January 29, 2006
I told my girlfriend, Magpie, that she needed to start greasing her butt with Vaseline so she could fit through the revolving door at Macy’s, and she smacked me.
Women’s butts in New York are expanding at a fantastic rate, and I feel it has something to do with E=MC2 and the expanding universe. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. A fat butt helps female snowboarders like Kelly Clark get more thrust to do spins. Also, from the male standpoint, it presents a larger target for other kinds of thrust. But it ain’t too esthetically pleasing, unless you’re an aficionado of Botero’s sculptures. Let’s face it, in the “sex appeal” category, and that’s where the money is, the streamlined European models are beating our girls hands down.
You’ve heard of the Arms Race? Well, this is the Butt Race. We need to mobilize our nation’s resources to get our women’s butts down to the size where they don’t create a vacuum effect each time they pass through the Lincoln Tunnel. Our nation’s infrastructure is suffering from the strain of all these fat butts destabilizing our bridges! Women of America, I implore you! Stop stuffing yourself with Cheez Doodles and Snickers bars. You are displacing too much volume! The girls in my gym know they have a problem. That is why they outnumber the men by a ratio of 100:1. But they only represent a minuscule portion of the female population at large.
Don’t get me wrong. American men aren’t too freakin’ fantastic either. But checking out men’s backsides is not my job. There are enough guys in New York happy to do that. I am here to inspect women’s bodies, and I am overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge. Oh, I used to be fat, but I took off a couple hundred kilos and now I can almost fit into my Santa suit. I used to be so fat, I went for a physical and my blood type came back “Ragú.” Peeping Toms would reach in my window and pull down the shade. When I took a bath, I didn’t leave a ring around the tub – I left stretch marks. But I got a grip on myself, and now I have a target date of 2010 when I’ll be able to find my pecker without the use of a periscope.
I realize it’s unfashionable to criticize fat people, especially since they're the majority, but it’s getting harder and harder to move around midtown because of the gridlock caused by huge, blubbery butts taking up all the space on the sidewalk. I saw a cop giving a woman a ticket because she didn’t have a red flag attached to her butt. Levis is coming out with a line of relaxed fit jeans with “WIDE LOAD” stenciled across the back. Also, you can’t get a seat on the subway because of all the people who need one seat for each cheek. The Staten Island ferry has cops to distribute the fat people equally on the boat for fear they’ll all crowd onto one side and cause it to tip over.
Even the Statue of Liberty has been put on a diet because there’s no room left in New York Harbor for the Queen Mary.
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Posted on 1/29/2006
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January 27, 2006
“Welcome to Election Night in Canada, live from the Molson Centre in Montreal, where a capacity crowd of thirty million fans is excitedly awaiting the beginning of the game. I’m Scotty Labatt and my partner here for tonight is Quebec color commentator Lucien Brador.”
“Hi dere, folks!” “
As the teams make their way onto the ice, I’d like to point out some rules changes for tonight’s match. First of all, instead of two teams playing, we have four teams and one guy, André Arthur, who will be playing with himself because no team wants him.
“Second, instead of a hockey puck the teams will be batting around a hot potato, which should make for an interesting game as it melts the ice and the players start falling over each other.
“The third, and most important rule change, is that all the rules have been suspended and there are no rules. That should really shake things up, folks! Expect a lot of iceing, high-sticking, body slamming and outright brawls as the four teams and one single bloke go for broke in their attempt to wrestle control of one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Isn’t that right, Lucien?”
“Dat’s right, Scotty. Dis is da big game that Canadians have been sharpening dere skates for since Jean Chrétien retired. Anybody who tink Canadians are peaceful people never saw that clip of Chrétien slugging the reporter. The big difference between us and our neighbors in the States is, rather than shoot a man from a distance of one kilometer, we like to get up close to our victim.”
“Incidentally, we’d like to welcome our American viewers to the game tonight. We know how important our elections are to our neighbors to the south.”
“Yeah, right!”
“Now all the players are assembled on the ice. Paul Martin, the Liberal captain, is saluting Stephen Harper, the Conservative leader.”
“Is that what he’s doing, Scotty? I never saw a guy salute with just one finger.”
“He’s just showing Harper where he can hang his Alberta cowboy hat.”
“Thanks for clearing that up.”
“Now our national anthem will be sung by Avril Lavigne.”
O Canada we stand on guard for thee
Six-pack of beer and smoke a joint of tea….
“That was certainly inspirational. Now the face-off. Martin hits the puck to Pettigrew, who is checked by Layton. He passes, but it’s intercepted by Olivia Chow, who skates to center ice where she’s hit from behind by Tory MP Rosa Ambrose. They throw their gloves off and start throwing punches.
“Conservative coach Brian Mulroney is yelling from the sidelines for Harper to swing around and get the puck. He sees that the Liberal goaltender, Stéphane Dion, has left the goal wide open to join the fight.
"Harper skates up, grabs the puck, makes it down to the Liberals’ net and SCORES! That makes it 1-0 for the Conservatives. Meanwhile, Quebec radio announcer André Arthur is skating back and forth down the ice screaming, 'Passe-moi le puck, hostie!'"
“Dat guy’s crazy! Everybody thinks Garneau’s an astronaut, but André Arthur was in outer space since before he was born. In fact, we’re building him his own rocket that only goes one way, so he don’t come back!”
“Now the camera’s showing the crowd, that’s going crazy. The whole country’s here, including a lot of fucks who immigrated to the States and forgot what we did for them. Like Jim Carrey, and fucking Dean, dere.”
“Incidentally, all the fans got one of those useless Canadian flags that you can’t do anything with, so they’re waving them around like crazy, and the whole arena is a sea of red. Except for the Quebec contingent, who don’t know what to do with theirs, so they’re sewing them into backless thong panties for the women. Monica Lewinsky, eat your heart out!”
“Now the face-off! Governor General Michaëlle Jean grabs the puck and skates toward the Conservatives’ goal, but she’s stopped at the blue line by Laureen Harper, who’s smashed against the boards by Joe Clark.”
“I thought he was dead!”
“Maybe he is, but it’s our national game you’re talking about here. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trudeau show up to play…!”
“Or at least Margaret Trudeau!”
“Anyway, hockey or politics, it’s just a game. Come July First, we’re all one team!”
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Posted on 1/27/2006
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January 25, 2006
Mayor Keynes, dressed in Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts, exalted at the ocean breeze as the sun rose over the South Atlantic. The morning air of Punta del Este smelled of salt spray with a faint odor of pines. He had just completed his morning constitutional, a walking tour of the small peninsula that the people of Uruguay consider the jewel of their country. Originally founded as an obscure fishing village on a spit of sand at the point where the mouth of the Rio de la Plata meets the Atlantic, Punta del Este was seized upon in the 1940s by developers as the site for a luxury resort because of its location midway between Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. It had evolved as the playground of Latin American aristocracy, its casino, five star hotels and nightclubs playing host to notables no less eminent than Juan and Eva Peron, the presidents and industrialists of Argentina and Brazil, performing artists and sports stars of South America and Europe, as well as various other monied elements drawn by Uruguay’s discreet banking culture and lax enforcement of extradition agreements concerning fiduciary irregularities. In short, it was the ideal location for a mayor of New York currently under indictment.
The mayor had long ago purchased a duplex in the luxurious Malecón Condominiums overlooking the Playa Mansa beach in anticipation of just such an eventuality, and that is where he had retired to following his inculpation by New York’s Republican U.S. Attorney following revelations of kickbacks relating to the rezoning of Coney Island.
Mayor Keynes had no doubt that he would inevitably get the indictments thrown out. New York was a Democratic city, and he had had a stranglehold on judicial appointments to the federal bench in the Southern District for a considerable number of years. But he was damned if he would give his political enemies the satisfaction of seeing him led into the courthouse in handcuffs, the digital images of which would survive for the duration of the Republic. No, he would take a much-deserved vacation and leave his attorneys to sort out the legalities of the situation.
He had a private jet awaiting him on a little-used runway at Kennedy Airport. On his way to the airport, he instructed the driver to change direction and go by way of the Belt Parkway through South Brooklyn. Once there he again confounded his security detail, ordering them to take him to Brighton Beach, where he exited his limo and walked out onto the sand. It was a clear, moonlit night. He walked in his Saville Row suit and hand-crafted brogues to the water’s edge, turned his back to the bay, and gloated with triumphal satisfaction on the result of his handiwork, a magnificent, glittering skyline rivaling that of Miami Beach or even Manhattan. What had formerly been a shabby, inconsequential quarter of Brooklyn, a squat, nondescript neighborhood of squalid apartment blocks and ramshackle carnival attractions fit only for the deracinated masses of immigrants, he had transformed into a glittering utopia of avant-garde architecture and glamour bursting at the seams with the cream of the world's elite, who battled each other tooth and nail for an apartment overlooking Breezy Point (he had a development plan in mind for that as well) and Sandy Hook.
Mayor Keynes understood that the process had been brutal, neighborhood cohesion built up over the course of generations having been destroyed. Helpless people had been uprooted and made to suffer. But if New York was to survive, it was only by continued growth and development. Where would Paris be today if not for the vision and ruthlessness of Baron Haussmann? Closer to home, Robert Moses had been viciously excoriated for his remodeling projects of the twentieth century, but ultimately been proven right.
Mayor Keynes was unmarried and childless. New York was his only family, and he intended to leave it grander and richer than he had found it, the same as one would do for one’s own children. He saw the city as an organic entity: cells die and cells are born – the difference being that the physical body has only a finite expectancy of life whereas New York was meant to live FOREVER!
Had he personally profited? Of course he had! The concept of the selfless public servant working for the betterment of the community while himself refusing to touch filthy lucre was a naïve one at best. Put plainly, it was pure imbecility. Mayor Keynes had fought himself up from the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, where his mother ran a saloon on Tenth Avenue. He had been a Golden Gloves boxing champion as a teenager, won a full scholarship to Yale and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. If he had gone into government, as opposed to private enterprise, was that any different than the nobility of Europe who disdained commerce for careers in the military, government or the clergy? They certainly never entertained the notion of living modestly like a humble dormouse, and neither did he. From the start, he had modeled himself as a “novus homo” in the tradition of the Roman Empire, an eminence of public administration who became rich working for the benefit of the collective.
Starting his political career in the office of the City Controller, he had become notable for his integrity, though he nevertheless developed close ties to the banking community and used what he heard to occasionally make a small investment for himself. As he rose through the city hierarchy, so did the volume of his placements and nobody thought the worse of him for it.
Though naturally gregarious, erudite in fact, he kept his own counsel. And he never forgot the lessons he had learned as a boxer. Nobody advances in New York without making enemies, or at least adversaries, and the mayor kept his stomach tight to withstand hard body blows. Though he tried to stay outside the reach of opponents and keep them off-balance with jabs in their faces (rhetorically speaking, of course), he was never hesitant to step inside and exchange shots at close range, to keep punching with both hands until he had driven them onto the ropes, exhausted and reeling from the inundation of blows, whereupon he would shower them with head shots until they crumpled. People of lesser ability than he, and that included everybody, soon learned to stay clear of him though it built him indomitable blocs of enemies that waited and seethed in frustration as he prospered, until the zoning scandal finally erupted.
The scandal broke when the New York Long Term Credit Bank discovered that a Brooklyn machine tool manufacturer, Simon Ripofsky, had borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars secured by forged export orders that did not exist, and that Orlovsky had invested the money to finance the construction of luxury condominium developments in Coney Island. When Federal and state prosecutors became involved, Orlovsky quickly flipped, supplying details of dummy corporations controlled by The Sea Breeze Gang and wearing a wire to record discussions involving payoffs to “consultants” in return for rezoning resolutions passed by the city council. The payments were traced to Swiss bank accounts which the compliant Swiss banking authority revealed to be controlled by shell corporations operated out of the Channel Islands and Grand Cayman Island. And so on and so forth until, when all the skins of the financial onion had finally been laboriously peeled away, the trail finally led to a handful of Tampa millionaires with CIA connections who had contributed heavily to Mayor Keynes’ (among others’) election campaigns and who owned vacation properties to which the mayor held lifetime leases.
These revelations were enough to whet the appetite of the Republican U.S. Attorney, ominously (for anybody who had ever served time in Massachusetts) named Shirley Needham. She subpoenaed all Mayor Keynes’ banking records and discovered links with other “consultancies” suspected of arranging for various exclusive Manhattan properties to be undervalued for tax purposes in return for cash payoffs.
No smoking gun was ever discovered with the mayor’s fingerprints on it, and as the flood of nebulous accusations and innuendo cascaded daily in the newspaper and media reports, he ceaselessly insisted that he was the victim of a right-wing smear job fuelled by partisan politics, but Shirley Needham, who kept a bust of Rudolph Giuliani in her office, had been able to assemble a construct of interlocking interests illustrated by flow charts and diagrams that convinced the sitting grand jury to indict him on forty-two counts of conspiracy and racketeering.
In the first interview granted by the mayor from his “vacation retreat” in Uruguay, he stated with jocularity, “Forty-Two is my lucky number.
“These things happen from time to time in New York politics,” he went on. “Mayors are often sitting targets for competing political interests. William Jay Garner was shot in the neck by a disgruntled public employee, and he eventually died from the wound. Let them say what they like, as long as they keep their pistols in their pockets.”
Mayor Keynes breathed deeply the robust salt air of the South Atlantic. To witness the inspirational rising of the sun and the multifarious beauties of nature at dawn was his tonic. He often wished that he had been inspired by the muse to write poetry like so may of his Roman forebears (as a person of English extraction, he counted the ancient Romans as part of his ancestral heritage). Oh, the joy to compose as Cicero had:
Meanwhile the paths which you from earliest days did seek,
Yes, and when Consul too, as mood and virtue called,
These hold, and foster still your fame and good men’s praise
His heart quickened. Oh boy, that was poetry! That was life, to dine at the banquet table in the company of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, discussing Scipio’s African campaigns and the politics of the Roman senate. Life today, with its predigested video life and its sound bites, was barely tolerable.
Mayor Keynes was nevertheless clever enough to know that not having been visited by Calliope, the goddess of poetry and, lacking the artistic component, he was condemned to at best a second-rate existence. Still, he accepted his limitations as he saw them and persevered.
He breakfasted on croissants and strong coffee at an outdoor café facing the boat basin and walked back to his apartment. One room of the apartment had been remodeled into a situation room with T.V. monitors and an elaborate computer set-up. He switched on three monitors to the American all-news channels and let them drone on while he perused the web sites of the New York papers. The hard copies would be FedEx-ed down to him, but that would be late in the day, too late to respond, so he gleaned what he could from what was available on the internet. Then he speed-dialed his press secretary at City Hall.
The mayor had found it useful to have for his spokesman a person of color. The man he chose for this post, a black man named Julius Knight, was a retired policeman who had only achieved his B.A. at age 39. Julius Knight was hard-bitten as they come, having served in the city’s most notorious precincts, but he had kept a vigorous, youthful image by virtue of an exacting fitness regimen, and would not have been out of place modeling shirtless and in tights in the color pages of Muscle and Fitness Magazine. After retiring from the force, he had become active in community affairs in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he worked as advance man for a city counselor nowhere near as qualified as he. It was there that he came to the attention of the mayor, who he met at a community function. What endeared him to Mayor Keynes was that as a youth, Julius Knight had been Golden Gloves. The mayor loved boxers.
Julius Knight presented a stern, authoritative image of rectitude before the television cameras, but in private he was a helpful, eager subordinate. The mayor loved him and repeatedly promised him all future assistance in the furtherance of Knight’s political career (Julius Knight took these promises with a grain of salt, being enough of a New Yorker to understand the true value of a boss’ promise).
When Knight’s image appeared on the videophone, Mayor Keynes, dispensing with niceties, plunged into the business at hand. “We have to respond to these Community Board 3 complaints about the emissions from the emergency generators at the 13th Street Pump Station.”
“I agree.”
“You’ll call a press conference and emphasize the fact that water purity is in the interest of all New Yorkers, and that the short-term loss of air quality in Alphabet City is an unavoidable by-product of the current energy crisis. Make sure you throw in something about the fouling of city waters from the pollution being dumped into the Hudson River by upstate manufacturers.”
“Gotcha.”
“In the meantime, call Dan Bernstein at the Department of Environmental Protection and find out where we stand in terms of installing more powerful filters on the emergency generators.”
“O.K.”
“That rabbi in Brooklyn who got indicted – did you find out if he contributed any money to our last campaign?”
“As far as I know, his contribution was in the neighborhood of $2,000.”
“Well, when you find out the exact amount return the contribution to him.
“Issue a press release deploring the design of the Regents Math exam, saying it places an unfair burden on underprivileged city students.”
Julius Knight asked, “Have you seen the exam?”
“We’ll go back to it later. Remember, there’s an election coming up.”
“O.K.”
“What’s the latest on that officer who was shot in Staten Island?”
“He’s in intensive care.”
“Who visited him?”
“The Deputy Police Commissioner.”
“You feel like taking a ride over there?”
“If you think I should, sure whynot?"
“Don’t forget to bring flowers.”
“The guy already got enough flowers to start his own export business.”
“That’s O.K., think of something else. Don’t show up emptyhanded. Make sure you have something inspirational to say to the press.”
“The only thing the press wants to hear is when you’re coming back.”
“You can remind them that this is my first extended vacation since I assumed office. Tell them that I’m having a conference with the Uruguayan justice minister to explore international law enforcement cooperation.”
Julius Knight smiled, “They should get a good laugh out of that.”
“He who laughs last et-cetera. Have you spoken with my attorneys?”
“I spoke to Jake Pretzel. They’re drawing up a motion for the Court of Appeals to have the indictments thrown out on the grounds that they are ‘offensive to your rights of due process on the grounds of the dangerous expedient of commencing an investigation based on media reports.’”
The mayor exploded. “What kind of horseshit is that?! I’m not paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars to bury me by filing frivolous motions. Tell them to file that motion in the garbage and come up with a more comprehensive strategy, something with a foundation in case law. No, I’ll tell them myself.”
“Pretzel’s in Chicago today, and Hamburger and Frankfurter are in court trying a counterfeiting case.”
“Counterfeiting of what?”
“Currency.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!” Mayor Keynes laughed out loud. By this time the American dollar had been loaded up with so many security measures, 3-D halographs of the presidents, bars and water marks that showed when the bill was held up to the light, even embedded computer chips, that only the biggest donkey would attempt to knock it off. “Who is this genius?” he guffawed.
“A guy named Morrie Belo. They call him Pops.”
“I know Pops,” said the mayor. “He’s in the rag trade. He’s already loaded.”
“Show me a New Yorker who thinks he’s got enough money, and I’ll show you an anti-social element,” deadpanned Julius Knight. “Anyway, I don’t think they got him for participating in the actual operation. More like being an accessory before the fact, for the financing of it. The actual counterfeiters are Italian wiseguys from Bay Ridge.”
“You think they got a case against Pops?” asked the mayor.
“If I was privy to that kind of intelligence, I might be better placed to tell you the true status of your case. My sources just don’t extend that far.”
“Well, I hope for Pops’ sake that it’s not as bad as you say. Counterfeiting, whew!”
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Posted on 1/25/2006
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January 22, 2006
A few weeks ago I wrote in this space that the underlying motivations driving Roger Toussaint to end the transit strike had nothing to do with the union membership or the motivation to restore a normally functioning transit system, but rather the sinking feeling that accompanies a major, costly gaffe. This happened when a firefighter riding his bicycle to work was hit by a private bus in the traffic chaos that ensued during the strike. As luck would have it, that fireman happened to be the son of Michael Long, saloonkeeper and Chairman of the state Conservative Party. Since the strike was ruled illegal from the start, any lawsuit by the Long family, who have access to all the city’s top law firms, is guaranteed to be a slamdunk in New York’s politically motivated court system.
Toussaint and the union leadership, as well as the union at large, stand to forfeit millions if ruled criminally negligent, which is a sure bet.
Now, in the latest reversal for this knucklehead, his union has refused to ratify the contract he reached with the MTA by seven votes, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Seven votes! Whatta’ putz! Now he has to go back to negotiations and start from the beginning.
I currently know more about negotiating a labor agreement than any other writer in New York City. I didn’t just cover a labor contract, I negotiated one with a bakery union while I was working as Manager for Industrial Relations for a large industrial bakery, a job I left when the boss decided to give me the same kind of screwing we had just administered to the union, reinforcing once again, ladies and gentlemen, the old adage that there’s no honor among thieves ha-ha!
I attended all the negotiating sessions as part of a two-man negotiating team, the other member being the company president, a coarse piece of work if ever there was one, except in the cases where he had pulled a particularly nasty piece of deception on the union and was ashamed to show his rubber Halloween mask of a face, in which case I appeared alone. In addition, I wrote all the documentation for the negotiations, neither the company nor the union employing anybody literate enough in either English or Spanish to compose more than a one-sentence estimate of the anatomical attributes of each other’s mothers.
In the preparation of this documentation and the development of negotiating strategy, I was counseled by one of the nation’s ablest labor attorneys, paid at the rate of $400 and hour by my employer, so you might say that over the course of the sixteen months that the contract negotiations took place, I received a very adequate grounding in labor relations as they are currently practiced in this country.
I might add that as a result of these negotiations, the management that I represented achieved a resounding, groundbreaking victory over a union which is so corrupt and exploitative as to give a bad name to the concept of racketeering.
The whole process was so absurd and ridiculous that it can only be portrayed in terms of fiction, which I am currently doing as part of my San Juan Bagels series of short stories, some of which are included in these blogs.
But in this essay I will stick to the facts as I see them. It may be imperfect (I’m no genius), but I believe my recent experience as a labor negotiator can help me to shed some light on the current cul-de-sac in which we as transit users find ourselves. Certainly, I am better qualified to interpret these processes than any other writer in New York City, most of whom have never even held a real job at all.
It is my experience that since labor unions are functionally illiterate entities, they relay on massive amounts of hot air to get their message across, either by screaming and yelling it or by injecting it into gigantic inflatable rats. The same can be said for industrial managers, most of whom have a very superficial grounding in the philosophical precepts formulated by Rousseau or Voltaire. The end result in this instance was some very unfortunate sound bites by Roger Toussaint in which he tried to ground the contract negotiations in terms of social justice and the struggle for civil rights as embodied by the historical example of Rosa Parks because she was black and the thing happened on a bus. This satisfied nobody except the newspaper writers, who used it to nail Toussaint to a cross of railroad ties.
The real action was over givebacks, management insisting on worker contributions to their medical insurance and pension fund, and the union insisting on MTA givebacks of previous pension fund contributions that they felt they had overpaid.
Toussaint and his cronies on the TWU executive board, having lived off the fat of the land in the form of union dues for many years, adopted a very strident and militant stance against management to show the rank and file that they were not too fat from gorging themselves like the Goodyear blimp to step up to the plate and fight for the workers’ interests. They called an illegal strike the week before Christmas, paralyzing the city in the midst of its shopping frenzy and went to feast on lobster ravioli like Diamond Jim Brady in a fancy restaurant in Harlem.
This whole pipedream burst like an overstuffed ravioli in Roger Toussaint’s ample midsection when Michael Long’s firefighter son got hit by a bus in the midst of the ensuing traffic chaos, and the union executive, quaking in their Gucci loafers, immediately ordered the strike ended.
Meanwhile, the MTA management, every bit as accomplished a gang of plunderers as the union, came to the realization that they had to loosen up a little bit on the purse strings to return New York to relative normalcy.
They negotiated a reasonable contract that extracted some concessions from both sides: a 10.5% raise over three years, MTA givebacks on the pension fund and nominal worker contributions toward their pension and health benefits.
This should have been the end of the story – Local 100 officials back to the dinner table and the MTA executive back to its wasteful larceny at 2 Broadway, but a funny thing happened on the way to the ratification elections. A gang of militants within the union, tired of sweltering or freezing in the subway tunnels according to the season, took Roger Toussaint at his word about racial and class inequities, and decided he had not adequately represented their interests. As proof of the union executive’s betrayal, they held up Pataki’s bleating noises about blocking the pension fund giveback.
Now, here is where my unique perspective into the process comes into the picture: the union executive did not go into the trenches and promote the settlement to the members whose votes were necessary to ratify the contract. That was too much like work. When I was negotiating on behalf of my company, a big part of my job was stroking the workers to make them see the benefits of putting pressure on the union to accept the laughable contract we were offering them. This person-to-person contact is absolutely necessary in industrial relations, and my union adversaries were every bit as lazy and irrelevant as the TWU executive proved to be.
I, on the other hand, speaking Spanish, was able to joke around with the workers, cajole, convince them and, most importantly, listen to their concerns. This process of talking and listening is one of the most important components in industrial relations.
Toussaint, as tone deaf on this point as he is lazy, slothful and incoherent on all the others, not only refused to massage his rank and file on the terms of the agreement and address their criticisms, he went them one worse, threatening to punish any union members who spoke out against the agreement.
After all his preaching about class struggle and racial solidarity, he showed himself to be just another banana republic Mussolini, and the rank and file murdered him by rejecting his contract by seven votes.
Seven votes! He could have won with just a few kind words.
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Posted on 1/22/2006
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January 19, 2006
Il serait prématuré que l'administration américaine acclame un nouveau jour pour la diplomatie Germano-Américaine. En fait, la progression allemande des Démocrates chrétiens de Merkel aux
Démocrates sociaux de Shroeder reflechit la progression française des Gaullists de Chirac aux Socialistes de Mitterand, qui n'a apporté aucune satisfaction aux intérêts de l'administration Bush.
Merkel, la fille d'un théologien protestant, est d'abord plutôt réminiscent de Margaret Thatcher
dans son ambition de libéraliser l'économie allemande. Probablement, elle essayera de simuler le ton pédant et strident de Thatcher afin de secouer des choses.
Plusieurs facteurs incommodent que cela se produit:
D'abord, Merkel dirige une coalition qui inclut les Démocrats sociaux, ainsi toutes les initiatives domestiques ou étrangères qu'elle lance sont sujettes à l'approbation de cette partie. Ceci exclut tout de suite n'importe quel genre de collaboration étroite de la sorte dans laquelle Blair a été disposé à engager contre les souhaits de ses constituants au R-U.
En second lieu, comme partenaire dans l'entente d'après-guerre Germano-Français traditionnel, elle ne pourra pas vaguer loin des politiques établies par des gouvernements précédents des deux côtés du Rhin.
Fille de precheur, elle pourrait tourner sa tendance moraliste contre l'administration de Bush, au lieu de ses associés du côté gauche. Elle a déjà confronté Bush sur les questions de la "rendition" des suspects et de la prison de Guantanamo, où même Chirac a craint de marcher.
L'enthousiasme américain pour Merkel peut rapidement dissiper même comme il a fait pour Chirac. Le décalage n'est pas entre l'Amérique et l'Europe, mais plutôt entre la civilisation anglo-saxonne et le reste du monde.
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Posted on 1/19/2006
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January 16, 2006
Johnny was already persona non grata in the office of La Creta, whom he had tried to seduce in his own inimitable grease monkey style by telling her up front, “Why don’t you quit playing hard to get and admit that you want me, bitch?”
Frank Perdue, who was across town apologizing to a customer for some rancid, moldy bagels that the night shift had delivered to his gourmet deli, was immediately called back to the factory to separate Johnny Pato and La Creta.
La Creta had gone through the roof and threatened Pato Gonzalez with a lawsuit alleging (what else?) sexual harassment, and was also threatening to call the police.
Pato didn’t want to fire Johnny because it was summer and Johnny, who knew a little bit about refrigeration systems, was in charge of keeping San Juan Bagels’ tired, leaky compressors running. The compressors, which Pato had bought third- or fourth-hand, had multiple Fire Department violations against them for leaking enough refrigerant gas into the atmosphere to raise the earth’s temperature by several degrees. These compressors were so old that the gas intended for them was obsolete, so Johnny, who by some miracle held an E.P.A. license, was able to keep them filled using whatever gas he could get his hands on by hook or by crook. It didn’t help that the tubes that carried the gas down to the freezer compressors were so clogged with sludge, an analogy being arteries blocked by cholesterol, that the roof compressors had to work twice as hard to pump and were constantly burning out.
Frank Perdue had brought in a couple of competent refrigeration contractors to give him estimates on what it would take to bring the system into compliance, but when he confronted Pato Gonzalez with the figure, which ran into the multiple tens of thousands of dollars, Pato just gave him a sly, snaky con man look and instructed him, “Let Johnny take care of it.” He was paying Johnny ten dollars an hour.
The first thing Frank Perdue did when he got back to the factory was to prohibit Johnny Pato from going anywhere near La Creta’s office. He then took written depositions from La Creta and from King Bongo Rock who, while not being at the scene of the actual harassment, had been close enough in the vicinity that he had witnessed La Creta’s tearful flight. After Frank Perdue had typed up the statements, he presented one to La Creta for her signature. When he went to King Bongo Rock with a statement that essentially said, “I saw Ms. Rodriguez crying,” King Bongo Rock, all blown up with self-importance, insisted on multiple wording changes, which Frank Perdue, bored to tears with all this unbelievable nonsense, considering he had a million other things to do, was obliged to go back in his office and re-type the stupid thing to King Bongo Rock’s satisfaction.
King Bongo Rock was a master of taking a simple function and turning it into a Gordian knot of obfuscation and complication in order to enhance his own importance. If you told him to take a forklift and a couple of men to the trailer, which was parked directly across the street, and get a bundle of cardboard boxes for the packers, he would come up with multiple reasons why it couldn’t get done before he eventually relented and did it. Just trying to get him to sign a one-paragraph statement, which was taken verbatim from his own recollection, was already a backbreaking exercise in futility.
“No, I didn’t say I saw her in the hallway, I said I saw her in the stairwell. You have to change that.”
“I didn’t say she was crying.”
“C’mon Bongo, you said she was crying.”
“I said she looked like she was crying. I didn’t actually see the tears. You have to change that, or I won’t sign it.”
“She didn’t tell me that Johnny insulted her. She told me that he was rude to her.”
“Look, what the hell is the difference? This is just a bunch of horseshit! I got other things to take care of!”
“If you don’t change it, I’m not signing it. This could end up in a court of law, and then I’d be responsible."
Finally, Frank Perdue wrote a formal violation letter for Johnny Pato to sign, duly witnessed. The conditions as set down by Pato Gonzalez, were that Johnny avoid all contact with La Creta and that he enroll in anger management therapy (about the third go-round for Johnny with the anger management). This was funny coming from Pato Gonzalez, who was the most abusive, explosive temper in the place. Pato was afraid to scream at the workers, for fear they would run to the union to complain, but he loved to pick fights with his managers and his head factory mechanic, Nestor. For Pato Gonzalez, who could be unctuously sweet when he needed something from you, business was completely a function of naked aggression and dominance. Everything was personal with him, and he particularly loved abusing Johnny, who was his older brother by a couple of years. Frank Perdue had determined that this was a beef going back to their childhood in Hunt’s Point. Maybe at one point Johnny was the cool brother with the duck’s ass haircut and Pato was the fat, nebbishy nerd, and Pato had spent the rest of his life getting even.
Johnny signed the statement with humility, accepting the conditions. He told Frank Perdue, “I swear to you, she manipulated me into this.”
“I’m not saying no,” said Frank Perdue, “I know what that cunt is capable of from my own experience with her.”
“She and I used to be close.”
“I know you did. You used to spend a lot of time in that office with her. But I always thought she was being nice to you because you’re Pato’s brother. I guess now she has decided you’re not an asset anymore.”
“I used to drive her home to her house in Brooklyn. Shit, she used to call me to come pick her up in the morning and drive her to work.”
“Well, that didn’t mean she wanted you to fuck her.”
“There’s more that I can’t tell you about.”
“Johnny, you’re my friend. I like you and I hate her. Just stay away from her. If you need something from her, call me and I’ll take care of it.”
“Cool,” said Johnny, and he went back to work.
“Shit,” thought Frank Perdue, “Now I’ve got another headache.”
La Creta never set foot anywhere near the parking lot, just as she had never been on the roof or stuck her head in any of the engine rooms infested with rodents and waterbugs that were Tato’s little kingdoms. She saw herself as the mind of this prehistoric creature of a production facility, so retarded was it that the obvious entropy of its various extremities never communicated to its brain.
She was preoccupied by her own survival, and in her mind that meant ensuring that the place remained dysfunctional. Her reasoning was that she had been brought in to ensure the continuing flow of product. The fine details of the situation, worker safety, hygiene, product integrity, record keeping – she had no knowledge or interest.
A true woman of her times, she was consumed by what she saw on the TV screen, as though she were watching a schmaltzy Mexican soap opera on Tele-Mundo.
One of the male leads in this telenovela was the second floor production foreman, Gustavo Hernandez, a white Argentinean. A former Buenos Aires policeman, Hernandez, who went by the name Porteño, would proudly lift his shirt or his pants leg to show admiring acquaintances his bullet entry scars.
Porteño was a hardened working stiff, a ten-year factory veteran who had started in the walk-in freezer, learning every job in the place until he had been appointed foreman. He had the brawny physique of a stevedore and a sensitive, alert, tough guy face that made Latin women swoon. He emitted an aura of invincibility and a sense of masculine entitlement, along with a loud, boisterous attitude of triumphalism that grated all the more on La Creta because it was combined with a native intelligence and shrewdness that were at least the equal of her own. All the rest of him she might have dismissed, were it not for his intelligence. To watch him day after day on the TV screen manhandling heavy racks of dough, expertly mastering the mixers and ovens, operating the machines and effecting repairs, the authority he exercised supervising workers, made her fell insignificant and inconsequential. Since she was watching him in a real-life performance on television, the comparison to all the fake TV stars was all the more devastating because El Porteño actually knew how to do useful things!
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January 14, 2006
The day before they were scheduled to leave Montreal, Papu and Eponine took a taxi to the summit of Mount Royal Park, which is right in the center of the city and overlooks the downtown from several hundred meters above. The effect of seeing the city with its glittering modernistic architecture, with the mighty, wide St. Lawrence River in the background was like seeing a miniature scale model of a city in a museum — it had an unreal quality of artificiality about it.
The intimacy of marriage between Eponine and Papu had made them more equal, though she still perceived him as a person of overwhelming personal authority and he still perceived her as an ethereal presence who might escape his grasp at any time.
Looking out over the city, Papu said, dreamily, "If you look far enough into the horizon, you can see the mountains of Vermont in your country. See? Over there."
He pointed. "Whenever I come to Montreal, I come uphere to see America.
"From here I can sometimes feel as though I know how William the Conqueror felt looking across the English Channel in the eleventh century, dreaming of conquest."
"You want to conquer America, Papu?"
"Only in the cinematic sense, of course. It's not as simple as you might suppose, to discern the taste of your people. The Japanese have tried, the French. None have succeeded.
"In any other country you go in, you take a partner and you make business. With Hollywood - it's a snakepit more incomprehensible than the Forbidden City of China. Everybody smiles and confides in you how well you are going to do. They seduce you with big parties and beautiful women, and the whole time they are picking your pocket. Finally you are so desperateto stem your losses you sell out at any price — to the same people who have been stealing from you all along.
"But there's no alternative. I can't make movies in Bombay to sell to Americans. If you want to sell there, you have to work there."
Eponine said, "Maybe you should just be happy to be the king of Asia."
Papu turned to Eponine. "What is a king without a successor? I need a prince to inherit my dynasty. Eponine, we have had a long honeymoon, but now is the time to consider the prospect of creating an heir."
Tears welled up in Eponine's eyes. "Are you sure you want to try? I warned you when you proposed to me that an attempt to create a child could have tragic consequences."
Papu said, "I feel confident that if we proceed deliberately, we can succeed."
They flew to Geneva and consulted the geneticists at the Clinique Leclerc de la Reproduction et de la Fecundation. Papu gave a sperm sample and Eponine underwent a procedure to extract eggs. These elements were merged to create embryos which were incubated and monitored through the primary stages of development. Many were rejected out-of-hand. The more promising embryos were enhanced with nutrients, injected with colored tracking dies, and their genetic maps were analyzed with microscopic precision until the doctors were able to assure Papu and Eponine a ninety-nine percent probability that she could bring to term a normal, well-formed male child.
The embryo was implanted into Eponine's womb and she was flown back to Bombay by corporate jet. Papu had constructed for them a grand yellow palace in the exclusive Malabar district, and Eponine's pregnancy was achieved with the most exquisite care in the most elegant luxury.
The baby arrived on a stormy night. The Sea of Oman roiled turbulently, breaking against the concrete wharves of the harbor, seeming to express the displeasure of the gods, as sheets of rain battered the city, bringing all activity in the normally bustling megalopolis to a halt. A spider web of lightning erupted repeatedly and with increasing ferocity low overhead, accompanied by deafening shock waves of booms and clashes, like a tremendously amplified symphony orchestra gone insane.
Papu and Raj Bhopal waited nervously in the maternity waiting room of the Mahavishnu Clinic, Papu sipping Courvoisier from a gold flask. At length, the surgeon appeared in a pale green scrub suit and removed his surgical mask, revealing a wizened face ash-white with apprehension. "Doctor," blurted Papu, "what is your prognosis?"
"Both mother and son are doing well. But I must advise you to prepare yourself for a shock."
"In what sense?"
"The baby is also born with three eyes."
Papu fell back in his chair. Raj leaned over, grabbed Papu's hand and squeezed it tight.
The doctor said, "This is an occurrence that we were not able to detect with the ultrasound. Surely, you must have been able to deduce that this result might be an eventuality!"
"The doctors in Geneva assured me that the baby would be normal!"
"Mr. Bhopal, nothing in this world is a hundred percent guaranteed. A man of your wisdom and experience is able to appreciate that better than most."
"I must see them!" Papu exclaimed. He was led to Eponine's room with Raj at his heel. Eponine lay slightly elevated in her bed, her face drawn with concern. She clutched to her bosom a tiny brown baby bundled in a pink blanket. The baby was awake, but not crying. In the center of its tiny forehead was a brown, perfectly formed third eye. Papu recoiled in horror. He shielded his eyes with his hand, unable to look at mother or child. Eponine broke out in unrestrained sobbing. "Papu, I'm sorry! I tried to warn you!"
Papu said, "I have made a terrible mistake. I have sinned against the gods, against you, Eponine, against my ancestors. I have brought an abomination into the world..."
"No, Papu!"
"Papu, try to calm yourself," admonished Raj.
"Calm myself! Are you mad? I have ruined everything." He turned to Eponine. "You have bewitched me with your evil. Now that I am doomed, I can see it all clearly. This is the price I have paid for my success.
"When we stood on the mountain in Montreal, you showed me the world as Satan showed it to Jesus, but instead of refusing, I accepted. And now I have lost the world as well as my immortal soul."
"Oh, Papu!" Eponine's tears came out in torrents, the same as the sheets of rain that pounded on the window of her room. Raj clutched Papu's arm. Again he tried to calm him. Papu broke free and ran from the room. Raj turned to Eponine. "Don't worry. He's drunk. We'll call the baby Shiva. He'll grow into a great man and the Indian people will revere him." Raj turned to the doctor who, transfixed, had witnessed the entire scene. Calmly, he addressed him. Doctor Krishnamenon, do you think a sedative might be in order?"
Papu ran from the building into the wild storm. His yellow Lamborghini was parked in the adjacent parking lot and he got in, soaked with rain, behind the wheel. He took out his gold flask and hungrily swallowed the cognac. His life was in ruins.
Everything was a shambles. How could he have allowed himself to be bewitched by that whore? She was the personification of evil. And that baby, if you could dignify that creature with such a name! He resolved to murder it immediately, and damn the consequences. Nobody would indict him for such an act. It was clear that such a monster could not be permitted to live and grow. He ignited the engine and put the car into gear, all the time taking swallows from the flask. First he must flee. He must flee into hiding so that he could plot the murder of that bitch and her bastard child. The car swerved wildly through the flooded, deserted streets, higher and higher into the hills, faster and faster as he pressed the accelerator to the floor to escape the banshees and screaming demons that pursued closely behind him. He caught the attention of a police patrol which gave chase, its blaring siren adding to the cacophony of thunder and lighting exploding in Papu's head. He attempted a hairpin turn at 200 kilometers an hour. The auto skidded off the road into a ravine and exploded in an infernal ball of fire.
In the end, Papu Bhopal achieved his wish of becoming immortal in Indian culture, though not as he had imagined. The story of the rich, powerful king of cinema who married the three-eyed beauty and threw himself over the cliff after she gave birth to the three-eyed baby became the stuff of fabled legend, and was the subject of endless film remakes the world over.
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January 12, 2006
One of the many desperate gambits I have tried along my tortured career path was to spend a year in paralegal school, achieving a paralegal certificate.
This is roughly equivalent to the first year of law school. Although it doesn’t qualify me for anything more than a low-level litigation support position, I have worked in some pretty nice law firms and I have more than a passing acquaintance with such concepts as statutory law, decisions, common law, legal precedent, legal standing, judicial competence to decide cases…whatever.
I have worked on some big cases: Enron, asbestos poisoning and toxic torts involving birth defects arising from work in microprocessor clean rooms. The nature of these jobs has led me to read thousands and thousands of pages of documentation.
Does this qualify me to express an opinion about Alito? Absolutely. Does it lend any more weight to my opinion than that of Muhammed the Shish-Kebob Peddler? Let the reader decide!
I must say that the CNN commentators for the Alito hearing were not much help in interpreting the proceedings. When Alito conceded that evidence obtained by torture was inadmissible under the Fifth Amendment, Blitzer, Toubin and Greenfield, all attorneys, breathed a sigh of relief (this just shows you how far we as a country have deteriorated, that a thing like that would be in doubt at all), saying “At least he cleared THAT up!” Unfortunately, nobody brought up the obvious follow-up question, which provides a pretty big judicial loophole to jump through, namely “What constitutes torture?” This is a hairsplitting polemic that has bedeviled jurists in many countries, but these knuckleheads are totally oblivious to it!
My problem with attorneys is that their mental processes have been shaped by conformism to the consistency of American cheese. They are absolutely incapable of applying imaginative creativity to any subject. In the whole debate over NSA eavesdropping, nobody has raised the distinction between eavesdropping on suspected terrorists as opposed to, say, against protest organizers or hostile journalists. I must say that Senator Feingold raised a very important point when he expressed doubt that Alito would be a dependable defender of legislative prerogatives against executive encroachment.
Alito’s obvious political and judicial defects became clear enough when his past decisions were closely examined. Senator Schumer found opinions that Alito wrote making the government case where the government itself neglected to completely refine its arguments. Senator Feinstein, referring to a case involving federal jurisdiction over the illegal sale of assault weapons, recited an Alito opinion where he voted to throw out longstanding precedent in favor of a newly written decision loosening government regulation of interstate commerce. Feinstein is obviously concerned that once Alito ascends to the Supreme Court, he will try the same strategy on abortion, which he only grudgingly admits is supported by established precedent.
The executive and legislative branches of government are partisan political institutions, and so is the judicial branch, notwithstanding popular mythology that it is impartial. And Samuel Alito is a blatantly partisan political functionary. He has been a partisan Republican since he was a teenager. The fact that he decided to follow the legal route to power rather than the electoral route taken by other law school graduates, like the senators who interrogated him, is more a function of temperment and does not make him any less of a political animal. He has never had a private sector job. Despite the fact that these hearings have been described as a “job interview,” the fact is that these hearings are a political process prescribed by the Constitution in which a Republican administration is presenting a Republican attorney before a majority Republican senate for confirmation.
This does not mean that the minority Democrats have no cards to play. The Republicans are perilously close to melting down, particularly in light of the Jack Abramoff case. That is why the Republicans are trying to rush through the confirmation before the indictments start to rain down on the Republican congress as a result of Abramoff’s and Randy Cunningham’s cooperation with federal prosecutors.
For this reason, it would be in the interest of the Democrats to stall, drag their feet and delay the Alito confirmation until the sky falls down on the Republicans, destroying their authority and reducing them to shambles.
Then the Democrats will have a better chance to insist on a moderate compromise candidate whom they comfortably feel will not enforce a reactionary, statist concept of public policy for the future decades.
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January 11, 2006
Stepping out of the house, all set to go work out, in my sweat suit and carrying my boxing gloves, I felt the warm temperatures and saw the beautiful sunny day, and I knew I couldn’t go through with it.
Magpie had told me she wanted to take the subway to Brighton Beach, walk on the beach, eat lunch in one of the restaurants and go shopping in the Russian delicacy stores. “Go ahead,” I told her, “I don’t have any interest in going to the beach in the dead of winter.”
But I reconsidered. Magpie had been a brave girl, going to a job that she hated every day without complaining. When the transit workers had gone on strike she had braved vile weather to walk both ways, over a hundred blocks, for each of the three days of the shutdown.
The idea of making her spend that glorious sunny Sunday by herself was more than I could bear. I have a conscience. I ran back upstairs and announced that I was willing to do anything she wanted.
A couple of hours later we arrived at the Brighton Beach elevated station. It was the height of the day and the January sun shined brightly, warming the air temperature to the 40’s. Brighton Beach Avenue was quite animated. Russian people, who compose the overwhelming majority of the population, were out in force, enjoying the temperate weather. They looked quite elegant in their shearling and fur coats. The Russians are obsessed with rich-looking fur and leather outerwear, and during the winter they put on a really toney exhibition of fashion that frankly puts the normal American population to shame by comparison. Having been deprived under communism, they are making up for lost time now, with ermine hats, all manner of fur-lined shearling coats, the women’s coats dyed in flamboyant pastel shades of pink and mauve, and ostentatious full-length mink and nutria coats, the latter being so superfluous and exorbitant as to eclipse the wearer.
At the other end of the spectrum were the young girls walking around on the warm day wearing just t-shirts and large studded belts, showing off their arms, mid-sections and busts. Nobody ever accused the Russians of being cold fish, and these young girls were certainly bursting out estrogen in every direction. It’s great to be a kid!
Walking around the Russian section of Brooklyn, with all its signs in Cyrillic lettering is like taking a trip to a foreign country. The shops are filled with exotic European delicacies and fashions, and the sensibility is more reminiscent of the popular Barbès quarter of Paris, with its cheap, flashy boutiques and cornucopia of exotic comestibles than of any North American city. The place is defiantly European, with its gaudy, heavily made-up women, forbidding male heavies and TV monitors blaring syrupy Russian music videos.
What distinguishes Brighton Beach from any other immigrant quarter is, of course, the beach. This beach is one of the few beachfronts in the world which has not been appropriated by the monied classes. The beachfront section of Brooklyn from Coney Island to Brighton has been from its inception the preserve of the working and striving classes, people of means preferring to avoid these rough elements and go farther afield, to the Jersey shore or Long Island, to enjoy the sea.
Magpie and I don’t see it that way. While Brighton Beach may not have the pristine sand of the Long Island beaches, it is quickly accessible by subway and the ocean view is breathtaking! You’re seeing a vast expanse of ocean, with tremendous cruise ships like the Queen Mary II leaving and entering New York Harbor, the Jersey Shore all the way from the point of Sandy Hook to Sea Bright, several miles to the south and Jamaica Bay. When the Concorde was flying we saw it overhead every afternoon as it made its approach to JFK Airport.
The proximity of the beach to Brighton Beach Avenue, just one block away, means you never have to run out of cold beer, ice, food or liquor. In addition, there is a very lovely boardwalk always jumping with riotous activity. Joggers and bicyclists navigate around musicians, chess players, radical orthodox Jews seeking to bring backsliders back to the fold, performance artists, whatever the human imagination can devise.
In the middle of all this, there are some elegant Russian outdoor cafés right on the boardwalk where, for a very modest sum, you can enjoy a lovely seaside meal with wine or vodka under an umbrella with tablecloth and linen napkins, enjoying a view of the shimmering silver sea and the sailboats breezing by. After a day at the beach you can walk down the boardwalk to Coney Island and have drinks at Ruby’s or Cha Cha’s and enjoy the blues music, the sea breeze and the continual floating crap game of outrageous characters that never lets up for a second, day or night.
When the blackout of August 15, 2003, occurred, Magpie and I were spending the day on the rather more placid beach and pristine dunes of Gateway National Park, which occupies the de-commissioned army post at Fort Tilden in Rockaway. With city transit paralyzed and no way to get back to Manhattan (and just as well, thank you), we managed to get a lift from a guy with a car, who left us off at Brighton.
Brighton Beach Avenue was in a riotous state of emergency, with food vendors, their refrigeration having shut down, trying to get rid of their perishables right on the sidewalk, and at any price.
Magpie and I loaded up on half-price sandwiches, bought a jug of wine at the liquor store and headed to the beach, where we spent the night in comparatively cool comfort on the beach instead of having to sweat it out in pitch black, sweltering Manhattan. The only inconvenience was at four AM, when the sand cleaning machines and garbage trucks descended upon us like “Terminator” machines, belching diesel fumes and chasing us from one spot to the next as they cleaned the formable mess of refuse from the preceding day.
Just before dawn, when we saw the first sparkling necklace of lights across the bay in Breezy Point, at the far western extremity of Rockaway, it was our first indication that the power grid was being restored.
I recently read a magazine piece about a Brooklyn developer who is trying to assemble financing to upgrade this potentially lucrative piece of seaside real estate. He seems to want to build a giant mall and amusement area where the Cyclone roller coaster and parachute ride currently reside. I don’t believe he’ll succeed because his business model does not strike me as being very convincing. Without casino gambling, which is an option that the state legislature foreclosed long ago, the revenues from a bunch of fancy rides, food courts and crummy NBA stores will never cover the massive costs of a major development project.
I would modestly like to advance my own proposal for the area, if anybody’s interested, which is to build a ferry terminal at Coney Island pier and inaugurate a high-speed hydrofoil service to Wall Street. Once it’s demonstrated that a fast commute to the financial district has been established, developers will instantly rush in and snap up all that beachfront property for high-end condos, because what you potentially have there is another South Beach. The Brooklyn Riviera, it’s inevitable!
But who listens to me?
Magpie and I bought a sausage and pepper hero and a bottle of wine and headed to the beach. Our plan was to find a nice bench on the boardwalk facing the sea and have a picnic. But when we got there, our plan was complicated by a major snag, namely that the public bathroom was closed for the season.
Fortunately, the Russian boardwalk cafes were doing business, although the outdoor terraces had been dismantled for the winter. I proposed that we go into the Moscow Café for a vodka, and Magpie would be able to use the bathroom. As we walked there we passed The Tatyana Café, which had a sign announcing Brunch. We decided to go in.
Though we had eaten and drunk many times at The Tatyana outdoor terrace in summer, this was the first time we had gone inside the place, and we were shocked by the elegant décor!
We had expected a nice place, to be sure. Even if the Russians’ taste in cuisine, with an emphasis on overcooked slabs of greasy meat, boiled or fried dumplings and marinated salty fish filets, is rather primitive, they demand an overwrought, neo-Romanoff décor for their lavish, wild drinking parties.
And not just the kids, but everybody right up to old age gets dressed up to kill to go out at night. It’s not unusual at all to see men of retirement age fully decked out in black tie or immaculately pressed Red Army dress uniforms weighted down with Hero of the Soviet Union medals and their huge peaked hats dragging along their old dolls in floor-length gowns, out for a big night of feasting on herring, shish-kebob and pastries, washed down with copious draughts of vodka and wine to the musical accompaniment of cabaret bands with sexy singers.
But instead of a ponderous setting of heavy velvet draperies and elaborate chandeliers, like I expected, the room was bright and airy, almost ethereal. The place was done up in a nautical motif, with beige wood paneling and glass tables. Set into the wall paneling were fish tanks filled with exotic, brightly colored tropical fish.
Most amazing was the clear plexiglass floor, under which swam live tropical fish in a real aquarium. Huge goldfish, catfish and even eels swam through little coral formations beneath our feet as we were shown to our windowfront table facing out onto the boardwalk, the beach and the shining sea. Walking over this live, teeming exhibit of sea life induced in us a giddy, vertiginous sensation of exhilaration unlike anything we had ever experienced. Magpie fairly swooned, “I feel as though I’m going to fall in!”
Seated at our table, we ordered cocktails. We looked down through the glass tabletop, through the plexiglass floor and into the eyes of fish, who were watching us with the same intent curiosity that we felt peering back down at them.
The wait staff was smartly costumed in nautical attire, the women in tight-fitting black and white striped Edith Piaf blouses and the male servers in theatrical Billy Budd sailor suits. Our waiter brought us menus, but then told us, in a thick Russian accent, “If you like, you can try our brunch buffet.” He gestured to a buffet station at the back of the salon, which contained a deluxe raw bar as well as salads, hot rack of lamb and a table with elaborate dessert pastries. The price of the buffet was extremely reasonable, about what you’d pay for a couple of rounds of apple martinis in a good Manhattan bar.
We immediately opted for the buffet with delight, feasting on huge raw oysters the size of a person’s hand, jumbo shrimp cocktail, cold crab, Alaska king crab legs, rack of lamb, salad, pastry and fresh fruit in whipped cream.
Every couple of minutes we’d stop eating to marvel at the fish gathered beneath our feet, as though expecting a handout. We were so effervescent with happiness that Magpie forgot that she had to go to the ladies room, our original intention when we first walked in.
At the end, we emerged from the restaurant and into the sunlight dazed, like Dorothy returning to Kansas after her whirlwind sojourn in Oz. Crossing the beach to the water’s edge, we strolled on the direction of Coney Island. There seemed to be as many people strolling there as on the boardwalk, elegantly dressed Russians enjoying the temperate ocean breeze and intense sunshine.
After a while, we realized that we still had the bottle of wine that we had originally purchased with the intention of enjoying a picnic. We walked back up to the boardwalk and found a bench in one of the open concrete shelters that punctuate the promenade at intervals of a few hundred meters.
The westerly wind brought cloud cover in the late afternoon. We sipped our wine and awaited the sunset, watching the ships sailing to and fro as they passed heading in and out of New York Harbor to our west.
At the last few moments of sunlight, as the sun was descending over the horizon, a wispy band of bright fuchsia opened at the very edge of the sky as the sun, a blazing crimson ball of fire, was exposed for our delight, inching down through the bright ribbon of sky on its eternal voyage to the other side of the world. Magpie and I shared a kiss.
We’re so lucky!
THE NEW 200MOTELS WEB SITE. ORIGINAL STORIES AND GRAPHICS AT:
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January 08, 2006
Havelock switched off the TV and went into the bedroom. He peeled off his clothes and jumped into bed, though it was not yet seven P.M. What he needed was a good twelve hours’ sleep. Then he would be able to get to the factory early and re-check all the work that he knew he had fouled up that day. In less than a minute, he was out cold.
The world of dreams is an eternal infinite universe inside each person. Though it may to some extent be driven by the unformed expression of neurotic impulses and sexual repressions of the dreamer, it is also informed by conversations with the dead: voices of the Unanswered, the Unresolved, the Unredeemed, who struggle to make their desires known to the material world by using living voices of those fortunate enough to still possess them. By what method of selection is one chosen to be a vessel for the revelation of these programmes? That is a question which has long intrigued such illustrious deities and savants as the world has produced.
The eternity of dreams can act as a soothing Doctor Without Frontiers, or it can be a manifestation of a satanic dimension of hell; a fount of philosophical profundity, or a bottomless oubliette of gibberish; a rocket to the celestial paradise of desire, or a subway ride to the terminus of consummate suffering if one should endure the misfortune of boarding a train conducted by the infernal motorman of Orphean malediction. This was the train Havelock found himself on, the solitary passenger of a fluorescent-lit express barreling through diabolical stations withnames like “Hiroshima,” “Auschwitz,” “Ypres,” and “World Trade Center.” As his train flew by on the express track, Havelock was able to catch a glimpse of the crowds of dead souls jammed together on the platforms; rotting, monstrously deformed victims missing limbs and faces; fountains of blood spouting from open arteries, people retching and vomiting from gas intoxication, wailing from the suffering of unendurable agony as herds of rats gorged themselves on maggot-ridden body parts that had been kicked onto the tracks by the ever more crowded mobs of victims compressed onto the narrow quais, waiting for a local which would never arrive.
This train ride went on for hours, passing through an infinite number of horror-ridden stations. Tiled walls announced the names of stops: Nanking, Krakatoa, Srbranica. Havelock, who had at first been revolted and horrified by the monstrous scenes of suffering he was passing through, eventually became habituated and even impatient. At length, he was only stirred to interest by the most grotesque manifestations of atrocity, chemically mutated birth defects or people who had become fused together from the heat of nuclear explosions. Finally, he lost interest completely as his train progressed mile after mile, station after station, hour after hour, the monotonous clacketing of its steel wheels against the rails pounding out a metronome rhythm of tedium. To amuse himself, Havelock composed a little song:
The death train through hell, It sure is swell,
Mutilated corpses smell,
It’s got its own beat,
Of rotten meat,
Landmine victims got no feet
The train slowed and switched tracks. It pulled into an empty, garbage-strewn station. The mosaic-tiled sign on the wall said “Avenue X. Gravesend.” Havelock thought to himself, it figures that the train to hell would end in Brooklyn.
The doors opened. A voice announced. “Last stop. Everybody off the train.” Havelock picked up his duffle bag and walked out. He looked for an issue and saw the exit sign at the end of the platform. Hoisting his duffel bag over his shoulder, he made his way to the sign and ascended a flight of stairs.
He found himself on the deck of a troop ship mobbed with soldiers that was being nudged into a docking berth under the scorching Mediterranean sun. Havelock found that he was wearing a soldier’s uniform as well, in camouflage green with a peaked garrison cap.
A sign on the side of a corrugated storage shed announced to him that he was in a port named Philippe. A French flag hung limply from a pole in front of a colonial-style administration building at lands’ end.
Havelock and his fellow soldiers smoked cigarettes and watched over the side as arab longshoremen dressed in long robes secured the ship’s ropes to the dock. Gangplanks were set up and the soldiers, each bearing his duffle bag and carbine, filed down to the wharf where they mustered in platoon groups to await their transport assignments. The stood at parade rest, their kit bags in front of them.
The sergeant of Havelock’s section came up and addressed the group. “While we’re waiting for the trucks, I’ll just say a few words.
“Welcome to Algeria. Remember that you are still in France. Our job is to maintain order and security until the government in Paris arrives at a disposition concerning the future governance of this territory. Remember that all the inhabitants, European or Arab, are French citizens and entitled to all the guarantees of the constitution.
“Having said that, I will remind you of a fact that you already know – that we are in a war zone, although with the exception of certain sectors adjacent to the Moroccan and Tunisian frontiers where the adversary maintains standing divisions, it is an unconventional war, a shadow war. Certain of you who have served in Indochina know what I am talking about. For the rest of you, that means that the enemy will not fit any normal combatant profile. It could come in the form of a woman with a knife or explosives concealed beneath her clothes, or a child with a hand grenade. Do not be deceived by a smile or a friendly greeting. Always be on your guard.
“Right now you are attached to the Eighth Parachute Regiment. You were trained to jump out of planes and kill people. But that does not mean that that is what you will do here. It’s possible that some of you will be transferred to infantry or intelligence battalions, depending on the needs of the service and our evaluations of your capacity and motivation. Follow orders, maintain discipline and work as a team with your comrades, and hopefully you’ll avoid any undue misfortune.”
An officer wearing a round kepi approached with a clipboard and summoned the platoon leaders. In a minute, the sergeant, whose name was Lhotel, returned. “All right, the trucks are here. Platoon, attention!” He marched the soldiers to a staging area filled with idling trucks and they clambered into the backs of them. The canvas tops had been rolled down, and as the convoy rumbled out of the port and onto the streets of Philippe, the troops were able to get their first glimpse of Algeria.
The port and center of town were heavily fortified with tanks and half-tracks. Soldiers manned sandbagged control posts at intersections, and at regular intervals along the tree-lined boulevards. The centre-ville resembled any French town, apartment blocks with ornate facades, outdoor cafés, department stores and boutiques, banks and manicured gardens. Well-dressed Europeans on the streets went about their affairs in seeming normality. Schoolchildren in shorts carrying leather satchels and piles of books entered walled lycées. Blue-uniformed gendarmes armed with submachine guns stood sentry in front of a commissariat displaying a tri-color flag on a flagpole over its entrance.
The town was not large, and in a few minutes the convoy passed through the arab quarter at its periphery. The contrast was dramatic. Children in rags played in the dust next to fly-ridden piles of trash under a baking sun. Veiled women peered out at the passing trucks from the dark interiors of jerry-built huts. Mangy dogs and barnyard animals scrounged for food in the barren yards or looked for bits of shade in the meager shadows of dead trees. Waves of heat rose from piles of manure. As the soldiers surveyed this dismal landscape, which seemed to eerily resemble the stage set of a surrealist left bank theater production, the kid sitting adjacent to Havelock said in a discreet voice, “This doesn’t look like any part of France that I ever saw.”
Somebody else said, “It looks like a fucking shit house de merde. No wonder they went berserk.”
Another voice piped up, “You sound like a bunch of commies. You think this tells the whole story? We’re not off the ship fifteen minutes and you’re sounding like a bunch of damned defeatists. Why don’t you just shut up!”
They rode for a long time in silence, sweating in the dust and heat. The convoy passed through monstrously dreary arab villages identified by signs in Arabic and French signifying names like Sartir and Bouktir, flea-bitten bidonvilles with food stalls displaying stringy bits of meat crawling with flies, hanging from posts exposed to the African sun. It was a desolate wasteland of a place. Veiled women carrying bundles cringed in the shadows of walls. Children waving sticks harassed pathetic dogs who fled trailing drooping tails and shanks sticking through their threadbare coats. Such men as were visible from the passing trucks were seen working in the fields pushing crude plows through rocky, crotted soil, or lethargically breaking stones with pick axes in open-pit quarries. The trucks were forced to slow down to a snail’s pace over stretches of highway which were so rutted and potholed as to be practically impassable. At one point they passed a road crew of arab workers guarded by a lacsidasical detail of native harkis soldiers. One soldier on the truck remarked, “Did you see how they work? No wonder the road’s in such bad shape.”
Another said, “That’s not the worst of it. During the day they’re workers, but at night they come back as fellaghas and tear up all the work they did.”
Just when the desolation would reach a stage of such oppression as to consummately shatter any remnant of human sensibility, a scenario of divine lovliness would arise out of the heatwaves from the barren, black earth like a mirage. These were the European-owned farms and vineyards; fertile, beautifully irrigated and groomed plantations verdant beyond all comprehension, resplendent with balconied mansions resting on impeccable lawns adorned with manicured gardens and bougainvillas. The farm structures, barns and equipment sheds were well maintained and freshly painted, peopled by purposeful workers who drove modern farm machinery. Modern automobiles were seen to be parked on the grounds, and the occasional chic, well dressed French woman would wave at the passing convoy from the terrace.
The soldier who had earlier admonished had his carping comrades exalted triumphantly, “You see? That’s what we’re fighting for!”
Late in the day the convoy reached it destination, the camp at Guellal. They mustered in the courtyard of the barracks building, where they were addressed by the squadron captain, a young career officer named Poisson. “Welcome to Guellal. After you are dismissed you will be shown to your quarters. Install yourselves, shower, and mess is served at 19:00 hours. Lights out at 22:00. Because of the nature of the operations in this sector, you may be awakened during the night for nocturnal sorties. You must be fully dressed and equipped and in formation here no later than ten minutes after you are called. That is all. Section chiefs, dismiss your sections!”
The sergeants called out in unison, “Dis-missed!”
Algeria! The name alone is enough to send one into an hypnotic euphoria of reverie, provoking visions of jangling coins on a dancer’s bodice; swaying palms and olive groves; winding alleys of the casbah; scimitars and daggers; camel caravans traversing an infinite desert dotted with idyllic oases, Barbary pirates. It has inflamed imaginations through the ages, inspiring the sun-drenched tableaux of Dégas and the existential musings of Camus.
Since the birth of human civilization it has played a pivotal role of the cultures of Africa and Europe. A province of imperial Carthage, it provided cavalry troops for Hannibal’s conquest of Iberia and Gaul and his twelve year rampage across the Italian peninsula, later allying itself with Rome during her brutal reduction of Carthage. It was overrun in the fifth century by the Vandals and recaptured for Byzantium by the Emperor Justinian. The Berber tribesmen of ancient Kabylie flooded across the Straits of Gibralter to spread a golden age of Islamic culture throughout Spain, receding like a tide to leave a detritus of Moorish temperment that still informs the societies of Europe and Latin America. What is Cartagena but the Spanish name for Carthage?
The French Foreign Legion, newly formed, subdued and captured it for France in 1830. Rich in agricultural resources, it was also discovered to contain vast petroleum deposits. The French also found a use for its vast, sparsely inhabited Sahara region, using it as a testing ground for their nuclear weapons production.
Havelock knew nothing of this except that it came to him as a dream, not so different from the inspiration that affects a writer from an unknown source, compelling him by way of obscure forces to move his hand across a page, guided by impulses of mystic provenance.
Maybe he had been infected by a psychic contagion during his pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, the spirits flowing to and fro across the consecrated terrain of Père LaChaise Cemetary judging his artist’s soul to be a suitable vessel to inhabit with their memories and passions. Maybe something had occurred when he had participated in the procession up Sixth Avenue on All Hallows Eve, New York’s psychic ground being turned over to suddenly expose a buried underworld of worms, bugs and parasites better left entombed under the soil.
Havelock was an artist and the furthest thing from an intellectual, but he knew viscerally that the artist’s inspiration is mostly stimulated by abnormal shocks and setbacks that crush ordinary souls. The key to survival is to ride the crest of the wave rather than try to resist, hoping that the meaning of the thing will ultimately reveal itself in a fashion that he can shape into a communicable form. This abstraction he would never be able to verbalize in a million years, but it was nevertheless the key to his survival, and the fluidity of his nature enabled him to endure, after a fashion, the sledgehammer blows that his spirit was having to absorb.
The barracks erupted in light as Sergeant Lhotel strode down the aisle in full battle gear. “Wake up, soldiers! Let’s go! Everybody downstairs and ready to move out in ten minutes! Move your asses!” The soldiers, barely awake, threw on their uniforms, laced up their boots, grabbed their helmets and carbines, and crowded down the stairs to the courtyard. When they were in formation, the sergeant briefed them. “There’s been an attack on a farm fifteen kilometers from here on the road to Sidi el Khier. Apparently it’s pretty bad. We’ll secure the area for the DOP to investigate, and then we’ll fan out and search for the perpetrators. They can’t have gotten far. Any questions?”
Nobody had any questions.
“All right, Let’s get to the trucks. Double time, hurry and move it!” The soldiers ran to the idylling trucks. From the side of the road, Sergeant Lhotel yelled to his men, “Be alert for ambushes. They could be trying to lure us into a trap!” Then he jumped into the cab of the lead truck.
The convoy barreled down the road in the pitch darkness, the trucks’ headlights showing the only illumination in sight. The soldiers peered out anxiously from their seats in the rear, rifles at the ready. Like Havelock, most of them were green conscripts. Havelock’s neighbor whispered, “We’re sitting ducks out here.”
Havelock heard himself say, “Quit carping. We haven’t even got to the battle yet. Just keep your eyes open.” Nevertheless, he was shaking too.
The convoy reached its destination without incident. A sign painted in fancy script announced the name of the establishment: Vignobles LeClerc SA. Etabli 1909. Vins Fins. Appelations Controlées. It was a vineyard. The convoy pulled onto a tree-lined private road and halted in front of an ornate mansion. A couple of luxury sedans were parked at the front stairs of the house. Private roads led in either direction from the house to equipment and wine processing sheds, all of which were in flames. Captain Poisson and a detail of DOP intelligence officers were already on the scene, having arrived at high speed in jeeps. They were examining the bodies of well-dressed European settlers which were scattered about the lawn. Some had had their throats cut and others had been shot at point blank range. An elegantly dressed young woman in a peach-colored silk dress lay on her back on the grass, staring vacantly into the darkness, her abdomen sliced open from her breastbone to her pelvis like a gutted fish.
The soldiers piled out of the trucks, Sergeant Lhotel yelling “Come on, let’s go! Corporal Bouchard, get a detail down that road and secure the area where those buildings are burning. Charpentier, you do the same in the other direction. Detain anybody you find and bring them back here. Schroder, secure the entrance to the farm. He addressed the troops, “The rest of you, I want you to form a line and go into the fields at intervals of ten meters. Don’t group together. Watch out for ambushes. Anybody you find, try to detain them without killing them, if possible. We need to interrogate them.
Havelock stalked warily through the vineyard, carbine at the ready. In the starlight he could discern the silhouettes of his fellow soldiers to the left and right. His apprehension at being exposed in unknown terrain, vulnerable to an invisible enemy, was palpable. The minutes ticked past as the column of soldiers marched farther and farther into the field, until the burning farm structures, the only landmarks in their topography of obscurity, had diminished in size to small glowing embers.
He was jolted by a flash of light and a small explosion to his left. The flash, lasting only a millisecond, was followed by a man’s hideous screams of terror and unendurable pain. The other soldiers quickly ran over and grouped around the wounded victim, who was writhing in agony on the ground.
“It’s Millet. He stepped on a landmine.”
The man’s reddened face was contorted in a grotesque eyepopping mask of horror, his mouth stretched to twice its size in a bizarre smile like a funhouse billboard. His abdomen had been blown open like an over-inflated soccer ball, internal organs bulging out through the shreds of his flesh. One leg was blown clear off and the man’s arteries were irrigating the ground under him with torrents of black blood.
Two soldiers kneeled over him, one cradling his head. “There, there. The medics will be here soon. You’ll be fine.”
The wounded man looked up into the eyes of his friend. “What happened? Oh God, it hurts. Make it stop hurting. Mais pourquoi, pourquoi? Where am I? I have to go home. I have to walk my dog!”
He died.
“Poor devil.”
Shots rang out. A man cried and fell as bullets thudded into his body. Flashes of light appeared in the dark like fireflies from shadows rising up that appeared in the dark to be a wooded area about a hundred meters in front of the line. The corporal who was leading the detail ordered the men, “Get down!” They all hit the dirt. “Who got hit?”
“It’s Boileau. He’s still breathing.”
“Blondin, run back and get a medic.” The firing from the trees continued, with the bullets whizzing over the soldiers’ heads. “The rest of you, this is what I want you to do,” the corporal continued. “Five of you, I want you to spread out at intervals of ten meters and return fire. Let them think they have us pinned down. The rest, divide into two groups. One group circle fifty meters to the left, the other group fifty meters to the right. We’ll run to the trees and then close in and catch them in a pincer. Don’t shoot until you’re in position.” The bullets continued to zing overhead. “The five men who are returning fire, when you hear us engage them, you’ll stop shooting and run in from the front. Any questions?” There were no questions. “All right, now. Speed is essential. It shouldn’t take more than two minutes to get in position. We should be able to kill them all. These arabs are stupid. Now, go!”
The group broke up, keeping low. In a few seconds the line of riflemen was set up and returning fire. Havelock ran with the detachment that broke off to the right. After he felt that he had put enough distance between himself and the skirmish line, he stood up straight and ran with all his strength toward the copse of trees. He could hear the clump clump of his own footsteps and those of the other men, his own breathing, the firefight to his left and the chirping of the cicadas in the African night.
The men made it safely to the trees without drawing fire and started to close in towards the source of the shooting. In a minute’s time they were close enough to see the muzzle flashes from the insurgents’ guns. The pressure of the excitement and fear had built up to critical mass in Havelock, and he felt he couldn’t wait any longer to start shooting. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and started squeezing off rounds, stopping after each shot to reset the bolt. The arab attackers stopped firing into the field and turned to confront the soldiers. Bullets flew blindly in both directions as the two sides strained to fix a bead on their enemies. The bullets whizzed by Havelock as he struggled to reload faster and return fire, aiming into the pitch dark.
He felt a hammerblow to the head and was knocked down onto his back as a bullet slammed into his helmet. His ears started ringing, but it wasn’t a churchbell kind of ringing – it was a sinister, diabolical kind of electric ring, like a condemned man strapped to an electric chair would experience from the metal conducting helmet that had been strapped to his head. The ringing seared through his brain as he felt the life force being drained from his body. Havelock sat up in his bed. It was morning, and the phone was ringing. He picked up. It was Paulette.
“Why didn’t you call me last night? she demanded.
THE NEW 200MOTELS WEB SITE. ORIGINAL STORIES AND GRAPHICS AT:
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January 07, 2006
Jack Abramoff is being tried in the court of public opinion as much for his wardrobe as for his criminal activity.
He showed up for his arraignment wearing a really cool black fedora and overcoat which looked like they had been designed for a Sergio Leone spaghetti western.
Since we are living in an age of adolescent conformism, where the wrong ring can sink you, the news media went into a screaming rage because he had not been dressed in casual Friday attire.
Maureen Dowd, who is not exactly a model of sartorial urbanity, began one of her usual sarcastically insulting pieces (doesn’t she have any other rhetorical devices?) with a lead paragraph railing about the hat and coat. The Washington Post ran a whole editorial piece about it. Ditto CNN, CNBC etc.
I realize that freedom of expression is totally dead in this country, not because of the government, but because the CheezWhiz TV announcers and the general population at large have laced themselves into a such a medieval corset of conformism and political correctness that you can get tarred and feathered for wearing a coat that threatens somebody’s milquetoast sensibilities.
Go into any clothing store and you’ll see that all the attire has morphed into a mind-numbing blur of sorority rush week.
One sports announcer spent five minutes of air time making snide digs about Pat Riley’s hair, which he likes to keep slicked back instead of air-blowing it into a freakin’ bird’s nest.
This preppy look has got me down in the dumps. I dig Italian suits and pinky rings. The first thing my girlfriend, Magpie, did when I moved in with her was to wait until I went out and then throw out all my suits, along with my double-breasted grey tweed Italian overcoat with the shoulder epaulets.
Shit! The political correctness gang is not kidding around! Now I look like a freakin’ Ken Doll too!
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January 05, 2006
Her keen interest in etymology notwithstanding, La Creta was a shit administrator. She rarely left her office to inspect the plant premises other than an occasional walk around the place. Trucks were forever leaving the premises short one or more pallet of goods because she had neglected to impart clear shipping instructions to her shipping manager, a dreadlocked Rastafarian former boxer called King Bongo Rock, who had recently returned to work after recovering from a gunshot wound received under nebulous circumstances in East New York. She herself had never been inside the huge walk-in freezer, which was the size of a movie theater and kept at a frigid twenty degrees below zero, her delicate Ecuadorian constitution precluding exposure to harsh arctic temperatures.
Likewise, she had never been on the roof where the machinist, Nestor Valenzuela, dwelt in perfect and contented obscurity among his drill presses and lathes, away from all supervision, emerging only periodically to demand a raise from Pato Gonzalez, a demand that was always coarsely rebuffed, and Nestor would retreat to his rooftop hideaway to smoke dope and plot his next campaign.
She never visited the parking lot either. If she was afraid of the freezer and roof, La Creta dwelt in perpetual fear of the parking lot, which was two doors away, separated from the factory by the Taliban shish-kebob garage where resided the The Forty Thieves of the spicy halal chicken and rice wagons which were ubiquitous around Manhattan, led by their boss, ZiZu. The sidewalk was blocked by overflowing dumpsters and sundry, ripped garbage bags overflowing with a universe of greasy food waste, rice, chicken bones and wilted lettuce leaves covering the sidewalk and gutters as gangs of pigeons gorged themselves on the rancid wastes, while crazy Arabic men wielding large knives and pushing aluminum hot dog carts in and out of the building at all hours, screaming hysterically at each other, an object lesson in the futility of trying to transform a phantasmagoria of chaotic nonsense like Iraq, incomprehensible to the occidental mind, into a non-threatening, family-oriented theme park. And this was only the |