Kitty Cats

For the same reason I was recently traveling with a disco ball, I also recently purchased some realistic looking kitty cats. There are companies that manufacture stuffed, taxidermy-like cats for people who love cat so much that they need an inanimate cat always within reach. Of course these things are not sold at the bodega on Manhattan Avenue, so I found myself talking on the phone to a very nice Minnesotan named Debbie.

The thing is, I purchased these cats for the sole purpose of dismembering them. Some people, somewhere once dismembered some cats. I had been conscripted to help emulate this activity for filming purposes. Of course we could not dismember real cats, though it would have been easier to find and butcher real cats than the fake cats. I like cats. They have dignity which must be honored. But the gig required me to desecrate some fake kitties, and I'm nothing if not a guy who does what he's asked.

I did not tell the nice lady from Minnesota that we planned to chop the kittens into little bits. As we completed the transactionon on the phone, Debbie told me that her website features a page on which customers can display photographs of the settings in which they have placed their fake cats. We planned to decaptitate a cat and impale its head on the top of a beer bottle. Debbie would not appreciate the aesthetic value of this display.

"That's swell Debbie," I said. "I'll be sure to send you some snaps."

People are Good and I am a Loser

So for reasons that will go unexplained I found myself on the bus today, carrying a disco ball. This was an unusual circumstance. As I sat on the bus, I spoke to my girlfriend on the phone about another couple we know who have just broken up. The young woman half of the couple had just loaned me the disco ball. I stopped by her place of work to get it, moments after she and her boyfriend broke up. That couple had been together for a very long time, 11 years. For almost the entire time that I had known my friend, she was in this relationship. So it upset me to hear that they had called it all off, and I needed to share this information with my girlfriend, if only to get some of the weight of it off my shoulders.

So as I spoke to my girlfriend something was amiss in my pants. I wore a tattered pair of jeans whose right rear pocket had worn through from years of carrying my wallet there. This was the occassion when my wallet decided that it would break free. I should have known. The possibility of losing my wallet in these pants has been on my mind for some time. But I was distracted.

The bus reached my stop and I got off. I did the quick mental check that I do from time to time as I move through the city. Do I have my disco ball? Yep. My backpack? Check. Ipod? Uh huh. Wallet? Wallet. Oh shit. I turned and the bus was pulling away.

This was on a section of roadway in Brooklyn called Park Avenue. I have no idea why it is called Park Avenue. So far as I know, it passes no where near any major or even minor park. It is not verdant. It is hell, hemmed in on one side by rotting warehouses and factory buildings, and collapsing tenemants and rapidly gentrifying brownstowns on the other. Looming above it is the BQE, which is forever losing its battle against entropy. Scaly flakes of rust and concrete rain down from above every time a large truck rumbles past. Through this tableau, I watched the bus (and presumably my wallet) recede into the distance.

I ran.

Some people think I'm in good shape. I ride my bike everywhere, when I'm not carrying a disco ball. But urban bicycle commuting is not really aerobic excercise. It just keeps me from becoming grossly overweight. I have smoked about a pack of cigarettes almost every day for the past 12 or 13 years. Still I ran. My shoes started to come loose, as I had tied them loose. The mirror covered disco ball grew heavy in my left hand. My backpack shifted awkwardly on my back. I ran. There were moments when I thought I was lost, that the bus would escape, the rhythm of traffic lights would conspire against me and the bus would race ahead at 35 miles an hour. At those moments I despaired, and I admit, slowed to a broken-hearted walk. But then the red of stoplights would blossom again before me, and I said to myself, "I can catch it." I ran again.

With one last mighty sprint, I caught the bus. I ran that fucker down. Just as I reached the door, the driver began to pick up speed. I pounded on the door. The bus driver cursed me.

I recalled nearly missing the school bus in North Attleboro Massachusets in 1981. We had a driver named Barbara. She had blond hair and a nerve-slashing screech. When a child sprinted for the bus, she would often see him (it was always a boy, often me, or my brother) in the rear-view mirror and she would continue to drive, slowly, for a hundred yards or so. Just to make him run. I thought of this and pounded on the glass. I shouted "I lost my wallet on the bus," facing the driver through the glass. I exagerated the shape of the words on my mouth, so she could read my lips. I prayed that she was a native speaker of English, and that she would recognize the key words "lost" and "wallet." She did. Through the glass I saw her lips form the words, "Oh, you lost your wallet" as she slowed the bus to a stop. She let me on and I thanked her profusely.

I walked back to where I had been seated. There was a woman sitting in the spot where I had been.

I told her, "I think Iost my wallet here."

She started looking around her. She got up. I looked under the seat. I looked behind it and on the floor between the seat and the rear door where I had exited. The woman felt bad for me. She also worried that I thought she might have picked up my wallet. In her hands she had a brown paper lunch sack. She opened it for me, unbidden, to show me a half empty soda bottle and something wrapped in foil.

"I didn't pick it up," she said.

"I know you didn't," I said.

Then she told me that I'd just have to cancel my cards. I began to come to grips with this reality.

There's a sinking feeling of self pity and loathing that overcomes me at moments like this. I knew my wallet would escape these pants sooner or later. I knew I should have had the account numbers of my cards recorded somewhere else. I knew I should have picked up the disco ball two days ago. All these failures of judgement. I felt like a loser, literally and figuratively.

Normally I place my metro card in my wallet immedately after I get on the bus or enter the subway. I do this so I do not lose my metro card. On this occassion, I kept my metro card loose, in my front pocket. I did this because I was on the phone when I entered the bus. Now this, the second time that I had entered this exact bus, the driver did not require me to dip my metro card. But she had continued on her route while I searched. Now I was miles beyond my initial destination. At least I could get off and take the bus in the opposite direction. I would deliver the disco ball and call my card companies. The rest of the day would be a total wash of beurocratic annoyances.

This is all I could think of as I rode the bus back to where my misadventure began. I did not think about my friend who lost her boyfriend of 11 years. I did not think of all the other horrible mistakes I have made in my life. I did not think about the book I am trying to write that was at that moment, officially past due. I thought about customer service reps for Bank of America, and low level functionaries at the New York Department of motor vehicles. Through the slow moving chaos of my life, at least, for this moment, I had clarity.

I also thought about all the bank cards and cell phones I have come across in my life. I thought about how I either returned them, if any information was available that let me return them, or destroyed them (the bank cards) so at least they would not be misused by anyone. I hoped that in doing this, rather than buying a new ipod or calling Kuala Lampur, I had saved up some Karma.

The bus reached my stop. I got off and started walking down the sidewalk. I reached the very spot where I first realized my wallet was gone. For the sake of due dilligence, I intended to search the gutter and the sidewalk, on the off chance that the wallet dislodged as I stepped off the bus. At that moment my phone rang. The caller ID displayed a Brooklyn number that I did not recognize. I answered the phone.

"Did you lose a wallet?" the voice said.

"Yes I did."

The caller then explained to me that he was at the corner of Washington and Park avenue. I too was near the corner of Washington and Park. He said he would come outside in a moment and return my wallet.

And he did. I melted with gratitude for the decency of all man kind. I love you all, each and every one of you.

CIA

Recently I went to the movies. We saw The Wicker Man, which was a piece of shit. The usual previews and ads preceded the film. There was one ad that stood out, it was a recruitment ad for the CIA. Huh, that's odd, I thought. How many people does the CIA really need to hire, even in these troubling times.

Then I was watching My Name is Earl last week, and the same ad appeared during the show. I love My Name is Earl. I think it's a smart show, just like I think the Simpsons is a very smart show. But I do wonder why the CIA is posting expensive prime-time ads looking for new employees during that particular half hour.

Bravado

I have not been this proud since I won a breakdancing contest in 1984. Yes, this is all me. My moustache, my music, my voice. That's the truth.

The Good Ole Days

Michael Caine remarked the other day that movies just ain't what they used to be. It's true. Films once had a much higher quality.

Who knew Sicily had such a cool, and faintly scary, flag?

Exploding Liquids

I'm dissapointed in the terrorists. More air travel shenannigans. Big whoop. I just heard a commentator on NPR refer to Al Quaeda as innovative. What a crock. I'll call them innovative when the motherfuckers impress me. Can you see the brainstorming meeting they had for this one. Ole Ahmed says, "Okay men, we need a new scheme. Let's hear some ideas."

Ismael says, "Uh, how about we mess with some planes."

Ahmed: "Genius. No one's ever thought of that before."

C'mon guys. How about a death ray? A black cloud that eats the flesh off our bones. A giant mechanical turtle that shoots flame from its arm holes? anything

Andy

Early in the morning he stands across the street from my building. One hand wrapped around a coffee cup, the other hand holding a cigarette, he paces in front of his building and looks up and down the street. Andy is 5'9''. His hair and moustache are all grey. In the summertime he wears camo shorts and a muscle t-shirt. At fifty something, he still carries himself with a pugnacious athleticism. His arms curl slightly by his sides when he's not holding a coffee cup. He rocks side to side as he walks.

Andy's prize posession is his Toyota SUV. He details it every Monday morning at 7. Over the two years that he's owned it, he's added a few modifications. There is now a fake airscoop on the hood. On the rear left quarter of the body he has placed decals that look like bullet holes at a glance.

When people walk by he glares at them.

When he worked, Andy was a corrections officer for New York City. I don't know what jail he guarded. Now he's out on permanent disability. He says he has a bum arm.

The parking space in front of Andy's house is his. It is a streetside parking space, the same as all the others on the block. But it is his. If you drive up the block while he is out and park in his spot, he will be upset upon his return. If he sees you taking his parking spot, he will scream at the top of his lungs and treat you like a perp at Rikers who's been done for statutory rape of a Dominican boy.

You will move your car. As you drive around the block you'll mutter, "What a fucking loser."

If Andy returns from a trip to Home Depot with a load of lumber or cinderblocks in the back of his truck, and you happen to be coming out of your house at the same time, he will cross the street to talk to you. Then he will say, "Buddy, can you give me a hand unloading some of this stuff? I got a bum arm."

Everyone on the block knows that he does this because he fears that spies will photograph him lifting cinderblocks and rob him of his disability pension. He has a hard time finding helpers.

It's not the heat, it's the pointless precision.

Meteorologists give increasingly exact temperature readings as the weather gets more extreme. When the temperature hovers in the 60s, they go, "Ahh, it'll be a comfy 65 degrees or so today."

When the temperature goes off the chart of normalcy they say, "Oh, it's going to be 97.865231 out there, so check on your elderly neighbors, open all the fire hydrans on your block, take salt tablets hourly and call 311 if your balls get itchy."

Then they add in the heat index, the summer analoge to the wind chill factor. "But remember, with the heat index, it will feel like 120 degrees." After that they rattle off a long list of locations, "It hit 102.245 at Ahmed's Deli on Flatbush Avenue today, that's 123.243 with the heat index."

Poor poor Ahmed. In his unknowably hot native land, they at least knew enough to say "It's just hot."

Historical Lies

I have been comissioned to write a book about Lewis and Clark for children. The initial research for the project has been interesting and revelatory. Everything you know about Lewis and Clark is a whitewash. This is all a way of saying that everything I write about Lewis and Clark and submit to my publisher will be a whitewash. A whitewash is a species of lie, perhaps the worst kind and so it's proper for me to confess it here. It will also allow me to give the publisher the desired product while alleviating my desire to hang myself from a waterpipe in the basement.

I've not yet begun reading Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose's account of the journey. I'm not looking forward to it, but given that it's such a popular book on the same subject, I'm professionally obliged to read it. Ambrose is famous for his heroic accounts of heroic people who live in heroic times and all that crap. I've no doubt that he bestows the same treatment on Lewis and Clark because, well that's what everyone wants. When we were in school we were told that they were brave and smart. All that.

But this is where historical whitewashes get fucked up. Lewis and Clark kept journals through the course of their journey. Each man made his own entries, and so there's a certain degree of corroboration or comparision that a student can make with these first-hand accounts. Since the journals are public domain, you can buy cheap paperbacks of the journals at any bookstore. Each edition of the journals comes with a foreword by Mr. Owl Phd who inscribes some nonsense about the American Spirit and Merriwether Lewis and Bill Clarks Indominable Spirits. Yet even a cursory reading of the journals reveals that, first and foremost, Lewis and Clark were dumb.

They could not spell. At all. I don't mean they sometimes misspelled a word here or there. I'm not the copyeditor type who condemns a man for writing "to" when he meant to write "too." I mean if a word has more than three letters, there's a fair chance Lewis and Clark misspell it. Not only will they misspell it, they will misspell the word in an innovative way, every time they write it. I cannot count the variations on the words "mosquitoes" and "fatiguing" these two men discovered. For this accomplishment they have gone unlauded until now.

Now I know, they were explorers, not grammarians. Dictionaries and standardized spelling were not established in 1804. But Lewis's last job was Personal Secretary to the President, Thomas fucking Jefferson. You would hope that a guy who served as the personal secretary to the Mayor of Idiot town would at least settle on a single spelling of mosquitoes, no?

It runs much deeper than that though. In an early entry, before the beginning of the trip, Clark wonders in print, whether or not the religious rituals of Native Americans bear any relationship to those of "the Jews." This is one of the primary questions ole Bill sought to answer on his trip. There's no clear implication that Clark had anti-semitism on his mind when he wrote this. I think he moronically equated all cultures different from his own with "the Jews."

Once underway the journey unfolded with all the scientific and military precision of a cat race. While almost every account you read will describe the 40 odd men on the trip as "carefully chosen" for their skill, discipline and courage, there's little evidence of any of these traits in the journals. They are more like the Dirty Dozen than the A Team, but less competent. Men fall asleep on watch and get beaten for it. (Clark loves running a Court Martial.) By the end of the first summer Lewis writes that everyone is in good health "except for venereal concerns." This is his polite way of saying that all the boys caught the clap from fucking Indian women.

It should come as no surprise that they kill nearly every animal that crosses their path. Deer, mule deer, buffalo, black bear, grizzly bears, none of them stand a chance. (Though one grizzly bear very nearly makes a lunch of a few members of the expedition). They have no practical way to store the meat they kill, but that doesn't stop them from the slaughter. The one act of mercy I've found so far comes when a few guys nap a live ibis and bring it to Lewis. He turns all Francis of Assisi and lets it free, then he breaks his own arm patting himself on the back for his decency.

When they come upon a new Indian tribe the two intrepid explorers always set about diplomatically wooing the chief. In order to do this, Lewis demonstrates his bb gun (he calls it an "air rifle," but a bb gun is a bb gun) with pride that would shame Ralphie from A Christmas Story. In Lewis's accounting, the chiefs are always much impressed. Clark, not to be out done, commands his slave York, a gigantic black man, to dance for the Indians. Most of the chiefs have never seen a black man before, and the sight of a 6'5'' giant busting a move by the campfire is certainly impressive to them. At least according to Clark it is. (The knowledge that York had been Clark's personal slave since childhood makes this all the more creepy.)

Now to bring it all back home, it nearly shocks me that no one else seems to be aware of all this, despite the fact that unexpurgated editions of the journals have been in print for most of the last hundred years. Am I the only person who's read these things?