The Jennifer Dispatches: My Father versus Cheese and Bread

My sister relates a story of my father on Superbowl Sunday:

Halftime. The family sits around a coffee table laden with snackfoods and appetizers. My father voices a complaint:

“Next time, we should really make some plans for dinner and not just snack. We should have some protein for dinner. I’m tired of having Cheese and Bread all the time. We should have gotten those ribs at the supermarket.”

My sister responds: “We weren’t going to just snack for dinner. Mom ordered a pizza.”

“More Cheese and Bread! Why would I want more Cheese and Bread?!” cries my father.

“Well then why don’t you go to the supermarket and buy those ribs?” asks my sister, foolishly.

“I don’t want to go all the way out to the store to buy the ribs! I just don’t want to eat any more Cheese and Bread! All we ever eat is Cheese and Bread since you came here! This must be your doing!”

“Are you talking about the hors d’oeuvres? There isn’t even that much Cheese and Bread,” says my sister.

This is the last straw apparently. My father leaps from the sofa and hunches himself over the coffee table. Extending one of his stubby index fingers he points violently at a bowl of French onion dip and its companion plate of Ruffles brand potato chips.

“Cheese and Bread!” he exclaims

He jabs his finger at a pate.

“Cheese and Bread!”

He, predictably, stabs his thick digit into the wedge of jarlsberg.

“Cheese and Bread!!”

Even the bowl of sweet pickles is not immune from his wrath.

“Cheese and Bread!”

He punches with his finger at a bowl of Cheetos. He’s almost perspiring with the force of his hate.

“Cheese and Bread!!”

The twin bowl, filled with Fritos.

“Corn Chips! Just like Pizza!!”

My sister, always the glutton for paternal punishment, interrupts my father’s reverie of rage.

“How are corn chips just like pizza?” she asks.

“Shut up!” responds my father, “I’m speaking to your mother!”

My sister announces that she is going to go work on her art history paper. She goes to her room and does so. Later, when the pizza arrives, she leaves her room to find my father, perched stone-faced and alone at the dining room table eating the enormous porterhouse steak and gargantuan baked potato that my mother prepared for him.

My sister went into the living room and finished the game - and the pizza - with my mother.

To an Anonymous Punk, My Rebuttal

The other day, in the parking lot of a bookstore, I strolled by a small group of militant old-school punks drinking on the hood of an old beater. These guys were classic. Mohawks, studded leather, overweight girlfriends.

I wanted to walk as near to them as possible as I passed them on the way back to my car because I wanted to communicate to them (my blazer and flip-flops aside) that, in some cosmic sense, I was one of them.

Or anyway, I wanted them to know that I sympathized with them enough to not avoid them outright. I tried to emit early Ramones vibes at them as I strolled by plucking the price sticker from my book of Sontag essays.

The lead punk, his primacy evidenced both by his size and his possession of the plastic jug of vodka, greeted me with a “hey, man!” and I returned it with vigor.

“Isn’t this a magnificent evening?” he offered up lankily.

I replied that it was, but beginning to question my wisdom in instigating the exchange, I veered slightly and made for my car as casually but as quickly as I could.

The punk had a parting query for me and I’ve thought of it intermittently since:

“Don’t you wish everything was free?” he asked me in his hale timbre.

When I climbed into my car (a convertible), I took especial care to turn down the volume on the Belle and Sebastian song then playing on my stereo; I didn’t want to offend or rile the punks.

I muttered something supportive to them and drove away.

Afterward, I made for the dinner party I was attending that night at the Hometown Buffet.

I'll let that sink in.

The terrors were legion.

The place shared a wall with the 99cent store. Pay at the door and then take as much food as you like.

Lemme give you the tour: Here’s eggs. Here’s pot roast. Here’s spaghetti with ketchup. Here’s a vegetable - no, wait, that’s a chicken finger.

At one point a woman (one hopes) in a large bee costume sat down next to me and gave me a sweaty hug. The pilling felt of the costume’s gloves was used to caress my cheek. The black tights of the outfit had pooled around her ankles and spilled over the oversized sneakers. The smell was reminiscent of nothing so much as the ancient t-shirt I once discovered under a seat cushion on a houseboat.

Point is, I desperately wanted to be somewhere expensive as all sin. I think that punk had the wrong of it; I don’t want everything to be free, I just want to always have enough money to dine at an establishment where I can eat food that hasn’t been sitting under a lightbulb for a week and a half and takes less than an hour to chew.

But you can’t say that kind of thing to a punk, not when you have a haircut like I have.

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.

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.