him sometimes.

I read once about the tortoises that were kept by the Ottoman sultans on the Topkapi Palace grounds on the Golden Horn. They wandered freely through fields of tulips with gigantic candles fixed to their backs and at night, the candles were lit so that - in those days before electric lights - one could look up at the gently sloping hill from the banks of the Bosphorus and watch the sad creatures’ nocturnal movements by the slow, pendulous motion of the flickering candles on their backs.

I like to think Adwaita’s days on the Clive Baronate Estate were like that: full of balmy nights under quiet stars, with a belly full of flowers.

I hope that his long years at the Calcutta Zoo weren’t anything like the only tropes I know for zoo animals. I hope they gave him strawberries sometimes.

I hope he didn’t have the kind of memory we do - one that endlessly ferments everything into treacly nostalgia, no matter what we pour into it; I hope he didn’t think much about the Seychelles or about other tortoises.

The Egyptians have this thing they say about the Pyramids:

“All men fear Time, but Time itself fears the Pyramids.”

The story of Adwaita the tortoise feels like that to me, mixed up with the sensation I get when I see homemade posters stuck on stop signs advertising lost dogs and cats.

I am strangely moved by the passing of this reptilian monument to time and I never even knew he existed until today. If I ever go to Calcutta, I will be sure to look for his great shell, horny and calloused, wherever it hangs - as it is sure to do - for a reverent public to view. Maybe I will feel like I feel when I visit the grave of someone I admire.

Cancun: Tim Orders an Odd Dessert

“Tim’s breath always - always - smells of corn.”

This from my sister during a brief pause in the conversation last night at dinner.

“Except when he eats creamed corn. Then it doesn’t smell like anything at all,” she added after a moment’s scrunch-nosed thought.

This was presumably a segue from the discussion of one of Tim’s more surprising actions of the evening: ordering the corn ice cream off the dessert menu.

When it arrived, it came inside an actual cornhusk and was the creamy color of French Vanilla. I guessed it would be less bizarre than, at first blush, it seemed it would be. After all, I reasoned, cornbread is sweet - after a fashion.

This ice cream smelled strongly of raw corn and, delighted at our trepidation, Tim dug in with gusto.

“It’s not bad,” he said. “exactly."

After another spoonful and a moment of thought: "It tastes like corn.”

We pressed him.

“Well, it doesn’t taste like cornbread as much as corn juice.”

This brought a joyful horror to all of us.

Tim ate about half of the stuff before giving a kind of full-body shiver that started from his head and moved down his arms. He set his spoon quietly down on the table and pushed the plate of ice cream away from him.

I got up to go to the restroom and stumbled on the leg of my chair to everyone’s delight.

“It’s an old tequila injury,” I explained. “Acts up sometimes - always tells me when I’m drunk.”

Tim’s breath, it was reported to me later, had not even the faintest trace of corn-smell after eating the corn ice cream.

Cancun: A Difficult Dinner

Dinner last night began in the same way it so often does - with me feigning indignation for comedic effect.

My mother had ordered a bottle of pinot grigio for herself and, after receiving it and tasting it, declared that it was pretty good. My father asked to see the bottle and when he took it from my mother I leaned over Chiara to have a look at it myself.

The first thing I noticed was that it was not, strictly speaking, a pinot grigio at all, but rather a blend of chardonnay and pinot grapes. I slammed my fist down onto the table in mock disgust and cried out “A blend!? Mother, how could you!?”

I then asked my father where the wine was from. He read the back of the bottle and informed me it was from Vera Cruz. Again I slammed my fist down on the table, rattling the flatware.

“Vera Cruz!?” I shouted in faux consternation.

“What’s wrong with you?” my father asked me.

“Nothing,” I replied quietly. “I’m feigning indignation.”

“Why?”

“For comedic effect.”

Stare. Silence.

Later, while discussing the adoption of Children, Tim impressed upon me the importance of a child having a cool name.

“Like Kobe or LeBron?” I asked. “Yeah,” said Tim.

I offered to call an adopted son LeJeff or LeKobe. Somehow or other this led to a more earnest discussion of potential baby names. Jennifer volunteered that she and Tim had already selected baby names for their theoretical children. The top boy name? Finnegan.

I said I thought it was a terrible name with a great nickname: Finn.

My dad said it was a terrible name because it was Irish.

This, as you might have expected, was the screeching turntable of the evening and rather upset my sister. It also rather perplexed the rest of us.

We pursued the topic with abandon.

Turns out my father believes that an Irish name dooms a child to a life of prejudicial treatment because, and i quote:

“Everyone knows that the Irish are a bunch of drunks and criminals” and “No one would ever think an Irish name was anything but low-class.”

It should be noted, for the record, that mine is, of course, an (ethnically) Irish family. Indeed, my father's actual surname is O'Brien.

We tried to explain to my father (over Jennifer’s mild protestations) how dashedly pretentious and upper-crusty a name like Finnegan actually was, but he wouldn’t have it. Instead he insisted over and over again that we must be incredibly ignorant if we didn’t know what people thought about "the Irish."

Tim asked him if he still called it a paddy wagon.

You can guess how this all went over.

Later, my sister offered up the middle ground (and perfectly true) position that words and names change their meaning with time and use. She mentioned the etymological history of her own name ‘Jennifer’ and how it came originally from ‘Guinevere’ who, according to my sister, was a slut.

This really caught in my father’s craw for some reason.

“How was Guinevere a slut!?” he demanded in far too loud a voice.

“Uh, because she slept with someone who wasn’t her husband!” my sister replied, pitched over the table and pointing a fork at my father.

“A knight!” he replied, red in the face, bubbling with anger. “You can’t be a slut for sleeping with a knight of the Round Table!”

“Of course you can! Especially if you are married to King Arthur!”

Here I tossed in that maybe she felt neglected because he was always off somewhere with Merlin, playing cards and whatnot. Tim smirked and, looking down, stirred the food on his plate in ever-tighter circles.

From here things got progressively more ridiculous until, almost as if the weight of the conversation caused itself to collapse, the whole thing just fizzled away leaving little more than a smell of burnt ozone and a cloud of steam.

We ate more or less silently for the remainder of the meal.

Cancun: My Father's Jokes Go Unappreciated

At dinner last night, Tim and my father and I all ordered Margaritas.

I opted for the Cadillac with Don Julio reposado tequila. Those other two got the house.

Good luck explaining to them about the bottle of Pancho Villa-wouldn’t-piss-in-it tequila they ordered. Anyway.

The waiter brings the drinks: Pinot Grigio for my mother. Coke for my sister. Coke for Chiara. Then he places my drink in front of me and announces it (as it deserved):

“the Cadillac, Señor.”

When he goes to place my father’s leper of a margarita before him, my father chimes in loudly:

“Ford!”

The waiter pauses in mid-action, the watery concoction disguised as a margarita suspended mere inches from the tabletop. He looks at my father.

“Ford!” my father again cries out, beaming at the poor waiter.

We all sit still as statues, confused or petrified; no one has the foggiest idea what we should be doing.

“Chevy!” my father yells.

By now, people at other tables - human resource managers in town for conventions, families of Iowans just vomited forth from cruise ships, chain-smoking New Yorkers happy to have someone other than the waitstaff to sneer at - are all pausing in their conversations, forks arrested halfway to mouths, to stare at our table.

And still the waiter holds that drink above the table in front of my father, perplexed.

And still my father beams his toothy smile.

“Cadillac.” says my father, gesturing at my margarita.

“Chevy! Ford!” he exclaims, pointing at his, still hovering before him in the waiter's hand.

With a sigh of either final comprehension or relief, the waiter chuckles briefly if unconvincingly and quietly and places the margarita in front of my father and then hands the other to Tim.

I take a deep breath and resolve to eat quickly.

The Would-Be Sultan, Subverted

I once went to a rib joint with my friend Joe. We were waited on by a stunning brunette who seemed to be flirting with both of us rather brazenly.

When she brought our dinners to us, she offered us bibs with a wry grin and a tuneful laugh. Joe and I exchanged glances and almost with one voice said to the girl “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

It seemed a charming sort of a lark - an opportunity to demonstrate how game and secure we were and what keen, ironic senses of humor we possessed. Our confidence and joie de vivre would communicate amply what giving and lyrical lovers we would make, surely.

She offered to tie the bibs on for us. As she came around behind me I arched my eyebrow at Joe and gave him a lopsided smile, full of significance.

Having an attractive woman gird a bib onto you in a restaurant is a heady experience. More than any other service of modern life save perhaps the massage, it suggests a kind of opulent servitude. In the moment, it felt like nothing so much as having a harem girl in a diaphanous gown feed me grapes, or fan me with a palm frond, or fill my goblet with wine from a bejeweled decanter.

The dance of the seven veils bibs.

In short, I felt important and powerful.

But when she had secured the bib and moved from behind my chair in order to repeat the task for Joe, a curious transformation of my mood transpired.

I felt stupid.

It was more than that, though; in the split instant of time between the bib being placed around my neck and the waitress removing her hands from my person, I underwent a profound reversal of emotion. I went from feeling regal and pampered, to feeling emasculated and childish.

I was, after all, just fitted with a device designed to catch foodstuff that fell from my mouth accidentally as I ate.

The experience of having that girl tie the thing around me was exciting. The experience of wearing it in front of her was painfully embarrassing.

As I watched the waitress tie on Joe’s bib, I saw in his eyes the same sudden swelling of potency and then, as she completed the operation, the same deflation in his demeanor. The girl left us to our meal and Joe and I stared silently at one another for a long, awkward moment before removing our bibs.

The girl never said anything or gave any sign that she noticed or cared that we had cast our bibs aside. She continued in her flirtatious vein and was attentive in all the usual waitress ways, but Joe and I hadn’t the anima left for any flirting in return. At least the act of eating ribs was still masculine and primal. It was likely that fact alone that salvaged whatever could have been salvaged.

Oh, and neither of us dropped any food onto our shirts. We aren't animals.