*Carefree* Gum Presents: Mistletoe Moments

I walked by a bus stop that asserted all prostitutes are "sex slaves". 250,000 reside in North America. Does that make the husbands of women who married them for money or financial security "slave owners"? Am I allowed to wish that it does?

Pretty Woman came out when I was eleven. It was the first movie I ever went to alone at a theater. It was also the first--and last--movie I ever sneaked into. Over the summer I'd asked a girl to go with me to a fun park and to get out of it she lied and told me her mother had leukemia. My mother reads palms for a living, I know a curse when I see one. I was convinced that if a girl would go to such egregious lengths to avoid a date with me there was a significant chance a prostitute was the only way I'd ever get near a girl in my lifetime. I was resigned to it without much hope. Pretty Woman was going to be my Rosetta Stone in uncovering my future wife. Richard Grieco, fresh off his success as "Booker" on 21 Jump Street---shot at my high school---was going to show me on the big screen how to seduce and marry a kindhearted prostitute in fairytale-like fashion. Maybe even one like Julia Roberts, who I knew was the sister of Eric "freakin'" Roberts, star of such indelible classics as "Best of the Best" and "Best of the Best II", for which I had devout admiration.

Little did I know that my spike haired hero Richard Grieco was never to be in this film. After they misspelled his name in the credits I went on looking for him in every distant, out-of-focus leather jacket in the frame until it finally sunk in it was in fact this aging Richard *GERE* entrusted to educate me in the ways of becoming a future slave owner. Julia made it a tempting proposition. Craft? Or, perhaps, as an actress engaging in sexual relations for profit on film, potentially she qualified as a "sex slave" herself---one of those 250,000 mentioned on the poster---albeit an exceedingly well compensated one.

Looking back on the performance---with the new heads up on context courtesy of the bus stop)---I like when lies tell the truth. Or part of it. They usually do. Maybe they always do.

I have a confession: up until about 9 months ago, the best kiss I'd ever had was with a "sex slave". I'm not entirely sure I can blame Julia Roberts, but her crying at the opera Gere took her to didn't help. It took 3 years to know that my kiss was with a "sex slave" because she failed to inform me of her involvement in the sex slave trade at the time. I may also be culpable of attempting to become a "sex slave" owner as I did pick up the tab at Denny's at 4:30am after we'd walked around Stanley Park for a few hours the evening I'd met her. And, oddly enough, it never went beyond a kiss with her. Just one night that was a pack of wet matches the next night and---POOF!---gone.

It's nice when professions you don't know much of anything about, that posters on bus stops presume to speak for, mess with your preconceptions a little. While I've never minded stereotypes, I do intensely resent people who *aspire* to be stereotypes. I've always found it poetic that the one thing a prostitute is famous for withholding from their customers turned out, somehow, to have more feeling in it than, say, my *first* kiss. My first kiss wasn't a frivolous thing either. I stayed with the girl who belonged to that first kiss for nearly 5 years. The other poetic thing about them that she ("sex slave") told me---a few years later when I bumped into her---was what sort of people she had as clients. "Everybody. There's no *type*" I was working on a book about a school shooting at the time and there was symmetry in this. You know what the profile is on a school shooter? There isn't any. That's not riddle or enigma material, it's poetry.

It's burned now, but wanna know what the inside of my binder in 6th grade looked like after the movie?

Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts Julia Roberts

Wanna know what the inside of my notebook looks like today:

Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara

Maybe Lewis Carrol was right, "We're but children growing older."

If you listen very carefully you can hear all the kids playing dress up snickering at me...

Merry Christmas

Her Giftshop In His Museum

We were close to where I was gonna be dropped off to stay that first night in Brooklyn. I was nodding off in the backseat. "Yo, Brinny, O.D.B grew up in the projects a little ways down there. On the other side of Fort Green." I opened my eyes. There was a deafening moment of radical ambiguity about *why* this information should be passed along to me. I wasn't sure if O.D.B's legend was a punchline or a solemn ambassador of the neighborhood. Our windshield had been focused and all the windows were fogged up. It was too cold and too dark to roll down the window to soak anything up. I was the first one being dropped off while everybody else was going to Brownsville. "Here it is, I'll getcha for work early tomorrow. Here's the keys."

There was a plaque outside the building for a dead poet who'd lived there that I'd never heard of.

She'd told me about his apartment. It left an impression on her. She was very uneasy I was staying there. She didn't live far off, twenty minutes walk, but she'd told me she wouldn't visit. This was a place she didn't use similes or metaphors or examples to describe or compare. I learned about it in her pauses; many different kinds of pauses---pregnant, stillborn, miscarried, aborted. The state of whatever she had with him had been the same for a couple years but she still wasn't used to it. The paint was still wet. She'd fallen in limerence with him and been picking at the scab ever since.

It was a walk-up. I was a little nervous and smoked climbing the staircase and flicked the cigarette out a window when I reached my floor. When I got inside the apartment the lights were off but I could hear two different sets of people talking in their rooms down the hallway. I walked past them and found his room and flicked the light switch. Large wine colored made bed in the corner. Bookshelves lined the walls and leaned under the high ceilings of the room. His library was 95% the same as mine. His mother was born in the same place as mine. I unpacked my shit in the corner and hunkered down with my back against the door facing the bed. I'd heard about the laundry list that stained those sheets before I'd known about her being included. Which was before I had any idea she'd be underlined in my laundry list, or that he was underlined in hers.

Couple months back, across the continent:

"I guess I might as well ask at this point. How do you know this guy?"
"He didn't tell you?"
"I didn't ask."
"He's the only guy I've ever been in love with."
"Past or present tense?"
"I dunno."
"You have the same expression as the Sphinx when you lie."

I shut off the lights and cleared my throat to test out the acoustics in the room.

The breadcrumbs lead here... so are you supposed to find this dynamic amusing or violently beautiful? Don't you want a flashlight to go prowling around her sewers? Is that smirk across your face supposed to make the room a little queasy over its secrets? It's not. All her kites become your anchors if you let them. If you can't give your phone number without giving something of yourself---why didn't her museum lure him over to her gift shop? Maybe she was waiting for somebody to steal all the originals. Trip the silent alarms.

I stole a couple pillows and slept on the floor.

Punchline

I am an uncomputed sum of what will happen ( c )

Her Moats and Subways

Pawed over a shoebox-load worth of kid and baby photos of hers while she finished up some work from the office in the other room. "If you get bored you can stop." Invading this little cubbyhole or keyhole doesn't run much of a risk of being dull, it swings a little too hard the other way. Ballerina outfits, hoisted on shoulders, backseats, Long Island fun parks, sidewalk under her little shoes looks like reels of film. So is this exhuming or really conducting an autopsy of her childhood or her parent's marriage or places and times she knew or looking in some crystal ball for some misty tarot card of my own spoiled brat kid? I like watching or hearing about pretty much anybody getting used to the shipwreck of starting out, kicking off training wheels. But I play favorites with everything and she's my favorite. Shuffle a stack of these things and the flip book reveals Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, the Bronx, Brooklyn, all of them steering for where she ended up in Manhattan. Most of these places have amounted to road signs for me, articles in newspapers, anecdotes from friends or strangers---basically muffled elevator music in a stuck elevator at the basement of a building I don't know. But there she is, not much more than a stuffed animal (koala bear), being led around. First steps, first words---rumor. Maybe the first big triumph she'd have stashed in her memory might be riding a first bike which must have occurred somewhere between that photo booth shot with her dad and that other Christmas snapshot at Rockefeller Plaza.

What kind of algebra is anybody's life for somebody who wants to tag along? Wall Street dad carrying you on his shoulders---your face swiping so much of his it's spooky and more endearing than it has any right to be---and maybe we oughta retrieve the drawbridge from this castle already. Cats poking around in different houses. Which ones felt like home? Which ones feel a bit like lighthouses now in your memory? Maybe I'll ask you when you finish in an hour two. Maybe you'll shoot me down or deal me from the bottom of the deck like you do sometimes. How early on was the prerequisite for the fella you were looking for, "Someone I'd like to write to"? What brought that on? You're taking a bath in that one and I'm now in possession of child porn.

I got home last night around 2am. There was an opened letter waiting for me on my desk from January 2nd, 1984, written to my mother by my grandmother---my dad's mom---a year and two and a half months shy of her death on St. Patrick's day. I had a Shamrock shake in my hand when I found out. Her handwriting leans a little and if you hold it out at arms length it flows over the page the way a current creases the surface of a river. She had a little river bend at the foot of her property in countryside when she wrote the letter. Now my uncle owns that property and I helped him uproot all the peach and plum and cherry trees and dig all the holes and pound in all the posts and string all that wire and plant all those grapes for a vineyard eight springs ago.

I don't remember much of her, but I recall she was one of those people who had no weaknesses when it came to beginnings, middles, or endings with people. They were seamless and warm and welcome. I caught up with her late in the game, but she wasn't any different with me.

In her letter she was writing to my mother about not feeling bad for ducking out on a Christmas away from the city. Maybe she sensed some kind of rupture that might have taken place and sought to reassure. Only a couple years later my dad moved out, maybe she sensed it. It has all the unwavering bias she always gave to anyone she paid attention to. Holidays are a really rigged big deal in far too many ways. Which, at least for me, was a pertinent subject seeing how I attended another family's (and country's) Thanksgiving Dinner only a klutzy kid handful of days ago. My first time in Jersey.

Maybe it's this annoyingly true thing Dan mentioned before he left for Europe: "If you commit to somebody you worry a lot less than if you don't. Because all you have to worry about are the problems you've got together and figuring them out. But you're free of all the problems surrounding the actual or fantasized commitment bullshit. Which usually are way more and feel way bigger."

Dan's another guy whose got beginnings, middles, and endings down.

I only like the first two---and only if the first feels like the 2nd in all the important ways.

In keeping with lousy endings, there we go...

Ninth and Broadway

No matter how many times I come here I can't scratch the itch of wanting to have a cigarette on every fire escape clinging to those brick buildings, something like wanting to kiss a girl with braces I guess and her streets that I'm well aware are more like lanes in her mental scenery and hobos lumbering against the tide of wealth, resembling far too closely Sinbad and Issac Hayes, wearily dragging past the tourist stampede for the comfort of an alley while out here trench coats pop their collars and light cigarettes inside them against the cruel frigid wind with all the while me a little nervous to take a cab and rush back to her apartment from Penn Station after just arriving maybe because Tolstoy had a good point with the shitty thing about trains being that they destroy the natural distance between people even though it would be fair to say telephones have kept my little long distance deal alive for the last nine months and I'm here doubling up on Thanksgiving even though I'm a little worried all this cold might work one over on the spark which so quickly remade me afraid of the dark only because it wanted to be my nightlight and pretty soon the doorman will call up to her that I'd finally gotten here and maybe it's better to move here because I'm very taken with the idea of having a doorman, I like saying hello and seeya here, sorta mercifully murders my home town in gentle doses, but maybe taking my time getting south isn't such a bad idea cause if it works out this time we're both gonna have to make the decision to move in together either here or there and if she doesn't want to she's not gonna say she doesn't want to because it's far easier to rig this week with passive aggressive explosives or drop a few comments in like suicide bombers and 1+1=3 will very very very quickly diminish and shrivel and wither---better to snap than rust---but she already knows I really really don't need more taxidermy or autopsies on relationships since believe me I'm content to leave several establishments mysteriously lacking plaques and even more mysteriously set ablaze by underground arsonists in my heart commemorating a romantic rendezvous of mine where Cupid's arrows were suction cup tipped and didn't stick to her the way they should've instead just one big lousy jewelry box that I'd like to exchange for nickles in order to shove them up those dirty sentimental memories asses until they'll submit to being a regret and finally sing a sad song in that delicate beautiful way Jeff Buckley hits certain notes as if he knew he wouldn't be around for long before that Ophelia act of his and it makes me sleep a little better than I do currently what with this grinding jaw thing going on lately and we've only covered 15 blocks so far and I'm far too cold and the stars are out and I'm tired of looking at windows when I guess it's time to look out of hers when after all the stars always remind me of the first time I figured them out at seven or eight years old, cause I was convinced instead of everything being a void of darkness maybe the stars were poked like breathing holes in a shoebox which meant the pinpricks showed that outside everything was really bright and I asked my mom and she agreed with me and bought me some liquorish to reward the hunch and the doorman opens the door and I give the apartment number and he calls up says, "Yeah, Brin's here" and I can hear her say, "let him up" and I know her doors already open even before I get in the elevator and hear the Gerswhin serenade on the way up and get a chance to apologize for this drawn out stutter.

Sleepwalking

I heard a secret not too long ago about a couple I know who got married but didn't tell anybody. While I'm a little puzzled about the secretiveness surrounding it, the news was a pleasant surprise. I hate weddings, but I've always been fond of marriages where 1+1=3. This two halves make a whole business is a cheap, rotten lie. They're one of those couples you meet where you like both of them *more* as a result of each other. Perhaps I should say they ARE the couple you like more as a result of each other. From where I'm sitting that's a sneaky ass trick. But there it is: their partner is the best thing I like about both of them. Fuck me. Even if it makes you feel a little sloppy in the arena yourself, when your friends give that sorta thing to you, no matter how hard you try, you can never quite get the ribbon off the gift. But in this case what's special, at least for me, is I was there the first night they saw each other. Maybe you'll get a kick out of the story.

I've known the bride since I was five, but I met the groom on the same night, eight years ago, that she did. On that same night, for the first and only time, she made a pass at me. We've never spoken about it since.

I'd gotten a phone call from a friend asking if I wanted to play with fire that night. I like fire. He'd lined up twenty people to show up in the middle of the forest at a concrete covered over reservoir at midnight with 800 bucks worth of gasoline and various means of using it, along with a tripod and piles of film. I didn't know any of these people except the bride to be. While I have some balls one-on-one, I'm fairly gutless in groups. Everybody was gonna be high on different stuff except the guy who'd invited us, because he wanted to photograph everyone. Nobody was really sure why. Which was EXACTLY when I wanted to go.

The only drug that's ever interested me was acid. I liked it back then. I'd only done it a few times, but eight hours of turning everything into a wet painting appealed to me. This was before I had a first date with a girl on it and watched one of the more horrifyingly twisted things ever created, a film called "Rebel Without A Cause". In case you've ever wondered if the Antichrist exists I can put it to rest that he does indeed: his name is Sal Mineo playing a closeted teen in that movie. If a Hitler can be sewn from a failed pastoral painter, what the man who stabbed Sal Mineo to death saved us from cannot and SHOULD not ever be imagined.

I wasn't really sure how it was going to play out being there. Everybody was out swinging fire from a chain or juggling it in all these arty Hawaiian sorta ways, so I watched for a while. It had that spiritual and ritualized angle to it and the skills on display were fairly impressive. I don't really get my spirituality from Hawaiian luaus but it seems more honest than a lot of other places. But those new age junkie, fast food experience faces get to me at the best of times and there they were on a couple faces.

So I picked up a couple gas cans and Charlie Browned it over to a corner of the reservoir and began spelling my name over vast quantities of cement. My WHOLE name. FOUR names. WITH the fucking hyphen. Then, soul searchingly, in an act of etymological suicide, I crossed my name out. Once completed, I tried that movie trick of dropping my cigarette into the gasoline. And missed. On the second try that irresistible scratch sound of ignition and pure, almost clitoral, domino effect skimming across the ground.

The bride to be walked over. She's small and freckled with straight shiny red hair and was friends with all kinds of pretty girls in school because where they were beautiful she was interesting. The best they could do was be interested...

When we were kids I used to spend a lot of time watching her interact with beautiful girls. Those girls you look at and get handed over a whole wing of the Prado but no lunch included. Their beauty always took something, it didn't give much. Back then it broke your heart even worse because they didn't have a clue what their value was, all they cared about was the asking price. Casing stuff you wanna steal is a rotten habit if you don't know what to do with it. She'd be talking with them, watching them, and it was like watching sunsets stain the ocean. She could soak up beauty better than anyone I ever met. She had Hungarian blood like me, love and beauty are seen as curses to all Hungarians. But they orbited her more than she gravitated to them. They wanted each others' endorsement in a way. You could tell. I was trying for a backstage pass in my imagination. One time she'd told me that girls walked around naked in front of her a lot. She wasn't bragging or provoking with the disclosure. It wasn't matter of fact either. I could see them wanting to. I knew the pretty girls must have gotten a little something extra out of doing it in front of her. The tease of it, maybe the dare too, picking at the scab of her dirty little secret: maybe she'd trade-in being deep for being beautiful. Maybe she wasn't above superficiality at all, just a sore loser. Her body and features never went beyond sculpted cookie dough. Her eyes were arresting, blue had to stick it's finger in an electrical socket to get THAT blue. Maybe because she didn't have it, maybe other reasons too, but she understood beauty. Whereas the boys could smoke it, she mainline that shit. In the early days the pretty girls weren't going home with any of us, they went home with her.

So she's standing there beside me on the cement edge of the reservoir and we're both looking at my writing on fire, the flames like a thousand golden and drunken belly dancers hamming it up. I asked her what everyone else was doing and she grabbed my arm and turned me around. The moon looked like a tipped over container of Whiteout pooling in the night, then trickling off into clouds, stars just poked breathing holes in a shoebox, and all of it hanging off center and off key over the jagged cutout treeline of the forest and all those crates of black Magic Markers that must of been used up to fill in that stolen coloring book sky.

FLASH! Camera guy caught us from a distance and she handed me a bottle of some sorta snot colored liquid in the firelight.

I get really queasy having my picture taken. Probably explains why every photo of me looks a little different. My signature isn't too regular either. Nearly got denied my passport on account of not reliably demonstrating that I'm me. Which I felt sorta flattered about, to be honest. I mean, if it doesn't match, then what? Maybe I don't wanna be the same guy much of the time. Moving targets are harder to hit. Maybe the ID in my wallet isn't doing such a good job convincing me of this identity, ATMs are more forgiving.

"You look like a little kid Brinny. Don't make that face. You DO."

In my whole life, aside from family, only about 5 people have called me by that nickname. All words go in your ear and fill your brain except your name. It gets your heart. So why's she doing that? Leave it alone. Please stop staring at me when I'm vulnerable. Why does defenselessness bring out the mother in girls who in turn sorta wanna molest my little angelic kid? I'll pose it this way: if two girls get raped, the one who fantasized about it is worse off than the one who didn't. She feels responsible. So why am I wearing a leather jacket here? Is that a statement? Okay, okay, okay. Bad thoughts. Don't freak out. LSD is not necessarily an enlightening drug. Everything's fine. You're okay. Let's take a benign topic, Alex. Etiquette for 500. "That's the daily double! How much do you want to RISK?" Jesus Christ, don't fuck with me Trebek. Okay, I'll risk everything. "The duration of time one shakes hands for?" What is, until you make out the person's eye color? "Correct." Yeah, and her eyes are blue. Blue eyes see better in the dark. You know, so why's your wedding ring on that finger. Cause the Romans thought there was an artery running from your wedding finger to your heart. It protected it. ASK HER A SIMPLE, PLAIN, DECENT QUESTION...

"What's in the bottle?" I asked.
"The green fairy."
"Hey! Don't say something goofy like that shit. Fairies are pornstars in G-rated movies."
"Absinthe. Homemade."
I took a swig. "It's heinous."
"It tastes like ass but the wormwood might make this look nicer."

She'd fooled around with the guy taking pictures. I knew that from both of them. They'd told me separately too. They never spoke about it when they were together in front of me. So it was that cool kinda tension fiddling with their vibe. I love that stuff. I love getting two different takes on what lead up to a big thing, how it met the expectations or swooped somewhere else, where they think it's going, all the trapdoors and minefields. I get off on just about anybody falling in love. I want box seats. I sorta got they weren't sure but were enjoying finding out. That's a nice place to find anybody. They'd hooked up after his girlfriend wasn't sure about a full on commitment and recommended they see other people. But then, after seeing the effects, she changed her mind. Too late? Acid for me is like sneaking into a movie theater and swiping a balcony seat. These two and what was going on between them was the main peg the painting of that night hung on for me.

"You wanna see how he's doing?"
"Sure."

We started walking towards him while he was filming a guy in a trench coat, wasted out of his mind, hurling a chain over his head with a beach ball worth of flame attached at the end. Suddenly the guy saw us coming over and opened his arms wide as if to give us a hug. The fire came down crashing onto his head, sparks shot out, and he fell on the ground laughing with the fire creeping up to his cheek. There was smoke coming from his head. He was clowning around with the fire getting closer. He couldn't stop laughing until he started choking on it. It was a disturbing image out there in the open night. I went over and took his sleeve to pull him away but he slapped it away. "I'm fine." He clearly was not. I was deeply worried that physical contact had infected me with lifetimes worth of paranormal psychosis. Then the paranoia took hold of someone dying out here and ambulances or police or crazy neighbors or hobos living in the forest moving in with some kinda confrontational stampede. Our friend put down his camera and ran over and pulled the guy out of the fire and threw him on his back. After a second he rolled over and started crawling toward the fire again. It was clear the guy wanted to take a nap in it. Our photographer told us he'd taken Ketamine after finishing half the bottle of that vile homemade absinthe. He dragged the guy back to the tripod and pitched him over a pile of jackets.

Me and her watched him taking more pictures of people out there. Some were dancing in the moonlight. New people came up the trail and shook hands and joined in. Nobody was sinister. No Mr. Potato head creepy bullshit where accessories mask that everybody is pretty much the same. Everybody was easy to delineate up close and inviting. It was hard to pick who you wanted to walk up to and start talking with. And I liked the shapes of people if they were far away. Nobody really paid attention to the camera flashes. No camera faces or poses.

"He didn't take anything tonight?" I asked her.
"No," she smiled. "He wanted to see all this chaos sober."
"Jesus. Who the hell comes up with something like this? Organizes it?"
"That's what turns me on about him. He's totally in the moment."
"Hmmm," I looked at her and over at him. "Maybe that's it. I *see* it. I do. Maybe you're right. I can't quite put my finger on it. But you're right, he's right here isn't he?"

She left my question alone and turned to me. I kept looking at him taking pictures. I wasn't sure why she was staring at me exactly. Finally I looked down at her.

"I also think that's why you'd turn me on more than anybody."

I took a massive Neal Armstrong moon step backwards and mumbled something about flashlights and band aids and Uncle Tom's Cabin and she said "what?" and I shrugged and kept on and sped the hell up retreating over a slippery plank while ferociously pointing at a patch of some cement until with concern she hollered out about what I was pointing at and I shrugged again, shouted back, "Steinbeck probably! What about next week?" Moonwalked for a second to emphasize the point and finally dug into my pockets and scowled asking what I'd done with my matches. It was an ugly, egregiously cowardly, theatrically horrifying retreat.

Even though I was facing her during the retreat, I couldn't look at her the whole time. I kept her in the peripheral. But I saw her posture change and I felt awful. Then I saw her swivel and in a heartbeat she marched over to the guy passed out on the pile of jackets and grabbed his hand and hauled him into the forest. She lifted a branch and in they went for half an hour doing who knows what. They've been together ever since.

He turned out to speak 8 languages and is getting paid to go for his PHD at an Ivy league school right now.

All Right Then, I'll Go To Hell

My dad was a lawyer up until a couple years ago when he retired. He had a little private practice and worked for the government protecting and defending kids until he decided the system he was a part of did more harm than good for them. He used to joke he fell into the law because he loved office supplies. He *did* love office supplies, but if you happen to know any lawyers and you get a chance to ask them what area of law they'd least like to practice, chances are the kind my dad chose would be near or the very bottom of their list. Most lawyers don't like much that has to do with feelings. Besides, it doesn't pay as well and there really isn't anyone you can engage in pleasant conversation over what you see or deal in on a daily basis. I won't say it drove him to be an alcoholic or a 2 pack-a-day smoker---but it didn't help much either. Once I asked to see files about what parents did to their kids. I was 8 or 9. He got upset and wouldn't show me. So that night I broke into the basement and raided a box of files and found a photo in one case entered into evidence where a screaming kid was hoisted onto an element over a stove. The context was provided in text while the damage was documented with a kid pulling down his jeans and exposing the harm. No face of the little boy, but it said he was my age. It was a confusing moment for me. I wanted to cry from what I'd seen but couldn't, because what seemed more chilling was that my dad *chose* to be intimately acquainted with that aspect of the world. And I couldn't understand why my mother would marry someone who *chose* this world 10 or 12 hours a day when he didn't have to. He couldn't stand most lawyers or the judges who tolerated them. I never saw him in court. I never met one his clients. When I was a baby I slept in his office a handful of times. He had an original framed painting of a Don Quixote-like knight in his office that might be the only heirloom I'd care to have from him. I watched them implode that office building when I was ten and helped move boxes of office supplies to the new office he had. We took in a foster kid for a few months when I was around three, but he called my mother a "fucking bitch" and my dad had to find him another foster home. My dad published a text book for social workers that sold very poorly that he dedicated to my family with a one sentence inscription. It embarrassed all of us, mostly because it was heartfelt. Heartfelt inscriptions in textbooks work on me about as gracefully as Christmas carols (say "Silent Night") in July.

These details made me biased for somebody like Atticus Finch defending a black man in a racist town. It made me biased for Harper Lee telling a story like that. I was even more biased after they showed the movie of "To Kill A Mockingbird" during two English classes in 8th or 9th grade and Gregory Peck played Atticus Finch. I wasn't the only one in class choking up when Atticus lost and was packing up his briefcase while people stood for him and his children had to be reminded to stand along with them. But I never understood what gave that Finch family such clarity about the issue of racism when everybody else in town was sipping the Kool-Aid of hating black people. Atticus had no arc to his goodness. He was born with it. And I remember feeling really annoyed KNOWING that most white people who read the book probably identified with Atticus when most of us would probably have gone along with the mob if we were around. I resented a book that flattered a lie. That profited from a lie. If Harper Lee knew what allowed Atticus to stand for good, it made sense she would have included it. But she didn't. There's no explanation.

That's why God punished Harper Lee with not being able to write anything else : ).

I'm really glad Barack Obama doesn't remind me of Atticus Finch. He reminds me of a cross between Huck Finn and Robert Jordan. UNLIKE Atticus, Huck Finn actually had some fucking soul searching going on to figure out racism was wrong. He got upset he didn't spend enough time in church to understand why slavery was okay and chose hell over giving up his friend Jim, whom he'd decided was a person after all. Obama smokes cigarettes, he smoked weed, and he snorted coke. I don't recall Atticus Finch even requiring the use of a bathroom over the course of the entire novel.

I dunno if you read the NYT on Sunday, but both McCain and Obama mentioned Robert Jordan from "For Whom the Bell Tolls" as one of their major sources of inspiration. Which floored me. McCain took the title of his autobiography from a dying soliloquy of Robert Jordan's, "The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for." Robert Jordan was a fucking communist by the way. A professor from Montana who went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Which is sort of a joke because MOST of the Americans who went off to fight in that war didn't look like Gary Cooper. The vast majority were Communist-leaning Jews from New York. I met one of them over Christmas in New York back in 2002. His name was Mo and he had a fancy white suit on. I was trying to read a copy of The Sun Also Rises in Spanish I'd brought back from Havana. He asked what *other* Hemingway stories I knew with a glimmer in his eye. In his eighties by then, but he was 19 or something when he fought. All those kids never shook the wrath most Americans heaped on them when they came back. Mo had seen Hemingway in Madrid on a couple of occasions. Never talked to him.

Robert Jordan spends a fair bit of time contemplating suicide when it's clear he's not going to go home. That it's last time he'll ever see the sky. As in Hemingway's case, Robert Jordan's father had committed suicide. Unlike in Hemingway's case, Robert Jordan doesn't follow his father's lead. He keeps on fighting.

I read this book when I was 20 after making a VERY dumb decision of borrowing a few grand and skipping town without telling anybody to shipwreck into Madrid in the dead of winter. I had no Spanish and didn't know one person and the cab dropped me off at midnight at a pension just off the Gran Via that really was operating as a brothel for transvestite prostitutes. I don't really know what constitutes a nervous breakdown, but I know that I didn't eat or drink or move, let alone leave that room for 3 days. I felt like a wild animal stuck in the jaws of a trap. I smoked cigarettes and I read For Whom the Bell Tolls, the only book I'd brought along that I'd started 50 times without getting past more than a few pages. This time I went straight through. It was the first time a book really made me cry. And after I was finished, something sawed just above the area that was caught in the trap and I could leave again and did.

I'm terrified about what could happen to an American president whose hero is somebody like Robert Jordan. But for now, it just feels so nice that somebody like that could win! Fuck man, Castro learned guerrilla warfare from For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was reading it up in the mountains before he came down and took over Cuba. Shucks...