Faraway

Hang around me long enough and inevitably you’ll hear my lament to give up the daily grind and retire to some pristine but remote area; an almost stereotypical wish for the stereotypical malaise of the 21st century Westerner. If I were to actually forge my own Kurtz-styled refuge in the outer wilderness, we have no doubt it would end badly:

PURSUANT to the legal matter of 87 US 291, myself along with second-year firm associate Melvin Jenkins III traveled via 777 to Bangkok (12 billable hours), upon which we transferred to a 6-seater turbine plane for the journey to the location 50 km south of Nakhon Ratchasima, 14 degrees 43’ 0” N / 102 degrees 2’ 0” East (2.8 billable hours), for the stated purpose of finding witness N. and securing his legal deposition to the matter at hand. Upon landing we ventured to the nearest commissary through thick jungle (3 hours), only to learn from the locals that N. had ‘retired’ to the ruins of a Buddhist temple deeper within the border zone along with several former Miss Indonesia winners, several crates of Chinese AK-47s and Jack Daniels, a copy of ‘Heart of Darkness,’ and a long-lost tribe of cannibal midgets who worshipped him as the second coming of their deity, whose name is pronounceable only by several sharp clicks in the back of the throat. At this point Jenkins became visibly agitated and attempted to leave the area, at least until I persuaded him to stay with the point of my sterling silver corkscrew.

Two billable hours and some medical attention later we set out again along the path, only to encounter one of the midgets blocking our way. After a few minutes of increasingly frantic sign language it was ascertained that unless my associate and I turned back, we would quickly discover how anatomically feasible it would be to have our laptops inserted forcibly into our rectal cavities. We took this motion under advisement. Deciding that we could achieve victory in the case without said deposition we turned back for the plane, only to find it had been stripped and set on fire on the runway and our position surrounded by dozens of the little fuckers. Only by offering myself to their depravities could I secure my freedom (18 billable hours).

And God, oh God, I think they sacrificed Jenkins to the creature they call the Lizard From Beyond Time.

Cordially,

Mason Goldenbacher IV, Esq.

Cc: Medical

Anyway. This past week, I found a suitably empty beach, on an island in the Turks & Caicos. By mid-afternoon I could separate myself sufficiently from the family and wade into the lapping surf, the sand empty in both directions for hundreds of yards, and let my mind drift off into the blue.

When a catamaran from Provo, groaning under the weight of several paunchy Baby Boomers trying to relive their frat days with a couple of beers, beached on my little piece of serenity, I simply veered away into the water. If I were less civilized I probably would have considered the use of a spear-gun to re-secure a little peace and quiet. Legend has it that Columbus first sank his boots into the sand of the New World on this spot, in search of the freshwater lakes at the center of Pine Cay, and I wonder what the natives thought when those boisterous creatures crashed upon them.

A few days later, I fly back north. My face tanned, my hands covered with near-microscopic bites from a few dozen Darwinian Superstar insects that managed to get past my copious amounts of repellent. I trade shorts and sandals for a thermal shirt under a hoodie under a heavy suede jacket. Walk back into the office, one of my co-workers sticking her head up and querying, with rising incredulity, “You actually came back?”

A Million Little Fixes

I have something to confess. In the wake of various hysterical news stories about James Frey and how he supposedly manufactured out of whole cloth his history of self-abuse, police abuse, drug abuse, parental abuse, alcohol abuse, money abuse, and pretty much everything-else abuse with (hopefully) the exception of boinking the family pet – I have to get something off my chest to the all of 10 people who actually read this blog.

I did not actually shoot a man in Reno to watch him die.

There’s that story I like to tell about where I flew out to Los Angeles to interview Gary Oldman and we ended up in that highway standoff with the police, throwing Molotov cocktails as police choppers circled overhead and whatever bullheaded SWAT lieutenant nearly had an aneurism deciding whether to snipe our nation’s most beloved character actor on live national television. In truth, I took a few small liberties with that event. I spent that weekend playing ‘Civilization III’ and occasionally walking down to my mailbox to see if my Netflix had arrived yet. I have never met Gary Oldman, and hope never to do so without a sizable bodyguard escort, because I hear he preys on the flesh of the living.

I am not big in Japan.

The trauma of watching a beloved friend die when I was seven did not propel me into a life of debauchery, drugs and crime, climaxing with twelve months spent in a rehab facility sharing a room with a 400-pound tweak freak known only as ‘The Ram.’ In truth, I had no friends in elementary school, because I wandered around using words like ‘discombobulated’ and ‘juxtaposition’ and ‘asshole,’ frequently in the same sentence.

Thirty seconds ago, I announced to somebody that this entry was entirely my idea. I have to confess that I stole this idea from that piece by the ‘Daily Show’ writer in today’s New York Times. God forgive us all.

Seriously

I liked Frey’s book, despite his reluctance to obey the rules of proper grammar. He has skill; there’re not many authors who have the ability to make the decision over whether to drink a glass of beer as gripping as he does. But I think all the legions of fans who decided to affix themselves to ‘Million Little Pieces’ as a sort of Gospel of Addiction are feeling severely put out – I mean, if you tattooed ‘Hold On’ on your bicep, only to find that the entire narrative behind that particular phrase was a falsity, you’d probably be pretty miffed. Plus he angered legions of Oprah fans, who, like Gary Oldman, prey upon the flesh of the living.

Satan is my Motor

Most writing jobs do not pay well. Particularly when you get down to the level of local alt-weeklies and bar magazines, you're looking at the princely rate of 5 to 15 cents a word for your deathless prose. A large paper like the Washington Post will, on a good day, pay you around $400 for a short feature, closer to $1000 for the longer ones; but the space for freelancers is limited. Then there are the bigger jobs, the feature pieces for the New Yorker or comparable publication, which will pay you thousands - but unless you're Joan Didion, those are often three-times-in-a-lifetime affairs. This is why most of the professional writers I know (myself included) also have day jobs within the publishing industry, be it art direction or as an editor at a custom-publishing house or what-have-you.

And for 99 percent of the time, the assignments your day job or freelancing gigs assign, you are 100 percent A-1 copasetic with. Taking Miss DC bowling. Watching rednecks drive super-reinforced cars off cliffs during ESPN2 tryouts. Faking like you're homeless for a few days. But then there are those assignments, accepted purely for the money, that leave you feeling so evil afterwards you figure the only way to keep the streak going is to go out and stomp some kittens or sell heroin to octogenarians.

Which is precisely the situation I'm in right now. Evil Client, Stupid Article, Ton of Money. In a state of near-constant verbal and electronic bombardment by people whose email addresses read things like 'BILL SMITH - LEGAL' and whose voices carry the brittle desperation of four-pack-a-day smokers caught for 100 billable hours a week on the 99th floor of a non-smoking office building. I even cupped a spider and took the tickling beastie outside last night instead of stomping it because I felt it would give an incremental boost to my karma, which sorely needs it.

My moral ambivalence translates into pumping a lot of weights, watching bad French horror movies, working on the book, and generally remaining as cheerfully acerbic as possible. My office-mate says, "Arik Sharon had a stroke," to which I reply, "I guess that shatters his lifelong dream of ever appearing on Final Jeopardy."

I'll take Inconveniently-Timed Brain Damage for $500, Alex.

Although it looks like the Prime Minister might very well recover. The only thing you can tell about broken-down old men is that they're survivors. The only thing I conclude from the last few days is that, where man used to try and conquer other men by hurling loads of flaming arrows and other large missiles via catapult, now we launch legions of chattering lawyers via Gulfstream IV. Meanwhile, I find myself listening to a lot of Spoon and Joe Strummer. In less than a week I will be on a beach, praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

Rolling

So the bar magazine sent me to bowl with Miss DC last night, and afterwards I went home to write a Woody Allen-style comedy piece based on the experience, before turning it into Monica this morning. Of the 250+ words that she chopped out of this, most were similes, which is fine (they were a bit excessive). I just thought I would include my draft here without having to do another post:

Beauty and the Zen of Bowling

I am not good with really beautiful women. Talking with them often makes me do a classic flop-sweat like Johnny Cash, only without the guitar and black suits and actual songwriting ability. Ask me about it and I’ll inevitably flashback to that time in college when I asked out that model living in our dorm, and what should have been a suave query ended up ruined because I was jittery as bin Laden at an FDNY convention.

Today, though, I am recovering from both a Mongol of a virus and a festive and mildly felonious New Year’s, too drained to be unnerved by even the prospect of imminent nuclear attack. This is a good thing, because tonight I’m hanging out with Candace Allen, Miss District of Columbia USA 2006, and we’re going bowling.

Bowling, like songwriting, is not a skill I possess in my repertoire, unless you define it as ‘sending a 12-pound ball airborne in the general direction of the pins, likely giving any innocent bystanders a cranial contusion in the process.’ If this were the 1950s, I would be banned from the neighborhood bowling league, which would only be a positive, because I’m allergic to polyester shirts. Fortunately, we’re going to the new Lucky Strike in Chinatown, which is quite a bit swankier than the lanes your grandfather rolled on, in a retro-ironic sort of way.

Allen is pretty much everything you’d expect from someone who beat out 25 other women to become Miss DC: poised, articulate, intelligent, and beautiful. Mind-numbingly beautiful. She sums it up as the two of us walk over from the Metro: “I’m easy going; my friends say I’m laid back. It takes a lot to irritate me. I just like being around other people; I’m gregarious.” Which is probably why I’m not a sizzling bundle of nerves as we lace up our bowling shoes. The bowling shoes that Lucky Strike provides, just as an aside, are immaculate – in marked contrast to the footwear normally provided by bowling alleys, so diseased-looking that it would make a hypochondriac’s head explode.

Anyway. It was family that drew her into the pageant to begin with. “It was something I was motivated to do by my cousin, who was Miss Pennsylvania 2003,” says Allen, a Philadelphia native who is now a senior at Howard University, focusing on media law. “It was somewhat on a whim, and I was a bit nervous, but that drove me more.”

In April she’ll head up to Baltimore and face 50 new faces for the Miss USA title. Baltimore, with family close by, means she’ll have a cheering section. This is necessary, because while the contestants do their best to help each other out backstage, the competition itself can be tough. “You’re judged on personality. There’re a lot of tough questions. You have a one-on-one with the judges beforehand,” she says, adding. “There are people who don’t understand, that it’s more than just walking around in an evening gown.

“Though a girl does like to dress up, whether she admits it or not.”

Allen, just as another aside, has an iPod filled with everything except country, although she does make exceptions for some cowboy music. She has a small tattoo on her wrist and a diamond ring on her right hand.

We start to bowl. She favors a coral-pink ball. I grab pretty much anything heavy enough whose holes won’t pull my fingers out of their sockets, and through massive effort manage to keep the ball on the ground. The screen above our heads helpfully provides, in addition to the score, a little window showing how fast our ball is moving when it hits the pins. Allen rolls between 11.2 and 13.4 miles per hour.

The last time she played was at a charity bowl for the homeless, where “we didn’t keep score, but I had more strikes than this.” Indeed, volunteer work has always been a big part of her life: tutoring kids at elementary schools throughout the District, even a gig as a candy striper. “My main thing now is working with children, tutoring in an after-school program. Right now it’s pre-K; it’s wild but it’s fun,” she says. “Just reading to them and helping with homework. More people should volunteer – they don’t realize the satisfaction they’ll get out of it.”

If she weren’t so nice, she’d probably be getting satisfaction out of whaling me at this moment.

Allen rolls with what a purist would likely call a classic form: windup, aim, release, and follow-through, in one graceful, arching movement. At first her ball keeps curving left, but then she corrects; her scorecard begins to read like a New York phone number: 9-1-7-9-9-3-7-7-6-9… Meanwhile I hold my own with the occasional strike. I do not mind. At the end of the first game, she leads me by five points.

The last time I went to a bowling alley was on an insomniac summer night in Chicago, an old-school West Side place filled with old wood and cigarette smoke and bad intentions. If you want to see the textbook definition of ‘dysfunctional,’ I give you some of the people chain-smoking and rolling in a place like that at three in the morning. But most bowling alleys these days, in a bid to attract what marketing directors expansively refer to as the ’18-to-25 demographic,’ now resemble the interiors of UFOs. Lasers rake the ceiling; black light casts everything in alien hues; music videos flash and gyrate on big screens over the lanes.

Lucky Strike doesn’t fall into either of those extremes. The décor is tasteful and expensive, about what you’d expect around the MCI Center, an area that under Abe Pollin’s wrinkled but iron grip is starting to look like Times Square’s bastard lovechild. There are screens over the bowling lanes, and they play silent clips from movies – Bill Murray going wild near the end of ‘Kingpin,’ Christina Ricci and Vincent Gallo fighting in a photo booth in ‘Buffalo 66,’ among others – alternating with still shots of abstract art. There are couches and tables that look like they belong in a club, recessed lighting, and pool tables in the back.

Because this article is for the February issue of OnTap, devoted in a large part to Valentine’s Day stuff, I ask Allen her thoughts on Lucky Strike as a date spot. I also do this because she’s just rolled a strike, nearly terminating my narrow lead with extreme prejudice, and I feel the urgent need to throw in a distraction.

“[The place] is good,” she says. “It has food. Entertainment. It’s a little loud. It’d be a good place for a first date, because you’re out there doing something.” And that’s important. “As a first date, movies aren’t any fun, because there’s no interaction.”

Ladies and gentlemen, take note.

At that moment she winds up. Aims. Sends her arm sweeping back – and the ball goes flying backwards, where it bounces once and rolls to a stop against the couch where I’m sitting, taking notes. No harm; it doesn’t smack the large group of poets who have, incongruously enough, decided to use a bowling alley for a reading, and who more to the point have taken over our couch. How anyone can analyze iambic pentameter while “Stuck in the Middle with You” blasts on the speakers is beyond normal comprehension.

“I’ll try not to kill anybody this time,” she says, taking up her favorite ball again, and rolls. Pins scatter with a resounding boom. Strike. Vindication.

With one game left, the score on the screen says ‘Candace: 339 / Nick: 333.’ But I am coming back, just like Jesus. Rolling that 12-pounder right down the center, just like the Big Lebowski. The scores are staying close. I roll. Allen and I have developed a shtick that revolves around memorizing a positive outcome as the ball streaks toward its target: strikes, splits, pins flying. It’s seemed to work so far. I concentrate. I am but a monk in the Temple of Rolling, intensely focused. The ball goes straight … at 15.2 miles an hour … straight … starts to curve, and (oh crap) whispers by the leftmost pin and flops into the gutter. Three lanes away, meanwhile, a little kid totters with a ball the size of his whole upper body and scores a strike. My irrational jealousy at him knows no bounds.

Allen wins, which is exactly the way it should be. She is happy about this fact. In another two months she’ll head for the Miss USA pageant, and there’s a solid chance she’ll earn the crown, because she has personality and beauty to spare, but for the moment she has another victory to pump a fist about: kicking ass at bowling.

January 2006

My Body is a Temple. The Temple of Doom.

There’s a theory that the human race owes everything to alcohol. That it was fermentation sites brought people together out of the hills and forests, who then, once they gathered together in sufficient numbers, created trade and culture. But I’ve never had the same affinity for liquor as others; I’ll have wine with dinner sometimes and beer when I’m out, but I don’t spend the equivalent of a small nation’s defense budget on getting smashed. With the exception of two or three times a year, when a special occasion or happenstance dictates that I unleash a chemical Tet Offensive on my cerebrum.

New Year’s is as good an excuse as any.

At Ben’s party, in the midst of firecrackers, music, game-playing, and a rhetorical discussion escalating into a fistfight in the backyard, I quaffed three-quarters of a bottle of red and two glasses of champagne and then, because I am a lightweight, fell asleep on a couch. Woke up the next morning to the usual distressing symptoms: headache, stomach apparently trying to qualify for acrobatics at the next Olympics, a world that kept threatening to fall distressingly out of tilt. I was still on the couch. Maro had taken off my boots and someone else had thrown a blanket over me.

Now it’s the Year of our Lord 2006 here on the east coast of America, three hundred and some odd years after the first European settlers landed on New England shores in search of someone weaker to terrorize. We are still stuck with a President whose literary pursuits extended to the nutritional label on the back of a Tabasco bottle, when he should have been studying Kipling or Conrad for examples of what happens when Westerners fuck around in the wrong Sandbox. And my landlord still hasn’t fixed my kitchen ceiling.

A group of us wake up and wander out to forage, finally ending up at Tonic for pancakes, before heading back to Ben’s basement apartment for the inevitable cleanup. I walk out back. Ben, Joe and Hanna are standing in the small, brick-enclosed back yard, scanning for something. I ask, “What are we looking for?”

“Miller lost his glasses.”

Miller lost his dosage, is more like it; he and Patrice had gotten into some sort of argument that has escalated to a full-on brawl, the sole casualty of which was a small tree in the center of the yard that had been broken by the force of two grown men slamming against it. It tilts askew like the mast of a sinking ship amid the cracked, wet concrete and piles of brown leaves. We begin to search, the three of us, flicking our boots through the quasi-humus.

Joe, peering into a large ceramic pot on the back stoop: “I think there’s a dead pigeon here.” A stick is procured, wet leaves parted to reveal a dirt-clogged Marv action figure, grimacing manfully with a severed head in one hand.

“There’s still that smell,” I say. The glasses are not in plain sight. I decide to find them by listening: I’ll stomp through the leaf piles and if I hear a metallic crunch, jackpot. “It’s like overcooked chicken or something. Maybe it is a dead pigeon.”

My head is throbbing like a broken tooth. I help mop the floors inside, and then head home, resolved to start the year off right by writing lots of Nabokov-quality copy.

The Body

An hour later I come back down the hill. There were two police cruisers parked behind my building, and a navy-blue Ford Explorer with the words OCME-14 in white on the door, below a city seal. Under the pretext of taking out the trash I wander out back and peer in the windows. No cops, just crackling radios and a half-finished bottle of Snapple in the dashboard drink holder of one cruiser. The ‘ME’ part of ‘OCME’ stands for ‘Medical Examiner,’ and in the back of the Explorer is a cardboard box filled with cartons of latex gloves. Huh.

I wander back inside and stand in the stairwell, cocking my head for the sound of radios or the usual chaos that accompanies the arrival of law enforcement. No sound except for my new neighbor continuing his seemingly days-long phone conversation with someone who berates him constantly. I wander back outside, immediately greeted by the sound of sirens. A vehicle that looks like a navy-blue ambulance is pulling up outside, the words OCME-2 on its side. I promptly sit down on the stoop and watch as the driver, wearing latex gloves and a blue mesh cap over his hair, steps out. Even before he walks over and opens a side compartment, pulling out a gray bag wrapped in clear plastic, I know what I’m looking at: the meat wagon. He goes around, opens the back doors, and yanks out a collapsible stretcher. The scene is starting to draw a small crowd. Out of the building next door walks the medical examiner, an older woman with gray curly hair dressed in a white turtleneck under a black jacket marked OCME on the back. Two cops follow her. Words are exchanged between tech and cops and medical examiner; tech and one cop disappear inside as the others drive off, to reemerge minutes later with a body sagging in the gray bag between them. Whoever the person was, they spend their last thirty seconds in daylight being bumped and wheeled over the sidewalk and into the back of the wagon, which unlike an equipment-packed ambulance is empty save for another collapsible stretcher. And the wagon drives off.

“That’s it, my New Year’s resolution is to eat right and exercise,” I say to nobody in particular, and it seems forced and hollow coming out of my mouth. I wonder about the person, and about how they died. Not a homicide – there would have been detectives, more cops, the front entranceway of the building taped off. Maybe natural. Maybe suicide: someone who decided the New Year – and every New Year after this one – didn’t really look all that promising. I walk inside and select the loudest action movie in my collection, make some popcorn and spend the next two hours forgetting about how the tech and cop grunted and fought against the weight of the body as they carried it out the front door, and the slithering sound of the body bag sliding onto the scuffed crimson backboard of the stretcher.