Perspective

My Canadian pen pal Peggy e-mailed me after last Tuesday’s elections to ask if Lynn and I soon would be seeking asylum in her country. Although Peggy and I haven’t see each other in person since we met for the first and only time in Edmonton, Alberta, sometime in the late 1990s when I was there on a work assignment, she knows my politics well—from correspondence and this blog. She’d assumed correctly that I’d be displeased—to put it mildly—by the Republican romp that will give the GOP control of the US Senate come January, and its biggest majority in the House since 1930.

What I told her, however, was that she needn’t worry about our showing up at her and husband Bob’s door in Victoria, British Columbia, seeking refuge from at least two years of foxes guarding the henhouses of everything I hold dear (environmental protection, the social-safety network, etc). Rather, I remarked, when you feel certain, as I do, that we’re already on an inexorable path to the end of the world as we know it (see my September 5 post, “Sing a Song of Armageddon”), it’s hard to feel as if an electoral debacle is even the figurative end of the world.

Indeed, just a couple of days before Election Day, an article ran in the Washington Post that began on this gallows note, “The Earth is locked on an ‘irreversible’ course of climatic disruption from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the impacts will only worsen unless nations agree to dramatic cuts in pollution, an international panel of climate scientists warn.” The article’s gist, if you’ll forgive my paraphrasing, if that we’re already completely screwed, but, should the governments of the world unite in ebony-and-ivory harmony, in such a way that even a made-up optimist I'll call Stoner Pollyanna couldn’t conceive, our beleaguered planet might swirl down the drain to widespread drought, horrific flooding, and devastation on an unimaginable scale just a tad less rapidly.

I mean, sure, it’s maddening and depressing to me when Republicans Win Big at the polls on promises that they'll unfetter business to pollute more and will see to it that the national wealth is spread even more inequitably than it is now. But those polar ice caps were melting before November 4, and the sea levels continue to rise. We all have bigger fish to fry—pun inadvertent but apt, as one of this morning’s newspaper headlines was “Larger Ocean ‘Dead Zones’—Oxygen-Depleted Water—Likely Because of Global Warming.”

Which is not to say that I’m happy about last week’s results at the polls, or that I’m feeling particularly conciliatory toward the two-thirds of eligible Americans who didn’t bother to vote, leaving a passive nation to the government it arguably deserves. Even here in Maryland, where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a two-to-one margin, we’ve now got a Republican governor-elect because too few Democrats bothered to turn out. (I also fault the camp of Democratic Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown, which ran such a safe and uninspired gubernatorial campaign that its spokesperson should’ve been Mad magazine’s Alfred E “What, Me Worry” Neuman.)

I’ve already read, by the way, that my governor-to-be, an Annapolis businessman named Larry Hogan, thinks the Washington Redskins, whose home games are played in Maryland, should proudly keep their odiously insensitive name. This stance struck me as a dog-bites-man bit of “news.”

So, anyway, would I like to live in a land where, in the short run, I could avoid the news media regularly uttering such obscenities as “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,” and where, in the long run, I perhaps could enjoy four well-defined climatic seasons for a few decades yet? Sure. But not enough to move to Canada. It seems like a lot of upheaval for some temporary gains.

Besides, there’s still the occasional pitcher of lemonade to be made out of the (oxygen-depleted) ocean of lemons that our future promises. I’m already savoring in anticipation a cool, refreshing glass of electoral turnabout in 2016, when the Republican Party will have to defend both its Senate-majority record and many more up-for-grabs seats than will the Democrats. And when Hillary Clinton just may become the nation’s first female president, to the GOP's apoplexy.

Two "Bangs" for the Buck

Two posts in one day! What’s that about?!

Well, I’ll tell you. But first, I must call attention to something I just did. And, in the process, give a shout-out to my awesome friend Karen.

Over the course of an illuminating happy hour that she and I shared last week, she schooled me on the tantalizing yet sadly marginalized existence of the interrobang. Which, per Wikipedia, is “a nonstandard punctuation mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark and exclamation point.”

Conceptualized in 1962 by American advertising agency head Martin K Speckter—a true “Mad Man”—it is a punctuation hybrid that looks something like a capital “P” (a modified question mark) with an open space on its stem (forming an exclamation mark). It’s entirely awesome, and I so wish my computer keyboard included it. But alas, the interrobang never quite caught on. Decades ago it was featured on some keyboards, domestic and foreign. But no longer. Which is a crying shame, if you ask me. Why, I could’ve saved an entire keystroke at the start of this post, had the interrobang been available. Multiply such savings a zillionfold worldwide, and cancer may well have been cured by now, and planet-saving energy sources discovered, in the resulting pool of otherwise-unused time.

Anyway, back to “two posts in one day.” Back on January 6, 2012, I posted a tribute of sorts in this space to theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking on the occasion of his 70th birthday. I saluted his achievements, and cataloged the conjectured medical reasons for his longevity, despite the fact that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis popularly is known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and Lou Gehrig didn’t live to be 40. I began the post by noting, in full disclosure, however, that I’d found the audiobook of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to be so incomprehensibly boring that I nearly fell asleep at the wheel on I-95 about 20 years ago while attempting to be edified by it.

In the intervening years, Hawking, who I believe already had consensually appeared in animated form on The Simpsons by 2012, has continued to display an impish good humor that is stratospherically beyond what I imagine I’d be able to muster as an undoubtedly whining, self-pitying invalid. Last year he was a complicit, I assume, part of the storyline on an episode of the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory. I again was reminded of just how delightful Hawking can be when I was reading an article this morning about The Theory of Everything, a new movie that traces Hawking’s life from age 21—when he was diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live—to age 45. The film itself is getting middling notices for a formulaic approach to its material, but the actor portraying Hawking, Eddie Redmayne, already is attracting Oscar buzz for his ability to wring pathos, dignity, drama and humor out of a character who’s mute and all but immobile for most of his screen time.

The article in today’s paper actually wasn’t so much about the film itself as it was an interview with Redmayne about what it was like to meet and portray the still-living scientist. The 32-year-old British actor came off in the interview as self-effacingly likable. His first quote, in fact, was, “I tried to educate myself on the science, which was complicated for someone who is pretty inept.” But the passage that really endeared me to Redmayne, and made me like Hawking more than ever, was this one:

“Hawking, now 72, uses his cheek muscles to communicate with a sensor on his glasses that prompts a computer screen with an alphabet and a cursor. “It takes a long time for him to communicate, and one’s instinct is to start a conversation,” said Redmayne. “Maybe Stephen said eight or nine sentences. So I spilled forth about Stephen Hawking to Stephen Hawking for 40 minutes.”

He shook his head at the absurdity. Hawking had just published his memoir, “My Brief History,” in which he mentioned being born on Jan. 8, 1942, three centuries to the day after Galileo’s death.

“And I told him my birthday was Jan. 6 so we’re both Capricorns,” Redmayne said, “and as I said that I thought, ‘What am I saying?’

“There was this excruciating pause,” he recalled. Hawking, a man of few words but considerable wit, replied, “I’m an astronomer, not an astrologer.”

In response to which, Redmayne said, “I died a hundred deaths.”

God, how much do I love that anecdote?! And, yes, of course, the interrobang that I again was denied the opportunity to employ just now?

I try not to be too oppressively grim in this blog. I really do. So, granted, Armageddon is nigh. And today’s Veterans Day ceremonies, while properly saluting our soldiers past and present, remind us that war is endless. Still, I must add that life’s pleasures are boundless. (For whatever time we have left!) All one need do is look around. You’ll find joy in the darndest places, ranging from physics labs to barstools.

  

Keep Digging

The text popped up on my phone at 5:08 one morning last week. It read, simply but dramatically, “The body is not Bishop!”

It was from my friend Karen, who—when she’s not busy swing-dancing and waltzing and canoeing and hiking and seemingly redefining the phrase “live life to its fullest” (no mean feat for a single mother of three with a demanding full-time job, three dogs, a cat and a semi-long-distance boyfriend)—like me, worries a lot about the end of the world as we know it. Karen’s big thing right now is Ebola. She was up early that day scouring the Internet for the latest on confirmed deaths, government lies and obfuscations, hospital screw-ups, and cruise ship travel by possible carriers of the virus. While scrolling through a list of reasons it’s best never to read the news, she’d come upon an item in which she knew I’d be acutely interested.

I knew the text message meant that the question I’d asked atop my previous post, “The Truth Unearthed?” had been answered by the FBI’s forensics team in Quantico, Virginia. The “John Doe” who’d been buried in a cemetery in Jackson County, Alabama, after having been struck by a car on October 18, 1981, was not, in fact, the notorious fugitive Brad Bishop, aka the Bethesda Bludgeoner. (OK, that’s my aka for him. But I’ve noticed that the British tabloids have been all over this story. Given their me-like zeal for alliteration and indifference to taste and decency, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of them has employed the term. Damn the Washington Post and their “journalistic standards.”)

“We were hoping it was him, but we have other leads, the Post quoted an FBI spokeswoman in Baltimore as saying. Here in Montgomery County—where the 39-year-old multilingual State Department employee one spring day in 1976 went to a hardware store, purchased a small hammer, then infamously embarked on a fiendish home-improvement project that consisted of beating his wife, three sons and widowed mother to death—Sheriff Darren Popkin and County Police Chief Tom Manger echoed the FBI’s disappointment and optimism.

The case has been open for nearly four decades now, and even this latest “big break” consisted of nothing more than facial similarities between Bishop and the autopsy photo of the John Doe. But, what is law enforcement going to say? “We’ve got nuthin”? Bishop might, after all, have died under an assumed name overseas, his true identity unknown to anyone with whom he’d dealt. If he is still alive, he may be just another Alzheimer’s patient at an old folks’ home in Croatia, or a retired ski instructor in the Swiss Alps whose longtime companion, a distant relation of Eva Braun, will carry her lover’s secret to her own grave.

It seems hard to imagine, in this era of omnipresent cameras and instantaneous communication, that a still-living Brad Bishop could remain hidden for this long. Plus, does a guy who’s unhinged enough to murder his entire family then just settle down to a quiet life of clock-making? I don’t know. I’m not a criminal profiler, although I’ve watched plenty of them theorize on TV.

I’m more dubious than ever now that this coldest of cold cases ever will be thawed out and solved. Per my post previous to this one, what I’d most like to see at this point is Bishop’s comeuppance—a cold-blooded killer who’s certain he’s gotten away with murder being brought to justice, ideally interrupted mid-sip on a martini by a swarm of gun barrels pointed directly at this wizened face. That would be justice, inasmuch as the word possibly could apply to a killer who’s enjoyed decades of freedom while his family’s been skeletal in the ground.

I suppose I should clarify and concede, after having indicted Brad Bishop so many times over in this space, that he is an alleged killer. He is the Alleged Bethesda Bludgeoner. He never stood trial, after all. Perhaps it was just a monumental coincidence and a huge misunderstanding that Bishop disappeared at exact time of the murders, that items found at the northeast North Carolina site of the family’s half-burned bodies were traceable to him, that more evidence linking Bishop to the slayings were found in the family’s abandoned station wagon in the Smoky Mountains, and that no other suspects ever have been suggested or have emerged. It’s theoretically possible that a wrongly accused Brad Bishop is a latter-day Richard The Fugitive Kimble, still out there trying to ensnare the real killer while the stupid, misguided coppers persist in pinning the rap on him. (Although such efforts can be difficult even for acquitted and unpursued innocents, as OJ Simpson discovered during all those years he spent turning Florida’s golf courses and bars-upside down in a frantic-if-geographically-curious search for the killers of his ex-wife and her friend.)

So, to be fair, it was DNA from an alleged murderer that the FBI compared recently with DNA from that Alabama John Doe. And the 350 leads that the FBI says it’s received since attempting in April to revive interest in the case by placing Bishop on its Ten Most Wanted List are just part of an effort to touch base with a widower who’s got some serious ’splainin’ to do.

If that roadside drifter in Alabama had turned out to be Brad Bishop, however, the book would’ve been closed on him, and on a case of presumed guilt. Ebola still would be frightening, to be sure. Wars still would still rage all over globe, atrocities still would abound, environmental calamity would keep looming ever closer. But at least I could’ve run by that house on Lilly Stone Drive and thought, “So much for that alleged homicidal asshole.” Now I wonder if I’ll be able to say that anytime earlier than 20 years from now—when I’ll figure that Bishop probably didn’t live to be 100, and when I myself will be 76 years old.

By which time, if I’m still alive, I’m sure to find Bishop’s default death by old age to be pretty unsatisfying. Especially as I’ll be dealing with my own infirmities, and all the manifestations of impending Arageddon about which I’ve so cheerily written in this space. (If, that is, Karen’s fears prove unfounded and Ebola doesn’t wipe us all out first.)

So, one final note, and then I’ll drop this subject. I promise! Unless and until there’s bona fide news.

This morning I spotted a handmade sign at the entrance to Lilly Stone Drive, advertising a neighborhood Halloween “Spooktacular.” Not at the old Bishop place--despite its provenance, ghost potential, and suitability to Nerf-hammer party favors! Talk about an opportunity lost.

The Truth Unearthed?

I swear, I had the best of intentions to break blog silence of more than a month by writing about something upbeat. Or, at least not so damn dark.

I mean, last time I wrote about my firm belief that that everything we cherish about human life soon will cease to exist—possibly within our lifetime. Surely within the lives of the children of those who took the losing gamble of bringing kids into a doomed world.

After that post, I’m sure my readership (I like that word because it suggests a vast following) was screaming into their computer screens, “Lighten up, man! We expect end-times talk from guys with signs on street corners—or from that buzz-kill trio with megaphones outside Nationals Park this past season. Stick with what you do best, Ries: complaining about shit in a self-effacing but amusing way, with a stray optimistic thought sometimes thrown in.”

I heard you, imagined voices! I really did. In fact, I had a post planned in my head that would talk about all the senior citizens I’ve volunteer-visited over the years. About how I never really know what they’re all about, because by the time I enter their lives their memories are failing and/or the narratives they’ve constructed over the decades have calcified into their own reality. A reality that may be the truth, but that in many key respects probably isn’t.

So, OK, it wasn’t going to be a happy piece, exactly. But it was going to have a bittersweet tone. Note that “sweet” is part of that.

What had brought all of that to mind was the recent experience of my friend Bob. Or, rather, his recent experience as told by him.

Bob is 92, and in many respects his mind remains sharp—as evidenced by the fact that he’s always asking me if I’ve yet ordered on Amazon that CD or transistor radio or talking watch for him that my younger and theoretically sharper brain has completely forgotten about. Bob recently lost his only surviving sibling, a sister who was only 80, to brain cancer. He’d known she was dying, and had spoken to her on the phone many times during the months of her decline. But, as Bob tells the story, he didn’t learn of her death until two days after the fact—and then was prevented from attending the service, which was local, by his sister’s only child. This woman is in her 50s. Bob describes her as “liking  to control things.”

According to Bob, the daughter wouldn’t tell him where the service was being held, even after he told her he could get a ride. He then appealed to his late sister’s husband, who Bob has long characterized to me as reticent and ineffectual. The brother-in-law shruggingly responded, Bob said, that he was “between the devil and the deep blue sea” in this matter—the implication being that his own daughter was the devil and that he risked sleeping with the fishes were he to tell Bob where and when the funeral service was being held.

My first and natural instinct was to mourn for my elderly friend who’d lost his last remaining family member and closest confidante—they spoke at least weekly on the phone, and she sometimes came to visit, bearing new shirts and pants and other items that her nearly blind and ambulatorily unsteady brother couldn’t shop for himself. Not only had he lost her, but he’d had no closure on her death—no funeral service, no chance to mourn with a community of family and friends who’d loved his sister, too. Not even a program or memorializing obituary to which he could cling. If the latter existed, I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Internet.

Bob was able to cull from the brother-in-law that his sister’s ashes had been scattered on a section of Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach that is reserved for such purposes. So, no cemetery to visit, either. I’m loath to drive Bob anywhere because he’s so feeble, and I haven’t done so for years. But I would’ve gladly driven him to his sister’s grave site, were she to have had one.

I’d better get to the point, because right now I’m telling you about what I was going to write about today, and I haven’t yet gotten around to what I am going to address.

To make a long story shorter, I e-mailed a niece of Bob’s—the daughter of a brother of his who died 30 years ago—to inform her of her aunt’s death and her uncle’s loss, if she didn’t know already. Which I figured was distinctly possible, given that this niece, too, lives locally, but she’s seen Bob in the flesh exactly once, to my knowledge, in the many years I’ve known him. In fact, I had served as go-between for that lone meeting, which struck me as odd at the time. But, whatever.

So, the niece e-mailed me back. She’d had no idea her aunt had died. She thanked me for letting her know. She said that she would write “Bobby” a note of condolence. Within her short reply, she also referenced her family’s indifference to her “outreach” efforts in the years since her father’s death. She alluded to “strange family dynamics.”

No kidding! It was then that I fully realized something that I’d already been thinking about at some level: I know nothing about the Bob who preceded our acquaintance. I know the outlines—his long marriage; how he tended to his wife in her Alzheimer’s years; his career as a bank teller and later, in semi-retirement, as a seller of fine pens; stories here and there about his family and his schooling; hobbies such as his lifelong love of watches. (I’ve worn a hole in the carpets of a jeweler in Alexandria buying new batteries for his vast array of timepieces. Or, I did, until his eyesight deteriorated to the point where he no longer can tell when time stands still.)

But what do I really know about Bob? About his familial relationships, for instance? How do I know that he didn’t somehow make himself persona non grata with his sister’s family? Why, for that matter, has the one niece with whom I’ve communicated largely snubbed Bob in the years that I’ve known him? I used to simply assume that she’s a self-centered bitch. But perhaps Bob had been among those family members who’d been insufficiently “there” for her upon her father’s death and had then rejected her overtures.

Twice in e-mails this niece has written to me “He’ll always be Bobby to me.” Why? What does that mean? So, I asked her. In an e-mail, I also asked if she has any idea what the real story might be about the alleged funeral-service snub. I conceded that it’s really none of my business, but added that I’d like to be able to sort out—or at least have some insight into—an elderly friend’s past, for a change.

I’ve run into this many times, and it always drives me a little crazy. Why? Yes, my wife is right—I’m nosy as hell. But also, I like these people. I care about them. But I see only a single puzzle piece of their totality. I wonder what the big picture once looked like. I wonder what my elderly friends loved and loathed in their prime, what they cared about the most. Who they were, when they were fully themselves—as opposed to the diminished and circumscribed fragments of themselves that I now see before me.

Just to name a few of them, there was Helen, who’d been a nurse and a doctor’s wife and an avid tennis player and swimmer, but whose divorce, progressively debilitating MS, and bouts with cancer had rendered her bitter and cantankerous (to be kind) by the time we met, but who lit up when talking about the fine arts and her travel days, and who always thanked me for coming. There was Phyllis, who’d put her heart and soul into raising her three boys, but couldn’t remember much about them to tell me. They and I finally met at her memorial service, where they regarded me warily, as if fearing I was about to become rich in a recently rewritten will.

There was Marianthe, who’d run a Greek restaurant in DC back in the day with her late husband, and who was mortal assisted-living enemies with Augusta, whose son in California either was a saint or a bastard, depending on whether Augusta or the man’s son was telling the story. And there was Jean, who’d once helped Rachel Carson research Silent Spring, and who dreamily invited me to her family’s island retreat on the St Lawrence River at a time when it was clear that she herself never would see it again.

Bob’s niece didn’t reply to my e-mail. Which was neither surprising nor in any way offensive, given the buttinsky nature of my request.

Anyway, what all this is meant to say is that I’d planned to make this entire blog post about the strangeness of time, age, perception, family, and the role of the volunteer. It wasn’t going to be an uplifting piece, but I was going to end it on a note of my affection for all the seniors I’ve known in this capacity. I was going to emphasize that I think of each of them often, and always fondly--for who they were in our specific context, not for who they may really have been over the course of their lifetime. Even though, yes, I always end up wishing I’d known more about all that stuff.   

Which would’ve made for, as I noted several hundred words ago, a bittersweet post. But at least not a dark one, coming on the heels of my subtly titled “Sing a Song of Armageddon” entry.

OK, I guess at this point I sort of have written that post, anyway. But now—and this part will end up being way shorter than I’d planned it to be when I first sat down—here’s what’s topmost on my mind today, blog-wise.

Last Thursday, the media again dug up Brad Bishop. Literally, sort of.

Surely you remember him. He’s the guy who, in 1976, bludgeoned his wife, three sons and widowed mother to death in their Bethesda home, piled the bodies into the family station wagon, burned them in a shallow grave in northeastern North Carolina, later abandoned the car in the Smoky Mountains, then infamously vanished into history. Given that he was a State Department diplomat who spoke five languages and was an avid outdoorsman, the thinking was that he might have hidden at first in a remote area of Europe and later built himself a life overseas.

I first wrote about him in June 2012, then returned to the subject in April of this year, when the FBI moved to heat up a very cold case by placing the now-78-year-old fugitive on its Ten Most Wanted list. I admit to having a morbid fascination with killers, particularly those who pile on the bodies. It bums Lynn out and can put a real damper on cocktail-party conversations. I often run by the former Bishop house, which is just a few miles from my own, and I think about the murders, and Bishop, a lot. Part of me enjoys imagining the scene of the Smartest Man in the Room being ripped off of his comfy fireside chair in an Alpine ski lodge by an Interpol SWAT team, being extradited back to Maryland, standing trial, and ultimately spending what’s left of his dotage being anally penetrated in prison.

But then, last week, a Washington Post headline screamed (OK, it didn’t scream, but I nearly did when I read the story), “Exhumed Body in Alabama Could Be Notorious Bethesda Fugitive Brad Bishop.” In a nutshell, a recent re-airing of the case on CNN led to a tip that a “John Doe” who’d been struck by a car and killed in Jackson County, Alabama, on October 18, 1981, looked remarkably similar to Brad Bishop. The John Doe’s autopsy photo was pulled, and the likeness was deemed compelling enough to dig up the casket. Forensic samples were sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia. Where, within a few weeks, we’re told, the case of the fugitive Brad Bishop may at last be solved.

Even if it is not resolved, in some senses. If the body is Bishop’s, we’ll never know why he did it, or where he spent those five years between the killings and his own death. For years I knew the street on which the Bishop residence was located but not the house number. And I’d long thought that this was a head-scratching case of responsible-family-man-inexplicably-turned-savage-murderer. But then all of a sudden my Google searches started turning up results they never used to. The house number suddenly was everywhere. (Prompting me this spring to drive over there, take pictures, and make Lynn eye me more nervously that she had before.) Also, the Internet now is rife with mentions of Bishop’s having been under psychiatric care in the years before the murders. And also, of his having been a huge narcissist whose own mother once had scolded him at a dinner party for his rudeness toward others, and had warned him of a “comeuppance” that she might have lived to see, if her rude son hadn’t first crushed in her skull with a household tool.

So, if the body exhumed in Alabama—which belonged, according to eyewitnesses, to a shambling, middle-aged-looking man who was wearing several layers of clothing at the time he was killed—does prove to be that of Brad Bishop, it shouldn’t come as any huge surprise. Alabama isn’t terribly far from the Smoky Mountains, and the journey from one place to the other may have been roughly as linear as might have been a mentally ill man’s journey from respectability, to homicidal rage, to cognitive descent into foggy homelessness and heedless perambulation.

But I have to concede, I’ll feel some disappointment if that proves to be the case. Not that I’ve ever felt that Brad Bishop deserved the decades of freedom I’ve imagined for him. But, rather, because I relished thinking of him sitting pretty, smugly convinced that he’d gotten away with murder, only to find that all his linguistic brilliance and cunning couldn’t save him from justice in the end. (And I do mean “the end.” See that earlier prison reference.)

Last week’s Washington Post story quoted a now-retired State Department colleague of Bishop’s, Roy Harrell, on the matter of “comeuppance.” He says he was sitting at the dinner table with Bishop and his family in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1965 or 1966. The final line of the Post article was this:

“Regarding the possibility of Bishop being run over by a car, Harrell said, ‘I would think that this is what his mother referred to as his comeuppance.’”

Maybe. But I personally think she would have preferred my scenario—self-proclaimed criminal mastermind rotting in prison (there being no death penalty in Maryland)—rather than the image of some addled bum shambling aimlessly down the road one second, dead the next.

See? That’s dark. But nowhere near as dark as Armageddon. The Bishop story may even have a happy ending, depending on how you define such things.

Sing a Song of Armageddon

One of the more surprising career resurgences of 2014 has been that of song parodist Weird Al Yankovic, who’s roughly my age and was last big news decades ago. Well, a parody has been running through my head recently, but I won’t share it with Weird Al because I’ve only gotten as far as the title and, more problematically, it doesn’t lend itself to the upbeat humor for which Weird Al is so well known and celebrated.

There’s a scene in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall—which coincidentally dates back to 1977, even before Weird Al’s heyday—in which Allen’s character, Alvy, comes to a third-rate nightclub to hear Annie make her singing debut. She battles the bad sound system and noisy and inattentive crowd through a tentative rendering of the classic song “Seems Like Old Times,” which had been a big radio hit in the 1940s. It’s a sweet scene in the film, coming at an early moment in a young woman’s quest for identity and a fledgling couple’s hope for intimacy. Afterward, Alvy addresses Annie’s self-criticism with a first kiss on a New York City sidewalk.

The thing is, though, my parodic song title is “Seems Like End Times.” It’s a recognition of the sorry and worsening state of world affairs. And the only thing funny about that is that it’s the one point on which fundamentalist Christians and I agree in principle, if not in context or details. Which isn’t funny ha-ha, anyway, but, rather, funny-odd, in that I otherwise have very little in common with a demographic that thinks things like gay marriage and legal abortion are hastening the Final Judgment.

It’s not same-sex matrimony, the right to abort a zygote, or Middle Eastern tumult that's been given a wacky biblical spin that I worry about. And I’ll be among the more surprised guys on the planet if Armageddon plays out in exactly the way the fundamentalists expect, with a climactic battle between the Messiah and the Antichrist, the righteous being lifted up to Heaven while the rest of us wail and gnash our teeth, and I don’t know what else. I’ll go directly to Hell, maybe, without passing “Go” or collecting $200. I’m so not a biblical scholar that I had to Google even the preceding recap, which probably leaves out many juicy details.

Anyway. What I worry about are little things like the fact that wars are being waged all over the globe, millions of people are dispossessed, overpopulation continues unabated (while we in America celebrate loony incubators like the Duggar family), the climate’s done for, entire categories of jobs are gone for good, political will and public tolerance for hard decisions are nonexistent, and oh, yeah, enough nuclear weapons still exist to annihilate humankind many times over. Sorry if I left out a thousand or three reasons for near-suicidal despair, but you can be sure they’re on some level further swelling the worry-tumor in my brain.

Given the enormity of that clusterfuck (a vulgarity that nevertheless seems abundantly apt here), you wouldn’t think that I’d still have the time and energy to get outraged about things like America’s gun-nut culture or the fact that most US citizens polled think it’s fine to call a football team the Redskins when you’d never call a Native American such a degrading thing to his or her face. But those quibbles are peripheral to the end times discussion, because paranoia and racial insensitivity, as bad as they are, are way less lethal than are jihadists and other murderous bullies, the ravages of climate change and the exponential growth of the world’s population.

My take, in a nutshell, is, if you don’t think we’re screwed, you’re not paying the slightest bit of attention. I’m not sure when the tipping point was reached, but I don’t think it’s even within sight anymore. There’s a deadly Catch-22 in play: It’s easiest for people to think rationally and charitably—to look beyond their own needs and wants, and toward the greater good—when things are calm and they don't feel threatened. In the world of 2014, everyone feels threatened in some way. Calm is illusory, and temporary at best. It’s not an environment that’s friendly to altruism, or even to enlightened self-interest. The Enlightment, such as it was, was so 18th century.

Speaking of days of yore, I’ve written before about how I love going to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Part of it surely is the giddy mix of alcohol, skin and Elizabethan vaudeville. But it’s alarmingly easy, in this day and age, to romanticize and even luxuriate in an era in which life was short and brutish, true, and deodorant was unknown, but also in which so much that’s frighteningly out of control in the contemporary world hadn’t even started yet. The Earth then was under-populated. The Industrial Revolution was centuries off, so the ozone layer was happily intact. There were dukes in the palaces, not nukes in the silos.

Walking through Revel Grove—as the Renaissance Festival’s woodsy grounds are cheesily dubbed—a couple of Saturday or Sundays each fall is a dependably delightful distraction from the world as it is, and, I believe, ever shall be. Until the world, for all recognizable intents and purposes, simply isn’t anymore. Which will happen, I fear, much sooner than later. I’ll be surprised, in fact, if something akin to anarchy doesn’t reach even the DC suburbs in my lifetime.

Cheery thought, that! If it sounds as if I’ve given up hope, it’s because I have. But does that mean I’ve given up on living? Hardly. There’s a lot of beauty in the world. I’m blessed with an amazing family and friends. I’m gainfully employed. Roof over my head, AC in summer and heat in winter, food in my gut? Check, check and check. I’ve got the time and means to escape to the Renaissance, to movies, to music that moves me to in-car harmonies no one should ever have to hear. When I feel like it, I post to this blog, and a few people even read it.

I’m not saying I haven’t had a good time. But all time is borrowed now. I truly believe that. Technology won’t save us from ourselves, although it will provide more distractions as the ship continues sinking. By the 2060s, even insolated America may well look more like Mad Max than the Mad Men of a century before. Good luck getting WiFi when there’s no more electrical grid.   

No, I can’t see even a clever artist like Weird Al taking my premise and song title and turning it into comic gold. On the other hand, though, maybe fundamentalist Christians could play the song straight, supplying their own suitably dire lyrics about man’s folly and God’s wrath.

Except that the word “seems” in "Seems Like End Times" sounds too tentative. For both the fundamentalists and for me, now that I really think about it.

Holden Steady

The best obituary I’ve ever read is a tribute to my favorite novel.

I was going to write “the best novel I ever read” because that would have made for a better sentence. But I don’t suppose The Catcher in the Rye is the best novel I ever read, in terms of language and plot. Although I’m not a huge reader of novels and have terribly retention of the ones I have read, I seem to recall that Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys blew me away, for instance. But if I’m honest with myself, I have to concede that, even though it sounds unoriginal and probably dated in the year 2014 to say so, Catcher, the coming-of-age classic from 1951, is the novel I most cherish within my admittedly limited sample size.

You’d think I’d remember how old I was when I first read it, but I don’t. I probably was in my late teens. I definitely hadn’t yet come of age, although I’m not quite sure what that even means, or whether I ever made that transition. It seems to connote a level of maturity or comfort in one’s own skin that, by the end of The Catcher in the Rye, seems perhaps graspable for protagonist Holden Caulfield, but remains tentative. I still feel that way much of the time, even now, about my own maturity and self-assurance.

Anyway, last week on public radio’s The Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor quoted the book’s revolutionary-in-its-time first line on the 63rd anniversary of Catcher’s publication. It reads, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” The recitation brought back to me how Holden’s voice and worldview are there from the get-go, and how I knew at that moment I knew this was a story I wanted to hear, as opposed to read. (If you don’t know the difference, you’re probably more into that David Copperfield kind of crap than I am.)

Much has been written over the decades about how JD Salinger’s story of a young prep school kid trying to figure out life transcends its privileged trappings to become a universal tale of every teen’s struggles with peer pressure, sexuality, adult hypocrisy, grief and all the other things that stretch a young person’s ability to cope. I certainly felt immediately that I’d found a friend and fellow traveler in Holden, as so many other readers had—and presumably still do, although with the Internet and social media the escape routes from feelings of emotional isolation that now are available to young people are multitudinous.

And then, of course, interest in and attention to The Catcher in the Rye were rekindled in early 2010 by the death of Salinger at age 91. We were reminded at that time that Holden’s creator had been not only a longtime recluse but also a seeming creep who fed on impressionable young women and couldn’t take a compliment on his work without shaking his fist and screaming at you to get the hell off his lawn. While he shared some of Holden’s crankiness, Salinger didn’t seem like a guy who his vulnerable but essentially hopeful literary creation would’ve much liked.

What I loved about the obituary of Salinger, though, was that it ignored all that and reconciled author and protagonist in a send-up that was worthy of Catcher itself. It ran not in the New York Times, but, naturally, in The Onion. And, despite the outsized impact that Salinger’s slim output had on 20th century literature, the obit was far from Dickens-sized. Like Catcher, it was short and packed with attitude. Its headline was “Bunch of Phonies Mourn JD Salinger.” Here it is in its entirety:

In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author JD Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. “He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers,” said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don’t have to look at them for four years. “There will never be another voice like his.” Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it’s just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything. 

Ha! If that isn’t perfect, I don’t know what is.

Just a few days after Garrison Keillor’s notation of the publication anniversary, I was walking back to my car, having completed my Sunday-morning run. I was on MacArthur Boulevard in Cabin John. I’m used to peering down at cigarette butts, beer cans and other litter, despite the best efforts of Adopt-a-Road monitor Kepler Framing, in the person of our delightfully eccentric friend Ritch Kepler. But this time I happened upon a rarity—a book. It was rain-soaked but readable, open to a spread of pages. At first I passed it by, but then my curiosity got the better of me. I wondered what book it was.

You know where I’m going with this, but I’m not making this up. It really was The Catcher in the Rye. It was open to the chapter in which this girl named Sally suggests that she and Holden go skating at the Radio City ice rink, and Holden figures out that the reason she’s so “hot to go” is that she “wanted to see herself in one of those little skirts that just come down over their butt and all.” In a scene that well-represents the entire book, Holden kind of hates the superficial Sally and feels sorry for her at the same time, because she’s a terrible skater and is killing her ankles. He’s also chagrined to concede “how cute her little ass looked” in the skating skirt.

I saw the book’s roadside presence as a sign that I must in some way blog about The Catcher in the Rye. I just didn’t know quite what I wanted to say about it. Then, yesterday, I saw a link from the Washington Post to a piece about how Bethesda has made some group’s list of the “Top 10 Snobbiest Small Cities in America.” I clicked on it since I, too, think Bethesda is incredibly snobby (even though it’s my mailing address), and I was ready to read this vindication of my view. As it turned out, however, the designation was misleading. A real estate website had assigned the ranking to Bethesda based on such measures as household income, education levels and private school attendance, rather than having made any attempt to tabulate and quantify the stuck-up unpleasantness of the citizenry.

Well, no matter, I thought. Cabin John is essentially Bethesda, and surely I could figure out something clever to say about having found a book that indicts phonies blithely chucked aside in a town that’s full of them. Except that I spent the next several days thinking on it and came up with nothing beyond the basic premise. And anyway, I got to thinking, are snobs and phonies precisely synonymous? Also, isn’t one of the points of The Catcher in the Rye to point out that nobody is pure, and that a certain amount of “phoniness” is acceptable and even necessary, lest the societal order fall apart?

The task I’d laid out for myself started to seem too complicated, contrived, even boring to complete. And why should anything related to The Catcher in the Rye run the risk of being boring, when the novel is anything but?

That’s when I thought about the obituary, which actually is posted on my office bulletin board.

It’s great, as is the novel it parodies and celebrates. And that’s the heart of what I really wanted to say today about The Catcher in the Rye. There's no need to complicate things and get all David Copperfield about it.

Burlesque

What do Ann B Davis, Huntz Hall, Dick Cheney and OJ Simpson have in common? This, believe it or not, had been my quandary until I forged a connection.

Most people know Dick Cheney as the scary former vice president of the United States and OJ Simpson as a first-rate football player, turned second-rate actor, turned victor of a third-rate trial prosecuted by the biggest gang of idiots not proudly billed as such on the masthead of Mad magazine.

Fewer people might know that Ann B. Davis played Alice the housekeeper on TV’s The Brady Bunch four-plus decades ago, although her recent death highlighted that fact.

For every 10 people who recognize Ann B. Davis’s name, however, there may be one or two who remember—or who knew in the first place, particularly if they’re younger than me —that Huntz Hall played a buffoonish street not-so-tough named Horace Debussy “Satch” Jones in the  “Bowery Boys” film series in the 1950s, serving as comic foil to tough-guy Slip Mahoney (portrayed by Leo Gorcey). When I was a kid in New Jersey in the 1960s, Bowery Boys films seemingly were as omnipresent on weekend daytime TV as Law and Order reruns now are on cable TV at every hour. The comic patter went like this: Satch would ask, “Should we sympatize [sic] our watches, Slip?” and his hotheaded mentor would respond, “Ah, you’ll need sympaty when I get through witcha!" This was when Slip wasn’t grabbing Satch’s hat off his head and slapping him across the face with it. Satch nevertheless remained intensely loyal to his abusive buddy, and somehow by the end of the films’ hour-long running time the duo and their pals would solve some crime that had stymied the coppers and help put the bad guys in the slammer.

Anyway, when Ann B Davis died a few weeks ago, the Washington Post ran a nostalgic tribute—partially to the actress and partially to the hokey wholesomeness of her TV character and the show on which she’d appeared. Predictably, the piece elicited a letter to the editor from a reader lamenting the ceding of precious up-front space to an actress whose main claim to fame had been a supporting role in a cheesy old sitcom. I write “predictably” because, for every letter/e-mail writer advocating that this or that hard-news topic receive more/better/at least some space on the front page, there’s always another writer decrying all the doom and gloom on 1A and asking why the deathly seriousness of it all can’t sometimes be leavened by good news and happy stories—such as fond salutes to dearly departed actresses and the campily endearing characters they once played on TV.

“Wait, where’s he going with all this?” you're asking. Hold on a minute while I connect the first two dots, then the third and fourth.

The letter writer who had dissed Ann B Davis’s front-page treatment had sarcastically asked, “Can we now expect a retrospective of Huntz Hall (‘The Enfant Terrible of the Bowery Boys’)?” The comparison seems obscure here in 2014 until you factor in the fact that, at age almost-56, I'm probably on the young side for newspaper readers in the digital age. To my utter delight, one of those aging readers proved to be Huntz Hall’s son. Who, in what's perhaps a cosmic nod to a young Huntz Hall's appearance in 1938's Angels With Dirty Faces, is the dean of the Washington National Cathedral.

“As an Episcopal priest and the son of actor Huntz Hall,” Gary Hall’s letter began, “I am perfectly positioned to respond to a churlish letter [‘Too Much for a Second Banana,’ Free for All, June 7] objecting to the front-page obituary of Ann B Davis.” Hall the Younger went on to decry the writer’s denigration of his dad, proudly noting that “No less an authority than Groucho Marx called my father 'the American Chaplin.’” Gary Hall praised Davis, who had led a religious later life, as a “faithful and selfless church person,” and concluded that “My father would have been proud to have been mentioned in her company, even if ironically.”

It was an awesome letter for many reasons, although it did make me wonder what Groucho Marx had been smoking, or if Gary Hall doesn’t always recognize sarcasm, or what. (For all of Huntz Hall’s comedic talent, I wouldn’t quite equate the Little Tramp with the B-Movie Lummox.) Why was the son's letter awesome? Huntz Hall, a significant TV presence of my youth, now had been mentioned not once, but twice, in the year 2014 in a major American newspaper. A crabby Ann B Davis detractor had been devastatingly slammed by no less authoritative a figure than the closest living relative of the actor to whom said detractor had disparagingly compared her. And, of particular importance to me, Hall’s letter gave me a way to bring Dick Cheney and OJ Simpson into today’s post.

Two words here: second banana.

Bear with me, because I really want to say a few words about Cheney’s idiotic recent pronouncements about Iraq, and also to reflect briefly on the 20th anniversary of the OJ Simpson trial. And Ann B Davis and Huntz Hall have provided my thread.

It wasn’t until I read Gary Hall’s letter that I was reminded of the earlier letter’s headline. That got me to thinking about how the term “second banana”—much like the names “Ann B. Davis” and “Huntz Hall,” as a matter of fact—aren’t often seen in the pages of modern publications. Given that I, too, am a product of an earlier era, I recognized “second banana” as meaning “sidekick” or “number two” or “also-ran.” When I looked up its origins on the Internet, I discovered that the term dates back to burlesque acts in the vaudeville era. During a show’s finale, showgirls would bunch together in a banana-shaped formation, making the center showgirl the “top banana.” In comedy acts, then, the straight man to the headlining comedian became known as the second banana.

This got me to thinking about how Cheney, as vice president, had been grim straight man to George W Bush’s comedy act of stumblebum policymaking and mush-mouthed malapropisms. And how OJ Simpson had been a lightweight second-tier actor before starring in a farcical trial that ended in his literally getting away with murder.

Next, I took the dictionary one step further, looking up the word “burlesque.” This really was where everything came together for me.

Here’s Google’s definition of burlesque: “An absurd or comically exaggerated imitation of something; a parody.”

Why, I thought, Google might just as well have been defining “Recent Dick Cheney editorial in the Wall Street Journal” or “OJ Simpson trial from start to finish”!

In that recent editorial, the oft-heart-attacked Man Who Will Not Die and his daughter Liz added new dimensions to gall by essentially opining that Iraq’s current chaos is all President Obama’s fault, and that the current commander in chief is, in fact, “on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.” This from the man who, as vice president, was integral to all the bad decisions that have brought Iraq to where it is today. As even Megyn Kelly of typically Cheney-friendly Fox News was compelled to remind him this week, “You said there was no doubt Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the Iraqi insurgency was in its last throes back in 2005. And you said that with our intervention, extremists would have to rethink their strategy of jihad.”

My point here is not to point out the myriad ways in which Cheney was wrong. That’s being done very effectively across the news media this week, by seemingly every outlet and commentator except maybe Aryan News Today. Which, if it exists, displays as its logo a lynched black man who looks suspiciously like Barack Obama.

No, my point is return to that definition of burlesque and note the parodic absurdity of Cheney’s claims. While I’m at it, I also would like to say, in my own defense, that there are good reasons I didn’t alert the world to the satanic horns atop Cheney’s head when I interviewed him in his House office as a Capitol Hill intern back in 1979. I was young and nervous, and he had hair then to cover his demonic protrusions. Also, his tail was out of view, because he was sitting behind a desk.

Which brings me to OJ Simpson. People who are old enough to have followed that trial live vividly remember the array of comically exaggerated absurdities—ranging from but not limited to the endemic racism within the LAPD, the inept prosecutors, egocentric and grandstanding Judge Lance Ito, the low-speed chase by the allegedly suicidal defendant, the high theater and low comedy of a pair of moisture-shrunken gloves somehow failing to fit OJ’s hands, and finally, of course, the all-counts acquittal in the face of overwhelming DNA and circumstantial evidence, thanks both to those prosecutorial blunders and the long legacy of institutional racism in the United States.                

While we’re on the subject of burlesque, the trial anniversary also has brought up the dark comedies of the two decades since. Such as the fact that Simpson ended up in prison anyway, for his role in a bungled burglary of stuff he used to own. And the fact that surely he’s still telling anyone who’ll listen that while he is languishing in a jail cell, the “real killers” of his ex-wife and her friend Ron Goldman remain at liberty and unpunished. And the fact that, before Simpson was jailed, his search for those killers seemed to be conducted strictly on golf courses. And the fact that, even now, race relations in this country are such that the prevailing postmortem on the trial among black Americans seems to be, “OK, OJ probably was guilty, but hey, how many black men continue to be racially profiled and unjustly railroaded in America? Score one for our side.”

So, there it is: Second bananas. They’re sometimes benign, like Ann B Davis and Huntz Hall. They’re sometimes pure evil, like Dick Cheney. They can be deadly, like OJ Simpson. And yeah, they may even provide a pretty weak unifying theme for a guy who wants to cover the waterfront in a single blog post.

Road Trip

The road trip is this near-mythical American concept, born of equal parts Manifest Destiny, Henry Ford and evocations in popular culture. To me, those two words conjure Kerouac’s On the Road, which I haven’t read. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, which I have, and Paul Simon’s song America—the latter having been revitalized in my memory by the recent discovery of an improbable version by the British prog-rock band Yes that I found on an added-tracks CD of 1971’s Fragile.

In Simon’s bittersweet Vietnam-era travelogue there’s the line “Michigan seems like a dream to me now.” Well, so, too, does my own April 13-19 journey through the American South. While it was happening I took daily notes, with the intention of ending my self-imposed blog hiatus with an amazing, revelatory addition to the Great American Road Trip canon. In my mind, this idiosyncratic yet deeply insightful piece not only would elicit gasps of admiration from my tiny but loyal readership, but somehow would find its way to a wider audience, leading to a book deal or at least to an invitation to blog for pay on some hotshot website.

But when I came off the road, it seemed as if there were many demands on my time more compelling than sitting down at the PC in a protracted struggle to shape my experiences into something literarily memorable. There not only was that pesky paying job that again was taking up so much of my time, but there were newspapers and magazines to read, e-mails to write, texts to send and TV shows to watch. Indeed, even though the editing project that had been the putative cause of the hiatus was done, not even an automotive odyssey trip through seven states and across 2,400 miles in six days had changed the fact that blogging is work, and that my work ethic isn’t the best. Would I like to be known far and wide as a brilliant writer? You bet! Am I—have I ever been—willing to put in the time and effort to hone those skills and truly develop whatever talent I might have? Not so much.

Still, there are certain things I want to relate to you about what truly was a memorable trip—one that came about because Lynn’s and my friend Julie Smith wanted to show her English second cousin Danny Pickwell a bit of America on his first journey stateside.

Now, if I were to have written the rich and multifaceted travel opus I’d originally conceived, there’d have been a lot in there—in a much longer post than this one—about the many charms of the tireless Julie, who got stuck with the vast majority of the driving because I can’t (physically or legally) drive a stick shift, and because Danny didn’t feel entirely comfortable driving on the “wrong” side of the road. I would have tried to convey, too, why and how much I enjoyed the company of the affable Englishman, who runs a bed and breakfast back home and surely is the perfect host.

But, for the purposes of this lazy-assed abbreviation of my road trip story, suffice it to say that I can scarcely imagine two people with whom I’d rather have shared close quarters for multiple days while constantly snacking, singing badly to various musical genres, and popping in and out of truck stop megastores so jam-packed with junk foods, automotive supplies and electronic gadget as to make one simultaneously awed and appalled to live in a nation whose carbon footprint is so grievously outsized.

So, let me first related the itinerary, then bullet-point the highlights.

We set off from Julie’s house in Sterling, Virginia, and reached Nashville, Tennessee, that first day. We subsequently traveled through Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, the Mississippi city of Hattiesburg (where Julie’s English mum incongruously lives), and New Orleans, then headed back via the Gulf Coast all the way to Pensacola, Florida, through Alabama to Athens, Georgia (home of Julie’s adult son Tanner), and back to Sterling.

Highlights:

Graceland. In the 19th century, cotton was king in the South, but by the latter half of the 20th century the King was Elvis Presley. So, we hardly could take an English tourist through the region without paying tribute to the King at his home in Memphis.

I’d never been to Graceland, but I thought I knew what to expect: Kitsch overload. Ostentation, tacky furnishings, an onslaught of gift shops bursting with tacky souvenirs. An ambiance that was in keeping with the man himself: a huge talent who wasted and prematurely lost his life in an excess of food, booze and pills.

What I saw and discovered, much to my surprise, delight and sorrow, was a moving memorial to a devoted family man and generous philanthropist whose descent into dissolution was tragic, but which didn’t negate all that was admirable in his musical and personal legacy.

I was surprised by the modesty and lack of grandiosity of everything from the house and grounds to the portrait of the man painted by the audio tour and the photo-rich memorabilia. Yes, I know that Graceland, as a money-making enterprise, is dedicated to burnishing Elvis’s image, but I learned a lot that added dimension to the flat and rather clownish image I’d had of a sultry superstar gone fat and stoned. Particularly moving were the joyful reminiscences of her dad by Lisa Marie, who’s always come off in public as a rather cold and unsympathetic figure.

There is what only can be described as a riot of gift shops, however. And my Graceland umbrella, purchased in response to that day’s downpour, lasted fully one day before it fell apart. And no, Elvis’s decorating style wasn’t the classiest, as evinced by the carpeted walls of the stairwell leading to the King’s faux-safari room.

Clarksburg, Mississippi. You know that Cream song “Crossroads”? It’s not a Cream song. It was written by Delta bluesman Robert Johnson in 1936. The crossroads to which he was referring are in Clarksburg. We stayed there overnight, at a great ramshackle cluster of lodgings called the Shack Up Inn. Julie found it for us on the Internet. The owners have moved and refurbished a collection of old sharecropper shacks. Mine was named Pinetop in honor of bluesman Pinetop Perkins.

While in Clarksburg, we heard live Delta blues at Red’s, a bona fide juke joint that is dumpy, tiny, smoky and wonderful. There, I happily burst my eardrums and washed down my two coleslaw sandwiches (there was nothing else vegetarian on the menu) with an 18-ounce Budweiser.

Clarksburg also is the home of the Delta Blues Museum, which we toured, and the Ground Zero blues bar, which is partly owned by Mississippi native son Morgan Freeman. We lunched at Ground Zero, where I feasted on a soul food vegetable plate that included one of the best pieces of cornbread I’ve ever eaten.

Also in Clarksburg, I added Mississippi to the list of states in which I’ve run for one uninterrupted hour. It was chilly and windy that particular morning, and I got no sense that passing motorists had any inkling of the history being made on their roadside. But I was psyched, and afterward I allowed myself a few mini-doughnuts from the Shack Up’s version of a continental breakfast spread, which was limited to a few pastries and coffee.

New Orleans. This wasn’t the stuff of Mardi Gras. It was a cold day; the parade of naked women Julie had assured us we’d see failed to materialize, to Danny’s and my bitter disappointment; and our streetcar ride was intermittent and confusing due to construction on the trolley line. But we got a great walking tour of the French Quarter that included a raised cemetery and the House of the Rising Sun, I snapped pictures of Danny stuffing his face with crawfish, and at Julie’s urging we went that night to a dueling-piano bar that was so cheesy that, with the aid of a few ridiculously alcoholic hurricanes, it was fantastic. Four female pianists alternated taking pop-song requests from the audience and reducing each to its two-minute essence. A sloppy cross-section of America enthusiastically if not tunefully harmonized.

Photographs. This was my first road big road trip with an iPhone, so I took a lot of pictures. This was a highlight for me because of the ability my phone afforded me to indiscriminately shoot, and the gratification of being able to instantly view every single poorly composed, badly lit and blurry image.

Actually, some shots turned out pretty well. Among my favorites were interior shots at Graceland and exterior shots of the rustic and rusty Shack Up Inn grounds; a fish skeleton on the beach in Long Beach, Mississippi; a line of urinals in rainbow colors behind  a casino in Biloxi where construction was being conducted; the juxtaposition within a Gulf Coast strip mall of The Wireless Center and End Time Ministries (enjoy broadband access while awaiting Armageddon!); close-ups of a pelican and a heron at a downtown Tallahassee park; and shots of Danny modeling cowboy hats at a huge discount store in North Carolina on our journey’s final day.

So, that was my road trip. It wasn’t bawdy like Kerouac’s, or topical like Steinbeck’s, or lyrical like Simon’s. It was personally memorable, though. And Danny has promised us Road Trip II: The English Leg when we can get over there. Maybe that will be the road trip that I’ll immortalize in brilliant prose. A Maryland Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or some such.

But I dunno. Sounds like a lot of work. Probably not.               

House of Kill Repute

We interrupt our Blog Hiatus to issue this important update to a June 2, 2012, Lassitude Come Home post titled “Grim-Reality TV.” In that account of my fascination with the all-murders-all-the-time cable television channel Investigation Discovery, I noted that I pass many known homicide sites during my runs through the outwardly safe neighborhoods of Bethesda and Washington, DC.

So, my update is this: As I wrote nearly two years ago, it’s been known for decades that Brad Bishop left the building on March 1, 1976. But this week, thanks to the FBI and the Washington Post. I finally learned the building’s exactly location. And this morning, I saw the building.

Or, rather, I saw it with fresh eyes. Not as just another ‘70s-style split-level set back from the road on leafy Lilly Stone Drive in Bethesda’s Carderock Springs subdivision, but as the house where a 39-year-old officer in the US Foreign Service on that late-winter day 37 years ago left his Foggy Bottom office early, withdrew money from his bank, purchased a ball-peen hammer at a hardware store, drove home, and bludgeoned to death his wife, three young sons and widowed mother.

I’d become aware of the case several years ago, when the Post ran a story about the home’s grim history from the quirky angle of its subsequent longtime owner’s utterly unconflicted delight at having gotten such a great deal on the cleaned-up mass-murder scene. That piece—which maddeningly placed the homeowner’s right to privacy above my yen for a house number on the named street— led me to the Internet, where I found other articles and the inevitable Wikipedia page for William Bradford Bishop, which told the complete story (but again, sans house number!) of the multilingual government employee’s partially successful attempt to burn the bodies in a remote section of northeast North Carolina and entirely successful escape from custody—his blood-stained station wagon having been found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park on March 18, 1976, and Brad Bishop himself having been found and brought to justice never.

The thinking back then, and now, was that a smart guy who spoke five languages fluently might easily be living under an assumed name and an acquired tongue somewhere in Europe. Indeed, there were a few alleged Bishop sightings in Sweden, Switzerland and Italy in the early years by people who knew the fugitive and were pretty damn sure it was he who they’d fleetingly seen. But even pleas for pre-smartphone crowdsourcing help on such real-crime TV shows as America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries yielded no significant leads.

For years, I’d run down Lilly Stone Drive and wondered Which House It Was, my Google searches having gotten me exactly as far at identifying the Death House as international law enforcement had gotten at tracking down the Bethesda Bludgeoner. I’d hoped forlornly for a momentarily icy wind, or a ghostly cry, or a couple of dog-walkers just happening to point at a house and remark within my earshot, “Who’d ever think five people would be pounded senseless with a household tool there!” Somehow, none of those things ever happened. The neighborhood pines whispered, but never any words I could understand.

Then, though, a few afternoons ago the Post’s daily headlines e-mail popped up on my office PC, coaxing me to drop what I was doing and to add a “hit” to the website’s numbers. This particular attempt succeeded, as one of the headlines proclaimed that, in an effort to revive interest and prompt new leads in this coldest of cold cases, Brad Bishop, now 77 years old (if alive), had been placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

While this news of course was of great interest to me—beyond my grim fascination with the case, I of course would like to see the cocky narcissist (as I see him) pay for his crimes—the article itself told me nothing that I, voracious reader of all things Bishop, didn’t already know. Well, it did remind me that he is an “alleged” mass murderer—all devils leaving blood-soak trails in their wake being innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. But I’d long known all the other things. Like how Brad Bishop’s sons had been ages 14, 10 and 5, his wife was 37 and his widowed mother was 68. And how, in addition to speaking French, Spanish, Italian and Serbo-Croatian, Bishop was an “avid outdoorsman” who’d  presumably be at home in the Black Forest or the Pyrenees, not to mention the Smoky Mountains in which he might have lingered if not for all the unfortunate notoriety.

But then I saw it: a link from the FBI article to a much-earlier Post story. The piece, dated February 22, 1977, was headlined, “Brad Bishop Home Sold Year After Family of Five Slain There.” In the article, Carolyn Gneiser—wife of the homeowner whose quotes I would read decades later—noted, “We renegotiated the price a little bit” after learning from a neighbor the grisly details their realtor had been loath to share. (No kidding!) The sentence that riveted my attention, however, was this: “When the Robert H. Gneiser family moves into the contemporary split-level house at 8103 Lilly Stone Drive next month, their neighbors are hoping the event will remove the specter that has haunted the Carderock Springs development in West Bethesda for the last year.”

Finally, an address!

So, after my Saturday run in Washington this morning, I drove to Lilly Stone Drive, found the house, parked my car, and walked up the driveway to get close enough to take a few pictures. Yes, if you’re wondering, I did feel like a ghoulish intruder and an insufficiently respectful trespasser. I abashedly waited to take a photo of the front mailbox until the street had cleared of traffic. As I neared the house itself, I mulled my possible responses to the shouts of a furious and possibly gun-toting Bob Gneiser. I was braced for him to run out the front door screaming, “The damn FBI, putting this back in the news! Get the hell off my property!”

Only, one of the first things I saw, after noting the utter blandness of the dated home (you’re not missing anything from my technological inability to post a photo here), was the diplomatic license plates on the lone car in the upper part of the driveway. That, and the fact that today’s newspaper hadn’t been brought inside, suggested to me that Bob Gneiser, too, has left the building, and that the foreign renters who succeeded him might not even be home.

Emboldened by the likelihood that I wouldn’t be chased off the premises at gunpoint, I proceeded to walk right up to the house and took a few pictures. I even took one at the back of the house. No one said “boo.” (Although under the circumstances, that exact comment would’ve sent me running even more surely than would have Bob Gneiser’s imagined gun.) I completed my reconnaissance work, got back in the car and drove home, which took all of five minutes.

I of course had to immediately share my best shot of the house with a few friends who know well my preoccupation with lethal crimes, even though I consider myself a pacifist and the National Rifle Association to be a terrorist organization. In my texts, I repeated the same joke I’d used in the 2012 blog post, about how I’d resisted the temptation to ring the doorbell and ask the man or lady of the house to pose for me with a catsup-soaked hammer.

But why, really, is my knowing Exactly Where It Happened so important to me? Why do I so relish the fact that, on future runs on Lilly Stone Drive, I’ll know the history of that one particular house?

I speculated back in 2012 that violence somehow is part of our DNA as Americans, whether it manifests in sociopathic ways or just weirdly prurient ones. Anyway, it’s probably a harmless interest on my part. I hope so. I think so.

But I also know—and I’m not proud of this—that I’d have gotten a real kick out of that red-hammer shot, had Sven the Diplomat materialized and been up for the gag.