April 30, 2006
Oh, The New York Times is in big trouble. BIG SURPRISE!!! I’ve been complaining about that newspaper for years. A city like New York should be able to do better.
They think they are an Establishment, but all they are is just another boring newspaper. I have practically quit reading it, and even though I try to avoid taking it seriously, I am still mortally offended by its middlebrow conformism.
Not that The Times does not sometimes feature superb writers, but the regular staff is from hunger! If I have to sit through another plodding, moralistic opinion piece by a neurotic dork whose whole qualification in life is that he graduated from Podunk College forty years ago, and has never done shit since then but write boring little opinion pieces, then I am going to go up with that guy at the Empire State Building and jump off with him.
Now it turns out that The Times is leaking money like a sieve and facing a shareholders revolt. BIG SURPRISE! That place is like a Rodney Dangerfield movie, minus the laughs. The publisher of The Times, “Pinch” Sulzberger, who inherited the job because his family owns all the voting stock, looks from his pictures like he could not be trusted to feed the canaries in a pet shop. He has mismanaged a multi-billion dollar publishing empire to the nth degree. Under his management The Times completely misrepresented the Iraq war and generated the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals. The editor who had to resign over the Jayson Blair scandal, Howell Raines, is having his new book serialized in, get this, Field and Stream Magazine!! Talk about not knowing shit about New York….!
And that’s an apt metaphor: The Times doesn’t know if it’s fish or fowl. Who’s going to read an article about hip-hop music written by a Princeton graduate? Just because you know Strunk’s Elements of Style does not make you a writer.
“Pinch” Sulzberger’s strategy for The Times seems to be based on a business model Where No Man Has Gone Before, change a New York newspaper into a national newspaper. Obviously, to succeed would necessitate softening its urban impact to appeal to readers living in more sedate environments. This is already happening, with tedious features about baby carriages, and the joys of living in Park Slope.
The cloying, vacant cultural coverage, which used to be targeted at tired middle-aged readers, now seems to target tired youngish readers. It is a paper without a point of view, covering insignificant social tendencies with an airhead, pollyannaish, smilyface naiveté totally uninformed by anything resembling culture. It’s the lowest common denominator for the middle range.
The paper needs to be shaken out of its lethargy from the top, with a complete change of leadership. It’s current editorial line-up is a dog. It needs to take a jazzier approach to local news, where The Post and The Daily News are eating its lunch.
Who cares if The New York Times lives or dies? Not me. There’s plenty of places to go for news and opinion. Hell, I’ll just write it myself!
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Posted on 4/30/2006
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April 26, 2006
Peter Kalikow did a terrible thing by accepting delivery of that Lamborghini in public and in the newspapers on the day that Roger Toussaint went to jail.
Toussaint is a perfect Bozo, with the way he has totally botched up the labor negotiations, and he is ruined as a labor leader. His ten-day jail term is just the beginning of his problems, which will really become apparent as the civil suit by the family of the firefighter who was grievously injured during the transit strike, Matthew Long, progresses.
As I have insistently and repeatedly emphasized in this blog, Long’s father, bar owner Michael Long, is the chairman of the New York Conservative Party, and this is an election year. The support of both the mayor and the governor for Long and against the union leadership in this lawsuit is already taking shape. There is going to be a full-court press on this from the entire establishment, and Toussaint is going to get, tar-and-feathered, flattened like a piece of Iraqi road kill.
But that’s no reason for jamming your thumb in his eye the way Kalikow has done. By making a fool out Toussaint, he is also insulting the rank and file for no reason. The name of the game in labor relations is conciliation, not confrontation. I have been in labor negotiations where there were screaming, insults and threats and I have been in sessions where there was conciliation and reasoning, and all the positive results were achieved in an atmosphere of harmony.
Kalikow already has a chauffeured limo courtesy of the MTA. He says that he could afford the Lamborghini independently of the MTA because he is supposedly independently wealthy, but knowing all the bullshit people talk, how are we supposed to believe that?
The way the workers are being jerked around, first by their own union’s stupidity, and then by managers like Kalikow, is only going to lead to explosive trouble. If the law forbids the union from striking, then it is supposed to forbid the management from behaving like pigs. The MTA is a public utility and to make it operate efficiently the management and union are going to have to adjust to a sophisticated new reality that takes the interests of the public into consideration, and that means not fighting like cats and dogs. But given the personalities involved, that’s not going to happen.
I can tell you this, every single transit worker saw that Lamborghini in the paper and said to him/herself, “That’s my money.” That’s normal.
But what’s not going to be normal is when the Long lawsuit gets going and holy hell is raining down on the transit union and the workers every single day. Plus the fact that when their contract goes to arbitration the workers are going to lose major concessions that were in the contract that they refused by seven votes.
When this whole mess comes to a head, which it will sooner than later, I’m going to start walking to work.
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Posted on 4/26/2006
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April 21, 2006
Entering into a dream is the passing from one eternity, that of life and death in the physical universe, into that of another, the infinity of impulses and synapses of the human mind, those that we have formed through our experiences and those we have inherited through ancestral memory – the reptilian brain, if you will. Below the threshold of Havelock’s consciousness was a world seething with life, like a tranquil pond betraying no movement, though once you looked under its placid surface there were unimaginable little creepy-crawlies, slimy, hellish flesh-eating monsters with mandibles, antennae and bulging eyes, lying in wait of a passing victim of opportunity into whom they would inject their paralyzing toxin, and once the terrified but still alert prey was immobilized, to tear into it with jaws and teeth, ripping its limbs from its body and eating its still conscious and feeling flesh and organs.
Or maybe they would swallow it whole, and the last experience of the fully alert victim would be the dark interior of his aggressor’s organs; the throbbing, pulsing functions of its digestive tract and the corrosive acid effects of its enzymes gradually dissolving him as he choked and writhed in ineluctable agony.
Havelock dreamed he and Paulette were in Coral Gables, at the Venetian Pool. It was a wonderfully bright cloudless day as they swam through the grottos and under the teasing cascade of the tropical waterfall. Life could not have been sweeter; they were in love, robust and healthy and flush with cash. Paulette, her rich wet mane hanging down over her shoulders, droplets of water glistening on her perfectly classical face, shoulders and breasts invoked in Havelock the image of Aphrodite formed from the foam of the blue Aegean Sea and washed onto the sun-bleached sands of Mykonos. Havelock swam to the edge of the pool and, muscles bulging, lifted himself out. He climbed onto the five-meter diving platform. From that height he could survey the whole area. At the coral rocks that bordered the far end of the pool there were photographers, fashion models and assistants holding reflectors preparing to shoot a swimsuit layout for Italian Vogue. Havelock could not have been more exhilarated – this was a world away from the obscure, shabby life he knew as a kid in Newfie, or the grasping, petty, nickel-and-dime chiseling of Seventh Avenue. Miami was the Real Deal, The Glistening Pearl of The Caribbean, The Blooming Tropical Orchid of Desire. Below him in the water, his stunning, rich, sophisticated girlfriend waved to him in adoring admiration.
“Watch this, Paulette!” He dived off the platform, executing a perfect jackknife. He felt the surge of power that one experiences from succeeding an exacting athletic technique, touching his toes, swinging the legs behind and up, a perfect vertical plunge.
In the split second he was suspended in air, all the water drained out of the pool, revealing its blue-tiled bottom. He felt the bones in his face crunch as it smashed into the enamel, followed by his ruined, crumpled body.
He awoke emotionally devastated, panting as though he had run up a flight of stairs. The dream with the gorilla had already been eclipsed by this latest horror, though he was aware that he was having a very traumatic night. He was trembling in his bed. The only time he could remember having passed a night like this was one time he had eaten some spoiled antipasto salad and gotten food poisoning. The dreams and the stomach pain had been agonizing, with sweating and monstrous mental horrors. Then there was one time he had eaten some rancid onion soup in Paris and had come down deathly sick.
Maybe a glass of milk would calm him down. He rose from the bed, poured himself some skim milk and sat on the couch in his darkened living room. The sweet taste had a sedative effect. He forced himself not to think at all. Some people have to train themselves for years to sit there blank-minded and unthinking, but Havelock, as has been previously noted, was not a reflective individual. He was a dork. In fact, thinking was something he disliked, preferring rather to stare beady-eyed in a neutral state of imbecility if it were at all possible. Most people did not realize this about him. If they thought about him at all it was in terms of what they wanted from him but Paulette, for whom not the smallest vibration passed unappreciated, was of course perfectly attuned to his true moronic nature. It was a comfort to her in that it validated her contemptuous evaluation of men in general and allowed her to do all the thinking. Her father Jack had been a nit-wit but a good provider, and Havelock captured her imagination in that way, as a sort of post-modern imbecile who would be acceptable to her social set, the same as Jack had been to the Oyster Bay ladies. Havelock was a kind of cipher that you could read anything you wanted out of. He embodied for Pops an idealized version of his own youth. It was peculiar how this gentile guy from the far reaches of the Canadian outback could excite the imagination of a bunch of New York Jews.
After sitting in the dark in a perfect flat-line state for a while, he went back into the bedroom, threw himself onto the bed, and in a matter of seconds was out like a light. His dream transported him to the maternity ward where Paulette was giving birth to their first child. When the nurse led him to her bedside, she was beaming with pride, her newborn bundle of joy swathed in a pink blanket at her breast. She glowed with maternal fulfillment as she removed a corner of the blanket to reveal its face, the face of a perfectly formed baby - gorilla!
“How adorable!” cried Havelock. “We’ll call her Vaati. I ain’t bringing into the world another Brittany, Whitney, Jitney or Shitney.” As he spoke, Havelock noticed a rustling commotion which seemed to be disturbing the bedcovers between Paulette’s legs. The noise emitting from it was a kind of chuckling and high-pitched barking. He threw off the covers to discover a family of rats frolicking in Paulette’s bloody afterbirth, which had not been cleaned away and was serving as a kind of jungle gym for the rodents, their fur glistening in menstrual blood.
Paulette, cuddling the gorilla at her breast, exalted “Aren’t they cute? I’m going to adopt them and we can all live together.”
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Posted on 4/21/2006
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April 17, 2006
WE NOW TAKE YOU TO MADONNA'S NEW ANCESTRAL HOME IN SCOTLAND, SCHMUCKMORAL CASTLE, WHERE SHE HAS INVITED HER OLD FRIEND, SANDRA BERNHARDT, FOR HIGH TEA:
SANDRA BERNHARDT: When you invited me to High Tea, I thought you had something really good to smoke!
MADONNA: Oh no, my dear, the lady of the manor can't allow herself to be defined by such low proclivities.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: Hey, what are those in your mouth, Chicklets?
MADONNA: No, they're smooth stones. I find if I talk with a mouthful of rocks, it really helps mah-velously in cultivating the right British accent, don't you agree?
SANDRA BERNHARDT: Oh yeah! The Rain in Spain and all that shit. Well, just keep falling off your horse, baby, and maybe you'll knock all your teeth out. That should help.
MADONNA: I daresay!
SANDRA BERNHARDT: Long as you don't end up with your ass in a sling like Christopher Reeve.
MADONNA Oh, le pauvre! That's French, ya know. Every day I say a prayer for Christopher Reeve when I do my kabbalah. I'm Jewish, you know.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: You don't say!
MADONNA: Yes, dah-ling! When I do my "Like a Prayer" number I've got the cutest little dancing rabbis.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: Did you ever think of shaving your head and having sex through a hole in the sheet?
MADONNA: Don't be coarse, dah-ling. How would I know for sure who's on the other side? How do you like my castle?
SANDRA BERNHARDT: Pretty cool. It's a far cry from when you used to crash on a cum-stained mattress in Corona. But it's so biggggg! How do you get around all these rooms?
MADONNA: That's where the horses come in. Incidentally, will you be riding to the hounds with us on Sunday?
SANDRA BERNHARDT: Wow! You're a regular Ivanhoe!
MADONNA: As long as you don't pronounce it Ivan-HO'.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: How are your lovely children?
MADONNA: Well, as you know, I'm a strict disciplinarian.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: I heard that.
MADONNA: I don't want them to turn out like I did.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: Good point! Where did you learn to be so strict?
MADONNA: When I was married to Sean Penn, he used to tie me to a chair and whip me.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: That's a good school.
MADONNA: We have to get back to traditional values. I'm a Republican, you know. And I'm researching my geneology to find out if I'm descended from the original Mayflower puritans.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: I thought that was pilgrims.
MADONNA: Whatever....
SANDRA BERNHARDT: Sounds to me like you got all the bases covered. Say, the father of your daughter Lourdes is starring on Broadway.
MADONNA: I always knew the boy had talent. All he needed was a little wind in his poop.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: Is that a nautical term?
MADONNA: I'll have to invite you onto my yacht, The Virgin Queen.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: I figured it was only a matter of time until we got around to the Queen. Have you been invited to Buckingham Palace yet?
MADONNA: Not yet, but I had an audience with the Pope. We discussed the kabbalah. I tried to talk him into converting to Judaism, but he told me at his age there's not enough left to circumsize. I'm hoping that if I make enough money on my world tour the Queen will knight me, or whatever it's called when you're a woman.
SANDRA BERNHARDT: You mean the whole ceremony, where you get down on your knee and she smacks you with the sword?
MADONNA: Well, look at it this way, all the time I used to spend on my knees in New York when I was young, this way I might as well get something out of it, too.
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Posted on 4/17/2006
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April 17, 2006
THIS RESPONSE FROM "SPASM" IN PARIS, FRANCE.
get up ! stand up !
and fight for your rights !
yeah !
boss can't treat U like a Kleenex and throw U away for any reason
just to take another guy who won't say anything about his exploitation or cost cheaper...
you can't be fired if you do a good job and the company make benefits !
that's was what french people were fighting for !
Spasm, Paris, France
THANK YOU, SPASM! YOU KNOW I ADMIRE FRENCH PEOPLE!
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Posted on 4/17/2006
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April 16, 2006
Hands off Barry Bonds! Remember, they crucified Jesus too.
In this country the standard is still, was he arrested and was he convicted.
Barry Bonds has never been arrested or convicted. The only evidence against him is a bunch of scumbags who say they saw him taking steroids. I could say the same thing about you, "I saw Joe Schmuck take steroids."
Well, big fucking deal! Hearsay evidence is not admissable in court.
The worst of it is, these accounts were given to reporters and book writers who were looking to make money. Take it from me, writers are a bunch of fucking whoooooores! They'll write anything to make money. Writers particularly don't like athletes or artists because most writers are freakin' nerds.
The standard in this country is: has he been arrrested and has he been convicted, and in the case of Barry Bonds the answer is no.
If the prosecuters start bringing up guys who say, "I saw him take steroids," then it becomes a witch hunt, like when they had witnesses saying "So-and-so is a commie."
Do we really want to go back to those bad old days, when people's careers were ruined because of what some cowardly scumbag said about him because he was pressured to?
My girlfriend, Magpie, told me,"You want to see Bush impeached, but you're giving Barry Bonds a free pass."
First of all, Bush is guilty of wasting billions of dollars and thousands of lives of American resources in Iraq on a wild goose chase, not to mention Hurricane Katrina, which he blew completely.
Second of all, impeachment is not criminal, it's political, with no jail time. These prosecutors are looking to railroad Barry Bonds with criminal jail time.
I'm not even bringing up the race aspect of the thing, but you don't see them going after Mark McGuire.
We've been here before, with Clinton and the blow job. These prosecuters are out of control. They have too much time on their hands.
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Posted on 4/16/2006
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April 15, 2006
Anybody can do it
Let's get it on
C'mon people
Live human target
Omigod plenty of guts here
Oh yeah! Unreal unreal
Oh yeah let's go
Omigod my balls are flyin' around I'm in the loop
Oh yeah, you with the blue hat, s'up bro?
Oh yeah wotta rush If you wanna get your freak on, come on down
You the mad dog
Live human target
Git it on, baby
Let's go, people
Family therapy
Oh yeah, brother, I hear that
Shoot The Freak in the head anybody can do it.
Yeah you with the brown shirt, you
I'm talkin' to you
Everybody's lookin' at you
Oh yeah, wotta rush!
Live human target
Yeah, you with the suit
Bring your girl on here
Why you holdin' your head bro?
You got a rock in there?
Live human target
Yeah, I like that
Oh, lookit that shot
Thatsa freak, baby!
Oh wotta rush
You can't have no more fun than this
Let's go, baby, you're freakin' me out
Ooooh
Ooooh
Ooooh, wotta rush
Omigod C'mon, baby, don't look at me!
Pay a buck and Shoot The Freak in the head
Let's go, people, get your freak out
This ain't no movie thee-ay-ter
This the real thing
Hey hey hey hey
C'mon leave me alone
Oh yeah oh yeah
You gonna go do this or what?
Oh man oh man oh man
De dum de dum de dum-dum-dum
Don't BE a freak, SHOOT the freak
Omigod, awesome shot, baby!
Let's get busy, baby
Hi, baby
Live human target
Awwwww! Awesome, baby, awesome!
Oh, wotta rush
Whattya talkin' about, woman?
I'll jump on your head
I ain't gonna punch you
I ain't gonna shoot you
I ain't gonna mess with you, brother
If I had a sap, I'd hit you with it
It's therapy with a paintball gun
You! Get off the phone
Get off the phone I'm lookin' at you too, brother, with the camera
Don't look up, you might see Ur-anus!
Yo, Baldy-Head
Whyn't you come over here and win a bottle of Miracle Grow for your head Why you got that beard?
To tickle your girlfriend?
It's therapy over here
Live human target
Shoot The Freak
You ready? You ready? You ready?
I know you're a sharpshooter
Anybody can do it
OK OK OK
Shoot The Freak in the head but don't hurt him I need him next week
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Posted on 4/15/2006
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April 15, 2006
Americans are in an uproar again about France because the French treat themselves too well. Nothing throws the Americans into a frenzy like the five week vacations and 35-hour work week, the free medical care, the S.M.I.C. (minimum guaranteed living wage) and subsidized housing that the French insist upon. When the French workers hit the streets yet again and forced their right-wing government to retreat on the youth contract, the American press launched into yet another vitriolic tirade, calling them lazy, selfish and myopic for not permitting themselves to be legislated into the same kind of mean,nasty servitude that we in this country consider to be our God-given right.
The element of envy in our complaint was too readily apparent. One editorial cartoon, which captured both the reality of the situation and our national seething resentment of it, showed a mob of well-dressed demonstrators marching under a banner which read, "Let Us Eat Cake." Indeed, the French are fighting for nice cake, and not freakin' Twinkies!
The Americans, who are long on hot air and short on historical perspective, are bewildered about how the French came to live so well. Everything the French have, they had to organize and fight for it tooth-and-nail against the most voracious blood-suckers in history, the bourgeoisie, who took the maxim of "never give a sucker an even break" and enshrined it as their Eleventh Commandment. The misery of the French workers was historically so dire that they threw themselves into the arms of the only people who could protect them from the entrepreneurial class, the royalty, and for centuries the only miserable protections the people had came in the form of edicts and regulations handed down by enlightened rulers like Louis XIV and the robust bureaucracy that was established by the French kings.
When the French Revolution, which was essentially a bourgeois revolution, overthrew the aristocracy and put the power in the hands of the industrial capitalists, even the meager protections of the royalty were removed, and the working people were thrown into the bottomless "oubliette," or black hole, of relentless exploitation, heartless misery and degradation, magnified by forced industrial uprooting and collectivization characteristic of nineteenth century social Darwinism.
Out of this morass of despondancy and humiliation sprang up, like a flower growing out of a pile of manure, the humanist school of nineteenth century Frency literature, characterized by such "monstres sacres" as Victor Hugo, a magnificent, towering triumph of human civilization, and the no less formidable Emile Zola, who gave a voice to the human suffering and really set the standard for contemporary civilized society.
The U.S., with no literary society to speak of, and a craven, self-seeking, social climbing, puny excuse for an intellectual class, has no equivalent to the intellectual monoliths of nineteenth century France. The intellectual and humanistic fervor inspired by these men, along with the concomitant explosion in art, music and architecture made possible, paradoxically, by the wealth created by capitalism, stimulated the creation of an intellectual movement for social evolution characterized by labor unions and, ultimately, the French Socialist Party.
The first Socialist prime minister, a Jewish intellectual named Leon Blum, created an uproar by forcing through legislation that guaranted one week paid vacation for all French workers. At the time, this was a revolution. This Blum government got the ball rolling for following governments and social reforms. The accompanying evolution in social thought culminated in the election of Francois Mitterand, France's first Socialist president, and he spent fourteen years concretizing the French welfare state.
The impetus for French socialism comes from the grassroots, not imposed from above like Russia, so when Americans attack French society, they are attacking not an establishment but normal men and women who are outwardly like themselves (though better dressed) but who have a vastly richer cultural patrimony to draw from. The idea that the French public can be browbeaten and bereated by people like Donald Rumsfield or Rupert Murdoch into denuding themselves before the onslaught of savage capitalism is laughable on its face, and delusional.
For The New York Post to suddenly take up the cause fo the young Arab and African "banlieusards" who would ostensibly be helped in finding employment if the French would only abandon their hard-fought rights, rights that were won over more than a century by mass protests and bloody strikes and riots, is not demonstrated and is only self-serving. The great fear among the American ruling class is that Americans will learn from the French example and start demanding equivalent rights, though that is not likely, given the vast cultural and historical differences between the two societies.
Nevertheless. the French were right to go into the streets to defend their rights. Let the politicians devise a more reasonable solution that leaves in place the rights of French workers. 200motels
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Posted on 4/15/2006
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April 13, 2006
Here is the latest lesson of Republican logic: a leak is not a leak if the president does it because, by definition, the president is the defining authority of what is classified information and what is not classified.
What if the president is a freakin' moron and leader of a whole gang of morons? Does that make him the ultimate authority on morons, and lets him decide the present definition of what constitutes a moron? "I'm lowering the bar on who is a moron. From now on I'm a genius." To give the reader some background on this kind of thinking, in the early days of the Iraq war an administration official told a reporter, "We're an empire. We decide what is reality."
So by definition, reality is whatever these knuckleheads tell us it is. We're living in a world halfway between "1984," with its Ministry of Truth bureaucracy, aided by a corrupt, brain-dead press establishment, feeding us a daily dose of lies, and "Brave New World," where everybody is so zonked out on mood altering substances like Prozac that they don't care anymore.
Let's examine what constitutes a war hero: former Senator Bob Kerrey got the Medal of Honor for Vietnam, but there's all kinds of sneaky stories circulating about how he and his unit got stuck out in a rice paddy one night and massacred a group of innocent villagers for fear the villagers would give away their position to the Viet Cong. Nobody mentions that anymore.
John Kerry was widely recognized as a war hero until the Fast Boat Veterans for Truth altered the reality of that. Now he's not a hero anymore. John McCain is also widely regarded as a war hero, but there's a problem with that one as well. The way I'm given to understand it, his superiors repeatedly instructed McCain to stop doing "Top Gun" tricks with his jet fighter, but since McCain's father was commander of the Navy's Sixth Fleet, he was a spoiled brat and he ignored them, so he eventually got shot down. His Vietnamese captors, knowing full well who his father was, repeatedly tried to get rid of this hot potato, but he refused to leave captivity. What kind of nut job is that?!! He evidently was figuring on building a political career on being a POW.
This story of political calculation and manipulation will probably never see the light of day.
So, what is a war hero? It's somebody who survives and goes into politics.
And let's not forget that other Top Gun, our Commander-in-Chief, Mr. Mission Accomplished. Either he served out the Vietnam War in the Texas Air National Guard, a summer camp for rich draft dodgers, or he was a flat-out draft dodger who didn't even bother to show up for duty. It's dangerous to bring up Bush's war record, ask Dan Rather.
But, hey! "Reality is whatever we say it is." So a draft dodger is not a draft dodger, a hero is not a hero and a leak is not a leak!
What about a blow job? If the president gets a blow job from a fat cow in the Oval Office, is that a blow job? Hell no! It's national security. He was probing her tonsils for listening devices!
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Posted on 4/13/2006
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April 13, 2006
[Scenario: New York 1986. Now that Jacky has gotten comedian Kelly Shine out of the picture, he can go ahead with his plan to feed the girl Inch to the tender mercies of the lunatic Bogdan]
“You think she’s gonna come?” Bogdan asked me anxiously. He and Pedro were drinking light beer. I was already into my second Wild Turkey.
“Don’t worry about a thing. She said she’ll be here.” I felt quite confident. Molly McGuire’s Irish Pub was like my second home, after the gym. It was a congenial place to meet friendly women, or just get drunk and hang out with the fellows at the bar. They were doing a rollicking landslide business that Saturday night. The place was packed with reveling New Yorkers and also many expatriate Irish, Canadians and British. On the dance floor Irish au pair girls danced a lively two-step with construction workers from Staten Island. The current house band, Freedom’s Sword from Scotland, sang:
“Willie come sell your fiddle
Come sell your fiddle so fine
Willie come sell your fiddle
And buy a pint of wine
If I should sell my fiddle
The world would think me mad
Many’s the handsome day
My fiddle and I we had”
Pedro asked, “What is that, English music?”
“Not English, Scottish.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” he persisted. I thought Scotland was part of England. I thought Sherlock Holmes came from Scotland Yard.”
“Lissen, Pedro, take it from me, if you call these guys English you’re gonna end up getting into a fight.”
He brightened up at the prospect. “Good, let ‘em! Motherfuckin’ English are just a bunch of sissies. They don’t have any good fighters. They had that guy whatzisname, Cooper, but he was a tomato can.” The sap was beginning to flow in him, I could tell. “Any motherfuckin’ English….”
“Scottish!”
“…whatever, who wants to kick my ass, I’ll show him how we kick ass in P.R.! Puerto Rico could kick Scotland’s ass anytime.” Pedro was a very patriotic Puerto Rican nationalist. He had even been there once, when he was a kid, to visit his grandparents. He didn’t have too much fun, he had confided to me once, because everything was in Spanish.
I felt the Wild Turkey struggling to take control of my mind. “Lemme tell you something about the English, Pedro, I’ve made a study of it…”
“Shit, man, the only thing you’ve made a study of is the business end of my boxing glove while I’m punching the shit out of you!”
I insisted, “Why don’t you let me talk!? Most people consider the British a bunch of effete tea drinkers, but that stereotype masks a savagery and bloodthirstiness well-known to any race unlucky enough to have experienced their true nature. Just ask the Irish, the Scots or the French, all of whom have experienced endlessly repeated instances of mass-murder, looting and rape. If you wish to dwell upon the nature of the traditional Englishman, look not to the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, but to the murderous mobs of soccer fanatics who engage in mass slaughter at football games. It might interest you to know that football riots did not just start yesterday, but were going on in the time of Oliver Cromwell, may his soul rot in Hell, hundreds of years ago. Just dress these animals up in uniform and you have the British Empire.”
They gaped at me. Bodgan asked, “What the freakin’ hell have you been drinking?”
Pedro said, “Is Ireland near England?”
“Forget it. Miss!” I held up my glass to the waitress. Once, Pedro and I went to a screening of “Julius Caesar” starring Marlon Brando, a particular favorite of his. Pedro insisted on bringing into the theater two gigantic bags of popcorn which he decided to combine right there in the audience while all the Shakespearean acting was going on on the screen. He was making a terrible racket, shaking the bags back and forth and messing around with the popcorn. Finally, a guy sitting in front of us decided he had had enough, and turned around to complain. Pedro caught his eye and, without saying a word, just growled like a dog. The guy got up and moved to another seat. During the scene where the people of Rome are tearing up the city in response to Marc Anthony’s defense of Caesar, I had to explain to Pedro that Romans were Italians. After that, the movie made perfect sense to him.
Inch finally materialized through the crowd, and we stood up to greet her. Her blonde hair was all teased out and she was wearing a mink coat over black aerobic tights and a leopard-print tube top. Little gold rings with stones sparkled on her fingers, and her face was heavily made up in an attempt to mask the bruise Nick had inflicted on her. The dark lighting of the club worked to her advantage. She ordered a beer and turned to me. “Kelly called me from L.A. He’s up for a part in a film called ‘Dog of My Dreams’. It’s about a German shepherd who returns from heaven and saves a child from some kidnappers.”
I said, “It’s too bad he left town so sudden, like.”
“Yeah, well that’s comedians for you. Anyway, if he gets this part I may go and visit him in L.A. for a while.”
“You really like this guy, huh?”
“Jacky, he makes me laugh.” The band finished their set and, seeing a big flashy-looking blonde at our table, came over and sat down. They had lots of hair and big, thick arms and hands like Glasgow dockworkers. I introduced everybody all around. The musicians crowded around Inch, flirting with her and buying her drinks. Bogdan grew agitated at the sight of so much competition and I ran around the table and whispered to him, “You better get cracking or you’re going to miss out on all the fun.” I met an English girl named Gillian at the bar and invited her to sit with us at the table. Bogdan and Inch danced while the band played. Pedro explained the finer points of defensive boxing, comparing Muhammed Ali with Mike Tyson: “See, Ali would run away from the guy and catch him with his long reach. He’s the only fighter that I could say had a good jab when he was moving backward. Tyson relies on his strength. He likes to work from the inside. ‘Course he has to because he’s so short for a heavyweight…”
Inch excused herself to go the Korean deli next door. A few minutes later she came back with cigarettes and a bag of beer sausages which she offered around. There were no takers, so she ate them all herself.
The band finished its last set of the night. By this time we were all pretty far into the bag. The band’s manager, an amiable little Irishman named Seamus with a game leg and a dapper Seville Row suit came over to the table and invited us upstairs to the dressing room for a private party. Inch had switched from beer to straight Tia Maria. Soon she would be ready for Bogdan’s amourous advances, or so I calculated.
We walked in a line up a narrow back staircase, carrying our drinks. The dressing room was a chaotic mess of guitars, costumes and decrepit furniture. The members of the band greeted us and we made ourselves comfortable, a happy group of after-hours revelers gossiping about bars, bands, who was drinking too much, who was on the wagon, who was going out with whom. Somebody told a joke about a schoolteacher and an Irish jockey. The band’s lead guitar player, Gordon, took out an acoustical guitar and strummed a few chords to the approval of two admiring females.
Suddenly Inch stood up, leaving her mink coat draped over the chair. “Is there a place I could lay down for a minute?” she gasped, “I feel like the whole room is spinning around.” She had turned pasty-white and her bosoms seemed to be straining to jump out of the tube top. They led her to a couch where she reclined and closed her eyes. “Just leave me alone for a couple of minutes. I’ll be allright.”
We all turned from her and continued talking. However, the explosive combination of beer, Tia Maria and spicy beer sausage inside her was not to be denied its moment of combustive glory, and all at once exploded from her mouth like some great infernal geyser from hell, soiling her and the sofa.
“Fooking Jesus”, exclaimed Davy the drummer, “Somebody open a fooking window! God, what a stench!”
One girl said, “Oh, the poor thing! Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Still, nobody moved. I felt my whole plan collapse like a house of cards. My new apartment was not going to materialize.
I hadn’t counted on the urgency of Bogdan’s sex drive. He raced over to the couch and helped Inch gently to her feet. “I’ll make sure she gets home all right,” he offered, manoeuvering her toward the door. A woman gathered Inch’s mink coat and bag and pushed them into Bogdan’s free arm as he rushed Inch out the door and down the stairs. This signaled the end of our little after-hours party, but not before somebody said of Bogdan, “That bloke must really be desperate.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I offered gamely. “I don’t think he’s been with a woman for a while.”
A red-headed chewing gum popper named Maureen asked disinterestedly, “What, did he just get out of the Army?”
“Army, my arse,” deduced Gordon, “Prison’s more bloody like it, if you ask me. That chap looks like a bad lot. I would say that girl’s probably in for a long night.”
“But she’s sick!” protested Maureen.
“I don’t think he cares if she’s bloody dying.” He took another swig from his beer bottle. “It’s going to be a long night.”
Davy chimed in, “And something else is going to be long too, ha ha ha!” All the men laughed.
“You men are worse than pigs. Even a pig wouldn’t do a thing like that,” Maureen opined with disdain.
“Oh, yes they would,” countered Davy, who apparently once had lived on a farm, and the discussion turned to the romantic habits of domesticated livestock.
The next day found me back in the boxing room at the gym, furiously pounding the body bag with my fists as a way of releasing my own pent-up sexual frustration. The English girl of the night before, Gillian, had wanted to come back with me but I had demurred. Who could bring a date back to that dump? What were we gonna do, get it on on a mattress on the floor with mice scurrying all around us in the dark? As I punched the shit out of the bag, I imagined it to be a living body with a face. And the face was mine.
“Yo, Jacky!” A voice startled me from behind. I turned, all winded and sweaty, and came face-to-face with Bogdan. He was relaxed and smiling, and I realized he had gone through with it.
“So, you took her home with you.”
“Just like you said.”
“Frankly, I don’t know how you could get it up. That broad was a freaking mess.”
“Try spending some time in the joint. You’ll find out how much you’re capable of.”
“She can’t have been very much fun.”
“Hell, she slept right through it.” Hearing this, I figured that I could have bought him a rubber sex doll for $29.95 and saved myself a whole lot of trouble. But he seemed satisfied, so why argue with success?
“Where is she now?”
“Back at my place, sleeping it off. I gotta get back there before she wakes up. I just came over to thank you. That’s the nicest thing anybody ever did for me.”
“Hell, what are friends for?”
I never did get the apartment. Bogdan ended up going back to prison for violating his parole by beating up another guy on the subway. Inch moved to Los Angeles and married Kelly, who became a big success as a movie star playing tough-guy roles in adventure movies.
I met a German redhead named Greta at the gym and moved into her rent-controlled apartment in Washington Heights. When we make love she spits at me and screams blood-curdling curses in German. She terrorizes her upstairs neighbors by banging on the ceiling with a broomstick if they should be so bold as to walk around at night. All in all, we’re pretty happy.
One weekend a month I go up to Rockland County and take small arms- and hand-to-hand combat training with a group called the “Committee for the Defense of a Free Ireland.” Once I get good enough, I plan to fly to Dublin and join the I.R.A.
I’ve got it all figured out.
THE END
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Posted on 4/13/2006
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April 08, 2006
COZUMEL, MEXICO
“Thank God for the Queen of Spain!” exalted the taxi driver as he sped us down the modern autoroute leading to the south of Cozumel Island. It was a clear, dry day and the temperature was climbing into the high 80’s. On either side of the highway the mangrove forests soaked up the life-giving energy of the sun, striving to regenerate themselves months after the devastating assault by Hurricane Wilma had denuded the trees of their leaves, leaving a barren tableau reminiscent of the devestation visited upon the Vietnemese jungle after an Agent Orange deforestation campaign.
Above us the hawks glided on currents of hot, rising air, their job of locating prey on the ground made infinitely easier by the total absence of vegetation.
The driver continued his litany of thanksgiving. “The Queen of Spain called the state governor, and when she heard the magnitude of our suffering, she immediately dispached three military cargo aircraft filled with water and food. Otherwise we surely would have perished because all our water was contaminated.
“The hurricane lasted two days,” he continued. By the second day our houses were flooded and the water was up to our chest. We had to go on the roof in the wind and rain with our children, who were all crying. We thought we were all going to die, and we prayed to Jesus for our salvation.
“Finally, by the grace of God, the storm moved away. If it had lasted two hours more all the people in my barrio would have been swept away and killed.
“There was a great wailing of relief and thanks to God that we had survived. We sat on our roofs and waited for help, because we had no water or food. When at last we saw the Spanish Air Force planes circling above us, those of us who could ran to the airfield to await their landing, and when they landed we went inside the airplanes and emptied them by hand, passing the cartons out in a chain until all the supplies were stacked on the tarmac.
“And so, because of the benevolence of the Queen of Spain all the people survived.
“After came the Canadians and the Americans. Then the Mexican Navy ships docked in the harbor. They brought soldiers with trucks and helicopters, and the soldiers and police patrolled the streets to keep order.
“By the grace of God, all the people survived. Not one person died. Unfortunately nobody was able to save the poor animals and they all perished. All the dogs and cats, the horses and donkeys, the chickens and roosters. All dead! The only animals that survived were those birds that knew how to survive in the water, and when the water receded from the town the streets were filled with the corpses of the dead animals.
“This highway we’re driving on now, when the water receded, was strewn with thousands of dead fish all the way to the southern end of the island, as far as the eye could see.
“For two months we had no work and we only lived on what we received from the government. They gave us water, food and ice every day, but no alcohol or beer. Let me tell you, that was the worst of it! I can live without seeing a woman for two months, but two months without beer in this heat, and nothing to do – that was the worst. A black market developed where you could buy a bottle of tequila for five hundred pesos, but nobody had any money, and if the police caught you they sent you to jail.”
He reiterated, “I don’t care if I don’t see a woman for two months, but no beer – that’s the worst!”
My girlfriend Magpie and I had taken an efficiency apartment in the center of San Miguel, on the malecon, or oceanfront boulevard, just a couple of blocks from the ferry terminal. For whatever reason, the downtown business district and central plaza, with its lush tropical foliage, appeared untouched by the devestation, but that might be because the authorities determined that it be beautifully appointed for the needs of the tourist business, which is the island’s only source of income. This central plaza was a far cry from what it was the first time I visited Cozumel twenty years ago. Then, it was a devastatingly ugly patch of dirt right out of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, a lazy, filthy unshaded mound of barren soil surrounding a concrete bandshell, fit only for “borrachos” and the North American dropouts that inhabited the surrounding flea bag hotels.
At that time Cozumel was only visited by a few hard-core divers and by small groups of day travelers from the mainland attracted for snorkeling excursions into its wonderfully rich coral reefs. The town had one rickety dock, a t-shirt store and a store selling silver jewelry. The rest of the place was a real dive, with pigs and chickens freeranging down the middle of its shabby side streets.
Each time I came back, the island had incrementally improved, and when the cruise lines finally glommed onto its exotic tropical beauty, a gold rush soon followed, with government and private investment pouring in, followed by an exodus of migrants from all over Mexico, seeking opportunity, as well as rich Mexicans and Spaniards who established oceanfront residences. A new ferry terminal, the muelle fiscal, was constructed directly in front of the town square. A gigantic port built to process cruise ship passengers was built a few kilometers to the south. Shopping centers housing boutiques for Cartier jewelry and Rolex watches sprang up in formerly desolate lots overgrown with weeds. Luxury resorts sprung up like jalapeño poppers. Restaurants and bars charging New York prices spread into the side streets like kudzu vines overtaking an abandoned jungle shack. Now the town, with its miniature malecón, or oceanfront boulevard, resembles nothing so much as a tiny Havana or San Juan, much more charming than Cancún, and with a distinctly Mexican and Mayan personality.
And now that Cozumelenos, as they refer to themselves, are racing along the information superhighway with the rest of us, with 100 television stations and internet cafes on every block (not to mention the ubiquitous cell phones that they have seized upon with the voracious fury of a ravenous octopus), the people on this once-isolated backwater are every bit as sophisticated as the most jaded denizen of Mexico City or New York. Since Magpie and I had neglected to bring along a radio, we more or less left the TV on in our room full-time for background noise.
Mexican television is pretty good. There are a lot of music video stations featuring the whole gamut of popular music ranging from norteno music, which is updated mariachi played by hard guys dressed in vaquero suits and sombreros, to latin hip-hop. There are plenty of movie channels, most featuring dubbed-over American films, but also with plenty of vintage black-and-white Mexican westerns and romantic comedies. You have the choice of watching CNN en espanol, which is broadcast live from Atlanta, but with really cool, elegant latin announcers sporting sharp haircuts and modern suits. There are always soccer matches featuring the best teams of Europe and Latin America. And for hard-core political junkies, there is a public access station that shows parliamentary debates from the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico City, which was a real eye-opener!
The hands-down star of Mexican political commentary for our week in Mexico was undeniably Venezuelan president Hugo “Chavez, who is not passing up any opportunity to project himself throughout Latin America. He was on CNN two or three times every hour all week, and he had a lot to say about Mexico’s ruling party, the PAN, calling them lap dogs of George Bush and the Americans. Since this is an election year for Mexico, the PAN deputies in congress are highly exercised about what they consider Chavez’ interference in the country’s internal politics in favor of the left-wing candidate, Obrador, who is the mayor of Mexico City.
Magpie and I watched a legislative session where the deputies were debating a PAN motion to investigate Chavez and statements by the Venezuelan ambassador to Mexico to determine whether they constituted Venezuelan interference in Mexican domestic politics. It was a raucous debate, the Mexican sense of political decorum not extending to restrained behavior by elected officials. The speakers all started their speeches softly and politely, with reasoned dignity, and then built up to a crescendo of denunciations and accusations, sort of like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, to the accompaniment of shouts, jeers, whistles and points of order by the assembled dignitaries. Everybody was playing to the home audience, and they knew what their constituents expected of them – something spicy!
The motion to investigate Chavez passed, but later that day, when the Venezuelan strongman appeared on the screen, as though in response, he sang a song by the fantastically popular Spanish singer Rocio Durcal, a kind of singing Simone Signoret, who had died earlier that day. Later on, the Venezuelan government announced that it was increasing housing subsidies for all its low-income citizens.
What effect all this is having on Mexican voters I cannot say. But the other big story of the week, the massive demonstrations taking place in the States by undocumented Mexican workers protesting the imminent immigration legislation by the U.S. Congress, aroused plenty of emotions and indignation. Every Mexican knows somebody working in the U.S., so the issue has an emotional aspect as least as strong in Mexico as it does in the U.S.
This issue has many conflicting aspects to it. Nobody wants to raise the point that those regions of the U.S. that have been most impacted by Mexican immigration are areas that were historically Mexican territory for many centuries before they were annexed to the U.S. as a result of the Mexican War of 1845, a war that was described by many commentators of the day, including no less an authority than Ulysses S. Grant, who participated in it, as an abomination and a blatant land grab. This area, stretching from Texas to Northern California, was the richest part of Mexico, so on one level you could say that the Mexican people still retain the residual sentiment that they have some indefinable rights in that region.
Another aspect of the situation is that NAFTA, unlike the European Union, made no provision for movement of people across borders to compensate for the inevitable dislocations and contradictions that would result as a consequence of free trade. This glaring omission has unfortunate racial overtones to it, the Americans and Canadians wanting access to the not inconsequential Mexican market and cheap labor pool without having to accept the possibility that Mexico might come to them.
Anyone who takes the trouble to read the classified section of Mexican newspapers, where jobs are advertised as paying one hundred fifty dollars a MONTH, knows that trans-border migration is inevitable. The problem is that this influx of cheap labor is depressing wages in the U.S., where American employers are happy to pay these substandard wages and no benefits for work for which they would otherwise have to competitively bid.
It should be noted that Mexico takes the integrity of its own borders very seriously, maintaining a large standing army, navy and air force, and has long pursued a policy of forcibly repatriating illegal immigrants back to their poorer neighboring countries to the south.
Magpie and I enjoyed a week of near-perfect weather during our Cozumel vacation, and every day we visited a different beach or snorkeling area. The big nature park at Chankannab had been devastated and was closed for repair, but a few kilometers to the south a beach called Playa Sancho was open for business, and we rented a couple of deck chairs under a newly refurbished palapa.
I swam out a couple of hundred meters to where the water was sparkling clear. The coral, which had been covered in sand kicked up from the hurricane, was arranged in little bouquets separated at intervals of a few meters and extending in all directions. Despite the bland, almost lunar aspect of the sand-covered landscape, it was clearly rich in nourishment, as schools of large blue, purple and black angel fish darted between the formations to leisurely nibble at each for a while before zooming to the next. I would hover at the surface above them, studying each feeding group for a while, when some other point of interest at the periphery of my vision caught my attention, and then I would swim in that direction. Sometimes it would be a particularly large and colorful parrot fish or an intricately sculpted coral formation that drew me. I found a sunken ridge of coral fragments and, knowing these depressions to be particularly attractive to the fish, followed it for several hundred meters.
All at once, I found myself in a murky, brownish patch that, I discovered to my horror, to be infested by a very large school of thimble-sized jellyfish. This was a particularly wild stretch of beach, Magpie and I being the only bathers as far as the eye could see in any direction that day, and jellyfish, even tiny ones can do a lot of damage to humans with their toxic discharge, so finding myself hundreds of meters from the beach, in the midst of a swarm of them, filled me with inquietude. I had once seen a television show about an Australian diver who had just narrowly escaped death after being stung by a jellyfish no larger than a fingernail. Were these ones toxic? Would the exertion of swimming cause the poison to circulate faster through my bloodstream? These were some of the questions that went through my mind.
I finally managed to get clear of the swarm of jellyfish, apparently no worse for wear, to find myself comforted by a large heterogeneous group of brightly colored tropical fish feeding on a coral formation. Large blue angelfish;, lovely grey fish with blue markings; grey ones with just one large white dot at the posterior end of their torso; fluttery blue and yellow fish resembling delicate, charming feather dusters; robust black-and-white checked fish with lurid, red bottoms all swam about their business, taking no notice of me.
Suddenly there emerged from this idyllic scenario, as if to remind me once more that I was in the midst of wild nature with absolutely no device of human civilization to shield me, an enormous golden barracuda, more than a meter in length and headed unswervingly in my direction. The face he presented to me had a serious, not to say grave, aspect to it, quite unlike the cute little denizens of the deep served up in the Walt Disney “Nemo” movies, and the fact that he was following a direct trajectory toward me was not in the least reassuring, particularly since I was about a half-kilometer from shore.
Magpie is fond of reminding me that barracuda do not attack humans. They also say that about sharks. But these are wild animals we are describing here, and they do not follow any literary rules of etiquette, as guys who have lost arms and legs, not to mention even less fortunate witnesses, would be happy to attest if they could still be around to discuss it.
I took a page from the Octopus School of Wisdom, and started thrashing my arms and legs wildly to let the creature know that I was alert and robust, and he swam away.
Deciding that I had had enough Wild Kingdom for one day, I made a dash for shore, stopping every few meters to turn around and make sure I wasn’t being tracked. I was plenty alarmed. Next thing, I came face-to-face with another barracuda (or maybe it was the same one? How would I know? It’s not like they wear license plates!) I performed the same thrashing manoeuvre, and this one swam away as well.
At length, I reached the shore and made it back to the palapa where Magpie was relaxing with an iced rum cocktail. She had immediately returned to shore after experiencing the jellyfish. When I told her about the barracuda, she casually remarked, “Maybe they were attracted by your gold chain. In their mind, the sunlight reflecting off the gold reminds of the glittering scales of a fish.”
I immediately removed the chain from my neck.
The Palenkar reef, which stretches between the Fiesta Americana Dive Resort and the El Presidente Hotel is our favorite snorkeling site. There is a small beach at Dzul-Ha where, for the price of a drink, you can inhabit a shaded table on a seaside terrace all day and walk into one of the world’s greatest coral reefs at your leisure. Magpie and I put on our snorkels and swam southward in the direction of the Fiesta Americana, about a kilometer down the beach, in search of a beautiful undersea forest of purple fan coral where we had spent many hours exploring the previous year.
Every modern artist works by the rule that colors and shapes possess the latent energy to release emotions in the beholder, so it is a mystery to this writer why more artists have not taken to the undersea world for inspiration in the same way that Georgia O’Keefe brought the mysteries of the orchid or the American Southwest desert landscapes into the salons of the art world. Why have not dress designers gone in search of striking color combinations and patterns so readily available as to be literally at their fingertips just by donning a mask and wading into the therapeutic, warm coastal waters of the Mexican Caribbean?
Alas, the marvelous coral forest was gone, decimated by the furious devastation of the hurricane. Shattered fragments of fan coral lay on the ocean floor, covered in grey sand, the myriad of exotic sea life that formerly sustained itself on them in such harmonic tranquility also gone. But as we swam, a closer inspection of the terrain made apparent to us that the miraculous restorative evolution of nature was already at work in this hidden garden. Tiny purple fans the size of maple leaves were already springing from the ocean floor, and vibrant, green patches of brain coral had affixed themselves like skin grafts to the surface of dead formations. Magpie returned to our beach transfixed at having been privileged to witness the rebirth of nature at such close proximity, and we wondered aloud how this powerful, eternal cycle of destruction and restoration may have transformed the psyche of the indigenous Mayan civilization. The Mayans, who had a highly evolved culture of architecture and astronomy, also had great mathematical expertise, having discovered the concept of the number zero. They also had a written language, which implies literature. Tragically, the conquering Spanish destroyed all the written records of this great civilization. What marvels of philosophy and poetry, inspired by the terrestrial paradise they shared with the animals of both land and sea were lost to the drunken conquistadores and sociopathic agents of the Inquisition? Who has the insight to imagine what psychic imprint of wisdom is left on the souls of the surviving Mayans, secrets locked forever in the genetic chemistry? That is the role of the artist.
On our last full day of snorkeling in Cozumel, Magpie and I went to Playa Paraiso, just north of the cruise ship terminal, which we know from previous trips to be a real hotbed of sea life.
The cruise ship pier being under repair from the ravages of Wilma, the ships, huge, immaculate floating hotels with names like “Pearl of the Caribbean,” were moored at sea right in front of us. At the side of each ship’s hull, near the waterline, was a solitary little door were the shuttle launches would pull up to disembark cruise passengers and bring them to shore for a day of sightseeing. You expect passengers of huge ships like these to disembark down a big gangplank at a dock, so seeing ferries pull up to this little side door was a bit incongruous.
Anyway, what interested Magpie and me was what was teeming beneath the surface, not what was going on above it. We adjusted our masks and snorkels and jumped in.
You’re immediately transported to another planet. Floating above this world in the clear, warm water you soon forget that you’re in water at all, and it is like flying through the air at the top of an atmosphere whose inhabitants are also flying few feet beneath you, as though you were flying in the air above the birds. That is part of what makes exploring sea life so fascinating, an extra vertical dimension that you don’t get on dry land.
One wonders what our culture would be today if the ancient inhabitants had had access to those mundane objects that we so take for granted today, the sealed diving mask. Of course, the engineering expertise it takes to fit a glass lens to a rubber mask that forms a vacuum around your eyes and nose has only been perfected in the last century. Prior to that, people could only gaze over the water’s surface and speculate on what took place beneath. If previous civilizations, with their great sculptors and painters had had access to this simple instrument, the mask, might not our world today more reflect that which takes place over 90% of its surface? Would not our architecture reflect the inspiration of coral formations, our clothing and interiors mimic the shimmering, gaudy reflections of the deep? Would not the epic poetry of the ancient Greeks and Romans have recounted mythic adventures that took place beneath the ocean’s surface, our religious deities portrayed as gods residing in magnificent undersea palaces? Unfortunately, now that we have the tools to study these heretofore forbidden regions, the masks, scuba tanks and undersea vessels, we have not the artistic inspiration or curiosity to bring them into our cultural realm.
Magpie and I found what we were looking for: what had once been a huge school of silver fish that resided in these waters. On previous visits, we had been astounded by the size of the school – millions of fish, a carpet of them, stretching hundreds of meters. This immense megalopolis was an astonishing sight, and we wanted to see it again before returning to New York.
Unfortunately, this swim brought home to us a more graphic understanding of what damage Wilma had effected on the marine environment than had any of our previous excursions. The huge school of fish had been completely decimated. Where once existed millions upon millions of fish was now reduced to a small group of perhaps several thousands. All those millions of fish gone! It would take years for the school to return to its former size. People see the surface effects of the hurricane, Magpie had kept insisting, without giving any thought to the damage done to the marine life by the seismic churning of the sea.
The stupendous magnitude of the damage was incontrovertible, yet what was left of the school behaved eerily like nothing had gone amiss. What that school of fish does there, I couldn’t possibly imagine. It had been there for years that we knew of, and never broke ranks, even to hunt for food. Was it in the path of a current of microscopic algae and could just sit there as its food was brought to it? The shimmering reflection of the sunlight on the fish’s scales reminded me of what Magpie had told me about barracuda confusing my sparkling gold chain for a fish, and now I came to really conceptualize the logic of that.
What marvel of intelligence or communication causes fish to gather in the millions, to instantly separate and regroup as though by instantaneous thought transference, swimming back on themselves and forming a complex and intricate geometric ballet, forming kaleidoscopic patterns of visual enchantment?
Might it not be indicative of a collective wisdom formed by billions of years of evolution? Who says that fish are stupid? People have never given any thought to submarine intelligence except in dolphins who are, after all, mammals, and therefore more comprehensible to us, but who knows what thoughts or wisdom are locked in the mind of a fish.
People are generally conditioned to think of fish as dumb corpses packed on ice in a Chinatown stall, but I have had occasion to look into the eyes of many a live fish in his own natural environment and have discerned from those experiences a lively intelligence and curiosity. They have not hands to construct, or a spoken language, but who can imagine the thoughts, memories and emotions that might be trapped inside them, that might obsess them?
We came across a huge eagle ray, a monstrous spotted creature at least ten feet across, with a barbed tail at least twelve feet long. His face, impassive and pensive, was eerily humanoid. He stared as us for a moment without curiosity and then fluttered his batlike wings at us, as though to bid us adieu, before swimming out to sea.
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April 01, 2006
SYNOPSIS: New York, 1986. Jacky has told Frank the Cop a pack of lies about comedian Kelly Shine, hoping that Frank will get Kelly out of the picture so that Jacky can set up the girl Inch with crazy Bogdan, and also collect $1000 from Nick the Greek.
I sat at the last table, in a dark corner of the Yuk Factory Komedy Kabaret on Second Avenue. Half full, it being a weeknight, the room was done in early Greenwich Village motif, with brick walls and candles stuck in old wine bottles on the tables. The stage, a platform a couple of feet higher than the floor, was furnished only with a stand-up mike and a wooden stool. There being no backstage, the comics entered from the antebar near where I was sitting when they were announced. Behind the stage, on the brick wall, was a sign that said “Yuk Factory Komedy Kabaret”, with a design of a nebbishy-looking workman shoveling a pile of steaming manure.
The M.C. was a skinny little guy with a hang-dog expression, a jaundiced eye and a spine bent from too many years of slouching over bars and nightclub tables. His name was Paul K. Murdoch, and he was funnier than most of the acts he introduced, though not all his stuff was on the mark by any means. Let’s face it, if you want to be a stand-up comic you don’t need looks, you don’t even need talent. All you need is a big mouth and the urge to make a fool out of yourself in public. Comedians may not be our most valuable national resource, but they are certainly one of our most abundant, with a new crop of jerks springing up each season with the regularity of winter wheat.
I saw about half of them that night: a little old Jewish man with what I assumed to be a very dirty routine, except I didn’t understand the punchlines because they were all in Yiddish; a boring blonde bemoaning the lack of eligible husbands in New York; a Chinese guy with a motorcycle jacket who based his act on paranoia of anti-Asian bigotry; a Canadian; an overweight brunette who ranted about Haagen-Daz ice cream and sang a revolting show tune to taped accompaniment. Like, it was really painful. I consoled myself with the idea that soon it would be Kelly’s turn, the high point of the evening, although he didn’t know it.
Another tedious Jewish comic was taking a bow for recounting how he used to get picked on at summer camp, and Paul K. Murdoch gave a little leap into the floodlights. “Allright, ladies and gentlemen, how about another round of applause for Howard Saplow! Howard Saplow, ladies and gentlemen! Tomorrow Howard begins a four-year engagement at Rikers Island! Scattered laughs.
“Our next comic just blew in from the left coast, where he absolutely killed them at a Ku Klux Klan rally in San Bernadino. After this, he’s scheduled to appear at the men’s room of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Ladies and gentlemen, the inimitable comedy stylings of the former instructor of the Roman Polansky Institute for Little Girls, Mister KELLY SHINE!”
Tepid applause as a taped fanfare blared over the loudspeaker, and Kelly made his entrance from the antebar, rushing by me and bounding onto the stage.
Dressed in dark slacks and a navy windbreaker, Kelly was a six-footer in his thirties with thinning hair, a flattened nose and a round, jowly face. Already well into his decline, it was obvious that he had just enough teeth left in his mouth not to embarrass himself when he smiled. If I’m any judge of people, I would say that Kelly had been through enough hard times to lend a kind of immediacy to any kind of stage performance. He was the archetypical American drifter, had done plenty of menial labor, had committed petty crimes (maybe even murder), was well-acquainted with the law-enforcement establishment. Pity anybody dumb enough to go on a drinking binge with this guy, for after a certain point he would become a morose, vengeful drunk.
Nevertheless, his act, though certainly not written by William Shakespeare (“The way he got his name is, he Shakes Beer before he drinks it!”), was marked by a kind of vitality and enthusiasm born of desperation. He quickly got the crowd on his side with his dopey antics: an impression of a pigeon relieving itself in Central Park; a story about a gay cowboy; an encounter between the Incredible Hulk and the Flying Nun, both played by him, wherein the Nun insists the Hulk use some kind of prophylactic protection and he responds by pulling out a green plastic garbage bag. The audience screamed its approval. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Kelly went on, “You might be interested to know that I ran into my ex-girlfriend and we made love all night. The only thing is,” he scratched his groin, “I’ve been itching all day! Wait a minute!” He pushed his hand into the waistband of his trousers and pulled out a monstrous six-inch rubber tarantula. The women screamed with delight. “Well,” Kelly gave a crooked smile, displaying his sparse crescent of front teeth, “she said she just got back from Texas!”
Just then three cops, led by Frank, pushed their way past me and right up to the stage. I squeezed myself deep into the corner and tried to make myself invisible. The laughing died and the smile froze on Kelly’s face. “You come with me right now!” Frank boomed, and Kelly, not even attempting to protest his innocence, for who knew what atrocities were preying on his conscience, meekly allowed himself to grabbed by the arms and hustled away, past me and out the door.
Paul K. Murdoch jumped onto the stage waving his arms. Never at a loss for words, he shouted, “Don’t be alarmed, folks, those guys are part of the show. They’ll all be back later. Now our next act….”
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Posted on 4/1/2006
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