yustyoking

My World Darkens

 

                     Stabbing Roils Neighborhood          

Oxburg, Md., Aug. 8, 2011. An apparent dispute over dog poo led to a violent confrontation in the 1800 block of Peanut Blvd. at approximately 11 a.m. on Monday. A homeowner approached a dog owner, demanding that the latter remove from the former’s front yard a substantial, although minor, amount of excrement newly evacuated by the dog owner’s pooch. When the dog owner suggested the homeowner clean up his property himself “since you are right here anyway,” the homeowner took offense. Brandishing a K-bar knife of Vietnam War vintage, the homeowner stabbed the dog owner several times, inflicting life-threatening injuries.

          The neighbors immediately called an ambulance. The victim is currently in stable condition at Suburban Hospital.

          Arrested by the police soon after the incident, the homeowner expressed remorse. “The guy kind of just flipped his lid,” according to Sheriff Emeritus Aloysius Horner.

           A witness described the sequence of events as “bizarre, unfathomable and horrific.”

           The identities of both perpetrator and victim remain at this time confidential, pending a fuller police investigation.

                                                            *

           The “witness,” standing like a jerk on the sidewalk, holding a yard sign in each hand, was me. Not the greatest way to start my day.

                                                            *

            It was a home masquerading as a warehouse. Two enormous white doors graced the front, exiting directly onto the street. There wasn’t even a sidewalk. Halfway down one side, I found the steps, door and doorbell. Jungle growth filled the yard, elephant grass and squat cacti sprouting quills. I cut myself on the enormous green leaves of a rubber plant, just trying to reach the door.

            Sweating in the suffocating humidity of another scorcher, I take time out to admire the incredible collection of gargoyles that litter the property. Beaked phoenixes rise from the bushes. Mexican death masks adorn the walls. Skeletal dolls nestle in the foliage, creeping me out. They seem to watch me, leering. Most unsettling, at the door, there is a life-size blue sculpture of a cat. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. A pharaonic feline, dating back to the Egyptian pharaohs, it is truly awful. Like no cat I’ve ever encountered, the back is surrealistically arched. The mouth is a vicious maw of pointed teeth. The paws sport five toes apiece, the nails sinuously long and razor sharp. The tail… the blue tail arches up over the back of the sculpture, impossibly long and thick, like the stinger on a scorpion.

            Scary sculpture.

            I hear yowling in the grass, but I’ve already pushed the doorbell. I hold aloft my Anna Bola For Attorney General yard sign in front of me.

            When she opens the door, I am struck by how tall she is. Whippet thin, gaunt, enormous brown eyes staring from a craggy face, she is dressed in a peasant blouse and denim jeans. We’re the same height.

            Then the smell overwhelms me.

            Incense, musk and dust, in equal measure.

            Raising her right hand, holding the door with her left, she announces, “You are very hot.”

            I AM DYING IN THIS HEAT.

            A serious little frown creases her forehead. Standing perfectly still, she tells me, “You are so tired.” The accent is thickly Chicano, but the words intelligible.

            I feel worn out. I am also gagging on the scent.

            “You are not well,” she says huskily.

            Immediately, I feel deathly ill. So ill, I drop the yard sign and have to hold on to the brass railing to keep from falling down the concrete steps. As it is, I feel myself swaying like a drunken sailor.

            “You need to lie down,” she says, all but gathering me in her surprisingly strong arms and virtually carrying me inside her house. Stumbling, with her help, I make it to a dusty sofa and collapse astride it. A minute or two pass amidst waves of nausea, my face inches from the floor. I sense her manhandling me onto my back. A cold, wet towel descends onto my forehead, the relief almost indescribable.

            “You’re tired,” she coos, hovering over me. “You need to sleep.”

            I pass out.

            I awaken on the same sofa. The front door is closed. My yard sign leans crazily against the wall. I no longer feel like death warmed over, but the same glut of incense, musk and dust leaves me thick-headed. How can anyone live this way? I wonder. Open some doors and windows, for God’s sake. Let some air into this room!

            “You’re awake,” she observes. A Selma Hayek beauty, I find her physically attractive. The surroundings, I find repulsive. “Drink this,” she says, handing me a coffee mug of steaming liquid.

            “What—“

            “It’s hot tea with cloves. Sit up or you’ll burn yourself.” Joining me on the sofa, pressed against me, she helps me to sit up straight. I can’t believe how weak I feel.

            “I can’t believe how weak I feel!”

            “It’s the heat,” she assures me, blowing her cool breath over my face through blood red lips. She smells of peppermint.

            “Your breath smells of peppermint.”

            “No, it’s the cloves,” she corrects me.

            I sip the scalding tea.

            “Breathe in, breathe in the cleansing steam,” she admonishes me. “It’ll clear your head.”

            So I sit there breathing scented steam from the coffee mug clutched in her hands. Her nails are long, slender, sharp and painted blood red.

            “You’re tired,” she says, putting the mug on the coffee table. “You need to sleep.”

            I pass out for the second time.

            “I am in deep shit here,” is my last, panicky thought. After that, I feel myself hanging, suspended, in a black void. No sound. No light. Nothingness.

            A wave of refreshing coolness quickens me into wakefulness. It is dark out. Night. I don’t see my hostess, but a fresh, cold, wet towel has been draped over my sweaty brow. Water droplets run down my cheeks, soaking the sofa fabric.

            I take a preliminary inventory. The brain seems to be working, but the body is totally immobile. I can’t lift a finger. I’ve never felt such lethargy.

            She comes back and feeds me cold tea with a spoon. “It’s herbal tea,” she explains. “It’s important you drink it all. Otherwise, it won’t be effective. What’s your telephone number?”

            “My telephone number?”

            “Do you live with someone? It would be courteous to tell your wife or fiancée that you are all right. Also, they might otherwise telephone the police. You’re not a missing person, after all. You are here!”

            “I live with my mother.”

            “Give me the number,” she suggests in her husky baritone.

            She dials the number and presses the cordless phone to my ear. “Tell your mother you are all right, but you will be spending the night with a friend.”

            I hear the signal, the phone is ringing. Brat, brat, brat.

            “Hello?” answers my mom.

            “Hi,” I sigh. “It’s Kevin. I’m still with the campaign. I’ll be sleeping over here tonight.”

            “What about dinner!?” my mom insists. “I’ve cooked pot roast. Where are you?”

            “You can’t talk more. You’ll call and explain everything tomorrow,” my strange companion suggests.

            “I can’t talk more,” I tell my mom. “I’ll call and explain everything tomorrow.”

            My hostess plops the phone on the coffee table, severing the connection. “You need to get up now,” she tells me, helping me to my feet. “There’s a bed in the back room.”

            I stumble into another room. Candles are burning everywhere, dozens of them, on metal trays, in candleholders, in table candelabra. An overpowering stench of wax sends me sprawling onto the floor.

            “Get up slowly,” she says.

            I feel as if I’m levitating. I feel myself floating over the bed. Flat on my back, she tucks the edges of a scratchy, gray, wool blanket under my shoulders and around my neck.

            “I’ll see you in the morning.”

            I see her long before that. I see her, through the open doorway, feeding her cats. I see her come into the room I am in and draw a pentagram on the floor. She throws white powder into the air. As it wafts over the lit candles, it disappears in a gentle poof!

            In the morning, I find, if I hold myself astride the bed, I can just barely stand. She finds me stuck that way, unable to stand up straight or even fall back onto the bed. She unhinges my cramped hands and lowers me onto the bed. Lying on my back, I gaze up at her.

            “What’s wrong with me?” I gasp.

            “It takes time to get used to a new environment,” she tells me. “But you’re much better today. You are making good progress.”

            That morning, she brings me a breakfast tray and actually helps me drink a glass of grapefruit juice, eat a piece of buttered toast and consume another cup of her herbal tea.

            With her all but carrying me, I cross the floor to the bathroom in a shambling walk. She sits me on the toilet and my cock burns like the fires of Hell as I urinate. “Jesus, that hurts!” I grunt, feeling sweat break out on my forehead.

            “You’ve been sick,” she explains in that same maddeningly reasonable tone of voice.

            I’VE BEEN SICK.

            “I have to accept the fact that I’ve been unwell,” I tell her as she helps me back to bed.

            “You need to stay here and recuperate,” she suggests evenly, tucking me in.

             I NEED TO STAY HERE AND RECUPERATE.

            “I need to stay here and recuperate,” I tell her.

            “Of course,” she agrees, shaking her head. I keep staring at her jet black hair and the wide band of mascara over each eyelid. “Soon you’ll be well and can resume a normal, productive life.”

           “Soon, I’ll be well and can resume a normal, productive life,” I assure her.

           She massages my shoulders, neck and arms.

           I feel a tiny spasm of arousal.

           “No. Not that,” she says, getting up quickly and leaving the room. She comes back with an old-fashion music box. Winding it up, she pushes the switch. Clinky, clanky, tinkle, tinkle music fills the room. She leaves the box on the night table. Whenever it runs down, she comes back in the room and winds it up again.

            The music irritates the shit out of me.

            “Your music box irritates the shit out of me,” I inform her.

            “Actually,” she says, “you like it.”

            Oh. Listening, I realize that I kind of like it.

            “You look tired and should sleep.”

             I pass the day in a haze of tinkling music, sweet herbal tea, strange and undefined dreams, and a fever headache. Every few hours, she leads me to the bathroom. I have yet to defecate, but I urinate profusely. Probably from the tea. The burning is still present, but less and less each time.

            In the afternoon, she perches herself on the edge of the bed and hands me the cordless phone.

            “Look at me! Look into my eyes.”

            “Th-They’re huge. They’re black.”

            “That’s the light,” she assures me. “They’re actually dark brown. I want you to call your mother and tell her you’ve fallen ill. You’re staying with a buddy from the political campaign. His name is Raymond Dix. Here’s his phone number. Say his name.”

            “Raymond Dix.”

            “Call your mother. Tell her you’re getting better and will be home in a day or two. Give her that phone number. Tell her not to worry.”

            “But when—“

            “Look at me… Look into my eyes… Now call your mother.”

            Well, I call my mom, tell her I’ve gotten food poisoning. I’m recovering at Raymond Dix’s place. I’m not sure of the address, but I give her the phone number. When she wants to talk to him, I tell her— quite truthfully— that he isn’t there!

           “Tell her not to worry,” my strangely detached wardress whispers in my ear.

          “Don’t worry, mom, I’ll be home before you know it,” I joke.

          “Hang up.”

           I push the OFF button on the cordless phone.

           More music therapy. Hard-boiled eggs and toast.

            Hurrah, I defecate, my viscera writhing like a cobra. Bent over, I can’t believe the pain.

            “You’re fine, you are pain-free,” she tells me, pressing her hands to my head.

            The pain stops.

            Instantly.

           My body continues to squirm, but it no longer hurts. “How long?” I gasp.

           “Not long. You’re growing accustomed to… a new set of circumstances,” she tells me. “Imagine you’re in a bookstore, buying books.”

          “Why?” I ask.

           “It helps to take your mind off… other things. Think of yourself at the beach, lying in the sun, the soft roar of the ocean ringing in your ears.”

           Returning to bed, I lay, basking in the sun, the soft roar of the ocean ringing in my ears. It’s great.

           That afternoon, she gives me pills. I don’t know what they’re for, but they make me groggy and then send me into a total void. Utter blackness, no thought, no sound, no nothing.

          When I awake, a number of things have changed.

           The doors and windows are wide open, admitting a cool breeze and tons of daylight. She sits in a wicker chair and stares at me from across the room, a curious, rueful smile playing around the corners of her mouth.

          “What’s your name?” I ask her.

           “You know my name. It’s on your list. The list you brought in your car when you came with the yard sign.”

           “I don’t remember.”

           “Christina Fabiola.”

           “Oh.” Really, it doesn’t mean anything to me.

           “You have a great friend in Anna Bola,” she tells me.

           “Yeah. Yes. Anna and I are great friends. She—“

           “She sends her regards! Come! Let’s walk in the garden.”

            As creaky as a caterpillar tractor, every joint cracking, I manage to stand, trundle to the bathroom, take a leak and join her outside on a tiny cement patio. Pussycats howl and hiss from among the foliage. 

            A high, brown palisade fence masks her backyard from the neighbors. A wraith in a white hospital gown stumbles amid monstrous blue wisteria, saw grass, ragweed, nightshade, chickweed, honeysuckle and wild cabbage. The victim of some terrible accident, one eyelid is sown shut and even from a distance, I can ascertain multiple scars about his body.

           “Raymond!” she calls. “Come here!”

           We descend into the yard. He drifts over to us, his one eye glassy, his glance seemingly unable to focus. He keeps craning his head to look at the sky.

           “What the hell happened to him?” I ask.

           “This is Raymond Dix,” she explains. “He’s one of my organ donors.”

          “Your organ donors?”

          “My dear,” she says, touching my arm playfully. Why does this gentle, languid touch send electric shock waves through my body? Where’s the 12-volt car battery, hidden under her billowy peasant skirt? “I am an organ harvester. It’s my profession. Raymond, say something to the nice man!”

          “Aaaaauuuugh,” Raymond moans.

          “Stop that!” Christina snaps. “You can still talk if you exert yourself!”

          “H-H-Hell-lo,” he declares in a voice that sounds fifty thousand miles away and beyond the clouds.

          “Hello,” I reply.

          “Y-Y-You… I-I-I… C-C-Christina!”

          “You, me and Christina, yeah, right.”

          “Y-Y-You… she help you!”

           I look at Christina.

           “I’ll let you two talk,” she suggests generously, walking away amidst the ragweed and honeysuckle.

          “What is with you, Raymond?” I ask sincerely. “How long have you been here?”

          “L-L-Long time. Awhile. C-C-Christina helps me. She’s my friend.”

          “Have you been in an accident?”

          “No. No accident,” he replies, looking confused. “Have you… accident?”

          “No. But you’ve got some scars,” I point out. “What happened to your eye?”

           “M-M-My eye?” he asks and starts feeling all over his face with his hands, moaning. He makes this low guttural sound, his body heaving in sobs, as he seems to search for his…other…eye under the stitches.

           “Raymond! Stop that! Come here!” Christina shouts angrily, marching up and pulling him to her. Caressing him as though he were a little kitten, she whispers soft endearments in his ear.

           Quickly, visibly, he begins to relax, an idiot smile suffusing his face.

           “Now, scoot!” Christina coaxes him, pushing him away. “Go walk in the garden. You like the garden, Raymond.” Turning to me, she says, “Come.”

           We return to the house.

           “He’ll do anything I tell him,” she explains evenly. “Just the same as you. Of course, I’ve harvested several organs from him. Really, I’m afraid he doesn’t have very much longer to live. There’s a liver transplant, his other lung, his remaining kidney, even heart tissue that needs to be salvaged. More corneal tissue. Muscle tissue. Skin, of course. Burn victims often need skin transplants.”

           “Whoa!… Wow! I mean, what are you saying?”

            “You were next, my little friend. My next victim, my next patient. That’s why I say Anna is such a good friend of yours. When you desapareció de la vista, she suspected what had happened. She had that man Eric check the list they had given you. That confirmed it. I don’t answer my phone, but she came here herself last night and asked my pardon. I’ve known her for years. We go way back. So I put you on an IV and got you hydrated and healthy enough to rise, this morning, from the living dead. Isn’t that nice of me?”

            “You’re some kind of bitch!”

            “No, I’m not,” she says in that maddeningly even voice of hers. “You’re grateful for everything I’ve done for you.”

             I AM. I’M VERY GRATEFUL. FOR EVERYTHING. SHE’S DONE FOR ME!

            “Really,” I explain, “I’m very grateful for everything you’ve done for me, Christina. What I don’t get… I mean, how do you do that? Christina? Make people…you know, receptive, to your… suggestions. Drugs?”

            “I thought you knew!” she actually laughs.

             I can’t take my eyes off her. I feel as if I am seeing the real Christina for the first time. An Antichrist? A relic of 1920’s style, she sports pencil-thin eyebrows, her hair pulled back in a widow’s peak, held in place with tortoise shell combs. Her skin is glossy and luminescent, her eyelids heavy with mascara. Tiny white teeth as sharp as knives. A round little chin and a bow mouth the color of blood. One spooky lady.

             Who is this woman? This China doll who defies understanding?

             Still chuckling, she waves a hand at me and says, “I’m a witch!”

             “Jesus! Why don’t you go back to Mexico?” I ask. “Do you have any kind of a life here?”

             “I have a very good life. I’m not afraid to work hard. I have my cats, my garden, men friends, women friends. We go rumba dancing, we make trips to South America. Life is good! In Mexico, they’d recognize me instantly. La bruja. They would hunt me down and kill me.”

             “Don’t you ever get… in trouble? Regarding your… profession? It sure seems odd to have this taking place in the middle… of Oxburg, Maryland.”

            “It’s true, no one would suspect!” she agrees. “But I put a hex on anyone who looks to get in my way. My friends, them I don’t touch with maldad.”

             “I wouldn’t ever tell anybody,” I mention. “At least, I don’t think I would—“

             She gives a husky laugh. “Get down on the floor and bark like a dog!”

              I get down on all fours, between the coffee table and her chair, and go “Arf! Arf! Woof! “

             “Get up! I need to show you something else.” She gets me a glossy plastic apron. “Put it on.” Rubber gloves. “Put them on!” She hands me a machete and leads me into the kitchen where there is an enormous chopping block— on legs. “It’s an actual butcher’s block,” she explains. Stepping outside, she brings in a cardboard shoebox punched with air holes. “Come here, my little sweetums,” she croons like an American woman, lifting a fat, chirping guinea pig from the shoebox. “Take the guinea pig in your left hand. Hold him by the body. Hard or he’ll squirm loose on you. Be very careful,” she says, spreading paper towels in abundance on the chopping block. “I want you to take the machete and chop off the guinea pig’s head. But carefully!”

                I hold the guinea pig with my left hand, and he’s not really fighting me. He kind of chirps worriedly as I lift the machete, but I bring it down so swiftly and forcefully, everything is over in a single second. The still squirming body spews blood everywhere, but Christina is all smiles.

                “See?” she asks. “¿Comprendes? You are just like Raymond Dix. You must always do anything and everything I tell you, my little one. It’s not something to discuss. You will always be this way. I have cast a spell on you. Duradero. You and I will always be as one.”

                “Jesus Christ,” I say. I’m still standing there, looking at the shiny red blood splattered all over the butcher’s block, my apron and the paper towels. Gently, I plop the lifeless torso of our little friend on top of the paper towels. “You’re as bad as Carrie Ann Winslow.”

                “Who is that?” Christina asks in the same level voice, but I see how her eyes narrow.

                 “Now take it easy,” I ask, no, I beg her. “She’s just some young girl who has her hooks into me. She’s been in Europa and she’s coming home and… Well, all I mean is, no offense, but she also makes me do absolutely anything she says. That’s all I meant. Please. No curses. No hexes. She’s a sweet kid,” I end, lamely.

                “Look at me… Look into my eyes… You are free of this woman. This Carrie Ann no longer holds any interest for you. You find her boring. Her voice annoys you, like a cat’s claw scraping on glass. Everything she says strikes you as stupid. ¿Comprendes? This is my gift to you because we are friends and we are linked by a psychic bond. Maybe some other young girl, that is your business. But this relationship is terminado. No more!”

             So, cleaning up the mess after the slaughter of an innocent guinea pig, I can now rejoice in my new-found freedom from Carrie Ann Winslow.

             Life is becoming perverse. 

                                                        *

            I come home. Mom is no longer concerned with where I’ve been. “Are you all right?” she asks, looking worriedly at my pale visage.

            “I feel weird,” I mumble. “I’m going to bed.”

            After a lifetime spent living with a hypochondriac for a husband, naturally she asks, “Do you want chicken soup?”

            “I couldn’t eat a thing.” Just making it upstairs is heavy weather. The house has wall to wall carpeting. I sleep on the floor. I throw down a blanket, spread a sheet on top, and roll myself up inside my cocoon. A pillow for my head is heavenly, but completely optional. I have slept on concrete floors in war zones with my face pressed to the pavement. That doesn’t bother me. I like achy cheekbones.

            At least usually I do. You have to understand, I am due back at the campaign at 10 a.m., but that hardly accounts for half my day. First, bathed in sweat, sitting on the toilet, bent over in cramps, I evacuate everything I’ve eaten in the last three days. My bowels churn, my ass burns. I take a quick shower. Then I have to roll our trash bins—the black plastic garbage bin and the blue recycling bin—across the street for morning pickup. I’ve already missed collection on our side of the street the day before.

            At 7:45 in the morning, I drive my mom’s car to the local garage for an oil change. With the recession, people are spending additional coin on their autos, rather than buying new. The appointment has been made way in advance. I leave the car and walk home, suffering a new bout of cramps, waves of nausea leaving black spots before my eyes. A 20-minute walk, once again I am drenched in sweat. I seriously ain’t sure I can make it. My feet won’t move.

            Breakfast isn’t even a possibility. I drink, gingerly, a cup of coffee with lots of scalded milk in it.    

            Ma voiture needs to be topped up with coolant, which I do.

            I take a second shower of the day and put on a decent pair of shorts and a plain white T-shirt. I pack a bagel with cheese and an apple in my brown paper lunch bag. I fill my briefcase with eyeglasses, sunglasses, instant coffee, my own personal coffee cup, cellphone, ballpoint pens, a map of Maryland, paper towels for wiping down yard signs and smoothing the rust off the metal legs. A collection of brochures, handbills, cards and mapquest printouts from previous excursions.

             Then I telephone and leave a message for Boopsie, my filmmaking collaborator, telling him I still live, but just barely. “Boy, will we ever get a screenplay out of this one!” I say. “So don’t be angry.”

            Now, finally, still a little tipsy, I drive to Anna’s house and arrive around 10:10 in the morning. Eric is on the phone, earbuds stuck in his ears, talking via computer. Judith and Anna are busy writing and signing checks. An intern with spiky black hair is typing on a laptop, his back to me. I take my water bottle into the kitchen and refill it. Draining it in the ten-minute drive over here does not bode well for the rest of the day. August, it’s already hot as blazes out there.

              Since Eric is busy, I boil up some water and have another cup of Joe with milk.

              “Montgomery County, rights of way,” he says, welcoming me back. As always, he simply gives me the assignment. He never micromanages in my case, although I’ve seen him ride herd hard on the interns. I get out my map, paper and pen and start noting major thoroughfares.

             I go upstairs to filch additional sheets of scrap paper from the cardboard recycling carton. With printing on only one side, everyone uses the backs for notations. That’s when I notice new brochures I’ve never seen before, four different 8½ by 11 inch sheets of cardboard printed in full-color offset. Stacks of 100 in four different cardboard boxes. They’re like nothing relating to Anna Bola that I’ve ever seen before.

              Firstly, they are very dark. Lots of black borders. Two of them extol Anna, but in very gritty terms: “Anna Bola has gone head to head with the Governor, demanding equal benefits under the law for gays and lesbians in same-sex marriages. She continues fighting to include sexual orientation in Maryland’s hate crimes law.

            “Anna champions a woman’s right to choose. She has called on the Governor and the Statehouse in Annapolis to require Maryland insurers to cover birth control expenses for women. If elected, Anna will sponsor legislation to make this a reality.

            “Anna leads the way in fighting organized crime. Crime bosses, Latino gangs, corrupt union officials all know their time has passed with Anna Bola as the new Attorney General!”

            With the accompanying photographs, this is very potent stuff. So strong, I am checking the printed return address in the upper left-hand corner to be sure they really are being handed out by OUR campaign.

            They are.

            The two cards attacking Hiram Whiplash are even harsher. “Atrocities at an Exhibition,” they specifically accuse Hiram of… Well, read for yourself: “Hiram Whiplash’s ‘main client’ is Yuri Orlov, the famed Merchant of Death, an arms dealer whose many wares have spread death and devastation to all parts of Africa.

            “Hiram Whiplash recently admitted he is funding his campaign with blood money made from the sale of illicit diamonds smuggled out of Sierra Leone.

            “Hiram Whiplash has loaned his campaign $180,000 of his own money, but even today, he refuses to release a list of his law clients and/or business partners.

            “A major player on the spot market for illicit plutonium, there is reason to believe Hiram Whiplash has supplied Iran with nuclear fuel for their reactor program.”

             These statements bristle with footnotes, referring to Greenpeace reports and international arms commission testimony. Dates abound. Page numbers. University case studies are named.

            The color-scheme again is somber, the photographs appalling.

            I take one of each, go downstairs and slip them into my briefcase. If we’re making these kind of claims, I need to stay in the loop!

            Busy writing up my route for the day, I get interrupted by Eric. “Do you have any mailers?” he asks me.

            Mailers? “I don’t know what you mean,” I tell him. “Anna gave me these to hand out.” I show him a stack of small green cards.

            “No, those are handcards. I mean mailers. Did you take any mailers from upstairs?”

             “Huh? You mean, today? Yeah. Sure. Here,” I say, fishing the four cards out of my briefcase.

             “Those aren’t really for public consumption,” he tells me.

             “Oh. You never sent them out.”

             “No, no. We sent them out. The ones upstairs we want to keep.”

             “An archive. Okay. I can Xerox these at Kinko’s and return the originals.”

            “But why do you need them?”

            “Are you kidding? I’m out there knee-deep in yard signs. I represent this campaign. If we’re saying stuff, I gotta know.”

            “I don’t want that stuff to leave the upstairs office.”

            “So I should take them upstairs and take notes?” I ask.

             “Well, uh, yes.”

             So now I have to spend an hour copying longhand, verbatim, from the brochures because Eric is unhappy. While I’m busy pencil-pushing, Judith comes into the room and starts bashing things. Clump, clump! Clunk, clunk! It’s not my business and I’m pretty browned off about this tedious chore I am saddled with. When I come up for air, behold! All four cardboard boxes with the brochures are missing! They gone.

            Then, a not-so-funny incident occurs. Eric and Judith come upstairs and sit themselves adjacent to me and begin, on the Mac, perusing websites. “Look at this one!” Eric snickers. Chortle, chortle! Guffaw!

             I continue my writing assignment. They are baiting me. They want to see if the New Inquisitive Kevin is sticking his nose in their business. I don’t play that game. Eventually, I finish my note-taking and turn to Eric to point out the most salient facts I have gleaned from this literature. Z-Z-Zap! He pushes a button on the keyboard and the screen on the Mac goes blank. By now, I want to punch the guy in the face.

            My world darkens.

             I go downstairs looking for Judith. I’m holding the four cards in my hands and everyone is looking daggers at me. Anna, her husband, the intern. I’m thinking of what snide, stinky remark I should make when I give Judith the cards. “Here are your poison pen letters! Have some turds, turd blossom! Fucked is as Fucked does.” But I reconsider. Not finding her, I go down in the basement, looking for the four cardboard cartons. I can’t find where she has hidden them. Coming back upstairs, I find Judith in the kitchen. “Here!” I say, handing her the radioactive brochures.

           “Um, what?” she asks, flummoxed.

           “Put them with the others.”

           “Oh… Oh. Okay.”

            When I’m ready to leave on my rounds, I find Eric and Judith in the upstairs office. “I need to talk to you for 120 seconds,” I tell Eric. Holding aloft two fingers, I clarify, “Two minutes!”

           “We can talk right now.”

           “Alone!”

           “Oh, I just need my cellphone,” Judith says, grabbing it and scuttling out of the room.

            “I told you four weeks ago, I’ll tell you again,” I say, looking him very levelly in the eye. “Volunteers need a lot of petting and stroking. We only come in a few days a week and we always feel we are outside the campaign and the last to know anything. If you want me to work, you have to bend over backwards to make me feel part of this campaign. Include me! Obama does clueless. I don’t do clueless.“

            “I have a no-nonsense policy among the interns that nothing in this upstairs office leaves this room,” he tells me.

            “Cute!”

            He frowns.

            Tough titty.

            “Here! Hand out these. They have the endorsement announcement by The National Herald,” he suggests, handing me a stack of green cards from a box by the door.

             Pap. Vanilla. Bland. A waste of my precious time.

             “We’re not Tiger Woods and his former caddy,” I point out. “We’re not super-star athletes. We’re ordinary adults who can use the English language to communicate. Talk to me, Eric! If you want me out of here, just ask for my badge and I’m out of Dodge.”

             “Oh, no, we need you,” he tells me. “You are an integral part of this campaign. You provide work I can’t get from anyone else.”

             “As long as you are sure. Because I can’t stand out there on those scorched rights of way, pounding yard signs into the earth in 98 degree heat, if I feel unappreciated. That I cannot do! “

             “I appreciate you! I appreciate you!” he insists, shaking my hand. We leave it at that.

              It’s a campaign. Nothing is more temporary. Everyone wants to get as close to the candidate as they can. Everyone wants to wield power. Everyone wants a full-time, high-paying job at the end of their Herculean effort. And, maneuvering like hawks, no one helps anyone else or gives even an inch of ground. Exclusion is the name of the game! Campaign work is the ultimate ego trip. It’s all about Me-Me-Me.

            Not only has this campaign gone way negative— which Eric promised we wouldn’t do— I don’t see a lot of smiling faces. In fact, things look kind of dour.

            Plopping yard signs in the back seat of my car, a woman I don’t know exits the house. “Hi!” she calls, waving.

           “Hi!” I reply, holding aloft some signs. “I’m Kevin. I volunteer.”

           “Hi! I’m Jeanie. I live two blocks over. I just brought by a check.”

           “That’s always welcome!” I tease.

           “I didn’t think the election would be this close.”

           “You mean three weeks away?”

           “No, the surge in poll numbers for your opponent.”

            “I don’t get it,” I tell her. “What is so attractive about Hiram Whiplash? All right, I can understand that he’s got the Jewish vote. That makes sense, he’s one of theirs. They should support their man. But, otherwise, politically, his résumé is paper thin.”

           “I sure don’t know,” Jeanie tells me. We wish each other a good week.

            Two hours and 20 minutes later, I’ve knocked nine yard signs into the rock-hard earth and driven a total of 11 miles. “Fuck it!” I rant, sweat pouring off my nose and trickling to the ground in ropes of snot and perspiration. “Let Eric find some other sucker to do this chicken-cacky!”

           “You’re home early,” says mom.

            I tell her about the new, negative literature. “So I touched something radioactive and they all howled like scalded cats.”

            “You weren’t here,” she explains. “You called home sick. They sent those cards out to the four corners of the state, a few thousand here, a few thousand there. When they arrived in the mail, it made the local news shows. People did not like it. Your coworkers at campaign headquarters were hoping the incident would die a quiet death. When they saw you had copies of the cards, they panicked.”

              I take a third shower of the day, go upstairs and crawl into my cocoon.

             Over the dinner table, I complain about the freaky, annoyed looks I am getting from Anna’s husband Frank. “He seems to think we campaign workers have invaded his house, and he don’t like it. Added to everyone else’s paranoia, it makes for a lousy campaign!”

            “Oh,” says my mom, “that one’s easy. How old is Frank Reynolds?”

            “My age. We’re contemporaries.”

            By now, mom is out and out laughing. “Look in the mirror, dum-dum! Frank Reynolds is jealous. Here’s this good-looking son-of-a-bitch hanging around his wife! He probably said something to Anna. From what you’ve told me, I’m pretty sure she replied, ‘Kevin’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and indispensable to this campaign!’ How do you think that makes Frank feel? So, he’s jealous.”

           I’m still on the campaign trail, but the honeymoon phase is definitely over.

 

                                                           *

American Default Blues

          “One small debt for a man, one giant black hole for a government.”  

                    – RT, Russian Television, commentator reporting from Moscow on America’s debt crisis

           Jules Boolkin, TV Network News: “Good evening! As millions of you saw last night, we sent news teams all across the country interviewing ordinary Americans regarding their views on the solution to the debt crisis in Washington. Ordinary Americans just like you!

            “What you may not know, is the acid condemnation Corporate has received for what critics and the public agree, for once, was ‘boring’ television.

            “’If I want to hear the opinions of my neighbors,’ wrote a typical viewer, ‘I don’t need to turn on my television.’

            “So, to beef up our story— and hopefully re-attract those viewers lost in the hiatus— we’ve returned to this issue. Tonight: Previously Unheard Voices On the Debt Crisis.

            “We first take you to Flatland, Indiana, where billionaire maize farmer, entrepreneur and inventor Silas Worthington is seen climbing aboard his corporate jet.”

            Worthington: “I didn’t make the hole in the rowboat, why should I have to help bail?!”

            Boolkin: “We now interrupt a hold-up on Third Avenue in New York City to ask stickup artist and anonymous robber ‘R’ what he thinks.”

            ‘R’: Karl Marx prophesied the fall and ultimate demise of capitalism as an integral step in the formation of a communist society. We are currently in the second painful phase of that transition, the economic collapse of the West.”

            Boolkin: “In that same city, pole dancer Trixie LaBoom had this to add…”

            LaBoom: “I’m not saying there will be, but if there’s a backlash to the curtailment of entitlements amidst the general public, the Tea Party may well rue the day they made their demands.”

            Boolkin: “This homeless person standing on a street corner in New York City is Cyrus Corning. We don’t have Smellovision in our homes, but take my word for it, Mr. Corning smells pretty awful.”

            Corning: “The market’s crashing! No, it’s rallied! The Market’s crashing! No, it’s rallied! The market’s crashing! No, it’s rallied! The Market’s—“

            Newsman (off-camera): “Any other thoughts?”

            Corning: “Oh, wait! Stocks have taken a nosedive! No, the Market’s recovered! Stocks have taken a nosedive! No, the Market’s recovered! Stocks have taken a nosedive—“

            Boolkin: “Meanwhile, on Castro Street in San Francisco, gay rights activist Monty Markham gave us his commentary.”

            Markham: “Times are hard for the Movement. Castro Street has definitely been left behind. Wall Street flourishes, the rest of us are dumb [bleep]. I, personally, think House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is a lovely, lovely man and I would be happy to speed date the man in a Bachelorette-type setting. I’m in the phonebook. Or google me online at Markham dot Monty.”

            Boolkin: “Finally, back in Washington, on Euclid Street, in the downtown area— about as far from Capitol Hill as you can get and still remain on the same planet— we asked the Reverend Jasper C. Pettiwhistle for these comments.”

            Pettiwhistle: “A darkness rises upon the waters, Oh brothers and sisters! And the Righteous shall strike at the Iniquitous, like the scorpion riding aback the turtle. As we together sink into the mire of everlasting damnation, Brother Barack will give us all a speech tellin’ us we got to be prepared to make ever-greater sacrifices.

           “He got his millions!

           “He know where he can stick that one!”

            Boolkin: “That’s our economic recovery report for tonight on reaction to Congress and the Administration’s debt ceiling legislation and the resulting economic downgrading of America by rating agency Standard & Poor.

            “We’ll be back, after this…”

*

 

Name of the Game

           As the east coast of the United States slowly turns into a desert, the population hunkered down behind glass in air-conditioned splendor, the government in Washington, D.C. continues fighting over the debt ceiling. Considering that most Americans have been living on credit and “enjoying” staycations for over a decade, the concept of America welching on its commitments in the midst of a worldwide recession doesn’t sit well. This impasse makes all politicians look bad.

           I know politics isn’t for everyone, but I promised myself I’d get a book out of volunteering on the Anna Bola campaign for Attorney General of Maryland. Since it sure don’t look like I’m gonna get anything else out of it, as Harry Potter would say, “Specialis Revelio!”

            We’ll start with the hype: This is a statewide campaign encompassing all 23 counties, from the tobacco fields upstate to the cornpone and crabmeat of the Eastern Shore. This voter drive includes Baltimore and Annapolis. To quote Miss Jamie, our 23-year-old intern supervisor, blond, attractive, incredibly young, “We’ve dialed 18,514 telephone calls and held 4,302 conversations. We’ve knocked on 11,736 doors, gotten 5,709 strong supporters, taken 622 requests for yard signs, received email addresses for 2,136 voters, and fielded zero volunteers. What’s wrong with this picture?”

            In addition, we’ve marched in seven parades (groan!), attended four (groan!) county fairs, participated in five debates, held 8 fundraisers in hotel ballrooms, and had Anna do the meet-and-greet at private parties held in individual homes no less than 26 times.

           Operating out of Anna’s house in the trendy backwater town of Oxburg, Maryland, located in Montgomery County, our stalwart crew has canvassed the state, leaving no stone unturned. This has included cemeteries and Civil War battlefields, where applicable. Who says the dead don’t vote?!

            Super-Skypers, this campaign has videoteleconferenced to beat the band: strategists, speechwriters, pollsters, consultants, pundits, everybody works from their office and telecommutes. Truly a network, we have received data from so far afield as Mumbai. We have consulted with pollsters in Sochi, Russia. I don’t know how useful the info is, but we’ve done it. At the risk of waking the sleeping giant known as the State Department, we’ve even been in regular contact with Jerusalem.

           The State Department is prickly about Israel because, second only to the Russians, no one does espionage against the United States like the Israelis.

           You like Skype? Computer telephony is an Israeli invention, for God’s sake! Five years before anyone else, the Israelis pioneered “VoIP” technology (voice over internet protocol). Israeli emigrants called home on-screen. Even physically, they are seven hours ahead of us: If it’s 6 p.m. here, it’s one o’clock in the morning over there. Talking with Josie at the Jewish National Fund— basically, they plant trees and use the donations for everything else— we agree on some things. The legality of settlements in the West Bank? We agree, “Possession is 9/10’s of the law.” The Gaza embargo? Agreed, “We’ll break the necks of anyone who tries to break the embargo.” The two-state solution? “The Palestinians will never be happy until the Jews march backward into the sea!” Peace Now? “Some Jews are filled with self-loathing. The self-hating Jews join Peace Now!” I can hear the hubbub of the JNF Call Center in the background, many voices making appeals. Josie’s Russian/Hebrew accent melts my heart. Dispensing with politics, we get to the real meat and potatoes of our conversation: The weather. “The heat is so bad,” he tells me, “it’s incredible. Most of the houses don’t even have A/C. So we’re suffering.”   

            I know talking long distance internationally over the computer is standard office routine.  People do it all the time, but I haven’t previously experienced it. The endless minutiae of neighborhood voter preferences, issue research, scheduling and voter registration is, for me, way too much information. It’s the process I like. I’m less enthusiastic when the person portrayed on-screen is campaign treasurer Fluffens or the staff has tuned to Rachel Ray talking about meatball goulash, but otherwise, I’m game. When everyone else breaks down with a case of the giggles, and campaign manager Eric calls out to me, “Good times on the campaign trail, Kevin!”, I don’t disappoint. Campaign handyman and mascot, I assure him, “Oh, yeah!”

             It’s 27 days before the primary and the Battle of the Yard Signs has left me with egg-sized blisters on my fingers. I don’t know who Eric’s other volunteer is, but he or she, admirably, has peppered Montgomery County with Anna Bola yard signs. I never realized how soft and well-manicured our neighborhood lawns are, until trying to sink a yard sign into the rock-hard earth of a county right-of-way. Standing deep in scrub grass filled with chiggers, fleas, gnats, ticks and other biting insects, I get eaten alive on the traffic islands, vehemently trying to push in a yardy! Since this just ain’t gonna happen, I have procured a screwdriver with an exceptionally thin, long shaft that I pound into the ground with a hammer. Utilizing the strength of Hercules, I valiantly rescue this tool that once belonged to my late dad Bernie. [Note: Cheap ploy to gain your sympathy.] Shoving one metal leg of the sign into this hole, I follow the same procedure on the opposite side. Hopefully, the sign will sink more than one inch into the unyielding soil.

            Sweltering in the blast-furnace heat of this excruciating summer, many a swear word mingles with the roar of on-coming traffic. I was ready to give up and tell Eric, “Find some other customer,” but a few artistically-placed yard signs on hills adjacent to public parks, in flower boxes fronting Metro stations, and inevitably, on islands in the middle of roadways, reawakened my sense of sport.

          Hiram Whiplash supporters have spent a fortune on signs: A traffic island doesn’t receive a measly one or two. As in all things Hiram Whiplash, his people insist on overdoing it. Six yard signs on each and every traffic island march along in step with the traffic.

           Rather than try to compete, I choose my spot and place a single, solitary Anna sign adjacent to Hiram’s minions. Everybody likes an underdog, and Anna’s lonely little blue and white signs accentuate the difference between the campaigns. “Our little shepherdess among the wolves,” is the effect I seek. “Little Miss Muffet amid a sea of red and white spiders.”

           This comic effect has kept me going, despite having my fingers taped in bandages and bug bites liberally spaced about my body.

            Listen, anything is better than setting up signs outside BWI-Marshall, where the planes roar in loud and low. Those cute contrails pouring off the wings are the pilot dumping excess fuel. It makes for a safer landing, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

                                                            *

            Kudos to AT&T, I think our telephonic Town Hall Meeting went reasonably well, considering we ran it on a singles hotline. “When will titty bars be reclassified as family entertainment?” kind of threw us, but Anna was brave when asked, “Should partners in same-sex marriages remain chaste before, during or after the marriage ceremony?”

                                                            *

            EDITORIAL: “Both candidates for the Democratic nomination are equally patriotic, equally American and equally active in politics. Some, however, are more equal than others. Just as a B-2 Stealth bomber burns more fuel than an F-4 Phantom, we feel A.B. is the heavier contender. She’s not just steeped in ability, she’s Obi-Wan Kenobi-steeped in ability.

            For our civilian readers, the vast majority, we apply the analogy of creamery butter. Everybody likes their butter creamy, but there’s no accounting for taste. Choose accordingly. Hiram Whiplash seems a nice enough person, but that doesn’t mean we want him for State Attorney General. Our next-door neighbors are also nice, but oy veh, you’d have to be meshuganah to even consider them for elective office!

            This election is a case of ‘On what side do you want your toast buttered?’ You can butter us up, but we may yet abstain— in protest— from voting. Until someone kicks ass in Washington, until someone gets the debt ceiling raised and a handle on the economy, it’s hard to stay focused on anything, much less the election for Attorney General. According to our word count, we have now written the requisite six column inches on this subject. That said, do whatever strikes your fancy. Regarding anything. I myself am going out for coffee. Later!”

                                                            *

           Dear Anna,

           The yardsign I received had a white fleck about 1/16 inch square, squarely on the edge of the Navy blue border. I know you feel you can do this only because I am a widowed, Jewish, handicapped person of limited means.    

            I shall continue to support you, but with deep misgivings.

                                    Sincerely,      Ethel Rosenwasser

                                                              *

           Jennifer Lopez is running for the School Board. Of course, it isn’t that J-Lo. Our Jennifer Lopez is 42 years old.

           Three weeks before the primary, both campaigns are going whacko! Now it’s the Battle of the Websites: At “Bananatricks,” Hiram supporters’ oppositional research site, they busy themselves publishing Anna’s dirty laundry. “This sheep in wolf’s clothing,” they rant, “is in actuality securely in the pockets of the cable companies!!! Comcast, Verizon Fios and T-Mobile have all made contributions to Anna’s campaign!”

            “This is crazy,” Anna complains to us over her kitchen table and in print, “Hiram Whiplash has also accepted contributions from the cable companies!”

            A smear is a smear, however. “Anna Bola In Bed With Cablers,” read the blogs.

            “Hiram’s Magical Mystery $180,000” our bloggers respond. “Where’d Mr. Clean Shirt Club get the money, honey???”

            “Anna Bola in pockets of safari shirt manufacturers!… As many pockets as a safari shirt, Anna Bola sits in every one of them!”

            or

            “Anna Bola In Bed With Sealy Posturepedic!”

            or

            “Anna Bola takes money from C.I.A.!!!… The Bola campaign makes no bones about the hefty $500 contribution from brothers Sidney and Isaac Shelton, owners of Custom Ice Associates of Waldorf, Maryland. “Even in a downturn, companies still book private ice cubes for their parties and charitable events,” Sidney Shelton explained in this exclusive interview. “It’s the size, shapes and colors that appeal to our customer base. Our slogan remains unchanged these 50 years:  ‘Stay Out of Hot Water, Order Your Ice Here!’ Corny but effective. We feel the same about Anna Bola. She’ll be a boring Attorney General, but I mean that in a good way. Boring into corruption, boring into organized crime, upending cold cases. And we know from cold!  Relentless. A pretty icy customer, if you get my drift.”

             I didn’t know politics could give me freezer burn.

                                                            *

              Lolita Mancheno-Smoak is running for an At-Large seat on the Fairfax County School Board in Virginia. With a name like Lolita, she’s a shoe-in. I’ve found a Lolita of my own at our community swimming pool. I wouldn’t normally go, but I truly need some down time. Seventeen years old, her body clad in a candy-stripe green and white bikini, toenails painted a shocking pink, sun-bleached hair as perfectly air-dried as a shampoo commercial, slender fingers and sweet hands, regulation little-girl sunglasses, she reclines daily on a chaisse lounge, reading fashion mags. She puts the “u” in “cute.” She reads articles entitled:

                           “12 Ways To Improve Your Lip Gloss”

                           “If He Can’t Hear You, Try Esperanto”

                    “The Proper Length Glove For Evening Wear”

                        “Charlene of Monaco Secrets Exposed!” 

          Her name is Polina and it took me FOREVER to realize she’s a 17-year-old Russian immigrant and wants nothing to do with me, bandaged hands and all.

                                                     * 

            At a news conference on public access television, requested by no one, current Oxburg mayor Sparky Welles tells us: “I am willing to take significant heat from my constituents regarding my personal vision, and plan, encompassing the bulldozing of Natalie Woods in order to erect a condominium complex of 125 new dwellings, as well as meaningful additional retail space at ground level for boutiques, restaurants and stores of every description.

         “I am willing to consider such amenities as an indoor gym and a multiplex cinema exhibiting Hong Kong Kung Fu features on a regular basis for the art house crowd. They are, all things considered, a potentially rich pool of investors.

         “To those who say, ‘It can’t be done,’ I say, ‘It can and shall be done.’ Riverdale Creek can provide sufficient fresh water resources to allow for indoor plumbing, flush toilets, and standard shower fixtures in every condo, without further taxing the existing water table.

         “Woodland glades, pretty though they may be, do not generate tax revenues!

         “If not now, when?

         “Let the word go forth to friend and foe alike, ‘A $120,000 down payment secures you unlimited access to planning committee meetings, architectural drawings, artists’ renditions, wallpaper swatches and a color-coordinated pie chart by interior decorator Mel Vin.’

         “Don’t miss this wonderful opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a project that will only increase in value over the years.

          “Easy access to Rockville Pike and, of course, the high-end suburban mecca of Chevy Chase. Why be stuck on the Beltway when you can spend an equal amount of time and gas stalled in line on Wisconsin Avenue?

           “But enough about me! The only thing standing in our way is the approval of the Town Council. Their switchboard is open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday except for the July 4^th weekend and on Yom Kippur. Call and demand the passage of Town Zoning Ordinance 1137—that’s one, one, three, seven—and let’s get this row on the shoad. Time’s a-wastin’! To quote the illustrious adventurer and cultural icon H. Potter, ‘Erecto! ’

           “I’d also like at this time to deny any allegations of untoward sexual conduct during my recent school inspection tour of the girls’ locker room at Oxburg High. Forensic tests will show that, while my shoes left tangible prints on the tiles of the shower stalls, the purported semen stains were found in the bushes on the southwest side of the building, not exactly a teeming thoroughfare. So don’t let malicious, wagging tongues tell you otherwise.

            “We need to build these condos today to secure Oxburg’s budget for the next 30 years. The country’s broke, don’t let it happen to you!

             “I need your help! Support me on this initiative. I’ve already bought surrounding acreage on the spot market. If this little project goes through, I stand to make a goodly profit. You elected me! Obviously, you wish me to succeed.

          “Somebody has to be mayor!

          “Vote ‘yes’ on Proposition 4 in the upcoming referendum.

          “ ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.A.,’ ” Sparky concluded, “Thank you and God bless.”

             The explosive reaction of citizens’ groups and environmentalists was not long in coming.

                                                    *

              I know I started off talking politics, but I’ve got a problem here. I have received A COMPLAINT from one of my younger readers. “Everything you write about is all messed up!” he writes. Guilty as charged! I find these screw-ups comical, that’s why I write about them. An alternative to droid rage, I try to couch disaster in high-end language and succinct phraseology. This one’s for you, Ilya! 

           Five days a week, I continue to make my living as a screenwriter, although I do try to get one day off, out of every seven, for good behavior. Together with my partner Bruce— aka “Boopsie”— at Montevideo Films [Marca Registrada], we specialize in sequels, prequels, mashups, parodies, lampoons, satires and blue movie porno flicks. Erase that last part! What am I saying? That our desperation for geld  would drive us to debase ourselves in unscrupulous ways??? Well… as the man said in the movie Dave, “Yeah… I guess I am.”

            Pitching these yarns over the phone to Hollywood takes a lot of chutzpah. To quote Heimie Aaronsky, “You got a lot of damn noive calling me with a tale like this, you yid! So… what happens next?! In your movie?”

             The following is a screenplay I’m really proud of!

         Harry Poofter and the Totally Bad, Thoroughly Abysmal, Really Awful, Pretty Crumby, Not So Good, Very Lousy Christmas Vacation

                                       by B. Davis & K. Feingold

                                                      Synopsis

           Young Harry, his cat Hermeline and his best friend Jacek travel to Jacek’s brother in New York who runs a Polish-owned limousine service. The brother, Andrez, puts them to work washing cars, vacuuming automotive interiors, polishing chrome and wiping down dashboards with a mild detergent. This makes for a three-hour movie, but have heart, Harry discovers a dropped microchip with encrypted blueprints of Chinese drones. Striking a deal with the Chinese consulate, Harry and Hermeline and Jacek return the chip in exchange for the release of half a dozen Falu Gong dissidents. This wins Harry two Wizard points and promotion to Junior Journeyman Assistant Associate Wizard’s Apprentice. This movie is pitched as the first in a very lo-o-o-o-ong franchise.

            An added feature in this premiere event is the shower scene where Harry’s bum is clearly, pinkly visible. Since Boopsie and I wrote the screenplay, we also have Harry in the act of French-kissing a groundhog, although the studio says, for contractual reasons, they are going to CGI the groundhog. Apparently, the young actor playing Harry has dander issues.

            The TV rights are being shopped in Brazil, since the Chinese market has, understandably, taken a hands-off approach. I’m told the storyline will be the basis for a game show. I think they’re going to have speed car washing contests, video monitor games portraying drone strikes (“Contestant A, see if you can hit the SUV full of little children from the Somali orphanage!  Oh my! I say! Good shot!”) and Tiger Ladies slinking around in Chinese silk kimonos. My Portuguese is almost non-existent, but I do look forward to seeing an episode on YouTube.

                                                                        *

Culture Vulture

        I mentioned that Oxburg is rich, but not necessarily why. My younger brother Timothy feels I should come clean. And he accuses me of being cynical. “Maybe they don’t want to hear this!” I wail, but to no avail. Well, it’s been nice…!

        Oxburg, Maryland, the entire 12 square miles, is one mighty speed trap.

        In two separate places on The 1812 Hwy., the sunken road that connects one neighborhood to another, cops on motorcycles perch like falcons ready to swoop. Everybody knows they are there, pointing their hairdryer-shaped speed detectors in our direction, their blue and white Harleys parked by the curb, available to give chase.

        Roaring along, I always, immediately, sink my speed to 30 mph, driving the people behind me absolutely bananas. Time and again, my next-door neighbors announce, bitterly, “Can you believe this? The cop at the speed trap gave me a ticket! I live here!”

        Thus, one of Oxburg’s sources of income: unwary motorists from Chevy Chase, Bethesda and Rockville whose imported revenue generously fills the town coffers of our fine municipality. I hope you won’t think less of us for this scarlet “S” branded on our foreheads. I have pleaded before the Town Council at traffic hearings to suspend this foolish practice. “When you mention to anyone, ‘I live in Oxburg,’ they look at you like an enemy. Listen, the neighboring communities resent Oxburg’s speed traps. Abolish them for the good of our reputation.”

        “What? Ridiculous,” Town Council Chairman Johnson J. Johansson responds. “They’re a major source of income!”

        I’ve seen the town budget: 7% goes to schools, 8% for roads, a bogus 10% to cover infrastructure, overheads and admininstration, a whopping 75% in petty cash!

        My neighbors support me in my campaign to abolish speed traps, right up until some slick councilman reminds them that removing the speed traps will raise their property taxes! “We’d have to do something to compensate for the loss of revenue, you know.”

        Which also explains why everyone in Oxburg who knows me– certainly not every Oxburger– thinks I’m a kind, considerate, helpful, goddam sonofabitch troublemaker.

        Go figure.

                                                        *

                        Why I Hate the Oxburg Towne Faire

        It’s supposed to be a barrel of laughs!

        The Blankety Blank Blank Blanket Sale

        Scottish Hopscotch Scotch: hopping around to different locations imbibing shots of whiskey

        The Alistaire Charles Foundation: a presentation of charitable works by rich snobs

        Herman Nelson Hot Air Ride: sent aloft by balloon with an overtly gabby guide

        Asa Pace Kissy Face: heavily rouged 14-year-old girls in Antebellum costumes give pecks on the cheek for money

        Rebus Robust Raucous Car Wash: high school toughs beat you up, wash your car

        Derringer Donut: buy donut, have it stuffed down your throat

        Cagney Grapefruit: buy grapefruit half, have it squashed in your face

        Yogi Bear Yawning Contest

        Billy “Twang” Cooper: Billy as in “hillbilly,” this “entertainer” offers songs that are clumsily crude and indelibly stale.

                                                       *

        We only have one famous Amos in Oxburg, painter and living legend Linton Hicks. Three times already, people have said, plucking yard signs from my eager hands, “Since you volunteer for the Anna Bola Attorney General campaign, come join our effort to have Linton Hicks declared ‘painter laureate.'”

        “You mean, like, poet laureate?”

        “Exactly. He’ll be the national portraitist.”

        “You’re, what, lobbying Congress?”

        “We’re lobbying Congress!”

        “No, thanks!”

        Who wants to be considered a kook?

         “The damned shame shall be upon you and you shall roast amidst the iniquities of Hellfire forever,” Parson Jeremiah Parsons, from a long line of religious fanatics, declares. Co-chair of the Linton Hicks Movement, he is not an easy man to get along with. He does not readily take “no” for an answer.

        “Um, Parson, this is a conflict of opinion between two mortals,” I remind him. “Let’s leave God and the Devil out of it.”

                                                     *

        I’m standing on the corner of Peanut Blvd. and Brevity Lane. The latter, of course, is the shortest stretch of road in town. I don’t smoke any longer, so I’m just sweltering in the heat, discussing the Chinese trade deficit with economics professor George Meeks. As I’m talking, Town Council Chairman Johnson J. Johansson drives up in his council-sponsored RV. Forget SUV’s, Oxburg goes the whole nine yards. He rolls down his window. “It’s Friday!” he announces.

        “Truer words, seldom spoken?” I ask.

        “It’s hot! I taken mah fam’ly to th’ country! Y’all have a good ‘un!” he rejoices, roaring away in a cloud of black diesel fumes.

        “What was that about?” asks George.

         “The Council feels I am overly critical of their expenditures.”

        “Maybe I shouldn’t be seen associating with you,” George speculates in that ambiguous tone of voice that always leaves me hanging: Is he joking? Perhaps he means what he just said.

        Before we can iron this out, Molly Sieverts, Town Council Vice Chairperson, drives by in her RV. “Never heard of air conditioning?” she asks, before hitting the switch that rolls her driver side window back up.

        “I detect a pattern here,” says George.

        “No, it’s…”

         It’s Prescott Anderson, Town Council Treasurer, who drives up to the corner in his RV, gives us a haughty look that clearly implies we aren’t worth talking to, and drives off with a throaty roar.

        It’s not like they were correcting my calculations regarding the mismanagement of the town budget or anything.

        Thank God for small favors.

        I could call these jerks mafiosi, but that would denigrate our one, real, true, actual mafioso, Vinnie Panini. Arrriving Stateside in the 1960’s, Vincenzo opened a furniture shop. I was one of the locals who told him, “Don’t be ashamed that your furniture is imported from Naples! Italian furniture is the coming thing. Brag about furniture with a Neopolitan flair.” He’s done well, but even at 70 years of age, he’s still a mafioso.

        He comes into Lorenzo’s, which is a pretty good eatery, and makes his rounds of the tables. You watch, you see how the non-Italians joke around and treat him like an amiable eccentric. The families with Italian and Sicilian surnames gush and fuss over him, but when he wheels to one side to canvas the next table, they stare daggers at his back. Yes, they still buy their bedroom sets at his shop, because they don’ wan’ no trouble, but as second and third generation fellow immigrants, they resent the pressure.

        To me, he always delivers the same litany of advice: “Hey, puppy eyes! How you business? You should move you business inside town limits. Then I could help you develop you business.” He says this grumpily, looking vaguely distressed by heartburn, in a semi-threatening manner.  He never fails to crack me up!

        In 1984, he took delivery of two Lamborghinis that seriously lacked documentation. There was no pink slip on either car, no registration, nada import papers, no nothing. He called me.

        “Where you at?” I asked, busy with black recruits.

        “I wish to Kevin Feingold I should speak,” he enquired tremulously.

        “Speaking,” I replied, recognizing his voice. “Vincenzo! Qué passa?”

        “You can be of a big help or I ask this service of my own people,” he told me brusquely.

        “What do you need?” I asked frankly.

         I arranged to stash the vehicles in an aircraft hangar on a military base in Maryland.  I insisted he not tell any of his fellow wiseguys because, after all, why should he give them the upper hand in some future test of wills? He loved that.

         The state police went around Oxburg from street to street, making every single household open their garage doors. No Lamborghinis. If people weren’t home, the police kept coming back until they’d nailed that location. People returned from vacation and found CRIME SCENE / DO NOT PASS tape stretched across their driveways. It was a madhouse, I’m told. Still, no Lamborghinis.

        Since then, Vinnie and I have been thick as thieves. I keep him at arm’s length, but we amuse one another.

       That’s small town culture.  

                                                      *

Victoria’s Secret Secret

Dear Victoria’s Secret,

            Thank you for the catalog. I noticed on page 13, item C, your pleather push-up halter top, a “bombshell of a bra, now in a bikini top. Special padding lifts you up and out, instantly adding up to 2 full cup sizes for maximum cleavage and fullness… Imported nylon/Lycra spandex… Orig. $58. CLEARANCE $33.99.”

          Does the young lady come with my purchase or would that entail additional charges?

           I noticed your models are all photographed full-frontal except pg. 35, a young woman with an exceptional derrière. There seems to be a theme to this swim suit issue, namely, the pristine white beaches, thatched huts and azure blue waters of the Caribbean. A snorkeler, I say, jolly good show! Could you include snorkeling equipment, please?

                                                   Sincerely, Jarvis St. John, Esquire

                                                        *

In A Foreign Land

  

            Officially embedded as a journalist in the 30^th Infantry Regiment of the 10^th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, N.Y., I ate like everybody else, but was in a privileged position to use my eyes and ears. Not having to man a weapon, read a GPS or give commands, I did nothing but observe. It was great.

            I was surprised at the speech Colonel Freddy McFaye gave to the Afghan villagers after a Predator strike went awry and killed two children. “We are sorry about the misguided drone,” he droned, sharpening a Gerber army knife on a wet stone. We had transported two sheep to the village in the back of a camo-painted pickup truck. The Colonel was preparing to slit their throats in ritual sacrifice. ”These things happen,” McFaye said, referring to the drone strike. Peering at his bloodshot eyes, I suddenly realized he might be having a bad day.

            There was something feral about the way he kept sliding the knife edge—scritch! scritch! scritch!—along the satiny surface of the wet stone. He seemed preoccupied, definitely not in the moment. Maybe sheep aren’t his thing.

            This was one fly-blown village: Traditional mud huts, stone walls, raggedy kids and turban-toting, bearded men in pajama pants and jerkins. Women in mobile tents, replete with airholes, armholes and peepholes, did the honors while the men crouched in a semi-circle and considered McFaye’s attempt to make a sacrificial offering of atonement.

            “Although a soldier, I too have children,” he declared. I was relieved to see he was back on message. “I have seen death up close and personal,” he continued, pausing after each thought so “Charlie Boy,” our young, enthusiastic translator could deliver the message in Pashto. I always felt “Charlie Boy” was too young for the job. Today didn’t help.

            I crept further into my leggings. The chill on the mountain top was making me start to hate Afghanistan.

            “The point is,” I suddenly heard McFaye’s booming voice shout as he gathered up a ewe and in one swift motion sent its soul heading toward the hereafter, “I too know what grief is about. I have grieved comrades in arms lost in combat,” he insisted, wiping the knife distractedly on his trouser leg. I winced at the glistening red blood on the camo-colored cloth.

            This wasn’t going well.

            “The point is, I know what it is to grieve,” McFaye told us. Sitting stolidly, the tribal elders looked doubtful. I wished they knew the Colonel I know, a natural  leader, concerned and compassionate about his men. Someone who exudes command presence, his troops will follow him to the far corners of any valley hellhole. He was, for the moment, however, dead on his feet after spending three solid days and nights videoteleconferencing with the Washingtonistas. They seemed determined to “educate” the Colonel on what he’d done wrong and the implications the strike will have on their poll numbers and the Fourth Estate.

            He seemed noticeably relieved to finally leave the VTC behind and come out here to make it right with the villagers.

            “McFaye is a good guy!” I wanted to shout, but held my water. He was the professional. Who was I? Joe Hollywood.

            “I once had a tin whistle,” McFaye explained. “I lost it, as a kid. I grieve for it still. Of course, that can’t compare to your children… May you be fruitful and have many more,” he said, finishing up. “Fortunately, you can replace children. A tin whistle, once lost, is lost forever.”

            I’m not sure the analogy went home with the Afghans. Maybe the imagery wasn’t something they could relate to. “Charlie Boy” may have botched the translation. The villagers accepted the second sheep, unmolested, still kicking and braying. We gathered together what little we had to carry, got back into our vehicles and roared out of there.

            Mission accomplished.

            Sort of.

*

 

Growing Up ferklempt

 

            “Gee, you never mention your dad.”

            We’ll get the bad stuff over first. In the 1960’s, the self-righteous Catholic burghers of Oxburg taught their children, over the dinner table, that the Jews crucified Jesus. Our schoolmates were hell-bent on paying us back. We guys carried our schoolbooks underarm, pressed against our hips. My tormentors “dumped” my books, coming up behind me in the halls and giving my notebook a solid, downward shove that sent everything flying. On a daily basis. Until the jocks told them to stop because the resultant mess was disrupting their walk to class!  

            This inbred hatred meant that every Easter, a cross was burned on our lawn. Since April in some years was dry and the grass brown, like as not, the resulting brush fire brought fire trucks with their wailing sirens and spinning red lights.

            Which annoyed the neighbors. “Why can’t the Jews and their neo-Nazi enemies live somewhere else?” they complained volubly. “If the family’s Jewish, why don’t they move to where Jews live? Chevy Chase!”

            Portly Sheriff Aloysius Horner would come to investigate.

            “Those vandals burned my lawn!” fumed my father.

            “The county won’t charge you for the fire trucks,” Aloysius assured us. “Not your fault.”

            “They burned a cross on our lawn,” my little brother Timothy— expecting some form of justice or retribution— would point out. “Every year, they burn a cross on our lawn. The same three kids. They’re—“

            “And every year,” said Aloysius, “I tell you, Timothy— get over it! Getting angry isn’t going to help anyone.”

            Today, they’d say “Suck it up!”

            Back then, they said, “Be a man! Get over it! Don’t let it get to you.”

            “They burned my lawn!”

            “Buy grass seed, Mr. Feingold. It’ll grow back.”

            So, there was never any discussion about finding or punishing the perpetrators.

            Despite his kvetching, I got my dad to drive me to Sears and let me use college funds to buy a set of weights from the Atlas Dumbbell Co. Weights and a crossbar. You put the weights on the ends of the crossbar, evenly placed on both sides. With that equipment, you could do lifts, press-ups and jerks. I wasn’t trying to set any world records, I just wanted to become sufficiently muscular to defend myself.

            I did.

            So when my books went flying one day, I didn’t bother to pick them up. I scanned the crowd. Rapidly making his departure was Peter Doyle.

            “Hey, Pete!”

            “I ain’t done nothin’,” he swore, shrugging me off.

            “Hey, Pete!”

            “I… ain’t… done… nothin’!” he repeated, turning to face me. Broad-shouldered, wearing his felt bomber jacket with the embroidered name patch, “Peter,” he weighed a good deal more than me.

            “Say ‘hi’ to Steve and Billy!” I suggested, hitting him square in the face.

            We had a major fistfight. He blackened my right eye and gave me a bloody nose. I K.O.’d the sonofabitch. While he was playing pretty, I swung from the floor and planted a full-on, bare knuckle smash to his jaw. My hand was swollen for a week. Like something in a movie, his dainty little eyes fluttered and he sank to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

            “Hey, Pete! Your lights are out!” I taunted his lifeless figure, prone at my feet.

            “Hey, Pete!” Jeff Sullivan, walking by with his girl, echoed. “Your lights are out!”

            “Who threw these books here? Who threw these papers and pencils all over the hall? What are you boys doing?” the Assistant Principal asked, approaching us indignantly. Mr. Niedermayer. “Wimp” Niedermayer.

            Peter was bent forward on the floor, vomiting profusely.

            “Well, really! Are you ill, young man?”

            The Assistant Principal was, shall we say, ineffectual? I ignored him and collected my books and sundry possessions. I also left droplets of blood everywhere.

            “Stop that! Don’t you have a handkerchief? Here, use mine, for God’s sake.”

            Unspoken: The fact that it was a fistfight right in the middle of school right in the middle of the day.

            No one ever dumped my books again. Now the hoods thought I was cool. They wanted me to join their gang and beat up on other classmates. I declined.

            At home, I got no support at all. Wringing his hands, my father fussed and said, “Be a man! Get over it.”

            My father’s definition of “lazy” was: adj. someone who doesn’t do the chores you have assigned them.

            A government personnel director, he was the original (Model 1950) empowerment freak. “I’ll let you… I’ll let you…” he was always telling us, his pickaninny  house servants:

            “I’ll let you mow my lawn

            “I’ll let you wash my car.

            “I’ll let you trim the bushes.

            “I’ll let you wax my car.”

            If, for any reason, we rejected this once in a lifetime golden offer, he stormed into the house and screamed at my mom, “What a load of lazy sons of bitches you are raising. Totally worthless. They are totally worthless!”

            I joined the military to get time off! Even a soldier isn’t on duty 24/7/365, which was what my parents expected, and my dad required.

            “Where were you!?!” my mom ranted at me when I turned 16. “I’ve been standing at the top of the stairs screaming your name for the last 10 minutes!!!”

            “I was working in the basement, unclogging the storm drain,” I replied, too tired, soggy and fed up to even get angry. “Next time, come find me and save your vocal cords.”

            She blinked. “What?”

            “I can’t answer you if I can’t hear you. Save yourself the aggravation. If I don’t answer, I’m out of earshot. If I do hear you, I will answer.”

            My mom and I never had that conversation again. If the parents in Oxburg were going to act childishly, we kids took it upon ourselves to be the adults.

            This happened all the time.

            One summer day, my cousin Jimbo borrowed a go-kart. A go-kart! We kids never had things like that. All the money was saved for college. But Jimbo worked for Farmer Pete out on The Flats, repairing barbed wire fences around the paddocks (cows and sheep). He got to borrow 18-year-old Robbie’s old go-kart.

            A two-stroke engine, we mixed oil in with the gas, revved it up and took turns roaring around the lower parking lot of Oxburg High. The steering was bent, the seat left your behind an inch off the ground, but we weren’t exactly attempting off-road. It was great!

            “You goddam sons of bitches!” Mr. Smith, the physics teacher, screamed, charging out of the building in his shirt sleeves. “I’m working in there. Take your goddam noisy contraption someplace else to race!!!”

            “But Mr. Smith,” we replied sheepishly, “It’s the 4^th of July, a national holiday.”

            “Just get the hell out of here,” he muttered, stomping back indoors.

            We understood that whatever he was doing in there (he was making hot July love to an underage summer school lass), he had no official reason to chase us off school grounds.

            Being kids, when we found out— from her— that trampy, gum-chewing Patty Campbell was letting Old Man Smith pork her, we stood in awe of her. After all, engaging in sex was such a grown-up thing to do!

            Here’s an anecdote: In 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the elementary, junior and senior high schools in Oxburg were instructed to configure fall-out shelters for students, teachers and staff. I don’t know what the other schools did, but in our case, the janitor searched his key ring, came up with the correct key, and opened the metal door leading to the unfinished foundation of the building. This was simply an enormous, underground dirt embankment pressed up against the red brick supporting wall of the school.

            “Okay,” Jimbo announced, when 1,200 students, 40 teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, two janitors, the nurse and four kitchen staff were freaking each other out with flashlights in this subterranean space. “Here’s how this is gonna work.”

            The brainiest science student in the school, everyone stopped horsing around to listen.

            “Tell ‘em, Jimbo!” I said, violently angry and frustrated. “Explain it to them. Speak up real loud!”

            “Okay!” he shouted in the gloom. “This is how it’s gonna work. Some missiles in silos in someplace like Vladivostok, Russia are going to be fired at the White House. Following the curvature of the Earth, these I.C.B.M.’s—or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles—are going to follow pre-programmed, gyroscopic coordinates. In other words, they’re gonna miss!”

            Total, eerie silence in our underground cavern.

            “Oxburg High is 7½ miles from the White House as the crow flies…”

            The sound of over a thousand bodies shifting uncomfortably.

            “… One of those missiles is gonna fall right on our heads and we’ll all be instantly incinerated! Fried to a crisp in less time than it takes to say ‘Frito Lay’!”

            “Who is that?!” Principal Hearst demanded.

            “You shut up!!!” chemistry teacher Delores Kilpatrick and physics teacher Benjamin Smith shouted simultaneously. “How dare you say such things! How dare you rile everyone up!? How dare you?!”

            “It’s the truth,” I added, venomously. This was deep in my high school schizophrenia phase. I had enough bile in my stored-up anger to fill an ocean.

            “You shut up, Kevin Feingold! You shut up, Ricky Barber! You Jews! (This under her breath.) You are both on report. Consider yourselves on report,” Mrs. Kilpatrick howled like a banshee. “Children, pay no attention to the ghost stories and lies spread by these two known troublemakers! Now let’s get out of here!”

            We got trundled off to the Principal’s Office. Our parents had to come to school and vouchsafe our future, docile demeanor. I brooded theatrically, threatening suicide. Jimbo thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

            Here’s the anecdotal part: While we were being frogmarched to purgatory, my blond, blue-eyed high school crush Peggy Sue Cockburn announced to Joey Wall in her incredibly whiney voice, “If I’m going to be killed, I’m not going to my death without ever having sex! Will you have sex with me?”

            Sweeter words rarely spoken.

            Unknown to the rest of us, Joey took Peggy Sue out in his Ford Mustang the following Saturday night, parked quietly in the back end of Natalie Woods and deflowered her in the back seat of the Mustang.

            Growl !!!

            I’m in love.

            When Peggy Sue explained all this to a gaggle of admiring men at our 20^th high school reunion, all you could hear was a deafening chorus of “WHY NOT ME?!”

                                                    *

            At the age of eight, I brained my father with a hammer. My mother immediately sent me to live with her parents in Sweden. It was 1955. Propeller airplanes took me first to New York, then Newfoundland, then Iceland. From there, I flew to England and finally, Stockholm. Avraham Zakroiski and his wife Rivka were mensheviki, “Mensheviks,” chased out of Russia by the Bolsheviks in 1921. That’s how come ma mère was born in Svedala. (A nickname for Sweden.)

            We’re Bialystokers. Abe’s father owned Nahun Zakroiski Bäckerei on Mühlen Strasse in Bialystok. A bookstore. Abe started his working life as a bookbinder. “Waste not, want not,” people brought in their used and damaged books to be rebound. Such is life in the provinces. Stuck in northeastern Poland, the town was White Russian one year, Polish the next. Naturally, the inhabitants spoke Yiddish in addition to Polish and Russian.

            Even as a young man, Abe was a political firebrand. It’s in our blood. He never made it to St. Petersburg, but he shook things up 270 kilometers due east in Minsk. The NKVD had him on their Watch List. “Run like hell and don’t come back,” a Jewish army officer counseled him. It took some doing— money they never repaid because the recipients were either in Siberia or dead— but they landed, as refugees, in Sweden, amidst a small wave of Russian émigrés.

            Rivka was born and raised in the shtetl village of Zabludova, 20 kilometers from Bialystok. She became a seamstress. A brilliant beauty, on her visits to town to buy thread, needles and cloth, she quickly caught the eye of young Abe.

            Once in Sweden, Abe spent his immigrant years working in a steel mill in Örebro. The Mensheviks were Social Democrats. The government of Sweden swung between farmer parties and the Social Democrats. Life was hard, but they had landed among comrades! Abe advanced to the shipbuilding wharves in Karlskrona. Rivka became a dress designer. Multilingual, Abe also became a union rep. By the time I arrived, they’d already lived over 10 years in the capital as city-dwellers.

             You knew they were Old School when they shunned a new, spacious apartment in Söder (Southern Stockholm) to live in a cramped, poorly lit abode overlooking the Slussen subway station. Slussen was history! Slussen was police charges, freedom marches, workers united, Easter massacres.

             I respected and loved my grandparents. To each other, they spoke Yiddish. They spoiled me outrageously and then would disappear together two or three days at a time, leaving me to fend for myself. Fortunately, Bengt (“Bengi”) Gustavsson had full-time parents. Their entire, extended family— including spinster aunts— lived across the hall and one landing up. On May 1— “May Day” in Europe, the Socialist day of solidarity— Bengi and I took turns carrying the union flag for my grandpa’s chapter. They had a leather harness into which we shoved the base of the flagpole. That mother was heavy!

           Nine years old in 1950’s Stockholm, where virtually everything in the home was handcrafted by artisans— feather dusters, rugs, brooms, dishware, the stove, the sewing machine, the radio— I grew up with an abiding respect for the working man. Neither facile nor lazy, I learned to heave-to and get the job done! Child labor, adult labor… In this household, everybody works! Nobody worked harder than my grandparents.

            They declared themselves atheists, but part of that was for Socialist credibility. We still belonged to a creaky old Orthodox shul where the crusty Rabbi got my undivided loyalty. I figured anyone that old and gnarled, draped in an enormous white tallis yellowed with age, must know what he was doing. He smelled of dust and scholarship!

           Total immersion, I read, ate, spoke, slept and dreamed in Swedish. I never wanted to leave. But no one even asked me. I was put on a boat out of Portsmouth, England at the ripe old age of twelve and sent back to America, where the opportunities for success were considered so much greater.

           “If your son’s such a prodigy,” film magnate Harry Cohen told my mom on a visit to New York, where we were spending the summer, “why isn’t he already out in Hollywood making big money? We have child actors! Talk is cheap.”

            When I told people that Harriet Weisenthal, the clothes designer, was an aunt, they all wanted an introduction. A melding of the old and the new, Harriet had learned her craft from Grandma Rivka!

             On my mom’s side of the family, we were a creative, politically involved group of people from the get-go. My dad’s family seemed like slackers, by comparison. And did he ever resent it! Gliringar, snide remarks, fell from his lips in a steady stream. “Your dad is such a bundle of resentments,” as my cousin Ricky “Jimbo” Barber put it, always a pistol at social analysis.

            You talk to my dad’s coworkers in the government, the picture is completely different! In on the ground floor, he was what you’d call “an efficiency expert.” He accumulated personnel credentials at several of the U.S. Government’s largest agencies, the Post Office, General Services Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior. A pacifist, he always worked as a civilian. He could travel out west to an Indian reservation and explain to them how they were doing everything all wrong! “You don’t want open fires using brush and kindling! Hold out for electrification, for God’s sake! Demand your rights!”

             Marching to the sound of his own drummer, he was a radical without knowing it.

             At one point, he had an office and three employees. One of them was someone I actually knew, Chuck Duchamp. The Duchamps lived only three blocks away. I was trying to kindle a romance with Mr. D’s daughter Ginny. She thought I was “for the birds,” “off the roof,” “out of sight,” all pejoratives indicating that she never intended to become my sweetheart. Chuck’s specialty was reading. He began his stint working with my father by bringing a book to the office every morning and reading it all day long.

          “Chuck,” my father coaxed him in conference, “we don’t read books in the office.”

          “Oh, okay!” said Mr. Duchamp. “No problem! You got it.”

           The next day, he came in with a newspaper and read that all day.

            “Chuck,” my dad gently chided him, “let’s not spend all day reading the newspaper. You know, we have assignments—“

            “Oh! Right! Yes!” said Mr. Duchamp. “No, really! I hear ya! I’m all over it.”

            “W-What are you doing?” demanded my dad the very next day. “I thought we agreed—“

             “It’s a magazine! You didn’t say anything about not reading magazines in the office.”

             My dad put him on the Space Program Evaluation. The guy never wasted another day! “Do you realize,” he testified before Congress in 1964, “we are sending our astronauts into space in equipment whose only virtue is that the contractor offered the lowest bid? Do you really want to go roaring aloft on bargain basement hardware? I don’t!”

            My dad’s office tended to drive people crazy.

           “Quality control is a fairy tale,” wrote Michael Napier, reviewing an Army weapons program. The Army felt differently.

           “It’ll fly if you remember to wind up the rubber band,” Charlie Duchamp wrote in his review of a design for a military helicopter. Congress and the defense contractor remained unamused.

           “This country needs more college graduates in government,” my father proselytized, and for once, he was hailed as an oracle.

            “Inspired by true events,” Charlie Duchamp assured me. “We’ve gotten some new hot-shots from N.Y.U. in the office and they’re tearing up the tarmac. It’s all we old geezers can do just to keep up.”

            It all reached a head in, God help me, 1973. Thirty-one years in government, my dad gets together with personnel directors from nine different government agencies and writes a classification program. This was his legacy to the American people. How many letters must a secretary at the State Department type to equal a Post Office mail sorter’s morning sort? How many halls must a janitor sweep, window ledges wiped, ashtrays emptied, to equal a stenographer’s three hours of dictation? How many lonely night patrols must a building guard complete to equal a Congressional cafeteria worker’s prep of lunch for both houses of Congress? They created a mathematical program that answered those questions! Algorithms, tables, multiplication factors.

            He got a small, trade publisher interested enough to crank out a first printing, Government Classification In the Public Sector. A Workbook. “If this thing catches fire,” everyone agreed, “the entire U.S. Government will be springing after copies! We’ll be in Nirvana heaven!”

            Hold your breath. For one shining moment—

            Computers came in and blew the whole fantastic program to Kingdom Come. Spreadsheets allowed for comparison of salaries, hours on the job, level of workload, expertise required, miscellaneous factors and ground out the numbers and answers in slightly longer time than it takes to say “Univac computer.” Even I worked as a night guard in a computer building, watching the technicians in their overalls busy behind glass in hermetically dustproof enclosures with an internal air pressure slightly higher than the surrounding environment. Giant reels of tape spun on shiny, fancy silver and sky blue consoles. There was a constant hum in the air, and everyone went home impressed and a little better informed.

            No worries! I was in the Army, no skin off my nose. My dad took his act on the road and sold his classification system to India, Taiwan and Peru! Not exactly bastions of computer technology at that time.

            “I tried to explain efficiency to the Inca tour guides at Machu Picchu. I don’t know whether they got it or not,” he wrote me. “Your mother and I spent several miserable days in Cuzco, laid up with altitude sickness.”

            “The best-known cure is to skedaddle off the mountain pronto,” I wrote back, but he didn’t appreciate the advice.

            “We were waiting for the rest of our party…” Yada, yada, yada, always an excuse, a complication, a fuck-up. No wonder we didn’t like each other.

            I came to Oxburg for a familial visit in 1997, to the family house where I, more or less, grew up. “Your father’s in the hospital, he’s had a seizure,” said my mom. Burning leave, I spent the next three weeks tending him, first at the hospital, then at home and finally in a hospice. My older sister Rebecca, who should have been there, sent too many flowers and badgered his doctors by phone from California. My younger brother Tim came to visit, stayed two days, and took me aside. “I can’t handle this,” he panted. “You gotta take over.”

            “I’m here! I got it,” I assured him. I love Tim. He tried.

            My dad had emphysema, liver and heart disease. He was ready to go. We got a visit in the waiting room of the hospice from the “traveling clergyman of your faith,” a Rabbi Beale.

            “Beale?” I asked sardonically. “Not the most Jewish of names…”

            “An Anglicization of Bialy,” he assured me.

            “A Bialystoker?”

            “My family, yes.”

            “Yeah, we heard that from the Bialystoker Society in New York. ‘You have to meet Rabbi Beale. His people are from the Old Country. He’s in your area.’”

            “About your father Bernard…”

            “Bernie.”

            “Okay, Bernie.”

            “He’s ready to go,” interjected my mom from the chintz sofa on my left. “His goose is thoroughly cooked!”

            “Well, I think I’d need to hear that from Bernie,” Rabbi Beale said, a gentle, little correction that made me want to strangle the guy!

            Fifteen minutes later, he came back out, smiled ruefully, sat down and said, “I owe you both an apology. Sometimes the nearest and dearest are either in denial or have distanced themselves. I was worried you and… Bernie… weren’t on the same page.

            “Since everyone agrees on what you want, my job is basically over. Unless…?”

            “Unless what?” complained my mom.

            “Unless we need more counseling,” I told her.

            “Well,” the rabbi concluded, spreading his hands, “I am available if you need me.” He gave us his card. I still have it.

            “Have you been back?” I asked, curious.

            “To Chicago?” he asked.

            “No, to Poland. To Bialystok.”

            “Oh! Good lord, no!”

            “In the 1990’s, American descendants of the Bialystok Jews flew into Poland on LOT, the Polish airline, took the train up north and descended on Bialystok. I haven’t been there in…17 years… but back then, they were all busy with plans to rejuvenate the place. The only decent restaurant in town was a pizzeria owned and run by an American expatriate.”

            “Yeah, wow, um, great!” replied the rabbi. I guess renovation projects weren’t his thing.  

            In the end, my dad’s doctors put him on morphine, fully aware that it would accumulate and eventually lead to cardiac arrest. That was our 800-pound gorilla and everyone, including my dad, was grateful for the option. He passed away at one o’clock in the afternoon on my 50^th birthday. I had just gone out for a smoke. I came back, heard his raspy breathing, and suspected it was time. Taking his hand, I stood by his bed as he passed on to another world. I wished him well on his journey, and for once in his life, Bernie didn’t give me an argument!

            For the next three years, his spirit followed me everywhere, day and night. I’d be working on a project and feel him there, looking over my shoulder. Turning, I’d just catch the impression of something hazy, but of course, I never actually saw him. It was a friendly visitation, except that he always gave off the same perplexed emanation: “What are you doing?” he seemed to ask. I guess even at that stage in his spiritual quest, the military was still news to him.

                                                      *

Snapshots

            As a candidate for Attorney General of Maryland, Anna is composing position statements. “There is no such thing as a free lunch” begins her paper on “Using Laws to Regulate Industry Behavior.”

            She writes: “As we continue to curtail smoking in public areas and tax the tobacco industry into oblivion, both tobacco farmers and employees in the production, distribution and administration sectors of this industry are forced to retrench under increasing economic pressure in a shrinking corporate environment.

            “The push for solar power increases competition for raw materials in the production of power cells.

            “While the manufacture of PC’s, laptops, notebooks, tablets, gaming consoles, cameras, televisions, cell phones and smart phones creates jobs and drives a major sector of the economy— in hardware, software, networking and broadband— recycling is a constant issue. The alternative is a planet buried in e-waste, literally tons and tons of outdated and burned out electronic equipment full of mercury, metal and corrosives.

            “The desire for electric cars creates stresses in the lithium industry and possible trade imbalances vis-à-vis the few countries in the world rich in this mineral.

            “The proponents of ethanol production claimed they would be using the by-products of the corn industry—the husks, the cobs, the silk—to produce a fuel additive for gasoline. In reality, they are using the corn itself as their basic raw material. This has pitted human consumption of corn against the need to wean the public off petroleum. Drive and starve or eat and walk. A classic example of industry’s ‘bait and switch’ tactics, ‘the market’ has no corrective for this typically larcenous human behavior. It’s called greed. The ethanol people are greedy for quick profits.

            “Only through continued legislation can industry remain profitable, productive and non-destructive. Left to its own devices, ‘the market’ will trash the environment to the point of self-destruction.

            “Regulating and policing the fishing industry to prevent over-fishing some species to extinction creates short-term economic hardship in the communities dependent on fishing for their livelihood.

            “While gambling may seem an incurable human condition and, thus, a guaranteed source of revenue, gambling does not produce consumer goods or services in a particularly large proportion to the money accrued through this vice. Gambling havens have thriving hotel industries, restaurants and amenities, which create jobs and stimulate the local economy, but at what price to the households afflicted by this addiction? Is it in the public interest to skew the redistribution of wealth through horseracing, slot machines and state lotteries? Does the success of a gambling mecca have a punishing effect on surrounding states?

            “In regulating industrial development through the judicial process, the consequences of our actions must always be taken into account.”

            Wow! Heavy stuff. Apparently, the A.G. does more than grandstand on liquor sales, fight crime, hound illegal immigrants and position oneself to run for president.  Some intellectual thought, some actual work, is involved!

            “We have a population of 14,000 in Oxburg,” Anna laments when next we meet. “I don’t think Bogotá, Columbia will agree to become our Sister City.” 

                                                    *

             “Oxburg has sidewalks everywhere,” I report. “The same cannot be said about surrounding communities. Some have sidewalks in some areas, but not in others.

             “You told me to go look, so I drove around and looked. I’ve also telephoned to friends around the state. Some new suburbs are decidedly lacking in sidewalks.

             “State legislation may—“

             “What does the state sidewalk legislation say?” demands Eric.

              “I don’t know! I haven’t had time to look it up.”

              “Look it up!” he orders. “Sidewalks are a campaign issue!”

                                                      *

        The Proliferation of Yard Signs in Suburban Neighborhoods

                                              A Monograph

                 … many of those interviewed spoke of having experienced a sky blue colored, late model Honda Accord with license plate ZOT-2011 in the vicinity of their visitation.

            Surveillance cameras, newly installed, confirm this phenomenon.

            Upon contacting the candidate, however, her office claimed to lack all knowledge in the matter. “Is there a problem?” the alleged campaign manager responded when queried by phone.

            Laboratory analysis of the objects verified them to contain chemical elements associated with life on this planet, seemingly ruling out extra-terrestrial involvement at this time.

            MK Ultra influence may be prompting citizens to place these fetishistic totems on their lawns in preparation for an alien invasion from outer space. In a worst case scenario, only the households displaying the appropriate sign will be spared!

           Alternatively, the Rapture presupposes “a Sign upon the door posts of their houses.” This could be that sign!

           Further investigation is called for…

                                                       *

            “And this is, what?” I ask the interns, as I approach Anna’s house. It’s hot enough to melt lead and they’re out front playing some kind of game. If they were throwing a Frisbee, I could understand, but this is… what?

            “It’s Quidditch. You know, from Harry Potter?” one of the young men answers. “It’s really not hard to learn…”

            What New Age pharmaceutical concoction could motivate them, in this heat, to ride around on brooms like toddlers on hobby horses? 

            “I’m good!” I laugh, proceeding into the house. I call myself the campaign handyman: “I do the jobs that would drive everyone else crazy!”  But these youngsters always surprise me. I don’t know any of their names, but since we march in parades together and attended the debate and spend time at HQ, everyone knows Kevin, “the Dude Who Does.”

            These are the goals for every canvasser per shift: Knock on 80 doors. Have 60 conversations. Get 2 orders for yard signs. Find one volunteer.

            Every tenth shift, find a householder who wishes to invite Anna to their home to meet their friends in a personal event.  

            I don’t know whether these proportions are realistic, but the interns aren’t complaining or threatening to quit, the gas comp doesn’t seem to be sinking the campaign, and I have enough requests for y.s.’s to fill my days. Eric seems fulfilled, if not downright happy.

            Nothing beats success.

            “… Kevin has something to say,” Eric tells them, carried along on sheer motivational momentum. I mean, I never stick my nose in their business. Suddenly Kevin has something to say? A pro, Eric doesn’t let this strange occurrence faze him.

            “It’s hot out there, guys!” I tell them, joining their circle. “Stay hydrated!”

            Holding up their water bottles, they cheer, “ ‘Ray, Kevin!”

            I go back into the kitchen to finish preparing my coffee. Soon, I hear them let out a roar: “Let’s do this thing!”

            Within minutes, they have jumped in their cars and taken off.

                                                      *

            This kid comes to the house, lets himself in, then moons around, looking through all the paperwork. It’s not like we keep the front door locked. I’m there, eating my lunch in the kitchen. Eric, Anna and Judith are all upstairs together, having a video conference on the Mac with liaison from the current Attorney General’s office. “Can I help you?” I ask him.

             He’s plucking together papers from various folders. “I’m… mumble… mumble…mumble…” he replies.

            “Sorry, ace, try again. Mumbling won’t do it,” I tell him a little more sharply. A spy? Anything’s possible.

           “I need to get my packet together,” he half-whines.

           “Your… canvassing… materials?” I guess. Everyone else has left a half-hour ago.

          “Yeah!”

           “Look, why don’t you just go up and tell Eric you’re here? What’s your name?”

           “Paulie.”

           “Well, go up and knock on the bedroom door and put in an appearance.”

           “Ah, I can’t do that, man!” he moans.

           “Paulie, right?” I ask, taking the stairs two at a time. I quietly open the door and catch Eric’s eye. He gets up from his chair and comes over. “Paulie’s downstairs,” I whisper in his ear.

            “Ah, shit!” he murmurs, rolling his eyes. “Late as usual. Tell him I’ll be down shortly,” he sighs.

            “Why don’t you sit down and relax,” I tell Paulie. “You’ve got a couple of minutes.”

                                                      *

             Le jour arrive, the day comes when I arrive at Anna’s house and find Eric dressed in a dark blue knit T-shirt with the logo “Hard Rock Café, Stockholm.”

            “You’re kidding!”

             “I’ve traveled! Good grief…You’re Swedish. I’ve been waiting to spring this on you.”

            “When were you in Stockholm?”

            “Between junior and senior year at college. My ‘summer trip to Europe.’ Fight the crowds and admire the graffiti on the statues outside St. Mark’s Cathedral. Get food poisoning in Spain.”

           “Everybody gets diarrhea in Spain. It takes a few days for your body to adapt to their bacteria.”

          “Whatever!”

          “Cool!”

           “This tee dates me,” he remarks wistfully. “This has 1990 written all over it. Travel the big cities of the world collecting Hard Rock Café T-shirts. Today, the youngsters want busty Señor Frog tees, so girls can show off their breasts.”

           “Ah,” I laugh, “the 1990’s. Those were the days! If only we knew how well off we were. I brought back a glass head from Amsterdam—“

           “A glass head?”

           “A wig holder. A chunk of glass shaped like a head, hollow inside, so ladies could hang their wigs overnight. A surreal representation of a face. Very futuristically retro, like the face on the robot in the movie Metropolis. It was neat.”

         “Far out.”

          “Mucho chic.”

          “Still got it?”

           “Of course not. Taken to Goodwill. Recycled. Gone.”

           “Yeah,” Eric agrees. It is interesting to see a softer side to this campaign’s own Bobby Fisher.

                                                     *

             He has me drive to Hagerstown to deliver one yard sign. One! With stops on the way, of course, but still… The next day he has me drive to the ‘burbs west of Balto. This area I know, we have friends there. One Saturday in May, I attended a Bar Mitzvah outside Ellicott City. If there’s a city there, no one’s been able to find it.

             The parkways are majestic. Ribbons of concrete unwind before your car’s radiator grill, mile after mile of shrubbery-lined lanes, constantly interrupted by brown concrete walls lining the road to baffle the sound and keep it from bothering people in the neighborhoods. “Carbon Monoxide +30% – 60%, Carbon Dioxide + 20% -26%” for a simple speed hump, God only knows what people are breathing along the parkways.

            A glacial plain, scraped flat in the last Ice Age, the sun always seems to be shining, winter or summer. Erosion has produced those rolling hills.

            So I leave the parkway and make a left onto Wedding Cake Lane. I have a Google map: Turn left off the highway onto Wedding. A helicopter is chattering overhead. Careful not to run over any errant children, I keep my eye on the chopper. I do love helicopters. And this one is coming lower and lower, though it’s anybody’s guess where they’ll find room to land amidst the lawns and houses.

            I reach the bottom of the hill and… it’s a cul-de-sac! Where’s Baker Street? I’m sitting at the edge of a pebble redoubt that wends its way into a woods filled with fir trees. Also present, a big, brown police cruiser. Empty. State Police.

            I check the map again. I turned too soon. I want Wedding Road, not Wedding Cake Lane. As I start my car, a policeman and policewoman come out of the woods. My car’s already in gear. Coasting forward, I wave to them.

            They wave back.

            As I drive up the hill, I see them running in my rear view mirror.

            What to do? Stop? Don’t stop? I mean, this has nothing to do with me. “I took a wrong turn, officer.” They’re busy. I leave.

            With the heli still clattering away, I drive to the junction with Wedding Road. Many, many brown police cruisers, their roof racks blinking red, white and blue in the yellow sunlight. The way they’re arrayed along embankments and atop knolls, it looks like a Rambo-style manhunt is in progress, chasing a fugitive who has taken to the woods on foot.

            I find my address at the end of a street whose backyards taper into a woodland cascade, thick with mixed growth of every description. Brambles. Pine trees. Holly. Fir. Weeds.

            No one home, I choose the spot I hope the homeowner herself would like and shove in the yard sign. It sinks one inch and stops dead. Stones! The bane of my existence. I have to try four times before I get both spokes of the sign sufficiently deep in the soil, so the sign won’t flop over with the first puff of wind.

            It looks good.

            Pleased, I continue northeast to deliver a sign in Towson.

            “Is this all right?” I ask Judith, handing in my comp sheet. “Eric’s had me driving to Hagerstown and Balto. I’ve racked up a lot of miles this week.”

            “Are the odometer readings accurate?” she asks.

            “Well… yes!”

            “Fine! Listen, whatever you put down, we’re going to compensate you.”

            Which is to say, they are not “Fluffens,” the campaign treasurer. They aren’t going to demand I follow them out to my car to check the odometer. They trust me, which is nice considering how much water I carry for the campaign.

            I get home 6:30 in the evening and my mom gives me a wild look. “What have you been doing?” she demands, sounding like Ray’s mother in Everybody Loves Raymond. “The police called. Twice! They want you to call them back. Where were you?”

            “Delivering yard signs. That’s what I do on Thursdays.”

            “You were speeding? You hit someone? You totaled your car?” she asks, envisioning the worst.

            “No. No, no and no. I think I know what happened. But let me talk to the cops before I tell you.”

            I call the number and get a police detective who participated that very afternoon in the manhunt.

            “You’re the owner of the sky-blue 1999 Honda Accord with license plate ZOT-2011?”

            “Officially, my mom owns the car. It’s a 1998 Honda Accord. It’s her car. I live with her. She lets me drive it.”

            “Not that it has a bearing on this case, but does your insurance company know that?”

            “Of course! Yes. We have listed me as the driver of that vehicle.”

            “We’re curious to speak with you… Mister… Feingold… about your friendship with Charles Pike.”

            “Who?”

            “Charles William Pike. You had a rendezvous today to pick up Charles Pike at the edge of Bear Paw Woods.”

            “I’m sorry,” I snort, feeling like an idiot. “You mean at the bottom of Wedding Cake Lane?”

            “That’s right! So you admit it! You drove down there to pick up Mr. Pike. Are you aware, he’s a known fugitive?!”

            “Um, no. I… took the wrong road. I needed Wedding Road. I turned too soon and ended up on Wedding Cake Lane.”

            “Oh… people do that. My partner and I have done that! What about your friendship with Charles Pike?”

            “I don’t know who that is. I don’t… know the man. At all.”

            “Ah! Well, all right. You do understand that aiding and abetting a known criminal is punishable under the law? If things really go south, you can be charged as an accomplice, should he commit a crime during your involvement.”

            “I don’t know the man.”

            “But you do understand what I’m saying?”

            Aha! “We informed the alleged accomplice of his rights.”

            “Yes, officer, I understand. Aiding and abetting. An accomplice.”

            “Good! We’ll get back to you if we have anything further.”

            “Fine!”

            “Good night!”

            Sheesh! “Good night!”

           “What did you do, now?” grouses my mom.

                                                   *

              Eric: “What do we do about Sharpée? She pulls off her sticker, hands me her clipboard and announces ‘This isn’t working for me.’”

             Judith: “You can’t really fire her.”

             Kevin: “These kids don’t have a lot of years of experience in the workforce.”

             Judith: “She clears tables at a burger joint. Not a lot of people skills.”

            Susan: “She seems to have personality issues. She definitely does not get along with the group.”

           Kevin: “You have to let her go!”

           Judith: “You can’t really fire her.”

           Kevin: “On the outside, it seems hard-nosed, but the campaign can’t afford to be a training center in personal development. We don’t have the resources. Some of these kids need to mature before they’ll fit into a group project.”

            Eric: “She says her personal space is invaded by the people we canvas. That strikes me as kind of flaky. I can’t have a nut job out there representing Anna and the campaign.”

            Kevin: “You have to let her go! It benefits her and us.”

            Judith: “How does that benefit Sharpée?”

            We’re interrupted by the arrival on the front porch of… Sharpée!

                                                  *

             Hola, Anna!

            Antonio Rodriguez here, sending you a $25 contribución for your campaign (250 pesos in Mexican currency). Since U.S. law prohibit you take money from Family Rodriguez in Mexico, say it come from my cousin Manuel Vasquez who live in U.S. legally, but in State of Flux. ¿Comprendes?

            We need more Latinas in American law enforcement!

            Aj caramba, the recession hit even the drug trade, Anna, no one is free of these monster. Profits for first quarter not so good as last year, but we talking million $$$ ganancia. ¡Pujar para adentro! I don’t complain. Cocaine sales dip, marijuana shares go up. ¿Comprendes?

            You no contact me, I call on cell phone twice a day to you campaign, find out what you need. ¡We help!

            For Family Rodriguez,

                                                                        Antonio Rodriguez 

                                                      *

Video

            The campaign videographer, a fresh-faced kid named Chou Li, is easy to spot in all the photographs: He’s the dude wearing a Navy blue beret! And one day he arrives with his first masterpiece on a home-cooked DVD, “Freedom To Be Who? You!” A workman-like portrait of Anna on the campaign trail, he hasn’t even asked me to contribute narration.

            “This campaign be too compartmentalized,” I complain.

            “Is there a problem?” Eric asks in a voice tinged with lead.

            “I told you what I do, Eric. I’m a screenwriter.”

            “Yes,” he agrees, “but not for this campaign.”

            “Wrong answer, Eric. I’ve told you, volunteers need constant petting, otherwise we start to feel unappreciated!”

              Pausing, he considers what I’ve said. Friends do that for one another. “What I’m saying is, we need a full-fledged videographer for this campaign,” he explains affably enough. “We interviewed people for this position. We chose Li because we felt he understands what we want, a campaign document that also delivers a message.”

            “Jesus, man, my partner and I are documentary filmmakers,” I grouse, losing steam fast. The kind of film they want to make would bore me to distraction. “Anyway, keep me in mind if you ever need backup.”

            “I will, I will,” chimes Eric. In Eric-speak, that’s a “maybe.”

            When I volunteered in the Call Center of the Myrtle Beech campaign in 2008, the day arrived when a crisp new pile of bright and shiny DVD’s in little white “Myrtle For President” envelopes sat squarely upon the desk of the Visual Arts Director. Not prone to sticky fingers— everyone at that campaign was scrupulously honest— I sashayed up to Naomi Warren, my supervisor, and said, “I see some DVD’s. Can I have one?”

            “Kevin,” she said, looking extremely uncomfortable, “those DVD’s cost us money, you know. The campaign pays for these services. Those DVD’s are a campaign video specifically tailored to the needs of State Team Leaders in all 50 states. We only have 50 of them. We’re about to mail them out with complementary materials. That’s the only reason they are even in this office.”

            “Well, I thought I’d ask,” I say, giving her my most apologetic smile.

            “Kevin, I love your work, but you’re a volunteer employed at the intern level answering and transferring telephone calls. 2008 is a busy time for us. I have a meeting upstairs in about 15 minutes… I’ll ask.”

            “You’ll ask?” I repeat, stunned.

            “I can’t promise anything, but if there are any stray production copies floating around, I’ll try to wrangle you a video souvenir. God knows we don’t pay you anything!”

            Leaving Campaign HQ that evening, I took the Metro straight to our film office off Rockville Pike. Grabbing dinner in the taquería, the only other tenant in the mall, I joined my partner Boopsie at the controls of our celestial starship Enterprise.

            “Is that what I think it is?”

            “It’s a Myrtle Beech video.”

            “Gimme!”

            First off, we transferred the image portion to a clean DVD. Then we went to work on our own bombastic narration: “In a country as great as ours— and we spit on any grubby foreigners who say otherwise, p’tooee!— once a generation, there comes a candidate so outstanding, so incredible, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, et cetera, we humbly bow to Her Highness in abject humility.

            “Failing that, here’s… Myrtle Beech! An alternative to all the slick, over-the-top candidates with their perfect teeth and chi-chi smiles, Myrtle isn’t afraid to smell like day-old deodorant, piss and vinegar!

            “She’s a fighter à la Floyd Patterson or George Forman, the sweat pouring off her in a rain of high-quality executive leadership ability.

            “Listen, after the duds we’ve had in the White House, anybody is fit to be president!

            “Elect Myrtle Beech!

            “Why? Because she’s best? The most qualified? The most dedicated? More moxy than a barrel of Congressional staffers?

            “No and Hell no!

            “Elect Myrtle Beech because we said so!”

            Today, mashups prevail, but in 2008, this was cutting edge. The complete DVD sits in a white paper sleeve on a shelf in the office, used only to seduce and impress young college girls into thinking we circulate with the Stars.

                                                    * 

            “Wanna work on an Anna Bola video?”

            “No! Help me write dialogue. Jim hates Susan, but the only way they’re going to escape from the burning elevator is… what?”

             “I thought elevators were fireproof?”

             “All right, let’s move them into a burning bedroom…”

             “Okay. Susan: You always do this…”

              “Wait! Okay, go ahead.”

              “Susan: You always do this! You always get us into these impossible situations! It’s like you just don’t care! Do you have any idea how hard it is to befriend someone whose entire life is dedicated to—“

               “Chasing bad guys! Okay, good.”

               “Anna Bola—“

               “Forget it. We’re making money here. Stay focused!”

                We have just completed a summer video of our receptionist Jacqueline and her punk band Explosive Plastic. Mom’s meteorologist on TV warned motorists of sheet lightning in the next few days. Every night, cranking out our low-light video camera, tripod, mikes and sundry colored gels, we used the overhead halogen lamps on Rockville Pike as basic illumination, switched the camera to the black and white setting and proceeded to do our thing.

                 Behind some bushes, in a hollow full of groundhog holes, just off the highway but wonderfully hidden, we staged a little orgy. Everyone quietly mimed to the playback on the dinky, plastic Magnus brand boombox. Three nights in a row, we were out there. Armed with an endless supply of cheap hamburgers from the local diner, the musicians plied the groundhogs shamelessly. By the third night, Jacqueline was kanoodling with the groundhogs, the footage getting more surreal by the minute.

                Not wanting to chase away the gawking busboys from the taquería, but afraid a crowd would attract la policía, I got Boopsie to drive to the local supermarket for beer. Arraying these stalwart Mexicans as a chorus line behind the main action, half hidden by boughs of myrtle (what else?), we kept everyone involved, inebriated, intense and out of sight of the highway.

                A film like that begs to be done justice in the editing room. If the footage was glorious, it landed in the 3 minute 20 second video, regardless of whether Jacqueline French-kissing a groundhog synchronized perfectly with the song lyrics.

                                                White Nigger

                 Oh momma! Pa Jama!

                 Strike me, mike me, / Don’t ya try to psyche me.

                  Rock me, sock me, / Don’t ya try to shock me.

          Wacko, Jacko, / This guy’s a flacko. / Oh momma! Pa Jama!

          Pantyhose for a pantywaist. / Get on board, you make haste.

          Cash, cash, / Blah-h-h-h-h! / Money, honey! Ah-h-h-h-h!

                  The sun rises on Good Hope Road!

                   Half a million assholes waving clipboards.

                   Average contribution, sixty-nine dollars.

                  Sure! And he’s the greatest / Thing since French toast.

                  Belly-achin’ heartbreaker, two-faced dealmaker.

                  White nigger, Indian giver! What am I? Chopped liver?

                   How can I repay my student loan???

                   Oh momma! Pa Jama!

                   Suck me, pluck me, / Don’t ya outta luck me.

                   Do me, screw me, / Don’t ya black and blue me.

                   I’m totally plucked.

                                                (c) 2011, Rosario, Feingold, Davis

                  A masterpiece is in the eye of the beholder.

                 Many, many hits on YouTube.

                 How could poor Anna compete with that? Campaign video? ¡Mucho gracias, no, por favor! Detalles sin interés.

                                                      *

 

Rocky Road

 

                 “Most of the members who have worked on this feel

                 that if Social Security were put on the table, and Medicare,

                 cuts in that area, that we as Democrats and progressives

                 would be thrown under the bus.”       

                                                – Congressman Raul M. Grijalva (Arizona) 

            Four days a week, I collaborate on movie scripts with working titles like “Stanley Herberg Project” or “Studio 8/Delores Vehicle” or “Haboob—Arizona Dust Storm Story.” At least one of these films has a full-blown title and synopsis: “Monte Carlo Ponti. Rom-com. Three American girls head for Paris. Boarding the wrong train in London, they pass through the Trunnel and wake up the next morning in the Italian Alps, on their way to starring in an Italian cult film.” Definitely the most promising of the bunch!

            Are we making progress? Ask me when we get paid.

            And three days a week, I’m still trying to get my friend Anna Bola elected State Attorney General. “Where will her office be?” I finally remember to ask. “Baltimore or Annapolis?”

            “Why do you want to know?” campaign manager Eric Brown shoots back, immediately suspicious.

            “The A.G.’s office is a secret?” I chuckle. “Fuck! I can look it up on the Internet.”

            “Don’t cuss in front of my interns,” he asks me stiffly, and I respect him for that advice. “Her offices will be in both Annapolis and Balto.”

            No one can stay polished throughout an entire campaign. The cracks are starting to show. Eric still has me driving miles to deliver yard signs. Burning gas, I am getting tired of driving to places like Gary Puckett Blvd. & Turkey Gravy Lane. Two of the names on my list are repeats. “They’ve already got signs,” I tell Eric. “I know, I delivered the pizzas. I even remember meeting these guys. One—“

            “Okay!” he snaps. “I never said I was irreproachable.” Which is a good attitude for a campaign manager to have.

            The campaign never sleeps. Anna and her hubby Frank Reynolds go to Bethany Beach in Delaware for a one-week vacation, come home, no one outside HQ even knows they are gone. The campaign doesn’t miss a beat.

            “Why is this happening?!” I hear Eric ranting, struggling to overcome a computer glitch on his laptop. This is new. I’m the one known for ranting at inanimate objects. Although a computer isn’t entirely inanimate.

            “HARAAAR! Ninja duck!”

            “What?”

            He has this little black rubber ducky, dressed up in a judo robe. He keeps it by his laptop for moments of levity or tension. When under stress, he has the duck “attack” us, nuzzling our necks and pecking at our arms with its rubber bill. “HAAARAAA! Ninja! Ninja duck!”

            Pure Eric.

            It’s summer. Driving home one evening, what do I see? Under a red golf umbrella, on a folding table, behind brown cardboard boxes with hand-lettered signs, the “Little Girl Lemonade Stand” is in full swing. Facing the street, sitting on metal folding chairs, 9-, 10-, 11- and 12-year-old darlings, incredibly blond and fluffy in T’s and shorts, wave, beckon and laugh at motorists, seeking trade. Mommy has given them pitchers of lemonade, little plastic buckets of ice, plastic cups and spoons, and a metal cash drawer. The most incredible kind of honey trap. Unspeakable. What are these parents thinking? What is the message here? For the girls? For the motorists?

            “Insanity Strikes” we called these occurrences in the Army, like when Bosniak families decided to “retake” their village by marching up the road under a rain of Serb artillery.

            Waving at the little girls, I do not stop.

                                                       * 

            Since March 14^th, Town Traffic Calming Committee meetings have been taking place in our neighborhood: Gathering promptly at 7:30 p.m., bi-weekly at Taylor-Moffett, the local elementary school, this guaranteed headache never seems to go away. Eventually, I will publish in detail. Suffice to say, some of our neighbors are speed hump enthusiasts and some of us are opposed. The proponents want speed humps the way people want a new car or new garden furniture. They want them! It’s an emotional response. Never mind technical explanations that traffic doesn’t warrant it or that this is an over-reaction.

            Speed humps.

            They want them.

            We who are opposed feel just as strongly. Opinions vary from “they’re a nuisance” to “British Transport Research Laboratory measurements show they increase carbon monoxide output +30%-60%, carbon dioxide +20%-26% and diesel vehicle emissions up to 30%.” Even, “they cause more trouble than they’re worth.”

            I’m in the latter camp. This controversy has torn apart the neighborhood, pitting neighbor against neighbor. Life-long friendships have been abruptly interrupted over the midget-size desks and chairs of the libes at Taylor-Moffett. It’s bad enough battling leg cramps without having to argue with your neighbor over how many inches high the industry standard is for speed humps and whether they will be more palatable if we call them “Flat-Top Speed Cushions.”

            “A rose by any other name…” I tell them.

             “We’re talking speed cushions here,” advocate Rusty Neill chides me in turn. “Can’t you stick to the subject???”

              “How can a place like Rockville have no speed humps, and yet their traffic fatalities are not markedly higher than ours?”

             “We’re not talking about Rockville, Rockville is heavily commercial,” Rusty replies.

             “Chevy Chase—“

             “We’re not talking about Chevy Chase. We’re talking about Oxburg,” Committee Chairperson Turner O’Toole reminds me.

              It’s nuts. We go on arguing ad infinitum, an hour and a half, every other Monday night.

               One of the recommendations of the TTCC is to issue a used computer to every child who wants one.

               ?-??

             “Our studies have shown,” Turner explains, “that many pedestrian traffic fatalities occur among children on their way to and from the public library. Also, people out walking their dogs. Additionally, joggers.

             “Since we cannot outlaw pets and have already built as many bike paths and outdoor tracks as is technically feasible, the one area we feel we can make an improvement is to keep children at home as much as possible.”

             “What about the expense?” wonders Margaret “Fluffens” Meeks’ husband George who, after all, is an economics professor. “This seems controversial.”

             “Oxburg has a population of 14,000. Everyone else lives in Chevy Chase, Bethesda or Rockville. The risk of an outlandishly large expenditure is offset by the relatively low demand in used PC’s. They just aren’t very popular. Nobody wants one. You can’t give them away! A 3-year-old computer is as welcome as a skunk at an Independence Day parade.

            “People complain they’re outmoded.”

            “Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose?” Fluffen’s husband George persists.

            “Never-the-less, we feel any measure that can save the life of even a single child is not to be overlooked,” answers Turner O’Toole haughtily. “We’re trying to save lives here!”

            The 800-pound gorilla that everyone prefers not to see sitting in the corner on a Friendly Toddler Stool [ Marca Registrada ] is that Oxburg is inanely rich. The Town Council feels they can throw money at the problem, Hollywood style.

            “Why are you arguing about things like that?” my aunt Sophie demands from San Mateo, California by phone. “Speed humps? Painted bike lanes? Raised intersections? What are you talking about? Who has the money?!”

            Unfortunately, she’s only talking to me, and I’m on the phone in my mom’s living room. When I present this “newly discovered fact” at the next Monday night meeting, I am roundly condemned as a baby-killer.

            “We’re trying to save the lives of our small children,” Mildred Danville declares. In tones of pure derision. A cosmetic-ad-beautiful brunette, dressed impeccably in high-end blouses and pleated skirts heavy on the gold lamé, every word out of her mouth makes me want to strangle her. She’s new to the neighborhood. I have never before met someone whose one and only expression is a Bronx sneer.

           “What do you do exactly?” I ask before one meeting, lugging mini-mart furniture into place.

           “Why do you want to know?” answers Mildred.

           “Let’s not be too paranoid, shall we? I’m a screenwriter. My office is in a deserted strip mall on Rockville Pike.”

           “Oh. I’m in advertising.”

           “Figures.”

           “What’s that supposed to mean?”

           I shrug and carry an easel to the far end of the room. Knowing one another’s occupation doesn’t exactly cement a bond.

           “Where do you live?” asks my mom, coming late to that meeting. Mildred’s style sits no better with my mother than with me.

           “Across the street from you!” replies Mildred, in a voice laded with condescension.

           I would have to say these meetings are not going well!

                                                      *

 

            On my rounds as campaign delivery boy, I see a bumper sticker that feels so appropriate, the only way to cut it any finer would be if it were written in blood:

                                       SOME PEOPLE ARE ALIVE

                                              SIMPLY BECAUSE

                                       IT’S ILLEGAL TO KILL THEM

            Cuss, cuss, fuss, fuss, at our office, Montevideo Films [ Marca Registrada ], receptionist and punk princess Jacqueline is quick to pick up on my bad mood and write a song about it.

                                                SPEED HUMP

                                       Speed hump! I want speed.

                                       I wanna hump.

                                       I wanna bump that hump.

                                       I wanna grind

                                       My gears.

                                       Suppress

                                       My fears.

                                       Duress my peers.

                                       SPEED HUMP!

                                       I want speed.

                                       I’ll give you hump!

                                       Dump the bump!

                                       Speed hump!

                                                                              (c) 2011, Rosario

                                                     *

             Now that I have wire frames, I dig into my yard sign collection in the basement. It’s extensive, including Delaware, Virginia and New Jersey. On the right side of the lawn, I put up a sign that says “Janet Oleszek for School Board.” I believe this nice lady was a candidate in 2003 or something in Fairfax, Virginia. On the left side, next to my newly-installed 150 lb. concrete yard troll of a monkey scratching his head, I erect a yellow and black sign that announces “Firemen For Gore In 2000.”

            This is war! Let the neighbors just try to complain!

             They have their preferences. The latest craze is black plastic sprinkler heads on metal sticks attached to green garden hoses. One neighbor after another is getting them to water the lawn. A recurring weather cycle every 50 years, this summer alternates between storm/flood warnings on Tuesdays and drought conditions every Friday.

             “This is what it was like when I was growing up,” I tell the neighborhood fathers. It doesn’t make them like it any better.

             “They warned me about Maryland freak weather,” Chris, a transplant from Buffalo, New York, complains. He lives across the street. “I thought nothing could compare to Buffalo’s endless snow. A cauldron, the clouds circle over the lake, pick up moisture, blow in over the city and dump 12 inches of snow in, like, three hours. But, sure enough, Maryland has it beat! This place is very annoying! How do you keep your lawn alive when it’s drowning one day and parched the next?”

           “Chris, I don’t even try. Qué sera, sera! Whatever will be, will be.”

            I need to crank out a video camera and capture his Saturday afternoon ritual for YouTube. (1) Placing the sprinkler in center of yard. (2) Turning on water supply. (3) Eyeing sprinkler. (4) Deciding to move sprinkler while it is spraying. (5) Running frantically in all directions, trying to move sprinkler without getting soaked.

             Every Saturday.

             It must be an upstate New York thing. Indecisive in the face of diversity. Optimizing parameters. Paradigm shift. Three dimensional matrix coordination. Taking a bath.

             I mean, he is a stockbroker. Type T personality, the thrill’s the thing.

            The ice cream sale at Hayne’s Grocery:

            First, it was “Buy One, Get One Free!”

            Then it was “Buy Two, Get One Free!”

            Followed by “Buy Three, Get One Free!”

           Now, it’s “Buy Out the Store, Get One Free!”

           I love what it said in the consumer magazine: “Even when it’s on sale, you’re still spending money! You can go broke buying sale items, too!”

           Mom brings home crab legs for dinner. Alaskan king crabs, each leg is 7” long. And then you’ve got the body of the crab to eat, too. Shipped alive from up north, they’ve been steamed at the store. They’re already cooked. You microwave them one minute. Anything longer destroys the meat.

           Sitting at our dining room table with nut crackers and tiny crab forks—and steak knives to slit the shells—we gorge on Alaskan king crab while bitterly commiserating over Obama being a corporate shill of Wall Street, out to sell Israel down the river and emasculate Medicare and Social Security. “The worst kind of snake oil salesman,” rants my mom. “I knew you couldn’t trust him even before he got elected!

           “And he met with a Jewish group— $25,000 a plate to get in— and they gave him bundles of money for his upcoming campaign.

           “In Israel, his popularity rating is in the single digits. And over here, the Jews are swooning, ‘Obama! Obama!’”

            I feel like Marie Antoinette who, upon being told the people had no bread, replied, “Let them eat cake!” Feasting like kings, you would think we’d be merry.

           “He was on the TV, bellyaching.”

           “That was a press conference,” I point out.

           “I know what it was! I turned him off. ‘Everybody has to make sacrifices’? The federal workers are expected to work for nothing and be indentured servants?”

           Mom was a federal worker.

          “We’re Democrats! If we have a problem, everybody has a problem with this president! The little people are made to suffer,” she grouses, “so the fat cats on Wall Street can receive bonuses and have a field day. In the old days, rich people used their wealth to hire accountants to find them tax shelters and loopholes. No more! Now they pour their money straight into the campaign coffers of the candidates. Politicians are bought and sold hand over fist.”

           “Eating crabs makes you crabby,” I tease.

           “Reading the newspaper makes me crabby!”

           “You’re just tired from trolling with a net off the coast of Sitka… Good crabs, by the way! Thank you!”

           I was stationed at Fort Richardson, outside Anchorage. Before the pipeline, frontier people on the Kenai Peninsula still rode horses into town and tied them up at the parking meters. They would put a dime in the meter, hang an oat bag over the horse’s muzzle and go about their business.

           There were trashcans behind the Army barracks. I’d come bopping along the towpath in the morning, round the corner and come face to face with a moose. Having knocked the lid off the trashcan, he’d be busy nosing through our garbage, looking for edible produce. Snorting, he would raise his giant head of antlers and stare at me balefully.

            Every morning.

            “Hi there, moosey woosey!” I’d chant nervously, skipping along down the path mucho pronto.

            One morning, hung over, in a foul mood, I come around the corner, same thing, same moose, he’s pressing his snout in my face, flaring his nostrils. “All right,” I growl, haul off and punch him in the nose with all my might. (This is not a tall tale!) He stands there, looking at me. He blinks. He snorts. He turns on his heels and goes lumbering off toward the woods with the crazy, disjointed, loping gait of a moose.

            My superior officer sees me wincing at the weapons depot where I work. “What’s the matter?”

            Weapons were stored in the armory. Vehicles were arrayed in the motor pool. Our depot was a workshop area, dedicated to the cleaning, care and maintenance of equipment. The Alaskan climate gave us plenty to do.

           “My right hand is sore. I might have broken a bone. I punched a moose.”

             He looked at my swollen hand and sent me to the infirmary for an X-ray. Nothing was broken, but it was badly sprained. They made me soak it in ice water and wear a bandage for a couple of days.

              The embarrassing part was being taken before the camp commandant. “I hear you had a run-in with a moose?” he asked genially. “They were here first, you know. They consider us squatters.”

           “Yes, sir.”

           “You see a moose, Corporal, you turn and go the other way, you hear? I don’t want to have to write home to your folks in CONUS [the Continental United States] that you got sparked by a moose on my watch! Y’hear?”

           Both he and my commanding officer were struggling mightily not to burst out laughing.

         “Oh, yes, sir! Sir!” I said, snapping to attention and saluting.

         “Some of these non-coms will do anything to get out of doing a good day’s work, sir,” my commander smirked.

         “Can I get back to work, now?” I asked, feeling my face go red. We all knew I was a demon for my assigned tasks.

         “Nope! You go get y’self a cup o’ coffee. And you bring me one, too! Cream. No sugar. My wife has me watching my weight.”

         After that, my C.O. picked me up every morning in front of the barracks and drove me to the depot.

         They all thought I was hilarious.

         This was the same officer who once said, “Here’s a hose, sponges, buckets, detergent and shammies. I want you three men to wash these jeeps.”

          Used by troops on maneuvers in the bush, they were caked in mud. Positively caked.

         “Sir,” I asked, “there are, by my count, 17 of them. Sir.”

         “That’s right. What’s your question?”

         “Wash 17 jeeps, sir?”

          “Wash 17 jeeps.”

          “Yes, sir.”

          If I remember correctly, we spent three days cleaning and polishing those vehicles.

         Ah, tales of my youth!

                                                       *

            If you didn’t know better, you might think the map of Maryland was sexually explicit.

                                This state has been rated R.

                                For Mature Audiences Only.

 

           Eric does go out canvassing with his boys and girls. He is not a shut-in. The result is, he’s been all over the state.

            “It’s a shame you don’t go squirrel huntin’,” I point out. “There be opportunity galore in the western and southern precincts.”

          “Maybe after the campaign,” he responds dryly.

          Once again, I’m acting gauche.

            He has me put a plastic overlay on the map and, based on my own experience, I indicate with a marking pen which areas are predominately black. “They’s everywhere,” I assure him.

           Eric just rolls his eyes.

          When we get visited by a big donor and his gorgeous, striking executive assistant, Eric proudly trots me out as “the local colorful character on this campaign. There’s one in every camp. Kevin is ours. Go on, maestro, give ‘em one of your dialects. Tell us something in ‘waterman.’”

           So I tell them several things in “waterman.”

           We’re all chuckling, I’m trying not to stumble over my tongue, and then “Mr. Smith,” who owns about a million chickens, looks at me admiringly and asks, “What does all you just said mean?”

          “Oh, it’s nautical. Lower the centerboard. Pull in the net. Dump a crab pot in the water. Flush out the bilge. ‘No women allowed on board.’ That kind of stuff.” If I’m supposed to feel put on the spot, all I can say is, there isn’t a trace of that. They call on me as an expert in local cultures.

           “I work with farmers,” Mr. Smith explains. “I know exactly where Kevin is coming from.”

            His lady friend follows me into the kitchen to watch me brew coffee. Talk about Brazilian fashion models! I want to lick the make-up off her amazing face with my tongue. “Is that your profession? You’re a linguist?” she asks. There’s this tiny bit of a lisp to her speech, making her seem more innocent than she probably is.

           “No, I’m ex-military,” I reply without thinking, busy measuring coffee grounds.

           “Oh,” she gushes, squeezing my arm and all but creaming in her panties. “A soldier boy!”

          “Hélène!” I hear Mr. Smith call from the living room full of laptops. “Behave yourself!”

           Eric is lecturing on our demographics.

          “Look, we’re not kids and this isn’t Sweden,” I say. She’s as tall as I am, thin and angular in a black suit, a red scarf around her creamy white, perfect throat. I want to pull off the red scarf with my teeth! I take her in my arms right there in the kitchen, under the clock, by the sink, and she’s giggling and French-kissing, her tongue halfway down my throat, letting out these long, sonorous grunts.

         “Ah, crap!” I hear Mr. Smith call from the next room. “Hélène! Stop that!”

           If he says anything else, I certainly don’t hear him. Immersed in pleasure, making out like teenagers, enjoying ourselves, we’re totally oblivious to anything around us.

           She smells good. I’d forgotten how good a woman can smell. Talc, perfume, the animal tang of her skin. She tastes good, as well. Her long, red fingernails claw at me gently, her fingers exploring every nook and cranny of my face and hands.

           It’s fun!

         “I need to use the bathroom,” she breathes in my ear.

           I show her where it’s located on the ground floor.

         “Is this the only one?”

         “No,” I answer, not getting her drift, “there are two upstairs.”

         “I guess we’ll have to go upstairs, then. Two! That’s convenient.”

           Ignoring us, Eric and Smith go on discussing the campaign.

          She’s happy, I’m happy, it’s not like there are any issues. We’re both adults. Things rarely move this fast for me. I suspect women look at me and assume I’m “taken” already. I appear complete unto myself, cold. But Hélène is a girl who explores the possibilities. Fearlessly. An adventurer. “You should use Axe, it would smell good on you.”

          Well, maybe not a mountain climber. “Men’s colognes don’t really work well on my skin,” I reply, leading her into someone’s upstairs bedroom. I’ve never had reason to determine whose room is which.

         “Do you always wear shorts?”

         “No, of course not!” I reply. I’m wearing cargo shorts because of the heat.

           We fold back the blue, checkered coverlet on the rather large bed.

           “Is this a bed for one person or two?” she asks professionally.

           “Three!” I tease. “At my place, I sleep on the floor.”

            “On a bamboo mat? Like the Japanese?”

             “No, like a soldier who misses sleeping outdoors on the hard earth.”

             “Feel this, soldier boy,” she says, guiding my hand.

               Listen, I’m grateful. Sexually, I’m not the aggressor. If a woman doesn’t march right up to me and grab what she wants, I’ll look, listen and admire forever, but never make a move. Once I start, though, I’m told I’m a powerhouse. I tend to leave no square inch of skin untouched.

            “Now what is this?”

           “That’s my hair, silly.”

           “Shaved in a V?”

            “Harry likes it that way.”

             “What’s this scar?”

              “I had my tubes tied off,” she says in passing.

              “And this?”

             “Appendectomy.”

             “Did they leave you any extraneous body parts?” I joke.

              “Not really. I’ve even had a lymph node removed.” She shows me where, a tiny scar like a tuck of skin below her right ear.

             “Had any work done?”

             “Do I look like I had work done?” she quietly shrieks in my ear.

             “No, you look as fresh as a tomato on the vine.”

              “I am. I’m your All Natural Ingredients hot tomato.”

               “Avon calling!”

               “C’mere, Lieutenant! Do something only a military guy would do. Let’s see you do your stuff. How ‘bout some close order drill ?”

               “Yes, ma’am!”

                I fit into her like we were manufactured for one another.

               “This is definitely a campaign first,” I marvel.

               “For you, not for me. I do this kind of stuff all the time. Harry gets turned on when I describe my infidelities, improprieties and razzle-dazzle to him… We’ll open the window, of course, and air out the bedroom.”

              “I don’t know about the sheets.”

              “Don’t tell anybody!”

               Ouch! My first major disappointment.

              “I didn’t mean that,” Hélène says, sensing my withdrawal. “Stop worrying! We’ll find the washer/dryer and run a wash.”

              “Oh, okay!” I agree and we’re off and running like gangbusters. I do her once. I do her twice. She’s just getting started! Shuddering, vaginal fluid gushes from her like a fountain. “Are you all right?” I ask.

               “I… can… hardly… breathe!” she cries, gurgling happily.

               “Hélène! We’re going to Quizno’s for sandwiches! Can I get you anything?” Mr. Smith calls from the stairs.

               It’s a pretty small house.

               Pushing me away, she takes several deep breaths, smiles at me winningly and asks, “Do you want anything from the sandwich shop?”

             “I brought my lunch.”

             “I’ll take a BLT on rye and a Sprite, Harry! Hold the mayo,” she calls out to him.

               The sound of the front door closing.

             “Oh, goody!” says Hélène. Now that we’re alone in the house, everything done previously was just foreplay. We’re into the main event!

             In this corner, weighing in at 118 pounds, Hélène, the main contender, defending her title for Be Bop a Lu Bop of the Year. Over here, the challenger. Weighing in at an atrocious 155 pounds—ten pounds overweight, my friends!!!—Kevin Feingold, lately of such far-off cities as Banja Luka, Tirana and Kabul!

            A three-round bout to the finish, winner take all. Place your bets and may the best one win!

           – – –

          “Do you have— you know— an actual occupation?” I ask, curious.

          “Of course! I trained as a court stenographer. I like the technical aspects of courtroom cases. Harry came to court, took one look at me, and carried me off in his fancy car. I do dictation, shorthand, typing and data entry. I also know how to talk on the telephone,” she teases.

          “A lady of many talents.”

          “Here’s one I don’t normally use at the office.”

         “Ouch!”

          “If it hurt, I didn’t do it right. Let’s try that again.”

         “Whoa!… Nice.”

         “Why, what did you do? In the military?”

         “Peacekeeping.”

         “Smooth! Make war, make love, make way! Let’s go find that washing machine and get dressed. Harry should be back with my sandwich and soda any minute. I could eat a horse!”

          Sitting around the kitchen table like nothing remarkable has transpired, the four of us discuss the ins and outs of poultry legislation. “I wouldn’t want Anna to do anything improper, but as a major supporter, I’d expect the judiciary to recognize my side of the story,” Harry explains.

          “I take it, you view propriety with a wide latitude?” I wonder. “That’s not meant to be rude, but I need to ask.”

          “No, no, that’s a fair question. We’re friends. I’m on your side. All I’m saying is, please be on my side when and if the time should ever come.”

         “Mr. Smith,” Eric smiles, “You have yourself a BFF.”

         “A ‘best friend forever,’ Harry,” Hélène translates.

         “I knew that!” Mr. Smith insists.

                                                *

           When the post office stops working, forget it! A lady and her husband, the Davidsons— their two little daughters in frilly pink dresses in tow— are applying for passports. On July 8, a Friday. The weather service warns of a massive storm front blowing in from the south. Rufus, the clerk, is S-L-O-W, stapling forms majestically. In the other window, a dude in cargo pants and a sky blue T-shirt engages the lady clerk in fine conversation. He’s sending ski socks to Germany and has all the time in the world. Five minutes, ten minutes, we better have all the time in the world, because the line is not moving.

           The Davidsons are having A Day At the Post Office. Ready camera one. And… Action! Smiling Mrs. Davidson, of Swedish derivation, is so embarrassed. The kids run everywhere, chanting “Rosey, posey, posey… poo!” Ready camera two! Rufus takes them into the back room to do finger prints!

            America, land of bureaucracy.

            Ten minutes in the back room, fifteen. God knows what additional procedures take place there. A Pledge of Allegiance? A lie detector test?

             The rest of us are going crazy waiting for it to end. The one remaining clerk sighs and does what she can to expedite our transactions.

              By the time I leave the P.O. thirty-five minutes later, the Davidson family is still there, smiling innocently and raising a jolly old ruckus. Waiting, waiting, waiting for their passports.

              I order mee kahti off the Laotian menu at Vientiane Indochine, and Joey, the 20-year-old Filipino waiter, asks, “Do you know what that is?” Worried, he refers me to the spice scale on the bottom of each page. One pepper: mild; two peppers: spicy; three peppers: very spicy.

             As soon as I saw there was “mung” in it, I knew it was for me!

          “Lots of veggies in curry hot sauce,” he warns.

          “I want something different tonight.”

          “You are familiar with Laotian food?”

          It’s our first visit. Mom clipped an article out of The National Herald.

          I explain how I took some Swedish friends to Stockholm’s only Laotian restaurant. “They were totally lost.” I recommend to Joey the Lao restaurants in Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen.

       “Are there a lot of Lao restaurants in Denmark?” he asks.

        “Vietnamese, predominately. I only know of one Laotian establishment in Copenhagen, and it’s out in a suburb.”

        The lady cook comes out to confirm that I really want what I ordered.

        The décor is pure Laos. Photographs of flat-bottomed boats on muddy rivers, pictures of villages and temples. Goat skin drums hang on the wall. Many depictions of Buddha. An elephant grass fan, looking hairy and out-of-place in suburban Maryland. Flower displays made of paper and crêpe.

        Everything but the Pathet Lao, I think.

         Mom orders off the Thai menu.

         When Joey, spiky-haired and garrulous, brings my dish, I tell him, “I’m Buddhist. I will spend eternity eating Thai food.”

        “You also eat Thai food?”

        “All the time. My mother here is a great aficionado.”

        “You’ll spend eternity eating?” he asks me. “I would— you know.”

         Spend eternity making love to beautiful women.

         He’s 20 years old.

        “I’ve already put in my order,” I assure him.

         The mee kahti is essential Laos, everything there except the ferocious heat of the jungle. The noodles are as viscously gooey as if they’d been dipped in motor oil. Curry and chopped green peppers make my nose run and my eyes tear up.

        “Crying over your dinner?” mom teases.

         When Joey comes by our table, I tell him, “She’s teasing me about crying over my dinner.”

         He looks worried.

        “The spices make my eyes water.”

        “Oh! Well… Man up! Don’t be a cry-baby!” he recommends in a sing-song voice.

          I gotta get my sorry ass back to Laos.

          I once had plans to retire to the hill country and live in the Shans with the indigenous tribes. Who knows, maybe I still shall. It appeals to my romantic nature. But then I began thinking about doctor’s visits and dental appointments and what it is like to live among primitive people. A vast amount of time goes into preparing and cooking food. Farming, fishing and trapping consume most of the day. Everything is done over open fires. Life is slow. There’s a calm rhythm to it, but in the long run, westerners get bored.

           I have no desire to become a bored westerner, certainly not among the gentle people of the Shan States.

           Like everyone in my generation, my mom—27 years older—is becoming nostalgic for Vietnam!

           Everyone misses their youth.

           Been there, done that, I don’t think returning to Jungle Hell will be such a cool experience.

          The next morning at the office, my gut explodes. You don’t need a rocket scientist to know your butt is on fire. Good old mung!

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