Old People Like a Little Heat

Headache today. Need to write some other things. But I can’t pass up the following story, heard at an AA meeting last night and certainly one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard anywhere.

I’m not sure it will translate (humor is a delicate thing and heavily dependent on context) but I’ll put it down anyway. Suffice it to day that my friend GI and I were laughing until we cried. I can’t help it. I’m an easy touch for the subversive, for the guy who disrupts and undermines the conventions. I love the clown, I love the buffoon. I love the Fyodor Karamazovs of the world.

The meeting was on the 11th step and of course people were busy saying all the right things about their meditation and their prayer and the long, unavailing searches of the world’s religious traditions, which ended happily in their discovery of the rooms of AA, so on and so on. I don’t deny the truth of these statements, and I also recognize that it is useful and even necessary to identify with these ideas on some level. Still…it can start feeling a awful lot like church when meetings like that get cranked up to a fever pitch and one alcoholic after another (we are so much like children) takes a shot at really “topping” the meeting off with a more sincere and gripping account of their search for the Higher Power.

Enter a man whom I will identify only as CH (I can tell you that the “C” stands for “crazy”, and justifiably so. Rumor has it that he takes, under the care of a doctor, six or seven different medications to keep him balanced).

Our very sincere and well-meaning leader for the evening actually called on CH to share. My recollection is that the leader was completely in harmony with the feeling of gentle self-righteousness which seemed to dominate the room, and that he had no idea what he was doing when he called on CH:

“Ya know, what makes me laugh is how everyone tries to say the right thing, and the popular thing. It’s like we come into these meetings and we test everything out, and we build up something to share that’s goanna get a big reaction. In that case, it don’t even matter what we’re saying. We might as well shut up. Listen, I been in and out of these rooms, for the first ten years I was in and out of these rooms more often than a young couple on their wedding night. In and out and in and out and in and out. I was sore, if you know what I’m saying. Bone sore!

"But hey, you know, I got it, finally, but I was going to so many meetings that it almost made me sick. Now I go ballroom dancing. I like to do that a couple nights a week and give everyone a rest from my face. We can hardly stand each other sometimes. That ain't popular, but it's the truth.

“Man, what amazes me is that all them years I was drinking I managed to keep a roof over my head. Because let me tell you, I started drinking first thing when I got up and the last thing I did before I went to sleep was have a drink. But I was crafty. I’d get some roommates and have them pay the rent so I could use all of my money on booze. For a while, I was thinking about this the other day when it was kinda cold, for a while I was living in this old Army barracks.

“I had this old lady for a roommate, her name was Gladys P. Wildeson. The 'P' stands for 'Pearl'. I had her in a room out the back of the barracks. I thought I was pretty slick because between her and another guy they were paying all the rent, which was like a 109 bucks a month, so I could use all of my money on liquor. You see why I was into saving money. In order to keep costs down I didn't run the heat, and it got pretty cold there in the winters, like I said. I would leave the stove on during the day, and that heated up the kitchen just fine, but the heat didn’t go down the hallways very good and the bedrooms were pretty cold, I guess.

"Gladys got pretty cold. She got so cold that she used to take my old liquor bottles and fill 'em up with hot water, and put 'em all around her in the bed so she could sleep at night. I was pretty confused at the time, I guess. It wasn't until later that I realized, old people like a little heat to help 'em sleep nights."

CH was finally silenced by a chorus of people thanking him for sharing. My friend and I, who were sitting in the back, were both hunched over, our shoulders shaking, helpless with laughter.

The Love of Latin Girls

There’s this fellow I got to know recently, he’s in software sales. His job was to come and visit me and convince me that I should recommend his company’s software based on its technical merits. When a large corporation is looking to make an enterprise purchase, the decision-making process can sometimes take up to 18 months and involves a number of steps. By the time this fellow came to see me last week, the company for which I work (let’s call it LC, for Large Company) had narrowed the field down to two choices. This fellow (we’ll call him TS for Technical Salesman) represented the larger company, the company that was better-established but which was inferior from a technical standpoint, at least in my opinion.

I met this fellow in a local restaurant a few blocks away from my house. I always take people to this restaurant when I can, even though the food is not very good, because it’s owned and run by a hopeful young couple and I’d like to see them make it. Even though I’d never met TS before, I knew him right away because my boss had said he looked like a “dissolute former punk-rock drummer.”

Yes, that fit pretty well. He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, untucked, with prints of various American cityscapes on it. He had sunglasses nestled in his reddish, spiky hair. His eyes were rather close together, his nose was long and thick, and his upper and lower lips were precisely the same size and shape. We shook hands, ordered and sat down. I’d come with all sorts of papers and sketches and printouts of his company’s technical documents and whitepapers. I was prepared to get to work, and began to ask questions about his company’s implementation strategy. These questions seemed to bore him. He continued to eat steadily and to suck at his drink when he wasn’t chewing; now and then he would make a statement that indicated, vaguely, that I might be on the right track.

After lunch he said that he’d like to go to Starbucks, so we got into his rented convertible and began to drive toward the beach. He lit up an American Spirit cigarette while I sat in the passenger seat, clutching my sheaf of printouts and drawings, trying to keep them from blowing out of the car. It occurred to me that I must look like a real square, sitting next to LS with his sunglasses and spiked hair, talking into his cell phone in a gruff, man-of-the-world way to some member of his sales team.

At Starbucks TS ordered an eleven-dollar coffee. It involved several shots and several pumps of various flavors, prepared at a specific temperature, double-cupped. We sat outside in the sunshine and I continued to struggle along with my questions and note-taking and implementation diagrams. Now and then TS would wave the cigarette between his fingers in a dismissive way and say, “Yeah, we’ve got that. We’ve got all that.”

When I’d stopped talking he began to tell me about his family, how his wife complained that he was never at home while she was stuck with their two children, but that she didn’t realize how tough it was, this life on the road. This took a long time, and several cigarettes, to describe in detail. He went to refill his coffee, and when he came back he mentioned that he had a certain kind of car which he identified only by a letters and numbers, assuming I would know the make. I nodded my head as if I understood when he said he was thinking he might sell it now and collect the $55,000 or so that it would bring.

Then he began to enumerate all the problems with his company’s competitor. It was as if some invisible switch had been flipped in his brain. He ticked off the points on his thick, freckled fingers, with his mouth curled in disdain around the barrel of his cigarette. It was so absurd and strange that I found myself mesmerized. I had no idea what to think of his sales strategy, which seemed to be constructed around a kind of vicious but joyful negativity. In that sense, it was an extension of his personality and was equally captivating in its own strange way. I duly wrote down all his points. Without thinking I took a cigarette from his pack on the table and lit up.

TS asked had I ever been with a Latin girl. I said I had, once, in high school, but that we’d only kissed behind a sand dune because she had a curfew. TS asked had I noticed a special smell to their skin. I said I couldn’t remember. He said the skin of a Latin girl was always sweet. He began to talk about the Latin girls he’d known in other cities around Florida. He told a series of fantastic stories involving dance clubs, shots of liquor, short skirts, hotel-room balconies, and Latin girls with soft, smooth, dark skin. It was almost poetic. His red, bushy eyebrows popped up from behind his sunglasses like puppets and his white hands flashed in the sun as he pantomimed the curves of his Latin lovers. He left the possibility open that some of these encounters were quite recent, perhaps as recent as last night.

I took another cigarette and lit it. I felt sick but strangely excited. I had the idea that I could follow TS’s example. I might be capable of similar exploits and perhaps I, too, could smoke and drink anything I liked. By now it was late in the afternoon and TS said we ought to consider where we would like to eat dinner. It was on his company, he said. His treat. We drove back to my house so that I could send my meager collection of notes and drawings to my boss. TS spoke loudly and laughingly on his cell phone while I tapped away on the computer, squinting at the screen with dry, smoke-hazed eyes. Then we proceeded to dinner.

When we got to the restaurant TS ordered three drinks at once and tossed them off in succession. His phone rang and he said that it was his wife and that he would “have to face the music sometime, god dammit.” I suggested he go talk with her before we sat down to our table. TS told me that while he was gone I should have a drink or two so that I would be ready for some action at the local strip clubs.

But then, during dinner, something strange happened. Perhaps it was the call from his wife, perhaps it was the food in his stomach, perhaps it was the drinks or the late hour, I don’t know. Something seemed to leak out of TS and he looked crumpled, deflated, and ordinary. He seemed to have shrunk by several inches. His hair looked slightly wilted. He lay back in his seat as if he’d been stunned by some blow. His conversation was disjointed and difficult to understand. I realized that he was struggling to keep up the man-of-the-world tone which he’d established with me and which had worked so well for him thus far. He began to talk very earnestly about his company’s technical accomplishments, and I joked with him that it was a little late for that, as I wasn’t planning to take notes during our dinner. He slumped further in his seat.

I was worried that he was going to make some kind of confession to me. I did not want to find out that he was miserable or lonely. If he’d been playing a part during our day together, I felt he should play it to the end. After all, I’d enjoyed it immensely, even believed it a little bit. I quickly changed the topic of conversation to sports, and he seemed to brighten a bit; he even managed to stare at the waitress when she came to refill our drinks, but as soon as she was gone he lapsed back into his melancholy silence.

I told him I had work to do that evening and that I could not go out with him after dinner. He mumbled some regretful phrases and extended his hand, not even bothering to get up. As I was walking away from the table I looked back and saw him standing there, squinting in my direction, but in the dim light of the restaurant I couldn’t be sure he was looking at me.

I was puzzled by TS’s behavior. I could not figure out why he hadn’t tried harder. It seemed absurd that he’d fly in to see me and then behave so strangely. But, to my surprise, his company won the contract. As it turns out, they’d already managed to lock up the support of my company’s VPs the week before. He'd only come to see me as a matter of form.

From what I understand, and this is only a rumor, TS flew a group of my company’s executives to a weekend retreat in Miami where they stayed at a hotel on the beach, golfed, and at night they were entertained by some Latin girls of TS's acquaintance. Can you imagine? Is it possible that TS might build an entire business empire on his connoisseurship of girls of a certain ethnicity? I can say this about his approach; it sure beats grinding away at technical diagrams.

What a Good Swell Does to the Mind

Sometimes I wonder if surfing is all that good for me. When this swell began, almost a week ago, I can remember that while I was sitting in the lineup I was busy thinking about my assignments for school, considering various ways of writing code for my job, and so on. This was a familiar and typical mental state: Active and discursive, producing copious amounts of information, working obsessively at certain problems; perhaps not arriving at a solution, but certainly giving me the impression that I was interested in, and engaged with, my work and my studies.

Over the course of the weekend the weather and the waves improved. I can remember that at a certain point, somewhere around the third day, I began to stop thinking. It was as if the waves had washed away the top layer of my consciousness and had left behind only a few inane preoccupations that rattled around, almost randomly, in my brain. My mind was now, in a feeble, disjointed way, pondering the “value” of surfing. As I duck-dived the oncoming sets (for some reason this only happened when I was paddling back out) I would say to myself, “When you surf nothing accrues to you, personally. Therefore it has no value.” The sentence and the preoccupation with the value of surfing recurred every time I duck-dived a wave, but my brain was incapable of pursuing that thought any further. Once I made it outside my mind became focused on categorizing the size, shape, and movement of the incoming swells and was almost completely quiet. Now and then parts of a Matisyahu song would become audible in my head, but that was all.

By my fourth and fifth days surfing, my brain was almost completely shut down. As I paddled out I was aware only of a sensation of extreme pleasure and identification with every aspect of the water. I did not feel my wetsuit any more; it did not constrict my movement. My body balanced efficiently and firmly on the board. I did not rush or strain. Once I made it outside, I sat quietly in the lineup, watching the pelicans, the wind, and the waves. I was aware of my breathing and of the other surfers around me but there was no reflection, no attempt at categorization, no thoughts of my life on land, no problems to solve. I can only discuss this in the past tense because at the time I wasn’t reflective, so of course what I’m saying cannot be completely accurate. I’ll never be able to describe exactly what it was like out there, but writing about it now, with most of my mental processes re-activated, it’s almost disturbing.

Occasionally, when I was padding back out after riding a wave, the sentence that I’d formed a few days before went through my mind – “Nothing accrues to you personally from surfing” – but it came and went sporadically and at long intervals. At night my dreams centered on the sensation of surfing. I dreamed that I could surf without a board. I also dreamed that I was surfing a hill – that the earth had literally assumed a wavelike form and was propelling me down its face. I was enjoying myself immensely but there was no verbalization – I communicated to the other figures in my dreams by impulse and feeling.

As my life in the water became easier and more rewarding, my life on land became increasingly confusing and difficult. I never made a decision to devalue my other pursuits, such as work and school, but I found myself unable to engage with these things. They required so much thought…my success at them was somehow bound up with the resurrection of that sleeping layer of consciousness which I now found to be annoying, repetitive and useless. It seemed to me that almost all of my mental processes were ritualistic and functioned to provide distance between my emotional self and the outer world, a distance which I felt I no longer needed. I was relating to the world from a place of perfect security that was bound up somehow in my experiences with the waves and with the idea of the ocean as some vast being which cared for me personally.

This is a nice state of mind to visit, but I’m not sure how easy it would be to live there. People keep sending me bills in the mail which they expect me to pay, and all that ocean identification stuff does not seem to have any effect on the bills. The bills march on. The solution to the bill problem is a “land” thing, and, in my case, involves a job, which requires productivity.

Yesterday I really needed to get some things done at work. I sat at the computer, looking at the lines of code which I’d once written, trying to decipher them. There didn’t seem to be any underlying logic here. It was all gobbledygook; I didn’t know where to begin. I needed to take a set of information from some parsing routines which I’d written and output this information as a properties file. I didn’t see how in the world I’d ever do it. I stared at the screen, sighed, and lay down on the floor. I got up. I paced. I had a cup of coffee. I called a co-worker and listened to her gossip. I played around with the idea of having a panic attack. I checked the surf report and saw that there were still waves. I almost talked myself into going surfing again as a way of “finally getting it out of my system” so I could concentrate. I ate an early lunch, then I ate another lunch right after the first. I called some co-workers. I looked at pictures of girls in bathing suits. I lay back down on the floor. This went on until almost three o’clock in the afternoon. My mind simply would not work on this problem! It no longer saw the point, and refused to engage. Through an effort of will I forced myself to begin writing code, even though I had no idea how it would work out. After several minutes of hacking around, I found a problem to solve, and then another. By six o’clock I was done. I’d lost track of time, I’d gotten into the groove, and I was done. I was very grateful and not worried at all. As I went downstairs to get something to eat, I could hear the chatter in my mind, as if someone had switched a radio back on. My boss and I were having a conversation about some enterprise information management software. Someone in my head was offering a commentary on the Australian Open, more specifically on Martina Hingis’ comeback. I listened indulgently, and with interest. I’d actually rather missed these voices. I was comforted by the idea that the buoys were falling and that there would be no reason for me to go surfing tomorrow.

Biological Dawn Patrol III

To my shock and amazement, the buoy was up to 5.6 feet this morning, which means that my resolve to be a good boy has been seriously shaken.

5.6 feet and light winds is a "must-paddle-out" buoy reading. I haven't come up with a complete scale yet, because so much of the decision about whether or not to surf depends on other factors such as one's level of physical and emotional well-being, the amount of work one has to do, and so on, but I can tell you that in almost any circumstance a buoy reading of 5.6 and light winds qualifies as an instant paddle out with no consideration or weighing of one's options required, even on a weekday, even on a busy weekday with lots to be done.

So I'm going to go, even though, due to the events of yesterday morning, my wetsuit should be in rather foul shape at the moment. I was on the hook to go see the biological in Orlando, but the buoys were up and so I had to get in a little DP session...when I finished I went to meet CT at the local coffee joint to swap vehicles for the drive to Orlando, as hers is much more fuel-efficient than mine (but it can't hold two boards in the back). I drove straight to Orlando without going home to shower or rinse out my wetsuit, so my wetsuit will probably smell like booty and feel like sandpaper.

The drive to Orlando was not very comfortable. On the way in from my session I thought I'd catch a little inside wave and got rolled on. This is a bad idea, because in close there's lots of sand that gets sucked up into the water, and during my wipeout said sand was deposited in my hair, down the back of my wetsuit, and so on. Imagine, as I'm driving to Orlando, I can drag my fingers through my hair and my fingernails are full of little sand grits.

Then when I got to the hotel where the biological was staying, he and his wife were waiting on this little bench and wanted to go straight to Cracker Barrel without letting me stop for a bathroom break (a bio-break?) , because they were hungry. We got lost on the way and it took us another half hour to get to the Cracker Barrel, and then there was a forty minute wait, during which we sat in those ridiculous cane rockers (for sale, of course) on the porch, rocking with sixty other hopeful and hungry Cracker Barrel patrons. Of course it didn't take the biological long to start in on his health. There's nothing he loves more than talking about his illnesses. He began on his skin cancer and held forth about that for twenty minutes or so, then, when we'd finally gotten a table, he transitioned to his Crohn's disease. Now this is when it really gets good. Nothing inspires the biological like his Crohn’s. Nothing fires him with passion and infuses him with eloquence like the chance to discuss his Crohn’s-related sufferings.

He caught me off guard this time by opening with a bit of a historical/psychological perspective, theorizing that his mother had been an undiagnosed Crohn’s sufferer and that this explained her emotional unavailability and generally vicious disposition. But he didn’t dwell on his mother for long. It was as if his mind, having begun to circle the idea of his sickness, could not resist the urge to go straight to its most compelling aspect, which was, of course, his own suffering. He told me (this is something he inevitably says, you can bank on it, like a catchphrase in a sitcom) that when he has an attack "it's so bad that it takes me right off my feet."

In the past I've just nodded and tried to look sympathetic, but here in the Cracker Barrel, hungry, tired of waiting for the food, I couldn't help but press the point a little bit.

"Does it knock you physically back? Like you've been punched in the jaw? Because that would be interesting."

“No, it just doubles me over and takes me down. Takes me down hard.”

“If you had an attack like that in church they might think you’d found Jesus.”

“Even Jesus can’t help me then. I cain’t even describe the pain (although clearly he would try his best). The pain is so bad, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I never hated someone bad enough to wish them a good attack of Crohns.”

“Well, that’s too bad (by now I was looking nervously around for the waiter. It was almost one o’clock and I hadn’t eaten all day. I get cranky when I go that long without food and I’m thinking that I might have to strangle the biological with my belt to keep him from talking).”

“You know, sometimes the Crohn’s gets so bad, I can’t even get up from the couch. I just void my bowels right there on the sofa.”

“Oh god (I must’ve looked horrified. The skin on my head was tingling). Well, I’d be making you wear a diaper.”

“I do,” The biological’s wife chimed in. “But sometimes it doesn’t hold everything. (I imagined the biological, short, fat, swaddled in a diaper, squalling and red-faced on a cheap sofa, waiting to be changed, and I felt immense pity and respect for his wife)”

“Boy,” I said. “There are a lot of things I’m glad I didn’t inherit from you. Crohn’s would obviously be at the top of that list.”

“Had my first attack when I was seven,” The biological pursued. “They gave me all kind of tests and said it was a psychological problem. Said I needed to see a shrink. My old man took me home and beat the hell out of me for about two hours. Crohns stopped hurting. Said I was cured.”

“Hmm,” I said, trying to will the food into materializing on the table. “If he starts talking about nuclear radiation,” I thought, “I really will lose it.” Out loud I said, “Well, like I say, I’m glad I didn’t inherit that.” What did he want me to say? I’m sorry that you were abused as a kid? That totally justifies you beating up my mom? Hey why not go beat her up again, or maybe beat up your wife or some other woman, just go ahead and get it out of your system. Jesus, I could see him a little younger, red-faced and pounding away indisciminately on anyone in his path. He was past sixty and still stuck his jaw out there like he was daring you to crack him one.

The biological got a faraway look in his eye and then said, “Just wait until you’re forty. You might get it then. That’s when I started to notice it.”

“I thought you said you didn’t hate anyone enough…” I mumbled, but then, mercifully, the food came, and I devoured it, hardly pausing to breathe. Then as I was walking back out to the car I was nervously aware of every sensation in my stomach. Just being in the biological’s proximity made me nervous for my own health. I imagined doubling over and defecating myself…of lying on the sofa with a diaper…of the six-foot cockroaches that the biological usually mentioned, the radiated, mutated cockroaches that somehow seemed to be tied up in his mind with his Crohn’s disease, the big three topics around which his mind seemed to ceaselessly revolve: His old man, his Crohn’s, and nuclear radiation.

Once he’d told me about a Crohn’s-induced hallucination of six-inch cockroaches sailing up and down in his bathtub on a "beam reach." I could almost see the cockroaches now, their glinting, mechanical bodies topped with striped shirts and sailor’s caps. Get a grip, I thought, get a grip. Jesus, I wonder if the craziness is the first sign of a Crohn’s attack. It would be just my luck to come all this way and have my first attack outside a Cracker Barrel, as if my exposure to all the fat rednecks gobbling up this cheap food has triggered some mechanism in my slumbering redneck DNA.

I took them back to the hotel. Just knowing that it was almost over made me cheerful and I was able to hug them goodbye. I drove home, trying not the think about the Crohn’s or the biological. On the way back I picked up a dub reggae program from a college station in Orlando and turned it up. I rolled down the windows. The lady who was spinning the songs kept cutting in to add a soft voiceover about the scientists. I found my head bobbing back and forth the music. Every mile that went past I felt a little better. Everything will be okay if you have good weather, good waves, and good dub.

Biological Dawn Patrol II

Yesterday's waves were quite nice; some in the chest-to-head range. I didn't go see the biological, that was put off until today. So this morning I wake up and the buoy is at 4.6 feet, up from yesterday's reading, which means that I simply have to get in a little session this morning before I head to Orlando. Which means that I will take some clothes and change in the parking lot after my session.

Thank god (God? Gawd? Cod?) that my wife is so understanding. She's pretty cool about my surfing and tries to give me the time I need with the waves. During hurricane season her patience slowly wears thin, but that's because I have been known to put waves in front of other, "more important" things like a job, church, whatever. I don’t' know if I'd really be able to live in a place that had good, consistent waves. I don't know what effect a steady diet of good waves would have on my brain. I might get warped and go native like Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness." I'd be floating out there on my board all fat and sweaty with my face painted up. I might end up fulfilling my childhood fantasy, which was to live in a crappy little apartment, work at a 7-11 (Big Gulps were the primary fuel of my adolescence) and surf daily.

I wonder if they have 7-11s in Chile. They have deep Pacific pulses, mostly coming up from the south, which means lots of left-hand waves. Goofy footer's paradise.

Biological Dawn Patrol

It’s just before dawn. The sky is lightening outside my window, showing the silhouettes of the palm trees. Get ready, I’m going to drop a cheesy “poetic” line here.

“The palm trees against the gray backdrop of the pre-dawn sky were like explosions of shadow.”

Ah…I feel much better now. The buoy is up from yesterday’s 3.0 feet to 4.3 feet, so I think it’s going to be a good Dawn Patrol session. Even the tide is cooperating with the idea of a DP, because it is low right now and filling back into high. Last night I was surfing with my friend DG and I asked him if he wanted me to call him for a DP, and he said he would like that, but only if the winds were lighter than 5 knots and the swell was up above four feet. Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!

Some surfers like to sleep in. JM, the best surfer I know, almost never makes a DP session because you can’t get him out of bed. If you try to get him up (this was attempted in Costa Rica) he will snarl and snap and try to roll over and go back to sleep. Shrug. That’s all right. This is one of the things that makes a DP so nice…if half the surfers feel this way, you can bet the lineup won’t be as crowded in the early morning as it will be later.

I’m supposed to be going to visit “the biological” (Shaq’s famous term for the absentee sperm donor) in Orlando today. He lives in Washington State and has come to Disney land with his sweet (and possibly dying) wife. I’m not sure if their trip to Disney is one of those “last request” things or not. The biological is being rather cagey about it, and I don’t blame him for that. All I know is that she’s got some kind of lump on her liver.

The biological was nothing but a concept, a representative figure, as I was growing up. My mom divorced the biological for beating her up and kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant with me (I’ve got Bruce Springsteen beaten here. First hit you took was when you hit the ground? Oh yeah? Well the first hit I took was in my mother’s womb!), so I didn’t actually meet him until I was 31. By then, what was the point? He’s a broken down ex-alcoholic, a diabetic, he’s got Crohn's disease, and he seems to have an obsession with the effects of nuclear radiation on living organisms, particularly cockroaches, which he believes will outlive us all since in his experience cockroaches always respond to radiation by growing bigger and stronger.

So I was supposed to go meet him today and go to the Epcot Center, but I think I’ll go surfing instead. Is that terrible? Ah. By the time I catch my first wave I’ll have forgotten to worry about it.

I’ve just called DG. No answer. He’s going to miss out! I know better than to call JM. He won’t pick up. The only guy who would be an absolute lock to surf a DP in the winter is my friend AB, and he’s living in San Francisco now, dropping bombs at Maverick’s. See, even he might find it hard to get motivated for today’s surf. More for me.

Going to the Dentist

Looking back, I can see that the section of Pierson Road where Dr. McKenna had his offices was emblematic of Flint itself. At the intersection with Dort Highway, where Pierson Road began, there was a bar, a lawnmower repair shop, and a Laundromat. Then it ran up a short hill past other repair shops and electronics shops and package stores, all housed in little brown buildings. Pretty soon it hit a stretch where it was flanked to the south by an auto plant and to the north by the hospital; here Pierson Road was a strange mix of junk shops and pawn shops and respectable stores, of positive economy generated by the hospital and the negative economy generated by the plant, from which, by that time, most everyone had been laid off. Dr. McKenna’s offices were on the north side of Pierson Road. The hospital side.

We had to go down a short hill and park around the back of the building. He had a small, clean waiting room with ferns and the usual collection of inoffensive magazines; Good Housekeeping, People, Reader’s Digest. I was always taken into the examination room nearest the entrance, where the hygienist prepped me. Then Dr. McKenna would come in. He was an older fellow, probably in his mid-50’s, and he had crisply combed white hair, a thin nose, and large, soft, supple hands which smelled good and which he always put immediately in my mouth, all the time asking me questions about school which I, of course, couldn’t answer very well.

I was aware that Dr. McKenna was handsome, mostly because my mother mentioned this fact either before we came in or after we left: “He’s so handsome…he’s very handsome…a nice-looking older man…”

I was also aware, without any help from my mother, that his hygienists were pretty. They were tall, willowy, good-smelling, and blonde; they reminded me of the models from “The Price is Right”. It was like a television show in the office and I was the guest star. There was feeling of fashionable ease. Dr. McKenna always wore an impeccably white smock coat and gold-rimmed glasses, and the hygienists all wore v-neck scubs that showed off their gold jewelry and the faint freckles on their chests when they bent over to fasten me into the examination chair.

I loved going to see Dr. McKenna. I hated the dentistry and later the orthodontia which he talked my mother, who couldn’t afford it, into getting for me, but I loved the experience of going to see Dr. McKenna. There was something there, in the easy, clean life these people were living. There was something almost magical in the words Dr. McKenna used to describe his latest round of golf to my mother, or how he would tell the office staff to set him up a t-time or how in the dead of winter he would tell my mother that he was going on a vacation soon to Barbados or Paris, some place far away from cold, dirty Flint, and I thought that it must take a special kind of person to escape so easily from this town which seemed to hold the rest of us captive.

They piped music into both the waiting room and the examination rooms. I can remember a feeling of exhilaration that came over me as I lay there in the chair, with the examination lamp glaring into my eyes, while Dr. McKenna’s soft hands explored my mouth. The music played and I listened to the words:

Longer than there’ve been fishes in the ocean
Higher than any bird ever flew
Longer than there’ve been stars up in the heavens
I’ve been in love with you.


A penny for your thoughts
A nickel for a kiss
A dime
If you tell me that you love me

I dreamed that I was singing to a girl, some pretty girl with her hair tied back in a scarf. We were on the golf course together or on the deck of some sailboat in Catalina (which I thought was in Spain – I was dimly aware that Natalie Wood had died there), and the girl kissed me wither soft, glossy lips. These daydreams came easily and naturally at Dr. McKenna’s but were almost impossible to recall later in the attic bedroom that I shared with my brother. The attic, with its green carpet, paneled walls, and water-stained acoustic ceiling, was less congenial to romance, and as I lay there trying to recapture my daydreams the glow from Dr. McKenna’s office would slowly fade away.

Strangely, the “Dr. McKenna effect” never failed me, even as I went through puberty and entered high school. Dr. McKenna got a little older and a little smaller but he was still handsome and the hygienists were always attractive and the dental equipment was always clean and new. It was an escape from my life of studying worn-out textbooks in shabby schoolrooms with my pimpled and awkward classmates. My visits always left me hopeful that the future would be different and better, more like Dr. McKenna’s life and less like my own.

My mother was not always happy with Dr. McKenna, and several times she threatened to get a new dentist. She was particularly upset about our adventures in orthodontia. Dr. McKenna was a progressive thinker, always up on the latest in his field, and he suggested a treatment plan that involved a variety of retainers and other devices which he said would be much more pleasant, although a bit more expensive than, old-fashioned braces. My mother was not so sure; perhaps it would be better, she said, just to get the teeth straight and be done with it. I sided with Dr. McKenna because I felt that braces would push me finally and irrevocably into the bottom tier of my school’s social hierarchy, from which I was always plotting my escape.

My overbite was pronounced; mom said that something had to be done, and when Dr. McKenna offered to work with her on the cost, she consented to his plan. Then the process began. First there were retainers, which I inevitably broke or lost. Then there was a kind of mouthpiece which I didn’t wear enough, and finally (perhaps a desperate move by Dr. McKenna) there was a contraption that consisted of two pistons on either side of my jaw, anchored to my molars with some kind of cement, which forced the lower jaw, when I closed my mouth, to come forward. I’ve often wondered if Dr. McKenna didn’t invent that last one himself. Once I yawned in Sunday school and the pistons locked in the full-open position, so that I couldn’t shut my mouth and we had to make an emergency trip back to the office to get me unstuck. I finally destroyed this apparatus by eating a stick of taffy and uprooting the mounts from my teeth.

After several years and expenses that went far past what my poor mother had anticipated, she and Dr. McKenna finally agreed that I needed to go into braces after all. Of course, by then I was in the tenth grade and all my classmates had already had their braces removed. Still, through all of this, and despite her mutterings about the cost, my mother kept bringing the whole family, herself included, back to Dr. McKenna. Maybe the office had an effect on her, too. Maybe it gave her a break from the daily grind, maybe she saw the same clean and carefree future in her mind and it stayed with her for a while. When you live in Flint, Michigan, you can’t put a price on something like that. When you live in Flint, you take the good where you can get it. If you get it at the dentist, hey. At least you’re getting it somewhere.

I think I saw Dr. McKenna for the last time when I was home from college; by then I had long hair and a leather coat and I had philosophical convictions against men like Dr. McKenna and against clean, well-ordered offices. I don’t think he noticed my change of heart. I think he went on asking me questions with his soft hands in my mouth, the same as always. And I think the hygienists went about unfastening my paper bib and whipping away the examination light and telling me to have a nice day, same as always. I think they joked about his golfing and about their children, while their gold jewelry, which I’d decided was tacky, glinted on their tanned chests and fingers. I’m glad the feeling in the office survived my contempt. I’m glad they didn’t notice. That’s how it should be with something really good; it should sail imperviously on and on.
I like to believe, on the evidence of that last visit, that they’ve been going all these years without noticing how time was passing, and that if I went back it would still be the same.

Kelly Slater on Steroids (The Whole World is Juicing)

First there was the Canseco/Baseball/Palmeiro story and the juiced-up McGuire taking the fifth, and Barry Bonds, and…well, you remember all that. Then, the talk about steroids died down a bit this winter, flaring up briefly when that wrestler died in his hotel room, but mostly going to the back pages, probably because every journalist in America is saving their stuff for the “Welcome Back to Baseball” article that we’ll be seeing in a few weeks.

Steroids slipped back to light rotation in my mind, too, right there with Rick from Magnum, P.I. (he was more dangerous than he seemed – out of that whole crew, he was the one who might’ve snapped and become an Evil Kingpin. Mangum was tormented by flashbacks, yes, but he could always hop on his paddleboard and hallucinate that his father was making him “tread water”, which was inexplicably comforting…it would’ve made me even more depressed. I’d rather flash back to icing the VC than wonder whether my father would’ve let me drown during my passage to manhood) and Ivan Lendl (did he sport the world’s most durable and minimalist butt-cut? That was a work of art).

Then the other night I was watching portions of an MTV special called “Real Life: I’m On Steroids.” Why? Because the Broncos-Patriots game was on, and I couldn’t handle the tension. I just knew that the Patriots were going to come back somehow and win that game, and I couldn’t listen to another word about Tom Brady. Every announcer on every network and every writer for every publication has gripped themselves sore over that guy and the net result is that I wish he would die. I can hardly stand to look at a picture of Tom Brady’s face. I’m sure he’s sexy. I’m sure that his facial progenitor, Dudley Do-Right, would be proud. Did you know he loves children? Did you know he once reached into the body cavity of a dying child and pulled out a malignant tumor, then hurled it into outer space, where it orbits the earth as “Brady’s Comet”? Did you know he was a sixth-round draft pick? Did you know that? Did you know that he’s never lost a single playoff game? Did you know that a woman can be brought to orgasm simply by pressing her ear to the cleft in his chin? They say it sounds like the ocean in there, only a sexy ocean that never loses in the playoffs.

So this MTV show featured a couple of guys doing steroids. The first was a “lost soul”, a wildly insecure gay guy who was pumping himself full of steroids with no noticeable changes in is physique. He had these small, perky breasts that he couldn’t seem to lose. God, I hope he doesn’t read this somehow; he’ll do something crazy. Then there was a young, studly guy whose goal was to make the cover of a fitness magazine. He got really buff. As an aside, I saw him later on another show and he was arguing that he knew all about steroids because he was in pharmaceutical sales. Insert your own punchline. So I flipped back and forth between this show and the football game. I probably would’ve forgotten the whole episode in my joy over the Broncos’ victory, but the next day there were waves.

So I was out in the lineup with my friend JM. It was a sunny day, waves 3-4 feet, light winds. The paddle out could only be described as ridiculously easy. However, because it’s winter, JM and I were wearing wetsuits, and because it has been flat for almost a month, neither one of us were in surfing shape. By the time I got outside I was gasping for breath and feeling like I was going to throw up. JM was the same way. I’m not that fazed by my lackluster surfing performances; I turn them in all the time. JM, however, is a gifted, gifted surfer, a real artist on the waves, and he’s nervous and critical about every aspect of his session. That’s not to say he doesn’t enjoy himself, he has a wonderful time in his own intense, concentrated way, but he doesn’t relax until he’s finished surfing.

JM was really getting down on himself about his lack of conditioning, he was complaining about the water temperature, about how he had no balance, about how he felt fat, and so on. “I’m too old for this, dude,” JM said. “I’m old, dude. I turned the corner this year.”
To try to make him feel better, I said, “Yeah, but look at Kelly Slater. He just won his seventh world title, and he’s older than us!”
“He’s on the juice, man. On the juice.” JM went on to explain that Slater had gotten onto HGH and testosterone. There was no other way to explain his sudden return to top form after a five-year decline.
Another guy in the lineup chimed in that he’d heard the same thing.
“Youth, dude,” this other surfer said. “HGH is instant youth. Surfing doesn’t test for illegal substances, man. You can paddle out on speed, crack, ‘roids, acid, whatever, dude.”

Slater on the juice? This was rather depressing news, if it was true. I’ve always idolized Slater (who doesn’t? The guy is dating Gisele Bundchen, for god’s sake, and he tapped Pamela Anderson in her first-and-second-Playboy-spread prime) and it was such a compelling story when he won his seventh title, I hated to think he’d cheated his way into it. In a short aside, I just want to mention that after JM had finished grousing about all the things he was doing wrong, he picked a wave way, way out, paddled about a hundred yards to the south, caught it way outside (it was the biggest wave of the day, about 5 feet), and then did a huge air off the back, sailing over some longboarder who had dropped in on him. In that one wave JM demonstrated vision, positioning skills, speed, and aerial ability. How he never went pro is beyond me. He is, to use the jargon of the sport, a “rad” surfer.

That episode in the water pushed steroids back into heavy rotation on my mental playlist. The next day one of my co-workers called me up and as part of our obligatory pre-work chit-chat, he asked what I was doing.
“Doing some hammer curls,” I joked. “About to start another cycle of ‘roids.”
I suppose I expected him to react with mystification or stunned silence, but instead he said, “Where you getting them? What are you taking? I just got some stuff from Norway.”
I was flabbergasted, and in a rather tight spot, because there’s no way I could tell the guy I was only joking, not after he’d opened up to me that way. I gave noncommittal answers while he described his routine in great detail; what steroids he took when, how he took them, and what he did in the gym at certain points on the cycle. You have to understand, my co-worker is the last person you’d suspect of juicing. Yes, he’s in decent shape, but he’s a mid-40’s software architect, and a devout Christian. I don’t recall Jesus saying “Unless ye become buff…”, but who knows, maybe Council of Nicea took all that stuff out. I guess Jesus had to be pretty strong to smash those pillars in the temple and bring it down on Delilah. Too bad they chained him to that rock and let the buzzards eat his liver. By the way, if you ever feel the messianic urge, resist. It will pass. Don’t just sit there under the Bodhi tree, get up and go mingle, for Christ’s sake. Hit Starbucks and get coffee and a compilation CD by Carole King. Go buy some nice, fluffy towels. Call your mother and tell her you’re thinking about going back to medical school.

Strange. See, now I’m thinking that everyone is on steroids but me. Now I’m thinking that I should investigate this further. If I weren’t so lazy and so reluctant to spend money, I’d get on a cycle, too. Everyone else (excepting Tom Brady, of course) seems to be doing it. Hey, I wonder if T.C. was juicing. That dude was awfully big. And he did have rage issues, particularly when Magnum was trying to con him into using the chopper.

Ray Nagin's Martin Luther King Speech

I have to start by saying that I like Ray Nagin, personally. I’ve never met him, but I’ll bet he listens to The Low End Theory. I’ll bet that when he’s talking to a pretty girl his eyes get a little bit moist. I’ll bet that, up close, you can see places where his strange goatee-mustache configuration is nicked and uneven. In other words, I believe that Ray Nagin is a real person. I believe were seeing the true Ray Nagin, not the mayor of New Orleans, when he deviated from his flight plan and used the MLK speech to promote his agenda to rebuild New Orleans as a “chocolate” city. That’s right, New Orleans is going “chocolate”, y’all. Get up and get get get down, New Orleans is a cho-co-late town. It's all a little bit sad, really.

Nagin’s speech suggests that he still hasn’t recovered his equilibrium, or that he’s lost it for good, and if you conceive of Nagin as an embodiment of his city, then New Orleans has a long way to go. Nagin was put in a horrible situation by the Bush Administration during Katrina. He had to take some shots then; it was his job to do anything he could, including making a clown of himself, to help the city. But now that things have settled down a bit, he probably needs to dial back on the racism and start building bridges, creating coalitions, and all the other boring but necessary tasks that politicians are paid to undertake. Instead, he used the MLK speech to make these ridiculous pronouncements about “chocolate."

Here’s the real problem, as far as Nagin is concerned; it’s expected that these comments would alienate white viewers and voters, and you could argue that he’d intended to do just that, but it would only be a viable strategy if the “chocolate city” idea inspired and motivated the black constituency. Judging from the footage I saw, in which Nagin seemed to be attempting to work the crowd by falling into the cadences and rhetorical devices of a preacher, the “chocolate city” comments were not only a failure in retrospect, but they went over like a lead balloon in real-time as well. If you listen to the crowd reaction in the video clips, you’ll hear an isolated exclamation or two, but the general reaction seems to have been mystification, as if even Nagin’s eager and supportive audience was thinking, “Wait, what’s ‘chocolate’ got to do with Dr. King?” You’ll have to ask Ray, but I’m not even sure he really knows.

And what about the use of the word “chocolate” as opposed to “black” or “African-American” or “the people”? What does the use of “chocolate” reveal about Mr. Nagin’s view of the word? There are obvious sexual connotations to the use of the word “chocolate”, as well as a kind of seventies swingers-vibe. One thinks of Wilt Chamberlain and his 10,000 concubines, or of Darryl Dawkins and his “Chocolate Thunder” backboard-shattering dunks. Seeing Nagin up there bobbing and weaving, working himself into a frenzy, you get the impression that he was picturing himself as part of that lineage – a modern-day Shaft of sorts, updated for the new millennium, all about the people, yes, down with Dr. King, for sure, down with that, but with a little something left for the ladies, too. Got to love the ladies. As Nagin delivered his speech he might have been imaging the balconies along the French Quarter overflowing with Nubian princesses who would whip up their tops and call out his name as he passed by.

Of course, the speech was picked up and run on all the cable news outlets and quickly became a major story to which Nagin was obliged to respond. His explanation that he got carried away and caught up in the moment was believable, and it reinforced my idea that Nagin is really a rather unsophisticated and decent man at heart. Nagin had a golden opportunity, after his comments, to play the race card all over again, and to further divide the city along racial lines. In so doing, he might have guaranteed his re-election. If you think that’s a crazy idea, look to Detroit, where the “Hip-Hop Mayor”, Kwame Kilpatrick, was just re-elected, defeating an African-American challenger, Freeman Hendrix, largely by positioning himself as the “blacker” of the two candidates. Kilpatrick was headed for defeat until the Grim Reaper intervened in the form of Rosa Parks' death. I'm not saying Kilpatrick milked Rosa Parks' funeral for his own personal gain, but I did enjoy the portion of his eulogy where he revealed that the reason Rosa went to the front of the bus was that Freeman Hendrix was occupying the last seat in the back and refused to give it up. As an aside, I’m not even sure what it means to be “blacker” than someone else, but the implications are not good. It seems to me that when you get into the individuating characteristics of any culture (“whiter”, “more Jewish”, “blacker”) you’re really talking about the behaviors and attitudes that are seen as roadblocks to understanding and integration.

Nagin had the same opportunity in New Orleans; that is, he could’ve defended his speech and accused the Bush administration (again) of racism. By circling the wagons, he could’ve advanced his political credibility at the expense of his personal credibility. Instead, remarkably, he apologized. He claimed he’d gotten caught up in the passion of the moment, and that he’d said things that he simply didn’t mean. This was not good for Nagin the politician but it was probably good for Nagin, the man. Given that he stood to gain very little by his apology, I believe in its sincerity, and I accept it.

Now, having said all that, I have to offer one additional, and far more skeptical, explanation for Nagin's apology. Perhaps, after the speech, he huddled with his team and they decided that since the "chocolate city" comments hadn't been greeted with any enthusiasm, it was best to distance themselves immediately. Perhaps Nagin made an attempt to divide the city and, unsure that it could be carried off successfully, went into a calculated retreat. Perhaps that's true, but I hope not. In this age of focus groups and media managers and George Bush's clumsy reading of scripted speeches and metal boxes sticking out of suit coats, it's nice to think that someone was being genuine, even if they were genuinely offensive.