Reading the tea leaves...

In a moment of despair about the intelligence of my fellow hominids, I resolved to write a little squib about the lunacy of the Tea Party/GOP -- until I read Matt Taibbi's article on the same in the October 15 issue of Rolling Stone. The excellent Mr. Taibbi says it all.

To my mind, the money graf:

"Of course, the fact that we're even sitting here two years after Bush talking about a GOP comeback is a profound testament to two things: One, the American voter's unmatched ability to forget what happened to him 10 seconds ago, and two, the Republican Party's incredible recuperative skill and bureaucratic ingenuity. This is a party that in 2008 was not just beaten but obliterated, with nearly every one of its recognizable leaders reduced to historical-footnote status and pinned with blame for some ghastly political catastrophe. There were literally no healthy bodies left on the bench, but the Republicans managed to get back in the game anyway by plucking an assortment of nativist freaks, village idiots and Internet Hitlers out of thin air and training them into a giant ball of incoherent resentment just in time for the 2010 midterms. They returned to prominence by outdoing Barack Obama at his own game: turning out masses of energized and disciplined supporters on the streets and overwhelming the ballot box with sheer enthusiasm."

The Bishop Orders His Womb

Since I will be doing that banned-book thing at the Providence Athenæum tonight, I think it only fitting to provide you with a passage from my work in progress that will most likely feel the teasing tickle of an editor’s shears after the manuscript is delivered to the publisher. I think you’ll understand why: some words are not supposed to be used in histo books.

Ah me, censorship begins at home.

Then again, this attempt at titillation may be a sly marketing ploy on my part, in an effort to cause such a tsunami of interest in the inquisition and such a landslide of Amazon pre-ordering of my Friar of Carcassonne that all will be swept away… Lady Gaga, Sarah Palin, Afghanistan… gone, kaput, deep-sixed, vanished from the headlines, as the masses clamor, plead, squeal, beg for more, more, MORE... oh god yessss!!!… on fourteenth-century France and the inqui –

I think I spend too much time alone.

Anway, here we go. Albi is a town north of Toulouse. The rest is self-explanatory.

“Bernard de Castanet was a theocrat. A native of Montpellier who conducted a distinguished career in coercitive diplomacy for several popes in Italy and Germany, Castanet was awarded the see of Albi in 1276. At that time it had been vacant for five years, and previous bishops had seen their rights and privileges whittled away by the king and the town. Albi was, by long-standing custom and law, ruled by the bishop: he was the lord of the region, with all the temporal regalia and revenue and obligations that such a position entailed. Lax churchmen had let the once-splendid bishopric slip into the moribund margins of power; even the inquisition, after the rowdy reception given it in the 1230s, had not been active there.

“Castanet’s spent his entire tenure clawing back the money and temporal power that he believed was rightfully his. As for pastoral care of the souls in his diocese, one historian has drily termed his approach as “terrorist.” The episcopal prisons at Albi were renowned for their harshness – some inmates died quickly after incarceration, an occurrence unusual in medieval jails. In some instances, the families of these deceased, left in the dark on the fate of their kin, continued to bring food and other comforts to the prison for years, all of which would be quietly confiscated by the bishop’s minions. Castanet declared war on usury, meting out capital punishment to its practitioners. He was known to intervene frequently in the courts, usually stiffening sentences – death, on one occasion, for a woman who had stolen a loaf of bread. In his drive to regain lands and tithes, he showed particular ferocity. He refused Christian burial in consecrated ground to those who had died on lands withheld from him, decreeing instead that the corpses should be hung from trees (funera per arbores) and left to rot for public edification. Even sex fell within his punitive purview. Invoking the specter of his prison, Castanet ordained that sexual congress had to be heterosexual, that only the missionary and sidewise positions were permitted, and that ejaculation must occur in the vagina of one’s wife, and nowhere else. Such spoilsport attention to detail in these matters was extremely rare in medieval France; if anything, it makes Castanet all the odder.”

Date the Save

Just to remind you of the ACLU event to be held tomorrow, Friday, 24 September, at the Providence Athenæum, from 5pm to 7pm. See the post “Read it and weep” below for details. Please stop by to hurl your symbolic pebble at all the morons out there who think they can tell us what to read and write. Together, our efforts might all one day form a boulder, and then we can roll over and squash them.

Splat.

I guess I never got the memo... party in the USA!

Date: April 4, 1286

From: The burghers of Carcassonne

To: John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Richard Cheney

CC: Anyone with a taser, a waterboard, a billyclub, etc.

“Many prisoners have been put in similar situations, in which several, because of the severity of their tortures, have lost limbs and have been completely incapacitated. Many, because of the unbearable conditions and their great suffering, have died a most cruel death. In these prisons there is constantly heard an immense wailing, weeping, groaning, and gnashing of teeth. What more can one say? For these prisoners life is a torment and death a comfort. And thus coerced they say that what is false is true, choosing to die once rather than to endure more torture. As a result of these false and coerced confessions not only do those making the confessions perish, but so do the innocent people named by them…

“Whence it has come about that many of those who are newly cited to appear, hearing of the torments and trials of those who are detained in the mur and in its dungeons, wishing to save themselves, have fled to the jurisdiction of other kings. Others assert what is false is true; in which assertions they accuse not only themselves but other innocent people, that they may avoid the above mentioned pains, choosing to fall with dishonor into the hands of God rather than into those of perverse men. Those who thus confess afterward reveal to their close friends that those things they said to the inquisitors are not true, but rather false, and that they confessed out of fear of imminent danger…

“Likewise, and it is a shame to hear, certain vile persons, both defamed for heresy and condemned for false testimony, and, it is reported, guardians of the dungeons, seduced by an evil spirit, say with a diabolical suggestion to the imprisoned: ‘Wretches, why do you not confess so that you can be set free? Unless you confess, you will never leave this place, nor escape its torments!’ To which the prisoners reply: ‘My lord, what do we say? What should we say?’ And the jailers reply, ‘You should say this and this.’ And what they suggest is false and evil; and those wretches repeat what they have been told, although it is false, so that they may avoid the continuous torments to which they are subject. Yet in the end they perish, and cause innocent people to perish as well.”

Monsieur Quayle

The ass-hattery of American politics is so riveting at this moment that we tend not to notice similar flowerings of the same elsewhere in the world.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you… Nicolas Sarkozy.

So, a glancing familiarity with the current chaos of public life in France will yield the following: a widening scandal concerning the use of the treasury of the richest woman in the country (who is in her dotage) to finance the president’s political party; fanning the flames of bigotry by making a burqa ban a national priority; earning the well-justified horror of other Europeans by singling out an ethnic group, the Roms from Romania and Bulgaria, for mass and sudden deportations, thereby pulling off the best imitation of Vichy France since, well… the Second World War.

Poor Nicolas needed a break. So last weekend he went to visit the magnificent Cro-Magnon cave paintings of Lascaux, in the Périgord region. Apparently, the paintings are once again in danger of disintegrating. The very serious Président de la République went underground with an entourage of experts… historians, scientists and the like. During their fifty minutes inside he was given a meticulous explanation of what he was looking at.

When he emerged, he stood in front of the mikes and said this:

“Le brave néandertalien avait parfaitement compris qu’ici, c’était plus tempéré qu’ailleurs, qu’il devait y avoir du gibier, qu’il faisait beau and qu’il y faisait bon vivre.”

Translation: “The brave Neanderthal clearly understood that here was a milder place than elsewhere, that there had to be plenty of game to hunt, that the weather was fine and that it was a good place to live.”

The whole country burst out laughing.

As every French middle-schooler knows (Lascaux is a national treasure, after all), the paintings at Lascaux were done by Cro-Magnon artists, about 17,000 years ago. The Neanderthal had definitively disappeared from Europe some 15,000 – 20,000 years before that.

Remember: Nicolas had just been lectured by the world’s leading experts on Lascaux, at Lascaux…

The derision has been withering. My favorite was a French blogger who wrote something to the effect: There is something Homeric in the way our president speaks. And I don’t mean the Iliad, I mean Simpson.

Moving Grand Finales

I have been remiss in providing the answers to the pop quiz inspired by Captain Kirk's letting his girlfriend get run over by a car. Apologies.

The accomplished French critic Roland Barthes was struck by a van delivering dry cleaning in the fifth arrondissement of Paris. I’ve been told, but am not certain, that it happened on the Rue Lagrange, leading up to Place Maubert-Mutualité. On February 25, 1980, he left a lunch hosted by François Mitterrand and was walking home when the incident occurred. He died a few weeks later at the age of 64. A great loss.

Dancer and champion bohemian Isadora Duncan had a flowing, hand-painted silk scarf around her neck on the night of September 14, 1927. On the seaside corniche in Nice, she got into the sports car of her putative lover, a mechanic named Benoît Falchetto, and bade her entourage a florid farewell. When he roared off, her scarf became entangled in the open spokes of the right rear wheel, snapping her neck. She was 50.

In his later years, Antoní Gaudi had become an unkempt, spiritual monomaniac, living in the crypt of the construction site of La Sagrada Familia (aka, Our Lady of the Smurfs). On June 7, 1927, while walking ragged and haggard near the church, he was hit by a streetcar. Believing him to be a homeless derelict, the police brought Gaudi to a paupers’ hospital, where he died three days later, at age 73.

King Henry I of Jerusalem (aka, Count Henry II of Champagne) fell out of a window at his palace in Acre (aka, Akko, Israel) on September 10, 1197. He was 31. He is thought to have leaned too heavily on the lattice, and was then knocked further off balance by a dwarf named Scarlet, who, in trying to help, only ensured that both of them fell to their deaths. There is a certain falling-to-death irony in his demise: a few years earlier, Henry is supposed to have visited the Assassin stronghold near Masyaf, Syria, where their leader instructed two of his men to jump to their deaths to show the visiting Christian dignitary how serious they were in seeking an alliance with the Crusaders to crush the Sunnis of Damascus and Aleppo.

Elezear Maccabeus was the younger brother of Judas Maccabeus, the leader of the great Maccabean revolt of the Jews against the Seleucid Empire (aka, the Greeks). Elezear, during the Battle of Beth-Zecharia of 162 BCE, crept under a magnificently caparisoned war elephant – leading him to believe it the mount of an important official – then stabbed it in the belly with his spear. The dying animal collapsed. Thus our man was killed by a falling elephant. We don’t know Elezear’s age or the elephant’s at the moment of this encounter.

Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen, there was a cat that really was gone. Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine, it was a shame how he carried on… Ahem... Although there is some dispute over the exact details, it is thought that a group of Russian aristos fed Rasputin cyanide-laced cakes on the night of December 29, 1916 (aka, December 16, by the Tsar’s calendar) in Saint Petersburg. When that didn’t work, someone shot him in the neck. The conspirators left and when they returned to dispose of the body, they found him alive and angry – so they shot him three more times in the back and stabbed and beat him. Greatly weakened but still kicking, Rasputin was then tied up and chucked into the icy waters of the Neva River, where he eventually expired. He was 47.

On May 13, 1935, motorcycle enthusiast Thomas Edward Lawrence (aka, Lawrence of Arabia) took his beloved Brough Superior SS100 for a ride in hilly Dorset. At the last moment catching sight of two boys on bicycles, he swerved to avoid hitting them and crashed his motorbike into a hedgerow. He went sailing over the handlebars. He died six days later, at age 46.

Read it and weep

For those of you lucky enough to be living in the center of the universe (i.e., Rhode Island), please make note of what should be a diverting event to be held by the ACLU at the Providence Athenæum on Friday, Sept. 24, from 5 to 7 p.m. Writers resident in this seaside paradise, including the no-baloney Rosemary Mahoney, the fearless Adam Braver, and the neither-of-the-above myself, will be reading excerpts from classics that various beetle-browed bigots and other assorted scaredy-cats have tried to ban from schoolrooms, libraries and bookstores over the years. The event is part of the ACLU’s consciousness-raising Banned Books Week, an annual effort to underscore the importance of the First Amendment. Readings will be brief and varied, followed by a discussion, then further discussion over drinks, methinks. There is no cover charge, rope line, or bouncer involved, so please feel free to breeze by a week from Friday.

September 11, 2010

My friends in robes, could you please add the following story to your holy books? I'm not asking much, just slip it in as an appendix.

The tale comes from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise. But don’t worry, it is not a product of the Enlightenment that you so detest. It is a far older tale, told four centuries earlier in Boccaccio’s Decameron. And who knows where he found it?

It is a human, rather than divine, Revelation. Please give it a read:

In the Orient in ancient times there lived a man who possessed a ring of inestimable worth. Its stone was an opal that emitted a hundred colors, but its real value lay in its ability to make its wearer beloved of God and man. The ring passed from father to most favored son for many generations, until finally its owner was a father with three sons, all equally deserving. Unable to decide which of the three sons was most worthy, the father commissioned a master artisan to make two exact copies of the ring, then gave each son a ring, and each son believed that he alone had inherited the original and true ring.

But instead of harmony, the father's plan brought only discord to his heirs. Shortly after the father died, each of the sons claimed to be the sole ruler of the father's house, each basing his claim to authority on the ring given to him by the father. The discord grew even stronger and more hateful when a close examination of the rings failed to disclose any differences.

The dispute among the brothers grew until their case was finally brought before a judge. After hearing the history of the original ring and its miraculous powers, the judge pronounced his conclusion: "The authentic ring," he said, "had the power to make its owner beloved of God and man, but each of your rings has brought only hatred and strife. None of you is loved by others; each loves only himself. Therefore I must conclude that none of you has the original ring. Your father must have lost it, then attempted to hide his loss by having three counterfeit rings made, and these are the rings that cause you so much grief."

The judge continued: "Or it may be that your father, weary of the tyranny of a single ring, made duplicates, which he gave to you. Let each of you demonstrate his belief in the power of his ring by conducting his life in such a manner that he fully merits – as anciently promised – the love of God and man.

You are free to move about the cabin

In my last post, I remembered the doomed girlfriend of Captain Kirk from one of his many timetraveling love affairs. She was a cute 1930s girl, passionate and intelligent, but not intelligent enough to know that you should never date anyone 2,000 years younger than yourself. So what happened? She got run over by a car as he looked on, the jerk.

But let’s leave aside my still smoldering indignation. The poor kid met a fate that might be called kinetic death. Not cinematic, but kinetic.

Since it’s back to school time, time for a pop quiz. So, boys and girls, get out your pencils and match the famous figure with the kinetic nature of his or her demise:

1) Roland Barthes

2) Isadora Duncan

3) Antoni Gaudí

4) King Henry I of Jerusalem

5) Eleazar Maccabeus

6) Grigori Rasputin

7) Lawrence of Arabia

a) thrown in a river, after surviving three shots to the head, three to the body, and a thorough bludgeoning

b) motorcycle crash

c) defenestration

d) hit by a laundry truck

e) scarf caught in a moving hubcap

f) crushed under falling elephant

g) nailed by a streetcar

Answers Monday.

The Secret Ride of Walter Meaty

The heretic had gone back to his errors, the inquisitor shouted to the villagers over the roar of the flames and the wails of the dying, “like a dog returning to his vomit!”

Pleased with that chapter-closing sentence, I decided to return to my beloved bike path. It had been a long day of torture and burning.

Within minutes my two-wheeled destrier was groaning under my weight and we were creaking over the bridge. As it was late afternoon and the days were shortening, I would not go all the way to the path’s end at Bristol, Rhode Island, fifteen miles’ distant. Instead I would turn around at the six-mile mark, at the Extramarital Parking State Park. That’s not its real name, but past experience of pedaling through the parking lot of the pretty seaside spot had usually included seeing a couple of rocking pick-up trucks and hearing the joyful squeak of shock absorbers.

On my way there I whizzed past a tanned twenty-year-old Adonis clad only in what seemed to be a handkerchief. He was sprinting, but I effortlessly distanced him, allowing myself a brief thrill of intergenerational supremacy. Then I realized I was on a bicycle, and had I been on a roadway, a World War Two veteran in a beat-up Buick could have done the same to me.

The cars in the parking lot were not dancing. Just truly stationary. Oh well.

There was a reason for this: a farmer’s market was being held alongside the lot, so this was a day for vegetable voyeurs. Before investing in an organic tomato, I called a friend in Bristol, who has a plantation of tomato vines. As I waited for her to pick up, I felt a zephyr of wind tickle the back of my neck. “You’re on the bike path?” she said, in alarm. “There’s a huge storm down here.”

I looked to the south. Black, black, black.

Almost immediately on returning to the path, the wind kicked in. If the storm’s coming from the south, I muttered, why is a north wind blowing in my face?

Pedaling became harder, much harder, as the wind strengthened. I made it to the four-mile mark, past the Dari Bee ice cream joint. Its roadside sign – Kids! Scream Until They Stop! – was buffeted by the gusts.

Then alongside the bay as it narrows toward Providence. The water was choppy, angry. Even a gargantuan oil tanker tied up at the dock could be seen rocking as if extramarital.

Adonis came barreling toward me, propelled by the wind at his back, Buick-like. His hanky fluttered.

At Voldemort’s Cottage – a country club on a big rock in the sea – the wind became a howl. I moved into lower and lower gear, it seemed as if I were pedaling in place.

Then on to the wide-open space of the Fallopian Straightaway. Here the bike path sits on an old railway bed, arrow-straight. To the east, a large pond; to the west, the open expanse of the bay. Water everywhere, just a foot or two beneath the straining spokes.

The wind became a wall. No, I was in Boulder, Colorado, going straight up a mountain. I looked out at the bay to get my bearings. The water churned white – and it was on fire.

OGM! (Oh Goodness Me!), I thought, my mind unhinged by panic, it’s the apocalypse!! A cloud of brown smoke skittered demonically over the heaving sea. Where’s the Antichrist? And what will he be wearing?

I heard the flap of a plastic bag and a sudden whoosh. Even my tomato had deserted me.

The smoke was coming closer, coming toward the Fallopian Straightaway. Brown, choking, brimstone… No, wait… it wasn’t smoke, it was sand. On the far shore stood the industrial port of the city, home to great pyramids of crud. I glimpsed a geyser of brown stuff whip into the air from one of them, and head out to sea.

The cloud got closer and closer, and then was on me. Sahara, Gobi, Star Wars. Although the sun was still out, I could barely see. The whipping wind and the tiny particles… I wouldn’t need a facial for months.

Through the swirling brownish murk I could see a figure approaching. A cyclist. Young woman. She came nearer. A very low-cut top barely suspended by spaghetti straps. Of a blinding, otherworldly white, to match her teeth. She bent low, very low over her handlebars. I stared. Was she the Antichrist? No! OGM! I can’t believe it! It’s Selena Gomez!

She flashed past me. Then came her companion. A billboard for bad tattoos disguised as her boyfriend. For some reason, he glared at me.

By now the cloud had lifted, but not the wind. I struggled past another jogger, a stocky, lego-like woman, blonde to the point of albino. She seemed not even to notice the impending global cataclysm. A wicked gust of wind struck me in the chest, almost toppling me over. If I fall off, I thought, at least I’m wearing my…

Oh no! In my haste to escape the dog vomit, I had forgotten my helmet. What if I get blown off the bike, fall on my head, crushing the centers of reasoning and intellect? What would happen? Would I join the Tea Party? What about my family? My block? My neighborhood? My city? Hell, what about the whole country…

Humbly, I thought back to the episode when Captain Kirk has to let his pacifist girlfriend get run over by a car, or else the whole course of history would change and Hitler would win the Second World War. How could I have forgotten that helmet? Had I no sense of responsibility?

I was almost at the end of the the Straightaway. A Vietnamese couple with a baby carriage and a long fishing pole stood laughing in the wind, looking out to sea.

The fools!

I heaved myself into the home stretch. The sun still shone, the birds still sang, people still fell in love.

Unbelievable.

At last, in front of my fridge, I tried to make sense of it all, to recollect in tranquility. I reached in for a tall boy of Narragansett beer. Yes, it was possible to live the heroic life, to face down certain death, to emerge triumphant. There was nobility to every action.

I looked at the can I was holding. Below the brand logo, a message read: “The Official Beer of the Clam.”

How to make an inquisitor cry

A friend recently asked me what I do most days. Swear at my computer is the answer.

But every now and then I get a chuckle. Below is a draft excerpt from the book I'm writing. This passage deals with the inquistion in thirteenth-century Languedoc. Not a laff riot, I know, but every now and then a little humanity worms it way out of an old document. Read to the end, to see how.

So here's the set-up. In trying to explain how the inquisition works, I have an inquisitor pay a visit to a small hilltop village. He delivers a fiery sermon to scare the shit out of everyone, and then instructs the congregation that they must come forth to denounce any heretical activities they have seen in their neighbors, kinsmen, etc. Betrayal is the flavor of the month.

So he sits around and waits for the snitches to come to him:

The inquisitor, for his part, would take to his lodgings and try to gauge if the town was going to be a tough nut to crack. The first collaborators might arrive quickly, perhaps under cover of night to avoid neighborly scrutiny; or they might not – some brave villages observed an omertà that took years to grind down. If this was further on in the century, the inquisitor would be able to examine records of past inquisitions held in the locality. These were carefully guarded in bound registers, containing scores of transcripts of interrogations and sentences handed down. Fairly uncharacteristically for document-keeping practices of the era, the registers were systematically organized, cross-referencing individuals and allowing archival retrieval of damning detail that might otherwise have been lost or forgotten. They were, in essence, a collective data-base designed for a sole user – many a time an inquisitor confounded individuals with contradictory testimony they had given years earlier. Not unsurprisingly, it was an inquisition register that brought la rage carcassonnaise to a boil.

Further reading for the visiting Dominican investigator might be an example of a supremely peculiar self-help genre, the inquisitor’s manual. These manuals compiled admonitions, tip sheets, descriptions of different forms of heresy, and tactics of interrogation. Years of questioning people with something to hide had given the authors of these manuals insights into the dodging and weaving tactics developed by heretics and their sympathizers. Nicolas Eymerich, a Dominican of the fourteenth century, listed ten different techniques that the exasperated inquisitor should be on the lookout for when questioning heretics. They range from artful casuistry to blatant excuse-making of the-dog-ate-my-homework variety. An example of each:

“The third way of evading a question or misleading a questioner is through redirecting the question. For example, if it is asked: ‘Do you believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son?,’ he replies, ‘And what do you believe?’ And when he is told, ‘We believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son,’ he replies, ‘Thus I believe,’ meaning, ‘I believe that you believe this, but I do not…’

…“The eighth way of evading a question is through feigned illness. For example, if someone is interrogated concerning his faith, and the questions having multiplied to the point that he perceives he cannot avoid being caught out in his heresy and error, he says: ‘I am very weak in the head, and I cannot endure any more. In the name of God, please let me go now.’ Or he says, ‘Pain has overcome me. Please, for the sake of God, let me lie down.’ And going to his bed, he lies down. And thus he escapes questioning for a time, and meanwhile thinks over how he will reply, and how craftily he will conduct himself. Thus they conduct themselves with respect to other feigned illnesses. They frequently use this mode of conduct when they see that they are to be tortured, saying that they are sick, and that they will die if they are tortured, and women frequently say that they are suffering from their female troubles, so that they can escape torture for a time…”

Don't ask me why, but I love this kind of stuff.

Judge, Jury and Jameson

Visitors here may recall that last month, when recounting how a Quebec City emergency-room nurse recommended Pepsi-Cola as a cure for incipient strangulation (see “Je me souviens”), I was moved to make what could be thought an unkind and indefensible comparison to similar medicinal beliefs in Ireland.

Unkind, perhaps. Indefensible? You be the judge of that.

A crucial piece of exculpatory evidence emerged – in a story I had never heard before – during a conversation with my father here in Ottawa last night. He is about ten days shy of his eighty-ninth birthday, so our interaction can be somewhat stop-and-start, when not wandering into fields of weirdness. Or it can be lyrical. Depends on the day.

Yet one sturdy artifact that has survived wholly intact from our past is his active, mischievous interest in my hair. Ever since my teen years, it has been too long. Now it’s white. When did that happen? Looks greasy. Looks unkempt. Is it thinning? When you going to get it cut? Etc.

Last night the stars aligned differently and the hair hectoring ceased. Not only that, the subject turned to his hair – specifically. his very first haircut, in his hometown of Tralee, County Kerry. He must have been about four or five, and his mother decided it was time for her curly-headed eldest to get a proper shearing.

His father, my grandfather, was instructed to bring the little boy to the barber. It was the mid-1920s, in what was then a remote corner of Ireland.

Before they left, however, his mother handed his father a small bottle of whiskey. A brief discussion ensued, but, as usual, the woman won.

So the haircut took place. My father cried. His father squirmed.

When it was over my grandfather held out the bottle of whiskey to the barber.

“Now what might that be for?” the barber inquired.

“It’s the lad’s mother,” my father’s father replied, scientifically. “You’re to massage his scalp with it, so he doesn’t catch cold on the way home.”

The defense rests.

Freelance Hall of Famer

True story. I heard it from the protagonist just the other day. For reasons that will become obvious, I have changed his name and the setting a bit.

So this guy is sitting at his desk one fine weekday morning a few months back, working on an article for a magazine. He’s got it all, house in the country, wife and kids. He works at home, gets lots of magazine gigs, and has a spacious ground-floor office looking out onto a verdant, rolling lawn.

Only this morning he sees a figure on the lawn, hesitating, a man in some kind of uniform. He flits past the window, twice, three times.

My friend goes out to the porch. The man is there. He is clearly on the defensive, almost cowering.

The intruder speaks. “Are you… are you… Joe Blow?”

“Yes. What do you want?”

He tentatively reaches out and hands my friend an envelope.

“From your wife’s divorce attorney.”

“What?!”

“You’re being served papers for divorce.”

My friend looks at the packet in his hand, dumbfounded. He looks back up at the stranger and says the first thing that comes into his mind.

“What? Am I supposed to tip you?”

The man relaxes, allows himself a smile.

“Well at least you’re taking it with a sense of humor. That’s a first for me.”

Eyes fixed in disbelief on the papers, my friend says reflexively, “So how does it usually go?”

The man, as if unburdened, launches into several tales of woe, about how he’s met by hostility, outrage, profanity, how suddenly everything is somehow his fault, how he’s to blame for the break-up of the marriage.

My friend listens, absently, but lets the man go on, automatically interjecting the usual encouragements to continue.

But at last he can take no more. There’s that package in his hand. After about ten minutes on the porch, the stranger leaves.

My friend takes to bed. He stays there for a long time, the door closed, the lights off. No one bothers him.

The sun sets, then rises, then sets again, then rises… or maybe it doesn’t. He’s lost track of time.

Part of him is utterly surprised and confused, but, he realizes at last, another part of him is not confused in the least.

He gets up and calls the guy who served the papers. They meet for coffee.

Then he comes home, sits down at his desk and types up a a pitch letter.

About how tough it is on a sensitive person to be a court officer serving papers on divorcing people. And maybe he could find a touchy-feely repo man and include him in the piece. What do you think? 3500 words?

He hits the send button on his e-mail to various editors.

By day’s end he gets a bite. He has sold the article.

It’s Thursday.

He was served the papers on Tuesday.