The Feast of the Immaculate Conception

So, in keeping with the reason why God put me here on Earth, I had to drive a carful of teenage girls to some event. Normally I tune out their conversation because it is incomprehensible.

Not yesterday.

The girls were arguing about who had the best phone app to track her period.

Bless us 'n' save us, Missus Jack Davis!

The Rhode Island Diet

I am a self-betraying stooge for a weight loss clinic. I have to note and disclose everything I eat during twelve weeks, and I have to report the daily variations in my weight. Every Sunday evening I make these disclosures on the website of the Oberkommando running the show. This morning, standing in my altogether at the daily weigh-in in my bathroom, I was neither at the same weight as yesterday nor at a lower level. In fact, I was one pound heavier than I had been a week ago. Panic. I had to make those weight disclosures tonight. I knew the culprit. Last night, there was an unfortunate three-way between me, a novel and a bottle of screwtop rosé. The contents of the bottle had somehow insinuated themselves between my lips as I read the novel at my kitchen table, in the vicinity of where I would wake up at about two in the morning. Life is full of such coincidences. As I stepped off the scales I pondered my options. I could lie to the Oberkommando and risk a court-martial. No, too daunting. Or I could count on the workings of intestinal transit to lessen my weight. Yes, good! So, Adam and Eve-like, I took a couple bites of an apple, bounced about a bit to encourage peristalsis and waited for Ma Nature to come calling. She did, and I did – though I will not inflict the details of the operation on posterity, even if posterity is what it was all about. Anyway, I then stepped back on the scales and somehow, impossibly, I was a half-pound heavier. Desperate now, I reached for my helmet. I would delay breakfast, bike like a madman, then weigh myself. The rules stated that you had to weigh yourself before breakfast – they did not specifically say just after you woke up. So I wouldn’t be deceiving anyone, would I? I would take my beloved bike trail. This would be my first time on it this year. Somehow I had developed a vague fear of tire inflation, which had kept me off my bike for months. Conquering this fear, I grabbed the pump and set to work, and soon I was hurtling lancearmstronglike down the familiar stages of the trail: The Ramp That Hugs, The Ramp That Doesn’t, The Hill of Death, Riverside Drive, Redemption Slope, The Fallopian Straightaway, Voldimort’s Cottage, The Lesser Fallopian, Tankerville, Dari Bee, Extramarital Parking State Park, The Bridge of Hungover Fishermen and then at last, to Bristol, Rhode Island, and its seaside Gull Guano Boulevard. Pausing only an instant to take a slug of water, I turned the bike around to head back the fourteen miles to the Center of the Universe (i.e., Providence). I was elated, the sun felt good. As this was the first time I’d been on the trail as a non-smoker, it no longer felt as if I was pedaling uphill all the time. The sensation was novel. And the sights! All the familiar sights came back to me in all their human glory: the tramp stamps and tanktop gullies of the girls, the tattooed biceps and dirty looks of their boyfriends. The archetypes were out in force, too. At Mile 15: The Tottering Grandfather. Later on: The Teeth-Bearing Sprinter. Then, in quick succession: The Immodest Behemoth, The Sullen Virgin, The Unicycle Mime, The Aspirational Jogger, The Aerodynamic Lawyer, the hotties, the fatties, the homeys… trail nuts, all. And I love them. At last I pedaled up The Ramp That Hugs, then went the two blocks home. I was exhausted, but in a good way, as if I had just attended a successful reunion. I stabled my metal steed and headed upstairs to my apartment. The scale lay in wait on the tile floor. I stripped off then stood on it. I had lost three pounds. There would be no court martial.

Stephen Makes Friends

Yesterday, at my younger daughter’s new school: So there we are, a clutch of parents, waiting to pick up our kids. Some of the parents are obviously professionals – lawyers, accountants, doctors and the like. We stand on a sidewalk, facing a building fronted by a large plate-glass window. Huge SUVs idle on the street.

Through the big window we can see a hundred or so middle-schoolers gathering their things, fastening their backpacks. The vista is an unrelieved expanse of skinny jeans, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, Uggs…

“I think I’ll wait for my daughter to come out of the building,” I say with an attempt at levity. “They all look the same, I can’t tell them apart.”

Silence. Looks of horror.

The empty space surrounding me suddenly grows very large.

Questions for a New Year

Why ill in kill, but laughter in slaughter?

Is men in women there deliberately?

Do all interesting women have problematic relationships with their mothers?

If the child is the father of the man, then he’s sleeping with… ? Never mind.

Which Republican presidential candidate would you feel most at ease with in a bar, sharing a pitcher of hemlock?

When a priest pennstates a choirboy, is the end-product sancta santorum?

If Immanuel Kant but the Vatican, should we even complete the sentence?

Are you better off in life crying in a Bentley or laughing on a Vespa?

Is Sumatra comfortable?

Why do Americans pretend there’s an “r” in Goethe?

If your spouse gets raptured, do you have to quit your swingers’ club?

Can you get acne from Facebook?

Is your guiding principle WWYYMD?*

Why does Texas exist?

Did Jimmy Carter really say, “I came, I saw, Iran”?

Is one man’s Mede another man’s Persian?

Do you pronounce Cretan and cretin the same way? Why? What have you got against Greeks?

If you were a drone, would you enjoy the flight?

Can you have an atrocity in the countryside?

Have you heard the one about Orthodox Jews refraining from having sex while standing up because it might be construed as dancing?

Who was Kim Kardashian’s equivalent in Classical Antiquity?

Do you agree with the following syllogism: “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is a homosexual”?

Does it get better? Really?


*What Would Yo-Yo Ma Do?

Question of the Day

Beautiful, sunny, warm, creepy December day, and I am walking back home from a seaside park. To get to my place, I have to cross a wide pedestrian bridge spanning an eight-lane interstate.

At mid-span, I notice two young women standing to one side, holding a large sign that can be seen from the roadway. They are post-hipstah twentyish, a bit of hardware in their faces, but not of the Home Depot amplitude popular a few years ago. Their bare arms are purple-green tattoo canisters; their faces, white and impassive.

“Hey!,” I say. “What’s your sign say?”

Dutifully, they maneuver the huge sign to face me. It reads:

Sometimes Saying I Love You Is Not As Good As An Anal Plug!

“Wow!” I exclaim, genuinely impressed. “That’s quite a sign.”

They nod, bored.

“Have you been showing it around town?”

A shake of the head. “No, we just found it.”

“You found it?! Where?”

“Over there.”

A Stieg Larsson arm points further up the bridge to a stone bench, deserted save for two empty beer cans.

We exchange glances. “Well, do you agree with it?,” I ask.

Shrugs. “Seemed like a good idea.” Obeying some unheard signal, the girls then proceed to turn the cumbersome sign back around to face the highway.

I return home.

Now my question is this: Don’t you think these two young women are more socially useful than Lloyd Blankfein?

Musical Madeleine

A few weeks ago my elder daughter had her sixteenth birthday.

Sweet.

But bittersweet, too.

On that day seven years ago – on her ninth birthday – my mother (her grandmother) died.

This year we did not celebrate her birthday on the proper day. Why? Her youth orchestra was performing a concert. A piano virtuoso from Russia had been flown in. The piece to be played was Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4.

“You’re going to like it, Daddy,” she said after emerging from the final rehearsal that morning. I was surprised, for she never hypes any of her performances. Usually, you can’t get even the shadow of a sneak preview.

So as I took my seat in the auditorium and the birthday girl took hers onstage, I was prepared to be transported.

And I was. Within the first few measures – the spectacular sprint of a beginning to the concerto – I was in Montreal, in the early 1960s. I was sitting in my shorts, playing with a red firetruck. I was the lone child in the house, as my older brothers now went to school. On the other side of room, standing at the ironing board, my mother, her coal-black hair swaying a little as she hummed along to Rachmaninoff.

The LP was Romantic Piano Concertos. She did housework to the strains of such pieces as Variations on a Theme by Paganini, as I studied and restudied the album cover on the floor, in my dad’s armchair, on the sofa (or chesterfield, as they called it). Slashing, vertical, black and white photographs of pianists in ecstasy.

The piece ended. My mother came back to herself, smiled at me from across the room, her lipstick scarlet.

I was on my feet, applauding my daughter.

Thank you, Sergei.

Shock Treatment

Montreal’s left-winger is about to take a slap shot…

No, wait.

I feel a gentle breeze on my face.

Strange.

I open my eyes. Yes, there is a breeze.

Not again! I look out the window from my bed, expecting to see trees bending in the gale.

The darkness of 4 a.m. Nothing but silence, the glow of streetlights.

Streetlights?!

Then I hear it. A gentle whir.

I look up. In the dimness, the blades of an overhead fan turning and turning.

Electricity! For the first time since Sunday.

Thanks for nothing, Irene.

Portrait of a Lady 5

So, Lance Armstronglike, I mount my trusty metallic steed and wheel through the lazy summer heat.

I come to an intersection, a 4-way stop. I am the first vehicle there, the only other candidate is a small red car, with Mass plates, approaching from my right, still twenty feet away from its stop sign.

So I proceed, thinking idly about Eleanor of Aquitaine, for some reason.

Thank god for peripheral vision. And animal reflexes.

The red car guns it, sails through the stop. I slide to a violent halt, fall onto the pavement.

The woman in the car whizzes past, two feet away from me. The window is down. She yells.

“Fuckhead!”

Then drives on.

Portrait of a Lady 4

Early this morning, in this Al Gore of a summer, I was, as usual, cooking up some green eggs and ham on the sidewalk outside my building.

It was hot.

On the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, a woman in shorts and a tank top was walking her dog. It was a small, malevolent thing, a roll of elastic bands covered with hair.

It stopped, squatted and -- kerplooey! -- had a poop.

When it was finished, dog and owner walked on. Then, about a half-block away, they stopped.

The woman extracted a tissue from her pocket, bent down and wiped the dog's rear end. Then she straightened up and threw the tissue to the ground.

They rounded the corner and disappeared.

I think I'll stop cooking on the sidewalk.

Portrait of a Lady #3

My tween daughter and I conducted a bicycle reconnaissance mission of enemy territory yesterday. We glided silently through its alien streets until, creeped out, we decided to sneak back across the international frontier and return to headquarters.

The intersection of Ridge and Pidge Streets (I’m not making that up) marks the beginning of the DMZ, that grey intermediate zone between free, funky Providence and the dark mystery city of Pawtucket to the north.

We crossed without incident, the border guards apparently fraternizing at a strip-mall Dunkin’ Donuts.

Relieved, we made a stop at an ice-cream shop. The tween operative went inside to place the order, while I remained outside with our two-wheeled stealth vehicles.

I thought we were safe.

Across the street, on a park bench, sat a man about my age, kinda preppy, trim grey hair, khakis, white-bread. Beside him, a young woman in an electrifying red dress, low-cut, high-hemmed with a Marilyn flare of scarlet flounces. She had long, raven-black hair, which she shook frequently, dark sunglasses and a smile that flashed like arc-welding even at a distance of about a hundred feet. Her shapely tan legs, crossed now, ended in high-heel leather sandals whose straps climbed the lower half of her calves.

They appeared to be in desultory conversation, two strangers, a middle-aged sparrow with a sex-bomb cardinal, sitting comfortably in the late-afternoon sunlight.

I tried to look away.

I tried. Really.

I knew I had been unsuccessful when the woman stood up. She was looking at me. Then, to my horror, she started walking straight in my direction.

The whole infernal machinery was set in motion as she crossed the few yards of grass to the curbside opposite me. Hips swaying, dress dancing, her red lips forming a slight, knowing smile.

On the curb across the street she performed some mysterious move with her torso that made what little that had been left to the imagination about what lay beneath the red fabric smaller still. Astonishing. The move would have stopped traffic, had it not already come to a mesmerized halt.

She stepped off the curb and crossed the roadway, eternal.

At precisely this moment my daughter emerged from the shop and handed me my ice-cream cone. By the time I had straightened up, cone in hand, the lady in red was but three feet away. A blinding, almost thermonuclear smile… but she did not step up onto the sidewalk. Instead she opened the trunk of the car parked in front of the shop. Her car. She threw in her purse then slammed the trunk shut.

I sat down in a café chair, opposite my daughter. I did not look across the street for a long moment.

But then I couldn’t help myself. The two had left the bench and were walking further into the park, the boring john and the swaying, scarlet woman.

When I turned back to my daughter, she said, “Do you know that lady, Daddy?”

“Sort of,” I replied.

As an archetype, I thought.

How to dine alone

So my new book on a revolt against the Inquisition in medieval France is in the final throes of readying itself for a readership rivaling Lady Gaga’s fan base in numbers. Or thereabouts.

New York e-mails regularly with slings-and-arrows queries about such-and-such a passage, such-and-such a quote. As the story concerns fourteenth-century monks hurling insults at each other from various pulpits and ox carts, thereby causing burghers and burghesses to run over the cobblestones in joyous riot, à la – take your pick – Pamplona or Vancouver, there is a lot of colorful language and overheated rhetoric from the men in the dresses. And their references have to be nailed down, identified, explained, as required in any book of non-fiction histoprose.

A young person of my acquaintance came over for dinner last night. She admired my goldfish, my air-conditioning unit, my attempts to keep squalor at bay. Then she saw my desk. On it sat my computer and an edition of the Holy Bible.

Nothing else.

She looked at me. “What’s with that?”

“It’s for the book,” I said, unthinking. “I’m doing a lot of fact-checking.”

Horror crept across her beautiful Blue-State features. Her gaze darted nervously about the room, as if looking for carry-on bags packed for the Rapture.

“Fact… checking?!”

I then knew what it was like to be damned.

Never Say Neverland

With apologies to Johnny Depp and Justin Bieber.


Never write a bibilographical essay while hungover. Books that were boring become personal affronts; those that were annoying, crimes against humanity.

Never go to online dating sites and state that the principal reason you’re looking for a relationship is to find someone who can apply eczema cream on a place you cannot quite reach. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work.

Never use your turn signal in Rhode Island. It confuses people.

Never quibble with a local about the excellence of Dunkin’ Donuts.

Never invite two French people who do not know each other over to dinner. They usually end up hating each other.

Never ask a soccer mom how her day was, unless you’ve got a lot of time on your hands.

Never say, “Okay, I’ll read your stuff.”

Never get romantically involved with a divorce lawyer.

Never suggest that Harry and Hermione should actually hook up.

Never turn on the tv evening news expecting to learn something.

Never read David Brooks.

Never eat a pizza topped with pineapple chunks.

Never continue a geopolitical conversation with someone who says “the Arab street.”

Never take your hookah into the bathroom.

Never trust anyone wearing a necktie. Especially if it’s the only thing they’ve got on.

Never tell a woman she looks like your mother.

And never ever tell a woman she looks like her mother.

The Eyes Have It

Paris once had dozens of repertory cinemas. In those folksy medieval days long before netflix and bluray, the owners of those cinemas more or less dictated what people would be talking about in the cafés afterward. The movies could be good, bad, awful, dated, cheesy – but that didn’t matter because the whole point of the evening was to escape from your unheated, closet-sized chambre de bonne apartment for as long as possible.

So you’d have a month where Billy Wilder was the big thing, then Preston Sturges, then maybe Carol Reed or Kurosawa. Sometimes the programming centered on actors, many of them almost entirely forgotten. But you didn’t care… everybody went to old movies all the time.

During one drizzly February in the mid-eighties, my local was running a Robert Taylor festival. I plopped down my five francs and found a seat in the crowded hall. The feature was Ivanhoe, starring Taylor, Joan Fontaine and another Taylor – Elizabeth.

Refresher: Ivanhoe tells the story of a knight home from the Crusades who allies himself with Robin Hood to restore Richard the Lion-Hearted to the throne of England. Along the way, the dashing Ivanhoe has to contend with a Saxon lady, Rowena, played by Joan Fontaine, and with a Jewish girl, Rebecca, played by Elizabeth Taylor.

Okay, so jousts and tournaments and treacheries took up most of the running time, all shot in Technicolor camp and greeted by the audience with occasional snickers. Then came the climactic scene. Ivanhoe has to make his choice. Both women stand before him, Rowena and Rebecca. He chooses Rowena, the Saxon.

Close-up on Rebecca’s face.

The movie was made in 1952. Elizabeth Taylor was twenty years old.

You get the picture.

From the back of the room, a gruff voice, the voice of a homeless man, the words slurred, “Putain de merde!! Il est aveugle, cet enculé?!!”

Which may be delicately translated as: “Holy shit! The fucker’s blind!!”

The explosion of laughter turns to raucous catcalls and whistles as Ivanhoe and Rowena look at each other lovingly. The crowd loses it, joyfully, and the shouts and jeers make the concluding moments of the movie inaudible.

No one cared. Suspension of disbelief had just crashed and burned.

Utterly and completely.

Il est aveugle, cet enculé?!!

Won't you come home, George Bailey?

The world has changed.

Robbers used to take the money and run. Now they take the money and run the bank.

Churches used to be picturesque outposts of institutional anti-Semitism. Now they’re franchises of the Bangkok red light district.

Schools were joyful factories of drudgery, filled with obstreperous kids and staffed by tough-love teachers. Now they’re a drag on the economy, spreading nonsense about evolution and suckling away at the taxpayer teat.

The business section used to be the most boring part of a newspaper.

Corporations paid taxes.

Spam was something you ate.

White supremacists knew their place.

The United States got into a war only once every decade.

Ke$ha had not yet been born.

Double chocolate-chip mud-pie fudge-infused pancakes did not come with melted cheese and bacon.

Individual mortality inspired literature and philosophy, not lawsuits and twenty-mile jogs in a blizzard.

Self-storage facilities were used exclusively by eccentric collectors who had amassed too much stuff.

Automobiles were a means of transport, not a residence.

Tutankhamen and Omar Sharif represented Egypt.

The Gilded Age was found only in history textbooks.

A special interest meant a hobby, not a lobby.

Soldiers took pictures of themselves raising a flag, not some dead guy’s head.

All other news of the world and the country did not get blacked out when a sports star like LeBron James changed teams or a minor entertainer like Charlie Sheen shot his mouth off.

Israel was sort of cool.

The purpose of a man was to love a woman, not legislate about her womb.

Tyrants, despots and dictators were our bff.

Ignorance was an embarrassment, not a qualification for public office.

Airports were not managed by Benito Orwell.

Vampires were not considered suitable prom dates.

People prayed in private.

Privacy existed.

Same Old, Same Old...

“It looks to me like if shooting these immigrating feral hogs [from a helicopter] works then maybe we have found a solution to our illegal immigration problem” – Virgil Peck, State Rep. (R), Kansas, 2011

“The Eastern Jew in his homeland knows nothing of the social injustice of the West; nothing of the habitual bias that governs the actions, decisions, and opinions of the average Western European; nothing of the narrowness of the Western perspective, jagged with factory smokestacks and framed by power plants; nothing of the sheer hatred that, like a life-prolonging (though lethal) drug, is so powerful that it is tended like a sort of Eternal Flame, at which these selfish people and nations warm themselves.” Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, 1937.

Daddy Knows Best

I’m worried about a friend of mine. Actually, I’m worried about his daughters. One is fifteen, the other, twelve; nice girls, smiling, innocent, yet I’ve begun to worry that their father deploys parenting techniques that are – how should I put this? – heterodox.

It all began in the summer of 2009. We live in a small New England city, home to a famous art school and an Ivy League university. The local newspaper announced that an attractive young movie star, known to millions of children for her portrayal of an apprentice witch in a famous English film series about a school for wizards, was going to attend our university in the fall. My friend’s daughters were overjoyed, hoping that they might one day catch a glimpse of her.

My friend proclaimed that he would make that happen. To that end, on a hot September afternoon at the beginning of term, he told his girls that they were to walk through the campus and see if they couldn’t spot her. They squealed with delight.

Did I say it was a hot day? As anyone who has ever been on an American campus in fine weather is aware, such meteorological conditions immediately cause a physiological phenomenon known by specialists of exhibitionist psychology as the Mass Garage Sale Erotic (MGSE), wherein scores of unbuttoned and unlaced biomasses loll about on the grass seeking to tan hitherto inaccessible recesses of flesh in the most public manner imaginable. The mean age of an MGSE participant is 21 years, 3 months.

As they passed through the fine wrought-iron gates and entered the quad, my friend said to his daughters, in a strangled voice they had never heard from him before, “Remember, Daddy used to interview lots of famous people, so he knows that movie stars don’t look the same in real life. She could be anywhere.” He gestured to the college green before them, its acres of verdant lawn strewn with recumbent MGSE practitioners, as if a blizzard had passed through and left hundreds of sculpted, shapely drifts on the grass.

His daughters, as instructed, led him through the green. Daddy had told them that his eyesight was failing, so he would have to rely on them. And, remember, to be a movie star, you have to be really really pretty.

They picked their way slowly through the sunshine. Every now and then they halted before someone, just to make sure she wasn’t the actress they sought. It was important to look very carefully, girls…

Most of those subject to such close scrutiny eventually sat bolt upright, a look of disgust crossing their faces as they saw the rheumy eyes of a vacationing Santa upon them, then broke into a smile once they spotted the girls on either side of him. The iPhone to call the campus police was dropped in the backpack as a warm feeling suffused them: Awwww, how cute, I remember what it was like to be a little girl…

The day drew on, but no actress appeared. He sensed that his girls’ disappointment matched his satisfaction. Then, at a distance, he spotted Aphrodite beneath an elm tree.

“That must be her.”

“Daddy, she’s black.”

“Could be a disguise.”

Miss Brazil put down her heavy book, sat up and adjusted her many adjustables. Her face broke into a wide grin. It was different from the awwww smiles of the others.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “My father used to walk with me on the beach and do the same thing. I was supposed to ask them if they had any lip balm, ’cause Daddy had forgotten it at home.”

My friend laughed softly at the memory. “The beach… lip balm… genius… pure genius…” His voice trailed off, he closed his eyes.

There was an awkward pause. We were in his apartment, sitting on a sofa, under the portrait of a young woman he called “The Etruscan Babe-a-licious.”

In front of us, on the coffee table, lay open the book we had been examining, “Ophelia Unplugged: The Unpublished Sketches of the Pre-Raphaelites.” I was beginning to understand my friend better.

Or so I thought.

The unmistakable scent of vodka filled the room. His fifteen-year-old daughter stood before us, a full martini glass in hand. She placed it on the table.

“See if the three o’clock is better than the two o’clock,” she said expectantly.

He took a sip.

“The grain juice could be a little colder, honey. Try to get it right for the four o’clock.”

She frowned.

“That’s all right, darling. Now make one for him,” he said, turning to me. “You’d like one with juniper juice, right?”

Intrigued, I followed her into the kitchen. On the counter a well-thumbed volume: “Teenage Bartending for Dummies.” In a corner, covered in dust, an AP Chemistry textbook, a World History textbook, and several school notebooks. She had her back to them, hunched over her task, pitting olives.

I rushed back into the living room. “For the love of God, Montresor!” I exclaimed, “She’s just a child!”

He shrugged, lifted a dainty spoon to a nostril and snorted a pinch of snuff.

I turned away, appalled. What was his other girl doing, stomping grapes in the basement?

I looked around. Where was his other daughter?

“At her sewing lesson,” he explained. His fleshy, degenerate lips creased into what I was meant to take as a smile. It made me queasy.

The twelve-year-old was taking a six-month course, 15 hours a day, six days a week, in the unventilated premises of the Providence Perspiration Shop, a vocational finishing school in the fine old tradition of New England manufacturing.

“Her sister packs her a knish for the three-minute lunch break,” he said in answer to a question unposed.

“Good heavens, man!” I shouted. “What about her field hockey? Her fencing? Why on earth should the poor thing learn to be a seamstress?!”

He rose, the hem of his scarlet silk dressing gown tickling a naked Ophelia on the coffee table as he crossed the room to a tall bookcase. He took out a large flat volume, of the format customarily used for fine-art books about the Trump properties.

“You know, I’ve handed in my manuscript,” he said absently, prising open the glossy pages.

My heart sank. No doubt the tiresome fellow was about to launch into another of his long speeches about his latest book, some incense-and-mirrors rumination on the medicinal properties of mead or the best jousting techniques or some other surefire bestseller topic.

To my relief, he said only, “I shall need a seamstress.”

I now saw the book’s cover: “Ecclesiastical Fashions of the High Middle Ages.”

He spoke softly to himself as he turned the pages: “Curate… abbot… bishop… cardinal…” His eyes widened, his breathing became labored. “Pope!” he whispered, “Pope… pope…”

I cleared my throat, loudly, as if entering the rectory of a Catholic church and thereby announcing my presence so that whatever was going on inside would stop.

“This will be my daughter’s first commission,” my friend said, opening wide the book. A double-spread centerfold showed a handsome man reclining, playmate-style, although his entire frame was covered with a cowled white robe, set off with a jet-black scapular.

“Dominican?” I ventured.

“Mmmm.”

“Inquisitor?”

“Grand Inquisitor.”

That was when I noticed the entire ensemble was trimmed with fur.

“Ermine?”

“Sable.”

“But you can’t possibly afford that, my good man! You’ll be a bankrupt!”

He raised a finger, trained his red eyes on mine.

“I know, I know. So I have bowed to the inevitable.” He retreated through a doorway and returned clutching what appeared to be a half-dozen fur stoles.

“Synthetic. Faux-fur boas. They’re for dress-up parties.” He smiled, with easy family-man condescension. “Found them in the tween section of Toys R Us.”

I nodded, impressed.

“Warwick?”

“No, no, noooo,” he tut-tutted. “Attleboro. Just past the Wendy’s.”

“But won’t your daughter… won’t your tween daughter… the seamstress… won’t she want them for herself?”

He stopped short. His mouth fell open. Clearly, the thought had never occurred to him.

The monster.

A girl’s voice wafted in from the kitchen. “Daddy… daddy… we seem to be out of juniper juice. I… I… can’t find any…” Her voice faltered, apprehensive.

My friend recovered himself. He glanced at his watch.

“On your bike, then,” he called out. “Mick’ll still be there. Get a bottle of Gordon’s. Tell him to put it on the tab.”

“Your tab?”

“No, your tab, sweetheart. What do you think your allowance is for? Candy?”

The door closed behind her.

“Kids these days!” he chuckled.

Despite his entreaties, I left shortly thereafter, wondering if my worries had any foundation to them. There are, after all, so very many different ways of growing up. Who was I to say?

I spent the next day in my rooms, lost in thought, the blinds drawn, torturing my canary.

Who was I to say?

Singin' in the Rain

We are drowning in New England today. Whither the slush of yesteryear?

The madman is still at large in Tripoli, the fool hangs on in Madison, the ferret prances in Paris. What to do with such a day?

I give you William, ninth Duke of Aquitaine, the man who put the beat in the twelfth century. Just in case we thought the cosmic funk was our own invention:


Poème sur Pur Néant

Je ferai vers sur pur néant
Ne sera sur moi ni sur autre gent
Ne sera sur amour ni sur jeunesse
Ni sur rien autre ;
Je lai composé en dormant
Sur mon cheval

Ne sais quelle heure fus né
Ne suis allègre ni irrité
Ne suis étranger ni privé
Et n’en puis mais,
Qu’ainsi fus de nuit doté par les féés
Sur un haut puy.

Ne sais quand je suis endormi
Ni quand je veille, si l’on me le dit
À peu ne m’est le cœur parti
D’un deuil poignant
Et n’en fais pas plus cas que d’une souris
Par saint Martial.

Malade suis et me crois mourir
Et rien n’en sais plus que n’en entends dire,
Médecin querrai à mon plaisir
Et ne sais quel
Bon il sera s’il me peut guérir
Mais non si mon mal empire.

J’ai une amie, ne sais qui c’est ;
Jamais ne la vis, sur ma foi
Rien ne m’a fait qui me plaît, ni me pèse
Ni ne m’en chaut,
Que jamais n’y eut Normands ni Français
En mon hôtel.

Jamais ne la vis et je l’aime fort
Jamais ne me fit droit ni me fit tort
Quand je ne la vois, bien en fais mon plaisir
Et ne l’estime pas plus qu’un coq
Car j’en sais une plus belle et plus gentille
Et qui vaut bien plus.

J’ai fait ce poème, ne sais sur quoi
Et le transmettrai à celui
Qui le transmettra à autrui
Là-bas vers l’Anjou,
Qui le transmettra de son côté
À quelqu’un d’autre.

Tea for One

Having ranked sixth in this year’s top ten list of The Most Influential Beings in the Milky Way (the only other earthling, coming in at #2, was Tonya Harding), I am often asked by friends and admirers – if they can be differentiated – whether I resent not being invited to the White House for state dinners. For the most recent banquet there with the leader of China, for example, neither Tonya nor I was contacted.

I have to say that for all my galactic importance I do not feel the smallest twinge of resentment at such neglect.

The truth is, China does not exist, as I am not there. Neither does New York City, unless I am visiting it, which of course I never will. To those willing to drink deep at my wisdom well, I use the example of the refrigerator. Does the light go out when you close the fridge door? Yes? No?... I see you’re beginning to understand. In the same way, when I am asleep the universe ceases to exist.

In uncharacteristic moments of weakness, I sometimes wish that I could find confirmation of this axiomatic truth from Professor Einstein. Unfortunately, he had the weakness of being mortal. But in all other respects we are similar: hair coloring, personal hygiene and genius.

So, will China eventually matter?

It depends on my mood.

I have so many other things to think about. For example, greasing the semiautomatic that my daughter is bringing to her prom. The Second Amendment is Number One on her dance card. As for the wholly unnecessary verbiage surrounding it, called the Constitution, I will concede that it is the most amazing thing ever produced in the galaxy about the greatest country ever to exist past, present and future and in every dimension up until beyond the infinite. Yet, yet… activist judges have argued that it applies to Mexicans. Whereas, to use one of the Founders’ funny, scrolly words, it was written principally to abolish government.

I have to remember that, aside from myself, perfection is elusive.

Okay, okay, I will admit that sometimes I lose patience. But then I realize I just have to fall asleep to make it go away. Or daydream, back to the days when I played pitch-and-catch with Spikey, my pet stegosaurus.

Do I care about women, you ask? Yes, of course, those wonderful, wonderful helpmeets. Other men my age may think about young women’s vaginas, but I think about their wombs, which are public property. It’s a difficult burden to bear.

Even more troublesome are the brown people. Exactly how much should we bomb them when they’re not there in the first place? As a galactic figure, I have to put it into perspective. And as a free man, unfettered by government, history and perspective, I sometimes wonder if we really need to pay for more armaments.

But then I realize as a one-man militia it is my duty to put the whole country in uniform and attack places I’ve never heard about and therefore don’t exist.

Funny that, no? Lordy, it’s fascinating, this push-me-pull-you world in which we live.

On the one hand, there’s nothing. On the other, there’s me.

A Little Dignity, Perhaps?

Let's see how the estimable people who run prisons respond to this. In my experience as a kid growing up in a penitentiary town, many of those outside the bars should be inside them:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/us/13prison.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

Highway Clobbery

From the Edinburgh Evening News, 1978:

“While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Mr Robert Clear. ‘He demanded that I give him my wife’s purse,’ said Mr Thirsty. ‘Telling him that the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him off, but unhappily for us all, he died.’”