Don’t Force It,

Get a Bigger Hammer

A newspaper journalist’s memoir with names changed when that seemed best.

Mark Eric Larson

To my parents, Henry and Lois. I’ll forever be indebted.
Chapters
Here kid, have a martini

Creatures of the newsroom

Trigger, Mr. Ed and Charlie

I sprained my middle finger in Paris

Paris weaves magic

Mom notes

Woman on the train

Laid back in Mexico

The Chimpala of 1960

Don’t force it, get a bigger hammer

The young man of Mendoza

Altered state

You must go with flow, grasshoppah

Barney, Bertha and the Bedouin

The cable virgin falls

Rambler classics

Buelah’s house
Vintage Vegas meets Big Bob

Here kid, have a martini

I come from a long line of boozers. My grandfather, a Swedish immigrant named Gustaf,

didn’t drink. I never met the guy, being that he died about 25 years before I was born. But

I’d be willing to bet it was because either his dad or mom, or both, were drunks he had to

put up with while growing up poor in Sweden.

Gustaf immigrated to Chicago in 1910 when he was 35 with his embittered wife Hertha

and daughter, my aunt Ingrid. Then in Chicago he and Hair Tonic, as my sister called her

– her name was pronounced with a hard T – had three more kids: My uncle Gus, my Aunt

Astrid and Henry, my dad. They spawned a grand slam of problem drinkers: All four

grew up to lead lives derailed by too much booze on a regular basis. Their lives were

guided by the gene of the drunkard, which my mother informed me as a kid, made their
worlds “read like a Eugene O’Neill play.” I didn’t get it until many years later. But she

nailed it.

A quiet guy, Gus was an empty bottles scattered around the room kind of drinker who

loved to sail and draw. He and my dad made their own sailboat on the Indiana sand dunes

as teens, and my dad told me Gus would just sail off alone in the boat on Lake Michigan

and be gone for days. Gus was the most unhappy guy my dad ever knew. And being in

the music business and a member of a family where misery was everywhere, especially

when the gentle Gustaf died when my dad was 13, that was saying something.

When Gus went off to fight in World War II, my dad told me many years later, he’d

hoped Gus didn’t make it back. That sounded harsh to me as a kid. But my dad, who

really loved his brother, saw him as a tragic figure, hopelessly stuck deep in a dark muck

of emotional misery. My dad figured if he were killed in the war, he’d at least be put out

of his misery.

But Gus made it back from the war physically intact, with bravery medals. He even got

married, but it didn’t last. My dad made it back, too. But they both came home having

absorbed much more of the dark side of life than their tenderized psyches could deal

with, at least booze-free. A few years later, Gus died alone in his apartment of a ruptured

appendix because he refused to be taken to the hospital when it happened. I never got a

chance to meet him.

After growing up with my dad’s alcoholism – he had an appointment at 5 every night

with a sequestered chug of straight vodka – my mom finally had enough after three kids

with him and 23 years of marriage. It didn’t hurt that she was interested in the local city

manager, so she kicked my dad out of the house and divorced him when I was 12. He

died nine years later at 61, at a Veteran’s Hospital. He was offed by cirrhosis of the liver

and pneumonia after a few years of declining health.

Astrid married a doctor and lived a pretty quiet life. But her youngest daughter, my

cousin, who grew up in another city, said she was a drinker. And she smoked. She died

years before her husband, but I don’t know much about her demise.

My dad’s eldest sister, Aunt Ingrid, and her man, Earl G., a.k.a Cap, were different, to

say the least. They were the ones I got to know the best while growing up. They were

federal bureaucrats in Washington D.C., and in their early years together they lived in a

farmhouse in rural Virginia with their two black standard poodles. My mom called them

“the original hippies,” since nobody ever remembers them ever actually getting married.

Cap worked in federal government intelligence circles and had been a physics professor

at the University of Chicago. He was tall and had a big girth. He was bald on top with

white hair on the sides and back of his head. He wore big black plastic framed glasses.

He was a quiet guy, but liked to drink fine wine, martinis and as a young man, was said to

be quite a skirt chaser.

When he and Ingrid retired on their government pensions at a ranch-style home in the

Southwest desert, he regularly watched Ironside, the detective show featuring a guy he
could relate to: Raymond Burr, a cerebral fat guy who barked out his theories on crime

cases and got pushed around in his wheelchair by his assistant. Cap also listened to the

Metropolitan Opera he taped from the radio. And just for kicks, he’d work on physics

problems in his study.

Ingrid, petite and gray-haired, had worked as a Census Bureau bureaucrat for 30 years,

and always felt she’d been denied promotions because she was a woman. At 16 in

Chicago, she was a beautiful dark haired Swede, a whip smart budding woman who had a

job as an executive secretary and helped support her family. She was a staunch believer

in women’s rights and subscribed to the then-Ms. magazine. She regularly wrote letters

with her brown-ink typewriter, keeping carbon copies of everything she wrote in her oak,

cigarette burned desk. She always wanted kids. But Cap never did, so they never had any.

Ingrid’s drink of choice was gin, which my mother once informed me as a kid, “Makes

you mean.”

I first met Ingrid when I was 10, after getting annual birthday checks and occasional

typewritten postcards from her. I’d only known her from her postcard messages, written

in a witty compact style that read like a good newspaper column. One of he favorite

transitional words was “Anyhoo.” But when I first met her face-to-face, when she and

Cap visited our house, she looked like a gray-haired teenager. She had on a short skirt

and fishnet stockings. She was whacky, and I had a hard time reconciling her writing –

which seemed like it came from a very focused mind -- with her giggly personality.
A year later during the summer, my parents paid for my sister and me to fly to Cap and

Ingrid’s house in Georgetown in Washington D.C., so we could widen our horizons with

the sights there. Cap and Ingrid’s house was built during the Revolutionary War with

square nails. Like most of the homes along the street it was three stories high and big

leafy trees canopied the neighborhood. Cap and Ingrid always argued right in front of us

about who would take us to the next D.C sight.

One night we made popcorn, and were all set to season it with the typical salt and melted

butter. But Ingrid wasn’t happy about it. She said she liked garlic on her popcorn and

made a stink. We couldn’t fathom the idea of putting garlic on popcorn. We appealed to

Cap and he said go ahead and put salt and butter on it. Ingrid was in her white robe,

drunk with heavy eyelids and little-girl whiney. She pouted with her lower lip at the top

of the stairs, and looked down at us eating the tainted popcorn in the living room.

“Caaaaaaaaaaaaaap,” she moaned like a sick cow. “I like GARRRRlick.” She made a big

ugly face at my sister and me. She looked insane, ready for the loony bin. But we realized

she was shit-faced, and therefore had inhabited a personality nothing at all like her little-

used sober one. It was a routine we were used to with my Dad, who when drunk, made a

lot of the same goofy facial expressions his older sister did. They must have shared the

same goofy face when fucked up gene.

They dropped us off at a movie one night, and Ingrid picked us up in her baby blue

Valiant, drunk. How she ever got there alive, I’ll never know. She apparently lost the
argument over who would pick us up. Apparently, Cap wasn’t worried about her crashing

the Valiant with or without us in the car. The ride home was short but her erratic turns

and jerky brake work, punctuated by slow motion blinks of her eyes, had us scared

shitless.

But Ingrid was always very kind to me. A few years later, when she and Cap were living

in the same desert where I was going to school, she invited me over to have Thanksgiving

with them. I went over, and prompted by my mother, brought some flowers and wore my

only good clothes: a gaudy powder blue and white checked suit and coat. When I arrived,

the house smelled great; a turkey was roasting in the oven.

Soon, we sat down to eat, with Ingrid at one head of the table and Cap at the other. And

from my many years of experience sitting at the dinner table with my drunken father, I

immediately knew one thing: Ingrid was thoroughly shit-faced. So shit-faced that her

head was lolling around like a loosely attached bowling ball on her neck. She had the

same drunken behavior as my dad had displayed for all of us to see for many years at the

dinner table. Her eyes blinked in slow motion and her face made exaggerated contortions

in reaction to whatever she saw. There were mashed potatoes and gravy and turkey. We

three silently dished food on our plates, Ingrid doing so sloppily. I started to eat and

Ingrid says, “I hate it when Cap duzthedisssshes. He takes TOOLONG,” she wailed, “and

makes everything tooo CLEAN!”

I looked over to see her lay the side of her face into the mashed potatoes so she could

comfortably take a nap. I looked over to Cap and he had his head down, eating the food

on his plate. He acted as if nothing was out of the ordinary. I got up from the table and

told him, “I gotta go.”

While I often watched my dad try to conduct himself passably while trying to eat his

dinner drunk, I never saw him pass out on his plate. He reportedly upchucked at the table

once when my sisters were little kids. But I remember him being just as goofy. He’d

hover his fork over my plate to stab food he saw I wasn’t eating. But I got more than my

fill of it over the years, and Ingrid’s faceplant broke open a flood of bad memories. Cap

followed me out of the house.

“You know, the drinking never kills anybody,” he said at the door.

“Really?” I snapped. I got in my car and drove back to my apartment.

A year or so later I asked if I could stay at Cap and Ingrid’s house while I studied for my

finals. I needed a place to bunk before leaving town. I could save a month’s rent if I

checked out of my apartment a few weeks early. They waved me in, and gave me a spare

bedroom. I set up a desk and figured I’d keep a low profile, mindful that this place, the

Twilight Zone of Cap and Ingrid, was really an insane asylum posing as the home of an

eccentric old couple.

The first Saturday, early in the morning, Cap was dressed up in big blue denim overalls,

looking like Captain Kangaroo with a hard-on. He blew open the door to my room. I was

still in bed, trying to make sense of what I saw.

“I want to clear some brush,” he said, standing in the doorway with his eyes lit up as if

this was something he’d wanted to do for forever. “Give me a hand?”

I’d never seen him bursting with energy like this. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Let me put some

clothes on.”

We went into the garage and found saws to cut back some of the brush growing close to

the house. In the garage were huge empty green bottles of Tanqueray gin. One was as big

as a spare gas tank. It was hinged in a large wooden cradle that enabled the drinker to

pour without having to heft the bottle.

I couldn’t believe all the bottles. Looked like a fifth-a-day habit for dear old Aunt Ingrid.

We started cutting brush, but only after about a half hour Cap groaned and bent down in

serious pain. He had gout in his shins and had to quit, and he was pissed about it. He’d

started the day with high hopes of feeling like what it was to be a man again, doing man

chores requiring manly brawn. When he was a young man, Cap was a fucking stud. I saw

an old photo of him once when he was on the shore of Lake Michigan in his swim trunks.

He was barrel chested, tan and muscular with a cigarette in his mouth as he held a fishing
pole cast into the surf. He looked like anything but a quiet intellectual. But those days

were long gone for him. His notion of doing some manual labor was quickly wrung out

of his head into ringing pain in his shins. I helped him into the house while he muttered.

After he sat down and tried to figure out what drugs would best kill his pain, I went to my

room to study.

He and Ingrid slept in different bedrooms. Ingrid’s room was nearly filled by a massive

four-poster bed of ornately carved wood, with a canopy draped over it. It looked like

something the fucking Queen of England would sleep in. To get in it, she needed bedside

stairs, a piece of matching dark wood furniture that doubled as a drawer. Her getting up

and onto her bed while shit-faced must have been one for the rake in the crotch home

video shows.

Cap slept in a room across the hall, in a simple double bed. One night I heard a big boom

and crash coming from the bathroom off of Ingrid’s room. I went to investigate and heard

Cap moaning. The door was shut. “Are you OK, Cap?” I hollered.

“Argggggghhhhh, owwwwwwwww…” is all I heard.

I opened the door and saw him completely naked, lying crosswise in the tub. He had

fallen backward and cracked his head against the tile wall. He was holding his head and

moaning.

“Here let me get you out of there,” I said. His big round face was beet red.
I grabbed his arms and pulled him to his feet, and sat him on the toilet. He clutched his

bald head as if he were holding together cracked pieces of his skull. He threw off a

seriously foul body odor.

“Should I call a doctor?” I asked.

“Nawwww, I’ll be OK,” he said, sobbing.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m OK,” he said, anguish rounding out his raspy voice.

He seemed more embarrassed than hurt. So I told him I’d get him anything if he needed

it, just to tell me what it was.

“I’ll be OK,” he said, and waved me off.

Feeling like I’d just returned from Pluto, I went back to my room to study.

Another night I opened the window in my room to get some fresh air and it set off the

house alarm. It was a very loud fucking bell. I went out to the hall and my Aunt Ingrid

ran toward me out of her room naked, wide eyed, and looking every bit like a loony bin
escapee. “Ahhhhhhhh,” she shrieked, as if she’d just seen a ghost. “Someone’s trying to

get into the house!!!!!”

I looked away and sputtered, “I just opened the window for some fresh air, there’s

nobody trying to get in!” She ran to the alarm keypad and punched in what she thought

was the code but it didn’t stop the nerve jangling alarm. It was loud enough to rattle any

sober person’s brain, let alone one addled from years marinating in constantly

replenished washes of grain alcohol.

Adding to the din was the suddenly ringing telephone, which for some reason was loud

enough to be heard over the alarm. It was the alarm company calling. My aunt had

somehow covered up with a robe and shakily took the phone from me. They asked if they

should send in cops, a SWAT team, medical unit, whatever.

“It’s OKAY!!!” she shouted with a nervous laugh, looking up at me with the scared face

of a little girl. Cap appeared in the hall in his shorts, fear darting in his small dark, rodent-

like eyes.

“Sorry, I just opened the window for some fresh air,” I said. “Everything’s OK.”

“Don’t DO that!” whined my aunt, who still didn’t look sober, even after the terrific jolt

of terror had jump-started her deadened nervous system. She got the alarm code from the
security service and somehow managed to punch in the numbers that mercifully stopped

the damn ringing.

I went back to my room and shut the fucking window. Ingrid lit a cigarette and went into

her study. I could hear her through the adjoining wall, shuffling shit around, and

eventually she was clack-clack-clacking another one of her letters to someone.

She didn’t sleep much and spent many nights smoking and typing letters to family and

friends. And if she really got bored, she’d call up family members. It didn’t occur to her

that calling somebody in the middle of the night across the country was usually bad

timing because of the time difference, and that whoever she was calling wouldn’t likely

be in a chatty mood.

When I was a kid, she’d call our house late at night from D.C., drunk, of course, and just

wanted to talk. My sisters or me would hand the phone to my dad, laughing at her crazy

lady voice, reporting, “It’s Ingrid and she’s drunk.” My dad would take the phone and

talk to her if he was sober, which amazingly, sometimes he was. My sisters and me, being

mean spirited snots, thought she was both annoying and hilarious.

My mom mentioned to us a few times that Ingrid had had “a hundred abortions” over her

many years with Cap, because he never wanted to have kids. Apparently contraceptives

weren’t her thing. Maybe it was best they never had kids. But Ingrid seemed to be a

mother without somebody to take care of. She baked great allspice cookies and fruit pies
and put them in a huge freezer in the garage because there was never anybody around to

eat them. She was a phenomenal cook, even though she was usually half in the bag when

she started banging around in the kitchen.

While I was staying with them I asked Cap why they never had kids.

“Just think what they’d look like,” he said, laughing.

But they weren’t butt ugly people, at least when they were a lot younger. Somehow, I

didn’t think that was the reason.

One afternoon I came home from school and Ingrid was in the kitchen with her

industrial-sized electric mixer turned on. Its dough hook was loaded up with a, big

lopsided lump of cookie dough. The spinning over-laden dough hook made the whole

unit skip sideways across the counter. It made a deafening racket when it crashed into the

sink as Ingrid watched it all, blinking in drunken disbelief.

“What the HELL are you doing?” roared Cap as he rushed into the dining room to see the

kitchen spectacle.

“I’m making gookies,” declared Ingrid with defiance. “Caaaaaaaaaaap. Stop it Cap,” she

whined like a six-year old girl who’d been scolded by her father, which essentially, Cap

was.
I went over and unplugged the thing before it started breaking up into pieces of bent,

overheated metal.

Somehow, Ingrid was mostly functional while drunk. She’d cook drunk, and even

practice playing the piano soused, reading and playing her music in slow motion while

her right eye voluntarily shut as she concentrated.

“Cap HATES when I play,” she told me.

One night the incredible wafts of her cooking floated into my nostrils as I emerged from

my room after studying most of the day.

Cap was in his den which had been converted from an attached garage, so it was roomy

enough to hold all his stuff: a big dark brown leather couch, a laminated work table for

tinkering with physics problems, tall walls of bookcases filled with science books, a side

room with racks full of wine, and a big TV. The room had a dank, musty smell, like it

needed air, and cleaning.

Cap readied to watch a rerun of Ironside.

I wandered in, and Cap sat at one of three place settings Ingrid put on the long table

behind the couch facing the TV.

“Ironside’s on in a few minutes,” he said. “Want a martini?”

“I’ve never had one before,” I said. ‘I’m only 20.”

“That’s OK. I’m making a batch. You can see if you like a martini.”

“Uh, OK.”

He had a huge glass beaker that he set out on his side bar and began pouring and stirring

the batch.

He brought out ice-chilled martini glasses and put them in front of each place setting.

“Here kid, have a martini,” he said, and carefully poured my glass. “I like ‘em straight

up, made with gin.”

He speared three pimento-stuffed green olives each on three toothpicks and dunked one

olive trio apiece into the three martinis.

“Cheers!” he said with palpable glee, and raised his glass to me, not bothering to wait for

Ingrid to come in from the kitchen.

I took a sip, just as the show started. The cold, viscous liquor coated the inside of my

mouth and made me blink hard when I swallowed. I finished it and it wasn’t too long

before Cap had the beaker poised over my glass for a refill. I let him pour and then Ingrid

came in with the great smelling food. Prime rib with gravy, roast potatoes and green

beans. She was already drunk from nipping earlier in the day, but somehow she hadn’t

screwed up the food at all.

I finished my second martini, and was feeling it, when I looked over to Cap to see he’d

already chosen the fine red wine we were going to drink with dinner. He pulled the cork

and poured generously into the wine glasses he’d produced from his bar.

I ate the food and drank the wine. After the show was over, Ironside had solved another

murder, the food was eaten and the wine finished. I was full and not completely stable.

“Let me help clean this up,” I said to Ingrid.

“No, don’t do anything,” said Cap. “I’m doing the dishes.”

Ingrid was already in her study when I thanked her for the dinner and shuffled into my

room feeling flush with martini-fueled numbness.

I left early one morning after my last final exam. I was headed to Los Angeles, and Ingrid

had packed me lunch and tins of her delicious cookies. I waved goodbye to them in the
predawn desert light and after they left the sight line of my rearview mirror, I never saw

them again.

We kept in touch and Ingrid sent me money to go to graduate school and to help pay for a

six-week jaunt through Europe as a graduation gift. Education and travel were two things

she believed in.

A few years later Cap had some kind of heart problem while sleeping and fell out of bed.

But for three days, Ingrid hadn’t noticed he wasn’t up and around. She eventually found

him unconscious on the bedroom floor and got him to a hospital. He was alive, but

barely. She sat next to his hospital bed for several days, and held his hand the whole time.

But Cap eventually died. And that sent Ingrid into a panic. She moved back to

Washington D.C., then to California. She had such bad blood circulation she had to have

a foot amputated.

And not many months later, after hard boozing for probably at least 60 years of her life,

she died of lung cancer. After all those years of liver abuse, booze didn’t knock her out.

The cigarettes did.

Creatures of the Newsroom

Leo Valachi

I first met Leo Valachi soon after getting hired at a weekly business newspaper in a

Northern California city known for its killer tomatoes, goofy politicians and nearby

federal prison. This was in 1987 and in those days, Leo had permed his brown hair,

making him look vaguely like a skinny Harpo Marx. A local, the son of a Southern

Pacific railroad guy, he was in his mid-thirties, reed thin, a permanent but straight

bachelor who looked like a cross between Bob Dylan and Robert Crumb in their middle

years. He was fiercely loyal to his hometown, which he felt was being constantly

degraded by outsiders, or what he called “carpetbaggers,” or “shysters” taking away the

unpretentious small town feel of the city.

Leo was a copy editor at the paper. He had an absolute command of proper English usage

and was a math whiz to boot. His tanned face was pocked with the remnants of teenage

acne. He was deaf in one ear, and talked in loud outbursts as if he had no inner sense of
his volume. “I do believe I’M FLUMMOXED,” he’d say out loud to himself. The sudden

high volume made heads turn.

Something had turned off his ability to smell, which enabled him to brag about how he

could handle with ease the hottest salsa, even habanero peppers. He’d drink salsa from

little plastic cups others would leave on his desk, returning from lunches at Mexican

restaurants. After swallowing, he’d bellow, “No BURN at all!” as if he were some kind

of hot pepper ingesting stud. He’d scoff at anybody saying peppers like habaneros, which

are ridiculously incendiary to a normal person’s senses, were too hot to eat.

He always wore a blue threadbare not so clean oxford shirt to the office. The shirts

elbows were ripped through. He’d wear a ratty gravy stained dark blue tie, and apparently

never looked in the mirror, because his collar was always flipped up around the back of

his neck, showing his tie. Nobody in the newsroom ever bothered to tell him this because

he wouldn’t have appreciated it. Plus, it was funny to look at, with his eventually straight,

greasy thin brown hair, which always seemed have a cowlick or two sticking up off the

top or side of his head. He always wore a silver tie tack with his initials on it, which was

tethered to a shirt button with a mini chain. Just in case you may have missed his initials

in the tie tack, he wore a wide brown leather belt with a big silver buckle from Southern

Pacific with LV on it. He wore generic blue or brown slacks and beat-up, cracked brown

dress shoes for years, until one day, after more than10 years of dressing in ratty clothes,

he got the idea he needed some new clothes. He showed up to the office wearing new

slacks, shoes and dress shirts. I think he may have even got a new tie or two.
But Leo wasn’t one for taking regular showers and that was no more apparent than on

deadline day each week. That was a dress down day, where the newsroom folks could

wear jeans and t-shirts and not get dirty glares from the phony, tight ass publisher who

Leo loathed with all his heart, and referred to as “Needledick.”

On deadline day, Leo wore greasy blue jeans with paint stains on them from his latest

home painting project, torn and dirty tennis shoes, a wrinkled, dirty T-shirt, and if you

got near him he always had an extra gamey aura of nuclear B.O., the kind which makes

you wonder about his hygiene habits, or lack thereof. I found myself wondering just how

many days of not taking a shower would have to pile up before Leo might say to himself,

“Aw shee-it, I guess I need to clean up.”

Leo was a man who saw the world in black and white. He either passionately hated

something, like kids, dogs, Bob Hope, pro football, John Madden, his ex-boss, golf, the

British, and “high tech gizmos” like computers and cell phones. He never changed out the

rotary dial phone from his family house, and his office computer crashed more than

anybody else’s. Probably because whenever it froze up on him, he’d bang on it and yell

“Goddam fucking gizmo!” and shove piles of books papers, dried out apple cores, orange

and banana peels, off his desk. Other icons of disgust for him were advertising people,

who to him were “gnats,” sugar, or any food or drinks containing sugar, which he called

“donuts,” and “liquid donuts,” American or “ersatz” pizza, “yupster” coffee from places

like Starbucks -- he only drank the low-grade battery acid brew available for free in the
office kitchen from a skanky, unwashed mug -- Oliver Cromwell and the composer

Wagner.

If he saw anybody in the newsroom about to eat or drink something with sugar in it, he’d

call out “Don’t do it!”

He ranted on and on about the evils of pro football, calling it the “Corporate Football

League” with sneering contempt. He saw all the ad sales “gnats” on the other side of the

office as shallow, uneducated, money-hungry giggle-prone half-wits. Which, for the most

part, they were. Whenever loud cackles erupted from the ad side of the office, Leo, in

resigned acceptance, called out: “Unbridled mirth.”

But his other half zealously loved things, such as baseball, soccer, chess, Basque food,

dubbed Japanese monster movies or other weird, grainy creature features, cigars, Irish

whiskey, or anything Irish for that matter since he was half Irish, and anything Italian

since he was half Italian. He thought the world of Joe DiMaggio, W.C. Fields, Bob Wills

and his Texas Playboys, the Beatles and Nevada.

He’d listened to soccer games on Spanish radio and watch Spanish-language TV game

shows, which he found hilarious. His favorite imitation was of some sportscaster’s well

known call of a goal in Spanish. He’d yell out “Goooooooooooooooooooooollllllllllll!!!!”

When he watched baseball on TV, he turned the sound down and listened to the radio

play by play of the same game. He liked radio announcers, but hated TV sportscasters.
He liked to show of his mastery of an arcane vocabulary. He’d refer to some occurrence

that he loathed as an example of “Stygian depths,” or sometimes simply as “The decline

of Western Civilization” when he witnessed anything he considered modern cultural

shlock.

When confused, he’d declare: “I’m FLUMMOXED.” He said “flummoxed” so often in

fact, I think it had to be his favorite word. He’d sometimes admit to a mistake by saying

“I’ve been on the DUMBNESS TRAIN.” If he thought someone wasn’t so smart, he’d

say they had “low candlepower.” He wouldn’t simply say “nose,” he’d say “proboscis.”

He wouldn’t say “tickets,” it was “ducats.” People he despised were “Philistines.” All

politicians were “solons” and most of them – except for Jerry Brown – were also

“philistines.”

His dictionary was the most beat up book in the newsroom. To hold it together, he had a

thick, red rubber band stretched around it. He worked hard, showed up early and left late.

He was resigned to his heavy weekly workload, and would let on by occasionally

muttering, “Resistance is useless.”

For some reason, whenever Leo heard a siren go by outside, he’d yell out “SMOG

BELL!” He had a reason for this ritual, as all others he had, but to ask why he did it

meant having to listen to a 15- minute explanation, so nobody did. If somebody in the

newsroom had gone to the dentist, he’d declare they’d gone “to San Diego” for some
other unknown reason derived from some past occurrence of amusing significance to

him. Anybody on vacation was “taking a powder.”

Leo gave people in the newsroom two types of names. Either he added “ster” to a

person’s name, or he’d give them a name arrived at through some connection he’d made

with a fellow office cube farmer, which one reporter called “Leo’s special moment.”

Leo’s every day greeting for me was kind of a drawling “Ehhhhhhhhh…” It came about

in the early days when we agreed how funny Willie McCovey was when he talked.

McCovey was the San Francisco Giants slugging first baseman of the 60s and 70s.

McCovey was funny because of his good-natured personality, which made him smile a

lot, along with his molasses-like Alabama drawl. Leo recalled a time when a sportscaster

told McCovey that the old Dodgers-Giants games were like wars.

“Willie thought about it,” says Leo. “Then he smiles and says, ‘Ehhhhhhhh, they WUZ

WAUHs, WASN’T THEY!!!!’” We howled imagining Willie’s goofy, toothy grin. So

from that story, and my appreciation of it, Leo always greeted me with an

“Ehhhhhhhhhh…..” and I’d do it back to him like he wanted. Nobody else in the office

had any idea what our greeting meant, but they were definitely puzzled by it. He always

initiated his customized greetings, and gleefully awaited the ritual reply, as if it was

necessary for him to continue his day.

One statuesque blonde working on the ad side, who happened to be a “gnat” was

nonetheless a favorite of Leo’s. He’d freely call her “Big Girl.” Another cute brunette in

research with the initials D.D. he referred to as “Double D.” A fresh faced young redhead

who in later years also worked in research had the initials E.E., and she, of course, was

“Double E” to Leo.

His greeting for another editor was simply to say “Bob Purkey,” and the editor would

echo the name back to him. Purkey was an obscure major league baseball player from the

50s another editor had declared as his favorite obscure player from his baseball card

collection. For some reason Leo had Purkey’s baseball card displayed on his desk along

with various small photos of half dressed women, or photos of other “dollies” he wished

he could have bedded.

One reporter, who happened to speak German was also on the special events planning

committee, which set up office Christmas parties and other in-house parties. Leo called

such gatherings “mandatory fun,” and scoffed at them as idiotic, since all employees

were expected to attend whether they wanted to or not. So Leo ended up calling this

reporter “Der Spasskaiser,” which loosely translated, meant “fun president.” Every time

he’d see this reporter, he’d faithfully call out “Der Spasskaiser!” who would return his

expected line of “Ya vol, Herr Valachi.”

Der Spasskaiser one late night happened to catch Leo at a local Safeway while he was

buying day-old muffins, the very type of comestible Leo regularly ranted about for their
evil sugar content. Spasskaiser alleged Leo tried to hide the bag of muffins upon eyeing

him, but to no avail. Der Spasskaiser made sure everybody in the newsroom heard about

it the next day.

Leo despised the idea of “mandatory fun” as something thought up by some corporate

prick to make idiot staffers whistle while they work. In the early days Leo would go to

some of the gatherings because he knew there was free booze. To him, getting something

free was worth the effort, even if it involved something he was philosophically opposed

to, like muffins. He figured that if he got it for free, it was somehow absolved of its sins.

But he didn’t have any problem with booze, free or not. He was a cheap drunk, and at

office parties in the early days, he’d get roaring drunk and make a scene.

Shortly after he started at the paper he and other editors had to fly to Kansas City for a

company meeting. Leo had never been on a flight before. At the main dinner, he drank

too much and sat silently at his place, and slowly and quietly bent his spoon in half. He

had to be helped back to his room because he couldn’t walk down the hall without

scraping his shoulder on the wall.

At a Christmas party, he got one of the hottest women on the ad side to dance with him.

When they got on the dance floor, somehow she slipped and fell to the floor. Leo, boozed

up with naked lust in his heart, fell right on top of her. He had to be pulled off her by a

few guys watching the spectacle. Leo was driven home, too sloshed to drive.
At an office party held on a riverboat, he immediately got shit-faced on the free booze

and after rolling around on the deck, was driven home by another editor. From then on,

Leo wouldn’t go to any office parties, especially those on a boat, which he mercilessly

mocked as loud as he could in the newsroom.

When one would be scheduled, he’d say “Gee whiz, are you going on the BOAT

RIDE??? Golly, everybody loves to go on a BOAT RIDE. OH BOY!!!” Then his mock

glee expression turned to a sour ass scowl of utter contempt. “SHEE-IT.”

And when the office was moved to a new space, which was designed with a budget-

minded try at urban hipness, it came with a red pendant light glaring annoyingly off of

Leo’s computer screen. He bitched and moaned for someone to turn off the “fun lights.”

One thing Leo and I agreed about was the word “Indeed.” We both hated it. It was

popularized by Hunter S. Thompson, who felt it was profound to start a paragraph with

“Indeed,” as it if put a thinking man’s approval on what had been said in the previous

paragraph. Leo’s response was to say, “Indeed, he quipped,” whenever it was appropriate

to say “Yes.”

Other words and phrases we agreed could be flushed from the language as jargon-

infected stupid-speak guys and gals in corporate-land used all too often were facility,

utilize, level playing field, bottom line, glass ceiling, hit the ground running, think outside

the box, slam dunk, win-win situation, lifestyle, concept, self starter, fast track, with an

eye (or view) toward, downsizing, rightsizing, cutting edge, bleeding edge, at the end of
the day, basically, obviously, as you know, blue sky, connect the dots and monetize, just

to name a few.

Whenever copy editing, Leo called out words he considered overused, pretentious or

meaningless. “FACILITY?” he’d always call out. His tone dripped with sarcasm when

he’d flag these words for all to hear, then say disgustedly, “OH BOY,” or simply mutter,

“Shee-it.”

If he found a particularly tortured mixed metaphor, he’d yell it out, laughing, making sure

everybody knew who wrote it. A few of his favorites came from a former reporter known

for making regular gaffes with the language. Leo’s favorite, which he loved to recite, was

“It was a runaway train that slowed to a trickle.” Next was, “Buy low, sell lower,” and

the third was the description of a man who milked cows for a living as a “diary farmer.”

Leo always kept a greasy, dirt stained baseball at his desk, and his ritual with a marketing

manager, a petite blonde he called “Sweetheart,” was to have her stand back about 10 feet

away. He’d take his baseball and throw her little grounders and stand with his glove hand

out, like he was a first baseman. He’d always do three of them and Sweetheart fielded the

grounders barehanded and tossed the ball to Leo. On the third catch, he’d play the umpire

and call an out with his thumb. Then they’d both go about their business. No one asked

why they did this. But it was a Leo ritual so it came to be accepted as normal.
Whenever he crossed paths with the paper’s grumpy photographer, Jerry, a big burly guy

with a big gray beard and glasses, Leo, without fail, would blurt out: “Go take some

pictures.”

Leo loved to hear about weird encounters of reporters. One time I came back to the office

to tell of an early morning interview I’d done with some insurance guy, and I told Leo it

was all I could do to stay awake while this guy was rambling on and on about soft

markets, re-insurance and whatever. Finally, I realized I’d forgotten the guy’s name, so I

sneaked a peak at his business card and came away with the name “Lawrence.” So when

I’m wrapping up the interview, I say, “Well, great talking to you Larry!”

I tell Leo the guy gave me the stink eye, and silence. I left and took another look at his

card when I got back in my car. And it turned out the guy’s last name was Lawrence.

When Leo heard that, he slapped his thigh and hooted and howled. And ever since, he’d

occasionally ask, “Hey, how’s Larry doin’?”

Leo had been an only child, and grew up a mama’s boy. Every opening day of the major

league season, Leo’s favorite day of the year, she’d send a huge plastic bag of store-

bought buttered popcorn to the office for Leo, who would open it up an let everybody

have at it.
Leo liked to sing the national anthem in the newsroom every opening day, and he’d try to

get everybody to sing along with him. One reporter, Ted Dean, loved to take part, and

one year, opening day fell on story meeting day. There in the conference room, Leo

spontaneously started singing the anthem. Dean, a gangly 6 foot 6 goofball, stood up in

the conference room and joined in lustily, practically yelling the words, while the editors

and the rest of the reporters half-heartedly joined in.

This was important stuff to Leo. Baseball season, to him, was “The season of lightness.”

While the rest of the year was, of course, “The season of darkness.”

When he’d hear other people in the newsroom talking about pro football, he’d scoff, and

huff and puff, and mutter loudly, “Stupid CORporate FOOTball League.” He’d argue all

day with anybody that tried to defend pro football of having any merit whatsoever.

His most hated member of the pro football world was the ex-coach announcer, John

Madden. While Madden is loved by many, Leo held nothing but raw contempt for the big

boy. When ranting about Madden, he’d get angrier and angrier the more he thought about

Madden. He’d mock Madden’s game-calling style.

“And this guy goes over here, BOOOM!” yelled Leo, “And that guy goes over there,

BOOM! He’d slam his fist on his desk with molten fury in his face. “Fucking Corporate

FOOTBALL!”
He also hated the local NBA basketball team, and referred them with dripping mockery

as “The Kingsie Wingsies.”

Same with golf and the “lifestyle” it represented to him, which he thought was just a

bunch of corporate clowns posturing with what he considered a game for yuppie idiots.

His favorite sportswriter was the late Sean McGrady, who had retired after years of

writing for one of the local dailies. Sean was a legend in town, and because he was Irish,

gruff, drank plenty of booze and smoked cigars, Leo loved him. McGrady was known for

falling asleep at his desk with a lit cigar between his fingers. Another time, after a night

of heavy drinking, McGrady drove his car into his driveway, turned off the engine and

fell asleep. When he woke the next morning, he realized he wasn’t in his own driveway.

Leo loved to imitate McGrady’s gravelly, deep voice, and his habit of calling every man

he met “partner.”

“Hey there, partner,” Leo would say Sean-style. “Time for me to get a refill.”

His favorite ballplayer from his favorite sport was, of course, an Italian: Joe DiMaggio.

Leo played organized baseball when he was younger, and claimed he once got a hit off a

pitcher who eventually made the big leagues, Louis Arroyo. It was the proudest feat of

his life because he’d mention it often enough so that everybody knew.

When he got paid, Leo never cashed his checks. He just kept them in his wallet. Spending

money was something he rarely did, and only when absolutely necessary. He owned his
house outright and inherited another when his mom died. He was flush, but lived and

looked like a hobo.

One weekend while driving back from a trip to Nevada, Leo’s faded blue Buick Regal

blew its engine. He was stranded in the foothills about an hour away. He later told of how

he abandoned the car, took a bus home, then went to a local Ford dealership. There he

bought himself a brand new black Thunderbird, with a V-8 engine, for cash.

In the early days, he’d take notes during story meetings, then type up his version of them

in a list passed around to everybody. His summaries were in Leo-speak and could be

deciphered with a little thought. A story described as a dental insurance company moving

to a bigger building would be described as: “San Diego premiumsters get new local

digs.” He wrote headlines that were obviously his: “Rug hub shags new digs,” for a

carpet manufacturer moving its headquarters, or “Sanguine solons ink pact on energy.”

He’d embellish the weekly story list, often by dating it at the top of the page in Italian

and adding some of his pseudo cubist artwork or favorite small photos in the margins. His

lunatic doodles would frame the story list, such as a Dali/Picasso-esque man’s head with

a faucet where his forehead should be, with water dripping out of it. Nobody knew what

he was trying to say with his little pictograms. The editor let him do it for years, until for

some reason, took the job for himself. Immediately, the story lists turned from pop

expressionism to bloodless corporate-speak.

One of Leo’s favorite photos was the very tall chick from the classic sci-fi thriller “The

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,” from the movie of the same name. He loved to imitate

the call of the King Kong-sized tall blonde when she’s walking around the town,

destroying any of the toy buildings getting in the way of her feet. She’s on the prowl for

her husband, and Leo would do her yell in particularly grating, loud tones:

“HAAAAARRRRRRYYYY!!!!”

Prior to working the paper, Leo wrote a book he kept in a binder, titled “Chiladaville,”

whose hero was Leo’s alter-ego, Benny Chilada. He’d show it to anybody that had heard

about it and asked to read it. It was typed and illustrated with Leo’s stick figure/cubist

artwork. It was about the adventures of Benny Chilada and his takes on various weird

situations. It summed up Leo’s world in short vignettes, and he never got it published. A

reporter at the paper claimed he’d seen an almost identical book from the late 60s, and

said Leo just copied the style. Maybe, but it was a good, light read.

Leo took satisfaction in playing the diva. If he didn’t like something he’d state his case in

no uncertain terms and follow it with a particularly loud “HAAAAARRRRUUUUMPH!”

As in, “I’m not going to do that, because that would be a complete and utter waste of my

time…….”

Before working at the paper, Leo was a staffer for Jerry Brown, the governor known for

flakiness, being a long time bachelor, and one-time boyfriend of Linda Ronstadt. He

called his immediate boss at “the castle” the “Wacko alleged supervisor,” whose myriad
flaws he would occasionally rant about as he tried to purge the years of misery she’d

caused him.

At the paper one of his main jobs was to assemble a column called “On the Move,” which

was mug shots of local business types who had just gotten promoted or a new job. Leo

hated the concept of honoring people he considered to be self-promoting clowns, since

they or their companies would send in the information to get free publicity. He called

them “scumsters.” But Leo was a stickler for making the column look good on the page,

and would painstakingly make sure the copy surrounding the mug shots was perfectly

even, with consistent spacing of all letters and no unsightly spaces.

So when he picked up the occasional complaint call from a scumster unhappy about

something in their write-up, the rage would rise from his toes to his ever reddening face

in a flash. Something was left out, or gave the wrong impression, they’d whine to Leo,

who’d mumble occasional “hmmm- mmphhs,” saying nothing else while he quivered

with rage. To vent his hot temper while on the phone listening to the scumster bitching

about their injustice, he’d throw things up in the air around him: Staplers, books, cups,

anything within reach on his debris filled desk. One new reporter couldn’t help but notice

a stapler whiz by his ear while Leo fielded a particularly galling complaint call. The

crashing of thrown items around his desk was always a tipoff that Leo was listening to a

whining asshole. When the call ended, Leo would mumble, “OK” and then slowly and

gently hang up the receiver. He’d gather himself, then yell out, “Goddam FUCKing

SCUMster!!!!” One time he was so mad after a call that he walked over to a metal filing
cabinet and kicked it repeatedly, the kicks booming into the bucking metal, as he

muttered “Sons of BITCHES!”

This got the attention of the whole newsroom and then of Needle-dick, who told the

editor to tell Leo if he ever did that again, he’d be history. The editor, a fairly tolerant, but

generally angry guy in his own right, walked over to Leo and yelled, “Leo, can I help

you?” which is what he always said to Leo when he was veering dangerously close to job

threatening behavior.

Leo got the message and never did it again. Still, despite his tantrums and rants, he’d

often loudly declare: “There’s no such thing as stress.”

Once in the early days, Leo invited fellow newsies to his house to watch his collection of

old Japanese science fiction movies. He thought these things were a riot and told

everybody to bring booze and food. Leo was dipping heavily into a bottle of Irish

whiskey through the evening and the story in the newsroom the next day was that Leo’s

cute brunette next door neighbor, who was at the party by herself, and was definitely

someone Leo wanted to make friends with, was the last one to leave the party. Leo,

however, didn’t know this because he was passed out on his couch.

A smartass page layout editor then says to Leo the following Monday morning: So Leo, I

hear you missed a chance to get lucky Friday night.”

“How so, he inquired?” was Leo’s standard reply.

“Well your neighbor – you know the one you like, was the last one to leave the party.”

“No NO…NO…” Leo was devastated. He figured he just missed a once in a lifetime

chance to nail his hot neighbor. Just like after his mother died, he was quiet and

depressed for days.

An ex-patriot Brit joined the editing staff in the middle years, and though Pete was a

funny, smart guy, and easy to joke with, Leo never warmed up to him. Probably because

Leo was half-Irish, he hated British people. To him, all Brits might as well be Oliver

Cromwell, and thus should be despised as evil conquerors of his ancestors in Ireland and

Scotland. Pete, a fairly experienced pub crawler who in younger days in his homeland

placed third in a three-day long ale drinking contest, dismissed Leo’s inability to hold his

booze as a sign of frailty.

“We’ve go’ a woohd fah his type,” said Pete, a short, slim guy with male pattern

baldness, a quick wit and a big smile. “He’s a one-pot (of ale) screamah.”

That he was.

Leo also carried a lifetime grudge against Hiram Johnson, who was governor of

California from 1911 to 1917. Johnson did something that Leo could never forgive him
for: Introduced the initiative process to the state government, among other things. In

recent decades the initiative process has dominated California politics, with special

interest ballot measures that essentially bypass the state legislature’s job to make state

laws. Leo thought this was an abomination, a governmental loophole that let state

legislators get away with doing nothing while in office. Whenever he thought of it, even

out of the blue while editing at his computer, Leo would yell, “To hell with Hiram

Johnson!!!” It was his mantra for state politics.

One of Leo’s great joys was what he called his “food experiments.” Outside the window

of our second floor office was a concrete ledge. For some reason, Leo figured it would be

fun to put “donuts” out there to watch them change form in the outside elements of

extreme heat, rain, wind, birds, whatever. He’d put cookies, candies, pieces of cake with

frosting, anything that showed up in the office with sugar on or in it, which to him,

qualified it as vulgar. The stuff would melt into the concrete and become an

unrecognizable glob, and that change brought glee to Leo’s heart. “Gotta check the

FOOD experiment,” he’d say, and go look out the window.

Most of the time Leo went home to eat lunch, and at the office he’d mostly eat bananas

and apples, leaving the skins and cores on his desk as if he were trying to create his own

version of potpourri. He gulped the crappy free office coffee and the occasional glass of

tap water, when he got dehydrated from all the coffee.

One day he brings something in for lunch to heat up in the microwave. It is the middle, or

crown of an octopus, with the eight-tentacled arms cut off, which he no doubt got fished

out from the day old dirty water discount tank at the local Asian market. He pops it in the

microwave, an appliance he never uses, and immediately the kitchen, and soon thereafter

the newsroom reeks of putrid fish.

Almost in unison everybody gets a whiff of the stank, which prompts scattered calls

around the office of “What the hell is THAT???!!!!” People put their hands over their

noses to block it off.

“Light a cigarette,” the editor tells an associate editor who smokes. She happily breaks

the no smoking rule, and the smoke brings some welcome alternate notes to the virulent

molecules of torturous stench permeating the office. Leo strides out of the kitchen

holding the piece of torched octopus on a paper plate, the crown burnt to a black crisp, as

everybody in his path recoils in horror. He acts as if nothing is out of the ordinary.

“Get that the fuck OUTTA HERE!!!” yells the editor, and without missing a beat, Leo

turns and heads out the back door with his lunch, not saying a word. I go out the back to

go somewhere soon after and Leo is sitting on the fire escape stairs, quietly eating his

microwave-burnt octopus with hot sauce on it.

Leo liked to spend his vacations in Arizona to see spring training games and in Nevada

where he could eat his favorite: Basque food. And possibly partake in other recreational
activities available in Nevada. He once did a cross-country trip in his car and came back

wearing a “Corn Palace” t-shirt.

Because of his love of routines and fairly clumsy attempts at being social, the science

reporter in the latter years at the paper suggested he had Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of

autism.

When he retired after 22 years, he sold his houses and moved to Nevada. He bought a

house south of Carson City and started a project of sponge painting his interior walls.

Dave Jones

Early in my career I was hired as a police reporter for a small daily newspaper in a

Southern California desert city known for its palm trees, golf courses, celebrities, spring

breaks and “snow birds,” the moniker locals gave Canadians in their trademark Cadillacs

weaving along local streets in the winter.

I showed up at the paper mid-morning one April, the editor told me he’d help me look for

a place to live, since I was new to town. I was greeted warmly by a short wiry guy with

big black plastic rimmed glasses, a rubbery, overly tan face and greasy, short straight

black hair that looked like it had been combed with an eggbeater. The guy wore an

oversized, wrinkled striped shirt that looked like a pajama top, with the shirttail out.
“Dave Jones,” he says, extending a clammy paw for a limp shake. “Let’s go show you

around.”

We climb into my Chevy and pull onto the city’s main drag, heading north. Dave points

in a northeast direction. “You don’t want to look for a place anywhere in that area,” he

says laughing. “Lotsa spooks.”

He points east. “Look around there,” and his point moves south, “and anywhere down

there.” We’d driven about a mile. “You won’t have any trouble finding a place,” he says.

“Let’s go eat lunch.”

He tells me to make a few turns and shows me a place to park a couple blocks off the

main drag. We get out and walk to a low-slung building and enter through what seems to

be a side door.

“This is the Press Club,” he says as we enter an overly air-conditioned bar that seems

pitch dark after being in the bright hot light outside. Dave greets the bartender and

introduces me. The bartender quickly produces a pitcher of draught beer and two glasses.

Dave pours them both full. By now it’s 11 a.m. and I take a few sips. I look over to

Dave’s glass and he’s already refilling it with the pitcher. I never saw him drink the first

one.
“Have some more,” he says, topping off my glass. My eyes have adjusted to the low

light, but it’s cold as a freakin’ meat locker in the bar, which is empty except for us.

Suddenly, a second pitcher of beer is sitting in front of us.

Dave refills my glass and then his own. Seemingly within minutes the second pitcher has

been drained and so has Dave’s glass.

“Hey, I gotta get back to work,” says Dave. “Let me know how your apartment hunt

goes. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I find myself standing at the bar by myself. Dave’s gone, the bartender’s gone. I finish

my beer and push open the heavy door to get outside.

I’m immediately hit with a blast of midday desert heat and blinding sunlight. Squinting, I

wander to my car. I’m not sure where to drive to look for a place to rent while on a beer

buzz. I start up the Chevy and decide to let it take me wherever the newspaper ads

suggest.

Each morning in the newsroom, Dave Jones gives an exaggerated “Good morning,

Katie,” greeting to one reporter known for very fowl moods, especially in the morning.

“What’s so GOOD ABOUT IT?” she’d always snap back with naked hostility, sending

Dave into his always ready chuckle, looking around the newsroom to see if everybody

saw this funny ha-ha ritual of the morning.

Katie was a good looking dark-haired Jewish girl, who despite having asthma, smoked

cigarettes. She laughed at cynical jokes and had no patience; her temper was easily fired

up. She was known for interviewing people over the phone in a very even-tempered,

polite manner, only to break the spell by saying goodbye, slamming down the phone’s

receiver and muttering, “Stupid sack of shit!”

Dave wasn’t known for having any discernible skills. Sure, he was editor, but he was

never around. He seemed to show up in the newsroom randomly, as if he’d been out

doing something and suddenly remembered he had a job.

“Has Dave shown his incompetence yet?” asked the young, rotund smart-aleck

sportswriter Don Goldstein, shortly after I started at the paper.

At that time, he hadn’t. But over time, he did.

Once a large brushfire broke out in the nearby mountains, and most everybody was out

covering it. I was check back in to my desk after working on the story out of the office

for a couple of hours. The police radio is still abuzz about the enormity of the wildfire

and efforts to contain it. Dave wanders into the newsroom, and cocks his head toward the

police radio.

“Hey, there’s something big happening,” he says. “I think it’s a fire.”

“Sure is,” I say. “Everybody’s on it.”

Dave always liked to have a “chit chat” with reporters one-on-one, and it was never about

the job.

“My little Kathy cakes sure is cute,” he’d say of his young daughter. Then he’d lay some

jokes on you. Lame ones. At first I played along, wanting to be accepted. So one time, I

say to him, “Hey Dave, know what they call elderly Mexicans?

His face breaks into his goofy grin, elated that he has a new joke-buddy. “What?” he

says, beaming.

“Senor citizens.”

Dave goes into his hyena giggle as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Sadly, it

may have been.

After that, I’m a bonded joke-buddy, which comes with the requirement of having to

listen to his bad jokes, and come up with a few rejoinders.

“So there’s this Chinese couple,” he says, giggling as he starts. “And they just got

married, right? The woman’s a virgin and so is the guy, but she doesn’t know it. They’re

in their honeymoon suite and the husband really wants to give his wife a special
experience. As they start taking off their clothes, the husband says, “Honey, what would

you like?”

His new bride, thinking about what her girlfriends told her was a must, says:

“I woo’ like a SIX-TTTeee NINE!”

The husband is confused.

“You want Kung Pao Chicken?

Dave laughs and laughs.

“That’s a good one, Dave,” I say.

One of Dave’s favorite commentaries of any woman in the office he considered a bit

loose was simple: “She fucks like a mink!” he’d declare, then laugh himself silly.

Dave’s general incompetence finally caught up with him and he was finally shown the

door. On his last day, after we’re all off deadline at 9 a.m., he asks me, “Wanna go with

me to the bank?” He was going to close out his accounts.

We get in his car and he immediately turns into the parking lot of a liquor store.
“Be right back,” he says.

He comes back with four Bud talls.

He hands two to me and cracks one open as he drives back onto the main street. We get

to the bank.

“Be right back,” he says.

I see he’s already drained the first tall. I’m not even half way through mine. About 10

minutes later he comes back to the car and pops open his second tall as he drives back

toward the office. In the few minutes it takes to get to the paper’s parking lot, he’s

finished it. And I never saw him drink any of it.

“Thanks for the company,” he says, and jumps out of the car. I leave half of my second

tall in the car and follow Dave into the newsroom. In the dreary fluorescent light of the

office, the absurdity of the moment hits me. It’s 9:30 a.m., I’ve got a beer buzz and I’ve

got to work today. I look at a few of the reporters in the newsroom, and when I zone in on

Katie, I start laughing. She gives me a quick look and she’s got it.

Smiling, she says, “You’ve been drinking.”

I try not to laugh, but I fail.

Guy Columbo

Guy Columbo was the food editor at the small desert community daily I worked for. He

was from Jersey, in his early 20s and like to show off his muscles by wearing shirts that

were too small for him. He was short, so he always wore cowboy boots. Guy was an ex

marine, who also liked to go to a nearby nudist colony. He liked to shoot guns, thought he

was a player with the ladies, and had a bit of a temper. At the same time, he had a pretty

well developed sense of humor. The nickname of his good-looking girlfriend was “house

plant” because she was dumber than one.

Guy was good at one-liners. One time he was playing Frisbee at an apartment pool, and

threw the disc all the way across the pool where it accidentally hit an loud elderly woman

in the head.

“You’re not a very good shot!” she howled as loud as she could across the pool.

Guy just shrugged. “I hit ya didn’t I?” he said.

One time he talked of a woman he’d interviewed for a story and how much he liked her:

“I’d eat her out on hot pavement,” he said.

One time we were walking to a movie with a group from the newsroom and there was a

shoe store window display of men’s shoes. One pair was garish, white and pointy. “Those

look like they’d look good on you,” I teased Guy.

He looked at them and said, “Yeah, I’m secure enough with my manhood to wear a pair

like that.”

I looked further down the row of shoes on display. Before I could indicate the next even

gaudier pair of pointy-toed faux leopard skin numbers, he stopped me.

“I’m not that secure,” he said.

One of Guy’s things was shooting off his pistols. On New Year’s Eve he’d go out onto

the balcony of his apartment and fire off a few rounds of his 357 Magnum. He also had a

.38 revolver and some rifles he liked to shoot at a shooting range.

One night, the people next door were partying loudly with their stereo playing loudly.

Guy let it pass for awhile, but then he wanted to get some sleep. But the loud party and

music wasn’t letting him. So he described the next thing he did:

“I put my .38 in my waistband behind my back and knocked on the door. A woman

opened the door, and I said, ‘Hi, could you please tell me where the stereo is?’ And she

said ‘Sure, it’s over there.’ So I walk over to where this record is playing, I pull out my

gun and shoot the turntable. Everything got quiet as the record slowed to a stop. I walked

out, went to my apartment and called my girlfriend. I told her to call the paper in the

morning to tell them I was out sick, because I was sure I was going to be arrested and

taken to jail. But I went to bed, and got up and went to work. Nothing happened.”

Columbo got pulled over on the Interstate late one night, and the cop had him get

out of the car to take the drunk test. Columbo knew the drill to say the alphabet backward

was hard even if you were sober, but he’d memorized it. Plus, he offered to dance while

he did it. The officer let him do it, and Columbo did an Irish jig in the glaring spotlight of
the cop car. The officer had a big laugh and let him go. Columbo was philosophical about

it afterward.

“They just want to be entertained when they pull you over,” he said. “So I entertained

him.”

Steve Pyle

Steve Pyle started as a reporter at a weekly business paper in Northern California a few

months after I did in 1987. He lived in the foothills about 45 minutes away and drove a

dinky little baby-shit yellow Toyota pick-up truck. When he came into the newsroom to

talk to the editor, he had on a tattered blue and white checkered short sleeve shirt, baggy

brown pants and huge beat-up brown wing-tip dress shoes.

“He looks like a bum,” said Martin, the real estate reporter, who rarely said anything, but

mumbled whenever he did.

Pyle had long brown hair and sad eyes. He looked like he could be Joe Montana’s

forgotten scrawny brother who lived on the street because the family hated that he wasn’t

an All American jock like Joe.

Pyle sat across from me, and the first thing I found out about him was that he loved to

talk. He’d talk and talk in his South Carolina twang about everything under the sun,

didn’t matter what it was. And if you managed to get in a word or two as a rejoinder to

what he was talking about, he’d wait for your pause as his eyes glazed over, then as soon

as he heard it, he’d resume what he had been saying, making it obvious he hadn’t heard a

thing you had said.

Not long after he met anybody, he’d tell them he was a poet who gave readings of his

work, which he always kept in a sheaf of papers with him. By saying that, he was hoping

that the new friend would ask to hear some of his poetry. If they did, he’d drop

everything, get his poems and pick one out to read, right there.

Before becoming a newspaper reporter, Pyle worked in coffee shops for 10 years.

Whenever his boss gave him too much shit, he told me, he’d walk and get a job at another

coffee shop. Pyle was a tough reporter, absolutely maniacal and obsessive about chasing

down stories and digging up stuff nobody else would or could. He was tenacious and

fearless, and downright crazy when he was working a story. Often when he turned in a

story, it was late, but it was always very good. Which drove the editor nuts. And Pyle

didn’t stop working on a story after he turned it in, like every other reporter in the world.

He never stopped until there was nothing left to beat out of it. And he managed to tell at

least three people every detail of every story he was working on, while he was working

on it. He followed reporters into the bathroom telling them of the latest detail. He even

followed a woman editor into the women’s bathroom, telling her an update on something,

and didn’t even realize where he was.

When he first started at the paper, Pyle always wore his beat up wingtips, one of which

had a hole in worn right through its sole. Pyle went out to interview a guy who somehow

happened to notice the hole in his shoe. Afterwards the guy calls up the editor and tells

him he wants to contribute a donation so Pyle can go out and buy a new pair of shoes. So

the editor tells Pyle to buy some new shoes and the paper will pay for it. Pyle goes to

Nordstrom and buys a nice pair of dress shoes with two-tone leather and suede uppers.

They look good, but stand out against the baggy second hand-looking clothes he

continues to wear.

Pyle covered retail, and at new regional mall opening he went there to cover it. He finds

out that B-grade TV actor Corbin Bernsen is there to make an appearance. Bernsen has

bodyguards and Pyle wants to get an interview from Bernsen. He follows Bernsen’s

entourage after the appearance and yells out to the actor.

“Corbin Bersen, Steve Pyle of the Business Standard. Can I ask you a few questions?”

Bernsen stops for a second, and says, “Sorry I don’t have any time,” he tells Pyle with no

small bit of agitation. He turns and hurriedly walks away with his bodyguards.

Pyle didn’t like it when he got blown off, especially if there was an audience to see the

humiliation.
“Well that’s just FINE!” screamed Pyle, as the buzzing crowd fell silent. “I guess that’s

what I’ll have to put in my story then, CORBIN BERNSEN DIDN’T HAVE TIME!”

A pair of mall cops came up to Pyle and led him out of the mall and to the parking lot.

Sometimes Pyle worked so late that he was too tired to drive home to his apartment in the

foothills. So he’d just sleep in his pickup in the parking lot, and wake up the next

morning and wander into the office early.

He told me he’d gotten a divorce and that when it came down to who got the stereo his ex

went into madness as he tried to carry it away. She grabbed its cord, and wrapped it

around his neck, trying to choke him with it.

But he was single for the time being. He told me he wrote down all his dreams, and he

used them in his poetry. He wrote one about teenage hoodlums of his youth in the South.

They would get stoned on pot and glue sniffing. Then they’d hide near an old lady’s

house and lob bricks onto her roof, just to scare her, just for kicks. He was from South

Carolina. His family was still there. He’d fly back during the holidays and come back

with stories. His younger sister, he said, had grown up to be a racist. His family and

friends were a little unsure about him since he left to go live in California years before.

He told of watching a football game with his cousins – Pyle never watched football on his

own – during one of his holiday visits. It was all guys and everybody was talking,

yukking it up during the game except for one cousin, who’s quiet the whole time. When it
comes time for him to leave, he gets up, walks to the door, turns around and stares at

Pyle.

“All I know is all they got in California are queers and actors. And I don’t see you

wearin’ any sunglasses.”

He turned and walked out.

Before Pyle left South Carolina, he got to know a guy by the name of Forrest Byrd. The

weird thing was, his parents for years had known a Forrest Byrd. Pyle figured out that

these were two different people. So he thought up a scenario he wanted to create. He

found out the next time his parents were going to have a party, with Forrest Byrd there.

Then he invited his Forrest Byrd to come. He got all animated telling the story:

“So at the party, I get my parents friend, and my friend and I introduced them. I say, real

loud, ‘Forrest Byrd, meet Forrest Byrd!’” he drawled triumphantly. To Pyle this was

harmonic convergence of poetic proportions.

Pyle came to every party with his notebook of poems, because he figured at the right

time, he would begin reading them, and blow people away. But mostly it would cause

people to leave the party. He wrote some inspired story poems, one called Café Blues,

which he like to read while somebody played blues guitar next to him. I play guitar, so I

suggested we go to open mic at local pub and try it out.

The open mic night was just a bunch of wannabe big time guitar players and songwriters

and singers, all very serious and as an audience, pretty distant. One guy would go up,

play his songs, get a little tense clapping and then the next one hear his or her number

called, and would do the same. Some were good, some were bad, some were half and

half. Most of the pub patrons were on the periphery, talking, oblivious to the open mic

performers. When Pyle and me got called up, I sat at the guitar player’s chair and

adjusted the mic. Pyle was immediately transformed when he got up and grabbed the

microphone on the stand. He looked like he did his first day at work: threadbare

shortsleeved blue and white shirt, baggy pants, but with his good shoes on.

“OK, we’re going to change the PACE, NOW,” Pyle yelled into the mike, as I watched a

corner table full of women that had had their backs to the proceedings, simultaneously

wheel around to see what the hell was the source of what they just heard.

“We’re gonna do some BEAT POETRY here tonight.” And as he started his epic poem

on life working in the greasy pits of coffee shops he’d lived through, I started playing

blues chord progressions on my guitar. The place was full of musicians and some bar

patrons, but it was absolutely quiet as Pyle acted out his poem of vivid imagery and

slippery humor of slinging greasy food with characters out of a Fellini film. I got a good

view of the audience, and Pyle had almost intimidated them into respecting his offering

with his forceful intro. So much so that even at the funny parts of the poem, obviously

funny parts, nobody laughed. I think they got the humor, but they caught themselves
before laughing out loud, as if they were afraid Pyle might blow up at them if they

laughed at something they weren’t supposed to. At the end, there was clapping, and the

next guitar player was called up. We left.

Another time at an office Christmas party, we tried to play “Happiness is a Warm Gun,”

but our sound was turned off by the miffed DJs hired for party. Pyle, pumped up, went

into an Elvis-like contorted frenzy doing the vocals after toking up, yelled out the song,

red-faced. But nobody could hear us because the DJs didn’t want us horning in on their

act, so they turned our sound off. We were like a mime band for a few songs.

Pyle was a mellow guy most of the time, but he’d blow his stack occasionally. He kept a

lid on his emotions, but if he got mad, his face would get beet red and he’d yell louder

and louder.

Once I made a comment about how messy his desk was and he took it personally. Steam

blew out of his ears as we stood toe-to-toe. He was beet red and shaking with anger. I was

ready to punch him if he took a first swing. But the editor came over and pulled him

away. Pyle snapped out of it, went back to his desk and mumbled, “I guess I need a

vacation.”

A few of us in the newsroom went to see Richard Thompson play at a local theater, and

we got seats in two rows close to the stage. Pyle and I were in the row closer to the stage

and the editor and his buddies were behind us. They went to get beers, so Pyle said he’d
save their seats for them. Soon, four teenagers come and sit in the four seats. Pyle gets

up, turns around and says to the chatty girl in one of the seats, “Uh, those seats are taken,

our friends are coming back in a few minutes after they get some beers.”

The chick looks at him blankly for a second, then continues chatting with her friends.

“No, really,” says Pyle, his voice louder this time. Those seats are taken.

The chick looks at him again, then goes back to her friends.

Now, the volcano has begun rising through Pyle’s wiry frame and he’s trying to keep it

from blowing out the top of his head.

“Now I ASKED YOU, really NICELY, to LEAVE those SEATS, which ARE

ALREADY TAKEN,” says Pyle, his voice steadily getting louder, his face blood red, his

eyes giving the chick a stare that said he was ready to snap her in half.

“BUT YOU DIDN’T LISTEN, TO ME, DID YOU?”

WELL YOU’RE GOING TO LISTEN TO ME NOW. YOU NEED TO

GET…OUT…OF…THOSE…SEATS, RIGHT NOW!!!!”

Pyle’s lava was flowing and the four quickly slunk out of the seats as all talk with the

entire seating section had stopped. He turns around, looks at me and takes a big breath. “I

need a beer.”.

We had an editor who liked reporters to write regular features about weird businesses.

One time, he gave Pyle a press release and told him to do a story on an animal rights guy

making “Animal Stuff” toys for kids. Pyle took the story and ran with it. He spent a week

on it, obsessing over its weirdness, and giving everybody in the newsroom blow-by-blow

accounts of what he dug up. It took on a life of its own, making for a surreal tale of

idealism, naivete, and a tall dose of the uniquely bizarre.

“This guy’s a trip,” Pyle says to me. “He’s been trying to get a toy manufacturer to make

his animals for eight years! Can you believe that? Eight years! He wants kids to know

that animals have insides just like people do. So his mock up shows a dog with a belly

that opens up and inside are a furry, liver, heart, kidneys, that you can take out and look

at.

This guy, Mike Maloney is his name, is a real animal rights activist. He went to the local

animal shelter with a tape recorder to get the sounds of the animals in their cages. I heard

it. It’s weird! He wants to play it publicly to show what he thinks is the mistreatment of

the animals. I called the shelter and told them he did that, and they freaked out!”
Every week each reporter was supposed to write three or four stories for deadline. But

this week, Pyle was neck deep in his weird biz story, it was going to be his only story. As

he got into it deeper, he talked and talked about his latest discovery.

“So this last year, he went to New York to meet with some Chinese toy manufacturer to

try to convince them to make his animals. He tells me he stayed in a cheap room in

Manhattan and didn’t close the window, and he woke up with snow in his room. Can you

believe that? Snow in his room!

“Then he went to meet a guy in Chinatown and the place was a restaurant with dead

ducks hanging in the window. I got the guy in on the phone, and he remembered Mike.

But he barely spoke English, so I’m not sure. Nothing came of it, after all that.”

When Pyle went to the editor to explain what story he was working on, the editor always

said, “Okay, Steve, tell me whatcha got – the short version.”

Pyle did a story on a guy who would take any poem anybody had that they wanted

published, and for a fee, include it in a hardbound book. No matter how bad the poem

was. Pyle interviewed the guy, describing him in the story has having pants on that were

“torn at the crotch.” Pyle did follow-up stories describing police discoveries of bags full

of cash and boxes of hollow-point bullets in the trunk of the guy’s Cadillac after he was

investigated for some sort of fraud.

Pyle eventually went back to school to become an English professor.

Jon Duffy

I started my journalism career as a copy aide in the late seventies at a large Southern

California daily that had a reputation as one of the best papers in the country along with

the New York Times and Washington Post.

I answered phones for a bureau office in San Diego and sent all the copy written by

reporters up to the Orange County printing plant. It was an introduction to so-called big

time journalism, with experienced, savvy reporters and editors. Turned out that some of

them were good, but most of them were dead weight. My favorite reporter of the bunch

was Jon Duffy. Lean, with reddish brown hair, Duffy was rarely in the office. And when

he came in, he didn’t have a shirt and tie on like all the other guys. He came in dressed

like a janitor, with khaki pants, black belt and matching work shirt. He wrote the best

stories on the staff, mainly by getting out of the office for extended periods. Duffy was a

pilot, and had written an obscure novel which one editor said sold well in England. He

was a freelancer for several national outdoor magazines. He took custody of a kid he and

his girlfriend had. He took the kid with him everywhere, camping, flying, bars, and often

wrote about his adventures as a single dad in his freelanced stories.

Duffy spent time hanging out with local bums and did a long story on his experiences. He

was gone for weeks in Mexico with a photographer, getting a story on the trials of

immigrants trying to get across the border. He and another reporter and photographer

teamed up to do a story on California’s marijuana growing industry. He roamed around

Northern California all summer, for three months. About a month after he got back, he

hosted a big Halloween party at his house, and was dressed, just to be Duffy, in a tuxedo.

Circulating around the party were plenty of fat joints of killer weed. He’d turned in a

$20,000 expense account the rumor had it, and the paper paid it without missing a beat.

He was fired from another Southern California newspaper gig years later – he didn’t kiss

bosses asses, and they tended to take revenge – and promptly wrote a scathing indictment

of the corporate culture he’d been booted out of. He mocked the newsroom as one of an

idea-free, moron-run accounting office, with reporter’s noses “spot-welded” to their

computer screens. The story, which ran in an independent paper, included a photo of him

wearing shades and smoking a cigar while hoisting a sail on a sailboat out on the water

somewhere.

He then went to be editor of the paper in Blythe, in the California desert near the

Colorado River, but got the boot there after nine months for not following the company

line. While in Orange County at a land auction, he bought 10 acres of abandoned desert

land south of Blythe for a bid of $325. He first used it as a retreat to shoot guns and light

fireworks with his buddies. But after losing his Blythe newspaper job, he decided to

become a survivalist on his barren land and build a makeshift house. He wrote a book
about it, published by a house specializing in survivalist works, and has told visitors

Hollywood could be coming with a movie deal.

Red Mack ey

Red Mackey came to work at our business weekly having spent years writing for a small

daily. A lifelong bachelor, he had a fat, red face and large rectangular wire rim glasses.

His gray-specked black hair was parted on the left side and combed neatly as if he were

in the fourth grade. When he grinned his face looked like a crimson jack o’ lantern, his

gapped yellow teeth emerging. Red didn’t have a girlfriend, and had effeminate

mannerisms. He loved to gossip and could often be seen holding up one hand to the side

of his mouth and whispering his latest social scoop to one of his women friends in the

office. He often mentioned hot women in his jazzercise class, but I always figured he was

just trying to throw people off from what he probably really was: an officially undeclared

non-participating homosexual.

He was hired as the banking reporter, impressing the editor that he got his college degree

in macroeconomics. Turned out he had a problem balancing his checkbook. He’d already

filed for personal bankruptcy before taking the job. He filed for bankruptcy some time
after leaving the paper, as we found in local court records. When I told the editor of

Mackey’ second filing, and the first one, he got very quiet.

While he seem mild mannered and easygoing most of the time, it was a thin veneer

barely keeping the lid on a hair-trigger, volcanic temper. Mackey often became instantly

furious, and many things, some known and others not, set him off. He was often argued

on the phone at his desk with somebody livid about what Red had written in his last story.

Almost every time Red would say, “Okay…No, that’s not….” Then after a bit he’d say,

“All right, I’ve given you a chance to hear your side, now it’s your turn to listen to what I

have to say.” Then he’d launch his counter-attack. This happened constantly. He started

his day drinking a soft drink poured into a coffee cup with ice cubes, figuring he’d fool

everybody into thinking he was really drinking coffee. He continuously ate take-out

sandwiches and chips. A half eaten sandwich would often be sitting among the litter and

clutter of his desk. He was argumentative; he’d argue with Leo Valachi, claiming pro

football was a great game, an argument everybody in the newsroom knew he would never

win. But he argued on anyway.

He screwed up on a story so bad one time, the editor had to run the correction on the front

page to avoid getting sued. Mackey was told to do editing chores for a couple weeks as

punishment. He told me once that at his old paper he wrote a story on an accident and

said that one of the people involved died. But it was the wrong person he had dead, and

well, that was another time he had to eat public crow.

I used to keep back issues of the paper stacked on a file cabinet next to my desk for easy

reference. Because I often discovered some people in the newsroom would take papers

out of it and never return them, I put a sign on the top of the stack. “Don’t take papers

from here, and that means YOU.”

Anyway, one deadline Mackey is overheating from the pressure and he comes over to my

desk. “Can I look at one of the papers in your stack?” he asked.

A bit irritated myself while enduring a particularly frustrating deadline, I took the

opportunity to send Mackey off to the deep end, mainly because I wanted to see what

he’d do.

“No,” I said.

His face immediately went from red to purple, and he began striding a wide circle around

the newsroom as if he were trying to let the steam out of his head before it exploded. This

made Leslie, the reporter directly opposite my cubicle, laugh.

Mackey really liked Leslie, much more than she liked him. Hearing her laugh at him, set

him off even further. Suddenly, I wasn’t the object of his anger anymore. It was Leslie.

For laughing at his frustration. Which was pretty entertaining, actually.

Mackey did a few more revolutions around the newsroom, then exited to find the paper

he needed in the archive library. After that, he no longer liked Leslie. He forgot about my

“No,” altogether.

At 5 p.m. every day at work, Mackey would go to the men’s room and change into a

bright red sweatsuit in preparation for his upcoming jazzercise class.

Ted Dean, the tall jokester reporter know for telling great stories, not necessarily writing

any, thought this ritual by Mackey was hilarious. So much so, in fact that he wrote a

jingle about it. He sang it to the tune of an old transmission company jingle that had been

on TV for years. He got everybody in the newsroom to sing it together a few times when

Mackey wasn’t around. When we were sufficiently rehearsed with the words and music,

we waited until Mackey emerged from the men’s room in his red sweatsuit and began his

sashay toward the newroom. On Dean’s cue, we all sang:

“It’s five O’Clock and Steve is tired/and he wants to feel like new/He grabs a garish

looking outfit/chartreuse, purple, pink and blue”

We shouted more than sang the anthem, as Mackey entered the newsroom, him grinning

red-faced, as we all howled in laughter. It became a ritual, we’d sing it on cue at around

5:05 p.m. to Mackey’ hitting the runway back to the newsroom in his red sweatsuit.

One time I cornered Mackey, and said, “Steve, when we sing that song, isn’t a little over

the top? Don’t you think we’re being a little tough on you?”
And he says in his breathy voice: “Oh no, not at all. Believe me, you’d know if I didn’t

like it.”

Actually, he drank in the attention like a nightclub diva.

Sherry and Lindy

Sherry was a reporter, a good one. Lindy was an editor and a very poor one. They didn’t

get along. At all. Sherry, who was knocked kneed, and had no man in her life, probably

for a long time, wore her emotions on her sleeve. She swore like a sailor, said what was

on her mind without checking to see if it was OK to say it outloud. Which made her very

entertaining in the newsroom.

Lindy on the other hand was sneaky. She was a classic passive aggressive. She had the

habit of talking loudly on the phone during personal calls, so loud in fact that the whole

newsroom couldn’t help but hear.

One time she was on the phone to the IRS. She was recently divorced, and bitter about it.

“Check into everything he reports,” she told the IRS person very audibly. “I can

guarantee you he’s cheating big time.”

With a satisfied smile, she hung up the phone.

“Remind me never to piss YOU off,” said Mick, another reporter.

Sherry was known for eating big pieces of cold chicken at her desk, noisily, then using

dental floss like a slingshot to eject the chunks of chicken caught between the cracks of

her teeth. I heard women in the office complain that she never washed her hands after

using the bathroom. She seemed oblivious to her disheveled look. She did her week’s

stories very fast and on deadline day, when everybody else was working at fever pitch,

she’d sit at her desk reading a novel with a big smile on her face. One time the editor

asked her if she called a particular source for a story of hers he was reading.

“I didn’t bother,” she said. “That asshole never says anything anyway.”

The editor, who was one of the grouchiest people on earth, and who always looked as if

he was on the verge of losing his temper, to the whole shocked newsroom’s amazement,

didn’t say a word.

Sherry’s lower lip would crease in the middle when she was ready to blow her top, and

one morning she greeted me as I came to my desk.

“You wouldn’t believe what that fucking bitch did!” she hissed at me.

“Uh, let me guess, Lindy.”

“She parked her fucking car in the employee lot on a line, taking up TWO spaces, and we

need all the spaces. I told her she better move her car and you know what that bitch told

me? She said, ‘I don’t want anybody to hit their door against my car.’ Can you believe

that?” Her lower lip was almost on the floor.

“Then you know what she says when I ask her when she’s going to move her car? She

says, ‘I’m not going to.’”

I’m not much of a sympathizer to Sherry, who clearly wants sympathy. She had already

visited everybody who was in the newsroom before me with her plaint, and hadn’t gotten

much a satisfactory reaction. I was no better, because I just didn’t care.

One reporter, Nelson, had heard her complaint, I was told later, and responded: “Sherry, I

hear you, I validate you, now get away from me!”

I was still trying to turn the ignition key on my day when she came with her flood of

angst over Lindy. I listened to what she said, then had to cut her off.

“Look, I’m just trying to start my day here, so why don’t you just let me do that?” I said.

This put Sherry’s frustration over the top. She sobbed and headed to the restroom. Then

she wailed: “Nobody here cares whether I live or DIE!”

Leslie followed her to the restroom and tried to console her. Whew.

Lindy and Sherry were at it all the time. One time, I was standing in the production

department, and Lindy, fresh from tangling with Sherry over something, walks up to me

and says: “I’ve just been told I’m a fucking bitch.”

“Well…” I said, refraining from completing my thought of, “if the shoe fits.”

Lindy liked dogs, and one day told me that she ran into the hopeless drunk who was

always outside the office in the morning with his seemingly much healthier dog.

“I gave him some money,” she said. “To get heartworm medicine for his dog.”

“Not for him?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“So you care more about the dog than you do the drunk?”

She just looked at me. I knew the answer.

Bon Mots

“Let him fucking talk!” Veteran Riverside Press Enterprise reporter telling other reporters

to back away from a man everybody’s trying to question at once.

“You know what gets me? When an editor tells you something to go cover is funny, that

it’ll be a funny story. It’s NEVER FUNNY!” Desk editor and ex-reporter while doing a

late night shift at the L.A. Times.

Weird ones

A black haired bearded guy who answered phones in an L.A. Times newsroom. He got

the job because his sister was a big shot editor at the paper. He had a pet snake, a pool

table, and liked to snort coke. End of story.

A reporter in an L.A. Times newsroom. He kept up on every piece of gossip he could get

in the newsroom. Then he’d tell it all to the managing editor, convinced it would help

advance his career. Don’t know if it did. Didn’t care.

Creeps in Power

After getting a masters degree to keep from having to go out and get a job, I couldn’t find

a job as print reporter. I ended up going to an employment agency where I sat and read a

paperback while they tried to find me a job. I got one assembling pool tables in an

industrial district of San Diego, a job I detested. It must have showed because I only

lasted a couple of weeks before I was fired. I finally decided to get aggressive and took

my clips and resume to the Los Angeles Times’ downtown offices. I walked right in and

asked who the city editor was. A guy in a blue shirt, Dave Swallow motioned for me to

sit down and he took a look at my clips. After a cursory glance at them he thanked me for

stopping by and I went home. But I got a call not too long later from the managing editor,

Swallow’s boss, who asked me to come in for an interview. His name was Gene

Marshall. I went to the newsroom and into Marshall’s office. I knew I didn’t have

anything to lose, so I pored it on selling myself.

“I have a bachelor’s in journalism, a master’s in mass communications, I can speed read,

I work hard,” I kept driving hard, barely coming up for air.

Marshall, a short stocky guy who looked a lot like Dan White, the San Francisco

supervisor who shot Harvey Milk and George Moscone, just sat back in his chair and

listened to me. I don’t remember him saying much at all, except he had a part-time copy

aide position open. So I left and went home, and a few days later he called. He never

formally told me I got the job. He just asked me to come to the office and help out. The
job was to answer the newsroom phone and route calls to reporters. And send copy up to

Orange County on the massive fax machine. And edit an events column. And maintain

the local newspaper archives. Mondays and Tuesdays from 1p.m. to 9 p.m. When I saw

the opening, I asked to become full time, and Marshall went for it, taking pains to tell me

that there was no way they’d ever hire me as a reporter.

The job allowed me to do some police reporting on the weekends when there was only

one full time reporter on duty.

The cute librarian told me about Marshall. She said I should be paid more money for

doing the entertainment listing, but that Marshall wasn’t paying it to save money. She set

me up. I went in to complain to Marshall, and he hit the ceiling. He launched a shit-storm

of vitriol at me that took me aback. Told me if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t even have a

job, and basically how dare I question the man who hired me.

My head started to spin and I wandered back to the phones. All he had to do was say no,

and that would have been fine. But I touched a nerve. He chided me another time for not

moving the copy to Orange County fast enough. He liked to try to intimidate people.

When he wanted to talk he’d come up from behind and whisper in your ear, “Got a

minute?” Then he’d lead the way to his office with a swaggering walk to make you

wonder what he was going to say. He’d tell me things that the office snitch – a reporter

who agreed to fill him in on every bit of gossip in the newsroom – had told him about me,

basically trying to keep me off balance. He strutted around the newsroom slapping a steel
pica pole against his thigh as if it were a riding crop ready to whip anybody he pleased.

He wanted to be promoted up the food chain of Times editors, but never was. When I saw

him swagger around the newsroom, I imagined horns coming out of his head. Such was

my first exposure to a corporate climber with no people skills. In the end, he, like many

others, became an ejection of the newspaper business.

While Marshall seemed like a militaristic creep for a boss, at least with him you pretty

much knew where you stood: He’d tell you if he liked something you did, and he’d blast

you if he didn’t. Later in my career I worked in a newsroom headed by a publisher who

could be nice to you while plotting your demise. This guy would have been comfortable

driving a truck full of Jews to the gas chamber. I’ll call him Needle Dick. He specialized

in self-promotion, and had no sense of humor. If he said something he thought was funny,

he’d laugh and expect you to laugh. If you said something that was funny, he wouldn’t

get it and would frown.

Needle Dick played nice to me for several years, apparently because I was useful to him.

But when he decided I made too much money, he made up his mind to demonize me, and

get me out. He called me into his office after one deadline, and made nice for a few

minutes, trying to make me feel comfortable. Then he launched into an attack on my

performance, reading from a stack of notes in front of him. The attack was a calculated

effort to make me mad. He wanted to goad me into standing up and telling him to fuck

off and that I quit. That would get my departure at no cost to the company.
While I was rattled, something told me to stay cool, and when he paused, and said, “I

have more,” I just told him I disagreed with everything he said. He gave me an envelope

with my name written on the outside and the meeting was over. The envelope had a piece

of paper in it that formally said if my performance didn’t improve – without giving any

specifics – I would be fired, and asked that I sign it and return it to NeedleDick.

I went on leave, got a lawyer, and met with NeedleDick a second time, when he asked me

about the paper to sign. “I don’t have it,” I said.

He pulled a copy out of my file and signed it, including it in my dossier. Then I told him

I’d leave if I were paid a severance package. After another meeting I agreed to accept

severance money, and not to sue the company.

It was not all unexpected behavior from NeedleDick, who was a practiced liar and job

executioner when he figured the job needed doing. He turned on me even after I’d given

the company years of quality service, won awards, etc. and had good relations with him.

To him, I was just somebody who made too much money and needed to go. Many years

of accomplishments suddenly meant nothing. What a great guy.

But I came out ahead. I was liberated from having to work every day in a greedy

psychopathic corporate culture. I’m eternally indebted to NeedleDick. So, thanks

Needledick.
Trigger, Mr. Ed, and Charlie

The first time I ever became aware of cowboys riding horses on TV, I was transfixed.

The horse was the cowboy’s trusted, humble buddy, ready to gallop after bad guys. The

horse provided the cowboy a swaggering ride through town while everybody watched in

awe. Trigger, Roy Roger’s beautiful mount, was my favorite. I’d fantasize about riding

Trigger when I played cowboys and Indians with my buddies in the woods and brush in

the mountains of Lake Tahoe. I’d drag my feet to stir up dust like a horse. And make

imitation hooves-on-dirt sounds by flipping my tongue against my lips as I trotted on my

imaginary horse. My toy six-shooter would sit loosely in its black plastic gun belt and

holster, slung low and tied securely to my right thigh. I held my air rifle in my left hand,

in case I needed to quick draw.

Then there was Mr. Ed, the weird TV sitcom about a suburban guy with a fetching blonde

wife. The guy, Wilbur, happened to have a back yard barn occupied by Mr. Ed, a

handsome palomino. And while that wasn’t so weird, it was really weird that Mr. Ed had

conversations with Wilbur. And only Wilbur. Which was probably a plot device by the

show’s alcohol-familiar writers to imply that Wilbur’s conversations with Mr. Ed were

really just bouts of his booze-fueled hallucinations. To me it was just a stupidly funny

show on TV.

But beyond Mr. Ed’s oratory skills, there was one thing about the show that mystified

me. Wilbur, an easy going cardigan-wearing good-looking guy, seemingly spent most of

his free time in the back barn talking to Mr. Ed. All while his attentive, voluptuous

blonde wife was in the house. I wondered why Wilbur would rather talk to his horse than

enjoy time with his wife. But back then, I had no knowledge about the ins and outs of

married life and occasional booze binges, so this seeming disconnect was only a niggling

distraction.

Mr. Ed must have been invented by a writer whom had seen his dad holding one-sided

barnyard conversations with the family horse. The horse probably just stood there in a

stupor, with the dad convinced the large pet empathized with his plight: “You’ve got it

easy, ya know,” the writer heard the dad tell the horse. “You just stand there and eat hay,

walk around, crap. Now that’s a great life! Me, every day I go to a stupid office, deal

with a moron boss, do an idiot’s job, just so I can pay bills!”

(Writer, after pitching the series: “And it’d make the regular husband-guy seem totally

nuts if the horse talked only to him!”

Producer: “It’s pretty far out there. But it’s true, Francis the Talking Mule was a big hit in

the movies a few years ago. Oh, what the hell! Let’s do it!”)

Having animals or inanimate objects talk as TV show characters was apparently seen as a

masterstroke by some people in TV-land. Mr. Ed lasted six seasons and led to goofy

shows trying out talking cars. One, “My Mother the Car” featured a 1928 Porter touring

car as Jerry Van Dyke’s mother, of all things. She’d yack at him whenever he drove the

damn car. Mercifully, it lasted only one season. It was roundly booed as one of the worst

shows ever put on TV.

I saw it. It was.

Then in the early ‘80s there was Knight Rider with Kitt, the talking sports car. It

apparently upped the credibility of the talking-car genre of shows, staying on the air for

four seasons. Still, the talking car shows never topped Mr. Ed’s absurdist suburban

surrealism. Francis the Talking Mule would have been proud of the TV show he inspired.

So what if it was a horse talking and not a cranky-ass mule?

I think back to the mid-‘60s or so, when Mr. Ed was cancelled. It was then, that my

depressed/happy-go-lucky-when-drunk dad, an ex-orchestra bass player, decided to do

something extra special for Karen, my teenage oldest sister. Dad asked me to keep it

secret until the surprise was unveiled. He said he was buying her a horse. I was amazed.

It wasn’t her birthday or anything. The “horse” he bought turned out to be an aging

swaybacked Arabian breeding mare and her colt. I’ve always wondered if he paid for

them, or saved them from a pending date with a dog food factory.

Because this was such huge news to me, a 9-year-old with cowboy dreams, I couldn’t

resist taking my sister aside to quietly and dramatically spill the beans. After listening

intently, she tried to be cool, but I knew she was stunned. It sounded too crazy to be true.

My parents never seemed to have extra cash to do anything like this. This was out there,

and it had my brain abuzzin’.

Dad borrowed a horse trailer to haul our new pets from the Carson Valley to Tahoe. We

took them to a friend’s empty stream-fed corral deep in the woods. The horses would stay

there for the summer and we’d come to feed ‘em and ride ‘em, just like cowboys,

whenever we could. The colt, however, hadn’t been broken in for riding. In the winter

we’d take them down to stay at a ranch in the Carson Valley.

Upon hearing of Dad’s caper, my mother was convinced he had lost the last of his sober-

time marbles. She worked as an executive secretary and on the way home from work,

because her office was closer to the corral than our house, she’d drive the dirt road

through the cool shade of the early evening woods to the corral. The horses learned to
associate the sound of her approaching VW with being fed, and they’d greet her with

neighs and snorts from their dusty, road-appled haven in the woods.

Mom, with her neatly coiffed bouffant hairdo, and usually wearing a smart business suit

and high heels, awkwardly flipped clumps of hay into a plywood trough Dad built for the

horses. Stomping and swishing away flies with their tails, they contentedly munched

away.

We named the moody mare “Mother,” because we’d been calling her that from the

beginning and couldn’t think of anything better. We called her colt “Charlie,” since he

was brown and we liked Charlie Brown.

And the adventures began.

We didn’t have a saddle to ride Mother, we could only afford a glorified red pad that

could be cinched up like a saddle. We got a halter with a bit and reins, and Karen rode the

headstrong and reluctant Mother along dusty back roads winding through the woods and

along a big pasture, which was a short walk from the corral. Meanwhile, Lauren, my 11-

year-old sister, and I, goofed around with Charlie. He was a gangly, sweet soul, and loved

to graze the pasture. He let us put a rope halter on him and lead him around, and he didn’t

seem to mind when we’d climb onto his back while he munched grass.
Eventually, we borrowed a saddle and managed to get it on Charlie’s back and cinch it up

while he was grazing. I told Dad I wanted to ride him, and get him to gallop. My cowboy

dream atop Trigger was becoming real. I had my horse. I had my saddle. It was Roy

Rogers time. All Charlie had on his head was a rope bridle, no bit in his mouth, no reins.

I climbed into the saddle. “Let’s make him run!” I yelled to Dad, who stood watching

nearby. And Dad went with the moment. He whistled and waved his hands. Alarmed,

Charlie did a series of short, quick bucks, then took off like a quarter house exploding out

of the gate into a full-on gallop down the dirt road next to the pasture. He tried to scrape

me off on a pine tree, scuffing my leg as we flew by. I grabbed the saddle horn with both

hands and hunkered down like a human barnacle while wild-eyed Charlie ran with all he

had, as if he’d seen Godzilla’s advancing shadow. All this stuff was on his back, and he

figured if he ran hard enough, it would fall off and he’d be free again. His hoofs

thundered and his mane flowed straight back. I had no control of him. He veered right,

moving off the dirt road and along the outer edges of the big pasture where there was a

pine forest too thick to ride through.

At the far end of the sprawling meadow, Charlie made a hard right to start a bee-line back

down the middle of the lumpy, grassy expanse. It was riddled with gopher holes -- soft

mounds of dirt in some spots – amid ankle-tall grass. I knew if one of Charlie’s legs

poked into a gopher hole, it would snap like a twig.

I peeked ahead and saw a problem in the distance. It was Butch, our friend’s huge-eared

donkey standing placidly, but directly ahead, watching the show from behind a barbed-

wire fence. Charlie, for some reason, bolted straight for him, and both Butch and the

fence got bigger and bigger in a hurry. At the last second, Charlie finally caught his first

glimpse of the fence and Butch, but not until he was about 10 yards away. He tucked his

rear-end down, locked his front legs forward and went into a skid. His front hoofs, heel-

down, plowed a pair of dirt gouges into the damp meadow earth. He just managed to stop

his skid right in front of the barbed wire fence as a dumbfounded Butch looked on

without making a move. Charlie skittered away from the fence and snorted, taking a few

steps before lowering his head to graze. I saw my chance, and jumped to the ground as

fast as I could. Dad ran toward us red faced, into the pasture, wearing his white straw

cowboy hat. I realized I’d never seen him run before. He was pretty fast.

“I figured since you didn’t yell or anything, you were OK!” he puffed, the naked fear still

in his voice.

I couldn’t talk. I don’t remember saying anything. I just tried to take in what had just

happened. Dad and I took a look at Charlie graze with the loosened saddle pushed high

up on his neck. All we could do was laugh.

Over the years since, I always wondered why Dad let me get on Charlie and, without

missing a beat, spook him into running wild. He never worried about the possible

nightmare that could have made it end badly. And it worked out fine. Plus it was an

adrenaline-fueled thrill ride that remains branded into my memory to this day.
Dad eventually found a buyer for Mother and Charlie, and my fantasy-inspired cowboy

days ended.

But I was good with that. After all, I’d lived my cowboy dream of riding like Roy Rogers

on a galloping horse like Trigger. I was Roy, Charlie was Trigger, and rounding out the

scene, Butch was available to cameo as Francis the would-be Talking Donkey. And even

though English wasn’t anything the mellowed out Butch would ever master, even he

surely would have said something to Charlie, a la Francis, about the spectacle he

witnessed. Butch’s version of the Chill Wills baritone twang would have filled the air.

Flapping his big fat donkey lips, showing his yellowed set of hay grinders, Butch would

have taken the role of sympathetic uncle to calm Charlie.

“Easy, son,” he’d snort. “It was just a saddle and a kid! Better let ‘em take off the

saddle, though, ‘cause you’re wearin’ it like a hat.”

I sprained my middle finger in Paris

It’s not what you think. I didn’t sprain my middle finger because I angrily flipped off a

Parisian and in doing so crashed my finger into an unforgiving low ceiling.

But there is a stereotype. Americans think Parisians and the French in general are

arrogant, and they in turn think Americans are idiots, and treat us like we have

stupendously bad breath. Even though most of us love, like they do, dogs and French

bread. And even though we saved their asses in World War II.
The arrogant French stereotype held by a lot of Americans must have started with their

damn waiters. Their tip is already figured into the bill, so they don’t need to kiss

customers’ asses like American waiters do. So what’s the ugly American’s answer to

such seemingly unjustified, haughty, treatment? I’m sure more than a few of us UAs

would say that would be the ol’ bird, silently flipped high and proud. But I’m pretty sure

a French person wouldn’t understand that they’re supposed to be offended whenever they

get flipped off. What do they care?

All this one-way, garbled communication between Americans and French people is more

frustrating for Americans, who will more often than not take it personally when they

think they’ve been disrespected. But as I recently found out via a little French etiquette

tip, Americans have it in their power to have good feelings with French people they come

across. To make this happen, however, requires playing the greeting game the French

play.

First, though, is the story of how I got my annoying digital injury. It happened a few

weeks ago in Paris because I have trouble reading and speaking French. I’m completely

illiterate in French, except for a few commonly tossed words and phrases.

It all started when we arrived at the Montparnasse train station in Paris at 6:30 a.m. on a

Sunday. We wanted to give ourselves enough time, since our bullet train to Spain was set

to leave at 7 a.m. The huge, cavernous station was pretty busy for so early on a weekend

morning. Elena and I sat on a bench, bleary-eyed from jet lag, with our wheeled suitcases
and our tickets. There we waited for the big schedule board to tell us which of the several

bays our train was in. For some reason they apparently like to keep this information

secret until it’s almost time for the train to leave. At about 15 minutes to seven, it flashed

the info that our train was in the first bay at the far left of the station. Suddenly everybody

in the station seemed to be migrating swiftly toward the train to Spain.

Bustling among the crowd rushing to get on, we quickly realized two things. This train

was long. Very long. It seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance along the platform.

And we had no idea which car to get on. We looked around for train employees to point

us in the right direction. We asked what looked to be a train employee, but he might have

been a tour guide. He looked at our tickets and pointed down the platform as if to say,

“Your car’s a-way down there somewhere.”

Meanwhile, all the other passengers apparently were very familiar with this train ride.

Everybody seemed to know exactly where to get on. We got on one car randomly and

found what we thought were the corresponding seats to our tickets. But the Frenchman

sitting in one of the seats showed us his ticket. Oops! We were in the wrong car.

The clock was ticking, and I knew these French trains always leave right on time. We got

back out on the platform, which was slicked up by a fine mist. Now it’s about seven

minutes ‘til 7 and we still don’t know which car to get on. It appears that two or more

trains are hooked together, so we can’t go from inside any car to get to our seats. Getting

on anywhere might work, but maybe not. Sometimes they split trains at stops so they can
go to different destinations and you don’t even know it. And if we miss this train, we’re

screwed. It’s a six-hour ride, and the next one doesn’t leave the station ‘til late in the day.

And we’re due at a dinner in San Sebastian Spain that night.

With the urgency of Matt Damon in a Bourne Something movie, I run down the

platform, which is now completely empty. Holy crap, everybody is already on the train. I

see a lone French guy standing by a car window, looking inside at a friend or relative he

is seeing off. I rush up to him and stupidly blurt: “Do you speak English?”

“No,” he says, but he looks concerned. I show him my ticket and motion that I’m clueless

where to get on. He takes a look at my ticket and immediately points to the very car that

his friend is in. It’s this car! It’s a miracle! I jump on board and check, and sure enough,

there are two available seats, one that matches my ticket assignment. I throw my bag in

the luggage rack near the door. Now it’s about five minutes to seven and I bolt back out

to the platform and run back to find Elena. This problem isn’t solved yet! I sprint toward

her in the distance, and motion that I know where to get on.

“It’s down here!” I holler. I skid up to her, grab the extended handle of her pink rolling

suitcase, wheel and sprint back down the platform with panic making me run like the

wind. I see the Frenchman again and he quickly points to the door where I should get into

the car, a door that I just ran past. I hit the brakes and skid on the slick concrete deck,

while my momentum, helped along by Elena’s lead-filled suitcase, barrels me into a

headfirst belly flop.

I skid on my chest, but break my fall mostly with the middle finger of my right hand, for

some reason. Transformed in a half-second from a cool-under-pressure Matt Damon to a

ridiculous Inspector Clouseau with no control of his motor skills, I scramble to my feet.

The Frenchman watches, and I’m amazed he isn’t laughing. I mean, my flop and skid had

to have looked pretty damn hilarious. Or maybe he felt my pain and humiliation, the way

someone might feel sad that anybody could be that discombobulated. Unfazed by my

own spectacle, I grab Elena’s suitcase and jump on board. She follows me and tries to

find a place to wedge her suitcase while I go to our seats.

Standing at my seat, I am completely out of breath, feeling like I just ran a couple of 100-

yard dashes, and two French guys, one older and one younger – possibly a father and his

adult son -- have the facing window seats next to us.

They, like everyone else on this long-ass train, have been resting comfortably in their

seats for several minutes already. The sight of an out of breath American, who clearly

almost missed the train for his incomprehension of matching cars to seat numbers, seems

like no big deal to them. Amazingly, it doesn’t seem to make them any less bored than

they already look. I pull off my windbreaker and as I slowly catch my breath, I don’t say

anything to our seatmates. First, I don’t know French, and second, I feel incredibly stupid

for my headfirst slide trying to make it into the car, and for being so needlessly late.

We finally settle into our seats and before we know it, the train is moving. I can’t believe

that guy was standing there alone on the platform, and he clued me in that he just so
happened to be next to the car with our awaiting seats. It was the Frenchman; the lone

person on the empty platform along an endless train. Yes, it really was a miracle. Without

him, we could have been skidding around the platform when the doors locked us out, the

train pulling away. It was by mere minutes that we managed to miss a day-long wait in

the station for the next train to Spain.

After that cardiac adrenaline injection, we slumped into our seats exhausted, drained,

emotionally spent. Soon we were lulled into head-hanging, dreamless sleep by the side-

to- side motions of the quiet, speedy train. Our seat neighbors didn’t talk at all, not even

to each other until getting off at their stop in Bordeaux.

We later learned a week or so later that the French don’t talk on trains and subway rides.

So they expect everybody else to shut up, too. If they hear chatter, they consider the

sources of this uncalled-for noise as clueless and rude. And that quite possibly the

offenders are, more than likely, Americans.

We also learned that Americans usually don’t understand that the French are very big into

greetings. They expect you to say “Bonjour” or “Bonsoir” every time you meet someone.

And if you know the people you greet in France, you’re supposed to kiss the air on each

side of their cheek to give a more intimate hello.

So if you don’t start an encounter with the fundamental “bonjour” or “bonsoir,” you will

be chalked up as a manners-free troglodyte unworthy of attention. This information made

us slap our forehead. No wonder Americans think the French are arrogant! They don’t

say “Bonjour,” or “Bonsoir” when they meet a French person, get snubbed and feel

insulted! This is key information!

Armed with this knowledge, we used the expected greetings a week later when we got

back to France and encountered locals. And it really did make all the difference in the

world. Bonjour! Bonsoir! It’s code for, “Hello, I’m a civilized person and I’m glad to

meet you.” And if you give them their greetings, by golly, the French are instantly

magnanimous. You’ll been welcomed to their world. Who knew?

Paris weaves magic

I visited Paris recently. It was the fourth time in my life I’d visited the city of lights and I

had a strange feeling about its timelessness. This old European city seemed pretty much

the same as when I first visited in 1970 when I was 15, on a trip with my mom, step-dad

John and older sister Karen. And it was pretty much the same as in summer 1977 when I

passed through with my then-girlfriend Lucy. It hadn’t changed much at all in May 1992

after a year of marriage to my bride Elena. And this last time, also in May, it was as

remembered. We celebrated our 18th listening to a string ensemble play Vivaldi’s Four

Seasons at St. Chappelle, the cathedral encased with towering walls of backlit stained

glass.

While Paris felt all but unchanged, 38 years had passed since I first laid eyes on it. Yes,

Paris has all the modern features of most big cities. But its landmark buildings seem like
they’ve been in place forever, and will continue occupying their same spaces forever.

This time around, it felt like Paris had quietly thrust me far into my future.

On my first visit as a wide-eyed 15-year-old, it was December and face-numbing cold.

We went on the Metro subway, and I remember two things about those rides. The damp

heat of the cramped trains was pungent, exuding fat notes of sour cheese body odor

mingled with cheap sweet perfume. And the word “Sortie” was over every exit. I

correctly guessed it meant “exit” in French.

We saw the play “Hair” in French, and went to see Les Folles Bergere, where I was

entranced by all the feathered, glittering topless beauties. I didn’t understand the whoop-

free, civilized demeanor of the audience. These were topless women, and for me, a

budding teen, this was an unbelievable live show that had topped any that had up ‘til then

lit up my high-octane imagination. We went to the Louvre and saw the Venus de Milo

and the Mona Lisa and got very leg weary looking at seemingly everything else. We went

up on the hill in Montmartre to visit the impressive Sacre Coeur cathedral. We took the

elevator up the Eiffel Tower and had lunch there, saying hi to a fellow American at a

nearby table who worked at the then-Kennecott Copper in Nevada. We unexpectedly

stumbled onto a fancy restaurant called Louis XIV.

And, thirsty for a glass of water at an Italian pizzeria down the block from our hotel, I

discovered there was no water, but plenty of chianti in a large carafe. I gulped down a

few glasses and in no time got foggy-glasses drunk. Suddenly hot and flush-faced, I put

my head down on the table, only to see the pizza guy across the room. He stood on one

leg in front of the oven using his pizza paddle to pry some gooey chewing gum off the

bottom of his shoe. “Hey, look,” I said, as I sloppily pointed with one hand, squinting

sideways through fogged lenses.

“I hope that’s not the same paddle he’s using on OUR pizza,” my mom said in her loud

party voice, aimed above the guy’s head, but filling the empty restaurant.

I’m sure the paddle wielder didn’t speak English and didn’t get the hint. He may have

used the gum-poking paddle to pull our pie out of the oven, but I don’t know. I don’t

even remember eating any pizza. I stumbled back to the hotel drunk, in search of my bed.

We visited the mother or grandma of a friend of my Mom’s at the lady’s dark, high-

ceilinged home somewhere in Paris. She had a small white poodle. She didn’t speak

English and we didn’t speak French, so it was an awkward visit. We didn’t stay long.

We went to Versailles south of Paris, the sprawling, decadent hangout of Louis XIV and

his royal descendants, where for some reason I felt nauseous in the Hall of Mirrors. I

thought I was going to toss my cookies and had to go outside into the frigid air to settle

my stomach. It turned out to be a good alternative to the tour, which was boring as well

as nauseating.
But the time we had at the coincidentally named Louis XIV restaurant in Paris was a

doozie. We were wandering around Paris one cold gray-sky afternoon, I think it was a

Sunday, not a lot happening. John said he didn’t feel very well. The street was

abandoned, and to the right was an empty fruit stand. For some reason John led us to a

door into the non-descript dark building it fronted. He opened the door and the four of us

walked in. It turned out to be the back entrance to a fancy French restaurant called Louis

the XIV. Suddenly my step-dad had an appetite.

“Let’s eat here!” he said, suddenly energized.

He didn’t have to twist our arms.

As my eyes slowly panned the restaurant, I took everything in with curiosity and

disbelief. It was like a big Hollywood set that out of nowhere had wondrously opened up

before us. The dark, candlelit place was full of people quietly eating lunch, including

elderly French ladies, with their toy poodles sitting quietly next to them. Booths full of

patrons were on two or three tiers in a long half circle. Led to our table, we sat down and

looked at the menu. My mom saw there was a cheese menu, and asked the waiter how

many different cheeses they had.

“Madam,” the black-suited waiter said as if he were suffering from tight shoes. “We have

more than three hundred cheeses.”

We all laughed, but then checked ourselves. This, after all, was a very dignified locals’

place to eat lunch. Any outbursts of laughter could only be the indicator that typically

obnoxious Americans were in the house.

The food we ordered was great. But the only thing I remember were the potato crisps.

They were potato slices fried in hot oil to form air pockets of thin potatoes. Lightly

salted, they were amazing.

Just for kicks I looked up the restaurant on my recent visit to Paris, and found 38 years

later, that it’s still there. Kristen, a local guide, laughed when I told her the street it was

on.

“A lot of prostitutes hang out there now,” she said. “But they tend to move around.”

A few weeks ago we landed in Paris and took the train to the Montparnasse station where

we planned to catch an early train the next morning to Spain. Elena had the printed out

name of the hotel she booked in the neighborhood for one night, and after coming out of

the Metro station, we set about looking for it, with map in hand.

But even though we were right across the street from the station, we couldn’t find the

street of our hotel. Elena asked a pharmacist, and after looking at her printout, he told her

that hotel wasn’t even in Paris. Through some online reservation glitch, she’d reserved a

room near the train station of some other French town. So we set about looking for a
room for the night near the station. We’d just flown halfway around the world and were

jet-lagged, and not much in the mood for hunting the neighborhood for a place to stay.

But we had to, unless we planned on sleeping in the train station that night.

As we pulled our rolling suitcases beginning our hunt, I thought back to 32 years earlier

when at 21, I came to Paris on a train. My girlfriend Lucy and I had taken a ferry across

the English Channel. We got on a train at Calais that was headed for Paris.

It was a warm summer Friday night and already dark when we pulled into the famous

city. Because planning ahead wasn’t a concept we had grasped as travelers, we didn’t

have any cash, only travelers’ checks. I had a student travel guide of Paris and we quickly

learned that there were no banks open to change our travelers’ checks.

But that really didn’t matter, because every crappy little hotel we checked for a room was

full. So we just kept looking in the Latin Quarter, our backpacks getting heavier by the

hour. We walked and walked but couldn’t find a hotel with any vacancies. It seemed like

we had walked 25 miles and the night had turned to early morning. Everything was

shutting down. I worried that we might have to sleep somewhere outside. I wanted to

avoid that, mainly for security reasons. Some American guys I started talking with in

front of their hotel said we could stay in their room. But the owner was standing right

there, listening in. He said too many people in a room would be breaking the law and

that wasn’t going to happen.

One of the Americans didn’t understand what the owner was saying and kept asking him

to explain what he said. But I knew immediately it wasn’t in the cards. Just then a tall

English speaking guy and a girl dressed like an exotic Arabian dancer walked behind us.

“Need a place to sleep?” he asked.

“Yes we do,” I assured him.

“Follow us, I’ll show you where there’s a park up the street where you can sleep.”

With no other alternative, we wearily followed the guy and his girlfriend. We didn’t walk

long, until he said: “Tellya what. For seven francs, you can sleep on our floor.”

“Thanks!” I said. “I’ll pay you when I find a place to get my traveler’s checks cashed.”

“No problem, I’ll show you where the bank is in the morning.”

We went into a dark narrow alley into his building and up three flights of dimly lit rear

stairs. We got to the small studio apartment and the guy lit a candle on the table in the

living room. It gave the room a soft, golden orange glow. He took some cheese and fruit

out of his refrigerator to share.

He told us he was Canadian and the manager of his dancer girlfriend, who was from

Texas. They had bickered earlier about the heavy tips she’d received from a rich Arab in

the audience, a regular, who apparently had made it clear he wanted something extra for

his generosity.

After the snack, the Canadian told us he usually tries to help lost newcomers to Paris.

“Everybody who comes to this city stays longer then they originally plan,” he said. “It’s a

magical place.”

Then he said, “Tell ya what. We like to sleep on the floor. Why don’t you guys take our

bed?”

We were exhausted and had no problem taking him up on his offer. We crawled into the

bed, which was in the same room, and I looked up at the dark high ceiling, amazed at our

good fortune. Less than an hour earlier, we were homeless on the early morning streets of

Paris. And Voila! We were in a comfortable bed for the night for a paltry seven francs.

All because we were lucky enough to run into the kind Canadian.

As we decompressed, the guy pulled out a book. Sitting on the floor on a sleeping bag

with his girlfriend, he started reading aloud by candlelight. We soon discovered he was

reading Winnie the Pooh. And he didn’t read it in a conventional way. He breathily

voiced all the different characters as if reading to an audience of small, wide-eyed

children. So not only did we have a nice warm bed to sleep in, we had a dramatic reading

of Winnie the Pooh to help us get to dreamy land.

The next morning, he led us to the nearby bank and we got some cash. I paid him,

thanked him, shook his hand. We said “Au revoir!” and continued on our way. But we

ended up staying in the city longer than we thought we would. The Canadian was

absolutely right. The city of Paris is magical. It doesn’t let go of you so easily.
Mom notes

My mother, Lois, had a split personality.

It just wasn’t split down the middle.

In the morning, especially on Christmas mornings when everybody was tearing into their

presents, she was down to earth, mellow and caring. In her robe with no make-up on, her

guard was down and she was comfortable and serene in her surroundings.

She was proud of her Swedish heritage and for many Christmas eves put out a full

smorgasborg spread: Swedish meatballs, potato sausage, pickled herring, rye cracker

bread, beets, cucumber salad. Glogg, the booziest of any of the many glogg recipes I’ve

seen since, came from her side of the family and was always fired up in a saucepan and

ladled hot into glass mugs to bring on a special flush-faced holiday sipping buzz. For

Christmas dinner she’d roast prime rib with Yorkshire pudding and always served up a

lime Jello/ cream cheese molded salad.

At parties, my mom had the kind of voice you’d always hear above the crowd. It wasn’t

so much that she was loud. There was just never a problem hearing her.

But after her morning down time, after she applied make-up to literally “put on her face,”

she was from that moment very much “on,” and greeted the world as if the only way she

would survive was with her ruthlessly applied street savvy. In this, her warlock mode,

she’d act like a snob, and for laughs, freely talked trash about other people, politics,

whatever. Sometimes she was funny. But mostly she was just plain nasty and obnoxious.

It was her way of attracting attention to herself, getting people to laugh at her one-liners.

She loved attention, probably because she didn’t get much as a kid..

To survive the scary parts of life, she passionately denied being afraid of anything. Fear

was something she was determined to keep from getting the best of her. So much so, that

she tossed aside anything that smacked of sentimentality or emotional goo, which she

saw as contemptible, simpering weakness. Her armor of denial closed her down so much

that it kept her at arm’s length from taking in and understanding new information. She

read a lot, mainly newspapers and magazines, but would joke, “It just goes in one ear and

out the other.” And in talking to her, I could see, that was pretty much true. Her all but

impenetrable shield of denial deflected any learning from information trying to enter her

brain. She didn’t want to expose the fear she buried in her core.

She passed away in December 2001 at 78 after a year-long struggle with bone marrow

cancer. She died in her bed, as she wanted, and slipped off listening to my step-dad John
reassure her that it was OK to let go. Letting go of her life, which until then was as

physically healthy as anyone’s could be, was the first time she let go of anything.

Born in Chicago on July 9, 1923, her parents divorced when she was 8 and her brother

Roger was 2. Never saw much of her dad, Jack Franzen, a traveling salesman. She told

me that after she had my oldest sister in 1950, her dad had been diagnosed with some

illness or other that would require his leg to be amputated. She said he then killed

himself.

Though they lived with their party-loving mother Ruth, she and Roger were raised in

Chicago by their maternal grandmother, “Grandma Mollander.” On several occasions I

remember my mom telling the story of when, as a little girl riding a streetcar, a man

exposed “his penis” to her. She told her grandmother about it.

“I never rode that streetcar again!” she said.

I always thought it an odd story to repeat to anybody, much less her own kids. But she

thought it was funny.

As a girl and throughout her life, she idolized ballerinas and dreamed of being a famous

one.
She never went to college, but as a teen, learned to take shorthand and type fast. Having

her fill of Chicago, she took a train by herself to Hollywood when she was 20 or so,

found an apartment and a job in a bank.

With tousled light brown hair, long legs, WonderWoman breasts, a confident smile with

perfect teeth, she was young, beautiful and living her dream. A big fan of glamour, and

glamorous living, she no doubt hoped somehow she’d be discovered and be made

famous. She typed letters regularly to Ginzie, her best friend back home, when her boss

wasn’t around. She’d brag about seeing Bob Hope and other stars in the bank. While in

Chicago, she and Ginzie had double dated a couple of guys in the service. Ginzie and her

date fell in love and later got married. My mom fell in love with her date, and had hoped

for the same wedding bells Ginzie got. But her date had other ideas, and his rejection

really crushed my mom, who confessed as much in her letters to Ginzie.

In Hollywood she kept in touch with two guys away at war, one of which was my dad,

Henry, a Navy ensign serving in the South Pacific. She’d known him as a young teen in

Chicago. He was six years older, and both families would spend summers in no-frills

cabins at the-then expansive, unspoiled Indiana sand dunes.

After the war in 1945 she married my dad, whose daily wartime letters she later

rhapsodized over. Later, she burned those same letters in a fit of rage over her hurt and

frustration with my father’s nightly drinking. He’d typically eat dinner snockered. His

eyelids blinked in slow motion, his face made exaggerated expressions of happiness,
sadness and whatever other tweaked emotion was roiling through his head. He’d usually

make it an early night, and pass out into bed shortly after dinner. Despite the dire warning

signs, my mom went ahead and had three kids with him anyway, my two older sisters and

myself. But my dad, a professional musician and top-notch finish carpenter, never looked

at drinking as something he should stop. He drank because it drowned out the desperate

pain he felt from losing his hero – his father – when he was 13, and the horrors of the

South Pacific during World War II.

My mom’s take on life with him came out as an oft-repeated bittersweet line: “Never a

dull moment.” While my father was a gentle, uncompetitive man with little or no

direction, my mother was impatient, and constantly pushing to get things done.

When my father got a job in a nightclub orchestra at Lake Tahoe, we moved there from

Los Angeles. My mom quickly found work as an executive secretary at a Lake Tahoe

nonprofit dedicated to keeping pollution out of its clear, cold waters. She managed to stay

at it for 12 years, a time when she was our family’s only steady means of support. During

those years 1959-68, my dad’s drinking eventually ended his career as an upright bass

player at clubs in Tahoe and Reno.

My mom worked as the executive secretary for a nonprofit dedicated to keeping the

legendary clarity of Lake Tahoe. She didn’t make much but she was the primary financial

supporter of our family of five.

Through sheer willpower, and force of personality, in 1963, four years after we’d moved

to Tahoe, she managed to finance purchase of a south shore lakeview lot, and the design

and construction of a two-story custom home for our family. Before moving into the

house, we lived in a double-wide mobile home, first in a dirt-road South Tahoe trailer

park she often called “Tortilla Flat,” then on the lot our house was built on.

The new ridgetop house sat amid pine trees, and was designed with Japanese accents.

With a lot of interior finishing yet to do, it had a two-car garage, large redwood decks,

spectacular views of the lake and plenty of room for our family. It was my mom’s castle,

her biggest accomplishment. And over the years, she made it abundantly clear to

everybody that she was the boss when it came to the house.

My dad poured the steep 100-foot driveway in sections of concrete, a project that took

months. Meanwhile there was no carpeting in the house, we lived in it with plywood

floors. My mom told me we couldn’t afford carpeting because of my father’s drinking.

But she told other people she didn’t want to have the carpets put in until the driveway

was finished and there’d be less chance of tracking in dirt on the new carpet.

My mom gave great descriptions of my father’s escapades, always prefaced, with “Your

father.”
She’d tell of his routine after he’d play a show. Often on the way home he’d pick up

some garlic hot dogs and some maple nut ice cream. He’d eat the dogs and finger the

grease all over the next day’s sports page. Then at about three a.m. he’d hit the sack.

“Your father would flop into bed with greasy hands and garlic hot dog breath, Ugghhh,”

my mom reported, horrified, but laughing too.

Finished as a professional musician, my dad was left to pursue a succession of low

paying odd jobs. He was a nightclub security guard. He delivered eggs. He refinished

furniture. He worked at a plant nursery. But he kept his habit of sneaking snorts of

secretly stashed vodka at about 5 p.m. every night. So he’d be a regular pie-eyed dad at

the dinner table, joking and acting goofy. Everybody else rolled their eyes. We had no

idea how to vent the bottled up tension at the mostly silent dinner sessions.

Cornered by all that, my mom didn’t wilt under the pressure. She put on her man-pants

and shouldered the load. After work every night, she’d come down from her day with a

scotch and water. She’d often have enough energy after work to cook new dinner recipes

she’d look up.

My mom always read the newspaper in her corner of the couch, often holding it up high

while she read, forming a wall between her and anyone who might otherwise interrupt

her. The message was, “Leave me alone.”

When I was a young kid while we were living in the trailer, she’d read to me before I

went to bed. She’d act out the voices in the story and got me interested in reading and

storytelling.

In those days, I’d always ask her to come kiss me goodnight, and she would. She’d come

into my darkened room to tuck me in, kiss me on the cheek and would always say “Sleep

tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

I loved the routine and would always say the line back to her. “Don’t let the bedbugs

bite.”

But after she’d verbally assaulted me enough times with regular barbs or snide cracks

venting hostility I didn’t understand, I pulled back from her. At some point, I decided to

purposefully pass on asking her to kiss me good night. I’d learned passive aggression at

an early age, probably from my dad, and decided to use it. Once in awhile, she’d wonder

aloud why I didn’t ask her to kiss me goodnight anymore. But that never made me feel

bad enough to ask her again. The message was, “You figure it out.”

My mother saw her kids as something of a trial to endure, and not necessarily with good

humor. Having to do the heavy lifting to support and raise kids stood in the way of her

freedom to do as she pleased, and freedom to do as she pleased was what she valued

most.
“Having a kid is a 20-year jail sentence,” she’d say to anyone that would listen, never

minding if her kids heard.

When asked by a close family friend, “Oh, Lois what would you do without your kids?”

she had a rimshot answer: “Get a divorce.”

Didn’t seem to bother her that I was well within earshot.

Many times she acted as if my sisters and myself were just ungrateful snots. Which

maybe we were, on occasion. But none of us stole cars or held up liquor stores or went on

drunken joyrides like some other delinquents at our school did. For the most part we were

passive rule followers. Still, she figured it was up to her to keep us busy during the three

months we were out of school on summer vacations, or we were sure to get into trouble.

She used to demand I pick five grocery bags full of weeds from our unused, dogshit-

bombarded weed-choked lower front yard, and ordered them be pulled out by their roots.

I’d do the weeding, hateful of what I considered to be casually concocted slave labor

busy work. When she got home from work she’d cynically inspect the bags to make sure

I didn’t hide dirt clods in them to fill them up (I did). After I finished a chore, she’d

sneeringly inspect my work, and would invariably point, sniff and say, “Missed a spot.”

This was said to me so many times, for so many years I thought “Missedaspot” was my

name.
Whenever I couldn’t find something in the refrigerator, I’d stand there looking in with the

door open. “Close the refrigerator,” she’d yell, and without fail, she laugh: “It’s right in

front of your nose.”

And damned if it wasn’t.

Then after dinners when I was a teen, she’d suddenly be the concerned provider. “Did

you get enough to eat?”

Upon looking at the Beatles’ poster hanging in my sister’s bedroom in 1964, the Fab Four

looked like sweet tough guys with black leather coats in a dark, blue-hued grimy alley in

Liverpool, my mom’s take was: “They look like they could use a bath.” Followed by,

“They need orthodontia.”

When as a kid building model cars, I asked my mom what it meant on the tube of

airplane glue when it warned of toxic fumes with an icon of a skull and crossbones. She

had a quick answer: “Open the window.”

At 6, I declared, “I hate asparagus,” and refused to have any.

My mom didn’t miss a beat. “Good, more for us.” Then, I wanted to try some, because

everybody else was and they liked it. The nice little reverse psychology by my mom got

me to try it, which was her goal in the first place. And when I tried it, I liked it. From
then on, I learned to try food that looked odd or exotic. The only food I remember that

made me pay for such adventurousness was fried liver, which made me gag if I didn’t

hold my nose when I ate it.

To get control of us when we were kids on the verge of emotional explosion, she’d yell,

“Simmer down!,” or “Lower it an octave,” or “Keep it down to a dull roar,” or, “Alright,

already!” But when she yelled, we listened.

When disgusted, she’d say things like like “Ish,” or “Ugh,” or “Gross”…or she’d let fly

with the nasty parental trump card: “Shame on you.” If she cleaned something that really

needed it, she’d always say, “Not that it needed it or anything.”

When my 16-year-old oldest sister was out on a date, in November 1966, we got a late

night call. My mom answered the phone after having gone to bed with cold cream on her

face and in her warmest PJs: longjohns. I was next to her listening to her on the wall

phone in the kitchen, and immediately her whole body began to shudder. The voice on

the other end of the line told her that Karen had been in a car accident and that she was in

the hospital. Karen as it turned out, miraculously survived the crash, which killed her

boyfriend.

My mom eventually had enough of my dad’s nightly appointment with vodka, and in

1968, after 23 years, suddenly divorced him. She told my sister Lauren that she said

something that finally convinced my mom to go through with what she’d thought about

doing – but didn’t have the nerve – for years. I overheard her tell my uncle one summer
that my dad told her he’d kill himself if she divorced him. That gave her pause. But then,

after my father had made another drunken faux pas, embarrassing my mom in front of

friends, my sister later said to her: “How can you let him humiliate you like that?”

If there was one thing my mom wouldn’t stand for, it was being told by her daughter that

she was a regular victim of humiliation by my dad. Even though she knew it was true, to

be told by her daughter was more than she could take.

All those humiliations had balled up enough for her to spit out, and there were plenty of

them.

Like when at a dinner party at a couple’s house, my dad was drunk early in the party and

decided he wanted to go to bed. He proceeded into the couple’s bedroom where all the

coats were on the bed. He shoved them all onto the floor and flopped down on the bed to

sleep. My mom suffered the embarrassment of waking him and helping him to the car,

then had to drive many miles home with him passed out in the back seat.

Then there was the time he drove home in his Travelall late at night with a week’s worth

of groceries in it. Only he didn’t make it home in his truck. For some reason he parked it

at the highway down the hill a mile away and walked home. But in the morning, he didn’t

remember a thing. All he knew was his truck was gone. He reported it stolen. Later in the

day we drove down to the highway and there was his truck, parked, with the keys in it,

and the week’s worth of groceries still in it. Dad shrugged. Mom couldn’t even speak.
Then there was the time I was 10 and mom sent my drunken dad to pick my buddy and

me up from the movie theatre, about a 30-minute drive away. My dad picks us up,

driving our Volkswagen, and I know immediately he’s in the bag. He’s acting goofy and

is driving very slowly. He stops to get out and pee. My buddy has no idea my dad is

drunk. When we made it home I went directly to Mom and angrily told her how

irresponsible she was. She got very quiet. She actually listened.

Mostly she didn’t. She was an animal lover, but one night when I was a kid, my parents

were having a party. J.D., a neighbor’s toy poodle,scratched desperately against our back

sliding glass door. It was snowing, and he was freezing. I pleaded with my mom to let

him in. But she refused and I was too intimidated to go against her orders. The next day,

the dog was found dead in the snow. That shook her up, my sister told me, but I didn’t

find out about J.D.’s demise until some time later.

But she kicked my dad out of the house, got her divorce, and after a suspiciously short

dating period, quickly married the local city manager, a boorish, self-impressed divorcee

father of three young girls. His name was John, and he ended up being married to my

mom for 32 years, until the day she died.

John was the provider my dad never was, and brought travel and easy living to my

mother for the last half of her life.

On their honeymoon, John took a black and white photo of my mom reading the Herald

Tribune on a Paris bench, legs crossed, nose tilted up, looking very European, which

happened to be one of the biggest goals of her life. A good family friend took a look at

the picture and gushed, “Oh Lois, you look like a NATIVE!”

And my Mom couldn’t help herself.

“Yes,” she said, thoughtfully.

Even though an attractive, style-conscious woman, my mom seemed to relish acting the

part of power-drunk, belligerent man. She didn’t need a cigar or suspenders. Around the

house, she called all the shots. And if she felt the natural inclination to belch or fart in

what she considered her house and nobody else’s, she’d let ‘em rip with self-affirming

manlike nonchalance. We accepted this sporadic behavior as normal. It was a big source

of amusement later in life to her grandsons, who as squirrelly little boys, big on displays

of anarchy, thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen or heard.

As a mom, she lorded over her own kids with intimidation. To her, we were mere pawns

to be kept in place and off balance by ruthlessly wielding her boundless parental power.

She was trigger-happy, never hesitant to fire off heavy rounds of reverse psychology,

bullying, baiting and just plain old meanness to keep the upper hand.
In the bargain, we learned how to use these verbal switchblades whenever we were

provoked into argument. We’d pull them out as go-to secret weapons when we sensed we

were cornered or near defeat, to cut up any opponent into humiliated submission. We all

became proficient at tapping into our tool bags of verbal treachery, thanks to her. She

wasn’t the best I’ve ever seen at being a nasty button-pusher, but she did it so habitually

with her family, she had no idea how rude, and sometimes cruel, she was.

When I was 11 or so, my mom called all of us together for a “meeting.” I can’t remember

if my parents had already split by then. And I barely remember what the meeting was

about. But I remember her forcefully saying that if necessary she might have to sell the

house. She was in her tough-man role, and for some reason my oldest sister started

crying.

But instead of comforting her, my Mom decided her daughter was showing weakness.

Weakness was something she despised seeing in her kids. So my Mom figured she

needed to toughen up my sister.

“Look at her,” she said with disgust in her voice at her oldest teenage daughter, the

daughter she was clearly threatened by as an attractive rival. Good looking, sharp-

tongued and intelligent, my oldest sister Karen had stung my Mom more than a few times

with barbs. My mom was out of earshot from one of her nastiest retorts: “No wonder our

father’s an alcoholic.”
This time my mom glowered at my sobbing sister. Mom was a practiced schoolyard bully

with an arsenal of verbal assaults substituting for fists. Here, she got nastier by the

second.

“You’re not so tough now, are you?” she sneered at my sister. “Nope, not so tough now.”

I don’t remember feeling a need to comfort my sister, probably because I sensed my

mom would have turned on me, if I had. But that scene left an impression on me that

didn’t return until many years later as an adult.

My mom was always tough on my sister’s husbands and my first wife. Just held them off

enough to make them feel they didn’t quite measure up, and on occasion would outright

insult them.

With me, she flip-flopped on the spousal disapproval front. When my first wife ran off

with another man, my mom blamed me, and we hardly spoke. She went out of her way to

accommodate my ex-wife, even invited her to Thanksgiving at her house, when I said I

wasn’t coming. I was sure she was doing it to send the message: “It wasn’t her fault that

she ran off, it was YOURS.”

It was on the phone around that time that I screamed at her. ”You call yourself a

nurturer,” I hissed into the receiver.

“I am a nurturer,” she said meekly.

“Nurturer? NURTURER?” I yelled. “As a mother, you’re a DISGRACE!”

That led to a no-communication phase, which continued for a couple years. Finally, we

agreed to have lunch near my office to clear the air.

“Why do you think you get all this anger from me?” I asked her. “Do you think there’s no

reason for it?”

Suddenly she was almost contrite. “Probably from things I’ve done or said,” she said.

“Yes, you could say that,” I said

But she wasn’t about to beat herself up over anything she’d handled poorly in the past.

She didn’t seem to understand angry reactions to anything she did.

We had a few more rough months, but I invited her to my wedding, and even though we

were barely speaking, she showed up with John acting like all was well and always had

been.

My second wife and I were eating dinner at the Tahoe house one summer and my Mom

suddenly started talking to Elena in the same predatory tone I remembered from when

she’d thoroughly humiliated my sister many years earlier.

“She’s not so tough,” my Mom said, half smirking, looking across the table at Elena. I

thought she was circling slowly, getting ready to pounce. All the alarms went off in my

head at once, and I became an attack dog. I don’t even remember what I said to my

mother, but it wasn’t pretty. It was a volcano of anger-spewing froth; red-hot vitriol,

more desperately mean and nasty than anything she’d ever heard from me. It came from

the pit of my stomach, where it had hibernated for many years, but it exploded into attack

mode when there was suddenly nothing in me to hold it back. My words sought to inflict

as much damage as possible, fueled with an urgency to protect my wife from my

mother’s belittling, cruel ways. It was something I’d been too cowed to do for my sister

many years ago when I was a kid. Now, I wasn’t going to let it happen again.

But that’s the thing about venting mean and nasty thoughts fueled by long unexpressed

anger. It usually results in overkill, like chopping up a kitten with a machete. All that’s

left is eviscerated emotional remains of the one attacked, nothing but torn feelings searing

with pain and hurt, and with no clue of how to sew the pieces back together.

My mom got up from the table and disappeared into her bedroom, completely caught off

guard by my barrage. I’d shocked myself with what I’d done. I felt like I’d checked out

for a moment, under a spell that wasn’t broken until I saw my mom close the bedroom

door behind her. I was unsettled and hollow inside and when I went into the bedroom,

heard her sobbing in the bathroom. The only other time I’d seen my mother cry was when

I was 11. She came into my bedroom to console me over the sudden death of my dog
Sam, who had been run over by a motorcycle the day before. She came into my room and

told me the vet’s news that Sam, my best buddy and world’s best dog, had died of his

injuries. I was inconsolable, and somehow it was all made worse by the fact that my

mother – who never cried -- was sobbing as hard as I was.

Now, after I asked her to come out of the bathroom, we sat on the edge of her bed,

shoulder to shoulder. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I put my arm around her

and tried to explain myself. I could and I couldn’t. I could blame her for teaching me how

to be mean. Or I could blame myself for losing it. But as we sat there, it occurred to me

that we were both the way we were and that’s just about all there was to it. And

sometimes it involves getting your feelings hurt by someone who is very angry with you

for reasons you never imagined.

I was the only one in my immediate family who ever got a college degree. All through

my childhood I was brainwashed by my mom that I would to college and there was no

other option. So I got my bachelor’s, something that took four years of trial-filled, pedal

to the metal dedication by me, not the most natural of students. At the graduation

ceremony, my mom decided a simple congratulations wasn’t in order. She’d used college

savings money my sisters didn’t use, along with money she’d saved for me, to pay my

way through college. Now that I had accomplished this goal, one that she had made it

clear for many years that I would achieve, she was going to make sure that I didn’t get a

fat head over it. So, meeting up in the reception area after I got my diploma, the first

words from her mouth were:

“It’ll really be great when you get your master’s.”

Years later when I showed her our new car, one we we’d saved for and were really proud

of:

“When are you going to get another one?”

Over the years, my mom dealt with various life situations by reciting clichés she’d picked

up over the years. Whenever she caught me as a kid using a table knife as a screwdriver

on one of my models her pat line was: “Use the proper implement.”

Whenever the subject of womanizing men came up, she’d always say: “Any port in a

storm.” Anybody or anything she considered cheap was “chintzy.”

Other cracks she’d regularly spout were: “I couldn’t give two hoots in hell for (fill in the

blank)….”The truth hurts,” which she personally knew was true. Asked about her

education, she’d unapologetically say, “I went to the school of hard knocks,” or assessing

a particularly obnoxious idiot, who invariably would be a man, she say, “He’s a non

compos puke-us,” substituting the typically used word “mentis,” with her own riff of

“puke-us.”
Her litany of one-liners and pat phrases came from all directions:

“I’m not a bread eater,” “Turkey lurkey,” “Cross that bridge when you come to it,” “Two

minutes on the lips, ten pounds on the hips.”

If parents didn’t discipline their bratty kids, she’d declare with a concerned look,

“They’re doing them a disservice.”

If times were tough you should “Take the bitter with the batter.” Somebody that could

hold their liquor: “Has the constitution of a horse.” When the time was right, she’d say,

“third time’s a charm,” “too many cooks spoil the broth,” “ya snooze ya lose.” When she

saw a flaw in a plan, she’d say, “rots a ruck,” or “oy vey,” “that’ll be the day,” or offer a

drippingly sarcastic “Good luck.”

Occasionally, whenever a point came up she disagreed with, but wanted to be somewhat

diplomatic, she’d wait a beat, then say “Oh….” Her message: “Why don’t we do it my

way?”

“You’re such a liar, you’re so bad,” she’d say affectionately to John’s regular attempts to

show how smart or clever he was, which everybody knew, he wasn’t.

Other of her oft-used phrases were: “horse’s ass,” “pompous ass”, “If you don’t have

anything positive to say keep it to yourself…,” and “silence is golden.”

After receiving a barb or two from me when I was in college, she had a ready

counteroffensive when I’d point up one of her myriad contradictions:

“I feel sorry for your (future) wife,” or “You know it all, don’t you?”

After she’d rip me about something, she’d explain, “It’s not criticism, it’s just an

observation,” followed by the reverse bank shot of, “You’re just too sensitive.”

Whenever she was spooked, she’d always say: “That gives me the whim whams,” a

phrase, along with “Ish” that to this day I’ve never heard uttered by anybody else.

“Takes two to tango,” was her response to any claims that one side or another was right

in a fight.

She called any house with a bad floor plan “a dumb house.”

Explaining the basics of the most coveted thing in her life: “It’s about the money, honey.”

In June 1972, she refused to buy new tires after a scare attempt by a gas station guy in

Chicago where we stopped while driving across the country from the East Coast. The guy

told her the tires on our car should be replaced. A naïve kid, I thought the guy had our

own safety in mind.

“They’re fine,” scoffed my mom, insulted that the shit thought he could scare her into

buying unneeded tires.

“That’s par for the course,” was her line for losers doing loser-like things, or, “It figures.”

She loved to rip on people for being obese, because she wasn’t, and it made her feel

superior. “It’s not that I’m putting them down when I say how big some people are,”

she’d explain. No, it was because “It’s a problem from a health standpoint.”

When bringing food to the table she’d always say: “Sittenzeeselfdown,” and “Hep

y’sef.”

After cooking one of her many great dinners and getting compliments heaped on her by

guests used to eating Hamburger Helper or worse, she’d fish for more: “Don’t be silly,

it’s nothing, three items on the menu.”

She’d say “Take off your coat and stay awhile” to those who had left their coats on

because the house was a cold as a meat locker, the temp she preferred. She was a big fan

of fresh air and couldn’t stand stuffy rooms.

“Whooof,” she say, waving her hands in front of her face, “Open a window.” She told of

one night as a kid in Chicago when she kept her window open near her bed. She woke up

to find snow on her blankets. Which didn’t seem to bother her. Whenever anybody would

ask, “Why don’t you turn up the heat?” she’d quickly bark back, “Put on a sweater!”
Trying to show that she wasn’t racially prejudiced (she pretty much was) and liked

African American stars like Bill Cosby or Sammy Davis Jr., she’d say the same thing:

“He’s a credit to his race.”

She liked to stick her nose in the air in social situations. For some reason, she vainly tried

to anoint the state of Nevada, where we lived, and sausage, which we occasionally ate,

with some sort of esoteric exoticism by messing with their common pronunciations.

She’d say “Nevahhhda,” and “so-saahhhhge.” Which always made me laugh because she

was convinced such crap impressed people. For whatever reason her most-used phrase

was: “in conjunction with,” which at some point she decided was a phrase that was likely

to make people think of her as an intellectual. Which she wasn’t.

Whenever she didn’t understand a semi-complicated notion offered by someone, she’d

say, with feigned confidence, “Oh, of course.”

Whenever she was pretty sure she agreed with whatever argument that was stated, she

say, “ Yeah right.” Which really meant she didn’t have a clue what was being said.

Once my Mom didn’t know which side of an argument to be on so she agreed with both.

The argument by one family friend was, “You know, we all choose our parents.”

“Of course,” she said, a little uncertainty in her voice.

My ex-wife then countered, “ So all the starving people in Africa chose THEIR

PARENTS because they wanted to starve to death? I don’t think so!”

“Yeah right,” said my mom, still unsure of what else to say. It was as if her head were on

a swivel; she was afraid of being on the wrong side, so was nervous about weighing in.

This was a rarity, because she usually shot her mouth off on all subjects whether she

knew anything about them or not.

One time after my wife and I spent the day cleaning our house in anticipation of my

mom’s visit – she was a stickler for a clean house, and showed no respect at all to a wife

with a messy house – She walked in the door, looked at the couch and the first words out

of her mouth are: “Looks like the cat scratches have ruined your couch.” Then, declaring

the house too hot, she proceeded to the back yard. Later on the same visit, she said, “Too

bad you don’t wash your windows, then you could see out of them.”

Another time when my sister Lauren was trying to comfort her infant son, my mom

looked on impatiently and said, “Hit him in the back, he’ll be fine.”

To my stepdad, John, who was once temporarily missing one of his false front teeth,

while ranting on and on in his usual braggadocio style about how he was going to do this,

then he was going to do that about something or other, my mom laughed hard as she
watched his toothless speech, and said: “Before you do anything, you better get your

tooth fixed.”

The Tahoe house was her domain, and she made that abundantly clear to everyone in the

family. Even though she and John lived in San Francisco, they kept the house rented

during winters, and it was my mom’s summer place. She treated visiting family like

intruding guests. She’d complain about my car dripping oil on the asphalt (black)

driveway and told John to ask me to wash it off. Her cousin visited with his little dog

once, and she wouldn’t allow the dog in the house, saying it would pee and crap on the

carpets. This incensed the cousin who abruptly left, scraping the bottom his car while

angrily backing down the driveway where it met the steep street below, all while my

mom laughed and laughed at the spectacle she’d created.

When I’d visit the Tahoe house with my wife during summers, my mom knew I liked to

sleep in my old bedroom. But she set up an office in there, and said she needed to use it

in the early mornings, so we could sleep in my sister’s room. Or if other people were

visiting at the same time, she’d give them my room.

We all went out to dinner in Carson City one summer night and had to wait a long time

for our table. While waiting we drank at least a couple of bottles of wine between us, so

we were pretty loud and loose by the time we got seated in the old home-turned

restaurant. By dessert, Mom was in rare form, loudly tossing off rude asides about

whatever was being talked about and laughing hysterically. My sister and I ordered the
same dessert, and both arrived at the same time. Each had a large erect banana at the

center of the plate, with appropriate male genital-like garnishes at the base. We took one

look at them and broke into gales of laughter. But then Mom’s dessert came, and she was

crestfallen when she saw it. It was a similarly phallic plate motif, but the erect part was

small and one fourth as tall as my sister’s and mine.

“Is THAT ALL?” she snarled.

On the way home in the car we talked about a woman we knew who was particularly

bitchy. Woozy from the wine and food, I offered, “All she needs is a big stiff one, and

she’d be fine.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mom piped up. “It hasn’t done me any good!”

A few years before my mom got sick, she used to buy Elena and me tickets to plays in

San Francisco as a way to get us to visit. We wouldn’t go otherwise, because we really

didn’t enjoy visiting her and John. It was never a very relaxed time, so we didn’t make

many efforts to get together. It was over the phone with my mom during this time that I

mentioned the off-putting nature of her years of nasty behavior. To this she acted

completely surprised. But she was a great actress. She knew exactly what I was talking

about. Still she said she wanted to come visit and talk about it. She came to the house

with a legal pad and pen, with the notion that she would write down examples of her

nastiness so that she would know exactly what they were. I wasn’t in the mood to recite
them, and didn’t think she’d own up to any of them anyway. The way she protected

herself was to deny the validity of anything she didn’t want to be true, whether it was or

not. So she eventually left with her legal pad, with nothing written on it.

After 77 years of healthy living, she suddenly came down with multiple myeloma, cancer

of the bone marrow, and became increasingly sick for 14 months. When I first found out

about it, I talked to her on the phone, and pacing while I talked, told her she was going to

beat it, and not to worry. But she got worse as the months went by, and she was no longer

her confident self. She was scared to death, her voice faltered. “It all started with a

stomach ache,” she said in a small voice. She sighed a lot, a scary sign that she was in

trouble. I tried to think of what would help. I remembered that laughter has been used to

help people trying to fight diseases. I suggested she rent the funniest movies she could

find, watch them and just laugh.

But she didn’t seem to be listening, her silence made me think she’d already veered into

hopelessness. I didn’t know what to do, other than to try to sound upbeat. But what I said

probably sounded like empty words; nothing she could grab onto to keep from drowning.

She mentioned going to meetings to commiserate with other cancer victims, and coming

back horrified by the stories others had to tell. She was slipping away, a realization I

wouldn’t even allow to enter my mind. Not my mom. She was a force who for all my life

had been all powerful; an intimidator who always got what she wanted by playing the
angles. This wasn’t going to take her out. No way. But a tiny voice told me I could deny

all I wanted, but this was it. I tried to ignore it.

A month or two before she died she gave me the set of sterling silverware she got for her

wedding. And on my last visit she had some sterling engraved sugar spoons she asked me

to take one. I took the one that had “Chicago” engraved on it. She said her dad gave it to

her when she was a girl, after coming home from a sales trip.

A year into her illness she invited me to spend a mid-December day with her at her place,

and we both knew this would be the last time we’d see each other. I was still acting like it

was just another visit. Over the years, she’d made it clear that she liked her space, and

wasn’t all that thrilled about frequent family visits. She and Karen, who lives in the same

city, were barely on speaking terms. Lauren and myself, both a couple hours’ drive away,

had kept in touch with occasional phone calls and rare visits. So when she was very sick,

she invited my sisters and myself for individual visits when she knew the end was near.

When I got to her place, she was dressed up and ready to go out. I think it had taken her a

long time to pull herself together, but she seemed determined to leave me with the

impression of her strength. She set out some chicken for lunch, and said she wanted to

run some errands.

But first, she brought me a legal pad and a blue felt pen and sat down across from me.

She wanted me to take down notes for her obituary. “We’ll laugh about this later,” she
said, but insisted this had to be done. She knew this was it, the last time we’d be together.

I wrote obits at the start of my newspaper career 20 years earlier.

Feeling very weird, I asked her the basic questions and started writing. “Born, July 9,

1923 in Chicago, Ill. It was an odd, emotionally charged feeling as I wrote. Looking at

my mom, I couldn’t or wouldn’t believe she was close to death. She still seemed to have

so much life in her. I finished taking notes and took the old classical guitar I brought with

me out of its old battered case. “You need a new case,” she said. I reminded her that this

was the guitar she bought me for Christmas when I was a freshman in college, my first

guitar. She’d forgotten all about the guitar. I played her a couple of tunes that came to my

head at the moment. “Sad Songs and Waltzes” by Willie Nelson and “Juicy Fruit” by

Jimmy Buffett. As I played and sang, I couldn’t look at her, I wanted to hold my

concentration and not get distracted. Something was telling me that if I looked at her, I’d

stop playing, and this moment felt like it was about holding everything together, not

breaking down.

When I finished she said she wanted to drive to nearby Chestnut Street to take care of a

few errands. She held my arm as we walked down the three flights of stairs to the car. We

went to a shoe store, and to a clothing store to buy a Christmas gift for John. As music

played in the store, she swung to the beat, and I couldn’t help but feel she was doing this

for my benefit. At a jewelry store she picked up a watch and took a handful of M&Ms

from a tray and gave some to me. She told me that even though I didn’t ever know my
grandparents, I’d had good substitutes in our Tahoe neighbors Barney and Bertha. I told

her they were definitely that.

She mentioned the Halloween pumpkins she had on her porch. “I hated throwing them

away.” She knew they were the last pumpkins she’d ever see.

Later she kissed me goodbye, and as I drove home I turned up the volume on an old

Tower of Power CD as the day faded into dusk and darkness. The music helped crowd

out the thought that I had just seen my mother for the last time.

I talked to her on the phone on Christmas Day a couple weeks later and asked her a

question about her uncle, which I’d always wondered. What did he do for a living?

“He was a draftsman. But he quit in his late 40s over a brouhaha with his boss. He had

enough money. And he inherited money from his wife’s family.”

Four days later she died in her bed at home. In accord with her wishes, she was cremated

and half her ashes were scattered in the San Francisco Bay, and the other half in Lake

Tahoe.

And to fulfill her other wish, a dinner party for friends and family was held in her honor

in San Francisco a few months later.

A few years earlier, she’d sent me a leggy photo of her in shorts, high heels and a smart

looking long sleeve button down blouse, taken in on the rooftop of her Hollywood

apartment in the summer of 1944. She was 21 years old. She looked like a starlet ready to

be discovered. In the letter she sent with the photo she wrote:

“I found this picture among my souvenirs, and am sending it to you because this is how I

want you to remember me. Young, vital, with all systems ‘go’ and intact. Taken on the

roof of the apt bldg I lived in in Hollywood during W.W. II, and lived subsequently, after

I got married.

“During the period this picture was taken, it was a particularly happy free learning era for

me, and I’ve never experienced any time like it since then. I look happy, and I was. Love,

Mom.”

Within months of her death, John sold the Tahoe house and remarried an online pal soon

after. Apparently stung one too many times during the barb-ridden ride with our crew, he

ended all contact with our family.

During her many summers at Tahoe, my mom loved the beach, sitting in her beach chair

working on her tan for hours, slathered with Bain de Soliel. She’d wear a big straw sun

hat and read the New Yorker, and usually fell asleep while reading. When she got too

hot, she’d venture in the cold waters of Lake Tahoe slowly edging in a little deeper, but

would never dive in. She’d smile once she was in over her shoulders. Looking back at the
beach, she’d have a smile that said all was good in the world at that moment. All the grief

in her life was cleansed away in the glinting diamonds on the deep blue water of her

beloved Lake Tahoe.

Woman on the train

I sat next to my wife on the train, headed north into Paris from Versailles. I looked out

the window to the platform and saw a dark-haired, olive skinned young woman, walking

briskly toward the train and talking to a shorter Asian person. The two got into the car

and the woman sat a few seats ahead and facing me, her friend in the seat facing her. She

spoke French intently and lovingly, leaning forward as her big brown eyes locked in to

her friend’s face. She was enthusiastic as she spoke, her dark brown hair pulled back

from her face. Her teeth were white and perfect, and when she smiled, warmth and love

flowed through her eyes. I was riveted just looking at the pure beauty, light and

expressiveness of her face. I wanted to photograph her with my phone camera, but

decided not to. It would be awkward explaining it to my wife, even though she probably

wouldn’t have minded. As the woman continued her steady-gaze chatting, her face

suddenly fell. Sadness washed over her eyes, but only for a few seconds. The train

stopped and her friend got off. She stayed. I watched her as discreetly as I could, I
couldn’t get enough of her face. It was a study of concentrated beauty and love. I again

thought of taking her photograph, knowing that the ride wasn’t going to last much longer.

But I decided not to. She busied herself checking her phone for messages, and soon came

our stop. We got off, but she stayed. I watched her pass through the train window from

the platform as the train pulled away. I didn’t have her photograph, but it didn’t matter.

I’ll never forget her face.

Laid back in Mexico

The unmistakable whiff of burning trash. Being jarred awake by what was surely the

loudest fart ever loosed. You must be gay, senor. Hussong’s, the motel, the vomit, the

mysterious turd on the chair. chihuahuas running free. Trash. Safety measures? We don’t

need no stinking safety measures! Littering? Go ahead, it’s a long train ride, amigo.

Seatbelts? No serve. Passing on blind curves? Yep. Speeding bus drivers? Oh yeah. No

life jackets? Hell no, it aint our boat! Insurance? Que? Master and Commander.

Belching smoke, deafening diesel and dirty crying girl sitting on the sidewalk... now

that’s harsh. . Hola amigo, welcome to Mexico.

The thing that works for me about Mexico is how low key life is there. In America,

everybody’s tweakin’ on too much coffee, in a hurry, driving the freeway like it’s the last
lap in a Nascar race. Not so in Mexico. In Mexico, everything is slow. Well, except for

bus drivers driving through the jungles of the Yucatan, angry at being passed by a gringo

in a rented Volkswagen. Nobody seems to sweat the details in Mexico, which for some

gringos is frustrating and annoying. I think it’s a good thing. Kind of refreshing, really.

Just taking time to be seems to be an art in Mexico that gringos would do well to try other

than getting shitfaced 24/7 and acting like they own the place.

Many years ago I boarded an overnight Greyhound in Long Beach, destination Mexicali.

I needed a break from thinking about a recent personal train wreck that forced me in the

middle of my junior year to transfer to a university in Southern California. And during

that spring break, I decided to take a trip somewhere to clear my head. My new

housemate Doug was an experienced traveler from wanderings through Central America

and Mexico, and recommended I take the train to Guadalajara, then work my way back.

The redeye bus, which has a stop in downtown L.A., is crowded with Mexicans, many of

them small men wearing big cowboy boots, jeans and beat up white straw cowboy hats,

who presumably are headed home. I don’t sleep very soundly on the overnight ride,

which is peppered seemingly the whole night with low staccatos of Spanish. I’m groggily

awake at first light as the bus barrels through the still shadowy greens and browns of the

pre-dawn April California desert.

When we stop at the deserted bus station in Mexicali, I grab my bag and walk the dirt

road that soon takes me across the border. I hail a cab and get a ride to the train station. A
few minutes later I’m there, and it’s only 7 a.m. My train doesn’t leave for another four

hours. I sit down at a lunch counter and order enchiladas verdes and a beer. I’m the only

one at the counter, and sitting there dazed from lack of sleep, it somehow feels like it’s

the afternoon, not early morning. The sun seems to be in the west rather than the east, my

bearings have somehow been flip-flopped. Probably happened as soon as I crossed into

Mexico.

The food comes and I start in, soon realizing that the cook probably thought it would be

funny to load up the gringo’s enchilada with some extra jalapeno peppers. I cough

harshly as the peppers flame my trachea, flush my face and water my eyes, as I grab my

bottle of Pacifico and chug. The guys behind the counter laugh with mischief in their eyes

as I motion for another beer and try to stop hacking. Nobody is selling tickets for the train

yet, so it looks like I’ll be sitting on one of the station’s wooden benches for a few hours.

The beers and last night’s bumpy bus ride prompted me to throw down my blue and

white plastic bowling bag – my suitcase -- and try to sleep.

Just as I’m settling down, some federales stroll into the station, carrying semi-automatic

machine guns. There are about six of them, all acting like they’ll fire off their guns to

show they’re in charge. But they’re short, skinny teen-agers, and their green uniforms are

too big for them. They nose around the luggage with their gun barrels, sneering at the

scene, which doesn’t appear likely to give them an excuse to grab somebody, pull them

outside and riddle them with bullets. Eventually they saunter out. I take a nap.
When I awake, the station is noisy and filled with Mexican families and American

college students getting ready to take the train south. A single window opens to sell train

tickets, making for a long, slow line. But the ticket to get to Guadalajara, 1,500 miles

away, is only 15 bucks. Gringos have to get their tourist cards stamped, and that’s another

shoving match as we all try to push our way to the counter to get to the one guy checking

IDs and wielding the stamp with drunken nonchalance.

Finally it’s time for the passengers to head into a staging area before getting on the train.

A huge warehouse-like door rolls open and passengers jostle into a separate pre-boarding

staging area. Mexicans going on the trip don’t carry their stuff in what gringos consider

luggage. They use cardboard boxes bound with string. Everybody but the gringos has

cardboard boxes chock full of their clothes and whatever else they want with them.

Suddenly the second warehouse door opens to reveal an ancient train about thirty yards

across an expanse of dirt, and it’s quickly like the gates keeping back a herd of restless

cattle have suddenly blown open. It’s a gleeful stampede to the train. No assigned seats,

just get on and find a place to sit as fast as you can.

The train cars are covered in dust, and look like they’ve been mothballed after making the

inaugural train treks across the Wild West a hundred years ago. I climb into a car and find

the powdery desert dust is a thick blanket on the seats inside. I throw my bag into the

overhead shelf and sit down to look out the window. The dust billows up with the people

invading the car, and is so thick I cover my nose and mouth with my hand just to have a
shot at some unfucked up oxygen. I squint out my window, which like all the others,

sports a thick film of baked on grime. I can’t see anything outside but opaque light.

A Mexican peasant woman sits at the aisle-side edge of the seat next to mine, acting very

afraid of me, as if I have a knife and am about to slit her throat. I’m not thinking I look

like Attila the Hun, so I don’t get it. Maybe it’s her first train ride, I’m thinking. Or

maybe I’m her first gringo, an evil whitey from the north. Poor thing is just scared

shitless.

Once the train fills up, it jerks into motion and begins creeping south toward Mazatlan,

the first part of the trip through the sandy expanses of the Sonora Desert. It seems like 35

mph is its cruising speed. Then after a few hours out in the middle of the desert, it

suddenly jerks to a halt. People get off the train to buy tacos from vendors who have

barbecues set up along the tracks. I wonder how they get here, because looking around,

there’s nothing but sand as far as I can see.

“I’m not eating any of that,” says a spoiled looking college chick in the car with a sneer.

“Probably dog tacos.”

I get out of the train and buy some tacos and wash them down with a beer. Dog or no

dog, they’re delicious.

The train rumbles on all day and into the night. A few dim bulbs wash the car in yellow

light. With nothing to see out of the black windows, the car feels like some antique space

ship, shaking along, but not getting anywhere. Some college frat boys are roaring drunk

in the next car up. I get up to check out the commotion. I find a drunken college gringo

sitting in the open air between the cars, smashing empty beer bottles on the tracks below,

cackling and hooting like a madman. I figure the Mexican train guy that shows up will

tell him to stop and shut the fuck up. But he just walks around the guy, unconcerned in

the least. Just another asshole gringo, no different than hundreds he’d no doubt already

seen in his lifetime.

The next morning, the train stops in Mazatlan, where all the boorish gringo collegians get

off, leaving the train with plenty of room. As we pull away from the station in a long arc,

I open my window to get some fresh air, and stick my head out. Along the side of the

train tracks is a tall mound, a continuous compost heap from passengers throwing trash

out that side of the train for years and years. I look on the other side, and there’s another

parallel trash berm. No need for trash cans in the train. People just throw their trash out

the window. No problem.

In many other trips through Mexico, I found it common for people to rake their trash into

a pile and burn it in their front yards. In fact, the unmistakable smell of burning trash is

for me, almost always a confirmation that I’m in Mexico. I like it. If I’m in Mexico and I

don’t smell burning trash, it just doesn’t really seem like Mexico. Along with happy, free

ranging chickens, it’s part of the ground level Mexico ambience.

In Guadalajara I find a room for $2 a night and run into a guy from Chicago who tells me

the only way to learn Spanish is to live in Mexico rather than take courses in it. Later on

the way back to my room, I have to tell a gay young Mexican who is making it too clear

that he likes me, that I’m interested in mujeres, not hombres. Finally he gets it and moves

on. My upstairs room is spare, floodlit from a big window letting in a massive full moon.

There’s just a small bed and the bathroom is down the hall. Turning on the bathroom

light scatters too many cockroaches to count on a dirty wet green tile floor. And I

discover too late the bed I sleep in is a flea convention. All night long, about 10,000 of

the little nippers gorge ravenously on my blood-filled legs.

In the morning, my legs are rippled with flea bites, all of which seem to be in a contest as

to which one can itch the most. I wander around Guadalajara’s open-air markets,

checking out the sides of beef hanging where flies that look like furry mammals have at

them. I don’t know what to do here after walking around noticing high walls with broken

glass shards cemented along their tops to discourage intruders. After having a few

Bohemias, I take a bus to Mazatlan.

And after a harrowing winding ride down the mountains west to the Pacific, I check into

another cheap hotel whose entry is near a plastic Fanta sign. I meet a teen-age kid who

for some reason thinks we’re friends for life and takes me to meet his family. I eat dinner

with his parents and sisters. His one teen sister gives me her address and asks me to write

her from the U.S.

The next day I walk along the beach in the southern part of town, and see locals

swimming in the surf, including one fat grandma in a dress sitting in the sand, laughing

hysterically as waves crash over her, sending her sprawling and rolling in the wet sand.

She seems like one of the happiest people I’ve ever seen in my life. I walk to the beach at

the swanky north end of town and see rich Mexicans sporting jewelry and bright

swimwear, getting served food and drinks by lowly Mexicans while lounging on their

sunchairs. They don’t look like they’re having anywhere near the fun grandma had. They

don’t look like they know how to have fun. Hell, they’ll never even get into the water.

They’re too busy trying to look cool.

I end up downtown and decide to see the movie Jaws, except here it’s titled “Tiburon,” or

“shark” in Spanish. It’s a matinee and the place is packed with kids. Whenever the big-

ass shark lunges at the crowd, everybody screams bloody murder. It’s a let it all hang out

shriekfest of filmic terror, and I’m pretty sure this crowd is pumped up for scary shark

scenes at an amp level one hell of a lot higher than you’d ever see in any U.S. theater

showing the same movie. Then, the kids weren’t jaded with endless vomit streams of

screen violence, so anything that seemed remotely dangerous to them made them loose

high-pitched wails with house of horrors-like passion.

The next day back at the poor folks’ beach I met a couple of teenage Mexican girls. We

try to communicate, but we don’t get anywhere. I finally manage to tell them I’m taking a

bus out of town, and they point me in the direction of the bus station. The next morning,
feeling queasy after eating some chorizo and eggs for breakfast, I pick up my bag and

walk to the bus station. I buy a ticket to Tijuana.

Heading north out of Mazatlan in the greyhound style bus, I’m in for a day and a half

ride. I have a window seat up front with a clear view of the bus driver and his plastic

Jesus, holy cross, and decorative window-decaled work shrine. Just as we turn onto the

main highway and I settle back for the long ride, again listening to scattered Spanish

conversations, I hear the guy behind me take off his cowboy boots so he can stretch out.

Within milliseconds, the air is polluted badly with the cheesy ripeness of nuclear feet

stink. Since I figure it would be futile to ask him if he’d mind, please, to put his fucking

boots back on, I once again have my hand over my face and nose. Just so I can breathe

without smelling the ever so ripe aura of two steamy feet under my seat. My stomach

starts to rumble in a not so good way, and I’m sure I’ve got a case of Montezuma’s

revenge. Must have been the chorizo and eggs. The spicy chorizo keeps burbling up my

throat and raking my taste buds. I try to think of something else.

A few hours later the driver stops in a small town in front of a shack-like restaurant and

announces “para comida.” I’m not hungry, and this place is a real dive. I figure if I go

into the bathroom, it might take awhile, and I don’t know how long the bus is going to

stay before getting back on the highway. I imagine sitting on a fetid toilet, shitting liquid

chorizo fat, never quite feeling done. Only to emerge from the stinkhole to find the bus

pulling away, me running after it futilely with my pants around my ankles. So I figure I

best sit tight.

We start north to Tijuana and I make my mind up that I’m going to hold everything til we

get there. We head into the mountains on a windy two-lane road, and pass westward

through Tecate, on the final leg to TJ. The trip is gets more uncomfortable as the hours

pass, and my mind is in fierce concentration to keep from shitting my pants. It’s a busy

Friday night in TJ when we pull into the bus station, and I jump out of the bus as fast as I

can. I don’t want to look for a public bathroom in TJ, even on the verge of a rear end

blow-out. It just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

I ask where the road to the border is and start walking fast. I clutch my bowling bag of

clothes to my chest as I stride over the bridge leading to the border. It’s late at night and

there are some bad looking Mexican bros sitting on the bridge fence glaring at me. But I

have a determined look that put out the message, “Uh, I’m on a mission here.” And

somehow, thankfully, none of the hombres try to block my path. Maybe they pick up on

the urgency, maybe they just don’t care. But I do. I keep a fast stride, and wonder why in

the hell it is taking so long to get to the border. It feels like I’ve already walked a couple

miles. I get through customs quickly and make a beeline for the bathroom at the bus

station. I burst into the bathroom and see all the stalls’ doors are locked.

I look at the locks, and they’re all coin operated. To take a shit properly, I need a goddam

dime! I fish desperately into my pants and pull out a handful of change, most of it pesos.

And in my shaking palm as I angle the change in the fluorescent light, I see it. A lone,

shiny dime. “Ohh,uuugggh,” I mutter in feverish anticipation. I pinch it with my other

hand, pop it into the slot, push open the damn stall door, rip down my pants and sit down.

Finally, relief, relaxation, bliss.

In younger days my buddy Doug and I decided to drive down to Ensenada to check out

Hussong’s, the famous bar made popular by cheap tequila and party-bent gringos. Of

course, like our fellow stereotypes, when we head south in Doug’s small pick-up truck

we have an unspoken understanding that when we go to Hussong’s we’re going to sample

deeply from the well of local liquid offerings.

We check into a motel across town from Hussong’s, and start the evening off at a nearby

restaurant with fresh grilled shrimp as the centerpiece of a big seafood dinner. Then we

walk through town to Hussong’s the famous hole in the wall party bar.

Because they enforce the fire code Hussong’s only lets so many people in the old

building at a time, so when it’s crowded, a line goes out the front, and for every person

that leaves, the guy at the door lets one in. The local cops apparently don’t like a crowd

milling around the front of the place, so whenever a cop car rolls by the crowd scatters

like cockroaches in flicked on light.

The cops in Ensenada in those days, at least, tended to be nasty and bent on getting bribes

to either keep you from going to one of the filthiest jails on the planet, or to shorten your

stay in their stank hole hotel. A friend who was hard of hearing found out the hard way.
According to this friend, John, who told his story to me when I lived in San Diego, says,

“A big fat cop with a wet spot on the belly of his shirt,” had for some reason called out to

John with some sort of message about the law. But John, being no doubt drunk himself

and pretty fucking deaf to boot, didn’t hear the cop. Which infuriated the cop, who caught

up to him and threw him into the pokey, apparently for not listening to his commands.

John’s friends, meanwhile, were among he throngs in Hussong’s getting drunk, and so it

took them awhile to realize John was missing. Meanwhile, John had been pushed into the

fetid jail for the night, in a cell with a rugged crowd of inmates emanating a potpourri of

profound odors ranging from vomit, to pee, to bowel movements.

“I wake up looking at this dirty limp hand in my face,” says John, “and the sound of

water dripping from the ceiling onto a pool of dirty water on the floor.” The grimy hand

belonged to a bum dressed in greasy rags, who had slept on top of him, snoring a phlem-

filled death rattle as he polluted the jailhouse air with serious death breath. By morning,

John’s friends had assembled enough brain cells to think that maybe they oughta check

the jail. They do, and are told he’s there, but that he won’t leave until they throw down 50

bucks cash.

Doug and I eventually wade our way into the roaring, sweating, swarming crowd at

Hussong’s and make our way to the bar. Both of us order shooters, at 40 cents a pop.

Over at the corner of the bar an old guy is grinning goofily and raising his glass to me. I

raise my glass and pop it down. And we keep going, downing more than a few after that.

And in no time we are completely and utterly shit-faced. The muggy room filled with hot,
sweaty, loud, drunken humanity, heaves from side to side as if we were underwater

seaweed, getting pushed back and forth by the power of ocean waves, with the mashed

crowd’s closeness working to barely keep everybody from spilling down to the floor.

It wasn’t long before oxygen is all but absent in the steaming bar, and immediately I

knew I had to get out, or I was going to fall down and get trampled. I wave at Doug, who

is also barely stable, and we push our way out and back into the relatively cool, fresh air

of the street. We stagger toward our motel, and in the back of my mind, I think of the cop

that hauled John into jail. Don’t look drunk, I told myself, as my legs wobbled under me,

seemingly devoid of any bone. We walk stoically, mumbling about where is the motel

and why did it have to be across town.

We find our room and our beds across the room from each other. After slamming down

into mine and sleeping for a bit, I remember at some point putting my head to the side of

the bed and upchucking on the floor. And at some later point I wake up from hearing an

ungodly roar. I look over to see Doug sitting up in his bed and ralphing between his legs.

A few hours later I wake up in the dim light of the morning amid the smell of blow

chunks, hearing Doug giggling crazily, in a high pitch, like a little kid.

“What’s so funny?”.

“You’re not going to believe this,” says Doug, barely able to get out the words through

his laughter.
“What?” I ask.

He laughs some more. “There’s a turd on the chair next to my bed.”

“What?”

“I’m not kidding, there’s a turd on the chair. Look.”

I look over and by golly, he’s right. There’s a big pile of shit in the middle of the chair’s

seat.

“Man, why didn’t you use the toilet?” I ask.

“I didn’t do it,” he says. “You did it.” He giggles uncontrollably.

“No way I did it,” I say.

“You did it,” he says, still giggling.

We check out of the room, leaving it a total disaster. In a vain attempt at leaving the room

a little less fucked up, Doug uses his Jack’s Wood Pit Barbecue T-shirt to mop up some

of the damage.
To this day, I think he did it, and he thinks I did it.

Racked with murderous hangovers, we walked tentatively to eat breakfast at a nearby

restaurant, then drove back up the coast. We felt bad for the poor maid assigned to clean

up our room.

Most likely she was horrified, but not surprised.

Two more drunken gringos doing what they all do when they come to town.

It took me a few trips to Mexico to figure out the best way to get around: walking, bus or

taxi. But I discovered the worst way: A free rental car in return for listening to a

timeshare pitch. I was on vacation with my future bride in Cancun when I figured a rental

car would be the best way to drive around Yucatan to see some ruins. I found an offer

where if you sit through a time-share pitch, you can rent a car for free. So we go to the

room in a hotel and we end up spending three hours listening to a fire and brimstone and

vaguely threatening pitch to buy timeshares. Bouncer sized guys at the exits all slam the

doors at once after the hotshot salesman asks for our money, giving the audience the

notion that we aren’t going anywhere until we put some dough down for a timeshare. The

main pitchman is a Jerry Orbach-looking guy in a dark suit, with white shirt and no tie.

His cocky, fast talk is to make us stupid tourists think he’s some kind of sales superstar
with an edge. Sweating from his exhortations to buy the rights to four-star rooms at

luxury destinations all over the world, most of which probably don’t exist, he give us the

scoop.

“My assistants will lead you to tables in the adjoining rooms to take your time share

deposits,” he says. “You don’t want to disappoint me now, so GET TO IT!”

We goofy looking freebie minded gringos file into the next room, an empty restaurant.

We sit at a booth. A staff of beautiful young women descend on the crowd, and one

comes to our table.

“What deposit plan would you like to take part in today?” asks the budding porn starlet,

smiling a perfect teeth smile as she leafs through a booklet. It shows glossy color photos

of luxurious resort time share properties that I can’t help but think are just a collection of

promotional shots of fancy hotels with no connection to this scam.

Thinking about the time we’d already given up listening to the sleazy, somewhat

gangster-esque pitchman, I say to the pretty young sales tart: “You know, your properties

are the most luxurious I’ve ever seen. Very impressive. And I’m sure it’s really cool to go

to any of them as a timeshare owner. But the sad fact of the matter is, even though I’d

like to buy a time share, I don’t have any money.”

“That’s no problem, just give us your credit card number and we can get you started,” say

the perky one.

“I don’t think you understand,” I say. “I don’t have any credit cards, and I don’t have any

cash. I’m tapped out. I just want my car rental coupon.”

Pretty young sales tart furrows her brow as if I’ve just been speaking in tongues. She

quickly brightens and says, “I’ll be right back!”

We wait a few minutes and she returns.

“We can still get you in!” she beams. “Just call your bank and have them send us the

deposit!”

“That’s impossible!” I say, laughing. “I don’t have any bank accounts!”

Concern clouds face again. “Just a minute,” she says, and she’s off to go tell Mr. Scam

What Am the bad news.

She returns, and this time she has the rental car coupon. “Thank you,” I say, and we move

quickly for the elevator.

Somehow, on the our way out, Mr. Scam Master is on the elevator with us with a towel

around his neck as if he’s the heavyweight champ who’s just gone 15 rounds, and needs
some TLC from his handlers. A pair of attentive and pretty personal “assistants,” stand

close to him. I think about saying something to him, something like, “Hey jackass, don’t

you realize that gringos trying to get a car rental freebie aren’t exactly the bucks-up

crowd that might fall for your scam? I mean think about it, they’re genetically cheap

fucks, and you’ll never get any money out of them unless they’re really, really stupid!”

But my internal censor grabbed ahold of my vocal chords because this guy had animal

growth hormone goons at the ready. My survival gene helped me conclude that it was

best to keep my yap shut and just take my free rental car coupon and get the hell out.

So after four hours of wasted time, we rent our beater white Volkswagen and head east

out of town to Chichen Icha, the Mayan ruin a couple hours’ away via a two lane road

through thick jungle.

They have tourist buses that make the same trip, and I begin to wonder if that was the

better option over spending a few hours listening to a con job just to get a free VW rental.

That thought recurs over the next several hours. On the way out to the ruins, the drive is

easy. Occasionally a massive speed bump would be at a small shantytown, placed there

so speeders are less likely to hit locals trying to cross the two-lane highway.

These are the nastiest speed bumps ever conceived, big and tall rounded balls of iron

lined up across the road that will in no small way, fuck up the undercarriage of your car,

truck or bus if you should be so stupid as to hit them at any speed faster than a slow roll.
We get to Chichen Icha and walk around the grounds of the ruins in the afternoon sun,

which was low enough to shine on the main pyramid under a backdrop of steely black

clouds, making for a calm before the hurricane feel in the air.

By the time we climb into the VW to head back, daylight is fading. It’s May, and I’d

figured it would be light ‘til 8 or so. But we’re a lot farther south than home and it was

close to dark at 6. Driving back on the two-lane road, I end up behind a big tourist bus

that seems like it is it is moving about as fast as a burro with a refrigerator tied on its

back. When the bus finally gets to a speed bump, it slows down even more, and I drive

around the speed bump and pass the bus, then wind out the beater Bug’s gears so we can

make some time. Finally, I think, I can get up some speed.

But I soon learn my gringo get-there-fast driving mentality has led me to commit a grave

tactical error. Apparently, it’s an established fact that Mexican bus drivers take it as an

affront to their manhood if you pass them. That’s bad enough. But what really makes

them crazy to prove they’ve got plenty of Latin testosterone, no problemo senor, is when

the car that passes them is an obvious rental piece of shit Volkswagen that could only be

driven by a gringo.

So we’re tooling along in the VW on the narrow blacktop road, which is raised like a

levee through thick jungle. It has occasional curves and no reflectors or paint to show

what lane you’re in. It’s twilight, and I’m pushing this thing at about 65. Any faster than
that and this little beater will shudder violently enough to lose fenders and break up into

little pieces.

Then I see something in the rearview mirror. There’s no mistaking it, it’s the bus that I

passed back at the speed bump. And the front end of this thing is getting bigger very fast.

I try to coax more speed out of the pounded down VW, and it’s already giving me all it

has. Before I know it, the massive tourist bus with the pissed off driver blows by us like a

low flying jumbo jet, and he takes extra care to cut as much road off as possible as it

returns to the right hand lane, whipping the VW hard with a violent windstream. I duck,

as if a spray of machine gun fire might be part of this payback move.

“Holy shit!” I yell wide-eyed at my bride to be.

I slow down enough to keep from being run down an embankment and into the

impenetrable, dark jungle alongside the road. The bus rumbles ahead, and its red taillights

soon disappear into the night. I have to drive slower than before, because I’m having

trouble seeing the road. Other than the beams of our dim headlights on the pitch black

pavement, there are no lights, reflectors, civilization, nothing. Just staying on the road

keeps me locked in concentration. It seems like hours before we finally see the lights of

Cancun.

It was a lesson I’ll never forget. Mexican bus drivers are a proud bunch, not to be

challenged. A friend later told me of his experience as a passenger on a bus on a windy

mountain road in Mexico. He was looking out his window at a memorial cross and plastic

flowers denoting a roadside fatality, when a gringo woman, with her long blonde hair

flowing in the wind, sped past the bus in a red convertible.

As my friend discovered, the driver felt the woman had publicly humiliated him in front

of his passengers. And he was going to do something about it.

“The driver just jumped on it,” said my friend. “He did the same thing. Caught up to her

and made sure we passed her. It was scary because he suddenly didn’t give a shit about

driving safely. I thought we were all gonna die.”

Still, I’d rather be a passenger in a Mexican bus driven by a pissed off driver who’s

manhood is at stake in chasing down and passing an offending driver, than being that

chased down driver. Because when you see in the rearview mirror a greyhound-style tour

bus bearing down on your VW bug with seething vengeance behind the wheel, survival

suddenly seems like something that might not happen.

Taxis in Mexico are a great way to get around, unless you’re going on a big highway

from town to town. I got in a cab going from Ixtapa to Zihuatenejo, about a 10-minute

ride. I sat in the front seat and went to put on my seatbelt. There was a seatbelt hanging

on the frame next to the seat, but I couldn’t pull the strap across my shoulder.
“No seervay,” says the driver, who proceeded to drive fast enough to kill us all. If we hit

something we might as well hold hands as we somersault side by side right through the

fucking windshield, into space, and into a jagged mix of glass, steel and asphalt. Safety

precautions in Mexico pretty much reflect a “you’re on your own” philosophy. That is,

there are pretty much no legally required safety precautions. Cars and trucks freely belch

smog into the Mexican air, and people aren’t written up for smoke trails caused by their

burning of garbage. “No big deal,” seems to be the prevailing attitude.

Nothing impressed me more about the laid back, safety last style in Mexico more than

when we booked passage on a 50-foot sailboat in Puerto Vallarta. The deal is you get to

the marina early in the morning and head out into the bay northward under motor power,

since before noon the bay is wind free and glassy. The Mexican crew puts on rock and

roll music and provides passengers with beer, wine and soft drinks as we make our way

north. This trip has gringo vacationers on it. Mostly middle-aged parents and their teen-

aged kids. And Elena and me.

The Mexican guys never tell you to put on lifejackets, which don’t seem necessary

anyway, since it’s so calm. Everybody stretches out on the decks and soaks in the sun and

the crew points out “tore tolls” that poke their green heads up to get air while cruising

below. The boat moves slowly under motor power, and getting to the north end of the bay

takes a few hours. The crew drops anchor in a small cove with a deserted beach and

passes out snorkeling gear. They hand out sandwiches, chips, beers, soda and snacks.
Most snorkel, and some swim into the beach and hang out there. Others stay on the boat

to sunbathe, eat and drink.

When the lunch stop ends, the anchor is pulled in and the crew unfurls the boat’s massive

canvas sails. The wind has already picked up, and the sails quickly bulge with it and pull

the sleek boat through water with silent, graceful, rippling power. This boat can fly, and

I’m psyched up for a great sail. Elena and I sit at the front deck of the boat, when a crew

member says to me, “If you want to sail the boat, you can.”

I’m surprised. This is a big freakin’ sail boat with a fair amount of people on it. The only

boat I’d ever sailed was an itty bitty one-sail Sunfish. But I wanted to do it, so I make my

way to the back of the boat, where all the parents are getting happily shit-faced. The

teenagers are sprawled out on the front decks of the boat, working on their tans. I take the

big wheel of the boat and look up the tall mast and watch the sails. Well, I say to myself,

when am I ever going to sail something this big again? Let’s let ‘er fly!

The wind was stiff and steady, and I angled into it. The sails snapped full, and the boat

tilted toward shore, steeply and as I kept it on course, the boat felt like a thoroughbred

jumping around in the starting gate, itchy to hit full stride. The parents whoop at the

quick, tilted surge ahead and the front end of the boat smacks into the water and splashes

the front decks with frothy, cold seawater. I’m pumped up, sailing this big dog at a 45-

degree angle to the howls and hollers of the drunken parents. I’m not making any teen-

age friends, however. They are up front, having to hang onto the decks with whatever
hand holds they can find, while occasionally getting a cold spray of saltwater. Elena is

clinging to the front mast for dear life, getting doused with regular splashes.

I can feel the boat thrum through the water with the massive push of steady wind, and just

keeping it on course, tilted for speed, is hard work. After about 20 minutes, I’m tired. So

the parents call one of their tall teenage sons to come take the helm. I stand back and

relax as the new captain eases the boat into a barely tilted cruise mode. The teenagers quit

giving me dirty looks.

I feel great, like Russell Crowe master and commander or something. I can’t get over

how the guys on the crew are so laid back about letting people sail this big boat. We

don’t have life jackets, or at least none were passed out to wear, and the crew is happy to

let you sail the boat. They are easygoing guys interested in having as much fun as the

tourists. They aren’t worried about some would-be sailor tipping the big fucker over and

spilling everybody into the ocean, drowning a few in the process. Clearly, this isn’t their

boat. Liability doesn’t weigh on their minds. Still coming down from the high of my

World Cup experience, I’m filled with gratitude to these guys on the crew. They let me

have a great experience. Not once, when I had the boat practically on its side, did they

say any words of caution or worry. They just let it go, apparently trusting that nothing

bad would happen. If only there was more of that in the world, I think to myself. We

could all use a dose of it once in awhile.

I go up to check on Elena. She’s cold and soaked. I feel bad. It had been no fun at all for

her. I do what I can to help her warm up in a sunny, dry spot during the rest of the way

back. I’m lucky to have her. I tip the crew with some gringo cash to show how much I

enjoyed their ride.

Of all the fun I’ve had over the years in Mexico, there’s one image that always reminds

me, that like anywhere else in the world, things aren’t always so great there. It’s a

country of elites and poor people, and not much in between. One afternoon along the

beachfront street in Mazatlan, I see a little girl sitting alone on the sidewalk crying

desperately as a diesel truck roared right by her ear, belching black smoke into the air.

The deafening roar of the truck, the polluted air, the dirty, scared, alone, crying little girl

just brought home how harsh and cruel life can sometimes be. I walked on, but I’ll never

forget that image. It’s a humble reminder that in this world there are the lucky, and the

luckless. And those of us who are lucky, should be thankful. Really thankful.
The Chimpala of 1960

When I was 18, I needed a car. My stepdad’s father found one for me in Bakersfield. It

was a 1960 two-door two-tone blue Chevrolet Impala. Top of the line in it’s day, it had a

dark blue body, with a baby blue roof and side stripes depicting the vapor trail of a

chrome jet on each side.

My step grandpa, a retired railroad guy, got it from another railroad guy who only drove

it a short distance to and from his job. It was 14 years old and had 67,000 mile on it, a

straight body, with its only flaw a deep scratch on its lower left rear quarter panel. He got

it for $250. He drove it to San Francisco where I was pumping gas for a summer job

during college, and I paid him for its pink slip.

Little did I know, the Chimpala, the space-age designed two-door, with squared off

tailfins, hound’s tooth patterned interior, cockpit designed dashboard, a massive trunk,

was to be my car for life. Now in my 50s, it’s still my everyday car.
Chimpala, or La Bomba has a 348 cubic-inch engine and a huge steering wheel. Driving

it fast on the freeway makes you pay attention because you have to continually correct its

path. It drifts, and there’s a bit of play on the wheel when you turn.

I found out early that driving an older car meant parts would wear out and need replacing

without notice on a semi-regular basis. I drove the Chimpala all over California, Nevada

and Arizona, during college years and she ate up the highway like an uncaged greyhound.

Along the way I replaced key parts under the front end of the Chevy: Its idler arm, lower

ball joints, steering wheel box and A-frame suspension bushings. It had a generator, and

as the years passed, it became harder and harder to find a rebuilt generator that would

last. In San Diego while in grad school a mechanic told me the Chevy had a burnt valve.

I’m the first to admit that I’m no mechanic. No knack at all for it. All I ever did on the

Chevy was change the oil and filter. So when I came across an acquaintance, Gary

Adams, who was a full-on build the engine from the ground up mechanic, and who was

also looking for work, I asked him if he wanted to rebuild the Chimpala’s engine.

Gary said he could tear down the engine and replace all worn out parts in a few weeks.

He’d keep track of the cost of parts, and it would cost $400 in labor. I let him go at it and

he started the job in his garage. Gary liked to brag about how clean his garage was and

that he had a piano player’s hands. A big red-head with a beard, he’d grown up in Iowa,

maintaining the engines on farm equipment. He graduated to a racing team’s pit crew. He

knew every nuance about car and truck engines and always said if you listen carefully to

an engine with a problem, it will tell you what it needs.

He steam cleaned the Chimpala’s engine, drove it to his garage and took the hood off. He

dismantled the engine, part by part until exhaust manifolds, and everything else that had

been attached to the cast iron engine block, was all stacked along the sides of his garage.

I asked him if he needed to take notes on what part went where. He looked at me like that

was something only a rank amateur would do. “It’s all in my head,” he said. He went to

auto parts stores and bought replacement parts and kept a ledger of what each one was

and how much it cost.

At the end of the job, he had me over so we could give the rebuilt engine a test drive.

With the hood still off, he told me to start it up. When I did, a huge lick of fire exploded

loudly off the top of the carburetor. We tried to drive it but the Chevy kept lurching

forward, jerking around and banging big explosions off the carburetor. Gary couldn’t

figure out what was wrong. He thought for a long time, then realized he’d made a rookie

mistake: He’d connected the spark plug wires in the wrong order. He made the change,

angry at himself for overlooking what in his world was almost unforgiveable. But the

tension passed, and the Chimpala was suddenly reborn with a new power plant, ready for

a new life of unfettered driving.

Gary’s list of new parts showed a total cost of $300. So the new engine, including his

charge for labor, cost me $700. It was one of the best deals I ever made.
The Chimpala continued on over the years as my everyday mode of transportation, and I

learned there were other big mechanical issues other than the engine that I’d have to deal

with. One was the discovery that I had a broken thermostat, which would make the

Chimpala overheat unexpectedly. After a couple of times when I had to pull over and

wait for the radiator to cool with a refill of water, my mechanic in Sacramento found the

thermostat in two pieces.

J.R. was also the guy I went to when the driveshaft’s rear bushing was shot, allowing it to

drift dangerously off center and making a lot of noise when it did so. It’s a big problem

that if you don’t get fixed, puts the whole rear end assembly in danger of breaking up

loudly, like clanging garbage can lids, I was told.

J.R. made the fix, and after a few more years, I realized I needed to replace the

PowerGlide two-speed transmission. It wasn’t shifting when it was supposed to, from low

speed to high speed, and more and more often, the engine would be race for awhile

before it kicked into high speed. So I hired a mechanic in Sacramento to do two things:

replace the transmission with a 350, which had a lower low than the PowerGlide, and was

a smooth shifter into high speeds. And the balky generator problem was solved with an

AC Delco alternator, a much more reliable upgrade.

After new engine mounts were put in, and new ignition wiring, the Chimpala was

mechanically redone, top to bottom. Over the years, I’d always wanted to get it repainted,

but had never found anywhere that would do a good job without taking months and
charging too much. I finally found a place that did it right, took off all the chrome,

replaced the creased right front fender with one I’d picked up at a junk yard, sanded it

down to the metal, worked out the back left panel scratch, primed and booth painted it the

original two tone blue. All for $4,000. I took all the chrome home and polished it, and

brought it back for them to put on. It was a sweet job, but there were still a few things

needed. I’d gotten a re-upholstery job done a couple of times over the years, so the

interior was clean.

But the original tires were two small and set in under the chassis too far. That made the

car roll sideways on turns. So I put wide tires on the back with chrome wheels and had

them set for a wider stance. The last thing was to lower the front end about an inch to

stabilize handling and give it a sleeker look. I took it to some old pros in downtown

Sacramento and they cut a bit off the top of the front coil springs. That dropped the front

of the car just a bit, giving it the best look possible. After many years, all of them serving

as my go-to car, the Chimpala is fully restored these days, and still has plenty of giddyup

when it gets on the freeway.

Adventures on the road

It was early in the morning one day after Thanksgiving at Lake Tahoe, and it was

snowing. I knew I had to get in the Chimpala and drive it over Echo Summit and out of

the basin immediately, or risk being snowed in. At about 8 a.m. the snow – the first of the
year -- is coming down steady and looks like it’s going to stick and pile up fast. If there’s

one thing the Chimpala isn’t, it’s a car that you can drive in the snow. I get dressed and

tell my parents I’ve gotta leave right away and my step-dad looks for some tire chains in

the garage. He finds some and I put them in the trunk. I back down the steep driveway

and up Canyon drive with one goal in mind: Just beat the snow and get out of the Tahoe

basin. I drive south and the snow isn’t sticking on the main drag, Highway 50.

I decide to take a shortcut to Meyers, where the road starts winding up the mountain to

Echo Summit, then descends over many miles to Placerville. The shortcut is called

Pioneer Trail, and while a shorter way to go, it is less traveled, and I soon find that the

snow on this road is starting to stick. I’m starting to get rattled as I begin an uphill part

and feel the backside of the Chimpala slide to the right. Other cars are passing me up,

slipping and sliding as they do so, and I just try to keep the Chimpala out of the ditch on

the side of the road.

There’s nothing but forest and a few scattered homes out here, and I know if I put the car

into a ditch, I’m fucked. I’d have to hike to a house, ask to use the phone, get the car

towed, all this is running through my mind as the Chimpala slowly moves up the grade in

the road at a 45 degree angle. I’m so nervous, my foot is shaking on the accelerator; it

feels like I have no room for error. I get to the crest of the hill and fortunately the rest of

the road to Highway 50 is downhill. I get to Meyers and find out that chains are required

to go over the summit.

I pull over and get the chains out of the trunk and put some gloves on. I have a plastic

tarp, but it’s cold and slushy as I try to put the chains on. I struggle under the car to get

them around one tire and when I try to clip one end to the other, there’s about an inch

gap. I find out the very hardest way that these chains are too small for my tires. Looking

back, I must have been crazy to think they would magically fit; they were bought for

some other unknown car. I get back into the Chevy cold and wet and crank up the heat. I

drive back on Highway 50 toward South Lake Tahoe, which is still wet and snow free,

looking for a hardware store. I find one and figure out that I need a set of chains for 14-

inch tires. I buy them for $60, then drive back to Meyers where the “chain monkeys,” the

guys you can pay to put on your chains hang out.

I pay a guy five bucks to put my new chains on, because I’m still trying to warm up. The

Chimpala’s heater, thankfully, cranks out a nice flow of hot air, and it did its job thawing

my numb fingers. But I can’t help wondering how the car will handle the steep road up

the mountain. Even with chains, the Chimpala is light in the back, and in snow, that’s not

good. And it’s still snowing steadily. Once I’m back on Highway 50, I decide to take it

slow, and just put it in low gear. Everybody driving the two-lane road is doing the same,

and the chains are keeping the Chimpala from slipping on the hard packed snow between

the tires and the asphalt. I’m amazed that it’s not slipping at all, moving steadily up the

mountain, slowly but surely, as well as any four-wheel drive.

At the top of Echo Summit, the descent begins and I keep it in low all the way to Twin

Bridges, where cars coming up to Tahoe have to put on chains. The road at this lower
altitude is now snow-free, just wet asphalt in the rain. I pull over and take off the chains. I

take a pee behind a tree, and I’m exhilarated about how the Chimpala and I hung together

and made it up and down a big mountain in the middle of a snowstorm.

I felt like a bush pilot who had dodged what might have been a miserable, cold

disaster.

Rainy day fender

I found a junkyard north of Sacramento that had old Chevy parts and wanted to

find a straight right front fender for the Chimpala. The one on it was creased slightly at

the the top rim of the wheelwell. The railroad guy bumped the right front bumper into

something solid like a phone pole, to push the bumper into the fender.

So my wife Elena and I wander around this junkyard, and I find the fender I’m looking

for on a junked out Impala. It had been painted light green with a brush. The junk guy

says I can have it for $50 if I pull it out myself. So I got my socket wrenches and loosed it

from the junked Chevy. I paid the guy and managed to fit it into the trunk of the

Chimpala. Looking up, the sky was suddenly black and menacing, and it was getting

windy and colder by the minute. We rush to get back on the freeway home, but as we

enter the slow lane, the rain starts dumping big time.

I can barely see in front of me, and this could be a big problem. The car in front of me

suddenly brakes and stops, and experience tells me that the last thing you ever want to do

on a freeway is stop in the middle of the lane. I decide to go around the guy because if I
brake, I’ll smash right into him, but I can’t see if anybody was coming in the lane I

merged into. It’s a split second decision, and one that once I made it, immediately know

there’s a chance we’ll be creamed by a car coming along at a high rate of speed. A 50-50

chance that there’ll be a nasty collision, or nothing at all. No collision happens. I pass the

stopped car and move back into the slow lane, gripping the wheel with white knuckles

and straining to see through the dense, but blinding white/gray light ahead. The rain

crashes down so hard, the freeway looks like a river. I drive onto an interchange and

sheet lightning lights up the whole sky in the south horizon. I take it easy and make it

back home. I feel like I dodged a huge nightmare. That drive was the scariest one I ever

had in the Chimpala. But the fender I found eventually replaced the bent one when the

Chevy got a new paint job.

How fast, how many miles? Who knows?

The speedometer in the Chimpala worked when I bought the car. But it lasted for just a

few years. I found another one in a junkyard when I was in San Diego, and put it in. The

second one lasted for awhile but was dried out and brittle and eventually quit working.

Since then, I’ve never tried to get a replacement. Part of it is the odometer. Once you put

in a different speedometer from another car, you have that car’s mileage, not yours. Gary

Adams, the guy who rebuilt Chimpala’s engine told me trying to change an odometer’s

reading never works; the numbers never line up right. So I really don’t know how many

miles the Chimpala has on it. It’s a continuing mystery.

One late Saturday morning I’m on Interstate 80, driving fast with the stereo blasting. I

never see the CHP car until it was is pulled right up next to me. Scares the crap out of me.

The officer picks up his bullhorn mic and says, all while we’re driving side by side, in a

God-like booming voice, one that was so loud it cut through the wind, the stereo music

and the engine noise:

“WHAT’S THE MATTER, DOESN’T THAT THING HAVE A SPEEDOMETER?”

I sheepishly wave to him and slow way down, as he speeds off, nice enough not to give

me a ticket. As my heart returns to its normal rate, I laugh out loud. That officer probably

had an old Chevy with a nonworking speedometer and just made the right call on mine.

The sickening smell of radiator steam

The Chevy overheated a few times over the years, and each time made for a hair-raising

experience. Once in Anaheim, it overheated on the freeway to Long Beach. I just kept

driving it til I got to my neighborhood gas station. Probably burnt a valve over a small

rubber hose to the radiator that had split. Another time was on Highway 50 on the way to

Tahoe along the American River. It overheated out of the blue. I pulled over and filled

some plastic radiator fluid bottles with river water and cooled and refilled the radiator. It

continued without any problems. I didn’t know why it had happened but forgot about

having it checked out.

Then I was caught in a traffic jam in Napa on a bridge over the Napa River when the

sickening smell of radiator steam came to me, and I knew I had another boil over in the

making. I sweat it out driving stop and go another mile, watching the steam coming from

under the hood. There’s finally room to pull off the road at the top of the bridge.

I figure I’ll have to hike down to the river to get some water, but after taking a look, I

realize it could take too long time to get down there and back. I pop the trunk and see I

have two five-gallon jugs full of cold water. I must have put them in there after my last

overheating experience on Highway 50. I let the steaming radiator cool off a bit, and with

a rag, ease off the radiator cap. I pour in my supply of cold water. I notice two things. It’s

starting to get dark, and the stream of stop and go traffic is still extending far into the

distance. I can’t get back into stop and go traffic or I’ll surely overheat again. Then I’d

have to pull over somewhere in the dark with no water to cool down the radiator. So I

make a decision. It’s the only thing I can do to get out of here with the car. I don’t get

back into traffic, I drive at the edge of the pavement right on the fog line and start passing

all the cars in traffic. I’m pissing off each and every driver of every car I pass, but I think

this is something of an emergency and I have no other escape. But they don’t know my

radiator problem. They think I’m an asshole who doesn’t want to sit in traffic, and who is

cheating to get out of it. I fly past a stream of slow and go cars for at least two miles, then

get to the intersection where I need to take a left to get to the freeway. Which is a

problem, because I’m on the right shoulder with no way to get to the left turn lane. So I

take a right at the light, then do a U turn on the cross street, which doesn’t have any cars

on it. I wait for the green and blast through, and there’s no traffic on this road that
eventually turned into Interstate 80. I soon find a gas station and refill the radiator with

water. I got out of the jam but, not wanting to go through anything like that again, I took

the car to J.R., my mechanic, and asked him what he thought was going on. He found the

problem, which was an easy fix. The radiator’s thermostat was broken into two pieces

and would occasionally turn the the radiator into a steam whistle. He replaced it and the

problem was solved. That was one lesson that took too long to get through my head:

When the Chimpala tells you something is wrong, fix it, or you’ll pay. Oh yes you will.

Once in Palm Springs I kept driving even though my brakes were steadily getting worse.

I kept putting off dealing with it until one very early morning I rolled right through a red

light, unable to stop. Fortunately it was so early that it didn’t cause anybody to T-bone

me. Turned out all I needed was a new master cylinder, an easy fix. I had to remind

myself not to put off fixing a problem on the Chevy, when it tells me what it needs.

But somehow, I managed to let the adventures continue. In Sacramento, my tires were

getting pretty bald, and I figured I’d get new tires at some vague future date. So I’m

driving on the freeway, probably 70 mph, when I hear a tremendous boom coming from

my rear right tire. I figure I’ve had a blow out, and since there’s room on the right

shoulder of the freeway and I’m in the fast lane, I pull over, my heart thumping. But the

car was rolling evenly, and I knew the tire hadn’t blown out. So I drive back onto the

freeway and hit the nearest exit where there’s a gas station. I get out and look at the tire

and found out what the bang had been. The outer tread, what was left of it, had separated

from the tire, smashed into the wheelwell, and was deposited somewhere along the
freeway. Now bald, with metal threads showing where tread used to be, the tire still held

air. I took it off and put on my spare. And not many days later, getting the message, I

bought some new tires.

Drove my Chev y on the levee, over a cone, down a wall

One time in Palm Springs a co-worker had just been fired, so we all went to a dive bar

and drank beer. I lived just around the corner, but driving the Chevy back, I went along a

road that ran parallel to a dry creek, with a high dirt berm lining it. I remembered the

song line in the song American Pie, “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was

dry,” so feeling the fuel of alcohol, I wheeled the Chevy off the pavement onto the dirt,

up to the top of the berm, down, then up, then down, laughing hysterically the whole

time. It was a stupid thing to do, but it felt great.

And once in Palm Springs everybody piled in the Chevy to go to a lunch for the editor

who was retiring. There was booze consumed at the lunch and on the drive back, there

was a line of orange traffic cones set up for some roadwork. I couldn’t help myself from

driving the Chevy over one of them, just for laughs, and the crumpled cone stuck under

the car while I drove, making a big scraping racket, and causing increasing laughter.

Eventually the cone worked itself free of the underside of the car. I looked in the

rearview mirror to see a completely flattened cone deposited on the street. It was the

highlight of the day.

And once in San Francisco, I drove the Chevy to play some tennis and my buddy was in

the passenger seat. I remembered previously driving down a hugely steep street on

Russian Hill, which had scared the crap out of me. It was so steep, the big ass hood of the

Chevy seemed liked it suddenly disappeared, then like you were driving down a wall. So,

I figured it was a good time to incidentally drive down that street, without saying

anything to my buddy. Well I wheeled the Chevy semi-fast down the street, keeping a

corner of my eye on my buddy’s reaction as the hood disappeared. He didn’t disappoint.

He let out “Whoooah” while his eyes almost popped out of his head and he grabbed the

metal dashboard to hang on.

Midnight Flying Mattress

One late night I drove the Harbor Freeway south to Long Beach from Burbank. Me and

the Chevy are just tooling along when I see a large bed mattress flying in the air between

us and the car in front of me. I’m powerless to brake or change direction because this

happened in a split second. I plow into the mattress and run over it going about 70 mph,

with a quick “Whummmp,” and I look in the rearview mirror wondering how the car

behind me fared. Couldn’t tell. When I got to Long Beach I checked the front end of the

Chevy and there was no damage. Just some remnants of the mattress stuffing wedged

here and there in the grill. I still wonder how many times that mattress got hit before there

was nothing left. Or if anybody crashed because of it. Flying mattresses are about the last

thing anybody’s thinking about while on a nighttime freeway drive.

How much do you want for it?

Over the years, it got to be a joke. On a regular basis, strangers would ask me if I wanted

to sell the Chimpala. One time I was sitting at a red light and a guy pulled up next to me

and asked. I never planned to sell it, so I always said it wasn’t for sale. I never got to the

point of discussing how much money I’d sell it for. I didn’t want money for the Chevy. I

wanted the Chevy.

Almost as frequent as the “is it for sale?” questions were people that told me they used to

have a 60 Chevy. My neighbor had a 60 Bel Air and he used to race it on the streets as a

young crazy guy. He sees my car and all his memories come back. His was painted

copper and had a 287 cubic inch engine that was very fast. He brags that he used to beat

guys with cars with bigger engines, and nobody could figure out why his car was so fast.

Somebody told him that it was one of those engines that occasionally comes off the

assembly line as a perfect piece of machinery. He let his girlfriend drive it once and he

was sitting on the passenger side. She was driving fast and hit some gravel, and Al says,

“All I remember her saying was, ‘Hold on!’” and she rammed the car right into a

telephone pole. Al was forced forward and ended up taking a bite out of the metal

dashboard, and losing his front teeth.

There were no seatbelts on the Chevy when I got it, so after driving without them for six

years or so, I put two lap belts on the front bench seat. But I don’t think they’d do me
much good in a front-end crash. Probably just hook me at the ankles as I head through the

windshield, stopping me halfway through the glass.

Check out this trunk

The Chevy’s trunk is huge. One time I found I could put snow skis crosswise in it, and

still have no problem shutting the lid. Another time, I went to a building supply store in

the Chevy and bought a couple four feet by eight feet sheets of sheetrock. I couldn’t fit

them in the trunk, so I opened the lid and placed them lengthwise on top of each fin, then

tied down the lid as far down as I could. The drive home was on surface streets and slow,

but it worked.

Thief deflection

I rented a room in a house in Long Beach while going to college, and one time parked the

Chevy on the street in front of the house. The neighborhood was full of tidy bungalows

and small Spanish style stucco homes so I didn’t think any body would try to boost the

Chimpala off the relatively slow street. But somebody did. Fortunately they failed. I

found the nickel cap to the ignition popped off and it looked like someone took a

screwdriver to the keyhole. They cracked and slightly bent the metal cover plate, but I

was still able to put the key in and start it. I depended on the Chevy heavily to get me

around, so I knew I had to do something. I made arrangements to park it in the driveway

of an elderly lady around the corner, who was glad to let me park it there. She lived

alone and liked the idea of a car in her driveway to ward off any would-be intruders.

Meanwhile a college buddy told me of a way to shut off the ignition with a toggle switch

wired to the distributor. He put it in after his Volkswagen had been stolen, but later

recovered without any damage. His dad wired it up and put the switch under the car near

the driver side door, and would flick it with his foot before and after a drive. It cut the

juice to the distributor and anybody trying to start it could try all night long, and the car

wouldn’t start. His dad rigged up the same system for the Chevy, and put the toggle

switch under the front driver’s side wheelwell. It helped give me peace of mind, and

worked for years, until one time in Palm Springs, the coil burnt out and the mechanic

replacing the coil disconnected it.

As far as I know, nobody tried to boost the Chevy again. I have a padlock to keep the

hood down, and one time it served to keep a would-be battery thief from extracting mine

from the Chevy. Now I have redundant anti-theft systems in the Chevy, and I make it a

point not to park it anywhere I can’t keep an eye on it.

Don’t force it, get a bigger hammer

I started my junior year of high school in a new town. In fact, it was about 3,000 miles

east from Lake Tahoe, where I’d grown up, to that point. It was in Western

Massachusetts, where my step-dad moved my mom and me to take a job with some

hotshot homebuilder. I wasn’t too thrilled about the move, having to go to a new school

and make friends, which I didn’t know how to do. I’d gone through 10 successive grades

at my schools at Tahoe, so I always knew everybody and never had to make friends.

This new school was bigger than the little high school I’d gone to. At Tahoe, you had to

play sports in high school, or you were considered an unworthy male, a pussy. At this

school, jocks were only one of many groups that hung out together. There were the drama

students, the chess club intellectuals, the pot smoking freaks, the greasers, the musicians,

and a few people who were in an out of each group.

I didn’t know how to even start a conversation with anybody, so the whole going to

school thing became a really no-fun time for me. I took woodshop because I always liked
woodworking. The woodshop class at Tahoe was fun. I made a little desk organizer out

of mahogany and a bookcase with a shelf for record albums for my sister, who was in

college.

The shop teacher at Tahoe was the father of one of my buddies, kind of a gruff fucker. He

had spiky gray butch cut hair and clear plastic glasses and always wore a white lab coat

for some reason. He looked like a goofy scientist who liked to mutter to himself and

experiment with mixing chemicals that go boom. Mr. Myron didn’t run a very tight ship,

and we did our fair share of fucking around in the class when he wasn’t looking. Like put

a piece of wood on each of the two side-by-side lathes, then have a contest to see who

could shave their piece of wood down to the thinnest stick without breaking it.

Richie Brown, the biggest kid in the sophomore class, who had been shaving his full

black stubble daily since eighth grade, was fearless about the danger playing games with

a lathe. Between classes when Mr. Myron wasn’t around, he’d cackle like a madman

while shaving down a piece of spinning mahogany until it snapped and the jagged piece

of wood flew off the machine, making everybody flinch.

The woodshop at the western Massachusetts high school was huge, and stocked with the

best power equipment you could find. Big table saw, radial arm saw, joiner, routers,

drills, band saw and a full stock of nice wood like mahogany, cherry, and maple. It had

an enclosed finishing room with filtered air, and an armoire full of small hand tools, stain

finishes, wood dough, everything.

When I came to the class as a new kid, I didn’t know what to make of the place. The

teacher looked like somebody they hired off of welfare. He wore wrinkled dirty clothes,

and seemed constantly in need of a shave and shower. He was amiable, but seemed like

he just wanted to be left alone in his enclosed office.

I didn’t do too much that first year in the class. I really didn’t have any good ideas about

what to make. I settled on probably the easiest thing I could think of. It was a plaque onto

which I used a router to groove out the word “BARF” on it. Looking back, it must have

been some sort of expression of how I generally felt about being a new kid at a new

school all the way across the country with no friends. After making the plaque, I went the

conventional route, making a bird feeder, which wasn’t anything special, just a fucking

bird feeder that I gave to my Mom, and it disappeared somewhere. She probably broke it

up for firewood. Toward the end of the year, Mr. Needs a Bath got the boot, and was

replaced by Mr. Camden, a big tall guy with an egg shaped body, chicken bone shoulders

and wide hips.

Mr. Camden had sandy brown hair, but was mostly bald, and had a moustache and big

tortoise shell plastic-rimmed glasses. He usually wore flared tan pants that were too short,

sporting a consistent look of short sleeve shirt, flood pants and work boots. He also was

very loud and had a big Bahhhhston accent. He figured he needed to yell to get the

respect of the guys and the lone girl taking the class.

He put his stamp on the job immediately.

“Okay, I just wanna let you guys know that it’s gonna be DIFFARENT in this woodshop

NEXT YEAUUH,” he bellowed. “Weauh not gonna be makin’ any BUhhhd FEEDahs,

OK? We’re gonna make Fuuuhhnacha, ya got me? So I want you guys to think about

what you wanna make when you come back heah in the fall. Can ya do that fah me? Now

CLEAN UP, and get outta heah. And have a good summah!”

I liked Mr. Camden. He was a no bullshit guy. When I signed up for classes in my senior

year, woodshop was the only one I really looked forward to.

When I showed up for the class that fall Mr. Camden had everybody design whatever

piece of furniture they were going to make on graph paper, then let them start working on

it. I started on a mahogany cabinet to hold my record albums inside and my stereo on top.

Mr. Camden suggested I make doors for it with framed raised panels.

“I’ll show ya how,” he said, and I was stoked, because cabinet doors with raised panels

looked very slick. I never dreamed of trying to make them because it took some pretty

tough angular cuts with the big table saw.

I spent every free stretch of time I had during the school day in the woodshop, because

Mr. Camden didn’t care if you worked on your project while other classes were going on.

It wasn’t really a class, it was a place to hang out and I got to know everybody else that
was into woodshop. Some were greasers, others were jocks, and a quiet blonde tomboy of

a girl, Phil, was even into it to.

At the end of every class, Mr. Camden yelled “Clean Up!” and everybody grabbed a

broom or brush to sweep up the fresh sawdust and scrap wood on the big chopping block

work tables and polished concrete floor. He’d walk around like a drill sergeant making

sure everything was clean for the next class. He liked to banter, and always had the radio

on in the back playing FM rock songs, like the one Carly Simon sang about what a

peacock Warren Beatty was. One time he had it tuned to a country music station and on

came Buck Owens and the Buckaroos.

“Yeee--haaah,” I said to Mr. Condon. “You like that country stuff don’t you?”

“Damn right, I do,” he said. “The country singers, tell it like it is.”

“Yeah, but it’s COUNTRY,” I said.

“You don’t like Buck?” he asked.

“You mean Buck Owens and the Buckaroos?”

“Yeah, Buck Owens.”

“Yep, I hate country, except for him,” I lied. “I’m a real big Buck fan. Real big..”

Mr. Condon knew I was putting him on, but he got me back. From then on, he only called

me by one name: Buck.

Pretty soon everybody in woodshop thought that was my name. But he was doing

something else that I didn’t get at the time. He was making it easier for me to fit in. It

worked. We were all different and didn’t cross into each other’s cliques. But in

woodshop, we didn’t feel differences. We all got along. When I was in there, I felt I

belonged for the first time since I’d moved to town a year earlier.

Another kid, Willie Sloan was inspired by Mr. Camden’s call for furniture projects. He

made a classic tilt-top table with three curved legs. It had a wafer thin circular inlay with

an ornate design centering its round table top. It turned out nice when he was finished,

which was about the time my cabinet had the final polish rubbed onto it. I’d designed a

flared old-style keyhole for the cabinet door lock that Mr. Camden helped me figure out

how to cut cleanly. “That’s pretty shahp theah, Buck,” he said. “You came up with that

yahself?”

It felt pretty good that he noticed.

Mr. Camden had a flair for promotion and called the local newspaper to talk up Sloan’s

and my projects. They sent a photographer, and a photo of Willie and me standing behind
our projects appeared in the paper. It was another way I got acceptance. Willie already

had it. He grew up there and knew everybody.

After that I decided to build a more ambitious final project. It was going to be a cedar

lined hope chest made out of solid cherry, with carved ogee bracket feet. Another guy

started on a chest with the same design, but used maple. He later built a tall grandfather

clock out of maple and it turned out fucking beautiful.

Fitting together pieces of wood grooved to go together in a joint didn’t always go

smoothly. When a fit was too tight, you’d occasionally see a kid using a mallet on his

project. Smacking it hard. One time Paul, the guy making the chest out of maple was

pounding on it to make a fit, and wasn’t having much success.

“DON’T FAHCE IT, GET A BIGGAH HAMMAH,” roared Mr. Camden, shaking his

head at the crude workmanship taking place in front of him.

Once we’d assembled the pieces of our projects into rough pieces of furniture, Mr.

Camden made it clear that the way to get a great finish was to sand every part of the piece

thoroughly. “Need moah sanding,” he’d bark, running his hand on a project.

“Remembah,” he liked to bellow. “It’s not sanded enough until its “SMOOTH AS A

BABY’S BEE-HIND.”
Mr. Camden was never shy about throwing out his opinions. I think he thought of himself

as my informal guidance counselor, for some reason.

“Buck, you need a guhhhlfriend,” he’d say.

That came after a big-titted brunette named Sugar came into the shop one day and just

watched me work on rasping one of the ogee bracket feet for my chest. She made me

nervous. I didn’t know what to say to her. I’d seen her holding hands with a few different

oafs over the year or so, and she’d been in a few of my other classes. One time, I looked

into the window of a study room in the library and there she was, lying on the carpet in a

dress, heavily making out with this deaf guy who went to school there. So when she came

to watch me like some kind of zoo animal in the woodshop, it was awkward. I just

ignored her.

After she left, Mr. Camden weighed in.

“Buck, Sugah babe likes you….”

“Think so?”

“C’mon, Buck you need a guhhhlfriend.”

“I don’t need one, I got a dog,” I said.

Truth was, I didn’t have the guts to ask any girl on a date. So I just shrugged and kept

working on my project.

Mr. Camden used to tease me about California, where he’d spent some time in the

military. “Lotsa Califone-ya queaahs,” he’d say. He was trying to sell his yellow Ford

station wagon and told me, “I’ll give ya a good deal. It’ll get ya out to Califone-ya.”

If he had a problem with gay guys, he didn’t seem to have one with lesbians. Phil, the

tomboy in class, was a rarity. Most girls didn’t go near the male dominated woodshop

unless it was Sugar looking for another guy. So at graduation Mr. Camden figured

tokenism would work to make him look like the kind of progressive teacher that school

boards loved to have.

He named her for an industrial arts scholarship because she was a girl, not because her

woodworking was the best among the senior guys. Not even close. But hell, I didn’t

really care. I did. But I didn’t.

I still have the pieces I made in his class in our master bedroom. The first one I’d always

kept for myself, and it evolved from a place to put vinyl records to an ancillary liquor

cabinet.
But the hope chest, which came out beautifully with a mirror-like finish, I gave to my

mom. It was a thank you for putting up with me for all those years of shouting matches

before I left the house for college. I asked her to keep it polished, and didn’t think any

more instructions were necessary. She ended up putting a hulking TV on it in her

bedroom, and carelessly gouged a groove into the lid of the chest, probably from the TV.

So a few years later I told her because she didn’t take care of it and give it the respect it

deserved, I was taking it back. Now it sits in my house holding linens.

I figure Mr. Camden would have given my decision to take it back a thumb’s up. These

days, I rarely think back to when his roared words, “CLEAN UP,” were a comforting

routine in an otherwise awkward, tenative world.

When I think of what Mr. Camden did for me, and what he did for Phil, it’s clear he

wasn’t doing it to boost his career as a high school woodshop teacher. He knew both of

us were outsiders in our worlds, underdogs. Phil liked to work with wood so much, she

didn’t care if she was pretty much ignored by the guys in the class as a weird tomboy.

Mr. Camden could see that all that didn’t matter. He knew she was a shy, quiet loner. He

helped her get respect and recognition.

When I first took his class I think he saw me as a lonely, shut-down, friendless kid.

He knew Phil and me needed help because he must have been a social misfit himself one

time, maybe when he was a kid or goofy teenager. He knew because he probably got the
crap beat out of him in junior high for being too much of a nerd that didn’t fit in. Or

maybe it was some other hard knock he’d had to deal with. He knew the signs of

loneliness and he knew the cure. And Phil and I saw some light because of him.
The young man of Mendoza

Federico used to work at the Hyatt in Mendoza, Argentina shuttling luggage for hotel

patrons. But he wanted more conversational contact with tourists he served. So he quit to

come work at a country inn situated among a working vineyard in the outskirts of

Mendoza, a small tree-lined city anchoring Argentina’s burgeoning wine industry. The

city, which sits on an alluvial plain at the base of the Andes on Argentina’s mid-western

border, is watered with a web of street-side canals fed by a river from the nearby

mountains.

A Mendoza native, Federico is 23, tall and thin with curly blond hair. He is fluent in

Spanish, English, German and Italian. At the vineyard inn, he conducts an informal early

evening wine tasting for guests. He notes the relatively high altitudes in which grapes are
grown in the region; from 1,400 feet to 3,900 feet above sea level. That, along with its

low humidity, hot days and cold nights, makes for growing exceptional, thick-skinned

wine grapes. The Malbec grape is king here, joining great beef and fine leather goods as

trademarks of the country. Here, the soil and climate yield much higher quality Malbec

wines than its predecessor plants ever did in the more traditional winegrowing climates of

France.

And while wine is the big tourist draw to the Mendoza region for Europeans and

Americans, they have followed the trail blazed by ambitious winemaking investors from

the United States, France, Chile, Spain and other countries who are busy producing

attention-getting vintages.

Randall, a Sacramento chef staying at the inn, suggests we check out a microbrewery

tucked into the lower altitudes of the nearby Andes. It’s an early stop on the nearby road

through the mountains to Santiago, Chile. A fan of tasty beer as much as fine wine,

Randall had already sampled one of the “Jerome” beers at the inn. Federico offers to

drive us the 50 miles or so up to the mountain brewery early the next morning before his

midday shift at the inn.

We climb into Federico’s small Renault and on the way stop at the huge gas station along

the highway out of town where cars and trucks fill up before going over the pass to Chile.
Federico’s car runs on gasoline. But to keep fuel costs manageable, he’s had his engine

retrofitted to also run on natural gas, a common practice among Argentines. While

Argentina has plentiful oil and gas reserves of its own, fuel costs reflect those in the

United States and Federico notes, “They never go down.”

Argentines like to drive fast, and Federico is no exception. Speeding tickets are

expensive, he says, and traffic fatalities are common in the Mendoza region. People drive

too fast and don’t pay attention, he says, making eye contact while he tells us this.

As we drive higher into the jagged desert mountains resembling those above Palm

Springs, Ca., we skirt a vast aqua-blue reservoir. It was formed five years ago upon

completion of a dam built to regulate what had been Mendoza’s seasonal feast or famine

water supply, dictated by snowmelt river flows.

A crack was found in the dam’s concrete surface before it was cleared for service, says

Federico, but it was filled with concrete. A second smaller dam was constructed upstream

from the main dam, as something of an insurance policy should the big dam break.

But Federico makes one thing clear: “If the dam breaks, there would be no more

Mendoza.” And to keep unwanted vibrations out of the water, which are believed to

weaken the dam, all motorized boats are banned from the reservoir. But other outdoor

activities, such as whitewater rafting, horseback riding, mountain biking and windsurfing,

are offered by outfitters along the reservoir.

We veer off the main highway and climb what is now rugged alpine country on a narrow

twisting road, passing stables and garden rich homes. We turn down a dirt road and pull

over as two German Shepherds give halfhearted barks from behind a wire fence.

We’re in El Salto Protrerillos, home of the Jerome brewery. We’re greeted warmly by

Eduardo Maccari. Smiling and energetic, he looks like he’s in his mid-30s. He started the

microbrewery with the help of his father in 1998. The name comes from a beloved

German Shepherd Jerome, who lived for 10 years with the Maccaris, and whose two

descendants had greeted us earlier. The loss of Jerome still saddens Eduardo’s eyes. “He

was like a brother,” he says. As a tribute, the labels of all Jerome beer display its logo of

a sitting German shepherd’s silhouette.

Eduardo tells us the brewery got its unlikely start in the wake of a mountain climbing

rescue. It was during a winter in the 1980s when Eduardo’s Czech friend hadn’t returned

from a climb of “El Plata,” one of the highest peaks in the Andes. Eduardo asked the Air

Force for help finding his friend. A crew took him to the campsite where they found the

friend’s tent, and the friend inside, showing no vital signs, apparently frozen to death.

The friend was taken to Mendoza where, over time, he recuperated.

To thank Eduardo for his good deed, he invited Eduardo to visit the Czech Republic,

where he was introduced to a beer brewer. The brewer, using a family recipe for Belgian-

style beer, taught Eduardo the art of making the family’s liquid pride. He took the recipe

home and started brewing his own beer as a hobby, using local glacier-fed stream water.
He initially shared his homemade brew with friends, but then decided to make a business

of it.

Built on a hillside in two levels with cinder blocks and concrete, the Jerome

microbrewery is truly a no-frills, grass roots, at-home brewery.

Watching a Discovery Channel segment on microbreweries and their equipment,

Eduardo’s father designed and built a machine for filling nine bottles of beer, using air

siphons, hoses, and operated with metal foot pedals and hand levers. He figured out how

to build the thing after seeing a factory made one in use at the American brewery on the

show.

“My father really isn’t a very mechanical person,” says Eduardo, showing us how the

machine siphons air out of empty bottles and then fills them perfectly with beer.

Eduardo shuns buying more equipment to automate his tasks. He’d rather hire locals to

help him bottle, cork (he corks bigger bottles like wine) and label his beer, noting that

local jobs are scarce. He plans to build an expansion onto his small brewery, but doesn’t

want to add more capacity after that. He likes the idea of staying small and filling a niche

market. He tells us that he’s just got a distributor to sell his beer for the first time in the

United States, to delis in San Francisco and Sacramento.

We sit down and sample his lowest alcohol beer, Suave, with 3.5 percent. After all it’s

still morning and Federico still has to drive down the mountain and go to work. The cold

beer has a creamy head and goes down easy. Three of his other beers, a red, a dark and a

“Rubia,” have around 6 percent alcohol in them; while “Diablo,” has 7.5 percent.

Maccari’s brochure on his beers describes them having familiar flavors similar to how

quality wines or cigars are pitched.

In strangled English the brochure describes the flavor of its “Diablo” style of brew: “With

a smooth beginning and a fruit (sic), light profile, but with a (sic) explosive finish, like

whiskey. Of good and heavy head, is (sic) ideal for to taste (sic) after dinning (sic),

before to sleep (sic), or with old cheeses fruit desserts, and why not, a good Cuban.”

We head back down the mountain highway with Federico at the wheel, squeeling the

car’s bald tires around hairpin turns as we talk about water, cops, drug busts and women.

It turns out there’s a widely known shortage of men in Mendoza. The best guess, says

Federico, is five women to one man, a number he said is made more lopsided by the local

gay population. Federico says he has two girlfriends. He figures that’s not a bad thing. “I

work hard,” he says.

But at 23, he’s already got a plan for retiring. Six years ago, when the country’s

overriding debt prompted the government to freeze everybody’s savings, Federico was

convinced to buy a small piece of land near the brewery as a place he can build on when

he retires. The 2001 economic moves devalued the Argentine peso from being one to one
with the American dollar to about 33 cents. Nobody could withdraw their savings; the

government instead issued debit cards for purchases. The good part was that borrowing

became easier for big-ticket items and Federico took advantage. Since his land purchase,

its value has shot up.

As we get back off the mountain and on the country road back to the vineyard, we see a

man driving a 60s era green Ford Falcon very slowly in front of us. Ford Falcons are

everywhere in Argentina, and Federico notes those Falcons painted white or green ignite

terrifying memories from 1976 to 1983 for the country’s older generations.

That was a harrowing period known as the “Dirty War.” A post junta “truth” commission

found the Argentine military during that time had “disappeared” at least 10,000

Argentines, in actions officially undertaken against “subversion” and “terrorists.” Then-

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger backed those actions.

But human rights groups estimate the number of victims over those seven years came

closer to 30,000 and claim they targeted the country’s educators, artists and intellectuals.

Federico, who was lucky enough to be born as the military actions ended, says the green

or white Falcons were known for pulling up in front of a home. Armed military men

would emerge from the car and forcibly enter abodes, and drive away with whomever

they’d targeted. Most of those taken away were never heard from again.

After all that, the country’s leaders decided to pursue the ill-fated attempt to fight Britain

for the Falkland Islands, leaving a demoralized populace.

Fast-forward 20 years, and after a 2001 economic restructuring, letting market forces

devalue the peso from the U.S. dollar, heavy foreign investment is reviving some of the

country’s industries. But labor tensions have surfaced, with strikes by concrete workers

and pilots and airline mechanics taking place early last year. Pilots had gone on strike for

more than a week four months earlier. And while busts of cocaine and marijuana

shipments are commonly reported, both drugs are generally available in the country.

But today, Federico is reminded after consuming his relatively early morning beer, that

yes, he does have a hang-over as he prepares to go to work.

Never mind that he’s got a long way to go until retirement.

“Forty years,” he says.

Altered State

I kiss my wife Elena in the waiting room as the heavyset young nurse calls my

name and motions to follow her.

“We’ll take good care of him,” she tells Elena.

Sure hope so. I’m about to get snipped, a procedure my wife and I agreed was a

good idea to eliminate any unwanted surprise parenting scenarios. I follow the nurse

down a hall and she shows me into the room. I’m a little nervous. No matter how routine

this procedure is, I still have to wrap my head around the fact that someone is about to

take a knife to my balls. The mental images are a bit disquieting.

I think back to my mental preparation for this. I asked a few buddies that have

gone through it. They all said it was no big deal. Then when making the appointment six

weeks earlier, I was given a booklet that was published in the early 80s, and had the look

and feel of a kid’s think-and-do book, complete with simple anatomical drawings

explaining it all. The worst description of the aftermath I was told by one friend, was a
bruised feeling in the nether parts. Still, it was tough keeping my mind from repeated

thoughts linking two words “razor,” and “balls.”

“Take off everything below your waist and use that paper gown to wrap yourself,”

she says. “The doctor is running about 20 minutes late, but I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I heel off my slip-on loafers and take my shorts off, then my underwear, and place

them on a nearby chair. Standing naked, except for my shirt, I fetch the folded paper

gown, wrap it around my waist and sit on the padded exam table.

Great to sit half naked for 20 minutes waiting for a doctor to come in and do a

little knife work. I try not to think about it. But I like my doctor. She’s around my age

(half a century, let’s face it, but hey, I could pass for a few years less), and doesn’t dress

like a doctor. In fact, a little over a year ago, I met her for the first time while waiting for

a physical, which included that extra special feature: the prostate exam.

Her blonde hair pulled back, she breezed into the exam room wearing a smart

skirt, blouse and what more than a few years ago could pass conservatively as knee-high

black leather go-go boots. Now this is my kind of doctor, I thought. She shook my hand

primly, holding her hand high, and introduced herself, friendly but very businesslike.

Sitting naked on the exam table with my paper gown awkwardly pulled around me, I

watched her pull up the chair on wheels and sit at the exam room computer. She tapped in

my name and confirmed what I was there for, and tells me I’m due to get a colonoscopy.

She recommended a specialist for that upcoming experience that also includes disturbing

mental images that made me look at the fascinating texture of the false ceiling, just to

keep my mind from thinking of a long tube with a camera attached at the end of it being

fed up my backside.
 Then it was on to the physical. Dr. GoGo Boots had me lay on my stomach then

quickly stuck one of her rubber gloved fingers far enough up my bum (Whooaa!) to

strum my prostate like a bass fiddle. Everything was fine, she told me, snapping off her

glove. Later I proudly told buddies over beers that I got my prostate exam from Dr. Go-

Go Boots. How often does that happen?

There’s a knock on the door and in comes a short round nurse who asks me a

serious question: “You know this is permanent right?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Have you shaved?”

“Uh, no.”

“That’s OK. I’ll shave you. Lie on your back.”

I do, and she proceeds to tape my penis up against my stomach. This, she says,

keeps it out of the way while the business of cutting into my dual prunes takes place.

There can be no hairy interference for this procedure. Suddenly, she’s standing over my

midsection with a razor in her hand.

And apparently there’s no shaving cream in the house. “Sorry I have to do this

dry,” she says mournfully as she starts scraping/tearing hair away to fully reveal my

family jewels in all their bald glory.

“What’s new with you these days?” she asks, trying to make conversation as if

we’re in a kitchen and she’s peeling a potato.

“Just got back from Portland,” I say.

“That’s nice,” she says. “I haven’t traveled much. I’ve only gotten as far as the

East Coast.”
 “How long have you been doing vasectomies?” I ask. “I mean, this isn’t your first

one, right?”

“No, no. My fiancée thinks its kind of weird. He’s in the military and just got

transferred from the Middle East to be a bodyguard for somebody in Singapore.”

“That’s not bad duty. Pretty country, good food. You and your fiancée going to

have kids?

“We plan on it.”

“Then when you’re finished having kids, you can try out your specialty on him.”

She drapes a paper blanket over me with a hole in the middle of it, which she

places over my giblets. This, I’m thinking, is not something I’d ever want showing up on

YouTube.

In comes a young lady resident doctor who is assisting. She looks down at me,

smiles, introduces herself and shakes my hand. She’s in her 20s, with friendly brown eyes

and dark brown hair. I can’t remember her name.

And soon strides in Dr. GoGo Boots, but as far as I can tell, this time she isn’t

wearing the boots. She also shakes my hand and introduces herself as I look up, noticing

there’s a magazine photograph of a landscape of wind sculpted rocks taped on the white

false ceiling panel directly above. I’m thinking the Valium is kicking in, because the

white Styrofoam ceiling is changing color to a spongy yellow, then back to white as I

squint at it.

The short round nurse’s voice asks if I’ve ever had an allergic reaction to any

painkillers, or if I’ve taken any. No reactions, but I note Vicodin, Novocaine and

Demerol drips have worked for me in the past.

 “Good, we’re giving you a shot of Novocaine, which will be a little pinch,” says

my doctor, as she does it, and yes, I do feel it.

“That will stop any pain,” says my doctor, “so the worst is over.”

With my nuts sufficiently numbed, the proceedings begin.

“Do you know who Edith Piaf is?” my doctor asks the resident working the other

side of me.

“No,” says the resident, a generation or two too young to have any clue who Edith

Piaf was.

As I lay there with the Valium trickling through my brain, I feel like I’m in a very

unusual situation: Two women I barely know are fiddling with my teabags from opposite

sides of the table while having a casual conversation. They might as well be eating

crumpets and sipping tea in an English garden. I’m thinking they must be trying to help

me relax. I join the conversation.

“You’re giving away your age,” I say to my doctor. “Wasn’t she a long ago

French singer or something?”

“Yes,” says the doctor. “I am giving away my age.” Right now I’m thinking it

was a bad move to anger a doctor poised over your genitals with a knife in her hand. “But

I’m good with my age. I’d never want to go back and do it over again.”

“I wouldn’t either,” I say, trying to soothe any possible anger. “Who would ever

want to be in their 20s again?”

“Oh yes,” says my doctor. “I was going through medical school and had two

kids.”

No way I could top that. I let it ride.

 “This is full,” she says to the resident.

Hmm. I decide not to ask for an explanation. Must be the tubes have some extra

mobile squigglies in them.

Now they’re quiet and I can only guess they’re knuckle deep in my jewel bags,

seizing upon the tubes in question, then tieing and cauterizing (zzzzzttt, smell of burning

flesh), tieing and cauterizing (zzzzzttt, again). I have no overhead mirror to watch their

intricate finger work on me, and that’s just as well. It’s no doubt a gnarly sight capable of

making me want to jump up and off the table, cradling my semi-altered bags, drive home

one handed in need of ice to numb the pain.

As the smell of burning flesh dissipates from my nostrils, I’m casully asked my

plans for the coming week. Traveling to Newport Beach I say. Can I go swimming?

“Better just dangle you feet in the water,” says Dr. GoGo Boots. “No running, and

keep your walking to a minimum for a few days. This doesn’t happen often, but if there is

too much movement before healing, it can cause internal bleeding, swelling, and a lot of

pain. But that is very rare.”

It’s suddenly over, the penis-holding tape is gently pulled from my stomach hairs.

The young round one gives me a typewritten instruction sheet telling me to ice myself

down for the rest of the day and to do very little the next day. No sex for a week, then in

six weeks I return to drop off a sample to be checked for any residual squigglies. Unless

something went awry, there will be no more squigglies, no more worries of unexpected

20-year debt-ridden jail sentences. Ultimate freedom.

Elena drops me off at the house so she can go back to her office and I go retrieve

some ice from the freezer, put it in a plastic bag, and gingerly arrange it under my shorts.
Two guys working on our kitchen remodel can’t help but see the bulge in my pants as

they update me on the job.

“I just got fixed,” I say.

The younger of the two, a guy in his 30s, laughs and says something about a

doctor standing over your privates with a scalpel, and laughs some more. The older

contractor, who’s around my age, is horrified at the thought. “Ohhh,” he says, as if he’s

just had a whiff of fresh vomit, and moves to the next room.

I talk to him the next day on the phone and after we finish talking business, he

asks, “Are you taking it easy?”

I assure him. “Yes I am.”

“After yesterday, when I went to bed I couldn’t sleep just thinking about it,” he

says. “Ohhh.” His imagination ran wild with scenes of balls-slitting blades. This has him

in utter imaginary pain. He may need a little something to make it stop.

You must go with flow, grasshoppah

I was in the middle of tequila shots and yacking it up during a backyard party at my

house a few years ago, when one of the party-goers comes up to me and says, “Your

toilet’s overflowing.”

Talk about a buzz kill. My faculties for thinking clearly had already packed their bags

and rolled out of town earlier in the evening. Soon, word had spread that the only toilet in

the house was unusable. Still, people had to pee, and hopefully that was the extent of it. A

woman asked me where she could go.

“Uh, why don’t you go around the other side of the house,” I said, wondering why she

couldn’t figure something out on her own.

I made my way back to clean up the overflowed toilet and make sure nobody, heaven

forbid, would flush it again and create another pee foam-filled splat-fest on the floor.

On and off ever since I was a teenager, for some unknown reason I’ve had strangely

recurring experiences with wayward sewer. That is, sewer traveling in the wrong

direction, burbling back up into bathtubs and toilets, sometimes horrendously breeching

the toilet and splashing raw sewage onto the tile floor and (Please, No!!) down into the

floor-mounted heating grate. That, instead of the intended unimpeded route, flowing

quietly out the sewer line to the city lines transporting it underground, unseen and

unsmelled, to a treatment plant.

And for another unknown reason, it seems that these stench-filled experiences have

happened at the most inconvenient and unnerving times possible. Like when my wife and

I are hosting a party. Or when we have company or relatives over. It’s almost like a sewer

god wickedly calculates when a backed up line will cause the most angst, and

accordingly, summons the nerve wracking pipe-blocking forces from hell.

Why? No idea. But this has happened enough times that I have gotten accustomed to it.

Sort of. Even though I’ve done all I can to make sure it won’t happen again. But

eventually, it comes back for an encore.

Still, these occasional run-ins with backed up sewer have taught me a few life lessons.

I’ve learned about sewer pipes, the relative strengths and weaknesses of those made with

cast iron, tar paper, clay and plastic.

I’ve learned about tree roots and how they’re always looking for water. And that while on

this search will infiltrate leaky pipe joints and grow fine root networks which will

conspire to seal off anything resembling a wastewater flow in any unsealed sewer line.

And I’ve learned that guys you call to run a metal snake with a finely honed blade on the

end of it into your sewer line to cut out roots, or hair, or grease, will happily charge you a

lot of money. I’m convinced most of them charge too much money because they can.

They know that flustered customers with a backed up mess are more than happy to pay

through the nose to make their nasty go away.

And these already extortionary charges are even more gleefully doubled if you happen to

call these guys on a holiday, when somehow, a lot of backed up sewer lines come a-

callin’. I’ve been there.

Now, even if the floors are sewer flooded on Christmas, I know the best thing to do is to

sit back and have another double spiked eggnog. Wait ‘til the next business day to call, or

you’ll pay bigtime.

Several years ago, my first wife and I bought a house in Sacramento. It was built in 1947.

It was in the aftermath of this purchase that I began a series of experiences triggered by,

(a) my tarpaper sewer pipe, which over many years, had become crushed into a slow-flow

horizontal slot, and (b) the water-seeking roots of big elm trees bordering the back yard.

They had set up shop to take in regular sips of the ohh so convenient, nutrient-rich liquid

that regularly tried to flow throw the time-mangled pipe.

And I found that nothing taught me more about myself than how I dealt with a messy

overflowing toilet in front of friends and family. Even though it took awhile, I’ve learned

that it doesn’t help matters to let fly with the creative tumble of my entire curse word

vocabulary in front of a semi-sympathetic audience. No, soliloquies of blue language

won’t change the fact my sewer line is backing up and doing its best to prompt laughter

from bystanders seeing the chaos exploding from piss water, and befouled, soggy toilet

paper spilling onto what had been clean and pristine tile and hardwood floors.

But the plugged-up sewer line, like a funny noise coming from your car engine, is a clear

message. That message is saying in it’s own way, “this thing isn’t working and you better

get it fixed. Yes, you better. Or you’ll really pay later.”

Still, the sewer line’s cry for help was one that I just didn’t want to hear for years. The

message never clicked on the light bulb to give me the bright idea that hey, maybe the

solution would be to replace the sewer pipe. If I ever did think about it, the thought didn’t

go far. Because I was sure it would cost more than I could afford. Which was probably

true. But I never even looked into it because, well, denial was so much easier.

So every year or so, when the toilet water faithfully spilled onto the bathroom floor, I’d

call the cheapest sewer de-rooter outfit in town. And these grungy looking dudes would

show up in a pink van, of all things. They’d cart their electric snake to the back yard, and

it would cut through the roots, and all was well again.

But after living with a barely functional low flow sewer line for 12 years, my second wife

and I decided to remodel the house and add a second floor. The plumber on the job

reported that the sewer line was pretty bad off, and asked if we wanted to replace it.

Please do, we said. Damn the expense.

Out came the tarpaper pipe, called Orangeburg, and in went modern plastic pipe called

ABS.

Orangeburg pipe. It had been in the ground under my back yard lawn for 50 years, but

time, constant sewer flow, roots and packed earth had turned it into a bashed up version

of cheap sewer pipe, unable to handle extra toilet flushes, or as we learned the hard way,

simultaneous washing machine and dishwasher cycles. After World War II, when my
house and millions of other stucco crackerboxes were built, cast iron pipe available for

sewers and drains was limited. World War II and the Korean War made cast iron hard to

get. Orangeburg, made with wood fibers and coal tar pitch as a rolled up tarpaper pipe,

was the solution of choice through the 1970s. Then plastic pipes came in.

Historian John Schladweiler, who did extensive research on Orangeburg pipe, concludes

in a published paper that if you have this pipe, “Start thinking about verifying its

condition and replacing it.”

Thanks, John, we did. At last, I thought, the gotcha sewer back-ups that had plagued me

for years, were mercifully over.

Well, not quite.

No, we had another back-up a year or so after the remodel. The sewer cleanout guy in the

pink van reports the clog came from tree roots entering the pipe right next to the house.

Huh? But that pipe was replaced a year ago. What the hell? With more curiosity than

annoyance, I dug down to the pipe, looking for the answer. I wangled my shovel,

stabbing at thick, pesky tree roots all the way. And as the hard packed clay dirt was

scraped away, the evidence became clear. About three feet from the outside edge of the

house the sewer line was cast iron. Then it joined in a tangle of roots to about a one-foot

length of the all but crushed old Orangeburg pipe. Our friendly remodeling plumber had
connected the new plastic pipe into the short length of old pipe. Instead of connecting it

directly to the cast iron pipe as he should have.

There was the problem. Mr. expletive-deleted plumber decided not to take out a last bit of

the old pipe, probably because it was under sprinkler pipes he didn’t want to accidentally

break with a wayward stab of a shovel. And he must have figured we’d never know the

difference ‘til he was long gone.

Well, he was right. So at that point I hired a guy to put in new pipe to replace the tarpaper

Achilles heel of the new and improved sewer line, along with a two-way cleanout access

to help get a snake to any future clogs. After that, I was sure I’d solved the problem.

And I had. For a year or so.

That’s when the toilet gurgled after a flush, an unmistakable sound I’d come to know

well. It was sewerese for “I’ve got rooteriosclerosis.”

Back came the guys in the pink van.

They ran their electric steel ubersnake into my line. The cable ran several yards toward

the back fence and bucked when its nose blade hit a thick snag of roots near where the

line hooks into the city pipe. So I still had a root problem at the last leg of pipe under my

yard.
Hey, wait a minute. Our trusty plumber replaced that pipe a few years earlier. Well, sort

of. If he cut corners on one end, he probably did on the other. So I set aside a few

vacation days to dig it out myself and find out another piece of this crazy, messy puzzle.

After a lot of hours of digging a trench chest deep out of wet sticky clay, I found what I’d

suspected. Our expletive deleted remodel plumber fella had run the new plastic pipe into

a few sections of clay pipe that slanted down deeper to the city pipe. Tree roots were

happily tangled into the line though the seeping joints between the three clay pipe

sections that had probably been there since 1947. So I had another plumber break out the

clay pipe and put in new plastic line.

After that, I was sure I’d solved the problem.

Three years went by. Then the tub drain began gurgling whenever the toilet flushed. I

called the snake guys.

These low cost leaders have been in business forever and along with several Yellow

Pages full of competitors, have made a living out of the inability of Orangeburg pipe to

keep tree roots from invading its innards. When I first called them in the mid-80s, they

charged $50 for a cleanout. Now it was up to $145. But compared to outfits with fancy

logos on their vans, driven by guys in crisp uniforms with nametags and carrying

clipboards, a bargain.
Just like all the times before, they ran their mondo electric eel with razor tip into roots

encountered in my pipe near the city connection. The pipe is clear, at least for a year or

so, once again.

But over the years, this sewer saga has made me more philosophical about irksome

occurrences. Now, whenever it comes time to deal with a backed up sewer line, I take a

deep breath. I attain a Buddha-like calm and ask myself the essential question. What’s a

little backed up sewer in the river of life grasshoppah? There is a solution. I just pay the

man to clear its path, and move on, calm, and yes, tranquil.
Barney, Bertha and the Bedouin

The house of Barney and Bertha, just up the street from ours at Lake Tahoe, was a haven

of otherworld exotica to me as a kid in the 60s. The retired couple’s house was full of

keepsakes from their earlier years living in Saudi Arabia where Barney had worked as a

pipe welder for Standard Oil. When you walked into their house, built on a hillside of

pine and brush, the first thing you saw in the entry on the short-pile green carpet was an

old wood and leather camel saddle. The living room circled a large fireplace with a large

brass platter hung from its brick facing. Among the Arabian hardware in the kitchen,

which circled around the back of the fireplace where stood a potbellied black iron wood-
burning stove, they had other unique items, including a set of steel kebab skewers, with

brass handles, flat for gripping, and each handle with a different ornate design.

But there was one object that transported my mind across the world to the fascinatingly

spare, hot windy and endless Saudi Arabian desert every time I saw it. It hung on an

alcove wall as you left the bathroom to return to the living room: an intricately carved

and painted wall-mounted fresco of the head and shoulders of a desert Bedouin and his

falcon, about eight inches tall and a little less wide. His nut colored leathery face was so

lifelike, with every wrinkle revealing years of exposure to hot desert sun and wind, he

looked like he’d try to answer you if you asked him a question. The falcon stood on his

left shoulder. The keen eyed raptor had tan chest feathers and beginning at his eyes and

up to the crown of his head and back, was smooth dark brown down. The Bedouin’s face

looks up and to the left into the wind, as if something just got his attention, the veins in

his neck show the strain of his gaze from flinty brown eyes. His face is framed by the

flowing white hood of his robe as his big squint reveals perfect, slightly buck white teeth.

His open mouth is framed by a scruffy Fu Manchu mustache and gray-flecked black

goatee. The falcon’s left wing is slightly pulled away from its body as if jostled from

repose by his master’s sudden turn to look into the distance. The raptor’s steely, primal

gaze, is locked in on what the Bedouin is trying to see. I imagine the Bedouin mumbling

to himself in Arabic without moving his lips, while trying to discern whether what he

sees is friend or foe.

I never tired of studying the Bedouin and his falcon when I was at Barney and Bertha’s.

Whenever I saw him on the wall, I just stopped and took him in, transfixed by the gritty

life etched in his face.

I walked over to Barney and Bertha’s house often. They seemed like the grandparents I

never had. They always welcomed me into their home even when I showed up

unannounced, and would give me a Coke or 7up without fail. Which was a big deal to

me, because soda wasn’t a beverage I could ever get at home. And Barney and Bertha

were laid back and forgiving. I once tracked snow onto their carpet after coming into the

house and upon seeing my tracks, apologized to Bertha. Because I’d have been roundly

scolded for doing so at home. But Bertha waved her arm and just said, “Don’t worry

about it, it’s good for the carpet!”

Barney and Bertha retired to the Lake Tahoe in the mid 60s and built a house in our

neighborhood. They were older folks, but they had plenty of energy. Portly and friendly,

Bertha worked at the post office, a job Barney drove her to every day since she didn’t

drive. And Barney had a paper route. He rode a red motor scooter around the

neighborhood and delivered the local afternoon daily, tossing them on driveways and

waving to everybody he saw. He was in his late 60s, short and stocky, had a gray goatee,

big black plastic rimmed glasses, and looked like he could have been Col. Sanders’

scruffier brother. He chuckled a lot, and always seemed genuinely happy, finding

pleasure from the littlest things. Barney’s thick hands were gnarled; his fingers were

frozen crooked from his youth as a baseball catcher. His skin around the back of his neck
was tanned, weathered and pocked, from his days in the desert sun and wind, and from

childhood smallpox. When he took a breath, he wheezed, like he couldn’t completely fill

his lungs because of all the dust particles he’d inhaled for years in Arabia. He always had

a faint aura of body odor that somehow wasn’t offensive. He didn’t smoke, but he

regularly had cocktails with Bertha or neighbors after work. He and Bertha had a

daughter, Sharon, and several cats and two dogs that roamed free like all the other dogs in

the neighborhood.

As a neighbor kid, I’d feed their animals when they left town. Barney’s garage workshop

was where I’d feed them, and I’d carefully examine his girlie calendar on the wall.

When it was cold outside, Barney always had a fire roaring in the fireplace and used big

leather gloves when he threw more split pine logs on, or jostled the hot embers with a

black iron poker.

But Barney had a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde to his mostly easygoing, helpful manner. It

was when he drove. He had a metallic tan Jeep and drove around in it with his dogs

laying on his lap and against his chest, radio blaring.

He was a terrible, erratic driver, and had a hair trigger temper when encountering drivers

making moves he didn’t like. Most other drivers to him were impossibly stupid.
Bertha, having sat in the passenger seat with him for many years, always said she learned

to just look at the floor when driving with Barney. She found watching the road was too

scary, and definitely not worth incurring Barney’s wrath if she said anything about his

driving.

One time, when beginning a drive home from a party, a drive that included, icy, windy

mountain roads, Barney was clearly drunk. Bertha knew it would be a miracle if they

survived the drive home with him at the wheel. As Barney wove the Jeep in the dark

night along a lonely farmland road toward the mountains Bertha suddenly yanked the

keys out of the ignition. When the Jeep rolled to a stop, amid Barney’s fusillade of

epithets, she hopped out and flung the keys into the icy dark of a nearby field. Covering

her ears to shield herself from Barney’s drunken curses, she was determined to walk back

toward the party. Seeing her as they drove home, my parents stopped and she filled them

in on what happened. She got in their back seat and a little further up the road when they

slowed to a stop at the Jeep, they encountered an irate Barney.

“That damn woman of mine lost the keys!” he roared, as Bertha ducked down into the

back seat.

“This is a goddam big prooooblm,” he yelled into the car, unaware that Bertha was a few

inches away. Everything turned out okay, but in the days afterward, which involved no

small amount of inconvenience to get new keys made and the car back home, Barney was

none too pleased with Bertha. For the next week or so, to make sure she knew how mad
he was, he slept in the basement with the dogs. Bertha told my mother, who found the

incident hilarious.

I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I went on a camping trip with Barney

and Bertha and their friends Jack and Vickie Claar, when I was 12 or so. We drove to the

abandoned high desert town of Bode, and the drive there was long and boring along

Highway 395, a trek that seemed endless to me. Then we finally got to the dirt road

turnoff that after several miles, took us to the abandoned mining town. We wandered

around looking for Indian arrowheads. We barbecued food and slept in sleeping bags on a

flatbed trailer Jack had. During the night, Barney let rip with an especially loud fart,

which Jack couldn’t help comment on. “Quit fartin’ ya old fart,” called out, which I

thought was funny. But I was 12.

I had no idea that the true adventure for the trip would be on the drive back to Tahoe.

Barney had been drinking beer all day, so he was in fine form when we got back onto 395

after miles of dusty dirt road driving. I crouched in the back of the Jeep, and thought

about what lay ahead, Kingsbury Grade, a narrow windy road through the mountains to

Tahoe, which had big cliffs on either side. Looking at Barney, and knowing what I knew

about him behind the wheel, I didn’t like our chances. I started to feel sick. In

Gardnerville, after we’d stopped to get some food, Barney steered the Jeep back onto the

two-lane highway and encountered several kids on bicycles who blocked the lane. This

infuriated him. “GET OFF THE ROAD!,” he roared at them as we passed. He kept
jawing at them looking backward with his head out the window as the Jeep drifted into

the opposite lane where a car was coming.

“Barney!!!!!” screamed Bertha. He jerked his head around and yanked the steering wheel

to the right, making the Jeep careen seemingly on two wheels as I closed my eyes for a

collision.

Nothing happened, but my heart pounded as we headed in the late afternoon shadows to

the base of the mountains and plenty of twisty cliffside driving. I wasn’t a religious kid,

but this drive made me pray. I thought there was no way we weren’t all gonna die when

Barney drove the Jeep off a cliff, the flipping piece of metal flinging all three of us into

the ether for not so soft landings on plenty of jagged granite below.

So when Barney’s driving was good enough to get us home in one piece, I knew my

prayers had been answered. When he pulled into our driveway, my stomachache

suddenly went away. I jumped out of the Jeep and vowed to never do that again, ever. I

felt like I’d survived jumping out of a plane without a parachute.

Dogs roamed free in the neighborhood, and unfixed males would occasionally get in

bloody fights trying to hump the available females in heat. This happened to our dog

Sam, a mid-sized mutt who was so beat up once he slumped home and slept for days

while he licked his wounds. Barney and Bertha’s mutt, Monte, got similarly beat up once.

Monte, a mid-sized yellow coated low key, lovable dumb dog, was so thoroughly
thrashed that Barney brought him to the vet. Monte was patched up, but Barney had to

pay a hefty bill for his treatments. Bertha said after Monte recovered, Barney caught him

wandering out to what Barney suspected might be a foray for a female in heat. Bertha

told us that Monte looked back, because Barney shouted out a warning to the horny,

dumb dog.

“You better not do it again,” Barney shouted. “Or I swear, I’ll cut your balls off myself.”

In those days, for some reason, nobody neutered their dogs.

In the winter, getting a car on the road after a snowstorm was always tough in our

neighborhood, which had no shortage of steep, twisting roads. The county would plow

the roads, but they’d leave berms of snow and ice at the driveway entrances. That meant

not only did the driveways need to be shoveled or hit with a snowblower, but the tall

berms did too, if you wanted to get to the road. But after storms Barney put a plow on his

Jeep and drove around clearing away the snow and ice blocking people’s driveways.

He’d be out after the nastiest storms. I can remember only a few times when there was so

much snow that even he wasn’t able to make his rounds.

At neighborhood parties Barney loved to dance with women, wowing them with his

moves, even though his height typically put him at eye-level with their boobs. He was

more than fine with that. I remember him savoring some sourdough bread once. He held

it up in his crooked hand and said, “This is like cake.” Another time I heard him say with
ultimate confidence. “I’m going to live to be 100.” He was about 74 at the time. He once

told me something that I never forgot: “Traveling is the best education you’ll ever get.”

Barney and Bertha eventually moved to a house in Placerville where the winters were

milder and where Barney immediately planted fruit trees. “In about seven or eight years,

these will be really be great trees,” he declared. Even at that late stage in his life, he was

sure he’d be around to see them grow and flourish.

But about a year later he had a massive heart attack and died suddenly at 75. But Barney

didn’t get cheated out of one minute during his time on earth. All the way up to the end

he was a happy guy, ready to help anybody he could. And even now, many years after his

departure, I still miss him.

Bertha ended up suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and eventually died in an elder care

facility. She couldn’t recognize anybody at the end.

One day my Mom brought some stuff left behind by Barney and Bertha, and I guess their

daughter forwarded it to me through Mom. Among the items was a set of ceramic spice

containers from Arabia, which set within a cabinet built for them by Barney. Another was

the kebab skewers. And the third item was the Bedouin. “They knew you were always

fascinated by it,” my Mom said.

It had been years since I’d last seen him and his falcon, and his gaze into the distance

remained as determined as ever. He was like a long lost friend, a reminder of my

surrogate grandparents, Barney and Bertha, who were looking down at us. The spirit of

Barney and Bertha, the Bedouin and his falcon are with me forever.
The cable virgin falls

I was a cable virgin once.

But not anymore. No, now I’m part of the cable nation, absorbed into this TV channel

fest like liquid brains sucked up by a Shop Vac.

This took some time for me. I made it well into my 50th year before I waved the cable

caravan into my home.

Cable came to my hometown Sacramento in the mid 80s, a lot of years later than in most

towns. Sacramento is a flat valley floor and for years, everybody got their TV shows by
way of rooftop antennas. When I bought my little suburban home in 1984, my house,

along with most others in the neighborhood, had one of those ever so lovely pole-

mounted aluminum contraptions on its roof.

The antenna on my house was put up by the previous owner, and it towered high above

the neighborhood. This baby was mounted at the top of a pipe about three stories tall. The

pipe was held in place with four metal guy wires anchored to rings screwed into the roof.

The former owner told me the antenna’s height, with its direction-adjusting “Tenna-

rotor” remote control, was to make sure his wife could pick up her favorite TV show,

viewable only on San Francisco stations.

To pick up SF stations you just turned the unit’s dial to the SW point on the circle, and

the antenna rotated – ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk – until it got there.

The chatty guy who sold me the house coveted his setup so much that when he moved to

another neighborhood, he asked if I’d let him take the antenna controller with him.

Sensing the gizmo could be valuable, I said no.

Enrique, my neighbor across the street at the time, told of his help in installing this

towering antenna, and remembered it as a horrible, horrible experience he’d never do

again. Enrique and chatty guy put it up, one holding the antenna upright, while the other

staggered around the roof, tightening the guy wires while worrying about two things:
falling off the roof, and/or getting clobbered by a very tall pipe and antenna heading

earthward, out of control. Not worth it, Enrique assured me.

Not long after we got settled in with our San Francisco powered TV antenna, a cable

company set up shop in Sacramento. But since we could still get just about anything we

wanted free on our mondo antenna, I decided against paying for TV.

My late mom was the reason. While I was growing up, she always preached the evils of

watching too much TV, smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. She was a reader, and

was convinced TV turned off one’s brain and mixmastered it into nonthinking mush. Just

look at the blank stare of anybody watching TV, she’d say. She had a point.

By 1992 my 19-inch color TV died, so I bought another one. Then Elena and I got the

crazy notion to add another story to our house to get the extra space we wanted. When the

dust cleared, we had the TV in a built-in stack of shelves facing the living room. But one

of the first things to fall in the remodel was that tall-ass antenna. I watched it topple off

the house and onto the back lawn in a few seconds. The wreckage was hurled into the

carpenter’s debris bin, and forgotten.

Until, that is, when we tried to pick up local stations on the now, nearly closeted TV.

Rabbit ears couldn’t be used: no clearance on the shelf. Elena found one of these gizmos

in a catalog that promised to turn your entire electrical system into an antenna!
We got it in the mail and hooked it up, and well, it kinda worked, but mostly not.

Couldn’t get all the local channels. And San Francisco stations? Forget it.

We went through a few years of financial and emotional healing from the remodel, which

turned out great. But because we pretty much did all the painting, molding and other

various small jobs to save money, we were left with the energy of two people dying of

thirst crawling across a desert.

As we were going through this burnout, it slowly dawned on us, that our TV wasn’t able

to get many channels. And we were missing the most basic of offerings.

Meanwhile, the cable world had weaved its expanding content into the nation, creating a

parallel universe of shows we would only hear about from other people, but never see:

Sex in the City, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Daily Show,

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, HGTV, and on and on. People swore by these shows.

But we couldn’t get them, except when we left town and stayed in hotels or motels. Elena

would commandeer the remote on those occasions, feverishly changing channels to see

all that she was missing. We knew there was stuff we’d like to watch, but we still hadn’t

gotten around to doing anything about it.

Our choices for a fix were clear. Get cable. Then there was the much less expensive

option. Get another rooftop antenna. I’m sure Elena wanted cable, but I didn’t. I wasn’t
crazy about the idea of paying a monthly bill for a lot of crap TV I'd never watch. So we

go to an electronics store and I ask the sales kid where the antennas are.

“You mean the satellite dishes?” he queries.

“No no, the rooftop antennas.”

This gets a blank stare.

“You know, the aluminum thingies that pick up the local stations?”

Right about now, this kid thinks I’m a raving lunatic with tin foil on my ears, crinkled

just so, to pick up alien signals from space.

“Why don’t you just get a satellite dish?” he asks.

Sensing I didn’t want one of those, he went to ask somebody else at the store what it was

that I wanted. Elena tried very hard not to laugh.

Another sales guy points up to some long cardboard boxes collecting dust above a row of

displays at the back of the store.

He pulls one down and I buy it. I bolt it to the chimney atop my roof and run a cable from

it to the 19-inch. Sure enough, I could pick up all the local stations. At last, free TV

again!

But my excitement over this only brought sympathetic looks from friends. These looks,

translated, said, “You sad, pathetic, poor, cheap bastard. Heaven help you, and here’s to

hoping that someday you’ll wean yourself off the crazy pills.”

Meanwhile, only the biggest sports events could be seen over the air. Everyday stuff like

baseball games, all went to cable. And more extensive coverage of big events like the

Tour de France, the World Cup, and Wimbledon was all on cable. Then high definition

TVs started proliferating, and more programs offering HDTV. And then DVR boxes to

record shows were out

The tipping point was coming, and I knew it. I’d seen HDTVs every time we went to the

discount-warehouse store where people buy 50 pounds of tortilla chips and multi-quarts

of foot pump nacho cheese. I knew an inner shift, a conversion to a mass religion – cable

--, was here.

We went to look at HDTV flat panels because we had the perfect place to put a flat panel.

We settled on one and then ordered cable. I warned Elena that this would be a call to

addiction to trash TV reruns, movies, sports, etc. etc., etc., and that, at least initially, we

could go through a dizzying period of binge viewing.

After years of standing clear of the cable beast’s awesome pull, a violent vortex into

videoland, I knew I would be helpless as a doe-eyed baby harp seal with a vicious

hunter’s club raised above its fleshy skull. At least for awhile.

And sure enough, for the first weeks of cable I watched nothing but sports, NBA finals,

baseball games, World Cup games, more baseball games. Every time Elena looked up I

was watching a Giants game. “When can we watch something I want to watch?” she

asked, dismayed.

“I warned you,” I said. “Maybe we should get another flat panel in the front room.” I was

dull-eyed and sedentary.

But I found that even cable’s commercials are better than those on free TV. Since when

has there been a Jack Daniel’s ad on free TV? Then there’s the ad for a hangover remedy

called “Chaser,” touted to contain charcoal and some other stuff that filter the hangover

molecules out of your system. “Helps stop hangovers before they start.”

Elena’s co-workers were stunned at her reporting that we’d suddenly jumped across the

abyss from a cable-challenged, 14-year-old, 19-inch TV, to a 40-inch flat screen LCD

HDTV with DVR.

One co-worker recalled another of her worst to first moves. After driving a 1965 Rambler

Classic for 10 years, a car she bought for $500 and which had doors that wouldn’t lock,
she bought a brand new Volkswagen Passat with not only remote control door locks, but

get this: heated leather seats.

“You skipped over a lot of stuff in the middle there,” said the co-worker, who frothed at

the sound of a big flat panel HDTV. “How does that work?”

Yes, we took the grand leap into overdrive, and this may have shifted our brains into

permanent TV screen addiction. If we devolve to the point of watching cable TV all day,

we’re in deep do-do. Because watching too much cable, I’m sure, has the power to lock

us into a catatonic state in which we think like drugged monkeys.

Lord, give us strength.

Rambler Classics

When I first met my wife Elena she was driving a white, 1965 Rambler Classic. She paid

$500 for it. I could relate. I bought my 1960 Chevrolet Impala many years earlier for

$250. She bought the Rambler to replace her Volkswagen Rabbit that had become a

problem. Like the night she was driving along a city street when the Rabbit’s hood flew

upright and back against the windshield to block her view of the road. It was the same car

that broke down on the freeway another night, and luckily a Highway Patrolman

happened by and drove her home.

The Rambler was good for getting around town, but it didn’t like to go more than 60 mph

on the freeway. You could push the accelerator to try to make it go faster, but it refused.
It was like it was telling you, “Push all you want on my gas pedal, but I’m not going any

faster.” And it wouldn’t.

While it was a cheap way to get around, the Rambler made you pay in other ways. It

burned oil all the time, so you couldn’t drive it out of town without a case or two of

motor oil in the trunk. When you put oil in, it seemed that before too long, most of it was

in a pool under the car. The Rambler didn’t burn oil as much as it provided ways for it to

leak out. Somehow, those were ways we never took the time to investigate. And it

resisted having a gas pump nozzle rammed into it. It insisted on gentle foreplay, which

usually meant the nozzle had to be torqued upside down until the Rambler would accept

the gas without making the pump click off. When it rained, the Rambler’s vacuum

powered windshield wipers sped up and slowed down as the car did. So if it was raining

hard and you slowed down, you got water-impaired visibility. On cold mornings, its

heater seemed like a very efficient air conditioner. All it could do was blow around frigid

air in the car. Like trying to get it to go fast, asking it for heat came with a simple answer:

There isn’t any. Outside air forced its way in through the frame of the Rambler’s much

less than air-tight interior. As you gained speed, you might as well have been driving a

birdcage on wheels. You needed to bundle up even in moderately cold weather if you

didn’t want to feel parts of your extremities go numb.

One Saturday afternoon when Elena had driven off to do some errands, I stayed home

and napped on the couch. It was one of those great naps, a dreamless sleep that went on
for hours in my effort to recover sleep I’d lost during the week doing my annoying job at

the newspaper.

Suddenly the front door was noisily unlocked and in blew in my wife. She took one look

at me prone in nappy time mode on the couch and it set her off.

“What are you DOING?” she demanded, as I blinked in the glare of her utter contempt.

“Uh…”

“I bet you didn’t notice I didn’t drive the Rambler into the driveway, did you?”

“Huh?”

“I just walked from near T Street.” Her tone said this was definitely all my fault.

“Where’s your car?”

“Not here! It’s parked on the sidewalk on 59th Street. I was driving home and all of a

sudden my back left tire came off.”

“Came off?”
“Yes, and I had to pull over. I looked in the mirror and saw my tire rolling the other way

down the street. These guys were digging a trench in a front lawn and saw it all happen.

Scared the hell out of them.”

“Jesus, are you OK?”

“Yes. What do we do about the car?”

“We’ll get it towed, don’t worry.”

I called a tow truck and went back to the scene of the accident where the Rambler sat

crippled half way in the street and half way on the sidewalk. The back left tire and rim

had pulled right through the mounting bolts, leaving a trail of a hubcap and hex nuts

along the street. About 50 yards behind the car was the tire that had for some reason,

decided it didn’t want to be part of the quartet of white sidewalls that allowed the

Rambler to roll forward and backward. The tire went for broke and struck out on its own.

It managed to roll about thirty yards before there was no more gravity to keep it rolling. It

fell flat on the street, its taste of freedom dramatic but short. I tilted it up and rolled it

back to the Rambler, and tossed the tire, hubcap and hex nuts into the trunk. It had been a

valiant try for freedom by the left rear whitewall, but ultimately a futile one. Its future

still belonged under the left rear wheel well of the Rambler.
The Rambler was towed to the space in front of our house. We decided to leave it parked

there until J.R., my mechanic, could find a replacement back axle in an American Motors

junkyard somewhere.

I told a friend at work what had happened, noting that I was sure glad this didn’t happen

on the freeway far from home. It could have been a deadly nightmare.

Mike, a workmate from WisCANson was into the PAAAAAckers and cars. He said the

same thing happened to a friend’s big Buick station wagon years ago where he lived.

“The guy was driving along and suddenly his left front tire was gone,” said Mike. “It just

disappeared. Suddenly with no left front tire, the car dipped down he had to fight to get

the damn thing under control and stop it. He never saw the tire break free or anything. It

was just gone. But he eventually found it jammed up in the car’s wheel well.”

We knew it’d be awhile before the Rambler axle could be found, because J.R. was always

behind on his jobs, and this wasn’t likely to be high on his to-do list.

The Rambler stayed put in front of the house, and spiders set to work spinning curtain-

like webs between the car and the street. Weeds grew up along side it from cracks in the

street. The house next door had just been sold. Its new owner, just moved in, decided to

call the city and report the Rambler as an abandoned vehicle. The sourpuss bitch hadn’t

even said hello, and didn’t bother to ask if it was our car.
So bless the wicked shrew’s heart, the Rambler was tagged and we had to move it in 24

hours or risk having it towed to a yard where we’d have to pay a few hundred bucks in

legalized extortion money to get it back.

So I called J.R. and told him my problem.

“I got room in my pen, just have it towed over here,” he said.

That’s what was great about J.R. He might have been a slow working mechanic, but he

did good work and always tried to help. He wasn’t even going to charge for storage.

So we had the Rambler towed. Our pissy new neighbor watched from her driveway in

feigned innocence as the Rambler’s back end was hooked up by the big yellow tow truck

and driven away to J.R.’s.

Elena kept her routine of taking the bus to her job, which was only 10 minutes away.

Months passed, and we took a three-week trip to Europe. We returned completely blissed

out from our adventures. Just back from the airport late at night, the phone rang as we

pulled our bags through the front door.

I grabbed the phone.

“It’s J.R.,” said the voice.

I honestly couldn’t remember who J.R. was.

“Who?” I said.

“It’s J.R., the mechanic. Your car is ready.”

“What car?” I wondered aloud.

“The Rambler,” he said. “I found an axle for it and it’s ready to go.”

“Oh yeah… Wow, OK,” I said. “We’ll come by and get it.”

We got a ride over to his shop the next day, and J.R. gave us the key and didn’t charge us

much at all, considering he’d stored the thing, found the obscure part on some junkyard

Rambler, and installed it. The guy was a prince.

J.R. had parked the newly drive-able Rambler in his alley. Elena got in the drivers seat

and I piled into the passenger side. She hadn’t driven in months, and was nervous about

it. She started up the Rambler and carefully put it in reverse, as if the car might blow up if

she didn’t put it in reverse, just so. It kicked into reverse and she backed out slowly with

her foot on the brake, and immediately hit a telephone pole. Despite the fact that it was
clearly behind and a little bit over from the right back bumper, neither of us had noticed it

was there.

“WHAT WAS THAT?” I said, looking at Elena like what had just happened was

impossible. We got out to look at the damage. The good thing was that the Rambler, like

all other American cars of its day, had a bumper and body metal made with fucking thick

steel. So thick, that it took a serious collision with some other very hard surface to put a

dent in it. Like a telephone pole. The telephone pole pushed the right side of the rear

bumper up a bit, but that was it. So we got back into the Rambler, laughing at how

neither one of us even noticed the pole was where it was before we got into the car. Jesus,

our trip had really put us in a “who cares?” mode. Any other time and we would have

been yelling at each other.

One day, Elena called me from work at the end of the day.

“The Rambler’s been stolen!” she said, panic in her voice.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who the hell is going to steal the Rambler? It’s just not the kind

of car somebody who steals cars would want.”

“Well I went out to where I parked it this morning, and now it’s gone.”
After making a few calls we found out the Rambler had been towed because the lovely

and dutiful campus parking police made note that it didn’t have a current registration

sticker on its license plate. The DMV, it turns out, had sent one to Elena months before.

But she forgot all about the need to actually put it on the plate.

So we drove to the car impound yard that pays the highest kickbacks to campus cops for

towed cars, and found the Rambler way in the back of the muddy lot in a jagged chorus

line of junky looking cars. To get it free, we had to pay the fat, bored, cigarette smoke-

spewing, spandex-wearing lady cashier $500.

Elena eventually decided to buy a new car, so that meant she had to sell the Rambler after

10 years of sort of tolerable service.

She ran an ad in the paper, and after a couple of weeks got no responses. Then she parked

it near a busy street, and put a FOR SALE, $500, OBO sign in its windshield. Almost

immediately, she had two interested buyers. The first was a thin young guy with a

pronounced lisp and insistent tone. The second was a tall, big-boned, fat-faced gal who

wore a lumberjack shirt and looked like she could do fine as a pro football linebacker.

The guy said he wanted it for cheap transportation around town. The gal said she liked to

work on old Ramblers with her dad and that she wanted it to tinker with.
The guy ended up outbidding the gal for the rights to buy the Rambler for $700. After

driving it for 10 years, Elena ended up with $200 more than she paid for it, or about a 10

years’ supply of motor oil.

Considering she never had to make a car payment over those years for a car that for the

most part did its job, it had served its purpose with dignity. All it ever asked for was a

few regular guzzlings of 30-weight to keep from blowing up.

Buelah’s house

I’d just transferred to Long Beach State University in Southern California and needed a

place to live. The student housing office had a recipe box file of possible rooms to rent

from area homeowners. I found one card written in old-fashioned handwriting. It was

written slowly with plenty of loops. “Room to rent to male college student. Kitchen

privileges, $60 a month.”

I called the number and an old lady answered. “You cane come over and see it now, if

you’d lahk,” she said with a drawl.

So I drove there. The modest Spanish-style white stucco home with red tile roof was in a

well-manicured middle class Long Beach neighborhood.

Buelah Jones was 83 years old. Tiny, wrinkled, with white hair and glasses, she walked

stooped, with the top of her back curved over. But she had spunk, a twinkle in her eye.

She showed me the back bedroom where I would stay. A small yard of lawn bordered by

flowers was visible through the window. The place was clean with old hardwood floors.

Another student rented the other bedroom, she said, but he wasn’t in just then.

And another student knocked at the front door, and said he was interested. “Especially for

the price,” he said.

I liked the place. So I told Mrs. Jones right there, “I’ll take it.”

She told the guy who looked like Jackson Browne to check with her neighbor Mrs.

Caswell, who she thought might be open to renting out one of her bedrooms.

Mrs. Jones showed me the refrigerator shelf where I could put my food, and cupboard

space for cans and dry goods. The kitchen was small, with painted wood cabinets, an old

fashioned white upright oven and range, a steel and Formica table and two chairs with

gray plastic cushioned seats and backs.

After I moved in I got to know Mrs. Jones. She grew up in Texas and had married a

businessman in the tire business. She showed me a black and white photograph of him in

her bedroom. He looked like an old-time back room dealmaker. Big and burly he had on

a wool suit, fedora and was smoking a cigar. For years he worked out of Mexico, and

there, Mrs. Jones lived in luxury and was pampered by servants.

“Ah don’t cook,” she’d drawl in her Texas accent. “The only thing I cun make is lemon

merange pie. That’s it!”

But when her husband died 25 years earlier, this kept woman decided what she would do

to make her way alone. She bought the house in Long Beach, and to pay expenses, began

renting out her two spare bedrooms to college men. She was determined to remain

independent.

“Ah won’t take woman roomers,” she declared. “Too many problems.”

She didn’t charge much, just enough to pay for any incidental expenses. While she

charged me $65 a month, she told me she might have to raise it to $70 at some point.

Rent everywhere else at the time was a lot more.

She drove an old baby blue Rambler, and only used it to drive downtown every month to

meet with her girlfriends and play cards at the women’s city club.
For dinner she’d heat up TV dinners, then in her living room set the stuff on a tray

between her recliner and her TV – pushed right up close for easier viewing of her

favorite. The Lawrence Welk Show.

After she finished eating, she’d sit back, and immediately fall asleep, her head cocked

back against the doily-topped chair, her mouth wide open. But she never snored.

On her stove was an ancient, rusted out teakettle.

“Ah caint understand wha mah coffee always tastes so BAD!” she told me.

“Buy a new teakettle,” I said.

She cocked her head, turned and walked off.

Every time she bitched about her bad coffee, I’d tell her the teakettle was the problem.

Finally she bought a new one. Then she marveled at how great her coffee tasted.

Mrs. Jones had a phone in her hallway but didn’t allow her roomers to use it. She was

worried they’d run up a bill and she’d be stuck paying it.

I told her I really needed to use the phone on occasion. “What’s the big deal?” I asked.

“I’ll keep the calls local.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. She refused.

“Wait a minute. If you let me use the phone, when the bill comes, we can go over it, and

I’d pay you for any of my calls.”

She mulled that over for a bit.

“Okay,” she said.

When she saw I had beer in the fridge one time, she made a stink.

“You caint have beer in my cooler,” she said.

I told her it wasn’t going to be a problem with me. I told her if it ever caused a problem,

then it would be reasonable to ban beer from the fridge.

She thought about it, looking up at me with her mouth hanging open.

“Okay,” she said.

Doug was student in the other bedroom. He had hair down to his shoulders, a beard, and

smoked Marlboros. He and Mrs. Jones didn’t get along.

In fact, frustrated over his surly, condescending attitude, she eventually kicked him out.

But before she did, Doug and I regularly barbecued meat on the back step with a hibachi.

We grilled steaks, made pizzas in the oven, tossed together salads and ate plenty.

Mrs. Caswell, the tall round old lady next door, who always seemed to be wearing a moo-

moo, apparently didn’t like our regular barbecues on the driveway that bordered the side

of her house. She told Mrs. Jones that the hibachi barbecues were illegal. And that sent

Mrs. Jones into a panic.

“You bowahs caint barbecue anymore, it’s ILLEGAL,” she declared.

We couldn’t believe it. We tried to tell her the barbecuing wasn’t an outlaw activity. But

she wouldn’t have any of it. All she knew was she didn’t want any trouble with the police

for illegal barbecuing.

Finally, Doug called the local fire station.

“I’m living in a house with a senior citizen who’s under the impression that barbecuing

with a hibachi on the concrete along the side of the house is illegal,” he announced over

the phone. “Can you set her straight?”

He handed the phone over to the scared Mrs. Jones. She grabbed the phone. “Is it legal?”

she hissed into the receiver, her lips tight.

We watched her face turn from fear to serenity as the fireguy smoothed her over. She

hung up the phone and looked at us.

“Okay,” she said.

Meanwhile, James, the kid who was looking for a place to rent the same day I was, had

gotten a room next door at Mrs. Caswell’s house.

“There’s not a stick of furniture in the place,” he said. “I’m sleeping on the floor in my

sleeping bag.”

Turns out Mrs. Caswell had been in the hospital a few months earlier and the prognosis

for whatever she had was death. During that time, her family sold all the furniture in her

house, and was just about to put the house up for sale. But Mrs. Caswell recovered. And

when she came home, she walked into a house of empty rooms.
Now, she had James as a roomer. About three months after he moved in, Doug and I

asked him what he paid for rent. He just laughed.

Mrs. Caswell had probably forgotten to ask for any money, and he, being one of the

cheapest people on the planet -- something we discovered later -- hadn’t volunteered to

pay anything.

“How is it over there at Caswells?” I asked him. “She seems a little off. Whenever she

sees Doug, for some reason she calls him Gary.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of like talking to a dog,” said James. “A lot of stuff just goes over her

head. She asked me if I’d take her to visit her brother in the hospital and I told her I

would. But then I forgot all about it. I got back to the house one night and she’s all

dressed up at the door with her coat and purse and says ‘Are you ready to take me to see

my brother?’ So I said ‘Sure, sure,’ and I turn around and walk back to the Volkswagen.

I’d just smoked a joint and when she gets in she says, ‘What’s that burning rope smell?’”

“Jesus, you probably got her high.”

One morning I found somebody had tried to hot wire the ignition of my Chevy that had

been parked on the street. I asked Mrs. Jones if I could park in her driveway but she said

no. But she suggested I ask her old buddy Mrs. Shakeshaft around the corner who got in-

home nurse care, but never drove anywhere. Turned out it was fine with 90-something
Mrs. Shakeshaft, so I started parking there. After awhile she was moved to a local

convalescent hospital, and I asked James if he wanted to walk over with me and visit her.

We walked into this place, which smelled like people peed anywhere they wanted, early

and often. I got the number of Mrs. Shakeshaft’s room and James and I walked down the

halls of the stinky place, getting small glimpses into some of the rooms of the poor

patients waiting out their times to depart.

I turned into Mrs. Shakeshaft’s room to see an old pale dead-eyed woman sitting up in

bed with her mouth open.

“Hello Mrs. Shakeshaft!” I said loudly just in case she was deaf. The woman didn’t

respond, just stared at me with her watery eyes, mouth hanging open.

James left the room and cracked up in the hall..

I followed him. “Are you sure that’s her?” he laughed.

“I hope not. If it is, she’s gone downhill fast.”

I checked the front desk and got the right room, and was able to visit the real Mrs.

Shakeshaft. She was a helluva lot perkier, and could speak and hear.
But I couldn’t leave the place fast enough.

“If ever I get to the point where I have to go live in one of those places,” I told James.

“I’ll leave instructions to for somebody to shoot me first.”

Most of the time I studied in my room at Mrs. Jones, but I had a little TV and my stereo.

Once I played a Cheech and Chong record and had it on a little loud.

The bit on the record re-enacted an exchange between an anxious dope deliverer banging

on a door and a massively stoned guy inside not responding well. The door banging

sounded live on the speakers.

“Whose there?” asks the wasted Chong.

“It’s me, Dave, I got the stuff, open up.”

“Who?” asks Chong.

“Dave, I got the stuff, let me in.”

“Dave?”

“Yeah, Dave.”
Long pause. “Dave’s not here.”

This routine repeats, and I hear Mrs. Jones react right on cue when she hears the

pounding on the door coming from the speakers. She’s almost deaf and refuses to wear a

hearing aid. What I hear next is: “BammBammBamm, It’s me, Dave, I got the stuff, open

up.”

And right on cue, Mrs. Jones yelled out “Who’s there?”

Then she heard Cheech’s plea again. And in harmony with Chong, she says, “Who?”

To convince a skeptical Doug that this really happened, the next time he was around, I

cued up the record on the stereo. We left the door to my bedroom open and hid in the

closet.

Sure enough, it made her wander to the back of the house, yelling “Whose there?” We

couldn’t keep quiet and fell out of the closet laughing.

“Ha ha! The joke’s on me!” she shouted.

Although I don’t think she liked what we did, she took it all in good stride and didn’t kick

us out. But she eventually gave Doug the boot. He was rude to Mrs. Jones’ good friend
Eddy, calling her Schmeddy, and Mrs. Jones had had enough. She told him he was out of

there.

“You can’t fire me!” Doug yelled at her.

But she held her ground and he moved out.

Vintage Vegas meets Big Bob

When I was about 8 or 9, my friend’s parents planned a long Vegas weekend. They were

our neighbors when we lived in LA, in Sherman Oaks. They phoned us at Tahoe and

asked my parents if I could join them to keep their only son, Vince, occupied, most likely

while they drank and gambled.

For Vince and me, it was a great adventure to go to what was then a much less glamorous

Las Vegas Strip. Still, Vegas was a snazzy, cool daddy kind of place for gamblers to try

their luck. The four of us, Vince’s dad Bob, his mom Nancy, and we boys drove off in

Bob’s big black Caddie, heading to Vegas from their North Hollywood apartment.
Big Bob was a tall, big-chested man. His hair was jet black and slick with generous

palmfuls of Vitalis. Old Spice was his aftershave. My mother always said Big Bob had

“the constitution of a horse.” Which I later learned meant the guy could drink anybody

under the table, get up early the next day and sell more cars than anyone else on the lot.

He smoked filter-less Pall Malls and he chased women. Nancy seemed, at least on the

surface, happy to respond to his sporting as if it were one of his most endearing traits.

“Oh, that’s just Bahhhubb,” my mother would mimic her saying.

Nancy was an exotically attractive olive-skinned brunette, with a husky voice. She liked

to throw back her head and laugh. She had kind of an Anne Bancroft in “The Graduate”

thing going on. Like Bob, she had no aversion to the sauce, but she didn’t smoke. She

called both Bob and Vince “babe,” and was nice to me every time I saw her. Her family

had money, but Bob and Nancy never seemed to have much. They’d lived in a house

when we were neighbors in Sherman Oaks a few years earlier when Vince and I were

toddlers. But now they were living in a run of the mill apartment a few miles away,

where everything seemed to be painted beige.

Bob was a hustler from Detroit, and for years sold shiny new cars at a big lot called Felix

Chevrolet. He was a born salesman, street smart and liked the image of being a little bit

shady. But he took pains to show he knew the finer things in life. He looked at himself as

a man with style, a class act. “Class,” in fact, was one of his favorite words.
He considered himself an authority on the subject, and freely pointed it out whenever he

saw somebody lacking it.

“Hey, show some class, for chrissakes,” he’d say out of the side of his mouth.

Bob snapped his fingers a lot, wore snazzy open collar dress shirts and gold cufflinks, a

gold chain, a diamond studded pinkie ring. He was quick to flash a big white-teeth smile,

flecked with gold dental work. He often winked whenever he was up to something. He’d

flick his silver lighter open to fire up a fresh Pall Mall, then clack it shut as he winced

into his first puff. Bob was a fast and easy charmer of anybody he wanted to hustle. To

him, skirt chasing was what a real man did, married or not. Didn’t make any difference to

a player. And there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that he was a player.

We crossed into the Nevada desert toward Vegas with the air conditioning on full blast.

We sped through Needles and the barren desert blurred by as the unforgiving summer sun

broiled the horizon ahead into liquid ripples. Vince and I jawed in the back seat.

“We’re getting damn low on gas,” Bob muttered, his voice edgy. It got our attention. I’d

never heard that tone from Bob, who’d always been a big joker around me.

We still had a lot of desert to cross before getting to Vegas. Now we were all nervous.
“Chrissakes, a LOTTA MILES, OK?” he snapped bitterly after Nancy asked how far off

Vegas was.

Suddenly it was quiet. Bob looked like a ticking time bomb. Any idle chatter was sure to

set him off. He twitched in the chilled air blowing through the car. His mind couldn’t

shake the thought of getting stuck along the desert highway without any gas. He got

increasingly ticked the more he pictured the embarrassment of it all: Flagging down a car

to hitch a ride out of the middle of nowhere and 198 degrees, to a gas station back in

Bumfuck Nevada and 210 degrees, all to get a goddam can of gas and hitch back to the

stupid Caddie.

All that would ruin his silk shirt. That was just for starters. It was a humiliation he wasn’t

ready for. He hated people who ran out of gas in the desert or anywhere else, for that

matter. Anybody that did that was a schmuck, because it only happened to schmucks and

clowns too stupid to keep an eye on the gas gauge.

But he could feel himself getting dangerously close to becoming a schmuck and a clown

in front of his wife and kid, and his kid’s friend. Who would sure as hell tell his parents

all about the whole goddam clown act.

But Vince and I caught a quick glimmer of hope that -- just maybe --we wouldn’t have to

see Big Bob blow a gasket. A roadside sign ahead said: “Las Vegas 13 miles.”
Bob saw it but stayed sullen. Vince and I tried to figure out how much time equaled 13

miles.

We made it into Vegas, but Bob didn’t say a word until we finally pulled into the parking

lot of the neon light encrusted Thunderbird Hotel. He parked the Caddie, threw his door

open and whistled into the stifling nuclear heat.

“GODFREY DANIEL, MOTHER OF PEARL!” he roared, flashing his big smile over at

Nance. “We’re here, babe!”

“Ohhh, Bohhub!” said Nancy, smiling and rolling her eyes. She, like us, was very

relieved. We were all more than ready to take a pee.

Bob and Nancy hung around the huge Thunderbird hotel pool during the day. Vince and I

played with our little matchbox metal cars, splashed and hollered as we played like we

were scuba divers finding and blowing up bombs at the bottom of the pool.

That night Bob said we could order anything we wanted from room service for dinner.

We ordered platters of deep fried food over the phone as Big Bob came into our room

and poured himself a generous tumblerful of bourbon and rocks from his own bottle.

Having witnessed boozers in my family, I could tell Bob was already half in the bag. But

he was playful and a lot of fun.

He lowered his shoulder to Vince. “C’mon champ, hit me with your best jab!” Vince

stepped up and popped him a good one. He reeled back. “Good hit Vince! Atta babe!”

Then he dipped his shoulder at me. “Show me what ya got, kid!”

I really wanted to impress Big Bob. So I gathered myself and threw a right hand punch

with all I had. But it felt like I hit a padded concrete wall, and my wrist didn’t stay

locked. It flipped up, and even though I hit Bob’s shoulder hard, my knuckles and wrist

were on fire.

“Jeez, he said a jab,” Vince chided.

“Yeah, take it easy,” slurred Bob. “Don’t wanna hurt yourself.”

I felt stupid, but then our room service dinner came. Bob snapped off some Polaroids of

Vince and me eating golden greasy shrimp dipped in cocktail sauce. We felt like kings.

The next morning back at the pool, Vince bet Bob five bucks that he wouldn’t jump off

the high dive board. Bob was hung over from a long night of booze-fueled high stakes

blackjack. He’d been playing at a fever pitch for hours, riding a hot streak that had the pit

bosses hawking his chip-stack bets. But that night, nobody, not even the house, was going

to beat Big Bob. He couldn’t miss.

He half snoozed in his poolside lounge chair, drinking in the warm glow of victory. He

was rich, thinking himself a legitimate Vegas high roller that caught the house by

surprise. He’d burst into our room at 4 that morning, with a blood- curdling shriek: “I

WON!”

He told us what he won, but I don’t remember how much it was. I went back to sleep.

By the pool, upon hearing Vince’s challenge, Bob stirred to life. He got to his feet, and

stretched his big frame like a grizzly moseying out of his winter cave and blinking

groggily into warm springtime sun. He re-tied his white swim shorts and winked at

Vince.

“You’re on, babe,” he said with his cocky smile.

This was something that never happened in my family. I watched it unfold with my

mouth open. Even Vince’s eyes got big as Bob sauntered over to the high-dive ladder and

climbed it deliberately to the top board. Which was very, very high. Scary high. Big Bob

was just bluffing to get a rise out of us. No way was he going to do it!

But Bob was still riding high on his killing the night before. He felt like King Kong on

cocaine, and he was going to show us something we’d never forget.

He counted his steps to the end of the board and bounced lightly, surveying the panorama

of hotel and pool below. He paced to the back of the high-dive board, turned and blew

out a deep breath. He leaned into a running start and powered into a high, end-of-board

jump with one knee up, arms extended upward, eyes straight ahead. He bent the board

down deep on his plant, and in turn, it flung his 250 pounds high up into the dry blue

desert sky, bow-wow-wowing violently after his launch. Gravity then gathered him in

and Bob aimed himself arms-first toward the big deep pool below.

Vince and I were riveted, mouths agape. But Bob didn’t knife into the water at a near

vertical entry. He didn’t make a dinky little splash like those Olympic divers on TV

always did. He was much too slanted when he hit the water, so his chest and stomach

took a full-force smack. It was an ugly bellyflop; a thunderous whitewater collision with

the pool surface, as if a full-sized Frigidaire had been dropped onto it from a high-flying

helicopter.

Bob’s spectacular entry got the stunned attention of every person in or around the pool.

And though he didn’t get one, he definitely deserved a standing ovation. So what if his

dive had all the grace of a snorting bull plowing through a plate glass window? At least

he had the balls to do it. For a little while, anyway.

It seemed like forever before we saw Bob’s soaked, black-haired head rise from the froth.

He spit out some water.

Nancy called out semi-worriedly from her lounge chair, “Bohhhub? Are you OK?”

Bob grunted. We were speechless as we watched him limply drift toward our side of the

pool. Bob dragged himself out with Vince pulling on one arm, and staggered dripping

wet to his lounge chair. He eased his tall frame down gingerly and winced.

He had just absorbed the equivalent blunt-force trauma of a head-on collision with a

Mack truck, which, just for good measure, no doubt included a nice whack in the balls.

But Bob didn’t want anybody to see he was kissing the canvas and down for the count.

We knew, though. And we were impressed at how tough he really was. He showed us. To

this day, I’ve never seen a braver act by someone with a hangover.

After his second all-nighter in the casino, Bob again burst into our room at 4 a.m., and

once again scared us out of dreamless sleep and into heart-pounding discombobulation.

“I WON!” he bellowed lustily, as if he’d single handedly beat the crap out of every

demon in his booze-tweaked brain.

The next day he asked Vince if he and I would sleep that night in the next room with

Nance.
Vince knew what he was up to, and wouldn’t have any of it. He knew Bob was scheming

on a skirt he was chasing in the casino. When Vince shook his head, Bob started in on

him. His voice was soothing and low.

“Fer crissakes Vince, show some class,” he pleaded, his voice almost a whisper. “Sleep in

your mother’s room tonight. C’mon babe! Can’t ya just do me this one favor? Just this

one time…”

He kept on.

But Vince held his ground. We slept in our room that night, our last of the weekend.

And Bob made his last 4 a.m. room-rattling entry.

“I LOST!” he wailed.

The hard luck demons kicked his ass that night. But he assured us he still had some

winnings left over to pay for the trip.

And we believed him.

On the drive out, Bob took us to see Hoover Dam, and angrily declared “I’m not going on

the damn dam tour! Let’s just take some pictures.”

Bob and Nancy ended up divorced, and the last I heard, Bob had re-married the daughter

of a famous Old Hollywood starlet. He was driving a powder blue Mercedes convertible,

Vince reported several years later, and was living the life in Malibu. But he’d had to quit

his beloved drinking and smoking on doctor’s orders. Nancy has since passed away, but I

lost contact with Vince and got no more Bob updates.

The last time I saw Vince I asked him how his dad always seemed to make out pretty

well. Big Bob came from humble beginnings, but he always had plenty of money in his

pocket. Turned out, he had figured out the easiest way to make that happen. It was

simple. Don’t marry down. Don’t marry equal. Always, but always, marry up.

“Well, he always told me,” said Vince. “You’ll never get anywhere hangin’ around poor

people!”