With the trial of Ingmar Guandique for the 2001 slaying of Chandra Levy well underway here in DC, former California Congressman Gary Condit has been back in the news. This past week we learned two things: that the FBI found his semen on a pair of Levy’s panties following her disappearance, and that Condit is working on a book about what his son calls the “bad deal” his father got from the police and the press in the months before 9/11 swept the scandal from the national headlines.
I’m struck by the juxtaposition of those two pieces of information.
The broad outlines of the case are well known: Attractive Washington intern goes missing. It then turns out that her home district’s (married) “man in Washington” was in fact servicing his much younger constituent. Washington, DC, police focus almost exclusively on Condit as the suspect in the intern's disappearance rather than the young Salvadoran with the criminal record who’d assaulted other women in the park that is the primary search area. The congressman is hounded by police, vilified in the press and ultimately booted from office by his constituents.
On Good Morning America the other day, Chad Condit lamented to host George Stephanopoulos that his father “didn’t deserve what happened,” and complained that the Condit family has been “dealing with [this] for 10 years.” When Stephanopoulos asked whether the former lawmaker perhaps had contributed to his woes by consistently declining to speak publicly about Levy, Chad Condit said no. His father had cooperated fully with police, the son said, but had felt the details of his relationship with Levy were irrelevant to the criminal investigation and need not be shared with the public.
“We hope people will understand that in this country you are entitled to certain level of privacy,” the younger Condit said. “If we lose that, we’re going to lose the very essence of what we are as a country.” Well, it seems to me that what the Condit boys would do well to understand is that, had the congressman in 2001 shown a fraction of the concern for and interest in Chandra Levy’s fate that he’d shown for his own reputation and hide, he might today be seen as a sympathetic figure, rather than as just another disgraced politician who’s now out to make a buck from his infamy. Condit’s philandering still might have gotten him kicked out of Congress, but his name might not now be synonymous with “self-centered ass” by those of us who remember the angry vehemence with which he sought to distant himself from the missing and presumed-dead young woman with whom he’d been amorously linked.
I followed the story closely in the local news in 2001, and what I saw in Gary Condit then was a righteous indignation so consuming that he scarcely could bring himself to concede he’d known Levy, let alone slept with her. Though the police consistently described the relationship as sexual, Condit never would publicly confirm that. He clearly hated being asked about Levy, or even mentioning her name. At one point, as I recall, he managed a perfunctory, lip-service expression of concern for her fate and sympathy for her parents. But when the Levys—not knowing what to think, and having been egged on by the bungling DC cops—themselves began questioning Condit’s innocence, the rage in his face implied that he now hated them nearly as much as he seemed to hate their daughter for having ruined his life by disappearing in the first place.
What both Gary and Chad Condit still don’t seem to get—although to his credit, the son expressed more genuine sympathy for the Levy family’s grief in five minutes this week than his father has in the past nine-plus years—is that, while a rush to judgment on the parts of the police and the press unquestionably made Condit’s life miserable for a while, he never was the real victim in the Chandra Levy affair. It was Chandra Levy who was murdered in Rock Creek Park, after all. And it was she who was slandered in a way by Condit, whose stonewalling about the relationship only solidified her public image as simply another foolish young woman who’d bought into a married man’s promise of divorce. What I truly despise Gary Condit for—and I suspect I’m not the only one—isn’t so much the abuse of power that facilitated the affair as the utter lack of any tenderness, any grief, any acknowledgement on his part that this tragedy was about Chandra Levy, not Gary Condit. Had she meant anything at all to him, other than the obvious? It’s there that his silence was, and still is, deafening.
Now that his renegade semen has been cited in official court testimony, Condit presumably will at last cut the crap in his book. If he’s smart, he’ll say some nice things about Chandra Levy, portraying her as a real flesh-and-blood woman who had feelings and attributes—as more than simply a quick you-know-what. But it will be up to readers to parse how much of that is heartfelt and how much is belated damage control. Regardless, Condit’s history suggests that Levy still will be little more than a bit player in the bigger story of how a stellar lawmaker was grievously and outrageously, if you'll pardon the expression, screwed.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
Foreign Concepts
My fascination with Canada predates even the Dave Thomas-Rick Moranis “Great White North Skits” on SCTV decades ago, during which the home-grown comedians spoofed their native land as a nation of flannel-clad, tuque-topped, beer-swigging, hockey-playing “hosers” who end every other sentence with the word “eh.”
I’d first ventured north of the border, if just barely, on a family vacation to Niagara Falls when I was maybe 8 or 9. I don’t remember much about that visit except the magnificence of the water—especially Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side—and the vague sense that I’d left the United States and set foot in a new place that closely mirrored my own country, but wasn’t. There were Maple Leaf flags all over the place. The coins and paper currency were different. The accents were flatter, and some people spoke French. I may or may not have noticed then that various written words featured an extra “u” or a transposed e-r, as in “centre.” Regardless, I clearly wasn’t in America anymore. There was a skewed familiarity to everything that made Canada different without being scary to my young, provincial self.
Now I’m 52 and have been back to Canada several times—most recently in late October, which I’ll get to shortly. Because our neighbor to the north is chilly and under-populated—two qualities Lynn and I prize in vacation destinations—we’ve been to the Canadian Rockies and Vancouver on one trip and to Newfoundland, Labrador and the Maritime provinces on another. To me, there’s so much to love about Canada: the natural beauty, the vastness of the land, the lack of bluster and self-importance compared to what I see every day in this country, the national health care system and tough gun laws.
I was impressed, too, when Canada approved gay marriage nationwide a few years ago. But I think it was really the security measures enacted after 9/11 that iced the cake for me. Now Americans need a passport to cross the border, which is extremely important to someone like me who’s still seen little of the world. The passport requirement means, to me, that I’ve now officially been to three foreign countries—Iceland, Japan and Canada. Before, when Americans could gain access to Canada simply by producing their driver’s license and assuring the border guard there were no explosive devices in the trunk, Canada’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation for travel-resume purposes seemed vaguely questionable. Sure, Canada had different laws and other political and social quirks, but so did, say, Utah and Texas—US states that also weren’t quite like mine. The passport lent Canada an extra layer of exoticism.
It was with even greater anticipation than on previous visits, then, that I prepared to cross the border this time. Lynn and I were bound for Toronto, where neither of us ever had been, and it would be our first border crossing since enactment of the passport requirement. On the morning of Monday, October 25, with great pride in my worldliness, I handed over our proof of US citizenship to the Canadian official on that country’s side of the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, Ontario. That he turned out to be kind of a hard ass who chastised me for failing to heed some stop sign neither Lynn nor I could recollect having even seen took nothing away from my excitement as we proceeded by car into the land of metric highway signs and throwback Esso gas stations.
We would spend most of that day and two full ones in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, before returning to the US on Friday the 29th. During our stay we had a fantastic time walking the city from our centrally located hotel—some highlights included the top of the CN Tower, the Royal Ontario Museum, much gluten-free vegan fine dining (emphatically not an oxymoron in Toronto, Lynn delightedly discovered) and a couple of hours at the Hockey Fall of Fame (OK, maybe more a highlight for me than for Lynn). But what I’d really like to share with you in this post are three specific ways in which, I observed during this trip, Canada is so not the US, should any readers still need convincing—the passport thing notwithstanding.
· I was struck almost immediately by the complete and utter lack of bumper stickers. In fact, it got to the point that I was thrilled we’d valet-parked our car upon arrival at the hotel and only reclaimed it when we left town. My rear bumper area features not one, not two, but four stickers—promoting the Human Right Campaign (the “equal” sign), Amnesty International, vegetarianism (“Veg”) and the greatness of cats (“Meow”). Here in this country, I like displaying them, because I feel they project to the driving public that I’m a fan of social justice who’s comfortable with his feminine side. In Ontario, though, the bumper stickers made me feel garish and loud. They seemed the visual equivalents of screaming my opinions in Canadian ears, thus finding yet another way to be the Ugly American foreigners love to hate. What was this utter dearth of sticker mania? Was it a manifestation of Canadians’ stereotypical politeness, not wanting to offend those with opposing viewpoints and allegiances? Was it the pointlessness of “I’m the NRA, and I Vote” belligerence in a country with no gun lobby? Might it be welcome modesty about their honor-student kids? Was it the problematic distance to long weekends at “OBX”? Whatever. Once you zero in on it, as I did, you know this ain’t America.
· Being the technological caveman I am, I’d brought an old-school transistor radio with me so I could listen to music while in the shower, as I am wont to do. I found a Toronto classic rock station, which I then listened to for a total of maybe 45 minutes over those few days. I was stunned and overjoyed not to hear a single song by Boston during that time. Instead, the gaps between the standard Stones, Clapton and Tom Petty tunes were filled by unfamiliar offerings that turned out to be lesser hits by the likes of Canada’s own Rush and the Guess Who. I was completely flummoxed by the DJ’s mention at one point of the Jeff Healey Band. Playing a hunch, I Wikipedia’d the group on our laptop computer. This was the first sentence: Norman Jeffrey “Jeff” Healey (March 25, 1966 - March 2, 2008) was a blind Canadian jazz and blues-rock vocalistist and guitarist who attained musical and personal popularity, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. Not in the US, he didn’t. Now, that’s what I call foreign classic rock.
· Canada’s Election Day had just been held when we arrived in Toronto. Toronto had elected as its new mayor a city council member named Rob Ford. His relatively easy victory had been deemed surprising—not only because Ford is a member of the Conservative Party in a Liberal-leaning city, but also because he’s fat and undiplomatic. Many Torontans were concerned that his protruding gut and blunt, take-charge attitude—qualities that characterize many a successful US politician—would ill-represent their cosmopolitan and polished city. The Toronto Sun quoted a local dietician as advising that Ford, whose unintentionally ironic campaign slogan decrying profligate government spending had been “The gravy train stops here!”, had “better have waist management on his agenda.”
There’s a lot more about Canada that’s “foreign,” of course—from the “loonie” dollar coin and those wacky Celcius temperatures, to the self-denigration and national inferiority complex that turn America’s belief in its own exceptionalism on it head, to the mistaken belief (per Lynn) that tights and leggings look good on all women regardless of body type, to a military policy that favors peacekeeping over war-making, to an endearing lawfulness that seems to preclude pedestrians crossing against a traffic light even during lengthy windows of opportunity, to the iconic status of “Hockey Night in Canada” as not only a television broadcast but as a national description of Saturday evenings everywhere from St John’s in the East to Yellowknife in the West.
Still, it seems to me there’s no better definition of "foreign country" by American standards than one in which one might never know a motorist would “Rather Be Golfing,” might never hear “More Than a Feeling” or “Peace of Mind” on the radio, and might seldom see and hear a lawmaker with a piehole as huge as his belly.
I already can’t wait to go back. I'd better keep my passport current.
I’d first ventured north of the border, if just barely, on a family vacation to Niagara Falls when I was maybe 8 or 9. I don’t remember much about that visit except the magnificence of the water—especially Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side—and the vague sense that I’d left the United States and set foot in a new place that closely mirrored my own country, but wasn’t. There were Maple Leaf flags all over the place. The coins and paper currency were different. The accents were flatter, and some people spoke French. I may or may not have noticed then that various written words featured an extra “u” or a transposed e-r, as in “centre.” Regardless, I clearly wasn’t in America anymore. There was a skewed familiarity to everything that made Canada different without being scary to my young, provincial self.
Now I’m 52 and have been back to Canada several times—most recently in late October, which I’ll get to shortly. Because our neighbor to the north is chilly and under-populated—two qualities Lynn and I prize in vacation destinations—we’ve been to the Canadian Rockies and Vancouver on one trip and to Newfoundland, Labrador and the Maritime provinces on another. To me, there’s so much to love about Canada: the natural beauty, the vastness of the land, the lack of bluster and self-importance compared to what I see every day in this country, the national health care system and tough gun laws.
I was impressed, too, when Canada approved gay marriage nationwide a few years ago. But I think it was really the security measures enacted after 9/11 that iced the cake for me. Now Americans need a passport to cross the border, which is extremely important to someone like me who’s still seen little of the world. The passport requirement means, to me, that I’ve now officially been to three foreign countries—Iceland, Japan and Canada. Before, when Americans could gain access to Canada simply by producing their driver’s license and assuring the border guard there were no explosive devices in the trunk, Canada’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation for travel-resume purposes seemed vaguely questionable. Sure, Canada had different laws and other political and social quirks, but so did, say, Utah and Texas—US states that also weren’t quite like mine. The passport lent Canada an extra layer of exoticism.
It was with even greater anticipation than on previous visits, then, that I prepared to cross the border this time. Lynn and I were bound for Toronto, where neither of us ever had been, and it would be our first border crossing since enactment of the passport requirement. On the morning of Monday, October 25, with great pride in my worldliness, I handed over our proof of US citizenship to the Canadian official on that country’s side of the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, Ontario. That he turned out to be kind of a hard ass who chastised me for failing to heed some stop sign neither Lynn nor I could recollect having even seen took nothing away from my excitement as we proceeded by car into the land of metric highway signs and throwback Esso gas stations.
We would spend most of that day and two full ones in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, before returning to the US on Friday the 29th. During our stay we had a fantastic time walking the city from our centrally located hotel—some highlights included the top of the CN Tower, the Royal Ontario Museum, much gluten-free vegan fine dining (emphatically not an oxymoron in Toronto, Lynn delightedly discovered) and a couple of hours at the Hockey Fall of Fame (OK, maybe more a highlight for me than for Lynn). But what I’d really like to share with you in this post are three specific ways in which, I observed during this trip, Canada is so not the US, should any readers still need convincing—the passport thing notwithstanding.
· I was struck almost immediately by the complete and utter lack of bumper stickers. In fact, it got to the point that I was thrilled we’d valet-parked our car upon arrival at the hotel and only reclaimed it when we left town. My rear bumper area features not one, not two, but four stickers—promoting the Human Right Campaign (the “equal” sign), Amnesty International, vegetarianism (“Veg”) and the greatness of cats (“Meow”). Here in this country, I like displaying them, because I feel they project to the driving public that I’m a fan of social justice who’s comfortable with his feminine side. In Ontario, though, the bumper stickers made me feel garish and loud. They seemed the visual equivalents of screaming my opinions in Canadian ears, thus finding yet another way to be the Ugly American foreigners love to hate. What was this utter dearth of sticker mania? Was it a manifestation of Canadians’ stereotypical politeness, not wanting to offend those with opposing viewpoints and allegiances? Was it the pointlessness of “I’m the NRA, and I Vote” belligerence in a country with no gun lobby? Might it be welcome modesty about their honor-student kids? Was it the problematic distance to long weekends at “OBX”? Whatever. Once you zero in on it, as I did, you know this ain’t America.
· Being the technological caveman I am, I’d brought an old-school transistor radio with me so I could listen to music while in the shower, as I am wont to do. I found a Toronto classic rock station, which I then listened to for a total of maybe 45 minutes over those few days. I was stunned and overjoyed not to hear a single song by Boston during that time. Instead, the gaps between the standard Stones, Clapton and Tom Petty tunes were filled by unfamiliar offerings that turned out to be lesser hits by the likes of Canada’s own Rush and the Guess Who. I was completely flummoxed by the DJ’s mention at one point of the Jeff Healey Band. Playing a hunch, I Wikipedia’d the group on our laptop computer. This was the first sentence: Norman Jeffrey “Jeff” Healey (March 25, 1966 - March 2, 2008) was a blind Canadian jazz and blues-rock vocalistist and guitarist who attained musical and personal popularity, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. Not in the US, he didn’t. Now, that’s what I call foreign classic rock.
· Canada’s Election Day had just been held when we arrived in Toronto. Toronto had elected as its new mayor a city council member named Rob Ford. His relatively easy victory had been deemed surprising—not only because Ford is a member of the Conservative Party in a Liberal-leaning city, but also because he’s fat and undiplomatic. Many Torontans were concerned that his protruding gut and blunt, take-charge attitude—qualities that characterize many a successful US politician—would ill-represent their cosmopolitan and polished city. The Toronto Sun quoted a local dietician as advising that Ford, whose unintentionally ironic campaign slogan decrying profligate government spending had been “The gravy train stops here!”, had “better have waist management on his agenda.”
There’s a lot more about Canada that’s “foreign,” of course—from the “loonie” dollar coin and those wacky Celcius temperatures, to the self-denigration and national inferiority complex that turn America’s belief in its own exceptionalism on it head, to the mistaken belief (per Lynn) that tights and leggings look good on all women regardless of body type, to a military policy that favors peacekeeping over war-making, to an endearing lawfulness that seems to preclude pedestrians crossing against a traffic light even during lengthy windows of opportunity, to the iconic status of “Hockey Night in Canada” as not only a television broadcast but as a national description of Saturday evenings everywhere from St John’s in the East to Yellowknife in the West.
Still, it seems to me there’s no better definition of "foreign country" by American standards than one in which one might never know a motorist would “Rather Be Golfing,” might never hear “More Than a Feeling” or “Peace of Mind” on the radio, and might seldom see and hear a lawmaker with a piehole as huge as his belly.
I already can’t wait to go back. I'd better keep my passport current.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Creepshow
Usually I carve a pumpkin for Halloween, and it’s glowing through a window of our darkened house when trick-or-treaters walk up our driveway and front steps to the screened-in front porch. Typically we drag down from the attic every plastic skull and paper skeleton we can find, and prop or hang them forebodingly on the porch swing, a pedestal table and other available surfaces.
Traditionally our front porch has lent itself well to the occasion, since—with its cobwebs, dead bugs, withered flowers, filthy plastic chairs, chipped paint and other indicators of manifest neglect—it has more closely resembled the entryway to the Munsters’ place at 1313 Mockingbird Lane than anything a suburban kid might expect to encounter in our pricey Bethesda zip code.
This year, however, we’d been on a vacation trip until the day before Halloween, and a social engagement that afternoon that had kept us away from the house until about 5 pm. Also, a month or two earlier we’d had the front porch painted, after about a decade’s worth of increasing shame over its appearance. The floor was so badly chipped by that point that the few times I vacuumed it each year, the bag quickly would fill with floor fragments. It had seemed only a matter of time until some barefoot neighbor kid soliciting funds for a school project would splinter his or her way to a huge lawsuit filed against us by litigious parents. Frankly, if we hadn’t cleared and tidied the porch for painting when we did, we might just as well have moved a rusty refrigerator and assorted hubcaps out there and hired a banjo player to complete the picture of utter indifference and dilapidation.
What I mean to say is, while our porch at last was fit for the eyes of polite society by this past Sunday night, it was considerably less ideal as a gateway to Halloween than it had been in past years. There not only was no glowing pumpkin in the window this time, but no cobwebs, no insect carcasses, no pealing porch swing perfect for the Crypt Keeper and a date. We’d hung a wreath of skulls on the front door and set a line of three wooden Jack-o-Lanterns on a low table, but that was about it. It isn’t like we get a ton of trick-or-treaters—generally between 30 and 50, most within a 90-minute window—but I felt like I was letting down those youngsters who are familiar enough with our house of planned and inadvertent horrors to have expected more from us. When the first group of kids arrived at around 6:45 and I opened the front door, I could see and hear in the distance eerie flashing lights and disturbing shrieks coming from a house on Wagner Lane. It made me feel rather like a wallflower at the Monster Mash.
At least we had good candy, and plenty of it, I consoled myself as I sat at the kitchen table. It overlooks the driveway, and I had the TV on AMC (American Movie Classics), which was showing the 1996 roadhouse-of-the-undead flick From Dusk Till Dawn. Before our vacation, Lynn had stocked up on multiple bags of Snickers, Reese’s, Milky Ways and Butterfingers. The kids who arrived periodically in groups of three or five over the first hour or so seemed pleased enough with the ambiance when I produced the candy basket and told them to take “a couple” of pieces. Which more often than not meant three or four, not that I balked.
But even the kids’ apparent satisfaction with their haul and the between-knocks distraction of the rampant gore and pixilated nudity on the TV screen (damn basic cable!) couldn’t keep me from feeling a bit like the Grinch who’d unduly sanitized Halloween. Until, that was, about 8 o’clock, when I opened the door to a trio of boys who were maybe eight or 10 years old. One was dressed as a pirate, another as a ninja and the third as Batman.
Each took several candy bars from my basket—I no longer was issuing instructions, as surplus inventory was assured at that point. They muttered their thanks and were turning to leave when Batman suddenly paused and squinted his eyes in my direction. At that point I’d returned the candy basket to its perch on the radiator beside the door, leaving my truncated-since-birth right arm entirely exposed, since I was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt. The transfixed Caped Crusader nudged Jack Sparrow and Ninja Man, then, pointing at me, said with a mixture of fear and disbelief, “It looks like your arm’s cut off!”
In retrospect, what I should have done at that moment was malevolently cackle, and perhaps order them to accompany me to the kitchen for similar amputations courtesy of my butcher’s knife. But in truth I was momentarily taken aback by the fright I now saw in all three kids’ faces, as they realized this wasn’t a gag and I really had no right hand. I managed to muster a disarming smile (OK, pun intended) and cajolingly assured them, “It’s a birth defect. No big deal.”
But Batman was not mollified. With his friends already hightailing it down the front steps, he left me with the parting exclamation “Eww!” before turning to join them.
I closed the door and returned to my post at the kitchen table, feeling a bit shaken as I numbly watched George Clooney and Juliette Lewis on the TV, subduing grotesque vampires with rifles and stakes fashioned from chair legs. But then, a few minutes later, I suddenly appreciated the true legacy and import of my doorway encounter. At that precise moment the undead were vaporizing before my eyes, as Clooney’s bullets brought vampire-killing daylight streaming into the seedy Mexican bar—deadly dusk having given way to sweet dawn.
I smiled, having at last realized that, far from having failed Halloween in some way, I’d actually succeeded in making it more terrifying, at least for one group of young boys. I’ve since made a mental note to keep a rubber knife by the door next year. By then, too, our housekeeping record suggests the porch will again look pretty damn scary.
Traditionally our front porch has lent itself well to the occasion, since—with its cobwebs, dead bugs, withered flowers, filthy plastic chairs, chipped paint and other indicators of manifest neglect—it has more closely resembled the entryway to the Munsters’ place at 1313 Mockingbird Lane than anything a suburban kid might expect to encounter in our pricey Bethesda zip code.
This year, however, we’d been on a vacation trip until the day before Halloween, and a social engagement that afternoon that had kept us away from the house until about 5 pm. Also, a month or two earlier we’d had the front porch painted, after about a decade’s worth of increasing shame over its appearance. The floor was so badly chipped by that point that the few times I vacuumed it each year, the bag quickly would fill with floor fragments. It had seemed only a matter of time until some barefoot neighbor kid soliciting funds for a school project would splinter his or her way to a huge lawsuit filed against us by litigious parents. Frankly, if we hadn’t cleared and tidied the porch for painting when we did, we might just as well have moved a rusty refrigerator and assorted hubcaps out there and hired a banjo player to complete the picture of utter indifference and dilapidation.
What I mean to say is, while our porch at last was fit for the eyes of polite society by this past Sunday night, it was considerably less ideal as a gateway to Halloween than it had been in past years. There not only was no glowing pumpkin in the window this time, but no cobwebs, no insect carcasses, no pealing porch swing perfect for the Crypt Keeper and a date. We’d hung a wreath of skulls on the front door and set a line of three wooden Jack-o-Lanterns on a low table, but that was about it. It isn’t like we get a ton of trick-or-treaters—generally between 30 and 50, most within a 90-minute window—but I felt like I was letting down those youngsters who are familiar enough with our house of planned and inadvertent horrors to have expected more from us. When the first group of kids arrived at around 6:45 and I opened the front door, I could see and hear in the distance eerie flashing lights and disturbing shrieks coming from a house on Wagner Lane. It made me feel rather like a wallflower at the Monster Mash.
At least we had good candy, and plenty of it, I consoled myself as I sat at the kitchen table. It overlooks the driveway, and I had the TV on AMC (American Movie Classics), which was showing the 1996 roadhouse-of-the-undead flick From Dusk Till Dawn. Before our vacation, Lynn had stocked up on multiple bags of Snickers, Reese’s, Milky Ways and Butterfingers. The kids who arrived periodically in groups of three or five over the first hour or so seemed pleased enough with the ambiance when I produced the candy basket and told them to take “a couple” of pieces. Which more often than not meant three or four, not that I balked.
But even the kids’ apparent satisfaction with their haul and the between-knocks distraction of the rampant gore and pixilated nudity on the TV screen (damn basic cable!) couldn’t keep me from feeling a bit like the Grinch who’d unduly sanitized Halloween. Until, that was, about 8 o’clock, when I opened the door to a trio of boys who were maybe eight or 10 years old. One was dressed as a pirate, another as a ninja and the third as Batman.
Each took several candy bars from my basket—I no longer was issuing instructions, as surplus inventory was assured at that point. They muttered their thanks and were turning to leave when Batman suddenly paused and squinted his eyes in my direction. At that point I’d returned the candy basket to its perch on the radiator beside the door, leaving my truncated-since-birth right arm entirely exposed, since I was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt. The transfixed Caped Crusader nudged Jack Sparrow and Ninja Man, then, pointing at me, said with a mixture of fear and disbelief, “It looks like your arm’s cut off!”
In retrospect, what I should have done at that moment was malevolently cackle, and perhaps order them to accompany me to the kitchen for similar amputations courtesy of my butcher’s knife. But in truth I was momentarily taken aback by the fright I now saw in all three kids’ faces, as they realized this wasn’t a gag and I really had no right hand. I managed to muster a disarming smile (OK, pun intended) and cajolingly assured them, “It’s a birth defect. No big deal.”
But Batman was not mollified. With his friends already hightailing it down the front steps, he left me with the parting exclamation “Eww!” before turning to join them.
I closed the door and returned to my post at the kitchen table, feeling a bit shaken as I numbly watched George Clooney and Juliette Lewis on the TV, subduing grotesque vampires with rifles and stakes fashioned from chair legs. But then, a few minutes later, I suddenly appreciated the true legacy and import of my doorway encounter. At that precise moment the undead were vaporizing before my eyes, as Clooney’s bullets brought vampire-killing daylight streaming into the seedy Mexican bar—deadly dusk having given way to sweet dawn.
I smiled, having at last realized that, far from having failed Halloween in some way, I’d actually succeeded in making it more terrifying, at least for one group of young boys. I’ve since made a mental note to keep a rubber knife by the door next year. By then, too, our housekeeping record suggests the porch will again look pretty damn scary.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Reflection
At 11 pm this past Sunday, I exited DC’s 9:30 Club fairly deaf, slightly blinded, totally hoarse, extremely parched and mostly happy. I’d just seen one of my favorite bands, The New Pornographers, play a spirited show to a packed house.
I was feeling pretty cool, frankly, as I strode toward the U Street Metro station in my dark shirt, black jeans and boots. My hair was looking rebel-long in these shaved-head times. While I’d forgotten to wear my favorite clunky, retro glasses, the round Lennon-esque ones had sufficed quite nicely, it seemed to me.
Except, then I caught my reflection in the window of a bustling bar. I saw in front of me a diverse array of young hipsters, both al fresco on the patio and seated behind the glass. But there on the pane, I was not looking particularly fresh and happening. In fact, I was looking like I’d happened quite some time ago. If then. I was looking like what happens with age.
The truth, of course, was that none of those relative kids at the show I’d just left had exactly mistaken me for one of their own. While I haven’t yet succumbed to middle-age spread and against all odds have kept my hair, wrinkle lines and graying temples abundantly tell my chronological tale. Though I always hope twenty- and thirtysomethings will size me up and significantly lowball my age, I find they’re damnably accurate whenever I foolishly press the issue with acquaintances in that demographic. In fact, my only dependably affirming audience in this respect is the ancient-senior set with whom I socialize as a weekly volunteer at an assisted living facility. But those ladies tend to equate easy mobility with youth, and they consider my successful use of the TV remote to be the high-tech wizardry of a wunderkind.
I had, in fact, spotted at least a few peers in the 9:30 Club crowd. An older bald guy here, an older fat guy there. I’d stacked up pretty well, I thought. And anyway, didn’t I deserve some credit for even knowing who The New Pornographers are, let alone developing a genuine love for their intricate power pop stylings? Hadn’t I been an early evangelist of this suggestively named Canadian octet, now beloved by rock critics as an indie-music powerhouse? Hadn’t I voluntarily come out to play on a work night and secured a plum spot near the stage by arriving early and staying right where I was? Why, I’d foregone even a single beer so as not to risk displacement after a bathroom break. Shouldn’t all of that count for something?
Well, honestly? No, I answered myself as I passed through the subway turnstile. I mean, had my ability to mouth the lyrics to “Sing Me Spanish Techno,” “Mass Romantic” and “Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk” at that evening’s show established my street cred, somehow? Had my screams and applause been evidence of youthful vitality? Had my stoicism before the show and during breaks bespoken my timeless sense of hip?
To the contrary, I’d felt stupid mouthing the lyrics, but I’d wanted all the (zero) people who’d been watching me to see that I really knew the songs. I’d been stoic only for lack of company, as well as my crotchety distaste for cell phones and their social networking options. I’d screamed at the band mainly to reassure myself that I could make audible sounds after all that silence. And my clapping had made me self-conscious, as it always does. Had I raised my arms above my head, concert style, I’d have had that weird hand-stump disparity thing going on for all to see. So, I’d clapped with my arms in front of me. But my clap doesn’t and can’t match the volume of hand-on-hand applause. It’s always struck me as a little sad.
Not that I regretted the trip to the 9:30 Club. As I rode the Green Line train to my transfer point at Gallery Place, I felt good about having heard and seen a few hours of great music up close. I liked the fact that I’d made the effort on a Sunday night. And it wasn’t as if I was wiped out, either. I’d stayed through the final encore and felt considerably more wired than tired.
Riding the Red line train back to my car at Tenleytown, I sort of regretted that I hadn’t bought myself a New Pornographers T-shirt at the club. But then I again saw my reflection in the glass. I had to wonder if such a garment, arguably hip and quirky on a younger man, might simply encourage mothers to hold their small children closer as I passed by.
I got home at midnight. Lynn was asleep upstairs. I stayed up until almost 1:30 working on the New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle. By that time the cats’ initial enthusiasm for my surprise appearance had long since waned, and they, too, were dozing. I was finally ready to turn in myself. My ears no longer were ringing, and my throat had been soothed by a glass of water. It would be time to get up for work in just a few hours. There, I’d tell my office buddies about my big night out.
“Kind of cool,” I thought, turning out the light.
I was feeling pretty cool, frankly, as I strode toward the U Street Metro station in my dark shirt, black jeans and boots. My hair was looking rebel-long in these shaved-head times. While I’d forgotten to wear my favorite clunky, retro glasses, the round Lennon-esque ones had sufficed quite nicely, it seemed to me.
Except, then I caught my reflection in the window of a bustling bar. I saw in front of me a diverse array of young hipsters, both al fresco on the patio and seated behind the glass. But there on the pane, I was not looking particularly fresh and happening. In fact, I was looking like I’d happened quite some time ago. If then. I was looking like what happens with age.
The truth, of course, was that none of those relative kids at the show I’d just left had exactly mistaken me for one of their own. While I haven’t yet succumbed to middle-age spread and against all odds have kept my hair, wrinkle lines and graying temples abundantly tell my chronological tale. Though I always hope twenty- and thirtysomethings will size me up and significantly lowball my age, I find they’re damnably accurate whenever I foolishly press the issue with acquaintances in that demographic. In fact, my only dependably affirming audience in this respect is the ancient-senior set with whom I socialize as a weekly volunteer at an assisted living facility. But those ladies tend to equate easy mobility with youth, and they consider my successful use of the TV remote to be the high-tech wizardry of a wunderkind.
I had, in fact, spotted at least a few peers in the 9:30 Club crowd. An older bald guy here, an older fat guy there. I’d stacked up pretty well, I thought. And anyway, didn’t I deserve some credit for even knowing who The New Pornographers are, let alone developing a genuine love for their intricate power pop stylings? Hadn’t I been an early evangelist of this suggestively named Canadian octet, now beloved by rock critics as an indie-music powerhouse? Hadn’t I voluntarily come out to play on a work night and secured a plum spot near the stage by arriving early and staying right where I was? Why, I’d foregone even a single beer so as not to risk displacement after a bathroom break. Shouldn’t all of that count for something?
Well, honestly? No, I answered myself as I passed through the subway turnstile. I mean, had my ability to mouth the lyrics to “Sing Me Spanish Techno,” “Mass Romantic” and “Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk” at that evening’s show established my street cred, somehow? Had my screams and applause been evidence of youthful vitality? Had my stoicism before the show and during breaks bespoken my timeless sense of hip?
To the contrary, I’d felt stupid mouthing the lyrics, but I’d wanted all the (zero) people who’d been watching me to see that I really knew the songs. I’d been stoic only for lack of company, as well as my crotchety distaste for cell phones and their social networking options. I’d screamed at the band mainly to reassure myself that I could make audible sounds after all that silence. And my clapping had made me self-conscious, as it always does. Had I raised my arms above my head, concert style, I’d have had that weird hand-stump disparity thing going on for all to see. So, I’d clapped with my arms in front of me. But my clap doesn’t and can’t match the volume of hand-on-hand applause. It’s always struck me as a little sad.
Not that I regretted the trip to the 9:30 Club. As I rode the Green Line train to my transfer point at Gallery Place, I felt good about having heard and seen a few hours of great music up close. I liked the fact that I’d made the effort on a Sunday night. And it wasn’t as if I was wiped out, either. I’d stayed through the final encore and felt considerably more wired than tired.
Riding the Red line train back to my car at Tenleytown, I sort of regretted that I hadn’t bought myself a New Pornographers T-shirt at the club. But then I again saw my reflection in the glass. I had to wonder if such a garment, arguably hip and quirky on a younger man, might simply encourage mothers to hold their small children closer as I passed by.
I got home at midnight. Lynn was asleep upstairs. I stayed up until almost 1:30 working on the New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle. By that time the cats’ initial enthusiasm for my surprise appearance had long since waned, and they, too, were dozing. I was finally ready to turn in myself. My ears no longer were ringing, and my throat had been soothed by a glass of water. It would be time to get up for work in just a few hours. There, I’d tell my office buddies about my big night out.
“Kind of cool,” I thought, turning out the light.
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