Nemesis

I met him in Savannah in 1990 or maybe 1991. He was a friend of my friend Jane, and I remember the three of us standing on a road in Daffin Park, near the minor league baseball stadium, one mild winter day, making small talk.

I instantly disliked him.

I was in my early 30s at the time, and he was some years younger. Six, it turns out, though I didn’t know that at the time. He seemed like an odd pairing with Jane, who was something of a hippie chick several years my senior. Jane wrote a freewheeling column about local people and places and curiosities for the newspaper that was my employer at the time. She was a bit of a celebrity. A big fish in a small pond in those pre-Midnight in the Garden of Eden days, when Savannah was a faded backwater that hadn’t gentrified and become a go-to tourist destination in the way that Charleston, just up the coast in South Carolina, had. Jane, a transplanted Jew and open-secret lesbian from Michigan who’d been an itinerant everything in way stations ranging from Chicago to Arkansas to Key West before opting to give journalism in the Old South a try, was a breath of fresh air, and she was locally beloved for that. In a town whose historic currency was gentility, she was messy, visually and psychically.

But this guy, her friend, seemed to me her antithesis, except in one way. He did activate my gaydar. Not that there’s anything at all wrong with being gay, but I’m mentioning that for a reason that I’ll share later. Otherwise, though, he struck me as the embodiment of entitlement. He was a Savannah native who’d attended private school. He was a preppy dresser. To my ears, he spoke with a practiced worldliness that suggested he was bored to be in my presence. I can’t remember if he was living in Savannah at the time or just visiting, whether he was in school or working. But he was a big talker. He’d traveled to places I’d never been, and clearly saw himself as a change-maker. He exuded a self-importance that fairly screamed, “One day you’ll remember you stood close enough to me to touch the hem of my garment, but you’ll be lucky if I remember you at all.”

I lived in Savannah for only three years, and I lost track of him. But then he popped back into my life at, of all places, a big DC party thrown in early 1993 to celebrate my recent marriage.  Lynn and I had met through Ken Johnson and Jo Joyce, a married couple who lived on Capitol Hill at the time. I’d moved to DC the preceding November, and Lynn and I had wed at a bed and breakfast in northern Virginia with only the innkeeper—a state-sanctioned celebrant—as a witness. Because we’d had no public wedding or reception, Ken and Jo opened their charming row house one Saturday evening to a hand-picked gathering of our friends. We hired a professional photographer to take photos. Ken and Jo laid out a beautiful spread. It was a magical night.

Mostly.

Except that, when I leaf through the photo album from that night, the guy from Savannah is in one of the shots. If you’re guessing I hadn’t invited him, you are correct. Someone I had invited—a woman I’d dated briefly in Savannah, who by then was living in Washington—had taken it upon herself to bring the guy from Savannah as her date for the evening. This despite the fact that the invitation had been clear—no kids, no dates, no significant others or anybody whose name didn’t appear on the envelope. I guess I’d known that my former date and the Savannah guy were friends, but I hadn’t known that he, too, had moved to DC, nor that she would be so rude as to assume the evening’s rules weren’t meant for her.

Anyway, the photo in our event album shows the two of them conversing with each other on a couch where they stationed themselves pretty much the entire evening. They presumably congratulated Lynn and me on our betrothal when they first walked through the door, but after that they might just as well have been sitting in an otherwise unpeopled coffee shop, except that all the refreshments were free.

While their presence hardly ruined the evening for us, our loathing of the Savannah guy remained very much on Lynn’s and my mind the only time we encountered him after that, at an art show at the National Building Museum. We happened to run into each other. I remember nothing of that brief conversation, but I’m quite certain he made no mention of having showed up uninvited at our party a few years earlier and then having ignored us and all the other guests while he and my one-time date tried their best to keep each other from being bored to death.

So, that might have been 1995 or 1996. Which means I haven’t seen the Savannah guy in the flesh in nearly 20 years. But he’s hardly disappeared from my life, as much I wish he would. Over the years since, he’s appeared at regular intervals when I’m reading book reviews or the bestsellers list. He’s been there when I open the Parade magazine in my Sunday newspaper. He shows up once a month to ruin my enjoyment of the New York Times’ Sunday Styles section, which I otherwise love for its lively lifestyles articles, evocative how-the-other-half-lives wedding announcements and witty “Social Qs” etiquette column.

Because his New York Times column, “This Life,” is monthly, in the weeks in between I get sort of used to not seeing his name, and I start hoping that maybe the “Old Gray Lady” finally has seen the error of her ways and has kicked his ass to the curb. But no such luck, ever. He’s a bestselling author, after all, with God knows how many Twitter followers and Facebook friends to hopefully attract youthful readers to an old-media dinosaur.

My most recent deflation came a couple of weeks ago, when I pulled out the Sunday Styles section to see, there on its front page, a column of his headlined, “The Stories That Bind Us.” As he typically does, he started off with a folksy, seemingly self-effacing anecdote from his own family life, then segued into a larger societal observation, citing the work of sociologists and researchers. This time his message was that the more children know about their family’s history, “the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believe their families function.”

Once again, he’d noted immediately that he’s a parent, and before the first paragraph was through he’d established that he’s both a martyr and an Everyman who’s been through what you, the reader, has been through, and who Feels Your Pain. Here’s the paragraph in its entirety:

"I hit the breaking point as a parent a few years ago. It was the week of my family’s extended gathering in August, and we were struggling with assorted crises. My parents were aging; my wife and I were straining under the chaos of young children; my sister was bracing to prepare her preteens for bullying, sex, and cyberstalking.”

Because I somehow can’t seem to just look away, I read the entire column, and I got even more agitated upon noting that he’d gotten the New York Times to pay him for recycled work. The piece had been adapted from his latest soon-to-be bestselling book, whose full, nauseatingly cutesy and pandering title is The Secrets of Happy Families: How to Improve Your Morning, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smart, Go Out and Play, and Much More.

I disgustedly threw down the newspaper and growled out his name, in much the same manner that Jerry Seinfeld once greeted his TV nemesis. But whereas the sitcom king spit out the word “Newman!” the six letters that left my mouth enunciated “Feiler!”

You might not know that name, but chances are you know his work. As his Web site boasts, immodestly but not—it pains me to admit—inaccurately—“Bruce Feiler is one of America’s most popular voices on family, faith and survival.” The bio continues,  “He is the author of five consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including Walking the Bible and The Council of Dads.” The former “describes his perilous, 10,000-mile journey retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert” and is one reason why he’s “one of the nation’s preeminent thinkers, writers and speakers about the role of religion in contemporary life.” The latter book, meanwhile, is “an international sensation” that “describes how, faced with one of life’s great challenges, he asked six friends to form a support group for his young daughters.”

The “great challenge” he faced in 2008, and ultimately beat, was cancer. His daughters are identical twins, born in 2005, who are named Eden and Tybee. Yes, pretentiously like the First Woman, and oh-so-preciously like the beloved island and beach area near Savannah. And of course Feiler, his wife and the twins live in trendy Brooklyn, where they no doubt count organic food shopping, rummaging through funky boutiques and playing hacky-sack with mimes and poets among their secrets of happy family life. (What? You think I’m editorializing?)

OK, let me pause here and get my caveats out of the way. I’ve already mentioned that I haven’t seen the guy in nearly 20 years. I don’t claim to truly know him. He’s undoubtedly worked hard for his success, and his books may, for all I know, be well-written and even insightful. (Full disclosure: I did read his very first published book, a chronicle of his year teaching English in Japan titled Learning to Bow, and was chagrined to find his prose to be rather skilled.) I’m even willing to concede that it’s possible Feiler didn’t fake cancer and pay off a bunch of doctors just so he could write a tear-jerking book about how he asked a half-dozen guys to help raise his daughters in the event of his cruelly premature death.

Anyway, as should be evident at this point, more than 1,500 words into this post, I’ve spent way too much time over the years thinking about and stewing over a guy who might not even be able to identify me in a lineup except for my memorable one-hand trait. More than once, I’ve asked myself why this is. Is it sour grapes, because he’s a best-selling author and international Name, while I’m a slothful once-a-month blogger who has only a handful of readers? Is it like the title of that Morrissey Song, “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful”—never mind that he and I never were friends? I honestly don’t think so, because I have a good life, I don’t crave the limelight, and at any rate, I really am lazy and would hate to feel compelled to work hard to produce books. Also, while I have this Holden Caulfield-like urge to pronounce Bruce Feiler a big phony, I don’t dispute the likelihood that his books have been meaningful to his readers. While, yes, I do passively begrudge him his success, I don’t actively do so.

What is it, then? Do I envy his dumb toothy grin, the extremely odd consistency of his hair, the drooling brats hanging off his arms in those treacly photographs? No, no and no.

Am I jealous of his world travels? OK, maybe a little bit. But, spending all that time in the scorching Middle East, checking out biblical shit? No thanks. Plus, with Lynn being such a homebody, I’d end up traveling alone a lot of time, and I’d greatly miss the woman I married for love rather than (maybe) for cover.

Really, it all comes down to the fact that I just don’t like the guy. Have I perchance made that clear? And I hate the fact that he nevertheless was at my post-wedding celebration, and that I can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without regularly being reminded of his outsized existence in the world. It’s as if he’s constantly baiting me, somehow. How will he tweak me next? Maybe he’ll start a syndicated column that the Washington Post will pick up, forcing me to read his stupid name in my local paper. Perhaps one of his daughters will grow up to, by some twist of fate, become my boss, and will somehow intuit my distaste for her dad, and will retaliate by making my working life hell.

Or maybe next time he'll allegedly overcome malaria, or a flesh-eating virus, with another bestselling epilogue to the story. I can envision my face reddening as I read the sales figures, and I can hear a single, loathsome word escape my mouth: “Feiler!”

   

I Can Pee For Miles

I owe my ability to urinate in public restrooms to The Who.

It’s true. When I was much younger, two of my least favorite things about attending arena-rock concerts were the assumption that I must have joints to share because I had long hair, and the presumption that I could just pee and get out of the way with a long line of guys waiting for my spot at the urinal.

The joint thing mostly ended when I finally cut my shoulder-length locks sometime during college, therefore no longer visually misrepresenting myself as a guy who even knew how to inhale, let alone as the kind of pharmaceutical sophisticate who recognized the street slang for all manner of other illegal narcotics.

Then, on July 13, 1980, 10 days past my 22nd birthday, I was standing in a long line outside the Greensboro (NC) Coliseum, mostly psyched to be seeing my favorite rock band for the second time. (Though The Who's manically brilliant drummer, Keith Moon, had gotten his seeming death wish by overdose two years earlier, and had been replaced by Kenney Jones.) But I also was feeling more than a little nervous about the bathroom situation, given my serious case of Shy Bladder Syndrome.

I’d devised various strategies over the years to answer nature’s call, in such situations, somewhere other than in my jeans. Sometimes I’d simply seek the privacy of a stall. Other times I limited my beer intake, hoping I might avoid altogether the need to go. (That never worked, because then and now, I likely could shun all beverages for 24 hours and still need to drain at least hourly.) Like that old joke about voting in Chicago, I tried going early and often, while the concert or sports-event crowd still was arriving. (Front-loading,—or, rather, front unloading—I discovered, had limited value. And sometimes, as during The Who’s 1976 American tour, when warm-up act Toots & the Maytals was getting booed off the stage in those not-ready-for-reggae times, the bathrooms could get pretty packed even after the music had started.)

Youth is fraught with enough frustrations—untamable acne, unattainable women, etc—without the ultimate, ridiculous frustration of simultaneously needing to pee like a racehorse and being reined in by the psychological pressure of all the guys behind you awaiting your place at the porcelain. I would try closing my eyes and envisioning myself alone—not that easy a task amongst shouts of “Daltrey’s a god!” and “Puke somewhere else, asshole!” I felt as if all eyes were on me as I lingered there, even though the guys with whom I’d been waiting in line already had conducted their business at one of the other urinals and moved on.

In time, I usually could break through the dam, if not always completely empty the reservoir. Sometimes, though, I’d have to zip up and move over to the line for the stalls—where privacy was assured, but often at the cost of unspeakable sights and smells.

All that was to change, however, on that fateful July night. Eight months earlier, 11 Who fans had died of “compressive asphyxia” in Cincinnati—trampled to death in a mad rush for the doors. Many venues—including the scene of the tragedy, Riverfront Stadium—abandoned unassigned seating after that. I can’t remember if I had an assigned seat for the 1980 Who show in Greensboro, or, if not, why thousands of us had elected to stand on line outside the doors. Regardless—whether in tribute to this new round of dead kids in O-hi-o, or because assigned seating had removed any incentive to storm the gates, or simply because “Greensboring,” as we young wits used to call it, never was big on drama—the crowd was orderly and patient.

God knows what was on my mind as I waited to get into the building. I’d started my first job out of college, as Davidson County reporter for the High Point Enterprise, only a couple of months before, so I likely was wondering how soon people would realize I was an idiot and I would be fired. Maybe I was thinking about how much I disliked both the clueless Ronald Reagan and the ineffectual yet strangely haughty President Carter, and whether I might rather go third-party with John Anderson in the November balloting. But most likely, as I stood there I was hoping the band would sample liberally from Tommy and Quadrophenia, and I also was praying I wouldn’t need to pee anytime soon, an hour or more before the doors were to open.

At some point, though, I was roused from my internal monologue by the whoops and hollers of my queue-mates, who were tapping each other on the shoulder and pointing to three guys who were—no, were they really?—urinating in near-synchronous yellow arcs against the venue we were about to enter.

Granted, I’d lived a pretty sheltered life to that point, but I’d never seen anything like this. I honestly don’t remember what the Tinkling Trio looked like—whether they were short or tall, shaggy or trim, T-shirted or tank-topped—but what I do starkly, searingly recall, to this day, is how much they cared what anyone thought about their performance, which was not one iota of a damn. They had to go, so they went. Period. If that meant whipping their johnsons out in front of hundreds of strangers of both sexes, defacing municipal property, and risking a misdemeanor if spotted by law enforcement, so be it. Relief was its own reward.

As it happened, there were no repercussions. Except, that is, for the game-changing impact on me. Ever since that day, whenever I stand facing a urinal in a rock club or sports-stadium restroom, all I need do if I start to freeze is invoke the words “Who concert 1980”—sometimes I even say it aloud—and picture those three glorious, disgusting guys darkening the bricks outside the Greensboro Coliseum with their devil-may-care whiz. “If they could do that,” goes my internal mantra, “I can do this.” There have been very few times over the years when that hasn’t worked. (At such times, it’s back to the stalls.)

So, all right, I really owe my ability to pee in public restrooms to those three anonymous young men who never will know what their appallingly crude display meant to me. Still, neither they nor I would’ve been at the Greensboro Coliseum in the first place on that summer day 33 years ago had it not been for The Who. A band that, it should be noted, had selected as the cover of its 1971 LP Who’s Next a photo of the quartet zipping their trousers after evidently having just marked their territory, so to speak, on a concrete monolith in the middle of a slag heap.

Interesting, too, is this bit of back story from a Google search on the making of that album:

“According to photographer Ethan Russell, most of the [band] members were unable to urinate, so rainwater was tipped from an empty film canister to achieve the desired effect.”

Is it any wonder why I’ve always felt such an affinity for that band?