Rematch (overwrought prose edition!)

My esteemed associate Will Smallman has agreed once again to join me in opening the running season this imminent spring in the spirit of deadly competition.  As with last year, Will and I will, on the morning of this coming 13th of April, race each other through the dales, hills and treacherous ghettoes of Central Park and, in doing so, play our pawnish parts as insurgents in humanity’s rebellious beatback against the arrogant intransigence of cancer.

We will exert ourselves as such for a distance never before attempted by adult humans: Four miles, ladies and gentleman — four unpredictable, sweaty and yes, unimaginably dangerous miles.  They say that, after even two miles, a man starts to hallucinate, seeing demons and becoming filled with the desire to gnaw on his own flesh.  I pay these rumors no mind, and am prepared to put myself through any such peril.  Last year my brimming pre-raceal confidence was unequivocally vindicated.

This year the stakes are even higher: we have disinherited our wives (and, in Will’s case, child), and named each other as sole beneficiaries on our respective life insurance policies.  Thus, if one of us should stumble and pay the ultimate price in attempting to secure, but falling eternally short of, the tawny sweetness of victory, the other shall not be left unconsoled in the ironic solitude of triumph for lack of a big pile of cash to spend on bitches and boats.            

Flaps down

I have become addicted to the Google Earth Flight Simulator.  (If you have a Mac, just hit apple-alt-A to get in; the rest of the world you know where to find it if you’re interested.)  The past few nights I have been sitting in front of the computer, having taken off in an F-16 from fake JFK and trying to land at fake LaGuardia, or taking off from fake Meigs Field and trying to find fake O’Hare, without crashing.  I need to get back to reading books.          

Apparently, sometimes I think my life is a Wes (or is it P.T.?) Anderson movie

I went out to New Jersey to spend the day with my dad, who, at 79 and living alone, is quite a bit slowed down from his fiery days when he was in his fifties, during my childhood.  We sat at his dining room table for three hours, where, on his new (and first–a Christmas gift from his older children) laptop, I showed him some things about how to use his gmail, helped him get his credit report and gave him a few other basic pointers on using the internet.  For dinner he bought me a steak at T.G.I. Friday’s.  Afterwards, we reparked the car and killed a few minutes in the Barnes & Noble in the same shopping center as the restaurant, and then he drove me to the train station and we said goodbye.

I typically dread the return travel from the ‘burbs, especially now that we live in Brooklyn. From Somerville, New Jersey to Brooklyn, New York — a mere 46 miles, according to mapquest, it will take two commuter trains, two subway lines and at least two hours to get home.  Most distastefully, the midpoint of my journey is the empty Nothing-in-Being that is Penn Station–a charmless basement which perpetually smells, nauseatingly, like stale cotton candy, and is filled on a Sunday evening with weekend tourist transients — who look like refugees from the theoretical idea of “fun” — from points north, east and west constantly accumulating in preparation for their return home.  My annoyance at having to pass through all of this was abated slightly when the A train pulled up quickly, and I got a seat.

As I’ve groused before, I hate it when people sit down next to me on the train in a space between me and another person that, while technically wide enough to fit their ass, will not do so without infringing on the meager elbow freedom that made sitting down look so attractive to me two stops ago, before they got on.  At West Fourth, a man got on and sat down on the end of the bench, leaving exactly that kind of space between me and him.  He made a motion that signaled “sit in that space” to the person who followed him onto the train, who haltingly obliged the invitation.   I knew right away I didn’t like this kid, and I tried to send subtle psychological messages by mildly scowling in another direction, and keeping my weight shifted to my left, towards him, so that he would have to realize that he’s pushing me while trying to find a comfortable position for himself.  He picked his folded wet umbrella up towards his lap a few times, and, in doing so dripped rainwater on my knees.  I flared my eyes and jerked my head towards him, without attempting eye contact but just enough to convey “Try that aGAIN, motherfucker.”  For breaking the simple rules of urban decorum, I anonymously hated this anonymous boy.  Within a minute, he seemed to have relented from his wiggling and was listening to his iPod.

And then his father, a late forties-ish man, balding, tan-skinned, with a build that was fit but with a middle-age-earned heft, started laying into him, out of nowhere, and forcefully.  ”You need to start having passion for something in your life other than just movies and music.  If you would only approach other things in your life with the same enthusiasm as those two things, you would be much better off.”  The kid–about 13 or 14, pale, chunky, ugly in the face in an Augustus Gloop sort of way, responded by whispering something to his father that I couldn’t hear.  In fact, I’m not sure that he just wasn’t mouthing the lyrics of what he was listening to directly into the man’s ear.  I could see that “Shoop” by Salt-n-Pepa was displayed on his iPod screen.

The father, to allay slightly his own irritation, pulled out a thick dog-eared paperback, which resembled the compact mystery paperbacks that my own father fills his capaciously solitary days devouring, and quickly forgetting, such that he has told me that several times he gets halfway through a book before it occurs to him that he has read it before.  I was simultaneously astounded by the comically unreasonable position this man seemed to have vis-a-vis his teenage son’s interest in popular entertainment and intrigued about what the father of a kid listening to an old Salt-n-Pepa song is reading, so I strained my eyes to try to see the title.  I couldn’t make it out, as the man’s metal bookmark, which seemed like a tieclip, was pressed directly down the middle of the page and across the title header above the text. He moved just briefly enough for me to see from the back cover that he was (and is still now, judging how far he was into it just an hour ago) reading Little Children.  The son was definitely singing into his father’s ear now.

Then, suddenly, sforzando, violence and explosions, the man laid into his son again.   “I swear to you, Scott*, you’re driving me fucking insane.  You have got to have something in your life other than this fucking music and movies. . . . ” He continued on like this for about thirty seconds.  It was not a warm exchange.  It was not a tender fatherly moment of wise concerned guidance.  He kept saying “fucking” to the kid out of emphasis and anger. It seemed like a nightmarishly mean boss ripping into a subordinate.  Hushed, hoarse, shamefully: “. . . .Fucking ridiculous, Scott — you need to develop the resolve to have something in your life instead of this focus on just two things — music and movies — either that, or develop some abilities along either line.  But you’re not doing that — you’re not developing any abilities.  You need to have something else in your life.  I swear to fucking God, Scott.” 

I was sad and angry.  I anonymously loved this anonymous boy.  I couldn’t, in the comfort of my own skin, where I sit now, fathom how empty and lost and confusing and wrong that must feel to be that boy and to have your father be that way to you.  Maybe the kid does just listen to music and watch movies all the time.  Maybe not even good music or movies! It doesn’t matter — he’s   just     a      kid.  And maybe he’s taking it all in right now, and he’ll someday be a genius director or a sad, troubled troubadour who stabs us with poignant, painful beauty or maybe a PA on American Pie 11: Health Class or a producer of ebullient nonsense pop with no lasting cultural value but which does lift the spirits, however fleetingly, of the contractors and hotel maids and and hairstylists and short-order cooks who hear it played on their portable worksite radios in the rotation on the shitty corporate radio stations we love to openly scorn.  Or maybe he’ll just work at Wal-Mart and hang out with his underachieving friends in their parents’ basements playing video games and smoking pot through every weekend until he’s 38.  Or maybe he’ll grow up into something that will make the father ball-splittingly proud.   It doesn’t matter.  Right now he’s  just     a      kid.  It made me immensely sad that a father would give his son shit about being fixated on things that he finds beautiful and interesting and compelling–when he could just as easily be trapped too early in drugs, or filled with hatred towards himself, or lost so many other ways.  But there’s just no reason for him to be berated the way he was.  

I wanted to turn my head and tell the kid that he shouldn’t listen to his father; that he was wrong.  But that wouldn’t really work, obviously, since it would focus the issue on the impropriety of my meddling, rather than what the boy needed to hear.  After all, maybe there is some objective validity to the father’s advice that the son should apply his enthusiasm for music and movies more broadly throughout his life–my point is that the father had no business tearing into his son the way he did.  Plus I’m a non-confrontational pussy, so it would summon the wrong kind of fuck-all emotional courage for me to actually make my point to the two of them explicitly.    So I decided to write something down.  In my coat pocket, I always carry around a pen and elegant little notebook, for jotting down ideas, errand reminders, or anything at all.

I held it open in my lap for what seemed like an excruciatingly long time–about four stops.  I wanted him to see it so that he’d know that it’s ok that he listens to “Shoop” on repeat, that it’s ok for him to watch Harold & Kumar or god-knows-whatever-it-is over and over.  I wanted him to know that he’s not a fuckup–that his father doesn’t know what he’s talking about and doesn’t have any right to treat him like that or say those things to him if he’s not willing to love him and accept him for who he is first.  That he doesn’t have to grow up confused about the difference between affection and rage.

I kept it flat on my lap until my stop, my heart racing, afraid that at any moment the father was going to be distracted from his Little Children long enough to notice that I was trying to send encoded messages to his son that he’s full of shit.  I started to prepare an alibi–negotiating within my subconscious what answer I could give that would avoid an ugly confrontation but still maintain some integrity for my message — “I’m just reading something I think is true” was the weak, but serviceable response I settled upon.  

One stop before mine, two guys got on the train with conga drums.  Normally I’m annoyed by the interruption, but this time I was immensely pleased that these two guys were plopped right at Scott’s father’s feet, audaciously and loudly doing something that made them happy, in the hopes that some, or just one, would find the same thing beautiful and reward them for their efforts.  I wanted to dramatically give them a dollar and make an arrogantly dead face at the father while doing so, but they didn’t finish their first song before my stop, and I chickened out.

I can’t tell if Scott ever actually read what I wrote–his head seemed to bop in my direction for a second or two, but it wasn’t clear that he digested or even noticed it, and our eyes never met.      



*I don’t really remember if his name was Scott, and obviously some of the father’s rant is paraphrased, although I guarantee you he said “fucking” a lot.  In case you’re wondering, I have considered the possibility that the man is not Scott’s father, but is just some guy dating his mom, in which case fuck him too.    

I should really have more stories from my law firm days to supplement these.

I’ve started to really like Pellegrino sparkling water, which I feel is irrepressibly bourgey of me.  It’s like beer or soda, without the bloated feeling after!

One thing I enjoy about the New York subway system is the vestigial bathrooms.  You can still see them on the IND lines; occasionally a door will be open, allowing a peek into what must have been at some point, probably during the glorious days when John Lindsay was mayor, a marvelous convenience (or perhaps mainly just a place for anonymous gay sexual encounters–what do I know?).  Back in the year 2000 when I was a journalism intern at StreetWise in Chicago, I interviewed David McReynolds, then running as the Socialist Party candidate for president.  It was, as my editor put it kindly after reviewing the transcript, “not the world’s greatest interview,” especially since I was so elated to be interviewing a presidential candidate (however impossible the candidacy) while simultaneously aware of the irrelevance of my effort that I barraged him with a series of disparate and inane questions about a grab-bag of topics from abortion to Mumia abu-Jamal (you’ve seen the t-shirts demanding his freedom) that had much more to do with my own progressive interests at the time than any of his own.  But I do recall that at some point during the interview, when I shut up long enough for McReynolds to make some point about economic inequality, that he said that there were now-shuttered bathrooms in the subway stations where he was from in New York, and that, if he were president, he would open them up again and arrange to pay people $25 an hour to clean them.  That makes sense to me!            

I would just like to say, to all random people throughout the city,

if I hold the doors open for you on the subway, you should say thank you.  

Am I cranky?  It seems cranky of me to write that.   

Super Tuesday Night (I might erase this)

Sitting at home, monitoring the returns by listening to WNYC and clicking refresh on cnn.com (we don’t have a TV), I realize I could never be a political analyst — you’d have to stay sober on a night like this?  Relatedly, isn’t it a tad irresponsible for various media to report that one candidate has 33% and another has 66% of the vote in a state, with the headline that the latter candidate is leading in that particular state, when only 12% of that state’s precincts are reporting?