Jabbernowl

More Debt Ceiling Angst

2011-08-01T12:39:00.001-04:00

We all have a friend, that person who was always the most responsible of our little social groups. He’s the guy that always kept the rest of us from getting too carried away when the party got out of bounds. The guy who could deftly extricate the most belligerent of our crazier friends from getting pummelled at the bar at 2:00 AM. The one who kept you from chasing after the psychopath who we were sure at the time was your soul mate. Then one night, completely out of the blue, this model citizen goes berserk. It’s usually triggered by one small thing, which the rest of the group doesn’t even notice. He’s screaming at the cops, he’s trash-talking the biggest guy at the bar, he’s spilling food and drink, and just generally behaving frighteningly out of character and openly taunting disaster.

By 3:00 AM you and your mates finally get him talked down and tucked in. You’re all completely stressed by the 180 degree blitzkrieg visit from Mr. Hyde. Although there is no permanent damage done, your little circle can never look at this guy the same way. That look behind the curtain was just too much. What has been seen cannot be unseen.

This what our legislators have done with the debt ceiling fiasco. The uncharacteristic freak-out and their insane determination to push things to the brink have destroyed whatever scintilla of respectability these people has left. US debt is already downgraded in the mind of the masses. Any ratings agency following suit later this week or month is an anti-climax.

Debt Ceiling Slapstick

2011-07-26T13:05:00.001-04:00

There are a lot of life lessons that can be learned by re-viewing episodes of the Three Stooges. In every episode there was a critical point where Moe, at the end of his already short rope by the inept antics of his partners, would grab Curley and Larry by the backs of their necks and bang their heads together. This would produce the requisite hollow knock sound effect from the obviously empty skulls and simultaneously bring their idiotic shenanigans to an abrupt halt. It is a very safe bet that today most Americans would like to play Moe to Obama’s and Boehner’s Larry and Curley.

Much has been written lately on the subject of brinksmanship. Not enough has been written about the practice of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The level of our political discourse has fallen from the retrospectively high brow “nyeh-nyeh-ne-nyeh-nyeh” to the basest level “Am not! Are too!’ Even our duly elected muttonheads know that they cannot push the country into default. Too bad they don’t yet realize the irreparable damage they have already done. In a few more days “the full faith and credit of the United States” will be as believable as “until death do us part.”

Same-sex Marriage

2011-06-14T14:06:00.002-04:00

Should someone be allowed to marry someone else of the same sex? I don’t know. The loudest arguments I ever hear are against gay marriage. People say that it isn’t natural, I disagree. There are lots of gay people around, I know some of them – I’ve seen them in real life. They all arrived on the planet the same way I did, born of a human mother and father. They exist in nature, so that makes them and everything about them, including their sexual preferences, natural.

Other people say that gay marriage violates the sanctity of marriage. In a country with a 50% divorce rate, there is no sanctity left to violate. There is also the argument that if we allow same-sex marriage, soon people will want to marry dogs or goats. This won't happen because dogs and goats cannot be party to any legal agreement - they don’t have thumbs so they can’t hold a pen to sign the marriage license. A ridiculous premise deserves a ridiculous response.

What I think really spooks the religious right about same-sex marriage is the fear that the divorce rate among gay couples will be way lower. When people have to fight something, they usually hold it in much higher esteem when they finally get it. It is rare to hear of a couple who go through all manner of fertility processes and procedures neglecting or abusing the kid when it finally arrives. It’s the pathetic slatterns who reproduce at the drop of a hat that usually commit the horrible abuse of their defenseless progeny. Same-sex married couples will cherish their hard-won unions, actually putting a little sanctity back into the institution.

I guess about 10 years after same-sex marriage becomes legal the divorce rate will start to rise. Once the battle is won the reality will set in. Same-sex couples will realize that the idea of a life-long partnership is great when life expectancy is 60 years. With people living healthily and productively well into their 90’s – the idea loses its appeal no matter what the combination.

Aqualung, My Friend

2011-01-25T16:04:00.004-05:00

In the early part of my career I worked on a 24-hour trading desk. The company had one office in downtown New York and another in London. A "shout box" line at each locoation kept open communications between the desks. The New York office was responsible for trading gold and silver, the London boys handled the foreign exchange business.

The place operated in three 8-hour shifts from Sundays at 4:00 PM until Fridays at 4:00 PM. I was in charge of the 4:00 to midnight shift in New York. If I must say so myself this was the most treacherous part of the global trading day. New York had the active futures exchange and London had the interbank bullion market. We were trading a very thin Asian market by the seats of our collective pants from halfway around the planet using telephones and telexes!

There were four of us on the evening shift, we would be relived by two guys on the midnight shift. Back in those days downtown NYC was a ghost town after the bars cleared out at around 7:00 PM. The only places that I remember being open late were the Pussycat Lounge by the exit of the Battery Tunnel and the John Street Restaurant. Our employer provided meals for us because of the crazy hours that we worked - via a corporate account at the aforementioned John Street Restaurant.

When our relief guys came in at midnight there was a short changing of the guard ritual. We would brief them on all the important market developments and customer issues. They would essentially ignore everything we said because while we we carrying on about markets and such, the first thing the two of them did was call up and order their breakfast from the JSR.

It should be noted that the two of them were as different as night and day. One was a garrulous Brooklyn Italian, the other a taciturn WASP from somewhere in Pennsylvania. The Waspy guy ordered the same cheese omelette with rye toast and a large orange juice every day. The Brooklynite had a more adventurous palate, venturing into the daily specials on a regular basis.

On this particular midnight, there was a lot going on and I was still at the desk when the food delivery came at about 12:45 AM. The delivery guy was a sight to behold. He looked to be about 65 years old. He was sporting about five days growth of beard. The hair sticking out from under his filthy bald cap was dripping grease. The stink coming off of him was absolutely horrendous. He was wearing about 4 shirts and 3 pairs of pants, and I am pretty sure that his shoes didn't match.

After the stench his most noticeable features were his filthy, disgusting hands. They were as blackened as chimney sweep's lungs. The nails were excessively long - like Jerseylicious long - with what I estimate to be pounds of black grime packed under them. Be that as it may, whatever his faults regarding his personal hygiene, remember this was pre-Giuliani NYC. The place was lousy with homeless people back then, but at least this guy had a job. The most taken aback and disgusted by this delivery guy was my waspy co-worker. Wherever he was from they didn't have this type of character.

So my two co-workers have unpacked their breakfasts to make sure the order is correct, and as he is signing the bill and adding a nice tip my talkative Italiano co-worker engages the smelly delivery man in conversation. "Man I gotta give you a good tip because I know that you're not making too many deliveries this time of night down here."

The other guy is greedily tucking in to his omelette, toast, and OJ.

"So what do you do over there when you're waiting for a delivery order to come in? What do you just have to stand around?"

"I squeeze the orange juice."

Cue the absolute most mind blowing spit take that I have ever seen.

'Splain me, please?

2010-09-14T11:40:00.003-04:00

We have one of those screen news displays in the elevator of the 12-storey building in which I work. Today there was an entreaty for the good citizens of New York to turn off the lights in their offices as night because birds fly into the building. According to the elevator, it is better for the birds if the buildings are dark at night. What the hell is wrong with American migratory birds that they fly into well-lit behemoth structures?

Another problem with our avian-american friends is mirrored buildings. The birds crash into them as well. Don't they see that bird that looks just like them flying straight at them in the frigging mirrored building? Isn't that inborn tendency to crash into other birds in mid-flight some sort of natural selection thingy?

This one thing has got to stop

2010-08-10T12:58:00.007-04:00

I try to live my life by one simple rule - whatever floats your boat. When one lives and works in Manhattan, as I do, there is no shortage of strange and wonderful things to keep one entertained during the comings and goings of one's urbanite life. Being the laissez-faire type, I find escalating levels of flambouyancy entertaining. If some guy finds that having purple hair and platform shoes makes him feel good, then more power to him. Same thing goes for the goth chick with the chopped up hair and spider tatoos on her face and the ancient crone with the waist-length dreadlocks who I sometimes see doddering around the neighborhood in her high red Chuck Taylors.

I prefer to hoof it, take the subway, or take the bus to get around town. There are tons of eco-conscious types who use various bicycles and sometimes even high-tech tricycles. You will also see more than a few intrepid rollerskaters, skate boarders, and in-line skaters bravely sharing the road with the careening yellow cabs, ambling town-cars, and annoying pedal cabs. Remember my credo - whatever floats your boat.

I have to draw the line when I see a fully grown adult human being riding around the streets of the greatest city in the world on a frigging Razor Scooter. The only thing that is worse than that is seeing a fully grown adult human riding around the streets of the greatest city in the world on a frigging Razor Scooter wearing a crash helmet!

Let your freak flag fly. Don't dream it, be it. Fortune favors the bold. To thine own self be true. But damn, a grown-ass adult on a scooter is just begging for a beating. There is no possible justification for being a full-grown adult on a device designed for children who are still too uncoordinated to handle a bicycle with training wheels. And if you shouldn't be on the scooter in the first place, then you sure as hell shouldn't be wearing a frigging crash helmet.

The adult bicyclists and skaters can argue that they are getting exercise and keeping their carbon footprint small. The skate board dudes and dudettes have their own sub-culture with which they can identify. But any human over the age of 6 on a scooter is a dork of the highest order who deserves the abject scorn of the masses. These dufusses (dufi?) usually ride their dopey scooters on the sidewalk, which only heightens my desire to see them all summarily executed.

If you need to get from point A to point B in a hurry then plan ahead and leave more time to walk. Or if you are in an unforeseen time crunch you can try to jog your fat, scooter-having ass or walk faster. Hand the scooter over to the first needy looking kid you see and walk like the universe intended or get yourself some self-propelled transportation design for an adult. We all have to make some concession to being adults and at some time put away childish things. That is one of the premises on which civilization is built.

The only thing worse than a grown adult riding a scooter while wearing a crash helmet is a fully-grown adult riding a scooter and wearing a crash helmet and a backpack.

Netflix as a Tool for Self-analysis

2010-07-23T13:10:00.003-04:00

The DeWitt Theatre (strong accent on the first syllable – DEE wit - for reasons still unknown) was a converted opera house smack dab in the middle of town. In the early 1960’s - from noon until 4:00 PM each Saturday - this rococo old throwback degenerated into a maelstrom of pre-pubescent chaos. While the worst of leftover WWII movies or some convoluted monster saga flickered on the screen, the “audience” screamed continually, pausing only to erupt into spontaneous sectional wars, with armaments provided by the concession stand.

The projectile of preference was the semi-chewed Jujy Fruit, which if heaved with enough force at the head of someone with enough hair, could wreak proper tonsorial havoc for days. Because young vocal chords can only take so much abuse, the noisemaker of choice was the empty Good N Plenty box. If sufficient pulmonary power was applied on the open end, the closed end of the box would vibrate and issue a horrifying squeal that I can only imagine is slightly more out of tune than the accordions that provide the soundtrack in Hell.

I spent a lot of Saturday afternoons during my formative years as required excess baggage for my older brother at the DeWitt kiddie matinee. If he wanted to go to the movies, Mom usually said yes - but only if he took me along. My brother loved those monster movies, so he shouldered the burden of my company quite admirably. As long as I kept my mouth shut and did what I was told, there were no problems. He would even warn me when there was a really scary part coming up, so that I could hide my eyes. I hid my eyes a lot, because those movies scared the living shit out of me.

By the mid-1960’s, competition from television cut into Hollywood’s profits. The borderline talents that produced the sub-standard fodder for the Saturday afternoon quadruple features fell by the way side. Eventually the DeWitt was demolished to make way for a McDonald’s. Cable television came shortly after that, followed by the VCR. Finally the DVD player and the advent of Netflix brought the cinematic circle to full closure for me.

The scope of choice available on Netflix is a very dangerous thing to an unrepentant time waster such as I. While I was supposed to be working I recently found DVD copies of a few of the old black and white monster movies that I specifically remember terrifying me beyond belief. As I filled the queue I was giddy with the combination of nostalgia and fright. The three “classics” I found are The Manster and The Hideous Sun Demon from 1959 and House of the Damned from 1963.

These movies frightened me to the point of tears back when I was 6 years old. I slept with the lights on for weeks. I avoided dark spaces like the plague. I scheduled my days to insure I would not be alone for a second. I was traumatized. My fragile little psyche was permanently scarred. I loved it.

I won’t bore you with plot details. You can look them up on IMDB.com if you feel the need. Here are the highlights –

The Manster – an almost unwatchable pile of crap about an American journalist in post-war Japan who gets seduced into becoming a guinea pig for an evil Japanese scientist. The thing that sticks out the most after watching this again is the blatant anti-Japanese sub-text that went completely over my head when I was a kid.

The Hideous Sun Demon – another unwatchable dung heap attempting to pray on the public’s fear of radiation after the bomb. The lone clever bit is the twist on the werewolf story because the title character gets transformed by the sun instead of the moon. It is mostly a guy in a lizard mask and gloves running around Los Angeles chasing a torpedo-titted blonde bombshell. Then a cop shoots him.

House of the Damned – And we have a winner in this cinematic shit heap version of King-of-the-Hill! Mercifully it is only 65 minutes long. A group circus freaks try to avoid being gawked at by hiding in a big old house, because being gawked at hurts their feelings. About fifty minutes in they get discovered and have to move out, because they don't have money for rent. This horrifying group of monsters that haunted my dreams for weeks almost 50 years ago consists of a guy with no legs, a woman with no legs, that guy who would go on to play “Jaws” in a James Bond movie, and a fat lady. Not even an enormous scary fat lady – actually she’s probably a little smaller than the average white trash you can find these days waddling around any Walmart.

After I sat through these movies that had so thoroughly terrified me in my youth, I was struck by one common factor that I still cannot shake. Those days may have been simpler times, but I was a real pussy when I was a kid.

First Chapter of My Book

2010-07-14T18:08:00.003-04:00

You could say you were there at the beginning! Here goes -

By late 1984 Ronald Wilhelm Gester was the single most famous, feared, and respected men in the relatively small world of precious metals trading. This man who liked to be known as “Guess” had worked his way up from the summer intern to become the head trader for the New York office of James Metalco, then the biggest precious metal refining company in the world. As the head trader on Metalco’s New York metals desk, Gester ran the entire operation. Because he was the top dog, it was his prerogative to take personal control of any of the company’s trading “books” that he chose.

Gester chose to spend the majority of his time trading silver. Silver always held a soft place in his alleged heart, because that was where he had cut his trading teeth. He considered gold and the platinum group metals to be lesser markets for lesser men. As far as Gester was concerned, silver was the only big money table at the commodity casino. He was one of the few that had come out of the far side of the Hunt brothers silver fiasco a rich and powerful man.

From the mid-70’s Metalco had aggressively developed the most sophisticated infrastructure in the world for buying, selling, moving, and refining precious metals. The vast majority of the company’s standard operating procedures were developed by Gester. Largely due to his efforts, the Metalco corporate hallmark on any ingot or bar insured good delivery grade metal literally everywhere on the planet. That universal brand acceptance effectively gave Gester a stranglehold on global metals arbitrage - the simultaneous buying and selling of similar commodities in different markets. The Metalco board of directors also had an appetite for financial risk that was unequalled in the industry. Gester wasn’t just the biggest fish in the pond; he effectively controlled the size of the pond, too.

Utilizing the biggest customer order book in the world, exploiting a somewhat haphazard and lax regulatory structure, applying just the right amount of political market arm-twisting and more than a sizable amount of balls he had amassed record-breaking trading profits for his grateful employer quarter after quarter and year after year. A grateful James Metalco board was more than willing to spread the wealth in order to keep those huge profits flowing. The amounts rumored to be Gester’s quarterly bonuses ranged from astronomical to unfathomable. In those days that level of wealth and success were regularly indicative of a “Type A” personality. The people who worked for Gester agreed that he was more “Type CP” – as is colossal prick.

Every day Gester drove his black-on-black Maserati Biturbo from his home in suburban New Jersey into downtown Manhattan. To Gester, the drive was necessary time to psyche himself up for the day’s mental combat. This meant the Talking Heads or Blondie had to be blasting from the custom sound system for the entire ride. Gester had a mental scorekeeping system for his daily drive. He didn’t consider it a successful journey unless he got flipped the bird by at least three other drivers that he had cut off or somehow otherwise offended.

The New York silver market opened at 9:10 AM, so unless there was a major traffic snafu Gester usually pulled up in front of the James Metalco offices at 7:00. It was the petrifying responsibility of the junior associate on the trading desk to be waiting in front of the building from 6:30, no matter the weather. When Gester pulled up to the building he would hand off his keys to his employee who would then take “the Bambina” to the parking lot around the corner.

Every trader who came up through the James Metalco organization in New York went through this daily hazing ritual until that glorious day when the next hire came in below him. Since the inception of this baptism-by-fire rite, nobody had ever put so much as a smudge on the car. The stress of handling the boss’s expensive toy every day was what Gester called a character building exercise. His subordinates would have called it harassment, if they had known better at the time.

From about 7:10 to 8:00 Gester scoured the overnight printouts of the news wires. He was looking for political news or economic data that he could exploit on the market grapevine. 8:00 was his time for schmoozing with others in similar but lesser positions of authority at competing companies. He was a natural bullshitter and knew exactly how much misinformation and half-truths were necessary to get his competitors to show their hands. This networking was trying but necessary. If he knew what these other guys were thinking, Gester was sure at some point in the trading day he could use that knowledge against them.

At precisely 8:30 New York time the Metalco global morning meeting started. On speakerphones were Gester’s opposite numbers from the James Metalco’s London and Hong Kong offices. This daily conference call was another essential strategy session that Gester had initiated. The two overseas traders would relate what they had seen or heard in the market, and their opinions of how that data could affect the price movements.

On this particular morning, it did not appear that things were going Gester’s way. His intuition, his perusal of the news, and his informal polling of his competitors told him that the market was going to move higher once New York opened. But in the 8:30 meeting he learned that the London office had left him short about 400,000 ounces of silver- that is various customers had bought over ten tons of silver from Metalco’s London trading desk earlier, but the London trader hadn’t bothered to buy the metal back from the market yet. When Guess asked his counterpart in the London office why he hadn’t covered these sales, his overseas coworker explained, "it's fucking dead, Mate. Market's v quiet. No need to rush in and take a tiny profit on a relatively small position. It's worth a go to let the day develop a little, maybe the market would drop after New York opened." He aslo muttered that surely the great and powerful Gester would be able to work his magic and get the metal back in with a tidy profit.

Gester despised quiet markets like a sickness. He subscribed to the adage long attributed to King Gillette, the razor impresario – Never sell a dull one. He also thought the trader in London was an incompetent and a lazy windbag.

In New York, the futures market was the be-all and end-all of the precious metals trade. Prices for delivery around the globe were based on a constantly shifting differential from the actively trading futures price. Because James Metalco was the biggest player in the precious metals markets, they had three direct lines to each of the trading rings on the floor of the futures exchange. Most of the competitors had only one, a few had two. The phones on the floor were manned by street smart, hungry kids who eschewed academia for practical experience. These hungry kids from places like Brooklyn and Jersey City were Gester’s eyes and ears on the futures market. They knew which competing brokers and clerks did business for each of his competitors. They always knew which broker was holding what order. They knew all of the independent traders in the ring, and more importantly they knew their “tells.” If someone was trying to bully the market with a bluff of trying to execute a large order, these clerks new immediately. Via telephone they relayed everything they saw and heard directly to Gester from the opening to the closing bell.

Gester valued his relationships with the phone clerks on the exchange floor as much as any of his myriad other world-wide business connections. Possibly more so. Central bankers and mutual fund managers had obvious value to someone in his unique position. But Guess fancied himself a badass, a street guy. He often said that he learned more in a four hour drunken spree at a topless bar in Brooklyn with his clerks than a three-day conference in any European or Asian capital.

The phone turrets on the trading desk and the telexes behind them lit up at the New York market opening. Of course at the opening bell the silver market jumped up another few cents, and Gester’s guts tightened just a little more. “That miserable limey fuck dumped his shit position on me and now I’m screwed. He’s already got his fat ass down at the pub and I am left to clean up the mess. I am going to kick his pimply ass the next time I see him.”

Even though he was marking up his silver price a little higher than the rest of the market in an effort to get the unwanted short position back, Gester was “lifted” by competitors on his first three price quotes – that is other dealers had bought even more silver from him in the rising market. By this point Gester was steaming. He was now short over 20 tons of silver, he was losing money, and he was certain the price was going to move even higher. There were no customer selling orders on the book to give a reasonable coverage level to mitigate his risk. He was on his own with the clusterfuck.

“How does this shit always happen to me?” he shouted to nobody in particular. Gester then looked up to see his junior trader standing before him with his head hanging low and the keys to the Maserati in his outstretched, sweating palm.

“No. Oh hell no! You have GOT to be shitting me. Definitely not this morning, of all possible days.”

Without raising his eyes from the floor his clerk whispered, “Boss, I am so sorry. It wasn’t me, I swear. It was some old lady at the parking lot. I wasn’t even moving. I was standing still and she totally t-boned the bambina.”

Each of the telephone turrets on the trading desk had two handsets. This made it possible for the traders to speak to two people at the same time. Gester was standing at his position at the head of the trading desk, one of his handsets in his white knuckled right hand. This day was not going according to plan, he needed a quick release. He smashed the handset against the edge of the desk and it shattered quite impressively. The wires inside held most of the big pieces of the handset together, but several small, sharp bits of black plastic shrapnel showered the trading desk and immediate area. One of the female sales assistants was so startled that she jumped up from her seat and began to sob quite hysterically.

The grand macho posturing gesture did nothing to alleviate the pressure. And now with only one phone and that girl bawling he felt a little stupid. The silver price moved up another four cents per ounce. Gester stood there and muttered, “Motherfucker.”

True Conversation at the Dinner Table

2010-06-24T13:34:00.005-04:00

I know a married couple who never fail to entertain me. They are both immigrants from the former Yugoslavia. They did not meet until they came here. They are complete opposites, but they are very much in love.

He is Serb. She is Croat.

He is short and portly. She is tall and thin.

His tastes are simple. She is worldly and sophisticated.

He works with his hands. She is a high-end banquet manager in the city.

His politics are a little to the right of Rush Limbaugh. She makes Al Gore look draconian.

You get the picture. With their eastern European accents and their starkly contrasting physical appearance, they remind everyone they meet of Boris and Natasha from the old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons.

Either one of them would give you the shirt off their back if you needed it. If I was ever in a jam, I can state with metaphysical certitude that they would drop everything to come to my aid, no questions asked. As the saying goes, they would not only help me move, they would help me move a body. These are good people whom I am blessed to count as friends.

Not long after the movie “2012” was released, we were invited to dinner at their place. He had never heard of the Mayan or Incan or whatever the hell it is prediction about the impending endtimes. He was quite agitated about this prospect of the destruction of civilization, because he likes to plan ahead. What follows, to the best of my recollection, is a snippet of the dinner conversation from that night.

It should be noted that both of them tend to eschew the use of pronouns in their conversation. They prefer to use the terms “this mudderfucka” or “that mudderfucka” or “these or those mudderfuckas” instead. I can only assume that they both learned English from listening to old Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy CDs. Anyway, here goes the conversation:

Her: Why don’t you ask Jack about your stupid question?

Him: Ok. Jack, can you believe that this mudderfucka won’t tell me whether or not I should shoot her in the head.

Me: I am pretty sure that she prefers you not shoot her in the head. But of course now I must know why would you ask?

Him: The mudderfucking world is going to end in about three years. They made a movie about it.

Me: I don’t believe that schedule is engraved in stone.

Him: I know that. Don’t be smartass. But if it is true, I want to know if she is going to tough it out and fight for survival or if she wants to just give up and die. If she don’t wanna fight, I offered to shoot her in the head. This way she don’t have to worry about getting raped to death or anything. ‘Cause I ain’t sticking around here when the world ends.

Me: When you put the question in that context, I guess it sort of makes sense…

Her: Let me tell why I won’t tell this mudderfucka nothing. If I tell him I don’t wanna fight, in two years the first time a loud truck goes down the street in the middle of the night this mudderfucka is going to wake up in a panic and shoot me in the head.

Him: I’ll know the difference between a truck and an earthquake. Don’t be stupid.

Her: I ain’t taking that chance. You are fucking crazy when you first wake up.

Going Up?

2010-06-02T11:19:00.002-04:00

There are two types of people in the world. There are those who try to hold the elevator door open when they see someone coming and there are those who don’t. I am one of the former. That doesn’t make me any more thoughtful or considerate than the next guy. Because I am also the annoying jackass who will stick an arm, or a leg, or briefcase into the slowing closing elevator door when I am on the outside to stop its progress so that I can get in. And yes, I usually show up when you are in a hurry to get upstairs, and I am always going to a floor below yours.

Years ago, way pre-9/11, I had an appointment in the Chrysler building. Back in those halcyon, innocent days of yore there was no security labyrinth to navigate before boarding the elevator. There were no hypervigilant, minimum wage, painfully slow rent-a-cops dyslexically scrutinizing the identification papers of every visitor. There were no cumbersome visitor badges with that industrial-strength adhesive sure to destroy every fabric with which it comes into contact for mandatory display. One just walked in off the street and pushed the up button.

Because there were none of the security scans that are so commonplace today to endure back then, I actually showed up at the time of my appointment. There was intermittent rain that day, so I was carrying my brand-new, state-of-the-art, jumbo-sized-but-ultra-light-weight, wind-proof golf umbrella. Make no mistake; this was a very expensive parapluie befitting a man of my inflated girth and ego.

As I sauntered into the proper elevator bank for my vertical destination, I noticed there was an empty car available with the doors just beginning to close. Me being me, I deftly thrust my Beau Brumell brolly between the sealing panels, fully expecting whatever device it is that triggers the doors to re-open to do its thing and grant me my rightful egress. That didn’t happen.

Those elevator doors clamped onto my gamp with a mechanical tenacity that was both elegant and frightening. My first thought was to thank my creator that I hadn’t stuck an arm or leg into the gap. My second thought was, “Shit! That is a very frigging expensive umbrella and I want it back!”

I yanked mightily on the umbrella handle, but couldn’t get it free. The elevator doors were shut so tightly that the little knobby bit near the pointy thingy on the end of the umbrella was just too big to pull through the remaining space. Now I was pissed, I was late, and I was determined to regain my raingear.

I put a foot up against the elevator for leverage and pulled with everything I had. No joy. I tried to push the umbrella in a little, twisted it to the left then the right, heaved myself against it from every angle that I could manage, and this malfunctioning menace from the Otis factory continued to silently mock me.

After about ten minutes of this now sweaty exercise in futility the once proud bumbershoot was a mangle of ripped fabric and twisted metal. It dawned on me at that time that the usefulness of that mess in any kind of precipitation was undoubtedly seriously diminished. I surrendered unconditionally.

At some time during the struggle some passer-by saw fit to alert the authorities of my predicament. Just as I abandoned the struggle and composed myself, a kindly old geezer in a security guard uniform turned the corner into the elevator bank. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked me. I had to tell the truth but wanted to regain some sense of dignity. So I told him, “Some dipshit got his umbrella stuck in the elevator door.” Then I left.

Short NY Marathon Story

2010-05-18T16:55:00.002-04:00

I mentioned before that I plodded through the New York Marathon. I essentially got myself hoodwinked into it by listening to the stories of an acquaintance who is notoriously full of shit. A few of us were at dinner, and as he sat there smoking like a chimney he regaled us with his method for training for a marathon. I listened and thought to myself, “I could do that," completely forgetting who was weaving this yarn.

Things went fairly well for me during the training. I started training in June for a November race, so I had plenty of time and no shortage of confidence. I also had the good luck to mention my plans to a real long distance runner. He took me under his wing and provided mental support, real training tips, and most importantly – he shepherded me through the process of getting into the actual race.

A few days after the race my mentor called me and invited me to dinner to celebrate my accomplishment. The two of us and two other friends went to Sparks Steakhouse in NYC. To my surprise they dragged in a huge, ornate trophy. The date of the race, my name and my time were engraved and prominently displayed.

My mentor then explained the provenance of this specific trophy. According to him it went back to the first NY Marathon, which only had about 110 entrants. One of the non world-class runners who finished the race was awarded this impressively monstrous honor by his friends to acknowledge his effort. Over the next 25 years or so the trophy had been passed on to other first-time marathon finishers. The tradition called for me to find a first-timer and assist with their training, as my friend had guided me. After their race I was to take the trophy to a shop, have the brass plate with my name and time removed and replaced with the name and time of whomever I deemed a worthy recipient. I thought that was pretty cool.

After dinner we decided to keep the evening rolling and adjourned to Paddy Reilly’s, an obviously Irish pub with Guinness on tap. The place was pretty empty when we arrived; there was no live entertainment that night. We bellied up and ordered our pints. I placed my new award on the bar because I didn’t think it should sit on the floor.

The barmaid was straight off the boat from the Auld Sod. She was about 5 feet tall and 5 feet wide. What she lacked in physical appeal she more than made up for with personality. After a few rounds her curiosity finally got the best of her. She asked, “Alright then, what’s that big thing about?” I explained that I had finished the marathon and my friends were kind enough to honor me with the trophy and a lovely dinner.

“See?” I said quite proudly, “Its got my name and my time on that big brass placard there.”

“Oh, we’ve got a fella works here runs that thing every year. And actually he’s a lot older than you are,” our hostess explained to me. Then she put on her reading glasses and looked closely at the trophy again. “He's a lot faster, too.”

Foot Notes

2010-05-17T20:05:00.003-04:00

Let me tell you something about my feet. They are hideous. Young children have run screaming to their mothers after having innocently suffered an inadvertent glimpse at my woe begotten dogs. I have some sort of mutated bone structure that makes my feet look like they stopped in mid-transformation to the werewolf paws they aspire to be. I have ten toes pointing in twelve directions. My feet look like they hurt, and believe me they do. They are constantly in a state vacillating from ache to agony. If my feet were my mouth I would be the poster boy for Operation Smile.

In spite of this birth defect, years ago I plodded through the NY Marathon. I didn’t set any records, but I finished faster than Oprah did when she ran her marathon. I am a simple man; beating that pompous cow with her retinue of advisors, trainers, and nutritionists was my only goal. My months of Spartan solitary training wreaked misery on my already pathetic paws, but I was a man possessed.

Force of will can only take you so far against natural-born shortcomings. All that road work extracted a hefty physical price on my already horrifying hooves. Shortly after the race I was left with no choice but to visit a podiatrist seeking some level of relief from the pain. I hoped there was some newly discovered medical miracle to which I was not yet privy.

I have a theory that the people who finish in the bottom-most percentile of the class in med school are the podiatrists, proctologists, and urologists of the world. I refuse to believe that any human willfully chooses to earn their daily bread by tending to the disgusting toenails of the elderly or the hemorrhoids and anal fistulas of the dietetically challenged. This low-rent Dr Scholl did nothing to alleviate my disdain for his profession. I told Foot Boy I had just done a marathon, and his response was, “With these feet!?!?! No frigging way!” Square biz, a trained medical professional actually said “no frigging way” when he saw the contemptible tangles of bone and flesh on which I stagger through this vale of tears.

Mercifully, I don’t have those vomit-inducing, thick, yellow toe nails endemic to most American men over the age of fifty. That is the only remotely redeeming trait of my terrifying tootsies. My father and his father before him were afflicted with that singularly repulsive feature. When I was a kid I thought that nauseating transmogrification inevitably happened to every male as they matured. I cannot describe my relief when I learned that thick, yellow, tubular toenails weren’t a requirement for passage to manhood.

Now let me tell you something about your feet. They are just as horrifying as mine. Quite possibly - more so. If you are a male over the age of 6 months old you should never, under any circumstances at all, leave the house without socks. I can guarantee you that without exception, there is not another human on the face of the planet that wants to see your disgusting, misshapen paws.

When you leave the house wearing flip-flops and do not go directly to the beach, you are wrong. The only appropriate times for an American male to show have his feet bare is when he is swimming or in bed. Women secretly scorn you when they see you in any manner of footwear that shows your toes. They gather with their girlfriends and giggle their fool heads off about how much of a doofus you are because you don’t wear shoes intended for a responsible adult man. The last man for whom it was acceptable to wear sandals in public was Jesus. So do us all a favor and dress like a 21st century man.

You women are not exempt from this edict. You may think that you have “good-looking” feet, but trust me, you don’t. That is just what the poor Asian girl who takes your money tells you so that you will come back again in a week or two and shell out more money for her to tend your hooves. She’s just trying to earn enough money to buy her family out of servitude from the yellow slavers that smuggled her into the country in the first place.

Your toes are either too long or too short. In the first case they probably have those thick, arthritic-looking knuckles at every joint that remind any proper-thinking human finds revolting. In the latter case your stubby little toes could possibly be found comical if they weren’t frigging toes. No matter the extreme, rest assured nobody wants to see them.

The world really does not want to see those talons on your lower extremities. No matter how festively or discreetly you choose to paint them, your toe nails are gross. They are either too long or too short. In the case when they are too long it is just nauseating. They have been tortured into a grotesque mockery of the intended human form by the stupid shoes into which you have been stuffing them for the last few decades in the pursuit of some Carrie Bradshaw-esque fantasy. In the case where they are too short, people are probably trying to figure out just what kind of twisted troll you are who somehow manages to bite her own toe nails. Yuck!

Stop subjecting your innocent fellow humans to your calluses, corns, and other podiatric deformities. Some of us may have just eaten, and you really need to be more considerate when you dress yourself for the day.

Near Miss Reminisce

2010-03-12T11:52:00.005-05:00

I am in my early fifties. There is a fairly long list of people with whom I attended grammar and high school who are no longer with us. Every so often, when I think about that fact, I get hit with a wave of grief (mixed with a large dose of self-pity) that can take me hours to shake.

I have experienced several brushes with my own mortality. In just the last two years I have survived not one, but two major ventricular fibrillation episodes. For the uninitiated, a v-fib is when one’s otherwise normal heart sort of short circuits and just quits pumping blood. If it doesn’t get re-started to pumping within a few minutes, you die. My cardiologist tells me that the first symptom of v-fib is usually sudden death. But he is an unusually sunny, Pollyanna-ish kind of guy…

The first time I nearly kicked I never saw any white light or gathering of ancestors waving for me to join them. Nor did I hear any angelic chorus or any of that other cool shit that always happens in the Lifetime Channel movies. I just woke up in a hospital missing four days of my life, with my very own re-start button implanted in my left moob. I used to feel a little gypped about that, until someone pointed out that I also didn’t see a blazing pit of tortured souls getting poked with pitchforks by little red imps. The doctor tells me that the reason I don’t remember anything is that the blood supply to my brain was cut off for “quite some time.”

This most recent episode was different. I remember it all, and it happened in sort of slow motion. I was feeling light-headed and decided I had better sit down before I fell down. As I was lowering my caboose on to the seat I felt myself falling forward. My vision was clouding up around the periphery. I thought, “This is gonna hurt. I am about to faceplant.” Then WHAM! I was struck by lightning and landed on my ass on the bench. I heard myself let out a mighty grunt and went limp.

I sat there for a few minutes and gathered my wits. I took inventory and still had all my parts. I didn’t land on my puss and damage my cute little button nose. My implanted defibrillator had fired! I made my way home, slowly, and called the doctor. After a one-day stay in the hospital they cut me loose. Everyone told me how lucky I am, to have survived the first v-fib and had the device work for the second episode. I agree, I am the luckiest person I know. And not just for surviving these v-fibs. Life is very, very good to me and I appreciate it. I would also like to thank the Boston Scientific Corporation for their fine product.

I think another reason I survived is that I grew up in New Jersey. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” I concur. During the summer when I was ten, one of the things that we used to do every day was walk down to the Kill Van Kull to see what color the water was that day. We weren’t little scientists looking for subtle variations of green or blue from the aquatic flora. What we were looking for were the day-glo greens, iridescent pinks, chromium yellows, cobalt blues, or psychedelic purples that spewed out of the pipe at the end of Ingraham Avenue.

The rocks surrounding this certain future superfund site would be brightly colored from the industrial spew. Naturally we would naively gather up as many of these chemical-coated stones we could and carry them around all day in our front pockets, right next to our budding gonads. We all had quite the collection of colorful rocks in our bedrooms at home. It wasn’t sufficient to just handle the illegal pollutants once and forget about it. It was far better to have a big stack of them stored where we slept so we could get a nice eight-hour-per-night exposure to whatever poisonous coating they carried.

After checking out the color of the day, we would sometimes adventure into the mud flats. They weren’t really mud flats, but that was what we called them. This area in which we did our adventuring was actually a huge oil tank farm. There must have been at least fifty of those things there. There was no fence or security guard to keep us out, and in the mid ‘60s we kids took that as implied permission to go in. Besides, we weren’t doing anything but walking around and letting our imaginations take us wherever.

At first blush, walking around the grounds of a tank farm doesn’t sound like much fun. But there were two things that made it fun. First was the legend of the Mud Moose. The Mud Moose was a gigantic creepy guy who lived somewhere down in the mud flats. According to the detailed stories of several of the “big kids” he was huge, horribly disfigured, and killed little kids who dared to trespass around his area. At ten we were at the age where we were about 95% sure that the Mud Moose stories were total bullshit. But that 5% was more than enough to make roaming around down there pretty exciting. And as long as we traveled in groups of three or more, if something did happen I just had to be faster than only one of the other kids.

The second, far more important thing that made wandering around the flats an adventure was the actual ground on which we walked. To this day I don’t know what the hell was going on down there, but I am sure it wasn't kosher. In great expanses the ground was covered with a tannish-brown, spongy coating of varying thickness and unknown origin. Most of the ground in the tank farm area in which we adventured was overgrown with weeds, but nothing grew in these mysterious anti-oases. The spongy brown coverings of these areas were dotted randomly with sickly green colored thin spots. In the center of these green thin spots you could see that underneath the spongy coating was a black tar-like pool of indeterminate depth.

Of course, the funnest thing for ten-year-old boys to do was to walk out onto the spongy brown shit to see who could go the farthest before chickening out. The truly ballsy among us would even bounce up and down a little on whatever that shit was, sending a little ripple of danger under the whole group. This was the coolest way ever to waste an entire day.

One day on an adventure with two friends we had gone further than we had ever gone before. We were carrying walking staffs that we had fashioned from the trunks of sapling stink weed trees. (Stink weed trees at the time were the major natural flora of the untamed areas of downtown Bayonne.) We found vast expanses of that spongy shit, exponentially bigger than anything we had ever seen. At one point when we were skirting around the edge of a particularly large area of the mystery material, the foot of one of my co-adventurers went right through the squishy covering! This had never happened before! His entire sneaker up to his ankle was coated in a thick, black, horrifying smelling, disgusting goop. The other two of us immediately thought that this was the funniest thing that we had ever seen. It wasn’t the smell or his discomfort that we found to be most amusing - it was the metaphysical certitude of the record-breaking ass whipping his mom was going to give him for ruining his relatively new sneaker.

I have a lot of asshole in me, but back then I had even more. The more he told us to shut up about it, the more I had to go on riding him. I was like a dog with a bone. I just couldn’t stop. My other buddy had quieted down, but I kept ragging on old Stinkfoot. “Oh man, she is going to kill you!” “After she kills you you’re gonna be grounded for years!” I could have gone on for hours, except I was rudely interrupted.

In my schadenfreudal ecstasy I wasn’t watching where I was walking. In one step I was instantaneously through the protective crust and waist deep in that smelly black mystery sludge! I was also paralyzed with abject terror, because I had no idea how deep this stuff was.

My two friends immediately stuck out their stink weed walking staffs for me to grab, and they dragged me out of the muck. After I caught my breath and gathered myself (stopped crying like a little girl), I had to prepare myself for the walk home, which was well over a mile. To their credit, for some reason my two friends didn’t say much of anything all the way home.

At the time my family lived in an apartment on the main drag in town. On the other three corners were a church, school, and rectory. The corner in front of the church was a bus stop. This was a heavily populated area with a large amount of foot traffic, especially on a summer afternoon. As I made my way home, trying to work up a plausible story explaining my first brush with a horrifying death and why I shouldn’t be beaten or grounded, I took a few catcalls and razzing from neighborhood kids for my filthy smelly appearance.

That childish mockery bounced off me unnoticed. I had bigger fish to fry. When I got home the door was locked, so I had to ring the doorbell. My mom answered and was instantly and thoroughly disgusted. She wouldn’t let me in the house with my half-coating of petroleum waste. She made me strip right there on the front porch! Down to bare ass, in public!

At the time I was sure that I had narrowly escaped a black and gooey death. In retrospect I am not too sure, I may have actually touched bottom when I fell through, and my friends did drag me out very quickly. But no matter how much I replay that day in my head, I am certain of one thing - I definitely almost died of embarrassment from having to stand naked for a few seconds on the front porch!

Dogs, Death, and the Real Estate Market

2010-03-11T14:46:00.003-05:00

When my mom’s overweight dog Digger passed on to the land of endless spaghetti-o’s and mashed potatoes in the sky; after a short mourning period it was time to get her a new dog. Mom, to her credit, was adamant about getting a shelter dog. Instead of going to the local kennel, for some reason still unknown to me we schlepped from northern Jersey out to Port Washington on Long Island. It is only about 40 miles, but with unavoidable traffic it is at least a two-hour trip each way.

The North Shore Animal League has been doing wonderful work for unwanted animals for decades. After spending a while explaining to Mom that she couldn’t possibly take all the animals home, she eventually settled on a mixed-breed puppy. This puppy was one good looking dog. It had a solid charcoal grey coat, almost but not quite black. Its eyes were sort of dark blue. The dog looked like it had a lot of Black Lab in it, but the remainder of its lineage will always be subject to speculation. He may have had a little Beauceron in his bloodlines, too. He had two dew claws on both his hind legs. Mom named him Ashley, after Ashley Wilkes from Gone with the Wind. Maybe Mom had a thing for Leslie Howard back in the day…

Ashley’s life as a companion dog was unremarkable. He never tried to have sex with a bicycle, and for his entire life his weight was appropriate to his other dimensions. He actually ate dog food and dog biscuits. Mom crate trained Ashley. Man, he loved that crate. It was his personal space, his hidey-hole. Whenever he was done getting attention from any of the humans in the house, he would retire to his crate and cuddle up with his blanket.

There was only one distinguishing thing about Ashley. He was the only dog that I have ever seen that had male pattern baldness. The fur on the top of his head thinned and turned white at the end of his life. Unless you got really close to him it looked like he was some sort of Friar Tuck hound. We all assumed it was from years of his head rubbing against the ceiling of his crate. Whatever the cause, it was damn silly looking.

After my youngest brother got married and moved out, it was just Mom and Ashley rattling around in that big old drafty house. The house, Mom, and Ashley were all getting a lot older, and eventually the decision was made for Mom to sell the house and move into some place smaller. A realtor was contracted and the house was listed. But there was substantial work to be done before the first potential buyer could see the joint.

Mom never threw anything away. She wasn’t a hoarder; but she was sort of pathologically thrifty. The basement of the house was filled with a cornucopia of crap. A gallimaufry of garbage. An olio of offal. An excess of excrement. A surfeit of silly shit. To show the house that area absolutely needed to be purged. None of the five of us had the fortitude to go through the place and sort any possible wheat from all that chaff. This called for a acorched earth policy. My brother had the common sense to hire a rubbish removal service to take everything out of the cellar and directly to the dump.

Included in the detritus were a set of four larger tires for a truck (we never owned a truck), about six non-functioning air conditioners, a mountain of rusted and broken hand tools, a twenty-year-old Inchworm riding toy and a Marvel the Mustang, a broken, non-tumble Kelvinator® electric clothes dryer, several hundred yards of garden hose, countless board games, headless Barbies and GI Joes, five broken barbeque grills (one with a broken electric rotisserie attachment), several cases of empty Brookdale soda bottles, boxes of clothes from five kids growing up, and who-knows-what else. The take filled two dump trucks. Eventually the house was in good enough place to show, and the traffic was better than I expected.

About four weeks into the process, one Saturday I got a call from one of my brothers. He had just been over to visit Mom. What worried him was the state of Ashley. The old dog was about fifteen at this point and he had hit the wall hard. My brother was concerned that Ashley may have needed to be put down, and neither of us was sure how well Mom was going to handle it. I told my brother that I would go over there on Monday and take the dog to the vet to be assessed. We both hung up feeling like shit.

The next morning the phone rang, it was Mom. The realtor was going to bring some prospective buyers over in about two hours. Mom needed some advice. She had just gotten home from mass, and unfortunately upon here return from the magic show Ashley was now lying dead in the living room. Mom was ok with Ashley being dead; she just wasn’t sure what to do with the body. She wanted to know if I thought it a good idea to just throw a blanket over him and show the house anyway! Did I think the prospective buyers would notice!

I hung up with Mom and got the vet on the phone; luckily Sunday morning was when they did surgeries. I was told that if I could get Ashley’s body there within an hour they would take him for cremation. Mom’s house was about a forty minute drive from my place, and the vet about fifteen minutes from Mom’s. I was in some sort of Twilight Zone version of Beat the Clock – my challenge was to get the dead dog out of the house before the realtor arrived, and then get him to the vet before the crematorium closed. On top of everything else, it was pissing down rain.

I pushed the family minivan to the limit through the flooding streets. When I got to Mom’s poor old Ashley was as stiff as a board. With no time to exchange pleasantries with my lovely but daffy Mom, I wrapped up the recently deceased in the blanket and got him into the back of the happening Dodge Caravan. I was on schedule to get to the vet with a few minutes to spare.

When I got to the vet’s office there was a huge tractor trailer parked out front. It was covered with chrome eagles and other fancy metal filigree and had a custom sunburst paint job. I whipped the minivan to a screeching halt in front of this very eye-catching truck and jumped out, I was going to make this with a minute or two to spare!

The vet tech told me to bring the dog in around the back. I went back to the minivan and now there was some guy with a little kid out there, and the kid was absolutely rapt by the fancy truck. This father and son were Hispanic, the father about my age and the kid maybe two years old. I got the father’s attention and tried to explain that he and his kid should take a powder, as I was about to be lugging a stiff dead dog right past where they were standing. I am a father, too. I didn’t want the little fella to be traumatized. Of course, the dad didn’t speak a word of English.

I went to the minivan and tried to camouflage the canine corpse as best I could in the blanket. But he was sort of big and stiff, and the blanket was sort of small. I figured that I had old Ashley sufficiently shrouded to get into the office. Of course just as I was passing the little kid, whose attention was now 100% on me and my burden of beast, the blanket fell off the dog and the kid’s jaw hit the ground. The dad grabbed up his kid and started yelling at me and comforting his terrified scion in Spanish.

After I paid for the cremation and signed whatever paperwork was necessary, I lingered in the vet’s office for a few minutes. It had been a bad enough morning and I needed to give the father and son outside enough time to move along.

Just getting myself on the record

2010-01-14T11:48:00.004-05:00

For those readers who actually know me, you may want to skip this post; you have heard me rant about this and other stuff for years. What follows is a list of my prognostications. Some have already come true, feel free to attempt to profit from those that haven't come to fruition.

Sarah Palin going to FOX News - That was a slam dunk!

Detroit will eventually produce predominantly deisel-electric hybrid cars - Either this or some future US administration will eventually realize that the best way to "win" against Muslim extremists is to make them economically moot. No money, no bombs. There is enough coal in Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas to make the US energy independant. We can make deisel from coal AND we can make deisel fuel from corn. So while the US can have a full belly and a full fuel tank, those Middle East folks who don't like the US can't make a decent sammich out of crude oil no matter how much they refine it.

There will be a civil war in China and the whole place will fall apart within the next 15 years - I am giving myself a lot of leeway on the timeline, but this will assuredly happen. There are just too many different ethnic groups in China. Those schmoes in the hinterlands are going to get sick of seeing all their hard work going to line the pockets of a growing elite in Beijing and Shanghai. The up and coming youth don't want to hear all that shit about the people's struggles, they want to watch cable televsion and wear designer clothes. Just like their predecessors in the former Soviet Union. The Chinese government can't hold the flow of information from the rest of the planet forever.

The economic collapse of China will make India the place to be - India is the largest democracy in the world. Their work force is educated and they still come cheap. If you own stock in a company that uses Chinese labor, sell it and buy the stock of a company that uses Indian labor. Feel free to send me part of the profits.

The Jets will lose to Baltimore in the AFC chamionship game at Giants stadium, then the Jet fans will destroy the place - I don't really believe that one, but if it happens then I am going to take full credit.

Flabby Dog Story

2010-01-03T20:21:00.003-05:00

My mother had an Australian Terrier named “Digger.” According to the AKC breed standard, the Aussie is no more than 11 inches at the shoulder and no longer than 12.5 inches long from the withers to the base of its tail. That is not a big dog. They are pretty cute, though. The Aussie Terrier looks sort of like a big Yorkshire Terrier, but not as sissified, although you can’t tell by this picture, which I swiped from akc.org.

There were no real issues with Digger through her puppyhood. She was a pretty normal and playful little thing. By the age of about 10 months, she had developed a clear preference for the foodstuffs of the humans, and a severe disdain for dog food of any kind. Living in a house with a lot of knuckleheads who didn’t know better, she was given a lot of people food “snacks.”

She must have been at least a little smart, because she figured out how to work the household crowd to her ends. If you opened the refrigerator, Digger would be at your feet in a heartbeat. At the crinkling sound that signifies the opening of a bag of chips Digger would appear instantaneously. She would cavort and cajole for a handout, and she was relentless in her pursuit of goodies. She soon had the entire household trained that whatever one was eating, the rule was that Digger got a portion. She became a pint-size Don Fanucci, taking her percentage off the top of all the action that took place in the kitchen.

My mother was the one who fed and tended to Digger. Mom thought that Digger may prefer canned dog food. This was about the time that the Mighty Dog® brand hit the market, so Mom loaded up on that stuff. Mom also bought one of those dog dishes with two side-by-side compartments. Water went into one compartment and dog food into the other. Millions of dogs of all sorts of sizes have been fed from this kind of set-up since the invention of molded plastic.

One day I am visiting Mom in the late afternoon, and she says, “Watch this.” She takes up the dog’s side-by-side bowl, fills one side with canned dog food and the other with water, and calls Digger to the kitchen. In saunters the little empress, obviously in no hurry because there has been no refrigerator door signal or no snack bags opening.

Digger meanders over to the dish with the food and the water. Instead of eating the dog food, she starts to mush it down into the bowl with her nose. She very methodically flattens the entire contents of that side of the feeder, and never takes a bite while doing so. When the dog food has been completely pancaked, Digger then starts pushing the feeder from the side, which causes the water to slosh over into the food compartment. The entire process takes over five minutes. When she is done Digger leaves the dog food a disgusting mess, completely ruined by the smooshing process and the deluge.

After this remarkable demonstration, my mother asked me what I thought she should do. I told her take the ruined food away and not give the dog anything else until the next feeding was due. She may pull that trick a few more times, but eventually the dog would be hungry enough to stop wrecking the designated grub and eat. Silly me.

The dog held out for over a week, and Mom eventually folded like a cheap lawn chair. Instead of waiting until the next feeding was due, Mom started feeding Digger table scraps. Mom paid attention to what the dog seemed to prefer. It turned out that Digger had a predilection for carbs; particularly mashed potatoes and spaghetti. So that’s what Mom decided to feed her, all the time.

After years of her carbo-intense diet Digger was 11 inches tall, 12 inches long, and about 12 inches wide. That fat bastard’s stomach was almost dragging on the ground. Toward the end of her life if you tried to take her for a walk, she would make it about 50 yards from the front door. She would then just sit in the middle of the sidewalk, pant, and refuse to go further. She was so fat that she couldn’t even sit like a normal dog on her haunches; she had to sit in a sort of side saddle mess with her gigantic pink hairless belly sprawling over the sidewalk. Digger became the canine version of the Johnny LaRue character that John Candy used to portray on Second City.

Digger had a short life for a small dog, but as long as one wasn’t trying to take her for a drag she seemed to be a happy dog. Bill Maher says that there is no harm in overfeeding a pet dog or cat. Among the limited opportunities for joy in the life of a domestic pet, food is the only thing they really get to enjoy. I have to agree with Mr. Maher.

Nativity Naivete

2009-12-23T21:51:00.002-05:00

In the early 1960’s the world was a more magical place, at least in New Jersey. I mean that literally. All of the dopey kids in my homogenous, Irish-Catholic neighborhood totally bought in to every last thing that the Sisters of St. Joseph zealously stuffed into our empty little heads. Primarily, we all believed that there was a divine presence monitoring every move in our day-today existence. That’s a lot of pressure for a kid, trying to function under all of that omnipotent scrutiny.

Up until an age that I am way too embarrassed to admit, I firmly believed that Jesus saw everything that I did. And that he was taking notes. I was taught there was a cosmic balance that the son o’ god and his ethereal staff maintained for each of us. Having been duly taught the difference between right and wrong from my parents’ counsel and the business end of Sister Marie Vianney’s eighteen-inch ruler (with that fucking metal insert along the edge for drawing a straight line that hurt like hell no matter where she whopped you with it) I was the de facto captain of my own fate. It’s a simple proposition; be good and good things will happen to you now and forever, be bad and you will suffer not only here on earth but for the rest of eternity.

Several of the Twisted Sisters told the story of some kid who always stopped by the church whenever he passed it just to look in on Jesus. This dutiful kid would just stick his head in the door and say, “Hi Jesus, it’s Joey. How you doing?” From our catechism teachings, we understood that ol’ Jeez was all scrunched up in the locked tabernacle on that ornate marble altar, which none of us thought was a particularly comfortable way to pass the time. So this kid having the presence of mind to stop in and just say “Hey” was a pretty good idea if one wanted to build up credits in the cosmic bank. For the nuns, the payoff of the story was that Joey eventually got smushed by a bus, or somehow wound up on fire, or suffered some other horrifying catastrophe, and as he lay dying he heard, “Hey Joey. It’s me, Jesus.”

Looking back one would immediately question how a good kid who had the presence of mind to look in on the Savior every day still somehow suffered getting smushed or combusted. According to the behavior/result exchange rate as I calculated it, he should have had way too many credits in his account to get himself smote. But those nuns could really sell the story, so I didn’t see the inconsistencies in the narrative until way later.

Around Christmas time, the pressure was far worse. Not only was Jesus keeping tabs, but there was the whole Santa Claus thing to deal with. That combination was almost enough to push a normal seven-year-old to the breaking point. The nuns, in what can only be described as an insidious stroke of genius, drove home their point to us second-graders by maximally exploiting what is now called a “teaching moment.”

At the beginning of Advent, the sisters would remind us that if we remembered to say a certain special prayer every day until Christmas, we were guaranteed to get every present that we wanted. EVERY PRESENT THAT WE WANTED! Somehow the Vatican had legally bound the Holy Trinity to performance on this simple proposition. In my second-grade mind, these nuns were letting us in on the best secret in the history of the universe. All I had to do was say this dopey prayer every day for about a month and come December 25th my bedroom would be overflowing with GI Joes and all their different accessories (even the frigging Coast Guard stuff that nobody else wanted), and Mattel Thingmakers with a lifetime supply of Plastigoop to go with said Thingmakers, and Johnny West and Chief Cherokee and their respective horses, and Captain Action and Action Boy and ALL the superhero costumes for both of them (both Marvel and DC) and anything else that I saw on any Saturday morning commercial between then and Christmas. What a deal!

Of course I would eventually forget to say the prayer, usually on a weekend. And as a result of my own personal failure I would be sourly disappointed on Christmas morning. I would never blame the paltry state of my yuletide haul on anyone but myself. The reason that I didn’t get everything that I wanted was my specific failure to recite the required magic words. Those nuns were brilliant!

In retrospect the things we were made to believe as kids are laughable. What isn’t quite as funny is that my parents were willing co-conspirators in this indoctrination. I say that as a parent, but not from some self-righteous sense of moral outrage. Frankly I am jealous. Because I turned my back on organized religion and raised my kids as pagan babies, I didn’t have the threat of divine intervention to get my kids to toe the line. And I didn’t have a team of experts to help me indoctrinate them.

Hard Work in the Hot Sun

2009-12-16T12:27:00.002-05:00

I come from a long line of bricklayers. My father and his father before him were both considered the best in their trade when they were at their peak. My uncle Jim, my father’s youngest brother, was also a bricklayer. Where my father and grandfather were anal-retentive perfectionists, Jimmy was a practical businessman. He branched out into contracting and with his lovable, crazy personality did much better than the two mechanics combined. Working with Uncle Jimmy was also a thousand times more fun than working with my dad or PopPop.

In our formative years, my older brother and I both worked summers in the masonry trade. My brother being more cerebral and manually coordinated, did actually brick and block laying work. I was blessed with a broad back and a high tolerance for abuse, so I was a laborer. I mixed mortar and cement; and transported same along with loads of brick or block to the masons on the line to keep the projects running. I was also the designated hole digger and big ass-pieces-of-concrete-that-need-breaking-up-and-loading-into-that-dump-truck specialist.

That kind of work isn’t fun. There aren’t a lot of opportunities for jocularity when one is slaving away like some Israelite under Khufu’s whip. But as usual, there are a few family anecdotes that get dusted off and embellished whenever my brothers and I are gathered around an open bottle.

The first happened way before I was born. My grandfather used to tell this one whenever he was filled to the proper level with Four Roses and someone started pining away for “the good old days.”

When PopPop was a young man, steady construction work was hard to find. He managed to get hired on to a crew working for an Eastern European Jewish immigrant builder. This contractor was not well-liked; he had a horrendous reputation for treating his workers less than kindly. The job was a large apartment house, and PopPop started in August.

To get the mortar, block and brick up to the higher levels of the scaffolding, a system of ropes and pulleys was used. Because this project was several stories high, the rope was tied to a harness on a donkey. One of the crew was charged with walking the donkey back and forth to elevate the materials.

One afternoon it was particularly sweltering. The men were having a terrible time between the heat and the beating sun. The crew was complaining of dizziness and other heat-related problems, but the foreman reminded them that work was hard to come by and they needed to persevere. When conditions were at their worst, the contractor pulled up to check on the job.

As he ran up to the job ranting and waving his arms, the first command out of his mouth was to the guy tending the donkey. “Get that donkey out of the sun, you trying to kill that son-of-a-bitch?” he screamed. With that the masons and laborers said nothing as they gathered up their tools and walked off the job.

The other story is a variation on that theme. I was working with my Uncle Jim and it was as hot as hell. We had a few beers at lunchtime, but that only made it worse when we went back to work. We were all suffering from the heat. My uncle turned to me and said, “I know how to get us the rest of the day off. Watch this.”

He threw down his trowel, turned to the foreman, and yelled, “One more word out of you and I quit!” The foreman, not expecting such an outburst, confusedly stammered, “What the hell are you talking about, Jim?”

“That’s it! C’mon, John, were are outta here right now!” He stormed off the job to his truck with me following behind, giggling like a fool. We went straight back to the air-conditioned confines of the local tavern.

The next morning we reported for work like nothing happened. My Uncle Jim was such a great guy, the only thing the boss could do was laugh it off. At the end of the week we weren’t even docked for the two hours pay.

Two Manhattan Dog Vignettes

2009-11-05T18:28:00.001-05:00

I was walking home from the subway station and was stopped at the corner waiting for the light to change. I glanced to my left and there stood a woman with an absolutely beautiful greyhound, also waiting to cross. This greyhound’s coat was a solid charcoal grey, which I had never seen before. Having lost two greyhounds because of a divorce, I took one look and turned to mush immediately.

“May I pet him?” I asked. Without waiting for an answer I immediately started lavishing attention on this magnificent beast. I was telling this strange dog about the two greyhounds that I lost – their names, how both of them were black, how both of them ran at the same track up in Connecticut, and about how much I missed them. I was still prattling on when the light changed.

It took me a second to realize that I was holding up the dog’s owner, who was politely waiting for me to regain my senses. I realized my faux pas and looked up to thank her for letting me pet the dog. The dog’s owner was Ally Sheedy, the actress. I hadn’t noticed because I was so wrapped up in the dog. She smiled politely and went on her way.

Another time stopped at another light waiting to cross the street. An elderly gentleman walks up with a cute little mixed breed dog. The old man is as curmudgeonly looking as the dog is cute. Again I ask permission to pet the dog and start right in.

“He’s adorable,” I say. “What breed is he?”

“He’s a cross between a miniature poodle and a miniature schnauzer.”

Me - “What’s his name?”

Old guy - “Charlie.”

Me- “Ah, like John Steinbeck, right?”

Old guy – “The light’s changed you can fuck off now.”

In Honor of the World Series

2009-11-02T19:19:00.003-05:00

I have done innumerable things that have been either life-threatening, embarrassing, or both. Most of these stories, in retrospect, are sources of limitless amusement for me. Some of my dearest memories of character building personal failure come from my efforts to play team sports. The universe tried to warn me against such activities when I was only eight years old, but I didn’t listen.

Remember that I was the kid whose mother thought it a great idea to dress me as a ballerina for a Cub Scout meeting. I am not too proud to admit that she must have come to that conclusion for a reason. And my esteemed older brother and my dear old Dad did nothing to intervene in that cross-dressing adventure. Maybe they were all trying to tell me something…

My brother, who is four years older than I, was an above-average baseball player as a kid. My father was the coach of his Little League team for his first two years. The two of them had what I saw as good father/son thing with baseball. When I became old enough to try out for the minor league program, I kind of naively assumed that the baseball talent was somehow in my genes. Silly, silly boy.

As the time approached for the try-outs my father would take me over to the school yard to throw the old ball around. He was used to having a catch with my brother, a real baseball playing kid. I, by comparison, was a gigantic sissy. I threw like a girl (still do, unfortunately) and had a genuine mortal fear of getting hit by the ball (still got that, too, unfortunately). In his frustration at my inexplicable spasticity, his tactic to get me over my fear of the ball was to throw it at my head as hard as he could. I would react to these throws by ducking, squealing, and sometimes crying. This unmanly behavior irked the old man to no end.

For some reason Dad hadn’t given up on me yet when it came time for the city-wide try-outs, which were held at the high school gymnasium. I was thrown three easy ground balls to field, all of which I muffed spectacularly. I was then given a chance to show my batting prowess. I believe the catcher was throwing the ball back to the batting practice pitcher by the time I got around to swinging. My reflexes were judged a trifle slow.

I did get put on a team with a bunch of kids I didn’t know. Our sponsor was some entity called BMEA. I don’t know what that acronym stood for, but every other kid in town knew that it meant Biggest Monkeys Ever Alive. Those kids in the 1960’s were a regular riot in their cleverness.

For forty-five years ago, the coach was a pretty cool guy. He wasn’t one of those hard case guys who wanted to win at any cost, everyone got a chance to play at least half the game. His only rule was that if you didn't go to practice you didn't get into the game. The twice-weekly practices were in a park that my Mom deemed too far away for me to go unchaperoned. That meant that I missed most of the practices. Ergo, I had a very clean uniform.

We only played a nine game season, and on the few occasions that I did get into the game I was relegated to the official spazz position – right field. I never touched the ball in play during an actual game. In the rare at-bats that I had I never made contact with a pitch. Not even a foul ball. I was so afraid of getting hit by a pitch I stood way out of the batter’s box. I remember the umpire stopping a game to ask my coach why he hadn’t taught me where to stand. The coach argued that he had taught me but I was too scared. I was pathetic.

There was nobody on the planet more relieved than I when the season finally ended. The experience scarred me so that I have stayed away from baseball for the rest of my life. Because I have the uncanny ability to not learn from my painful childhood experiences, in my adult life I have been cajoled twice into participating in softball games. In slow-pitch softball the official spazz position is catcher, so of course that’s where I wound up. Both times I ended up bleeding.

The first time I got my red badge of ineptitude before the game even started. It was an intra-company game. I tried to explain to my co-workers that in spite of my imposing physique and cat-like grace of movement in my every day life, when it came to ball-and-bat sports I set the high water mark for geekdom. They thought that I was joking, and the more I tried to beg off the more my boss let it be known that I would indeed be playing. I couldn’t escape. They couldn’t believe that any American male could be as bad at softball as was claiming to be.

During the pre-game warm up I was tossing the ball back and forth with a teammate to loosen up. I miscalculated one of his throws and the ball hit me square in the nose. I commenced spouting hemoglobin like an inbred Russian prince, but miraculously my nose wasn’t broken and my teeth were unscathed. While I sat on the sideline with my beezer on ice and my self esteem in the toilet, my co-workers finally realized that I wasn’t kidding about my woefully inadequate hand-eye coordination.

The time that I actually played in a game it was worse. I was the catcher – the spazz position – and most of the guys on the opposing team were at least 280 pounds. This team was sort of world famous in my home town because of their girth. Most of them were local high school stars that were going to beer. They either hit home runs or very long outs. They were all too big or lazy to run the bases.

One of these monsters gets up and hits a long fly ball into the left-center gap that would have been a stand up triple for anyone else, but because of his pachydermian proportions he had only ambled around to second by the time my teammate chased down the ball and got it back into the infield. He was actually pissed that he had to run, and his teammates mocking his inability to hit the ball out of the park only added to his ire.

The next guy up ripped a line drive down the third base line that was going far, but also wasn’t going to make it over the fence. I was immediately struck with the imminent sense of dread that came from the likelihood of a play at the plate with that massive runner coming from second.

I was wearing the required catcher’s mask (over my glasses – without which I cannot see a thing) when the ball was hit. That dopey mask made it very hard to see. To improve my field of vision for the throw coming from left field, I took off the mask. And my glasses went with it. I went from partially obstructed to 100 percent blurry in an instant. Not a great situation for a certified softball doofus.

I was squinting and looking toward the outfield, and in my effort to see the ball coming I sort of wandered a few feet up the third base line. Not being properly educated in the manly code of conduct for base-or-softball, I did not know that my myopic meandering was effectively “blocking the plate” – a behavior considered both aggressive and discourteous. The runner from second hit me like a Mack truck just as the throw from the outfield whizzed by my head. I flew from about four feet up the third base line across home plate and into the far side of the backstop, where I collapsed into a broken heap.

When my son became old enough for Little League, he didn’t have show any interest whatsoever. Yet another reason that I love that boy with all of my heart.

Real Life Halloween Horror Story

2009-10-09T16:37:00.006-04:00

When I was just seven years old my mother actually said these words to me, “Go over there and let that man pull your hair.” What leads a reasonably intelligent, middle class, responsible mother of three to command her youngest son to voluntarily be abused by a grown man whom he has never met? As usual, there is a story behind it.

My life up to this point was one of blissful ignorance. All the kids in my neighborhood were the same. We were all white. We all went to the same school and the same church. Our mothers all shopped at the same supermarket. Our fathers all went to some mysterious place to work in the mornings before we woke up for school and their return home in the evening signified it was time for dinner. Of course, my mother chose to stigmatize me in kindergarten by dressing me like an English schoolboy from the 1930’s (see Jody Goes to School), but by the second grade I had regained some semblance of normalcy, at least so I thought.

Like just about every other boy in the second grade at my school, I joined the Cub Scouts at the start of the school year. My older brother had been a Cub Scout, so we already had the uniform. So this was a no-overhead proposal, and it was a great opportunity for me to work on the necessary needed arts-and-crafts skills which would guarantee me a wildly successful adulthood. The pot holder and lanyard world was wide open for me, and I was raring to go.

In early October about six of us started our Tuesday afternoon den meetings in the kitchen of Mrs. Incanella, Charlie’s mom. These gatherings were tame but fun, as I remember them. We started with a decent snack (no store brand cookies) and proceeded to the de rigueur craft sessions as outlined in the Tiger Cub manual. We painted chalk statues of Topo Gigio and glued little Blessed Virgins into tuna can shrines. This stuff was just biding time before the really big event. We all knew that the big payoff was the pack meeting at the end of the month, which was the Halloween party.

Among us kids, animated conversations usually started in early October about what we “were going to be” for Halloween. In our minds we didn’t dress up or masquerade as our bravest heroes or most horrifying monsters, we became them. The special magic of Halloween was the idea of an escape from our mundane, cookie-cutter existences. Our transformation plans were grandiose in scope, and beyond the skills of Hollywood’s best special effects experts. That hyperbole was part of the anticipation and the escapist thrill of the holiday. By the time the reality sunk in we were so hyped about the candy that the disappointment about the costume was negligible.

Until this point, in spite of all the wild plans that I fabricated with my knucklehead friends, my Halloween get-ups were limited to the hand-me-down Ben Cooper kits from my older brother. So not only was I stuck with the truly shittiest of shitty plastic costumes, I had to be a skeleton or ghost that was at least four years out of date. But I didn’t care. I was too young and blissfully ignorant to expect anything different.

What was different about this Halloween was my participation in the Cub Scout Pack Meeting and their costume contest. My big brother had been through four of these already (he was a WEBLO by this time) so my mother knew the drill. In the history of scouting, nobody had ever won a Pack Meeting costume contest in a store-bought Ben Cooper kit. I, of course, didn’t have a clue. So at the last minute when Mom asked if I wanted to "be" something else, I was amenable to anything that wasn’t made of plastic, staples, and rubber bands. I was a kind of dopey kid; in my excitement I didn’t remember my lesson from the kindergarten couture experience Mom inflicted on me.

My mom and her batshit crazy sister, Tootsie, (see More of the Set Up) put their seriously addled heads together and came up with the perfect costume for me. No burnt cork beard and raggedy clothes to be a bum - too pedestrian. No fangs and widow’s peak to be a vampire – flaunts the Catholic values. Not even an old sheet with eyeholes for a generic ghost – sheets cost money. The two knucklehead sisters decided that the perfect alter-ego for me was to be a ballerina! I was a seven-year-old kid in a cultural vacuum. I had no idea of the spectrum of 1964 heterosexual taboos that we would be breaking. All I knew was that I didn’t have to wear that cheesy Ben Cooper costume again, and if my dear old mom was to be believed, this getup had a chance of winning a prize in the Cub Scout costume contest. A prize! I couldn’t begin to fathom the possibility. I hadn’t yet won anything in my entire life. I was sold.

My cousin, Mary Ellen, was a year older than I and in about her fifth year of ballet school. Mom arranged to borrow her tights, tunic, ballet shoes, and tutu – all pink, of course. Toots sent these over on the afternoon of the pack meeting. After dinner Mom took me into the bathroom and did my makeup and hair. I don’t remember what she did, but I do remember that it took a long time. I was willing to pay whatever price she deemed necessary as long as it meant I had a shot at a prize. I was so blissfully unaware…

In retrospect, let me interject here that my father and older brother absolutely must have been out of the house during this episode. I have to believe this. Surely if they were informed in any way about what Mom and her nutty sister were about to perpetrate on me they would have definitely intervened. Their more highly developed senses of manhood and of fair play would have made it a moral imperative for them to rescue me. Or at least take me aside and explain to me why this was such a singularly bad idea.

Now clad from head to toe in a real, pink, ballerina ensemble (complete with frilly tutu and ballet slippers) and with perfectly applied eye shadow, mascara, lipstick, powder and blush, and with my curly hair appropriately teased up and Dippity-Doo®ed, I left for my first pack meeting with my mom. I was fabulous!

The pack meeting began with some official scouting mumbo-jumbo - lots of saluting and oathing and flag waving and such. Then we were given specific instructions on how we were to march around the Andrean Room (this was the big meeting room in the basement of our school) in single file for the costume contest. We were then informed of the judging criteria for the various prizes in the costume contest - most original, scariest, funniest, etc. I was beside myself with anticipation. I noticed there were plenty of bums, vampires, and ghosts, but I was the only ballerina! My prize was a fait accompli.

We had our little parade, and the prizes were handed out. I went home empty-handed! Evidently the judges didn’t see fit to encourage cross dressing by awarding my second grade drag queen routine. But I was the topic of some animated discussions from the parents watching the costume parade. One father, in particular, couldn’t believe that I was indeed a boy. He thought that I must be some scout's sister. Once he was convinced of my male credentials, he stood firm on the opinion that I must be wearing a wig. In his view, my hair was just too curly and beautiful. In spite of vehement assurances from my almost-criminally-clueless-in-appropriate-things-for-seven-year-old-boys mom, he would not concede this point.

So after the cupcakes and juice were served, my mother came up behind me, pointed to some guy across the room, and said, “Go over there and let that man pull your hair.” Like the dutiful and ignorant son that I was, I did it with no questions asked.

The dogs and the bees, a variation

2009-10-01T17:35:00.005-04:00

In my entire fifty-plus years, I have only been stung by a bee once. Once was enough. It happened when I fell asleep in a chaise lounge one late afternoon in scenic Belmar, New Jersey. It being summer, I was wearing only shorts and a t-shirt. I was comfortably luxuriating in that halfway place between sleep and wakefulness, until I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my calf. I woke to find that gooey bee-guts and stinger thingy pulsating its last bit of death-pus into my leg. Yuch!

Appropriately panicked, irritated, and grossed out, I managed to calm myself enough to pull the stinger from my calf. I didn’t give it much thought after that, but I did go inside to finish my siesta. Later in the evening I noticed some redness and a persistent annoying itch, but I saw no reason to panic. It being a summer evening at the Jersey shore, there were warm beers to drink and cold women to be spurned by.

Besides, there was plenty of time to panic the next morning. I woke up with one normal leg and one of Popeye’s legs. My calf was swollen to twice its normal size! The skin had taken on a lovely scarlet hue, nicely offset by the frecklage that was my best excuse for a summer tan. Funny thing was, aside from being freakishly large and red, there were no other symptoms. No itch, no pain, no nothing. So of course I didn’t go to the doctor. I figured that horse had left the barn. After about a week, the swelling and redness went away. I catalogued the experience as a warning to stay away from bees and take my naps indoors, the way that nature intended it to be.

With each year that passed I grew just a little more leery of stinging insects with wings. I had already been traumatized by a beetle (see The Wile E. Coyote School of Crisis Management) when just a lad. My two semi-disastrous interactions with the insect world magnified in my mind with the passage of time. As an adult I am six feet, one inch, two hundred and fifteen pounds of rompin’ stompin’ dynamite. But have a bee, a hornet, or god forbid a frigging wasp fly near me and I am immediately transformed into a squealing little girl. I'm told it isn’t very pleasant to witness.

One summer Saturday morning I am out in the yard, doing my Dad-yard thing. That means cutting and edging the grass, then trimming the rose bushes and other foliage. But the first and most important step is to pick up all of the dog poop. Discovering a hidden pile of used dog food with the wheels of the lawn mower is a specifically vile experience. At this time I had not one, but two seventy-plus pound greyhounds who roamed freely in said yard. For those of you uninitiated in the ways of dogdom, for each pound of dog over the course of a week you can reasonably expect one quarter pound of dog poop; at least that is the unscientific ratio that I came to with my two greyhounds. Suffice it to say that they shat a lot.

I hadn’t done a poop run in a few days, so I carefully scoured the yard for land mines. The cleanup method that I found most effective was first don a pair of disposable rubber gloves. Then I would double up two plastic grocery bags to serve as the literal shit sack. Being right handed, the shit sack was carried in my left hand. That left my right hand – protected by the rubber glove and another plastic grocery bag – free to do the poop picking. This disgusting procedure was my very own Twilight Zone version of an Easter egg hunt.

I have seen lots of people clean up after their dogs using just the plastic grocery bags – that is eschewing the rubber gloves. I always used the rubber gloves for one simple reason. My asshat of a father-in-law at the time used to visit way too often and stay way too long. Every time he saw me grab a few bags to take the dogs for a walk he would ask the same stupid question with the same stupid look on his face, “You find many holes in those bags?” Evidently he thought that the height of comedy would be me getting a fistful of crap because I was being a responsible dog owner. I wouldn’t have put it past the old douchebag to rip a few of the bags.
Hence the insurance of the gloves.

I had finished my pre-yard work poop patrol, and the literal sack of shit that I was carrying was probably about seven pounds. I tied the top of the shit receptacle grocery bags tightly, but was still wearing the rubber gloves. It was at this point that the biggest freaking wasp I had ever seen dive-bombed my head. This thing was straight out my worst nightmare. I swear it was so big it had a face! With teeth! It was wearing one of those oldey-timey horizontal striped sweaters and a battered derby cocked at a rakish angle, like the tough bugs in the old 1930’s cartoons. It was chomping on a cigar and it needed a shave, I am sure of it.

The noise it made as it passed my head was a little louder than a top-fuel dragster doing a pre-race burnout. I immediately pictured myself swollen to test the tensile strength of my skin from the thousands of stings this evil vespine would inflict upon me before I made it into the house. I was in full-blown panic mode. I was spinning around out of control and my head was whipping back and forth as I frantically tried to locate my attacker. I may have whimpered a little at this point, too. Muy macho, no?

At this point I heard the jackhammering roar of bug wings attacking my right ear. In a completely reflexive action, I swung around my left hand to swat at my airborne tormentor. That would be my left hand that was still holding the seven pound bag of dog shit. In my unreasonably agitated state I actually whopped myself broadside on my very own melon with a bag of poo. Lucky for me, the bags didn't rip. There is a special kind of relief that one experiences when one realizes that one has escaped having seven pounds of feces self-inflictedly spread across one’s own head. I fell into a fit of laughter at my own idiocy, and later made a mental note to write a letter of appreciation to the makers of the Stop N Shop plastic grocery bags.

This is my son’s favorite story that I tell about myself. I am not sure, but I think that the fact that I publicly admit to it makes him feel a little safer about himself. Surely he knows that he won’t do anything near this silly in his lifetime, and if he does he knows that it is perfectly acceptable to laugh at yourself. Just always remember to double bag.

The Iran nuke situation and small town thugs

2009-09-27T18:14:00.003-04:00

I just spent two hours watching the Sunday morning news shows. The majority of the conversation addressed the Iranian nuclear program. I was baffled yet again by the inability of my county to address these situations.

When I was a lad there was a kid in town who was the “bad kid.” What that meant in those days was that this kid was caught cutting school, drinking, smoking, and committing a few petty crimes, and that he got in to more fist fights than the rest of us. His reputation preceded him, and he used that fact to his advantage with stunning expertise. Think Keifer Sutherland in “Stand By Me.”

For instance, it was “common knowledge” that this guy carried a box cutter in his back pocket. In the 1960’s the box cutter was a weapon that inspired terror in the hearts of us nerds. Everyone had a friend of a friend of a cousin who knew someone that was put into the hospital for hundreds if not thousands of stitches because they had the temerity to stand up to this local tough.

In all the years that I knew the town’s resident hoodlum, I personally only witnessed him have one altercation. He got into a shouting match with an athletic guy that was older and bigger than he. The shouting escalated into shoving, then more jawboning and macho posturing. At this point the bad boy shouted, “I will cut you” and reached with his right hand to his back pocket. His opponent, who “knew” about the secreted box cutter, dropped his hands and took a half step backward. His eyes were glued to that right hand going for the box cutter. This would be the normal reaction of an unarmed man being accosted with a weapon.

As his opponent dropped his defense, the physically outmatched delinquent threw a roundhouse left that landed hard and square on his adversary’s jaw. The bigger man (he was the good guy, how can this be happening?!?) was rocked. He stepped back a little further and kept his guard down, still having no interest in tangling with a bad guy with a sharp blade.

The tough guy advanced a step and dramatically reached for his right rear pocket again. His bigger and stronger opponent kept his hands down and paid for repeating that strategy by taking another roundhouse left. He was so concerned about the box cutter that he was leaving himself wide open for just about anything else.

The cops pulled up at that point, and one of the bystanders shouted, “He’s got a knife in his back pocket!” Deputy Fife immediately searched the aggressor’s pockets, and announced to the terrified assembled citizenry that there were no weapons at all. I could actually see the light bulbs coming on over people’s heads as we realized how we had all been so completely bamboozled. For me, this was a lasting lesson in the strategy of the psyche out.

Saddam Hussein must have been somewhere in the crowd that day, taking notes. Because over twenty-five years later, even after getting his ass thoroughly whipped in the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein managed to hold the rest of the world at bay for another decade with his fictional weapons of mass destruction program. Everyone knew that Iraq had them, and it was just a matter of time before they used them.

Even after Bush the Younger had the US armed services comb through every last grain of sand in Iraq looking for WMD and come up empty, there are still plenty of people who believe that the late dictator somehow must have managed to hide his entire stash of military might in Syria or someplace else in the weeks before the second Iraq invasion. The depth of the belief in the bullshit is stronger than the evidence of the glaring reality. Part of the punch line for the late dictator is that the Unites States is made to look ridiculous for prosecuting a long and expensive war against a woefully inferior military opponent at great cost and for no identifiable gain.

Americans cannot digest the fact that in the twenty-first century the power of simple bullshit can still bring the strongest to their knees so easily. While I admit that Saddam Hussein being present for a New Jersey fistfight in the 1960’s is a product of my literary license; I know for a fact that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was watching Saddam buffalo the west for those last ten years of his life. And Ahmadinejad was definitely taking notes.

While the pundits still cannot even agree whether Iran has nuclear weapons capacity or ever will, Ahmadinejad reaches for his back pocket and thumbs his nose at the rest of the world. He can jerk the collective chains of the world superpowers on a whim with one simple news conference. And when he gets the world stage at a UN general assembly, he gets free rein to ratchet up the tension level to wherever he pleases. This behavior keeps Iran center stage in world events and a lot of the world’s population wary and confused. That power has got to make him look great to his people at home and do wonders for his ego. And Iran’s fictional nuclear weapons program is a lot cheaper than the actual programs of the US, Russia, France, India, et al, but so far pretty effective.

In spite of massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, Americans still cannot grasp the fact that bullshit does indeed succeed. At least up to a point. Just because someone says something that can be repeated in the public record, it doesn’t mean that what they say is true. Some very successful investment managers don’t invest your money; they scam people and steal money. Some supposed holy men cavort with male and female prostitutes while they preach about the evils of just such behavior. Some law enforcement professionals and officers of the court are really on the side of the bad guys.

Ahmadinejad is in charge of Iran, and he is going to do what he believes is in the best interest of Iran. A big part of his strategy seems to be to keep the Iranian people focused on hating the US in order to distract them from problems at home. He is good at it. The best way to deal with this grandstanding knucklehead is to make him financially irrelevant. The major economic power that Iran wields is their oil supply. The US needs to concentrate on becoming energy self-sufficient. Then the entire region will become the problem of whichever countries stay behind with combustion engine technology. Let the Chinese deal with them. I daresay they may be less patient.

Memory of Big Eddie

2009-09-25T11:20:00.004-04:00

My grandfather and grandmother – my father’s parents - lived in a simple three-room apartment behind a dry cleaner’s shop. Whenever my father would take me to visit his father, we would find him sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. He would look up from the paper, flash a broad, gap-toothed grin and deliver the same greeting that he gave to every single person who entered his domain, “Hey, look! It’s Shithead.” He called everyone “Shithead” because he could never remember anyone’s name. I guess he thought that calling people “whatsisname” would be offensive.

His blushing bride, my grandmother, had a really bad limp, one eye, and no teeth. She wasn’t like that when he married her. Bits went missing or wore out over the course of their long life together. I guess to him Nanny was like an old Monopoly game with the some of the tokens and a few houses and hotels lost long ago – not perfect, but still serviceable and just as much fun to play with.

Nanny had three brothers, all of whom were bald. Pop Pop spent hours on end trying to teach Petey, his pet parakeet, to say, “Hello, Baldie!” Petey never uttered a syllable as far as any of us can remember. I don’t even remember him even whistling or squawking. I think that bird was mute. He may have been retarded.

Pop Pop was a bricklayer. He was a big man, well over six feet tall and hardened by a lifetime of hard work in the elements. I was told by several of his friends that in his day, it was known all over town that my grandfather was not a man to be messed with. Our dentist, who grew up across the street from my grandfather, told the same story about Pop Pop saving him from a group of Neanderthals every time I went for a checkup.

Every day Pop Pop went to “woik.” The bathroom in their place was the “terlit.” I am not sure how far my grandfather went in school, but I know for a fact that his wife only made it to the sixth grade. She was the oldest of her siblings and was forced out of school to help put food on the family table. Whatever his education level, Pop Pop was a voracious reader. He particularly favored books on European history.

Typical of people of that generation, my grandfather could be a bit set in his ways. If someone crossed him, it would be near impossible to get back into his good graces. That aspect of his personality is the source of a family legend.

Like his bride, Pop Pop was the oldest of his siblings. There were seven kids in his family, first generation Irish-Americans. The youngest, Matthew, was a thorn in my grandfather’s side. Being the baby of the family, Matthew was an irresponsible ne’er-do-well and his big brother had to pull his butt out of the fire one too many times. We never knew what exact straw broke the camel’s back, but Pop Pop officially washed his hands of his youngest brother, and told him that he would never speak to him again.

Time marched on; several years passed and Pop Pop stayed true to his word. Even though they both drank every day in the same tavern, the two never spoke. One night great uncle Matthew showed up at the bar in his best (read only) suit. He was bolstering himself with generous helpings of liquid courage, because he was going to ask his best girl for her hand in marriage. He had just purchased a diamond engagement ring for the occasion, which he proudly showed to all his drinking buddies. Through all the commotion and bonhomie, his oldest brother sat quietly at the bar, his usual taciturn self.

As the night wore on Matthew got spectacularly snot-slinging drunk. Under advice from his bartender, the betrothal would definitely have to be delayed, at least until he could actually recoup the ability to speak clearly and properly genuflect without falling over. Matthew slurred his good nights to his fellow dipsomaniacs, and proceeded to stagger home.

Two of the shadier patrons at the shebeen that night saw an opportunity for a fast buck. They left immediately after the blotto would-be bridegroom with the intent of rolling him for his wallet and the ring that he was flashing around the bar. Unfortunately for them, Pop Pop figured what they were planning, and he followed them out.

When the muggers made their move Pop Pop was there to make his. He made quick work of them and they ran off battered and bleeding. Pop Pop then dragged his drunken and banged up little brother to his door, and made sure he was safely inside. It is a nice story, touching in a blue-collar, bruised knuckle sort of way. But for my family, the illustrative point about Pop Pop is that through the entire event, neither he or his brother said a word to the other.

Short Note on Long Nails

2009-09-17T13:12:00.008-04:00

I started this blog because I like to write, not to promote any of my personal agenda. I love animals, but don't have my dogs anymore. I know that nobody cares what cute thing my kids did, or what Dilbert-y crap I had to suffer at work. I love to cook, but I don't have any recipes to share here. My political views are far left of center and organized religion is not for me. However, there is something that needs to be said to all of womankind, so I am using my narrow-cast bully pulpit to spread the word. I shoulder this awesome responsibility becasue no other guy has gotten around to it yet. At least that I have seen.

Ladies, there are over three billion men on the planet. I can assure you with metaphyiscal certitude that there aren't more than ten of us who like long fingernails on a woman. And those ten guys are too frigging wierd, so none of the rest us talk to them. You will never hear a guy watching a Freddy Krueger movie say, "Man, I would love to get a tug-job from a paw like that!" It just isn't going to happen. Having pointy things near our junk just scares the crap out of us.

If your nails are so long that you are incapable of performing routine tasks then those talons need to be trimmed. That means if you must dial a phone with your knuckle, if you can't open a normal drawer or a car door, or if any movement from your fingers creates that clicking noise from your claws colliding, the man in your life is secretly thanking his upright-walking God every time you break a nail. You husband/fiance/boyfriend/dude-you-just-thought-was-worth-banging may make the appropriately sympathetic noises when you mangle your manicure, but inside his head he is leaping for joy, thinking that this may be the crucial event that gets you to regain your normal human hands.

Garish colors, silly designs, and heaven forbid jewelry-like adornments only make it worse. If there is some other part of your appearance that you feel is lacking and you think that you are pulling off some sort of mating-ritual diversion-tactic camouflage by sporting Wolverine claws at the far appendages, take my word for it - it isn't worth it. More than likely most men don't even notice the physical flaw that you are trying to de-emphasize. We aren't that observant.

The only person who really thinks that long, curving, feline-esque, corn-chip-looking nails have any value is your manicurist. And she's just taking your money, so her opinion is biased. If you are aren't a professional flamenco guitar player, there is no reason for your nails to reach any further than the ends of your fingers or so.

Oh, and if your are over the age of 9, neon colors on your hands or feet, no matter what the length of your nails, just looks silly too.

Only in New York

2009-09-15T12:01:00.003-04:00

I am a trader, and like most traders I harbor some really oddball, homemade superstitions. If I forget my watch it’s always a bad trading day. Some elevators in the building are up market indicators; the ones on the other side are down market indicators. A few days ago I found two dollars on the street. When I got to my office I pinned them on the wall next to my workspace. I figured that found money was lucky, and having a lucky thing on my desk may bring me more luck. Or something like that.

During a lull in the market the other day, I noticed those two bucks gently flapping in the breeze from the fan under my desk that cools off the computers. The days since I found them have been exceptionally good trading days. Of course that profit stems from my talent as financial prognosticator, not some arbitrary talisman. However, it started to gnaw at me a little that holding on to those two singles wasn’t karmically correct. I was struck with the arbitrary fixation that if I wanted to keep this good juju going, I had to give those two dollars to someone who needed it. I knew just the guy.

I live on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, in a nice apartment. One of my neighbors lives on the corner of 74th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, on the sidewalk next to the Apple Bank building. Yes, on the sidewalk.

This guy is a white male of indeterminate age. He has the long gray hair, the shaggy beard, and all the hygiene problems that you would expect from someone in his situation. He is missing more than a few teeth. He appears to have all of his worldly possessions in about fifteen plastic bags. He also has a large sheet of translucent plastic that he uses to cover those bags to further protect them from the elements during the day. At night he arranges the bags around him and the plastic over himself and the bags and creates a little polyethylene shelter for himself.

There are two things that differentiate this guy from the countless other homeless people I see in the city every day. First is he in never panhandling. He has no paper cup out for alms and no cardboard sign explaining his plight. Second, he is always reading. More often than not he is reading The Economist or the Wall Street Journal. The irony of a homeless guy continually poring over two of capitalism’s sacred texts is almost too good to be true. I instinctively knew that this is the guy who should have those two bucks that I found.

On my way home I found him sitting in his usual spot and reading The Economist. I leaned over and held out the two bills. “Here, Man. I found these and I figure you could use the money more than I,” I offered.

“Oh, no thank you,” he answered, “I don’t use money. I’ll just have to give it away to someone else, so if it is all the same to you I prefer not to take it. You can put it in a phone booth coin slot or something; a lot of homeless people look in there for loose change. That’s what I do with the money whenever anyone drops change near me while I am sitting here reading.”

Twenty-four hours later I am still shocked. In 2009, in the financial capital of the world, there is a guy who eschews the economic system. And he is an avid reader of the financial news.

The low, hanging, curve ball

2009-09-13T21:28:00.003-04:00

Trading rooms are notorious for several things. The most common things in order of priority are macho posturing, disgustingly filthy language, temper tantrums, and practical jokes. I am not a big fan of practical jokes; they usually seem too contrived for my tastes. But sometimes the stars and planets align to present an opportunity that just cannot be squandered.

At one stop in my career I worked in a trading room that was managed by an avid, nay rabid boater. He and a life-long friend partnered to buy what we uninformed landlubbers refer to as a big-ass boat. It was large enough to take eight or ten people all the way out to the continental shelf for deep water fishing trips lasting several days. There were all manner of license requirements and classes to be passed before either of these two newbie sea captains would even be allowed to think about moving this massive craft away from the dock.

As our fearless leader progressed through the training process, we scrones in the office were subjected to repeated and interminably detailed recaps of the various and sundry steps necessary in the licensing procedure to captain a twin engine power boat. None of us remotely cared, but he was the boss, so we listened. Because he had risen from our ranks we were allowed to bust his chops within reason, but we still were expected to express some interest in his seafaring stories.

The secretary for this trading room was a very unique woman. She was a buxom, young redhead who, by a factor of eleven, had the raunchiest vocabulary of us all. She took perverse pride in her ability to shock, but with an audience of traders and assistant traders she was playing to a calloused crowd. In that environment she simply upped her game. I try to keep these posts quasi-safe for work and my kids read them, so you will have to take my word for it.

El Jefe was a single guy who lived alone, so whenever he ordered any mail-order, boat-related material he had it delivered to the office. This way he was sure that somebody would always be available to sign for the packages. Clever idea, but it led to this tortuous episode for him.

One August Wednesday afternoon the big cheese was traveling on business. The market was slow, as it typically is in August. When our foul-mouthed secretary was distributing the mail there was boat video delivered for the boss. “Here’s another one of his queer boat videos,” she announced as she tossed a manila envelope on his desk. This isolated event struck me like lightning. We had an opportunity for a monumental prank. It was a moral imperative for us to switch out the video, and I knew just what we needed to put in its place.

I had my trading assistant carefully pry open the envelope that contained the precious boat video. It took her about ninety minutes, and she did a marvelous job. Next we had to fabricate duplicate labels for the no-doubt compelling Twin Engine Power Boat Handling. That was relatively easy with a basic word processing program on any one of the office PCs. The next, most important, step was on me. The video that was going to take the place of Twin Engine Power Boat Handling absolutely had to be gay pornography. This all stemmed from the fiery testarossa’s “another queer boat video” throwaway line. The chief and his marine partner were both manly, Hemmingway-esque, deep-sea fisherman. This stunt was the proverbial slam dunk.

At the video store I was flabbergasted by the variety of male homosexual pornography that was available. I was a neophyte in gay porn cinema. After careful deliberation I selected a tape that the box blurbs indicated had no plot. The selling point was that the entire footage was “action sequences.” If I hadn’t known better, I would have bet that this tape was made just for my special occasion.

I took the tape back to the office and my trading assistant and the secretary painstakingly peeled the labels from it and replaced them with our ersatz Boat video. Then they took the replacement package out to be re-shrink wrapped to complete the authenticity. We put the bogus video back into the original manila envelope and carefully resealed that. I put the real tape in my desk for safekeeping.

The victim was due to return to the office on Friday morning. I instructed our secretary to hold his delivery on her desk until then. She was to drop the package on the boss’s desk on Friday with her regular mail distribution. Everyone in the trading room was in on the prank, and all were giddy with anticipation.

On Friday when the mail was distributed, he ripped open the package with child-like abandon. All that painstaking re-packaging work was for naught. He didn’t take the time to notice. What he did was immediately call his boat partner and tell him, with great pride, that he had the new video in hand. They made plans to meet at his place that afternoon to study the new information. He was as excited about this stupid video as everyone else in the trading room, but for obviously different reasons. At quitting time we all wished each other a lovely weekend and raced out the door.

On Monday as we all rolled in, the boss had everyone transfixed with the story of what happened to him over the weekend. Things had worked out better than anyone could have expected. The company from which he had ordered the tape was in California. So after their initial shock they got the company on the telephone to register their complaint. The person who took their call, according to the boss, sounded like someone’s grandma. Under the circumstances he tried to use more genteel language to explain the problem, but the old broad wasn’t understanding his euphemisms. He finally lost it and screamed, “Look lady, I ordered a boat video and you sent me a tape of two guys fucking each other!”

While our victim was having his patience tested by the west coast senior citizen, his boat partner was on the phone with some ambulance-chasing lawyer friend trying to initiate a lawsuit for damages for the traumatizing ordeal they experienced. That comic escalation was bonus for us.

As the boss was recounting the story we howled with laughter. This jocularity only encouraged him to go into more detail. You could tell by his facial expressions that he was enjoying the limelight; he had us – his audience – in the palm of his hand. He was experiencing that rush of being the perfect raconteur. He got to what he believed to be the punch line of the story. His partner said, “I guess somewhere in Greenwich Village there’s a couple of disappointed gay guys watching a boat video.”

He then got to the one thing I was waiting for. “The thought even crossed my mind that you morons had switched the video,” he said. “We did,” I replied. His reaction was perfect. His face went blank, and I could have sworn that I heard the audible squeal of his mental brakes as he processed what I just said. I opened my desk drawer and handed him the original tape.

Without saying another word to us in the trading room, he walked over to his desk and picked up the phone. He called his boat partner and informed him that he needed to call of the legal dogs. There was not going to be any big payday from being inadvertently exposed to professional male genitalia. He scowled at me and said, “I’ll get you for this.”

His payoff was that he never lifted a finger for active practical joke revenge. Whenever anything bad happened to me after that episode, I immediately looked over my shoulder for him. However, when the market got slow and the company had layoffs, I was the first one to go. Rank has its priveleges.

No Father of the Year Award for me

2009-09-09T23:20:00.003-04:00

Eighteen months ago my son saved my life. We had just finished running together at the local track. I liked to run on the track because I am old, and the track was less abusive to my wretched feet and creaking knees. The track in our town was just far enough away from home that we needed to drive to the track to run. The goofiness of that is not lost on me. I do not remember any of what transpires in the next paragraph; I have been able to piece it together from various witness accounts.

We got into the car to go home and as I was pulling out of the parking lot, I keeled over and I went into major ventricular fibrillation. My son had the presence of mind to pull the emergency brake and get the EMTs on the cell phone. The EMTs responded quickly and put the zapper on me, and I came back. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital I flat lined twice and had to be juiced twice more. I was put into a drug induced coma for three days. Supposedly it was touch and go for those three days – last rites time and all that clobber. I pulled through with flying colors. After the implantation of my own personal defibrillator and a short convalescence, I was deemed fit to return to my normal life.

I now go the gym four times per week. I am stronger than I have been in thirty years. Most importantly, after this ordeal I have a special bond with my life-saving hero son. We both give each other the “if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be here” business on a regular basis. That special bond also means that I can post this story of his aversion to haircuts that developed when he was about two years old.

I took him for his first haircut. The barber put one of those plastic sweat death ponchos on me and my son sat on my lap. My boy was wrapped in his own protective layer of latex to keep the hair off him. His mother took a few candid snapshots. We kept a lock of his hair for posterity. My scion was the model of composure through the entire process and I considered it a roaring success.

The next few times he got his hair cut, his mother took him without me. After about three trips to the barber without the benefit of my imposing presence; she complained about how unruly his behavior was becoming during the tonsorial process. I attributed her concerns to her inferior parenting skills and a general propensity to overreact to everything. I would take him for his next haircut and get to the bottom of this silliness.

Near where we lived was one of those Supercuts places, and two doors down from that was a Chuck E. Cheese. I explained to my son that we would be going to get his hair cut on Saturday, and if his behavior was up to my usual high standards he would be rewarded with an afternoon at the rodent restaurant that he so loved. This was going to be a snap.

We got to the haircutters a little early. I primed my progeny repeatedly about how this thing would go down - a quick haircut and then it would be just us guys enjoying pizza and video games for the remainder of the day. He assured me that he understood the plan, and foresaw no difficulty in holding up his end of the deal.

I spoke to the haircutter in advance to hedge myself. I explained that the boy’s mother reported troubles in the previous haircuts. We decided that the old sitting on Dad’s lap approach from the first day would have the best chance of success. To increase our odds of victory I selected the one-length, number two buzz cut for my boy. The butch look would take the least time.

I donned my nylon reverse cape and my issue was similarly draped. I assumed the position in the barber seat, and he in my lap. Our technician went quickly to work, shaving the sides of his little melon from front to back in two quick swipes. Next came the center of his cranium, and a critical error in judgment. We were both lulled into complacency by his cooperation up to that point. Instead of buzzing from front to back, the hairdresser ran the shaver from back to front - very bad idea.

When the ball of hair fell over my son’s face, he freaked. I am still amazed by the absolute raw power of his panic. He was sitting in my lap, and it took all of my strength to keep him there. It was as if I had wrestled an adult porpoise out of the sea, and was trying to hold it in my lap. He thrashed. He howled. He flailed and he writhed. He wriggled, he wailed, and he squirmed. In spite of his best efforts to escape, I held fast. The haircutter was horrified. I was mortified.

Being swathed in a nylon body bib and wrestling a psychopathic two-year old, I had worked up a bit of a sweat. That flood of perspiration was a nice adherent for the loose hairs floating around from my progeny’s head, so now my arms, neck, and face were covered in a lovely layer of itchy kid fuzz. I was not a happy man.

My boy still had two strips of uncut hair running down the sides of his head. The hairdresser was ready to call it a day or call DYFS. “Finish the last two passes,” I growled, “I can’t leave here with him looking like that.” My sinister reaction almost brought her to tears, but at least she knew I meant business.

“Make sure you go from front to back,” I hissed. The boy had regained a minimal level of composure by this time. This poor, unfortunate, minimum wage employee had not bargained for this level of stress when she signed up at beautician school. She quickly made two haphazard zips in an attempt to salvage her work. I knew that I had pushed her to her limit, and my moral compass told me that it was time for us to go. I gave her a twenty dollar tip for a ten dollar haircut. That was to assuage both my guilt and my embarrassment.

I was absolutely seething when we walked out the door. My son had the temerity to embarrass me in public. Worse than that, his mother was right about his behavior at the barber’s. This combination of disappointment and agrivation was hard to swallow. The fruit of my loins, in contrast to my anger, was ready for pizza and playtime. In his two-year-old mind he had held up his end of the bargain, and it was fun time. His hair was cut, so his reward was in order.

That was when I lost it. I actually yelled this at a two-year-old in a public parking lot, “Are you freaking kidding me? You aren’t having any freaking pizza. Get in that goddamn car.” He looked at me like I was certifiably insane, but he was smart enough not to argue and got in the car.

When we got home I told him that his haircut wasn’t finished, and he was going to have to muster the self-control to sit there in his high chair and let me finish the job. I got out the "good scissors" and did my best to salvage his cranial disaster. It took another three hours for me to regain my composure, but I finally did. He wound up with an ersatz George Clooney (circa ER) Caesar-esque cut. For what its worth, I did apologize to him for my behavior in the parking lot. Evidently he didn't hold it against me, he had his chance to get even coming home from the jogging track.

Why I will likely never have another dog

2009-09-08T18:55:00.007-04:00

Following what they deemed to be a suitable mourning period after Oreo - the virtually immortal guinea pig - finally bit the dust, the kids started pestering me for a dog. Their now somewhat dopier but still asthmatic cousin, whose guinea pig had politely passed away about five years earlier, just got a standard schnauzer puppy. The kids took this as irrefutable proof that they were entitled to a dog, too.

I learned my lesson with the guinea pig. This was going to be my dog in very short order. There were going to have to be some rules this time. It was also going to be a very cold day in hell before I was going to plunk down $1500 for a puppy. There were several reasons for my stance. First of all I am notoriously cheap. Second, I really believe that it is immoral to pay a premium for one kind of dog when there were countless other kinds of dogs being put down for no good reason. Third, I didn’t have the time, the patience, or the inclination to be house breaking no puppy.

So I put it to my kids – “You most certainly may have a dog, but it is going to be a rescue dog. And it is going to be the rescue dog that I choose. I really and truly think that greyhounds are stunningly beautiful animals. So if you want a dog, you’re getting a greyhound or nothing”. Their reaction was predictable. “Ewwww, they are so skinny and gross!” After about one day they came around, which made me quite proud. Without me having to belabor the point, they understood that it was better to save a condemned animal than conspicuously consume a designer show dog. And most importantly to me we could morally lord it over my obnoxious sister-in-law and her $1500 schnauzer. She was just buying more status symbol stuff, we were saving canine lives. Nice schnauzer, Murderer.

I went online and found a greyhound rescue organization. They put me through their wringer, and I made all the appropriate noises in the interview process. I didn’t care whether it was a male or a female. I didn’t have a preference for color. I didn’t have any other animals in my house. I had a fenced in yard. Basically I was willing to take whichever of their inmates that most desperately needed a home. Because of my low standards I was deemed worthy of receiving a retired racer. I was going to be the proud new papa of Matilda- a black, evidently slow-as-molasses, two-year-old who, because of her insurmountable sloth, was thrown off the track at the first opportunity.

When we picked her up, Matilda ingratiated herself to my family by farting non-stop on the forty-five minute drive home. The stench was indescribable. Our eyes teared and our nostrils burned, but we all thought that it was as funny as hell. What they say is true: fart = funny.

Once Matilda was in her new home and had assumed her role of the family pet, I was frankly disappointed. Contrary to the beliefs of the uninitiated, greyhounds are notorious couch potatoes, and Matilda was the spud queen. On more than one occasion we remarked that Matilda was more like a cat than a dog. Make no mistake, she was a lovely dog – to look at. She just wasn’t effusive or excited or enthusiastic about anything. In the cosmic lottery of pets, I drew the canine equivalent of Oreo the guinea pig. The kids and I spent a lot of time wondering when she was going to do something.

I walked Matilda. Sometimes one or both of the kids would come with me, but I assumed the responsibility. There was dog waste to pick up, and I had a notion that the kids wouldn’t be as vigilant as I when it came to policing the poop. It was on these walks that I discovered an entirely new aspect of Matilda. Whenever we would meet up with another dog, Matilda would light up. Her entire personality would change. The ears would go back, her butt would drop down, and her tail would wag a mile a minute. She would whimper and moan. She seemed incapable of standing still; her little paws would be dancing and trembling with excitement. It finally dawned on me – she missed her kind.

There are dozens of dogs at the track. The family that was fostering Tilly had a few other greys and some Italian greyhounds, too. We thought Matilda was boring, but she must have thought the exact same thing of us. What she needed was a playmate. I already knew the drill, so I went online again in search of another canine orphan. A regular St. Francis, I am.

The place from where I got Matilda had since gone out of business. I easily found another. I explained my situation – I had a timid dog who I thought needed company. I again set the bar very low; I had no preferences regarding sex, color, or sensitivity to other animals. Their expert suggested that a male would be the best companion, sometimes two females won’t get along. It just so happened that they had just the dog for me. He was currently in a program where prison inmates teach the greyhounds basic obedience. When they finished, these dogs all had their CGC (canine good citizen) certificates and had mastered basic obedience. I set an appointment to take Matilda to meet her prospective new brother. This was going to be great!

On the appointed day at the appointed time I packed Tilly into the car and off we went. When we got to the kennel, a grizzled old broad of quite advanced years ambled out to me us. I immediately thought of Mammy Yokum. Except this one was puffing on a Marlboro instead of a corn cob pipe. My excitement began to wane.

After we exchanged pleasantries she told me to wait and scampered off to fetch my prospective new dog. The British have a phrase that perfectly sums up my reaction to the dog she brought out – I was gobsmacked. This dog was also black, like Matilda. He was eighty pounds of solid muscle. He looked like a Doberman on steroids. He was missing half of his tail. His legs and hindquarters were riddled with scars. The “whites” of his eyes were blood red. He was missing a few teeth. He was the scariest looking dog I had ever seen. When Satan goes to the dog track, this was the dog that he bets on. I was irrecoverably smitten.

I asked about his training with the prison inmates. I was told that he was taken out of the program before he could finish, there was no further explanation. I was allowed to believe that the dog had flunked out, but to me the evidence showed that whoever was training him was the real failure. I have no proof, but I believe that somebody had been beating the crap out of this miserable specimen. I had to have him. It was one of the best decisions that I ever made.

The instant bond that forged between Leo and I was one of the great relationships in my life. That dog loved me, and I loved him. Wherever I was, he needed to be. If he knew where I was and he couldn’t get to me, he would freak out until he got to be with me. He had to be crated when I cut the grass, if he was in the yard he would attack the lawn mower to protect me. If he was loose in the house he would work himself into a frenzy running back and forth to the windows so he could see me.

He never learned how to play like a normal dog. His idea of fun was to run full speed into his playmate. And then bite them. He didn’t bite to harm, it was that playful, slobbering grabbing that dogs do. Matilda never learned to enjoy that game. If she was in the yard when Leo was out, Leo needed to be muzzled. I, however, loved it. I loved everything that dopey dog did.

The greyhound people have a term for that one special animal. They call it a “heart dog.” Leo was my heart dog. I will never have another like him. Whatever hell he went through before we got together, I hope that the short time we had together made up for it. I am not too proud to admit that every day I miss that dog. He was one of the best friends that I ever had.

Best dog, ever. This was how he slept. I needn't say more.

Another reason that I am a dog person

2009-09-03T18:12:00.003-04:00

When my daughter was about six, she wanted to get a guinea pig. Her mother was dead set against it, but her mother was reflexively against anything that could be enjoyable. I was the fun parent, so of course I was willing to give it a shot. Her somewhat dopey, asthmatic cousin had one, and I had faith that my little girl was also old enough for the responsibility. Plus, it was a frigging guinea pig, how long can one of those possibly last?

The next week my little girl came home with an adorable black and white fur ball. She also had the whole kit: cage, dish, water bottle, and a little wooden house to go inside the cage for when a pig needs some privacy. The new addition to our home was cleverly dubbed “Oreo.” If you’ve never had one, here’s a tip. Guinea pigs don’t do much. At least ours didn’t do anything remarkable at all. Actually, there was one interesting thing.

Oreo went through several crates during her life. Not by gnawing at them like one would expect of a proper rodent, but by aggressively peeing on them. She must have loved the bouquet of her own urine, or had some version of guinea pig incontinence, because as soon as she was placed in a newly cleaned cage she soaked the sawdust. It is a matter of simple math that I never learned the cause of the voluminous levels of pee she put out. A guinea pig costs about $15, and a trip to the vet is at least $25 just to walk in the door. No brainer.

After about three months my daughter grew weary of husbandry and the attending responsibilities. That was about two months longer than I thought she would retain interest; so I was kind of proud of her. So now I had a guinea pig. I figured the thing wasn’t long for the world anyway, and when it wasn’t spraying wee every which way the little critter was actually kind of cute.

So six years later, we laid Oreo to her final rest. Six years! In the drawing for disposable pets my kid picks the rodent version of Methuselah. In those six years here is the sum total of what I learned about guinea pigs:

They make awful squealing noises, hence the “pig” part of the name.

Kids get bored of them real quickly.

Adults get bored of them even quicker.

If you don’t cut their claws on a regular basis, they start to look like one of those creepy Fu Manchu movie bad guys with the long twisty nails.

When you finally do get around to trimming their claws they really make a lot of that aforementioned squealing noise.

Some of them pee a lot.

Ass-kicking karma

2009-08-31T20:53:00.003-04:00

A few years ago I read an excellent book written by James E. Waller. It is called Becoming Evil. This work tries to explain how regular folks can commit horrifying atrocities in war time. It is not by any means an easy read; and I would only recommend it to those not easily nauseated.

One interesting point that stuck with me is that most people believe in some sense of justice. If someone is doing something really bad, we all know that they will surely get their comeuppance in due time. Conversely, if someone is suffering miserably, they must have done something to deserve it. It’s a kind of global base-line buy in of the concept of karma.

This is the story of how I come to believe that as long as I keep my nose clean, I have nothing to fear regarding retribution from the cosmos. If universal justice exists, I have this entire lifetime paid in advance.

When I got out of the service I returned to the parental nest. This act alone speaks volumes about the level of immaturity to which I held fast, but that is not the point. I was happy to be home, I had missed my friends, and I spent the first few weeks reconnecting with everyone that I could. All of these reunions took place in the various and sundry taverns of my home town. There was much beer and blackberry brandy consumed, and countless games of eight-ball. My parents started to take a dim view of my crashing in at 2:30 AM almost every night (the bars closed at 2:00).

I just finished an eight-hour marathon of alcohol consumption and revived camaraderie. I stumbled out of the bar with my surviving drinking buddy and started staggering homeward. I needed to walk three blocks west and another twenty blocks south to get home. I figured that stroll would give me some time to sober up just a little. To insure that I didn’t sober up too fast, the bartender was kind enough to let me purchase a long-neck bottle of beer for my long walk home.

I soon found myself one block east and two blocks north of my starting point, and my beer for the road was already done. I didn’t want to litter and there were no readily available trash receptacles. I gently tossed my empty over a stockade fence into someone’s yard as I staggered onward. It was about this time that I realized that I was going the wrong way.

What luck! There was a phone booth right there. I could have called a taxi to take me home, but I didn’t. Instead I decided to call the home of my high school girlfriend at 2:30 in the morning. Beside the obvious ones, there were several other reasons why this was a bad idea. First, the old flame had previously made it abundantly clear to me on several previous occasions that she could not have been less interested in me. Second, even when we were dating, her mother had detested me like a sickness. So instead of waking up her daughter like I asked, she took the opportunity to list the reasons why she thought the world would be a better place without me. Try as I may, there was no reasoning with that woman. She hung up on me.

I was crestfallen. As I hung up the pay phone I noticed a commotion up the block. It was 2:30 in the morning, what could possibly be going on now? I saw about eight guys running up toward me. They were yelling something but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I remember thinking, “Oooh, I am going to see some good stuff, these guys look pissed!”

The first of the group to arrive hit me harder than I have ever been hit before or since. He had a forty yard running start, and I was just standing there with my big drunken face hanging like a piñata. After he hit me, I hit the sidewalk. At this point his companions caught up with him and joined in the fun. I was punched and kicked mercilessly. When I covered my head they went for my ribs, when I covered my ribs they went after my head. A few had taken off their belts and were whipping me head to toe. This was a thoroughly unenjoyable experience.

I estimate that I took this ass-whooping of biblical proportion for about three minutes before the police showed up. Trust me, three minutes is a long time to take an ass-whooping of biblical proportions. My tormentors took the arrival of the gendarmes as a cue to take their leave. In a move that I would soon come to regret, I took the arrival of my rescuers as a cue to start talking shit.

The police on the scene decided that their time was better spent making sure that the bloody mess that was me wasn’t going to die there on the street. They are trained in that sort of crisis decision process. In my alcoholic, feeling-no-pain (yet) haze, I begged to differ. I was of the firm opinion that they should be pursuing some of those fellows whom they had just interrupted in the process of pulverizing me. Now that the threat was over, I felt the need to regain some of my manhood by spewing vitriol at the nearest target. Not a wise decision, yet again.

While the responding officers were assessing my physical state I escalated my harangue about their choice of action. Their level of concern for my well-being went down proportionally with my bombastic diatribe. I soon pushed them to the breaking point, and into the back of the squad car I went. Someone of higher rank back at the station was going to have to deal with me.

Any reasonable person would have taken the ride to the precinct as an opportunity to regain the sympathetic high ground and status of victim. I took the time to bray out even more similes and metaphors to describe my interpretation of their incompetence.

By the time I got to the station I was loaded for bear. Unfortunately for me the officer in charge had neither the time nor patience to put up with the likes of me. After ninety seconds of my nonsense I was relieved of my belt and shoelaces and given a room for the night. My quarters were somewhat cramped, and I could have done without the bars and the lack of private toilet facilities. But by this time I was exhausted, and any port in a storm... Also by this time it was 4:00 AM, so I decided to catch a few Z’s and regroup.

Here’s an interesting aside, I am not the only moron in this adventure. The fellow in the “room” across from mine wasn’t ready to turn in yet, so he decided to relate his story to me, whether I wanted to hear it or not. He had successfully pulled off an armed robbery of a liquor store and made his getaway - on the Number 10 bus! Before he got to his stop he decided to get rid of his handgun, so he discreetly pitched it out the window – onto the window of the police car that just happened to be next to his escape bus.

I was released the next morning with a stern warning about the foolhardiness of public drunkenness. I later found out from my drinking buddy who left the bar with me what crucial part of the puzzle I was missing. Evidently when I tossed my empty beer for the road over that fence, there was a group of young men on the other side who were sharing a “smoking experience.” They mistook my civic-minded effort to keep the streets litter free as provocation, and reacted accordingly. Because I suffered such a dire series of consequences for so slight an infraction, it is my opinion that I have pre-paid a hefty amount of karma points.

The Wile E. Coyote school of crisis management

2009-08-29T18:34:00.006-04:00

I mentioned before that the block on which I grew up was absolutely lousy with kids. Most of the parents were still young, too. I venture to guess they were in their late twenties or early thirties as a rule. People married and started their families much younger back in the 1950’s. This was also the era of black and white television with only three networks and another three independent channels in the greater New York area. Maybe that dearth of evening entertainment was a contributing factor to the population growth?

In the summer the networks showed reruns and the independents only ever showed old movies or baseball games. If the Yankees weren’t on (the Giants and Dodgers were gone and the Mets were still in the planning stage) some of the neighborhood dads would come down after dinner and relax on their stoops with a few cold cans of Schaefer or Rheingold beer and watch their progeny play stickball or tag or chase (an urban version of team hide and seek). The wives would join their breadwinners after they finished cleaning up the kitchens from dinner.

At the age of four I had a very cool red tricycle. On summer evenings when the older kids were playing in the street, I was thrilled to just ride that tricycle back and forth on the sidewalk. I was not yet allowed to go into the street unsupervised. If the parental units were not out on the stoop, my curfew was when the streetlights came on. But if Mom or Dad were out on the front steps, I was free to stay out as late as they deemed acceptable. This episode took place on one of the first late nights that I remember.

I don’t know to where Mom had ventured that night. It must have been a Girl Scout leaders’ event or a meeting of the Holy Name Society or the Trinity Alliance. Her absence meant that Dad was in charge.

Dad was a bricklayer. Although he was only 28 years old at the time, he was an old school sort of fellow. Like most men of his era, he held firm to the belief that his responsibility ended with the work day. He expected to come home after a hard day’s work, eat dinner, and then re-charge himself for the next day’s labor. On the infrequent occasions when the three of us were left in his care, he was likely to take the path of least resistance. On this summer evening that meant that he would sit on the steps drinking beer and smoking cigarettes while we kids entertained ourselves outside until our mother returned.

I was on my tricycle, tirelessly pedaling back and forth to my heart’s contentment. The streetlights came on, and there was no call for me to “go up” – the term we used for retiring home for the evening. I pedaled away and it grew darker. This was so cool; I had never been out this late before in my entire four years! Things were great when Dad was running the show.
Forty-eight years later I remember this as if it were yesterday. I stopped my tricycle in front of the neighbors’ house for just a second. I then heard a loud “ZZZZZZZZZTTT” and felt something very uncomfortable and very alive in my left ear. I immediately commenced screaming as if I was being hacked to pieces with a dull axe. Some sort of bug had flown directly into my ear, and he wasn’t leaving.

I leapt off my tricycle and ran up to my father, shrieking still. Dad had tippled quite a few Schaefers by this time. My caterwauling evidently made it difficult for him to understand the severity of the issue. What he was presented with was his youngest son screeching like a girl for no apparent reason. I also had the bad form to be performing this very unmanly act in front of some of the other neighborhood dads. That type of behavior very much flies in the face of the old school man regulations.

I was eventually able to get my father to understand the gravity of the situation. THERE WAS A FRIGGING BEETLE IN MY LEFT EAR! It was still alive, and surely within seconds it was going to eat its way into my brain and I was going to die a horrifying death if he didn’t do something about it right now.

Likely it was the all beer that he had consumed that clouded his judgment. Maybe the peer pressure of the other dads seeing his son acting so much like a like a little girl that got to him. Maybe Dad learned everything that he knew about crisis intervention from watching Bugs Bunny cartoons. Whatever the motivation, the course of action on which he decided was to bash me with a cupped hand on the right side of my head. I assume that he figured if he hit me hard enough he would cause a sufficient level of air pressure through my skull to blow that trespassing bug straight out of my ear.

Needless to say, the bug was still there. But I was so shocked by his choice of action that I stopped my effeminate squealing. The other dads had sprung to action by now. One of them whisked me up, held me with my left side to the ground, and shook me until the offending interloper fell out. I almost passed out from the relief.

At the time I had no idea how astronomically high the odds were for something like that to happen. I have never heard of it happening to anyone else. For the remainder of that summer I refused to leave the house unless I had cotton in both ears.

Why there is a special place in purgatory for me

2009-08-27T22:09:00.002-04:00

This is another true story. I am trying to flex the old writer muscles a little. This is my effort to put into words a typical “you had to be there” scenario. Feel free to comment. I can take it. Hell, after you read this you’ll agree that I deserve it.

In the early part of my career, just months after the infamous incident of the foaming footwear, I relocated from suburban New York (AKA New Jersey) to Chicago. This move was made at the behest of my employer. My company needed someone to act as their dedicated floor broker on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The person who previously held the position had struck out on his own - as had a series of intracompany legendary predecessors - for a very lucrative career in the “pit.”

This was a great opportunity. I volunteered on an impulse, thinking they would admire my moxie and select someone more qualified. It turned out the entire volunteer/candidate list was me. Everyone else knew how dreadfully underpaid the position was, and would have no part of it. I took the view that underpaid is a relative thing, and if they were going to give me what I considered a substantial raise and pay all the relocation expenses, who was I to say no. This was an opportunity to learn an entire new aspect of the business.

Off I went to the Second City. I quickly found a suitable apartment for myself, my soon-to-be first ex-wife, and our Irish Setter. The new digs were a duplex apartment in a brand new building and just a short commute (twenty minutes via mass transit – SWEET!) from my workplace. I was re-settled and ready to go in no time. I was quite stoked to be living in Chicago proper. I was advancing my station in the world, for sure. I was no longer a suburban rube. I was now a full-fledged city rube.

My new job was relatively simple. I stood in the same place for six hours and fifteen minutes every day. I had a clerk who stood in a booth about fifteen feet behind me, and she stayed on the phone with the home office. I relayed the bid and offer price of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ® futures to her via a series of hand signals. She relayed that information via a direct phone line to the home office trading desk. If there was any buying or selling to do for my company, the traders in New York would give my clerk the order, which she would then relay to me by hand signal. I would then turn to “the crowd” in the ring and execute the orders. I would then hand signal the filled order back to my clerk, and she would inform the home office. The whole process takes just seconds, and to the uninitiated it all looks very exciting. Think of Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy trading frozen concentrated orange juice in the movie Trading Places - or Tim Allen and Martin Short trading coffee in the beginning of Jungle 2 Jungle.

This was at the beginning of the stock index futures business, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange S&P pit was the hub of the action. There were other contracts in New York and Kansas City struggling for investor approval; but from Day One the CME was the place of choice for laying off equities risk. This was also at the start of one of the greatest bull markets in equities history. Because the S&P futures were a hot commodity, there was an unusually large level of transient human traffic in the futures pit.

Every day bought new faces to the ring. The price of a seat on the CME Index and Options Market division was about $25,000. Without going into my usual level of boring detail, just about anyone who could beg, borrow, or steal that $25k could buy a seat, put that seat up as collateral, and start trading. There were no prerequisites based on knowledge of the markets. To paraphrase the New York Lottery, all one needed was twenty-five grand and a dream. This was a free and open market in the truest sense of the concept.

The layout of the ring was a big octagon. There were three steps going up on the outside and then four steps going down on the inside. The people who stood on the top step were brokers; that is they were executing orders that came in from the telephones in the multitude of phone booths around the pit from all over the planet. Going down the steps to the center of the pit were the “locals” – individuals who only traded for their own accounts. These traders are also known as “scalpers” – their strategy is to make a lot of trades with small profits during the day.

There are many monumentally successful, multi-millionaire locals in the futures markets. The newcomers to the ring were all locals. They were intrepid mercenary sorts, there to make money for themselves and nothing else. A very important factor is that these new traders were all minimally capitalized. Their turnover rate was astronomical. In a fast moving market it is very easy to lose that $25,000 war chest. It can easily be done in a day, and a really stubborn or stupid sort can do it in minutes.

So the Catch-22 for these new floor traders was the fact that they were new. Errors in the pit can be devastatingly expensive. A bad “out trade” could cost six figures. To protect themselves against catastrophe most of the guys in the ring will trade with the people nearest them first. If that wasn’t possible, then you trade with people across the ring who you knew. If a person lasted a few months in the ring they established a level of credibility. Until that “pit cred” was earned, a newbie could find it very difficult to participate.

Because I was a dedicated broker working on a salary for only one company, if my only customer wasn’t busy, I just had to stand there and wait. I didn’t trade for myself or the company. I was just there to execute the company’s orders. Therefore I had a lot of time to just take up space and observe. From my post on the top step I had a good vantage point. There was a lot of drama going on before me. Fortunes were being made and lost every day.

On a normal business day there would be 150 slightly-to-grossly overweight men crammed into the pit. All of them yelling, screaming, and jostling each other to defend their little piece of real estate. That is a lot of body heat and expended breath and other gaseous emissions to have in one place. In spite of the best efforts of the air conditioning equipment it was always hot, humid, and smelly in the pit. No Gordon Gekko, glamorous, Brooks Brothers and braces world of high finance here. This was physical labor.

One midday, when the market was sort of quiet, I noticed there was another new guy in the ring. He was down in the bottom of the pit with the locals. This man’s appearance was absolutely striking. Just about everything about him was different than the crowd of fat, sweaty traders around him.

First of all he was thin – rail thin. He was skinny enough to have the top button on his shirt properly done and his tie was all the way up. He even had about three inches to spare in his neatly fastened collar. Most of the slobs around him couldn’t get that collar button done up with the help of an industrial winch - even if their children’s eyes depended on it. When he yelled out his bid his Adam’s apple ratcheted up and down viciously. Above the pencil neck he had a massive chin. Lantern-jawed doesn’t even come close to describing it. With that gigantic, prognathous protuberance he must have been spectacular at folding sheets and towels.

Above that anvil that would make Jay Leno seem like Mortimer Snerd were two wide, thick, liver-colored lips. I am talking Janice Dickinson after a bunch of grape ice pops. His nostrils were as wide as his freakish mouth; the nose proper was shaped like a velociraptor’s claw. His eyes were impossibly close-set and absurdly tiny. On either side of this comically nightmarish visage was a pair of flapping ears to put Prince Charles to shame.

The crowning glory was his hair. As if nature wasn’t already cruel enough to this poor sap, he had bright orange frizzy hair. His horseshoe mane had the look and texture of severely rusted steel wool. That’s right; he was sporting a very effective comb over. His remaining hair was so coarse that he was able to pull off a fairly convincing tonsorial trapdoor.

The market was quiet that day. This unmistakable new guy was trying to buy just one contract. One being the minimum tradable unit, it doesn’t garner a lot of attention or respect. In the pit it is not first come – first served. It is an "open market." The traders are free to transact with whomever they please, as long as sales take place on the best bid or offer available at the time. It was quiet, but the few trades that were happening were happening all around this new guy, and he just couldn’t participate. In order to have the chance to participate the rules stipulated that he had to keep actively bidding if he wanted to trade. His frustration grew rapidly and exponentially.

As his frustration grew his bidding became more frantic. Remember that this is in a hot, humid, sweaty, farty environment. The moisture and the frenetic pace of his bidding activity started to negatively affect his coif. I watched as the far-side seal broke, and his carefully constructed “Swept Ant’ny” began to unravel. The captivating thing about it was that the process was so slow. His comb over eventually opened to the point where it was standing straight up from the part, which gave him a semi-retarded, shark-like demeanor. By this time the entire pit, about 150 guys, had noticed his hair disaster and all were nothing short of enthralled. Nobody gave him even the slightest hint that his already startling appearance had devolved to comically selachian.

Eventually, somebody sold him his one measly lot. As he wrote up the trade, the entire ring exploded into spontaneous applause. He left the ring shortly thereafter, and never returned.

At the time I thought it was funny. After writing this, I understand what a complete bunch of perfect, smug, elitist douchebags we all were. The guy was having a hard enough time of it. Was it necessary to take his dignity, too?

This is going to leave a mark

2009-08-24T17:32:00.005-04:00

My life is a series of hard –learned lessons. Most of these lessons are painfully obvious beforehand to the rest of the world. Oh, I buy into some things without having to personally test the theories. Don’t shove your hand into a fire - I’ll take your word on that. Don’t press the sharp edge of a knife against your skin – gotcha. Yet for some strange reason, I have sometimes held tight to the doctrine of first-hand experience as the best teacher. By and large, the only person who has suffered any grievous bodily harm in the furtherence of my education has been me. One specific lesson that I taught myself is the following: It is very difficult to make impromptu changes to your destination when you are hurtling headlong through the air.

I learned that when I had a job one summer during high school. A friend of a friend knew someone who got me into what was a dream job for a horny teenage boy. I went to work at a large public swimming pool. The prospect of all of those girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day under normal circumstances, walking around in their bikinis for me to ogle, was almost too good to be true. I never even asked what I would be doing, I jumped on the offer. I was going to spend two and one half glorious months leering at chicks, man. AND I WAS GOING TO GET PAID FOR IT!

I was not certified by the Red Cross, and had all the aquadynamic properties of a cinder block, so I would not be sitting in the high seat wearing a whistle, cool shades, and white stuff on my nose. I was given a task more suitable to my narrow skill set. My naïve sexual fantasies were dashed about fifteen minutes into my first day. I was put to work in the snack bar. No buxom beauties were going to be dropping their tops, no matter how suavely I asked if they wanted fries with their burgers.

It wasn’t horrible. It was as hot as hell, but it wasn’t horrible. We worked in pairs at the counter, and there was a gigantic Polish immigrant woman working the grill and fryers in the back. Funny thing, hardly anyone ever salted their food. I couldn’t even come close to guessing the magnitude of sweat drops that made it from the end of my cute button nose into the burgers, dogs, and fries of the hungry customers. And Svetlana, or whatever her name was, would be soaked through her clothes and dripping worse than I ever was after about 10 minutes on that grill. For relief, we two up front were allowed to use the pool to cool off as often as we needed, as long as one stayed behind and there wasn’t anyone waiting for service.

It could have been a lot worse. I could have been stuck as an attendant in the men’s locker room. Twelve weeks in the heat and humidity looking at the pimply and/or hairy asses of my contemporaries and their fathers would have been too much for me to handle.

As the summer wore on, a congenial camaraderie developed among the work force. We were mostly high school kids, so of course there was a distinct hierarchy of the pool’s employees. At the top of the food chain were the lifeguards, then everybody else. We snack bar geeks weren’t as bad as the locker room attendants (male or female) but not as high as the girl who took the admission fees. Every day after the customers were gone, almost everyone would hang around for an hour or so and use the pool and the diving boards. The lifeguards would usually have a few of the groupies that they snagged that day hanging around at these après travail deals.

Those life guards were actually all very nice guys. They were all unbelievably strong swimmers, obviously. As an example, a lifeguard came into the snack bar and ordered a burger for his friend working the life guard station on the far side of the pool. When it was done, instead of walking the burger around the pool to deliver it to his buddy, he jumped into the eight foot water and swam it across the forty yards to the other side. He did that without getting the food wet! That was impressive, no matter how furiously jealous and completely inadequate it left me feeling at the time.

The pool itself was massive, and went from eighteen inches at the shallow end to fourteen feet where the one- and three-meter spring boards were. At the after work shindigs, those lovely young ladies who were smitten by the beefy charms of the lifeguards would usually just stand in the shallow end of the pool and watch their bronzed Adonises (Adonii?) cavort off the high dive. We lesser males just tried to stay out of the way.

Word of mouth began to spread among the female clientele about the after work swims. The lifeguards leveraged this newfound cache and became more selective about which young ladies were invited. The criterion they used was a complicated mathematical formula of breast size, hip-to-waist ratio, and perceived high level of moral turpitude. Once again, we lesser males just tried to stay out of the way, especially now that it was getting good.

Instead of meekly standing in the shallow end and politely applauding the diving exploits of the lifeguards, these more adventurous ladies were very proactive. There were chicken fights and dunkings and all manner of rowdy horseplay going on now. Another new twist was the pantsings. If a girl was staying out of the fun and standing in water that was thigh high or lower, one of the lifeguards would stealthily swim up behind her, underwater. At the appropriate moment he then would spring up and simultaneously pull down her bikini bottom. Remember, this was now the early 70’s, the last days of the sexual revolution and the halcyon time before sexual harassment was part of the popular lexicon. At the time this kind of thing was considered good fun. Once again, we lesser males just tried to stay out of the way.

At one after work swim I was particularly excited. I had developed a crush on Norma, the girl who worked the admission booth. Of course, she didn’t even know my name. She usually didn’t hang around for the after-hours swims, she had things like self-esteem and a life outside of the pool. But today, I was told, she was going to hang around a little. I was giddy with excitement.
I took up my usual position on the deck of the shallow end of the pool. The lifeguards and their dates du jour were cavorting in the pool around thirty yards away, in the four foot depth. I needed to be far enough away to be able to watch but not be creepy about it.

Just then I saw the opportunity of a lifetime. Wading into the shallow end of the pool, in her bikini, was Norma! The water was just above her knees, and she was moving slowly toward the deeper end, trying to acclimate herself to the temperature. In a fit of hormone-driven stupidity the like of which the world had never seen, I became a man of action! I was going to leave the ranks of the lesser males and pants the lovely Norma.

From where I was standing on the deck to the edge of the pool was about thirty feet. I took off at a full sprint, and launched myself into the air. I estimated that I would hit the water about ten feet behind Norma, my momentum would carry me to the exact place that I needed to be behind her, and I would breach the surface and pull down her bottom in one smooth move. This was going to be great!

I was in mid-flight when I realized that I was hurtling headlong into water about twenty inches deep. This endeavor, which was so fecund with sensuous possibility just seconds ago, was now fraught with peril. I had the presence of mind to arch my back to lessen the impact, but I still hit the water hard. When I hit the water my upper body snapped forward, and I soon hit the rough concrete bottom of the pool with my chest, nose, and chin. My forward momentum then caused me to drag along the bottom about a foot.

I broke the surface in perfect position to pants Norma. If it wasn’t for the blood spewing out of the gashes in my nose, lips, chin, and chest, I probably would have gone for it. As it happened, Norma turned around and regardedme with a sufficient level of horror for me to know that I had misplayed my hand. This evidently was not the opening gambit she expected from a prospective suitor. I slunk to the first aid station, and my permanent status in Norma's mind as the least of the lesser men.

Modern cinema and the wildlife of New Jersey

2009-08-20T17:47:00.006-04:00

The first time I took my youngest child to the movies it was almost a certifiable life –scarring catastrophe. I wanted to wait until the last minute before I brought him into the theater, because I knew that at the tender age of three his capacity to sit still and not disturb the other movie goers was severely limited. Also, his sister was sure to want to see the end of the movie, so I had to measure my available window of opportunity precisely. By my watch it was show time, so I picked up the boy and took his sister by the hand, and into the darkened theater we marched. As I opened the auditorium door, the coming attractions for Independence Day were on the big screen, specifically the scene where the Capital Building explodes.

Having no experience with modern cinema, my son could not differentiate between the real world and the mind-blowing special effects of Hollywood’s finest technicians. He deduced from the massive, fiery explosions at the far end of the room that dear old Dad was trying to bring him into a full-blown war zone. Even at the age of three, there was no dust gathering on my boy. He did what anyone of reasonable intelligence would do if someone tried to carry them into a fiery death. He freaked. He climbed from the comfort of the crook of my arm to the top of my head and he screamed bloody murder.

We made an abrupt about face to prevent the crowd from hearing his blood-curdling screams and from having some concerned citizen calling DYFS on me. In the lobby, his sister and I were eventually able to convince him that I wasn’t trying to kill him. He finally grasped the concept of the big television screen as we explained it to him, and after about ten minutes consented to going back into the theater. He did, however, insist on walking and not being carried. He wanted to be able to make a hasty retreat in case we really were bringing him into a war zone. Like I said before, there was no dust gathering on that boy.

In spite of that inauspicious start, we became semi-regulars at the movies on the weekends. It gave their mother a much needed break, and I could tolerate the kid fare that they always wanted to see. They would both get the kids’ special snack package – small drink, popcorn, small candy – and both were as happy as Larry. At least for the next two hours or so.

At the time we lived in Piscataway, New Jersey. Piscataway is world renowned for being the home of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Another claim to fame is being the home of Johnson Park Zoo. When I lived in scenic Piscataway, the residents of JPZ were the locally famous Monte the Bear, a pig (as far as I know with no name), a bunch of similarly anonymous deer, some chickens, and some ducks. The Johnson Park Zoo was also open year round. Marlon Perkins and Jack Hanna, eat your hearts out.

Try as they may, the fruit of my loins could never finish their servings of popcorn at the movies. The candy and the soda were always wolfed down, but the popcorn proved just too much of a challenge for them. After one late autumn cinema outing, when I was somewhat loathe to rush home (their mother is my second ex-wife, but we were still unhappily married at the time), I came up with a win/win idea. There are hungry deer in the Johnson Park Zoo. The kids have popcorn left over from the movie. The kids would love to feed the deer… Brilliant!

So off we went on a regular ritual to feed the hungry, penned-in, dopey deer. The foot traffic at the Johnson Park Zoo was exceptionally thin in the fall. The deer were proportionally hungry, and they rushed over to the fence shouldering each other out of the way to chow down on my kids’ unfinished movie snacks. The kids loved it, and I was out of the house, away from their harpy of a mother, for another blissful hour or so. A happy new family tradition was established.

The lesser inmates of the deer enclosure – the nameless chickens and ducks – soon learned that the deer were sloppy eaters and my kids were sloppy feeders, so there was easy pickins to be had off the ground when we showed up. We were usually the only three people in the zoo, so it was clear to the urbanized fauna when the dinner bell was ringing. Clever critters across the board.

One late autumn afternoon we were not the only ones in the zoo. There were two young couples, students at the State University of New Jersey from what I could glean from overhearing their conversations. These were four of northern New Jersey’s academic thickest. I knew this from the overpowering Jersey City Brooklyn-esque accents. Their conversation was redolent with “deeses” and “dohs” and “friggin’ disses” and the requisite “fuhgeddaboudits”. The hair on the females of the species was significantly teased-out and sprayed to its largest, and the manes of the males were appropriately gelled. All four were heavily perfumed, confirming my impromptu field species classification.

Because all the animals were clustered around my kids and me, the four geniuses were close to us. One of the females was particularly intrigued by a plump, white hen with particularly extravagant plumage (at least for New Jersey). Mademoiselle Bimbo marveled aloud to her companions, wondering what specific kind of chicken that could possibly be...

What I deemed to be her significant other in the group answered her decisively and derisively. He was quite confident in his expertise in husbandry. “Whatayou friggin’ stoopid?” He said. “It’s a angora chicken, like dem rabbits and dose goats. You can tell by the long white hair.”

Jody goes to school

2009-08-19T22:20:00.004-04:00

On the block on where I grew up, just the one block, there were eight two-family homes. That’s four on each side of the street. In these sixteen households there were at least twenty-seven kids that I can remember, and those kids were all spaced over a six year age span. Around the corner in either direction from ours - and on the blocks adjacent to those, and so on - the demographics were similar. You couldn’t swing the proverbial dead cat in my neighborhood without hitting a grade school kid. As you can guess, this was a proper Catholic neighborhood. All of the neighborhood kids were dutifully sent off by their parents to be indoctrinated and terrified by the good Sisters of Saint Joseph at Saint Andrew School.

I was at the tail end of the extended tribal age span. I was the baby of my family, the replacement unit to keep my mother busy while my older siblings went off to school. I do not know what event tramatized my beloved Mom in the four years between when my older brother went off to school and my turn rolled around, but she went some level of certifiably batshit.

There was nothing dangerous in her batshittery. She never dangled me off a balcony or anything overt like that. I think that she was just insatiably curious to see how far she could go with some genuinely original and whacky ideas for the time. The objective of this personal competition was to determine with what level of outrageousness she could send me out into the world of my peers; and still have me make my way back alive. For instance, I went through the entire year of kindergarten without ever wearing long pants to school.

She sent me to school every day wearing dress shorts, with suspenders! Yes, as recently as fifty years ago it was still possible to procure woolen dress shorts. Adding to my sartorial splendor were the happening white shirts with the little loops on the shoulders to hold the suspenders in place. Those shirts had dopey, rounded, Peter Pan collars that nobody else in the United States was wearing at the time. Some of the collars even had little loops of lacey shit on them! I also always wore a bow tie every day. Oh, and of course this ersatz 1930’s British schoolboy outfit required knee sox.

To protect my chubby little legs from the harsh New Jersey winter, I wore calf's leather leggings with all kinds of zippers and clasps on them. I had a matching coat, and a stupid hat with a frigging chin strap. The eighth grade girls who had to dress us kindergartners when it was time to go home used to avoid me like the plague. To those uninitiated in the intricacies of archaic methods of dress, getting me ready to walk the half-block home was particularly frustrating duty.

Let me remind you that this was in a blue collar neighborhood, in the early 1960’s. The most important thing in the world - that every kid knew instinctively from birth - was to blend into the crowd. Do anything, just don’t stand out. Mom had already saddled me with a girl’s nickname, now she sent me into the world every day in fabulous outfits that made me stand out like a sissified sore thumb. I can only assume that my father vetoed her idea to tape a sign to me reading, “Please kick the crap out of this kid.”

Wakes

2009-08-18T13:55:00.005-04:00

My family isn’t what would be conventionally called “close.” That is not a bad thing. We respect each other’s privacy, and as a rule we don’t offer unsolicited opinions on important things like our choices of significant others, or career moves, or other major life decisions. The laissez faire doctrine comes from my mother. She never wants to hear any of her kids complain about their spouses. Her logic is impressively sound. She says, “You’ll kiss and make up and all will be forgiven, but I’ll be left here holding a grudge that will eventually fester into full-blown hatred.”

It is actually quite difficult to get a solicited opinion when I really want one. The process usually requires a lot of alcohol be ingested and hours of circumlocution and evasion tactics. Then you get something completely useless like, “You have to do what makes YOU happy.” I have two ex-wives. After both divorces all my family said the same thing – they always knew that (version 1.0 or version 2.0) wasn’t the right one for me. I may have saved a lot of money and grief if someone would have piped up just a tad sooner.

We don’t gather often, but on the rare occasions when we do get together, it is always a good time. Nobody makes a scene, and everyone is pretty entertaining and very quick with a joke. It is quite likely that a conversation that got interrupted seven months previous will take up right where it left off. Compared to what I have seen in other families (I have two ex-wives), I definitely prefer what I have.

My godfather followed the family hands-off script. I spent some time with him when I was a kid. He was divorced and had six kids of his own. The gang of them were essentially Irish sextuplets (Irish twins, times three). There were little more than six years between the oldest and the youngest of them. When he had vacation custody, he would take them camping in the summer and I got to go along. The summers of my eighth and ninth years were the best in my life. Uncle Frank took the gaggle of us camping on his terms. If Uncle Frank was going to be alone in the woods for a week with seven kids ranging in age from 13 to 6, those kids were going to learn some skills to help him pass the time. We learned how to shoot guns, drink beer, smoke L&Ms, sleep late, and play pinochle.

As I hit my teens I saw less of my godfather. He got re-married and wound up estranged from his kids over it. I was busy and things just drifted apart. We were essentially out of contact for about 15 years. For some dopey holiday I invited my family over, and on a whim I decided to invite Uncle Frank and his wife. To my surprise they came, and we took up again right away. It was glorious.

At the time my two youngest kids were about 7 and 4. Uncle Frank was still estranged from his kids, and now any grandkids that there were. He took to my kids as surrogates. We visited a lot. We stayed in closer contact than I ever had with any of my relatives. Uncle Frank insisted on taking my kids to the circus, something he never did with his own kids. My father died before my two youngest kids were born, so they got a chance to have two grandpa figures for a while. It was touching to see this bad-ass ex-Marine enjoying the chance to grandparent a little.

As much as I enjoyed the Norman Rockwell moments watching my godfather with my kids, I enjoyed the times when he and I were the only ones around. Uncle Frank was a Korean War Marine Corps veteran, and had some of the raunchiest, filthiest, most violent, and funniest stories that I have ever heard. He was a storehouse of every politically incorrect joke ever written, and had loads of material ready to offend any special interest or ethnic group that you could imagine. He and his cronies had perpetrated some absolutely horrifying pranks on each other, when it came to getting a laugh there were no sacred cows. He told stories about my father and the hell the two of them used to raise. Essentially, he was a GREAT drinking buddy.

I was lucky enough to enjoy this rejuvenated relationship for about three years. Uncle Frank’s love of steak, Chivas Regal, and L&M cigarettes caught up with him and he suffered a massive fatal heart attack. I took it pretty hard, but I focused on the good times.

The wake was a two-day affair, somewhat subdued because Uncle Frank’s second wife was a proper church-going lady. She and her friends kept everyone in line. Uncle Frank liked that western-y art, particularly Paul Kane and Frederic Remington. So there was plenty of USMC paraphernalia and cowboys and Indian stuff around the funeral home. A particularly touching or cheesy (depending on your relationship with the deceased) affect was a small pewter version of Remington’s “End of the Trail” perched inside the coffin.

When the time came to leave the funeral home for the church, we all lined up to say our last goodbyes before they closed the box for good. The kneeler was removed from in front of the open casket, and everyone just sort of filed by with their hands folded, paused briefly, and returned to their seats. I was near the end of the line, me being the godson and all. When I got to the coffin I wanted to give my godfather a little kiss on the forehead, it was just something I felt the need to do.

I bent over, and must have leaned a little too hard against the casket. The head end rolled about six inches away from me. The wheels on the collapsible dolly- on which the box was perched - weren’t properly locked on that side. Nothing cataclysmic, but a sufficient jostle to make the little pewter “End of the Trail” statue fall off its perch and drop down beside the eternally resting Uncle Frank.

All these things happened within nanoseconds of each other. I thought, “Oh, shit.” I reached in to retrieve the little figurine and put it back in its proper place. As I reached in the whole apparatus rolled another foot or so. I also learned at that precise moment that caskets are pretty frigging deep, I couldn’t reach the toppled little Indian! I also realized that if I reached any further that I was in grave danger of toppling the whole bier that was holding my beloved Uncle Frank. And lastly, I realized that there was a room of horrified friends and relatives behind me that were sure that I was going to wreck the place. I could tell that by the collective gasp that I heard.

I did the only thing that I could do, given the situation. I turned to the assembled mourners and said, “If he was alive, he would think this is hysterical.” Even the new widow cracked a little smile.

Cue the theramin...

2009-08-17T12:39:00.004-04:00

I have a very good friend who is into all sorts of what I call woowoo shit. He puts a lot of stock in fortune-tellers, psychics, séances, astral projections, and past life regressions. As you can properly glean from my flippant “woowoo shit” reference, I am not a believer. But I do live by the credo, “Whatever floats your boat.” If it works for him and his missus, more power to them. I am, however, sometimes fascinated when he tells me about the various rituals that he and his wife perform in their efforts to reach out into other realms of consciousness.

The different things that they try have some common elements. There is usually some friend of a friend of a friend of his wife that comes over to their place on a Saturday night for some nice wine, cheese, pleasant conversation, and a bit of paranormal dabbling. I imagine that these itinerant spirit guides all craft their personal styles on some iteration of Stevie Nicks. Oceans of patchouli oil, leather and lace, big black floppy hats, macramé shawls, and such. I am told that they use a lot of crystals, mirrors, candles, tarot cards, rune stones, and amulets in these processes.

Usually it’s a bust, but once or twice he has tweaked my curiosity. When he told me about the past life regression party, I was intrigued. What got me hooked about this one was that there was no mandatory ritual equipment required. I didn’t have to find a white feather or make my own parchment or slaughter any defenseless animals. According to my friend, all it took to visit myself in history was the ability to concentrate. Here is the process as he explained it to me, and what happened when I tried it.

The first thing you have to do is find a nice, quiet place to relax. Then you imagine a tunnel. You then “enter” the tunnel, and when you come out the other side you will be in a past life! Piece of cake, but infinitely easier said than done. I filed these simple instructions away, and for the next six months or so I would try, to no avail, to get into my “tunnel.” I would get distracted and break my concentration every time. Dopey songs would pop into my head a lot. Grocery lists, chores, and weekend plans were always elbowing their way into my thoughts. Who was that kid in the second grade that puked orange juice all over my cousin’s back? I was beginning to think that the simplicity of the thing was what made it too hard for me to succeed. I know that made no sense, but it sounded pretty good if I said it fast enough.

One overcast autumn afternoon I decided to try it again. I was in bed with the shades drawn, flat on my back and very relaxed. The room was quiet, nobody else was home, and there was no neighborhood noise. I started to visualize my tunnel.

There it was - a granite block arch opening, about six feet tall and four feet wide, in the side of a steep hill. Some trees around the outside pleasantly shaded the entrance, and there was scattered greenery and some cast off leaves on the ground. As I got closer I could see that the inside walls of the tunnel were constructed of the same sturdy granite blocks that framed the opening. I come from a long line of bricklayers; this place was well up to code.

I stepped inside. The floor sloped downward, but not at a precipitous angle. As I went deeper into the tunnel it got darker, but the darkness wasn’t frightening. There was enough light from behind me for me to comfortably make my way. The floor eventually leveled off.

As the light from behind me faded, I saw a dim light ahead of me. There was just enough visibility from the glow ahead for me to proceed without stumbling. With every step the visibility improved. This was getting very cool. I was excited, but I controlled myself. I had never gotten this far in the process before, and the last thing I needed was for “Running Bear, loved Little White Dove…” or some other random to-do list to ruin it. I took my time, noticing the details of the walls, floor, and ceiling and made steady progress toward the exit.

When I reached the opening, I stepped out into a beautiful windswept snow-covered landscape. I could immediately sense that there was no other living thing anywhere around. I had this breathtaking place all to myself.

I was now holding a staff of some sort. It was as long as I am tall, about two inches in diameter, and it felt quite sturdy in my hand. I could not tell if it was wood or metal or bone. I was wearing thick boots and mittens made of dense gray fur, and some sort of a gray furry parka-type hood covering my head. My arms and legs were wrapped in pliant gray furs, fastened with some sort of knotted leather straps. Covering my shoulders, torso, and hips was a fur poncho that hung down to just above my knees.

What I remember most vividly was that there was nothing wrapped around my precious three-piece set. My thighs were wrapped in the fur, but my man tackle was hanging free under the furry poncho. I had no fuzzy little dreamscape underoos - nothing. It struck me as very strange indeed that in this cold, windy, snowy noplace my essentially unprotected junk was somehow magically still warm and toasty. Not even an occasional draft. This self-reflective musing about the climate of my crotch was sufficient to break the spell, and I was immediately back in my safe bedroom.

I think that the power of suggestion was sufficient to start me on a thought process that carried over into a dream as I began to doze off. But I have tried at least fifty more times to replicate the experience, and haven’t even come close again.

Public Speaking 101

2009-08-16T12:18:00.007-04:00

Believe it or not, I am not the only person in my social circle that does incredibly assinine things on a semi-regular basis. I have been lucky enough to witness to some mind- bogglingly boneheaded displays in my travels. This is the story of quite possibly the stupidest thing that I have ever seen anyone else do - and the best recovery from such a boneheaded move, too.

In the late 90’s I had the best job of my checkered career. I was a marketing shill in the energy business, specifically preaching the gospel of price risk management for my employer. The bottom line is that I got paid to travel (minimum business class) all over the world and give speeches at seminars and conferences. The conferences were usually held in the best hotels or the nicest resorts. Rough duty, but I endeavored to persevere.

This one gig was in Kuala Lumpur. Petronas, the Malaysian national oil company, sponsored a pretty important industry event every year that was well attended by a lot of prospective customers for my employer. I was placed on a first day panel addressing risk in the energy market. I was there to talk about managing price risk, there was a hedge fund guy there to talk about the potential benefits of assuming price risk, and the third guy was there to talk about cost-effective use of insurance products to manage physical risk of energy products in seaborne transport. Very stimulating material across the board – ZZZZZZZ.

The year is 1999. The Malaysian people had just gotten rid of their whacky dictator, and Petronas wants this energy conference to be a big success. There are a lot of multi-national oil companies that need to do their kowtows in KL, so this conference was booked solid. The Petronas Towers are now the tallest building in the world, and a great source of pride for the Malaysian people. The Towers are where the three-day conference will take place.

The auditorium at the Towers was state of the art. There was stadium seating for about 1500 people. It appeared that we were going to have a capacity crowd. The place had a great sound system. The stage was set up with a table for the three of us and a podium at stage right. Built into the podium was a monitor that showed our slides and the controls to scroll forward or back in the presentation. Behind us was a huge screen where our PP slides would be projected for the audience to see and follow along.

In 1999, most of the speakers at these industry conferences carried laptop computers and used PowerPoint to do their presentations. There were still a few holdovers that still did their presentations using transparencies and overhead projectors. The seaborne product insurance guy was one of those atavists. In spite of his technological retardation, he was actually a really nice guy. He was in his mid-60’s, balding, he still wore a tweed jacket in the frigging tortuous heat of KL, and most importantly he was some sort of Scandinavian. Me being the moron that I am, every time he opened his mouth all I heard was this guy –

“Bork bork bork”

Showtime! The hedge fund guy goes first, and his presentation is entertaining and informative. He is a charming speaker and he keeps the material simple enough for most to follow along, but not so dumbed-down that it bores the rest of us. I go next. Most of the audience knows that my whole routine is a thinly veiled sales pitch for my employer, but they politely follow along and I am not pelted with any rotten vegetation at any point in my spiel. That is my criteria for a roaring success.

The last guy is the insurance guy from the land of the midnight sun. There is an uncomfortable lull in the action as a rickety overhead projector is squeakily wheeled out to center stage and the speaker is fitted with a lavalier microphone on his sweaty, tweed lapel. He pops open his binder full of overhead slides and takes up an armload of transparencies for his talk. A hush falls over the crowd and he starts his presentation.

He is definitely speaking English, but with his thick accent and with my sophomoric sense of humor and self control, all I can still hear is “Bork bork bork.” Our presenter sing-songs on for about 5 minutes, but the next slide is evidently very important because he becomes very animated and agitated. The picture on the screen is nothing but flames. It looks like someone had taken a very nice close-up, well-detailed photograph of a just- struck match head. But that isn’t what we are viewing.

The picture on the screen is actually a VLCC (Very Large Cargo Carrier) – an oil supertanker – completely engulfed in flames! Those of us uninitiated in the science of cataclysmic conflagrations can’t even see where the boat ends and the flames begin. The speaker wants to make sure that everyone understands the horror of the image we see, but he has no pointer. So, still excitedly exclaiming, he marches to the back of the stage, where the screen is, reaches up his arm to explain where the boat is, and steps right off the five foot drop at the back of the stage!

The armload of slides flies up into the air into a beautiful multicolor plume. The lavalier microphone picks up his crashing and the resultant grunts and groans. It sounds exactly like Homer Simpson falling down the basement stairs! In a second I turn to my fellow speaker, we both have the same dumbstruck looks on our faces. I can tell we are both thinking, “Holy shit, did that really just happen?!?” After an uncomfortable pause of about 5 seconds, we both realize we should get up and do something to help. We rise simultaneously and I do not remember if it was he or I, but one of us let loose on little snort of laughter. That was sufficient for the dam to break. We both lost it.

Imagine the over-the-top, knee slapping antics of Sammy Davis, Jr. reacting to one of Frank Sinatra’s jokes. Multiply that by a factor of about eight. I could not control myself, so I actually bit down hard on my own tongue. It took what seemed like an eternity to traverse the short distance from our table to the chasm at the back of the stage. When we got there, the impromptu Scandinavian stuntman had managed to get to his feet, but his glasses were comically askew and his clothes were similarly disheveled.

Some of the backstage conference workers were already at the lower level helping him. They were gathering up the scattered slides and making sure that he wasn’t injured. Thankfully his ungainly unplanned stage dive left him unscathed. After a moment he walked over to the steps and came back onstage, to a polite smattering of applause. He took the now well-shuffled slides from one of the stagehands, turned to the audience, and politely explained, “You have to excuse me for a minute, I fell off the stage.” He actually said it like he thought nobody had noticed!

He then took another very uncomfortable minute to sort the slides into their proper order. When finished he turned to the incredulous audience and said, “Now then, let’s continue…” He then took up right where he previously left off and finished the presentation. The crowd gave him a very nice ovation when he finished.

This one is also 100% true

2009-08-13T13:03:00.002-04:00

I know that this will come as quite a shock, but I have not always been the suave, urbane sophisticate that I am today. In the beginning of my career in finance I was, frankly, a bit of a rube. How I wound up with a really good job for which I was totally unqualified is mildly entertaining fodder for a future post. What follows is the entirely true episode of my first misadventure in business casual dress.

I started my first Wall Street job in April of 1980. I was the most juniorest of three junior traders on a precious metals arbitrage desk. Our trading desk was set up with the senior trader (who was also the senior partner in the company) sitting at the head of what amounted to a long table. Along the sides of this long table sat the traders; three senior traders on his right and we three juniors on his left. As you would imagine, one’s distance from the head man indicated one’s value to the organization. I was in the last seat on his left.

The job of us juniors was to answer telephones on the direct lines from our customers and relay the customer’s price request to the head trader. He would in turn tell us what tprice to quote, and if the customer traded on our price we would shriek the details frantically back at the head trader. We would then write and time stamp a ticket with the details. It sounds simple but it was absolutely chaotic. One misspoken word or slow reaction could result in significant financial losses. The company took a dim view of losses of any kind.

Customer from overseas did not have direct telephone lines; the cost would have been prohibitive. Remember this was before the first breakup of AT&T. The foreign companies called in for prices on the telex. For the uninitiated, a telex was a primitive communication device one step above the telegraph. The telex system amounted to gigantic electronic typewriters linked together through the telephone system. There were five of these monstrosities lined up behind my works space. As the newbie, I was also in charge of the telexes. The pace of these deals was a little bit slower, so I had less chance of doing something stupid. I happily whizzed hither and yon on my rolling desk chair – the master of my eight foot long domain – typing prices, and screaming trades furiously, writing and stamping tickets like mad when the markets were busy.

This company for which I worked was a small private partnership. They were well-respected in the industry but unheard of by the rest of the planet. Our offices were near the Staten Island Ferry slip at the foot of Broadway in Manhattan. I commuted from Jersey via the PATH train into the World Trade Center and then hoofed it the eight blocks to the office.

The partners took good care of us worker bees. One of their more forward thinking ideas was the relaxation of the suit and tie dress code in the summer. In the “dress for success” early 80’s this was a huge perk. Being allowed to dress down offered savings in wardrobe money and a significant level of relief from the New York summer swelter. I scurried over to Sym’s (discount clothing for the educated consumer) and loaded up on nice chinos and short-sleeve dress shirts. In my sartorial splendor, I would have put the snappiest dresser at the Sears Appliance Department, or if I must say so myself – even Radio Shack, to shame. If I had a name tag and a pocket protector I would have smoked those punks! But the crowning jewel of my summer ensemble was the pair of tan canvas bucks that I got on sale.

Damn, I loved those shoes. They were as comfortable as they were stylish. They weren’t those girly-looking Capezio jazz shoes that were so popular at the time. They were a sturdy, manly, tan canvas walking shoe with a proper thick red rubber sole. For my twice-daily trek back and forth between South Ferry and the WTC they were perfect in almost every way.

The drawback to that fantastic footwear was work. While I was wheeling to and fro attending to my telex machines, I would occasionally run over my own feet with the wheels on my desk chair. The black scuff marks that developed on the heels and toes of my beloved tan canvas bucks completely ruined my carefully constructed mien of casual yet elegant professionalism. Believe it or not, I soon found the solution to my dilemma in the supermarket.

I found Kiwi ® Sneaker Shampoo! Back then, sneakers were made of canvas, and you had a choice of black or white, high top or low. My beloved bucks were canvas, ergo they must be suitable candidates for a possible rejuvenation thanks to the brilliant footwear scientists of faraway New Zealand. I snatched a bottle off the shelf and rushed home positively giddy with excitement. I was not to be disappointed.

The instructions were simple. Just rub the stains or scuff marks with the handy applicator conveniently attached to the top of the bottle, and voila! as good as new. Hell, in my humble opinion they looked better than new. I strutted back to work with a reckless abandon. Damn the black chair wheels, full speed ahead. I raced back and forth typing out prices and reporting trades with a renewed confidence that only a real quality pair of shoes can bring. Scuff marks were of no concern to me now. I must have gone through four bottles of that stuff during June and July.

In early August I left the office at the usual quitting time for my stroll up to the Trade Center and the PATH train home. That particular afternoon it was absolutely pissing down rain. I am talking torrents of biblical proportions. No worries for me, I had the foresight to bring my umbrella to work that day.

I got about two blocks from the office when I noticed that something was going horribly awry. My umbrella was doing its part to keep me mostly sheltered from the storm. Except for my feet. I glanced down because I heard a disturbing squishing sound with each step that I took. That’s when I saw the foam.

Not bubbles. Not a trickle of effervescence. Not a burble, murmur, or fizz. FOAM. My feet looked like they had been coated with shaving cream! Evidently two blocks of walking in the puddles and the rain had sufficiently activated two months worth of detergent that I had assiduously rubbed into the fabric of my shoes. The piston action of my wet foot in the soaked tan canvas buck acted like the agitator in a washing machine. With every step I took, torrents of thick white foam gushed from my foot.

I was two blocks from the office and six blocks from the Trade Center. I decided to press on homeward. I would walk two steps, bend over, wipe the billowing suds from my shoes hoping nobody would notice me, and repeat. It took quite a while, but I made it all the way to the plaza in front of the Trade Center on Church Street without hearing anyone mock me. I was almost home free, at least in my mind. That’s when I saw what had to be the role models for Melanie Griffith and Joan Cusack in Working Girl, and much worse, they saw me. I was frozen like the proverbial deer in the headlights, and to mix metaphors Tess and Cyn smelled blood in the water. “OMYGAWD! LOOKA DAT GUY’S FEET” they both screamed. They were so shocked I think they both swallowed their gum. I felt the eyes of the entire crowd on me and on my spume-ridden shoes. I was humiliated yet again, a victim of my own good intentions.

More of the set up

2009-08-12T11:50:00.001-04:00

A lot of this stuff that has happened to me is better appreciated in context. So for future reference, here is some context. I was born in 1957. I have two siblings who are 5 and 4 years older than I. They were getting ready to start their schooling (kids grew up faster back then) - and Mom was a housewife by trade - so I was the replacement unit to give her something to do all day.

Mom was the baby of her family, the youngest of six kids. She came from a typical Irish-American, blue-collar New Jersey working family. Her closest sibling in age was Muriel, who went by the nickname "Tootsie." Mom and Toots were veryveryclose. They lost their oldest brother in WWII. Their mother, who died before I was born, evidently went completely batshit crazy from the loss. I was to learn much later that tendancy toward batshit crazy, while generally entertaining, is an unfortunate genetic trait.

Toots and her brood lived aroung the corner from us. There were four kids over there to match the three at our house. Three of the four of them were almost exact matches in age (given or take a few months) to my siblings and me. That wild woman Toots had deviated from the script and cranked out an extra kid during my Mom's four year uterine hiatus. That extra kid was only a year older than I. Both of those cousins that were my age matches were girls. That will be important in a later post.

The very first attempt to make me into the subject of the scorn and ridicule of my peers was perpetrated by Toots (nee Muriel). About two years before I was born, Dinah Shore adopted a baby boy. His given name was John David, same as mine. Dinah being the good Tennesee cracker that she was decided that her son was going to have the nickname "Jody." Tootsie (nee Muriel) squirreled that little tidbit away and later convinced my mother that I should be called Jody, too. It would be cute, they thought. It's unique. It even has a little show business cache!

I am sure that Jody was a perfectly acceptable name for a boy anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line in the '50s. In Northern Jersey... not so much. In Jersey, it was a girl's name. It got a lot worse later, when this guy's television show debuted. Damn the luck, I was a dead ringer for him. I can still hear it as plain as day - "UNCLE BEEEEEL"

I swear every word is true

2009-08-11T09:16:00.000-04:00

When I was 17, I decided that I wanted a dog. Some guy that I knew had a dog, and this dog had puppies. On a whim I told him I would take one of the puppies. I didn't clear it in advance with either of my parents. I figured once they saw a cute little puppy they would cave.

It was February, bitter cold in Jersey. I went to pick up the new dog and almost shit myself when I saw it. It was the singularly ugliest puppy in the world. Its legs were about 10 inches long, but its body was only about 8 inches long. The little bit of fur that it had was orange and white, but mostly the pink speckly skin was showing through. It was just skin and bones, and the unfortunate creature smelled like an open grave. In spite of my horror, I took the thing home. It was so pathetic looking that it started to grow on me pretty quickly. I named him Fred. It seemed to fit.

I wrapped him in a towel and stuffed him inside my jacket, and brought the miserable wretch back to my parents' house. Remember it is February and bitter cold. My parents' house was a drafty old place with a heating system that was woefully inadequate. I thought they would cave if they saw a cute puppy, but they absolutely disintegrated when they saw Fred. He just stood there in the middle of the living room, shivering and stinking. Never underestimate the value of pathetic. They were hooked.

Because I was a 17-year old, self-absorbed, ne'er-do-well douchebag, in the weeks that followed I managed to get myself thrown out of out of not one but two different high schools and effectively torpedo any remote prospects that remained for my already limited future. Those stories will be addressed in separate posts. At the time, the only option that I had was to join the service, so I did. I took a GED and shipped out in about a week. I never gave Fred a second thought. My parents had grown attached to him, and I abdicated my responsibility with glee.

Jump forward two years. I am out of the service and head back to the parents' homestead to leach off them some more and take in my unemployment benefits and GI Bill college money. (My military career and what followed are also chock full of fodder for future posts.) My younger brothers and parents are pleased with my return, as is Fred the dog.

Fred had filled out really well. From the wobbly, reeking whelp that I left behind emerged an absolutely stunning beast. He looked like the best parts of a German Shepard dog with the coat and coloring of a Boxer. He had a massive barrel chest and a neck like a bull. His ears were long and straight. He had a tapered muzzle with beautiful teeth. He had a strong back, and his hind legs were thickly muscled. He was about 26 inches high at the shoulder, and was about 100 pounds of lean, canine beauty. He had a thunderous bark that would strike fear into the heart of any home invader. He was also as dumb as a bag of hammers.

My parents' house was on a corner lot, and the lot was not fenced. Along the side of the house, the long street side of the lot, ran a dead end street. There were some shade trees there, and my parents decided that it would be good for Fred to be outdoors, so they staked him out there on a 15 foot long chain. That gave him 30 feet to move around, which they deemed acceptable. He couldn't get to the sidewalk, so pedestrians were safe from him, and he was safe from any passers by. Win/win as the folks saw it. Fred seemed OK with it too. There was only one catch...

Catty corner from my parents house lived a young couple with an 8-year-old daughter. This little kid had a face only a mother could love, and a personality to match. Close-set eyes, a long and bony nose, pointy chin, bad teeth - she was the whole package. Picture Elvira Gulch in her youth. Because she was a loathsome child with no friends, she passed a lot of her time riding her bicycle up and down the street along the side of my parents' house. When she did this, it would drive Fred absolutely insane.

As the future Carolyn Wornoz would pass back and forth along the side street, Fred would dash from one end of his chain to the other, barking like crazy. He never figured out where the end of the chain was, and like the hapless dupe in the old Foghorn Leghorn cartoons he would damn near hang himself repeatedly until the little urchin got tired of torturing him. I was told this happened almost every day. Sometimes Fred would get taken in, but that was only if someone were home to save him from his tormentor. Perhaps all that chain yanking was what gave Fred that impressively massive neck and chest...

One afternoon soon after my return to the homestead, I took it upon myself to try to reason with the bane of Fred's miserable existance. I asked, quite politely, if she wouldn't mind riding her bike someplace else, because it was obviously disturbing the poor, dumb animal. I appealed to her 8-year-old sense of mercy and goodness. She told me to go fuck myself.

I was apoplectic. I started yammering about what a miserable little snot this kid was, and if there was a God in heaven someday that dog was going to break that chain, and she'd be sorry then because by the time that beautiful beast got through with her there wouldn't be anything left to save. She told me to go fuck myself again, and rode off home. I skulked back into the house, knowing that I had been publicly bested and completely owned by a hard-hearted little girl.

A few weeks later, I was in the living room reading the newspaper when it stated again. That evil little harpy was meandering back and forth and driving Fred nuts. I heard " Arf, arf, arf, yipe! Arf, arf, arf, yipe!" a few times, and then "Arf, arf" and the blood curdling scream of a little girl. The screaming grew, but the arfing stopped. This couldn't be good. I am not too proud to admit that I could have gotten there quicker.

My parents had never had Fred fixed. All that testosterone was probably another contributing factor to his impressive musculature. I am told that dogs that aren't fixed are more aggressive, too. When I got outside, the little creepy kid was still hysterical screaming, sitting on the roof of a parked car. She was safe, and physically unharmed. When Fred finally broke his chain, she was just far enough away to quickly jump off her bicycle and scramble to the safety of the car roof. If she was safe, why she was still wailing so horribly? That's when I saw Fred.

Her bicycle was laying on its side in the middle of the street. Fred had his front paws clumsily grabbing at the handlebars. The look on his face can only be described as orgiastic. He was fully aroused in all his male glory and pumping his hips to beat the band, making his best effort to breed the first 3-speed puppies with a banana seat. Turns out that he was in love with the bicycle the whole time.

This is the set up

2009-08-10T13:25:00.000-04:00

I don't know if anyone is going to find this or read this. It doesn't matter. I am going to use this blog to categorize a series of events, most assuredly in non-sequential order, that I think make good stories. I am doing this in the hope that anyone who does stumble across these posts finds will be entertained for a few minutes.

I am a baby-boomer. I remember things like fins on cars, beatniks, black-and-white with three networks being the only option for television, and the British invasion in rock and roll, all from first-hand experience. I remember when "made in Japan" was the absolute highest insult that one could assign to any product. Conversely "made in the USA" was the pinnacle of excellence. That's the innocent world into which I was brought.

Most people think that they have a book in them. I am definitely one of those people. However, I know my own limitations. I am far too lazy to sit down and craft a book. That takes levels of talent and dedication that I will never achieve in my wildest dreams. I will, instead, satisfy my need to agrandize myself here, in the anonimity of the web. This way if it sucks, I can deny the work.