Another Voice from the Void

I know that you’ve seen it, for a very simple reason: they made me—just like you—a member of the human race, which really isn’t a good idea. What I should have been is Anselmo, if you want to know the truth. Here he is, having found a perfectly good use for the Costco bag that I had to buy for my cross addiction.

 

Shit—am I oversharing?

 

Let’s get back to Anselmo and that fuck-up that has ruined my life, if you want to know the truth. Whoever it was who handed out the sex assignments did just great—I’m gay, of course, but otherwise perfectly happy being a man. And even though I revere the courage of trans people, I’m happy to report that I will stay right here in the weaker sex, thanks. Being a woman takes serious balls, as we sort of say down here in Puerto Rico (una mujer con cojones, unless I’m making this up, as I probably am.) 

 

So they didn’t do badly by me, and if I were a member of that organization mentioned in that thing that you and I both saw because somebody made the madcap decision to turn us into a human (Marc, who works his fingers to the bone making notebooks for YOU, and ‘tis sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have a thankless cat!) instead of a cat (Anselmo, and see last parenthesis) …

 

…well, I’d be damn grateful. In fact, I’d be ashamed of myself.

 

Anyway, let’s get both photos out of the way, before I tell you all about the organization that I’m not a part of.

 

  

                                                                                                                    

Anselmo has it made, of course, or so I think. Rather, so I WOULD think if I were a member of that organization mentioned above. I am not, absolutely not, a member of AA because by definition I can’t be. Some things have their codes embedded, as it were, in their names: you can’t ask if a woman is a lady because…well, you’d never ask that question of a real lady. (This is part of my Victorian upbringing, about which later). You can’t know if you’re an alcoholic for the same reason: by definition a person suffering a disease of denial (drugs / booze / sex / being right / needing to tell you about it / but that’s another story) cannot diagnose him or herself. And I would never tell you that I’m in AA because that second “A” five words ago? It stands for Anonymous.

 

Of course I don’t go to AA.

 

The idea is preposterous.

 

It would be a good idea, I think we can all agree, if I did go to AA, because that would sure be the place for me, if you had seen me, that last weekend before I went into detox for the most recent (not the last, which would be very clear to me, were I a member of the program) time. I was a fucking mess—the booze had stopped working despite drinking as hard as I could. The deal I thought I made with the demon rum was off—in the past I had drunk sullenly to a state of stupor and passed out. That weekend I couldn’t pass out because I couldn’t get to “stupor”, which was followed by “coming to,” during which time I had to pretend that whatever I was doing in “coming to” was in fact “real life.” I had to pretend this because it was critically important to pretend that I was not in deep trouble—an alcoholic, in fact. I knew—at some level, of course—that I was fooling nobody but myself. The cashier at SuperMax asked me, a month or two after I stopped drinking, “Dewar’s?”

 

An organized, thoughtful alcoholic would spread the booze purchases across several stores, if only not to put the cashiers in the uncomfortable position of being accomplices.

 

So if you had asked that particular cashier whether the tall gringo sometimes seen carrying his cello on his back needed to go into Alcoholics Anonymous…well, she’d probably just have looked at you.

 

Yeah, dude, and he could get a haircut once in a while and start shaving before he puts the mug out into the shared public spaces—that’s what she’d tell you.

 

So I should have gone to AA, but I didn’t. I know why, of course, because I know a lot of people in AA, and they tell me stuff that’s pretty amazing. They sit in the rooms, as they say, and they tell the shit about themselves that they would never tell anybody else except another alcoholic. They do this because they can’t forget—number one. The problem with the program is that it works, but for it to keep working, you have to keep working the program. If this makes sense to you, congratulations. You are not an alcoholic. 

 

I am an alcoholic, though I don’t go to AA (even though I should) because alcoholics are grandiose and delusional. That’s what they tell me, those guys who do go to Alcoholics Anonymous. By definition, I can’t diagnose myself as having a disease of denial (though haven’t I? shit…) and I also can’t plea delusional, since how can I know what’s real or not, if I’m delusional. 

 

Anyway, the point, which I really want to grind home…

 

…the point, as I was saying…

 

…the point seems to be, if the booze has cleared my brain enough in the eight years that I haven’t been going to AA…

 

…oh yes, I get my AA through osmosis, since I happen to be an alcoholic too stupid or grandiose or delusional to go to a meeting, which I would never do, but which even if I did I would never tell you about. Because I believe what they tell me, about keeping my side of the street clean, and minding my own damn business, which is called “not taking someone’s inventory.” Which means that I can see, as I very often used to do, one of San Juan’s most esteemed artists stumbling home every morning at six AM, and I don’t call him a drunk. He was, of course, but who am I to talk?

 

Anyway, the guys tell me a lot about those meetings because I have figured out a really, really great solution to the problem of what to do, as an alcoholic, with your morning, since I haven’t been reaching down through the slats of my bed to that nether world where the “scotch” in the green plastic bottle lives and rules. 

 

In Norse mythology, the troll—evil creature—lives under the bridge, and steals souls from those who pass above. (Little shout-out to Schubert, and the lied der Erklönig, which carries on this legend; also a shout out to Matthias Goerne, whom you can see below). The Dewars becomes, in the life of an alcoholic, not even marginally high-class: Dewars can pretend to be stuff that drinkers who are not drunks would drink, and keep with the crystal glasses in the Peruvian liquor cabinet, which he opens on occasion. That’s why the company keeps it running at 25 bucks a bottle, or so. They make a nice profit and those alcoholics who don’t go to AA (though they should, if I were to take their inventory, which of course I am not) can point out, with impeccable logic, that drunks get their booze out of green plastic bottles.

 

I digress, though it’s also quite possible that the grandiosity has made me need to explain all this to you, even though it should be perfectly clear to you…

 

Anyway, the point is that I couldn’t go to AA, for the reasons wearily explained above, but I did have to do something, if only to keep the cashiers at SuperMax happy. I had to get up, in fact, and get out of the house, because even though the Erlkönig no longer lurked beneath my mattress in the green plastic bottle…

 

…well, he might come back, if I don’t do something about it.

 

Working that program that you gotta keep working, you know…

 

So I have to get out of the house and I have to go somewhere and I have to take care of the first order of business, which in my case is to get somehow into tomorrow without a hangover. Any person not in denial can see that.

 

Even I, a drunk.

 

It’s more than that.

 

If I get out of the house, I will force myself to say, in my best gringo Spanish (or español, since I am giving it my all for Bunny!), Buenos días!

 

Oh, let’s piss them off. I say…

 

…¡Buenos Días!

 

If you say it in a Newhouse voice, it will command respect and reply from the five strangers who are trying to get through their morning and then through their day. They won’t want to be bothered, of course, but they’ll hear the inverted exclamation marks the gringo is trying to say, and they’ll grin. As I have grinned, since it’s pretty silly, a gringo speaking español (note that tilda above the “n”—ah, that’ll really drive the conservatives crazy!)

 

Anyway, by the time I get to the bus station, I will have gotten out of the house (no.1) and gotten away from the Erlkönig that will creep under my bed if I don’t leave the house in the morning and do something about him (no.2). I will have gotten five smiles from five strangers (no. 3). I will have greeted my bus driver, since I am an alcoholic who does not go to AA but who knows that he, like every other entitled drunk, is the piece of shit at the center of the universe. So my bus driver very naturally acknowledges that I am, in fact, the center of the universe. That’s why he stops right in front of where I am going, even though my destination (as the airlines say) is smack in between bus stops, and it’s strictly prohibited to make special stops for people who are just passengers, not alcoholics, with that lingering smell of shit.

 

My bus driver stops in front of my club, which is called Caribbean Twelve Steps, and which I might photograph since it is not anonymous, as some of the recovery groups that work in the space (work, not meet) are. My club is very nice, since it was made for me, of course.

 

And I dig seeing those alcoholics, who are usually out there smoking by the front door, since that’s what they do. I like these guys, even the ones who piss me off, or would if I went to their meetings.

 

I don’t, in case you need me on page six of this damn post to tell you.

 

Anyway, I am totally down with their laughing at me alighting from my conveyance (think Cinderella and that golden slipper!) since I have just amused five Puerto Ricans by pretending to speak Spanish (we’ll drop the español shit). I might as well let the alcoholics—God bless them—laugh at me for having trained my bus driver (one has to think of the little people who do so much for us entitled folk) to deposit me just where my delicate little feet want to go.

 

They laugh at me, and one of the drunks even tried to speak to the driver in his bad Spanish to commend him for shepherding his lost sheep over the bridge where Erklönig lives in the green plastic bottle pretending to be scotch. 

 

We can all see this, of course.

 

So all of that business with the bus driver and the alcoholics hanging out smoking their cigarettes and the grace with which the bus driver has accommodated my entitlement and fended off the Erlkönig in the GPB (green plastic bottle), amuses the little alcoholics, bless them.

 

It’s entirely coincidental that I am arriving just as they are going into their meeting.  

 

They do, and then they come out and they tell me about it.

 

Because I have serious stuff to do, which is to write this blog, and to make sure that Anselmo retains his most-favored-species status since they made me into a human and him into a cat. 

 

Which is the whole point of this post.

 

I’m human, which is why I’m not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, though God knows I should be. I’m human, so I haven’t told you about the other voice from the void, which is what this post is titled, and which you might reasonably feel entitled to read about. I’m human, which is the reason I knew that you had jumped down and looked at the picture of Anselmo and the fake headline before you had trudged up and began reading the text.

 

I’m human, and also an alcoholic, though I have to get my recovery second-hand, as it were. You might say that I get my recovery from the alcoholics just the way I get their nicotine—secondhand.

 

I’m down with that.

 

And the alcoholics tell me that I have typed 2190 words spread out over seven pages.

 

Shit—2199!

 

And—bingo, that “and” put me over the 2200 mark, and even Anthony Trollope didn’t pull that off, with his measly 250 words for every 15 minutes he wrote. It’s now three hours since I started writing after the meeting I didn’t go to in this very nice club where I write this important stuff. Let’s see, three hours is twelve fifteen-minute segments, and twelve times 250 words is only…

 

Shit, 3000.

 

Well, I’m human, which means that I am made lesser than the Trollopes (Anthony’s mother was just as disciplined, and considerably more caustic). It doesn’t make me a bad person, to be human.

 

That makes sense, doesn’t it?

 

Guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow, when there are some of the guys from the meeting out smoking their cigarettes.

 

I’ll get back to you on that.     

   

(If you have to, Erklönig starts at 24:00 in the video, and I get it if you just want to hear that lied. But you'll probably circle back to listen to the whole thing, if you have a pulse...) 

 

 

    

Nihilism

I’ve saved this post as “Nihilism,” which is a smart thing to do. I could leave the rest of the page (which is a screen) blank, and fulfill my purpose: I’ve told you all there is to know about nihilism.

 

Not really, though. I think of nihilism as an essentially negative space, which is where I’m at right now. I got here through a succession of negative events; to list them is only to be tiresome and burdensome. But in fact, I am living through my earliest and worst nightmare.

 

I no longer believe in or trust my government.

 

That’s bad, of course, but it gets worse.

 

I no longer believe in my countrymen.

 

You could argue that I never did, and that that’s the problem. I was born in 1956, eleven years after the holocaust had ended. But from an early age, I feared that at the end of my life, I would end up on a cattle car being transported to a death camp. There was a team—the Green Bay Packers—and a coach—Bart Starr—and even though we lived in Madison (100 miles or so away from Green Bay), all of my classmates were into it. 

 

I thought it was stupid, and still do.

 

I was on a different wavelength, and still am. There’s a guy named Bad Bunny, whom I’ve heard about vaguely for years. And just now, I clicked on one of his songs on YouTube. It’s called Otra Noche en Miami, and yes, I’ve heard it before.

 

Or rather, I’ve endured it, usually at about 10 at night when a car drives down the street, blaring it. Depending on traffic, I will experience either a minute and a half or something like seven minutes of it. The song may not be Otra Noche, and very likely won’t be. But since absolutely all rap / reggae / reggaeton sounds the same to me…well, it’s all another night in Miami.

 

Whatever night Bunny (don’t know him well enough to call him Bad) was having in Miami, he’s not having it now. He just got named to do a Superbowl halftime show, and apparently that’s a big deal. The conservatives are furious, because Bunny speaks Spanish, and is fairly in-your-face about it. He told us on Saturday Night Live that we have four months to learn Spanish, which prompted some conservatives to argue that English should be the official language of the United States. Given that we are now in a government shutdown, that’s unlikely.

 

I know enough Spanish, in fact, to get the gist of Bunny’s message—which is one of an alienation and of mourning a love apparently gone. Here’s what he sings:

 

Ahora que soy rico, no tengo lo que tenía

Pues mi Rolex no brilla igual que tu sonrisa

Y con estas putas no me gusta compartir la frisa

Si piensas volver, me avisa'

Mientras yo sigo solo 

 

Now that he’s rich, he doesn’t have what he had; his Rolex doesn’t shine like her smile; with those whores he doesn’t want to share his blanket. If you’re thinking of coming back, lemme know, he says. Meantime, he’s going it alone.

 

He’s got the toys: the Bentley is in the garage, the views from the penthouse don’t disappoint. But he’s the one who’s bringing home the bacon, or in this case the champaña (Moet champagne, if you have to know). And he’s the one empty inside: he has been given (or more likely clawed his way to) everything and discovers it is meaningless.

 

It's an old story, and how much popular music would there be, if we took away that old story away? Bunny sings that “soy Cristiano después de meter un gol,” and we think he’s joking, that he became a Christian after kicking a goal. But the Bible can sing that song very well, and even better. Here’s Ecclesiastes:

 

    

OK—I get it from Ecclesiastes, but I’m not so sure about Bunny. The alienation is there in both the song and the verse, but they come from a different place, somehow. Bunny bought in to the system, and found it meaningless and rotten in the end. Whoever wrote Ecclesiastes—and he was a hell of a writer—seems to be coming from a deeper place. Simply put, Bunny is coming from Miami, and Ecclesiastes is coming from…

 

…here I falter. 

 

I want to say “nowhere,” but it could also be anywhere. The cynic in me will say that Bunny will become disenchanted with the Maserati in the garage, but he’ll just go out and buy a Bentley. Ecclesiastes will always be taking the bus, even if Bunny stops the Bentley and offers him a ride. Bunny will be focused on the car, Ecclesiastes on the journey.  

 

“All things are full of weariness,” says Ecclesiastes, and who can deny it? Even outrage, for which there is an increasing supply, leads eventually to weariness. The United States went down like a preacher’s daughter, as we used to say, and the news that the US army used helicopters to rappel into an apartment building on the south side of Chicago, broke down doors, put US citizens in a U-Haul for three hours until they could prove their nationality, and zip-tied kids and left them on the street doesn’t surprise me now. Nor does it surprise me to see this:

 

 

 

 

Ho-hum, another Trump-appointed judge makes a ruling that pisses off the dear leader, and her home goes up in flames. Authorities are investigating, and we will know the answer to the question of who did what and why. Or we won’t know why. Or we’ll know why and still not give a shit.

 

Perhaps we have all come to nihilism—Ecclesiastes, Bunny and I. Bunny, I think, is desperate to get the hell out of it, and he has my total sympathy. It’s a lousy place to be, and it doesn’t help that most of us get here through our own damn fault.

 

Who knows about Ecclesiastes?

 

I won’t put words into the guy’s mouth.

 

Maybe it’s that I like English coming from King James better than Spanish coming from the ‘hood. But I think Ecclesiastes is in a deeper place than Bunny. Bunny dipped his toe in; Ecclesiastes is swimming in deep waters indeed.

 

I hope he doesn’t drown, and that may be the problem.

 

From a nihilistic point of view, it doesn’t matter if he drowns. Nor does it matter if I care if he drowns or not.

 

I tell myself that I am in the void, and that I’ve always been in the void, whether I thought so or not. I tell myself that space is just space, and an ocean just an ocean. I experience nothing and am terrified.

 

I tell myself that my void is just negative space—necessary to illuminate whatever surrounds it.

 

I tell myself that it doesn’t matter that nothing matters.

 

There is freedom in the void, I say to myself. There’s certainly plenty of space, and nothing to put into it.

 

Nothing except…

 

…dare I say it?

 

Nothing but hope.

 

    

What were YOU doing last night?

Last night was the most distinctly terrifying night of my life, save for only one or two. I would call it all an anxiety attack, a slowly unfolding panic attack, or an existential attack. Whatever it was, I remember the feeling that my whole world had unraveled, and that nothing would be the same. 

 

I stayed up until 2:30 this morning and awoke at 6:41, when I heard the garbage truck outside. I am operating on four hours of sleep, and also the belief that every American should be operating on four hours of sleep. Because we all should have had the night I had—sorry, but dammit, it’s true—for the basest of reasons.

 

I’ve always wanted to know if anyone had ever asked those Germans who piously maintained that they knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the horrors their democratically-elected leader, Adolf Hitler, was inflicting—well, what were they doing on Kristallnacht?

 

If you don’t know what Kristallnacht is, then you never met, as I did, Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky. I was a nursing assistant in my twenties; he was an old man dying of cancer at University of Wisconsin-Hospitals. He was also the first man I saw with the Nazi tattoo on his forearm. He was an extraordinary gentleman, accepting his end with grace and composure. It didn’t matter to him that he was deeply respected in the Christian community, had strong ties to Edgewood College, and was revered by his congregation or disciples. He had great compassion and concern for others, and he had not given in (this is hitting close to home) to bitterness.

 

I bring you this photo, a screen shot that I tell you I took from my Apple laptop operating on macOS Big Sur Version 11.7.10. I show you the photo instead of just hyperlinking to it, as I normally would. A link in a text on a webpage—what is it? It’s a series of 0’s and 1’s that can be immediately erased by a program of 0’s and 1’s that somebody, or indeed some artificial intelligence, can direct. And the motives of the entity directing the removal of every hyperlink to Manfred Swarsensky are not good. Nobody wants to remove any mention of Swarsensky unless they want to hide the truth.

 

Bury the truth.

 

Let’s go back to the question that every German of a certain age (how odd to be using that phrase that usually denotes a woman of, well, “a certain age) has to answer.

 

What were you doing on Kristallnacht? 

 

Swarsensky knew because he was there in Berlin on the night of November 9 / 10 in the year 1938. He was up all night, and he witnessed first-hand the violence of that night. He knew that it was a rampage of broken glass, burning buildings, shouts, bells clanging, fire trucks with alarms blaring, and the smoke of burning bookstores / butcher shops / and synagogues that burned your nostrils. If you were in the country, perhaps, with the nearest house miles away, then you get a pass. But if you were in even a village, you knew exactly what happened that night. If you did not, you were lying to yourself.

 

What were you doing last night?

 

Remember, last night? I was up until 2:30, because I could not stop seeing this image in my mind:

 

I was up looking at this, and having seen it, I cannot unsee it. I cannot unsee it because I met Rabbi Swarsensky, and I saw the tattoo as I walked him to the bathroom in his hospital room. He was pushing the IV pole, courteously refusing my offer to help.  Here’s the screen that I saw this morning as I wrote this, and that you might never see, if I merely “link” it. Indeed I could link, but something has to be there at the other end. So here’s the screenshot:

 

And here we are. I am a 68-year-old guy remembering a man three years older than my father, a rabbi whose synagogue burned down on Kristallnacht. Lousy syntax—it was Swarsensky, not my father, who was the rabbi whose synagogue…

 

Four hours sleep, remember?

 

I am thinking of Swarsensky because I wonder if he knew what was coming, and if he knew how bad it would be. I’m thinking of Swarsensky because I saw the picture of the “top brass” of the United States Military sitting stone-faced and silent in the face of an onslaught of Fascism and hate from the president of the United States and Pete Hegseth, Secretary of his newly-renamed Department of War.

 

Calling these guys the “top brass” or just the “brass” is like calling Hurricane Maria, which I went through, a “Cat 5.” These men and women know war as no one else does—they have seen it, endured it, directed it, defended it, and suffered it, often to the point of alcoholism, PTSD, and suicide. These men and women are serious in a way that I am not. They put their lives at risk, which is OK, and they put their fighters at risk, often knowing that there will be a price. A phone call that has to be made to a wife-now-widow waiting at home, the wrong decision made on too much adrenaline and too little sleep, the derision of civilians for fighting an unjust, unpopular war.

 

They had dropped everything to do what had never been done: gather them all up and pressure them. If they were historically minded, they would have known that   

Hitler had done the same thing, and had made his generals swear this oath, called in English “The Soldier’s Oath:”

 

 

 

He stopped just short, but trust me, to anybody who knew anything about what they were seeing, the Soldier’s Oath was not in the rear-view mirror. But the off-ramp was certainly in the rear-view mirror, and we were speeding directly toward a place where that oath would be impossible to ignore.

 

It was horrible first to see the complete dementia on display. Dudes, this guy told everybody in his first debate with Kamala Harris that immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Ohio, and not only did you look the other way, you bought into it and amplified it. This guy has been up walking on the roof of the White House not once but TWICE! Nobody can say that Trump is following some sly and devious logic that only an Oriental, subtle mind could conceive.

 

Grampa has dementia.

 

So for forty-three minutes, the mind numbed under the onslaught of Trump’s demented mind. We heard about the battleships that used to look like how battleships should look like, according to Trump. We heard his grievance about the Nobel Peace Prize. We heard a lot, but nothing spoke louder than the “joke” about what might happen if the generals didn’t loosen up and relax. You know, have a beer, raise your right hand, and swear some good will to you good bud. Here’s the inevitable screenshot, and note that it goes downhill immediately. Trump has entered a room full of people whose professional lives are now threatened, and who have devoted their lives to upholding the constitution, not catering to the whims of some madman. We are not two minutes in, before Trump makes a threat that everyone in the room must have taken seriously:

 

Trump knows that everybody in the room is thinking about the troops that he has sent to Los Angeles, to Washington, D.C., and to Portland, Oregon. But loosen up, he says, we’re all on the same team, and if you leave the room—"there goes your rank, there goes your future.” This threat is on SECOND 24 of his speech. See above. 

 

It followed an utterly chilling moment in which Hegseth directly addressed the generals, and spoke about the enemy from within, and made it very clear that that enemy wasn’t immigrants. It was me, since I am the radical left. 

 

I am the person to be eliminated.

 

This was Hegseth’s message, and Trump was on board on his SECOND sentence. And then, after all the minds in the room had been subjected to 43 minutes of malignant dementia, Trump finally told the audience what he wanted them to know:

 

 

 

It couldn’t have been clearer or more callous. Let’s train our military to be monsters in foreign countries by being monsters at home.

 

The “brass” should have walked out of this “Cat 5” hurricane. They were morally obligated to do so, as I was morally obligated to pick up the phone and call the White House. They didn’t, but they were silent.

 

They were silent, and so was I. Until now, when I am writing about it. And I am not writing for you, assuming there is any “you” reading this post today. I’m writing it for my nephew’s and my niece’s grandchildren, assuming any of those worthy individuals ever comes along.

 

I’m writing it because I met Swarsensky, and I know what he was doing on Kristallnacht. And I’ll tell you: he was woken in the middle of the night that his synagogue was in flames, and that his Jewish congregation and the local gentile population were watching the firefighter douse the flames…

 

…of all the buildings owned by gentiles surrounding the synagogue.

 

They let the synagogue burn to the ground.

 

And then they sent Swarsensky to the camps, and I ended up meeting him at the end of his life, and in the first years of my adulthood. And I have carried the memory of this man and his burning synagogue down hospital corridors and decades of festering hate and maddening indifference. I have worried who had the greater guilt—Hitler? 

 

The firemen?

 

Or was it the Germans who watched the spectacle and did and said nothing?

 

I think I know what Swarsensky would say. But I also think that he wouldn’t say it, certainly not decades after the event. He was a humble man pushing his IV pole to the bathroom of his hospital room. He had witnessed horrors, and would soon be free of them. He wouldn’t have troubled a nursing assistant with any of that.

 

He held his peace.

 

But I can neither hold his, nor hold my own.

 

What were you doing last night, by the way? 

 

 

Friday Thoughts

The penny dreadful was what I intended to write about, and perhaps I will. The serious side of me is appalled, of course, since how can I write about the penny dreadful when James Comey, the former director of the FBI just got indicted by the Justice Department? I should tell you, at least, that Comey went before a senate committee and told the truth. The Russians had done everything they could to help Trump win the election, and that’s just what we know.

 

It's just like my drinking was: a lot worse than you can imagine. So if we know that Putin set up a full-time shop in St. Petersburg to peddle fake news (sorry, but yeah) to gullible conservatives in 2015, you can be sure he did a lot more that we don’t know about. 

 

I remember the first time I realized that the president had been…compromised? Breached? What’s the word for a guy who is being blackmailed and has to get elected to save his skin?

 

Even worse, what’s the word for a guy who knows that the Russians have the dirt on him, but he doesn’t know what dirt it is? There being a lot of dirt, of course, and the Epstein files (which may or not be in Putin’s top right-hand desk drawer) are perhaps the least of it.

 

The idea that the president was compromised—that he was under the thumb to a large if not a complete extent of the Russians—was utterly jarring. I stood still in the living room in 2015, after the news of the Steele Dossier came out, and pondered if it was true. The sensational tidbit, of course, was the golden showers scene that Trump allegedly enjoyed with the two prostitutes in the room where Barrack and Michele Obama had slept.

 

Some stuff I believe because it’s entirely believable. Some stuff I believe because it’s not believable—it’s so unbelievable that who would cook it up? And some stuff I believe because it fits: Trump is traumatically insecure, his weak ego demands that others be humiliated, and sex is dirty for him (as it is for me, because we both grew up in the fifties and early sixties). Whether the story is true or not misses the point. It’s the old story of needing to ask if a woman is a lady: she’s not, by definition, because if you need to ask the question, you already have your answer.

 

Nobody, by the way, has ever had to ask whether either of the Bush presidents or Obama himself were diddling anyone on the side. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, on the other hand….

 

So this is serious, more serious by far than the penny dreadful. The penny dreadful is absolutely ridiculous and I am not going to say another word about it. I will devote myself to serious topics, today.

 

It’s a shame, really, since who could not love the dreadful? And I was going to say something about the book, which is more important than golden showers and senate committees.

 

You may scoff at the penny dreadful, of course, and if so, you’re in excellent company. Everybody sneers at the dreadful, which I will tell you (finally) is not much of a book at all. It’s a couple of sections of eight or sixteen pages each sewn crudely together, with no cover but a slightly thicker paper (for me, cardstock) with a cheap illustration. The whole affair is slipshod and cheap, as it had to be since the dreadful cost, as you can very well imagine, a penny.

 

It was trash, in many instances, but what a wonderful thing trash is! Trash (without sounding too much like John Steinbeck) is the mark of high civilization. In the slums of Bombay or Haiti, there’s no trash. They make musical instruments out of oil drums and coke cans; they build houses out of packing crates. You’ve got to be seriously well off to throw stuff away.

 

So the penny dreadful occupies a very serious place (he said flippantly) in the history of the book. The price of paper, which had been very expensive but was at least cheaper than raising and killing calves for parchment, had plummeted. True, the paper was lousy quality, but nobody ever intended the dreadful to be around for longer than a week or two. Who cared?

 

So paper was cheap, and guess what? Everybody had learned to read, by the time the dreadful rolled around, which was great. Literacy rates in the 18^th and 19^th century were at last out of the single digits, though far from 100%. Still, the days of producing elaborate, jeweled tomes for the elite and the entitled were not over but…well, shared, perhaps. Not everybody could afford to buy this (myself included):

 

 

 

That, of course, would cost a pretty penny.

 

We can all agree that the book above demands respect; you should probably go to confession before you touch it. But the dreadful gloried in its cheapness. It invited the dirtiest hands and the filthiest minds to enjoy it. Its purpose was amusement, not instruction—though in fact the dreadful could concern itself with religious instruction and educational material as well. But mention the penny dreadful, and everybody will immediately see this, in their mind’s eye:

 

 

I utterly love this, and in fact, I utterly need this. Because I can’t spend the morning horrified by a president who is trying to put his political enemy (meaning a guy who told the truth) in jail. It’s Friday, and I want to make it into Saturday sober.

 

The penny dreadful came along with the rise of the literate population, and was helped by the availability of cheap paper. But it was also helped by the rise of peddlers, who walked the countryside selling knives and pins and pots and (if he had some room in his bag) cheap stuff for people to read. The chapbook, which is the dreadful’s more respectable elder brother, was also carried around by peddlers. Both the penny dreadful and the chapbook were, as the name implies, cheap. In fact, the “chap” in chapbook is derived from the old English cēap which, yes, means cheap.

 

The book, in short, has been evolving with us over time. When monks were in charge of things, we got the bejeweled, illuminated manuscripts which we marvel at (and walk past) today. When the economy got perking, and ordinary folk started reading, we got the penny dreadful and the chapbook.

 

Now we have the internet, which everybody (including Meryl Streep) thinks is going to kill the book.

 

Will it?

 

I have no idea. But I couldn’t make books, nowadays, without the internet. I wouldn’t even knowabout the chapbook or the penny dreadful without the internet. I couldn’t decide, as I have just decided, to download the tale of Varney the Vampire. 

 

Gotta go—my fingers are itching!