1) You are a middle-class white male in the 25-40 age range. Two blocks from home is your local grocery where you shop a couple times per week. Over the years, you've developed relationships with the staff. Sam, the manager, knows you by name and greets you whenever you walk through the automatic doors. Elena, in the meat department, knows all your favorite cuts and will without hesitation go out of her way to get you the meat you desire. If ever you find yourself unsatisfied with a purchase you can return it for a full refund no questions asked, etc... This is your local grocery, and it feels like it.
One afternoon, you run in after work to grab a bottle of wine and some hummus. As the doors open, a man walks past you without making eye contact. He is an African-American man who appears to be in his 50's. His clothes are rumpled and his hair unkempt. Under his stained shirt, you can see the clear outline of some sort of square box, approximately the size and shape of a box containing a dozen donuts. He is walking out of the store on the side opposite the checkout lanes, and he carries no grocery bags.
Do you tell Sam?
2)You were raised in a large northeastern American city by a progressive family. You attended church as a child, but are not especially rigid or pious in your beliefs. After a good showing in high school, you decide to attend a competitive state university in the South.
At college, among your newly formed group of friends, you meet a boy named Isaac. Isaac is from a small town in the same state as the college, and grew up in a stern, Baptist family. As the members of your new clan begin to revel in the delights of college (new ideas, progressive politics, new sexual & drug experiences), Isaac is torn. He is drawn towards the new ideas and experiences but fears that they violate the tenets of his faith.
One late night, during an alcohol fueled bull session, Isaac confesses his fear of being condemned to hell for his sins. Feeling philosophical (and a little intoxicated), you look him straight in the eyes and declare "Isaac, man, there is no such thing as hell."
He takes it to heart. At first it's funny and kind of wonderful to watch Isaac embrace his newfound freedom from fear. But he goes overboard, falling into a rut of mindless hedonism and substance abuse. A few years after graduation, you run into Isaac at a party. Clearly high on cocaine, he tells you that he's living with three men and a woman in Brooklyn in a bizarre polyamorous relationship. He admits he is depressed and sometimes contemplates suicide.
Are you to blame? At least somewhat?
3) You are a dogmatic believer in your faith and always abide closely by its rules. After a long and devout, but not unhappy life you pass away quietly one night while sleeping.
You arrive at the gates of Heaven, and the mysteries of the world are revealed to you. Turns out you got it right, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was the Lord's one and only true vehicle into heaven. As you glimpse through the bars of the pearly gates into the bastion of eternal bliss, you feel pretty good about yourself.
Looking around, however, you realize that many of the people you love are missing. Moreover, most of the best people you knew on Earth have failed to make the cut. Close members of your immediate family have been cast out for minor transgressions, like missing mass a couple Sundays or wearing immodest bathing suits. You begin to worry that perhaps your wife will not be joining you when she dies.
You communicate your concerns to St. Peter, who goes and gets Jesus. JC listens, he understands. After mulling it over, he offers you a deal. If you agree to give up your spot in heaven, your family can get in. Further, if you agree, old JC will go ahead and let everyone up who was basically decent but ended up in Hell through the workings of some cosmic red tape.
The trouble is, while you will have surely done a wonderful and selfless thing, you'll never get to enjoy it. If you agree to the deal, you spend eternity in bitter agony and soul-killing loneliness. Of course, if you decide to take your rightful spot in Heaven, you experience eternal joy while many of your loved ones perish in damnation.
You think you've worked hard to earn your salvation and deserve it, but on the other hand, saving your friends and family from Hell seems like the decent thing to do.
Do you take the deal?
viernes, 4 de septiembre de 2009
Escaping Miami, Alma Intact
Ah Miami, the city so sexy your every breath hits like a hot blast in the mouth.
The 305, where vehicular homicide gets you less than 30 days, provided you have a good lawyer.
Mi-ami, the place to go when you want to give your culture a bad reputation.
Hauteville sous la pays.
I grew up in Miami, but left before the last afternoon bell at Gables High had quit ringing in my ears. Like so many sons of farmers or inner city kids who dance, I'd been consumed by dreams of "making it out of here." Except instead of an incestous backwater or gang-ridden ghetto I dreamt of leaving a sprawling metropolis, a global culture center.
Of course it isn't all bad down here.
The city's traffic conspires beautifully with its residents' weakness for leasing gaudy overpiced cars. Though your house may be a dump, you will have at least 3 hours a day to show off that whip as you turtle your way down the 836.
The weather is great, and concerns about the heat unfounded. Miami is the coldest city south of the Mason-Dixon line. True, you will be blowdryered as you dash between valeting your Masserati and walking into the China Grill, but otherwise you can expect to spend 95% of your time at a chilly preset 65 degrees.
Of course if you don't mind hot weather, you can always choose to don that Bruno-esque mesh fashion shirt and sweat your way from club to club down Collins Ave.
Seriously, there are some wonderful things about Miami. The cultures of South America and Europe nest comfortably within the county limits. You can learn Spanish, French, or Portuguese in a few short weeks. In Miami you can unpretentiously sample from dozens of cultures, either by patronizing their restaurants or hiring some roofers.
And there are stars down here! You're likely to witness people shooting a movie or music video as you maneuver your sports car around town, and even more likely to witness people living a movie.
Living here, expect to have neighbors arrested by helicopter dropped Swat teams at midnight. Expect to see folks down the street demolish their 3 bedroom and build a solid gold McMansion with a champagne jacuzzi, and expect to see it foreclosed on within the month. Expect to see corrupt politicians elected by the votes of the deceased survive scandal with a tenacity only matched by their zombie constituents.
All of this is fun and entertaining, and not why I left.
I left because growing up I witnessed the people here overcome by a pathological need to consume and produce, and to have this conspicous consumption observed and validated by others. I knew no adults who didn't see the acquisition of wealth as the driving impulse behind their every breath and movement.
Among friends and family, conversations inevitably centered on posessions and who had them: houses, cars, and water toys. Going out on a weekend night focused not so much on fun but became instead a cocaine-esque quest for more, hipper, better bars and parties offering unaffordable drinks and even less affordable girls. Here, even romance bears the mark of a market transaction, of a trade: tits for Tahitian timeshares, butt for a BMW.
I knew I couldn't or at least didn't want to compete in this game, but I also knew how hard it was not to get caught up. I didn't lack ambition, I just wanted a different definition of success.
Not that people aren't shallow everywhere, and not like there aren't people in Miami who consistently rise above it.
It's just that I knew deep inside that I wasn't immune to the Miami disease, and that the one sure cure was heading north on I-95 and not looking back for a while. And I still believe that in South Florida, with the probable exception of some medical doctors, it's practically impossible to both pay the mortgage and escape with your soul.
To those I left behind, I wish you luck.
Nice car, by the way.
The 305, where vehicular homicide gets you less than 30 days, provided you have a good lawyer.
Mi-ami, the place to go when you want to give your culture a bad reputation.
Hauteville sous la pays.
I grew up in Miami, but left before the last afternoon bell at Gables High had quit ringing in my ears. Like so many sons of farmers or inner city kids who dance, I'd been consumed by dreams of "making it out of here." Except instead of an incestous backwater or gang-ridden ghetto I dreamt of leaving a sprawling metropolis, a global culture center.
Of course it isn't all bad down here.
The city's traffic conspires beautifully with its residents' weakness for leasing gaudy overpiced cars. Though your house may be a dump, you will have at least 3 hours a day to show off that whip as you turtle your way down the 836.
The weather is great, and concerns about the heat unfounded. Miami is the coldest city south of the Mason-Dixon line. True, you will be blowdryered as you dash between valeting your Masserati and walking into the China Grill, but otherwise you can expect to spend 95% of your time at a chilly preset 65 degrees.
Of course if you don't mind hot weather, you can always choose to don that Bruno-esque mesh fashion shirt and sweat your way from club to club down Collins Ave.
Seriously, there are some wonderful things about Miami. The cultures of South America and Europe nest comfortably within the county limits. You can learn Spanish, French, or Portuguese in a few short weeks. In Miami you can unpretentiously sample from dozens of cultures, either by patronizing their restaurants or hiring some roofers.
And there are stars down here! You're likely to witness people shooting a movie or music video as you maneuver your sports car around town, and even more likely to witness people living a movie.
Living here, expect to have neighbors arrested by helicopter dropped Swat teams at midnight. Expect to see folks down the street demolish their 3 bedroom and build a solid gold McMansion with a champagne jacuzzi, and expect to see it foreclosed on within the month. Expect to see corrupt politicians elected by the votes of the deceased survive scandal with a tenacity only matched by their zombie constituents.
All of this is fun and entertaining, and not why I left.
I left because growing up I witnessed the people here overcome by a pathological need to consume and produce, and to have this conspicous consumption observed and validated by others. I knew no adults who didn't see the acquisition of wealth as the driving impulse behind their every breath and movement.
Among friends and family, conversations inevitably centered on posessions and who had them: houses, cars, and water toys. Going out on a weekend night focused not so much on fun but became instead a cocaine-esque quest for more, hipper, better bars and parties offering unaffordable drinks and even less affordable girls. Here, even romance bears the mark of a market transaction, of a trade: tits for Tahitian timeshares, butt for a BMW.
I knew I couldn't or at least didn't want to compete in this game, but I also knew how hard it was not to get caught up. I didn't lack ambition, I just wanted a different definition of success.
Not that people aren't shallow everywhere, and not like there aren't people in Miami who consistently rise above it.
It's just that I knew deep inside that I wasn't immune to the Miami disease, and that the one sure cure was heading north on I-95 and not looking back for a while. And I still believe that in South Florida, with the probable exception of some medical doctors, it's practically impossible to both pay the mortgage and escape with your soul.
To those I left behind, I wish you luck.
Nice car, by the way.
How To Blow a Job Interview
One of my first "real" jobs out of college was working as a residential counselor at a therapeutic boarding school. For those unfamiliar, a therapeutic or "emotional growth" boarding school couples the traditional boarding school concept with a highly structured and specialized program for special needs students. This particular school focused on boys with autism spectrum disorders in the 12-15 range. Although I quite liked the kids, looking back this gig ranks pretty low on my list of favorite jobs.
The school was beautiful and rich in acreage, but the dorms were dusty and cramped. For the duration of my employment, I slept there 4 nights a week, sharing an thin-walled 800 sq. foot dorm with 12 special needs students. I ate two meals a day (sometimes three) in the school cafeteria, way too many plastic trayfuls of bland, unhealthy, kid friendly fare. I struggled through a session of group therapy every afternoon. And I pulled out countless fistfuls of hair trying to get those guys through the simple minutae of daily tasks we all take for granted: brushing teeth, making beds, tying shoes, taking showers, turning off the tv, etc...
Still, for most of my time there I remained happy to be employed. And for all the children I worked with there and since leaving that school, there is one I'll never forget. Let's call him Andy. He joined us mid-semester, about two months after I began working there. I recall he was around 13 or 14 and from California. Among this group, Andy was a pretty agreable and easy going guy, and we shared a decent rapport based on us being the "new guys."
But the poor little dude had a volatile tummy. I think maybe Crohn's disease. For as bland as the food got, within minutes he was attacking our tiny dorm's toilet. I mean attacking. Because the dorm was so small and there was often nowhere else to go, all eleven of his compatriots and I could hear him in there after every meal, unleashing a torrrent of fireworks fit for an Independence Day grand finale. The noises he made were unhuman in their humanity. They sounded the way farts sound in a cartoon. Think of the sound produced when we place the bases of our palms together against our lips, grip our face with our fingers, and blow hard. The sort of sounds we almost always make when we're pretending to fart but rarely produce in earnest. Imagine those noises for 10-15 minutes without cease, coupled with a shitty smell inside of a tiny dorm with amazing acoustics.
Now imagine the effect this would have on the other eleven kids, special needs or not. For a few weeks, chaos erupted everytime the poor kid used the john. I admit I sometimes had difficulty choking back the giggles. But after a while, things changed. For one, the other students really liked the new boy. For another, something can only be funny for so long. So after a while, very few people laughed when he shit. And those that did got publicly dressed down, not by the staff, but by the other kids. After a month, no one even seemed to notice anymore.
Then one afternoon, a man came to the school to interview for the job of school psychologist. This was a gentleman in his late 30's or early 40's, a dude with a Doctorate in Psychology. It was the school's custom to have anyone interviewing for a job spend the day among the students, and to have other staff who observed them fill out feedback forms. Although staff and students alike dressed casually on the school grounds, I recall this poor guy had come to the interview in a suit and spent the day participating in school activities like art & crafts or soccer practice.
He was a bit rumpled by the time he arrived to participate in our afternoon group therapy session, but seemed to be in good spirits. Often people would come interview and leave in horror after witnessing a student outburst or trying to stomach a meal in the cafeteria. But this guy was hanging in there. He pulled up a chair and sat through our afternoon group session or "house meeting." He listened to the kids and offered feedback that seemed neither too stuffy or rehearsed. He told them a bit about himself, his family, cracked a joke. I began mentally checking off high marks on my feedback form.
None of us really thought much about it when Andy excused himself to use the bathroom. He was gone a couple minutes before things started to pop and fizzle. Even a few farts were emitted without anyone stirring. Then I noticed the interviewee begin to rock and shake in his chair, to tighten his lips and grind his teeth a little. He sniffed a bit at the air. I considered saying something, but couldn't think of what to say. As the kids kept talking, I thought the man was going to pull it off, he was regaining composure.
Then Andy let one really rip. Grand Finale. Hiroshima. Big Bang Theory.
The man wrapped his arms around his chest and rocked hard back and forth. His face went purple. Then he just erupted; he let his arms fly out and screamed with laughter. He fell out of his chair and lay on the floor for a good two or three minutes, quieter now but still shaking and hiding his face.
The kids were dead silent; these same kids who would applaud wildly when someone dropped a tray in cafeteria and go incontinent with mirth over a horse neighing. Stone-faced silence. When the poor guy finally pulled himself back up onto his chair and offered a flushed apology, one of the kids looked him right in the eye and explained in a monotone that Andy had stomach problems.
I'm not sure what happened to the gentleman interviewing, whether he left right away or stayed for dinner. Obviously he didn't get the job. I wish him the best and think about him every now and then. Especially if I have an interview coming up.
The school was beautiful and rich in acreage, but the dorms were dusty and cramped. For the duration of my employment, I slept there 4 nights a week, sharing an thin-walled 800 sq. foot dorm with 12 special needs students. I ate two meals a day (sometimes three) in the school cafeteria, way too many plastic trayfuls of bland, unhealthy, kid friendly fare. I struggled through a session of group therapy every afternoon. And I pulled out countless fistfuls of hair trying to get those guys through the simple minutae of daily tasks we all take for granted: brushing teeth, making beds, tying shoes, taking showers, turning off the tv, etc...
Still, for most of my time there I remained happy to be employed. And for all the children I worked with there and since leaving that school, there is one I'll never forget. Let's call him Andy. He joined us mid-semester, about two months after I began working there. I recall he was around 13 or 14 and from California. Among this group, Andy was a pretty agreable and easy going guy, and we shared a decent rapport based on us being the "new guys."
But the poor little dude had a volatile tummy. I think maybe Crohn's disease. For as bland as the food got, within minutes he was attacking our tiny dorm's toilet. I mean attacking. Because the dorm was so small and there was often nowhere else to go, all eleven of his compatriots and I could hear him in there after every meal, unleashing a torrrent of fireworks fit for an Independence Day grand finale. The noises he made were unhuman in their humanity. They sounded the way farts sound in a cartoon. Think of the sound produced when we place the bases of our palms together against our lips, grip our face with our fingers, and blow hard. The sort of sounds we almost always make when we're pretending to fart but rarely produce in earnest. Imagine those noises for 10-15 minutes without cease, coupled with a shitty smell inside of a tiny dorm with amazing acoustics.
Now imagine the effect this would have on the other eleven kids, special needs or not. For a few weeks, chaos erupted everytime the poor kid used the john. I admit I sometimes had difficulty choking back the giggles. But after a while, things changed. For one, the other students really liked the new boy. For another, something can only be funny for so long. So after a while, very few people laughed when he shit. And those that did got publicly dressed down, not by the staff, but by the other kids. After a month, no one even seemed to notice anymore.
Then one afternoon, a man came to the school to interview for the job of school psychologist. This was a gentleman in his late 30's or early 40's, a dude with a Doctorate in Psychology. It was the school's custom to have anyone interviewing for a job spend the day among the students, and to have other staff who observed them fill out feedback forms. Although staff and students alike dressed casually on the school grounds, I recall this poor guy had come to the interview in a suit and spent the day participating in school activities like art & crafts or soccer practice.
He was a bit rumpled by the time he arrived to participate in our afternoon group therapy session, but seemed to be in good spirits. Often people would come interview and leave in horror after witnessing a student outburst or trying to stomach a meal in the cafeteria. But this guy was hanging in there. He pulled up a chair and sat through our afternoon group session or "house meeting." He listened to the kids and offered feedback that seemed neither too stuffy or rehearsed. He told them a bit about himself, his family, cracked a joke. I began mentally checking off high marks on my feedback form.
None of us really thought much about it when Andy excused himself to use the bathroom. He was gone a couple minutes before things started to pop and fizzle. Even a few farts were emitted without anyone stirring. Then I noticed the interviewee begin to rock and shake in his chair, to tighten his lips and grind his teeth a little. He sniffed a bit at the air. I considered saying something, but couldn't think of what to say. As the kids kept talking, I thought the man was going to pull it off, he was regaining composure.
Then Andy let one really rip. Grand Finale. Hiroshima. Big Bang Theory.
The man wrapped his arms around his chest and rocked hard back and forth. His face went purple. Then he just erupted; he let his arms fly out and screamed with laughter. He fell out of his chair and lay on the floor for a good two or three minutes, quieter now but still shaking and hiding his face.
The kids were dead silent; these same kids who would applaud wildly when someone dropped a tray in cafeteria and go incontinent with mirth over a horse neighing. Stone-faced silence. When the poor guy finally pulled himself back up onto his chair and offered a flushed apology, one of the kids looked him right in the eye and explained in a monotone that Andy had stomach problems.
I'm not sure what happened to the gentleman interviewing, whether he left right away or stayed for dinner. Obviously he didn't get the job. I wish him the best and think about him every now and then. Especially if I have an interview coming up.
But all I see is sand around...
My parents split up on New Years Eve 2000. The "real millenium change", for all those buzzrapers back in 1999 who felt the need to point out that our calendar started with the Year 1, not 0. Numerology aside, it made for a shitty NYE. My brother showed up unexpectedly at the party I was attending. I thought he wanted to smoke some pot, but he just told me to get in the car. The entire ride home, I kept yelling at him that we could have got high inside the party. Finally, when we pulled into the driveway, he shut me up.
It turns out my mother had woken up around midnight and caught my father on the telephone with another woman. Confronted, he came clean about the affair, packed a quick bag, and headed off to god knows where. They'd been married for twenty-five years.
We spent the next few hours comforting my mother as she told us way more about their relationship than I ever wanted to know. In the morning, my father showed up for more of his things. I remember he sort of shook and cried as he hugged my brother and I. He seemed pretty pathetic.
When you're an adult and your parents divorce, no one gives you very much room to grieve. More than anything really, you're suddenly expected to flip roles and become the caregiver, to nurse your emotionally frazzled parents back to health. As far as tragedies go, it's not a very sexy one. I wouldn't write a song about, not unless I was in one of those really terrible emo bands with the wrist-cutting and the haircuts.
I'm quick to recognize that things could have been much worse. Everyone was still alive, and though they were acting a bit erratic, more or less my parents were ok. As my brother is fond of pointing out, if we'd been 12 years old, this probably would have fucked us up pretty good.
But still, at 18 and away from home for the first time, the dissolution of my parent's marriage sort of took the ground out from under me. In the years leading up to high school graduation, I worked hard to untie myself from the stabilizing forces in my life. I quit believing in God or attending church. I blasted my nervous system with hallucinogens. Although I made good grades in school, I didn't have any professional aspirations or take much pride in scholastic accomplishments. When it came time for college I picked one far away, and was excited about setting on my own, an empty vessel in uncharted waters.
What a crock of shit. I'd lived in the same house my entire life, had the same friends. I'd never wanted for anything or worried about money. If I'd managed to turn myself into a blank canvas, it was only because I was sitting atop the rock-solid sturdiness of the easel that had been my upper middle class life. I'd wanted to run as far from our boring little house as possible, but when I turned around and saw that house on fire, well, I wasn't so sure anymore.
The truth is, you can be 13 or 30, and something like divorce is still going to fuck you up. I think I spent the rest of my time in college sort of reeling from the shock. I pledged a fraternity, all too grateful for the opportunity for mindless conformity mixed with hedonism. I avoided home. If my parents would argue about who was supposed to pay tuition or rent, I'd just work it out some other way. I partied too much and studied too little. I was less than nice to some very nice girls.
But I graduated, and when I felt brave enough to face my family again it turned out everyone had landed on their feet. My parents both married people who were the polar opposite of each other, and I realized how different they'd been all along. My father married the woman he cheated with, and while this bothered me for a long time, I eventually just caved and formed a relationship with her.
There are still some things I'm unhappy about. I mourn the loss of the home I grew up in; it still bothers me to think of some other family living in our house. And when I approach my parents seeking life or career advice, and get two divergent answers, it shakes me up a bit.
But there is a shadow side to everything. They managed to sell the house before the market collapsed and made out like bandits. And two opinions are better than one, n'est pas?
Statistically speaking, children of divorce are more likely to end up that way themselves. This is not how I want my life to turn out. But while my parents may have done me a disservice in terms of statistics, I think I probably learned way more about life watching their marriage dissolve than I would have if they'd just decided to pretend for another twenty-five years.
Like a lot of people, I think they just got married because they were about that age and it seemed like the thing to do. When they started to feel unhappy, they just ignored it, burying themselves in their work, hobbies, child-rearing, white wine, etc... But a person can only repress so much.
You can call me cocky for saying I'm sure I won't make the same mistakes, but, I'm sure I won't make the same mistakes. I've learned too much from theirs. I'm calling it a hard-won confidence.
It turns out my mother had woken up around midnight and caught my father on the telephone with another woman. Confronted, he came clean about the affair, packed a quick bag, and headed off to god knows where. They'd been married for twenty-five years.
We spent the next few hours comforting my mother as she told us way more about their relationship than I ever wanted to know. In the morning, my father showed up for more of his things. I remember he sort of shook and cried as he hugged my brother and I. He seemed pretty pathetic.
When you're an adult and your parents divorce, no one gives you very much room to grieve. More than anything really, you're suddenly expected to flip roles and become the caregiver, to nurse your emotionally frazzled parents back to health. As far as tragedies go, it's not a very sexy one. I wouldn't write a song about, not unless I was in one of those really terrible emo bands with the wrist-cutting and the haircuts.
I'm quick to recognize that things could have been much worse. Everyone was still alive, and though they were acting a bit erratic, more or less my parents were ok. As my brother is fond of pointing out, if we'd been 12 years old, this probably would have fucked us up pretty good.
But still, at 18 and away from home for the first time, the dissolution of my parent's marriage sort of took the ground out from under me. In the years leading up to high school graduation, I worked hard to untie myself from the stabilizing forces in my life. I quit believing in God or attending church. I blasted my nervous system with hallucinogens. Although I made good grades in school, I didn't have any professional aspirations or take much pride in scholastic accomplishments. When it came time for college I picked one far away, and was excited about setting on my own, an empty vessel in uncharted waters.
What a crock of shit. I'd lived in the same house my entire life, had the same friends. I'd never wanted for anything or worried about money. If I'd managed to turn myself into a blank canvas, it was only because I was sitting atop the rock-solid sturdiness of the easel that had been my upper middle class life. I'd wanted to run as far from our boring little house as possible, but when I turned around and saw that house on fire, well, I wasn't so sure anymore.
The truth is, you can be 13 or 30, and something like divorce is still going to fuck you up. I think I spent the rest of my time in college sort of reeling from the shock. I pledged a fraternity, all too grateful for the opportunity for mindless conformity mixed with hedonism. I avoided home. If my parents would argue about who was supposed to pay tuition or rent, I'd just work it out some other way. I partied too much and studied too little. I was less than nice to some very nice girls.
But I graduated, and when I felt brave enough to face my family again it turned out everyone had landed on their feet. My parents both married people who were the polar opposite of each other, and I realized how different they'd been all along. My father married the woman he cheated with, and while this bothered me for a long time, I eventually just caved and formed a relationship with her.
There are still some things I'm unhappy about. I mourn the loss of the home I grew up in; it still bothers me to think of some other family living in our house. And when I approach my parents seeking life or career advice, and get two divergent answers, it shakes me up a bit.
But there is a shadow side to everything. They managed to sell the house before the market collapsed and made out like bandits. And two opinions are better than one, n'est pas?
Statistically speaking, children of divorce are more likely to end up that way themselves. This is not how I want my life to turn out. But while my parents may have done me a disservice in terms of statistics, I think I probably learned way more about life watching their marriage dissolve than I would have if they'd just decided to pretend for another twenty-five years.
Like a lot of people, I think they just got married because they were about that age and it seemed like the thing to do. When they started to feel unhappy, they just ignored it, burying themselves in their work, hobbies, child-rearing, white wine, etc... But a person can only repress so much.
You can call me cocky for saying I'm sure I won't make the same mistakes, but, I'm sure I won't make the same mistakes. I've learned too much from theirs. I'm calling it a hard-won confidence.
Gorilla Heart
I had a backward vision of heaven.
Everyone else aspired; lived righteously, prayed nightly, confessed monthly, flossed weekly in hopes of one day attaining paradise. They hoped for a future rise towards a celestial kingdom of happiness populated by all their loved ones who’d passed. But our heaven was gone, it was the place we’d started and to which we could never return.
Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were wealthy young parents living in the upscale Havana suburb of Varadero when Fidel Castro's guerilla troops overthrew the right wing Batista government in 1959. Believing Cuba to be unsafe for citizens of their social class in the wake of the revolution, the two families fled to the United States in 1960 with very few of their personal assets. Neither set thought the situation would last more than a year, and planned to return to Havana once things settled down politically. My maternal great grandparents spent six months and most of their available savings staying at an expensive Manhattan hotel before they realized that it would be wise to start making some more reasonable long term expectations.
I begged to hear about the old days almost every night, as my father tucked me into bed.
Tell me about Cuba, about when you were a boy…
The bedtime stories were plotless and repetitive. Everyone lived together on an island: my father and uncles, our cousins, my grandparents, Nana and Lito, and my great-grandparents Tuto and Bici. They all lived within walking distance, in mansions, and there were docks close by where my great-grandfather had a boat, a big boat. And all these dear relatives, now cruelly separated by space and time and death, used to gather almost daily at the dock to embark on terrific voyages together on Tuto’s boat, to sit atop the deck and share mouthfuls of bocadillos de lechon and lemonade, to fish and swim and surf the boat’s giant wake.
And then this paradise, which I was meant to inherit, burned and crumbled without warning, the yachts and mansions looted by a cruel dictator, his name synonymous with pure evil. Castro: the devil incarnate, Hitler with a full beard. And this Devil’s particular brand of Satanism was communism, a cruel plot to take everybody’s everything and give it to the government. My family barely escaped this heaven to hell transformation, handing over the houses and boats and jewelry in exchange for a ticket on the last flight to purgatory.
I was a product of this purgatory, an American. I knew no warmer reality. Gone were the days of the big boat. My beloved Bici and Tuto buried, and the rest of the family flung outward, diluted into the American landscape as if no city had the pork producing capacity to handle more than a couple Cubans at a time. Family became something that happened a few times a year, at holidays, or when someone died. My big boat was a station wagon that patiently navigated the Eisenhower Highway system to the coast on special occasions, my food the tasteless, processed white bread yankee sandwiches. Even my Spanish flirted dangerously with the flat unaccented speech of the gringos, the efficient but soulless rulers of purgatory.
To this end I switched schools in the third grade. My parents pulled me from my regular elementary school and sent me to a special program for language learning. At the time we lived at the little yellow house in Coral Oaks, only a few blocks from the regular elementary school. In a confusing turn, I started third grade not by walking the four blocks to school with my older brother, but to waiting at the bus stop down the street for a big yellow boat to take me into the city. At this new school we took half our instruction in Spanish, and worked from textbooks shipped from Spain.
The transition was traumatic. Although I’d been gung-ho about the idea at first, I quickly lost my nerve. For the first year or two I purposely fumbled around in the morning, hoping to miss the bus and have an extra hour in the car with mom or dad. In class I feigned stomachaches to earn reprieves to the boy’s bathroom, where I’d take up residence in a toilet stall and sob, pining for the good old days with all my friends at the old school. I made few new friends. Afternoons I would come home angry and demand to know why I needed to be sent off to some special school. At night I would mellow from emotional exhaustion and beg my father to put me to sleep with stories of the good old days, when everyone was together and happy.
But after a while something within me began to change. The long bus rides and longer school days caused me to miss meals and time with the family. In time, my homesickness grew into a sort of lonely independence, a feeling of separateness from the family. I engaged with the city around me and the world of academics as a private citizen, instead of someone’s kid. Suddenly school engrossed me, especially the words found within my Spanish textbooks, in them I found knowledge suddenly necessary for my new independent life.
A sixth grade social studies lesson proved crucial. We’d been studying European history, first medieval, then Renaissance, finally Enlightenment, the French Revolution. I’d been disgusted reading though dark ages, of cruel kings who ordered others around through the arbitrary power of their lineage. Perhaps anti-monarchism was the product of my growing Americanism, or my anger at having been bused off to a strange school. But the French Revolution hit me on a deeper level. Synapses began firing, concrete historical facts and political ideas connecting to deeply buried emotions and still developing preferences. The pages of Boveda, my Spanish Social Studies book, grew heavy under the weight of certain terms. Equality, Fraternity, Revolution. I felt swollen with revolutionary zeal, brimming with ideas that finally resounded with the longings of a long unsatisfied inner self. I wanted to storm the Bastille.
And then I flipped forward and saw the subheading, a page or two ahead of current lesson. Communism. I wondered what the great evil was doing on the page. Communism: Fidel’s National Socialism that ruined our Isle of Eden, the evil fueling the ever-present threat of an annihilating Russian attack, that sinister force which my G.I. Joe action figures fought tirelessly against. What did it have to do with my beloved Jacobins? I got worried. I skipped forward to the explanatory text box, double checked my findings in the glossary, waited for the bell and bombarded my teacher with questions.
I mulled it over on the long ride home, looking out of the rectangular bus window at the city streets of Miami. We dropped the poorest kids off first, the black kids who lived in concrete projects with the beige paint peeling and the laundry flapping in the front lawn. I wondered what was so wrong about striving towards the elimination of social classes, about common ownership and everyone being in it together. I thought class and color and money seemed as arbitrary a source of power as being born a Hapsburg or Bourbon. Why had my family fled from this? Wasn’t that togetherness, that collective experience what had made our heaven heaven?
Over the next few weeks I exhausted my reference resources. I quickly burned through our Brittanica, gobbling up the volumes that included Lenin or Marx, Socialism, Anarchy, etc, always keeping a finger bookmarking a benign entry on Luxembourg or Marsupials in case a family member inquired about my research. I read books in the school library about Bolshevism and the Spanish Civil War. I learned Hemingway had written about the Republican effort in Spain, but a brief survey of The Old Man and the Sea proved fruitless.
I assembled a list of good guys and bad guys. The good guys toiled, sweat, and bled on land owned by some rich dandies who didn’t care what came up from the soil as long as it was worth money. The good guys rounded up all the other factory workers to bargain collectively for their share; the bad guys hired goons to come in with clubs and rocks and break it up. As my list grew, I suddenly realized that I’d been lied to all these years. Sure, some of the bad guys were the ones I’d been taught about: Adolph, Benito, Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible. And some of the old good ones could stay: Ghandi, Lincoln, Dr. King. But some other names started to come up bad; suddenly Christopher Columbus didn’t seem like such a prince, along with the rest of the conquistodores. And two names, etched on my evil list so firmly for so long, begged for a second look.
Fidel y Che.
I outed myself on a family Sunday dinner. Tradition dictated that Nana and Lito came over around five every Sunday and stayed through the end my grandfather’s post meal cigar. It started innocently enough, with a perfunctory question about what I was studying. The conversation moved from France to Spain. Generalissimo Franco’s name came up. Lito called him a hero. I pushed back. I asked about all the people he’d killed. I said he’d betrayed the people’s right to govern themselves. My father said that those people were a bunch of communists. And I blurted it out:
“I don’t think communism is so bad. Rich people were just exploiting peasants in Spain like in Cuba. Something had to be done.”
Forks fell on the floor. My brother looked amazed. Nana cried. Lito leaned over and slapped me, the first time I’d ever been hit by anyone besides my older brother. I felt a surge of some previously unknown mix of neurotransmitters run through my nervous system. My blood tingled.
I was sent to my room, the rest of my pork and potatoes confiscated. Not that I could have eaten. I tried to listen to their conversation through my closed door. Now they seemed to be arguing with each other, mostly my mother and Lito. I paced around the room, fuming.
I thought I was hearty enough for round two. I was a glutton for punishment. When the glass door slid shut behind the kitchen and the matches struck after the meal was over, it usually meant keep out. Father and grandfather would sit in the dark, silent behind the glass, bright orange circles waving slowly in the air as if they talked with their cigars instead of their voices. Usually I studied in my room or helped with dishes and on their way out Nana and Lito crept into my room for a quick despedida. This time, I started towards my door twice and caught myself. I sat agitated on the bed, kicked at the shaggy blue carpet. This was my Bastille, my Moncada Barracks.
I stormed, out of my room and through the sliding glass door to the patio. I yelled something about free speech, about my right to my own views. Lito lunged out of his chair towards me, but he tripped and knocked over the table with the ashtray. My dad stood up and grabbed me by the collar, silent. The air was thick with ash; I felt it collecting in my eyes and hoped it would catch the tears before they ran down. My grandmother stepped into the open door space, called me every word for ungrateful in Spanish and English. I wrestled myself out from my father’s grip and ran back into my room.
I was alone now but still refused to cry. I ground the ash into my eyes with dusty fingers. I was right. I was brave. They didn’t respect me enough to listen. I was alone, but proud. My heart threatened to bounce clear out of my chest. I pounded my chest with both fists to better contain it. My gorilla heart, my guerilla heart. I was alone and proud and right and brave. History would absolve me, too. Me, Moses. Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses M…
Everyone else aspired; lived righteously, prayed nightly, confessed monthly, flossed weekly in hopes of one day attaining paradise. They hoped for a future rise towards a celestial kingdom of happiness populated by all their loved ones who’d passed. But our heaven was gone, it was the place we’d started and to which we could never return.
Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were wealthy young parents living in the upscale Havana suburb of Varadero when Fidel Castro's guerilla troops overthrew the right wing Batista government in 1959. Believing Cuba to be unsafe for citizens of their social class in the wake of the revolution, the two families fled to the United States in 1960 with very few of their personal assets. Neither set thought the situation would last more than a year, and planned to return to Havana once things settled down politically. My maternal great grandparents spent six months and most of their available savings staying at an expensive Manhattan hotel before they realized that it would be wise to start making some more reasonable long term expectations.
I begged to hear about the old days almost every night, as my father tucked me into bed.
Tell me about Cuba, about when you were a boy…
The bedtime stories were plotless and repetitive. Everyone lived together on an island: my father and uncles, our cousins, my grandparents, Nana and Lito, and my great-grandparents Tuto and Bici. They all lived within walking distance, in mansions, and there were docks close by where my great-grandfather had a boat, a big boat. And all these dear relatives, now cruelly separated by space and time and death, used to gather almost daily at the dock to embark on terrific voyages together on Tuto’s boat, to sit atop the deck and share mouthfuls of bocadillos de lechon and lemonade, to fish and swim and surf the boat’s giant wake.
And then this paradise, which I was meant to inherit, burned and crumbled without warning, the yachts and mansions looted by a cruel dictator, his name synonymous with pure evil. Castro: the devil incarnate, Hitler with a full beard. And this Devil’s particular brand of Satanism was communism, a cruel plot to take everybody’s everything and give it to the government. My family barely escaped this heaven to hell transformation, handing over the houses and boats and jewelry in exchange for a ticket on the last flight to purgatory.
I was a product of this purgatory, an American. I knew no warmer reality. Gone were the days of the big boat. My beloved Bici and Tuto buried, and the rest of the family flung outward, diluted into the American landscape as if no city had the pork producing capacity to handle more than a couple Cubans at a time. Family became something that happened a few times a year, at holidays, or when someone died. My big boat was a station wagon that patiently navigated the Eisenhower Highway system to the coast on special occasions, my food the tasteless, processed white bread yankee sandwiches. Even my Spanish flirted dangerously with the flat unaccented speech of the gringos, the efficient but soulless rulers of purgatory.
To this end I switched schools in the third grade. My parents pulled me from my regular elementary school and sent me to a special program for language learning. At the time we lived at the little yellow house in Coral Oaks, only a few blocks from the regular elementary school. In a confusing turn, I started third grade not by walking the four blocks to school with my older brother, but to waiting at the bus stop down the street for a big yellow boat to take me into the city. At this new school we took half our instruction in Spanish, and worked from textbooks shipped from Spain.
The transition was traumatic. Although I’d been gung-ho about the idea at first, I quickly lost my nerve. For the first year or two I purposely fumbled around in the morning, hoping to miss the bus and have an extra hour in the car with mom or dad. In class I feigned stomachaches to earn reprieves to the boy’s bathroom, where I’d take up residence in a toilet stall and sob, pining for the good old days with all my friends at the old school. I made few new friends. Afternoons I would come home angry and demand to know why I needed to be sent off to some special school. At night I would mellow from emotional exhaustion and beg my father to put me to sleep with stories of the good old days, when everyone was together and happy.
But after a while something within me began to change. The long bus rides and longer school days caused me to miss meals and time with the family. In time, my homesickness grew into a sort of lonely independence, a feeling of separateness from the family. I engaged with the city around me and the world of academics as a private citizen, instead of someone’s kid. Suddenly school engrossed me, especially the words found within my Spanish textbooks, in them I found knowledge suddenly necessary for my new independent life.
A sixth grade social studies lesson proved crucial. We’d been studying European history, first medieval, then Renaissance, finally Enlightenment, the French Revolution. I’d been disgusted reading though dark ages, of cruel kings who ordered others around through the arbitrary power of their lineage. Perhaps anti-monarchism was the product of my growing Americanism, or my anger at having been bused off to a strange school. But the French Revolution hit me on a deeper level. Synapses began firing, concrete historical facts and political ideas connecting to deeply buried emotions and still developing preferences. The pages of Boveda, my Spanish Social Studies book, grew heavy under the weight of certain terms. Equality, Fraternity, Revolution. I felt swollen with revolutionary zeal, brimming with ideas that finally resounded with the longings of a long unsatisfied inner self. I wanted to storm the Bastille.
And then I flipped forward and saw the subheading, a page or two ahead of current lesson. Communism. I wondered what the great evil was doing on the page. Communism: Fidel’s National Socialism that ruined our Isle of Eden, the evil fueling the ever-present threat of an annihilating Russian attack, that sinister force which my G.I. Joe action figures fought tirelessly against. What did it have to do with my beloved Jacobins? I got worried. I skipped forward to the explanatory text box, double checked my findings in the glossary, waited for the bell and bombarded my teacher with questions.
I mulled it over on the long ride home, looking out of the rectangular bus window at the city streets of Miami. We dropped the poorest kids off first, the black kids who lived in concrete projects with the beige paint peeling and the laundry flapping in the front lawn. I wondered what was so wrong about striving towards the elimination of social classes, about common ownership and everyone being in it together. I thought class and color and money seemed as arbitrary a source of power as being born a Hapsburg or Bourbon. Why had my family fled from this? Wasn’t that togetherness, that collective experience what had made our heaven heaven?
Over the next few weeks I exhausted my reference resources. I quickly burned through our Brittanica, gobbling up the volumes that included Lenin or Marx, Socialism, Anarchy, etc, always keeping a finger bookmarking a benign entry on Luxembourg or Marsupials in case a family member inquired about my research. I read books in the school library about Bolshevism and the Spanish Civil War. I learned Hemingway had written about the Republican effort in Spain, but a brief survey of The Old Man and the Sea proved fruitless.
I assembled a list of good guys and bad guys. The good guys toiled, sweat, and bled on land owned by some rich dandies who didn’t care what came up from the soil as long as it was worth money. The good guys rounded up all the other factory workers to bargain collectively for their share; the bad guys hired goons to come in with clubs and rocks and break it up. As my list grew, I suddenly realized that I’d been lied to all these years. Sure, some of the bad guys were the ones I’d been taught about: Adolph, Benito, Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible. And some of the old good ones could stay: Ghandi, Lincoln, Dr. King. But some other names started to come up bad; suddenly Christopher Columbus didn’t seem like such a prince, along with the rest of the conquistodores. And two names, etched on my evil list so firmly for so long, begged for a second look.
Fidel y Che.
I outed myself on a family Sunday dinner. Tradition dictated that Nana and Lito came over around five every Sunday and stayed through the end my grandfather’s post meal cigar. It started innocently enough, with a perfunctory question about what I was studying. The conversation moved from France to Spain. Generalissimo Franco’s name came up. Lito called him a hero. I pushed back. I asked about all the people he’d killed. I said he’d betrayed the people’s right to govern themselves. My father said that those people were a bunch of communists. And I blurted it out:
“I don’t think communism is so bad. Rich people were just exploiting peasants in Spain like in Cuba. Something had to be done.”
Forks fell on the floor. My brother looked amazed. Nana cried. Lito leaned over and slapped me, the first time I’d ever been hit by anyone besides my older brother. I felt a surge of some previously unknown mix of neurotransmitters run through my nervous system. My blood tingled.
I was sent to my room, the rest of my pork and potatoes confiscated. Not that I could have eaten. I tried to listen to their conversation through my closed door. Now they seemed to be arguing with each other, mostly my mother and Lito. I paced around the room, fuming.
I thought I was hearty enough for round two. I was a glutton for punishment. When the glass door slid shut behind the kitchen and the matches struck after the meal was over, it usually meant keep out. Father and grandfather would sit in the dark, silent behind the glass, bright orange circles waving slowly in the air as if they talked with their cigars instead of their voices. Usually I studied in my room or helped with dishes and on their way out Nana and Lito crept into my room for a quick despedida. This time, I started towards my door twice and caught myself. I sat agitated on the bed, kicked at the shaggy blue carpet. This was my Bastille, my Moncada Barracks.
I stormed, out of my room and through the sliding glass door to the patio. I yelled something about free speech, about my right to my own views. Lito lunged out of his chair towards me, but he tripped and knocked over the table with the ashtray. My dad stood up and grabbed me by the collar, silent. The air was thick with ash; I felt it collecting in my eyes and hoped it would catch the tears before they ran down. My grandmother stepped into the open door space, called me every word for ungrateful in Spanish and English. I wrestled myself out from my father’s grip and ran back into my room.
I was alone now but still refused to cry. I ground the ash into my eyes with dusty fingers. I was right. I was brave. They didn’t respect me enough to listen. I was alone, but proud. My heart threatened to bounce clear out of my chest. I pounded my chest with both fists to better contain it. My gorilla heart, my guerilla heart. I was alone and proud and right and brave. History would absolve me, too. Me, Moses. Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses M…
lunes, 8 de junio de 2009
Good Reads, Bad Blood: Why GoodReads.com is so Bad for Me
There is a type of person you know and dislike. Similar to a snob, but not snobby in the traditional sense of Lexus or Rolex's. The type of person who has chosen one particular aspect of life and become an expert; most often either in fine food, movies, or music. Whatever you want to call these braggarts, they exist and labor tirelessly to spoil your enjoyment.
Perhaps one overhears you casually mention your favorite food is curry, and swiftly rushes in to inform you about their semester abroad in Mumbai, and that you've never had real curry, just an American bastardation of the dish.
Maybe you tell one of these folks that you really liked Dogma, only to be informed that Kevin Smith movies are derivative of the German Impressionist films of the early seventies, overly reliant on ambrosial dialogue between underdeveloped characters and lacking in plot.
God forbid you happen to enjoy the same music as one of these folks, let's say the band Rancid. They'll look troubled for a second, but quickly regain their composure, cast you off as a parvenu, and let you know that yes, they do like Rancid, but they only like their old stuff.
Yep, these folks are out there, and it's not just you, everyone hates them. At least I hate them, or hated them, before I joined goodreads.com and realized I was ONE OF THEM. No, I may not wax philosophical about carpaccio or dismiss post-1983 Dead shows as nothing but Santa Claus on heroin, but apparently when it comes to books I'm just as bad. Only, before goodreads.com, I had no medium for my obnoxious inclinations.
(Sure, there was that one time in college I cursed a girl out for mixing up Tom Wolfe with Thomas Wolfe, but I chalk that up to drunkeness rather than literary snobitude. Like the time I mistook a homeless man for Method Man and challenged him to a freestyle rap contest, the T. Wolfe incident resides on a long list titled "things that never could have happened without the game Power Hour.")
If you're unfamiliar with the website (www.goodreads.com), more or less you just create a giant list of your favorite books and rate them on a five-point scale, leaving a brief comment if you're so inclined. There's a social aspect to the site as well, as you compile a list of friends, although I suspect the site is geared more towards revealing the literary tastes of your current friends than fostering new friendships based on shared taste. I established my goodreads friends by letting the site sift through my gmail contacts for potential members, mostly coworkers from a job I left a year ago in order to come back to school.
The next step, for me anyway, was indignation. Comparing these friends ratings with my own, my first thought was "jesus, this site is letting people play tennis without a net." Carlos gave 5 stars to Angels and Demons but slammed Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being with 3. Samantha loved Confessions of a Shopaholic but finds Cormac McCarthy "too boring". It wasn't just the obvious ones that got me, but even lesser offenses, like Brent awarding 5 stars to The Catcher in the Rye but only 4 to Franny and Zooey.
As I read on, my blood pressure skyrocketed and I found myself having horribe thoughts about these people. I caught myself composing hostile emails in my head, suggesting that the makers of goodreads add an SAT score to user's profile or require everyone who rates Don Delillo to have at least an M.A.
I don't want to have thoughts like these. In the world outside literature, I like and respect these folks for their wit and competence. And of course I hate the snobs and faux-savants who ruin my meal or movie, so why should books be any different?
For me, books are important, something to be taken seriously. My pie in the sky dream is to publish a novel of great importance, the kind of book a lonely but literate 14 year-old reads and thinks "wow, I'm not the only sentient being on this planet." So when an author attempts a work like this and succeeds, I respect the hell out of them. Conversely, when some blowhard writes a bestseller about sexy vampires, I curse them for using up the paper that might have held the next Look Homeward, Angel.
Still, there's not accounting for taste, and it's the asshole who keeps people from enjoying things they really like. I don't want some creep with a culinary school diploma behind me snickering everytime I order at a restaurant, and I'm sure my friends don't need me blasting every opinion they have about a book. (Hell, at least they're reading.) I've thought it over, and I'm deleting my account.
Good reads? I say, good riddance.
Perhaps one overhears you casually mention your favorite food is curry, and swiftly rushes in to inform you about their semester abroad in Mumbai, and that you've never had real curry, just an American bastardation of the dish.
Maybe you tell one of these folks that you really liked Dogma, only to be informed that Kevin Smith movies are derivative of the German Impressionist films of the early seventies, overly reliant on ambrosial dialogue between underdeveloped characters and lacking in plot.
God forbid you happen to enjoy the same music as one of these folks, let's say the band Rancid. They'll look troubled for a second, but quickly regain their composure, cast you off as a parvenu, and let you know that yes, they do like Rancid, but they only like their old stuff.
Yep, these folks are out there, and it's not just you, everyone hates them. At least I hate them, or hated them, before I joined goodreads.com and realized I was ONE OF THEM. No, I may not wax philosophical about carpaccio or dismiss post-1983 Dead shows as nothing but Santa Claus on heroin, but apparently when it comes to books I'm just as bad. Only, before goodreads.com, I had no medium for my obnoxious inclinations.
(Sure, there was that one time in college I cursed a girl out for mixing up Tom Wolfe with Thomas Wolfe, but I chalk that up to drunkeness rather than literary snobitude. Like the time I mistook a homeless man for Method Man and challenged him to a freestyle rap contest, the T. Wolfe incident resides on a long list titled "things that never could have happened without the game Power Hour.")
If you're unfamiliar with the website (www.goodreads.com), more or less you just create a giant list of your favorite books and rate them on a five-point scale, leaving a brief comment if you're so inclined. There's a social aspect to the site as well, as you compile a list of friends, although I suspect the site is geared more towards revealing the literary tastes of your current friends than fostering new friendships based on shared taste. I established my goodreads friends by letting the site sift through my gmail contacts for potential members, mostly coworkers from a job I left a year ago in order to come back to school.
The next step, for me anyway, was indignation. Comparing these friends ratings with my own, my first thought was "jesus, this site is letting people play tennis without a net." Carlos gave 5 stars to Angels and Demons but slammed Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being with 3. Samantha loved Confessions of a Shopaholic but finds Cormac McCarthy "too boring". It wasn't just the obvious ones that got me, but even lesser offenses, like Brent awarding 5 stars to The Catcher in the Rye but only 4 to Franny and Zooey.
As I read on, my blood pressure skyrocketed and I found myself having horribe thoughts about these people. I caught myself composing hostile emails in my head, suggesting that the makers of goodreads add an SAT score to user's profile or require everyone who rates Don Delillo to have at least an M.A.
I don't want to have thoughts like these. In the world outside literature, I like and respect these folks for their wit and competence. And of course I hate the snobs and faux-savants who ruin my meal or movie, so why should books be any different?
For me, books are important, something to be taken seriously. My pie in the sky dream is to publish a novel of great importance, the kind of book a lonely but literate 14 year-old reads and thinks "wow, I'm not the only sentient being on this planet." So when an author attempts a work like this and succeeds, I respect the hell out of them. Conversely, when some blowhard writes a bestseller about sexy vampires, I curse them for using up the paper that might have held the next Look Homeward, Angel.
Still, there's not accounting for taste, and it's the asshole who keeps people from enjoying things they really like. I don't want some creep with a culinary school diploma behind me snickering everytime I order at a restaurant, and I'm sure my friends don't need me blasting every opinion they have about a book. (Hell, at least they're reading.) I've thought it over, and I'm deleting my account.
Good reads? I say, good riddance.
jueves, 4 de junio de 2009
The Worst Party Ever
The worst party ever was a fraternity party, with a "Dukes of Hazard" theme. Though I never watched the show, I was a marginal member of the fraternity and decided to attend. Parked in front of the house was an orange 1960 something Dodge Charger with a rebel flag painted on the roof. Bails of hay were strewn about for decoration. Inside the house, a local band earned their $300 covering the likes of Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, Alabama, The Marshall Tucker Band, etc.
I dressed like Boss Hog, in a cheap oversized white suit from Goodwill. It wasn't a good look for me. The costume looked more like a cross between a hobo and a waiter at a fancy restaurant than anything from the TV show.
I considered myself a "marginal" member of the fraternity because it was April, and almost graduation time. By this point my collegiate concerns centered on dwindling job prospects and an intense fear of moving back with my parents. I'd reread the "Bell Jar" over Christmas Break and thought total psychological disentegration was a very real possibility if I didn't have an income and apartment come May 1st.
My point being, I stayed away from the keggers for the most part, except that every couple of weeks the pressure got to me and I'd head over for a rager. The Dukes party felt like one of those nights. Hobo-waiter Boss Hog was going to get tabernacled.
In terms of party-layout, there was a great hall on the first floor where the band was playing. Also on the first floor was a kitchen with a liquor bar manned by pledges. The second and third floors consisted of bedrooms, in a party sense these were mainly used for casual sex and the discrete ingestion of hard drugs. I went to the bar for a jack and coke, regarded the freshmen writhing to some Hank Jr. song in the great hall, and decided to head upstairs.
I found some friends passing around a j-bird by the stairwell on the third floor. This party is going to be alright, I thought to myself. I took a couple tugs off the spliff and asked my friend Travis how his job prospects were coming along. T-bone was a business major and destined to do a lot better on the outside than me. I doubt he'd read the Bell Jar.
Before he could answer I wave of nausea washed over me, and I was forced to grab the rail of the stairwell for support.
"You ok, Moe?" Travis asked. "It's a little early for the spins."
I wasn't ok. I ran into one of the bathrooms. I puked my guts out. After washing my face, I looked inside my plastic cup. It was about half-empty. Two tugs off a joint and half a jack and coke. Travis was right, it was too early for the spins. As would soon become clear, something was terribly wrong with me.
By the time I left the bathroom, my friends had dispersed from the stairwell. I attempted to rejoin the party, but only made down one flight of stairs before I had to run into the second-floor bathroom and puke again. A bunch of dudes wearing overalls pointed and laughed at me puking.
"Rookie!" They yelled. "It's only 9:30."
I didn't know what to do. I could hardly stand without getting terribly dizzy. Remembering that my friend Brad was out of town, I crawled back up to the third floor and holed up in his bedroom. I could hear the party thumping under me as I filled his trashcan with vomit.
After about 30 minutes of this, Travis knocked on the door. He'd been looking for me. T-bone asked if I'd had any of the cookies the Ladies of Omega-Moo had dropped off the week before.
"Those fat bitches left us some cookies and an invitation to some pancake dinner," he said. "Ben ate some and got sick as shit. Food poisoning. He had to go the hospital, and the nurses put some rod up his asshole."
I couldn't recall if I'd eaten a cookie, but I remembered Ben's story. I couldn't stop thinking about having some medical instrument rammed up my anus.
"Need me to take you to the hospital Moe?"
"No, thanks."
(A few weeks later we learned that I didn't have food poisoning, and we'd carelessly blamed the ladies of Omega-Mu for nothing. Some kind of vicious norovirus was tearing through campus. Worse, in my opinion, than any swine flu or chicken cold reported by some worry-wart newscaster.)
Brad saved my life that night, as I managed to find a case of some of knock-off sports drink in his room (not Gatorade or it's bastard cousin Powerade, but some other shit, Squencher maybe). While the party went on below me, I drank bottle after bottle of sports drink, puked it up, then rinsed and repeated.
A couple times I got the undeniable feeling that the demons were trying to escape through the other end, and sprinted to the bathroom to piss out of my butt. The runs drippin'. On the fraternity's third floor were two bathrooms: a single serving toilet and sink; and a big, multi-stall affair with showers and mirrors. The first two times with the runs I got lucky and found the single unnoccupied.
The third time I was not so blessed. There'd been girls voices outside the door and, even though I really had to go, I held out as long as humanly possible waiting for them to leave. When they finally did, I sprinted to the single but it was lock. My butt cheeks were clenched and giving way every second. I ran back around the hall into the big bathroom, where I found the three girls adjusting make-up in the mirror and gossiping. I knew one of them, not well, but well enough to be embarrassed.
In that big bathroom there were three toilet stalls. Only one, the farthest from the sinks, had a door. Occupied. With no choice, about to soil my white, Boss Hog suit pants, I ran into one of the doorless stalls, dropped drawers and blew ass. The girls stared at me with a combination of horror and mirth. Before too long, I got dizzy and had to flip around and vomit into the shitty toilet. This dance continued for another 5-10 minutes until it was all out. Thankfully, by this point the ladies had left.
I stayed in that room all night, vomiting. I stunk the place up. Nonetheless, at one point an innebriated couple crashed through the door and flopped onto the bed. The room smelled worse than a hog farm on a warm, windless day. I yelled at them to leave. The dude, who was trying to unhook the girls bra over her shirt, gave me a hand signal like "hang on bro." I stood up to physically remove them, got dizzy and passed out on the floor. When I came to they were gone. I sincerely hope they both contracted my norovirus, and maybe an STD to boot.
Around six in the morning, I stopped feeling nauseated and decided to make a run for it. I felt as though someone had turned me inside out, used me as a punching bag, and then turned me right side in again. Hobbling out the door, I passed a couple younger fraternity members sitting on the front bench and polishing off the last of the keg.
"Party of the year, Moses", they called out. "Party of the year."
Party of the year, indeed. I was ready to graduate.
I dressed like Boss Hog, in a cheap oversized white suit from Goodwill. It wasn't a good look for me. The costume looked more like a cross between a hobo and a waiter at a fancy restaurant than anything from the TV show.
I considered myself a "marginal" member of the fraternity because it was April, and almost graduation time. By this point my collegiate concerns centered on dwindling job prospects and an intense fear of moving back with my parents. I'd reread the "Bell Jar" over Christmas Break and thought total psychological disentegration was a very real possibility if I didn't have an income and apartment come May 1st.
My point being, I stayed away from the keggers for the most part, except that every couple of weeks the pressure got to me and I'd head over for a rager. The Dukes party felt like one of those nights. Hobo-waiter Boss Hog was going to get tabernacled.
In terms of party-layout, there was a great hall on the first floor where the band was playing. Also on the first floor was a kitchen with a liquor bar manned by pledges. The second and third floors consisted of bedrooms, in a party sense these were mainly used for casual sex and the discrete ingestion of hard drugs. I went to the bar for a jack and coke, regarded the freshmen writhing to some Hank Jr. song in the great hall, and decided to head upstairs.
I found some friends passing around a j-bird by the stairwell on the third floor. This party is going to be alright, I thought to myself. I took a couple tugs off the spliff and asked my friend Travis how his job prospects were coming along. T-bone was a business major and destined to do a lot better on the outside than me. I doubt he'd read the Bell Jar.
Before he could answer I wave of nausea washed over me, and I was forced to grab the rail of the stairwell for support.
"You ok, Moe?" Travis asked. "It's a little early for the spins."
I wasn't ok. I ran into one of the bathrooms. I puked my guts out. After washing my face, I looked inside my plastic cup. It was about half-empty. Two tugs off a joint and half a jack and coke. Travis was right, it was too early for the spins. As would soon become clear, something was terribly wrong with me.
By the time I left the bathroom, my friends had dispersed from the stairwell. I attempted to rejoin the party, but only made down one flight of stairs before I had to run into the second-floor bathroom and puke again. A bunch of dudes wearing overalls pointed and laughed at me puking.
"Rookie!" They yelled. "It's only 9:30."
I didn't know what to do. I could hardly stand without getting terribly dizzy. Remembering that my friend Brad was out of town, I crawled back up to the third floor and holed up in his bedroom. I could hear the party thumping under me as I filled his trashcan with vomit.
After about 30 minutes of this, Travis knocked on the door. He'd been looking for me. T-bone asked if I'd had any of the cookies the Ladies of Omega-Moo had dropped off the week before.
"Those fat bitches left us some cookies and an invitation to some pancake dinner," he said. "Ben ate some and got sick as shit. Food poisoning. He had to go the hospital, and the nurses put some rod up his asshole."
I couldn't recall if I'd eaten a cookie, but I remembered Ben's story. I couldn't stop thinking about having some medical instrument rammed up my anus.
"Need me to take you to the hospital Moe?"
"No, thanks."
(A few weeks later we learned that I didn't have food poisoning, and we'd carelessly blamed the ladies of Omega-Mu for nothing. Some kind of vicious norovirus was tearing through campus. Worse, in my opinion, than any swine flu or chicken cold reported by some worry-wart newscaster.)
Brad saved my life that night, as I managed to find a case of some of knock-off sports drink in his room (not Gatorade or it's bastard cousin Powerade, but some other shit, Squencher maybe). While the party went on below me, I drank bottle after bottle of sports drink, puked it up, then rinsed and repeated.
A couple times I got the undeniable feeling that the demons were trying to escape through the other end, and sprinted to the bathroom to piss out of my butt. The runs drippin'. On the fraternity's third floor were two bathrooms: a single serving toilet and sink; and a big, multi-stall affair with showers and mirrors. The first two times with the runs I got lucky and found the single unnoccupied.
The third time I was not so blessed. There'd been girls voices outside the door and, even though I really had to go, I held out as long as humanly possible waiting for them to leave. When they finally did, I sprinted to the single but it was lock. My butt cheeks were clenched and giving way every second. I ran back around the hall into the big bathroom, where I found the three girls adjusting make-up in the mirror and gossiping. I knew one of them, not well, but well enough to be embarrassed.
In that big bathroom there were three toilet stalls. Only one, the farthest from the sinks, had a door. Occupied. With no choice, about to soil my white, Boss Hog suit pants, I ran into one of the doorless stalls, dropped drawers and blew ass. The girls stared at me with a combination of horror and mirth. Before too long, I got dizzy and had to flip around and vomit into the shitty toilet. This dance continued for another 5-10 minutes until it was all out. Thankfully, by this point the ladies had left.
I stayed in that room all night, vomiting. I stunk the place up. Nonetheless, at one point an innebriated couple crashed through the door and flopped onto the bed. The room smelled worse than a hog farm on a warm, windless day. I yelled at them to leave. The dude, who was trying to unhook the girls bra over her shirt, gave me a hand signal like "hang on bro." I stood up to physically remove them, got dizzy and passed out on the floor. When I came to they were gone. I sincerely hope they both contracted my norovirus, and maybe an STD to boot.
Around six in the morning, I stopped feeling nauseated and decided to make a run for it. I felt as though someone had turned me inside out, used me as a punching bag, and then turned me right side in again. Hobbling out the door, I passed a couple younger fraternity members sitting on the front bench and polishing off the last of the keg.
"Party of the year, Moses", they called out. "Party of the year."
Party of the year, indeed. I was ready to graduate.
miércoles, 3 de junio de 2009
Give Michael Vick His Job BacK
Next month, upon his release from federal prison, the suits at the NFL will have to decide whether Michael Vick should be allowed to play professional football again. I say, give the man his job back.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not apologizing or downplaying what he did. I love dogs, even when they keep you up all night with their scratching or smell like a clam bake, and abhor those who would treat them inhumanely. Nor am I particularly a Vick fan. In general, I prefer college football and ignore the NFL unless the Dolphins are playing.
My argument for reinstating Vick has little to do with dogs or football. I want to give Michael Vick a chance because he's not the only one being released from prison this year. Vick is in a graduating class of almost half a million, and all these folks deserve a shot at a succesful life on the outside.
Among this huge graduating class, I would guess that Vick's experience is representative for approximately zero of them. Few are wealthy, famous, or skilled in such a lucrative field. Many have been raped, mistreated, or contracted life-threatening illness while in jail. Statistically speaking, over two thirds of them will be back in prison before the next presidential election. Of course, most have had their voting rights revoked anyway.
Somewhere along the way in this American experiment, we stopped caring that people had payed their debt to society in prison. In our current mindset, someone charged once with a crime is guilty for life. And these kinds of beliefs have an insidious way of manifesting themselves. They are self-fulfilling prophecies. We fail to give those released from prison a chance, and they fail to prove us wrong.
These folks know what we think about them. They hear it every time they try to get a job or an apartment, only to rebuked upon the results of a background check. With few allies and fewer options, most make the pathetic choice to reoffend.
I know many will disagree with my argument to let Vick play again. They'll say that playing in the NFL is a privelege, and that he's no longer worthy. Well, it may be a privelege, but so are many jobs. These days,it's a privege to just have a job. And playing football is Vick's job. Hell, it's what he studied in college.
So I say it's your lucky day, Michael Vick. Lets make an example of you just one more time. Not for the kids, or the Virginia rednecks raising fighting dogs, but for the graduating prison class of 2009. Lets let these folks know that they still have a chance.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not apologizing or downplaying what he did. I love dogs, even when they keep you up all night with their scratching or smell like a clam bake, and abhor those who would treat them inhumanely. Nor am I particularly a Vick fan. In general, I prefer college football and ignore the NFL unless the Dolphins are playing.
My argument for reinstating Vick has little to do with dogs or football. I want to give Michael Vick a chance because he's not the only one being released from prison this year. Vick is in a graduating class of almost half a million, and all these folks deserve a shot at a succesful life on the outside.
Among this huge graduating class, I would guess that Vick's experience is representative for approximately zero of them. Few are wealthy, famous, or skilled in such a lucrative field. Many have been raped, mistreated, or contracted life-threatening illness while in jail. Statistically speaking, over two thirds of them will be back in prison before the next presidential election. Of course, most have had their voting rights revoked anyway.
Somewhere along the way in this American experiment, we stopped caring that people had payed their debt to society in prison. In our current mindset, someone charged once with a crime is guilty for life. And these kinds of beliefs have an insidious way of manifesting themselves. They are self-fulfilling prophecies. We fail to give those released from prison a chance, and they fail to prove us wrong.
These folks know what we think about them. They hear it every time they try to get a job or an apartment, only to rebuked upon the results of a background check. With few allies and fewer options, most make the pathetic choice to reoffend.
I know many will disagree with my argument to let Vick play again. They'll say that playing in the NFL is a privelege, and that he's no longer worthy. Well, it may be a privelege, but so are many jobs. These days,it's a privege to just have a job. And playing football is Vick's job. Hell, it's what he studied in college.
So I say it's your lucky day, Michael Vick. Lets make an example of you just one more time. Not for the kids, or the Virginia rednecks raising fighting dogs, but for the graduating prison class of 2009. Lets let these folks know that they still have a chance.
lunes, 1 de junio de 2009
Latisse Eyelash Medicine & Everything Wrong About America
The FDA has approved the new eyelash enhancing drug Latisse, by Allergan, makers of that life saving wonderdrug Botox. Last night, I saw a commercial for the stuff. Side effects include redness, eye irritation, discomfort, blurred vision, blindness, and thicker, fuller eyelashes. Oh wait, that last one is the intended effect.
I hate to say it, but every so often I see a product like this and think: this is why terrorists hate us. Can you blame them? While Americans are taking to the street donning colonial garb to protest tax hikes to pay for universal health coverage, we're throwing our lettuce down and risking permanent darkness for longer lashes. Are these even desirable? Granted, I'm not a woman, but as a man I must note that I've never sat around with the guys and talked about how hot Cindy's eyelashes looked last night.
Also, I hate to beat a dead horse, but the next thought that came to mind (after the "Jesus I hope Al-Queda doesn't see this commercial" reaction) was why this country allows people to risk their organs to look like Brooke Shields but arrests marijuana smokers, even those using the herb medicinally. If pot is illegal, then Latisse should be illegal.
Oh and these things should be prohibited too:
(Disclaimer, I don't actually think all these things should be illegal, just that they are more harmful than marijuana.)
-Cosmetic Surgery, unless you are horribly disfigured. Poor Kanye lost his mama.
-Alcohol: 75,000 deaths per year.
-Kobe Bryant: Cockier than Ron Jeremy.
-Tobacco: Only beneficial use is as a laxative.
-Dane Cook. Seriously, yelling something doesn't make it a joke. This asshole has a whole comedy routine about Burger King.
-Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bells: For once in your life, make a damn decision! Do you want tacos or pizza for dinner? I loved the Das Racist song though.
-SUV'S: Bad for the environment, and being driven by people who like Dane Cook. If you get into an accident with an SUV, chances of injury increase dramatically, unless of course you're also driving an SUV.
-Those Ed Hardy T-Shirts: Tramp stamps for men.
-Harry Potter: Godless witchcraft and sorcery.
-Gossip Girl: Godless bitchcraft.
-Cold Cuts: Cold and slimey.
I hate to say it, but every so often I see a product like this and think: this is why terrorists hate us. Can you blame them? While Americans are taking to the street donning colonial garb to protest tax hikes to pay for universal health coverage, we're throwing our lettuce down and risking permanent darkness for longer lashes. Are these even desirable? Granted, I'm not a woman, but as a man I must note that I've never sat around with the guys and talked about how hot Cindy's eyelashes looked last night.
Also, I hate to beat a dead horse, but the next thought that came to mind (after the "Jesus I hope Al-Queda doesn't see this commercial" reaction) was why this country allows people to risk their organs to look like Brooke Shields but arrests marijuana smokers, even those using the herb medicinally. If pot is illegal, then Latisse should be illegal.
Oh and these things should be prohibited too:
(Disclaimer, I don't actually think all these things should be illegal, just that they are more harmful than marijuana.)
-Cosmetic Surgery, unless you are horribly disfigured. Poor Kanye lost his mama.
-Alcohol: 75,000 deaths per year.
-Kobe Bryant: Cockier than Ron Jeremy.
-Tobacco: Only beneficial use is as a laxative.
-Dane Cook. Seriously, yelling something doesn't make it a joke. This asshole has a whole comedy routine about Burger King.
-Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bells: For once in your life, make a damn decision! Do you want tacos or pizza for dinner? I loved the Das Racist song though.
-SUV'S: Bad for the environment, and being driven by people who like Dane Cook. If you get into an accident with an SUV, chances of injury increase dramatically, unless of course you're also driving an SUV.
-Those Ed Hardy T-Shirts: Tramp stamps for men.
-Harry Potter: Godless witchcraft and sorcery.
-Gossip Girl: Godless bitchcraft.
-Cold Cuts: Cold and slimey.
domingo, 31 de mayo de 2009
Nas 2012: Imagine That
Are you a progressive democrat regretting all your hard work in the 2008 campaign? Angry that Obama betrayed the left from Iraq to marijuana reform to torture photos and transparency? If so, it's time to imagine a candidate that will go in raw and tell his right wing detractos to hate him now instead spewing a bunch of garbage about compromise and bipartisanship; to imagine the first black president, for real.
It's time for Nas.
The Platform: God's Son Speaks Out
On Drug Laws
"Imagine smokin' weed in the streets without cops harrassing..."
Instead of misleading our bong toting citizens with a bunch of campaign talk all like "of course I inhaled", Nas promises to put his Philly where his mouth is and legalize the blunts. Finally, imagine a president who gets it, who blows "trees for breakfast."
On Prison Reform
"I'd open every cell in Attica, send 'em to Africa."
With one brave stroke, President Nas will simultaneously solve the problems of American prison overcrowding, and African underpopulation.
On The Economy
"Gimme one shot, I'll turn trife life to lavish..."
Instead of falling short with a boring stimulus bill full of highways, biways, and pork projects, Nas will send people to work putting together benz stretches. With Nastradumus at the helm, it won't be long before all Americans are tricking six digits on kicks and still holdin'
On Guantanamo Detainess
"Political prisoners set free, stress free, no work release purple M3's and jet-ski's."
If the notion of terrorists detainees set free makes you uncomfortable, just remember that President Nas has promised purple (BMW) M3's and jet-ski's in the same sentence.
On Women's Rights
"It sound foul, but every girl I meet will go downtown"
Controversial, but he should win Clinton supporters with this stance.
On Family Values
"More conscious of the way we raise our daughters."
See also, Women's Rights
On Housing & Urban Development
"The Villa house is for the crew, how we do."
On Transparency
"Open they eyes to the lies history's told foul"
No more hidden memos, deceptions or lies. President Nas invited you to imagine law with no undercovers.
On Culture
"Imagine everybody flashing, fashion
Designer clothes, lacing your click up with diamond vogues"
Forger Michelle and all her frumpy mom sweaters from J Crew. America's first real black president has style. Read Nas' lips: "And when I dress, it's nothing less than Guess."
On Diplomacy
"Trips to Paris, I civilized every savage"
On Race Relations
"The way to be, paradise like relaxing black, latino and anglo-saxon
Armani exchange the reins
Cash, Lost Tribe of Shabazz, free at last
Brand new whips to crash then we laugh in the iller path"
On The American Dream
"Cause you could have all the chips, be poor or rich
Still nobody want a nigga having shit
If I ruled the world and everything in it, sky's the limit
I push a Q-45 Infinit"
No more disowning the truthtellers, the Rev. Wrights. President Nas tells it like it is.
On Political Appointments
"I make Coretta Scott-King mayor the cities and reverse themes to Willies"
Forget tired old appointments like Leon Pannetta and that player hate Tim Geithner, let's get Coretta Scott-King in the house.
Of course, Pres. Nas would also have members of the Wu-Tang Clan in his cabinet.
Heard Enough? If not, check out Illmatic. But don't wait too long, it's time to get this campaign underway.
"Better find out before your time's out, what the fuck??"
NAS 2012"Imagine that, if you(r vote) could be mine, we'd both shine."
"I love em love em baby..."
viernes, 29 de mayo de 2009
An Open Letter to Mike Tyson
Iron Mike,
My sincerest condolences for the tragic loss of your daughter Exodus on Tuesday. I was saddened by the news. Though I'm not qualified to hold this opinion, I think you are probably a good and loving father, and loved in return.
Growing up, you were my favorite boxer. Truthfully, I wasn't really a fan of the sport; but I was a fan of yours. I liked watching your fights to try to discern the meaning of your tattoos. You made me dust off the Britannica and look up names like Mao Zedong and Arthur Ashe.
I liked your story, that you'd grown up poor and alone on the mean streets of Bed-Stuy and had to fight your way out.
Some of my friends used to make fun of your voice, but I thought it was cool. I liked the dichotomous pairing of the small voice with the big punch. I doubt they would have poked fun if you were around. I speak softly, and though I've never punched anyone, growing up I liked to think I packed the same firepower (perhaps intellectually or rhetorically).
Mostly, I liked your post fight rants. Watching you speak always carried the possibility that you would launch into an intense lyrical trash talk about your next opponent; often these were as laden with historical allusions as your body art. You were the original battle rapper, with an emphasis on battle.
This is a dumb gag, but, I had an older brother named Alex. Whenever my mother would call for him by his full name, I would wait for him to respond before interrupting in my best Tysonesque falsetto:
"You think you Alexander? I'm Alexander!"
Of course, like all boys who grew up when I did, I loved Mike Tyson's Punch Out on Nintendo.
As I progressed into my teenage years you continued to guide me towards the experience of new art and culture through your involvement, such as the James Toback film "Black & White" or the rapper Canibus. While your contemporary star athletes were pushing McDonalds and Nike, you lent your presence to projects of substance and intellectual rigor.
We met once. I doubt you would remember. It was the late 90's and I was in high school. I've never much cared for autographs or meeting celebrities, but we literally ran into eachother walking down the street in Miami. It's always stuck in my head.
I remember that, even though you'd walked down red carpets in Armani and prison halls in starchy jumpsuits, that day you were just walking down the street like a normal person. I do recall that you were wearing a platinum chain. I think it said "Mike 2000".
I was with my buddy Alfred, and you had two friends with you whose names I didn't learn. I remember how friendly you were. After we recognized you and introduced ourselves, your friends looked bored and walked off to talk with some girls. But you stuck around and spent a few minutes with us.
I can't recall what we talked about, only that you took the time to answer all our questions and asked us questions in return. I remember that you kept calling me "player."
Through all the less than stellar press coverage you've gotten since, that day is usually that first thing that comes to mind when I hear your name. I've always considered it a rule that, no matter what nasty things you may hear about someone, if they treat you respectfully then thats how they should be treated in return. I'll bet that most of the people who have really met Mike Tyson hold him in much higher regard than those who have merely read the news stories.
Speaking of those news stories, Mike. I recently read a quote somewhere where you said you think your life has been a joke. I hope you don't really feel that way. I'm sure that the tragic loss of Exodus has you re-examining, and that this process can be excruciatingly tough.
Perhaps you're not Alexander after all, but Job, and your life until now has been a test of your loyalty that will pay off in blessed latter days.
Hang in there player,
Moses M.
My sincerest condolences for the tragic loss of your daughter Exodus on Tuesday. I was saddened by the news. Though I'm not qualified to hold this opinion, I think you are probably a good and loving father, and loved in return.
Growing up, you were my favorite boxer. Truthfully, I wasn't really a fan of the sport; but I was a fan of yours. I liked watching your fights to try to discern the meaning of your tattoos. You made me dust off the Britannica and look up names like Mao Zedong and Arthur Ashe.
I liked your story, that you'd grown up poor and alone on the mean streets of Bed-Stuy and had to fight your way out.
Some of my friends used to make fun of your voice, but I thought it was cool. I liked the dichotomous pairing of the small voice with the big punch. I doubt they would have poked fun if you were around. I speak softly, and though I've never punched anyone, growing up I liked to think I packed the same firepower (perhaps intellectually or rhetorically).
Mostly, I liked your post fight rants. Watching you speak always carried the possibility that you would launch into an intense lyrical trash talk about your next opponent; often these were as laden with historical allusions as your body art. You were the original battle rapper, with an emphasis on battle.
This is a dumb gag, but, I had an older brother named Alex. Whenever my mother would call for him by his full name, I would wait for him to respond before interrupting in my best Tysonesque falsetto:
"You think you Alexander? I'm Alexander!"
Of course, like all boys who grew up when I did, I loved Mike Tyson's Punch Out on Nintendo.
As I progressed into my teenage years you continued to guide me towards the experience of new art and culture through your involvement, such as the James Toback film "Black & White" or the rapper Canibus. While your contemporary star athletes were pushing McDonalds and Nike, you lent your presence to projects of substance and intellectual rigor.
We met once. I doubt you would remember. It was the late 90's and I was in high school. I've never much cared for autographs or meeting celebrities, but we literally ran into eachother walking down the street in Miami. It's always stuck in my head.
I remember that, even though you'd walked down red carpets in Armani and prison halls in starchy jumpsuits, that day you were just walking down the street like a normal person. I do recall that you were wearing a platinum chain. I think it said "Mike 2000".
I was with my buddy Alfred, and you had two friends with you whose names I didn't learn. I remember how friendly you were. After we recognized you and introduced ourselves, your friends looked bored and walked off to talk with some girls. But you stuck around and spent a few minutes with us.
I can't recall what we talked about, only that you took the time to answer all our questions and asked us questions in return. I remember that you kept calling me "player."
Through all the less than stellar press coverage you've gotten since, that day is usually that first thing that comes to mind when I hear your name. I've always considered it a rule that, no matter what nasty things you may hear about someone, if they treat you respectfully then thats how they should be treated in return. I'll bet that most of the people who have really met Mike Tyson hold him in much higher regard than those who have merely read the news stories.
Speaking of those news stories, Mike. I recently read a quote somewhere where you said you think your life has been a joke. I hope you don't really feel that way. I'm sure that the tragic loss of Exodus has you re-examining, and that this process can be excruciatingly tough.
Perhaps you're not Alexander after all, but Job, and your life until now has been a test of your loyalty that will pay off in blessed latter days.
Hang in there player,
Moses M.
Lord, Deliver Me!
A couple weeks into my second semester of college, I realized that the $200 my parents wired into my bank account every month just wasn't cutting it. My appetite for weed, pokey sticks, Shafer light, and 3am chicken & cheese biscuits far exceeded my budget. It was time to get a job.
The problem was, I was 18, unqualifed and barely motivated in a town that was flush with 20,000 others just like, all demanding $15 an hour to do a half-ass job. So I bullshitted up the resume, made an inventory of my resources, and browsed the classifieds. I'd worked a couple part-time jobs in high school for friends of family- references, check. I was literate- but so were all the other college assholes. And I owned a car- a mid 1990's two door Ford Explorer that smelled of rotten spicy chicken sandwiches and swisher sweets.
I'll spare you the details of all the fruitlessly faxed resumes and applications filed. I've developed a theory about getting jobs (at least non-career type jobs), and in this case my theory proved correct. The theory posits: One either gets a job because you know someone at the company, or you walk in and they hire you on the spot. My high school jobs were the former; my stint at Domino's began as the latter.
Maybe it was that college hoops were in full swing and the Heels game that night was making everyone hungry for pie. When I walked into the store, workers were milling about in a hundred different directions and shouting at each other. I waited my turn in line, and was almost too embarrased once I got to the front to inquire about a job. I almost just inquired about a large pepperoni.
Here's how my interview went:
Domino's: (yelling at me across the counter while making pie) Got a car?
Me: Yeah
Domino's: Got a license?
Me: Uh, yeah.
Domino's: Come back on Monday at noon and you're hired.
So I came back on Monday. It was that easy. For my first night at work, I actually shadowed another driver. That is: we both rode together in his car, and both strolled up to the front door and gave people their pizza. You've never seen confusion until you see the face of someone who has opened their front door to discover two delivery men holding their pie.
"I ain't tipping both of you."
My mentor driver's name was Frank and he was racist. All night he kept telling me I'd "learn real fast about people around here." As in, who tips and who doesn't. He really had his pizza prejudice down to a science. Frank attempted to predict the amount of his tip based on the toppings ordered. Apparently banana peppers were not a good omen.
For the shadow night, and the first two nights of delivering on my own Kenny managed the store; he was the same guy who'd so briefly interviewed me. Kenny was a pretty good manager- he mostly just told me what to deliver and when to leave. The other drivers (Frank included) were not so easy to deal with. From what I could discern, I was the only driver there who wasn't a "lifer", my unspoken term for a man who has decided to make delivering pizzas his career. The lifers disliked me.
From my very start, they criticized. First problem was my car. All the lifers drove tiny little hatchbacks that got 45 mpg's well before anything called a hybrid existed. Also, they knew their town like the back of their wrinkly, tattoed hands, and constantly bickered about the fastest routes. If you've ever worked at a Domino's, you know that you check your delivery out on a computer, and when you return the computer logs the amount of time you spent on the run, displaying it on the screen for all to see.
A typical critique from the lifers went like this:
"13 minutes? Where'd you go? 1450 Knollwood?"
"Boy, what street did you take? Don't tell me you took Franklin? Jesus."
"What kind of mileage you get in that truck? 13? 14? I'll bet you don't get inch more than 15."
"Franklin to Knollwood on 15 mpg's! Christ, just throw that money away son."
The worst of the lifers was the Captain. That was his name. Captain. I swear to God; it said so on his nametag. The Captain had decided that, in addition to being a lifer driver, he was also some sort of unofficial assistant manager. He would take the iniative to dress me down for an errant shirttail, uneven visor, saggy pants, etc... I hated the Captain.
Once, and only once, I made the mistake of coming to work high. I figured it would help pass the time; that I'd have a rowdy time driving around town listening to some tunes and delivering pies, even if that Heat Wave bag turned my Explorer into a big fuel-inefficient sauna. As I mentioned, this was a mistake.
It started to go wrong on my very first run, when I walked out the door without putting the pizza into the heat wave bag. Captain caught me before I got in the car, and called me into the store. He interrogated me in front of everyone, asking me what I'd forgotten on this run. Was it a 2 liter diet coke? No. Some wings? No. And on and on until I realized what I'd missed.
Then, when I finally got into the car to make the delivery, "Wish you were here" by Pink Floyd was playing on the radio. I started jamming out and singing to myself, and got so distracted I ended up driving home instead of to the delivery address. I parked my car (with the pizza inside), walked up three flights of stairs, plopped down on the couch in full uniform, and turned on the TV. It took my roommate asking "dude, aren't you supposed to be at work?" for me to remember the pies in my car and the clock ticking on the Domino's computer.
By the time I made the delivery and got back, it had been almost 30 minutes. Captain was pissed. As Kenny wasn't there that night, Captain had assumed the mantle of control and was working as the manager and not a driver. He suspended me from driving for the rest of the night, meaning I'd only make $5 an hour for the rest of my shift. Worse, I'd never actually learned to do anything inside the store and he spent the rest of the night painstakingly describing all the in-store tasks.
Unlike your Mom & Pop pizza places, Domino's doesn't slide the pie into a brick oven. Instead, everything goes through this hot conveyor belt. This is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it means every item on Domino's menu has the exact same cooking time and temperature. In my estimation, wings require just a little more oven time than pie. Order at your own risk. Second, it means that if no one is ready to receive it at the ass end of the conveyor, your food falls on the ground. At our store, this food usually was dusted off and put right back in the box.
Despite the Captain's watchful eye, several pies hit the ground that night.
Luckily, we missed eachother for a couple weeks after that. I never got high before work again, and Kenny and I got along well. March madness was in full swing, people were ordering pies, and I was making money. For a few weeks, the job worked out real well.
But, on a Friday night in early April the Captain and I ended up back on the same shift. God, he was being a dick. Every run I made was scrutinized for time & route. He took issue with the amount of powdered sugar I shook on the cinna-sticks, the sauce on the wings. It was an awful night. At one point, the asshole even quietly walked up behing and pantsed me. "Too baggy Mendoza!" he explained to the grinning cadre of lifers.
By 10pm or so, I'd had enough. I was making a run far from the store, by the campus fraternity houses and I could hear other students partying, drinking and having fun. I could hear girls' voices. I decided to head back and ask Kenny if I could be cut for the night. About a mile from the store, I ended up side by side with the Captain at a red light. He was heading back to the store after a run in his Hyundai, a little electric blue ultra -efficient whip. We glanced at eachother, and I decided it was on.
When the light turned green, the Captain turned right. He was surely planning to execute one of his trademark supersecret routes that got him back to the store in record time. I was having none of it, and decided to beat him my way. He would twist around little side streets; I would race right through downtown traffic. I pushed down the peddle, weaved through cars, shot through yellow lights. For a five light stretch, the lord was on my side. Nothing but green.
Finally, stopped at a red right outside the store, I saw the Captain pull back onto the street a few cars behind me. I'd done it, I'd beat the asshole. I checked my rearview, he was staring at me fuming. I couldn't wait to stroll into the store and enter my code into the computer, then ask him what streets he'd taken. He was looking at me from his car; I winked. Still looking in the mirror, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the Volvo in front of me had released it's brake lights and was moving forward. I put the Explorer in gear and hit the gas all while staring at the Captain.
About 10 seconds later I slammed into the Volvo, who'd only pulled head to try and make a right. The light had still been red. My hood was slightly crumpled and emitting smoke. The Volvo driver was a heavyset woman in her 40's or 50's. She was apparently ok, as she's gotten out of her car and was approaching me yelling something unintelligible.
As the light finally turned green, the Captain eased around our accident and pulled into the Domino's parking lot. I watched, sweat pouring down my face from that damn patented heat wave bag, as he strolled into the store counting his tips and checked his run into the computer.
The problem was, I was 18, unqualifed and barely motivated in a town that was flush with 20,000 others just like, all demanding $15 an hour to do a half-ass job. So I bullshitted up the resume, made an inventory of my resources, and browsed the classifieds. I'd worked a couple part-time jobs in high school for friends of family- references, check. I was literate- but so were all the other college assholes. And I owned a car- a mid 1990's two door Ford Explorer that smelled of rotten spicy chicken sandwiches and swisher sweets.
I'll spare you the details of all the fruitlessly faxed resumes and applications filed. I've developed a theory about getting jobs (at least non-career type jobs), and in this case my theory proved correct. The theory posits: One either gets a job because you know someone at the company, or you walk in and they hire you on the spot. My high school jobs were the former; my stint at Domino's began as the latter.
Maybe it was that college hoops were in full swing and the Heels game that night was making everyone hungry for pie. When I walked into the store, workers were milling about in a hundred different directions and shouting at each other. I waited my turn in line, and was almost too embarrased once I got to the front to inquire about a job. I almost just inquired about a large pepperoni.
Here's how my interview went:
Domino's: (yelling at me across the counter while making pie) Got a car?
Me: Yeah
Domino's: Got a license?
Me: Uh, yeah.
Domino's: Come back on Monday at noon and you're hired.
So I came back on Monday. It was that easy. For my first night at work, I actually shadowed another driver. That is: we both rode together in his car, and both strolled up to the front door and gave people their pizza. You've never seen confusion until you see the face of someone who has opened their front door to discover two delivery men holding their pie.
"I ain't tipping both of you."
My mentor driver's name was Frank and he was racist. All night he kept telling me I'd "learn real fast about people around here." As in, who tips and who doesn't. He really had his pizza prejudice down to a science. Frank attempted to predict the amount of his tip based on the toppings ordered. Apparently banana peppers were not a good omen.
For the shadow night, and the first two nights of delivering on my own Kenny managed the store; he was the same guy who'd so briefly interviewed me. Kenny was a pretty good manager- he mostly just told me what to deliver and when to leave. The other drivers (Frank included) were not so easy to deal with. From what I could discern, I was the only driver there who wasn't a "lifer", my unspoken term for a man who has decided to make delivering pizzas his career. The lifers disliked me.
From my very start, they criticized. First problem was my car. All the lifers drove tiny little hatchbacks that got 45 mpg's well before anything called a hybrid existed. Also, they knew their town like the back of their wrinkly, tattoed hands, and constantly bickered about the fastest routes. If you've ever worked at a Domino's, you know that you check your delivery out on a computer, and when you return the computer logs the amount of time you spent on the run, displaying it on the screen for all to see.
A typical critique from the lifers went like this:
"13 minutes? Where'd you go? 1450 Knollwood?"
"Boy, what street did you take? Don't tell me you took Franklin? Jesus."
"What kind of mileage you get in that truck? 13? 14? I'll bet you don't get inch more than 15."
"Franklin to Knollwood on 15 mpg's! Christ, just throw that money away son."
The worst of the lifers was the Captain. That was his name. Captain. I swear to God; it said so on his nametag. The Captain had decided that, in addition to being a lifer driver, he was also some sort of unofficial assistant manager. He would take the iniative to dress me down for an errant shirttail, uneven visor, saggy pants, etc... I hated the Captain.
Once, and only once, I made the mistake of coming to work high. I figured it would help pass the time; that I'd have a rowdy time driving around town listening to some tunes and delivering pies, even if that Heat Wave bag turned my Explorer into a big fuel-inefficient sauna. As I mentioned, this was a mistake.
It started to go wrong on my very first run, when I walked out the door without putting the pizza into the heat wave bag. Captain caught me before I got in the car, and called me into the store. He interrogated me in front of everyone, asking me what I'd forgotten on this run. Was it a 2 liter diet coke? No. Some wings? No. And on and on until I realized what I'd missed.
Then, when I finally got into the car to make the delivery, "Wish you were here" by Pink Floyd was playing on the radio. I started jamming out and singing to myself, and got so distracted I ended up driving home instead of to the delivery address. I parked my car (with the pizza inside), walked up three flights of stairs, plopped down on the couch in full uniform, and turned on the TV. It took my roommate asking "dude, aren't you supposed to be at work?" for me to remember the pies in my car and the clock ticking on the Domino's computer.
By the time I made the delivery and got back, it had been almost 30 minutes. Captain was pissed. As Kenny wasn't there that night, Captain had assumed the mantle of control and was working as the manager and not a driver. He suspended me from driving for the rest of the night, meaning I'd only make $5 an hour for the rest of my shift. Worse, I'd never actually learned to do anything inside the store and he spent the rest of the night painstakingly describing all the in-store tasks.
Unlike your Mom & Pop pizza places, Domino's doesn't slide the pie into a brick oven. Instead, everything goes through this hot conveyor belt. This is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it means every item on Domino's menu has the exact same cooking time and temperature. In my estimation, wings require just a little more oven time than pie. Order at your own risk. Second, it means that if no one is ready to receive it at the ass end of the conveyor, your food falls on the ground. At our store, this food usually was dusted off and put right back in the box.
Despite the Captain's watchful eye, several pies hit the ground that night.
Luckily, we missed eachother for a couple weeks after that. I never got high before work again, and Kenny and I got along well. March madness was in full swing, people were ordering pies, and I was making money. For a few weeks, the job worked out real well.
But, on a Friday night in early April the Captain and I ended up back on the same shift. God, he was being a dick. Every run I made was scrutinized for time & route. He took issue with the amount of powdered sugar I shook on the cinna-sticks, the sauce on the wings. It was an awful night. At one point, the asshole even quietly walked up behing and pantsed me. "Too baggy Mendoza!" he explained to the grinning cadre of lifers.
By 10pm or so, I'd had enough. I was making a run far from the store, by the campus fraternity houses and I could hear other students partying, drinking and having fun. I could hear girls' voices. I decided to head back and ask Kenny if I could be cut for the night. About a mile from the store, I ended up side by side with the Captain at a red light. He was heading back to the store after a run in his Hyundai, a little electric blue ultra -efficient whip. We glanced at eachother, and I decided it was on.
When the light turned green, the Captain turned right. He was surely planning to execute one of his trademark supersecret routes that got him back to the store in record time. I was having none of it, and decided to beat him my way. He would twist around little side streets; I would race right through downtown traffic. I pushed down the peddle, weaved through cars, shot through yellow lights. For a five light stretch, the lord was on my side. Nothing but green.
Finally, stopped at a red right outside the store, I saw the Captain pull back onto the street a few cars behind me. I'd done it, I'd beat the asshole. I checked my rearview, he was staring at me fuming. I couldn't wait to stroll into the store and enter my code into the computer, then ask him what streets he'd taken. He was looking at me from his car; I winked. Still looking in the mirror, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the Volvo in front of me had released it's brake lights and was moving forward. I put the Explorer in gear and hit the gas all while staring at the Captain.
About 10 seconds later I slammed into the Volvo, who'd only pulled head to try and make a right. The light had still been red. My hood was slightly crumpled and emitting smoke. The Volvo driver was a heavyset woman in her 40's or 50's. She was apparently ok, as she's gotten out of her car and was approaching me yelling something unintelligible.
As the light finally turned green, the Captain eased around our accident and pulled into the Domino's parking lot. I watched, sweat pouring down my face from that damn patented heat wave bag, as he strolled into the store counting his tips and checked his run into the computer.
History Will Dissolve Me, Chapter One
It’s funny how so many lies can build up inside until you almost start to wear them like a patch of stubble on your neck or a stain on your shirt. The big ones you absorb so completely you almost forget, or start to believe them yourself. But then the little things start to add up and bother you; you begin living with a certain amount of paranoia, constantly checking yourself in the mirror, cupping your palm over your mouth and nose to smell your own breath, tucking in errant shirttails… It’s as if your appearance becomes the dike holding back oceans of deceit and you are constantly surveying for leaks.
It was halfway through seventh period that day when I rounded the corner of the East Building with trepidation, scared to run into Brother Angelo or Mr. McEwan. Those two were Headmaster and Dean of Discipline, respectively, though they were both dicks. We were only a week into March but already it was hot as shit. The swampy South Florida air was melting the Dep brand #7 Super-Hold hair gel that was keeping my hair slicked back and within dress code length compliance. Just last month McEwan had snuck up behind me, grabbed a handful, and jerked me out of the lunch line.
“This is shabby, Mendoza,” he’d said, wiping a gel covered hand down the front of my shirt. “Don’t look like this tomorrow.”
Hiding long hair with a slicked back gel job was small potatoes around here. A senior named Ernie Diaz had a tongue piercing, and as a result couldn’t really open his mouth during school hours. Not that Ernie had much to say in class. Small potatoes or not, I had no desire for Disciplinary Detention –an hour after school standing face up against the office wall- and was relieved to step into the frosty air of the guidance conference room without incident. It was like that here, all about appearances. You could be a murderer and no one would give a shit as long as your hair was short, your shirt tucked in, and your face free from any visible signs of weirdness or rebellion.
I was out of class to undergo the sacrament of confession, a monthly ritual for all students here at Christopher Columbus Catholic High School. For Boys. This was not your standard daytime TV confession. There was no black box in which to kneel and spill your deepest secrets anonymously to a shadow priest behind dark screen. Instead, we went face to face across grainy fake wooden boardroom table in the antartically air-conditioned conference room with Brother Eladio, who moonlighted as the school’s librarian. As the assigned confessor for juniors last names A-P, Brother Eladio served as the Catholic School equivalent to a guidance counselor. As an 80 plus year old (I’m guessing, but he was fucking old) lifetime monk with limited command of spoken English, he was about as well suited to the job of relating to 17 year old Miami boys as my Cuban great-grandmother Chichi was to being the lead guitarist of a thrash metal band.
I have to admit though, he had his routine down. Often, after school at Pedro or Rudy’s house, we’d sit across the card table in his backyard and take turns playing Brother Eladio. Of course he started with the standard confession business of opening prayer of contrition and admission of time passed since last confessing (always exactly one month), but then he’d jump into the Holy Trinity of teenage transgression with a shocking and often giggle inducing (but don’t you dare) matter-of-factness.
“Do jou dreenk?”
“No, Brother Eladio”
“Do jou yoose drogs?”
“No, Brother.” I’d reply, grinding teeth at this point to suppress the impulse to laugh.
“Do jou mastoorbate?”
Once you were found not guilty of the major sins, the line of questioning tended towards a more proactive destination, i.e. what you’ve done good instead of the bad things you haven’t done.
“And how have jou glorified the Lor this month by serving others?”
I found myself suddenly drained of the desire to lie to men of the cloth.
“To tell the truth, Brother, I haven’t really done much.
“Well then, Moses, jou mus go and serve others in the name of jor Lor.”
Later that night, I was practicing analogies in my SAT prep book when Pedro Rodriguez beeped me with a 420-911. My parents were watching the news in the den, but looked over suspiciously when they heard the jingle of car keys in my hand.
“I’m gonna go put some gas in the Explorer so I don’t have to stop on the way to school tomorrow,” I said, hoping that they wouldn’t notice that I’d used the same line two nights earlier. Dad hit the mute button and looked at me with wrinkled brow, but Mom beat him to the punch. Their decision making was like that, a first-come first served basis.
“Wear your seatbelt, Moses,” she said, draining the watery remains of her wine glass.
Pedro lived about twenty blocks away in a gated enclave of wealthy South Americans called Andalusian Oaks. I did wear my seatbelt too, as I raced down US-1 to make a twenty block pot deal look like a five block trip to the Shell Station. I was pissed when I got to the guard gate and found a five car backup. The gate was a ruse, however, as they lacked the legal ability to restrict people from entering the community and could only slow you down to photograph you license plate numbers.
I didn’t even bother with the door when I got there, knowing he’d be out back by the pool. Pedro didn’t have to make up lies to his parents to hang out on a school night. I knew little about his parents except that they were rich, from Venezuela, and rarely home. Also Pedro’s mom was smoking hot.
Pedro was laying back in a chaise lounge smoking a grit as I made my way around their landscaped backyard, instinctively reaching over the gate to pull the tab and release the door lock.
“What up Mo?”
“Chilling, What’s up with you bro?” I asked, regarding his almost closed eyes. “You look high as shit already. What’d you do this afternoon?”
“Bro, me and Ern chilled with these two gringas from South Miami, Robin and Sara. Public school bitches, hot as fuck. We got faded.”
“Nice, they had chronic?” I liked to be apprised of the competition. Not that it mattered, when it came to pot and high school kids, it was definitely a seller’s market.
“Mad nugs. We got faded for real.”
Pedro spoke in a vernacular that was almost hyperbolic in that it was composed exclusively of Miami slang. I think maybe because it was because he hadn’t learned English until his family moved here when he was twelve, and he never said much in school.
“Bro,” he went on, describing the afternoon he and Ernie had spent getting stoned on the docked yacht of some rich white girls they had met, “We smoked some regs (low grade commercial shit), we smoked some crip (high grade indoor stuff, like I was selling), we sprinkled some hash oil on it. We smoked a fucking salad bro.”
“Word. What do you need?”
“Just and eighter (an eighth of an ounce, $50). We’re hitting up the Spanish Mackerel show with them on Saturday in West Palm. That girl Robin’s hooking it up with tickets, but she told me to bring three crippie joints. I think she’s down to blade too, bro. Brains at least.”
“True.” I reached into the pocket of my jeans for the plastic sandwich baggie and unrolled it on my lap. Pedro picked up a yellow lighter of the little table by his chair and flicked it on to get a better look. I held the baggie up to his nose.
“Damn, Mo. Smells in the bag.”
“I don’t have a scale, but I weighed this quarter out at home. You can just eyeball half if that’s cool.”
“True.” Pedro went to work, picking the two biggest nuggets out right away, then deliberating for a while before settling on a third.
“That straight?” he asked sheepishly.
“Yeah, bro.”
“You want to blow one?”
“I wish,” I answered, checking the time on my pager. “But I gotta get home before Armando Mendoza gets suspicious.”
“Damn,” he said. “Heated.”
I was about to make for the car when I remembered that Pedro Rodriguez was the worst joint roller in the history of modern pot smoking. His sloppy j’s left you with weed in your teeth and nothing but burnt paper smoke in your lungs.
“You gonna get one of those girls to roll the joints for the concert?”
“Damn, bro, I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t want to look like a rook.”
“Chill, hand me some papers.” I said. “And break up the crip for me, I gotta get home soon.”
“You’re a fucking saint, Moses Mendoza. Thanks bro.”
Don’t thank me, I thought, thank Brother Eladio.
I suppose before I go much further I should explain to you how I got my name, Moses Mendoza, because as far as I know it wasn’t given to me at birth by my parents, which is how most people get their names.
I was born, I’m told, in Cuba, although I can’t remember and couldn’t tell you exactly when. I celebrate my birthday on February 21st, which is the date that a Coast Guard boat found me floating on a makeshift raft of innertubes about 20 miles south east of the Florida Keys. There was a man on the raft with me, I’m told, although by the time we were picked up he was dead from exposure. An eyeballed paternity test determined that the man on the raft wasn’t my father. He was black, and I’m not.
I got my first name from my adopted parents, on account of me having floated safely to the promise land (Miami) much like the biblical Moses floated down the Nile River in the book of Exodus. He was three months old when the Pharaoh’s daughter rescued him, but the doctors estimated my age at around a year and a half. My adopted parents gave me my last name too, which is their last name. Armando and Elena Mendoza, prominent and politically active Cuban exiles who were all too happy to rescue an infant who’d miraculously escaped Fidel Castro’s socialist nightmare. I have an older brother too, Armando Jr. or Armandito, who is their real son and was five when I floated on to the scene.
I felt the need to repeat the caveat “I’m told” because, unlike a famous boy who would later undergo a similar but ultimately unsuccessful exodus, none of this is terribly well documented. Only a few newspaper clippings and the conspicuous absence of pictures of my newborn self in my baby book attest to my unusual arrival. Most people, in fact, have no idea that Armando and Elena Mendoza aren’t my birth parents.
I’ve always called Armando and Elena Mom and Dad though, which makes sense since they are basically the only parents I’ve ever known. When I was little, and before she had to go back to Spain because she lost her visa, my nanny Anna Zuniga would put me to bed at night with fantastical stories about my real parents and our escape from Cuba, and each night the stories would be different. By now, it’s been years since anyone has even spoken about it really, but I can still remember how, before she died, my (adopted) grandmother Mamina used to cradle my cheeks in her wrinkled hands and say “Ay Moses, mi milagrito, mi balsero bandito – Oh Moses, my little miracle, my Holy rafter.”
I guess you could say that no good dead goes unpunished, because by the time I rolled the three joints for Pedro, plus one more out of my own stash that we smoked on the spot, plus drove the twenty blocks home going slow cause I was stoned, I’d been gone for almost an hours. My dad was sitting on the steps in front of our door waiting with cordless phone in one hand and a lit cigar in the other, the orange glow brightening and dampening like a cruel lighthouse that doesn’t bother to signal until you’ve run your ship into the rocks. In this case my ship being a red Ford Explorer with an incriminatingly insufficient amount of fuel. I racked my brain for a suitable lie. I could say I’d been at Caro Blanco’s house, between two men sex was always a reasonable excuse, but he’d probably know that there was no way her parents would have let me stay that late.
He moved towards the car slowly and deliberately, with the telephone jammed into his pocket. I was trapped in my own smoking gun.
“Where have you been Moses?” he asked with a calmness that was unnerving. I was still sitting in the car with the engine running.
“Getting gas.”
“Mentira – bullshit. It’s almost eleven.”
He had most of his face in the open car window and the acrid cigar smell came off his mustache and permeated my nostrils. A single finger of smoke was creeping up his left arm, solitary and unbroken. I could smoke pot all day but tobacco smoke still bothered me, especially from a cigar. I wanted to fan the smoke, break it up, break the unmoving wall of angry stillness that was blocking my way.
“I had a little look through your room.”
Fuck.
“The money, la marijuana, some shit I didn’t even know what it was, it’s all gone. Por el inodoro. Flushed.”
Fuuck. The old man took a step back, puffed on his cigar, and seemed to soften for a second.
“Cono, hijo. We have a big year coming up. You’re not going to fuck it up.”
With that he turned and walked back up the stairs and into the house, leaving his half finished cigar to extinguish itself in the marble ashtray by the door. I sat in the car by myself, surveying the damage. About five hundred in cash, another half-ounce of crippie, my scale, bong, papers, “some shit I didn’t even know what it was”. Who knew if he’d found everything, how thoroughly he’d overturned dresser drawer contents, rustled through the stacked shoeboxes in the back of my closet. I’d been so careless, even in my carefulness. I should have kept it all in the car. Still, you never know when you will be pulled over. Seventeen year olds make for easy targets. Better that he find it instead of some asshole cop.
But he’d been so calm, so sure of himself. Had he been so calm as he methodically searched my room? How long was I gone before he decided to go in there? Had he been waiting to do this? They both seemed so oblivious to the circumstances of my life, busy with the business, with the chairmanship of the CANF.
“We have a big year coming up. You’re not going to fuck it up.”
After about ten minutes of just sitting there thinking, still stoned but in a way that was not so euphoric, I shut off the engine and walked into the house. I took about two minutes just really softly opening and closing the heavy front door. Not that I was sneaking in or anything, just that I didn’t really feel the need to remind anyone that I was home. The light in the old man’s office was on and the door was closed. My mom sat on the leather sofa in the den, unmoved since I’d left to Pedro’s.
“Ven, Moses,” she beckoned. “I’m watching the tennis, the French Open. Agassi esta comiendo Sampras – he’s up by 2 sets.”
It was halfway through seventh period that day when I rounded the corner of the East Building with trepidation, scared to run into Brother Angelo or Mr. McEwan. Those two were Headmaster and Dean of Discipline, respectively, though they were both dicks. We were only a week into March but already it was hot as shit. The swampy South Florida air was melting the Dep brand #7 Super-Hold hair gel that was keeping my hair slicked back and within dress code length compliance. Just last month McEwan had snuck up behind me, grabbed a handful, and jerked me out of the lunch line.
“This is shabby, Mendoza,” he’d said, wiping a gel covered hand down the front of my shirt. “Don’t look like this tomorrow.”
Hiding long hair with a slicked back gel job was small potatoes around here. A senior named Ernie Diaz had a tongue piercing, and as a result couldn’t really open his mouth during school hours. Not that Ernie had much to say in class. Small potatoes or not, I had no desire for Disciplinary Detention –an hour after school standing face up against the office wall- and was relieved to step into the frosty air of the guidance conference room without incident. It was like that here, all about appearances. You could be a murderer and no one would give a shit as long as your hair was short, your shirt tucked in, and your face free from any visible signs of weirdness or rebellion.
I was out of class to undergo the sacrament of confession, a monthly ritual for all students here at Christopher Columbus Catholic High School. For Boys. This was not your standard daytime TV confession. There was no black box in which to kneel and spill your deepest secrets anonymously to a shadow priest behind dark screen. Instead, we went face to face across grainy fake wooden boardroom table in the antartically air-conditioned conference room with Brother Eladio, who moonlighted as the school’s librarian. As the assigned confessor for juniors last names A-P, Brother Eladio served as the Catholic School equivalent to a guidance counselor. As an 80 plus year old (I’m guessing, but he was fucking old) lifetime monk with limited command of spoken English, he was about as well suited to the job of relating to 17 year old Miami boys as my Cuban great-grandmother Chichi was to being the lead guitarist of a thrash metal band.
I have to admit though, he had his routine down. Often, after school at Pedro or Rudy’s house, we’d sit across the card table in his backyard and take turns playing Brother Eladio. Of course he started with the standard confession business of opening prayer of contrition and admission of time passed since last confessing (always exactly one month), but then he’d jump into the Holy Trinity of teenage transgression with a shocking and often giggle inducing (but don’t you dare) matter-of-factness.
“Do jou dreenk?”
“No, Brother Eladio”
“Do jou yoose drogs?”
“No, Brother.” I’d reply, grinding teeth at this point to suppress the impulse to laugh.
“Do jou mastoorbate?”
Once you were found not guilty of the major sins, the line of questioning tended towards a more proactive destination, i.e. what you’ve done good instead of the bad things you haven’t done.
“And how have jou glorified the Lor this month by serving others?”
I found myself suddenly drained of the desire to lie to men of the cloth.
“To tell the truth, Brother, I haven’t really done much.
“Well then, Moses, jou mus go and serve others in the name of jor Lor.”
Later that night, I was practicing analogies in my SAT prep book when Pedro Rodriguez beeped me with a 420-911. My parents were watching the news in the den, but looked over suspiciously when they heard the jingle of car keys in my hand.
“I’m gonna go put some gas in the Explorer so I don’t have to stop on the way to school tomorrow,” I said, hoping that they wouldn’t notice that I’d used the same line two nights earlier. Dad hit the mute button and looked at me with wrinkled brow, but Mom beat him to the punch. Their decision making was like that, a first-come first served basis.
“Wear your seatbelt, Moses,” she said, draining the watery remains of her wine glass.
Pedro lived about twenty blocks away in a gated enclave of wealthy South Americans called Andalusian Oaks. I did wear my seatbelt too, as I raced down US-1 to make a twenty block pot deal look like a five block trip to the Shell Station. I was pissed when I got to the guard gate and found a five car backup. The gate was a ruse, however, as they lacked the legal ability to restrict people from entering the community and could only slow you down to photograph you license plate numbers.
I didn’t even bother with the door when I got there, knowing he’d be out back by the pool. Pedro didn’t have to make up lies to his parents to hang out on a school night. I knew little about his parents except that they were rich, from Venezuela, and rarely home. Also Pedro’s mom was smoking hot.
Pedro was laying back in a chaise lounge smoking a grit as I made my way around their landscaped backyard, instinctively reaching over the gate to pull the tab and release the door lock.
“What up Mo?”
“Chilling, What’s up with you bro?” I asked, regarding his almost closed eyes. “You look high as shit already. What’d you do this afternoon?”
“Bro, me and Ern chilled with these two gringas from South Miami, Robin and Sara. Public school bitches, hot as fuck. We got faded.”
“Nice, they had chronic?” I liked to be apprised of the competition. Not that it mattered, when it came to pot and high school kids, it was definitely a seller’s market.
“Mad nugs. We got faded for real.”
Pedro spoke in a vernacular that was almost hyperbolic in that it was composed exclusively of Miami slang. I think maybe because it was because he hadn’t learned English until his family moved here when he was twelve, and he never said much in school.
“Bro,” he went on, describing the afternoon he and Ernie had spent getting stoned on the docked yacht of some rich white girls they had met, “We smoked some regs (low grade commercial shit), we smoked some crip (high grade indoor stuff, like I was selling), we sprinkled some hash oil on it. We smoked a fucking salad bro.”
“Word. What do you need?”
“Just and eighter (an eighth of an ounce, $50). We’re hitting up the Spanish Mackerel show with them on Saturday in West Palm. That girl Robin’s hooking it up with tickets, but she told me to bring three crippie joints. I think she’s down to blade too, bro. Brains at least.”
“True.” I reached into the pocket of my jeans for the plastic sandwich baggie and unrolled it on my lap. Pedro picked up a yellow lighter of the little table by his chair and flicked it on to get a better look. I held the baggie up to his nose.
“Damn, Mo. Smells in the bag.”
“I don’t have a scale, but I weighed this quarter out at home. You can just eyeball half if that’s cool.”
“True.” Pedro went to work, picking the two biggest nuggets out right away, then deliberating for a while before settling on a third.
“That straight?” he asked sheepishly.
“Yeah, bro.”
“You want to blow one?”
“I wish,” I answered, checking the time on my pager. “But I gotta get home before Armando Mendoza gets suspicious.”
“Damn,” he said. “Heated.”
I was about to make for the car when I remembered that Pedro Rodriguez was the worst joint roller in the history of modern pot smoking. His sloppy j’s left you with weed in your teeth and nothing but burnt paper smoke in your lungs.
“You gonna get one of those girls to roll the joints for the concert?”
“Damn, bro, I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t want to look like a rook.”
“Chill, hand me some papers.” I said. “And break up the crip for me, I gotta get home soon.”
“You’re a fucking saint, Moses Mendoza. Thanks bro.”
Don’t thank me, I thought, thank Brother Eladio.
I suppose before I go much further I should explain to you how I got my name, Moses Mendoza, because as far as I know it wasn’t given to me at birth by my parents, which is how most people get their names.
I was born, I’m told, in Cuba, although I can’t remember and couldn’t tell you exactly when. I celebrate my birthday on February 21st, which is the date that a Coast Guard boat found me floating on a makeshift raft of innertubes about 20 miles south east of the Florida Keys. There was a man on the raft with me, I’m told, although by the time we were picked up he was dead from exposure. An eyeballed paternity test determined that the man on the raft wasn’t my father. He was black, and I’m not.
I got my first name from my adopted parents, on account of me having floated safely to the promise land (Miami) much like the biblical Moses floated down the Nile River in the book of Exodus. He was three months old when the Pharaoh’s daughter rescued him, but the doctors estimated my age at around a year and a half. My adopted parents gave me my last name too, which is their last name. Armando and Elena Mendoza, prominent and politically active Cuban exiles who were all too happy to rescue an infant who’d miraculously escaped Fidel Castro’s socialist nightmare. I have an older brother too, Armando Jr. or Armandito, who is their real son and was five when I floated on to the scene.
I felt the need to repeat the caveat “I’m told” because, unlike a famous boy who would later undergo a similar but ultimately unsuccessful exodus, none of this is terribly well documented. Only a few newspaper clippings and the conspicuous absence of pictures of my newborn self in my baby book attest to my unusual arrival. Most people, in fact, have no idea that Armando and Elena Mendoza aren’t my birth parents.
I’ve always called Armando and Elena Mom and Dad though, which makes sense since they are basically the only parents I’ve ever known. When I was little, and before she had to go back to Spain because she lost her visa, my nanny Anna Zuniga would put me to bed at night with fantastical stories about my real parents and our escape from Cuba, and each night the stories would be different. By now, it’s been years since anyone has even spoken about it really, but I can still remember how, before she died, my (adopted) grandmother Mamina used to cradle my cheeks in her wrinkled hands and say “Ay Moses, mi milagrito, mi balsero bandito – Oh Moses, my little miracle, my Holy rafter.”
I guess you could say that no good dead goes unpunished, because by the time I rolled the three joints for Pedro, plus one more out of my own stash that we smoked on the spot, plus drove the twenty blocks home going slow cause I was stoned, I’d been gone for almost an hours. My dad was sitting on the steps in front of our door waiting with cordless phone in one hand and a lit cigar in the other, the orange glow brightening and dampening like a cruel lighthouse that doesn’t bother to signal until you’ve run your ship into the rocks. In this case my ship being a red Ford Explorer with an incriminatingly insufficient amount of fuel. I racked my brain for a suitable lie. I could say I’d been at Caro Blanco’s house, between two men sex was always a reasonable excuse, but he’d probably know that there was no way her parents would have let me stay that late.
He moved towards the car slowly and deliberately, with the telephone jammed into his pocket. I was trapped in my own smoking gun.
“Where have you been Moses?” he asked with a calmness that was unnerving. I was still sitting in the car with the engine running.
“Getting gas.”
“Mentira – bullshit. It’s almost eleven.”
He had most of his face in the open car window and the acrid cigar smell came off his mustache and permeated my nostrils. A single finger of smoke was creeping up his left arm, solitary and unbroken. I could smoke pot all day but tobacco smoke still bothered me, especially from a cigar. I wanted to fan the smoke, break it up, break the unmoving wall of angry stillness that was blocking my way.
“I had a little look through your room.”
Fuck.
“The money, la marijuana, some shit I didn’t even know what it was, it’s all gone. Por el inodoro. Flushed.”
Fuuck. The old man took a step back, puffed on his cigar, and seemed to soften for a second.
“Cono, hijo. We have a big year coming up. You’re not going to fuck it up.”
With that he turned and walked back up the stairs and into the house, leaving his half finished cigar to extinguish itself in the marble ashtray by the door. I sat in the car by myself, surveying the damage. About five hundred in cash, another half-ounce of crippie, my scale, bong, papers, “some shit I didn’t even know what it was”. Who knew if he’d found everything, how thoroughly he’d overturned dresser drawer contents, rustled through the stacked shoeboxes in the back of my closet. I’d been so careless, even in my carefulness. I should have kept it all in the car. Still, you never know when you will be pulled over. Seventeen year olds make for easy targets. Better that he find it instead of some asshole cop.
But he’d been so calm, so sure of himself. Had he been so calm as he methodically searched my room? How long was I gone before he decided to go in there? Had he been waiting to do this? They both seemed so oblivious to the circumstances of my life, busy with the business, with the chairmanship of the CANF.
“We have a big year coming up. You’re not going to fuck it up.”
After about ten minutes of just sitting there thinking, still stoned but in a way that was not so euphoric, I shut off the engine and walked into the house. I took about two minutes just really softly opening and closing the heavy front door. Not that I was sneaking in or anything, just that I didn’t really feel the need to remind anyone that I was home. The light in the old man’s office was on and the door was closed. My mom sat on the leather sofa in the den, unmoved since I’d left to Pedro’s.
“Ven, Moses,” she beckoned. “I’m watching the tennis, the French Open. Agassi esta comiendo Sampras – he’s up by 2 sets.”
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