Lazarus Goldberg

I was getting ready to tank my "three a month" streak of pieces I had going this year, when I decided to poke back into the failed novel of yore to see if there was anything worth poaching. Sure enough, I came across the character of Lazarus Goldberg, the small town's mortician in the novel. As a reminder, the novel was a first-person recollection of a kid growing up in the 70s, mainly noting the goings-on of his older brother George, a troubled rock-and-roll kid. I figured, why not, makes for a reasonable read. And as always with late summer, I feel like I'm running on empty creatively -- happens every year. September will be better. (For the record, I titled each chapter of the novel after a line from a famous 70s rock song.)

****

When you were young, and your heart was an open book

Lazarus Goldberg, Jr. was the mortician's son and George's best friend. His grandfather, a gravedigger Jew in Poland, had fled his homeland in the 1930's, settled in our town, and immediately married a die-hard Irish Catholic woman, who were never too hard to find in our parts. They named their son Lazarus, and he went on to open the first and only funeral parlor in town. Like his father, Lazarus fell hard for a Catholic, this time Italian. They had a son and named him Lazarus Jr.

He was the guiltiest kid I ever knew and got as close as any of us would to George. He had the nickname Bluebeard, which came about through the cruelty of kids. Like anyone else, I had my fair share of zits. A rash here and there, moving over my teenage face like a pack of epidermal nomads, disappearing after a week or two of bad angst and Clearasil pads.

Lazarus was one of those unfortunate kids with permanent acne. Hence the nickname. Regardless of the embarrassing teenage cruelty, the name fit. He wasn't a bad looking kid, with a long, straight nose and flowing black hair. But the acne spread from one cheek bone to the other. He had other nicknames. Pizza Face. Zit Boy. Abe Lincoln. But somehow Bluebeard stuck. If some kid had been born with no legs, no one would have called him Stumpy. Lazarus had no control over his face. But I think other kids were grateful that someone else was so heartlessly damned with their minor affliction.

Lazarus couldn't give a shit, and this was his saving grace. Like George, he was once an incredibly sharp junior-high kid who fell into drugs and drinking by sixteen. He had been a model airplane freak and a Trekkie. His bedroom was a monument to Boris Karloff and World War II fighter planes. Werewolves, stukas, vampires, mustangs, Frankenstein monsters and Japanese zeroes. The planes dangled from fishing wire, and the glow-in-the-dark monsters crouched all over his dresser and window sills. At night, Lazarus' room was never pitch black -- he liked his monsters over the bed. He smelled like Tester's glue.

I thought that aspect of his life was enormously cool, but I wasn't too crazy for the Stark Trek infatuation. The rare times my snooty cousin Arthur from Schenectady visited, he and Lazarus hooked up and traded Trekkie information. Vague conversations about conventions; they spoke Klingon. Arthur ate a lot of potato salad and loved the Electric Light Orchestra because they married classical music and rock. He was a smart, bookish kid who worshipped Isaac Asimov. I thought he was a corny loser, as were all kids who got a little too far into Star Trek. Trekkies were KISS fans with brains. Instead of wanting to get laid and ride around in limos, they wanted to grill Leonard Nimoy on the controversial triffid episode.

Kids like this never seemed to care what anyone, especially other kids, thought about them. This trait served Lazarus well as his face changed colors. Lazarus would be walking down the street. He'd pass a bunch of guys hanging out, and they wouldn't say a word. A few steps away, one of them would grumble, "Argh, matey, there goes Bluebeard." Lazarus would turn to see who had said it, and all of them would look away as if no one had.

If that weren't enough, he used to take crap for being Jewish, although his family were non-practicing Catholics. It was the surname -- his grandfather, after running from the threat of Hitler, was too proud to change it. His family was wealthy by our standards, but by no means greedy or flashy. I could hear the parents talking through the kids, calling Lazarus, behind his back, another gold-digging Kike, although the kids had no exposure, positive or negative, to any kind of Jewish culture. Normally, kids who inherited their parents' anti-Jewish problems would express it with a stony, intentional silence in Lazarus' presence.

He was destined to be an outsider. George wasn't, but converts appear more zealous than true believers. George told me how he used to go over and help Lazarus build those small boats inside bottles. They would start out with a clear head, but after an hour or two of inadvertently sniffing glue, they'd both get loopy and conversational. They'd talk about girls, or the lack thereof, and how school was such a bad joke, how many of the students were even bigger assholes than the teachers. George found out that Lazarus didn't know much about rock and roll, aside from the occasional Top Forty song that no one could avoid.

So one day, George invited him up to the attic and broke out his favorite album of the time, Diamond Dogs, by David Bowie. The front half of the cover was a painting of David Bowie all done up in his glitter make-up laying out all spindly and bare chested. The back half of the cover revealed David's lower torso, which was that of a dog's. The album itself was loosely based on George Orwell's book 1984. Heady stuff for glitter rock, and it wouldn't have made it if David Bowie hadn't been so talented. It was George's favorite kind of music -- the kind that could kick your ass, yet make you think.

Once Lazarus heard the title track, he was converted, and it wasn't long before he and George were sniffing glue and lighting those plastic models on fire, recreating the Battle of Britain at the town dump. He was the perfect foil for George. Where George was sarcastic and quick with the put downs, Lazarus let people say too much then be intimidated by his silence. It was only his defense mechanism, but people thought they had to prove themselves to him. He was like his biblical counterpart, stalking the earth in total silence, while everyone stared at his haggard face and wondered what to say.

George called him Laz, for short, because it was rock and roll. The name stuck, although George was one of the few to call him this. Adults called him Lazarus, and other kids called him Bluebeard. Some nicknames were too dead-on. He never was openly offended. In fact, he used to go to Halloween parties as Bluebeard, throwing on an eye patch and gluing a stuffed parrot on the shoulder of his Jimi Hendrix brocade jacket. Without a doubt, he was the smartest kid I knew, in or out of the classroom. Where George would be out in a corn field all night doing mushrooms then flunking a test the next day, Laz would get as high, take the same test, and get an A. Had they been in a band, George would have been the lead singer, and Laz would have been the rhythm guitarist who wrote all the songs.

Whenever Laz found himself in front of a mirror, a place he tried to avoid, he'd pause, take an appraising glance at his reflected image, and murmur, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, what did I ever do to you?"

Most of George's other friends weren't as smart as he was, so he and Laz had an unspoken bond of intelligence. They often debated the true meaning of rock and roll in the attic.

"Rock and roll is art," George would state with a flourish of his hand. Laz would snicker, as would I, and George would throw a Creem magazine at my head.

"George, man," Laz would drawl in his slow voice of reason, "rock and roll is entertainment. Damn good entertainment. Beats the shit out of Larry Ferrari and his magic organ."

Larry Ferrari was a Philadelphia performer who had a television show broadcasting on the ABC affiliate we picked up on cable. He looked like a used-car salesman with slicked-back hair and played Lawrence Welk shit on a Wurlitzer while little girls in tutu’s and senior citizens tapped dance all around him. We once saw him playing at Hershey Park and ran in the other direction.

"Don't put it in a museum, man. It's not a painting. Yeah. It is a way of life. Of looking at the world. But one day, we'll both abandon it."

"Never," George hissed. He was listening to one of those never-ending Yes songs about hobbits and rainbows.

"Never's a long time, man. Don't you think it'd be kind of pathetic if we were listening to the same shit twenty years on?"

Laz was a visionary, but George either didn't believe in his vision or was too afraid to acknowledge it. He predicted the turgid, repetitive quality of AOR radio back when it was still relatively fresh and innovative. That's an easy call to make today, but back then, it was near sacrilege. He loved the music as much as George, but maybe having a mortician for a father made him believe in endings.

He swore he'd never be a mortician, the worst, most morbid job in the world. They lived in the top two floors of a three-story, the bottom floor being the actual funeral parlor, with "the room" in the cellar. "The room" was where Laz's father prepared the corpses for viewing. All kids were forbidden to go anywhere near "the room." From what Laz said, it was more frightening on a sunny day than any graveyard on a foggy night. It was real death. And his father's job was to make real death look somewhat human for the final goodbye.

"What's it like to die, man?" George asked Laz one day as we sat by the apple tree before sun down. Like any other kid, George was fascinated by death, talking about suicide a lot, but never really doing anything about it. He was bright enough to know that everyone got depressed to a certain point. And it passed.

"As if I'm the expert," Laz said. Talking about death didn't make him uptight, but since it was his father's business, it must have seemed old hat. His family lived death.

"No, man. But you told me your dad makes you help out."

I pictured Laz, dressed in a gray hospital gown with a matching face mask, squirming in that cold, fluorescent tomb as his father went over the fine points of applying lipstick to an old woman's cold, dead lips. It struck me that our father did the same with George and me on Saturday mornings by making us help him fix his car. Laz thought for a while before he answered.

"I don't know what death is like. But I can tell you this much, man. Whoever you are is gone. There's a big piece of meat that was your body. I believe in heaven and hell."

People tended to keep quiet when Laz spoke. There were three or four other kids hanging out with us, and they all stopped their conversation to hear his answer.

"What's it like to look in a dead man's eyes?" George continued.

"Like looking at a beat-up, old teddy bear with coat button eyes."

Lazarus smirked, then started laughing at his answer. George laughed along nervously, as did all the other kids.

"You don't feel anything when you look at a dead body, George. I'm sure you can relate to that."

George started howling in laughter. He loved to have Laz put him down, especially in ways other people thought was harsh. It was as if Laz understood his dark side and wasn't afraid to take shots at it. All the other kids thought George was too cynical and intense. Laz had some view of the complete picture, and he didn't feel at all threatened. My parents probably understood him best, in that unspoken, natural way, but they didn't understand rock and roll, which was so much of George's secret heart.

Laz's father was a little strange, but he liked George a lot. He often invited George over for dinner. The man would slip rubber ears and noses from "the room" into a mound of mashed potatoes. Being fascinated with death, George would ask him about his profession, and then spill the gory details to the whole neighborhood during ghost story nights in the summer. Strange, ugly stories of exploding corpses and dead bodies that sat straight up in the coffin and screamed. Laz's father gave George his favorite teenage put-down. Whenever one his friends got too rowdy in public, George would moan, "Man, you're about as subtle as a farting corpse."

For Laz, the worst part of the whole death routine was the idea of make-up. Every corpse put on display at a wake needed that final makeover. Some even needed a shave and a manicure. Laz told us he thought death was the Grim Reaper in a pillbox hat. He rang the door bell with scythe in hand, and exclaimed, "Avon calling!" Once inside, over tea and crumpets, he would do an informal skin-tone test with colored scarves then tear the soul from the lady of the house.

That kind of humor was necessary for a 16-year-old kid to routinely apply rouge to dead faces. Laz and George were so much alike, using gallows humor, rock and roll and cheap drugs to hide from their fathers' hopes. The major difference was when some rock star like Alice Cooper sung a stupid, catchy song like "I Love the Dead," Laz would see right through it. George would believe in it, if not for the meaning, then for the intention.

Naturally, everyone thought George and Laz were lovers. That only seemed to happen with off-center, long-hair, non-athletic guys who spent most of their time alone, like George and Laz. They told jokes that only each other got. So, once again, kids being kids, they had to think of something nasty to cover their own insecurities. Laz seemed to understand that so many kids were narrow-minded assholes, their only saving grace being their youth, which would go one day soon, but it bothered George. He wasn't big or strong enough to run around beating people up. So he got a reputation for getting higher than anyone, and damn near everyone his age seemed to be stoned all the time. Getting high was his sport. The more you could abuse yourself, the closer you could fly to the sun and come back, the stronger your soul was. If that were really the case, George had the soul of a warrior, and most of his friends would gladly die with him in battle.

Laz and George remained friends through those years, but drugs definitely put a distance between them. Laz was a gentle soul who liked pot, mushrooms, and, on a good, peaceful night, maybe some acid, if people with the right head were around. George was a gentle soul with a fighter's heart. So he'd try almost anything -- if heroin had been available, he would have tried it. Luckily, that was far outside our small-town price range and life style. Cocaine wasn't popular yet. Speed, acid, crank, downers. Cheap drugs. It didn't matter. The most amazing thing was people never knew when he was stoned. I did -- he was so much nicer with a head full of acid. But he could snort a few lines of crank, then sit and talk with our mother about her Irish roots for the next two hours, and she'd be flattered that George seemed to care so much about our heritage. This was a kid who found his place in life with the advent of remote control television.

Despite the camaraderie, Laz was such a ghost of a kid. When he was high, he pulled within himself and wouldn't say a word. George said it was like getting stoned with Marcel Marceau. This made him more dangerous, though. Laz was the one who, late at night, would run into a field full of bulls and play matador with a beer-soaked blanket. George once mused that if life were a deck of cards, he'd be King, and Laz would be The Joker, the wild card that could mean nothing or everything.

"No, man, no," Laz slowly laughed, "you got me all wrong. I don't mean that much, but I mean something. If I were a card, I'd be a One-Eyed Jack of Hearts. And, you know, man, in the land of the blind, the One-Eyed Jack is King."

"I thought Knowledge is king," George would goof on him. That was the opening line from a game show called Joker's Wild we watched every night after dinner. A silly game show that none of us would remember if television hadn't pounded it into our heads every night.

"And Lady Luck is queen," Laz would finish the opening line. They'd both crack each other up while all their stoner friends, once again, wouldn't get the joke. Even I got their jokes, four years behind them. It frightened me how either dumb and/or humorless the rest of their friends were.

"That's TV, man," Laz would grumble in his stately baritone, "this is the land of the blind."

****


In the tunnels uptown, the rat's own dream guns him down


Is it sad that so many of us turn out to be what we never wanted to be? I don't mean abandoning the childhood dreams of being a fireman or football hero. I mean hearing a song on a radio when you're fourteen and being so struck that you go out and buy a guitar. Or cutting up in front of your friends and realizing that you have them in tears. How many of us actually turn into rock stars or comedians? Even professional musicians or small-town impresarios? Not many. Sooner or later, it turns into another forgotten dream, more faded than crab grass on a softball field.

Of all the people I know from that time, Lazarus Goldberg Jr. is the one who walked farthest down irony's horseshoe drive way. Until we buried my father, I hadn't realized that he had come home to take over his father's business. He did it quietly, moving back home from New York City, where he had been working as a coroner's assistant. The biggest shock was that his face had healed. Just as Robert Redford managed to be considered sexy even with his acne scars, Lazarus had grown into a darkly handsome man. His black hair was as long as it had been, and the time spent examining death in the city had added an even harder intensity to his deep-set eyes. With age lines and furrows, his face had grown perfect for funerals.

Unfortunately, his wife looked like Tom Petty. It made no sense, other than it kept his string alive of being involved with women who looked like homely male rock stars.

A few days after the funeral, we went out for drinks. Even going casual, he wore a black suit with a skinny black tie. The only sign that he was kicking back was a black pork-pie hat tipped slightly upwards on his head. If Frank Sinatra had been in a heavy metal band, he'd have looked like Lazarus.

"George didn't have much to say," Lazarus said after we ordered beers at the near empty factory bar. It was about an hour after the post-work rush and a few hours before the hard-drinking kids came out.

"You noticed," I said. We had spent a lot of time together planning the funeral. He had given me 50% off the coffin for old time's sake. The man was good at his work, offering quiet comfort, not trying too hard. He had grace and style in a difficult situation. The only thing was, it never seemed to turn off. It was as if every waking hour was a funeral for him, in terms of his serious demeanor. He had dinner with George and my mother a few days after the funeral to pay his respects as a friend.

"Yeah, I didn't even recognize him. I didn't even know it was him, until I saw him standing next to your mother. Man, I'm glad I still have my hair."

"I thought you guys were best friends," I said. I've found that it never hurts to be obvious with memories. People never forget, but they have to be coaxed out sometimes. Lazarus smirked.

"I don't think George ever believed in the idea of 'best friends.' He had strong acquaintances, and I was probably one of the strongest. Sally Sullivan may have been a little closer because she was a girl at the right time. But I knew him better."

Lazarus ran his long, veined fingers over his scarred face. Even his hands looked like they were made to hold a shovel. I noticed that when the bartender took our order, she hung on every word Lazarus said and kept staring at his eyes after he spoke.

Lazarus related how he had found my mother to be basically the same person with gray hairs and wrinkles. He had found me to be much the same, too, only a little more responsible. But he said that he felt no connection at all to George. Not even a glance of recognition. Neither of them laughed or shared any memories.

"It made me feel strange," Lazarus continued, "like the life I lived back then never happened. Like I dreamed being a kid, loving rock and roll and getting high. So much of all that is tied in with George. I don't listen to those old songs or get high anymore. It doesn't make me sad, but, man, it makes me wonder. Do you guys stay in touch?"

"Not really. I'll call him once or twice a year, but we don't have much to say. I was going to ask you that, but I guess you already answered."

Lazarus shook his head.

"In my line of work, you come across a lot of strange situations. People dying for stupid reasons. The survivors doing all sorts of things, some beautiful, others ugly. But trying to talk to George the other day -- I'm not Mr. Personality, either. But I didn't get any feel for the man at all. That's my job, and I guess George is still faking people out. He got me."

"You think he's still pulling an act?" I asked.

He shook his head again, laughing for the first time.

"The more I think of it, the more I remember how much George loved Bowie. It wasn't just the music. Each album was different. George always hit on that. You'd have a Ziggy Stardust, and then a Young Americans, and then a Heroes. Each album sounded like someone different made it. I thought it was the music he was into. But I think George liked that idea. Who knows who David Bowie really is? David Bowie probably doesn't even know."

"So, if you're like me, you feel out of touch because he won't be doing any Ziggy Stardust songs in concert."

Lazarus laughed as we made our way through our beers.

"That would be lame, man. None of us want to be Ziggy Stardust any more. Maybe he’s left us behind. But it wouldn't hurt to see the line of reason leading to the way he is now. I'll tell you, man, it was unnerving."

"Sometimes when I think of George," I said, "I remember those lectures adults would give us back then. One especially. Remember how when you'd make a funny face and an adult would catch you, he or she'd say, 'Be careful, smartey pants. If you hold that face, it might stay that way.'"

Lazarus grimaced and laughed.

"Well, for one thing, now that we're around their age, don't you ask yourself what kind of brainless lunatic would say such shit to a kid?"

"Yeah," Lazarus said, "my Dad did the same thing with farting. Warning me that one day I’d crack a rat for kicks and shit my pants. He was right, too."

"Thanks for sharing. Sometimes, I think maybe George did the psychological equivalent of holding a funny face. I guess we all do when we grow up. Only the funny face is very sober and serious, and it isn't really who we are, but we wear it to get by. I think George made one of those faces in his head, and now it's who he is."

"Serves him right, that naughty boy," Lazarus whined, mimicking the nasal squawk of a school marm.

"What you said about faces," Lazarus went on, "it reminds me of how I feel when I have to look at a dead body."

I blushed, and Lazarus noticed.

"Please, don't get upset. I'm only going to tell you something about my job. Nothing terrible. It's the faces. They say that when you die, all that's left is only a body. But you can tell a lot by that final face. Some people's eyes look like they're watching clouds on a summer day. Others like they're staring into a black pit. Some faces are pure peace, and others are fear. That face is the one your parents warned you about. I never knew most of the people I lay to rest. So I can't say a thing about their character. But I tell you, I honestly believe the essence of a person's life can be seen in that last look. It happens every time. I get ashamed, like I'm seeing something too personal, more personal than any nudity. I have to turn away and wipe tears from my eyes, even if it's a total stranger."

I wondered about my father's final face, but I didn't ask Laz what he had seen. It comforted me that we could talk so openly after all that time. I reminded him how he swore he'd never be a mortician.

"Yeah," he grunted, as if I had shown him an embarrassing picture of himself.

"Look at us. The only thing weirder than you being a drug counselor would be if George was. The world's a strange, ugly place, man. Not friendly. Not the world we grew up in. And we thought that world sucked."

"I don't really miss those days," I said.

"Me neither. But you got to admit they were easier. Maybe because we were young. I find myself doing shit my father did. Laughing a certain way. Having a favorite chair that no one else can sit in. Thinking about kids like they're all maniacs and scumbags. Bizarre shit I can't seem to control. I don't particularly like being a mortician. Too bad it can't be like the old days when George and me would get high and run away from this shit."

Our drinking didn't lead to regrets as much as easy memories. The old days weren't all that great, but no better or worse than today. Drinking with Lazarus made me feel like Major Tom, floating in my tin can far above the moon. The planet earth was blue, and there was nothing we could do.

"Sooner or later, you got to stop running," Lazarus said with a sad smile. I half expected him to wink and hand me his business card.

I remembered how he had avoided mirrors as a teenager, as if he were a vampire trying to conceal his identity. Bluebeard, hiding from his terrible face. The taunts from other kids were one thing, but the mirror was too honest. Now, the mirror had become his friend.

Paying Dues at the Legion

My parents made a point of never keeping alcohol in the house, a habit I vaguely follow, too. I have a six-pack of Old Speckled Hen sitting around the past few months, only drank one, a few cans of Guinness and a few bottles of Bass – those have been sitting in there at least a year or two. I keep alcohol in the house … but rarely drink it. It’s one of those “thrill of purchase” things to buy a six-pack every now and then.

I’ve never seen Mom drunk. In the 70s she used to have a beer every evening, per doctor’s orders that she drink moderately to help moderate her blood pressure. Of course, we had redneck doctors, otherwise she would have been instructed to drink red wine for heart benefits, too. Mom has seen me drunk a few times, stumbling home from bars in that early 20s “still living at home” phase. Not uproariously drunk either: we’re talking quietly taking off my shoes later at night and tip-toeing to my bedroom, generally after reeling off a minutes-long piss in the upstairs bathroom. And, lest we forget that first drunk, as documented years back in Leisuresuit.net – if you got a better first-drunk story, I’d love to read it.

I also recall once puking on the lawn at 2:00 in the morning, crawling a few feet away and falling asleep, waking up with our neighbor Frank staring and then waving at me at about 6:15 in the morning. (This was also during the regrettable bib-overall phase ... so I was wearing those and black converse high-tops ... i.e., I looked like a dick.) That’s what’s wrong with alcohol – you think you’re doing normal things – ah, just puked, it’s late at night, I’m tired, let me crawl to this patch of grass over here, ah, blades of grass so cool against my fevered brow, and nod off. But the reality is you’re passed out on a lawn next to a puddle of vomit. It aint right.

After awhile, alcohol stops doing you favors, literally and figuratively. Literally, you get past a few beers, you just end up abusing yourself, wasting hours in a strange state you vaguely or can’t remember, probably being sick the next day or at least feeling out of sorts. Worst-case scenarios, you get DUI’ed, or get in an accident while DUI, possibly causing damage to yourself or others. Figuratively, I can see in the long run, hard drinking does you no favors and only brings you harm.

I’ve never seen Mom drunk, but every now and then, I would see Dad drunk: paying dues at the Legion. That’s shorthand for Dad going out once a month and paying membership dues at an American Legion hall, I think in Mt. Carmel, PA, although I wasn't sure where he went. This was the 1970s, so he must have been a few years older than I am now, going through his 40s, since he turned 50 in 1978. As anyone in rural America knows, the American Legion in any given town is either a meeting hall with a bar, or an actual bar, often with an sign out front. In the 70s, it was a place for older World War II and Korean War vets to gather and have drinks together, often not having much contact with each other outside the Legion.

Does this still happen? I’m not sure what the differences are between the American Legion, AMVETS and VFWs, but all seemed to be roughly the same kind of places for vets to gather. You didn’t see Vietnam Vets doing that in the 70s – those guys were still in their 20s and had a real bad taste in their mouths over their war experiences, thus it might not have occurred to them to hang out at places like this filled with older guys with similarly harsh stories. I could surely see Vietnam Vets hanging out at an American Legion now, and I’m sure they do. But Iraq War vets? I wouldn’t know if Dad went to the American Legion in his 20s or 30s (he was mid-30s when I was born) – it’s possible he didn’t start going until later in life.

Seeing Dad drunk was like seeing me drunk – it didn’t fit the traditional experience of some stumbling idiot making more noise than a cupboard of dishes collapsing. No sob stories of the old man beating me with wire hangers, or getting Mom in headlocks. That shit never happened in our house, thankfully. (Sorry if it’s happened in yours.) I gather Dad liked to go out drinking in his 20s the same way I did, or millions of other people do. All I know is he only when out drinking once a month when I was a kid, and that was such an odd ritual that it hardly represented a whiskey-soaked free-for-all.

Dad always got dressed up to go to the Legion. His taste in clothes was legendary in its uniformity. When he was relaxing, he’d wear a collared, short-sleeved shirt, but it was rarely clean, always some sort of odd spot on it somewhere. (In later years, he’d just wear pocket t-shirts all the time, like we did as kids, when he’d chide us for dressing like slobs.) When working on the fleet of family AMC junkers he purposely bought to give himself a hobby, he’d wear his gray sweatshirt with sleeves and collars cut out, years before this became a trend with the movie Flashdance. The sweatshirt was cruddy with grease and oil stains – this was his usual weekend wear. For pants, he always wore a pair of dark gray corduroys, literally until they fell apart, and he’d buy another pair. He was inordinately fond of the Haband slacks store in the local mall. He never wore shorts.

I can see that I’ve picked up his fashion sense as I’ve grown older. I’m a uniformity person, too – white sleeveless t-shirt and khaki shorts, white socks, black sneakers. I wear this all summer long when not at work – in my mind, it’s too hot to wear anything more. I’ve taken the ribbings over a grown man wearing shorts, but that’s generally from guys with chicken legs. I look fine in a pair of shorts. And I’m used to wearing them from years of working out in gyms. This bothers me sometimes, as I think I should be walking around in fedora, dress shirt, slacks and expensive shoes … but it just doesn’t suit my lifestyle. Be glad I’m not walking around in loud Nascar or Ed Hardy shirts and sideways baseball hats, with attendant phony bad-ass tattoos and face jewelry. Still, I can’t help but feel haunted by that specter of adulthood I sensed growing up, even working-class guys dressed well in their leisure time.

Dad would put on a white dress shirt for the Legion, never a tie, but a dark blazer of some sort, dress pants, black socks and leather shoes – I should point out he normally wore black slip-on canvas loafers, the really cheap kind you’d find in supermarkets for $2.00 a pair. Basically black canvas sewed onto a small slab of tan rubber. I would buy these on a lark in my early 20s to mimic Dad and wear them occasionally, but I haven’t seen this type of shoes in years. (These got to be trendy in the 80s, especially when the black-and-white checkered version started appearing movies and videos.)

It was always a “what’s wrong with this picture” vibe to see Dad dressed-up like that. I got the same vibe when I saw Brother J dressed in a coat and tie for Dad’s funeral, as he normally dresses for working in a warehouse. You can see when a guy is uncomfortable in more fashionable clothes, and such was the case. Dad claimed to be more fashionable when he was younger, and he probably was, simply by dint of the times, coming of age in the 40s and 50s. It was always a major freak-out for us as kids to dig up old military uniforms in the attic and realize that Dad had a 26-inch waist … just unbelievable. I think the last time I had a waist that size was the 5th grade, and this was having a 32-34 inch waist well through my 20s. He must have grown quite a bit after leaving the army, because I later wore some of his old blazers while at college.

But we’d all be sitting around, watching Sanford & Son, or what have you, and Dad would come down the staircase like he was headed to the prom. Mom would blurt out something sarcastic like, “Oh, look, here comes prince charming,” and they’d laugh. She knew he was off to the Legion to pay his dues, because the only other reason he got dressed up was for church or funerals. I’m sure it would have been nice for him to take her out like that every now and then, but it rarely happened. They went out driving almost nightly anyway – just seemed to be more their style to hit a McDonalds, grab a Coke, then keep driving. They’d later add a mutt named Maggie that Mom picked up from the local pound to their nightly drives. (Wiped out Dad emotionally when that forsaken dog passed on quietly in her sleep one night.)

I don’t know what Dad did while at the Legion, save for have a few beers. I’m sure it was guys in the same boat, WW II and Korean War vets, working in factories, getting dressed up for one night a month to hang out and talk about their days in the armed forces. I’d have loved to hear this stuff, because Dad never discussed his war experiences at home. He’d drop bits here and there – his favorite story being the time he fell asleep on a bus in the midwest while trying to get back to the base, woke up with his head resting on a large black woman’s bosom, and they both realized the driver was going around in circles through the rain in East St. Louis.

I’m hazy on the exact story, but supposedly he was injured in a boot camp training drill. A live grenade was accidentally used with a bunch of blanks. There was an explosion, and the guys behind Dad were killed. He would have been, too, had their bodies not blocked the impact of explosion. But he took shrapnel in his lower back and legs, laying him up for a few months. In those few months, his platoon was shipped off to Europe, ending up in The Battle of the Bulge, where you were just as likely to freeze to death in a foxhole as get shot. When he came back, the war was over, so he spent a few months traveling around immediate post-war Germany, which was still a dangerous place, and took in a few days at the Nuremberg Trials, when Rudolph Hesse was on the stand. He then spent a decade afterwards traveling all over America doing mechanical work at various air fields – that much I know for sure as I’ve seen the Honorable Discharge papers, which dropped him back in Pennsylvania in the mid 1950s. His rank was some level of Sergeant, might have been Staff.

I would guess that most of the vets gathered in American Legion halls were like him – sergeants, corporals, privates – the guys who did the grunt work. I’d be curious to know how many officers would be found at the Legion bar – just seemed like one of those things the rank-and-file would indulge in far more. There would be Big Band music on the jukebox or radio. And the guys would talk, about the insanity of the service, work, families, etc. I didn’t know until I actually worked in Dad’s factory that he was fairly gregarious and got along well with people – he was quiet around the house. But knowing how he was at work, I could easily picture him having a blast at the Legion, the relaxing pull of a few beers helping out, too. He’d leave around 7:00 at night, usually get back no later than 11:00, often earlier.

And I could tell, he was tipsy. Flush in the face, relaxed, simply holding himself differently … the way we all do when we’re a little drunk. He’d walk in, take his usual place on the sofa, and quietly watch some TV. For all I know, he was seeing two TVs, but he never seemed that drunk. Even his voice sounded different, more conversational, which is the kind of thing you notice with someone who normally gives you orders. I can’t recall a single incident where anything more happened. I’m sure it was also in his head that he was in front of his kids, so he wasn’t going to take his pants off and climb a tree in the backyard. I’d say that must be an awkward situation, to be drunk in front of your kids, but judging by some people, it’s a fairly routine thing these days, and not unusual to act like a horse’s ass in front of them.

I don’t know how much his dues were, but I’m sure the whole thing was just a ruse to get away from the family for a few hours – a practice I wholeheartedly endorse for any married guy. Once a week would be even better. As kids, we always had reasons to break off on our own and do things after school – various sports practices and such. But parents were stuck. Aside from the drives and Dad’s Legion visits, they were there most of the time at night.

It should also be noted that right around that time, Brother M, as the eldest child, was going through his wild teenage years in ways none of us afterwards would replicate. But this must have scared the shit out of our parents, to think we were ALL going to do this, turn up drunk and stoned in at two in the morning, covered in clods of dirt and weeds, with a sob story about driving into the side of a hill to avoid hitting a dog. There are probably volumes of Brother M’s teenage misadventures to be told, but I only know a few, which involve essential elements like feces and vomit. Seeing as how he may be reading along here, I’d leave those stories for him to tell to avoid any potential embarrassment.

But in a lot of ways now, I feel like Dad when I drink, simply paying dues at my own legion hall, wherever that may be. We had an after-work get-together a few weeks ago that involved drinking on a rooftop of a 40-story apartment building in Manhattan, and that's quite an experience, especially as the sun goes down and the lights come on. I imagine it gets old fast if you live in a building like that, but not for people like me who rarely have that experience. I saw a few pictures of me from this thing the following week ... and I look like a very relaxed fellow, sitting way back in my lawn chair, smile on my face, BOMBED. I was bombed that night -- the host kept punching Coronas into my hand when he saw my bottle getting low, which pushed me up around the 7-8 beer limit. (I'm more comfortable with the buzz of 3-4 over the course of a night.) At that point, it's recreational for me just to get up and throw away my empty bottle, mainly to make sure I can still walk. Maybe it's from years of living in the Bronx and making sure I had my game face on when I got on the subway train late at night, but I don't think most people can tell when I'm really drunk. Plus, I can converse like a normal human being in that state, unless I'm totally obliterated, which has happened maybe a handful of times in my life.

Most other times, I'm just meeting a friend in a bar, hanging out, getting caught up, trading music, paying for our drinks, so not drinking more than a few. There are a lot of places downtown in Manhattan that have great happy-hour specials, so that's usually how it goes, right after work, getting those $3.00 pints before they magically double or triple in price at 8:00. It only adds to that Legion effect for me, although without fail, every damn bar I go to with a friend, there's only room for one at the bar, so we have to get a booth. I'm assuming most people at the bar around that time are regulars, and I've never been a regular at any bar, just never liked to drink THAT much. Even less now, much less than even 10 years ago.

What are my dues? What did I do in the war? Nothing. Jack shit. I suspect Dad would be fine with those answers. It's a shame we never sat down and had a few beers, but it seems like the drinking trains we were on in our lives just never ran down the same tracks, as he had given up the Legion dues night completely by the time I was of drinking age. I'd surely give anything to have a beer with Dad now -- or do anything, for that matter -- but it feels like his legacy does live on, in some oddly quiet way, a grown man, coming through the door around 11:00 at night, with some donuts to get some food in his belly before he goes to bed, maybe pop a few aspirins, check some emails ... much in the same way Dad would find his way to the sofa and watch the last half of Fantasy Island, or whatever else was on. I'm not sure why I'm that careful with my alcohol, but can't help but feel it's just as much genetics as any sense of manners.

Blueball Psycho

Like most people, I was troubled by the recent mass-shooting in Pittsburgh, where George Soldini, 48, calmly walked into a Latin Dance class at an LA Fitness Centre, turned out the lights, and opened fire with a few handguns he had stashed in a gym bag, killing three women and wounding nine others before turning the gun on himself. His intentions to do so were outlined in a blog he kept over the course of a year that apparently no one read.

What’s come out since then has been Sodini’s obsession over not having sex in years, and how this made him feel freakish, and ultimately homi- and suicidal. The most disturbing is a site that had the actual contents of his blog, which isn’t a long read. (While I don't advocate granting this guy's last wish to have his sick words live in infamy, it's worth reading once.) I’d like to comb through this and isolate certain passages that really struck me. Because much like the Virginia Tech massacre from April 2007 that I wrote about, there are so many annoying stereotypes put forth that they need some clarification. In the Virginia case, it was the media. In Soldini’s case, it was as if he was writing his clichéd, embarrassingly over-wrought “life story” – you know, his monument to not getting laid – that would serve as explanation of all this (when it explains nothing … a similar conclusion I came to in the Virginia shooting).

“Why do this?? To young girls? Just read below.”

From the first sentence, his core issue is put forth: not just that he’s not having sex, but his burning ambition in life is to have sex with “young girls.” There’s also a creepy video of him online, ironically about controlling his emotions, and even in that brief missive, he’s fantasizing about changing how he handles his emotions to better serve a relationship with a much younger woman. Later in his demented blog, he notes the young daughter of a local religious figure and a college-aged woman exiting a neighbor’s house in creepy ways. Watching that video, all I could think was, good luck getting laid by anybody. He’s got that officious “it’s under control” manner of speaking that always makes my skin crawl when I come across it in an office -- when I hear that tone of voice outside an office, I simply think the person is crazy. Why? Because it’s unnecessary – it’s someone trying to convince me he’s in control, when I can clearly determine if someone is in control or not. This guy sounds like a teenager trying to convince the world he’s intelligent … which is not an issue of intelligence, but lack of self assurance.

“Besides, dem young white hoez dig da bruthrs! LOL. More so than they dig the white dudes! Every daddy know when he sends his little girl to college, she be bangin a bruthr real good.”

That’s part of his first entry, where he laments the election of Obama as president. A theme he commonly touches on is his belief that everyone but him is not just having sex, but the kind of wondrous, life-affirming sex you see only in movies where there’s a soundtrack and two people with perfect bodies screwing in slow motion to a great song on the soundtrack. Well, that, or a well-hung Mandingo doing his thing with a white super-model … in either event, it’s a troubled man not seeing reality. I’m willing to wager no one at work caught on that he was a racist.

“Many of the young girls here look so beautiful as to not be human, very edible. After joining this gym, started lifting weights and like it.”

He’s objectifying, again, “young girls” as unobtainable sex objects – they’re not even human. It’s important to note that, because once he makes that delineation in his mind, it’s OK for him to kill them, since they’re not human to him. Like millions of other Americans, I go to the gym routinely. Flirt with women there. Notice the incredible shape some of them are in, and try not to ogle, which is hard as they dress to show off their bodies. And it’s not good to have that sort of casual, harmless sense of enjoying eye candy tied in with the deeper issues a psycho like this had. Granted, I’ve met a lot of creeps in gyms, particularly weightlifters, but that’s an entirely different breed from psychotic killers. Still, wheels are turning in his mind, if he stays young and fit – and he looks fine in the video and pictures – he’s still somehow in the running with these mythical “young girls.” (Some of the women he shot were, like him, in their 40s. I’d bet somewhere in his mid-30s he started developing this “young girls” logic to focus on his physical attraction to women in their teens and 20s.)

“No girlfriend since 1984, last Christmas with Pam was in 1983. Who knows why. I am not ugly or too weird. No sex since July 1990 either (I was 29). No shit! Over eighteen years ago. And did it maybe only 50-75 times in my life.”

He’s keeping count. And marking the calendar. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pam was Pam Dawber of Mork and Mindy fame, and he never really had sex with anyone. As I’ve pointed out many times before, life works like this: whatever you want to be a problem, will be a problem. If you’re not getting laid, and you want this to be a problem, it will be a problem. If you don’t want it to be a problem, it won’t be a problem. You decide. This guy was obviously in some fantasy world where everyone but him was getting laid, and their lives were wonderful as a result. He needed to get laid a lot more, if only to realize all your problems are not magically solved by having routine sex. I’d like to hear comments from female coworkers and such, even the mythical Pam, to hear what they have to say about him. The guy was this deeply troubled, yet he never did anything notably awkward or strange to women? I find that hard to believe.

“Just got back from tanning, been doing this for a while. No gym today, my elbow is sore again. I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne - yet 30 million women rejected me - over an 18 or 25-year period … Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are.”

He was a narcissist, and I’m guessing the sex he had wasn’t that good, because he wasn’t fucking himself. If I could have seen him in the gym, I’d bet he was one of those 40ish guys in very good shape, tight stretch pants and matching shirt, sticking solely to the weights, gazing at himself in the mirror after a set of reps, posing … I see this all the time in gyms, guys constantly gazing at themselves in the mirror. It’s disturbing, but not something I dwell on as I’m too busy working out myself, and don’t even want to think what that sort of blatant self absorption implies.

“30 million women” rejected him? I’m willing to bet about five did. He was keeping score again: 18-25 year period. He was 48, meaning in his mind the rejection started at the ages of 23 or 30. I think he meant to say 48-year period. He projected his sense of failure onto all women – every single woman on earth had rejected him. Strange. I knew guys in high school who were no great shakes physically, mentally or emotionally. But they had a theory that if you hit on enough women, sooner or later, you’d get lucky … and they were right. I think Neil Strauss has made a small fortune with his book The Game putting forth the same theory … and I’d be curious to know if Soldini owned a copy.

“A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend. This type of life I see is a closed world with me specifically and totally excluded. Every other guy does this successfully to a degree.”

This is his fantasy world of relationships again. Over half of all marriages end in divorce, but he doesn’t seem to recognize those sort of things. Or married guys at work belly-aching about being married. Or married coworkers having affairs. Or the boredom so many people express about long-term relationships. Or fellow bachelors going through life and not being overly concerned about all this. And if you’re gay, you don’t exist in his world.

What do I think would have happened if he got a girlfriend with all this darkness swirling around in his head? He’d have probably killed her once he realized she wasn’t the magic girl with all the answers. I’ve seen plenty of psycho boy- and girlfriends in my time – people who lost control and did nasty things when relationships ended. Stalking, abusive phone calls, physical threats, etc. I’ve seen articles on this guy try to interpret “the line” one crosses to do something like this … and there is no line. He was just psychotic. Not because of his issues with women. Because he was psychotic. His issues with women were a symptom, not the cause, of his psychosis. What caused that, I don’t know. Bad chemicals in his brain? How he was raised? I don’t know; there probably is no easy, set answer. But the whole “lonely man not getting laid snaps” routine is just that. If he was gay and shot-up a gay bar instead of a health club? Same difference, although the story would surely have a different spin in the media.

“My dad never (not once) talked to me or asked about my life's details and tell me what he knew. He was just a useless sperm doner … Brother was actually counter-productive and would try to embarase me or discourage my efferts when persuing things, esp girls early on (teen years).”

This says a lot. His real problem may have been his inability to bond with other men. You’ll notice in his missives that he hardly mentions having any male friends, and the gym is apparently wall-to-wall “young girls.” Has negative views of his father, hates his older brother. One of the joys men should have in their lives is the ability to bond with each other – to be “guys” – to revel in that sense of manhood. Sodini’s life must have been totally bereft of this sort of camaraderie – he would have mentioned it somewhere in his twisted online journal. The one thing I gather from a lot of married men is the regret they feel over losing these sort of relationships due to familial responsibilities; they simply don’t have time to hang out with other guys. The easy out in this scenario is to focus on his chosen words, but the unwritten message is that Soldini didn’t understand or fully grasp how to be a man and interact with other men. And he thought having sex with "young girls" would be the key to unlock that door.

“Mum - The Central Boss ... Don't piss her off or she will be mad and vindictive for years. She actually thinks she's normal. Very dominant. Her way and only her way with no flexibility toward everyone in the household.”

A good rule of thumb in life: anyone over the age of, say, 25, still bitching about his or her parents is someone who’s mentally ill or just a shithead. (This is, of course, barring people raised by genuinely abusive parents.) But I think you’ll find most adults complaining about their parents go through life with a victim mentality; they see the same hostility and lack of caring in the world that they project onto how their parents raised them. I don’t doubt he has valid points about his mother here, but even if it’s true, and the relationship is that troubling, after a certain point in life, you just let it go. You’re an adult. You choose how you want to live your life. Life is better if you can maintain those sort of important relationships, but if they’re that genuinely problematic, you can let them go. (It should also be noted that minutes before he went on his killing spree, he called his mother and told him he was about to do something awful that would result in his death. He didn’t get her directly, left a message, and she phoned back moments after it was all over. Why did he call her?)

“I knew children of parents who grew up in strict religious homes. Religion has a certain stink to it of guilt, shame, fear, and that moral standard that always contradicts the natural tendencies and desires of a person.”

So there’s the dichotomy – he wasn't religious, apparently hated religion, but had not lived a life where he directly refuted religious dogmatism and lived a totally hedonistic, sex-all-the-time, wild-and-free existence … thus he’s a failure. This is like crossing a Porky’s movie with the religious tracts of Jonathan Edwards. The self-loathing intensified when he realized his sex-less life is no different from those of uptight religious people he seemed to loathe, e.g., these people were losers in his mind, thus he was, too.

“I see twenty something couples everywhere. I see a twenty something guy with a nice twentyish young women. I think those years slipped right by for me. Why should I continue another 20+ years alone? I will just work, come home, eat, maybe do something, then go to bed (alone) for the next day of the same thing. This is the Auschwitz Syndrome, to be in serious pain so long one thinks it is normal.”

I see twenty something couples all the time, too. Whether they’re happy or sad is none of my concern. Ditto forty something couples, or fifty or sixty something. I don’t envy or despise them. I know their realities are going to have the same mix of good and bad issues as mine. If they’re in their 20s, chances are good they’re fumbling through bad relationships that will hopefully end and teach them how to be better people, whatever else happens afterwards. A few bad relationships, maybe a blown marriage, would have done this guy a world of good in terms of grasping the bigger picture about personal happiness and who’s responsible for it. But, again, rational thought wasn’t his problem – there was something radically wrong with him.

“Some people are happy, some are miserable. It is difficult to live almost continuously feeling an undercurrent of fear, worry, discontentment and helplessness. I can talk and joke around and sound happy but under it all is something different that seems unchangable and a permanent part of my being. I need to realize the details of what I never accomplished in life and to be convinced the future is merely a continuation of the past … I made many big changes in the past two years but everything is still the same. Life is over. Even though I look good, dress well, well groomed - nails, teeth, hair, etc.”

It’s hard to fathom the shallowness Soldini lived with when his wish-list of accomplishments would have amounted to having endless sex with dozens of Barbie Dolls. Not writing a great novel. Or working on a cure for cancer. Or simply helping others in some way. No. Getting laid. By “young girls.” That’s it. That’s the life. That’s what it’s all about. I joke with friends about this all the time, but my three main goals in life are to stay sane, healthy and solvent. If I get married along the way, have kids, etc. … fine. If not, that’s fine, too. I don’t feel a fire lit under my ass to live life in an outline format – never have, never will. Sanity is the one part of that equation most people never concern themselves with, but it's obviously well worth anyone's time to do things in his life that keep him sane in some sense.

Soldini wasn’t doing that bad for himself. He had a steady job, that paid well, well enough that he could buy his own home near a major city (Pittsburgh isn’t a bad place to live), but I guess walking around an empty house in the suburbs only intensified his feelings of loneliness, as opposed to having the ability to enjoy his solitude. (You better believe I enjoy mine, and the harder issue I’d have would be giving it up if I got back into something again.) I'd guess that living in a suburb could intensity feelings of loneliness or failure for someone who isn't secure and stays single, as he'll spend his time surrounded by people fully engaged in family life. (The good thing about city life is you get all kinds of people and recognize there are many ways to go through life.) Then again, if a trip to a crowded Costco on a Saturday afternoon doesn't enlighten you that this shit isn't all it's cracked up to be, you're just not paying attention.

“I haven't met anybody recently (past 30 years) who I want to be close friends with OR who want to be close friends with me.”

That happens to everyone in degrees over time, especially once people get married and have kids. The key in life is to never make assumptions about how other people are living, regardless of positive or negative appearances. If you don’t like someone, you can easily project negativity onto that person, hope bad things happen to him or her, but it’s ultimately a waste of time and energy. Whether they succeed or fail is no skin off your nose. You should be working on your own sense of happiness/satisfaction with life. And if things aren’t working, you change.

It’s important to note the 30-year-mark, making him 18 when he stopped making friends, i.e., after high school. In so many ways he seemed emotionally mired in a teenage male way of seeing the world: insecure over sexuality, constantly measuring himself against some mythical standard (that implied “successful” people having earth-shattering sex with “young girls” every night of their lives), feeling attracted only to women around that age … which is a losing formula for a guy in his 40s, and probably not a good idea in general. I’ll find myself physically attracted to women in their mid-20s, but, boy, when they start talking, and I recognize how far along they are in terms of maturity, reality sets in. (I'm a Woody Allen fan, but can't watch his movie Manhattan because it's too creepy in light of later events in his life, and the thought of a guy in his 40s having a serious relationship with a teenager in high school is preposterous.) At some point in your life, you learn to value wisdom and experience … or you go through life blind and subscribing to philosophies better suited to “Crib” shows on MTV. (And I’m convinced there are millions of people who fall into this category, not just this lone psycho.)

“I was invited to a picnic, and I went. An older woman there, out of the blue, asked if I liked high school. Then quickly asked if I was picked on very much. Intersting why she would ask that.”

I’m assuming “older woman” means someone his age.

If a total stranger meets this guy at a picnic and deduces in seconds that there’s something off about him, shouldn’t there be many other people in his life who recognized the same quality? (I should also note that anyone starting a conversation like that must be a creep herself.) It’s virtually impossible to recognize the difference between a person who’s “creepy” in some sense and someone who is genuinely psychotic, and has lived his entire adult life trying to hide this from others. I’d like to think I’m smart enough to spot this, but I know I’m not. Very few people are – I’m sure an FBI profiler would have a lot of insight and abilities to spot someone like this. But their jobs are to track down people like this after they've started acting out, and I don't think I've ever read an instance of a potential psychotic killer being stopped before he goes on a spree.

There are plenty of odd middle-aged people out there, male and female, married and single/divorced, etc. You can think they’re all potential George Soldini’s, but they’re not. Whatever they’ve done wrong in their lives, whatever opportunities they’ve missed, whatever mistakes they made … it’s just part of the baggage that everyone carries. How well they carry it will determine how they live. If your eyes are open as you go through life, you recognize this in everyone. Want to pretend that nebbish guy at work is going to go postal? Go ahead. But his life is probably no better or worse than yours, and he’s going to go on living, the same way you will. The circumstances of our lives are one thing: mental illness is another. If you think your life is bad, I assure you, it could be worse. We live in such a spoiled society that most people can’t recognize how relatively easy we have it in comparison to previous generations. Then again, maybe that’s a problem, creating “failure” out of nothing because we’re bored with life.

“I was reading several posts on different forums and it seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little hoe has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48.”

The internet is cancer for people with mental problems. He was reading teen sex forums. Why? Obviously, I know why, but how pathetic was that. That passage is the one that disturbed me the most. What anyone would hope to gain reading senseless junk like that, I have no idea.

The rest is just endless repetition of his core issues, until the end. All I can think is three innocent people had to die, nine others were seriously injured, and dozens of lives scarred because of this man, who was in desperate need of mental help. He didn’t “need to get laid” – this would have solved nothing. He needed to get mental treatment, and if that wasn’t an option, he needed to kill himself, as opposed to taking other people with him. It wouldn't surprise me if the gym was empty this weekend.

Walking Underwater

It’s that time of year again, when the city floats into deep summer, and walking around on the weekends gets to be an oddly serene experience. Before I walk down to the gym on Saturday afternoon, I’ll usually putz around on the computer for an hour while having ice tea or Coke Zero, giving me a caffeine buzz that carries over into my half-hour walk. Sometimes when it gets this hazy, I feel like my body will float away with each step, and I’ll be hovering over the neighborhood after a few blocks.

I don’t get that high, but it’s an odd sensation: walking underwater. Sometimes I wonder if it’s safe to walk around like this – the same way I’d be leery of walking around a city on a hallucinogen. But I suspect any jolt to the system, and this place is known for its jolts, would drop me firmly back in reality. But part of the reason for the calmness is the lack of people, either going to the beach or simply on vacation, with a lot of Greeks heading home for a few weeks this time of year.

The Sunday before, I blew off a boxing class that I was going to be 10 minutes late for and instead walked from the Upper East Side of Manhattan down to 14th Street, which isn’t the mind-expanding/neighborhood-jumping experience it once was. Even the length of time I’ve been here (late 1980s), going down the east side of white Manhattan hasn't been that jolting a walk. The only big change is going through the “empty on weekends” midtown area of high-rise office buildings. The rest is affluent Manhattan – and I don’t care where you live there, it takes a truckload of money to live anywhere over there these days. You’ll find isolated pockets that are a bit more gritty, always associated with housing projects, but otherwise, forget it, you could live in a nice-sized house most places in America for what most people are spending on cramped, non-descript, one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan.

And I can feel it when I walk. There’s a blandness to the place now that’s just unforgivable. Most of the people I come across are younger folks heading out to late morning brunches after a hard night of bar-hopping. Must have seen three dozen women pulling the Lindsay Lohan “fedora and hot pants” look. Guys who look like they’re more used to doing this dance at a frat house than a dumpy, shared apartment. Seeing more of this crowd the closer I got to the Village/14th Street was truly depressing – made me miss the stroller nazis and uncomfortable families “sharing quality time” back in the 60s and 70s. Once upon a time, a walk like that would have encapsulated dozens of ethnic and socio-economic classes, all easily identifiable with their neighborhood. Now, it’s more or less a huge white wall of affluence, basically a suburb transplanted back into the city.

I have a much more interesting walk when I head back to Astoria some Friday nights – which I’ll do when daylight savings rolls around each year, weather permitting. Getting up to the 59th Street Bridge, especially during rush hour, is an annoying walk, straight across midtown. Again with the yuppies – there’s an outdoor bar in Bryant Park that really kicks into high gear for happy hour, and man, just passing by there, I can smell the faux testosterone of aging frat boys in polo shirts as I pass, again with the Lohan-inspired fashions among gaggles of red-faced, drunk girls looking to breed with guys whose apartments smell like dust, stale farts and unwashed sweatpants.

The flood of foot traffic on 42nd Street is too much – I nearly bowled over Michael Stipe the other week. Knew it was him, made eye contact with him with that “you know I know who you are” nod. He was dressed like I was, sleeveless t-shirt and shorts, as I deftly side-stepped him, which wasn’t hard as he’s a pretty small guy. Should have blurted out, “Are you guys ever going to make another good album?” But he seems like a nice enough guy, impressive to see him walking around casually like this, and not someone I’d want to hassle for no good reason.

But most people aren’t rock stars traveling incognito – we’re talking tourists, who are always like cattle, and that time of day, office workers scurrying to Grand Central or Penn Station. The streets are buzzing well through the 40s and 50s, and things don’t calm down for me until I hit the 59th Street Bridge, climbing over the annoying barrier at 60th Street to get into the walking/biking lane on the north side of the bridge. (It always reminds me of swinging one leg and then the other over the old picket fence between the Catholic and Protestant cemeteries in my small town back in PA.)

And then it’s like another world. Always windy on the bridge, and I’m never alone up there. Always plenty of walkers, most sane, but the occasional bozo tourists walking three abreast in a very crowded space. The bicyclists can be pretty bad, too. Again, most are fine, but even if 10% are assholes, that implies dealing with a dozen guys who think they’re in the Tour de France, or constantly veering into the clearly-designated walking lane, often too close for comfort and at high speed. I’ve thought of clotheslining one of these pricks to make a point, but it would be more trouble than it’s worth.

In general, the bridge is peaceful, the hum of passing cars, the East River flowing by a few hundred feet below. (The first time I did this walk was 9/11, about the only good realization to come out of that day for me.) It’s a nice experience anywhere in NYC to walk with no one around for a few hundred yards – doesn’t happen a lot, which may be part of the reason I enjoy these Friday walks so much.

Coming off the bridge used to be a grunge walk through the mangy streets on the Queens side of the 59th Street Bridge, and still is for the most part. The first thing I’ll see on my left as I come down the exit ramp is a strip club. And it’s just the nature of that area to be gritty … which doesn’t explain the spate of luxury high-rise condos that have sprung up there over the past five years, each one touting the view of Manhattan, until a new developer builds another high-rise in front of that one. I don’t know who lives in these things, if anyone. The prices are surely extortionate, and this is still a lousy neighborhood, run down on the north side, and nothing but traffic patterns and exhaust fumes in the middle. I gather the gist is proximity to Manhattan, literally one subway stop away, but that doesn’t account for living in a heavily polluted area with zero residential charm or convenience – you have kids here, you can just about be certain they’ll have asthma and other weird diseases.

That area fades out over a quarter mile or so, the last of the strip clubs dwindles into the dog end of Queens Boulevard, and I hook north, simply following the elevated N Train line the rest of the way home. The 39th/36th Avenue area is still downbeat, despite the recent influx of white college grads. Garages, warehouses, beverage distributors, the occasional bodega and hard-assed latin nightclub with bars in the windows. Fading into Broadway, where that Astoria vibe starts, vestiges of Greece, the faces grow steadily whiter. Into 30th Avenue and Astoria Boulevard, now we’re really in Astoria, every side street grows residential, huge Orthodox churches, streets a little cleaner. Up over the Grand Central Parkway in the mammoth Astoria Boulevard subway station, come down the other side in front of the Neptune Diner, and there we are, the southern end of my neighborhood, and it’s back to Ditmars with all the diners, supermarkets and newer foo-foo clubs and restaurants going after the flip-flop yuppie dollar.

By the time I’m done, my ankles are wiped – it’s at least a six-mile hike, and I haul ass every step of the way. By this time of year, my walking tan is in full bloom. You won’t see it unless you get me naked … which means Bill Repsher, the moonlight and you … or you see me in the locker room at the gym. My face is tan, and my arms are tanned from the shoulder down, where the sleeveless t-shirt stops. There’s a ring of tan around my neck, at the collar of the shirt. My legs are tan from the shorts line above my knee down to my ankles. Otherwise, I’m fairly white and hairy, eat your heart out ladies.

Physically, it’s a nice change-up from boxing earlier in the week, which is far more intense, and Saturday is my weightlifting day, which is no walk in the park after sweeping out the landlord’s property in the morning. Christ, I should be like Charlie Atlas with all the shit I do, but I’ve got to do portion control if I’m ever going to get into that sort of top shape again. Which I’d love to after years of looking like a bouncer. But life goes on, and I’m in pretty good shape. Walking’s a good mental work out, too, your mind floats along, as you stay cognizant of your environment, you have to in New York, yet wanders freely as you think about other things, and in many senses simply walk away from all those things as you go along.

I guess in some respects, I’m just like one of those tourists who spend all day walking around New York, save I know how much you walk here, have done it for years, and I’m like a mountain goat in the Alps in that respect. And I’ve learned to be acutely aware of everything going on around me – a lot of these tourists don’t seem to have a fucking clue as to their environment or how to carry themselves – a sense I carry with me wherever I go. But that same sense of wonder is still there, and I’m just as physically exhausted as they are. I have to believe if you’re a tourist coming here, there can’t be a better feeling than flopping down in your hotel room after a hard day of walking all over the city, and you know all you want to do is to get a shower, have a long dinner with a few drinks, hit the sack and sleep like a baby.

Speaking of babies, this last walk, on the Upper East Side, as I was going down a leafy block in the low 90s, I saw a father, a guy probably about my age, teaching his infant daughter how to walk. You could tell by how she moved that she must have just learned how to walk a few days ago, that stumbling sort of gait suggesting each step could end in disaster. She had her arms swinging out in front of her, like a blind man, partially for balance, but mostly to get rhythm. She’s not really looking at anything, eyes sort of rolling around her head as she looks at her feet, the tree next to her, her Dad’s hand, me, a cloud passing in the sky. I have to move to get out of her way, and for once I don’t mind doing this for a Manhattanite, as she at least has the excuse of being new to this walking thing. The kid gurgled as she passed me. I couldn’t help but think we never get past that honest stage of uncertainty, grasping for self assurance, no matter how much we bullshit ourselves otherwise. Of course, we learn to walk with more confidence, and the next time we shit our pants might be a few decades from now, barring unfortunate drinking episodes, but I can't help but think she was onto something.

Heavy Bag Blues

Every now and then, an asshole will show up in one of my boxing classes. Sometimes it will be a guy, but it will just as often be a woman. With guys, you’ll get the hyper-macho jackass who doesn’t know anything about boxing and spends the class pushing the heavy bag with his punches (mark of the novice), shirking the conditioning and walking around with a smug look on his face like all this is beneath him. He rarely shows up again, much to everyone’s relief.

But one of my favorites is the middle-aged woman with an attitude. Usually she’s not that good at boxing either, save that, unfortunately for the rest of us, she’ll show up repeatedly (but never go the distance and become a regular). I had a mild exchange with one the other night in class. The situation was that our instructor was on vacation, and the gym had mistakenly thought he was coming back that day. But I knew that he wasn’t coming back until the next day, which he had told anyone who asked. As a result, there was about a dozen of us standing around at the appointed time, with the gym manager coming in a few minutes later and telling us the situation, and that we could hang around and work-out if we wanted as we (i.e., me) had already hung the bags.

I usually don’t hang around for these situations, because you can get some real bozos in unsupervised sessions. But I had missed Sunday’s class due to the train running late, and I felt the need to hang around and do something. Besides which, one of my boxing pals from Ireland was there for the first time in weeks, and it was nice to chat for awhile. So, half the people left, half stayed, and we all went about our routines, some jumping rope, others doing calisthenics, others hitting the heavy bags. Not as physically demanding as a regular class, but still a reasonable workout.

Towards the end of the class, as I’m merrily pounding a heavy bag, this middle-aged woman walks up to me. I’m willing to bet I’m as old or older than she is, but she looks at least mid-50s. Frumpy, not in good condition. I’ve seen her here before and have noted that she always shows up five to 10 minutes late, the mark of someone who knows the class is front-loaded with harsh, boot-camp style calisthenics and is purposely late to avoid this. Some people do this because they have some type of physical infirmity – a bad knee or back – that prevents them from doing these exercises. I’ve seen a few heavy women do this, too, just because they know that introductory blast of conditioning is too much to handle, and they wisely sit it out. But more often than not, the person is just lazy, not up to it physically, and I wish the instructor would lock the doors and keep horse’s asses like this out of the class, which tends to be over-crowded anyway.

This woman is the latter. Doesn’t appear to be anything wrong her. Is frumpy and egg-shaped, but I’ve seen women with that body type kick ass in these classes. It’s just the way she is, and folks like this usually don’t last, for whatever reason. It’s always a minor annoyance to see them. Remember, this is a group class. As with any other class, you get people clowning around, not taking it seriously, cutting corners, or dragging ass, it has a residual effect on everyone, i.e., I don’t like shitbirds, nor do any of the other regulars.

So, we’re all doing our thing, late in the class, I’m wailing on a heavy bag, really enjoying myself, when she walks over, stops next to me, dead-faced, and exclaims, “You don’t ever throw jabs, do you?”

This is the first time I’ve ever exchanged anything with this woman … and her introduction is a passive-aggressive insult. Even before this … why is she not concentrating on her own workout and instead watching me? And apparently watching me enough to “know” this about me? All I can figure is that you can actually hear me hitting the heavy bag, because I hit hard, when a lot of people in the class, particularly women, don’t hit hard. Which is not an insult. But in my mind, it’s a heavy bag, the object is to pummel the thing as hard and fast as you can. The instructor uses hand pads to perfect combinations. Sparring is for self defense and movement. The heavy bag is for pounding all the shit you have in your system out of it. You have to learn how to cut loose, with near total abandon – and that’s the one crucial thing I see a lot of people in these classes never do. If you never learn to hit hard and fast like that, you’re wasting time. In a real fight? You’re not going to tentatively jab at someone as you would in a boxing match, or score points for well-placed rabbit punches. The heavy bag is the place for you to get in touch with some primal urges. You could be the next bag over, cutting it in half with a chainsaw, and I won’t be paying any attention to you.

And I don’t throw a lot of jabs when I’m on a heavy bag, because the jab is mostly a defensive punch meant to keep an opponent away from you. I have seen guys with unbelievable jabs, and there’s an art form to that; it’s a hard punch to throw anywhere near as effectively as a well-placed hook or upper-cut. Most boxers I see cutting loose on a heavy bag, including the instructor, aren’t over-doing the jab either, because they know they’ll be doing plenty of that in sparring. They’re blasting combinations where the power punches, the cross, hook and upper-cut, come pounding in a lot more frequently … because they’re on a bag, they know this, that they’re hitting an inanimate object, which is not fighting or boxing reality, and the greater lesson here is to learn how to hit hard and fast. On top of all this, most of the bags in the gym are worn out and soft in the jab/upper area of the bag (because that where most people throw their punches as opposed to hitting lower body shots, where the bags tend to be much harder.)

I should have replied, “Why are you watching me?” But I’m in the middle of a workout, sweating profusely, breathing hard because I’m genuinely exerting myself. This woman hasn’t even broken a sweat, and we’ve been working out for close to 40 minutes now. I don’t try to explain anything to her, mainly because I’m insulted that this ass-dragging, out-of-shape, always purposely 10-minutes late d-bag thinks she’s going to tell me anything about boxing. On top of that, in all my years of taking classes, not once have I deigned to drop helpful hints on anyone in any class. Why? Because I’m not the instructor. I see people doing wrong stuff all the time – I’ve already noted what I’ve seen wrong with this woman, and that’s hardly even paying attention to her. It’s none of my business. We’re all there to get a hard workout above all else. I keep that in mind when it comes to lecturing fellow classmates. I just don’t do it – because I recognize what they do, that I’m not an authority figure and in no position to do this.

She then goes on to explain to me how her trainer made her jab for three weeks before he even let her learn any other kind of punch. Huh. For one thing, she needs to get her money back or get a new trainer – that’s the sort of shithead stuff you pull from Rocky movies, he probably had her chasing chickens in an alley, too. For another thing … this bitch has a trainer? Really? The kind of shape she’s in, she can’t even fully function in a group boxing class, and she’s telling me she has a trainer? Generally, when you get a trainer, spending hundreds of dollars for individual instruction, the one benefit, no matter what else happens, is that you get yourself into phenomenal physical condition. It’s part of the deal with individualized instruction. In the past, particularly on weekends in the summer, my instructor would occasionally get me in the gym one-on-one, and those were “point of physical collapse” style workouts since the instructor could concentrate solely on me, dotting every “i” with the calisthenics and working hard on every combination and bag session. If I worked out like that all the time, forget it, I’d be in astonishing physical condition. Not this frumpy, egg-shaped being in front of me. She’s either lying about the trainer, or she might have meant her trainer years ago … when she gave up after three months and started boxing again recently to get “her fire” back.

I had every right to tell this woman to go fuck herself – even if she knew what she was talking about, which she didn’t – but instead I mumbled a few things, yeah, you’re right, I don’t jab so much on the heavy bag. But I’m so annoyed by this nosey jackass that I move to the other side of the bag and ignore her. She has her boxing gloves on. At this point, a few people have peeled off, and she could have her own bag. I’m not sure what possessed her to walk over and give unsolicited advice to someone light years beyond her skill level. She keeps mumbling about her instructor, blah blah blah, importance of the jab, blah blah blah, you’re not doing it right. She has a sour look on her face the whole time. All this is dropped in a condescending tone, as if she was a master of the form doing me a favor, which only underlines to me how deranged her view of the world must be. After awhile, she realizes I’m not listening and saunters away. I’ve learned that’s the only way you can handle people like this: ignore them. I’m not sure what sort of delusional garbage passes through someone’s mind when they do something like that … this is the mark of a person with her head completely up her ass.

This would have been like me going up to a Golden Gloves champ in the middle of his workout and telling him he was doing something wrong. In which case, the guy probably would have kicked my ass, or at least made a very bad scene over someone on a much lower skill level trying to tell him what to do. You just don’t do shit like that! It’s tactless; it’s a mediocre mind not seeing reality. What I’m thinking? She just doesn’t like me! She hears me wailing on a bag, has her attention drawn to me, while she slowly and daintily practices her robotic, predictable combinations, feels insulted in some sense, and thus feels some hoary need to inject herself into my situation … like I’m going to listen to her when I've routinely seen how negligent she is in terms of determination, punctuality, conditioning, simple abilities, etc.?

Of course, I hope this woman never shows up again, but she will. Always 10 minutes late. Standing off to the side, staring into space while the rest of us get run ragged on wind sprints or nasty squat-thrust pushups. I can’t recall when she started showing up, but I gather it wasn’t until the past year or so. Seen her type before, will see her type again, and next time, she might very well be a he … same difference. And I’ll probably be cordial to her if she starts up again with her gibberish. Why? Because I know she won’t be there a few months from now – the greatest lesson I’ve learned from a decade of boxing and applied to life. Bullshit artists don’t last.

The Pyramid Scheme That Wasn't

There are so few “legendary” events in our adult personal lives, the kind of which happen routinely when we were kids. There are obvious things, like weddings, funerals, births, etc. Monumental events like 9/11 and natural disasters. But comparatively few of those sort of situations that we’d end up turning into legends as kids: fist fights, first drunks, dozens of weird, memorable moments related to school, etc. Most of adult life is rote work and responsibility – at least mine is.

But every now and then, something happens that you know you’ll be talking about years later. Such an instance occurred with my high-school friends T and J about 15 years ago, had to be early/mid 90s. J was infamous for getting us all into bizarre adventures that we’d curse him for at the time, but somehow knew these things would be shaggy-dog stories one day, and understood this almost immediately.

But this one was T’s doing. T was married to his first wife for a few years at that point, in his mid-20s, with a son and two stepsons. I knew things were rocky when I saw a hole in the paneling of his living-room wall and was informed that his wife had thrown a full beer can at him and missed. This was a bit of a shock to me, as I was just starting my tenure in New York City, and their marriage ceremony was fresh in my mind, a grandiose church affair, huge party at a local hall afterwards. That stuff is one thing, and the day-to-day reality of marriage is another. And sometimes there’s a hole in the living-room wall with a story to tell.

That marriage would peter out a few years later, but at the time, T was married, with kids, working in a more-managerial position at a company in a town about an hour north of our home area, where he had started as an engineer. Making so-so money. (He’s now making great money, especially for back there, but also seems to be under enormous pressure, too.)

T and J were always scheming ways to make more money in their lives. Money was a burning issue between both, a competition of sorts, although neither would have admitted it. To a certain extent, many things were a competition between them. I recall vague stories of measuring penises and such … must have phoned in sick that day … but in that event, J was hung like a horse, T not so much, so I guess that one didn’t pan out so well. It was often my duty to referee when they got too nuts with each other … assuming I wasn’t too busy getting nuts with one or the other. They were much closer friends than I was with either one separately, but prone to fighting much more as a result, as that sense of competition influenced nearly every part of their lives.

One summer, I came back for a visit, and T told both J and I that he had something special planned for us that Friday night. We had no idea what this meant. A strip club? We were going to get laid? Something wild? This was the vibe J and I got from T talking up what we were going to do that Friday. He picked us up at sundown in his VW Rabbit, still blaring Van Halen from his Big Brute speakers, as was the case when we were teenagers a few years earlier.

We drove through the summer night, the sense of expectation growing. We were heading north, towards Danville, a town which was not in our normal driving area. T pulled up the Rabbit in front of a Best Western hotel that seemed pretty crowded. It was a very strange crowd. Half of it was bikers. I don’t mean Hells Angels, but more scraggly, unkempt, chunky middle-aged guys in full biker regalia (leather chaps, denim vests with no shirt underneath, chrome nazi helmets, etc.), hanging out around the entrance and at the bar inside. The other half was guys in tuxedos and women in gowns. It looked as if the hotel was double-booked for a well-to-do wedding reception and biker rally. Both parties were unrelated and clearly couldn’t stand each other. What in the hell were bikers doing hanging out at a Best Western hotel? It was like some bad 80s video ... we were waiting for Night Ranger to come rocking out of the men's room.

T calls out, ‘Hey, Fred, hey, I’m here!” We see a nebbish middle-aged guy in wire-framed glasses and a collared shirt and khakis wave back and walk over to T. Fred looked like the kind of guy who would hang out at a hotel bar, hoping for homely women to get too drunk to notice how meek he was, and then go back for a romp in their room. There was something mildly off about him. What kind of person hangs out at a hotel bar? Not me! Not us! Immediately, J and shot each other a deep “what the fuck” look.

“Ah, you brought your friends, good, good,” Fred said, “unfortunately, it’s total chaos in here tonight, didn’t know there was so much stuff going on here. Where can we go to talk?”

Talk? What on earth were we going to talk about with this guy? I started getting stink-eye from J, believing that T had somehow guided us to a weirdo or pervert of some sort … visions of us waking up in one of the hotel rooms, in a bathtub filled with bloody ice, and a bad stitch job where one of our kidneys used to be.

Well, we were right about the “weirdo” part. Fred formally introduced himself … as a sales rep for Amway. Motherfucker! T had somehow fallen under the spell of an Amway salesman, and was looking to bring us into the scheme. This is something J and I would have never gone for … and I think T knew this by being so cryptic in how he framed the night’s events, keeping us in anticipation of what we were heading up to Danville for.

“Say, I noticed a McDonalds across the parking lot, let’s go there instead,” Fred said cheerily.

I was going to spend a good chunk of Friday night, in my mid-20s bar-hopping prime, sitting in a fucking McDonalds, listening to an Amway salesman’s pitch. I tell myself that these days, I would have just blurted out, “No, no, this ain’t going to happen,” but keep in mind, T was driving, and we were about 45 minutes from home, i.e., if we got weird on him and he responded in kind, we could conceivably have a very bad night thumbing it. It just didn’t seem right to offend T on this topic anyway, as he seemed to genuinely believe this guy was somehow going to enrich his life. It wasn’t as bad as T having a Born Again experience he wanted to share with us, but it was still pretty mind-blowing.

So, we walked over to that McDonalds, got some burgers and fries, and Fred went into his pitch. At this point, the whole thing was so absurd, I couldn’t make eye contact with J, lest we both burst out into unstoppable laughter. We felt like dicks, sitting in a fast-food restaurant, while a librarian-looking middle-aged man went into his expansive “let’s get rich quick together by selling worthless shit” scheme, the first step of which was buying his start-up kit of “how to sell effectively” tapes and various PowerPoint documents illustrating the path to success.

Fred was sitting awkwardly in one of those McDonalds swivel chairs, lecturing the three of us in a window booth. It just looked weird, especially on a weekend night. Kids were pointing at us and laughing. Of course kids were hanging out there – this is what kids do in small towns, hang out at fast-food places. J and I were dressed in t-shirts and shorts – T had anticipated the mild formality of the even and had on a short-sleeve knit shirt. I guess when you sell Amway, you adapt to any situation. This guy had probably sold Amway in topless bars and church basements. A McDonalds made as much sense to him as any place else.

Fred’s whole spiel, and he talked nonstop, was the usual horseshit – drop a few hundred bucks on his training materials (obviously how he made most of his money) and then start attending seminars where you, too, could unlock the secrets of success. The whole idea was to rope all your friends into buying and selling cheap Amway products. That’s all it was. Avon calling. Only Avon had a niche – cosmetics – while Amway was all over the place. Think Tupperware parties. I could understand the logic of grouping people together to buy one type of product. But Amway just seemed like the worst sort of horseshit sell, the concept that we were all going to be millionaires by exploiting our friends into buying and selling this utter garbage.

Fred got done his spiel, and immediately blurts out, well, where should I send the learning materials. Like any good salesman – closing the sale metaphorically when he senses the people he’s talking to think he’s an asshole. J got into it a bit with Fred, picking over his logic and points. Man, I just sat there stewing. T was already into the program, had put money down on the learning materials and such, already signed up for a seminar. J made the mistake of trying to engage this con artist in a real conversation, and all he got were circular replies to his real questions. No one asked me what I thought – I gather Fred picked up on the negative vibes I was emanating and figured just let that one go.

The kicker came when we finished up our Big Macs and headed back to the hotel parking lot. Fred made a big show out of his car – I can’t recall what it was, surely some type of luxury vehicle. He beeped open the trunk, an in it was a fishing rod that cost him a few hundred dollars. I guess he figured that since we were in a rural area, we were rednecks and into fishing. T was, but not J or I. He took out the rod and mimicked fly casting over the parking lot, inviting us on a fishing trip he had planned next day in the Susquehanna.

He already had T – hook, line and sinker – but he sensed J and I were lost causes. I later told J I had pondered the possibility of kicking Fred’s ass and stuffing him in the trunk of his car. We weren’t going to do anything, much less go fly-fishing, with this guy. From the second we met him until we bid adieu with his fishing rod in hand, J and I had felt nothing but radical discomfort. You have to understand, this guy’s whole spiel was based solely on the concept of making truckloads of money. It was a pure, unabashed advertisement for greed – every sentence finished with a reminder over how much money we would make (and we surely wouldn’t … he might if he hustled enough mooks in this fashion).

Having lived in New York a few years at that time, I found myself unimpressed by greed – still do, even more so now. I wasn’t impressed by garish displays of financial power – wasn’t repulsed either. It just never mattered to me. The rich people I sometimes worked for didn’t seem overly happy – many of them seemed much worse off than the middle/working-class people I’d always known. Less happy. Less sane. Less healthy. If there were a few things I was certain of, it was that their lives were no better than mine, and that I didn’t envy them. It seemed like a lot of work to keep up appearances, and very few opportunities to genuinely relax.

Most working-class people I’d known sat around fantasizing what it would be like “to be rich” … never quite realizing they’d go on being the same people, only with more problems generated by their increased income. We have this illusion that financial security exists in our lives – it just doesn’t for most people. And for the ones it does, as noted, their lives are not fantasy worlds of happiness and pure delight. People who live in mansions are always “on” in some sense – how you relax in a house filled with assistants and servants, I have no idea. Your whole life is geared towards maintaining that façade. Not kicking back after work in a tank top and shorts, with a beer, listening to the Dead, or what have you. You do that in a mansion, people think you've turned into Howard Hughes and start looking at the length of your fingernails.

How do you explain this to an Amway salesman in a McDonald’s parking lot, who reeks of “dick” but has himself convinced he’s got the world by the tail because of the things he owns? In short, you don’t. You just recognize that this is the guy’s thing in life, more power to him, and let him go off spinning in that wondrous constellation of seminars filled with easy marks who will end up unhappy, but only after he’s fleeced them for a few hundred bucks a piece. The difference between Fred and me was I knew I didn’t have the world by the tail – that it had me by the tail and the best I could do was try to make sense of the insanity around me. You don’t sell people when you see the world that way – you just live in it.

We said good night, T chatting a little longer with Fred to make sure all was cool with the next week’s seminar, and J and I finally got off on our own and started howling with laughter. Fred probably heard us … again, there was nothing new under the sun for the guy with his sales pitch, hell, he’d probably been physically attacked after giving his pitch, so a few 24-year-old guys laughing at him in a parking lot was no big deal.

When T got us back in his rabbit, he was a little angry with us, but he just wasted two hours of our lives on this horse’s ass salesman, and if anyone should be angry here, it should be us. But we weren’t really angry, probably because we sensed the insanity of the situation and rode with it. Actually, we started mercilessly haranguing T with the little self-help aphorisms and sayings Fred had sprinkled through his pitch, laughing uproariously after each bon mot. T wasn’t taking it well, and I knew not to ride him too hard. There was an instance in high school where he got the world’s worst haircut, literally a bowl cut, that left him looking like Moe from The Three Stooges. That day, I harassed him endlessly with Stooges riffs, making Curly “nook-nook-nook” sounds, doing that finger-popping/hand waving routine they would do before slapping each other upside the head. The kicker came when I started singing “The Alphabet Song” from one of their episodes (“Bah-aye-bay, Bay-ee-bee/ Bay-eye-bippie-bye-bye-boh-boo.”) T eventually flipped out and started punching me in the arm, which was excruciating.

I knew not to get the guy stewing, and he was stewing that J and I thought Fred was a complete asshole … which implied even worse for him if he was following Fred. As it turned out, we were right. T took the seminars, dropped another few hundred bucks into Fred’s pocket, started trying to sell Amway to his friends, immediately realized they resented being sold to, as any friend would, probably made a little money, but far less than he had invested in Fred, and gave the whole thing up a few weeks later. I don’t know how he didn’t grasp what J and I did immediately – that you would have to see your friends as potential customers – and this was not kosher. You don’t exploit your friends. You don’t see them as avenues for you to make money. I take that back – there are plenty of people in New York who do nothing but network, and everyone in their lives falls in that category of “how can this person help me.” But they have no real friends, which will become painfully obvious when the chips are down in some sense. I use the word “mercenary” a lot in New York because it applies.

We didn’t hold it against T because we knew he’d meant no harm. We had to play it cool that night, but we would later laugh about how he was led astray by the Amway salesman and his pyramid scheme. I’m not sure what people think when they have these schemes laid on them by enterprising salesman. Either you have a strong set of values in life before that, which may very well include pursuing monetary wealth, or you seem to expect this person to grant you a new set of values that allows you to make truckloads of money, like they’re introducing you to a new, better belief system than the one you had. They’re not. They’re hustling you. But I guess capitalism is built on that sort of “pie in the sky” hustle, and always will be.

The Computer Still Wears Tennis Shoes

Just returned from a mid-summer trip to Pennsylvania, which was bracketed by two strange sightings. A few years back, I wrote a story about a well-meaning nut who was roaming the earth as a Christ-like figure to spread The Word, and how that particularly related to the Coal Region where I was raised and he was spending some real time. You can find the story here, still on the Leisuresuit.net website. In that story I mention Buddy, the odd local still roaming the back roads and highways of the same area, and the strange, sometimes violent circumstances of his life.

Well, this trip, I saw Christ and Buddy. I don’t think this was whatsyourname. But the day I came back, the bus was driving through Tamaqua around 7:30 on a late June evening, that “golden sunset” time where everything glows. A guy dressed like Christ was on the street – thin, early 30s, long dirty blonde hair, beard, white robe, sandals, throwing his arms out wide and laughing as a crowd of senior citizens applauded. The bus driver gave me a “what the fuck” look, and I explained what I knew of the previous Christ imitator – like I said, this didn’t look like him. But I guess the concept must have caught on, and frankly, if you’re going to imitate someone, why not Christ. Or a guy who thinks he's Christ.

Buddy, I saw this time just outside of Tamaqua on the Sunday morning bus heading back to New York. Naturally, he was thumbing it, with that big shock of red hair, a goofy grin on his face. He made that honking motion with his right arm to get the bus driver to blow his horn, and the driver obliged, causing Buddy to clap his hands. Buddy looked like he had put on a few pounds since I last remember seeing him about eight years ago, but god damn, if he still isn’t out there thumbing it every day. Some things never change back there.

Sandwiched between all that, the madness of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett dying on the same day. Fawcett, I found out about early afternoon, but Jackson, I had gone out to have dinner with an old friend, and the restaurant was ablaze with the news that the King of Pop had expired. It’s been a landslide of Jackson news ever since, really disturbing, too. I guess my issue with Jackson, beyond the weirdness which is irrelevant, is that most of his music just doesn’t hold up to legendary status. Sure, the hype and image do, the methodical creation of style over substance he worked to an art form back in the 80s. The guy was a tremendous showman, no way around that. I recall the hype and self aggrandizement he generated being beyond belief and truly sickening at the time. Once a musician dies, and the hype wears off, only the music remains.

And the music just wasn’t that good after awhile. His best stuff, far and away, was with the Jackson 5, when he was a kid and had very little control over his creative choices. I can always go back to these songs and find unassuming greatness. But as he went along as an adult, he kept growing more slick as an artist, to the point where the music was meaningless, just a backdrop for him to dance to onstage and in videos, which occurred simultaneously with the advent of MTV. Welcome to the new age … because that became the formula for so much of soul/urban music from the 80s onward. Jackson, and surely Madonna as well, were the first to usher in that sense of style over substance. And it's been all downhill ever since: they were the best of the bunch, and their music was, and is, mediocre for the most part. The music industry started dying for real when this shift was made in popular music in the 1980s.

The guy worshipped James Brown, who brought the whole package, like a monkey wrench upside your head. I’ve been listening to a lot of James Brown lately, especially his live material, and he made a great case for style and substance. Even the way he screamed and grunted made some type of profound sense. But I’m hearing a lot of Michael Jackson on VH-1 and the radio and such, and the songs just aren’t there. “Billie Jean” and “Black and White” are about the only songs I can hack from his adult life – there are a whole slew of others that aren’t bad … but just aren’t that good either. (And there's stuff like "Man in the Mirror" and "We Are the World" that are utter shite.) I’d feel a lot better about this Elvis-like mania surrounding his death if he actually had the musical chops to back it up. I just aint hearing it! Somebody like Prince passing on would hit me harder. Granted, the guy hasn’t put out anything great in decades, but he has put out enough challenging music to register as a musical force above and beyond any style issues. (August Darnell, of Kid Creole & the Coconuts fame, put out as much great music as Prince and Jackson combined ... but no one gives a shit about this guy these days!)

It was just a weird few days for me this time of year, that particular death pushing me back to an early 70s time frame … and then stumbling upon some cool Disney movies at the local Walmart, in particular, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and The Strongest Man in the World, both starring a very young Ken Russell. Both staples of my early 70s childhood film experiences, seeing them at the then-decrepit Roxy Theater in Ashland, which was on its last legs and felt like it. For some reason, I distinctly remember seeing The Legend of the Boggy Creek Monster, The Jungle Book and Song of the South there – the latter two because they had the audience singing along and clapping, and the first because it scared the shit out of me. I still suspect if I had to spend any time near Texarkana, I’d be on the lookout for that furry manbeast creature.

In regards to the Russell flicks, I had already made a copy of The World’s Greatest Athlete (starring Jan Michael Vincent) from my cable system in New York, and thus was already in that mind frame to appreciate that early 70s Disney vibe. And it’s a good one. I find all these movies fun to watch – they’ve held up well despite being incredibly dated. Although I have to wonder what college campus Russell was on in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes … every kid in that movie has a reasonable haircut and seems more like a wholesome 50s teenager than an early 70s college student. Remember, this was the age of Kent State, hippies, drugs, Woodstock and such. But I’m sure Walt Disney himself stiff-armed any such concepts appearing in his movies, which makes sense. Besides which, I somehow suspect that if I could get in a time capsule and go back to 1971 or so on a college campus, the environment would probably be a bit more sedate and button-downed than the radical hippie utopia I have built up in my mind. I’m always meeting people in NYC office work who were college students around that time and were decidedly NOT hippies in any overwhelming sense.

About all I didn’t do back there this visit was find old video footage of Karen Valentine in Room 222 and Julie Newmar as Catwoman in the Batman TV series to masturbate over. I can just about guarantee you, the first few hundred erections I had in my life could be attributed to those two: those “roll over and cover my crotch with a pillow, because I’m pitching a mean tent in my footed pajamas” sort of woodies you can only get when you’re eight or nine and not really sure why that’s happening, but know you have to hide it.

I don’t know why, but deep summer is that one time of year I can go back to that part of Pennsylvania and have a more clear connection with the past. I’d guess this is because nostalgia ties in with focusing on good memories, and most kids have good memories of summer, even if that only means not being in school. Thus, adults relate more good memories to summer than the season truly deserves. It also underlines to me how oddly disconnected you become from your past when you move to another place and live there a long time. For me, it’s a blast to drive down all those all roads and re-connect myself to where I’m from. If you still live there, have always lived there and never left? I’d imagine it’s a much less romantic view of the place. I wouldn’t even call my view romantic. But when I go off on a long morning run on a back road through woods and farmlands, it’s a night-and-day experience from where I’d been only 24 hours earlier, i.e., dodging packs of annoying tourists on Broadway and fully immersed in that much quicker/more alert city life.

City life is good in that way: keeps you on your toes. Best to have your head on straight, lest you enjoy being taken advantage of. Gets tiresome sometimes, especially when you’ve run across more than your fair share of wolves and assholes, so it’s always good to get away to a place where they’re less plentiful. I’ve seen urban dwellers put forth about how great the city is in terms of setting yourself free in some sense, but from what I’m gathering about life, if you don’t have balls enough to be yourself anywhere, in any circumstance, that stance is pretty much bullshit, and will go on being such until you learn to be yourself at all times. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve underlined that basic tenet of life, but it’s not so easy to follow at times. I guess I’m veering off in this direction because I came across a website that had a few gay guys carrying on about the Gay Pride Parade this past weekend in New York, and that seemed like a basic thread in their musings. Man, there’s always someone who’s going to hate you for no good reason, whoever you are, wherever you go. You’re not living for those people, if you’re smart. The idea that “homophobic rednecks” are keeping you from being yourself is utter bullshit – only one person can keep you from being yourself. (And if you know city life like I do, you’re just as likely to run across packs of homophobic jackasses who will throw a scare into gay folks as hard as any rednecks in a rural bar would.)

The lines are more blurred now between here and there, although I can still clearly and easily feel the difference in that long bus ride, from one place to another. But I find that coming and going aren’t as shocking as they once were, there’s not that sense of letting my breath out when I get back to the country, or tightening my game when I get back here. I guess I’m just “on” all the time in the sense of being aware of other people and how they act, maybe because I’ve noticed more boorish, trashy assholes walking around back home in the past few years, and had just as many unexpectedly nice experiences in the city that are as genuine as anything you’d find in a small town. I can tell when I’m around good people, and when I’m around shitheads, and I avoid shitheads, no matter where I’m at. Are you writing all this down? Words to live by here!