yustyoking

Eulogy to a Mystery Writer

  

            Hardboiled detective writer Arturo Dinkelstam is dead. He died as he lived, a resident of ennui, doubt and Santa Monica, California. Age: 66. Cause of death, a heart attack. L.A. isn’t my cup of tea but I’ve flown out here on a moment’s notice to do justice to an old friend with whom I grew up. Passing over innumerable wildfires, the weather is still too pristine for words, with temps in the 80’s.

Known as “Arthur” to his readers above the Rio Grande, it’s true that Arturo (his preferred handle) made his living as a copywriter grinding out luscious prose for mail order catalogs in the lingerie industry:

“This frilly, fluffy wholly appropriate teddy just waits for the right fingertips to caress its soft, supple cloth, unfasten its snaps and slink into nothing less than imperial elegance. Imported cotton/nylon/spandex. Available in Large, Special and Extra Large sizes for the discerning woman.”

There are those who will decry Arthur’s/Arturo’s place in the pantheon of hardboiled detective writers because he was self-published.

It was a dark and stormy morning at Lex & Borden copyshop. “Dinkelstam’s gone,” reported Craig “Molson” Larson to his crusty, moustachioed boss, the incorrigible James “Jim” Rothgate.

“What d’ya mean, gone?!” thundered Rothgate, who knew a thing or two about proofreading marks. His specialty was the squiggly line over the reversed letter “e”. “How can he be gone? Page 11 in the October issue. Two Brazilian supermodels entwining a mangy goat. We can get in a lot of trouble unless the copy is exactly right. I CAN’T DO IT! YOU CAN’T DO IT! Get Dinkelstam!”

“He’s dead, boss.”

The shock made Rothgate physically ill. He clutched the high, black composite plastic back of his executive office chair as images of a small dog rabidly disappearing into the middle distance flooded his brain.

*

Genealogist Lev Kosygin tells me Arturo and I may be related on Lev’s uncle’s side. Since Lev and I are fifth cousins, I find a Dinkelstam connection tenuous at best. “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” according to Lev, everyone is related to everyone else in some way. Fuhgeddaboudit!

Philologist Harvey Crystal posits Dinkel as a form of German Dunkel or “darkness.” Stam is the equivalent of the English “clan” or “tribe,” so Dinklestam comes out meaning “tribe of darkness.” Nothing would have pleased Arturo more! “Hitler’s family name,” adds Harvey, “was Schickelgruber, meaning ‘trader of the hollow.’ German is lousy with family names made up of two-word combinations.”

Arthur’s detractors will insist that the low sales figures of his three outstanding novels limited his influence. True, his first book sold only 17 copies in hardback, but Arthur contributed over 100 copies to local libraries and the USO. His second book— considered by some to be his masterpiece— sold a respectable 152 copies. Not bad for a self-published vanity project in an industry chock-a-block with talented competitors. His third and last effort returned to the disappointing teens in hardcover, but saw somewhat brisker sales as a trade paperback. Ninety-eight copies might not sound like a lot, but it is the spirit of Arthur’s writing that impresses:

“Boozily, he sucked on her D-cup sized breasts. Tammy Sue’s languid fingers massaged deep into the murky lust of his consciousness, kneading his brow and temples with uncontrollable abandon. Slowly, searchingly, her right hand extended down, down, across his chest, his stomach, along his hip to the repository of his power: His left-hand pants pocket and the brown, alligator skin wallet resting therein.”

Wow! That’s writing.

Here are three testimonials I have gathered.

Mahjong Washington, a black man discreetly panhandling on Santa Monica Pier: “You The Heat? You Five-O? No? Well, yes, I know who you talkin’ ’bout. Dinkelstam. I was in the Army an’ read one o’ his books in boot camp. Damn fine author! Say, bro’, you got change of a twenty? Or maybe you just give me a twenty an’ we calls it even.”

Leon Backus, next door neighbor: “The neighbor from Hell. No, don’t object! You asked. I expect you to be honest and include my answer. You can’t edit out negative criticism. That’s what Arthur never learned. It’s not enough to call yourself a ‘Renaissance man.’ You also need to clear the derelict jalopies on cinderblocks from your front yard.”

Juliette Bush, checkout lady at the local grocery: “Dinkelhauser? Dinkelhurst? Oh, Dinkelstam! Yes, of course. She’s Chancellor of West Germany. I admire her. I had no idea she had died!”

Perhaps soliciting comments from local denizens isn’t the best approach.

*

            Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane and other titans of the genre exhibited styles equally distinctive as Arthur’s, to larger audiences and with greater commercial success. Never-the-less, Arthur attempted to hold his own. “I’m a leviathan,” he complained in 2010, only too aware that the proliferation of the blogosphere shattered his last, lingeringly rebellious reason for being. “How can I be the go-to guy for alternative literature when everybody is the go-to guy?” Arthur groused, still smoking a pack of menthol cigarettes a day and sinking scotch on the rocks several times every afternoon, Old School. Empty, decorative bottles littered his waste baskets both at home and at work.

His most lasting feud was with manager Stan Teller at Santa Monica Books & Smokes, the funky bookstore facing the beach. Arthur begged Stan to mix copies of his work in the remainder bin, going so far as to surreptitiously drop several into the square, dusty, black metal receptacle by the door. “I would have stocked his stuff,” reminisces Stan upon news of Arthur’s passing, “but I felt such trash lowered the quality of the entire bookstore experience, y’know?”

As with the exceptional Tesla electric automobile, it’s hard to argue with the man who owns one!

You’ll be missed, Arturo! Your penchant for maudlin self-aggrandizement. Your tendency, when criticized, to go into attack mode. Your needling, whiny demands for ever larger financial loans to support your ever more grandiose literary ambitions. You won’t be forgotten!

— Kevin Feingold

*

Mayor of Alla tiders

  

            Why run for mayor? “Because it’s there!” The same challenge that drove George Herbert Mallory to scale Mount Everest. Resulting in the Mont Blanc fountain pen, available at fine jewelers everywhere. In my case, sitting in my studio apartment staring at the four walls, I desperately feel the need to escape from NYC. “Oh, the pressure!” as the hooker says in the movie Pretty Woman. Let Anthony Weiner and all the other sexual deviants run against Christine Quinn for Mayor of New York City. Ce n’est pas moi! Ich will Bürgermeister af Alla tiders haben. I wanna become Mayor of Alla tiders.

Now since “Alla tiders” isn’t listed on the map at either Mapquest or Google Earth, look under Hemse. Southern Gotland. A farming area. Now run your finger along the screen northeast about an inch and a quarter and THAT’S WHERE THE FARMHOUSE IS that we christened “Alla tiders” (“Let the good times roll” in English) back in the summer of 1984.

Alla tiders. No one forbade us from putting it on envelopes as long as the address ended with postal code “62350” and “Hemse.”

“This is how new place names are created!” Björn assured us, his band mates.  A rock foursome, we called ourselves Social Security Safety Net. Think The Beatles minus a guitar and without Paul on bass. Synthesizers were all the rage back then, bands like Landscape, Soft Cell, Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk. They weren’t us. We were synth-playing anti-capitalist crusaders.   

* 

            Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is out on bail. In typical Moscow show trial fashion, Russia’s most popular opposition figure has been accused of embezzling half a million dollars in timber from a state-owned company. And he’s been found guilty. Well, d’oh! He faces five years in prison. Well, d’oh! A Russian judge has released him, pending appeal. So why has he been set free? Because he is running for Mayor of Moscow! Vladimir Putin doesn’t want any more effing martyrs. This way, Alexei Navalny gets to run. And when Navalny gets thoroughly trounced by Putin’s own handpicked candidate, Sergei Sobyanin, yeah, then Navalny will be yesterday’s news. “The people have spoken…” and all that kal. Anyway, that’s the game plan. Let the bastard run and then defeat him. No way is an ex-KGB man like Vladimir Putin going to allow Alexei Navalny to become Mayor of Moscow! Never happen. This is going to be an interesting election: Only former members of the Communist Party will be eligible to vote! Yust yoking! And, you know, they have Putin’s people tabulating the votes… D’oh! Assassination is always a final option, but no one likes to use it, since it instantly produces a martyr. And Putin’s doesn’t want any more effing martyrs!

*

            I spent my Junior Year Abroad at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. Then I vacationed on the island of Gotland for the summer. You take the ferry from the mainland, an eight hour trip. Half of Stockholm heads to Gotland for a week or two of summer vacation. My college bros Björn, Ronnie and Hans wanted more than that, so we rented a ramshackle farmhouse outside Hemse, way down in the south. There had once been a railroad on Gotland. Imagine! It’s a pretty small island. Having torn up the tracks, SJ ran a bus service from Visby up north down to the southern tip and most points in-between. I took the bus.

*

            Like Navalny in Russia, I know I am facing an implacable government with total hegemony over legality, culture and public opinion. “That’s the price of democracy” I’ve texted Björn in Stockholm. “A gov’t that represents the views of the people. Scandalous! What R they thinking?”

Nyever mind that the government is unaware of my running for mayor in the middle of the annual, national July vacation shutdown. It’s an insidious plot to brand me IRRELEVANT.  As soon as I lose the election— to a fictitious entity, but still— all concepts of legitimacy go out the window. How Machiavellian of those devious Swedish bureaucrats! First they ignore me, and  then they ignore me some more!

I would admire their plan if it were happening to someone else. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, for example. Get him to run for President of Ecuador and when he goofs, declare the man superfluous! Ha! You got to hand it to the Swedes! How ingenious. Otherwise, poor Julian has stepped on the cultural landmine built into Swedish sexual equality: The ladies wear the pants and hold all the cards. You sleep with a Swedish woman, you are signing on for a lifetime commitment, whether you like it or not. Swedish women are nice and they don’t necessarily push us men up against the wall, but if they have a beef, the system of justice protects women and children first. Men’s rights come way down the list, after dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, sheep, lynx, wolves, hamsters and parakeets.

Full disclosure: This isn’t the first time I’ve considered running for Mayor of Alla tiders. It is, however, my current run for this elective office, now, in the summer of 2013. Printed posters, buttons, bumper stickers and yard signs are all in the works, although the Swedes don’t actually do yard signs. Over in Svedala, yard signs never caught on.

Big music acts like to include Gothenburg and Globen in Stockholm on their tour schedules. “Money, money, money, it’s a rich man’s world!” to quote all-time Swedish record holders ABBA. Authors of Mamma Mia!, “Dancing Queen” and “Fernando.”

Our band, Social Security Safety Net, never made that big a dent. In a nod to Heavy Metal, my first attempt at a band logo used runic lettering. Very effective (all those S’s), it made us look like a cabaret act from the Third Reich. Ditch that! “Forget how the music sounds,” reasoned Björn. “It’s all in the presentation.” We taped over the names on our instruments, replacing them with Cyrillic lettering, spelling phonetically names like “Pony” (for the synth), “Boris” (on Ronnie’s guitar) and “Pivo” (Russian for “beer”) on our travel cases. I spent $125 on band T-shirts for our roadies: White on black, “SSSN” which in Cyrillic comes out “CCCH.” Go figure! Pins: The enamel work was done in Leningrad, since the Soviet Union had decades of experience. Buttons were made in the USA for the same reason. Album covers! Boy, did I ever design album covers. Art work. Photography. Liner notes. Everything but, you know, music.

“Our musical creations are so colossal,” Björn predicted, “it’ll take TEN YEARS for anyone else to catch up!” Throwing himself onto his synth keyboard with both hands, he wildly pressed down on two keys, his body vibrating with tension, head thrown back, face filled with emotion.

Wow!

I couldn’t wait for the day when we had enough cash to actually rent or buy amplifiers, plug in and, you know, hear how our instruments sounded. I got tired of singing into a dead microphone.

Being a rock star, I needed my fill of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” My summer flame was named Ylva Franzén. She still lives outside Visby, happily married. Her father had a farm. He grew hay for silage, corn and sugar beets. I met Ylva through her bro’ Peter, who worked as a stevedore on the Gotland’s ferry. See, my buddies Björn, Hans and Ronnie knew their place in society. They weren’t going to shoot the breeze with any uneducated stevedore. As an American, I had no such qualms. After three sentences, Peter (nicknamed “Per”) led me below decks and aft, plucking a bottle from the pocket of his overalls. Boy, did I ever sleep that night, zonked out atop the plush carpet under the main staircase. When we docked in Visby, I hung around until Per finished his chores. We walked ashore together. “Oh,” he remarked. “I forgot to mention it. This is my sister Ylva.”

Holy shit! As I live and breathe. Ylva Franzén. One whiff of her garlic scent and I was smitten. Waves of Viking red hair, enormous green eyes outlined in mascara, siren red rouge, red lipstick, melon-shaped breasts almost bursting through her blouse and wide, luxurious hips. And tall… A whole oak tree of a woman. She had me at “hello,” eating me up with those lantern green eyes!

“I’m only 17. I don’t know very much,” she lamented.

“You’ve got time,” I assured her.

She laughed, showing straight white teeth. “Oh,” she said, “I like you.”

Björn, Ronnie and Hans hated her. “Uneducated slut,” swore Björn impotently whenever Per and Ylva drove down in Per’s EPA-traktor— a sort of four-wheeled moped— to pick me up and spend a day at the beach.

“Don’t blame me!” I replied. “Find girls of your own!”

No way. They despised— and imitated, clumsily— the local accent and dialect. They made fun of the farmers. I began to realize that my band mates were parochial college kids and effete snobs!

We look back on our high school sweethearts and say, “I should have married her!” Those young marriages never last. At 25 or 30, neither partner is satisfied with high school fare. That was never in the cards with my friend Ylva. It was refreshing that she knew her own farm girl limitations. “I’m as dumb as a stone and know it” was a great way to put down the university snobs, but it left something to be desired in the marriageability department. Still, I would have considered it, but for Ylva’s “Muhammad Ali syndrome.” — “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee!”— Ylva flew into rages and threw punches. It took awhile to dawn on me, but that was why her brother Per and his friends looked so shocked when Ylva and I became an item. Within a week, I had my first black eye. We Feingolds, on my mother’s side, are Zakroiskis from Zabludova, Russian-Polish peasants. I grew up listening to my parents’ screaming matches. Only Shanty Irish, however, actually threw punches and broke things. Gotland introduced me to an earthier kultur.

Since we had an entire, secluded house for the summer, just off the main road, all our university friends came to party. Of course they did! I have hazy recollections of Björn and Ronnie standing on chairs at the dinner table, calling for attention by scraping knives along the ceiling, roaring drunk. “Here! Here! Just wan’ t’ thank all youse peoples for comin’ t’ join our little soirée,” they screamed in Swedish. Every night, if Ylva wasn’t around, some drunk college lass “accidently” fell into my lap, planting French kisses down my throat, all of us drunk as skunks. Jesus! My Prince Harry moment. As Samuel Pepys said, “And then to bed…”

Half our gang bicycled down to the beach. Bike rental is a time-honored tradition on Gotland. You rent a bike in Visby and pedal all over the island, overnighting in sleeping bags and pup tents under the stars. On the beach, where bathing suits were optional, our crowd attracted the attention of the locals. “The students” they called us, implying immature high schoolers. Or “the nerds” (plugghästarna) which wasn’t a whole lot better.

The famous “Goths” or “Visigoths” (West Goths) originally came from Gotland, long boats at the ready. For a small island, the Gutamål dialect has four distinct variations: The accent in Klintehamn in the west is very different from Ljugarn in the east. Slite in the north differs from Hemse in the south. Speaking the Swedish of Uppsala and Stockholm labeled us as transients, tourists. The locals tolerated us for the cash we brought to the island, but we were never truly accepted.

Poor Ylva! From Visby, she was a Gotländska, but still not considered kosher in the south. “Råire jär laddet! ” When she talked with the locals, they looked at her like she was crazy. “She’s from Visby,” I would interject.

“Aha! We thought she was putting us on!” answered the kids or the adult vendors, who I found blunt but friendly. Farmer style. “You guys aren’t with the ‘zero-eights,’ then?” they would ask quietly, glancing toward my Uppsala cohorts. Zero-eight was the prefix for Stockholm telephone numbers, a way of indicating folks from the mainland.

“She’s from Visby,” I would croak desperately, my English accent all over the map. “I’m from the States.”

They’d shake their heads understandingly, giving us wary looks.

Sweden’s other major island is Öland. I was amazed to discover a bond between the inhabitants of the two islands. One of our student visitors was Hélène, from Öland, and the locals treated her like a long-lost cousin. All the girls in our shack shared an animosity toward Ylva, a high school “townie,” a local. No one despised her more than Hélène. For her part, Ylva tried to be friends with each of us, before physically beating the crap out of my colleagues. I was never there to break up those fights. I was out gathering kindling or spending the day hauling nets on a fishing trawler. Open for any adventure, I found the Gotlanders ready to humor “the American.” I had a ball! Only to arrive back at Alla tiders to discover Björn sporting serious bruises and abrasions.

“Your girlfriend,” Ronnie explained, “wiped the floor with him.”

As film director Nicolas Winding Refn says, “Even though we’re taught not to enjoy the oldest form of justice, which is an eye for an eye, we’re still rooted in it and take pleasure from it.”

One day, big to-do, Hélène approached me with a major black eye on the right side of her face. She had her knapsack packed, water bottle filled. Hans sat at the wheel of our one and only car, ready to drive her up to Visby in time for the ferry boat. “This is quite enough,” seethed Hélène. “If you can’t control that witch of yours, I don’t intend to stick around and be anybody’s punching bag!”

“Ylva’s a regular Ingemar Johansson,” cracked Hans helpfully, incensing Hélène even more.

“You guys are such shits!” she screamed. I held open the door for her. Throwing her gear on the back seat, she hopped primly into the car without giving me a second glance.

Adieu, Hélène.

*

            Now it’s true that Alla tiders is a fictional entity. You may feel I’m selling you a lot of bull. But if Obama has taught us anything, it’s that YOU CAN SELL BULL AS LONG AS YOU ARE UP FRONT ABOUT IT. So what are the pro’s?

Unlike Detroit, Michigan or Virginia’s start-up airline Independence Air (remember them?), my entity is not saddled with debt. In fact, I’ve thrown a few bucks in the kitty and paid all expenses out-of-pocket, resulting in a positive, if limited, capital base. No debt.

We have a low burn rate, running through our money slowly, giving us a longer runway to push-back and start-up.

I’ve got a stupendous national anthem (“Rock Yer Socks Off” by Scam Artist), flag design (think Cuba’s minus the Communists), bird (Swedish wild turkey), flower (fläder) and  beauty queen (Yvonne Nyberg, 17).

Although we don’t have any industry yet, I’m hoping to lure some part of Tesla Motors to the island, even if it’s only to manufacture door panels, glove compartments and key rings.

Extensive tourism already established.

Extensive bird life.

Complete infrastructure regarding roads, electricity, potable water, telecommunications, bath houses, pristine beaches  and marijuana (all but the last c/o Hemse).

Neither Bradley Manning nor Edward Snowden know any of our secrets.

Young Swedish girls.

The cons:

Long Swedish winters.

Accessible only from the mainland by overnight boat.

Proximity to Russia (well…)

Young Swedish girls.

I’ve found a farmer who’ll give us a good price on Queen Anne walnut window slats and an 18th Century George III coal grate. He’ll vouchsafe their authenticity with a handshake.

Since math isn’t my strong point and market fluctuations are enormous, I’ve designated Ronnie the banker as Comptroller. I’ll simply quote verbatim from his statement: “Times are hard. Although our starting equity is limited, the possibility for a profitable expansion of goods and services is large. How large depends entirely on Kickstarter and investments by readers like yourself.”

I think that puts it rather well. Alla tiders is a fine property. The house is a little old, a little run-down, a fixer-upper with a mouse infestation in the foundation, bats in the attic and water rats over by the ravine, but it’s open to development.

I have realized why, in the past, we drove our college girlfriends crazy. We chose the prettiest girls and then expected them to cook, clean, wash our clothes and help us study for our exams. Lesson learned: Plain Janes should do the manual labor. They won’t resent it as much. For this project, we are choosing THE PRETTIEST GIRLS WE CAN FIND, requiring them only to do that one thing: Be pretty! Everybody wins.

Hans, who will be location manager, provides the following résumé: “Orchestra conductor (hobby), play the harpsichord, collect prints of Renaissance oil paintings, connoisseur of fine wines and ancient Greek philosophers including chablis, pinot grigio, Plato and Socrates. Graduate of University of Uppsala. Hope to own yacht and sail to Miami.”

Ronnie on potential: “Join the vanguard of investment opportunities! We are floating bonds to finance the following— The Hans C. Frumpélius Hydroponic Water Park for the indigenous rat population, all-night disco, “Guitar Playing Made Easy,” and The Björn A. Lindström Conference Center for Extra-Terrestrial Life (T.B.A.L.C.C.E.T.L., a $750,000 project, including dormitories). As for generating profits, we are orders of magnitude bigger than Van Dyes Properties, our nearest competitor both geographically and in terms of size. Our potential is insanely bigger than theirs. Like us, they also only have a single structure on the market, a whitewashed farmhouse with walls of packed hay. Very chic. Anyway, we’re way better than them because we just are!”

Björn, who wants to handle conceptualization, makes this pitch: “We have the advantage of being the post-Sputnik generation. The Soviet’s satellite had already circled the Earth. A fact, a done deal. Freed of that, we can now think in non-linear, non-factual parameters. We do intrinsically what the ‘holistic approach’ people can only accomplish in theory. Our business decisions are made entirely based on feelings. What feels right. Just like the supplemental health insurance companies, we’ve made investment easy, accepting all four major credit cards, Pay Pal, certified checks and wire transfers. I don’t know how you get your money out just yet, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

To quote Micky Dolenz of The Monkees, “We’re not selling plastic.”

Angst pays. In 2012, Petter Olsen, scion of a Norwegian shipping family, sold the only privately-owned copy of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” at Sotheby’s here in New York for almost $120 million, the most any artwork has ever garnered at auction.

As for me, whenever I reach a dead end, contemplating suicide, I opt instead to run for Mayor of Alla tiders in Sweden.

Be well!

– Kevin Feingold

Lonelyboy in Gotham

  

            I blame it on the weather. When the climate doesn’t know what season we are in, everything else follows. Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the underworld shrugs, New York trembles and I puke. Since 9/11, fear is the next normal.

*

            I used to live in Greenwich Village, but I got tired of the NYPD closing off the streets on Saturdays, Sundays and Muslim holidays to facilitate foot traffic to and from the local mosque. I try to be cosmopolitan, but if life is going to be inconvenient, I prefer to live uptown.

There’s an asinine web site called LinkedIn that presupposes that people network. It’s very retro. As if anybody is in a position to help anybody else get a job or make a career move! It’s 20 years since anyone has mentored anyone else in America. Yet the millennials, bless them, think that by tapping on their keyboards, they can introduce other people to the HR department and facilitate the hiring process. Pul-lease! People lose their jobs doing that. How do you know your “friend” isn’t a stalker, a hacker, a thief, an industrial spy, a Manning, a Snowden, a pedophile, a sex pervert or just plain boring? The safe thing to do— the smart move— is to mind your own business and become as distant as the planet Jupiter.

In need of income, I accept a job doing the narration on the schlockumentary “The Many Meltdowns of Justin Bieber.” The dude’s evolving into a male Lindsay Lohan. Try to figure that kid out! We end with his most recent gaffe, a TMZ video showing the 19-year-old Bieber peeing into a janitor’s bucket at a New York restaurant and then spraying a portrait of President Clinton with cleaning fluid while shouting “Fuck Bill Clinton!” What some people won’t do for a little attention.

The only way I can run for public office is by sleeping with one of Jengi Khan’s scarlet-clad daughters in the Wakhan Corridor of northeastern Afghanistan. Members of a Kyrgyz minority living in the isolation and brutal climate of the north, the girls are as strange and repressed as if they lived on the moon. Spitzer, Weiner, how meshuggah! Wouldn’t it be hilarious of they both get TOTALLY trounced at the polls? Show everyone that NYC, “Babylon on the Hudson,” cannot be stampeded into accepting just any kind of public behavior. “Turn the other cheek…” “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” Choke! Let’s not move the goalposts to Elbonia, people! Do I have to strip naked and parade down Broadway to prove myself qualified for elective office?

Always looking for interesting work, I stumble on polling the public regarding wheat cakes. Why should I be ashamed? There’s a government bill pending in Congress to provide funding for the introduction of this product into our public schools. Sensing a groundswell, I canvas our neighborhood. Finding like-minded individuals of all creeds and colors, I take the initiative and drum up some petitions. It’s amazing when you ring people’s doorbells: They look so relieved when they find out you’re not asking for a donation!

My neighbors, understandably, select Brand A over Brand B. The wheat is the same. They grow it out west. Brand A wheat cakes are manufactured in New York State. Brand B in Pennsylvania. New Yawkers, we prefer to keep the jobs in-state. It hasn’t gotten to the point where we are demonstrating in the streets. (Just think, if we were Palestinians, we would be throwing stones in protest over this very issue!) My spiel goes, “Federal tax-payer dollars. Buy New York produce. Sign here.”  We’re allowed to solicit for political causes. That’s the law. Once Mrs. McMullen or Ms. Diamandis lets me into her building, then it’s Neighbor to Neighbor. It’s not like anybody reports me to the super.

I get in touch with the president of the New York wheat cake company. I email him an interim report and attach an html of our signed petitions. Unsolicited. As an example of my work. As a booster. “Hooray for wheat cakes!”

He sends me an email, thanking me. One. He tells me how great it is to have street cred. “It’s the little people who matter most.” I send him a series of follow-ups, reporting my progress. Creating something at the grass roots level, I am damn proud of my accomplishment. I deliver.

Hey, I could be yodeling “Dixie” in the Alps for all the good it does me.

I am experiencing the equivalent of a politician waving from his limo during a motorcade. Hey, the dude waved! That shows he’s a nice guy. He didn’t have to. That doesn’t mean he wants to start a correspondence. That doesn’t mean he wants to “friend” me on Facebook. He’s not sending me a baseball cap with the company logo. Professionals are busy people, they really don’t have time to associate with us mere mortals. As Seth Meyers would say (only don’t expect Seth to “friend” you on Facebook), “Really!? ”

The higher people roost on Mount Olympus, the pinnacle of power, (a) the more paranoid they become about not screwing up and (b) the less inclined they are to help anyone else. After all, the young person they mentor today is their chief competitor tomorrow!

After a few weeks, I get the message and stop expecting to hear anything.

*

            I go to lunch in the limo of Jane Saltzman, my new employer. She has sent along an “exotic” to keep me company, a Venezuelan fashion model who pouts prettily. She’s got a lower lip the size of a car tire. Discreetly, I pluck lice out of her hair. I know Jane through our Neighborhood Watch Committee. We share the chairmanship. Jane starts every morning by watching Kathie Lee and Yoda. After Mandy, my former employer, got blown up in a terrorist attack, Jane accosted me in the elevator. Expecting condolences, what do I hear? “So. Unless you are otherwise disposed, I expect you’ll come to work for me.” Jane is 60 years young. She runs a spa empire. You don’t say “no” to Jane Saltzman without a damn good reason. I couldn’t think of any. The Upper West Side is certainly less crime-ridden and hairy than The Village, but the rents are astronomical. I went to work that afternoon.

I’m a commodities broker, meeting with companies, distributors, suppliers and truckers, trying to get 30% off the bushel price of soybeans, apricots and lemons. These are the natural ingredients that go into the shampoos and lotions used in Jane’s spas. Listen, brokering is better than driving a dump truck. Jane gets her carambola starfruit from Israel and her mangoes from the Caribbean, but otherwise, whenever possible, she buys American. She insists on using old-fashion family recipes for her goo. They come from Hungary, Poland and Belarus. I’ve always hated the shtetl mentality, but their manufacturing skills were legion. “They,” claims Jane, “could make vodka out of a speck of dust, copper wire, an old potato and water.”

They still do. Go figure. Now you have all these vodkas with Russian-sounding names like Vladimir’s and St. Petersburg and Kremlin One, but when you check the label, you find they’re made and distilled in Connecticut.

I amuse her. That’s why Jane sends me lice-ridden Venezuelan fashion models who sit next to me in Central Park, hungrily watching me devour a box lunch. “You’re not eating, señorita?”

“I gotta lose some weight,” she frumps. Her accent is as thick as Russian borscht.

I love these girls!

Jane’s a nice lady. She offered to blow a couple of hundred dollars, comping me and a date to tickets to The Book of Mormon. The thought of sitting in a theater with 500+ other people made my skin crawl. I couldn’t do it. But I appreciated the offer. It was Oscar Wilde who said, “Don’t you realize that missionaries are the divinely provided food for destitute and underfed cannibals?”

The occupational hazard of my job is that you start seeing everything in terms of components: Cardboard is compacted wood pulp. Plastic is a polymer made from petrochemicals. Ink is a pigment or dye suspended in a solvent. Jane uses Roland Sea Salt and takes iodine pills made from sea kelp. Life as Chemistry 101. Life in the lab!

I spend the afternoon negotiating with a chemical manufacturer. This is the real meat and potatoes of the cosmetics industry. Ninety-eight percent of any shampoo or lotion is chemicals. I approach their building in da limo. If you show up in anything less than a horse-drawn cab, you don’t get no respect. Front entrance security rivals, say, Kandahar. They X-ray my briefcase. Give me the full body pat-down. Then they X-ray me. I take the elevator, admiring myself in the wraparound mirror. I slick down my unruly eyebrows, get my appearance in order. The 10th floor conference room abuts other skyscrapers. I’m dressed for summer. I got slacks, sandals and a billowy Hawaiian shirt. Suits, they are dressed in full office regalia: pinstripes, white shirts, ties, wingtips. I shave my head for comfort. They sport a full head of hair. Don’t these corporate people ever sweat?

Their Executive Vice President of Sales, Wes Levine, asks how I am. “That’s Kevin Feingold,” announces Elizabeth Nutwell, a sharp-nosed shrew from the Marketing Department, barging in, arms loaded with files. She’s wearing an elegant black suit, off-white pearls, silver hoop earrings and kabuki make-up. “Not only did he steal my parking space last Tuesday, he’s a known bastard. Rotten to the core!”

“I don’t recognize myself in your description, Ms. Nutwell,” I counter.

“Not well,” comments Wes.

“Not well?”

“Nutwell. Actually, she has a point.”

“I know. We’ve met.”

Wes laughs. “The Hawaiian has arrived,” he remarks. “Marjorie, call our supplier and have him send us coconuts.”

I’ll give you coco, I think. I’ll give you nuts! Gearing up psychologically.

Wes opens the negotiation. Ten minutes later, Elizabeth has another go. “This man,” she declares, pointing at me with an accusatory finger, “is in the pocket of Big Labor. His hidden agenda is to hobble employers and drive workers into union sweatshops.”

Wes pricks you with a rapier, Elizabeth hits you over the head with a truncheon.

Okay-y-y. “Can we reduce the asking price of cetrimonium chloride, benzyl salicylate, benzyl benzoate, charcoal and paraffin by 30%, that would be more in line with what we’re looking for,” I reply.

“Du bist a hunt mit di oyearn,” Wes complains jovially, which is Yiddish for “You are a dog with ears.” Yiddish is the new Esperanto. If you speak it, you’re hip. Wes has delivered a deadly insult. Since he’s laughing, I shrug it off. Insults go with the territory. We compromise at 15%. I’m smart enough to know that I’m not going to get a better deal. They can take 15% off the top without direly affecting their profit margin. We can pay the going price minus 15% and feel better fast. I think it was Arnie Palmer who said, “A birdie in the hand beats a bogey in the bush.”

“I’ll still want 30% discount on the paraffin,” I reason.

“Oh?” smiles Wes, always ready for a joke. “Why?”

“From the Latin. Parum means ‘too little’ and affinis means ‘bordering on.’ Your paraffin borders on too little.”

“Pretium affinis parum,” suggests Wes. “The PRICE borders on too little.”

“You’re a hard man, Mr. Levine. If you ever choose to leave this mortal coil, I can offer decapitation with an Islamic sword.”

“Duly noted. Does that come with or without verses from the Koran?” he wonders.

I mean, thank God we like each other!

“Ms. Philips, take a letter!” he declares. “Dear President Obi-Wan Kenobi: So? Nu? How was Africa? We’re delighted you liked Tanzania. Although Communist, they have natural resources upon which we are deeply dependent. Give the First Lady a Tanzanite necklace. Or not.”

Polite applause. His staff shift uneasily in their chairs.

“How is your employer, Ms. Jane Saltzman?” he asks. “Is she sleeping with the fishes?”

“Naw, she’s relaxing with the corgis.”

I neither see nor hear Ms. Nutwell and her pile of folders during the rest of the meeting. She is not part of my universe. From where do people get these passionate hatreds? I once wished an opponent “Merry Christmas!”  He wanted to take me to court for racial profiling! “I’m Jewish,” he seethed. “Your characterization demeans me! How dare you???”

One Sunday a month, April through October, weather permitting, Jane has me drive her to Boston in her boxy 1969 Skoda sedan from Czechoslovakia. She buys old books and prints at the flea markets. It’s at the Raynham Flea Market south of Boston that I find a pristine copy of Music interview Magazine MiM, a cassette mag from 1984. In the original, sealed factory wrapper. A spastic color photo of Boy George on the cover and a grainy color glam shot of David Bowie on the back. Interviews with Boy George, Thomas Dolby, The Clash, Herbie Hancock, Pete Townshend and Bananarama (!). Sale price: One dollar! They’re giving this stuff away. “Put that back!” barks Jane.

*

            My loneliness and isolation aren’t new. The first indication that I wasn’t on the same page as everyone else came while I was still in the Army. This perfect example of casting pearls before swine took place in Alaska. My day job was Intelligence, monitoring Soviet military activity of every kind: radio traffic, freighter movement, their airspace, their weaponry, their boots on the ground and subs under the sea.

Civilians aren’t like military personnel. Civvies stand alone, self-reliant (good!) and all wrapped up in themselves (less good). Each of us is the star of his or her own little head-movie. This is particularly true in Alaska. Stand tall! Tired of vandalism and juvenile delinquency, the city gave its young people a clubhouse to do with as they saw fit. The kids turned it into a quite respectable punk music club, The Asteroid. I got involved because I love punk music, showing up on Saturday nights to listen to some truly raucous bands. Eventually, the adolescent punk music enthusiasts behaved so anti-socially, the public began to ask, “Why are these black-clad punks, Goths, ghouls and gremlins showing up in our town from all over the Kenai peninsula?! What have we done to deserve this blight?” The city pulled the plug, evicting them, cutting off the water and electricity, discontinuing the yearly endowment. By their very nature, punks are as anti-Establishment as you can get and still play music. The only adult in the room, so to speak, I interceded on their behalf. I talked to the authorities. City councilmen. Politicians of every stripe. “The club’s a good way to keep our youngsters off the street and out of trouble,” I pleaded.

“These aren’t just our kids, we’re a magnet for every low-brow underachiever in the state! Screw that!” replied the pols.

The powers-that-be and I reached an accord. What surprised me were the kids. “Oh,” they said, “that’s Kevin’s thing. The negotiations are Kevin’s idea. That has nothing to do with us! We don’t talk to pigs. We never asked him to do it!” This they announced to everyone. Newspapers. Radio. Their friends. How can I represent my clients when my clients renounce any allegiance? I reminded the Establishment that we were, after all, dealing with youth. You couldn’t demand too much ice-cold logic. Emotions ruled the day.

A year later, they ran aground and again faced foreclosure. The town wanted to build a hospital annex on the plot of land where the clubhouse stood. I kept busy at my desk. The kids got a dose of reality, seeing their clubhouse demolished. They also got arrested for disturbing the peace when they tried to block the wrecking ball with their frail, little bodies!

Not my problem.

Hasta la vista, baby!

When I’m dealing with The Man, I remind myself that once upon a time, I pretty much was The Man. People didn’t say “no” to me. Unlike today.

*

            I am just using the restroom at O’Day’s, but as I come back out into the sunlight, I can’t help but see the brunette hostess crouched behind her wooden podium between the sidewalk tables. She’s getting reamed out by a five-foot blond tornado. “Ah jus’ wanna borrow yo’ phone!” rants the customer. “I wanna cahl mah boyfriend!”

“And we don’t have a phone to loan you,” retorts the hostess, rolling her eyes and audibly sighing. I’m all for the hostess, she showed me the way to the men’s room without batting an eye.

I’m dressed in tan cargo shorts, brown leather sandals and a Les Tomkins charcoal tee. In the movie Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise knows something is wrong when he doesn’t see a single solitary soul on the streets of Manhattan. Anywhere you go, there’s always somebody. Surrounded by people, I’m lonely as a stick. You know New York. All those people, but they don’t return your calls.

“Y’ALL LOAN ME YO’ PHONE!” drawls the blonde, not giving an inch.

“I have a phone,” I intercede, proffering my cell phone.

“Thenk yew,” she simpers. Face to face, I can’t miss how cute she is: Her piercing blue eyes, her pointy nose, high cheekbones, rosebud mouth and round, little chin. “Y’all are too kind.”

“What kind of accent…?”

She’s wearing what we used to call “culottes,” a cross between a dress and shorts, a divided skirt with a pocket on each hip. Navy blue. My cell phone disappears into her left-hand pocket. “Ah’m from A-la-bama,” she drawls. Wrinkling her nose, she bursts out laughing. As she moseys down the sidewalk with my cell phone, she doesn’t so much walk as sashay, swinging fulsomely. She has a tight little ass to die for. Curvaceous legs. Dainty feet in cheap leather sandals. She’d look sporty if she wasn’t so damn sexy. She’s a cracker. Trailer trash. “C’n we fahnd an outdoor café an’ git a cold drink?” she suggests, flirting.

We just left an outdoor café, I’m thinking. Anyway, in The Village, you find a place on every block.

We get a table. Her name is Maggie. “Do you work?” she asks, peering at me mysteriously over the rim of her water glass with her enormous blue eyes.

“Of course,” I hear my rather pompous reply. I find myself trying to explain what I do: “I’m a commodities negotiator. Only I’m not working, y’know, today.”

“That’s good because I’m not working today either!” she declares forthrightly.

“Oh. Splendid. What do you do?” I ask, faux Hugh Grant.

“What do you mean?” she demands, filled with suspicion.

“Do you work?”

“No. I just said. I’m  not working,” she complains, making me feel like an idiot. “I’m into agenda-driven advocacy.”

“Really?” I ask, impressed. “What’s your agenda?”

“Shopping.”

Consumer protection? “What do you advocate?”

“More shopping for everybody!… You look hot,” she decides. Wrinkling her nose and cackling like a witch, she douses me across the table with an entire glass of ice water. I look down at my soggy, half-eaten sandwich. Jesus Christ! As Orson Welles said, “Women are another race… You can only win by being the cool center of their being.” Orson, does ice water count? If Maggie didn’t have my cell phone, I would leave. But I don’t want to seem rude.

We go shopping among the street vendors. Mostly Jamaican Rastafaris, their wares are spread out on blankets. Which they can easily roll up and make a run for it if The Man come around.  “Ah wan’ this blouse,” Maggie comments in the tiniest voice imaginable. A white peasant blouse with red embroidery, I hold it up in front of her.

The Rasta gives me a toothy smile. “She looka dynamite, mon !”

I check the label. “French smock. Made in Haiti. 35% recycled material, 15% polyester, 50% cellulose.”

“They have it at Macy’s,” Maggie assures me, “but the price is much better here.”

“I would hope so!” I reply, Kevin the supporter of free enterprise among street vendors.

“I need some money,” Maggie whines, flexing the fingers of her left hand under my nose. I crank out my wallet and peel her some bills. Watch her make purchases. Even the plastic bag the Jamaican offers us is what we euphemistically call “previously owned.” I tuck it under my arm, the first of many bundles.

“This is so much fun! I’m fun to be with!” Maggie assures me outrageously.

I look at her, about to protest, when she marches up to me, widening her eyes, staring into my soul.

Yikes!

“I’m. Fun. To. Be. With!” she repeats.

Jesus! Yes, she is!!! — “Jesus! Yes! Please! Maggie!” I gulp.

“Don’t take the Lord our God’s name in vain!” she instructs, playfully thumping me on the chin with her index finger.

“You are! You’re so much fun to be with!” I stammer.

“Good!” she shouts, waddling off down the pavement like a duck. With me in tow.

Blond hair, blue eyes and a cute face do that to me. Rounding a corner, Maggie stops, turns and tells me, “I also like the way your pecker is tearing a hole in your shorts!” Followed by gales of merry laughter. She thumps me on the chin.

I feel my heart lurch. I find myself falling seriously in love with this vixen. It’s been awhile.

Well, I was feeling unappreciated. Maggie may have the mentality of a 14-year-old, but she appreciates me! My single gun theory is that capable people are busy creating and don’t have time to hang out, while wastrels have all the time in the world and never accomplish a damn thing! I would retrieve my cell phone and walk away, but this business of Maggie drumming on my chin with her hot little finger is rapidly becoming addictive! I once recorded sound for a film crew from Channel 4. Behold! The wailing of police sirens is the sweet, melodic background to our daily lives. Even amidst the 70 decibel hum of street life, Maggie’s peals of happy laughter fill my head. She also has that cute little Irish milkmaid face and a stacked bod. Looking at her, I don’t exactly swell with pride. The swelling takes place lower than that.

Yes, she’s fun, but it also feels like the afternoon will never end. “When do you call Ricky, this boyfriend of yours?”

“Oh-h-h,” she coos. Waving both hands in my face, she thumps my chin. “He’s out of town until Friday.”

Now. Wait. A. Minute.

She kind of tinkles, arching her eyebrows. Blue eyes flashing.

I’ll do anything for her, I suddenly realize, a dead weight in my stomach. Time to skedaddle, ace!

Then she thumps me on my chinny chin chin. “Let’s go to your a-part-ment,” she whines, giggling.

This, my friends, is how I find myself saddled with a new roommate. Summer in the city. Don’t talk to strangers. Forget “free,” the best things in life are extremely cumbersome and excessively expensive.

Django and His Street Musicians are serenading the traffic circle. He sings:

“Summer haze goin’ in my mind,

I don’t know if I’m feelin’ fine.”

            Join the club!

*

            Coming out of the bathroom at 3 a.m., I find Maggie trying to bean me with a sand wedge. “Jesus! ” I swear, disarming her.

“Ah thought yo’ were an intruder,” she whimpers. Her arms encircle my neck as she stands on tiptoe and makes amends with a French kiss that goes on and on. By the time she’s done, we know a lot about the inside of one another’s mouth. She smells heavenly, a mix of talcum powder and Dove hand lotion. I’m instantly erect.

Pressing against me, she holds herself aloof. Her body language clearly telegraphs, “Fuggedaboutit ! No way, José!”

I disengage and crawl back into bed. It’s at moments like this, I consider investing in air conditioning.

*

            “Can’t we go outside and track down some dope?” Maggie asks me next morning at the breakfast table.

“I don’t do dope.”

“Oh, I don’t either,” she assures me in a little girl voice. “But can’t we go out and track some down?” Standing over me, she drums on my chin with three fingers, playing me like a bongo, huge blue eyes staring into mine.

“I. Don’t. Do. Dope.”

“Let’s go,” she says, collecting her shiny new purse and Louis Vuitton knock-off clutch.

So I take her to Marquand, who I know is at least reliable. “Wha’ kinda heaven you want?” he growls genially, standing in his kitchen. He’s six feet tall with a massive African cranium covered by a fuzz of black hair, razor cut. Wearing baggy chinos and a green halter top, hands the size of hams, he flexes his spatulated fingers, a white moon adjacent to each nail. “No more cane on the Brazos.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“Skype down, I ain’t heard nothin’ from Soweto.”

“I’m sorry to hear it!” I tell him. I’ve met a half dozen of his brothers and sisters, roasting lamb over an open pit on Staten Island. “Put in your order, honey,” I coax Maggie, who’s standing, looking at Marquand with her mouth hanging open.

“Wha’ yo’ wan’, lady?” he asks.

“I want you! ” she squeals, all but salivating.

“Hey now, wha’ kinda mahket you think I runnin’ here?” Marquand asks us, chitlins and guava resting uneaten on a white porcelain plate on his simple blue kitchen table. “I ain’ no gigolo!”

“Maggie, he’s a very good friend of mine,” I interrupt, once again the negotiator. “If you would like an illegal substance, Marquand will facilitate the purchase,” I mansplain. “Otherwise, that’s all she wrote.”

“Who wrote?” croaks Maggie, glancing at me suspiciously.

“Don’t be so literal! What’s your poison?”

“Does he have… Do you have any grass?”

“Sure!” says M. Opening a wooden drawer, he proceeds to line up little plastic bags on the table, listing the merchandise. We make our purchase. I thank him, stuff some bills into his giant hand and get us the hell out of there.

Maggie sits on my fire escape, rolling joints. “Don’t you want any of this?!” she calls innocently. When I join her, she hoses me down with her blue-eyed stare. Southern belles! “I don’t wanna toke alone!” she breathes, lighting up.

So I end up doing something I never do, getting totally wasted on high-grade marijuana. And, of course, once we’re whacked, we go through the whole munchies, climb in bed, sweat in the heat, unable to move, roaring with laughter experience. I want to peel off her clothes and cannot even lift my arms. I want to peel off my clothes, ditto. S.N.A.F.U., dear hearts!

“Ricky has substance abuse issues,” Maggie tells me.

“That’s terrible. Is he doing something about it?”

“Yes.”

Long pause. Hello-o?! “What’s he doing?” I ask.

“I told you. He’s abusing substances.”

Aha! Like… been there, done that.

“I’m fun to be with,” Maggie drawls.

“Yeah, so you keep telling me.”

“Say it! Say I’m fun to be with. Say it like yo’ mean it!”

“You are fun to be with.”

She props herself up on one elbow amid the bedclothes and eyes me critically. “Da-amn!” she smirks, thumping me on the chin. “Ah think yah in love with meh!” Guffawing uproariously, she reaches down to feel my boner. My shorts stand as erect as a circus tent. “Say it! Say you love me!”

“I… love… you!” I gasp, miserable.

Unplanned, unmanageable, this train wreck of a relationship has nowhere to go but down.

“C’mere, Honey Bear!” she giggles, rousing herself sufficiently to navigate the button and the zipper on my cargo shorts. Her fingers play up and down my penis like it’s a flute.

I lie on my back, inert, glutted, trails of sweat running onto the sheets. It’s gonna be a bad night.

*

            “This is Luis at the front desk. We got a situation. There’s a dude out front who says he know you. He look pretty bad hombre. I tell him go away, but I afraid he gonna breaka the plate glass window.”

“You want me to come down?”

“I no bother you, Mr. Feingold, but I see you with that woman. This dude, him looka more o’ the same.”

“I’ll be right down.”

So I finally get to meet Ricky. He’s a redneckognizable type. It’s not just the worn tan boots, stonewashed jeans and Texas oilman shirt, even his face sports an ornery expression. “Hello!” I say. We ride up in the elevator.

“So you been screwing my lady!” Ricky surmises, squinting like Clint Eastwood.

“It never happened, Ricky. Frankly, I don’t know which buttons you push. You guys are in your 30’s. I’m way older. I never got so much as a handjob.”

“But you wanted it!” he yelps.

“Wouldn’t you be insulted if I didn’t?”

By the time he figures that one out, we’re inside the apartment. Maggie throws herself into his arms. “Honey-ey-ey!” she squeals. Very touching.

Over coffee, I ask, “Where you been?”

“This some sort of federal investigation?” he sneers.

“So don’t tell me! I’m just makin’ conversation.”

“Y’know Macon, Georgia?”

“Sure!”

“Near Macon. It was a retreat.”

“A religious retreat?”

“Naw. Political.”

Huh? Ricky doesn’t seem the type for Young Republicans.  “Political? ”

“You makin’ fun of me?!”

“Cool down!”

“Yeah,” Maggie agrees, plopping herself in his lap. “Cool it, Sugar Bear!”

“Ever heard of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?”

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” I bitch. “Grow up, Ricky! You’re like a first-year college student who reads Marxism for the first time and wants to institute Communism world-wide. A few years later, he realizes that you cannot legislate against greed, corruption and inequality. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a bogus piece of bull written by the Czarist Secret Police in Russia in 1905. It’s been rattling around ever since, stirring people to irrational hatred.”

“The Jews control Wall Street and the lamestream media!” Ricky insists.

“If you don’t like Jews, what are you doing in New York?!”

“They’re everywhere! Even in China, there are Jews!”

“Yes! Right at the bottom of Chinese society!”

“All I’m sayin’ is, our time will come!” rants Ricky, a newly anointed  convert to White Supremacist ideology. “Like… like now that that Jew Zimmerman killed that nigger Trayvon, it’s open season!”

“Calm down, Ricky!” Maggie implores him, massaging the bump on the back of his scrawny head. “My great big stud muffin!”

Where to begin? I sigh. “Zimmerman is Hispanic, not Jewish. From his viewpoint, he killed the black youth in self-defense. He certainly wasn’t declaring open season on anyone, and you shouldn’t either!”

Ricky’s mumbled reply is inaudible. He and Maggie gather together her possessions. “Where did all this stuff come from?” Ricky asks, a twang of anger in his voice. I’m helping Maggie press it all down into a large pink suitcase.

“Kevin’s been an absolute angel,” Maggie replies, looking scared. “He knows how much I love shopping, Ricky. We never did anything! I just slept over and cooked. We never did anything.”

I could tell him, “I took one on the chin for Maggie,” but he doesn’t look like he’d be amused.

And just like that, they’re gone. No “Hasta la vista, baby!” No nothin’.

My Lonelyboy summer in Gotham.

 

*

A Patriotic Short

 

            Oops! I am so devastated to see my screenwriting career splattered against the windshield of reality. I would go on America’s Got Talent, but what are Harold Stern & Friends going to watch me do? Type? Call Dr. Phil! Intervention time. I need help. This cannot go on!

To: Silvia Plarsch, World Wide Pictures

Subject: Film for release December 2014

Title: “Go!”

This is an American adaption of an original Swedish screenplay. Stylistically, think Ingmar Bergman: black & white cinematography, heavy acting, pregnant pauses, sudden gusts of dramatic music.

Suggested Cast

Bernard: Robert De Niro

Greg: Greg Kinnear

Roger: Jake Gyllenhaal

Suzanne: Kirsten Dunst

Smooth J, the black dude: Chris Rock

Melvin: Tom Cruise

Alicia: Sigourney Weaver

Officer O’Malley, the cop: Harvey Keitel

Wolfgang Petersen directs.

The plot: Bernard (cameo by Robert De Niro) is in the hospital with a stomach ulcer. His friend Greg (Greg Kinnear) promises to look after his apartment, pay the rent, etc. Action follows Greg as he walks the streets of summer New York, meeting exotic characters: Street musicians, street people, Wall Street suits hailing taxis, hustlers, runaways, drug addicts, pimps. The proverbial voyeur, everything impresses Greg. If you burp dramatically, he’s on it in a second, recapping the event in excruciating detail.

            Meanwhile, at the group house where Greg lives, Roger (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in the kitchen enthusing aloud over synthesizers advertised in music mags. Z-Z-Zap! A space monster, suspiciously like Predator, rayguns him into a greasy smudge. The monster raids the china closet, eating crystal beakers and wineglasses by inserting them directly into its stomach. Crunch, crunch! Exit space monster.

            Roger’s housemates come home and complain about the odor of burning rubber, while slipping and sliding on his greasy remains.

            Bernard gets out of the hospital to find he’s been evicted, all his plants have died, his dog starved to death.

            The End.

It’s got legs. I think you should greenlight it. I’ll get to work on dialogue.

Sincerely, Kevin Feingold

*

The Swedish Hunt For bin Laden

 

Exclusive!!!

            HBO came out with a documentary on May 1, 2013, entitled “Manhunt,” about the CIA’s process of tracking and analyzing the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. This was the biggest manhunt in U.S. history. Prior to chasing WikiLeaks’ Edward J. Snowden to Ecuador via Moscow, of course. Watching the HBO documentary, I kept waiting for them to bring up the Swedish angle. I assume everyone is somewhat familiar with it. At least the broad strokes. For me, it’s personal— the three Swedish dudes operating as researchers/security analysts searching for bin Laden are my friends! I know these guys. Publishing their story, I too can now share in the limelight, even if only vicariously.

Björn, Ronnie and Hans were college bros of mine during my Junior Year Abroad at the University of Uppsala. On Friday and Saturday nights, we used to frequent Norrlands Nation, a three-story student club. There was a bar on every floor. We got thoroughly plowed. The basement was a dark, sweaty, cavernous disco, Billy Idol blasting from the loudspeakers. No talking down there. You couldn’t hear yourself think, but you could dance your ass off, face to face with pretty, blond Swedish girls.

Eventually, I returned Stateside, graduating from infamous Moosegrave College. I made the U.S. Army my career. “The boys” stayed in touch— by mail back during the Stone Age, nowadays via the Internet. Ronnie became a banker, Hans went into advertising and Björn, bless his jaded soul, settled on a bogus security system. His company is called Biff à la Lindström Security AB. I say “bogus” because the ostentatious cameras mounted on heavy black metal brackets in the corner by the ceiling of sales floors, offices and automobile showrooms all over Sweden may pivot and turn like an “eye in the sky,” but the black coaxial cable snaking into a hole in the wall isn’t attached to a damn thing. While providing a heady, ready deterrent (I grant you), if a robbery occurs, there’s absolutely no backup. None. Nada. Nothing.

B.A.L. Lindström Security AB‘s rates are correspondingly low. It’s a service for shop owners who want to go through the motions, but can’t be bothered to fast forward through 12 hours of video twice a day. I know the feeling. I worked security on an Army base in Alaska. I spent the first half hour of every morning staring at a TV monitor divided into four quadrants, showing the previous night’s activity at different locations: the front gate, the motor pool, the base storage depot and the armory.

At this point, I am handing Skype over to Björn in Stockholm, Sweden. Any errors in translation are mine.

Björn: “The prevailing theory in 2009 was that the U.S. Government had Osama bin Laden hidden away at a black site in Poland, adjacent to the Szymany Airport. If the 2012 election looked dicey, two weeks before election day, President Obama could spring Osama out of the box and declare a major coup. This would guarantee Barack Hussein Obama’s reelection. Nifty. Neat. (Häftigt! Snyggt!)

“The Poles participated in the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq under George W. Bush. Always strapped for cash, they were more than ready to rent space to the CIA. Even for black ops. Cash, cash! When the black site in Poland became exposed— and no Osama bin Laden— it was time for the rest of us to look elsewhere.

“Ronnie, Hans and I formed a security unit, each using whatever means were at our disposal. Codename: TV Dinner. We knew right away that our findings were going to stand the intelligence community on its ear. We were 10 years ahead of everyone else, combining intelligence analysis with special operations, Google Earth, extra sensory perception, astrology, est, an 1854 treasure map of the Caribbean, tarot card reading, tea leaf prediction, the Mark A. Hammer seed catalog, Scientology, S.E.T.I. and holy cosmic jive! Also, we knew certain pertinent details about our target not necessarily available to other intelligence services such as the CIA, MI6 and Mossad: Although the terrorist leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden is the scion of a rich Saudi Arabian family. Before he aged, he looked like a young Cat Stevens. He was a handsome devil! Focusing on revenge, death, martyrdom, drapery-style apparel, chic weaponry, one-upmanship and jihad, in his videos, bin Laden often grimaces like Jay Leno. Osama has many brothers and sisters.

“Ronnie and I began by trolling the Internet. Although a Google search revealed 37,485,237 possible links, after a lo-o-ong weekend, we concluded that none of them actually contained Osama bin Laden’s address. What to do? Ronnie canvassed the banking sector for leads. Hans asked around in the P.R. industry. I treated coworkers in the security field to tax-deductible lunches and dinners, but without success. Nobody knew nothin’. Undaunted, we persevered. Nobody ever worked as hard as us! We read every back issue of al-Qaeda’s online magazine Inspire. We ran up a $20,000 phone bill, calling the world over to people with Muslim-sounding surnames, asking ‘Has anybody seen Osama bin Laden?! I need to give him a letter from his sister.’

“No takers.

“Osama – Obama. There are no coincidences in life, only clues. Barack Hussein Obama said at a campaign rally in 2008 that he spent a summer in his youth visiting a friend in Pakistan. Was that ‘friend’ Osama bin Laden, perchance?!

“I spent the entire summer of 2010 on the beach in Gotland, eating vegetarian, studying the Koran, and developing an alternative lifestyle.

“I attempted to have sex with 72 virgins, so as to experience what the martyrs can look forward to in Paradise. I licked lingon berries off their breasts. Every tourist visits Visby. I impregnated several Portuguese lasses, to help counter their country’s plummeting birthrate.

‘What do I see,

what do I care?

Virgins, virgins

everywhere!’

            “I quit after 32 encounters, but I got the general drift.

“I read the Kama Sutra. I analyzed the lyrics of Matisyahu’s ‘King Without A Crown,’ searching for subliminal meanings. I traveled to Norrland and, despite the mosquitos, I ate reindeer meat and cleansed myself in the Gulf of Bothnia. I climbed Thunder Mountain in Gällivare. I looked around me the full 360°, north, east, south and west. No Osama bin Laden. Someone thought they had seen him at the disco in Malmberget. We went there for some pints. No bin Laden. Twenty-four years after the Chernobyl atomic reactor meltdown, I was still monitoring radiation levels in the North Country’s beer. Clue: High rad levels make your tonsils tingle.

“Moose rifles at the ready, my hired guides and I approached the old Czarist hunting lodge in Aavasaksa just over the border in Finland. ‘Åkej, bin Lahtis, nu har vi dig! ‘ (Okay, bin Laden, we’ve got you!)’ I shouted, unlocking the door with the brass key provided by the Finnish authorities. Owls in the rafters, bats in the loft, mice in the larder, lots of old, yellowed newspapers, but no bin Laden.

“It would have been a gas, though, to find Osama bin Laden hiding in Jukkasjärvi or Korpilombolo in Swedish Norrland! Hey, stranger things have happened.

“Ronnie, Hans and I waged war in cyberspace, creating the website jihadi_surfer.org. Birds of a feather flock together, we felt this was a brilliant way to gain immediate street cred. And we would have thoroughly infiltrated al-Qaeda, too, if Dutch and German schoolboys hadn’t hacked our site and hijacked it to spread a mess of spam! Dietary supplements. Chinese watches. Danish porno mags. Used Danish porno mags!

“If Ronnie and Hans were analysts, I functioned as our operational boots on the ground. You could never in a thousand years be as brave as me! I am the personification of the Cold Warrior. Toward the end of September 2010, I got my ass shot off looking around in Chechnya… without finding Osama.

“Returning to Sweden, I took lessons and learned enough Arab cuss words to get by, even if Saudis think I’m a Libyan day laborer. Saudis are Wahhabi Muslims, which can be pretty extreme. They whip prostitutes and chop off the hands of thieves. Saudis have no respect for human rights. Also, they hate my accent. Kuwaitis mistake me for a Palestinian smuggler from Rafah in Gaza. Egyptians assume I have a speech impediment. The Sudanese class me as a low-life Yemeni. What can I say? It’s always nice to be liked! The Israelis aren’t fooled for a minute. ‘If you’re Swedish,’ they ask, ‘why speak Arabic?!’

“Swedes spend $500 million a year on candy, soda and ice cream. I propose that we give that money to the Palestinians. Economically independent of Israel, they would then be able to declare statehood. This would spell the end of all conflict and dissension in the Middle East!

“Credit card in hand, staying at 3- and 4- and 5-star hotels, I traveled North Africa, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. I wore Giorgio Armani. I presented myself as an international financier, ‘Björn of Arabia.’ I played tennis, swam in the hotel pools, rode camels and smoked hashish. Yes, yes. Everywhere I went, I asked ‘Have you seen Osama bin Laden?’ I asked taxi drivers. Hotel clerks. Waiters in restaurants.

“I asked Alawites, Shiites, Sunnis, Sufis and Salafists. I interested myself in any Muslim extremists whose designation begins with the letter ‘s’. Some very shady characters sold me a bill of goods. A favorite technique was to lure me to some clandestine meeting and then demand big money to win my release. Interpol complained that I was a pain in the neck and should ‘Cease and desist.’ Obviously, they were envious of my progress. They wanted to find bin Laden first and gain both fame and fortune. Typical bureaucrats!

“Before you judge us too harshly, remember what the iPod makers at Apple say: ‘There are a thousand “no’s” for every “yes.” ‘ Nabbing bin Laden was like locating a parking space— you only need the one! Let the Americans have the rest of al-Qaeda’s leadership. We wanted to pluck the cherry off the top of the proverbial layer cake.

“Sometimes I feel like the Mount of County Crisco. Accompanied by my very own personal majordomo from the Peking government, as well as a military caravan and a photographer from National Geographic, I journeyed to China’s far northwestern province of Xinjiang and conferred with the Uigurs. They are Muslims, a true minority in Confucian, Taoist China. Consulting  a shamen, they thought they knew where Osama bin Laden might be hiding. ‘Could be Dubai,’ they said. ‘Hard to say.’

” ‘So you’re not sure?’ I asked.

” ‘We sure. But the name Dubai is hard to say.’

“At the airport in Dubai, I bought a duty-free Canon EOS Rebel T3 with an 18-55 mm IS lens. I also got an organic facial in the day spa. I listed the camera on my expense account as ‘Surveillance equipment for documenting Osama bin Laden in his lair.’ I ate in the best airport restaurant, but they didn’t know bin Laden’s whereabouts, either. Imagine! A top Zagat rating, a dessert list as long as your arm, but no Osama.

“In Egypt, on a tip from the taxi driver taking me into Cairo from the airfield, I spent three days smoking hookahs at Cairo coffee houses, waiting for a contact named ‘Charlie.’ He was a no-show.

“Acquiring a loan from Bank Leumi in Tel Aviv, I got several vaccinations and flew to Kabul. Hailing a cab to the presidential palace, I demanded an interview with Hamid Karzai. I’m a Swede. We’re known for our international diplomacy. I belong to The Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society. Sweden hasn’t had a war in over 150 years! Karzai’s a little touchy. (Han är en jävla typ.) His palace guard arrested me, drove me to the airport in handcuffs, threw me on a plane and said ‘Don’t ever come back!’ Those weren’t members of The Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society!

“In Pakistan, I prayed for President Obama, missing the Muslim holiday Shab-e-Barat, the holy night of fortune, by about six months. Reciting verses from the Koran, I sought Allah’s blessing for this fellow convert to Islam.

“The one time I got to America, living on Hostess Twinkies, I was so busy holding secret meetings with Tea Party opponents and aficionados, I had to scramble to watch ‘Mad Men.’ People came from as far west as Minnesota to meet me. Especially when I brought personal greetings from their cousins in the Old Country (i Svedala). They weren’t even necessarily Swedish. Many were Yugoslavs, Kurds or Assyrians. I also met former members of the alternative pop band FGAY! (‘Feel Good About Yourself!’).

“The French actually nabbed the number 32 man in bin Laden’s organization at Orly Airport in December 2010. I was hanging out in a bar of the international departure lounge with my very blond Swedish girlfriend Yvonne when a mighty buzz went through the crowd. ‘They’ve captured a terrorist! They’ve captured a member of al-Qaeda!’

“I sicced Yvonne on the Head of Security and for 1,000 euros in cash, on the spot, I was allowed to occupy the same, bare detention room as the Yemeni suspect Ammar Al-Salahat. The two French security gorillas accompanying us were huge, muscular hulks with faces like granite. It felt stuffy and oppressive sitting around a table in the tiny room. The air positively stank of Gauloises. Yvonne was busy elsewhere, flirting with the security chief in his office. I had 20 minutes until Interpol arrived from Paris. Offering my cellophane-wrapped cheese sandwich, I watched as Al-Salahat wolfed that down. We both drank café au lait.

“The following excerpt has never been released to the public.

Me: These idiots think you are somebody.

A A-S: I am somebody! I have a name. I own a passport. If you cut me, do I not bleed? (laughs)

Me: Aha! An educated terrorist.

A A-S: Thanks for the sandwich.

Me: You speak good English.

A A-S: I matriculated from secondary school in Sana’a. We Yemeni aren’t savages.

Me: I like the music of Ofra Haza.

A A-S: Too cultured. I prefer Ana Ma-Agdar.

Me: Are you affiliated with al-Qaeda?

A A-S: What a question! Guard, could we get more coffee? It is excellent!

Me: What do you think of Osama bin Laden?

A A-S: A busy bureaucrat.

Me: The gendarmes are zip-lining over here to sweat you. I’m a sympathetic Swedish internationalist. Maybe you’d better tell me something, so your people will get wind of where you are, when I leak this conversation.

A A-S: (long, silent deliberation) I am al-Qaeda’s Minister of the Navy in Afghanistan.

Me: Excellent!… Um… Isn’t Afghanistan kind of landlocked?

A A-S: The movement has many uses for us fighters. I, for one, scraped barnacles off the speedboat in Yemen which was used to strike a blow of almighty vengeance against the infidels aboard the U.S.S. Cole. I purchased the copper wire used to make the explosive charge. I made tea for the martyr who steered the speedboat and carried out the divine attack of retribution. When I arrived in Afghanistan, the al-Qaeda leadership felt these maritime activities qualified me to be Minister of the Navy in Afghanistan. I wanted a larger venue, but they said if I apported myself well in Afghanistan, other assignments would come later.

Me: I guess they have, considering you are here at Orly in France…?

A A-S: (silently raises eyebrows and smiles)

“After half a year, Ronnie, Hans and I drew the only logical conclusion. Osama bin Laden was dead! We notified the CIA of this thesis on February 3, 2011. A Thursday. There’s a six-hour time difference between Stockholm and Washington, D.C. Our 68,723 word report— while unsolicited— contained full documentation of our procedures, discoveries, frustrations and, of course, expenditures.

“Anyone accusing us of prostituting ourselves, of ‘selling out to the man,’ doesn’t know what they’re talking about. We received not one red pfennig from the U.S. Government. To our chagrin. Life is like a PGA golf tournament: If you don’t score among the top five, no one pays you any attention.

“No America, negotiations are underway with the government of Ecuador. Cuba – al-Qaeda – Ecuador. My friend’s friend is my friend. My friend’s enemy is my enemy. My enemy’s friend is my enemy. My enemy’s enemy is my friend. Sea anemone.

“Although not specifically applicable to the hunt for bin Laden, our data remains highly useful in a wide range of applications. We discovered, for example, that Sweden has a rocket launching site in Kiruna. Called the Esrange, it is capable of sending aloft orbital satellites. You would think the Americans— and/or Google maps— would be grateful for this intel.

“So where’s the money, honey?

(Translator’s note: Hint, hint!)

“I know that our purchase of a Maserati looks like a typical case of padding our expense account, but we got a really good deal on it and— who knows?— if he was alive and kicking, we might have spotted bin Laden from the front seat of our Maserati. Why not? Sweden’s a notoriously neutral country. Ever since World War Two, people seeking political asylum have looked to Sweden as a refuge. Dependent on heating oil every winter, the Swedes invariably side with the Palestinians and the Arabs. Anyone who faces persecution in their homeland is welcome to mop floors in Sweden. I know Osama was unhappy to be numéro uno on America’s hit list. You don’t need to be a genius to figure that out! Talk about claustrophobic, the dude couldn’t even send text messages! His Facebook page was a blank.

“In an effort to widen our net to its widest, we merged our business model with Sofia Soft Data, a hacker cell in Bulgaria. I’m not ashamed to admit that 98% of the hard intelligence we listed in our report came directly from them. As a western company, we could be paid in dollars and pass this money on to the Bulgarians via off-shore accounts in the Black Sea, along the coast opposite Varna. Listen! Everything is set up, the only missing ingredient is the cash!

(Translator’s note: Hint, hint!)

“The events of May 1, 2011 totally vindicated Ronnie, Hans and me!!! Actions speak so much louder than words. College students gathered at the White House fence in the middle of the night, waving American flags and chanting ‘Obama, Obama, you finally killed Osama!’ The President of the United States of America stood in the East Wing of the White House, claiming victory: ‘… the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda… Justice has been done.’ He was blowing smoke. Listen, I wasn’t born in a barn! I can tell the difference between Jay-Z and J-Lo. We know the truth! Osama bin Laden had already died, as we reported, in February of 2011! His bleached bones lay desecrating some lonely hillside in Tora Bora in Afghanistan. His ashes lay stuffed into an urn inside some Afghan cave, pictographs decorating the walls. We know this for a fact!

“Did Seal Team Six produce a body? No-o-o! Instead, they gave us an old wives’ tale about Osama bin Laden’s ‘burial at sea’! I don’t care how beautiful a funeral is. Someone always dies. If the hunt for bin Laden has taught me anything, it is that we should celebrate life, not death. The only kind of closure I want is the flap on a pay envelope!

“No body? Oh, really? Did the Seal team at least produce photographs? No-o-o! Instead, they came up with the hopelessly clumsy excuse that the images were ‘too graphic to be released.’ Pul-lease! Who’s kidding who?

” ‘Killed Osama bin Laden, killed Osama bin Laden.’ Name three other things your blabbermouth president has accomplished during his presidency. Duh! Don’t stay up all night! At least I wasn’t afraid to be seen in Kenya conferring with Uhuru Kenyatta… when I found myself in a jam over a certain little sexcapade. America’s birther movement says ‘Boo!’ and Barack Obama is afraid to show his face in Kenya! Clueless! Hillary Clinton even had to get the Secret Service to pull Barack Obama off the golf course to witness the attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. Talk about being outside the loop!

“Listen! The true story has yet to be written, awaiting the proper monetary incentive. Magazines, literary agents and book publishers— enquiries are welcome! Contact me: Björn@ashleyjudds_ jugs.com.”

Dance American (Extended 12″ version)

 

            I work for a 35-year-old lady mover and shaker in New York City named Mandy. She wants to see her cousin Stuart, his wife and his kids in southern New Jersey over the weekend. On Saturday, we drive down the Garden State Parkway. This is also the weekend of tropical storm Andrea. Days of sun interspersed with torrential rain. Eight inches of skyfall. Friday and Monday, flood warnings are in effect on the eastern seaboard from Florida to Maine. Crank out the ark! Thanks to global warming, monsoons are the New Normal. We get caught behind a Schmidt Baking Company truck. “Pretty Schmidty weather!” comments Mandy.

We arrive at the Rosenthal’s bucolic cul-de-sac in a fresh-faced suburban development. Cousin Stu comes out to greet us. Think Billy Bob Thornton in black motorcycle boots and leathers. His wife Jenny, orange hair, looks like Cyndi Lauper.

“We got tickets to our daughter Rihanna’s modern dance recital,” Stu tells us, flashing the tickets and instructing me where to park. Eventually, a white, shiny 28-foot stretch limo pulls up. The black driver behind the wheel has a shaved noggin and the shoulders of a linebacker. Hmmm. We’re riding to a 7-year-old’s dance recital in a stretch limo?

We sit in the back, chugging a light, refreshing Polish ale called Tyskie. In brown bottles. Puttin’ on a buzz. The television, in a teak cabinet over the bar, features an infomercial suggesting what cosmetic surgery—”For both men and women!”— we should use to “feel better about yourself.” How about doing some hard work? A feeling of accomplishment might make people “feel better” about themselves. I grind my teeth in frustration. I feel like I’m on “iCarly.” Some people bring out the best in me. I’m not so sure ’bout this crew.

What does Jenny say? “Oh, I’m so sorry we haven’t had time to see you, Mandy. Stuart and I were, of course, in France. Then on to Italy— and the alps— where we skied. The casino in Monaco was exciting. We used our winnings to visit Hong Kong. Busy is as busy does, dear.”

To quote Marcus Aurelius, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”

She goes right on nattering: “You realize, of course, that it was at the 1972 Munich Olympics that Sweden’s King Carl Gustaf met his prospective bride Sylvia Vrethammar. Eleven Israeli athletes were held hostage and then murdered by Palestinian terrorists. While Carl Gustaf was busy flirting with an Olympic hostess. He later married her and she became Queen of Sweden. The King’s courtiers had great difficulty teaching her Swedish.”

I am lost for words.

“Is Samantha Power good for the Jews? Do we really want an American Ambassador to the United Nations who would pit the U.S. Army against the Israel Defense Forces to protect the Palestinians? What would Jesus do? Why did Condoleezza Rice’s little sister Susan become the new national security advisor? Nu, couldn’t they find anybody else?

“Was it Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey who died of eclampsia?  Sometimes I think that’s me in a nutshell. Douse me with Valium, people! I’m already on three anti-depressants.”

Stu hands me a 24 oz. jar of Marky Ramone’s Marinara Pasta Sauce™.

“What’s this?”

“It came with the tickets. ‘A free gift with every purchase.’ “

Ingredients: Imported Italian Plum Tomatoes, Olive Oil, Onions, Tomato Puree, Salt, Garlic, Basil, Black Peppers, Oregano. Drums not included.

I wanna be sedated.

“Why,” Stu asks, “is NASA collecting data regarding the phone records of millions of Americans?  ‘Space, the final frontier’ and all that. But phone records?”

“You idiot!” I seethe. “That’s the NSA, the National Security Agency. NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. One flies people to the moon, the other snoops.”

“Oh,” Stu replies doubtfully.

“We now have enough digital storage capacity to archive every telephone conversation on earth,” I explain. “Including phone sex.”

As we pass a golf course, Stu informs me, “My wife kisses my balls to make my putz go straight.”

Okay-y-y.

            Dividing her time between texting and yakking on her cellphone, Mandy says, “Pam, uptown, reports that everything’s trending light. It could be a consequence of the weather. Don’t worry, things’ll pick up by this afternoon. We live in exciting times! Some periods are more Orwellian than others. PRISM allows the NSA to read everyone’s emails, but who would want to?! The Israelis have developed a crowd-sourced app called Waze for gathering traffic data. It’s a voice navigation system that tracks members’ phones, indicating the flow of traffic. In addition, whenever a driver sees a jam-up, an accident or a road repair, he or she adds it to the mix. This is a very popular service in Israel. Google has purchased it, but now comes the tricky part: European Union officials are terrified that, if implemented, the location of drivers on the roads will fall into the hands of the American NSA. Talk about paranoid! Theoretically, if we use Waze, the NSA could trace the whereabouts of this very limo.”

“Shit!” complains Stu.

Mandy’s my boss and she pays me, but no one ever accused her of having a scintillating personality. “I never thought I was important enough to track,” I joke.

“Oh. I am,” Jenny insists. Presto! Instantly, silence reigns.

            On some forested New Jersey back road, Stu picks up the gray hand mike on its curly black plastic cord, pushes the red button and tells the driver, “There are speed limits in New Jersey, dude!”

The limo pulls to the side of the road. “You insulted the driver,” crackles over the intercom. “Get outta the car.”

“Hey, dude!”

“We ain’t movin’. You a-pol-o-gize,” booms the black man’s voice.

Aristotle told us, “Anyone can become angry— that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way— that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”

“Shit! I just meant— ” Stu stammers into the microphone.

“Yo’ apologizin’?”

“Geez, I’m sorry,” Stu sighs.

“Tha’s better!” says the driver as we get under way again. We continue to a local high school. Lots of people milling around in the sunshine. Talk about crossing a line! There must be 600 people in this crowd, yet I can’t find a black face among us. In fact, the high school is located on a flood plane, flat as a pancake, yet the only black person in sight is our limo driver, arms crossed, wraparound sunglasses, leaning against the side of the car.

It takes awhile for things to get organized. I end up reading the limo driver’s comic book cover to cover: The Amazing Adventures of Supperman! The Gourmet Superhero!

                        “Look! In that restaurant, that diner, that fast food joint.

                        As featured on The Food Network. It’s Supperman! Able

                        to polish off a seven-course din-din at a single sitting.

                        Able to single-handedly gulp down an entire six pack. Able

                        to rise to his feet afterwards! No doggie bag. Supperman!”

We march into the auditorium, where 86 young ladies of varying ages put on 24 dance routines in glittery costumes before the Intermission and another 23 acts afterwards. None of the girls is older than 18. They do jazz dance, ballet, soft shoe and tap. Pedophile heaven! The only things missing are a little pole dancing and some lap dancing. Young girls in stage make-up! Bright red lipstick. Eye liner. Rouge. Sequins sprinkled in their hair. Bumpy little breasts. Round thighs. Curvy, muscular arms and legs. Young bodies writhing rhythmically. Help!!!

And they’re good. Some exhibit a technical proficiency that rates a 10 out of 10. The show-stoppers have not only mastered the technique, they flow with the rhythm. They are music brought to life. Arms and legs gyrating. Torsos swaying and twirling in total immersion. Enormous smiles on their cherry-red lips.

Rowr!

The younger generation lives life at 130 decibels. I tear up facial tissue and stuff it in my ears in lieu of earplugs.

Nor is this the land of the blondes. Brunettes, raven-haired beauties and redheads predominate.

The dance segments have titles like “Hit the Road, Jacques” and “Care of the Eye, I Care” and “Kinky Boots Are made For Walkin’.”  The music doesn’t always match the label, but it’s hard to judge a misnomer, since I don’t know my Broadway musicals.

Even when the entire ensemble takes the stage, some little darlin’ stands out based on sheer physical beauty. Another girlie dances with such abandon, you have to give her extra points for spontaneity. No one, however, is keeping score. The audience consists of proud mommies, daddies, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles. An enthusiastic crowd, we applaud madly after the biggest production numbers, hooting, stamping our feet and whistling. Cranking noise makers. Bellowing. Tooting compressed air bullhorns. Blat! Blat! Tossing empty plastic water bottles into the air. Firing starter pistols. Ka-blam! Waving lit sparklers in the darkened theater, acrid white smoke wafting toward the ceiling. Pummeling one another with plastic hammers. The shrieking grows so intense, you might imagine that Christians are being fed to lions. What a crowd! Such enthusiasm.

The girls’ costumes are right up there with the Broadway stage. In fact, one of the reasons this dance studio has stayed in business over 30 years is location, location, location: Broadway lurks right across the river. These dancers have somewhere to go.

“I’m sorry to put you through all this,” comments Jenny during the Intermission.

“Not at all. I feel like Czar Nicholas II of Russia. With his Fabergé eggs. Where else can I see 4-year-olds dance ballet?”

“My dad believed that ‘Only through suffering can you become great,’ ” Jenny tells me. “So he made us all miserable.”

The wizened geezer sitting next to me, a face full of hair, explains that he moved from NYC to the Jersey Shore. “If I’d known I was going to outlive my savings,” says he, “I would have planned my life very differently. Who knows what Obamacare will do to our Medicare benefits?”

“Well,” I suggest, “Bloomberg News tells us Hillary Clinton is fading in the polls while Chris Christie surges ahead. What do the pollsters expect? Hillary is no longer in the public eye as Secretary of State, while Christie continues to govern New Jersey.”

“Thank God for that!”

Welcome to the Republican State of New Jersey.

Far from being a let-down, the second half features choreography that is ever more complex and compelling. Lots of 60’s rock. “For Your Love” by The Yardbirds. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Little Richard. Dion’s “Teenager in Love.” The Hollywood Argyles singing “Alley Oop.” Even “Dream On, Baby” by Wolfram und der Jetzt. Plus lots of show tunes. When they throw in a techno recording, I feel for the girls. Stripped down to bare beats, the music becomes as challenging to dance to as a metronome. Not a lot of feeling to grab on to there.

The choreography is by Ms. Atomica Barstojani. From Tehran. Microphone in hand, she comes out on stage to take a bow. A portly blonde, she dresses like a suburban housewife. “Thank you!” she breathes. “Huh! What a fruit salad of emotions. We’re not portraying Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, children. The challenge is bringing out the rationality behind the theatrics. Our dancers nailed it!!!”

We give her a thunderous ovation.

Afterwards, in a hallway full of admiring families proffering flowers to high school ballerinas, an older couple try to explain to their granddaughter that “Our dances didn’t shimmy like that!”

The young lady rolls her eyes.

On bridge tables, the staff is selling computer-generated photos of the dance troupe, “Dancing Bear Studio” T-shirts, autographed pillowcases (?!) and more dance-related tjochkes than you can shake a stick at.

“Great costumes,” I gush. “Great production numbers!”

“They should be,” the grandparents assure me. “A hundred thousand dollars in dance lessons, the quality should be top drawer!”

“Is that what it costs?”

“We have no idea, but knowing our daughter, it wouldn’t surprise us,” says Gramps.

Eyeing me crabbily, Grandma asks, “Are you waiting for a bus?” Great standup comedienne.

Update 2: The Uncle from Hell

I am outraged over the events in Boston! If ever I decide to fly an airplane into the World Trade Center of Stockholm, Sweden or blow up the New Boston Mini Mart located halfway between Detroit and Ann Arbor in Michigan, at least I hope to have the support of my aunts and uncles. Ruslan Tsarni, uncle of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, held an impromptu press conference outside his home in Montgomery Village, Maryland days after the event and declared both his nephews “losers.”

Ever helpful, at a memorial service for the MIT police officer slain by the Tsarnaevs, Veep Joe Biden has labeled them “perverted, cowardly knockoff jihadis.” Ouch!

The hospitalized Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is now talking. He tells us that he and his older bro’ Tamerlan became angry with America over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Listen, Dzhokhar, lots of people are! Yet we don’t all go making bombs. Hey, Mr.G-man, there’s more to this than meets the eye! I say, law enforcement should focus on classic detective work à la Sam Spade: Cherchez la femme! What atavistic need to play tonsil hockey with giggling, young, blue-eyed blond American schoolgirls drove these two frustrated, swarthy immigrant boys from Chechnya to attack America in the name of radical Islam? Don’t forget, Marilyn Monroe was an American invention! (My YouTube playlist features pop videos by Lady Gaga, Kerli and Ke$ha, all young, all blond.) Young girls flirt. Rejection hurts. Life is a series of disappointments. Zero in on the Tsarnaev brothers’ lonely frustration.

When confronted by an in-your-face topless Ukrainian women’s rights protester at the Hanover Industrial Fair in Germany, Vladimir Putin didn’t get mad, he got even: Ogling the young lady lasciviously, he told fair officials, “You should be grateful to the girls, they are helping you make the fair more popular.” This is one of the perks of being dictator of Russia. Alas, not all of us can react with such aplomb. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan blew up the Boston Marathon.

Give the boys credit, unlike you or me, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan have left their mark in history. Their names will figure prominently in databases, which is more than you or I can brag about!

Payback is a bitch. Like rock-throwing Palestinians, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar probably saw detonating explosives as a form of personal expression. After all, we do have the First Amendment right to free speech. Following a long, worldwide tradition of anarchist bomb-throwers, their making IEDs and blowing up the Boston Marathon was a way for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar to express themselves. A day after the bombing, Dzhokhar told fellow classmate Zach Bettencourt at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, “Tragedies like this happen all the time.” Two days later, the FBI released photos of the Tsarnaev brothers to the world. Class was over.

You wonder how the brothers could concentrate on making bombs amid the hustle and bustle of modern Bostonian life. It wasn’t easy. Tip: One advantage of the slower tempo in Moombahton dance music (108 beats per minute) is the extra time it gives you to gather your thoughts.

Chechens aren’t like the rest of us: Most come from Chechnya. Despite the pitfalls of generalizing, I’m willing to state that Chechens are an emotional people often prone to violence. Joseph Stalin deported the entire Chechen nation to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in 1944. Although allowed to return home after 1956, between a quarter and half the Chechen population perished. No wonder they have a chip on their shoulders! Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s parents claim from their home in Dagestan that their boys were set up. They cannot believe their progeny would ever commit acts of violence. Of course, the parents no longer live in America, a land of 314 million personal agendas, road rage, the tea party, West Virginia snake handlers, income inequality, vampire films, Draconian state laws still on the books from two centuries ago and the proliferation of megachurches. The Mormon hymnbook ends with The Star-Spangled Banner and God Save the King. Where are Hatikvah and Allahu Akbar?

As always during an economic downturn, partisanship and extremism sound the death knell of civility. Perhaps in the panorama of Sufis, Salafist jihadists and adherents of Salvador Dali, these young men chose one from column A and another from column B. Whatever their nihilistic philosophy, armed struggle prevailed. Free radicals in the body politic can kill.

This is a violent essay in tune with our violent nation. Think of it as military humor, ha ha, laughing in the shambles. Django has been unchained: The NRA blocks any attempt at gun control while the U.S. Senate requires 60% to vote “aye” for any legislation to pass. Our prez is a feckless blabbermouth. When the institutions in power fail to rule, anarchy reigns.

I side with the National Rifle Association’s chief executive Wayne LaPierre: In a country of 314 million people, any attempt to run background checks on all purchasers of backpacks, pressure cookers and fireworks will prove totally unmanageable. Better to put an armed police officer on every street corner. This solution will also eradicate unemployment.

Not.

To the jihadis of the world, I throw down the gauntlet of challenge: Blowing up people and buildings is easy. Anyone can do that! Lets see you hit America where it really hurts. Beat us in golf, ping pong or tennis! Becoming a pro golfer, ping pong or tennis player takes talent, stamina, an iron will, dedication and years of practice. Bomb-making is a short-term walk in the park in comparison. Seriously, show us what you got, sports! Allahu Akbar? Before declaring a worldwide caliphate, at least win gold at the Olympics!

– Kevin Feingold

Dear Tech Support

 

            In the last few days, I have noticed that most of real life appears in  HD  and 3-D. I am very satisfied with the color saturation and detail. In extreme situations, however— like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, standing outside in a hurricane, participating in combat or getting in a violent fistfight— there is a small degree of pixilation. Is this normal or do I need to upgrade my mental equipment?

                                                                                                            – Kevin

Writer’s Cramp

 

            I am 65 years old and I have just published my first novel… as an ebook!

            Anyone who has written a work of fiction—and tried to get it published the old way, through the New York publishing houses— will recognize my dilemma. The book publishing industry is neither kind nor helpful.

            The perennial unpublished author, I have been trying to get published FOR 40 YEARS!

            Heartbreaking and hilarious.

                                                         *

            I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World when I was 10. I was deeply offended over how difficult he made it to read. For a 10-year-old. We were vacationing at my cousins’ house in Sea Gate, a gated community adjacent to Coney Island, across the river from New York City.

            Placing a sheet of lined, three-hole notebook paper in my uncle’s manual typewriter, I wrote a full-page, single-spaced knock-off of Brave New World. It was totally derivative. There were helicopters, an overbearing government, gas bombs, wild crowds, unbridled mayhem. The typewriter ribbon was new. I LOVED the dark letters on the white paper. I loved seeing my thoughts, expressed in words, set in type on the page.

            I was hooked. I was ready to write a novel!

            When I told the family at dinner, I got laughed out of the room.

            So, in high school, I wrote short stories, instead. I got published in the school literary magazine.

                                Then I saw the lit mag

                                Coming through the gook,

                                Yowling and howling

                                Like a coffee-colored book.

            (We were all crazy about Vachel Lindsay.)

            “Oh yeah, uh, this is Kevin Feingold, he’s our resident writer,” my schoolmates would say when introducing me to strangers.

            In my first year of college— a notorious drunk— I wrote the requisite Bildungsroman, the autobiographical novel of a young man growing up in a dysfunctional family.

            Boo-hoo-hoo, poor me! My sister Carol was mean to me, nothing I ever did satisfied my parents, my teachers didn’t understand, my high school sweetheart strung me along.

            Nu? So what?

            “Um, this is only moderately interesting,” said Paul Merman, in Manhattan, when I showed up in his office during the Easter holiday. “I know it means a lot to you, but for the general reader— who doesn’ t know you— your qualms of youth don’t give him or her a lot to chew on.” A macher in the publishing industry, Paul was at a loss. His son Barry was in my English class and suggested I show his dad my opus. “Even your blond shiksa— who should come across as a truly memorable character— seems a stock figure.

            “There just isn’t an approach that opens up your world to the reader, invites us to partake and tells us something new and vibrant. Have you thought about writing science fiction?”

            “Write my autobiography as science fiction?”

            “Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell’s— ”

            “I know,” I interrupted. “I’ve read all those books!”

            “It just seems, with the proper slant, you might possibly discover that you have something to say.”

            Give the man credit, Paul was trying to be helpful.

            The only advantage to being born in the Stone Age is the breadth of history covered in my lifetime.

            Back in those days, you could make an appointment and actually visit people in their offices.

            “The book publishing industry isn’t what it used to be,” Paul told me. “Too many damn people are writing too many damn books. The competition is murderous!”

            I expressed my condolences, thanked him and, three minutes later, found myself back on the street in Manhattan.

            Hating college, I dropped out of school, got drafted and ended up in Vietnam. Now there was something to write about, but the trauma and guilt of combat— shooting people is never easy, even when they are enemy soldiers— has left me shy about expressing my thoughts. There will always be some Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who’ll say, “What a load of crap! My experiences in Vietnam beat your experiences in Vietnam!”

            The first war America ever lost, it will always remain controversial.

            I love the Vietnamese. They taught me Buddhism, their history goes back thousands of years, Communism is a new and transient development. But again, there will always be someone who disagrees!

            In the 1970’s, made-for-television movies were in their heyday. When I finally graduated from college, I spent a year in Israel. Hanging around with Arab boys in their stall in Jerusalem’s souk, I met Candy, an American tourist who was a programmer at NBC. Red hair, brown eyes, a thick New York accent, she was very cute and very Jewish. “Don’t write me a pile of philosophical crap,” she explained over coffee, sitting cross-legged amid the carpets, pottery and leather goods. “I need scripts with lots of action! Get your butt back to the States and write me some action scripts for Sunday Night at the Movies!”

            So I interviewed veterans of the Six Day War. This was easy to do. Everyone in Israel had been through it. I cobbled together a script and mailed it to Candy in New York. I got back a letter on official stationery. It said: “What is with you writers? This script has too much philosophy and not enough action! Sincerely, Candy.”

            I also met an American named Sidney Bloomfield, an honest-to-God New York literary agent. We met on the beach in Tel Aviv. I rescued his wife’s beach towel when it blew into a culvert. Sidney liked me. I was (1) American, (2) Jewish, (3) young, (4) brown, (5) lean, (6) handsome, (7) enthusiastic, (8) full of good-natured chatter and (9) brimming over with opinions about politics, anthropology and religion. What’s not to like? He and his wife felt I had the potential to become a great writer, another Hemingway.

            “When you get back to the States,” he proposed, giving me his business card, “bring me a finished novel and I will do what I can to place it with a major publisher.”

            You can’t ask for more than that!

            So, a year later, I brought him a Jack Kerouac-inspired tale of college and military high jinks distilled from my time at Moosegrave College and my stint in the U.S. Army. As I remember, the novel contained a lot of steamy lovemaking with local gals, marijuana-laced monologues, bathroom jokes, latrine humor, little green men from outer space, and an American society in open rebellion against itself.

            “What is this?” asked Sidney, plainly hating every word. He sat behind his desk in a blue suit and red tie, looking totally perplexed.

            “A distillation of the 1960’s!” I answered perkily.

            “The military aspect has already been done— a lot better!— in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22,” he pointed out.

            I showed him the picture I wanted to use on the cover, “Saturn Devouring One of His Sons” by Francisco Goya (1823).

            He hated that.

            “I don’t even know how to begin to shop this to the publishers,” he exclaimed. His face was easier to read than the Manhattan phone book: “Here you are, a young man filled with talent, and when you bring me an ms., it’s a total load of crap!”

            Regretfully, I took back my manuscript.

            “What is wrong with your generation?” he complained bitterly. “Everybody writes, yet 99.9% of the stuff you people send me is unsalable!!! You think of writing as self-expression. That’s not the purpose of writing! The written word is for communicating, imparting a message or information to the reader. Writing isn’t painting. Good writing is storytelling.

            “I cannot believe the verbiage your generation produces. Even concrete poetry is supposed to mean something!”

            Sidney admitted defeat. “All I can advise you,” he said, “is to grow up.”

            I was on my own.

            Re-enlisting, I made the U.S. Army my career. I never suffered any downtime. When not cleaning and registering weapons, marching in close-order drill, lubricating tanks or studying languages at the Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California, I was busy writing. I wrote skits for my battalion. I wrote speeches for the brass. I updated weapons manuals. But the glory boys— the professional writers— the psy ops guys and reporters for Stars and Stripes— totally outclassed me. It was a volunteer army and those geniuses beat me on the aptitude test and they beat me out of promotions and the plum assignments.

            And let’s face it, what’s fair is fair: The Army kept me in the field, where my fiery temperament found many outlets, instead of having me tearing apart an office in a Quonset hut or making waves at the Pentagon.

            I don’t blame the Army, that was just me. 

                                                         *

            In the next 20 years, I wrote five more novels. A bath in frustration, I always felt sure each one would be my last.

            They were really awful.

            My method: First I’d write an outline and tape it over my desk for easy reference. Then I’d buy a ream of paper and two reserve typewriter ribbons, make a steaming pot of black coffee, put an enormous ashtray next to my manual typewriter, and begin to write, quaffing coffee and smoking cigarettes for the duration. Doped up on caffeine and nicotine, the words poured out of me.

            Hot. My every manuscript was hot. Cookin’. When I completed a novel, I would type on the last page 

                                                  The End.

            I then put the manuscript on a shelf to cool off for three weeks while I caught up with my life.

            When I took the typed pages in my eager mitts, sat down and began to read, I was horrified at the turgid prose confronting me. “Badly written” is a succinct evaluation. The storyline was always there, but you had to wade through a briar patch of words to get to it!

            Unless I was going to supply my readers with near-lethal doses of caffeine and nicotine, my books remained frankly unreadable.

            Not worth the candle.

            “Hey, man, what are you always typing?” asked my fellow soldiers. “Are you transcribing correspondence for the XO?”

            They thought maybe I’d found an extra source of income.

            “I’m writing a novel.”

            “Oh, shit, so am I!”

            “Oh, yeah, me, too. I’m writing a naturalistic, epic novel based on The Battle of Midway and the Solomon Islands campaign. Three hundred pages with charts and illustrations.”

            “Yeah, mine is 500 pages, a family saga based on Appalachian folklore.”

            LESSON NUMBER ONE: Never tell anyone you’re writing a book.

            “Listen, in this army, we yeshiva boys got to stick together,” said Mark Silverstein. “I understand you write books. Listen, my aunt is the literary agent for Jackie Collins. That lady grinds out pure rubbish and makes millions. Millions! Give me one of your novels and I’ll send it to my aunt and we’ll make a bundle.”

            Even if Mark took 15% off the top— in addition to his aunt’s 15%— at the moment, I had a book manuscript and no prospects whatsoever.

            I gave Mark a copy of my latest novel. “Don’t go flashing it around,” I cautioned. “Send it to your aunt. It may not be the greatest writing, but there are some A-1 jokes. They are mine. I don’t want the punchlines spread far and wide until I, at least, get the book published. Capiche?”

            “Oh, yeah. Sure! Whaddya think, man? I’m no jerk.”

            So a few weeks go by and I don’t get a response from Silverstein or his aunt.

            “What’s going on, Mark?”

            “Oh. Yeah. My aunt wasn’t taking on any new clients, so I sent the manuscript to this guy in New York who I hear knows some people. He promised to show it around. Listen, you owe me, man! Can your dad fix me up with a job in the federal government?”

            LESSON NUMBER TWO: Never depend on acquaintances.

            While I was stationed in Japan, Bernice, a classmate of my sister Carol, came to town with her husband and two teenage boys. My mom was a very close friend of Bernice’s mom, so I was expected to make an effort. I must say, I opened many doors and gave them some tea house and sushi experiences normally not available to gaijin. Bernice, a lawyer, claimed to have a client who was a literary agent. “I can fix you up,” she offered.

            “Everyone says that and it never works out,” I replied. “I don’t want another disappointment, but thanks anyway.”

            “I’m her lawyer,” insisted Bernice. “You’ve given us a lifetime’s worth of memories. We owe you, Kevin. I won’t let you down!”

            A few years later, at home in Oxburg, Maryland, I ran into Bernice. “I’ve written this really good novel about young marrieds. You know, I’ve been married twice. Are you still the lawyer for the literary agent?”

            “Maggie Stevens? Oh, sure!”

            “Let me give you a copy of my book.”

            “Well, I don’t know, Kevin. She specializes in children’s books. I really don’t know anybody who’d be interested in a book about young marrieds…”

            LESSON NUMBER THREE: Lots of people talk big, but they don’t deliver.

                                                       *

            Then, behold, my dad died. Still in the Army, I took leave to nurse him in his last days. Not universally known for a sense of humor, Bernie found the process of dying ludicrous. “What a hullaballoo,” he chuckled, lying on his death bed. “You’re the writer! Commemorate me by writing a comedy about my passing!”

            “Well…” I demurred, but at his funeral, we had to battle through a crowd of spectators who were there for a celebrity internment right next door. We buried my dad an hour late in a force seven windstorm. “It’s a two hairpin day,” said the rabbi, clutching his yarmulka, “and I only used one hairpin.”

            This was truly a topic worth discussing in a comic novel. Without using stimulants, I wrote a concise, descriptive, humorous account of Bernie’s demise. When I reread it, I was pleased to compare my manuscript to anything available at the public library.

            “Finally,” I told my mom. “I’ve actually written a publishable book!”

            This was in 1998.

                               “We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts”

 said the publishers.

            “Yes, but…”

            “We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts,” said the receptionists over the phone. “Find a literary agent.”

            “Yes, but…”

            “We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.”

            How do you find a literary agent?

            Back then, there was no such thing as Google.

            I asked Mario, my best friend from college. He worked in The Big Apple.

            “Kev’,” he replied, “they are out there somewhere, but no one knows how to find them. One of Gotham’s best-kept secrets, they don’t even list themselves in the Yellow Pages.”

            “What about the guide?” asked a local librarian here in Maryland. Until then, I had thought she was as immovable as a sphinx.

            “What guide?”

            “The Guide to Literary Agents.”

            Holy moly! There was actually a book printed yearly by Writer’s Digest Books of Cincinnati, Ohio entitled Guide to Literary Agents.

            Once you’ve chosen to approach an agent, you must undergo the catechism: Agents demand a 10-page and only 10-page, double-spaced and only double-spaced synopsis in 12-point and only 12-point type using Times New Roman and only Times New Roman fonts. They also want a brief description of the author.

            I had always heard that “It takes six months to publish a book.” Wow. I assumed there are endless rewrites, editing, galley proofs, print schedules, packing and distribution. All these facets take place, but they don’t take six months. Oh, no! It takes eight weeks for the whosis at the lit agency to make up his or her mind. If they take your project, they need another two months to pitch your book to the publishing houses. That’s four months gone! Then begins the editing, rewrite, proofreading, printing and shipment process.

            This is a 500-year-old industry, totally set in its ways. The publishers use the literary agents as gate-keepers. The lit agents maintain client lists of 25 or 30 writers. In order to pay their bills, the agents can only take on writers who can deliver BESTSELLING book after BESTSELLING book after BESTSELLING book on a regular basis. Preferably, one a year. Typically, the agent takes 15%. Paying salaries, rent and overheads in NYC with so few clients, the literary agents must demand huge advances for their writers from the publishers. This drives up the retail price of books.

            It’s a sick system where everybody milks everyone, the money is never enough, and everyone worries himself or herself sick over the future of publishing. It’s also a closed system. Five hundred literary agents service 15,000 writers and the seven big publishing houses. (How many are they now? Five? Six? They keep dying off.) If you don’t clasp the brass ring, so sorry, you get left out in the cold.

            No wonder independent authors choose to self-publish ebooks. It’s the only way to make our voices heard.

                                                         * 

            When no literary agent bit, I thought I was stuck. We had a high school reunion, however, and I ran into Marsha Rappaport. She and I went to Hebrew School together. I attended her Bat Mitzvah. Marsha, as everyone knows, is Chief of Marketing for BritCom U.S.A. Having lived in Asia, I own many BritCom imprints, BritCom being the default setting for English-language books in that part of the world.

            “It’s an antic novel about my dad Bernie,” I told her. “You remember my dad…”

            “And you want me to take a look at it?” she asked. For someone at the top of her game, Marsha looked as unpretentious as ever. Wan. No spark.

            “Look, this time I’ve written something truly worthwhile to which our generation can relate: Our parents are aging, mortality beckons. And it’s a funny book.”

            “Okay, okay,” she said.

            I shut up. I didn’t want to wear her out. She did give me her business card.

            I sent her the novel, FedEx, and called her secretary, Arlene, to be sure she got it.

            “She got it!” insisted Arlene.

            Okay, already. Sheesh!

            Then, nothing.

            I called Arlene.

            “I read it, Kevin,” she said. “I liked it. I don’t know what Masha’s problem is.”

            “Masha?”

            “Everyone calls her that.”

            Things I didn’t know. The new Tina Brown?

            At long last, the copy of the manuscript came back with the following letter:

            “Dear Kevin,

            While I find the writing compelling, we at BritCom U.S.A. prefer not to publish books by previously unpublished authors, as they tend to be a tough sell.

                                                                        Sincerely,

                                                                        Marsha Rappaport

                                                                        Chief of Marketing

                                                                        BritCom U.S.A.”

 

            At that point, having nothing to lose, I telephoned Arlene.

            “Oh, hi, Kevin,” she said. “I guess you got the letter. I typed it, so, yes, I feel bad about this. I mean, you know that Masha has it in for you…”

            “I’m sorry. ‘In…’? What’s in?”

            “You always ran after shiksas… Listen, I’m sticking my neck out here. Call me at home…”

            She gave me the number. That evening, I called.

            “There’s a backstory between you and Masha that is pretty strange,” said Arlene. “She wanted to fix your wagon, so when you asked, she couldn’t wait to hurt your feelings. As a member of the gay community— ”

            “Marsha is gay?”

            “As a member of the lesbian community, Masha doesn’t feel required to respect the prerogatives of men. She considers you one of the worst offenders… Don’t tell her that, you’ll get me fired.”

            “Of course not. I’m in your debt, Arlene.”

            “When I saw how you forgave your dad, I thought, ‘Masha is wrong. Whatever he was like in high school, Kevin has grown up to be a mensch.’ Unfortunately, I don’t make the choices at BritCom U.S.A.”

            “Thank you for informing me, Arlene.”

            LESSON NUMBER FOUR: Never expect a childhood chum to come through for you.

                                                         * 

            “Oh, shit, yes, ” said Andy Stickler, upon hearing I’m a writer. “I wrote this novel while I had the flu, a stream-of-consciousness fever dream. Totally unbelievable. I was using one of those notepad-based early computers. Since I was home sick in bed, I couldn’t go out and buy a 3½-inch floppy. I finished the entire book and was editing— without a backup— when suddenly the battery died and erased the entire novel.”

            ???

            LESSON NUMBER FIVE: Never believe other people’s b.s.

                                                 The End.

                                                        *