This is chapter seven of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here The novel begins here.
Shitonya turned to my captors and said,
“That’ll be all boys. I’ll be sure to let Mr. Maudlin know what a fine job you’ve been doing keeping the premises secured.”
Gorilla number one then released me from my shackles, he and his partner turned and walked away without another word, and I found myself facing my liberator on the threshold. Too bad I hadn’t stopped to pick up flowers on the way in.
“So, should I let you in? You do seem like a bit of a risk to the operation.”
“Why Shitonya, after all these years I’m shocked to hear you think of me as anything but harmless.”
“Well, you have been known to do an honest day’s work from time to time, and your colleagues are not exactly happy about the precedent that sets.”
“Flattery will get you no where, toots, let me in. I’ve got pointless tasks to complete.”
“Sweetie, you better not call me ‘toots’ or I’ll have the sensitivity police on your ass, and a few other places, too.”
“Promises, promises. It’s tempting but I think I’ll have to pass.”
With that, she turned on her heel and headed down toward her desk a few steps from the door, leaving the coast clear for me to steal into my place of employ.
Before turning into my own office, I stopped in front her desk.
“So where’s Arthur? I’ve got a meeting with him in five minutes.”
A half shriek half rasp sound rose from behind me. It was Mauldin love interest number one, Altoona.
“Oh, he called about a half an hour ago. Said he won’t be in until after lunch, and that you should start the meeting without him.”
“I’m supposed to start a meeting that’s supposed to be just me and him without him? How’s that gonna work? You know I can’t keep to an agenda.”
“Don’t ask me, babe. Figuring things out is not in my job description. You’re on your own with that one.”
I was about to throw some out some questions about why everyone above and below me in the chain of command was either missing or killed in action. Something told me not to trust Altoona and Carboña with those kinds of thoughts, though. I turned into my office, threw my jacket in the general vicinity of a coat rack and sat down behind my desk. Shitonya was the one to talk to about this. She was the only one in the office who did a lick of work, and the only one so far as I could tell, rebuffed the boss’s advances. She hardly ever gossiped, either, but her rumors were always on the money.
“Then I guess I’ll just have to make an executive decision. Meeting cancelled. Shitonya, can you come into my office for a minute please. I gotta do the asphalt orders myself this morning, and I need some help.”
“What are you talking about? You can do those things in your …”
“Shut up and close the door” I hissed at her.
“Ever since they started that new system over at Amici, I can’t keep the orders straight. I don’t know how Pats did it,” I said, perhaps only slightly exaggerating my usually befuddled tone for the benefit of the other two secretaries, who had perfect hearing, except for the sounds of their own phones ringing.
“Oh, you mean the new order forms. Here, I think there in this cabinet behind the door,” said Shitonya, clearly picking up on my ruse as she shut the door behind her.
“What are you talking about? There’s no new system. And what the hell happened downstairs?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. You managed to get in the door, how come I couldn’t?”
“The stupid ID things didn’t work, so I just walked in. The guards never stop me. When I got up here, the ID thing didn’t work on this door either, so I used the key I never gave back when they installed that thing.”
“What about the others? How did they get in?”
“Carboña and Altoona were already in when I got here. I didn’t ask them how. This happens a lot, and I think they have keys, too.”
“Yeah, I know, but nobody stopped you downstairs, and nobody ever stopped me before. I don’ know, but with everything I’ve been through, I’m getting a weird feeling about this.”
“What? You think it’s weird that somebody in our office gets murdered, and the security gets a little tighter? If you ask me, that’s a pretty good thing.”
Maybe I was being a little paranoid, or getting a little carried away in my new role as a homicide investigator, but it seemed to me that that wasn’t quite what was going on, and I said as much to Shitonya.
“Security’s getting tighter? So how come everybody gets in like usual except the one guy who talked to the cops, witnesses, and maybe the killer?”
“White, what the hell are you talking about?”
“What I’m talking about is this. Crazy Joe was in the apartment with Pats, alone. Maybe Pats was dead already, and maybe he wasn’t. He says he didn’t kill him, but he sure isn’t acting that way. He’s disappeared off the map. I’m the last guy that talked to him, and I’m the only one with any connection to Pats except his wife that had any connection to him. And that’s not all.”
With that, I started to tell her about Hunny, leaving out the underwear details. After all, who knew where the line between appropriate and appropriate lay. At first I also left out the details of her family tree.
“So lemme see if I got this straight. There’s this incredibly hot chick who used to be some broke dumpy married guy’s girlfriend and now she’s shacking up with you. And she’s trying to get you to solve a murder she’s afraid to talk to the cops about because she trusts you, a slightly less dumpy, slightly less married, equally broke guy?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“And you’re going along with it cause you’re a knight in shining fuckin’ armor right?”
“I don’t like to flatter myself, but you could look at it that way.”
“I’m not buying it. You’re an idiot who can’t take his eyes off a nice pair of tits, and is so desperate to get laid that he’d jump in to bed with a killer.”
With that, I looked up at her face (not that I’d noticed her tits), and started to contradict her.
“Look, maybe you’ve got a half a point about the tits (not that I noticed), but she’s not the killer, I didn’t jump into bed with her, and I’m not desperate. Just very particular, not that it’s any business of yours.”
“More to the story? Like what? She’s a member of the free frickin’ French resistance and you own a piano bar you ain’t telling me about?”
“What?”
“Casablanca was on the tube last night. It’s the best I could do.”
“Right actor, wrong movie. This is looking a little more like the Maltese Falcon. But trust me, this girl is in trouble, and if I don’t help her I could be to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t want to know anything more about her than that. I just need you to help me with one thing.”
“I’m not helping you with anything until you tell me the whole deal. Who is this girl?”
“Come on, you’re the only one who can help me with this, and it’s too dangerous for you ot know anything else.”
“Nothing doing. Spill it.”
I realized at that point that there was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t crack this case by myself, and if I was going to be taking on a partner, I couldn’t keep holding out.
“Her name is Hunny Pugliacci, and she’s afraid to go the cops, because she thinks her father might be involved.”
Shitonya let out a long whistle, then said:
“Vinny the Pooh’s daughter? Man you are in deep shit. If you’re stupid enough to get this involved, you’re definitely to dumb to get out of it by yourself. What do you want me to do?”
“Find Crazy Joe, and get him to come into the office, but don’t let him find out that it’s me who wants him.”
“You got it. But this is going to cost you.”
“She says she can pay. I’ll give you, uh, a quarter of what she gives me.”
“Fifty-fifty partner, and I got one more condition.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“Help me get rid of those to hos outside. Deal”
Under the circumstances, I didn’t see that I had much choice.
“Deal, partner.”
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Thursday, December 06, 2007
What I Did on My Summer Vacation
This is something I wrote for my 25th Anniversary High School Reunion a couple of years ago. It summed up where I was at the time (with the impending birth of my son). Had I had a blog then, this would have been posted there. I just happened upon it while looking for something else and figured, what the hey ...
Just for a little context, nowadays, Stuyvesant has a reputation for being ultra competitive and uptight, and populated exlcusively by Asian-American genius overachievers. In my day, in keeping with the generally apocalyptic character of New York, it was a much funkier place. There was a distinct lawless, anarchic character to the place, shaped by the forces of waning hippiedom and rising punk in a decaying city. The principal at the time was a guy named Gaspar R. Fabricante, who was a complete cypher so far as any of us could tell. He had no relationship of any kind with any students or teachers. Periodically, he could be observed at the top of the main stairs of the school greeting the student body in the style of a tin-pot dictator, with slicked back hair and a forced smile. He would occasionally circulate some sort of communication or make an announcement over the PA system reminding us that we attended a hallowed institution. I'm sure announcements of similar character are still made in the present day Stuyvesant, and from what I gather would probably be taken more or less seriously at face value.
Such was not the case back then. To most of my friends, even though many of us were relatively high achieving, Ivy-bound, etc., the ideas that we constituted some sort of elite, and that the decrepit teachers and facilities that attempted to contain us actually deserved their reputation were patently absurd. I don't quite know why the memory stuck with me, because I had zero contact with the him, and gave him virtually no thought during my high schoole years, but GRF actually did pronounce "You are the new elite" at our graduation, just at the moment that a friend of mine in the front row sent up a puff of smoke from a bong hit ...
What I Did on My Summer Vacation
By John Albin, Stuyvesant, class of 1980
It was a cloudless June day in 1980. Though the sky was clear, the air hung heavy with anticipation, the anxious perspiration of imminent adulthood, and a hint of burning vegetation (which due to impending life circumstances -- to be described later -- I shall not identify). I sat in Avery Fisher Hall with 800 of my closest friends listening to the most inspirational orator since William Jennings Bryan predict my future. I'm speaking, of course, of the great Gaspar R. Fabricante and his vision of me as a member of the new elite, a Stuyvesantian bound for glory.
Sad, to say, Gaspar, I haven't quite lived up to that billing. Stuyvesant (and the 1970s) taught me many things, not least a capacity for, suspicion of pomaded authority, along with a mastery of wry detachment and indolence, to say nothing of the nail delay and the collected works of McKinley Morganfield and Chester Burnett. However, Stuyvesant didn’t teach me how to find my way in the world. That is something I’ve had to learn on my own, and is still a work in progress.
That work began just two months after Gaspar’s valedictory, when I set forth on the road to elitehood. The first stop (after a series of track fires and diversions to some of New York’s more apocalyptic settings) was a collection of ivory (well, copper-roofed, but that ain’t the metaphor) towers, in a community the great 20th century philosopher Carlin once called “White Harlem”. I, a simple youth from a small village in lower Manhattan, soon found myself trafficking (never proven) among an assortment of humanity from an assortment of lands, some unknown even to the cartographer Steinberg.
While at this fine institution, I continued honing my skills as an authentic interpreter of African American music, subsidizing my studies with weekend gigs and dreaming of seeing my name in lights at the Regal (or at least Dan Lynch). Eventually, I made it as far as a certain Delphic temple on 125th Street (as an authentic Ivory Coast pop musician), but I realized that, even though the world always made life comfortable for artists, it might nevertheless be a good idea to pick up a trade. With this in mind, I settled in for a long hard slog in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Marx, figuring that if the blues didn’t pan out, the job market was always bullish for philosopher kings.
This plan, of course played out to perfection. First, the obligatory sojourn in a Paris garret, followed by three years of editing elementary school textbooks. By 1988 I found my self in civil service, studying garbage accumulation on New York City’s roadsides. The mythical cave wasn’t available, but shadows cast on underpasses served nearly as well. I could sense elitehood around the next bend.
Slowly I accumulated knowledge and responsibility, making sure to avoid remuneration with each step up the ranks. After all, philosopher kings are in it for justice, truth, and discovering the forms, and I certainly discovered the forms. Personal, intellectual, artistic, and romantic growth followed the same glorious arc as career and finances for many years.
Through it all, my fecklessness rarely caused me much more than an occasional sleepless night. I had friends and flings, music, recreation, and navel gazing to divert me. I also had the friendship and indulgence of my parents. But In 1991, tragedy struck, literally. My father, who had always been my closest friend and confidant, suffered a massive stroke at the age of 56, which rendered him severely physically, intellectually, and psychiatrically disabled.
He had been an athlete, polymath, and epicurean, a larger than life figure to most who knew him. Now, he was left a cripple who could speak, and cry out in despair, but could no longer think, create, or enjoy life. The impact on our family was enormous, physically and spiritually. Between the strain of caring for a demanding invalid, and the daily realization that what had once been was no longer, we all barely treaded water for years.
Gradually, we found ways to cope. I formed bands, wrote music, and performed sporadically through the mid and late ‘90s. In 1999, I began what have become annual visits to Europe. Most years this has included tours of some of Switzerland’s spotlessly seamy juke joints (where standards are low and, pay is high) with fellow Stuyvesantian Tom Lyons (‘81).
In 2000 I met the love of my life, Ivana Jovic, and my European vacations started including trips to her native Serbia. She has dragged me kicking and screaming toward maturity. I’ve done my part too, making sure to bring her down to my level whenever possible. With many miles still to go, significant milestones have been passed. We began living together in 2002. We were recently married, and now are expecting our first child. I’ve even started doing the kinds of career and life planning that most of my classmates probably got to at least a decade ago.
All of this is a bit daunting for a somewhat past it former new elite. It’s the kind of stuff that I’m sure Gaspar figured out by the time he was 20. But it’s also exciting and inspiring. There have been struggles and disappointments. But there has also been joy, and plenty of good old affirmation of the quotidian. And, when I’ve opened my eyes and paid attention, one commencement exercise after another. As Molly Bloom once said (or was it Marv Albert?), “YES!”
Just for a little context, nowadays, Stuyvesant has a reputation for being ultra competitive and uptight, and populated exlcusively by Asian-American genius overachievers. In my day, in keeping with the generally apocalyptic character of New York, it was a much funkier place. There was a distinct lawless, anarchic character to the place, shaped by the forces of waning hippiedom and rising punk in a decaying city. The principal at the time was a guy named Gaspar R. Fabricante, who was a complete cypher so far as any of us could tell. He had no relationship of any kind with any students or teachers. Periodically, he could be observed at the top of the main stairs of the school greeting the student body in the style of a tin-pot dictator, with slicked back hair and a forced smile. He would occasionally circulate some sort of communication or make an announcement over the PA system reminding us that we attended a hallowed institution. I'm sure announcements of similar character are still made in the present day Stuyvesant, and from what I gather would probably be taken more or less seriously at face value.
Such was not the case back then. To most of my friends, even though many of us were relatively high achieving, Ivy-bound, etc., the ideas that we constituted some sort of elite, and that the decrepit teachers and facilities that attempted to contain us actually deserved their reputation were patently absurd. I don't quite know why the memory stuck with me, because I had zero contact with the him, and gave him virtually no thought during my high schoole years, but GRF actually did pronounce "You are the new elite" at our graduation, just at the moment that a friend of mine in the front row sent up a puff of smoke from a bong hit ...
What I Did on My Summer Vacation
By John Albin, Stuyvesant, class of 1980
It was a cloudless June day in 1980. Though the sky was clear, the air hung heavy with anticipation, the anxious perspiration of imminent adulthood, and a hint of burning vegetation (which due to impending life circumstances -- to be described later -- I shall not identify). I sat in Avery Fisher Hall with 800 of my closest friends listening to the most inspirational orator since William Jennings Bryan predict my future. I'm speaking, of course, of the great Gaspar R. Fabricante and his vision of me as a member of the new elite, a Stuyvesantian bound for glory.
Sad, to say, Gaspar, I haven't quite lived up to that billing. Stuyvesant (and the 1970s) taught me many things, not least a capacity for, suspicion of pomaded authority, along with a mastery of wry detachment and indolence, to say nothing of the nail delay and the collected works of McKinley Morganfield and Chester Burnett. However, Stuyvesant didn’t teach me how to find my way in the world. That is something I’ve had to learn on my own, and is still a work in progress.
That work began just two months after Gaspar’s valedictory, when I set forth on the road to elitehood. The first stop (after a series of track fires and diversions to some of New York’s more apocalyptic settings) was a collection of ivory (well, copper-roofed, but that ain’t the metaphor) towers, in a community the great 20th century philosopher Carlin once called “White Harlem”. I, a simple youth from a small village in lower Manhattan, soon found myself trafficking (never proven) among an assortment of humanity from an assortment of lands, some unknown even to the cartographer Steinberg.
While at this fine institution, I continued honing my skills as an authentic interpreter of African American music, subsidizing my studies with weekend gigs and dreaming of seeing my name in lights at the Regal (or at least Dan Lynch). Eventually, I made it as far as a certain Delphic temple on 125th Street (as an authentic Ivory Coast pop musician), but I realized that, even though the world always made life comfortable for artists, it might nevertheless be a good idea to pick up a trade. With this in mind, I settled in for a long hard slog in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Marx, figuring that if the blues didn’t pan out, the job market was always bullish for philosopher kings.
This plan, of course played out to perfection. First, the obligatory sojourn in a Paris garret, followed by three years of editing elementary school textbooks. By 1988 I found my self in civil service, studying garbage accumulation on New York City’s roadsides. The mythical cave wasn’t available, but shadows cast on underpasses served nearly as well. I could sense elitehood around the next bend.
Slowly I accumulated knowledge and responsibility, making sure to avoid remuneration with each step up the ranks. After all, philosopher kings are in it for justice, truth, and discovering the forms, and I certainly discovered the forms. Personal, intellectual, artistic, and romantic growth followed the same glorious arc as career and finances for many years.
Through it all, my fecklessness rarely caused me much more than an occasional sleepless night. I had friends and flings, music, recreation, and navel gazing to divert me. I also had the friendship and indulgence of my parents. But In 1991, tragedy struck, literally. My father, who had always been my closest friend and confidant, suffered a massive stroke at the age of 56, which rendered him severely physically, intellectually, and psychiatrically disabled.
He had been an athlete, polymath, and epicurean, a larger than life figure to most who knew him. Now, he was left a cripple who could speak, and cry out in despair, but could no longer think, create, or enjoy life. The impact on our family was enormous, physically and spiritually. Between the strain of caring for a demanding invalid, and the daily realization that what had once been was no longer, we all barely treaded water for years.
Gradually, we found ways to cope. I formed bands, wrote music, and performed sporadically through the mid and late ‘90s. In 1999, I began what have become annual visits to Europe. Most years this has included tours of some of Switzerland’s spotlessly seamy juke joints (where standards are low and, pay is high) with fellow Stuyvesantian Tom Lyons (‘81).
In 2000 I met the love of my life, Ivana Jovic, and my European vacations started including trips to her native Serbia. She has dragged me kicking and screaming toward maturity. I’ve done my part too, making sure to bring her down to my level whenever possible. With many miles still to go, significant milestones have been passed. We began living together in 2002. We were recently married, and now are expecting our first child. I’ve even started doing the kinds of career and life planning that most of my classmates probably got to at least a decade ago.
All of this is a bit daunting for a somewhat past it former new elite. It’s the kind of stuff that I’m sure Gaspar figured out by the time he was 20. But it’s also exciting and inspiring. There have been struggles and disappointments. But there has also been joy, and plenty of good old affirmation of the quotidian. And, when I’ve opened my eyes and paid attention, one commencement exercise after another. As Molly Bloom once said (or was it Marv Albert?), “YES!”
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Minna and her sisters
A curse usually credited to ancient Chinese wisdom is "may you live in interesting times". I often think that my father Peter must have pissed off some ancient sage big time because he was born into quite an interesting household. His mother was one of four sisters nee Steigman, Minna (his mother), Rose, Lilly, and Olga. Rose, the oldest, escaped -- first to Westchester, later to Florida. Having escaped the folie a quatre Rose was only an occasional presence in my father's (and later my) life, flying north each summer to unite the remaining three against a common enemy.
These three spent almost their entire lives living close to each other in Manhattan, the last 20 or so years in the same building in Chelsea, and in neighboring country houses in the least fashionable corner of Fairfield County. Grandma Minna was the second oldest, and the closest to sane of the sisters. By the time I came along, she was retired from a career as a high school biology teacher and spent her time attending cultural events, gardening, dropping hints of her many affairs, and cooking large quantities of something she referred to as "food", but which was not readily identfiable as such. She also made frequent reference to things she used to do, such as playing tennis and the piano, but which she no longer could do, for reasons that were never clear. She remained vibrant and physically active with no outward signs of infirmity into her 80s, yet never touched the Steinway baby grand piano that stood silent witness to her abandoned concert career throughout my childhood.
Each morning my grandpa Joe made the coffee, and Minna exclaimed upon her first sip "Joe, this coffee is terrible! It's like dishwater!" Joe would then reply "Oh for Gord's sake Minna, if it's so terrible make it yourself!" She never did. Breakfast was always followed by a long, vigorous walk, and, when in the country, marathon sessions of ping pong in the barn on Lilly's nearby property. The sisters all fancied themselves expert ping pongers, though in reality they were no match for any of the men.
Joe was a classic, crafty spin-meister. Lilly's husband Lou (Grudin), though riddled with emphysema and arthritis by the time I was old enough to face him at the table, was a vicious smasher. Dad, a varsity tennis player and highly proficient in all racquet sports, was on a plane so far above the rest that they refused to play him, denying his gifts and declaring him a cheater. The same fate befell me when I showed signs of following in my father's athletic footsteps.
Minna was highly competent in her family's specialties, namely, disputing anything one of her sisters said at Led Zepplin-esque decibel levels, maintaining decades old grievances, mispronouncing any name she encountered, and disparaging anyone not related to her by blood, notably Joe and Lou. When not en famille, Minna was generally cabable of surpressing her worst instincts, and communicating civilly. Having also had the experience of giving birth to and rearing a child, she was capable of degrees of affection, jollity, and empathy almost completely lacking in her two childless sisters, traits that also helped her maintain a handful of friendships and get along with her neighbors.
As Calliope was to Minna, Terpsichore was to Lilly, the youngest, craziest, and most flamboyant of the four. In childhood and early adolescence, my sister Liz (then known by another name, which is another story) was an avid ballet and modern dance student. Lilly would often demand impromptu performances from Liz. She would then critique her form, while regaling us with tales of dancing "the bolly" in her youth. Lilly, who was five feet tall, grotesquely steatopygous, wore Murray's space shoes, and suffered from all manner of malady real and imagined, would then commence a demonstration of the "correct" technique, which would end mid-twirl in some combination of sneezing and spasming of various body parts.
What Lilly lacked in her older sister's argumentative versatility, she made up for in volume, paranoia, deafness, and production of bodily fluids. Her particular specialty was making it clear to strangers that she had no children because uncle Lou forced her to have countless abortions, preferring to forestall procreation until he wrote the great American novel and became a man of independent means. In the 1920s and 30s, this might not have been an a bad idea, as Lou was a published poet and critic of some repute, a polymath, and a minor figure in the modernist literary world, who showed promise of becoming much more.
Lou's poetic masterpiece, "Dust on Spring Street" is included in some editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and was called one of the greatest poems in the English language by William Carlos Williams, with whom Lou carried on a sporadic friendship and correspondence. Lou was close friends with Maxwell Bodenheim and other figures in New York bohemia. He was also acquainted with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, about whom he would say nothing more than "Ptui, that anti-Semite son of a bitch," when I attempted to interview him as a source for a college literature paper. When his novel Inkly Darkling was finally published in 1954, this review seems to have put an end to his greater literary ambitions.
Olga, between Lilly and Minna in age, was to put it cruelly but honestly, a person of no worth to anyone in the family. She had been married briefly in her youth to a man denounced by her sisters as a conniving abuser. Family legend had it that he met Olga on a cruise, conned her into marrying her to gain U.S. citizenship, and then left her as soon as the papers came through. I think it more likely that he married Olga (who in youthful photographs possessed a petite, doll-like beauty) for love, but an extended dose of the Steigmans was enough to send him to Australia.
Olga spent the rest her days living first with her mother, and then alone, working as a secretary for the Amalgamated Bank, and growing increasingly deaf, abusive towards children, and foul smelling. Each holiday season and birthday, Liz and I would buy Olga fancy soaps, perfumes and powders in the hopes of rendering the experience of being yelled at, insulted, poked, and pinched agonizing only to the senses of touch and hearing. Olga died when I was about 15, and my father and I were tasked with disposing of her belongings. I found boxes upon boxes of unopened toiletries stashed behind the furniture in her bedroom.
It feels heartless to admit this, but almost nothing more than this can be said about her. Almost immediately after her death, Olga disappeared completely from the consciousness of her family. She was almost never talked about, never the subject of reminiscences fond or otherwise. This wasn't superstition. No one feared speaking ill or well of the dead. It was simply that Olga was so insignificant to her sisters, that they paid no mind to her absence. Liz and I, having never had any feelings other than revulsion arising from the way she yelled, insulted, grabbed, poked, and stank, were guiltily relieved, but nonetheless relieved that we would no longer be subjected to her presence.
The sisters were raised by their mother. Her, name was Sarah, but she was known to all only by the nickname "Suchi". She called herself Suchi, and was never referred to as Sarah by anyone except on official documents. Suchi, who died when I was about three, and whom I remember only vaguely as a malevolent apparition, was feared and loathed by all of her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. Suchi came to America from somewhere beyond the pale of settlement (either Moscow or Minsk, depending on the document and the storyteller) with her four daughters and her sister, Gussie Zuckerman, who became a concert pianist and composer and made a name for herself as Manna Zucca. According to Minna, once they all got to America, Suchi took up with a boarder they had taken in, and tossed her husband the Luftmensch Torah scholar to the curb. He was never seen again by the sisters, who learned years later that he had died homeless in another city (variously recounted as Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle).
All other stories told about Suchi amplified the theme of her cruelty, manipulativeness, and divisiveness. She lived for a time with Minna, Joe, and my father when my father was very young, but was eventually sent to live with Olga after she accused Joe of molesting Dad. Even Minna, who rarely had a kind word to say to or about her husband, knew that such an accusation was preposterous. Joe, though not without some quirks, was a kind, gentle soul, completely incapable of anything approaching abuse of another human being.
Decades later, the subject of Suchi came up in conversation between my mother and Sophia, a Russian Jewish woman hired as a home health care aide to take care my father, who had become severely disabled following a stroke. As always happens among Ashkenazim, conversation turned to the names and geographic origins of our ancestors, and my mother described my father's monster of a grandmother. Sophia interrupted her.
"I'm sorry, Pat, what did you say her name was?"
"Suchi."
"Suchi? And She was from Russia? She spoke Russian?"
"Yes, yes. Mostly Yiddish, but Russian as well."
"Do you know what Suchi means in Russian?"
[It bears repeating at this point that Suchi was never called by her real name, called herself Suchi, and insisted that everyone else do so.]
"No, please tell me what Suchi means in Russian."
"It means 'bitch'."
Ah hah.
Liz and I experienced all the wonders of the Steigman clan at family gatherings, and during weekends and vacations in the country. We always had each other as refuge, day camp, friends, and activities as escape, and knowledge that we would eventually return to our parents as hope. Consequently, we were able to maintain a degree of detachment and amusement at the sisters' eccentricities, laugh at Lou's wordplay, and share conspiratorial asides with Joe, who kept his distance from the rest as much as he could.
Dad, on the other hand, had no such luxuries. He grew up in a cauldron of anger, argument, and erudition, and his personality reflected this. He possessed an absolutely astonishing mind. [My apologies for referring to him in the past tense in this context; he is still alive, but his mind is barely so.] By training he was an economist, but his intellect was restless and achieved heights of creativity in mathematics, artificial intelligence, chaos theory, chess, go, and even children's literature. I have never met a fellow academic who didn't spontaneously and sincerely describe Dad as one of the most brilliant people of his or acquaintance. Yet he spent much of his career in a (albeit tenured) backwater, unable to convince more prestigious universities to hire him, and unable to complete what he viewed as his most important work. The social and emotional deficits instilled in him by the Steigmans left him unable to navigate institutions and collaborations. They also left him with a distorted capacity for mature romantic love, which played itself out in a troubled marriage and embarrassing affairs.
In surprising ways, though, he transcended his upbringing. He was as outgoing and spontaneous as the Steigmans were xenophobic. He was fascinated by new people, cultures, and experiences, and had a number of long lasting, deep friendships. He was something of a fixture in the Greenwich Village cafe scene, particularly at the Figaro (which was once a boho outpost), where he was known as "Pete the Prof". He hung out in pool halls, and at basketball courts and tennis clubs. Consistent with his Upper West Side upbringing, he subscribed to the opera and the symphony, visited art museums and galleries at every opportunity, and called himself a socialist, but he also had an extensive collection of rock records, read science fiction voraciously, and listened to right wing talk radio in the car.
Above all, he was a wonderful father. He loved Liz and me as all parents love their children, but he also liked us as people, enjoyed our company at all stages of our development, and became our friend in adulthood. He was one of the dads in the neighborhood that all the kids like to play with when we were little, and was one of the "cool" parents when we were older, but he was also serious and responsible with our upbringing. He protected us from bullies, taught us to read write and do advanced math before we got to school, and was a stern taskmaster once we were there. As hard as he pushed us academically, he supported and "kvelled" at our experiences outside the classroom. He encouraged me to take the music I loved seriously and attended my gigs whenever he could. After one performance at a college dormitory, he walked up to me with a huge grin on his shaggy, bearded face and said "Now I know how Keith Richards' mother feels."
It is this side of my father that I hope has had the greatest impact on me. As my young son begins to emerge from babyhood and engage the world around him, I am often filled with sadness that he will never know his grandpa Pete, who would no doubt have surpassed himself in that role. At the same time I rejoice that I had the opportunity to know someone who was able to move past the curse of an "interesting" upbringing in some measure and achieve a state of fascination with the world around him. Alexander, may you live in fascinating times.
These three spent almost their entire lives living close to each other in Manhattan, the last 20 or so years in the same building in Chelsea, and in neighboring country houses in the least fashionable corner of Fairfield County. Grandma Minna was the second oldest, and the closest to sane of the sisters. By the time I came along, she was retired from a career as a high school biology teacher and spent her time attending cultural events, gardening, dropping hints of her many affairs, and cooking large quantities of something she referred to as "food", but which was not readily identfiable as such. She also made frequent reference to things she used to do, such as playing tennis and the piano, but which she no longer could do, for reasons that were never clear. She remained vibrant and physically active with no outward signs of infirmity into her 80s, yet never touched the Steinway baby grand piano that stood silent witness to her abandoned concert career throughout my childhood.
Each morning my grandpa Joe made the coffee, and Minna exclaimed upon her first sip "Joe, this coffee is terrible! It's like dishwater!" Joe would then reply "Oh for Gord's sake Minna, if it's so terrible make it yourself!" She never did. Breakfast was always followed by a long, vigorous walk, and, when in the country, marathon sessions of ping pong in the barn on Lilly's nearby property. The sisters all fancied themselves expert ping pongers, though in reality they were no match for any of the men.
Joe was a classic, crafty spin-meister. Lilly's husband Lou (Grudin), though riddled with emphysema and arthritis by the time I was old enough to face him at the table, was a vicious smasher. Dad, a varsity tennis player and highly proficient in all racquet sports, was on a plane so far above the rest that they refused to play him, denying his gifts and declaring him a cheater. The same fate befell me when I showed signs of following in my father's athletic footsteps.
Minna was highly competent in her family's specialties, namely, disputing anything one of her sisters said at Led Zepplin-esque decibel levels, maintaining decades old grievances, mispronouncing any name she encountered, and disparaging anyone not related to her by blood, notably Joe and Lou. When not en famille, Minna was generally cabable of surpressing her worst instincts, and communicating civilly. Having also had the experience of giving birth to and rearing a child, she was capable of degrees of affection, jollity, and empathy almost completely lacking in her two childless sisters, traits that also helped her maintain a handful of friendships and get along with her neighbors.
As Calliope was to Minna, Terpsichore was to Lilly, the youngest, craziest, and most flamboyant of the four. In childhood and early adolescence, my sister Liz (then known by another name, which is another story) was an avid ballet and modern dance student. Lilly would often demand impromptu performances from Liz. She would then critique her form, while regaling us with tales of dancing "the bolly" in her youth. Lilly, who was five feet tall, grotesquely steatopygous, wore Murray's space shoes, and suffered from all manner of malady real and imagined, would then commence a demonstration of the "correct" technique, which would end mid-twirl in some combination of sneezing and spasming of various body parts.
What Lilly lacked in her older sister's argumentative versatility, she made up for in volume, paranoia, deafness, and production of bodily fluids. Her particular specialty was making it clear to strangers that she had no children because uncle Lou forced her to have countless abortions, preferring to forestall procreation until he wrote the great American novel and became a man of independent means. In the 1920s and 30s, this might not have been an a bad idea, as Lou was a published poet and critic of some repute, a polymath, and a minor figure in the modernist literary world, who showed promise of becoming much more.
Lou's poetic masterpiece, "Dust on Spring Street" is included in some editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and was called one of the greatest poems in the English language by William Carlos Williams, with whom Lou carried on a sporadic friendship and correspondence. Lou was close friends with Maxwell Bodenheim and other figures in New York bohemia. He was also acquainted with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, about whom he would say nothing more than "Ptui, that anti-Semite son of a bitch," when I attempted to interview him as a source for a college literature paper. When his novel Inkly Darkling was finally published in 1954, this review seems to have put an end to his greater literary ambitions.
Olga, between Lilly and Minna in age, was to put it cruelly but honestly, a person of no worth to anyone in the family. She had been married briefly in her youth to a man denounced by her sisters as a conniving abuser. Family legend had it that he met Olga on a cruise, conned her into marrying her to gain U.S. citizenship, and then left her as soon as the papers came through. I think it more likely that he married Olga (who in youthful photographs possessed a petite, doll-like beauty) for love, but an extended dose of the Steigmans was enough to send him to Australia.
Olga spent the rest her days living first with her mother, and then alone, working as a secretary for the Amalgamated Bank, and growing increasingly deaf, abusive towards children, and foul smelling. Each holiday season and birthday, Liz and I would buy Olga fancy soaps, perfumes and powders in the hopes of rendering the experience of being yelled at, insulted, poked, and pinched agonizing only to the senses of touch and hearing. Olga died when I was about 15, and my father and I were tasked with disposing of her belongings. I found boxes upon boxes of unopened toiletries stashed behind the furniture in her bedroom.
It feels heartless to admit this, but almost nothing more than this can be said about her. Almost immediately after her death, Olga disappeared completely from the consciousness of her family. She was almost never talked about, never the subject of reminiscences fond or otherwise. This wasn't superstition. No one feared speaking ill or well of the dead. It was simply that Olga was so insignificant to her sisters, that they paid no mind to her absence. Liz and I, having never had any feelings other than revulsion arising from the way she yelled, insulted, grabbed, poked, and stank, were guiltily relieved, but nonetheless relieved that we would no longer be subjected to her presence.
The sisters were raised by their mother. Her, name was Sarah, but she was known to all only by the nickname "Suchi". She called herself Suchi, and was never referred to as Sarah by anyone except on official documents. Suchi, who died when I was about three, and whom I remember only vaguely as a malevolent apparition, was feared and loathed by all of her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. Suchi came to America from somewhere beyond the pale of settlement (either Moscow or Minsk, depending on the document and the storyteller) with her four daughters and her sister, Gussie Zuckerman, who became a concert pianist and composer and made a name for herself as Manna Zucca. According to Minna, once they all got to America, Suchi took up with a boarder they had taken in, and tossed her husband the Luftmensch Torah scholar to the curb. He was never seen again by the sisters, who learned years later that he had died homeless in another city (variously recounted as Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle).
All other stories told about Suchi amplified the theme of her cruelty, manipulativeness, and divisiveness. She lived for a time with Minna, Joe, and my father when my father was very young, but was eventually sent to live with Olga after she accused Joe of molesting Dad. Even Minna, who rarely had a kind word to say to or about her husband, knew that such an accusation was preposterous. Joe, though not without some quirks, was a kind, gentle soul, completely incapable of anything approaching abuse of another human being.
Decades later, the subject of Suchi came up in conversation between my mother and Sophia, a Russian Jewish woman hired as a home health care aide to take care my father, who had become severely disabled following a stroke. As always happens among Ashkenazim, conversation turned to the names and geographic origins of our ancestors, and my mother described my father's monster of a grandmother. Sophia interrupted her.
"I'm sorry, Pat, what did you say her name was?"
"Suchi."
"Suchi? And She was from Russia? She spoke Russian?"
"Yes, yes. Mostly Yiddish, but Russian as well."
"Do you know what Suchi means in Russian?"
[It bears repeating at this point that Suchi was never called by her real name, called herself Suchi, and insisted that everyone else do so.]
"No, please tell me what Suchi means in Russian."
"It means 'bitch'."
Ah hah.
Liz and I experienced all the wonders of the Steigman clan at family gatherings, and during weekends and vacations in the country. We always had each other as refuge, day camp, friends, and activities as escape, and knowledge that we would eventually return to our parents as hope. Consequently, we were able to maintain a degree of detachment and amusement at the sisters' eccentricities, laugh at Lou's wordplay, and share conspiratorial asides with Joe, who kept his distance from the rest as much as he could.
Dad, on the other hand, had no such luxuries. He grew up in a cauldron of anger, argument, and erudition, and his personality reflected this. He possessed an absolutely astonishing mind. [My apologies for referring to him in the past tense in this context; he is still alive, but his mind is barely so.] By training he was an economist, but his intellect was restless and achieved heights of creativity in mathematics, artificial intelligence, chaos theory, chess, go, and even children's literature. I have never met a fellow academic who didn't spontaneously and sincerely describe Dad as one of the most brilliant people of his or acquaintance. Yet he spent much of his career in a (albeit tenured) backwater, unable to convince more prestigious universities to hire him, and unable to complete what he viewed as his most important work. The social and emotional deficits instilled in him by the Steigmans left him unable to navigate institutions and collaborations. They also left him with a distorted capacity for mature romantic love, which played itself out in a troubled marriage and embarrassing affairs.
In surprising ways, though, he transcended his upbringing. He was as outgoing and spontaneous as the Steigmans were xenophobic. He was fascinated by new people, cultures, and experiences, and had a number of long lasting, deep friendships. He was something of a fixture in the Greenwich Village cafe scene, particularly at the Figaro (which was once a boho outpost), where he was known as "Pete the Prof". He hung out in pool halls, and at basketball courts and tennis clubs. Consistent with his Upper West Side upbringing, he subscribed to the opera and the symphony, visited art museums and galleries at every opportunity, and called himself a socialist, but he also had an extensive collection of rock records, read science fiction voraciously, and listened to right wing talk radio in the car.
Above all, he was a wonderful father. He loved Liz and me as all parents love their children, but he also liked us as people, enjoyed our company at all stages of our development, and became our friend in adulthood. He was one of the dads in the neighborhood that all the kids like to play with when we were little, and was one of the "cool" parents when we were older, but he was also serious and responsible with our upbringing. He protected us from bullies, taught us to read write and do advanced math before we got to school, and was a stern taskmaster once we were there. As hard as he pushed us academically, he supported and "kvelled" at our experiences outside the classroom. He encouraged me to take the music I loved seriously and attended my gigs whenever he could. After one performance at a college dormitory, he walked up to me with a huge grin on his shaggy, bearded face and said "Now I know how Keith Richards' mother feels."
It is this side of my father that I hope has had the greatest impact on me. As my young son begins to emerge from babyhood and engage the world around him, I am often filled with sadness that he will never know his grandpa Pete, who would no doubt have surpassed himself in that role. At the same time I rejoice that I had the opportunity to know someone who was able to move past the curse of an "interesting" upbringing in some measure and achieve a state of fascination with the world around him. Alexander, may you live in fascinating times.
Monday, March 19, 2007
So Many Roads ...
When people ask me what kind of music I play, I usually say something along the lines of "a bit of everything", because that's more or less true. In my gigging and jamming life, I've played all different kinds of rock and roll, jazz, blues, folk, r &B. I've even played in an authentic African band (with one obviously non-authentic member). But really, I play blues. For better or worse (often the latter), when I pick up my guitar, that's what I'm most likely to play for myself.
I got to the blues somewhat circuitously. When I was growing up, my father was an avid audiophile, with a pretty eclectic record collection for someone of his generation. This was the source for pretty much all the music I experienced up to about age 15. Tucked in with the classical, Beatles, and Kingston Trio records, there was some Muddy Waters, some Josh White, Jr., and an odd mix of progressive rock, stuff like Vanilla Fudge, Gentle Giant, and Cream.
As a little kid, I listened mostly to the Beatles and folk records, but when I started playing guitar, I stumbled onto the Cream. The songwriting credits on these records turned me into a bit of a junior Allen Lomax, and got me back to Muddy and co. But the playing of a white dude named Eric is what really got me hooked on playing blues guitar.
That led me to the infamous John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (the "Beano" album), which is the basis for the epithet "Clapton is God". Alas, "Wonderful Tonight" "Forever Man" and so much other dreck followed, but that's another story. The lead cut on this album is a song called "All your love (I miss lovin')". It's a minor blues that offers the Platonic form of the Les Paul-Marshall tone.
I'm never satisfied with a cover version though, so I had to chase down the original. "All your love" is credited to a guy named Otis Rush, who I think is the greatest of the second-generation Chicago Blues artists. This is the crowd (names like Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, and James Cotton) that got their starts backing the people who pretty much invented electric blues -- Muddy, Wolf, John Lee, et. al., and then emerged as solo artists in the early 60's. All of these guys are great, but to me Otis Rush has something extra going on.
Apart from the obvious talents -- a great singing voice, guitar tone, phrasing, and time -- there's something I find particularly fascinating about Otis Rush. One of the standard bits of wisdom about blues is that it's not just sad, dark, music. There's all kinds of humor, playing the dozens, ribaldry, love, hopefulness, and so forth. Not with Otis. With him you get all the darkness, sadness, and bitterness you can handle, and more. Death, depression unrequited love, you know, the blues. Some of this stems from the fact that he does a lot of tunes in minor keys, and as we know from music appreciation class, major keys are happy, and minor keys are sad. But the guy also puts out a vibe, and sings an awful lot of songs about being dying, or being mistreated by his woman, including at least one wherein the first person narrator is both dead and mistreated:
You've done me wrong
For a long, long time
And all you've done
Will never change my mind
So please try to love me
Please baby try
My love for you will never die
And these flowers grow
Where I lay and rest
And these colored blossoms
Darling hold to your breast
And darling know
It's my mind
Breaking out
From inside
My love for you will never die.
The other curious thing about Otis is the way he plays. He's left handed, but he plays a right-handed guitar, without restringing it. This makes all the fingerings, chord shapes and techniques not just mirror imaged (a la a typical lefty), but upside down, so you can't figure out what he's doing by watching; you have to use your ears. The only other player I know to do this is the late Albert King, and it has a similar effect in both of their sounds. Stevie Ray Vaughan comes closest of any "conventional" player to capturing it, but not quite.
Finally, for all you late night TV fans, come on, admit it, you've watched the Robin Byrd show. You know, the weird naked public access cable TV show with porn star interviews and stripper showcases? Anyway, ever notice how there's this really cool blues guitar tune over the opening credits? No, not "Baby you can bang my box" at the end. I'm 99.99% sure that's Otis Rush doing "Will my woman be home tonight" from a live in Japan album he did in the late 70's. That's the first Otis record I ever got, and the Robin Byrd thing is the same, note for note, inflection for inflection. Check it out, and if you can't find it on your dial, check this out from his prime:
And this when there were a few more miles on the odometer:
I got to the blues somewhat circuitously. When I was growing up, my father was an avid audiophile, with a pretty eclectic record collection for someone of his generation. This was the source for pretty much all the music I experienced up to about age 15. Tucked in with the classical, Beatles, and Kingston Trio records, there was some Muddy Waters, some Josh White, Jr., and an odd mix of progressive rock, stuff like Vanilla Fudge, Gentle Giant, and Cream.
As a little kid, I listened mostly to the Beatles and folk records, but when I started playing guitar, I stumbled onto the Cream. The songwriting credits on these records turned me into a bit of a junior Allen Lomax, and got me back to Muddy and co. But the playing of a white dude named Eric is what really got me hooked on playing blues guitar.
That led me to the infamous John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (the "Beano" album), which is the basis for the epithet "Clapton is God". Alas, "Wonderful Tonight" "Forever Man" and so much other dreck followed, but that's another story. The lead cut on this album is a song called "All your love (I miss lovin')". It's a minor blues that offers the Platonic form of the Les Paul-Marshall tone.
I'm never satisfied with a cover version though, so I had to chase down the original. "All your love" is credited to a guy named Otis Rush, who I think is the greatest of the second-generation Chicago Blues artists. This is the crowd (names like Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, and James Cotton) that got their starts backing the people who pretty much invented electric blues -- Muddy, Wolf, John Lee, et. al., and then emerged as solo artists in the early 60's. All of these guys are great, but to me Otis Rush has something extra going on.
Apart from the obvious talents -- a great singing voice, guitar tone, phrasing, and time -- there's something I find particularly fascinating about Otis Rush. One of the standard bits of wisdom about blues is that it's not just sad, dark, music. There's all kinds of humor, playing the dozens, ribaldry, love, hopefulness, and so forth. Not with Otis. With him you get all the darkness, sadness, and bitterness you can handle, and more. Death, depression unrequited love, you know, the blues. Some of this stems from the fact that he does a lot of tunes in minor keys, and as we know from music appreciation class, major keys are happy, and minor keys are sad. But the guy also puts out a vibe, and sings an awful lot of songs about being dying, or being mistreated by his woman, including at least one wherein the first person narrator is both dead and mistreated:
You've done me wrong
For a long, long time
And all you've done
Will never change my mind
So please try to love me
Please baby try
My love for you will never die
And these flowers grow
Where I lay and rest
And these colored blossoms
Darling hold to your breast
And darling know
It's my mind
Breaking out
From inside
My love for you will never die.
The other curious thing about Otis is the way he plays. He's left handed, but he plays a right-handed guitar, without restringing it. This makes all the fingerings, chord shapes and techniques not just mirror imaged (a la a typical lefty), but upside down, so you can't figure out what he's doing by watching; you have to use your ears. The only other player I know to do this is the late Albert King, and it has a similar effect in both of their sounds. Stevie Ray Vaughan comes closest of any "conventional" player to capturing it, but not quite.
Finally, for all you late night TV fans, come on, admit it, you've watched the Robin Byrd show. You know, the weird naked public access cable TV show with porn star interviews and stripper showcases? Anyway, ever notice how there's this really cool blues guitar tune over the opening credits? No, not "Baby you can bang my box" at the end. I'm 99.99% sure that's Otis Rush doing "Will my woman be home tonight" from a live in Japan album he did in the late 70's. That's the first Otis record I ever got, and the Robin Byrd thing is the same, note for note, inflection for inflection. Check it out, and if you can't find it on your dial, check this out from his prime:
And this when there were a few more miles on the odometer:
Chapter 6 – Morning with Hunny; back to the office
This is chapter six of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here. The novel begins here.
Being a bachelor of uncertain domestic talents, my usual morning routine is to stagger out of bed, somehow make it to the deli on the first floor of my building, and return to my lair with as much caffeine and breakfast pastry as I can carry. On the not so rare occasions when the elevator is broken, this is hazardous, as taking stairs in a pre-caffeinated state can lead to serious injury. It is often said that a child learns to go up stairs more easily than down. Not just kids, unless the definition of toddler has been expanded by a few decades. I’m not much of a drummer, but I think the rhythm of my cranium bouncing off the faux terrazzo is what’s known as a paradiddle. .
The morning after my first evening with Hunny, I awoke as usual to the grindings of world class garbage crushing-machinery beneath my window. As I readied my skull for some early morning percussion, though, I sensed something was different. For some strange reason the bouquet of mid-summer dumpster juice that usually wafted in from the street seemed to be masked by something pungent and strange. As I clawed my way to consciousness the strangeness of the smell receded, only to be replaced by the oddity of its presence in an unlikely environment. My days as botanist in the highlands of Central America told me that I was detecting the volatile aromatic emissions of the high-temperature distillation of c. arabica, a process that had never before been successfully performed in the biological niche of this particular homo civilis vernula. Either that, or someone had made a fresh pot of coffee.
As I staggered the few feet from my bedroom to the kitchen, awareness of the previous day’s events worked their way toward the frontal lobes. The smell, and now the sight, in front of me told me that I hadn’t been dreaming. Once again bursting out of her Arthur Avenue uniform, Hunny lifted a steaming mug from my kitchen table and beckoned me to the table. As I sat down across from her, the sort of thoughts apparently condoned in my workplace sprang to mind. No doubt, this was one picture that appropriate though it might be to the desires of a lonely man, still didn’t belong on my office desk. What little blood left to circulate to my brain fought its way north and woke up whatever common sense was left after years of bureaucratic purgatory and a night as a public-sector private dick. Rule number one: stay away from the daughters of men named after whimsical woodland creatures. Warily, I took a sip of coffee and broke the ice.
“You know, I heard there was a coffee maker around here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before”
“Really? It was in the cabinet, right next to the coffee.”
“Will wonders never cease. How did that get in there? Next thing you know, a couple of eggs and a glass of OJ’ll jump out of the fridge.”
“Don’t press your luck smart guy.”
This kind of witty repartee could go on forever, and certainly wouldn’t improve unless I artificially raised my dopamine levels a bit, so I put the mug to good use for a few reps and then got down to brass tacks, whatever those are.
“Listen. I’ve been thinking about what you said last night, and I’m not saying that you’re right, but I’m getting a funny feeling there’s more going on on the job than I might have realized. The way Crazy Joe disappeared doesn’t make any sense.”
“So you’ll do it? You’ll find out what happened to Tony?” she said almost giddily
“I didn’t say that. In fact, I doubt I’ll be able to find out much, but at least I’ve got to find Crazy Joe and figure out what he’s been up to. After that, I can’t say what I’m going to do.”
“But you promise not to tell the cops about me, right?”
“Listen, I don’t know what I’m going to tell the cops. I’ve got to keep my job, and keep my ass out of trouble. If I can do that and keep your name out of things, maybe, but I’m not promising anything. That’s the best I can do for you.”
She seemed to deflate a bit, at least from the neck up, with that, but she knew she’d gotten as much out of me as she was going to.
“All right then, I guess I can’t ask for any more than that. So I guess you’re going to work, right”
“Yeah, I’ve got to at least start from there. Besides, my boss scheduled a meeting for me that neither of us is going to show up to, so I’ve got to get to the office. What are you gonna do?”
“Can I stay here?”
“I thought you said you weren’t gonna ask me for anything else.”
“What are keeping score or something? Besides, you’re forgetting something. You need me here.”
“Yeah? And why’s that?”
“Well, it’s either let me stay here, and fix your phone, or kick me out and hope the phone company shows up, and charges you 350 bucks to reconnect the lines in your walls. I read your phone bill – you don’t have a service plan.”
Damn! If they hadn’t broken up AT&T, I never would have wound up in a spot like this. Besides, it was getting late, and I had to get to work early to line up the day’s asphalt supply now that Tony wasn’t around, so I didn’t have time to argue with her anymore about deregulation of the telecommunications industry”
“All right, you win. But just for today.”
With that, she gave me what might have been a smile of gratitude, or triumph, I couldn’t quite tell. Either way, I didn’t have time to sit around and try to figure it out.
A few minutes later, dressed, and as well pressed and shined up as a man of my means can be, which is to say wrinkled and scuffed, I got ready to leave. As I headed out the door, she grabbed my arm and stopped me. She gave me a soft kiss on the cheek and as she looked deep into my eyes, said
“Thanks, and here I blow dried it, and I think it might work now.”
With that she handed me cell phone gave me a little shove through the door and closed it behind me.
So I found myself on the way to work at the usual time, with the usual level of stimulants in my system, but with an altogether different collection of thoughts and obsessions. In this state I was barely able to direct a few tourists back to Boston, failed to muster my normal level of fierceness in glaring at my fellow passengers, and almost gave up my seat to a person whose impersonation of an arthritic eighty-year-old woman with a “thirteen” totebag was quite convincing. Fool me once …
Having miserably failed to meet the standard of surliness expected of me as a resident of a natural history museum diorama, I merged from the subway and scurried the rest of the way to my place of “work”. Only to be confronted with a puzzle worthy of Indiana Jones. Years ago, there was no security in government buildings, and anyone could and did go in, including the people who worked there (who generally chose not to, at least in spirit). All of that changed due to the events of one bright autumn day. Now, municipal government was attacking security with the single-minded alacrity it attacked efficiency and public service.
My office building has four entrances, each with its own separate electronic security systems. . Each requires a separate electronically encoded card, each of which emits its own radar or electronic whatchamacallit that cancels out the others unless all four are positioned just so. This might have been the product of the highest levels of security wizardry intent on keeping evil-doing enemies of freedom away from the strategic bureaucrat reserve. Or it might have been low-bid contracting. In any event, being in the midst of a bad just-so day, I gave up entrance roulette and joined the line of visitors signing in with the security guard. As I reached the head of the line, I fanned my ID’s for the guard and awaited admission.
“May I see some identification please?”
“C’mon, you see me here everyday. My cards aren’t working on the door.”
“If you have a card key, please use it at the security gate, sir.”
“I did, and it didn’t work.”
“If your ID isn’t working, please speak to security, and they’ll take care of for you, sir.”
“Aren’t you security?”
“No, I’m protective services.”
“Since when?”
“I got a promotion, see?” he said, grinning and pointing to where someone had crossed out the word “security” on his badge and written “protective services” over it.
“Congratulations. You must be proud.”
“How did you know name?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said how did you know my name?”
“I don’t.”
“Then why did you call me Proud?”
“I just assumed that you were proud because you got a promotion.”
“Oh, so you think I can’t get a promotion without using my family connections, is that it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just want to get into my office.”
“Oh so that’s how you want to play it? Don’t want to tell me how you learned confidential information about a Protective Services employee? And then go insulting my abilities to get a job fair and square. We’ll see about that.”
With that, he hoisted a walkie talkie and punched a series of buttons.
“Security, this is officer Proud of protective services down at entrance 3.”
Ah hah.
“I got a code 6 here.”
As soon as he said spoke those words, an alarm went off somewhere above my head, and a voice crackled through a loudspeaker. “Security to the lobby code 6 in process”
Before I could get my bearings a pair of guards swooped down, hoisted me from both sides side and hauled me into a door I had never noticed before. Before I knew it, I found myself handcuffed and being perp-walked to an old-style manually operated freight elevator, where a third guard waited.
The two gorillas who were holding me let go, and the one to my right said,
“OK Pal, in you go.” He gave me a hard shove into the waiting car. I stumbled forward, bounced off the back wall of the car, and flipped around in time to see the gorilla number three slam the cage door behind his rainforest buddies.
“Wait a second! What are you doing to me? I work here,” I shouted
“We’ll see about that”
“You have no right to do this.”
“Sure we do. Ain’t you heard of the patriot act?”
“What are you talking about? You’re not federal agents – you’re rent-a-cops.”
“Private Special Enforcement Officers”
“What?”
“I said we are private special enforcement officers. You’re in enough trouble as it is, accessing confidential protective services information. I caution you not to risk further sanctions by further use of incorrect nomenclature.”
“Huh?”
“I will not release any more information about the details of this action until I am authorized to do so by my superior.”
“And who would that be?”
“First Assistant Deputy Assistant Commissioner for security and support, Arthur Maudlin.”
Well, it looks like I was being taken into custody in my own office. That would solve the ID problem.
“I surrender. Take me to your leader”
As I spoke, the elevator lurched to a stop, and I once again found myself levitated by my elbows, half flung down a corridor and unceremoniously plopped outside the entrance to my own office. Gorilla number two swiped an ID card along the card reader. No buzz, no green light. He tried another, with no better luck. He then gave up and picked up a telephone hanging on the wall next to the door.
“Hello this is security. May I need to see Mr. Maudlin please … What’s this about? Well, we captured an intruder attempting to gain access to the facility…Uh, yes he did have ID, but it is a suspected forgery … Why am I using the phone? Uh, my ID does not appear to be working… I see your point, ma’am … His name? Just a moment”
Turning to me, and looking a little less, a bit less Rumsfeldian than a moment before he asked “You -- what’s your name?”
Knowing better than to risk another nepotism incident, I suppressed all repartee impulses and gave him only the information required by the Geneva conventions, which he then relayed over the phone.
“Oh, you recognize the name? … Yes, I think it would be all right if you came out, identified him, and let him in.”
Ah the sweet smell of freedom. I could practically taste it. A moment later, a familiar face appeared at the door.
“Hello Mr. White, nice of you to make it in this morning.”
“And hello to you, to Shitonya. A pleasure to see you, as always.”
Next Chapter
Being a bachelor of uncertain domestic talents, my usual morning routine is to stagger out of bed, somehow make it to the deli on the first floor of my building, and return to my lair with as much caffeine and breakfast pastry as I can carry. On the not so rare occasions when the elevator is broken, this is hazardous, as taking stairs in a pre-caffeinated state can lead to serious injury. It is often said that a child learns to go up stairs more easily than down. Not just kids, unless the definition of toddler has been expanded by a few decades. I’m not much of a drummer, but I think the rhythm of my cranium bouncing off the faux terrazzo is what’s known as a paradiddle. .
The morning after my first evening with Hunny, I awoke as usual to the grindings of world class garbage crushing-machinery beneath my window. As I readied my skull for some early morning percussion, though, I sensed something was different. For some strange reason the bouquet of mid-summer dumpster juice that usually wafted in from the street seemed to be masked by something pungent and strange. As I clawed my way to consciousness the strangeness of the smell receded, only to be replaced by the oddity of its presence in an unlikely environment. My days as botanist in the highlands of Central America told me that I was detecting the volatile aromatic emissions of the high-temperature distillation of c. arabica, a process that had never before been successfully performed in the biological niche of this particular homo civilis vernula. Either that, or someone had made a fresh pot of coffee.
As I staggered the few feet from my bedroom to the kitchen, awareness of the previous day’s events worked their way toward the frontal lobes. The smell, and now the sight, in front of me told me that I hadn’t been dreaming. Once again bursting out of her Arthur Avenue uniform, Hunny lifted a steaming mug from my kitchen table and beckoned me to the table. As I sat down across from her, the sort of thoughts apparently condoned in my workplace sprang to mind. No doubt, this was one picture that appropriate though it might be to the desires of a lonely man, still didn’t belong on my office desk. What little blood left to circulate to my brain fought its way north and woke up whatever common sense was left after years of bureaucratic purgatory and a night as a public-sector private dick. Rule number one: stay away from the daughters of men named after whimsical woodland creatures. Warily, I took a sip of coffee and broke the ice.
“You know, I heard there was a coffee maker around here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before”
“Really? It was in the cabinet, right next to the coffee.”
“Will wonders never cease. How did that get in there? Next thing you know, a couple of eggs and a glass of OJ’ll jump out of the fridge.”
“Don’t press your luck smart guy.”
This kind of witty repartee could go on forever, and certainly wouldn’t improve unless I artificially raised my dopamine levels a bit, so I put the mug to good use for a few reps and then got down to brass tacks, whatever those are.
“Listen. I’ve been thinking about what you said last night, and I’m not saying that you’re right, but I’m getting a funny feeling there’s more going on on the job than I might have realized. The way Crazy Joe disappeared doesn’t make any sense.”
“So you’ll do it? You’ll find out what happened to Tony?” she said almost giddily
“I didn’t say that. In fact, I doubt I’ll be able to find out much, but at least I’ve got to find Crazy Joe and figure out what he’s been up to. After that, I can’t say what I’m going to do.”
“But you promise not to tell the cops about me, right?”
“Listen, I don’t know what I’m going to tell the cops. I’ve got to keep my job, and keep my ass out of trouble. If I can do that and keep your name out of things, maybe, but I’m not promising anything. That’s the best I can do for you.”
She seemed to deflate a bit, at least from the neck up, with that, but she knew she’d gotten as much out of me as she was going to.
“All right then, I guess I can’t ask for any more than that. So I guess you’re going to work, right”
“Yeah, I’ve got to at least start from there. Besides, my boss scheduled a meeting for me that neither of us is going to show up to, so I’ve got to get to the office. What are you gonna do?”
“Can I stay here?”
“I thought you said you weren’t gonna ask me for anything else.”
“What are keeping score or something? Besides, you’re forgetting something. You need me here.”
“Yeah? And why’s that?”
“Well, it’s either let me stay here, and fix your phone, or kick me out and hope the phone company shows up, and charges you 350 bucks to reconnect the lines in your walls. I read your phone bill – you don’t have a service plan.”
Damn! If they hadn’t broken up AT&T, I never would have wound up in a spot like this. Besides, it was getting late, and I had to get to work early to line up the day’s asphalt supply now that Tony wasn’t around, so I didn’t have time to argue with her anymore about deregulation of the telecommunications industry”
“All right, you win. But just for today.”
With that, she gave me what might have been a smile of gratitude, or triumph, I couldn’t quite tell. Either way, I didn’t have time to sit around and try to figure it out.
A few minutes later, dressed, and as well pressed and shined up as a man of my means can be, which is to say wrinkled and scuffed, I got ready to leave. As I headed out the door, she grabbed my arm and stopped me. She gave me a soft kiss on the cheek and as she looked deep into my eyes, said
“Thanks, and here I blow dried it, and I think it might work now.”
With that she handed me cell phone gave me a little shove through the door and closed it behind me.
So I found myself on the way to work at the usual time, with the usual level of stimulants in my system, but with an altogether different collection of thoughts and obsessions. In this state I was barely able to direct a few tourists back to Boston, failed to muster my normal level of fierceness in glaring at my fellow passengers, and almost gave up my seat to a person whose impersonation of an arthritic eighty-year-old woman with a “thirteen” totebag was quite convincing. Fool me once …
Having miserably failed to meet the standard of surliness expected of me as a resident of a natural history museum diorama, I merged from the subway and scurried the rest of the way to my place of “work”. Only to be confronted with a puzzle worthy of Indiana Jones. Years ago, there was no security in government buildings, and anyone could and did go in, including the people who worked there (who generally chose not to, at least in spirit). All of that changed due to the events of one bright autumn day. Now, municipal government was attacking security with the single-minded alacrity it attacked efficiency and public service.
My office building has four entrances, each with its own separate electronic security systems. . Each requires a separate electronically encoded card, each of which emits its own radar or electronic whatchamacallit that cancels out the others unless all four are positioned just so. This might have been the product of the highest levels of security wizardry intent on keeping evil-doing enemies of freedom away from the strategic bureaucrat reserve. Or it might have been low-bid contracting. In any event, being in the midst of a bad just-so day, I gave up entrance roulette and joined the line of visitors signing in with the security guard. As I reached the head of the line, I fanned my ID’s for the guard and awaited admission.
“May I see some identification please?”
“C’mon, you see me here everyday. My cards aren’t working on the door.”
“If you have a card key, please use it at the security gate, sir.”
“I did, and it didn’t work.”
“If your ID isn’t working, please speak to security, and they’ll take care of for you, sir.”
“Aren’t you security?”
“No, I’m protective services.”
“Since when?”
“I got a promotion, see?” he said, grinning and pointing to where someone had crossed out the word “security” on his badge and written “protective services” over it.
“Congratulations. You must be proud.”
“How did you know name?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said how did you know my name?”
“I don’t.”
“Then why did you call me Proud?”
“I just assumed that you were proud because you got a promotion.”
“Oh, so you think I can’t get a promotion without using my family connections, is that it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just want to get into my office.”
“Oh so that’s how you want to play it? Don’t want to tell me how you learned confidential information about a Protective Services employee? And then go insulting my abilities to get a job fair and square. We’ll see about that.”
With that, he hoisted a walkie talkie and punched a series of buttons.
“Security, this is officer Proud of protective services down at entrance 3.”
Ah hah.
“I got a code 6 here.”
As soon as he said spoke those words, an alarm went off somewhere above my head, and a voice crackled through a loudspeaker. “Security to the lobby code 6 in process”
Before I could get my bearings a pair of guards swooped down, hoisted me from both sides side and hauled me into a door I had never noticed before. Before I knew it, I found myself handcuffed and being perp-walked to an old-style manually operated freight elevator, where a third guard waited.
The two gorillas who were holding me let go, and the one to my right said,
“OK Pal, in you go.” He gave me a hard shove into the waiting car. I stumbled forward, bounced off the back wall of the car, and flipped around in time to see the gorilla number three slam the cage door behind his rainforest buddies.
“Wait a second! What are you doing to me? I work here,” I shouted
“We’ll see about that”
“You have no right to do this.”
“Sure we do. Ain’t you heard of the patriot act?”
“What are you talking about? You’re not federal agents – you’re rent-a-cops.”
“Private Special Enforcement Officers”
“What?”
“I said we are private special enforcement officers. You’re in enough trouble as it is, accessing confidential protective services information. I caution you not to risk further sanctions by further use of incorrect nomenclature.”
“Huh?”
“I will not release any more information about the details of this action until I am authorized to do so by my superior.”
“And who would that be?”
“First Assistant Deputy Assistant Commissioner for security and support, Arthur Maudlin.”
Well, it looks like I was being taken into custody in my own office. That would solve the ID problem.
“I surrender. Take me to your leader”
As I spoke, the elevator lurched to a stop, and I once again found myself levitated by my elbows, half flung down a corridor and unceremoniously plopped outside the entrance to my own office. Gorilla number two swiped an ID card along the card reader. No buzz, no green light. He tried another, with no better luck. He then gave up and picked up a telephone hanging on the wall next to the door.
“Hello this is security. May I need to see Mr. Maudlin please … What’s this about? Well, we captured an intruder attempting to gain access to the facility…Uh, yes he did have ID, but it is a suspected forgery … Why am I using the phone? Uh, my ID does not appear to be working… I see your point, ma’am … His name? Just a moment”
Turning to me, and looking a little less, a bit less Rumsfeldian than a moment before he asked “You -- what’s your name?”
Knowing better than to risk another nepotism incident, I suppressed all repartee impulses and gave him only the information required by the Geneva conventions, which he then relayed over the phone.
“Oh, you recognize the name? … Yes, I think it would be all right if you came out, identified him, and let him in.”
Ah the sweet smell of freedom. I could practically taste it. A moment later, a familiar face appeared at the door.
“Hello Mr. White, nice of you to make it in this morning.”
“And hello to you, to Shitonya. A pleasure to see you, as always.”
Next Chapter
Friday, March 09, 2007
I must be getting old ...
Pardon the interruption. I've started several posts recently that have gone nowhere, and I'm about three quarters of the way through my next chapter, but everything is going as slow as molasses. So, knowing how my faithful readership awaits my every utterance, I've decided to go with old faithful -- a political rant. Here goes.
I must be getting old. I've been trying to wrap my brain around the Scooter Libby case, and I think I've wound up agreeing with the right wing punditocracy that Scooter shouldn't have been prosecuted. The charges were that he obstructed justice and committed perjury, and it's not clear to me that he did either of these things.
On the obstruction of justice counts, it seems to me that justice wasn't actually obstructed. Fitzgerald was appointed to:
A lot of anti-Bushies have gotten all righteous and sputtered about how national security was compromised and the safety of a CIA agent doing vital work was threatened. I'm not really buying it. First of all, I think the First Amendment considerations actually trump the security considerations. It's a bad law, created as a backlash to the anti-CIA backlash of the '70s. It's hard for me to view a conviction of anybody under this law as something to rejoice about. Second, who are we kidding. If the circumstances had happened 180 degrees differently, and if a CIA agent had been "outed" by the left in order to embarrass a pro-Bush apologists (the equivalent happened frequently during the aforementioned backlash), I think the left and right wings of the punditocracy would have switched places.
As for the perjury, as I understand it, perjury consists of knowingly lying under oath about facts that are material to the underlying inquiry. If you're testifying under oath as an expert witness about the copulatory habits of monarch butterflies and you fib about what you ate for lunch under oath because you don't want your wife to know you had a cannoli, you aren't committing perjury.
One of the reasons the perjury counts against Bill Clinton failed is that all those lawyer congressmen knew this. The judge in the Paula Jones case ruled that the Lewinsky business wasn't material to the Jones case and excluded it, ultimately dismissing the case itself. Because Clinton's Lewinsky lies were about a non-material issue in a non-case, there was no way to make a perjury case out of them (even in a setting so devoid of procedures and rules of evidence as an impeachment proceeding).
Scooter's lies are really a variation on this theme. His lies didn't influence what happened with Rove and Armitage and were about conversations with people who didn't disclose Valerie Wilson's identity. This makes their materiality to the underlying inquiry debatable. Moreover, it bears repeating that there probably wasn't a crime. Fitzgerald has very conspicuously not said that he thought the leak was a crime, but he couldn't build a case. He has been almost entirely silent about whether or not the IIPA was violated. What surprises me is that Libby's defense didn't pursue this angle. Instead, they tried to make the laughable case that Libby couldn't remember what he told to whom. His lies weren't lies, they were just mistakes.
Now we come to the chain of command question. Here's something anybody who has been paying attention to the case should know. Dick Cheney orchestrated the whole thing. There are smoking guns in the form of his memos, hand-written notes, and emails all over the place. These were introduced into evidence by the the prosecution to bolster its contention that Libby knew who Wilson before he told the FBI and the grand jury that he did. But these items were not used to build a case against Cheney. Fitzgerald has made it very clear that he thinks Cheney is responsible and has talked about a cloud hanging over the Veep. But he didn't indict him, he didn't forward a report recommending impeachment to Congress , and he didn't call for Cheney's resignation. If the leak was a crime, there's ample evidence to tie Cheney to it, and there's no evidence that Libby got in the way of Fitzgerald finding it. Fitzgerald took the investigation as far up the chain of command as one could imagine him going, and did nothing to anyone except Libby.
So why was this case prosecuted? I think for some combination of two reasons. First, Libby is a lawyer, and he lied to the FBI and to a Federal grand jury. This pisses off prosecutors. Second, it's possible that Fitzgerald was trying to make a case against Cheney, and he was trying to get Libby to turn against him. The trial could have been a result of Libby and Fitzgerald calling each other's bluffs. I think that Libby has actually got a strong possibility of winning on appeal. Expensive and high-powered though it may be, I think it was incompetent not to pursue dismissing the case under the logic outlined here.
Partly because I don't like it when prosecutors prosecute out of pique or bluffs, and partly because I like to swim against the stream politically, I hope the appeal goes pretty far and that the issues I outline get tested. Not that I have much sympathy for Libby, though. This whole matter is about something both despicable and stupid. The idea that Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger was some sort of junket or perk arranged by his wife is comical. Come on, Niger? How could these people have possibly thought that this would have undercut what Wilson, and the rest of the CIA, and British intelligence, and German intelligence, and Italian intelligence, and the U.N. said about the "sixteen little words" about Niger yellowcake? How could they possibly have had the balls to cite this as evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions in the first place. Many people deserve their time in the stocks for bringing about this war, Libby among them. But a questionable prosecution for perjury and obstruction of justice was not the way to get him there.
I must be getting old. I've been trying to wrap my brain around the Scooter Libby case, and I think I've wound up agreeing with the right wing punditocracy that Scooter shouldn't have been prosecuted. The charges were that he obstructed justice and committed perjury, and it's not clear to me that he did either of these things.
On the obstruction of justice counts, it seems to me that justice wasn't actually obstructed. Fitzgerald was appointed to:
- Figure out who leaked Valerie Wilson's identity to Robert Novak
- Determine whether the leak was criminal
- See how far up the chain of command authorization for the leak went
- Prosecute (if appropriate)
A lot of anti-Bushies have gotten all righteous and sputtered about how national security was compromised and the safety of a CIA agent doing vital work was threatened. I'm not really buying it. First of all, I think the First Amendment considerations actually trump the security considerations. It's a bad law, created as a backlash to the anti-CIA backlash of the '70s. It's hard for me to view a conviction of anybody under this law as something to rejoice about. Second, who are we kidding. If the circumstances had happened 180 degrees differently, and if a CIA agent had been "outed" by the left in order to embarrass a pro-Bush apologists (the equivalent happened frequently during the aforementioned backlash), I think the left and right wings of the punditocracy would have switched places.
As for the perjury, as I understand it, perjury consists of knowingly lying under oath about facts that are material to the underlying inquiry. If you're testifying under oath as an expert witness about the copulatory habits of monarch butterflies and you fib about what you ate for lunch under oath because you don't want your wife to know you had a cannoli, you aren't committing perjury.
One of the reasons the perjury counts against Bill Clinton failed is that all those lawyer congressmen knew this. The judge in the Paula Jones case ruled that the Lewinsky business wasn't material to the Jones case and excluded it, ultimately dismissing the case itself. Because Clinton's Lewinsky lies were about a non-material issue in a non-case, there was no way to make a perjury case out of them (even in a setting so devoid of procedures and rules of evidence as an impeachment proceeding).
Scooter's lies are really a variation on this theme. His lies didn't influence what happened with Rove and Armitage and were about conversations with people who didn't disclose Valerie Wilson's identity. This makes their materiality to the underlying inquiry debatable. Moreover, it bears repeating that there probably wasn't a crime. Fitzgerald has very conspicuously not said that he thought the leak was a crime, but he couldn't build a case. He has been almost entirely silent about whether or not the IIPA was violated. What surprises me is that Libby's defense didn't pursue this angle. Instead, they tried to make the laughable case that Libby couldn't remember what he told to whom. His lies weren't lies, they were just mistakes.
Now we come to the chain of command question. Here's something anybody who has been paying attention to the case should know. Dick Cheney orchestrated the whole thing. There are smoking guns in the form of his memos, hand-written notes, and emails all over the place. These were introduced into evidence by the the prosecution to bolster its contention that Libby knew who Wilson before he told the FBI and the grand jury that he did. But these items were not used to build a case against Cheney. Fitzgerald has made it very clear that he thinks Cheney is responsible and has talked about a cloud hanging over the Veep. But he didn't indict him, he didn't forward a report recommending impeachment to Congress , and he didn't call for Cheney's resignation. If the leak was a crime, there's ample evidence to tie Cheney to it, and there's no evidence that Libby got in the way of Fitzgerald finding it. Fitzgerald took the investigation as far up the chain of command as one could imagine him going, and did nothing to anyone except Libby.
So why was this case prosecuted? I think for some combination of two reasons. First, Libby is a lawyer, and he lied to the FBI and to a Federal grand jury. This pisses off prosecutors. Second, it's possible that Fitzgerald was trying to make a case against Cheney, and he was trying to get Libby to turn against him. The trial could have been a result of Libby and Fitzgerald calling each other's bluffs. I think that Libby has actually got a strong possibility of winning on appeal. Expensive and high-powered though it may be, I think it was incompetent not to pursue dismissing the case under the logic outlined here.
Partly because I don't like it when prosecutors prosecute out of pique or bluffs, and partly because I like to swim against the stream politically, I hope the appeal goes pretty far and that the issues I outline get tested. Not that I have much sympathy for Libby, though. This whole matter is about something both despicable and stupid. The idea that Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger was some sort of junket or perk arranged by his wife is comical. Come on, Niger? How could these people have possibly thought that this would have undercut what Wilson, and the rest of the CIA, and British intelligence, and German intelligence, and Italian intelligence, and the U.N. said about the "sixteen little words" about Niger yellowcake? How could they possibly have had the balls to cite this as evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions in the first place. Many people deserve their time in the stocks for bringing about this war, Libby among them. But a questionable prosecution for perjury and obstruction of justice was not the way to get him there.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Chapter 5 – Hunny in my Tree
This is the fifth chapter of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here. The novel begins here.
Leaving my office building, I headed toward the 7th Avenue IRT and my journey home. The IRT is a group of subway lines. So is the BMT. So is the IND. A lot of people don’t know this. At some point in the last decade or so, all traces of the New York I knew as a child disappeared. The whores were chased out of Times Square by a giant mouse. The junkies were chased out of Union Square by farmers. Homeless people were scooped up into unmarked white vans and deported to San Diego. New York accents were banned from Manhattan.
My Grandfather grew up in Manhattan and spent his whole life there. He spoke with the kind of accent you hear in old movies. Part Leo Gorcey, part Humphrey Bogart, with hints of the pale of settlement polyglot he grew up speaking. He used tell us kids bedtime stories about the charms of old New York. In his day, it was the Jews against the Irish – pitched battles in the Gashouse district against the gang led by his arch-nemesis Hugo Mahoney. The way Grandpa said the name, it sounded like “Oogie Maharney,” and in his stories, Grandpa always came out on top, hitting Oogie in the face with a rotten tomato, or chasing him into the shins of the beat cop.
I always knew grandpa wasn’t really gangster, or an angel with a dirty face, just a regular guy, retired from a regular job, who wore a fedora and a coat and tie when ever he went out. When he died, his final raspberry to the religious upbringing he walked away from when he enrolled in the Jewish Harvard was his instructions to be cremated. It’s a good thing we followed those instructions, too, because if there had been a body, some yuppie anthropologist who thinks an egg cream is supposed to have eggs and cream in it would have stuffed him and stuck him in a diorama in the Museum of Natural History next to the cavemen and the saber tooth tiger. Grandpa hated cats.
But I digress. One of the stranger things to have happened is that one day, in the middle of the night, somebody went and changed the names of all the trains. All vestiges of the three separate subway companies were erased. F’s were turned into V’s. V’s were turned into Q’s. The double-L lost an L. And nobody told the lifers. On the rare occasions when one of us could find another, we’d swap stories about flashers on the BMT or ax murderers on the IND. Meanwhile, flocks of newly arrived actors, lawyers, and media slaves stop and ask for directions to the red line, and we try to figure out why all these people think they’re in Boston.
But I digress. I took the subway back to my palatial civil servant’s villa, better known as a crumbling apartment, in a crumbling building, in a neighborhood that used to be overrun with hookers after the factories shut down at night. Now it’s the latest clone of Soho, but it’s still crumbling. Pushing and shoving my way through the phalanxes of smokers standing outside the 14 bars that have opened on my block in the last three months, I made my way to my building, inside and upstairs to my apartment.
As I started to turn my key in the lock, the door jerked open, and I tumbled forward into my foyer. I looked up from the floor to see standing in from of me the girl I saw loitering on Arthur Avenue.
Ordinarily, I gawk as well as the next guy, but when I saw her earlier, I was too preoccupied to give her the attention, she obviously sought. I could see now that she deserved, it too. From the brief glance I shot her way on Arthur Avenue, I had guessed she was jailbait because of the way she dressed – the only women on the streets who look like hookers these days are twelve year old kids. I have as active a fantasy life as the next guy too, but I have certain rules. Like never undress a minor with your eyes. Maybe the government can’t intercept what your eyes download to your brain, yet, but I’m not taking any chances.
Now seeing her up close, I could see that see wasn’t as young as I had thought. She was in her twenties, and dressed for, if not action, at least attracting the stares of civil servants who don’t get out too much. Beneath the spiked blond hair of dubious provenance, heavy mascara, multiple ear and nose rings, exposed skin, and tattoos was a certified natural beauty. Big green eyes, full lips, and porcelain skin, and cheekbones like a movie star. I picked myself off the floor, and lifted my jaw back into place before putting it into service.
“Who are you, and what are you doing in my apartment?”
“I’m a friend of Tony’s. A close friend. I need to talk to you. Your door was open.”
Two things told me she was lying. One, there was no way a vision like this was close friends with the likes of Tony Paternostro. He was a middle-aged, blue collar guy out of the Bronx, with a wife and kids, and a dead-end job. He hid from his battleax of a wife in neighborhood bars and social clubs with a one-eyed sociopath. She was a walking wet dream. Guys with looks, money, and connections for anything she could possibly want would be parading behind her, tripping on their tongues and signing over their condos in Florida to her. Lord knows who she hung out with, but it had to be someone with more obvious charms than a guy who spends his life around sticky black stuff and rocks.
Two, I’m a fourth generation latchkey-kid, native New Yorker. No silver spoon for me – I was born with a Medeco, a Schlage, and a Segal in my mouth. I’ve triple locked my door every day since second grade. In crumbling neighborhoods like mine, even ones where the cheapest apartments now go for three grand a month, that’s what you do. It keeps out the smokers. All that time I thought it also kept out girls with bodies that blatantly defy the laws of physics and who make no effort to conceal the color of their underwear. I guess I never got the memo that telling me they were allowed in after all. Maybe they only give those memos to the market rate tenants, like heat and hot water.
This was no time to discuss the finer points of the housing market though, and as much as I might have liked to let myself think with the wrong head, the events of the day wouldn’t let me. Besides, red lace thongs don’t do all that much for me. Not that I’d noticed. I’m not all that interested in looking at the outline of a nipple ring through a tight, nearly see-through blouse, either. Not that I’d noticed. I was trying to get to the bottom of why a barely clothed bottom threatening to escape from a tight leather skirt was in my apartment. Not that I’d noticed.
“Try again. I don’t know who you are, or how you got here. So how about you clear that all up for me, before I call my new best friend Detective Rendell.”
With that, I heaved my government-issue cellphone off my belt, fished Rendell’s card out of a pocket and started poking at the keypad.
“Please. Don’t do that. I can’t talk to the cops about this. You gotta help me.”
“I gotta help you? I don’t know anything about you, and I don’t think I want to, especially if you don’t want to talk to the cops about the murder of your ‘close’ friend.”
“I can’t talk to the cops. If they find out, I don’t know what they’ll do to me.”
“Who, the cops?”
“No the people who killed Tony”
“You know who killed him?”
“I think so, yeah.”
Regretting the words the minute they left my mouth, I asked anyway.
“All right, why don’t you tell me what’s going on, then tell me how you know Tony. Let’s start with your name.”
“Honey … ”
“You can call me honey once we get to know each other a little better, but for now why don’t you just tell me your name.”
“I told you – it’s honey. H u n n-y.”
“Yeah, and who’s your brother, Christopher Robin?”
“Ha ha. My daddy wanted to name me that, and he’s the kind of guy that gets to do what he wants.
“Yeah? Who’s your daddy?”
“His name is Vincent Pugliacci.”
The room reverberated with the sound of my jaw hitting the floor again. For the second time in a day, the name of one of the most notorious innocent-until-proven-guilty men in New York turned up in connection with a dead guy who used to work for me. On top of that, he appeared to have an appreciation for whimsical classics of children’s literature. Menace and whimsy can be a fearsome combination.
“So let me see if I got this straight. You’re Vinnie the Pooh’s daughter, and I’m guessing he loves his Hunny?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Cute, huh?”
“I guess so, but none of that explains what you were doing outside the scene of Tony Paternostro’s murder, and why you expect me to be able to help you.”
“Like I told you Tony and I … well, he was my boyfriend.”
“I’m having a little trouble picturing that”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Why does everybody say that”
“Well, he was … uh quite a bit older than you.”
“So?”
“Well, you’re a very pretty girl …”
“And Tony was a very handsome man.”
What can I say? Love is blind. Either that or “pear-shaped, pock-marked, and pale” is the new Brad Pitt.
“Let’s just skip that for now. Why don’t you tell me why you think I can help you?”
“Tony always said he trusted you. He said you’re the only boss who ever did anything for him.”
“Sure, at work I took care of him, but that’s just because he did his job OK, at least compared to whoever else was available. I’m still not seeing what you want from me.”
“Tony said that if anything ever happened to him, stay away from his wife, and stay away from crazy Joe. I got nobody I can trust so that’s why I’m coming to you.”
“Listen, all I can tell you is that if you think you know what happened to him, and you need someone to protect you, you’d do a lot better looking a little closer to home.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Start with your father. I heard he knows something about protecting people.”
“And a lot of other things too. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I can’t go to him because I think he might be connected to what happened to Tony.”
“What do you mean? You think your father killed your boyfriend? And you want me to do something about it?”
“I don’t know if my father did it. All I know is that someone close to him was involved. If this person was, and the cops come after him, he’ll know it was ‘cause of me.”
“Don’t worry about it. The cops can protect the person id-ing a suspect. They did it all the time on Barney Miller.”
“Who’s Barney Miller, and what’d the cops do on him?”
“Uh, forget it. Anyway, how would this guy know you told the cops about him?”
“Because I saw him running out of the building, and he saw me.”
“Look, I can see that you’ve got a problem, but I still think you should go to the cops. If you really think you can’t, then you’re better off going to your father and telling him what you saw. What would he do to his own daughter?”
“Don’t you get it? I can’t go to him. If he was involved, that means my own father killed the man I love. If that’s true, I don’t ever want to see him again, and I don’t want him knowing the reason why.”
“OK, but what do you want me to do for you?”
“I want you to find out if my father did it, so I’ll know whether I can ever see my father again.”
“Who do you think I am, Archie freakin’ Goodwin? I’m sorry Hunny, but I think you’ve got the wrong guy. All I do is push paper.”
“That’s not what Tony said about you. He said you knew stuff about my father’s business and the people that work for him. That you knew how to dig things up. He also said he could trust you.”
“Look, I know enough to know that I don’t want to dig any deeper. I also know that I already have a job, one I can’t afford to lose by interfering with a murder investigation.”
“You don’t have to worry about your job. I can pay you. A lot. And if you find out that my father is innocent, he’ll take care of you.”
“Are you crazy? What if he’s not innocent? Then he’ll really take care of me.”
“Now who’s being crazy? Look, Tony’s dead. You might be next. The only way you can protect yourself is finding out who did it.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. The inappropriate boyfriend of a mobster’s daughter winds up dead, and his boss has to worry about being next in line for a bullet? What, your father thinks I fixed the two of you up?”
“What do you mean ‘inappropriate’? He was a very nice man. And who would be appropriate? Some zip in a black shirt and white tie? Besides, this has got nothing to do with what was between me and Tony.”
“You’re saying your father was happy about you being in love with a married man who made next to no money and came home from work every day smelling like asphalt?”
“My father has never liked any of my boyfriends, but he’s never killed any of them.”
“First time for everything.”
“He didn’t know about me and Tony. Nobody did, so that can’t be why he killed him, if he did. If he did, it had to be about business. You and Tony’s business.”
“Then forget about you telling the cops. I’m telling them myself. Now. I’d rather take my chances with them.”
I hoisted the phone up again and tried to heave open its giant clamshell. She was too quick though. She grabbed it from my hands and heaved it through the open door. I heard a splash, and knew I’d be filling out forms in the morning.
“Nice shot.”
“I played shooting guard at Our Lady of Padua”
“You know that’s not the only phone in the world. You’re not gonna stop me from calling the cops.”
“Maybe, but for now, that was the last one in this apartment. The nuns taught shop, too. I know all about wiring.”
It looked like she had won the first round. If I was going to call the cops, it might not be for a while. There’s probably a code in the city procedures manual for how to replace drowned telecommunications equipment. I didn’t know it, but Carboña probably had it. Besides, they’d probably fine me for polluting the sewers. There’s probably a way to get the phone company to show up and fix your wires, too, but no one I know has ever cracked that code. I was gonna need to get to out of my apartment by myself to get to the cops. If she played hoops and took shop high in school, who knows what other skills the nuns imparted to her. Besides, I was taught never to hit a girl. The only people I was supposed to hit were Irish street urchins, and I didn’t have any rotten tomatoes handy. They were all in the fridge.
“All right. It looks like I’ve got no choice but to listen to you a bit more. But this doesn’t mean I’m gonna help you.”
For the first time since I fell into my apartment, somebody cracked a smile.
“Well at least that’s a start.”
I had to smile a little myself. Hunny seemed to have a way of getting what she wanted out of people. Not that I was ready to start moonlighting yet. I’d need to fill out a form to get approval to do that.
“All right, so what’s the story here? Why do you think this had something to do with Tony’s job?”
“I told you. If it’s not because he was my boyfriend, what else could it be?”
“For starters, it could be his wife.”
“No way. She needed him alive, and married. She wanted half his pension – Tony always told me she couldn’t collect if they got divorced or he died”
“Yeah I heard about that. I was there when the cops broke the news to her. The minute Rendell start asking her about her how things were between her and Tony, she broke out that story about the pension. Acted all pissed off about his dying before he filled out some paperwork that would have benefited her.”
“See?”
“Yeah, but it was all a little too neat – she was too ready to tell us she had no reason to kill him. Didn’t show the slightest hint of real emotion when she got the news. She was just pissed off that she didn’t get his money.”
“That’s what I’m saying. She didn’t care about him at all. All she cared about was what she could get out of him.”
“Maybe so, but I’m telling you, she didn’t seem surprised or affected by the news at all. After a minute, she acted like she was upset, but it was the fakest thing I ever saw. Almost like she knew he was dead. She’s got an angle in this, I bet.”
“No way. Tony says there was no way she could get his money unless he retired, and they were still married. That’s why we couldn’t get married – she wouldn’t let him go.”
After the m-bomb, I was tempted to say something, held my tongue. I still had electronic devices I cared about in my apartment, and more than one fixture with running water. Besides, it was getting late. I needed to get her out of my apartment. Civil servants need their beauty rest.
“Look, there are a lot of complexities to the pension system. I’ve heard all kinds of stories about guys thinking they had it all figured out, only to find someone’s hand in their pockets the minute they retired. Something else could’ve been going on, too.”
“Like what?”
“Like crazy Joe. That guy’s a walking disaster area, and Tony’s been hanging around with him for twenty years. Who knows what kind of shit he might’ve brought around? So why go get a good night’s sleep, think all this over, and then see whether maybe you might do better with the cops than with me.”
“I got no place to go. I can’t go back to the apartment – the cops have got it all sealed up. And can’t go back to my father’s place right now.”
“Don’t you have any friends, someone you can crash with?”
“No one I can trust. Look, just let me stay here‘till you get this figured out. It won’t take long. I promise, I’ll be no trouble at all.”
Before I could say no, she turned her back to me, pulled her shirt off and started walking toward my bathroom. I was disappointed to see that she wasn’t wearing a bra that matched her thong. Wasn’t wearing a bra at all, actually, but I guess I already knew that.
I tried to sputter a weak objection, but couldn’t get the words out before she beat me to the draw.
“I’m just gonna take a shower. I don’t mind sleeping on your couch, but I didn’t bring a change of clothes or anything to sleep in,” she said as the door closed.
“Why don’t you give me one of your shirts, and maybe a pair of your boxers? Just slip ‘em through the door and throw ‘em on the floor. And no peeking.”
With that, I heard the water in the shower roar to life. I resigned myself to having a new roommate and set about making her feel at home. I set up the pull-out couch in the living room for her and fished out some deluxe civil servant boxer shorts and a shirt I had long since given up on from a pile at the bottom of my closet. I then followed her distribution instructions to the letter, though do to the reflective properties certain glass surfaces, perhaps not the spirit.
The rest of the evening’s ablutions passed without further incident, and with teeth brushed and face scrubbed I retreated to my bedroom for a much needed rest.
Next chapter
Leaving my office building, I headed toward the 7th Avenue IRT and my journey home. The IRT is a group of subway lines. So is the BMT. So is the IND. A lot of people don’t know this. At some point in the last decade or so, all traces of the New York I knew as a child disappeared. The whores were chased out of Times Square by a giant mouse. The junkies were chased out of Union Square by farmers. Homeless people were scooped up into unmarked white vans and deported to San Diego. New York accents were banned from Manhattan.
My Grandfather grew up in Manhattan and spent his whole life there. He spoke with the kind of accent you hear in old movies. Part Leo Gorcey, part Humphrey Bogart, with hints of the pale of settlement polyglot he grew up speaking. He used tell us kids bedtime stories about the charms of old New York. In his day, it was the Jews against the Irish – pitched battles in the Gashouse district against the gang led by his arch-nemesis Hugo Mahoney. The way Grandpa said the name, it sounded like “Oogie Maharney,” and in his stories, Grandpa always came out on top, hitting Oogie in the face with a rotten tomato, or chasing him into the shins of the beat cop.
I always knew grandpa wasn’t really gangster, or an angel with a dirty face, just a regular guy, retired from a regular job, who wore a fedora and a coat and tie when ever he went out. When he died, his final raspberry to the religious upbringing he walked away from when he enrolled in the Jewish Harvard was his instructions to be cremated. It’s a good thing we followed those instructions, too, because if there had been a body, some yuppie anthropologist who thinks an egg cream is supposed to have eggs and cream in it would have stuffed him and stuck him in a diorama in the Museum of Natural History next to the cavemen and the saber tooth tiger. Grandpa hated cats.
But I digress. One of the stranger things to have happened is that one day, in the middle of the night, somebody went and changed the names of all the trains. All vestiges of the three separate subway companies were erased. F’s were turned into V’s. V’s were turned into Q’s. The double-L lost an L. And nobody told the lifers. On the rare occasions when one of us could find another, we’d swap stories about flashers on the BMT or ax murderers on the IND. Meanwhile, flocks of newly arrived actors, lawyers, and media slaves stop and ask for directions to the red line, and we try to figure out why all these people think they’re in Boston.
But I digress. I took the subway back to my palatial civil servant’s villa, better known as a crumbling apartment, in a crumbling building, in a neighborhood that used to be overrun with hookers after the factories shut down at night. Now it’s the latest clone of Soho, but it’s still crumbling. Pushing and shoving my way through the phalanxes of smokers standing outside the 14 bars that have opened on my block in the last three months, I made my way to my building, inside and upstairs to my apartment.
As I started to turn my key in the lock, the door jerked open, and I tumbled forward into my foyer. I looked up from the floor to see standing in from of me the girl I saw loitering on Arthur Avenue.
Ordinarily, I gawk as well as the next guy, but when I saw her earlier, I was too preoccupied to give her the attention, she obviously sought. I could see now that she deserved, it too. From the brief glance I shot her way on Arthur Avenue, I had guessed she was jailbait because of the way she dressed – the only women on the streets who look like hookers these days are twelve year old kids. I have as active a fantasy life as the next guy too, but I have certain rules. Like never undress a minor with your eyes. Maybe the government can’t intercept what your eyes download to your brain, yet, but I’m not taking any chances.
Now seeing her up close, I could see that see wasn’t as young as I had thought. She was in her twenties, and dressed for, if not action, at least attracting the stares of civil servants who don’t get out too much. Beneath the spiked blond hair of dubious provenance, heavy mascara, multiple ear and nose rings, exposed skin, and tattoos was a certified natural beauty. Big green eyes, full lips, and porcelain skin, and cheekbones like a movie star. I picked myself off the floor, and lifted my jaw back into place before putting it into service.
“Who are you, and what are you doing in my apartment?”
“I’m a friend of Tony’s. A close friend. I need to talk to you. Your door was open.”
Two things told me she was lying. One, there was no way a vision like this was close friends with the likes of Tony Paternostro. He was a middle-aged, blue collar guy out of the Bronx, with a wife and kids, and a dead-end job. He hid from his battleax of a wife in neighborhood bars and social clubs with a one-eyed sociopath. She was a walking wet dream. Guys with looks, money, and connections for anything she could possibly want would be parading behind her, tripping on their tongues and signing over their condos in Florida to her. Lord knows who she hung out with, but it had to be someone with more obvious charms than a guy who spends his life around sticky black stuff and rocks.
Two, I’m a fourth generation latchkey-kid, native New Yorker. No silver spoon for me – I was born with a Medeco, a Schlage, and a Segal in my mouth. I’ve triple locked my door every day since second grade. In crumbling neighborhoods like mine, even ones where the cheapest apartments now go for three grand a month, that’s what you do. It keeps out the smokers. All that time I thought it also kept out girls with bodies that blatantly defy the laws of physics and who make no effort to conceal the color of their underwear. I guess I never got the memo that telling me they were allowed in after all. Maybe they only give those memos to the market rate tenants, like heat and hot water.
This was no time to discuss the finer points of the housing market though, and as much as I might have liked to let myself think with the wrong head, the events of the day wouldn’t let me. Besides, red lace thongs don’t do all that much for me. Not that I’d noticed. I’m not all that interested in looking at the outline of a nipple ring through a tight, nearly see-through blouse, either. Not that I’d noticed. I was trying to get to the bottom of why a barely clothed bottom threatening to escape from a tight leather skirt was in my apartment. Not that I’d noticed.
“Try again. I don’t know who you are, or how you got here. So how about you clear that all up for me, before I call my new best friend Detective Rendell.”
With that, I heaved my government-issue cellphone off my belt, fished Rendell’s card out of a pocket and started poking at the keypad.
“Please. Don’t do that. I can’t talk to the cops about this. You gotta help me.”
“I gotta help you? I don’t know anything about you, and I don’t think I want to, especially if you don’t want to talk to the cops about the murder of your ‘close’ friend.”
“I can’t talk to the cops. If they find out, I don’t know what they’ll do to me.”
“Who, the cops?”
“No the people who killed Tony”
“You know who killed him?”
“I think so, yeah.”
Regretting the words the minute they left my mouth, I asked anyway.
“All right, why don’t you tell me what’s going on, then tell me how you know Tony. Let’s start with your name.”
“Honey … ”
“You can call me honey once we get to know each other a little better, but for now why don’t you just tell me your name.”
“I told you – it’s honey. H u n n-y.”
“Yeah, and who’s your brother, Christopher Robin?”
“Ha ha. My daddy wanted to name me that, and he’s the kind of guy that gets to do what he wants.
“Yeah? Who’s your daddy?”
“His name is Vincent Pugliacci.”
The room reverberated with the sound of my jaw hitting the floor again. For the second time in a day, the name of one of the most notorious innocent-until-proven-guilty men in New York turned up in connection with a dead guy who used to work for me. On top of that, he appeared to have an appreciation for whimsical classics of children’s literature. Menace and whimsy can be a fearsome combination.
“So let me see if I got this straight. You’re Vinnie the Pooh’s daughter, and I’m guessing he loves his Hunny?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Cute, huh?”
“I guess so, but none of that explains what you were doing outside the scene of Tony Paternostro’s murder, and why you expect me to be able to help you.”
“Like I told you Tony and I … well, he was my boyfriend.”
“I’m having a little trouble picturing that”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Why does everybody say that”
“Well, he was … uh quite a bit older than you.”
“So?”
“Well, you’re a very pretty girl …”
“And Tony was a very handsome man.”
What can I say? Love is blind. Either that or “pear-shaped, pock-marked, and pale” is the new Brad Pitt.
“Let’s just skip that for now. Why don’t you tell me why you think I can help you?”
“Tony always said he trusted you. He said you’re the only boss who ever did anything for him.”
“Sure, at work I took care of him, but that’s just because he did his job OK, at least compared to whoever else was available. I’m still not seeing what you want from me.”
“Tony said that if anything ever happened to him, stay away from his wife, and stay away from crazy Joe. I got nobody I can trust so that’s why I’m coming to you.”
“Listen, all I can tell you is that if you think you know what happened to him, and you need someone to protect you, you’d do a lot better looking a little closer to home.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Start with your father. I heard he knows something about protecting people.”
“And a lot of other things too. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I can’t go to him because I think he might be connected to what happened to Tony.”
“What do you mean? You think your father killed your boyfriend? And you want me to do something about it?”
“I don’t know if my father did it. All I know is that someone close to him was involved. If this person was, and the cops come after him, he’ll know it was ‘cause of me.”
“Don’t worry about it. The cops can protect the person id-ing a suspect. They did it all the time on Barney Miller.”
“Who’s Barney Miller, and what’d the cops do on him?”
“Uh, forget it. Anyway, how would this guy know you told the cops about him?”
“Because I saw him running out of the building, and he saw me.”
“Look, I can see that you’ve got a problem, but I still think you should go to the cops. If you really think you can’t, then you’re better off going to your father and telling him what you saw. What would he do to his own daughter?”
“Don’t you get it? I can’t go to him. If he was involved, that means my own father killed the man I love. If that’s true, I don’t ever want to see him again, and I don’t want him knowing the reason why.”
“OK, but what do you want me to do for you?”
“I want you to find out if my father did it, so I’ll know whether I can ever see my father again.”
“Who do you think I am, Archie freakin’ Goodwin? I’m sorry Hunny, but I think you’ve got the wrong guy. All I do is push paper.”
“That’s not what Tony said about you. He said you knew stuff about my father’s business and the people that work for him. That you knew how to dig things up. He also said he could trust you.”
“Look, I know enough to know that I don’t want to dig any deeper. I also know that I already have a job, one I can’t afford to lose by interfering with a murder investigation.”
“You don’t have to worry about your job. I can pay you. A lot. And if you find out that my father is innocent, he’ll take care of you.”
“Are you crazy? What if he’s not innocent? Then he’ll really take care of me.”
“Now who’s being crazy? Look, Tony’s dead. You might be next. The only way you can protect yourself is finding out who did it.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. The inappropriate boyfriend of a mobster’s daughter winds up dead, and his boss has to worry about being next in line for a bullet? What, your father thinks I fixed the two of you up?”
“What do you mean ‘inappropriate’? He was a very nice man. And who would be appropriate? Some zip in a black shirt and white tie? Besides, this has got nothing to do with what was between me and Tony.”
“You’re saying your father was happy about you being in love with a married man who made next to no money and came home from work every day smelling like asphalt?”
“My father has never liked any of my boyfriends, but he’s never killed any of them.”
“First time for everything.”
“He didn’t know about me and Tony. Nobody did, so that can’t be why he killed him, if he did. If he did, it had to be about business. You and Tony’s business.”
“Then forget about you telling the cops. I’m telling them myself. Now. I’d rather take my chances with them.”
I hoisted the phone up again and tried to heave open its giant clamshell. She was too quick though. She grabbed it from my hands and heaved it through the open door. I heard a splash, and knew I’d be filling out forms in the morning.
“Nice shot.”
“I played shooting guard at Our Lady of Padua”
“You know that’s not the only phone in the world. You’re not gonna stop me from calling the cops.”
“Maybe, but for now, that was the last one in this apartment. The nuns taught shop, too. I know all about wiring.”
It looked like she had won the first round. If I was going to call the cops, it might not be for a while. There’s probably a code in the city procedures manual for how to replace drowned telecommunications equipment. I didn’t know it, but Carboña probably had it. Besides, they’d probably fine me for polluting the sewers. There’s probably a way to get the phone company to show up and fix your wires, too, but no one I know has ever cracked that code. I was gonna need to get to out of my apartment by myself to get to the cops. If she played hoops and took shop high in school, who knows what other skills the nuns imparted to her. Besides, I was taught never to hit a girl. The only people I was supposed to hit were Irish street urchins, and I didn’t have any rotten tomatoes handy. They were all in the fridge.
“All right. It looks like I’ve got no choice but to listen to you a bit more. But this doesn’t mean I’m gonna help you.”
For the first time since I fell into my apartment, somebody cracked a smile.
“Well at least that’s a start.”
I had to smile a little myself. Hunny seemed to have a way of getting what she wanted out of people. Not that I was ready to start moonlighting yet. I’d need to fill out a form to get approval to do that.
“All right, so what’s the story here? Why do you think this had something to do with Tony’s job?”
“I told you. If it’s not because he was my boyfriend, what else could it be?”
“For starters, it could be his wife.”
“No way. She needed him alive, and married. She wanted half his pension – Tony always told me she couldn’t collect if they got divorced or he died”
“Yeah I heard about that. I was there when the cops broke the news to her. The minute Rendell start asking her about her how things were between her and Tony, she broke out that story about the pension. Acted all pissed off about his dying before he filled out some paperwork that would have benefited her.”
“See?”
“Yeah, but it was all a little too neat – she was too ready to tell us she had no reason to kill him. Didn’t show the slightest hint of real emotion when she got the news. She was just pissed off that she didn’t get his money.”
“That’s what I’m saying. She didn’t care about him at all. All she cared about was what she could get out of him.”
“Maybe so, but I’m telling you, she didn’t seem surprised or affected by the news at all. After a minute, she acted like she was upset, but it was the fakest thing I ever saw. Almost like she knew he was dead. She’s got an angle in this, I bet.”
“No way. Tony says there was no way she could get his money unless he retired, and they were still married. That’s why we couldn’t get married – she wouldn’t let him go.”
After the m-bomb, I was tempted to say something, held my tongue. I still had electronic devices I cared about in my apartment, and more than one fixture with running water. Besides, it was getting late. I needed to get her out of my apartment. Civil servants need their beauty rest.
“Look, there are a lot of complexities to the pension system. I’ve heard all kinds of stories about guys thinking they had it all figured out, only to find someone’s hand in their pockets the minute they retired. Something else could’ve been going on, too.”
“Like what?”
“Like crazy Joe. That guy’s a walking disaster area, and Tony’s been hanging around with him for twenty years. Who knows what kind of shit he might’ve brought around? So why go get a good night’s sleep, think all this over, and then see whether maybe you might do better with the cops than with me.”
“I got no place to go. I can’t go back to the apartment – the cops have got it all sealed up. And can’t go back to my father’s place right now.”
“Don’t you have any friends, someone you can crash with?”
“No one I can trust. Look, just let me stay here‘till you get this figured out. It won’t take long. I promise, I’ll be no trouble at all.”
Before I could say no, she turned her back to me, pulled her shirt off and started walking toward my bathroom. I was disappointed to see that she wasn’t wearing a bra that matched her thong. Wasn’t wearing a bra at all, actually, but I guess I already knew that.
I tried to sputter a weak objection, but couldn’t get the words out before she beat me to the draw.
“I’m just gonna take a shower. I don’t mind sleeping on your couch, but I didn’t bring a change of clothes or anything to sleep in,” she said as the door closed.
“Why don’t you give me one of your shirts, and maybe a pair of your boxers? Just slip ‘em through the door and throw ‘em on the floor. And no peeking.”
With that, I heard the water in the shower roar to life. I resigned myself to having a new roommate and set about making her feel at home. I set up the pull-out couch in the living room for her and fished out some deluxe civil servant boxer shorts and a shirt I had long since given up on from a pile at the bottom of my closet. I then followed her distribution instructions to the letter, though do to the reflective properties certain glass surfaces, perhaps not the spirit.
The rest of the evening’s ablutions passed without further incident, and with teeth brushed and face scrubbed I retreated to my bedroom for a much needed rest.
Next chapter
Monday, February 12, 2007
How to Vote for President
With the recent spate of announcements of presidential candidacies, it occurs to me that there would be great value in developing a systematic approach to candidate selection. With my background in the efficiencies of municipal procurement, who better than I to produce and disseminate such a system.
Behold the hand-dandy calcu-vote system:
1. Identify your most important core value
2. Rate each candidate according to degree of pandering to that value on a scale of 0 to 5 (0 = "I do not speak French"; 5 = "is your tongue supposed to go there?"
3. Identify 2 policy proposals from each candidate that conflate (your) self-interest and improbable predictions of macro-economic effects and rate each on a scale of 0 to 5 (0= "you want to raise my taxes and to fix social security?"; 5="cheap Chinese TV's and jobs at home? sounds good to me!")
4. Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 to 5 for combined naturalness and salt-and-pepper-ness of hair. (0=Donald Trump; 5=George Clooney)
5. Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 t0 5 for absence of melanin (0=Jack Johnson; 5 = George Will)
6. Sample each candidate's stump speech for 1 minute and add 1 point for each occurence of "Freedom" ,"America" ,"Hope", "Values" and "Future" up to a maximum of 10. For any occurences above 10, deduct 2 points per occurence
7. For each candidate, count the number of X and Y chromosomes. Assign 2 points for each X chromosome and 5 for each Y (up to a maximum of 5)
8. Add up the scores for steps 1-7 and vote for the candidate with the highest total.
9. If there is a tie, vote for Ross Perot.
10. If Ross Perot is not on the ballot select a fringe party candidate at random (make sure to bring a coin or die into the voting booth).
Behold the hand-dandy calcu-vote system:
1. Identify your most important core value
2. Rate each candidate according to degree of pandering to that value on a scale of 0 to 5 (0 = "I do not speak French"; 5 = "is your tongue supposed to go there?"
3. Identify 2 policy proposals from each candidate that conflate (your) self-interest and improbable predictions of macro-economic effects and rate each on a scale of 0 to 5 (0= "you want to raise my taxes and to fix social security?"; 5="cheap Chinese TV's and jobs at home? sounds good to me!")
4. Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 to 5 for combined naturalness and salt-and-pepper-ness of hair. (0=Donald Trump; 5=George Clooney)
5. Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 t0 5 for absence of melanin (0=Jack Johnson; 5 = George Will)
6. Sample each candidate's stump speech for 1 minute and add 1 point for each occurence of "Freedom" ,"America" ,"Hope", "Values" and "Future" up to a maximum of 10. For any occurences above 10, deduct 2 points per occurence
7. For each candidate, count the number of X and Y chromosomes. Assign 2 points for each X chromosome and 5 for each Y (up to a maximum of 5)
8. Add up the scores for steps 1-7 and vote for the candidate with the highest total.
9. If there is a tie, vote for Ross Perot.
10. If Ross Perot is not on the ballot select a fringe party candidate at random (make sure to bring a coin or die into the voting booth).
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Of Course You Realize, This Means War
According to a recent article in the New York Times, U.S. "intelligence" officials in Iraq (there's an oxymoron for you) believe that Iran is supplying insurgents in Iraq with munitions, including the most effective form of roadside bomb. The article alludes to the evidence U.S. officials claim to have unearthed, but makes no attempt to assess the validity of these claims. The article also mentions that Iranian officials flatly deny the charges.
This is an extraordinary story. Given the way the Times via Judith Miller got burned by the WMD claims leading up to the invasion, it's astonishing that that the Times would report these claims as straight news. I would think that most Times readers (and I would hope editors) would immediately sense their "here we go again radar" booting up. Yet the article alludes only very indirectly to the possibility that this is part of a P.R. campaign to start another war -- by quoting U.S. officials' denials that that's what it is. Beyond that, there's is no counterpoint and minimal political context to the story. There's also nothing on the opinion pages yet. One would think that the minute a story like this hits, the opinion writers would be raising "fool me once ... " warnings, but this isn't happening so far.
Ironically, the idea that support for Iraqi insurgents is coming from Iran is entirely plausible. Iran was a refuge for Shiites throughout the Saddam era. From what I understand, the border areas between Iran and Iraq are somewhat analagous to the "tribal" areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Allegencies are religious and tribal far more than they are national. Consequently, it's entirely logical that Shiite militants are getting arms from within Iran (even if not from the Iranian government). Yet the intelligence and military "communities" under Bush are so discredited that even if they present something that on its face seems reasonable, it's almost impossible for any thinking person to take it seriously.
Or so I would hope. For now, there is only speculation. If Joe "I am the Lorax" Lieberman starts talking about the the threat to U.S. troops posed by Irani armorers, though, we'll know for sure the fix is in.
This is an extraordinary story. Given the way the Times via Judith Miller got burned by the WMD claims leading up to the invasion, it's astonishing that that the Times would report these claims as straight news. I would think that most Times readers (and I would hope editors) would immediately sense their "here we go again radar" booting up. Yet the article alludes only very indirectly to the possibility that this is part of a P.R. campaign to start another war -- by quoting U.S. officials' denials that that's what it is. Beyond that, there's is no counterpoint and minimal political context to the story. There's also nothing on the opinion pages yet. One would think that the minute a story like this hits, the opinion writers would be raising "fool me once ... " warnings, but this isn't happening so far.
Ironically, the idea that support for Iraqi insurgents is coming from Iran is entirely plausible. Iran was a refuge for Shiites throughout the Saddam era. From what I understand, the border areas between Iran and Iraq are somewhat analagous to the "tribal" areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Allegencies are religious and tribal far more than they are national. Consequently, it's entirely logical that Shiite militants are getting arms from within Iran (even if not from the Iranian government). Yet the intelligence and military "communities" under Bush are so discredited that even if they present something that on its face seems reasonable, it's almost impossible for any thinking person to take it seriously.
Or so I would hope. For now, there is only speculation. If Joe "I am the Lorax" Lieberman starts talking about the the threat to U.S. troops posed by Irani armorers, though, we'll know for sure the fix is in.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
You say tomato ...
Electric guitar is a funny instrument. Compared to other instruments common in jazz and other improvised music, it's pretty hard to play a lot of notes, particularly at fast tempos. Those who do manage to achieve "speed" comparable to what pretty much any entry-level saxophonist or pianist can do are few and far between. Those can do this, and not sound like they're working really hard are among the the very best in the business. Those who can make speed sound easy and make unusual, insteresting music ... well ... that's genius.
Now, there's a "right" way, to play fast -- picking all the notes according to a system, keeping things even and tight. Using hammer-ons, and other guitarry quirks only for effect and expression. The ultimate example of this kind of tightness is probably Pat Martino. Outside of the world of jazz guitarists, he's relatively unknown. Among guitarists, though, he's a god, the true musician's musician, the platonic form of the way you're supposed to do it. But the chops aren't the most interesting thing about him -- his phrasing, his harmonic pallet, and an amazing dynamic range (both literal, and, for lack of a better expression, spiritual), are really what make him a killer. There's also the astonishing fact that he lost most of his mental capacity, including everything he knew about the guitar, following a near-fatal brain aneurysm, then systematically re-built himself intellectually and artistically, but that's a story for another day.
There's also a "wrong" way -- picking only a fraction of the notes, and hammering on, pulling off, or sliding into the rest, while paying no attention to your up and down strokes. That's what I do, an unabashed, lazy technique-cheater. It's the only way I can make the notes on up tempo tunes, and it sounds like it. It's also what John Scofield does, but he's a genius. For him, it's a style, a choice. When he plays, no matter how fast the tempo, and no matter how many notes he's playing, he always sounds like he's going slow, just lazing his way around the fretboard. I don't know any stories about his brain exploding, though I did once see him lose his chewing gum in the middle of a solo.
All of the foregoing is just an excuse for posting a video I scared up on YouTube -- a jam featuring Pat Martino and John Scofield, each tearing it up the way only he can. I'm not sure how it sounds to ears a bit less attuned to jazz guitar, but to me, it's as if they were playing different instruments, on different planets, yet, amazingly, perfectly complementing each other. Joey D. ain't half bad either ;-).
Enjoy ...
Now, there's a "right" way, to play fast -- picking all the notes according to a system, keeping things even and tight. Using hammer-ons, and other guitarry quirks only for effect and expression. The ultimate example of this kind of tightness is probably Pat Martino. Outside of the world of jazz guitarists, he's relatively unknown. Among guitarists, though, he's a god, the true musician's musician, the platonic form of the way you're supposed to do it. But the chops aren't the most interesting thing about him -- his phrasing, his harmonic pallet, and an amazing dynamic range (both literal, and, for lack of a better expression, spiritual), are really what make him a killer. There's also the astonishing fact that he lost most of his mental capacity, including everything he knew about the guitar, following a near-fatal brain aneurysm, then systematically re-built himself intellectually and artistically, but that's a story for another day.
There's also a "wrong" way -- picking only a fraction of the notes, and hammering on, pulling off, or sliding into the rest, while paying no attention to your up and down strokes. That's what I do, an unabashed, lazy technique-cheater. It's the only way I can make the notes on up tempo tunes, and it sounds like it. It's also what John Scofield does, but he's a genius. For him, it's a style, a choice. When he plays, no matter how fast the tempo, and no matter how many notes he's playing, he always sounds like he's going slow, just lazing his way around the fretboard. I don't know any stories about his brain exploding, though I did once see him lose his chewing gum in the middle of a solo.
All of the foregoing is just an excuse for posting a video I scared up on YouTube -- a jam featuring Pat Martino and John Scofield, each tearing it up the way only he can. I'm not sure how it sounds to ears a bit less attuned to jazz guitar, but to me, it's as if they were playing different instruments, on different planets, yet, amazingly, perfectly complementing each other. Joey D. ain't half bad either ;-).
Enjoy ...
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Chapter 4 – Back to the office
This is the fourth chapter of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here.
Apparently, the Bronx homicide division’s headquarters were nowhere near lower Manhattan, and Rendell wasn’t offering to go out of his way. A short while later, he pulled up to the curb next to a subway station.
“Out you go. I’m done with you for now, but don’t leave town,” he said.
Shocked at the circumstances I found myself in, and frustrated with being dragged around town and bullied all day, my natural peace-making and problem-solving instincts rose to the surface:
“Wow, so cops really say ‘don’t leave town?’, or have you just been watching a lot of Kojak on cable?”
“A wise guy eh?”
I guess that answered that question.
“No just trying to win you over with my charming sense of humor, but I can see it’s not working. If you need me, you know where to find me.”
With that, I descended. A short while later, I found myself on the train, with plenty to think about on the long ride downtown.
I guy who worked for me, whom I was friendly with, but not too close, was dead. Really dead. Usually, when a City worker dies, no one notices for a while. Lack of movement and strong odors don’t mean much in a typical civil service office, but this time there no was getting around it. Pats was dead -- he didn’t just smell funny.
A no account scam artist sleaze bag and known associate of the deceased finds the body, and decides to tell me about it instead of the cops. I should be honored by his faith in me, I suppose, but confidant to the bums wasn’t exactly my first career choice.
The widow of the dearly departed can’t keep her stories straight. Either she worshipped the ground he walked on, or she couldn’t wait to bury him. Either she didn’t know a thing about her husband’s extra-curricular activities, or she knew exactly what he was up to, and wanted to make sure she got her cut.
As for the dearly departed, he was turning into a complicated guy. It seems he was stashing girlfriends in an apartment owned by a guy with an animal for a middle name. Never a good sign.
And here I was, a bureaucrat, not bloated yet, but getting there. Rip Van Civil Servant waking up in the middle of a mystery. Except, as we say in the business, it’s not my department. Mysteries are for cops. Not for guys who drift through a career or two, wind up in a job they couldn’t imagine themselves doing in a thousand years, and stay there until it’s too late to leave. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great job for a guy who thrives on paperwork and tedium, but I flunked torpor in college. I may not be an artist, or a poet, or a rock star, but I’m not this guy behind this desk. And I’m definitely not a homicide detective. With a long ride ahead of me and psychopathic fellow passengers to stare down, I tried to put thoughts like that out of my mind. Soon enough, I found myself behind the desk behind which I’m not the guy.
For a change, the phone rang.
Before I could utter an officially approved greeting, I found myself being warmly addressed for the second time that day
“Where the fuck you been? I’ve been trying to get you all day.”
I quickly filled Big Al in on the details, and for the first time in 10 years, I heard his voice drop below a bellow.
“Holy shit. Pats is dead? Shot? Why would anybody kill him?
Not having gained any insight into that question myself, there wasn’t much to say, so I said it.
“I don’t know. His wife didn’t seem upset -- more like she was pissed off. She said something about a death gamble or something, but I couldn’t really follow it.”
“You still didn’t read that pension booklet? How many times I gotta tell you. Read the fuckin’ book and pick a fuckin’ plan. Don’t you know that’s your money?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t ‘huh’ me. You know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“I know, I know, but I still don’t know what I’m gonna do. I might quit in six months and putting all that money into the pension would be like throwing it away.”
“Who do you think you’re kidding. You’re a lifer like me. You gotta take care of these things.”
“Yeah, yeah, but what does that have to with Pats?”
“Listen you dope, she said death gambit. She was talking about the death benefit in Pats’ pension.”
“Yeah that must have been it. But I can never figure that stuff out.”
“Big shot executive. Got numbers comin’ out his ass, but can’t even read his own pension plan. Jesus H. Christ. Do I gotta teach you everything?”
With that big Al launched into a detailed explanation of civil service pension options. Apparently, when you sign up, you have a choice. Either you take your full pension when you retire, and if you die before your wife dies, tough luck for wifey – she gets nothing. But, if you agree to take a reduced pension, if your wife outlives you, she can keep collecting. It’s called a death gambit because you have to bet on who dies first. It also, as I understand it, involves filling out forms.
“Sounds sort of like a blueprint for spouse-a-cide, if you ask me,” I said after he finished.
“Yeah, well I love me wife and I don’t worry about it.”
“Maybe Pats’ wasn’t so sure about his wife.”
“Yeah, but if he didn’t set it up for her to get the pension, she wants him alive, or she’ll never get a dime.”
“I guess that knocks her out of suspicion, but I’m telling you, there was something really funny about the way she reacted – almost like she knew he was dead already.”
“Look at you. Sam Fuckin’ Spade. Leave it the cops, and get your ass down to the pension office.
“Yeah sure. As soon as I can. Hey, what were you calling me about anyway?”
“Asphalt you dirtbag, waddya think? What am I gonna do tomorrow? Who’s gonna place the orders?”
“Oh shit. That was the last thing on my mind. I’ll take care of it.”
After I hung up with big Al, I made the requisite phone calls and made sure that streets would flow black for another day.
I decided it was time to turn to my in-box and see what the bureaucrats on high had for me today before settling into some real work avoidance.
“Memorandum:
To: All Department Employees
From: Commissioner Davis
Subject: Objections to Materials
It has come to my attention that some employees have been displaying appropriate materials of an unobjectionable nature at their work stations such as pictures. As you know, exposure to appropriate materials constitutes a serious violation of the employee code of conduct and may result in serious consequences.”
I tacked the memo up on my bulletin board, next a collection of similar missives, and made a note to surf the web for some appropriate porn to hang on my wall. I hate to be out of compliance with policy. Then I continued to work my way through the pile. After a while, I reached the bottom and decided to move onto my next activity – reporting back to my superiors about the day’s developments. By that time, it was a few minutes after five, and I noticed that everyone else had cleared out of the office. Oh well, too late for that. Time to clock out.
Actually, sign out. A person of my exalted status didn’t actually have to punch a time clock, but I did have to write in the time I came and left, and account for any time taken off, or extra time worked by filling in a code on the card. There’s a code for everything – sick-leave with a doctor’s excuse, sick leave without a doctor’s note, sick leave for when you’re just malingering, scheduled vacation, taking a day off when your not scheduled to take off, coming to work when you’re scheduled to take a day off. The City’s got it all covered. It all goes into a computer. Nothing ever comes out of the computer, but that’s okay. We know it’s in there.
I couldn’t find “overtime spent watching a corpse and interrogating a widow,” though. I bet the cops have that one in their time code book. I wrote in the closest thing I could find and headed for the door.
Before I could get there, the phone rang. Surprised by such a late call, I was barely able to squeeze out an official greeting.
“Jon White speaking, how may I help you?”
“May I speak to Jon White please?”
“This is he.”
“Mr. White?”
“Yes?”
“Oh thank goodness I caught you. I’ve been leaving messages for you all day.”
“Funny, I checked my voice mail, and there weren’t any messages. Who is calling?”
“Oh, well I never use voice mail. I prefer to write messages down.”
“I didn’t see any notes in my inbox.
“Oh no, I have them right here.”
“That would explain why I didn’t get back to you.”
“I beg you pardon?”
“Well, you didn’t leave the messages anywhere where I could see them, so I couldn’t respond to them.”
“Oh that’s all right, I have you on the phone now.”
“Let’s try this again. Who am I speaking to?”
“There’s no reason for you to use that tone with me!”
“Tone? I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of any tone. Can you tell me who you are and what this call is about?”
“This is Miss Davis from payroll.”
Ah, now were getting somewhere. A fellow civil servant. Time to turn on the esprit de corps.
“Yes, Miss Davis? How can I help you?”
“Please send the cards I mentioned in my messages.”
“But I didn’t get the me … Oh never mind. Miss Davis, I seem to have misplaced your messages. Could you please tell me what cards you need me to send you.
“We’re missing the timecards for two of your employees. Could you send them in please.”
“Which ones are you missing?”
“The ones which weren’t handed in last week.
“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. Which employees are you missing cards for?”
“Honestly Mr. White, the least you could do is look at your messages. Time cards for Anthony Paternostro and Joseph Pazzolini were not turned in last week.”
“Uh, Anthony Paternostro is dead.”
“That’s all right, just submit his card. Make sure all the right codes are written in – and make sure he signs it.”
“I don’t think that would be possible in his current condition.”
“Why? Is he absent? There’s a code for that.”
“He is dead.”
“Oh. Well just put the code for that and write and have him sign it. Then send it in as soon as you can or he won’t be paid.”
“I think that’s the least of his problems. How about if I sign it for him? Also can you tell me what code to use.”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me to do your job for you. I’m sure you have a code book in your office.”
With that, she hung up. I decided to put off the late, questionably not-too-lamented Anthony Paternostro’s final payroll reckoning for another day, and headed out the door.
Next chapter
Apparently, the Bronx homicide division’s headquarters were nowhere near lower Manhattan, and Rendell wasn’t offering to go out of his way. A short while later, he pulled up to the curb next to a subway station.
“Out you go. I’m done with you for now, but don’t leave town,” he said.
Shocked at the circumstances I found myself in, and frustrated with being dragged around town and bullied all day, my natural peace-making and problem-solving instincts rose to the surface:
“Wow, so cops really say ‘don’t leave town?’, or have you just been watching a lot of Kojak on cable?”
“A wise guy eh?”
I guess that answered that question.
“No just trying to win you over with my charming sense of humor, but I can see it’s not working. If you need me, you know where to find me.”
With that, I descended. A short while later, I found myself on the train, with plenty to think about on the long ride downtown.
I guy who worked for me, whom I was friendly with, but not too close, was dead. Really dead. Usually, when a City worker dies, no one notices for a while. Lack of movement and strong odors don’t mean much in a typical civil service office, but this time there no was getting around it. Pats was dead -- he didn’t just smell funny.
A no account scam artist sleaze bag and known associate of the deceased finds the body, and decides to tell me about it instead of the cops. I should be honored by his faith in me, I suppose, but confidant to the bums wasn’t exactly my first career choice.
The widow of the dearly departed can’t keep her stories straight. Either she worshipped the ground he walked on, or she couldn’t wait to bury him. Either she didn’t know a thing about her husband’s extra-curricular activities, or she knew exactly what he was up to, and wanted to make sure she got her cut.
As for the dearly departed, he was turning into a complicated guy. It seems he was stashing girlfriends in an apartment owned by a guy with an animal for a middle name. Never a good sign.
And here I was, a bureaucrat, not bloated yet, but getting there. Rip Van Civil Servant waking up in the middle of a mystery. Except, as we say in the business, it’s not my department. Mysteries are for cops. Not for guys who drift through a career or two, wind up in a job they couldn’t imagine themselves doing in a thousand years, and stay there until it’s too late to leave. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great job for a guy who thrives on paperwork and tedium, but I flunked torpor in college. I may not be an artist, or a poet, or a rock star, but I’m not this guy behind this desk. And I’m definitely not a homicide detective. With a long ride ahead of me and psychopathic fellow passengers to stare down, I tried to put thoughts like that out of my mind. Soon enough, I found myself behind the desk behind which I’m not the guy.
For a change, the phone rang.
Before I could utter an officially approved greeting, I found myself being warmly addressed for the second time that day
“Where the fuck you been? I’ve been trying to get you all day.”
I quickly filled Big Al in on the details, and for the first time in 10 years, I heard his voice drop below a bellow.
“Holy shit. Pats is dead? Shot? Why would anybody kill him?
Not having gained any insight into that question myself, there wasn’t much to say, so I said it.
“I don’t know. His wife didn’t seem upset -- more like she was pissed off. She said something about a death gamble or something, but I couldn’t really follow it.”
“You still didn’t read that pension booklet? How many times I gotta tell you. Read the fuckin’ book and pick a fuckin’ plan. Don’t you know that’s your money?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t ‘huh’ me. You know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“I know, I know, but I still don’t know what I’m gonna do. I might quit in six months and putting all that money into the pension would be like throwing it away.”
“Who do you think you’re kidding. You’re a lifer like me. You gotta take care of these things.”
“Yeah, yeah, but what does that have to with Pats?”
“Listen you dope, she said death gambit. She was talking about the death benefit in Pats’ pension.”
“Yeah that must have been it. But I can never figure that stuff out.”
“Big shot executive. Got numbers comin’ out his ass, but can’t even read his own pension plan. Jesus H. Christ. Do I gotta teach you everything?”
With that big Al launched into a detailed explanation of civil service pension options. Apparently, when you sign up, you have a choice. Either you take your full pension when you retire, and if you die before your wife dies, tough luck for wifey – she gets nothing. But, if you agree to take a reduced pension, if your wife outlives you, she can keep collecting. It’s called a death gambit because you have to bet on who dies first. It also, as I understand it, involves filling out forms.
“Sounds sort of like a blueprint for spouse-a-cide, if you ask me,” I said after he finished.
“Yeah, well I love me wife and I don’t worry about it.”
“Maybe Pats’ wasn’t so sure about his wife.”
“Yeah, but if he didn’t set it up for her to get the pension, she wants him alive, or she’ll never get a dime.”
“I guess that knocks her out of suspicion, but I’m telling you, there was something really funny about the way she reacted – almost like she knew he was dead already.”
“Look at you. Sam Fuckin’ Spade. Leave it the cops, and get your ass down to the pension office.
“Yeah sure. As soon as I can. Hey, what were you calling me about anyway?”
“Asphalt you dirtbag, waddya think? What am I gonna do tomorrow? Who’s gonna place the orders?”
“Oh shit. That was the last thing on my mind. I’ll take care of it.”
After I hung up with big Al, I made the requisite phone calls and made sure that streets would flow black for another day.
I decided it was time to turn to my in-box and see what the bureaucrats on high had for me today before settling into some real work avoidance.
“Memorandum:
To: All Department Employees
From: Commissioner Davis
Subject: Objections to Materials
It has come to my attention that some employees have been displaying appropriate materials of an unobjectionable nature at their work stations such as pictures. As you know, exposure to appropriate materials constitutes a serious violation of the employee code of conduct and may result in serious consequences.”
I tacked the memo up on my bulletin board, next a collection of similar missives, and made a note to surf the web for some appropriate porn to hang on my wall. I hate to be out of compliance with policy. Then I continued to work my way through the pile. After a while, I reached the bottom and decided to move onto my next activity – reporting back to my superiors about the day’s developments. By that time, it was a few minutes after five, and I noticed that everyone else had cleared out of the office. Oh well, too late for that. Time to clock out.
Actually, sign out. A person of my exalted status didn’t actually have to punch a time clock, but I did have to write in the time I came and left, and account for any time taken off, or extra time worked by filling in a code on the card. There’s a code for everything – sick-leave with a doctor’s excuse, sick leave without a doctor’s note, sick leave for when you’re just malingering, scheduled vacation, taking a day off when your not scheduled to take off, coming to work when you’re scheduled to take a day off. The City’s got it all covered. It all goes into a computer. Nothing ever comes out of the computer, but that’s okay. We know it’s in there.
I couldn’t find “overtime spent watching a corpse and interrogating a widow,” though. I bet the cops have that one in their time code book. I wrote in the closest thing I could find and headed for the door.
Before I could get there, the phone rang. Surprised by such a late call, I was barely able to squeeze out an official greeting.
“Jon White speaking, how may I help you?”
“May I speak to Jon White please?”
“This is he.”
“Mr. White?”
“Yes?”
“Oh thank goodness I caught you. I’ve been leaving messages for you all day.”
“Funny, I checked my voice mail, and there weren’t any messages. Who is calling?”
“Oh, well I never use voice mail. I prefer to write messages down.”
“I didn’t see any notes in my inbox.
“Oh no, I have them right here.”
“That would explain why I didn’t get back to you.”
“I beg you pardon?”
“Well, you didn’t leave the messages anywhere where I could see them, so I couldn’t respond to them.”
“Oh that’s all right, I have you on the phone now.”
“Let’s try this again. Who am I speaking to?”
“There’s no reason for you to use that tone with me!”
“Tone? I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of any tone. Can you tell me who you are and what this call is about?”
“This is Miss Davis from payroll.”
Ah, now were getting somewhere. A fellow civil servant. Time to turn on the esprit de corps.
“Yes, Miss Davis? How can I help you?”
“Please send the cards I mentioned in my messages.”
“But I didn’t get the me … Oh never mind. Miss Davis, I seem to have misplaced your messages. Could you please tell me what cards you need me to send you.
“We’re missing the timecards for two of your employees. Could you send them in please.”
“Which ones are you missing?”
“The ones which weren’t handed in last week.
“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. Which employees are you missing cards for?”
“Honestly Mr. White, the least you could do is look at your messages. Time cards for Anthony Paternostro and Joseph Pazzolini were not turned in last week.”
“Uh, Anthony Paternostro is dead.”
“That’s all right, just submit his card. Make sure all the right codes are written in – and make sure he signs it.”
“I don’t think that would be possible in his current condition.”
“Why? Is he absent? There’s a code for that.”
“He is dead.”
“Oh. Well just put the code for that and write and have him sign it. Then send it in as soon as you can or he won’t be paid.”
“I think that’s the least of his problems. How about if I sign it for him? Also can you tell me what code to use.”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me to do your job for you. I’m sure you have a code book in your office.”
With that, she hung up. I decided to put off the late, questionably not-too-lamented Anthony Paternostro’s final payroll reckoning for another day, and headed out the door.
Next chapter
Friday, January 26, 2007
Live or ...
Discussion of music tends to focus on recordings. This makes sense, of course, since the majority of music we experience is through recordings. For pop music fans, this is often enough, maybe even better than focusing on live performance since live pop music can be a very frustrating experience. Nevertheless, the musical moments that have meant the most to me have mostly been live.
A case in point: in a previous blog entry, I mentioned that I think Pheobe Snow is one of the all time great R&B vocalists. I would guess that to the extent that anyone is even aware of Snow it's through her one hit from the mid '70s, a pleasant song called "Poetry Man" that most people probably file mentally somewhere in the neighborhood of Carole King or Carly Simon. Not a bad neighborhood, but you wouldn't take out a mortgage to move there.
So why do I think she's one of the greatest singers since Aretha Franklin? Because I heard her live once. In the early '90's, Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame) put together a sort of musical repertory company called the New York Rock and Soul Review that performed regularly around town. The NYRSR was basically a bunch of studio cats and semi-luminaries jamming together on R&B songs. At one of the shows that I saw, the theme was soul music from New York. During a medley of Berns and Ragovy songs, the band started playing the intro to the Janis Joplin hit "Piece of My Heart." Fagen announced a special guest vocalist, Phoebe Snow.
Phoebe approached the stage through the audience, parting the crowd like Moses and the Red Sea. She picked up the mic, and proceeded to deliver the greatest vocal performance I have ever heard in any genre in my entire life. Terms like virtuoso, colloratura, soul diva, voice of god don't even begin to do justice to what this was like. The expressiveness, emotional intensity, range, dynamics, power and musicality were literally awe inspiring. As the song built to the chorus, she leapt up and down octaves and made you feel like she really was having a piece of her heart ripped from her. As the song ended, the audience exploded. We screamed for more, but I think we were all secretly glad there was no encore. There was no way this could be topped, and if it were, I don't think we would have survived the experience. If Janis had ever heard Phoebe sing this song, she never would have dared sing it herself.
The NYRSR put out a live album which has two Phoebe cuts: a duet of "Knock on Wood" with Michael McDonald, and a solo version of "At Last". "Knock on Wood" is pretty good, but the song itself doesn't invite the kind of majestic performance that "Piece of My Heart" does. "At Last" comes closer, giving a sense of what Phoebe can offer. I've scoured the web for bootlegs or you-tubes of her doing "Piece of My Heart" to no avail. The only thing live performance I could scour up was this:
Perhaps it's best that this is all I could find. I'm not as young and vigorous as I used to be, and I'm not sure I can spare any pieces of my heart.
A case in point: in a previous blog entry, I mentioned that I think Pheobe Snow is one of the all time great R&B vocalists. I would guess that to the extent that anyone is even aware of Snow it's through her one hit from the mid '70s, a pleasant song called "Poetry Man" that most people probably file mentally somewhere in the neighborhood of Carole King or Carly Simon. Not a bad neighborhood, but you wouldn't take out a mortgage to move there.
So why do I think she's one of the greatest singers since Aretha Franklin? Because I heard her live once. In the early '90's, Donald Fagen (of Steely Dan fame) put together a sort of musical repertory company called the New York Rock and Soul Review that performed regularly around town. The NYRSR was basically a bunch of studio cats and semi-luminaries jamming together on R&B songs. At one of the shows that I saw, the theme was soul music from New York. During a medley of Berns and Ragovy songs, the band started playing the intro to the Janis Joplin hit "Piece of My Heart." Fagen announced a special guest vocalist, Phoebe Snow.
Phoebe approached the stage through the audience, parting the crowd like Moses and the Red Sea. She picked up the mic, and proceeded to deliver the greatest vocal performance I have ever heard in any genre in my entire life. Terms like virtuoso, colloratura, soul diva, voice of god don't even begin to do justice to what this was like. The expressiveness, emotional intensity, range, dynamics, power and musicality were literally awe inspiring. As the song built to the chorus, she leapt up and down octaves and made you feel like she really was having a piece of her heart ripped from her. As the song ended, the audience exploded. We screamed for more, but I think we were all secretly glad there was no encore. There was no way this could be topped, and if it were, I don't think we would have survived the experience. If Janis had ever heard Phoebe sing this song, she never would have dared sing it herself.
The NYRSR put out a live album which has two Phoebe cuts: a duet of "Knock on Wood" with Michael McDonald, and a solo version of "At Last". "Knock on Wood" is pretty good, but the song itself doesn't invite the kind of majestic performance that "Piece of My Heart" does. "At Last" comes closer, giving a sense of what Phoebe can offer. I've scoured the web for bootlegs or you-tubes of her doing "Piece of My Heart" to no avail. The only thing live performance I could scour up was this:
Perhaps it's best that this is all I could find. I'm not as young and vigorous as I used to be, and I'm not sure I can spare any pieces of my heart.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Every story tells a picture
There are certain songwriters who are artists pretty much beyond categorization or imitation. They merge music and lyric to create something so beautiful, intriguing, compelling (or some other inadequate adjective), that all you can do is listen. The most obvious examples for me are the Beatles, Stevie Wonder (though not in a long time), some of the great figures in the American musical theater tradition like Cole Porter, Rogers & Hartenstein, or A.C. Jobim & J. Gilberto.
What all of these have in common for me is that I have almost no desire to analyze their greatest work -- I just want to hear it, or play it, without feeling any strong pull to imitate it or figure out what makes it tick (except to the extent that I need to in order to blow over it if it's a "jazz" tune). I'm thinking of a song like "Fixin' a Hole" or "Golden Lady" or "Night and Day" or "Wave". Generally, I'm a pretty curious "say-how-does-this-thing-work" kind of guy, but with music like this, I'm pretty much content to let it send chills up my spine.
There's another category of songs/writers that achieve their own sort of excellence that I look at a bit differently. These tell a little story or vignette with, I don't know, closure? Character arc? A kind of Occam's razor of song elegance? Nothing missing, nothing excessive, singable, fun to play, with a hook to boot. These are the ones that intrigue me the most as a player and wannabe songwriter.
A case in point: "Dixie Chicken" by Lowell George/Little Feat. The song tells the classic story -- boy meets girl, girl gives boy cute pet name, boy loses girl, boy meets a crowd of guys in a bar who had their hearts broken by the same girl. It's got everything I love about a "story" song. Simple song form, with a great chorus and guitar hook. Mixture of humor, pathos, and self mocking in the words. A plot. Perfectly drawn scenes with clear who/what/when/where (though why is left up to interpretation). It's an utterly perfect song. At the same time, it's also so clearly structured and formulaic, that it's not too hard to do a half OK imitation. Lowell wrote a bunch of others that achieve similar perfection -- "Willin'" "Fat Man in a Bathtub" "I've Been the One" "Two Trains Runnin'" ...
Another one is Smokey Robinson -- "Tracks of My Tears" "Second that Emotion" "Ain't that Peculiar" "My Girl". He's maybe a bit closer to the Beatles in terms of ineffibility, but at the same time, he's got these kind of recurring characters and themes -- the weeping clown or lovesick soul, the cliche/stock phrase turned into a hook -- that give your friendly neighborhood plagiarist, er, aspiring songwriter a lot to work with.
A few of other writers inhabit this story telling world for me -- Merle Haggard, John Hiatt, Becker and Fagen, Jack Bruce, Mark Knopfler. But all in all, it's a pretty exclusive club, as perfection ought to be.
What all of these have in common for me is that I have almost no desire to analyze their greatest work -- I just want to hear it, or play it, without feeling any strong pull to imitate it or figure out what makes it tick (except to the extent that I need to in order to blow over it if it's a "jazz" tune). I'm thinking of a song like "Fixin' a Hole" or "Golden Lady" or "Night and Day" or "Wave". Generally, I'm a pretty curious "say-how-does-this-thing-work" kind of guy, but with music like this, I'm pretty much content to let it send chills up my spine.
There's another category of songs/writers that achieve their own sort of excellence that I look at a bit differently. These tell a little story or vignette with, I don't know, closure? Character arc? A kind of Occam's razor of song elegance? Nothing missing, nothing excessive, singable, fun to play, with a hook to boot. These are the ones that intrigue me the most as a player and wannabe songwriter.
A case in point: "Dixie Chicken" by Lowell George/Little Feat. The song tells the classic story -- boy meets girl, girl gives boy cute pet name, boy loses girl, boy meets a crowd of guys in a bar who had their hearts broken by the same girl. It's got everything I love about a "story" song. Simple song form, with a great chorus and guitar hook. Mixture of humor, pathos, and self mocking in the words. A plot. Perfectly drawn scenes with clear who/what/when/where (though why is left up to interpretation). It's an utterly perfect song. At the same time, it's also so clearly structured and formulaic, that it's not too hard to do a half OK imitation. Lowell wrote a bunch of others that achieve similar perfection -- "Willin'" "Fat Man in a Bathtub" "I've Been the One" "Two Trains Runnin'" ...
Another one is Smokey Robinson -- "Tracks of My Tears" "Second that Emotion" "Ain't that Peculiar" "My Girl". He's maybe a bit closer to the Beatles in terms of ineffibility, but at the same time, he's got these kind of recurring characters and themes -- the weeping clown or lovesick soul, the cliche/stock phrase turned into a hook -- that give your friendly neighborhood plagiarist, er, aspiring songwriter a lot to work with.
A few of other writers inhabit this story telling world for me -- Merle Haggard, John Hiatt, Becker and Fagen, Jack Bruce, Mark Knopfler. But all in all, it's a pretty exclusive club, as perfection ought to be.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)