Father and son spend six hours in the city of eight million stories
Hanging from the awning of a cramped clothes shop on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village is this black tee shirt with white block lettering across the chest: “New York Fuckin’ City.” It caught my eye and the closer we (Steve, my 17-year-old son and I) got to it the more I wanted to buy it. It sums up the city in a word. You won’t find a “Los Fuckin’ Angeles” tee shirt or a “Fort Worth Fuckin’ Dallas” tee shirt or a “Phila-fuckin’-delphia” tee, a “Washington Fuckin’ DC” tee or even a “Las Fuckin’ Vegas” or “New Fuckin’ Orleans” tee. And those last two towns are harsh, sleezy and slimy. What “fuckin” means to me in the sense of a metropolitan area is this: New York is the most emphatic city in the country. No doubt. It comes down hard on you. The natives talk loud, talk fast, emphatically, assertively, declaratively. They don’t much care what you happen to think. In other words, they’re fuckin’ edgy, opinionated people.
Then I thought, no, I can’t buy this shirt. First, I couldn’t wear to the mall, to the Y or to Barnes & Noble, or to mow my lawn. And then, what message am I sending my kids? I don’t particularly like them dropping the f-bomb in the house. Finally, I’m 54 years old — today — and a rebellious adolescent is still down deep somewhere, but the neighbors don’t need to know. Of course they’d shun me out of the ‘hood when I walked the dogs ‘round the block with a “New York Fuckin’ City” tee shirt on.
So we walked past the tee. We were searching for a CD store in the Village. If there was a vintage CD shop to be found anywhere, it had to be in the Village. But we had no luck and were wandering around aimlessly. At the NYU bookstore I asked a coed wearing NYU purple behind the cash register if she knew a CD store nearby. After a prolonged silence it seemed evident I was some old archeologist to her on an expedition irrelevant to her world. She was at a loss what to say. Steve was getting impatient with this expedition, I could tell. On East Fourth Street I ducked into Rivington Guitars, “NYC’s Best Little Guitar Store,” figuring if anyone knew where a CD store could be found, it would be musicians. This fellow Howie by the door shakes his head. “They’re all gone. Used to be two across the street, they closed.” That’s what I was afraid of. I have a four- or five-year-old street guide that lists CD stores on St. Mark’s like Mondo Kim’s and St. Mark’s Sounds. Gone. Then he says: “Wait. There’s Rainbow CDs over on First Avenue by Eighth Street. Go down Fourth to First Avenue, turn left, go four blocks and it’s across the street. Tell ‘em I sent you. They’re good guys.”
Rainbow Music 2002 Ltd. must be where all CDs go to die. A tiny, narrow slip of a shop, you can’t open the front door fully without hitting the first floor-to-ceiling tottering stack of random CDs. Rainbow is only 15-20 feet wide. Perhaps, what, ten thousand CDs could be inside. It’s impossible to guess. Along the sidewalls, which extend to the back 40 or 50 feet, piles of CDs climb until the top ones are jammed right beneath the ceiling. Four or five people were in the store and we had to turn sideways to slip past each other, like walking through a submarine. I’m knocking CD jewel cases to the floor, and that’s even after I took off my backpack. Steve seems mortified. This CD junkyard or graveyard is as far from his orderly world of iTunes as could be.
Rainbow Music, mess that it is, would seem to be under the ownership of a three-year-old, or a couple of college dorm mates. But no, Mel, the wizen, stooped proprietor, greets every customer coming through the door the same way: “Hi. Whatcha interested in? I got country along the side here. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash. Got blues in the back. You like blues? Jazz along that wall. You like jazz? Art Pepper? Got a lot of Art Pepper back there. You like African? Gotta lot rap, you probably don’t like rap,” he says to me. Actually, I like steel guitar players, I say. Got any? Mel looks at me blankly. Maybe in the back with the blues.
Mel cannot stop gabbing. Used to be 20 CD stores in the neighborhood, now it’s down to his and one other. He’s getting flooded with CDs coming in almost every day from Wall Street guys selling their CDs for a couple of bucks because they can’t afford their 5,000-square-foot homes. Mel played Wall Street since he was 12, 13, if I’m to believe him. Now stock prices are coming back to what they were when he started, Mel grins. But he’s doing all right, he says, has stock in food and pharmaceuticals. People still got to eat, got to take their meds in this recession. I ask him if he thinks the economy will ever be what it used to be. The economy will come back he says. But it will never be like it used to be. Of that he seems certain. “There are more than 80 stores closed around here,” he says. “Too many of ‘em were selling the same thing.”
“What do you do?” he asks me. “I’m a writer, a journalist,” I tell him while I’m down on my knees, craning my neck to read CDs on the floor. “Newspapers… Jesus,” Mel just about moans. “I remember when newspapers used to be cash cows. Can’t believe what’s happened to newspapers.”
Steve seems, no, it’s clear, he’s ready to bolt this cramped chaos of CDs where you could easily spend an afternoon trying to find titles, what with CDs upside down, sideward, on the floor, up to the ceiling, stacks blocking other stacks, stuff in boxes. The whole place seems a house of CD cards ready to collapse. As we check out, you hardly see Mel ringing up the sale. He’s hidden behind a wall of CDs on the counter. There’s but a small opening to see his head and hear his constant patter. Behind me a young man and woman speaking German try out CDs on an old boom box. I’m blocking the front door from people who want to come in. “That guy, he’s a good customer of mine. Comes all the time,” says Mel. But they open the door and see us jammed by the cash register, like elevator doors opening and finding no place to slide in. “Pretty soon it will start getting busy,” Mel says. Friday night. After the workweek guys like to go out drinking, and once suitably buzzed, they come into the Rainbow for impulse buys. “I’m open seven days a week, twelve to ten on Sunday and Tuesdays, twelve to eleven Wednesday and Thursday, twelve to nine on Monday” Mel tells me. “Friday and Saturday it’s twelve to twelve.”
OK, NYC is obviously so vast I have no idea where we are when we step outside Rainbow Music. The cabbies are your guides, unless you’re a city regular or can decipher the subway numbering and lettering system and navigate the maze of tunnels, stairs and turnstiles. We are somewhere down in the Village, in a neighborhood I haven’t been to before. But all one needs to get around the Big City is a destination. We hop in a cab, say, “Pennsylvania Station,” and we’re off, watching the small TV monitor with grainy newscasters and rolling headline text. With luck we’ll catch the 5:39 p.m. to Philadelphia. These screens are embedded in the back of the cab’s front seat. It’s been years since I took a cab in New York, and they weren’t wired like this. I rely on Steve to push the touch-screen buttons and read about Tiger Woods muddling through the second round of the Masters. Simultaneously, video shows a lost whale somehow turned around in the Hudson River and making its way back to the ocean.
Earlier in the day, after a tour of Madison Square Garden and a peek inside the Knicks and Rangers’ locker rooms and standing cramped in a super suite with other tourists, mostly foreigners, watching — the last thing I expected — the grand finale of the Ringling Brothers Good Friday matinee performance complete with the train of 16 elephants trundling out the tunnel along with the tumbling clowns and acrobats and trapeze artists, the elephants coming to a lumbering halt with each raising a front leg and placing it on the back of the elephant in front, after the loud crescendo of the live band and the ringmaster concluding, “Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you, thank you very much,” Steve and I got in cab to find a spot to eat lunch. “Steve,” I said, “there are few things weirder than seeing 16 elephants in a room, I don’t care how big the room is. Elephants aren’t meant to be indoors.” Sure enough, protesters outside the Garden hold posters claiming the circus kills baby elephants. “Wait a minute,” a mother tells her young daughter, “I want to ask a question,” she says, pointing to a protester.
A foreign cabbie, perhaps from Eastern Europe, looks at me blankly when I ask if he knows where The Mean Fiddler sports bar is on the Upper East Side. OK, how about Mickey Mantle’s sports bar? I might as well been chewing a huge wad of bubble gum my mouth. He can’t make sense of me. How can anyone drive a cab in New York and not know Mickey Mantle? OK, just drop us at 57th and Madison and we’ll wing it. I had written the address of The Mean Fiddler and Mantle’s and other spots to hit from Internet searches I had Googled this morning before we took the 10:37 a.m. Acela up from Philadelphia, but damn, the paper slipped out my back pocket somewhere.
We wandered 57th Street heading west not knowing what we were after, and came upon Shelley’s Tradizionale Ristorante di Pesce; it seemed as suitable as anything. Steve took a look around and asked, “Isn’t this a little fancy for us?” The maître d was dress in an impeccable suit and crisp tie, hair greased, the tables were draped with thick white linens, ten-foot mirrors lined the walls, chandeliers hung from the high ceiling, but what the hell, they had hamburgers on the menu. At the table to our right two overweight young women talked about Florida, Palm Beach, the former FedEx chairman who has a plane and a hanger on his property somewhere, just like John Travolta, one of the woman said. Yeah Steve, we are a bit out of our depth here. Two tables to our right slouched a thin, red-haired, middle-aged woman by herself, who kept eyeing her Blackberry for messages at least several times every minute.
We have better luck with a knowledgeable cabbie who drove us from uptown to NYU. Konte from Mali. Came to New York to live with an uncle after graduating from high school. He is two semesters away from getting his degree in finance and investment from Baruch College. He absolutely hates driving a cab, which he’s been doing for four months. “Too risky, too much risk,” he says. He starts in on his arch nemesis, the bus driver. “This I don’t understand. The buses, they go where they want. They block me. They go across lanes. A bus runs a red light, the police do nothing. I run a red light, I get a $350 ticket. I stay away from the buses. Too big. Once a bus smashed my window.”
Today Konte’s been driving since three in the morning. It’s now past three in the afternoon. Yesterday a passenger puked in his backseat. Couple of days ago he got tricked into pulling over to pick up a young girl in front of a restaurant at night. He stopped his cab, the girl disappeared, and four very, very large men squeezed in. “Any one of them could’ve eaten me. Eaten me,” Konte says. They want to go to Brooklyn. Konte says he is not moving, not taking them anywhere. “But you have to, it’s the law,” they say. “I will call the police,” says Konte. “See, over there, the police. Get out. Get out of my cab now.”
I knock on the Plexiglas panels that shield Konte from the rear and right side passenger seat. “Don’t these protect you?” He laughs. “These, these mean nothing to some of the bad people I pick up. Sometimes I drop them off in places I don’t even want to wait to get the fare. I just want to get out of there. Too much risk. This job, too risky.” Not long ago Konte picked up two young women, so gorgeous that if he met them on the street, he said he’d be too embarrassed to talk to them. The beautiful girls wanted to go to Brooklyn. “I don’t know Brooklyn well,” says Konte. “That’s all right, we’ll guide you,” say the girls. They get to where they want in Brooklyn, a $40 fare plus tolls. The girls open the doors and dash down the street. Konte wants to run after them, grab their purses and get his fare. But he remembers what his uncle told him. Do something like that and the girls will say you were trying to rob them. The media, the police, who do you think they will believe? Konte tells a story of a cabbie who took a man and four girls to the Staten Island Ferry. The girls skipped out, too, running away. The guy, who maybe picked the girls up in a bar, ran after them to get his fare money. The cabbie ran after the guy, thinking he was the one who should pay. They got into a fistfight. Two months later, the guy, the customer, is still in a coma. The cabbie, he lost his job.
“What about your good customers?” I ask Konte. “What are they like?” Ah, the rest of the story. “Ninety percent of my customers are good people,” says Konte. “They ask about my life, tell me about their life, they encourage me to keep studying. They talk. Only ten percent are bad people. This is a good country. People can be nice, very nice.”
Before Konte drops us off by Washington Square he mentions a shooting that happened a few blocks away a few weeks ago. “You know, everybody in this town has a story,” I say to Steve after we get out of Konte’s cab. “Yeah, even if you don’t want to hear it,” Steve says.
Steve and I make our way across Washington Square, buzzing with students and neighbors on this cloudy, mild early April day, a day to be outside. The cherry blossoms are a wild riot of white, along with the striking yellow Forsythia. Bare trees are just starting to show a tinge of light green. “I don’t think I’d want to go to a city school,” says Steve. “You can’t get away. It’s not relaxing.” No, you don’t come to New York to unwind. “I know one thing,” I say. “My idea of four years at a college is not sitting around talking about who got shot a couple of blocks away.” New York Fuckin’ City indeed.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
No more papers
It’s been two to three weeks now without a paper waiting in the driveway in the morning darkness. I can’t remember a time without the daily paper, the “Inky,” the Philadelphia Inquirer. Before home delivery out here in the ‘burbs, I used to pick up an Inky every day at 30th Street Station when we lived in the city. We’re talking a daily fix for a quarter century, at least.
But what with the recession and a substantial decrease in my salary, the family accountant, my wife Suze, red-lined the $136 twice-a-year payment for the Inky. I agreed without much thought. The Inky has been backsliding for years with less original and shallower reporting. Just yesterday it filed for bankruptcy. Also, the news is so relentlessly downbeat you need some distance from it. “The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” “Millions forced from their homes.” Consumer spending down. Food spending, housing prices, the Dow, corporate earnings, all down, down, down. “The U.S. Federal Reserve said this week that the recession could last five years.” “A healthcare crisis and the planet on the brink of incineration.” This recession is absolutely accelerating the great migration from print; it certainly forced the issue in our household. Gone, too, are magazine subscriptions, one by one as they expire. Lost to attrition in the last few years have been The New Yorker, American Cinematographer, The Oxford American, The Progressive, The Sun, Newsweek, ESPN, Adbusters, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, and surely others I can’t recall.
Gone also are the days, just about every day, when I’d get a turkey or tuna sandwich at the Valley Forge Deli and with it two or three papers, usually The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Philadelphia Daily News (aka the Daily Nuisance). Last time Sean at the deli rang up The Wall Street Journal it was $2.25. Even he did an exaggerated double-take. “$2.25? Is that right? Is that what it’s up to now? You know, we only make two or three cents per paper. The papers aren’t a good business. They’re dying.”
Join the funeral procession, Sean. It’s a long line mourning the passing of papers, and to a lesser extent, at least so far, magazines. I didn’t imagine it coming to this, myself and thousands of other journalists. But I’m referring here to giving up my addiction to print. I’ve been a newspaper and magazine junkie my entire adult life. Newsstands, the old school wooden sheds and narrow stores crammed with cigars, water bottles, post cards, lottery ticket signs and the kind of quirky, in-depth variety of papers and magazines usually only found on big city street corners or in college campus towns, always have been one of my guilty pleasures. That’s where, if you’re fortunate, you’d find The Times of London, London’s Guardian and Observer, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mirror, the Financial Times, the weekly Variety, and expensive and often short-lived dazzling niche mags like Beach Culture (long gone) for surfers and Doubletake (long gone) for photography and essays and 4c — color, couture, curiosity, culture (which I’ve only come across in southern California). And maybe, if the racks are long and deep enough, there will be a section for small personal “zines” like Survivalism by an Iraqi vet, Four-Hundred Word, a square little digest of short non-fiction, Reality Ranch, “a forum for humor writing,” and Sufism, the issue I bought containing a letter from the editor titled, “Intention and Expectation in Pursuing a Mystical Path.”
I bought all those zines at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, which takes up an entire city block and bills itself as the world’s largest independent bookstore. I can’t tell you most hotels I stayed at or the restaurants I ate at when on the road for business or vacations, but I clearly can picture favorite newsstands in Santa Monica, Princeton, Boulder, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Toronto, Manhattan, Newark, Delaware and Penn’s campus in Philadelphia. At any airport I’d search out the nearest newsstand before coffee or checking my flight. Always purchase the local paper. Far preferable to the free, homogenized, sanitized USA Today lying in the hotel hallway in the morning. Give me local color, local columnists, classic Herb Caen, god rest his soul, in the San Francisco Chronicle and Steve Lopez in the LA Times to name two, local heroes and villains, high school sports scores, the Chicago Trib and Sun-Time’s sports pages, the Dallas Morning-Herald’s sports, the Boston Globe’s sports, exotic LA Times coverage of Malibu brush fires and show biz, The Washington Post’s political reporting, even the crap, bland papers in Vegas, Orlando and Miami. Always good for passing time in trains, planes and nights propped up on pillows in hotel rooms.
Now magazines and newspapers fall under the miscellaneous category in our suddenly scrutinized family budget, a surely bloated monthly number ripe for spending cuts. And so it’s time for print withdrawal. Surrendering the print habit is somewhat disorienting at first (Sunday mornings with time on your hands is a test), but actually easier than I would’ve thought. Which has to be another nail in the coffin of “old media” publishing, because if a dedicated addict who mainlined black ink like me can give it up almost overnight, I can’t see who wouldn’t be able to.
It’s the alternate universe of the Internet that allows the transition from print to be as painless as I’ve found it. Of course there would be no transition from print if not for the Internet’s endless offerings. I’ve simply bookmarked many of the aforementioned newspapers and magazines and click on them for a quick look-see at the end my day in front of the computer. I know more about what’s going on in the Swat Valley in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province than in my own backyard now. I’m too lazy, or my eyes are too strained by five o’clock, to look up the local papers’ web sites. And I’m not all that concerned about sewer expansion plans, another accident on Route 422, a bomb threat at a middle school or a small-time meth ring.
No doubt dropping the morning Inky has made me a less informed citizen. I have more knowledge of the fortunes of the British Premier League football team Everton than my son Steve’s Methacton High basketball conference standing. I know more about California’s budget crisis than Philadephia’s. I can delve into more detail describing to you why the Tennessee Vols’ new football coach is pissing off every Southeast Conference opponent in recruiting wars than what the Phillies manager is saying about spring training and the upcoming season. And I have no idea what times movies start at the mult-plex five minutes from my front door. Suze tells me the Oscars are on tonight. I had an inkling but that’s all. Suze listens to NPR all day and then gets 22 minutes of news read to her by Katie Couric at 6:30 in the evening. I can listen to music but not NPR speak while I work, and I can’t stomach all the drug ads that break up Katie’s teleprompter recitation.
I’ve retreated from print, but not paper. Due to the strain and uneasy ergonomics of reading more than a hundred words on the screen, I waste good timber and run through ink cartridges printing out articles to read later in the evening on a couch. The “Net enables me to come up with my own custom newspaper each day, lets me be the editor and select or censor stories. I read what I want to read. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.
But what with the recession and a substantial decrease in my salary, the family accountant, my wife Suze, red-lined the $136 twice-a-year payment for the Inky. I agreed without much thought. The Inky has been backsliding for years with less original and shallower reporting. Just yesterday it filed for bankruptcy. Also, the news is so relentlessly downbeat you need some distance from it. “The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” “Millions forced from their homes.” Consumer spending down. Food spending, housing prices, the Dow, corporate earnings, all down, down, down. “The U.S. Federal Reserve said this week that the recession could last five years.” “A healthcare crisis and the planet on the brink of incineration.” This recession is absolutely accelerating the great migration from print; it certainly forced the issue in our household. Gone, too, are magazine subscriptions, one by one as they expire. Lost to attrition in the last few years have been The New Yorker, American Cinematographer, The Oxford American, The Progressive, The Sun, Newsweek, ESPN, Adbusters, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, and surely others I can’t recall.
Gone also are the days, just about every day, when I’d get a turkey or tuna sandwich at the Valley Forge Deli and with it two or three papers, usually The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Philadelphia Daily News (aka the Daily Nuisance). Last time Sean at the deli rang up The Wall Street Journal it was $2.25. Even he did an exaggerated double-take. “$2.25? Is that right? Is that what it’s up to now? You know, we only make two or three cents per paper. The papers aren’t a good business. They’re dying.”
Join the funeral procession, Sean. It’s a long line mourning the passing of papers, and to a lesser extent, at least so far, magazines. I didn’t imagine it coming to this, myself and thousands of other journalists. But I’m referring here to giving up my addiction to print. I’ve been a newspaper and magazine junkie my entire adult life. Newsstands, the old school wooden sheds and narrow stores crammed with cigars, water bottles, post cards, lottery ticket signs and the kind of quirky, in-depth variety of papers and magazines usually only found on big city street corners or in college campus towns, always have been one of my guilty pleasures. That’s where, if you’re fortunate, you’d find The Times of London, London’s Guardian and Observer, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mirror, the Financial Times, the weekly Variety, and expensive and often short-lived dazzling niche mags like Beach Culture (long gone) for surfers and Doubletake (long gone) for photography and essays and 4c — color, couture, curiosity, culture (which I’ve only come across in southern California). And maybe, if the racks are long and deep enough, there will be a section for small personal “zines” like Survivalism by an Iraqi vet, Four-Hundred Word, a square little digest of short non-fiction, Reality Ranch, “a forum for humor writing,” and Sufism, the issue I bought containing a letter from the editor titled, “Intention and Expectation in Pursuing a Mystical Path.”
I bought all those zines at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, which takes up an entire city block and bills itself as the world’s largest independent bookstore. I can’t tell you most hotels I stayed at or the restaurants I ate at when on the road for business or vacations, but I clearly can picture favorite newsstands in Santa Monica, Princeton, Boulder, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Toronto, Manhattan, Newark, Delaware and Penn’s campus in Philadelphia. At any airport I’d search out the nearest newsstand before coffee or checking my flight. Always purchase the local paper. Far preferable to the free, homogenized, sanitized USA Today lying in the hotel hallway in the morning. Give me local color, local columnists, classic Herb Caen, god rest his soul, in the San Francisco Chronicle and Steve Lopez in the LA Times to name two, local heroes and villains, high school sports scores, the Chicago Trib and Sun-Time’s sports pages, the Dallas Morning-Herald’s sports, the Boston Globe’s sports, exotic LA Times coverage of Malibu brush fires and show biz, The Washington Post’s political reporting, even the crap, bland papers in Vegas, Orlando and Miami. Always good for passing time in trains, planes and nights propped up on pillows in hotel rooms.
Now magazines and newspapers fall under the miscellaneous category in our suddenly scrutinized family budget, a surely bloated monthly number ripe for spending cuts. And so it’s time for print withdrawal. Surrendering the print habit is somewhat disorienting at first (Sunday mornings with time on your hands is a test), but actually easier than I would’ve thought. Which has to be another nail in the coffin of “old media” publishing, because if a dedicated addict who mainlined black ink like me can give it up almost overnight, I can’t see who wouldn’t be able to.
It’s the alternate universe of the Internet that allows the transition from print to be as painless as I’ve found it. Of course there would be no transition from print if not for the Internet’s endless offerings. I’ve simply bookmarked many of the aforementioned newspapers and magazines and click on them for a quick look-see at the end my day in front of the computer. I know more about what’s going on in the Swat Valley in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province than in my own backyard now. I’m too lazy, or my eyes are too strained by five o’clock, to look up the local papers’ web sites. And I’m not all that concerned about sewer expansion plans, another accident on Route 422, a bomb threat at a middle school or a small-time meth ring.
No doubt dropping the morning Inky has made me a less informed citizen. I have more knowledge of the fortunes of the British Premier League football team Everton than my son Steve’s Methacton High basketball conference standing. I know more about California’s budget crisis than Philadephia’s. I can delve into more detail describing to you why the Tennessee Vols’ new football coach is pissing off every Southeast Conference opponent in recruiting wars than what the Phillies manager is saying about spring training and the upcoming season. And I have no idea what times movies start at the mult-plex five minutes from my front door. Suze tells me the Oscars are on tonight. I had an inkling but that’s all. Suze listens to NPR all day and then gets 22 minutes of news read to her by Katie Couric at 6:30 in the evening. I can listen to music but not NPR speak while I work, and I can’t stomach all the drug ads that break up Katie’s teleprompter recitation.
I’ve retreated from print, but not paper. Due to the strain and uneasy ergonomics of reading more than a hundred words on the screen, I waste good timber and run through ink cartridges printing out articles to read later in the evening on a couch. The “Net enables me to come up with my own custom newspaper each day, lets me be the editor and select or censor stories. I read what I want to read. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.
Monday, February 9, 2009
"Space Available"
There’s a stretch of Trooper Road heading north, beginning beyond the stop light off 422, past the Harley dealer’s “No Money Down” sign and the gas station abandoned years ago, where on the left-hand side alone I counted five “Space Available” real estate signs in less than a mile.
Space isn’t all that’s available these days. Many homes are available, of course, with foreclosures and owners relocating for better jobs, maybe any job. “For Sale” signs are planted on front lawns wherever you go, more than few with “Reduced Price” attached.
Shuttered and decrepit Bud’s Tavern, about two hundred years old, plaster chunks continually falling off and orange barricade fencing encircling it, is available, and has been for probably more than a year. Whippoorwill Works, Mark and Xenia’s cramped little arts and crafts shop will be available shortly. The friendly counter-culture couple fought Target and K-Mart and Wal-Mart for decades, holding on, but now with Mark sick and their kids long raised, they’re moving their framing business back home. The glass-paneled corner store of the strip mall ten paces from Mark and Xenia’s is available once again. Years ago, when the strip mall still had old man Hillman’s Hardware store, Baskin & Robbin’s ice cream was sold out of that corner space. A plant and flower shop with a German Sheperd always loose inside made a run at it for a number of years before folding. Last up was a Beltone hearing aid center, which didn’t last long at all. The far end of the strip was long anchored by an under-sized supermarket, then Rite-Aid moved in. That space is available, too. Along with one or two other storefronts along the strip.
Five-hundred-and-ninety-eight thousand people laid off from their jobs in the month of January are available for work. Most of them, anyway. Some will retire if they can. Others will sulk and put their search. According to the government, about 3.6 million people have been put out of work since the recession started officially in December, 2007. There exists now a huge pool of nervous, struggling and available workers. My wife is available to start work immediately, full or part-time. Untold numbers of stay-at-home moms like her are diving into the pool.
Pass by any automobile dealership and you see row upon row of available vehicles, especially wide-assed chrome and metal pickup trucks and hulking sport utility vehicles too long for the garage door to shut. Farm land is available to build on. More parking slots are available at the mall. More seating is available at restaurants. More seats are available on Broadway, where shows are shutting down after both long and short runs. Empty seats beckon at basketball and ice hockey games and English and Italian soccer matches. You see it every night on cable. Physicians have more hours available for appointments. So do hair stylists. Hospitals have more beds available as people put off what they don’t have to do. Almost 100 million people in this country watched Super Bowl XLIII, a record-breaking number. Why? Because, well, it was cheaper to sit home and watch the game than go to the mall or a flower show or a boat show or to dinner or a bar. Commercial time for the Super Bowl in the end was not available, sold out, because, well, it was a one-time expense and there was this enormous captive audience.
Millions of Americans feel trapped, held hostage by an exhausted, bankrupt economy with the perverse strength to tie down millions. This experience is opposite of the promise implied by all things available. Something available is something to be had. Grab it, quick, before someone else does. Of course that’s not the way it works now. The drum beats daily sounding new layoffs and salary freezes, salary cuts and businesses disappearing, factories deserted, libraries and fire departments darkened, bus and subway lines running less often. The president talks of a possible catastrophe if we don’t get our house in order, and fast.
But there are tempting deals. Off 202 a black man bundled in layers against the cold has been standing for weeks holding one sign after another, “Going out of business,” first for Linen N Things. Then for Circuit City. The latest it is for Oskar Huber, the furniture store. It hasn’t been the same black guy for the past month, I’m sure. But wrapped against the weather, stamping his feet, shaking his hands, it looks like the same guy.
A strange contrast for sure, hunkering down when so much is there for the taking. We’re not used to it, of course. For years and decades leading up to 2007 or 2008, millions of us scooped up what was available without thinking twice. Anything seemed within reach. Maybe a house at the shore. Moving up to a larger home. Enclosing the carport, finishing off the basement. Adding a basketball court. A third car. A roomier car. A Harley. A floor-to-ceiling flat screen. Flat screens for the kitchen and the bedroom. Trips, repeated trips, to Vegas and Disneyworld. Biking in Baja. Vacations to Mexico or Portugal or Greece, who knows where. A night at the Ritz. During Christmas week a few years ago we spent surprise bonus money on a family night at the Ritz-Carlton downtown. Another Christmas we blasted the heat and tested the plumbing in two newly-constructed log cabins, one for the kids and one for mom and dad, outside of cold and empty Zion National Park. A few days later we were living large at the grand Bellagio in Vegas, ice skating on a temporary rink right on the Strip. A couple of good moonlighting gigs had come my way.
I come from the Ralph Kramden School of Money Management. “You see, Alice,” the rotund Ralph would bellow with gusto and satisfaction, in his bus driver’s uniform, holding court in the middle of his bare-bones ‘50s apartment in an episode of “The Honeymooners.” “You see, when I had it, Alice, when I had it, I spent it.” Business-minded people put a lasting value on money and so they work with it differently; they stretch it, manipulate it, multiply it. For me, it’s been a way to get to Zion or Crater Lake in the winter. Santa Monica in the summer. Or to The Blue Man Group show in New York or it is the means to build the CD library my kids can’t believe in the age of iPod. This philosophical difference helps explain why my bro is skiing in Vermont this week and I’m sweating renting three movies from Blockbuster.
Ah, if we had only known. If we had seen signs of this sudden, jarring crash in business and personal fortunes coming. No bonus. A sizeable salary cut three weeks into the new year. “I just kick myself,” said a coworker a few days ago. “Thinking about what I spent money on. Now I comb every expense and I go to bed at night thinking, ‘OK, what test don’t I know about that will come next?’” Her husband, who works independently painting blue skies and puffy clouds on the ceilings of children’s bedrooms in wealthy homes along with other unique custom paint jobs, says he is booked up for February but the phone’s not ringing and he’s concerned about March. A lot of contractors and consultants and salespeople are waiting by their phones. Or calling everyone they know.
“You’ll tell me if, you know, you find out, you know, that things might get worse,” asked my coworker, full of hesitation. When you are cornered and scared you think hard about who you can trust, what you can say, and who might cause you trouble. I assured her I would. “You would do that?” asked my wife. “If you were told in confidence?” This woman and I have worked together for more than ten years. She works extraordinarily hard when she must, which is often, and she’s very talented. “Yeah, I would, “ I said. “What could happen, really? They’d never find out probably.” “They” — the owners or managers who sign the paycheck to keep you going — have morphed into inscrutable and unpredictable figures. With one hand on the TNT plunger, it seems.
Many of us haven’t the slightest idea if and when HQ will rock us with the next blunt email announcement. Next week. Next month. Who knows? If sales keep falling across almost all markets in my industry, and right now our store is $80,000 off for March billings, will the owners be able to pay off the bank loan for last year’s acquisition negotiated just after the unofficial recession became official, only no one knew it yet?
It’s impossible to predict with any confidence how deep the recession will go, how long it will last. Any sense of confidence is but a whiff. People are dropping out of jobs like Mother Nature’s victims who fell from the sky in M. Night Shyamalan’s so-called eco-thriller “The Happening.” My wife’s sister emailed Saturday that her son got laid off from an investment house where he wasn’t happy anyway; said son and his fiancé lost their jobs in a bar that closed and they have moved in with her and her husband in Roanoke “to get their life straightened out.” A brother-in-law lost his job before the holidays. Her best friend’s husband got laid off this week from a auto dealership. Her daughter’s company got bought out and there is talk of lay-offs and relocating to Minnesota. “All in all we are thankful for what we have,” she concluded, rather abruptly. Still, amen to that.
She’s got the best perspective, but one hard to hold on to. Today I drove around thinking how office space, retail space, land, houses, autos, boats, motorcycles, tickets to this concert and seats that game are all abundantly available at the moment. But in a recession, to be “available” is too often a tease and a taunt. Six months ago, three months ago, heck, maybe three weeks ago I wouldn’t have thought this way at all.
Space isn’t all that’s available these days. Many homes are available, of course, with foreclosures and owners relocating for better jobs, maybe any job. “For Sale” signs are planted on front lawns wherever you go, more than few with “Reduced Price” attached.
Shuttered and decrepit Bud’s Tavern, about two hundred years old, plaster chunks continually falling off and orange barricade fencing encircling it, is available, and has been for probably more than a year. Whippoorwill Works, Mark and Xenia’s cramped little arts and crafts shop will be available shortly. The friendly counter-culture couple fought Target and K-Mart and Wal-Mart for decades, holding on, but now with Mark sick and their kids long raised, they’re moving their framing business back home. The glass-paneled corner store of the strip mall ten paces from Mark and Xenia’s is available once again. Years ago, when the strip mall still had old man Hillman’s Hardware store, Baskin & Robbin’s ice cream was sold out of that corner space. A plant and flower shop with a German Sheperd always loose inside made a run at it for a number of years before folding. Last up was a Beltone hearing aid center, which didn’t last long at all. The far end of the strip was long anchored by an under-sized supermarket, then Rite-Aid moved in. That space is available, too. Along with one or two other storefronts along the strip.
Five-hundred-and-ninety-eight thousand people laid off from their jobs in the month of January are available for work. Most of them, anyway. Some will retire if they can. Others will sulk and put their search. According to the government, about 3.6 million people have been put out of work since the recession started officially in December, 2007. There exists now a huge pool of nervous, struggling and available workers. My wife is available to start work immediately, full or part-time. Untold numbers of stay-at-home moms like her are diving into the pool.
Pass by any automobile dealership and you see row upon row of available vehicles, especially wide-assed chrome and metal pickup trucks and hulking sport utility vehicles too long for the garage door to shut. Farm land is available to build on. More parking slots are available at the mall. More seating is available at restaurants. More seats are available on Broadway, where shows are shutting down after both long and short runs. Empty seats beckon at basketball and ice hockey games and English and Italian soccer matches. You see it every night on cable. Physicians have more hours available for appointments. So do hair stylists. Hospitals have more beds available as people put off what they don’t have to do. Almost 100 million people in this country watched Super Bowl XLIII, a record-breaking number. Why? Because, well, it was cheaper to sit home and watch the game than go to the mall or a flower show or a boat show or to dinner or a bar. Commercial time for the Super Bowl in the end was not available, sold out, because, well, it was a one-time expense and there was this enormous captive audience.
Millions of Americans feel trapped, held hostage by an exhausted, bankrupt economy with the perverse strength to tie down millions. This experience is opposite of the promise implied by all things available. Something available is something to be had. Grab it, quick, before someone else does. Of course that’s not the way it works now. The drum beats daily sounding new layoffs and salary freezes, salary cuts and businesses disappearing, factories deserted, libraries and fire departments darkened, bus and subway lines running less often. The president talks of a possible catastrophe if we don’t get our house in order, and fast.
But there are tempting deals. Off 202 a black man bundled in layers against the cold has been standing for weeks holding one sign after another, “Going out of business,” first for Linen N Things. Then for Circuit City. The latest it is for Oskar Huber, the furniture store. It hasn’t been the same black guy for the past month, I’m sure. But wrapped against the weather, stamping his feet, shaking his hands, it looks like the same guy.
A strange contrast for sure, hunkering down when so much is there for the taking. We’re not used to it, of course. For years and decades leading up to 2007 or 2008, millions of us scooped up what was available without thinking twice. Anything seemed within reach. Maybe a house at the shore. Moving up to a larger home. Enclosing the carport, finishing off the basement. Adding a basketball court. A third car. A roomier car. A Harley. A floor-to-ceiling flat screen. Flat screens for the kitchen and the bedroom. Trips, repeated trips, to Vegas and Disneyworld. Biking in Baja. Vacations to Mexico or Portugal or Greece, who knows where. A night at the Ritz. During Christmas week a few years ago we spent surprise bonus money on a family night at the Ritz-Carlton downtown. Another Christmas we blasted the heat and tested the plumbing in two newly-constructed log cabins, one for the kids and one for mom and dad, outside of cold and empty Zion National Park. A few days later we were living large at the grand Bellagio in Vegas, ice skating on a temporary rink right on the Strip. A couple of good moonlighting gigs had come my way.
I come from the Ralph Kramden School of Money Management. “You see, Alice,” the rotund Ralph would bellow with gusto and satisfaction, in his bus driver’s uniform, holding court in the middle of his bare-bones ‘50s apartment in an episode of “The Honeymooners.” “You see, when I had it, Alice, when I had it, I spent it.” Business-minded people put a lasting value on money and so they work with it differently; they stretch it, manipulate it, multiply it. For me, it’s been a way to get to Zion or Crater Lake in the winter. Santa Monica in the summer. Or to The Blue Man Group show in New York or it is the means to build the CD library my kids can’t believe in the age of iPod. This philosophical difference helps explain why my bro is skiing in Vermont this week and I’m sweating renting three movies from Blockbuster.
Ah, if we had only known. If we had seen signs of this sudden, jarring crash in business and personal fortunes coming. No bonus. A sizeable salary cut three weeks into the new year. “I just kick myself,” said a coworker a few days ago. “Thinking about what I spent money on. Now I comb every expense and I go to bed at night thinking, ‘OK, what test don’t I know about that will come next?’” Her husband, who works independently painting blue skies and puffy clouds on the ceilings of children’s bedrooms in wealthy homes along with other unique custom paint jobs, says he is booked up for February but the phone’s not ringing and he’s concerned about March. A lot of contractors and consultants and salespeople are waiting by their phones. Or calling everyone they know.
“You’ll tell me if, you know, you find out, you know, that things might get worse,” asked my coworker, full of hesitation. When you are cornered and scared you think hard about who you can trust, what you can say, and who might cause you trouble. I assured her I would. “You would do that?” asked my wife. “If you were told in confidence?” This woman and I have worked together for more than ten years. She works extraordinarily hard when she must, which is often, and she’s very talented. “Yeah, I would, “ I said. “What could happen, really? They’d never find out probably.” “They” — the owners or managers who sign the paycheck to keep you going — have morphed into inscrutable and unpredictable figures. With one hand on the TNT plunger, it seems.
Many of us haven’t the slightest idea if and when HQ will rock us with the next blunt email announcement. Next week. Next month. Who knows? If sales keep falling across almost all markets in my industry, and right now our store is $80,000 off for March billings, will the owners be able to pay off the bank loan for last year’s acquisition negotiated just after the unofficial recession became official, only no one knew it yet?
It’s impossible to predict with any confidence how deep the recession will go, how long it will last. Any sense of confidence is but a whiff. People are dropping out of jobs like Mother Nature’s victims who fell from the sky in M. Night Shyamalan’s so-called eco-thriller “The Happening.” My wife’s sister emailed Saturday that her son got laid off from an investment house where he wasn’t happy anyway; said son and his fiancé lost their jobs in a bar that closed and they have moved in with her and her husband in Roanoke “to get their life straightened out.” A brother-in-law lost his job before the holidays. Her best friend’s husband got laid off this week from a auto dealership. Her daughter’s company got bought out and there is talk of lay-offs and relocating to Minnesota. “All in all we are thankful for what we have,” she concluded, rather abruptly. Still, amen to that.
She’s got the best perspective, but one hard to hold on to. Today I drove around thinking how office space, retail space, land, houses, autos, boats, motorcycles, tickets to this concert and seats that game are all abundantly available at the moment. But in a recession, to be “available” is too often a tease and a taunt. Six months ago, three months ago, heck, maybe three weeks ago I wouldn’t have thought this way at all.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Walking in L.A.
I know, no one walks in Los Angeles, kingdom of the car, empire of the freeways. No one takes public transit, either, judging by the empty orange Metro buses and Rapid Rail commuter cars pulling out of the Mariposa/Nash Street station near my hotel. But I had a couple of hours to kill in the morning before my flight so I headed out for a walk.
After a 70-minute stroll I return, having passed all of seven people on the street. Now this is in a district of L.A. far from the movie dream factories, Hollywood Boulevard, the beaches, Rodeo Drive or Santa Monica pier. I’m a seven-minute shuttle ride from LAX in El Segundo — “the most business friendly city” — according to banners flapping from lampposts. In other words, another concrete commercial no-man’s land no different from what you’d find in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Buffalo or Boston.
In L.A., you could call it paradise interrupted. There’s nary a palm tree in sight.
Starting about 9:30 on a cool, overcast Tuesday morn, the last week in November, my jaunt takes me a few blocks north on Mariposa Avenue to Sepulveda Boulevard, where I turn left and head west. Sepulveda is an eight, sometimes ten-lane flat, straight-arrow highway that’d pass for an interstate with stop lights back home. Crossing it on foot is worth your life. I didn’t try.
The sidewalk along Sepulveda serves a purpose I know not. It’s a long, lonely stretch of cement block dotted with empty bus shelters and randomly-placed brown metal benches that make no sense whatever other than effecting El Segundo’s “friendly” vibe. I’m naked out here, there’s not a person in sight. And it’s beyond me that someone would or could relax on one of these benches, reading a paper, the traffic roaring by.
This is L.A.’s back, back, back lot. On the blocks of Sepulveda I cover I pass by the Powerlight Solar Electric Energy compound and 20- to 25-story glass-paneled office boxes housing the likes of IBM, NCR, Xerox, Raytheon, Mattel, Oracle, SAIC, Sun Microsystems, Continental Datagraphics, Malaysia Airlines, Air New Zealand, Thai Airlines and Boeing.
Across the boulevard sits the mysterious International Rectifiers office, a hidden think tank for Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger wannabes? The nearby International Garden Center has rows of fresh-cut Christmas trees and “snow flocking,” which seems absurd of course to a northerner. But this is L.A. after all, with its facades and facelifts and history of nifty film fakery.
Katmandu Bedding and Furniture is in the middle of a mattress sale. Next door the Just Massage studio works you over for $45 an hour. In the parking lot of Ralph’s, a supermarket chain, Rebek’s Juice in a small squat building sells Energy Berry with mega-antioxidants for anti-aging.
If you look, you’ll find clues that yes, this is L.A. and not Houston. Like the little “L.A. Yoga” magazine stand outside Rebek’s. Or the pink, orange and purple flower bushes that pop up along the sidewalk. Or all the black or silver Hummers and Beamers and Lexuses on Sepulveda. Come to think of it, all the cars seem either black or silver. Or the young dude behind the counter at Border’s with the two steel studs protruding from each side below his lower lip and the shoulder-length black hair and the shaggy beard and the black tee-shirt with “think” on the front, while Elvis sings Christmas tunes from the ceiling and a black guy just in from Atlanta who says he’s a stand-up comic hits up another long-hair employee, apparently a guitarist in a band, for tickets to his upcoming gig and the café in the back serving Seattle’s Best has five or six people with open laptops setting up shop and it’s ten in the morning.
But the idea as I see it is not to notice. Not on Sepulveda with the obligatory McDonald’s and Starbucks and Subway and FedEx Kinko’s and strip malls and the Chevron station and food mart and the Public Storage row of sheds and the 24-hour Walgreen’s that just had its grand opening and the five-minute Express Car Wash and the Grand Café Bar and Grille. In the hour-plus I’m out and about I don’t see a single home, an apartment, a condo, not one sign of people going through their everyday living except for The Lakes at El Segundo golf course with middle-aged guys and women toting their clubs and a series of steel towers planted across the course carrying 20-30 slightly sagging power lines.
The sheer boredom of this barrenness dulls the senses. Which is fine I think with the sales grunts and grinders staying at my Hilton Garden Inn or the Marriott Courtyard next-door or the Homewood Studio Suites down the street. The idea is to get on with your business; get in and out, hopefully on an earlier flight or an upgrade to first class.
I’m out here for two nights, having spent $946.80 on airfare, 11 hours in the air, 6,000 miles roundtrip, $183.76 a night lodging, for two meetings, one lasting 90 minutes, the other maybe a half hour. The first meeting boils down to Bernard, the small, thin pleasantly determined Brit, asking and getting the same rates for his ads next year, $80,000 or so. The second is a bullshit session with Craig, cranky partner of a small agency out in the farmlands by Oxnard 60 miles from our first appointment, who drives a pickup to his office, wears jeans, a tee shirt and a ball cap. It’s a bullshit session because the contract between our magazine and his client was a done deal last week and the wiry, mustached, southern drawling Craig, who loves to drop “Fuck this” and “Fuck that” and “I remember that fuckin’ rep,” and many references to “Fuckin’ Charlotte” his client likes RDG, the magazine’s publisher, and RDG always gets a kick out of Craig and wants to drop by to thank him for the business.
I’ve been out to L.A. ten or twelve times in the more than 25 years I’ve been on the magazine. RDG, who was 8 years old when I started editing the magazine, might do that in 18 months. Completely shaved of head with a goatee and an easy grin, overweight and given to wearing ill-fitting suits and no longer a tie, he’s on a plane every week selling two magazines and 300 or 400 accounts. Do this for ten or twenty or thirty years, depending on one’s endurance and income expectations, and why not persevere comfortably numb and rather blind to where the road’s taken you this time out?
With RDG in the over-sized silver Lincoln Towne car rental, “grandpa’s car” he calls it, driving up I-405 and then Highway 101 through the San Fernando Valley suburbs to Ventura County and Oxnard and Craig it’s all business. From 9:30 in the morning till 5:30 in the evening when on our day is done and then RDG always, always calls his 8- and 5-year-old girls at his ex-wife’s home in Detroit. Otherwise, there’s no radio, no music, no news, no idea that off to our left a Super Scooper is dive bombing into Malibu’s Corral Canyon, dropping thousands of gallons of water on the remnants of a fire that destroyed 53 homes over the weekend with 2,000 firefighters battling the blaze at its height. The rental Lincoln is a sealed-tight sales mobile bubble; no noise, no smells, no notion we’re passing through canyon country with its cactus and coyotes and bobcats. Not when RDG has a list of 20-30 customer phone numbers on his lap as he drives and he makes call after call on his wireless headset and scrolls through emails on his Blackberry. “Did you get my proposal? Do you want me to send another?” “Is Jeff in?” “Have you made any decisions?” “We’re closing January next Monday.” “How about I call you in another six weeks?”
He’s in a zone, 35 years old, at the top of his game, his only apparent distraction a live-in girlfriend with two kids who’s pushing for marriage. His resistance is bound to crumble, he knows it. But most of all, he loves the game, chasing and closing deals. “I’ll sell anything,” he says over dinner. “A $750 ad, classified, it doesn’t matter.” From what I’ve seen over the years with sales reps, he’s in a definite minority. First sales trip I ever did the rep took the afternoon off to tour old mansions on Rhode Island’s coast. RDG bitches about one of our reps who he can’t get on the road enough, about former reps who wouldn’t travel or answer his calls, about competitors who don’t travel. “Frank, fuck, he just drives everywhere and sends accounts two-line emails. Jackie, you think she gets on a plane at her age? She just chats with her girlfriends on the phone. I’d be bored out of my mind.”
So if you’re doing something like RDG’s routine week after week, a place like our Hilton eases you along with its clean, simple, tan and brown, tile and brick fake fireplace in the lobby, a free water bottle and cookies at the counter, a gracious Mexican waiter in the restaurant — “Sorry to interrupt your reading sir, but I have a delicious dish for you” — a flat screen TV that swivels any which way you want in your room, five pillows piled high on your king-sized bed, a Cardio-Theatre 12-inch TV monitor attached to the treadmills in the fitness center and of course a USA Today at your door every morning.
Being dulled out and disengaged helps some when the inevitable occurs: flight delays, mechanical failures, missing crews, ice storms or clients who blow you off, stand you up, or take their money to a competitor. Here’s a for instance: “Bravo!” yells a guard as I go through security at LAX heading back home. “Freeze. Back against the wall, sir,” another guard instructs me. All the commotion instantly stops. Silence. Everyone stands in place, bewildered. “All clear!” someone yells 67 seconds later. One of the guards kept count. As in a game, the start button is pushed and all the travel players are off and running again. “She wants to get back into consulting,” I hear a guy say in passing. “When I’m back in the office tomorrow…” says a woman on her cell. Moving through the first-class cabin to my seat a gentleman by a window has this to say on his cell: “My heart’s not really into telling you how you screwed the thing up but that’s my assignment so for future reference please say I was an asshole, OK? Thank you.”
Taking care of business, as Elvis used to say.
After a 70-minute stroll I return, having passed all of seven people on the street. Now this is in a district of L.A. far from the movie dream factories, Hollywood Boulevard, the beaches, Rodeo Drive or Santa Monica pier. I’m a seven-minute shuttle ride from LAX in El Segundo — “the most business friendly city” — according to banners flapping from lampposts. In other words, another concrete commercial no-man’s land no different from what you’d find in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Buffalo or Boston.
In L.A., you could call it paradise interrupted. There’s nary a palm tree in sight.
Starting about 9:30 on a cool, overcast Tuesday morn, the last week in November, my jaunt takes me a few blocks north on Mariposa Avenue to Sepulveda Boulevard, where I turn left and head west. Sepulveda is an eight, sometimes ten-lane flat, straight-arrow highway that’d pass for an interstate with stop lights back home. Crossing it on foot is worth your life. I didn’t try.
The sidewalk along Sepulveda serves a purpose I know not. It’s a long, lonely stretch of cement block dotted with empty bus shelters and randomly-placed brown metal benches that make no sense whatever other than effecting El Segundo’s “friendly” vibe. I’m naked out here, there’s not a person in sight. And it’s beyond me that someone would or could relax on one of these benches, reading a paper, the traffic roaring by.
This is L.A.’s back, back, back lot. On the blocks of Sepulveda I cover I pass by the Powerlight Solar Electric Energy compound and 20- to 25-story glass-paneled office boxes housing the likes of IBM, NCR, Xerox, Raytheon, Mattel, Oracle, SAIC, Sun Microsystems, Continental Datagraphics, Malaysia Airlines, Air New Zealand, Thai Airlines and Boeing.
Across the boulevard sits the mysterious International Rectifiers office, a hidden think tank for Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger wannabes? The nearby International Garden Center has rows of fresh-cut Christmas trees and “snow flocking,” which seems absurd of course to a northerner. But this is L.A. after all, with its facades and facelifts and history of nifty film fakery.
Katmandu Bedding and Furniture is in the middle of a mattress sale. Next door the Just Massage studio works you over for $45 an hour. In the parking lot of Ralph’s, a supermarket chain, Rebek’s Juice in a small squat building sells Energy Berry with mega-antioxidants for anti-aging.
If you look, you’ll find clues that yes, this is L.A. and not Houston. Like the little “L.A. Yoga” magazine stand outside Rebek’s. Or the pink, orange and purple flower bushes that pop up along the sidewalk. Or all the black or silver Hummers and Beamers and Lexuses on Sepulveda. Come to think of it, all the cars seem either black or silver. Or the young dude behind the counter at Border’s with the two steel studs protruding from each side below his lower lip and the shoulder-length black hair and the shaggy beard and the black tee-shirt with “think” on the front, while Elvis sings Christmas tunes from the ceiling and a black guy just in from Atlanta who says he’s a stand-up comic hits up another long-hair employee, apparently a guitarist in a band, for tickets to his upcoming gig and the café in the back serving Seattle’s Best has five or six people with open laptops setting up shop and it’s ten in the morning.
But the idea as I see it is not to notice. Not on Sepulveda with the obligatory McDonald’s and Starbucks and Subway and FedEx Kinko’s and strip malls and the Chevron station and food mart and the Public Storage row of sheds and the 24-hour Walgreen’s that just had its grand opening and the five-minute Express Car Wash and the Grand Café Bar and Grille. In the hour-plus I’m out and about I don’t see a single home, an apartment, a condo, not one sign of people going through their everyday living except for The Lakes at El Segundo golf course with middle-aged guys and women toting their clubs and a series of steel towers planted across the course carrying 20-30 slightly sagging power lines.
The sheer boredom of this barrenness dulls the senses. Which is fine I think with the sales grunts and grinders staying at my Hilton Garden Inn or the Marriott Courtyard next-door or the Homewood Studio Suites down the street. The idea is to get on with your business; get in and out, hopefully on an earlier flight or an upgrade to first class.
I’m out here for two nights, having spent $946.80 on airfare, 11 hours in the air, 6,000 miles roundtrip, $183.76 a night lodging, for two meetings, one lasting 90 minutes, the other maybe a half hour. The first meeting boils down to Bernard, the small, thin pleasantly determined Brit, asking and getting the same rates for his ads next year, $80,000 or so. The second is a bullshit session with Craig, cranky partner of a small agency out in the farmlands by Oxnard 60 miles from our first appointment, who drives a pickup to his office, wears jeans, a tee shirt and a ball cap. It’s a bullshit session because the contract between our magazine and his client was a done deal last week and the wiry, mustached, southern drawling Craig, who loves to drop “Fuck this” and “Fuck that” and “I remember that fuckin’ rep,” and many references to “Fuckin’ Charlotte” his client likes RDG, the magazine’s publisher, and RDG always gets a kick out of Craig and wants to drop by to thank him for the business.
I’ve been out to L.A. ten or twelve times in the more than 25 years I’ve been on the magazine. RDG, who was 8 years old when I started editing the magazine, might do that in 18 months. Completely shaved of head with a goatee and an easy grin, overweight and given to wearing ill-fitting suits and no longer a tie, he’s on a plane every week selling two magazines and 300 or 400 accounts. Do this for ten or twenty or thirty years, depending on one’s endurance and income expectations, and why not persevere comfortably numb and rather blind to where the road’s taken you this time out?
With RDG in the over-sized silver Lincoln Towne car rental, “grandpa’s car” he calls it, driving up I-405 and then Highway 101 through the San Fernando Valley suburbs to Ventura County and Oxnard and Craig it’s all business. From 9:30 in the morning till 5:30 in the evening when on our day is done and then RDG always, always calls his 8- and 5-year-old girls at his ex-wife’s home in Detroit. Otherwise, there’s no radio, no music, no news, no idea that off to our left a Super Scooper is dive bombing into Malibu’s Corral Canyon, dropping thousands of gallons of water on the remnants of a fire that destroyed 53 homes over the weekend with 2,000 firefighters battling the blaze at its height. The rental Lincoln is a sealed-tight sales mobile bubble; no noise, no smells, no notion we’re passing through canyon country with its cactus and coyotes and bobcats. Not when RDG has a list of 20-30 customer phone numbers on his lap as he drives and he makes call after call on his wireless headset and scrolls through emails on his Blackberry. “Did you get my proposal? Do you want me to send another?” “Is Jeff in?” “Have you made any decisions?” “We’re closing January next Monday.” “How about I call you in another six weeks?”
He’s in a zone, 35 years old, at the top of his game, his only apparent distraction a live-in girlfriend with two kids who’s pushing for marriage. His resistance is bound to crumble, he knows it. But most of all, he loves the game, chasing and closing deals. “I’ll sell anything,” he says over dinner. “A $750 ad, classified, it doesn’t matter.” From what I’ve seen over the years with sales reps, he’s in a definite minority. First sales trip I ever did the rep took the afternoon off to tour old mansions on Rhode Island’s coast. RDG bitches about one of our reps who he can’t get on the road enough, about former reps who wouldn’t travel or answer his calls, about competitors who don’t travel. “Frank, fuck, he just drives everywhere and sends accounts two-line emails. Jackie, you think she gets on a plane at her age? She just chats with her girlfriends on the phone. I’d be bored out of my mind.”
So if you’re doing something like RDG’s routine week after week, a place like our Hilton eases you along with its clean, simple, tan and brown, tile and brick fake fireplace in the lobby, a free water bottle and cookies at the counter, a gracious Mexican waiter in the restaurant — “Sorry to interrupt your reading sir, but I have a delicious dish for you” — a flat screen TV that swivels any which way you want in your room, five pillows piled high on your king-sized bed, a Cardio-Theatre 12-inch TV monitor attached to the treadmills in the fitness center and of course a USA Today at your door every morning.
Being dulled out and disengaged helps some when the inevitable occurs: flight delays, mechanical failures, missing crews, ice storms or clients who blow you off, stand you up, or take their money to a competitor. Here’s a for instance: “Bravo!” yells a guard as I go through security at LAX heading back home. “Freeze. Back against the wall, sir,” another guard instructs me. All the commotion instantly stops. Silence. Everyone stands in place, bewildered. “All clear!” someone yells 67 seconds later. One of the guards kept count. As in a game, the start button is pushed and all the travel players are off and running again. “She wants to get back into consulting,” I hear a guy say in passing. “When I’m back in the office tomorrow…” says a woman on her cell. Moving through the first-class cabin to my seat a gentleman by a window has this to say on his cell: “My heart’s not really into telling you how you screwed the thing up but that’s my assignment so for future reference please say I was an asshole, OK? Thank you.”
Taking care of business, as Elvis used to say.
Landlubbers
“So, Kate, how could we suck so bad at something so simple as rafting down a river?”
Kate, you see, was the only one among us with any nautical experience to speak of, having rowed varsity for Delaware’s crew team for a month or so last spring, before the 6 a.m. weight training sessions made it a job more than anything.
“Well, we had the crazy old man who thought he knew what he was jabbering about but didn’t know a thing, and he wouldn’t listen to me. His wife was basically dead weight. She didn’t touch an oar. So their side of the raft unbalanced us. Mom, ummm, she kind of got confused.
We were a tired, beat-up squad coming home from a bruising encounter. Heading south on the northeast extension of the PA turnpike, returning from “one of those awesome days we all dream about,” according to the Whitewater Challengers rafting brochure.
“I don’t think we ever once rowed in the same direction at the same time,” said mom. “Back stroke, forward stroke, back stroke, forward, I had trouble with that.”
“I think we were trying too hard,” said Kate. “And in rowing you have a coxswain telling you what to do. Dad, you didn’t even know port from starboard.”
What defense did I have? “I wasn’t going to tell Elva (the dead weight) to row if she didn’t feel like it, and she didn’t feel like it. And Josef, how can you push a little 67-year-old Hungarian refugee with that heavy accent?”
“He was a pisser,” laughed mom. “Telling every raft that we were racing for a case of beer. Calling that grim old guide with the bushy mustache wearing the silver metal helmet one of Hitler’s guards. Before he threw the buckets of water at the raft with the Japanese he told us, ‘Time to get ‘em back for Pearl Harbor’.”
“All I know is the picture they took of us from the trees or wherever they hid that camera, if you look nobody has their oar in the water except me. Did you notice?” I complained. “Not one oar in the water. Everyone’s holding on for life. I was doing all the work. Josef said, ‘Someone take out a life insurance policy on that man’. Steve, you look like a rangy young sophomore surfer dude with your shaggy blond hair and baggy trucks. I expected more out of you. Where’s your beaded necklace?”
“That picture was when we were going through the rapids,” said Steve. “You don’t need your oars in the water.”
“Dad, you looked like you’re falling out the back of the raft,” said Kate. “Mom, you looked like you’re trying to climb out.”
“I did fall out a couple of times,” I said. “Almost got slammed by the damn raft on the rocks ten minutes into the trip. See this knot on my shin?”
“I got run over too,” said Steve. “Couldn’t climb back in the boat.”
“The only time we went in a straight line was when I got out and pushed us,” I said.
“There were too many rafts out there,” said Steve. He was right. The only whitewater rafting in the entire Poconos seemed to be along a short stretch of the Lehigh River south of the town of Jim Thorpe. On this brilliant August Sunday when we were on the river, 400 rafts, red, blue, gray, green, from different adventure outfits, skittered about like absent-minded waterbugs. Every half mile or so we’d collide with another outfit’s party, gridlocked and blocking the river. The procession down the Lehigh was as disorderly and slow as a Mummer’s Parade; everyone dressed in blue life vests instead of feathers.
“I’ll never do it again,” declared Steve. “We’d start and stop. Start and stop. Then the guides made us wait. Who told us the whole thing would only take three or four hours?”
“It wasn’t exactly relaxing,” said Kate.
“The woman at Whitewater Challengers told us that,” said mom. “If she told the truth and said you’d leave at nine in the morning and get back at six at night, half the people wouldn’t go.”
“Yeah, not exactly what I wanted to do the day before soccer practice two-a-days begin,” frowned Steve.
“My ass was really starting to hurt, wasn’t yours?” asked mom. “I didn’t think we’d ever get out of those rafts.”
“Josef said he was going to hang Elva by her ankles from their hotel balcony for suggesting the trip,” I said. “And we were on the supposedly ‘Easier Whitewater Rafting’ trip. Imagine the ‘Exhilarating’ trip. They’d still be searching for us. We really screwed up those last rapids. Went around the rocks totally ass-backwards. The young guide just smirked as we bounced by. Suburban flatlanders.”
“We went through all the rapids backwards,” noted Steve.
“The only thing we perfected was that spin move, you know, where we’d hit a rock dead on, then bounce around it sliding backwards and do a 360 to get turned around. Didn’t see anyone on the river spin out like we did,” I said.
“They didn’t have to,” said Kate. “Even the little kids, you know, the ones from some camp with that lazy, fat counselor who never stopped yakking, unless she was napping, she was so annoying, but even they rowed straighter than we did.”
“I think we tried too hard,” said mom.
“You’ll never get me back there,” said Steve.
“Come on, Steve, it was family bonding,” said mom.
And who ever said family bonding comes easy? No pain, no gain.
Kate, you see, was the only one among us with any nautical experience to speak of, having rowed varsity for Delaware’s crew team for a month or so last spring, before the 6 a.m. weight training sessions made it a job more than anything.
“Well, we had the crazy old man who thought he knew what he was jabbering about but didn’t know a thing, and he wouldn’t listen to me. His wife was basically dead weight. She didn’t touch an oar. So their side of the raft unbalanced us. Mom, ummm, she kind of got confused.
We were a tired, beat-up squad coming home from a bruising encounter. Heading south on the northeast extension of the PA turnpike, returning from “one of those awesome days we all dream about,” according to the Whitewater Challengers rafting brochure.
“I don’t think we ever once rowed in the same direction at the same time,” said mom. “Back stroke, forward stroke, back stroke, forward, I had trouble with that.”
“I think we were trying too hard,” said Kate. “And in rowing you have a coxswain telling you what to do. Dad, you didn’t even know port from starboard.”
What defense did I have? “I wasn’t going to tell Elva (the dead weight) to row if she didn’t feel like it, and she didn’t feel like it. And Josef, how can you push a little 67-year-old Hungarian refugee with that heavy accent?”
“He was a pisser,” laughed mom. “Telling every raft that we were racing for a case of beer. Calling that grim old guide with the bushy mustache wearing the silver metal helmet one of Hitler’s guards. Before he threw the buckets of water at the raft with the Japanese he told us, ‘Time to get ‘em back for Pearl Harbor’.”
“All I know is the picture they took of us from the trees or wherever they hid that camera, if you look nobody has their oar in the water except me. Did you notice?” I complained. “Not one oar in the water. Everyone’s holding on for life. I was doing all the work. Josef said, ‘Someone take out a life insurance policy on that man’. Steve, you look like a rangy young sophomore surfer dude with your shaggy blond hair and baggy trucks. I expected more out of you. Where’s your beaded necklace?”
“That picture was when we were going through the rapids,” said Steve. “You don’t need your oars in the water.”
“Dad, you looked like you’re falling out the back of the raft,” said Kate. “Mom, you looked like you’re trying to climb out.”
“I did fall out a couple of times,” I said. “Almost got slammed by the damn raft on the rocks ten minutes into the trip. See this knot on my shin?”
“I got run over too,” said Steve. “Couldn’t climb back in the boat.”
“The only time we went in a straight line was when I got out and pushed us,” I said.
“There were too many rafts out there,” said Steve. He was right. The only whitewater rafting in the entire Poconos seemed to be along a short stretch of the Lehigh River south of the town of Jim Thorpe. On this brilliant August Sunday when we were on the river, 400 rafts, red, blue, gray, green, from different adventure outfits, skittered about like absent-minded waterbugs. Every half mile or so we’d collide with another outfit’s party, gridlocked and blocking the river. The procession down the Lehigh was as disorderly and slow as a Mummer’s Parade; everyone dressed in blue life vests instead of feathers.
“I’ll never do it again,” declared Steve. “We’d start and stop. Start and stop. Then the guides made us wait. Who told us the whole thing would only take three or four hours?”
“It wasn’t exactly relaxing,” said Kate.
“The woman at Whitewater Challengers told us that,” said mom. “If she told the truth and said you’d leave at nine in the morning and get back at six at night, half the people wouldn’t go.”
“Yeah, not exactly what I wanted to do the day before soccer practice two-a-days begin,” frowned Steve.
“My ass was really starting to hurt, wasn’t yours?” asked mom. “I didn’t think we’d ever get out of those rafts.”
“Josef said he was going to hang Elva by her ankles from their hotel balcony for suggesting the trip,” I said. “And we were on the supposedly ‘Easier Whitewater Rafting’ trip. Imagine the ‘Exhilarating’ trip. They’d still be searching for us. We really screwed up those last rapids. Went around the rocks totally ass-backwards. The young guide just smirked as we bounced by. Suburban flatlanders.”
“We went through all the rapids backwards,” noted Steve.
“The only thing we perfected was that spin move, you know, where we’d hit a rock dead on, then bounce around it sliding backwards and do a 360 to get turned around. Didn’t see anyone on the river spin out like we did,” I said.
“They didn’t have to,” said Kate. “Even the little kids, you know, the ones from some camp with that lazy, fat counselor who never stopped yakking, unless she was napping, she was so annoying, but even they rowed straighter than we did.”
“I think we tried too hard,” said mom.
“You’ll never get me back there,” said Steve.
“Come on, Steve, it was family bonding,” said mom.
And who ever said family bonding comes easy? No pain, no gain.
Time Out for Bonding
Spending a couple of nights in a Holiday Inn Express for a weekend of NASCAR races is not exactly the most popular form of teenage entertainment in the Northeast suburbs. But my son Steve is a 15-year-old hooked on NASCAR, so off we’ll go. But Steve has other plans as well, a movie with friends before we depart Friday eve.
His mother’s concern, it seems, is does dad have enough sleep in him to make the drive down to Chestertown, MD, our hotel locale, leaving about 9 or thereabouts. Mapquest says the drive should take 1 hour, 52 minutes. Total estimated distance: 90.85 miles. Shouldn’t be a problem. So what if I’m usually in bed reading some book or magazine by 9:30. So what it’s too damn bad Steve is three months short of being able to drive. My problem could well be reading the small print and numbers on the map, in the dark, with squinting eyes and no GPS. Where the hell’s Chesterton anyway?
It’s where the closest hotel exists that I could find for the Big Dover Monster Mile weekend. If the room didn’t cost $200 a night, I’d have cancelled Friday night and driven straight to the track Saturday for the afternoon Busch Series race. In fact, Steve asked if we could do just that a couple of nights ago. Alas, too late. Past the cancellation deadline.
So this compromise. Steve gets to go to the movies with who? Whom? A girlfriend? A gang? It’s a mystery, of course.
“Ready to go, Steve?” mom asks. To the movies, that is. “I’ll take him,” she says. “It’s a mom thing.”
I just wonder, has Steve done any packing whatsoever for the weekend? “No, I was going to do it while he was at the movies,” says his dutiful mom.
OK. I think I’ll just sit in the rocker here and have a couple bourbons. Don’t worry about a couple of shots of Kentucky’s finest. First, it’ll kill some time. Two, I’ll shower before we leave. And I’ll take a jumbo cup of java from Wawa before we try to find Chestertown.
“Choppa, choppa,” yells mom. “We gotta go. Movie’s almost starting?”
Just wait. Daughter Kate is showing me how download a ringtone for my new cellphone. Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds.” “C’mon, let’s go,” yells mom. The car’s running.
Just wondering. How’s Steve getting back from the movie?
“That’ll be figured out later,” says mom. Figured out later. It’s like a mantra.
One more act of practicality before hitting the Kentucky firewater. Call the reservation desk down in Chestertown. “Looks like we won’t be rolling in ‘til about 11:30 tonight. Just want to be sure we’ll have a room.” “Yessir. Your reservation’s guaranteed.” “Thanks.”
We pull out from the driveway about 9:30 pm. Steve climbs in the back seat to “chill” about 9:40. Around 10 three lanes on I-95 merge into one and it’s a crawl. On the tape deck Paul Simon sings about his nine-year-old traveling companion from his first marriage going to Graceland with him. Steve toured Graceland once. He might have seven or eight. Other than Elvis’s Jungle Room, all Steve wanted to know is “when’s this tour over?”
“Is this it?” he asks when we pull into the Holiday Inn Express about 11:30 pm. “How come you kept stalling out all the time?” Got a new clutch put in and yeah, it was touchy and I drove it like a teenager.
“All right if I take a whiz here?” Steve asks, hopping out of the car. What is it about young males pissing wherever they feel like it? I whizzed off the side of Jersey Turnpike one time in rush hour so who am I to tell him to hold it in?
“You do snore a lot, dad,” the boy says next morning upon rising. “Good thing you brought your earplugs.”
Steve does geometry homework, God bless him, and I drive and check out Chestertown, Maryland. It’s Eastern Shore rural upscale you could say. We’ll miss the diesel tractor pull this afternoon. Dollar discount stores in strip malls ring the downtown village green that’s circled by brick sidewalks. Then there the street, Philosopher’s Terrace, Idiot’s Books, an Intuitive Gardens service, “Unwind your mind” with a Swedish Deep Tissue therapist, and a farm house with pond going for $3 million from Select Realty.
Says a middle-aged woman in a wide-brim straw hat sipping coffee outside Play It Again, Sam: “In the evening we all sit around an parse over the news and have a glass of wine and fall asleep.”
OK, enough parsing, let’s go racing. Steve and I cruise past cornfields, yard sales and large rain puddles. I decide to ask him about last night’s movie. “What did you see?” “The Bourne movie.” “Not with girls, did you, that’s not a chick flick.” He smiles. “I don’t think you know who they are?” “They who, the girls?” He smiles.
This is delicate, dicey territory with a 15-year-old. “Can I get a name? Of the girl you went with.” “Mackenzie.” Ah, how far to venture? “She play sports, music? What’s she do out of school?” “She plays soccer.”
The inquisition shall end there. This is a road trip, not a torture trip. Thirteen yellow flags slow the RoadLoans.com 200 Busch Series race until almost the sun sets on Saturday afternoon. The Dover Raceway is maybe one-third full for this “B” series race. We catch dinner at a nearby TGIF Friday’s on Route 13 and get back to the hotel to watch three hours of college football on the Vizio flat screens. Good games. Kentucky 41, Arkansas 29. Georgia 26, Alabama 23, OT. Wisconsin 17, Iowa. 13.
Along the way, in the dark flatlands, Steve asks some hard questions: “(Since the race is in Delaware) What does DuPont make?” “How do you think we will get out of the Iraq war?” He answers that one himself: “There is no easy way to get out of a war, is there?”
Sunday the raceway is jammed with 120,000 fans. I wear an AC Milan Italian soccer league jersey to see if even one motor head in 120,000 know their soccer. Turns out two do: “AC Milan sucks!” yells one. The other, shirtless, eyes glazed, leaving after the racing, blurts, “Is that a soccer shirt? I always get lost at this point coming out of races.” He is, as kids would say, way lost.
Steve and I barely speak to each other during the race. For one thing, it’s so frickin’ loud. And we’re the equivalent of 15 stories up, a good 150 feet above the track. Plus the crowd around you at a NASCAR race is always entertaining. Steve calls it a traveling circus. I say it’s like a state fair fueled by beer, great quantities of beer. Two wide-assed guys sit in front of us. One’s tee shirt reads, “The Beer’s Prayer — Our lager, which art in barrel…” The other’s displays the Periodic Table of Fish Lures & Flies” in great detail. To the left of them sits a fellow with a black Mohawk, so black it’s got to be dyed.
We save our race analysis for the ride home. Steve does some English homework with one of the inside lights on. Mostly we play old hip hop cassette tapes of mine, but Steve, the iPod download boy, has trouble with retro tape player technology. He can’t figure how to insert a cassette, but he can set the correct time on my cell phone in maybe a minute. Would’ve taken me an hour.
Nearing home around 8:30 pm I need some loud tunes to fight the weekend fatigue factor setting in. Steve looks at my tape collection from the late ‘90s and hasn’t a clue what to play. “I got one for you.” It’s the Stones’ “Get yer Ya’s Ya’s Out,” recorded in Madison Square Garden November 27th and 28th, 19 frickin’ 69. My god, 38 years ago, 22 years before Steve was born. I talk about Keith Richards’ Swiss blood transfusions and the driving brilliance of Charlie Watts and the blues, how the Stones listened to the blues in their formative years. “I remember going to blues concerts with your mom. You know, blues fans are like NASCAR fans. Different. Strange looking longhairs and bikers. I’d say, ‘Where are these people during the week? You don’t see ‘em at the mall.’ Like NASCAR fans.”
Ah, there’s so much more to lecture on about the Stones, Delta Blues, Chicago Blues, Muddy Waters. Willie Dixon. “Where’s the House of Blues?” asks Steve. But I stop. When I was 15, I wasn’t musing over music made 22 years ago in 1933. Not Duke Ellington , not Louis Armstrong, not yet. “It’s a pretty good album,” says Steve of “Yer Ya’s Ya’s.” We’ll leave it at that. When bonding, like many things, it’s what you don’t say sometimes that helps cement the bond.
His mother’s concern, it seems, is does dad have enough sleep in him to make the drive down to Chestertown, MD, our hotel locale, leaving about 9 or thereabouts. Mapquest says the drive should take 1 hour, 52 minutes. Total estimated distance: 90.85 miles. Shouldn’t be a problem. So what if I’m usually in bed reading some book or magazine by 9:30. So what it’s too damn bad Steve is three months short of being able to drive. My problem could well be reading the small print and numbers on the map, in the dark, with squinting eyes and no GPS. Where the hell’s Chesterton anyway?
It’s where the closest hotel exists that I could find for the Big Dover Monster Mile weekend. If the room didn’t cost $200 a night, I’d have cancelled Friday night and driven straight to the track Saturday for the afternoon Busch Series race. In fact, Steve asked if we could do just that a couple of nights ago. Alas, too late. Past the cancellation deadline.
So this compromise. Steve gets to go to the movies with who? Whom? A girlfriend? A gang? It’s a mystery, of course.
“Ready to go, Steve?” mom asks. To the movies, that is. “I’ll take him,” she says. “It’s a mom thing.”
I just wonder, has Steve done any packing whatsoever for the weekend? “No, I was going to do it while he was at the movies,” says his dutiful mom.
OK. I think I’ll just sit in the rocker here and have a couple bourbons. Don’t worry about a couple of shots of Kentucky’s finest. First, it’ll kill some time. Two, I’ll shower before we leave. And I’ll take a jumbo cup of java from Wawa before we try to find Chestertown.
“Choppa, choppa,” yells mom. “We gotta go. Movie’s almost starting?”
Just wait. Daughter Kate is showing me how download a ringtone for my new cellphone. Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds.” “C’mon, let’s go,” yells mom. The car’s running.
Just wondering. How’s Steve getting back from the movie?
“That’ll be figured out later,” says mom. Figured out later. It’s like a mantra.
One more act of practicality before hitting the Kentucky firewater. Call the reservation desk down in Chestertown. “Looks like we won’t be rolling in ‘til about 11:30 tonight. Just want to be sure we’ll have a room.” “Yessir. Your reservation’s guaranteed.” “Thanks.”
We pull out from the driveway about 9:30 pm. Steve climbs in the back seat to “chill” about 9:40. Around 10 three lanes on I-95 merge into one and it’s a crawl. On the tape deck Paul Simon sings about his nine-year-old traveling companion from his first marriage going to Graceland with him. Steve toured Graceland once. He might have seven or eight. Other than Elvis’s Jungle Room, all Steve wanted to know is “when’s this tour over?”
“Is this it?” he asks when we pull into the Holiday Inn Express about 11:30 pm. “How come you kept stalling out all the time?” Got a new clutch put in and yeah, it was touchy and I drove it like a teenager.
“All right if I take a whiz here?” Steve asks, hopping out of the car. What is it about young males pissing wherever they feel like it? I whizzed off the side of Jersey Turnpike one time in rush hour so who am I to tell him to hold it in?
“You do snore a lot, dad,” the boy says next morning upon rising. “Good thing you brought your earplugs.”
Steve does geometry homework, God bless him, and I drive and check out Chestertown, Maryland. It’s Eastern Shore rural upscale you could say. We’ll miss the diesel tractor pull this afternoon. Dollar discount stores in strip malls ring the downtown village green that’s circled by brick sidewalks. Then there the street, Philosopher’s Terrace, Idiot’s Books, an Intuitive Gardens service, “Unwind your mind” with a Swedish Deep Tissue therapist, and a farm house with pond going for $3 million from Select Realty.
Says a middle-aged woman in a wide-brim straw hat sipping coffee outside Play It Again, Sam: “In the evening we all sit around an parse over the news and have a glass of wine and fall asleep.”
OK, enough parsing, let’s go racing. Steve and I cruise past cornfields, yard sales and large rain puddles. I decide to ask him about last night’s movie. “What did you see?” “The Bourne movie.” “Not with girls, did you, that’s not a chick flick.” He smiles. “I don’t think you know who they are?” “They who, the girls?” He smiles.
This is delicate, dicey territory with a 15-year-old. “Can I get a name? Of the girl you went with.” “Mackenzie.” Ah, how far to venture? “She play sports, music? What’s she do out of school?” “She plays soccer.”
The inquisition shall end there. This is a road trip, not a torture trip. Thirteen yellow flags slow the RoadLoans.com 200 Busch Series race until almost the sun sets on Saturday afternoon. The Dover Raceway is maybe one-third full for this “B” series race. We catch dinner at a nearby TGIF Friday’s on Route 13 and get back to the hotel to watch three hours of college football on the Vizio flat screens. Good games. Kentucky 41, Arkansas 29. Georgia 26, Alabama 23, OT. Wisconsin 17, Iowa. 13.
Along the way, in the dark flatlands, Steve asks some hard questions: “(Since the race is in Delaware) What does DuPont make?” “How do you think we will get out of the Iraq war?” He answers that one himself: “There is no easy way to get out of a war, is there?”
Sunday the raceway is jammed with 120,000 fans. I wear an AC Milan Italian soccer league jersey to see if even one motor head in 120,000 know their soccer. Turns out two do: “AC Milan sucks!” yells one. The other, shirtless, eyes glazed, leaving after the racing, blurts, “Is that a soccer shirt? I always get lost at this point coming out of races.” He is, as kids would say, way lost.
Steve and I barely speak to each other during the race. For one thing, it’s so frickin’ loud. And we’re the equivalent of 15 stories up, a good 150 feet above the track. Plus the crowd around you at a NASCAR race is always entertaining. Steve calls it a traveling circus. I say it’s like a state fair fueled by beer, great quantities of beer. Two wide-assed guys sit in front of us. One’s tee shirt reads, “The Beer’s Prayer — Our lager, which art in barrel…” The other’s displays the Periodic Table of Fish Lures & Flies” in great detail. To the left of them sits a fellow with a black Mohawk, so black it’s got to be dyed.
We save our race analysis for the ride home. Steve does some English homework with one of the inside lights on. Mostly we play old hip hop cassette tapes of mine, but Steve, the iPod download boy, has trouble with retro tape player technology. He can’t figure how to insert a cassette, but he can set the correct time on my cell phone in maybe a minute. Would’ve taken me an hour.
Nearing home around 8:30 pm I need some loud tunes to fight the weekend fatigue factor setting in. Steve looks at my tape collection from the late ‘90s and hasn’t a clue what to play. “I got one for you.” It’s the Stones’ “Get yer Ya’s Ya’s Out,” recorded in Madison Square Garden November 27th and 28th, 19 frickin’ 69. My god, 38 years ago, 22 years before Steve was born. I talk about Keith Richards’ Swiss blood transfusions and the driving brilliance of Charlie Watts and the blues, how the Stones listened to the blues in their formative years. “I remember going to blues concerts with your mom. You know, blues fans are like NASCAR fans. Different. Strange looking longhairs and bikers. I’d say, ‘Where are these people during the week? You don’t see ‘em at the mall.’ Like NASCAR fans.”
Ah, there’s so much more to lecture on about the Stones, Delta Blues, Chicago Blues, Muddy Waters. Willie Dixon. “Where’s the House of Blues?” asks Steve. But I stop. When I was 15, I wasn’t musing over music made 22 years ago in 1933. Not Duke Ellington , not Louis Armstrong, not yet. “It’s a pretty good album,” says Steve of “Yer Ya’s Ya’s.” We’ll leave it at that. When bonding, like many things, it’s what you don’t say sometimes that helps cement the bond.
The Lost Art of Conversation
Art forms rise and fall. Evolve, peak, and peter out. And so it goes.
At first man grunted. Eventually he conversed. And wrote and mailed and waited for letters. But all that might as well have taken place on another planet. This is what I discovered after a recent three-day spring break road trip with my 20-year-old daughter: After the ancient house phone died of neglect. After mobile phones and emails lost their lure. Beyond what now seems the old art of instant messaging, the world belongs to the nimble-fingered text messengers.
Kate and I were in the car traveling through Virginia for three days, the first three days of April, and though her purple cell phone (“I need a new one dad”) was always by her side, not once did she use it to actually call someone.
I take that back.
Once or twice she phoned her mother. And on the last day, about an hour from home on the PA Turnpike, she spoke with her roommate. “Only because she called me first,” according to Kate.
Otherwise, Kate was in more or less constant contact with friends up and down the East Coast by texting them. “I don’t like talking to people,” Kate confessed. “No unless I have to. Especially boys. They have nothing to say.”
Except Kevin, her old boyfriend. “He’s the only one I could actually talk to.” Once on vacation in the wilds of southern Utah, we had to drive 30 miles into the small town of Kanab each evening so she could get cell phone reception and whisper to Kevin from the back of our rented SUV.
But that seems long ago and far away. Now thousands of years of communication have been reduced to, or returned to, mysterious hieroglyphics:
ayt.
afaik. jk. pos.
np.
break sucks.
ruok?
rme. bored2death.
gal. hf.
em. pir. prw.
f2f p911? jw.
imo. kpc lotta work. iykwim.
weg. eod.
need gbh.
ilu.
gmta. ilu.
b4n.
ptb. aeap.
lu.
Lu2.
Translation:
Are you there?
Are far as I know. Just kidding. Parent over shoulder.
No problem.
Spring break sucks.
Are you OK?
Rolling my eyes. I’m bored to death.
Get a life. Have fun.
Excuse me? Parents in room. Parents are watching.
Face to face parent alert? Just wondering.
I my opinion, keeping parents clueless is a lot of work. If you know what I mean.
Wicked evil grin. End of discussion.
I need a great big hug.
I love you.
Great minds think alike. I love you.
Bye for now.
Please text back. As early as possible.
Love you.
Love you, too.
Every two or three minutes Kate would take her cell out of the glove compartment to check a new text. I’d never hear a beep, ring or buzz. Maybe she knew intuitively when a text was coming in. She’d quickly punch out a reply and put the cell back in the compartment.
On our brief road trip to Charlottesville and UVA, Monticello, Appomattox, Va Tech and my writing friend Professor Geller’s hilltop ranch lodge, I must admit Kate had no trouble hold a conversation. We discussed the former New York Governor Elliott Spitzer’s secret fondness for have prostitutes pee on him; the prospects of Obama actually winning the election; how the north, with its factories versus the south and its farms, was bound to win the Civil War; how we have no clue where brother/son Steve will wind up in college; the charm, and expense, of quilts; why Jefferson needed slave labor to operation his plantation; Tupac versus Biggie Smalls, who’s better; how lucky Jack Johnson is to live the surfer dude life in Hawaii and actually have a way of making in living with his music, and so on.
Still I wondered, if you’re not trapped behind the windshield with dad… “So Kate, what do you and your friends talk about when you’re actually face to face?”
“If it’s somebody I don’t know, it’s the usual questions. Where are you from? What’s your major? Where do you live? If we’re at a party, nobody talks anyway. It’s too loud.”
I was thinking while Kate talks. Let’s see: Automated teller machines handle our transactions. A computerized voice makes and confirms my flight or train reservations. The doc’s office has an automated prescription refill service. Pharmacy has automated prescription ordering. I always get automated receptionists. You can buy anything online. Buy or rent a house or a car online. Plan a vacation. Plan your retirement. Drive anywhere at the beck and call of the droning voice directions from the GPS.
“I don’ like talking to people if I can help it,” Kate says again.
“What if you get lost or can’t find what you need?”
“You ask them for me, OK? Will you?”
My faith in all things not texted or automated was restored less than an hour after we returned home. Kate retreated to her bedroom and I could hear her end of a cell conversation, must have been with that lasted a good hour-plus. Later that night a girlfriend from high school came over and they stayed up until three in the morning talking. “Yeah,” said Kate, “we talked like real human beings.”
The art of conversation may be at the tipping point, edging close to the abyss of automated voice programming and texting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, texting your wedding vows, texting your way through a job interview. “It’s just more efficient, dad. More to the point. And if you don’t have anything to say, you don’t say it.”
Just turn off your cell.
But we’re not there yet, thank god.
At first man grunted. Eventually he conversed. And wrote and mailed and waited for letters. But all that might as well have taken place on another planet. This is what I discovered after a recent three-day spring break road trip with my 20-year-old daughter: After the ancient house phone died of neglect. After mobile phones and emails lost their lure. Beyond what now seems the old art of instant messaging, the world belongs to the nimble-fingered text messengers.
Kate and I were in the car traveling through Virginia for three days, the first three days of April, and though her purple cell phone (“I need a new one dad”) was always by her side, not once did she use it to actually call someone.
I take that back.
Once or twice she phoned her mother. And on the last day, about an hour from home on the PA Turnpike, she spoke with her roommate. “Only because she called me first,” according to Kate.
Otherwise, Kate was in more or less constant contact with friends up and down the East Coast by texting them. “I don’t like talking to people,” Kate confessed. “No unless I have to. Especially boys. They have nothing to say.”
Except Kevin, her old boyfriend. “He’s the only one I could actually talk to.” Once on vacation in the wilds of southern Utah, we had to drive 30 miles into the small town of Kanab each evening so she could get cell phone reception and whisper to Kevin from the back of our rented SUV.
But that seems long ago and far away. Now thousands of years of communication have been reduced to, or returned to, mysterious hieroglyphics:
ayt.
afaik. jk. pos.
np.
break sucks.
ruok?
rme. bored2death.
gal. hf.
em. pir. prw.
f2f p911? jw.
imo. kpc lotta work. iykwim.
weg. eod.
need gbh.
ilu.
gmta. ilu.
b4n.
ptb. aeap.
lu.
Lu2.
Translation:
Are you there?
Are far as I know. Just kidding. Parent over shoulder.
No problem.
Spring break sucks.
Are you OK?
Rolling my eyes. I’m bored to death.
Get a life. Have fun.
Excuse me? Parents in room. Parents are watching.
Face to face parent alert? Just wondering.
I my opinion, keeping parents clueless is a lot of work. If you know what I mean.
Wicked evil grin. End of discussion.
I need a great big hug.
I love you.
Great minds think alike. I love you.
Bye for now.
Please text back. As early as possible.
Love you.
Love you, too.
Every two or three minutes Kate would take her cell out of the glove compartment to check a new text. I’d never hear a beep, ring or buzz. Maybe she knew intuitively when a text was coming in. She’d quickly punch out a reply and put the cell back in the compartment.
On our brief road trip to Charlottesville and UVA, Monticello, Appomattox, Va Tech and my writing friend Professor Geller’s hilltop ranch lodge, I must admit Kate had no trouble hold a conversation. We discussed the former New York Governor Elliott Spitzer’s secret fondness for have prostitutes pee on him; the prospects of Obama actually winning the election; how the north, with its factories versus the south and its farms, was bound to win the Civil War; how we have no clue where brother/son Steve will wind up in college; the charm, and expense, of quilts; why Jefferson needed slave labor to operation his plantation; Tupac versus Biggie Smalls, who’s better; how lucky Jack Johnson is to live the surfer dude life in Hawaii and actually have a way of making in living with his music, and so on.
Still I wondered, if you’re not trapped behind the windshield with dad… “So Kate, what do you and your friends talk about when you’re actually face to face?”
“If it’s somebody I don’t know, it’s the usual questions. Where are you from? What’s your major? Where do you live? If we’re at a party, nobody talks anyway. It’s too loud.”
I was thinking while Kate talks. Let’s see: Automated teller machines handle our transactions. A computerized voice makes and confirms my flight or train reservations. The doc’s office has an automated prescription refill service. Pharmacy has automated prescription ordering. I always get automated receptionists. You can buy anything online. Buy or rent a house or a car online. Plan a vacation. Plan your retirement. Drive anywhere at the beck and call of the droning voice directions from the GPS.
“I don’ like talking to people if I can help it,” Kate says again.
“What if you get lost or can’t find what you need?”
“You ask them for me, OK? Will you?”
My faith in all things not texted or automated was restored less than an hour after we returned home. Kate retreated to her bedroom and I could hear her end of a cell conversation, must have been with that lasted a good hour-plus. Later that night a girlfriend from high school came over and they stayed up until three in the morning talking. “Yeah,” said Kate, “we talked like real human beings.”
The art of conversation may be at the tipping point, edging close to the abyss of automated voice programming and texting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, texting your wedding vows, texting your way through a job interview. “It’s just more efficient, dad. More to the point. And if you don’t have anything to say, you don’t say it.”
Just turn off your cell.
But we’re not there yet, thank god.
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