Now Then

Well, having dispatched our puppet—La Comay—to wherever it is he went off to, what’s next? We have, as we used to say corporationally (OK, computer, businessly? Companally? Does ANYTHING make you happy?), many opportunities down here. One person in seven is using drugs. Murder rate is over a thousand a year. Forty eight percent of the population is living below poverty level.

‘Well, at least we have absolutely no problems with snow removal,’ I thought on the morning trot, after having glanced at the New Day’s front page. Gobierno irá contra los padres, announced the headline. The Government Is Going After the Parents?

Hunh? Why? What have they done?

It started when our new governor visited a school two days ago, and discovered that very few of the parents had bothered to pick up their children’s report card, much less attend parent / teacher conferences.

How few?

A Department of Education spokesperson says only 30% of parents pick up the grades.

So the government gave the parents un halón de orejas or an ear pulling. It’s a common Puerto Rican chastisement. And now, they’re hitting where it hurts.

It seems that parents get all kinds of benefits from the state—plan 8, that’s the apartment. Tarjeta de salud—free medical care. Departamento de la Familia—money and food. You’ve pretty much got your life taken care of, right there.

But to get all this, the agencies require documents verifying that you do have a kid, and that she or he is in school. So the teachers spend time filling out these documents.

Hunh?

Let me put this car in reverse and tell you that I’m not at my best today. Yes, I did the trot, but it was more instinct / habit than Marc out there. I spent most of yesterday on the only throne I’ll ever own, and when I wasn’t there, I was in bed. I am, to speak frankly, metaphorically and literally flushing out the holidays.

Which may be why this situation, even on an island with a zest for absurdity, seems crazy.

OK—let’s do a list:

1. Teachers teach. They don’t fill out documents, or teach values, or police the school grounds. They just teach, for which they should be paid as much as the governor, easily.
2. Parents parent. Part of which is to say to the kid that the teacher is to be respected, and part of which is to make sure that the teacher is…respectable (OK, but you know what I mean.) Another part of which is to make sure that their kids know—school is work, your education is the most important thing in your life right now, and will be for the rest of your life.
3. Governments govern. Which means that I can drink the water (no), drive the roads without breaking an axle (no), go out on the street at night (what, are you crazy?), or send my kid to a public school (unthinkable).

Right, so now we have all the roles defined. Let’s talk about those public schools.

“Lock your kid in the marquesina!” I was once busily saying—actually repeating—to a student. She had just told me that she had announced to the director of the private school her kids were in, “the only reason I’m paying you ten grand a year is that gate over there!”

(A break for anyone who doesn’t know what a marquesina is. It’s a garage, but much more. It’s also a place where you sit, where you entertain neighbors, where you drink beer and watch fights. Importantly, it’s enclosed and has a gate that can be locked. So it’s safe.)

In the public schools, there are no substitute teachers. So what happens when missis (common nickname for a teacher—a little hangover from the Americans) is missing? The school dumps the kids on the street.

OK—so maybe your child has a cell phone and you’re at home, eating bonbons and reading French novels. You hop in the car and get your kid.

Oh, sorry—forgot. That was the fifties.

If you really would prefer that your child not become a street urchin, then you pay for a private school. The education—with some exceptions, of course—is just as dreadful. But they’ve got a gate and a lock and you know where you kid is gonna be when you drop him or her off at seven in the morning. Now all you gotta do is deal with the boss.

Well, my solution was to lock the kid up in the marquesina every day—with, of course, the 500$ of textbooks you shelled out for him. No, it’s not abuse. You’ll give him food and drink, safety, bathroom, etc. You could, of course, put a closed-circuit monitoring system in the marquesina, and follow him periodically throughout the day. Tremendous idea, if I do say so myself: thinking outside the caja as usual!

Well, I thought it was a good idea.

Predictably, it was shot down.

What I am telling you at obscene length is that the public schools are terrible, for the most part.

It now must be said.

You don’t have a right to have a kid. Not if you’re so damned stupid and lazy and uncaring that you can’t hustle your fat Departamento-de-la-Familia-fed ASS down to the school to pick up a report card. I can’t prevent you from having a kid, but I sure as hell won’t support you, you lazy fat cow who stands in front of me in the supermarket while your kids play tag between my knees, and you’re eating chips and drinking Coca-Cola—too damn busy to fish out your tarjeta de la familia card to pay for all the junk you’re slopping into your kids!

Whew….

Now then, back to bed…. 

Death of a Puppet

We won’t know if it’s a game changer until, well, we see the game change. But it’s looking very much like one.

Readers of this blog in the continental US will know that there is—sorry, that’s was—a character on local TV called La Comay. And La Comay—who in real life was a guy but who donned female clothing and a big foam head, atop of which was an awful wig—dished up just the kind of stew we all love: racy, gossipy, no-holds-barred and take-no-prisoners.

OK—not all of us. Neither Mr. Fernández nor I ever watched the program. My old boss Ofelia actively unwatched the program once in a doctor’s office. The show was on, the dish was flowing, the patients / viewers were sniggering. So Ofelia strode to the head of the room, stood in front of the television, announced that she was sure of the good taste and genteel sensibilities of everyone present, and knew that they must be offended by the program. Therefore she would take the liberty of turning it off. She did, and the room became one of the quietest places ever heard in Puerto Rico.

There was pretty much nowhere she didn’t go, La Comay. A student who had been a news anchor on another television channel once told me that in the middle of a painful divorce, she didn’t need La Comay commenting on her marital problems for all of Puerto Rico—and Orlando, New York, Chicago—to hear. She was having trouble enough.

Readers will also know that La Comay strolled into what was a particularly grisly murder and made insinuations. What was the victim doing on a certain street at night? Did he know his assailants? Wasn’t the street rife with male and female prostitution?

In short, she got right up to if not quite over the cliff of he-had-it-coming.

Standard stuff.

What was unusual was the reaction. Seemingly with the speed of toadstools cropping up after a rain, Ricky Martin and a host of other celebrities were holding signs saying “Todos somos Jose Enrique.” Then a boycott of the show was announced. Facebook and Twitter went onto overdrive.

Corporate sponsors left the show in droves. Here’s a little list:

Triple-S, Coca-Cola, Ford, Chevrolet, WalMart, AT&T, Sprint, Goodyear, Harris Paint, SC Johnson, Dish Puerto Rico, Claro, Kress, Lanco, Borden, Red ATH, Vanilla Gift Card, Enfamil, Ashley Furniture Store, Aqua Fresh, Carolina Herrera, Mon Cheri, Radio Isla 1320, Lenel Restaurant, Designer Shoe Warehouse, ICPR Junior College, PMC Medicare Choice, MMM, Kia, Burlington Coat Factory, MAPFRE, Goya, Corona Extra, Welch’s, Cold Stone Creamery, Plaza del Caribe, Gillette, Hellmann’s, Mayagüez Resort & Casino, Palo Viejo, Asociación de Productos de Puerto Rico y St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.

Well, money talks, but also on occasion screams. The manager of the TV station demanded that the program stop being recorded live, but pre-recorded and—presumably—vetted. La Comay said forget it, and walked.

All of this is surprising. More surprising is that the nemesis of La Comay, who is looking very much like the victor here, is a gay activist born on the island and living currently in New York. Nor did he start the battle recently—he had declared it in 2006, when he said “su más grande castigo, como homofóbico que es, que sea un hombre abierta y orgullosamente gay el que ayude a sacarlo de la televisión”. (Roughly, “his biggest punishment, given the homophobe he is, would be for an openly and proudly gay person to help take him off television.”)

The activist is Pedro Julio Serrano, born in Ponce, raised in Isla Verde, and now the director of communications for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. We are not in Puerto Rico by any means the most macho of Latin countries. But we are a Latin country. And for a gay guy to spearhead the movement to topple an icon—however disagreeable—like La Comay?

Major.

Pedro Julio Serrano (left), with his fiancé, Steven

Interesting Times

Well, we live in interesting times, or maybe it’s just that now, with our technology, we can see just how interesting the times are. Peering into CNN this morning, I saw a guy who was totally carried away. Why? For the first time a giant squid has been seen! And we have footage! Wow! He could barely sit in his chair—by comparison, kids on Christmas morning are blasé.

Well, the giant squid is interesting. I didn’t know that it had been the subjects of myths for centuries—a giant sea creature that swarms up and devours boats. They don’t—apparently—but they are big. Until now, they’ve only been seen when they washed ashore, dead. But they can get to be 60 feet; that’s several school buses.

Have a look—not at a giant squid but at the largest squid of all: the colossal squid.

Something to see, right? You’d remember that day of fishing….

Of course, you’d also remember being in Manila yesterday. That’s because nine million people decided to celebrate the procession of the Black Nazarene.

I can hear the question….

The Black Nazarene is a sculpture made in Mexico in the early 1600’s. It was transported to the Philippines by a galleon that, according to legend, caught fire, blackening but not burning the statue. So three times a year, six to eight million people walk barefoot—in honor of you-know-whom—through the streets of Manila. Well, maybe not walk—“jostle” is the word Wikipedia used. Oh, and “trample” as well, at times resulting in death. The deal? Wiping a white towel on the statue—it’s supposed to bring you good luck.

Listen, everybody, I would hate to antagonize my Philippine readership, and you know that I tiptoe on the topic of religion—but is this rationale? Sorry, forgot that the Philippines is also where they nail people up on crosses every Good Friday. So maybe Manila wasn’t the place to be, yesterday.

Of course, where you REALLY didn’t want to be was with the guy in clip below. But how fascinating to watch someone so fascinated and seemingly so fearless.

There is something compelling about a polar bear…..

104,000 Nuts, All Armed

The great thing about not following popular culture is that it’s so relaxing. I walk by the sea with Bach cantatas soaring into my ears, and drink my orange juice…it’s soothing.

It is, however, a bit isolating. Which is why I had to ask, “who’s Piers Morgan,” when Mr. Fernández told me that over 100,000 people want to deport him.

He explained—a British citizen who has a show on television.

Right—so what had he done?

If you watch the clip below, you’ll know. He wants to ban semi-automatic weapons, force background checks on buyers at gun shows, increase funding for mental health.

And if you watch the clip below, you’ll know something else.

We’re in deep trouble.

If I weren’t an atheist, I’d be on my knees. Why? Because the gentleman—though he seems to prefer the term “bud”—behind the petition is completely insane.

Most people in interviews start off reasonably enough, get challenged, become unnerved, and then unravel. Alex Jones unravels within the first fifteen seconds after being presented the question, “why do you want to deport me?”

A single nut is one thing; 104,000 of them—all armed—is another.

Watching the clip is an invitation to emotional highjacking. The fear, rather the paranoia, is contagious. Worse is the realization—no rational dialogue is possible here.

I know people who have guns. A neighbor of my mother has guns. Actually, at least two neighbors. And they’re good people and I trust them and they’re not crazy. But if they want to keep their guns, they’d better do something quick.

Change—or rather start—the dialogue.

Send this to everyone you know who has a gun. Give them this message.

The NRA is making you look completely ridiculous. And it’s pissing people off. So unless you want the rest of us to get down nasty and fight to ban ALL guns—which many nations have done, by the way—you’re gonna have to be reasonable. Nobody has to have an assault weapon. Not checking background at gun shows while requiring it in gun shops is crazy. Speak up, repudiate the NRA, and start a reasonable dialogue.

Why do I feel that ain’t gonna happen?

Moral Proximity

I came upon it by accident, as I do most things, by trawling through the ever-more-depressing news in search of something to write about. So here it is: 60,000 young Christians from around the world held candles in the Atlanta night and pledged to fight against slavery.

They did more—they put up a bunch of cash by using tablet computers; last year they raised three-and-a-half million dollars.

I’ve written about this before. There is a building in my neighborhood with a Chinese restaurant on the first floor. The upper floors are rooms for rent.

Or are they?

“It’s a whorehouse for Asian guys who work the cruise ships.”

Words a co-worker spoke fifteen years ago.

Was it true?

It was strange, those mornings at five when I was heading for the bus to take to work, that there was frequently loud music coming from the upper floors of the building. Oh, and that the door to those floors which was always closed during the day was flung open. And certainly most houses in Puerto Rico have rejas (security bars or burglar proofing). But almost always they're on the outside, this one appears to have the bars on the inside. Odd, too, that the restaurant on the first floor is so often empty.

Five or six odd things. Which may mean nothing. Or it may mean that there’s a whorehouse in my neighborhood.

In the days when I was walking past the open door to the staircase to the upper floors with the blasting music, I wasn’t alive. I was middle management working at Wal-Mart, a circumstance so extraordinary I still can’t believe I did it. Somebody else had to deal with the world, I was dealing with Wal-Mart.

Now I have time. So I took an hour to read the report from 2010 that the Ricky Martin Foundation sponsored on human trafficking in Puerto Rico.

There is human trafficking here, as opposed to human smuggling. The difference? You’re a Dominican guy who has saved up the thousands of dollars that you will pay a guy with a yola (a small and probably leaking boat) to take you across the deepest and sharkiest (exists now, computer!) waters of the Atlantic to Puerto Rico. Once there, or rather if there, you’re done. Transaction’s finished.

That’s human smuggling.

Now then, you’re a Dominican woman and a Puerto Rican guy meets you at the resort where you’re changing the sheets and cleaning the toilets and he’s got money and you fall in love. And he takes you to Puerto Rico and you wake up in a room and you’re naked and bruised and he’s nowhere in sight. Oh, and he has your passport. And also the key to the lock on the door.

See the difference?

What isn’t known is how much and what kind. But some facts leapt off the screen. Puerto Rico. Starting, for example, on page 1:

 Although specific statistics on cases of human trafficking in Puerto Rico do not exist, the high number of minors living in “upbringing” (crianza) or foster homes (close to 9,000), the nearly half of all families (48 percent) living in poverty and the high levels of immigration to the Island, taken together with gender discrimination, suggest the high potential for trafficking and exploitation in Puerto Rico. These factors, among others, contribute to Puerto Rico’s status as the third highest country in Latin America in which social inequality is most evident, preceded only by Paraguay and Brazil (El Nuevo Día, Nov. 12, 2009).

       1 The terms “human trafficking” and “trafficking in persons” will be used interchangeably throughout the document.2

Wow! But then there’s the statement of a police chief, “fathers having sex with their daughters is a cultural pattern in the rural, mountainous areas.”

Or how about the report on the Dupont Plaza Hotel? Remember that fire, and all those people on the roof, and the helicopter rescues? Well, somebody had to go in there and find all the belongings and give them back to the owners, if possible.

What they found was shocking.

“They found everything, from substantial amounts of money—up to $40,000—to pornographic photos, especially of men having sex with minors. This was in approximately 20 rooms” (Interview with a police officer in Puerto Rico, 2008).  

Right. I’ve read the report. I can give money. I can raise my voice and light a candle and feel good.

What can’t I do?

Get a bunch of people together and march up the stairs of a building in Old San Juan and figure out just what the hell is going on.

Amy and Me

OK—confession time. I have—sort of—a Twitter account.

“Nonsense,” you say. “You do or you don’t. How can you ‘sort of’ have a Twitter account?”

Well, I was willing—actually compelled—to write a book. I also vowed to start a blog to promote it. And I spend an hour or two trying to promote my work—asking people to write reviews, calling people who may be interested in the book.

What did I refuse to do?

The social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus.

I’m not stupid. I could do it if I wanted to. But that’s the crux—I have no interest that you ate a six-pound hamburger accompanied by a quart of diet Coke AND you have photographed the monstrosity and put it on your wall. Perhaps it was one too many dead sheep that dulled the senses to it all….

So I gave the thing over to doña Taí, who is capable and also interested. And, periodically, I get messages from people who are “following” me. These I happily ignore—the messages, not the people. OK—both.

Until yesterday, when I got an email notification from Twitter that Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club is now following me.

Yeah? 

A fake, I decided. So I checked it out, going first to her official website, which is quite beautifully done, by the way. From there I clicked on her Twitter page, which looked identical to the page I had received in the email Twitter had sent to me. There was a tweet about her new phone number, with the lucky “88” that’s spurring bill collectors to call daily. (Hmmm, and that’s lucky?) There’s the tweet about Joyce Carol Oates being over at her house.

Well, it’s real or it’s not. At any rate, it seemed a thing to do—find out the real, or at least the presented, dope on Amy Tan.

Born in America, of Chinese immigrants. Her father was an electrical engineer as well as a Baptist minister. But as anyone who has read The Joy Luck Club can tell you, it’s the mother that counts. So much so that the first line in her Wikipedia article runs something like “Amy Tan is an American writer of Chinese descent whose work explores mother / daughter relationships.”  When her brother and father die of brain tumors six months apart, her mother decides logically that there’s a curse—the fifteen-year old Amy is next. So they pack her off to Switzerland, to see the world before Amy leaves it.

In Switzerland, Amy hangs out with the counter-culture—remember that?—and gets arrested for drugs. But then she pulls it together and gets a scholarship to go to Linfield College in Oregon. She does graduate work in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later at Berkeley.

She worked as a freelance business writer for a bunch of telecommunication companies, until she wearied of it, and began to write in her spare time. The Joy Luck Club was her first novel—or rather, in her words, a collection of stories.

She’s written five or six other novels, a memoir, a couple of children’s books, and the libretto for an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

An impressive body of work, for which she has received numerous awards. She’s also been translated into 35 languages.

Wow—the lady is major!

Well, well—it was all a hoax, I decided. The world is not always a nice place—sorry you had to read it here, but somebody should tell you—and things are not always what they seem. A hacker, or maybe spoofster, has decided his day would be better off by playing tricks on an aged, unknown writer. It was a mistweet, or maybe a faux tweet.

But it now seems it’s real. Doña Taí writes that she too has gotten a notification from Twitter of a follow from Ms. Tan, and that she had Twitter-messaged Amy some time ago to say how much she—sorry, that’s Taí—had liked her—and that would be Amy’s—work. Especially her love of her dog Bombo. Taí had come across Amy’s blog looking for something, and read through it and saw the videos of Bombo and read Amy’s bio, stories and bloggies, as she calls them. Perhaps Ms. Tan stumbled across my blog through Taí’s tweets reposting links to its posts....

“Compare and contrast” started every essay question on every test I took in high school. (Right, not the math classes, but just about everything else…..) And some forty years later, I’m still doing it. The contrasts are easy—fame, fortune, sex, culture. But the comparisons are interesting—two writers with distinctive mothers, both of whom had Alzheimer’s. A strong love of classical music—she played the piano, I the cello. A total love of animals.

Most, I suppose, the fact that we sit down each day in our varying worlds before a screen of primordial whiteness, and conjure how we are going to cook up other worlds. The cat wags its tail and moves its head when I proclaim him “ridiculous.” Bombo thumps his tail. Somewhere, perhaps, Amy Tan is reading my blog.

I’m totally honored.   

From Cardboard Bicycles to the Voice of God

One of the strange things about being a blogger is that you frequently start out fully intending to write about one thing, and then discover yourself compelled by what seems a better, more interesting affair.

Though the first intention—an Israeli guy who’s making cardboard bikes—is pretty interesting. The cost alone is amazing—he estimated each bike will be less than fifteen US dollars. Most people pay more for a good bike lock than that.

I know all this because the good Taí sent me a link about the bicycles from The Economist. And it seems that the inventor, Izhar Gafni, has done his damnedest to use everything recycled. The hand bars are derived from Coke bottles. The chain is from recycled car rubber, as are the wheels. The frame and most of the rest is made up cardboard, which Gafni has folded, to increase strength. After that, he applies a resin to increase resilience, and waterproofing.

The low cost makes the bike a godsend for poor countries, since transportation is often a critical problem in the lives of poor people. I looked it up, in those days when I was championing everything from green roofs to the Lion’s Club eye glass donation to making an actual windmill be the star in Wal*Mart in the sign outside our stores.

Bicycles for Humanity—an organization starting in 2005, has shipped over 45,000 bikes to Africa. That’s not nothing. For a culture based on cars, the bike is a toy. But here’s what the organization says in its webpage:

A bicycle solves the problem of mobility and helps empower people to change their life. The mobility a bicycle provides allows people to travel greater distances in a shorter length of time and transport much more weight. Mothers can carry containers of water back to their village in a fraction of the time walking required. Students get to school faster saving precious daylight for studies. Parents transport more items to market to sell. Healthcare workers are 3 to 4 times more productive.

It’s estimated that ten million bicycles are dumped in landfills in Europe and North America. But these bikes are critically needed in Africa, and other developing nations.

Well, in those long-gone days of my bearing the standard of sustainability at Wal-Mart, I would have proposed something like this. Wal-Mart donates all its cardboard—or at least that usable for the bikes—to a local factory set up to produce the bikes. Wal-Mart also provides support for marketing, human resources, finance, and logistics. And of course, for every bike purchased at Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart donates a cardboard bike for the kid in Africa who needs one.

In those days, ideas like the one above came as regularly as flies to a picnic. And, like the flies, the ideas were always swatted down. One of the first victims of corporate positivism is the shadow side—a negativism to anything that is new and—especially—not vetted by the boss.

In fact, for all the thinking outside the box that we were always adjured to do, there were people who practiced rote inside the box. Because it’s not only possible to make bicycles from cardboard, you can actually make furniture from paper.

Or at least papier—as in papier mache. It was quite a Victorian thing, like the horsehair upholstery used on couches. And primarily it was tables and decorative objects. But not always—check this out:

Nice, hunh? And since it’s been around since the mid-nineteenth century, pretty durable, as well. The British Victorians, it seems, listen to offbeat ideas at bit corporate America.

What some people listen to, it also turns out, is the voice of God.

I know this because it really seemed unlikely—could I make a post out of a cardboard bicycle? I’m only on page two here, and 639 words. So I was trawling, looking for something with a little more heft than just a bicycle.

CNN came sailing through, as it so often does. And who could not click on a link, “My Take, If you Hear God Speak Audibly, you (Usually) Aren’t Crazy.” Clearly a thing to check out.

Full disclosure—I have had an audible hallucination. By which I mean I perceived a voice that was exactly the same in feeling and experientially as the voice of Mr. Fernández, each night, three feet away from me at the dining room table.

And in fact it was Mr. Fernández’s voice that I though I heard, saying the words that he says every night to his favorite cat, Kitty.

“Yo,” I shouted.

No response.

There was nothing eerie or uncanny about it. He simply wasn’t there.

Nor am I alone. About one in ten Evangelical Christians say they have heard the voice of God, according to T. M. Luhrmann. Gallup, in 1999, reported that 23% of Americans had heard a voice or seen something that was not there in response to prayer.

Nor is it only God we’re hearing. A surprising number of people report hearing the voice of a person they have lost, and are grieving. Twenty-eight percent, according to one study in Wales, over 60 percent, according to Dr. Phil.

In contrast, the rate of schizophrenia—the hallmark of which is hallucination—is only about 1%. And the messages / hallucinations tend to be different—the messages coming through prayer are filled with peace and love. Psychotics tend to hear quite the opposite.

Well, it’s a curious topic—what’s real and what’s not. There are also, by the way, negative hallucinations—when you don’t perceive something that is there. They probably happen a million times a day. How many times, when I was practicing the cello, focusing so intently on the music, did I lost sight of the actual cello—the reddish-brown varnish, the nick on the purfling—that I was playing?

And there are a number of diseases and conditions that can produce hallucinations: epilepsy, migraines, steroids, even too much caffeine.

Come clean. Besides that one hallucination, I’ve come very close to others. It was in my darkest moment on depression, and it felt as if only enormous willpower could keep me from changing my thoughts into voices. I was, I think, at that threshold where thought becomes voice.

Better minds than my mind will figure it out. In fact, one of them—Oliver Sacks—is soon to be out with a new book entitled Hallucinations. So he may prove or disprove my theory: the center for recognition of oral speech (that is, the voice speaking next to you) is very close to and intimately linked to the center that processes words, including the words that form our thinking. Sometimes, with stress, fatigue, varying chemicals and different diseases, the connections are lost, or jangled. A thought becomes a voice.

Well, why not? We live in part in a land of mystery: a thought becomes a voice, or a form, like the vision of Jesus after his death. Oh, and also a more prosaic land, where a cardboard box becomes a bicycle.

Which, for a kid in Africa, might be both a mystery and a miracle.

Boys Beware

It was a curious coincidence, hearing of the danger of the homosexual just after having read a biography of one.

“Homosexuals are sick,” announced the computer speakers. “But not a visible sickness like chickenpox or the measles. Mentally sick.”

“What in the hell are you watching?” I asked Mr. Fernández.

“Boys Beware, an educational film from the fifties.”

Wrong—it was from 1961.

And it was educational in everything but the message. Although some of the message made sense. Don’t get into cars with strangers. If a friend does, write down the license plate number, and the make of the car. If you have any doubt, go to your parents or a trusted teacher.

“He traded his life for a newspaper headline,” announces the narrator. For some of them—in my case us—can be violent. And careful, they / we may seem normal. Even really friendly—always a dangerous sign. One of the four boys in the movie makes the mistake of going to a motel. Well, why not? The guy—a suspicious type with sunglasses and a mustache (right, central casting wasn’t being imaginative that day)—had bought the boy a coke, taken him fishing, and then showed him a little pornography. The boy reports the presumed molestation to his parents—the man is arrested and convicted, but Jimmy is given “probation in the custody of his parents.”

Oh yeah? Isn’t this the classic “blaming the victim?” Shouldn’t we look on the kid as, well, a kid? They do stupid things, sometimes.

Well, it was shot in black and white, there in 1961. But apparently the message was no less timely—or important—in 1973, when they decided to shoot it again in color, though with the same script and soundtrack, but different actors.

1973 was the year I graduated from high school.

I tell you this because the ten minutes of nonsense that you can see below was the absolute background for my formative years. The men in their suits and their ties. Mother in her skirt, sweeping the walks. Even the voice of the narrator, with his folksy talk about “young people” is a voice no longer heard.

You never stop coming out, is a frequently-expressed truism in the gay world. Watching this film, I wonder if I can ever fully rid myself of the self-hate that comes with being told, for the first two decades of my life, that I was sick and perhaps criminal.

Perhaps? Well, unless I chose celibacy, definitely criminal. I didn’t realize, somehow, that the 1950’s were perhaps the worst years for oppression of gay people. In 1953, Eisenhower decreed a ban on homosexuals working in the federal government. Most gay people resigned--why wait for the axe? Joe McCarthy of Appleton, Wisconsin, threw fuel on the fire a few years later, and by then it was automatically assumed, if a man resigned from a government post, he was gay. The police are raiding bars, and taking a nice little pay-off in bribery money. Thugs are looming everywhere--to beat and bash gay men senselessly. Among all of this trauma, it's a wonder that there were men who continued trying to live their lives.

One of whom was Samuel Steward, a professor, a friend of glittering literary figures, and later, a tattoo artist. He travelled to England to meet Lord Alfred Douglas. To France, to meet Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. Through them, he meets Thornton Wilder, and has a physical relationship on rare occasions for the next twelve years.

And apparently, he’s a gifted teacher, judging from the letter from a former student quoted at the end of the book. But he tires of it, and goes into tattooing. Then, after a dozen years or so of work, he closes up shop and retreats into a small cottage behind a bungalow.

The description of the inside of the house is heartbreaking. A compulsive collector, he can throw nothing away. Papers are everywhere, along with the empty food cans and the newspapers the dogs have urinated on. The stench is unbearable. It takes the executors of the estate several months to clear out the house.

He was a sexual renegade, writes the author. Yes, in the sense that he had plenty of sex, and didn’t feel much shame about it. But I wonder about that. How could anyone—he or I or any of us who grew up in an environment saturated with shame and sickness not have been, or still be, affected? 

Braver than I

He had read my book, as I had read his. But that had been a long time ago—how would it read now? 

And what would I make of the dragons in the book—my uncle and my cousin’s girlfriend? The book is A Crossing and the author is my cousin Brian Newhouse. And I’m happy to say it’s just as good as I remembered it. 

Brian ventured from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic sometime in the nineties on a bicycle—but this is only incidentally a biking book. In fact—blessedly—it’s not at all a bicycling book. It’s a book about a nice guy and two lunatics. 

 “A cock tease,” was Franny’s diagnosis of Karen, Brian’s girlfriend, after she had read the book. She’s a hyper-“religious” girl who likes to test Brian’s “faith” in the Lord by proposing to sleep—and nothing else—together. So he’s lying there, stiff as a board in many senses, and she puts his hand on her breast. 

Brian? 

There is such a thing as too much Minnesota nice. And Brian, you’d crossed the line a country mile back. 

Well, eventually he can stand it no more, and goes to sleep in the guest bedroom. I’d have left the house and never looked back. Karen uses religion variously as a cudgel or a noose, and she’s no dab hand at either. When Brian can take it no more and breaks up with her she attributes the event to the work of Satan, who cannot abide the sight of two loving Christians standing together—the man leading, being a “cover” for the wife. 

I know—pass the Mylanta…. 

Well, he got an interesting character out of her, at any rate. 

And the other lunatic? His father. Just as crazy on Christ as the girlfriend, if not more. 

In the early days, my father would get a call from my aunt, saying that Bill was down in the village, preaching against sin and vice to drunks leaving the saloon. My father would get in the car and drag him home. 

“He was a really funny, high-spirited kid,” said Franny once about Bill. “Then, something happened to him, and he just turned into a religious nut….” 

Who also uses the Bible as a weapon. There always was something sad about going to their house, a farm on the Illinois / Wisconsin border. Religious tracts were everywhere—by the toilet, in the barn, on the table. A sermon was always impending, looming like an August thunderstorm. Any remark could be slash, meant to jolt you to your senses, repent, accept Jesus into your heart, get saved. In short, become as crazy as he. 

It might have been tolerable if there had been any joy, any fun in it. But this is the real fire-and-brimstone stuff, that old-time religion of talking in tongues and walking to the altar and accepting Jesus into your heart. Satan is real and he has his claws in his wife and his brother and his kids. By definition, anyone who is not saved is…. 

 …fallen? 

I don’t know. Nor do I know how he stood it, feeling that he was alone in his faith, and that his family was headed for perdition. 

Also don’t know how anybody else stood it. Because in addition to the religion, we get a guy who has an emotional straitjacket that no one can cut through. This one we know, on the other side of the family. Because Jack never got the religion, but the repression? 

Not in spades—more like the backhoe. 

“Once, my father came back from one of his trips, looked at me, and then shook my hand,” said Jack, my father. “He’d never done that before, and we never did it again. The only time I can remember touching my father….” 

Or how about this? 

“I always tear up when I hear a train horn. Makes me remember seeing my father off on trips so many times.”  

My brother Johnny took him on, as Brian took on his father. And one of the most heartfelt, poignant moments in A Crossing is the moment when Bill calls Brian and they talk at last. Brian gets it off his chest—he crossed a whole continent to get a good word out of the old man. And what does he get? A flip remark about a bad penny from a father who has judged, and judged him a failure. 

Oh, and is sorry he ever had him in the first place. 

Johnny did much the same thing to Jack. And Jack, stunned to hear that Johnny seriously questioned—hey, do you love me?—went to the hardware store, got a plumb bob, some string, and a piece of dowel. Then he went to the garage, found a board, nailed in a support, put the dowel as a crossbar, and hung the plumb bob. Next, he wrote a letter: 

Johnny, 

There are two things that are true.

 1. A plumb bob always hangs true 

 2. A father always loves his children 

 I love you, 

Pop 

Brian waded through this mess, though how I don’t know. “You were never abusive,” he tells his father at one point. 

Yeah? I think telling a kid he’s gonna go to Hell and suffer for eternity and the devil has entered him and if he doesn’t repent now he will…. 

I think that’s abuse. Brian praised Iguanas for its courage. 

I think Brian is braver than I.

Death of a Patrician

Now then, what to do about Ernest Chausson?

On the face of it, there’s not much that needs to be done. Despite the red squiggle that my computer has put under his name—and its suggestions of Caisson and Chausses, neither of whom I know—every music lover will know him. The Poème for violin and orchestra gets trotted out regularly, and his Poème de l’amour et de la mer falls not in the “pass the Kleenex” category but in the “hand over the razor blades.” Besides beautiful, it’s heart-wrenchingly sad.

So his reputation is secure—as long as there are violinists and mezzo-sopranos, Chausson will be heard.

The fact everybody knows about him is that he died in a bicycle accident. What isn’t known, however, is whether he willingly crashed himself into a brick wall—quite a metaphorical death, hunh?—or whether it was an accident.

He had been depressed for some time. And composition, for him, was no easy affair. “Not at all prolific,” states Wikipedia, and notes that he left only 39 opus-numbered pieces.

But he had a number of blessings. Money—first of all. His father had made a bundle redeveloping Paris (those famous boulevards are Chausson Père, partly). Friends—among whom were pretty much everybody in the cultural world of France at the time, as well as Turgenev and Albéniz. A wife and five children. A reputation that was just flourishing at the time of his death.

There was everything to live for.

The curious fact about depression is that it’s everything and nothing. An amputation, an infection, open-heart surgery—all that’s visible, on some level. But there’s not much to see, in depression. Until you choose to ride hard into a brick wall.

I read once that depression is the worst disease in terms of quality of life. Having spent some time in that dark forest, I can believe it.

It may also be that having too much money, or too much affluence / influence can be a curse. It didn’t hurt Trollope to have to get to the Royal Post every morning at 8AM. For all that the routine of work grinds you, it also grounds you.

Or just keeps your mind occupied. For in the music of Chausson, there’s the feeling of a man with quivering sensitivity. As well, a man with perhaps too much time to feel, a man who has passed feeling and entered into brooding. One commentator writes that if Chausson is to music as Proust is to literature.

He had many talents. He wrote, and then destroyed, a novel. He drew and painted, and had many friends who were artists. (Not surprising, then, that Chausson left a major collection behind….)

But he was stymied by that weapon that every writer or composer fears the most….

…the blank page.