On The Pyro-Quack Tour

Only those who have felt the searing pain of a pinched sciatica nerve radiating down their leg will know. Imagine, if you haven't, the incessant brutality of a half-inch drill bit driving deep into your ankle while you toss and turn in bed for weeks without sleep. Then add a flesh-ripping ache, akin to a stream of magma down the nerve along your calf, and the crawl of a thousand ants between your toes.

Now multiply it by minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years without remedy.

Even the more prescient threats of consequence in adolescence couldn't spare me. I wouldn't have listened, anyway. Russ and I had a game in junior high where we'd run headlong at each other and slam our shoulders together. We'd grunt like musk oxen in libidinous angst.

In high school I toted a sousaphone or bass drum in countless miles of parades. Carried the bass drum down a faux New York avenue during my cameo in Hello Dolly. Played tackle football without pads and endured a year of college rugby--all seemingly without consequence. In the 1980s, I'd train for hours with Jacques, lifting weights on the porch overlooking the sea at Santa Cruz, running for miles a day to get in shape for slam dancing on weekend nights at the Catalyst. Oh, we slammed.

And at 32, I was doing chair dips at my beach house in Aptos, using my body weight to pump up my triceps muscles when I felt a faint ping in my lumbar vertebra and spent the following day on all fours, tears pouring down, grinding my teeth at a sensation that someone had buried a screwdriver in my ankle.

Chronic pain is not for wimps. I have known people who walked with dignity and inner peace through life-claiming ailments and wonder what got into them. In our family, a sneeze is foreplay to cancer. We rent billboards when we catch the flu.

For a month I lay bedridden, ice packs pressed against my spine, my knees elevated. Physicians prescribed muscle relaxants, pain killers (God bless them!), and physical therapy. In the end, I received my doctor's approval to drive cross country to attend grad school in Alabama.

Less than a month into the semester, the disc slid back across the nerve endings and cannibals began once again to tear out chunks of my leg and gnaw on the wounds. Toss in the brain weasels that set to work once I'm in pain, add a healthy dose of heart-stammering culture shock, relentless Southern heat, and the heavy teaching/learning load of grad school, and I was ready to experience what I grimly called "Youth In Asia".

What I found, instead, were the Yellow Pages listings for chiropractors in Tuscaloosa, selecting (as anyone else might find suspicious) the office with the largest paid ad. And if grandiosity was the sign of professional acumen, then the long line of people streaming out the chiropractic office door and onto the sidewalk of the muggy fall day in T-town, then I had surely picked the winner.

Doctor Death had a new, candy-apple Corvette parked out front with a personalized Alabama Heart-of-Dixie license plate: "NoPain".

And I doubt he felt any.

Meanwhile, patients were shuffled through the office like cattle herded along to the abbatoir, whistling faint songs of hope as we trudged. In you went; the nurse took a healthy swipe off of your credit card, set you face-down on a movable table where you waited for Doctor Death to prance in and slam away as you cried out for justice.

He was at least 6 feet 9, 265 pounds, and came in stealthily, hammered you into the table, then pulled you to your feet with his large, hammy fist, and showed you the way to the corridor where you exited out a rear door, assembly-line style. He never asked how I was doing.

In truth, I wasn't getting any better, although I did learn that when visiting writers came through the university, it helped to drink heavily with them so as to sit through the readings. On Friday nights, we went to Storyville and pounded the cheap cocktails and I went home to rage angrily at the pain (and at my partner, Alabama, moronic student essays, and anyone in earshot).

Once I told Doctor Death that he was hurting me more than he knew and he replied that my pain was part of the healing. Every few days I'd squeeze in raw agony into the VW and drive over to line up with dozens of patients who were ahead of me in the slashing heat of mid-day. I couldn't tell if he was helping them, either. Meanwhile, my student loan account was hemorrhaging.

Eventually, I just gave up and tried to live with it.

Now over the years I've met some genuine healers who hold chiropractic licenses. Some helped, some admitted they couldn't help completely, several changed me for the better. A fellow out in Grass Valley helped heal emotional trauma from childhood. I've been needled, rolfed, stretched, yanked, had my cranium held by an herbalist, and burned by glass cups a healer put on my back in the Yucatan.

I'll offer Doctor Death up to karma. When I decided to stop driving to his office, my back felt better than ever.

Break a Leg

It's what my family calls the Hyman Curse. I'm not convinced that we've been singled out. I hear too many horror stories from other people to consider my siblings and progenitors sole proprietors of the domain of self-inflicted misery. There's a faint tinge of victimization to wander that route of presumption. But I do believe to my bones in the notion that we relish in our misfortunes in a grisly way and I know I developed the knack of sabotaging a fabulous opportunity in my youth.

Consider:

• My mother visits the emergency room an inordinate number of times a year with a broken toe (from walking into furniture or walls) or a viscous wound inflicted by a carving knife. She'd prefer to bleed into the sink, but my sister insists on proper medical care.
• My brother wandered into the path of three baseball bats swung at once by an on-deck little leaguer, bloodying his mouth. A trooper, he passed out only after safely at the hospital as the ER physician came forth with a syringe of pain killer, thereby crashing to the floor and knocking out his teeth.
• And my sister performed a hideous dismount from a wet deck on a Mexican Riviera cruise, failing to earn a 10 from the Russian judge or a reasonable settlement with the shipping line.

And yet, none can hold serve against my unparalleled predilection for misfortune. There are accident prone people--and there go I. I'd hold my record of spoiling family vacations, sundering romantic dinners, or destroying formal occasions with spilt blood and bare gristle--my own.

You could blame it on karma, on self-subversion, on one drink too many, on the coriolus effect or --my preference--on others. Given a way, I gladly have the will.

When I was still a toddler, a nasty shard of wood from the Coney Island boardwalk sliced completely through my foot. It's a tale firmly rooted in the Hyman folklore.

In my fourteenth year, our family took a well-deserved vacation to a lovely resort in Goleta, outside Santa Barbara. We rented a cottage near the beach in a delightful grove of eucalyptus trees with a wide, rolling lawn in the shade. My father got the fire going in the hearth while my mother changed into lounging clothes and settled into the couch.

I went out and rented a moped for an hour. It was a simple vehicle, dramatically underpowered, and it was like piloting a bicycle. The resort staff recommended a trail that rose up from the sea and wended through a refreshingly cool pine forest. The trail darted between shadows and light, and bent around a corner where a boulder had rolled off the hillside and plopped itself in the path...

That afternoon my parents spent their long-awaited afternoon in the emergency room as a doctor took a stiff brush to my bloody leg, removing twigs and gravel embedded by my fall. And I spent the rest of the trip sitting outside in a lounge chair, my leg swaddled in bandages. A harbinger.

My first summer home from college I sold shoes for Kinney's and hung out with my buddies by night at a gas station where one worked in the garage. We talked late into the night, listening to music and trying to pick up girls, their hair half over their eyes as we pumped gas and checked under the hood. My folks had packed their bags for a week on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, a dazzling blue gem cradled in the mountains at the Nevada border. I was to stay home one night, finishing up my shift at the shoe store, then fly up the following day to join them.

That night my friend Dennis suggested I try a little white pill marked with a cross that he said I'd enjoy. It was the only time in my life I would try speed. But I did enjoy it thoroughly. I felt invincible, jolly, and filled with great ideas. My hands trembled. And we talked all night, blasting out Moody Blues from the stereo in the darkened garage long after the gas station closed.

We raced to the airport on motorcycles in the dawn and after my folks picked me up at the Tahoe airport, I couldn't wait to change into my trunks and dive into the water. This was in the days before jet skiis, but a local merchant was renting an early version of the craft and my father--reluctantly--allowed me to rent one for an hour.

I crossed the lake, grinning wildly, a rooster tail of spray gushing out behind the little boat as I stood in it bounding across the swells. From the shore, people were pointing at me, so I grinned back, took one hand off the wheel to wave back. But they were insistent, troubled, and I looked back at the rooster tail to see it had blushed red in my wake.

Blood pounded out of the open wound in my ankle where the engine housing had come undone and a sharp edge of sheet metal sliced into me. Dearest amphetamines. I dared not speak their name as I spent the following week in a camp chair on the beach, observing everyone else splashing in the lake, changing my dressings twice a day to drain the pus.

Then there are the screaming verbal exchanges between my father and I across countless weddings and bar mitzvahs as he struggled to maintain martial order and I picked fights to demonstrate my rebellion, or the times I took a cocktail to smooth out the ennui of professional appearances and ended up face-down in the bathroom after one led to another.

Recovery has delivered God's cornucopia of blessings, but has not abated the Hyman Curse. In my fourth year free of substances, I went ass over teakettle from my mountain bike, stopping too quickly to avoid a rock in the path, and broke my arm. Last fall, in my darkened home, I stepped on an upended, three-pronged electrical plug, plunging it like the devil's trident into my arch. It took more than a month before I could walk comfortably again.

My mentor James Hall once wrote a short story, The Claims Artist, in which the protagonist, a writer with a flagging career, finds it easier to make an income by cutting off a finger here and there, collecting handsomely from his insurance company. In the end, he's a famous scribe, with a legion of groupies carrying his foreshortened authorial body across the Southern California strand -- in a basket.

It sounds like a reasonable ploy, if only I could afford health insurance.

Life on the Farm

Somewhere on these forty acres is a dope farm. I choose not to visit it. Once I take a puff of the stuff, I stop living for, oh, any number of years.

I had an extended love affair with marijuana. For a non-addicting substance, it called the tune for decades of my life. I'm not going to make a federal case over the weed; millions can take it or leave it. I cling fast to two opinions on the stuff: It ought to be legalized and taxed so we can rehabilitate our failing schools and, two, I can't smoke it without making it my God.

When I went off to college in the 70s, you couldn't walk down the hallways of the dorm without parting the clouds of smoke. I held out as long as I could. A month, maybe. My roommate was a police science major, so there was no dope in our room. But a weed-weasel neighbor had one of the only televisions in the dorm, so I went over every night. The neighbor, also a journalism major, rode his bike across campus every day with a green Army surplus sack filled with baggies of Michoacan, which he sold to pay tuition.

It was the cheap pot then, baggies three or four inches thick in the $10 bag, complete with eye gouging seeds that popped when you lit it. The night I gave in, I took a few puffs, and went back to my room, puzzled that nothing had happened.

But the third time I tried it, it felt like the small planet into which my unhappy adolescence had been confined burst open into endless plains of blue skies dotted with puffy, jolly clouds, and I stepped out of this world and right into the other. "Feel it yet?" my friend asked, and I flopped to the floor of the dorm and giggled like a baby.

In recovery, they say that at first it's fun. Then it's fun with problems. Then it's just problems.

The fun lasted a decade or more. Under its influence, I completed three college degrees, worked as a successful journalist and college professor. I published stories, essays, and poetry. Traveled across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Mexico, and most of the continental states. I had no idea when the fun period ended and I was ferried across the peaceful seas to the land of fun with problems. A subtle transition.

I lived like the bubble boy, encased in a film of comfort shattered unaccountably by foreshortened emotions. Without it, I could go off like a bomb at the smallest misconception of what happened around me. With it, I was solitary, indifferent to opinions outside my confined thinking, inaccessible finally to the concerns and loves of those most connected to me.

I wouldn't think of going to dinner, a movie, a concert, a ballgame--hell, a poetry reading--unless buoyed by the buzz. I put a tiny plant in the widow of my apartment in Tuscaloosa, frightening my partner with my moronic daring. Federales pointed automatic weapons at my head when they confiscated my stash one dusk on a sand dune south of the border. I disembarked from a ferry between Holland and the U.K. with a Marlboro box filled with hashish, thinking when the English customs officer asked if I had something to declare: "Why yes," I imagined saying, "I declare that the hash in Amsterdam is simply fine."

I'm leaving out the worst, of course. But without my stash, furniture went out the window, girlfriends packed their possessions into their cars and made off into their lives. I kept on keeping on.

Everyone has war stories. And everyone in recovery has gone to great lengths to repair the wake of emotional destruction that trails behind years of addiction. For a long time, the stuff simply kept me alive. When I think today of the suicides of my grandfather and my uncle, I know that the herb treated something dramatically wrong with my brain chemistry. But it eventually stopped working, and when the voices in my head were louder than the cozy veil that descended after I smoked, I had to consider treatment or suicide.

So you can imagine the subtle and cunning machinations of my thinking recently when my landlord moved off the 40 acres and rented the large house up the hill to a pair of couples who have medical marijuana licenses and are growing pounds of the weed on the property. It's how they make their living, and it's legal for them to do so here in California, where the monstrous deficit is mismanaged daily by the governor, a man who smoked pot in the 1970s. I'm not oblivious to the irony of living in a town called Grass Valley, or that it's renowned for its medical marijuana dispensaries.

We made a small pact, my new neighbors and I. They grow and process it where they want, smoke it as they will, and keep it out of my sight. But with the herb came problems. The couples fought and one of the men, sporting a freshly blackened eye, announced he was taking his girlfriend and moving out.

Recently I spied a new fence, to keep the mule deer and wild rabbits away from the tasty leaves--over by what had been my landlord's workshed. I see it out of the corner of my eye as I wend down the long driveway into horse country. In the quiet of the morning the leaves open out to the sun and the seeds of sabotage start to whisper.

But the cry of redemption, connection, love of friends and family and, finally, loving the man I have come to be is sung louder than any call from the shadows. And I know that to enter that fence is to wall myself off from grace, from you, and from my better nature.

Writer's Block

Where it is hot and dry, the ants begin to move at night.

In the July morning of this year in my life they have found something cool and refreshing in the metal case of my laptop computer, marching with purpose up the legs of the wooden table, across the unfinished birch grain and up, up, onto the black metal case, marching across the control key, the caps lock, the A and Q keys, strumming their own stories by the dozens.

I know how they feel. Last week I drove to the coast near Fort Bragg to escape the relentless, pounding three-digit heat, lazing in the 60-degree ocean breeze, stumbling quite by accident into a sleepy tribe of sea lionesses and their cubs who blended gray and mottled across the rocks and seaweed. Driving home again on roads choked by July Fourth traffic, the temperature gauge in the car rocking upward again into the 90s, I bit my tongue against declarations of rage against the sun, society, so many oversized and gluttonous trucks and campers trailing their appended smaller cars, migrating into volleys of shimmering air. And today, hot and parched, the ants are writing their own story.

To say they have nothing to share is nonsense. My first and best writing mentor, James Hall, would have us pack up our notebooks and drive off the campus in the hills of Santa Cruz into town to find stories. He told me to take a basket of dirty clothes to the laundromat on Mission Street. The assignment: watch someone schlepping their dirties in and out of the machines and create a line of dialogue that told their story. Then, we had to return home and write a short fiction that deserved the nugget of dialogue. The only rule: we were not to mention the laundromat.

There are few gems in the hundreds of books on writing, but they are precious and include John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, Henry James' The Art of the Novel, Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, Rust Hill's Writing in General and The Short Story in Particular, and Leon Surmelian's Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness. Of the last, I have James Hall's personal copy, bequeathed to me when I graduated the writing program.

None of these tells you what to do when you experience writer's block because, if you're a writer, there is no such thing. There are days when the prose comes easily. And there are the others when it feels like hell to lay down a poorly made phrase. Writing takes a lot of writing, and writers are self-limiting by a lack of imagination, by sloth, by immersion in crippling pop culture and the deluge of distractions and poor taste. Mostly sloth.

Here's the only trick that has worked every time I feel disconnected from the page: I read. I read it all and it tickles the crevice in the brain dedicated to calling out rhythms of language. James Hall had us read across the genres. We'd read a pop novel like Hotel, or a crime piece from Elmore Leonard, a Zane Grey western--all along with the customary Joyce, Melville, and Crane.

When I taught fiction at the University of Illinois, my upscale Chicagoan students resented having to read outside of contemporary short stories. Some hated reading entirely, which was surprising for a classroom of students who elected to enroll in fiction writing classes. Some saw the class as a pottery workshop or some other "quick-A" experience they could complete without compromising their frat parties, akin to a classroom version of the window of a bank or credit union where you'd drive through, swipe a credit card, and drove off with cash--or caché.

And in this first week of July, having taken a month off from my daily writing, it felt like begging for my life to lay out a few lines of prose. So I picked up Willa Cather's My Antonia last night and fell into the comfort of honest language.

The ants, you know, produce music as they walk--an effect created by rubbing of thorax parts to their rhythm of march. It's called stridulation.

One of my teachers, novelist Wright Morris once wrote:

"In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98th Meridian–where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn’t–towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place–now that it is dead–has come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied."

And so, like those tireless ants, I have begun again to march across the keys if only to breathe life into my life, to open out the broken windows and sing my dreams.

And What It's Like Now

When Grace said I'd have to move, that her cancer had progressed to where she could no longer climb the stairs to her home and needed to reclaim the two-room cabin I was renting from her in the mountains, I cascaded into a depression. I found her cabin through an online ad and had moved in the previous summer. It had glass double-doors that looked out over a meadow and lovely brook beneath the towering pines. At dusk, deer came to the back door to graze on the ivy.

I have moved more than 50 times in my adult life, chasing jobs across the states, following dreams and half-baked notions, and often packed up and gone with the wrong-headed idea that my life would suddenly change if I could rearrange the furniture. "Be it ever so humble," a friend in recovery says, "there's no place like somewhere else." So when I had to scour the ads once more for a place, my heart filled with dread that my days in the quiet, nourishing woods were done.

And it appeared so when I visited the converted single-wide trailer on a horse farm near Meadow Vista with leaky faucets and a noisy generator, then the mother-in-law apartment above the workshop-garage in Colfax with tiny slits for windows, and finally the solitary house in the heavy brush near Applegate with hot and cold running mice.

On my slender income from writing I had a limited selection, so my heart raced when I saw the photograph of the pink house on its hillside in the online housing ad. It's a tiny place, with a single room for living, a separate bath and storage, set on a 40-acre parcel of rolling hills and oak trees overlooking the San Joaquin Valley. On my visit, trout cut the evening air with leaps at passing gnats, splashing back into the pond just outside the front door. Bullfrogs cried out for love in the dusk and red-tail hawks traced circles into the fading light. I signed my lease.

In late May, I sat on the sprawling front porch in the advancing wind of a thunderstorm and counted my blessings. The rain marched up the canyon. Black clouds scudded overhead and lightening forked down into the valley. The air carried the taste of dust. Stars winked out overhead as the clouds moved in.

Not many people can say they earn their livelihood through their writing. So, while I have lost nearly 80 percent of my clients since December to the recession, and while I cannot afford much, let alone pay bills and taxes or the insultingly high fees for healthcare, I counted my blessings as the hail banged down on the metal roof of the little pink house and wondered how I had become so damn lucky.

This morning the red-throated house finches, the jittery flickers with their white tails, the wild turkeys and their scurrying young, the magpies with black and white chevrons, the hares with jackass ears a mile long, and the mule deer hang around the yard between the glistening leaves of the oaks in the soft, quiet wind. And I am home.

Stepping Up

Boredom, pangs of guilt, jealous of what I perceived were the productive lives of normal Americans, perhaps even the beginnings of altruism that I was learning about in my studies of Tibetan Buddhism--for an amalgam of reasons I volunteered to work in the classroom at the Shriner's Hospital for Children.

The year before, I had volunteered to feed baby birds at the rescue center in Sacramento, a small neighborhood house that had been converted to a nursery filled with the chirpers, strays, wounded and abandoned critters that dropped onto lawns or ended up in suburban backyards by the thousands. It was a stinky, noisy house, with hundreds of bins of hungry chicks that came through the massive flyway of California's Central Valley and were left to die or provide food for snakes, coyotes, and feral cats. In the end, I cut short the commitment, growing weary of stuffing worms into the endless open mouths, watching dead babies go into the trash.

So, in the spring of the new year, I filled out the paperwork for the background check and clearance forms to volunteer at the Shriner's. Since the 1920's, those men in the red fez hats have opened free hospitals across the country for the treatment of orthopedic conditions, burns, cleft lip and palates, and spinal cord injuries in children. In Sacramento, the hospital treated children from around the country and Central American countries, flying them in by helicopter, putting their family members in adjacent dormitories, restoring lives and lending hope to helpless amputees, kids scorched in home fires and automobile accidents, keeping up their schoolwork, teaching them how to play again, educating kids back home that when their disfigured friend came back how horrible it would be to make fun of them.

I had always wondered what kind of fools paraded around in silly red hats, smoked stogies at small town pancake breakfasts, or shot hands of cards while seated around the table at country fairs. They're angels. In Sacramento, they drove vans for hours on end to local and distant airports, picking up unfortunate accident victims and their families and ferrying them to the hospital. They put on clown make-up and dazzled bed-ridden kids with magic tricks, or they brought in specially trained animals to sit bedside and put smiles on faces--faces grimly webbed with burn scars or on those who had no arms to cradle a kitten.

In my first year out of school, I had taken a job on a daily newspaper in a college town just a few miles from Sacramento on the wide delta. I worked a 50-hour week for $85, and went home to pass out. I rode around the town's sprawling bike paths, coached a Pop Warner football team, but had few friends except for the fellow from San Francisco who sold me grass. That was until he passed out one night on his couch, his burning joint setting fire to the paisley tapestry that hung overhead, and ended up in the hospital burn unit, unable to regain consciousness.

He hung on for a few days, and I ran a blood drive in the newspaper, but after learning about the extent of his wounds, would not go out to visit him and he died in the middle of the night with his family at his bedside. I felt badly about it for years... .

The Shriner's Hospital in Sacramento is built in a wide circle, with bright sunlight streaming down the center into a spacious hall with comfortable couches and luscious foliage. A grand piano sits to one side, etudes played digitally by computer. Music without hands.

There are patient rooms up above, looking more like hotel suites, with family rooms nearby, cozy meeting rooms, cafeteria, laboratories, treatment rooms and gymnasiums, motion-study labs, a prosthesis shop where workers tirelessly create legs with brightly painted sneakers or shiny patent leather shoes attached on the ends, seamstresses completing detail work in sequins and flowers as for a debutante ball. A room filled with legs and hands and shoes and dresses.

But even the training sessions and pep talks I received could not prepare me. Here was a seven year-old girl from Mexico, where the building codes were slack and the scalp was blown from her head in a sudden arc of electricity, passing out the bottoms of her feet and taking the toes along into the ground. And later, in the classroom, I attempted to teach subject-verb agreement to a teenager who, now rendered motionless from his neck down by a dive off of a pier in Kauai, answered multiple choice questions in a clear, steady voice with noble acceptance until it cracked when he told me he had leaped off that pier for years, swimming in the blue bay with dolphins and turtles, but on the singular day miscalculated the wind.

And I, with few troubles in life save for the ones that constantly arise of my own making with want, and expectations, and a constant thirst for more, more, more of that, please....

"I don't know what to do," I told the volunteer coordinator one day. "I don't know what to say, how to act, nothing."

"Just look them in the eye," she said. "That's all they want from you."

But in the end I couldn't do it. I went a few times afterward, then stopped going. It was feeding birds all over again. No instant gratification in it at all, just endless open mouths. Perhaps I'm being a little hard on myself, but I doubt it. It takes character to follow through. I imagine normal people do it all the time. Guys in silly hats, smoking cigars for crying out loud. But fewer and fewer young men today are drawn to fraternal organizations and, some day, this may all go away.

"Normal," my friend Don says, "is a setting on a clothes dryer."

But I was thinking the experience would give me something else, something more tangible, maybe something to boast about. Maybe I'm boasting now. Like leaping off a tall pier in front of my friends.

Spun Out

Although I live in the woods, I am still a Brooklyn boy at heart. I've never gone spelunking, parachuting, or rappelling. But in my third year of recovery, I agreed to try whitewater rafting. I had floated in a canoe down the Yukon River in Alaska and bounced along in an inner tube down the North Fork of the American River, had paddled a sea kayak in the freezing waters of the Pacific Northwest, but the notion of dropping down a wild canyon in a raft seemed just a little too daring--until I was invited by the mayor to tag along on a two-day trip down a tributary of the fearsome Snake River in Idaho.

The mayor had a grown son who ran the raft trips down the class four rapids. He knew what he was doing, the mayor said. All I had to do was put on a vest and helmet, sit in the raft, and row when directed, he said. The mayor said his son knew every bump and curve of the Lochsa, could do it in his sleep.

The river begins in the Bitterroot Mountains and descends through forty rapids over the course of 20 miles. It runs unimpeded along dense groves of cedars, spinning through holes as large as a ranch house, with aptly named rapids called House Wave, The Grim Reaper, Bloody Mary, and Termination.

As we drove across Washington State to the Idaho border the mayor and I talked recovery. We talked about God and how the majestic plains of southeast Washington flowed like a golden sea in the sunset. We camped at dusk and woke to the smell of fresh coffee and bacon, and the chugging air compressor that was filling our rafts.

What the mayor did not say, or did not know, was that his son loved to smoke as much marijuana as he could along the wild river. And when we reached our first beach for a drinking water break, our guide whipped out his pipe and begin to choke down clouds of sweet smoke. I passed, but two other people on our raft took a hit or two before we climbed back in the boat.

The mayor had long since gone ahead in another craft, so I was stuck in the front of our raft for the duration, which now played out in a cascading series of gut wrenching drops between walls of water. Our guide's advice: no matter what, stay in the boat.

He took a last blast of pot before we turned into a rushing artery that raced up to a wall of granite where it bubbled and descended into darkness. We followed. The roar seemed to ebb as we smacked bottom and jetted out into another series of short, gurgling drops, each new bend curving green and white over mossy rocks into a curtain of spray.

It was like landing on concrete, and when my eyes cleared from the mist I saw that my companions had been thrown from the raft. Only my guide, grinning and whooping, remained aboard, jerking at the rudder, trying to free us from the whirlpool into which we'd careened rather haplessly at the bottom of a sudden drop.

I held fast to the raft, straddled out, legs tucked into the lines at the back, head high as the world raced by in a nauseating fury. My guide shifted his weight, but each time we completed a revolution, the raft slid back into the center of the whirlpool and twirled again and again.

On the rocks above, kayakers tossed us lifelines, but none came close enough, and my guide pitched against the side, jerking wildly at the yoke. "You're doing great!" he shouted above the roar. "Keep it up."

I had no idea what I was doing that was so great, nor what to keep up. With each spin, I saw my fellow passengers ahead on a sunny rock, dripping dry and laughing. I thought of hopping out to join them, but the force of the spin pinned me at the bottom of the raft. At the end of each orbit, my guide tried to knife us out into the current. He stood and for a moment, I feared he'd leave me there.

With a sudden lurch, the raft skipped out into the stream again and my guide aimed us for the bank where our companions waited. I climbed out, my head spinning and a sour ache in my belly, and found a rock to call my home. I wasn't moving.

But my guide raced up and offered a high five. "You rock," he said. "You can run with me any damn time!"

Years later, I still have no idea what I had done to please him so. But when we took out at the end of the run, I found the mayor and advised him to reacquaint himself with his son. I was taking the next day off, if he didn't mind. I was going to sit by the side of the Lochsa and meditate on the blessings in life, even if that made me a wimp and a city boy.

But, you know, I couldn't wait to try it again.

Gastronomic Judaism

Our family sailed through the 1950s and 1960s on the wave of convenience foods and fads, but my mother insisted on tradition when the holidays rolled around. Saturday through Thursday we dined on meat loaf, skirt steaks, chicken, and occasional TV dinners. Vegetables came from the can--usually peas and carrots--and we had a slice of melon before the meal in the summertime.

Fridays, in some bizarre reflection of old world culture, mom celebrated "dairy day". I thought only Catholics celebrated that. For us, it meant frozen fishsticks from the box, tuna casserole, or the occasional fillet. I hated Fridays. Sundays, however, we went out to eat somewhere to give mom a break, usually Chinese or Italian food.

Some nights, when the Dodgers were in San Francisco and the game was on the tube, we had pizza or hamburgers or TV dinners in the den and watched the battle in black and white. I tasted my first beer then, when dad offered a sip off of his can of Busch. My parents drank so infrequently it was a treat. Later, it made me confused to think that alcoholism was considered predetermined by your genes since I could count on one hand the number of times I witnessed my parents drunk.

Whatever we ate, my favorite portion was the largest piece of anything. I was a preemie, a scrawny kid that the nurse held in one hand, and so my mother made sure I never went wanting. I usually ended up with whatever she hadn't finished slid over from her plate.

Into her 80s, my mother still cooks spreads for the holidays, getting down the fancy plates and silverware, the goblets and glassware, and the crystal salt and pepper shakers. She opens up the dining room table, adding the extra boards that lengthen it for family, putting down the pads and white linen.

The Jewish holidays are spaced throughout the year, matching up with the seasonal holidays celebrated by gnostic tribal traditions before the formalized Judaic-Christian feasts of spring, fall, and winter. And each arrives with its special symbolic foods and wine. On Passover, the table opened out to seat uncles and aunts and cousins, sometimes a distant relative who strayed to the West Coast. By turns we had Sol and Fay, Shirley and Mort and Naomi, Bobbie and Les, and Jerry and Beth, and when it was a large crowd, my brother and sister and I were banished to a folding bridge table reserved for kids.

My father issued the faith wear, yarmulkes for all who would take them, then he'd sit at the head of the table and work his way through the seder book, taking as long as possible to march through the prayers until my mother scowled and went into the kitchen to bring out bowls of chicken matzoh-ball soup, announcing that the prayers were over.

We ate chopped chicken livers on matzoh, gefilte fish with horseradish, soup with matzoh dumplings, beef brisket, potato latkes with sour cream, asparagus, pickles, olives, and more matzoh, followed by coffee and kosher pastries and cookies that, frankly, tasted like cardboard.

On holidays where we could eat leavened flour, Mom and I would usually drive over to the bakery by Dales to pick up a challah or rye bread. We ate chopped liver on rye with mustard or ketchup. I am decidedly a ketchup guy. And I never refer to it by its gentile spelling, catsup. (Oddly enough, the word originates as ke-tsiap, a Chinese word for fish sauce.) On rare occasions, a relative would mail out a sleeve of Nathan's hot dogs from Coney Island and I'd slather it with ketchup, much to the dismay of my mother, who is a mustard gal.

Whenever I go home, even if it's between holidays, my mother always has some frozen brisket for me to take back on the airplane. When I was in college, I'd go home for holiday meals and drive back with a care package of kosher food and freshly folded laundry. One thanksgiving, I stopped along the long, lonely stretch of Interstate 5 to pick up a hitcher, a scraggly fellow who hadn't eaten in a while. When he got out near San Jose, I gave him a box of matzoh, a glass jar of gefilte fish, and a bottle of borscht (red Russian juice with slivers of beets). I wonder if he left it on the side of the road.

In the mid 1980s, when I was teaching at the University of Illinois, I was invited to a Thanksgiving pot luck and decided to try my hand at baking a challah. It's a braided loaf of egg bread with raisins, onions, and seeds, coated with yolk and baked until the outside has a golden, crispy crust. It's easy to make and it confers great honor on you since it looks like a labor of love. And it should be.

After the first success, it became my dish of choice for pot lucks. For one thing, it was always larger than the turkey, and therefore drew great and astonished praise. And, best of all, there was always enough for everyone. For days, I'd make french toast from the leftovers. I borrowed the recipe from an Eastern European cookbook, sometimes using poppy seeds instead of sesame.

Here's how you do it:

Ingredients

• 2 teaspoons (or packets) of instant yeast
• 3 1/2 cups of pre-sifted, unbleached all-purpose flour (or substitute one cup of whole wheat)
  
• 1/4 cup very warm water
• 4 large eggs, plus 3 for the batter, one for coating the risen loaf before baking
  
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup softened honey
• one onion, chopped, two cups of raisins (optional)
• sesame or poppy seeds
  

Mix the yeast, honey, and warm water in a bowl and let it rise for 15 minutes.

In a separate bowl, add oil, beaten eggs, yeast mixture, salt, and flour...in that order. Mix thoroughly, adding onions and raisins (optional). Form a large ball of dough (if too dry, add a little water); coat the ball with oil and let it rise under a warm cloth for half an hour.

Punch it down, and let it rise again, with a freshly warmed cloth for another hour and a half in a warm place.

Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper and coat it with oil. Divide the dough into one long strip and two shorter strips and let each rise for another 15 minutes.

Lay the long strip in the center, attach the two shorter strips at one end and knead the end into a single piece. Braid the shorter strips around the large center piece and knead the opposite end when done. Paint the top with beaten egg yolk and dot with seeds of your choice.

Put the loaf into a preheated 325°F oven and bake for 25-30 minutes. It's done when a toothpick pressed into the center of the loaf comes out clean. Let it cool on a rack before slicing. You can easily cover it in plastic wrap to schlep it elsewhere. Smile when people worship you. Tear off pieces and butter liberally.

Repeat as necessary.

Catch and Release

We were having a rough time--me with life, you with me--and we took a day out of the struggle to go swimming. I suppose I could undergo years of therapy to understand why I took out Alabama on you, but let's just say I was a mean fool. The relentless heat and humidity, the overbearing pace of grad school, the rapist that came to the screen door that day, the cockroaches marching in the leaves at night, the acrid fog of mosquito spray in the air, the relentless questions about whether we were married and which church we attended, the seemingly endless parade of objectionable morons with guns, including the idiot in the yard next door who shot bee-bees into a writhing squirrel he had locked in a cage... . It was all too much.

So it was off to Lake Nicol and the cool water we had heard so much about north of Tuscaloosa proper, out beyond the yacht club, tucked between the quarries along New Watermelon Road. We had a cooler of soda pop and sandwiches. We were planning a soft day. I left the books at home, the novels for that survey in modern British literature, my half-drafted short story about dog racing. What was it you left behind that morning?

Was it the resentment that you had followed me out to Alabama and its withering heat from our lovely home in the woods overlooking Monterey Bay and 65-degree summer fog? That you left the comfort of a loving family and a decent-paying job to take your place in the Women's Study department with its office in, of all places, Manley Hall? You must have left a lot behind that morning on our drive to Lake Nicol, because you were loving and kind and happy.

You had your new car with its moonroof and bright paint and the sun danced between the kudzu vines and dappled the road in shadows. We stopped at a country store at Sexton Bend for ice and laughed uneasily at the Rebel flags and fishing worms in the cooler, the Styrofoam cups of nightcrawlers stored right beside foil-wrapped sandwiches and microwave burritos.

By the spillway we stopped and watched the columns of heat rising off the water and the rooster tails of speedboats crisscrossing the lake. It was a struggle to get out of the air conditioned car, grab the blankets and food from the trunk, and head down the dirt track to the picnic area. Before we had gone 50 yards, we were soaked in sweat and your hand was wet when I took it in mine. Lord knows we needed a break.

But once we were under the shade of the pines and changed into our swim trunks, we saw that swimming would be impossible. Out on the landing, where the sand sloped into the cool green lake, hundreds of cottonmouths sunned on the rocks and darted through the water. You flushed and looked for a place to sit, but they were everywhere around us, and even as we went back under the pine trees, we saw them under the tables and curled around the fire pit, slithering through the brush, moving through the shadows, all around where we had left our clothes.

That night, back in our hotbox apartment, trapped in the bedroom where we had the single window air conditioner, we lay in bed watching bad television, rushing out for a quick dip in the bathtub we had filled with cold water, and back atop the towels we spread out over the sheets. At 3am it was still 103 degrees out in the dark Tuscaloosa night, with two more months of summer stretching out before us, venomous. It was a very small room and that night the kitty brought a cockroach into bed as a prize between her teeth.

Ducklings

"Half the world is crazy and the other half is scared."
-- Phil Ochs.

Shortly after the corporations found the Texas imbecile to represent their policies around the globe--to plump up their offshore holdings and cripple the American middle class--Dale was shipped out to Afghanistan. He was a monster of flesh, rising over 6'6", with a shaved, bullet-shaped head. Born and raised in the quiet towns of Oregon's Willamette Valley, Dale longed to do good for himself and his family. He'd flunked out of school, was arrested for alcohol-fueled pranks and misconduct, starred in football, but was a dismal failure in the eyes of his brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts.

I learned about his battlefield exploits in short asides that would leak out in innocuous conversations about weather or sports. He'd been home from the war and began anew the trajectory into rage and frustration, shoved out into the streets after battering holes in his father's living room walls with his fists. Alcohol steadied his nerves for an hour, but as he kept on drinking, he overshot the mark and began practicing hand-to-hand without discriminating between animate objects and just any old thing.

The Corps wanted nothing to do with him, kicking him out for alcoholism and mental illness. They washed their hands of him and turned their attention to fresh recruits. Dale said he had been prescribed depression medication in basic training but once they shipped him overseas the Corps decided either he no longer needed it or that it was too much trouble to find some for him. He said he felt excited when he killed, but sad and lonely afterward, that he could make up any number of stories in his mind about the women and children they killed. He said believed he was doing good, but was haunted. He and his fellows would kick dogs that lay in the streets, stupefied from concussions.

The stories slipped into conversations we had in coffee shops about recovery and how to live without alcohol. They slipped out when we sat in the park on summer mornings before the Sacramento heat took all energy out of you. We read the recovery books, swapping turns, and Dale stopped in the middle of his paragraphs because his mind went elsewhere. I'd sit and wait and smile at him. Told him how well he was doing.

He was living in a recovery home not far from where we held our meetings, sharing a house with a dozen other men who were trying to find a way out from a walled-up life. Dale had his own room now, decorated with posters of heavy metal bands and football players he admired. He had a devilish grin that flashed when you had no other indication he was in the same conversation, let alone the same room with you.

The fellows in the recovery home went everywhere together like so many ducklings in the road. In this war, you survived by safety in numbers and by sticking to the middle of the pack. It was more difficult that way to get picked off by the sniper in your head. Guys loved Dale and when I went over to read literature with him, they joked about his clumsiness drying dishes or how he'd scorched the macaroni dinner, mindlessly letting all the water boil out the bottom of the kettle.

On our happiest day, he came over to my apartment for the Fourth of July. It was brutally hot, so we strung canopies over the plastic patio tables and chairs that circled the swimming pool. He wolfed down ribs and chicken and chugged soda pop, and made cannonballs in the pool, his huge body a sudden flash in the air, then the center of rippling waves, his head pink in the sun.

In Sacramento, the locals were at odds about the war and a familiar chasm opened between us all. Guys in over-sized pickup trucks bearing flags roamed the streets, honking their horns. Across from the apartment complex, a Victorian house where a lesbian couple lived had a chart in their window, tallying the war dead .

At dusk we took the stairs to the roof to watch the fireworks explode over the fairgrounds. The roof had weak patches, which scared me, but Dale hopped up and down on them with sadistic delight. The fireworks flashed in his eyes. And as the party wound down, he was the last to go home.

It had taken me a long time to get over my own sense of shame of using a medical deferment to escape service in the Vietnam War. My draft number was among the lowest, which meant I was among the first to go. But I went to college instead and marched against the war, mostly for feeling at home among like-minded people, for the parties, drugs, and easy sex. Unlike many protesters, I did not resent soldiers who had been less fortunate with deferments or who had volunteered for duty, and I was not among the haters who spat upon them when they came home. I was mostly sad about the whole thing.

And when I reached recovery in Port Townsend, I was surrounded with vets who had returned to addiction and despair. I learned to shake their hands and welcome them home. I sat in coffee shops with guys who couldn't sit with their backs to the door, who had buried the living as well as the dead in trash pits in the jungle. With friends who had lost their hearing after manning cannons, or who now walked with braces on their withered legs and had no ill will after gaining traction in recovery. I made friends with the colonel who had come home in alcoholic rage and attempted to throw his wife through a high-story window. He had, at last, found an uneasy peace within our company. The military, I learned, had done little for them after their release. So when I learned that the Texas imbecile had not attended a single military funeral for Iraqi-war veterans, I had to redouble my recovery work to dilute my own rage.

The week after the Fourth of July, I went to the recovery house for a routine meeting with Dale, but he had gone. He had exploded again, this time ripping the kitchen sink from the wall, and had been dismissed. None of his friends knew where he went after he tossed his posters in the trash, rolled up his sleeping bag, and walked off into the night. He said he would phone them, but he never did.

Weeks passed and the ducklings continued to trail into our meetings. One by one, they graduated or were kicked out from the recovery home and went off into whatever lives they could muster. Eventually the last man who had known Dale was gone into the world.

The ones that live, they're amongst us now.

Squaredance

In the 1890s, march king Phillip Sousa was looking to replace the hélicon--an outdated small-bore instrument in common band usage at the time. Sousa wanted a beefy instrument with the range of the tuba and a massive horn that blasted deep sound over the top of the other musicians. In outdoor use, the original Sousaphone had an upright bell that was good only at catching rain or tossed peanuts. But manufacturers responded to Sousa's request for a bell that pointed forward, toward the audience--a change that revolutionized marching music, enabling the player to carry the weight of the tuba on his shoulder as he (or today, she) plowed along a parade route.

The sousaphone has a bell with a 26-inch diameter, is played by buzzing your lips into a huge metal mouthpiece, and you change notes by pressing a combination of three piston valves. Consequently, the horn eventually fills with moisture from condensation, which the musician can drain by opening a small valve called a "water key" at the bottom of the curve where the horn wraps around the body.

The b-flat sousaphone I carried weighed close to 30 pounds and after you marched five miles in a parade, your left shoulder hung noticeably lower than your right and it had a wicked throb. If you actually played the horn--which I could not do--the circular end of the mouthpiece left a red ring about your lips, as if you had spent hours French-kissing a harpy.

I had been in the San Fernando Valley Youth Band, an independent collection of kids from junior high age to college, who practiced Monday nights on difficult classical orchestral charts that had been arranged for brass band, then we went outside the last half hour and marched in place while blasting out Sousa marches. We held an annual, formal concert playing overtures and symphonies by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovitch, Holst, and others; but the balance of the year we performed at Christmas festivals, played for July Fourth celebrations, and marched in parades around California.

The trademark performance in the street was a Texas squaredance where the band separated into two facing lines while the sousaphone players skipped between like mad dervishes, wheeling about as the music rose to its finale. Unfortunately, there weren't enough trained tuba players to handle all the squaredance parts for the marching band, so tall and stocky woodwind players were pressed into "ringer" duty. That meant carrying that lacquered brass monster like a heroin habit for hours in parade formation, pretending to operate the valves, and wheeling around in the squaredance on asphalt roads covered with slick, green horseshit.

I didn't mind the attention it brought me--relished it, rather--but, frankly, the horn created a metallic vacuum around your face when you put your lips to the mouthpiece. I knew not a note, but blew into it anyway. The sousaphone had an odor of its own, a hint of iron and years of spit, and an alchemy of sour chemical tastes I had never since experienced.

We sousaphones marched in the last row of the band, musical pariahs in the fashion of today's exiled cigarette smokers. We were the last to know about a turn in the road, last to hear the drum major's whistle over the din of the percussion, the only musicians who went bare headed in the mid-day sun of so many summer's parades. But five or six times over the length of march, we strutted to the center of the squaredance formation and spun like behemoths from the iron age.

And, blissfully, no one was ever hurt. We fell plenty of times, denting the bells or earning a bruise the shape of the horn on our obliques and backs, or simply plopping on our asses, legs spraddled on the ground, the horn still coiled about us like a cobra, the bell glinting in the sun. In all my time as a ringer, I never saw anyone truly embarrassed, for it was all perfectly wonderful theater in its sheer idiocy.

Sometimes I think of my dance partners. I wonder if Matt Garbutt, now a symphony conductor in tails and tux, ever recounts the squaredance to his peers. I wonder what happened to Russ Quisenberry, too, after he went to Silicon Valley with his family to work in technology.

After the marching season ended and we were seated again on the orchestra risers, I took my place among the clarinets and, one Monday evening during a ferocious symphonic passage, I looked up in time to see Russ, red faced and blowing his heart out, topple backwards, his sousaphone bell leading the way as he plunged off the riser and onto the floor with an ugly clatter and bang.

Undaunted, we roared towards the finale as he struggled to his feet, playing like life depended on volume, chasing the final notes with the unleashed fury of lovers.

One Man's Trash

Highway 101, the West Coast's route from Mexico to the Canadian border, rises along Washington State's Olympic Peninsula and wraps itself in old growth forest, looping to an end at Neah Bay where the American continent tapers into the North Pacific. Further south, where it meets the Hood Canal and State Route 104, you'd find me with my crew of a dozen teenagers in hardhats and red vests as we picked more than 30 years' worth of trash from the lush berms and rugged cliffs along the road.

After I had left the home for the bewildered and my 28-day stay, I found myself near unemployable as my mind began the slow trudge toward sanity, rewiring its synapses, trying to spark without intoxicants. The State was a godsend, viewing my classroom experience a virtue when it hired me to run a clean-up crew of teens. The tipping point was that on Fridays, when the byways in the Olympic Forest were choked with weekend campers and logging trucks, we'd get the kids off the road and treat them to an educational day at an environmental site, a hatchery or recycling facility.

I went to Olympia for a week's training, gathered up my white van with state plates and a flashing orange light-bar, stocked it up with day-glo warning signs and highway cones, hardhats and vests for the kids, and a huge water cooler. We'd start at dawn at the county terminus near Brinnon and Quilcene, mark the road, and begin walking. We'd take lunch breaks along the Big Quil or the Duckabush, watching the wild rivers blast through narrow channels beneath a canopy of trees and giant ferns. We'd bag the recyclables in white bags and take them away, leaving the less savory trash in orange bags along the road for the state highway crews.

I needed humbling: I had been a college professor at a Big Ten university and now was bagging filthy diapers, beer cans crawling with worms and slugs, discarded syringes and secret stashes of porn magazines and whiskey bottles from along the road. But that university professor had graded student papers in the Esquire Lounge and helped himself to pills left by his landlord physician in the forest house where he taught in Alaska, and having the grace of working with kids at their summer jobs, cleaning up the detritus tossed from speeding cars and semi-trucks by drunks and addicts seemed like karma to me.

There were six boys and six girls on the crew--when they all showed up--some from poor homes, all a little distracted and in danger of wandering thoughtlessly onto the highway. So I spent most of the day herding them around, setting out traffic cones and signs, and discouraging the kids from picking up needles and dead animals. Along the expanse of pines and granite between Quilcene and Chimacum we found a discarded deer head, tossed out by a hunter, and a makeshift dump where locals had chucked busted refrigerators, stoves, boat engines, motorbikes, beds and couches.

Someone had made a parking spot behind a wall of wild rhododendrons with a firepit, a lawn chair, and a carton filled with girly mags. We picked up the empty beer bottles and magazines for recycling, dumped out his cache of whiskey bottles and bagged them, too. Along the route we found a discarded appliance box filled with Audubon Magazines.

I marveled at how long some of the trash had aged along the road: tin beer cans that had to be opened with a church key, newspapers and magazines from the 60s, cans and bottles of Bubble-Up, Falstaff Beer, other products long since discontinued in the marketplace.

On the last Friday of the summer, I took money we had received from the recycling center and bought the crew pizza and sodas. I asked if they wanted the balance of the money for their own pocket change. We hugged and went our separate ways. No one had been injured, although once I had to grab one of the girl's shoulders and heave her out of the way of a logging truck that blew down our sign and blasted through our line of cones.

For the remainder of my seven-year stay on the Olympic Peninsula I drove the length of Highway 101, knowing it better than most people, knowing parts of it intimately, and had the satisfaction of doing a full day of work for minimum wage, helping the forest to survive us, and befriending local boys and girls that called out my name when they saw me walk the streets in Port Townsend, waved at me in their caps and gowns.

It was a good first job back from the dead, all I could have hoped for in those early days when hope was but a glowing ember.

After the Storm

Appolonia, the ship from Haifa, left under calm seas and sailed through the silent Mediterranean night to Limassol. We were glad to be aboard. Caterina, who had left Israel in tears, had little to say as we walked the narrow Cyprian lanes in the early morning. We chose a small cafe along a row of whitewashed shops, sipping thick and strong Turkish coffee, planning our stays in the ports that the Appolonia called on her way to Venice.

We were poor, having saved very little on the kibbutz in the Galilee, and when the Appolonia steamed from Limassol that evening, we berthed in the bottom deck, a cavernous room in the prow of the ship decked out with airline seats where you reclined in your sleeping bag. There were no portholes in steerage, and the room pitched and rolled with every wave. The better alternative was to take your sleeping bag on deck and sleep on the gangway beneath the stars. We had bought honey yogurt, fresh baked bread, blood oranges, goat cheese, and honey wine in Cypress and shared our dinner under gathering clouds. She didn't mention the man she had left behind, and neither did I.

Sometime after midnight we woke to a storm, our sleeping bags soaked through, the rain pitching down in thick sheets and the Appolonia rising high by the bow and dropping like a stone. Water swept across the deck, slopping out the scudders and up the sides of the coamings, and the crew darted across the afterdeck to batten the hatches. They called out in Greek, shouting above the wind.

We had warm clothes below decks, so Caterina and I hurried down ladder after ladder until we stood dripping and shivering in the dim red lights of steerage where fellow travelers moaned with every swooping pitch and descent on the waves. It was hot and stuffy, and you could hear people choking down their nausea until you could barely keep down your own supper. When, finally, someone lost their stomach across the pitching floor, the smell was unbearable, and I bit down tight against my automatic urge to join in the chorus, racing up-ladder, seeking fresh air, wet still and cold, and looking for the hatch that led to the howling winds. Topside at last, I held tight to a camber thinking I had missed the worst, until I saw several of the crew, bent over the rail, moaning, and I lost it at last, surrendering.

The next morning the winds were calm, but I still felt the rocking in my bones. The clouds broke into quilts of reds and dark purples and the prow of the Appolonia curved through a cool, clear sea. She was bound for Rhodes, an island frequented by Swedes, and so Caterina chose it for an extended call so she could hear her native tongue again. We showered, packed our gear, leaving the sleeping bags to air on deck. It would be days before I could eat hearty.

By then, we had a room overlooking a tranquil bay in the village of Lindos. The hill town curved around a stunning white beach and aside from taxis and donkeys that hauled tourists around, you got around on foot. The acropolis and temple of Athena stood atop the bluff, facing the sea, and the fishing village looked much as it had in the second century, save the bright blue and green umbrellas set along the broad strand.

We shared so little talk, but we agreed on a daily schedule that suited us: mornings, we went off for fresh bread and honey yogurt and coffee before a swim in the lagoon so clear you could see down into dark blue depths where huge boulders sunk into the sand. In the afternoons, we'd nap in the room, escaping the heat of the sun that angled down through the rows of whitewashed inns and glittered on the chipped mosaic tiles set into the narrow walkways between the shops. In the early evenings, we chose a cafe at the base of the acropolis to sip brandy and work up an appetite for grilled chicken, fresh calamari, and roasted eggplant.

We played a game--Caterina seemed too ashen to do much else--wherein we eyed the rows of tourists descending the serpentine path from the acropolis, guessing their nationalities by their clothing and mannerisms. The Americans were loud and gaudily dressed and as they came down along the wares sold by Greek women in their black cotton chemises, you could hear them talking nonsense. The Italians were an easy call, too, with their clean pressed, bright colors and oversized gestures; the Germans, their clothing plain and functional, their bodies large featured and fresh-scrubbed skin; and the English, complaining about everything in tones that echoed off the whitewashed walls and across the square.

After supper, we sat on the patio with our separate thoughts.

Caterina wore a grim determination now and was already checking the schedule for the return of the Appolonia. We shut out the light and tucked into our separate beds in the little room with the tile floor. On our last day I snapped a photo of her, standing before a field of bright green grass, the hills dotted with sheep and olive trees in the mid-day sun. She smiled for the camera.

Shelter

Sakurajima is one of the world's most active volcanoes. At 3,600 feet, rising from the plain on the island of Kyushu on Japan's Osumi Peninsula, the volcano has been known to dump ash on the heavily populated city of Kagoshima. From the top floor of the youth hostel where we spent our nights in the city, you could see tire tracks from cars and bicycles in the thin layer of ash that covered the streets. The leaves on the ginkgo trees were tan on the bottom and coated gray where they faced the sky.

The mountain is less imposing than Japan's largest volcano, Mount Aso, also located on Kyushu. Earlier in the week, we had taken a bus to the trailhead and climbed to the top of Aso, dizzy from altitude and the heavy sulfur in the air. On top, the Japanese had constructed concrete shelters around the caldera, small bunkers stocked with boxes of plastic hard hats that you could wear against the hail of rocks and magma. It felt as silly as it looked. The last time Asoyama had erupted, it tossed rocks the size of semi-trucks all the way into the center of Russia.

On this steamy summer's night, we sat in our room at the hostel mapping out our trek up yet another volcano scheduled for the following day. My calves burned and my lungs ached. We were on the volcano tour of a country with residents that we had been misled into thinking spoke some of our language. But in Kyushu, more than 900 miles from Tokyo, we found few residents who could say more than hello and goodbye.

Everywhere we went, dozens of kids, all adorned in black and white school uniforms and daypacks, flocked to us, asking us to sign their scrapbooks. I must have been an odd sight, towering over them with my black beard and shaved head. You could plan your entire trip around the punctuality of the national railroad, and whenever we stepped off the train we were surrounded by curious onlookers, some of whom would point at me and shout aloud the Japanese word for "beard".

Three or four volcanoes into our trek, we discovered that it was nearly impossible to be alone in Japan. We'd take buses from the train stations to the national parks, where we were instantly amidst a pack of students in their uniforms. No matter the difficulty, there would be hundreds of students on the mountain trails. We'd often look for unmarked paths or picked our way along streams and rivers to avoid the notoriety.

That night in Kagoshima, we decided to try our luck with Mount Unzen, a 4,000-foot smoker that rose in Nagasaki Prefecture. In the 1700s, Unzen had gone off and caused an earthquake, avalanche, and a tidal wave that killed more than 15,000 people. That's what you call a trifecta. Two years after our visit, it would go off again and kill more than 40 people, including a handful of volcanologists. But on the day of our visit, Unzen was in a quiet slumber.

To our delight, the cab we hired dropped us off in an empty parking lot. Where were the buses of students? We set off in earnest, passing through a long corridor of shrines that formed the beginning of the trail. Little grebes zeered between the trees and you could hear the faint gurgling of a stream. The sun slanted through the leaves and flickered as we walked, promising warmth through the morning fog.

Out on the ridge beneath the caldera, we paused to catch our breath. We heard the subtle wind and, from the distance, a train as it rattled northward toward the Inland Sea. Below, beyond the trees, you could see the orderly rice paddies and tendrils of smoke from the burning of husks.

The ridge went up at a mad angle. We made our way, stopping every few steps on the incline, then trudging off again. My shirt was soaked and so was the blue bandanna on my head. A set of wooden steps were wedged into the trail near the top of the ridge. And when we reached the summit, we stood gasping, hands on our knees, peering down into the steaming caldera.

The rim trail wended off in both directions, so we chose the route to the east and made our way into the shimmering waves of heat. The sulfur pierced our eyes and I tied the bandanna over my nose and mouth.

We were happy enough.

Then we spotted the remnants of a group luncheon at the edge of the crater. The diners had left 40 or 50 styrofoam trays, neatly arranged in a semi-circle, individual sets of chop-sticks keenly set across the tops of plates smeared with brown sauce and white grains of rice.

The bento boxes waited patiently for Mount Unzen to bear them away.

The Other Country

"Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near to the United States." -- Porfirio Diaz, President of Mexico, 1876-1880.

So many of my favorite authors put in their time south of the border. In one year of literary studies I must have read a dozen writers who either lived in Mexico or wrote about it. I loved Kerouac's sorties and the tales of the revolutionary era that Katharine Anne Porter wove with Old Testament filaments of delicious clauses, and I thrilled in Malcolm Lowry's baroque constructions and disjointed plot lines. Then, there was Graham Greene's Power and the Glory and its non-fictional companion piece, Another Mexico, with tales of low dealings and a high exchange rate. I had been mistaken about Nathaniel West, author of The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts, thinking he had been killed in a car crash on his honeymoon in Mexico. Actually, the accident happened on the American side of the border. And then there was Cortazar and the poets, too!

My first sweetheart in Porter Junior High was a Chicana, Cecelia, and whenever I hear the voice of Cecelia Cruz I think of her and get woozy. In our Spanish class she got to keep her name, while the instructor dubbed me "Ramon". I considered myself Ramon Navarro and lacked only a fencing scar to complete the charade. I had my cinematic crushes on Lupe Velez and Katy Jurado--both birds of paradise-- such utter strangeness for a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, but somewhere my blood boiled. And I would have given my life for Natalie Wood.

Hence, I caught the wanderlust at an early age and as soon as I left home, I began visits to Baja and the Yucatan and the southwest Oaxaca coast. My writing mentor Don Hendrie took a home in San Miguel de Allende every summer in the cool mountains of Guanajuato to work on his novels. So when I finally entered graduate school in Alabama, I took advantage of its proximity to New Orleans and the cheap flights to the Yucatan.

My memories of the country have developed like a photo left too long in the chemical bath, with the details blurring over time and the contrasts sharpening into stark relief. While I had experienced great sweetness amongst the residents of small towns and villages, the exhilaration in the deserts, mountains, and beaches, the Mexican cities grimly coalesced around a gran peligro that one feels in the Baja of Touch of Evil. It was as if you could slip through a crease in the fabric of folkloric splendor into ugliness and violence without a moment's warning.

Let us wait for another day to talk about the ride in the taxi I caught on the outskirts of the bufadora blowhole on the baja coast where the driver only revealed his nearly downed bottle of tequila long after we sped away from the parking lot and into the sprawling dust of the horizon where the cacti went purple against the setting sun. And the story of the Yucatecan bus driver who added two hours to an already excruciating six-hour drive from the Mayan ruins of Chitchen to the Caribbean coast by stopping where he pleased to pick up black market shipments of stoves and other appliances in dark alleys for transport to friends and associates along the dusty lanes outside Valladolid.

Or, the night I slept on the concrete floor of the deserted bus depot outside Ensenada because I had missed the last bus and needed to slip from view of the federale who was tailing me--trying to entrap me by withdrawing marijuana papers from his vest and asking me to simply fill them with herb so we could smoke; as all Americans traveling the Baja night carried mota. Or the crowded cantina south of the Tulum junction where the beautiful barmaid who had an uncanny interest in me was -- as some laughing compatriots at the table warned me -- packing some male genitalia under her skirt.

But that said, we should talk about Dr. Z who joined me in walks about Merida and on strange nights sat talking to his half-drained mescal bottle as we lay in cheap motel rooms lit by bare bulbs to save money. And how at the end of a small street we found a cafe pressed in the alley between two buildings that served dirt-cheap fish tacos that we enjoyed until one evening, after the meal, a stray cat walked out from the kitchen and vomited on our table and Dr. Z asked the mesera to bring along a platter of whatever the kitty had eaten. And the following morning I awoke with a humbling case of Montezuma's Revenge that had me squarely where it wanted me in the latrine from dawn till late afternoon when Dr. Z and I went from farmacia to farmacia in search of the magic cure I had read about in a guide book.

It came in a small brown bottle and the doctor said to pour a tablespoon of the thick yellow liquid onto a mound of mashed green bananas in a plate and spoon it down. It was not one of the pro-biotics handed out today, but an old remedy redolent with opiates and belladonna and while the runs continued over the following two days, I sat in the small but clean tiled bathroom in great delight.

Dr. Z had brought back from his daily errands (rounding up mescal and some pan dulce) a stack of comic books that surpassed all my expectations. They were comprised of snapshots cut from hour-long television soap operas, pasted into linear plots, with outrageous dialog typed beneath each photo. The common plots were steeped in trickery, infidelity, alcoholism, gambling, and firearms, with out-sized dramatic gestures (popping eyes and rivers of tears) and verbal exchanges orbiting the grief planet (by my limited translations): "She was MY woman!" or "You have brought us all a veil of tears, may Christ forgive you!"

Or, perhaps, the comics never existed at all. The days and nights went by in a blur of bottled electrolites and the belladonna-opium tincture. And I had developed a profound respect for clean restaurants.

There is another tale, too, of being arrested by federales for passing a funny cigarette on a sand dune one evening along the Sea of Cortez where my fellow wanderers--Plunger Dave and Yossi Raz of the Israeli army, ret. -- had to cough up enough funds to "pay the ticket" or spend the night in a San Felipe jail. The federales were kind enough, and young, and despite Yossi's notion that he could get the drop on the three that held the automatic rifles if Dave and I took down the fourth, let us off for $40. And the wheels were then greased for the remainder of our stay, during which time they returned in civilian clothes to share our pot with us and joke about the wealthy American couple that they had busted in a nearby travel trailer with cocaine aboard. That "ticket" went for a bargain at $6,000.

On our last morning in camp, I repaid Yossi's offer of violence by spiking his breakfast omelet with magic mushrooms, waiting to catch his reaction when his brains began to melt. It was a hot day and the tide along the Sea of Cortez yanked the water out for nearly half a mile, exposing the rocks and squirting mollusks and fish, flopping, gasping for breath in all that sudden air.

But those are other stories and, besides, it was another country.

Dumping

Note from the wire services: over the last 30 years, pharmaceuticals--some 271 million pounds of them--have been dumped by drug companies into American water sources. These include contraceptives, antidepressants, nitroglycerin, sex hormones, anti-convulsants, antibiotics, antiseptics, nicotine, head-lice insecticides, sedatives, skin bleaching agents, codeine, blood thinners, and erectile dysfunction drugs.

Since chemical companies have no inclination of owning up to their egregious criminality, I'll hold up my slender end:

"Dear D,
I have no idea what got into me. I came home from that trip to the writer's conference in Chicago to find that your sister drank that bottle of rare rum that I brought home from the Yucatan. I tossed an electric fan out the second-story window. I know you had your car parked and ready to go the following morning. And I went to the Tuscaloosa community counseling center that afternoon, where the counselor told me I apparently just didn't have enough outside activities and "oughta just go fishin' more often." I appreciate that you gave me another chance. My behavior could very well have been attributed to the blood thinners, nitroglycerin, or sex hormones dumped into the Black Warrior River. Or it may have been that time I was jogging along the Alabama streets when the mosquito district truck drove past and coated me in that insecticide fog. But I finally found out it was unchecked alcoholism and a mood disorder! You deserved better."

------------------

"Dear Ennui.com,
You never did give me that whopping bonus you promised. In fact, you killed off the entire staff in layoffs because the twenty-somethings running the company burned the gift horse into the ground with endless parties in Vegas. I must have been out of my mind from all the blood thinners in the San Jose water supply when I believed your tech guy when he said you wouldn't notice the laptop of yours that I took when I quit as equity against the unpaid bonus. I know I brought it back to you when I got into recovery and made financial amends. But it could have been the blood thinners and head-lice insecticides that made me act like a petty thief. Just sayin'."

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"Dear M,
We had been so dang careful, too. And, with all those contraceptives they'd been dumping into the water in Palo Alto, who'd have thought you'd get pregnant? It's been easy for me despite living in a culture that apparently has its head up its ass to accept that your decisions about your body are yours to make. But hardly anywhere is it written about the hole in the heart that men feel when the woman they love decide not to have your child. Today I'm grateful that they had been dumping antidepressants and nicotine into San Francisco Bay so I could keep a smile on my face and hold your hand as you had to cross that picket line of righteous assholes that tried to make you feel like Charles Manson as you went into the clinic, slamming their placards against your body with all the disregard to human life they protested. I love you still, and I'm delighted to see the photos of the grown boys you've raised with your steady hand."

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"Dear Valley West,
I'm sorry about that night in my 20s when I had tequila for the first time and went out, apartment-by-apartment with a screwdriver, removing everyone's locks in an effort to "set them free from corporate greed". You made me pay, and I deserved it. But instead of the tequila, it may have been the codeine dumped into the drinking water that flowed out of those designer taps in your upscale kitchen. But if it was my fault, please know I never did anything so close to stupid as that again."

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"Dear Corporate America,
I had some serious chemical dumping problems those messy years. They were all of my own making. And while I did a great many things I'm not proud about, I've since cleaned up my own waste. I'm far from being the poster child for a well-centered, well-mannered individual, but I have found exceptional grace in owning up, paying back, walking straight, and changing the way I act to those most precious beings who share this fragile, tender, crowded space.

Try it sometime."

Openers

I was in a bar once--oh, in fact many times--but once I was sitting at the Esquire Lounge, making notes for a new short story on a napkin when a woman I did not know put her head on my shoulder. I noticed her sitting beside me and had shuffled my stool to avoid her cigarette. I had yet to develop an allergy to liquor, but as I had a bad case of asthma I was determined not to suffer her smoke.

So, this woman, as tall-tale openers usually go, just leaned over, put her head on my shoulder, and began reading aloud my plot line. "Hanamoto," the notes began, "works in a flower shop in the suburbs of Osaka and is troubled by the sounds of heavy screwing coming through his apartment walls late at night. In fact, the sounds blast through his wall by-day too, almost all the time, and are made by a red-headed American woman and her Japanese boyfriend. The florist, in his 70s, has survived the war, watched as the Yanks occupied his country, and now resents this girl and her profligate ways."

The notes sounded a little off-key read by this stranger in the bar in the middle of the Illinois winter, a February so cold that you had to pour scalding water on the door of your car to get the locks moving in the morning. And this woman, reading boozily aloud made the story sound more of a cheap comedy than the serious fiction I was planning. Maybe it was a comedy.

I asked if she could put out her cigarette. The ash had grown to almost an inch on the end and it tumbled off into my beer.

"Where do you get your ideas?" she asked.

* * *

In the summer in a very humid June in Virginia, I waited outside the baseball stadium to buy a ticket for the Triple-A class team of the New York Mets, the Tidewater Tides. The sun grilled you like a flatfish and the stadium, located adjacent to the zoo and airport, was built on recovered swamp-land, swarming at mid-day with gnats and mosquitoes.

I had come to watch the rehabilitation assignment of pitcher Doc Gooden, an amazing fireballer who had suffered tendinitis and had been sent from New York to Norfolk to work his way back into shape. The word got out in the Norfolk papers that Gooden would make a start, so the line began forming around the stadium at eight, and I had been out there from the start to snag a good seat. I had my yellow legal pad, a few ballpoint pens tucked into my shirt pocket, a sandwich from home, and a copy of Graham Green's Another Mexico in my backpack for inspiration.

The previous winter I had traveled to the Yucatan with Dr. Z, my zesty companion from graduate school, and we had celebrated Christmas in the homes of friends in Merida. It was an amazing eve, wandering the neighborhoods where Mexicans had opened their doors, set out meals of puc-chuc, turkey in black mole, egg tacos with pumpkin seeds, and cochinita pibil. In some instances, the family was out visiting neighbors, so you helped yourself and ate with whomever else had come inside, then wandered the streets, house-to-house, paying respects and dining into the night.

I wanted to write a short story about an American couple, lost in the jungle outside Piste, near the Mayan ruins of Chitchen Itza. I sat cross-legged on the concrete, outside the stadium in a precious square of shade, writing a few words about the village of Piste where in the cooling dusk families sat around smoking coils of mosquito repellent and cooked tortillas over an open fire.

Every few moments a jet roared into the pale Virginia sky and broke my concentration. I was writing about mosquito coils and swatting the real ones that were lighting on me. Sweat beaded up on my forearms and trickled down to the yellow pad, spotting light blue where I had been writing.

The American couple was truly lost. The husband sat in the jungle wondering if his wife was having more than the one affair he suspected. She had been writing postcards all morning at their hotel before they took the bus to the ruins. And now they had been separated in the jungle and he couldn't help but think she had wandered away deliberately.

I could hear the whirring gnats and the afterblast of a jet that had landed behind me, and then the ticket window opened with a whack and I got my ticket to watch Gooden toss four innings in the blistering Norfolk sun, giving up three hits and fanning two. No walks. I never finished the story about the couple in Mexico.

* * *

I was renting a cottage in the woods outside Colfax, on a meadow at 2,000 feet with a brook and tall pines. We were so far from town that you couldn't get internet service, save by a satellite hookup that was spotty at best. But my desk looked out a sliding glass window on a broad field, with a narrow bridge over the creek, and a single Japanese maple that had blushed brilliant red in the snap of fall weather.

In the pane of the software window I was typing a story about the pony express. I had always wanted to try my hand at a Western, and the road leading to our property spun under the heavy forest, down into a dirt track that snaked its way to the north fork of the American River. Called Yankee Jim's Road, it dropped suddenly over 2,000 feet to the river, where a rusted forest service bridge spanned the whirlpools and flowing current. At the north side of the crossing, you could still walk into the small cave that had been carved into the cliff face to provide shelter for the pony express and, later, the Wells Fargo stagecoach that crossed the American en-route to Folsom and, further down in the valley, Sacramento.

I spent the morning working on a description of the chenille brocade dress with detachable sleeves worn by a woman that worked in the Auburn cafe. Panners were coming in for late breakfast, some with bound sacks of gold dust they had taken from the Bear River.

Then my friend Derek came over from Forest Hill, driving the stage route in his white Japanese pickup truck to sit on my porch and yak about recovery. I had to save the story in the software and get up to greet him. And he was barely in the place, when another knock came at the door.

It was my neighbor's daughter, weeping, barely able to tell me that a local kid came speeding around Yankee Jim's and hit a fawn. I went out to the drive and neighbor Grace had the baby wrapped in a bloody blanket. The fawn struggled to get free, but both its rear legs had been snapped in the impact. The kid had shrugged, looked at the deer where it lay in the road, and drove off elsewhere.

I nested the deer in my arms and sat on the edge of the drive, trying to keep it from struggling while Grace called the sheriff. The deer cried out. I had no notion that deer made any sound at all. The family--two does and six fawns--were always in the meadow in the dusk, grazing on the wildflowers and grass. I had come to recognize the twins, including the spotted fawn that now rolled its eyes and moaned, its head covered with ticks.

Grace came down the steps in tears. The sheriff, she said, couldn't come for an hour. But there was a vet in Colfax and the office was still open.

I put a wet washcloth to the fawn's mouth, praying, assuring it that her misery would soon be over. And we drove to town along Yankee Jim's in the Toyota, crammed into the front seat, the doe squirming on my lap in its blanket.

We had only been there a few minutes when the vet came back into the waiting room to say she had put down the fawn. Its legs could not be repaired and it would have been easy prey on the side of the road. The vet had been crying.

"Most people just leave them lying there," she said.

We drove home in silence, and then I went into the cabin, washed up, and sat down to talk recovery with Derek. I had forgotten about the woman in the Victorian dress and the apron she was wrapping tightly about her pinched waist as she eyed the gruffy sourdoughs that had trod their muddy boots into her fine cafe.

Misery, Inc.

-- for Mark

Of all the world's religions, Buddhism made sense to me in its fundamental idea that suffering (dukkha) forms the axle around which the human condition rotates. The purpose of life, as I came to understand it, is to take action every day to eliminate desires to cling to things. I once thought that the principle applied only to material possessions, but later realized it also referred to clinging to other people or to expectations for the future, the wellspring of my own misery. But, that's now.

Eerily enough, when I was in treatment for addictions in 1991 I heard the message for the first time, although I perceived it as a shaming remark. In recovery, you assess your life up to the moment, listing things that people had done to you, the things you had done to them, the things you did to yourself, and all the things in-between that you only imagined took place. The latter of lists held the greatest number of items.

At the end of my stay, I was to share my discoveries, along with my deepest secrets with the treatment center priest. I had never deliberately taken my soul secrets to a priest in my life and, aside from accidentally working my way to the front of a communion line at a friend's funeral service only to escape ahead of the ritual, I had never even spoken with one. But I craved for the fresh expanse of a new beginning, so I told the priest everything.

"You decided at a very early age to be miserable," he said, summing up. He shook my hand and that was that.

If you don't know the location of the source of your misery, you can spend a life rummaging around your mind in search of it. The mind likes this, since it helps preserve the illusion that the mind is the remedy. And as I walked the verdant lanes of the treatment center after my housecleaning, I fumbled insanely for the magic bullet to remove the blood stains from my hands.

Avoid the deliberate manufacture of misery, says the recovery literature, based on Christian doctrine. Nirvana, the Buddhist tradition says, is the act of blowing out the mind like a bad holiday candle so that the wind of eternity can waft through. It is in dying to self, St. Francis says, that we are reborn. It felt as if every faith I encountered prescribed the same solution.

What a rub. After treatment ended, I drove back over the Cascade Mountains to my little cabin in the Olympic forest and pondered my navel. My brain rushed forward with useless remarks. I was so troubled, I couldn't stand my own flesh. I planned a trip to the coast.

The road to La Push spun out of the Quimper Peninsula beneath the snow-capped peaks and wild river valleys, flattened across the Sequim highlands, dove into serpentine loops around Lake Crescent and the darkened lanes where loggers had clear-cut the old growth forest, leaving a few rows of pines along the highway to block the view of stubbled fields.

I stopped along the way to sit beside Ray Carver's grave overlooking the Straights of Juan de Fuca. I had come to love Carver after all. His later stories contained a gracious expanse of love that burst from the mean figures of early prose. He had found recovery, too, during the last years of his life before cancer claimed him. A small temple bell fitted into his headstone jangled in the wind as I sat quietly viewing his last poem, etched into the concrete:

Late Fragment

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
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I couldn't sit more than a moment, my thoughts racing. I looked at Ray's grave. I said some things to him. I asked him to help me learn some things. I looked out where a freighter from the Far East turned into the center of the shipping lane. I looked across the straights to the whited strip where Victoria lay on the belly of land. Then I said goodbye to Ray.

At the coast, I took the turnoff to the second beach at La Push. There was a wood-plank trail through towering, dripping old growth forest, ferns that seemed to burst out green and wide, and white fungus clinging like bright ears to the sides of trees. And then descending the wet stairwell to the beach, I gazed out at the mist where it spread between the hanging branches. Red and purple sea stars held fast to the sea mounts and kelp drifted freely in the surf.

I walked without stopping the length of the beach to where it narrowed into spray at the southern end where the rocks blocked the way. Then I turned and walked my way back, my heart pounding, and took the steps back into the forest, gasping for air at the incline, wiping the light rain from my forehead. And then, finally at the parking strip, I climbed into the car and sped home.

I had driven several hours to get to the coast, spent less than an hour walking, and several hours driving home. There was no way I could sit quietly at the coast with all that brain noise and, back in my cabin, I lay in the sleeping loft, listening to the wind in the trees and the critters stumbling around outside in the dark until I finally drifted off.

It was Easter morning. And when I rose, I blew on the coals to get the wood stove going and boiled water for coffee. Friends had invited me over for supper after the noon recovery meeting. I had no sense of what Easter was about after the burying of eggs and the people who dressed up and went to church and the ham afterward. And I really didn't want to fit in. It was all fine the way it was.

But I set out for my morning walk along the Egg and I Road, heading north toward West Valley Road and the wide fields of horse farms between the ridges of fir and madrone. The road was wet and icy in patches and my breath came out in frosty pillows. I wore my blue mittens that I had bought in Fairbanks.

When I came to the bluff, I looked out at the Beaver Valley with its quilt of trees and fields dotted by cows and horses, and the whited crests of the Olympic peaks beyond in the sharp rising sunlight. You'd hardly know people lived here, save for the string of telephone lines that came up behind me and dropped down the long hill into the valley, then stretched out across the valley and up the hills on the other side.

They looked like so many crossed tees to me, strung up for all the ills, the black thoughts I had entertained for so many years, the lies, the rage (and I'd be damned if I'd buy into any of that Christian symbolism), but for a moment it all made perfect sense to me that I didn't need to call it anything if I let my mind drift away and welcomed the warm thrill that started around my knees and spread out like wings across my chest.

All That Glisters

"If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me." -- Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act I, Scene III).

In the spring of that year, I found myself sitting alone in a wing that made up half of the consulting company's Silicon Valley flagship office. The shark they had hired as new V.P. to sack the ship and toss the crew overboard was halfway through his charge. When I spoke on the telephone, my voice echoed across the empty room, bouncing off the concrete walls that once had been decorated with bright posters or flow charts describing the work on Fortune 500 company websites. I had to walk the length of the office, through the doors to the lobby, and into the doors for the adjacent wing to catch a glimpse of another employee.

So when my college friend from Sacramento called to say he had a lead on a job with the California Governor's office, I assembled a resume, a slide presentation of my web design and writing abilities, and drove the two hours to the capitol to treat the bureaucrats to my best dog-and-pony show.

The trick, my friend explained, was to get in tight with advisers and consultants to the governor who were of Mexican-American origin. They had, my friend assured me, the governor's ear. They were called, as a governmental bon mot, the Mexican Mafia.

I met my friend's friend in a small office outside the capital area. They were golf buddies and did some consulting for the state. My friend's friend had a friend with government contracts in the technology staff and could act as a kind of Masonic sponsor to usher me into the tribe. It didn't matter that I was a Russian Jew: my friend was Portuguese, his friend was Mexican-American, and the friend in the technology department was Latino. The Department of Technology, created in 1995 to oversee all technology and software purchases, was under the direction of a Mexican-American bureaucrat.

It was arranged for me to meet with a Hispanic member of Governor Gray Davis' staff to present my wares. The department had a website that had been poorly cobbled together over several gubernatorial administrations and looked it. Visitors complained that it took hours to find what they were looking for on the site, if they were lucky to find it at all. I told the staff that I could straighten it all out for $70,000.

They agreed, my contract went to the Mexican Mafia at the Department of Technology, was approved immediately, and I moved to Sacramento. This was in a time when technology was king, the state was buoyed by revenues, and the Department of Technology, housed in a formidable black palace known as the Darth Vader building, approved contracts with the same aplomb as a California medical marijuana doctor tosses prescriptions like confetti.

My quarters were less threatening. I worked across the street from the sprawling Capitol Building in a quiet office with friendly people. The office was run under a formal director, a southern California attorney of note who wore an impeccable tan and, on Fridays, Hawaiian shirts. But the troops took their marching orders from a career bureaucrat, a Hispanic who had come over from the FDA. I had privileges of walking the capitol grounds, visiting the governor's office for formal affairs, and attending to my own business without the apparent care of others so long as I made routine progress on re-organizing the website and turning in my time sheets regularly to the Mexican Mafia in the Vader building.

The pace of the project, one might say, schlepped along like a glacier. I was used to turning around a major website in a matter of months or less for a Fortune 500 client. At the state--where the unofficial motto among career workers was "vest in peace"--it took months just to push initial planning paperwork through channels. I surfed the net, handled outside clients, took leisurely walks in the trees lining the capital mall. They were happy with my work, and I was happy to have it.

Then, suddenly, the man in the Hawaiian shirts resigned and dark chatter smoked like a vapor throughout the building. Something, somewhere, was wrong. I got a call from my man in the Vader building with an urgent request for lunch at one of the fancy restaurants along the mall.

"Do you know anything about Oracle?" my insider asked me between courses. I said I knew they made customer relationship and business software. He nodded. If I heard anything about Oracle I was to call him for a meeting.

Frankly, I had preferred to hear nothing about the office, about software, or even the government. I had met Governor Davis, a New Yorker with the personality of an fish Popsicle, and I cared as little for him as anyone could without having a real opinion. So back to the slow crawl I went, enjoying my noon walks in the rose garden or workouts at the local gym, then back to my cubicle for an afternoon of shuffled paperwork. But the hush-hush atmosphere began to peal like a shame bell through my hours.

After the lunch date, I started to read the Sacramento Bee, particularly a conservative columnist who had little talent and blustered like a wounded rhino at the Democrats. The scuttlebutt was that the Administration had paid $42 million more than it needed to pay for Oracle software to serve a staff of 270,000 workers. A year after the no-bid contract had gone out to the bay area giant, not a single state employee for whom the buy was intended was using Oracle's software.

Not long afterward, three members of the Department of Technology resigned. I had my lunch date with my sponsor and he assured me all was well with my work. Then, the Bee dog-piled on a story that wouldn't go away: In May 2002, Davis returned a $25,000 campaign check cut by Oracle and passed to a staff member in a restaurant just days after the no-bid multi-million contract went out for the software no one used. And someone we knew, it was whispered through the halls of so many buildings in the capitol, was the man who accepted the check.

I completed the project, was shuffled into another office in under the Governor's umbrella and quietly laid off shortly after Davis barely survived a re-election campaign in 2002. But a year later Davis was toppled in a recall effort led by body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger. I had worked with Arnold on the set of End of Days, spinning a teleprompter machine for a message to film distributors. He was short, intense, had all the personality that Davis could have wished for, and in short order led a state to near-complete, economic collapse, having gutted fundamental programs for education, the less fortunate, and elderly.

Oracle, it must be said, has never been accused of wrong-doing in this matter, especially not here. But the company name is historically suited for the dramatic stage.

As for my initial contact in the Mexican Mafia, the man with the small office outside the capital was arrested and convicted for drunken driving in a quiet residential area, resulting in the deaths of several members of a local family.

This is all anyone should write about it. The story would make for fantastic, tragic drama, except for the whole thing.

A Simple No Would Do

Over the years I've had my writer's share of rejection slips. If you're unfamiliar with the process of sending out your writing without having an invitation or agent, it's quite simple: You put your manuscript in a manila folder, add a tasteful cover letter that suggests you know something about the publication, add return postage, and wait for two or three months. When I was in graduate school, the writers would compare rejection slips, boasting of ones that indicated near misses, showing off the ones that came back written, apparently, by a human being.

There were several kinds of slips: simple printed form letters, usually sent as postcards; printed letter-size rejections; quick notes from an editor and signed in ink suggesting that they actually read what you sent; and, if you were lucky, an extended missive with critical remarks about the writing along with reasons why it was declined. My favorite slip came from a little-known university literary journal that had boxes for the editor to check, with witty remarks such as "feet smell", "dog peed on it", or "thanks for the paper cut."

Writers have thin skins, especially this one, and I once was told by an author, since deceased, that I'd never make it if I took umbrage with being kicked around a little. Besides, he said, you could send the same story to the same magazine on different days, using different typewriters, and one would sell while the other drew rejections. If your envelope was opened after a hearty staff lunch, they probably fell asleep reading it. If it landed on a Monday morning, the staff may well be hung over.

To show I have no hard feelings, I'm going to present a selection of my more successful failures from the cornucopia of slips from my over-the-transom submissions.

"Dear Ms. Hyman. As before, I admire the writing, which is energetic and stylish. The story, however, doesn't add up to very much, and we'll have to pass. Please try us again." -- The Atlantic.

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"I'm sorry our tastes here are so particular and that I can't take any of these pieces, but the work is vital, energetic and accomplished, and I'd say you're just about to take off with publications. Please stay in touch, I'd be glad to read more." -- Esquire.

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"The writing style itself was excellent but the pace of the story was just too slow. You do have a lot of talent. Sooner or later, it's going to break your way." -- The Missouri Review.

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(Printed on a stock reply card) "We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it." The Editors, The New Yorker (signature and note at the bottom: Sorry, and thanks.")

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"Sorry that your novel chapter was not for us. Obviously flashbacks can work well in a novel, but to have so many in the first chapter is a little disconcerting. Thanks for the look." -- Playboy.

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"This story came very close. I sent it through four blind readings and while two readers (new persons here) didn't recommend it, our senior fiction editor loved it." -- Prairie Schooner.

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and....then....

"We loved 'Oh, Burning Power...' and want very much to publish it. Please assure us it's available, so we can go to the printer. Many thanks for the story." Paul Lyons, Carolina Quarterly.

But wait for the punchline. The story that the Carolina Quarterly loved and published was written in a single sitting, in a bar, as a satire of the kind of short, hyper-real fiction of the late 1980s that I loathed, and included the use of a character modeled to poke fun at people who loved the genre.

Not long after that, I stopped submitting fiction to the magazines. I won't say I'm bitter, because I'm not. These are rejection slips to die for. But I'm sensitive, and the dead fiction writer who lectured me was right. That a writer should have such little tolerance for caprice, the green fuse that flowers all creative life, is an unlovely thing.

Massive

Our father's justice gets closer
How could you fuck us all over
Rape, steal and murder
God bless the almighty dollar -- Ozzy Osbourne

Clever entrepreneurs in Campbell in California's Santa Clara Valley must have been drinking all night when they stumbled on the brilliant notion of opening up a shop with the name Psycho Donuts. I can imagine them sitting in the garage, passing a beer bong between them on a couch, the stuffing bursting from a worn cushion, when one of them explodes to his feet, the idea flaring like a cartoon image of an early Edison bulb, filaments sizzling. The owners deserve cheap caricature, since that's what they're about.

They opened the place not too long ago, investing who knows how much, branding it with delight in selling their boiled fat and sugar concoctions with decorative names such as Psycho, the Bipolar, Massive Head Trauma, and the Cracker Attacker. Hilarious. A belly buster.

Inside, they built a small platform, the size of an old telephone booth, into which they erected a stark chair and called the stall "The Padded Cell", where they entice young children to pose for photos while adorned in a straight jacket. When you belly up to the counter at Psycho Donuts, women in nurses' uniforms and sharp white hats take your order.

It's clever, right? Ask any soldier with Massive Head Trauma.

For the first time, soldiers in record numbers are returning from combat with massive head trauma. In previous wars, their armor could not spare them from fatal head wounds, but today, they survive explosions from insurgent devices rigged--like so many glazed donuts--in some Baghdad garage. Head trauma affects vision, hearing, and cognitive faculties--often for life. They experience fatigue, impaired memory, depression, lack of focus, emotional outbursts, loss of libido, faulty judgment. Facing redeployment, many commit suicide. More American soldiers than in any previous era are committing suicide in the comfort of our neighborhoods and mini-malls stocked with all-too-many donut shops.

Psycho Donuts' brilliant entrepreneurs, according to their website, have "taken the neighborhood donut and put it on medication, and given it shock treatment." Sounds like a baker's dozen of glazed and nutty confections are just the thing to cure the aftertaste of whatever truths you see behind the veil of mercantile insanity and prisoners of war in our own homes.

In 2004 I took a freelance job editing the website for NAMI California. It's the state's chapter of a national organization devoted to fighting the stigma associated with mental illness. When soldiers fear harassment or demotions for admitting PTSD, they eschew reporting their condition out of shame and resort to eating a bullet. And they're not alone. In a culture that hands out anti-depressants like candy to help people who have mild depression or who are trying to quit smoking, what's truly insane is that so much stigma is attached to individuals who suffer from grave mental illness. We think of these people as twittering imbeciles, foaming at the mouth, sitting on the eaves of their roofs in aluminum foil hats, channeling alien broadcasts.

They're not. Nor are they violent, as the media and film industry would have you believe (for box office revenue). Most are victims of violence done to them on the streets, where they're often homeless and looking for hope in tobacco or a bottle, products sold over-the-counter with clever names and colorful packages. They're among us everywhere. And so are the members of their families who fight a valiant struggle for normalcy in their daily affairs. I lost a grandfather to suicide--before I was born. My own father was only 17 when it happened. And last year, my uncle took his own life the day before my father's 89th birthday.

Excuse me for not laughing. Our father's justice gets closer, and I'm on a sugar-free diet.

The Faith That Can Save Me

On a bootleg recording of a 1978 concert, Bruce Springsteen admitted to the crowd that he had been kicked out of parochial school for pissing on a desk. Not bad. I had never been to anywhere other than public schools, but my mother busted me and my best friend for peeing in our rubber rain boots when we were in second grade. Nothing wrong with it.

When I left graduate school to take a job with an association of creative writing students and teachers, my boss would sing Springsteen lyrics all day. Good Liam Rector, a poet from New England, boozily belted out lines from My Hometown: "There was a lot of fights between the black and white/There was nothing you could do." Rector, who was struggling with cancer, took his own life a few years ago after championing writers and The Boss for decades. To Liam I owe my introduction to Bruce and the E Street Band and swear forever friends.

A year later, I left Virginia to take a visiting professor's job with the English Department at the University of Illinois. I taught two sections of undergraduate fiction writing by day, spent my evenings in the Esquire Lounge with two graduate students who got dewy at the idea of seeing Bruce--which they had been doing along the Jersey Shore since he started at the Stone Pony.

Lauren and Pat (who went on to become full professors in English) spun Bruce albums on the stereo to my utter consternation. I liked the rock okay, but couldn't see their devotion; besides the band was jangly with accordion and glockenspiel sounds of the boardwalk which meant nothing to me; and Bruce's long speeches between songs seemed like a terrible pose.

For three summers we stuck together, Lauren and Pat and I. We drove hours up to Chicago to grab last-minute seats behind the baselines at Wrigley. I had the touch: I scored dozens of prime ducats simply by walking up to the ticket window just before the first pitch. Once we nearly got tossed for riding an umpire. It was boozy, too.

Finally, I agreed to see a show when the band was playing the Rosemont Horizon in the suburbs of Chicago. We had terrible seats, I hated the mugging between Bruce and Clarence, and whined all the way home. But I did like road trips, so we piled in the car and drove from Champaign to Philly for the Amnesty International shows with Bruce, Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Tracy Chapman. And by the end of the show, the moon busting out over the open night above RFK stadium, the band played Jungleland and I was a goner.

I have not missed a single E Street tour since. And I'm late to the scene. Stand in line for a place in the orchestra pit before the stage at any show and Boss fans wear their pedigrees, reciting their total number of shows, recreating from memory the set list of songs the band played on any given date. (Yeah, I drove all night, too.)

Nearly 20 years after finally seeing what Pat and Lauren had been clamoring about, I joined them again in Jersey, for the opening of The Rising tour in the Meadowlands. You could gaze across the Hudson at the bleak south Manhattan skyline, robbed of its two towers, as you walked the parking lot of E Street die-hards who had been tailgating for days.

I met my friends again in the Midwest for the tour, taking in shows in Columbus and Indianapolis on successive nights. To get a spot in front of the band meant (back then) that you had to get on line days before the show, where fans took down a list of names of people in the order that they arrived. You were in a fatigue spiral by the time the band took the stage.

By the end of the Columbus show, I had my shoes off, dancing in my socks, when Pat tapped me on the arm. We were leaving before the encore, to drive in the freezing rain across Ohio to Indy where we'd jump on line for the following show. I ran for the car, a rental I had picked up at the airport, hopping on one foot, then the other, as I put on my shoes.

It was about 2 am when we took the exit off the interstate in a light snow flurry, making it to the Conseco Field House just as the line was lengthening around the sidewalk. The car in front of us braked suddenly--to release its passengers to the line--and I ran into it, crinkling the hood of the rental. I turned around in my seat, but Pat and Lauren--true friends , but (face it) Bruce fans--had already leaped out, leaving me to deal with the car. Fortunately, it was insured.

When the roadshow moved to California, I bought an extra ticket online from two women from the Bay Area. They became my second set of Bruce angels: Susan and Phyllis. They're unabashed fanatics, racing to the back of the arena before the show to get an autograph or log a Bruce sighting, pressing to the stage to touch him as he mugs with the crowd.

We were in my local gym the day of the show when Phyllis and I saw the Big Man--saxophonist Clarence Clemons--working out with a trainer. We had to go on over and shake hands. And that night he gave us a wink and chest thump as we danced beneath the stage. I got an email later from a friend who had seats above, declaring me "Mayor of the Pit."

We've been to a good dozen shows now together, Phyllis and Susan and I, and in the summer of 2008, we were joined by Pat and Lauren in the pit in Missouri as my Bruce world turned full circle. Billy, who runs the bay area Bruce tribe called "This Train" scored seats to a Cardinals game and we combined baseball and Bruce: my loves. We rode in the cramped capsule that rose up the limb of the Gateway Arch, eyed the Midwest skyline, then rode down, packed in the small cab with two strangers, and we sang Badlands at the tops of our lungs in the echo chamber of the great arch, learning with great regret at the bottom that our companions were professional opera singers, held hostage by fanatics.

That night I yakked giddily with hoops coach Pat Riley in the pit, where he danced with his wife. But I lost the last of my knee cartilage in St Louis, dancing with too much weight on my bones for nearly four hours, hobbling off the concrete arena floor to the car that took me across Missouri to night two in Kansas City, where I danced another three hours on the damaged leg. Doctors say it's now a case of bone on bone and I'll need a complete replacement. There was nothing you could do.

Doctors say I'll be fine afterward and the pain will go away. I can't wait to see how the knee holds up on tour.

Lauren, it must be told, has left the university to take a job with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Birth of a School

The fall in Tuscaloosa seemed an odd amalgam of earthly effects: the leaves burned with color and curled to crackling on the ground. The late afternoons felt like New England with a refreshing breeze, while the sun in its mid-day arc leaned down on the dry, baked ground so that you thought that summer with its humid swelter might go on forever.

We gathered in Morgan Hall for orientation into the graduate writing program, sizing each other up as we sat in neat rows of student desks, tuning our ear to the spoken tongues from New York and Chicago and the small towns of Dixie, wondering what our peers would sound like on paper.

The poets were an odd lot, easily given to maudlin sentiment, while fiction writers fell by turn to the mimicry of suburban prose, the K-Mart fiction of drunks, hypochondriacs, used-car salesmen, and adulterous wives that populated the fictional worlds of Ray Carver, Anne Tyler, Bobbie Ann Mason, or John Updike. I had read too much of it all, with its facile repetitions of brand names and parking-lot angst. And the poets, with their gnashing and wailing about poor dead John Berryman (a suicide) or the sad Montana taverns of Richard Hugo just seemed a bit over the top for me. I trusted neither.

That year, too, the writing world was reveling in what later came to be called "Sudden Fiction", works several paragraphs in length that mapped the immediate launch of a skyrocket without the fuel and oxygen sufficient to sustain your interest. They once might have been called "tone poems", but to me they were examples of Fiction Lite. It was like leaving town under the cover of darkness after selling snake oil to the locals.

That fall -- and perhaps always -- our writing faculty believed in the shorthand of drinking and adultery, and they led by example. In my first semester, I knew of at least four professors who were walking a sloppy line. One writer was sleeping with a current student and another wooed a married departmental secretary. A literature professor had a casting couch in his office and students delighted in speculating who was attending his darkened seminars.

That fall as we crowded into the seminar rooms of the writers' workshop, our fiction teachers championed two themes regarding our stories: the avarice of puerile prose and the requisite pearl of literary verisimilitude.

Let's examine each, shall we?

puerile
French or Latin; French puéril, from Latin puerilis, from puer boy, child; akin to Sanskrit putra son, child and perhaps to Greek pais boy, child; 1 : juvenile 2 : childish , silly

Don Hendrie, or Red Don as we called him, could make you cry in front of the workshop. He had a crimson beard and spatulate thumbs. He would do anything for you as a writer. But his face flushed raw and you could see him building up to an outburst when he found a line you wrote that was objectionable; he jabbed at it with his finger, then slammed his palm on the table and stammered. He called your writing "puerile".

Hendrie was sleeping with one of his students--a dark foreigner who would goad him during workshop and once remarked quite proudly that while he trashed her prose in the small classroom with the large table, he'd call out her name in religious fervor in their bedroom later that night.

verisimilitude
from Latin verisimilis; 1 : having the appearance of truth : probable 2 : depicting realism

Meanwhile, our other fiction professor, A--, was all about the baroque possibilities of language, was soft-spoken, and insisted that while the prose might reflect the complicated observations of the emotionally charged mind, it should bear verisimilitude on the page. He was wooing a fabulously stunning English Department secretary (whom he later married). But her divorce wasn't quite final and so A-- fearing that the ex was stalking him -- brought a loaded pistol to workshop in the briefcase which bore our stories for discussion. He asked the men in the fiction workshop to surround him with our bodies as we escorted him to his car in the parking lot. Got verisimilitude?

On one afternoon, after school let out, I was privileged to see both workshop expressions brought to bear at once in a convincing way. Hendrie asked me if I could help out in a delicate matter. As I was brand new to the school and invested in presenting a helpful, eager facade, I agreed.

I climbed into A--'s pickup truck and we drove out in the fall light to the secretary's former residence where A-- was to help her remove some possessions before her ex returned. Hendrie held a loaded shotgun as he guarded the driveway against demons. And when we had spirited the marital artifacts into the pickup, Hendrie put the shotgun into his Honda, and I climbed in for a drive to the tavern. A-- went his own way, having squired the last of Helen's finery to his personal Troy.

It was nauseating and delicious at the same time, for that night a fresh genre--Sudden Nonfiction--was born pink and screaming into the deep heart of Dixie.

In the Mirror Maze

Most of my childhood friends loved Disneyland. I did, too. But I preferred Pacific Ocean Park, a 26-acre playland built on a pier that stretched out into the cobalt sea. You bought your ticket --scarcely a few dollars compared to Disney's whopping entry fees--at the booth beneath a statuary of serpents and crusted seahorses, then entered through Neptune's Kingdom and took an elevator down into the depths of the tank that held giant octopi and sharks. You could descend in a leaky diving bell--thrust down into the sea by a piston engine--where you viewed a kelp forest and frolicking seals.

Sinbad's Flying Carpet soared on tracks through mysterious Baghdad with palaces encrusted in jewels, and an aerial skyway took you out over the ocean some 75 feet over the waves where you could gaze breathlessly across the expanse of coastline from Venice to Santa Monica, or you could ride the back of the Sea Serpent coaster, spinning dangerously close to the edge of the pier. It all had a grittiness, wrought with imperfectly functioning thrill rides that struggled against rust in the salty air. Add the aroma of saltwater taffy and spun sugar--the grains of sand that blew every way you turned--and it suited me fine compared with the perfect, goyishe sterility of Disney. And when you were done with all the rides and shows, you could head for the changing room and race down to the beach in your suit.

There were live shows in a tank, where dolphins arched wildly into the air in a blast of white spray. Or you could beat yourself senseless on the Sea Ram bumper cars. Matt loved the Whirl Pool, a wooden centrifuge that spun madly as the floor dropped out and the g-forces pinned your body to the wall. It only made me seasick for the entire day.

I loved Davy Jones Locker, a fun house with shifting walls, sudden slides, a moving sidewalk, and mirrors that made you look 15 feet tall or 10 feet wide. But my favorite attraction was the Mirror Maze, a convoluted house of glass that, once you entered, you could spend as much as a half an hour trying to thread your way back out to the world. You walked into small cubes, framed on three sides with mirrors, with only a single door leading out. To hold your hand in front of you was to cheat. Instead, you took your best guess and walked forward, often smacking yourself senseless against the glass.

There were times where I was frustrated to tears--and a bloody nose-- giving up and threading my way to freedom with my hands outstretched to prevent further injury. Since those days, I have seen halls of mirrors in traveling carnivals, but none were as large and complicated as P.O.P.'s. None had the distracting, dizzying lights that lent a sense of spaciousness and multiplied like a field of supernovas against the glass. Once inside, you banged endlessly against your likenesses, trapped in a world of a thousand yous!

Alas, in 1966 the park began to lose money and the rides fell into greater disrepair. By the following fall, it was closed forever. And today, the pier itself has broken up and descended in pieces beneath the sea. Davy Jones' Locker, the Flying Carpet, Neptune's Kingdom--gone the way of Atlantis.

However, I still have unlimited access to the Mirror Maze if I court despair. For many years I was trapped, banging into the image of myself wherever I turned, too proud to put out my hand for help, groping for the distant light that leads out to the salt-sea air, the sand between my toes, all that candy for the asking.

Simple as Pie

Suzanne Birrell (I called her "Sudsy Barrel) lived six blocks away on Haskell Avenue. Our mothers took turns driving us everywhere--to school, to junior high band practice, to friends' homes--so often that we were considered siblings. We had the absurdly easy friendship common among young musicians who belonged to our tribe of gifted kids with delight and runaway dreams.

My best pal Matt and I would orchestrate shenanigans that took Suzanne and Maryanne Hoobs by storm: we kidnapped them in their pajamas before dawn and spirited them to breakfast at the pancake house. We flocked the trees and eaves of their homes with rolls of toilet paper.

Matt and I gleaned most of our ideas from Mack Sennett comedies. Our favorite character actor, James Finlayson, appeared in more than 200 films--including the Laurel and Hardy features--as the master of the double-take and glare. He'd wink and yell "Doh", an expression later stolen for Homer in the cartoon series The Simpsons.

Matt and I would catch each others eye across the band room and shout "Doh", grimacing as if we'd been smacked with a plank. And we'd lug paper plates and shaving cream in a grocery bag when driving around to our friends' homes, ringing the front doorbell and slapping a pie into Suzanne's face or Russ' jolly mug, and then make a run for the safety of the road. By the time we were in high school, Matt owned a Falcon wagon, our corporate office for mischief, and we drove around the San Fernando Valley, slapping pies on people.

Wednesday was cruise night on Van Nuys Boulevard and we'd drive from Victory all the way to Ventura Boulevard, hang a u-turn in the Lucky Market parking lot, and head north again among the spiffy jacked-up Fords and Chevys, watching girls as they strolled the sidewalks in their headbands, vinyl boots, and miniskirts, leaning on the horn and speeding between the red lights. If we had more than three of us, we'd screech to a stop at the light and conduct what we called a "Chinese Fire Drill". The idea was to exit from the closest door, run around the car like madmen until the light turned green, then race back into the car and lurch off for the next street along the way, Jim Morrison's voice belting out "People are strange...", or the stereo booming out the Vanilla Fudge version of "Ticket to Ride"... or Jagger's "Ruby Tuesday".

One time Matt, hobbled by a broken leg, lumbered around the Falcon with his leg in a cast, the cops just behind us on Reseda Boulevard. Good old Matt. He had a spare steering wheel, which he held up as he screamed hysterically from the driver's seat while one of us wrangled the car surreptitiously.

When we tired of the slapstick, we sat in Bob's Big Boy, spooning down thick chocolate milkshakes, or we took a carload of chums over to Farrell's Ice Cream on Reseda where the waiters threw your own gluttony parade with horns and bass drum if you powered down a two-person serving of sundae, appropriately known as "The Trough".

In 1969, we graduated high school and went into the diaspora of pie-tossing expats. Today, Matt works among the musical elite in the San Diego symphony scene and Suzanne still makes music, playing bass guitar professionally. I sit looking out at the pond, down into the San Joaquin Valley where the Sutter Buttes rise into the smokey air, and cannot find the thread inside that leads to the unbridled glee of those days. Have I failed to leave a trail of breadcrumbs? I am recovered from hopelessness and I'm reasonably happy. But what I'd give for a belly laugh so fierce I'd have to struggle to hold consciousness, bursting into a million motes of delight--like the spray from an Independence Day sparkler--fizzing, jangling down to the marrow at the idiocy, blind, brutal idiocy of taking myself so damn seriously.

A Fabulous Flight

Let me tell you about Peter and Gus.

Peter loved the New York Yankees and he loved his father, a man who made miniatures in his workshop when not otherwise employed at the State Department. Peter P. Pepperell III, unlike his other friends, grew smaller day-by-day. By the time he was 10--which was exactly the age I was when I read A Fabulous Flight--Peter was consigned to sitting in small chairs crafted by his father, or sleeping in a tiny bed that his father carved in the woodshop.

Rather than bemoan his strange fate, Peter loved his new world. He rode safely on the back of a jackrabbit named Buck, seated comfortably in the saddle his father had made for him.

While sailing the Long Island Sound in a diminutive sailboat that his father had carved, Peter coasted alongside a bobbing seagull named Gus. For a moment, he thought he'd surely be eaten, but Gus was a profoundly chipper bird with an appetite for sardines---not small children. The two struck up an uncanny fellowship.

Mr. Pepperell creates a mobile home with a Plexiglas dome that he straps to Gus' back and, together, the seagull and Peter take off. Off they go, skywards, towering over New York, swooping down to Yankee Stadium, where Gus lands beside Joe DiMaggio; then across the Atlantic they fly, perching for a while on a gargoyle on the buttress of Notre Dame, off again along the Rhine, down to the crumbling Coliseum of Rome, Peter safe and warm in his little dome until they return to New York.

But all is not well. It's a dangerous world. From his State Department office, Mr. Pepperell learns of a dastardly plot in a small Eastern European nation to create an explosive far more powerful than a nuclear bomb, the size of a single grain of sand. He entrusts his news to Peter and charges him with the awful responsibility of saving the world. Gus flaps his wings, and off they go on their terrible errand...

But before I can finish the story, I come down with a terrible fever and throat infection, and the doctor is summoned to our house on Longridge Avenue to remove my tonsils and adenoids. The promise of unrestricted servings of ice cream is a false one: I cannot even swallow the chicken soup my mother brings to my bedside. The room spins...

And I put off my wanderlust for more than a decade, when finally I walk away from my desk at the Fremont Argus, my bags packed for Tokyo and, later, Athens and the Acropolis and the monolith on the Isle of Rhodes, the throngs of beggars in the airport at Islamabad, the broken pottery still in the surf at Caesaria on the Israeli coast, the honey swirled into the thick yogurt on Cypress, the small room that Anne Frank called home above the canal in Amsterdam, the glowing turquoise windows of Ste. Chappell by the Seine, the beggar with red dreadlocks by the seawall in Negril, the field where deer came to beg on bent knees for rice crackers outside the giant Buddha in Nara, the marbled ribs of the David that looked as if they breathed air in the Galleria dell'Accademia, in Harry's Bar in Venice where Hemingway drank down peach bellinis, on the Yukon River blood-red from bank to bank with teeming salmon, the little girl that sat on my lap at the cafe in the square in Merida spooning ice cream from my bowl, and the seat I paid way too much to borrow behind the plate in Yankee Stadium that summer's day, the clouds banked high in the blue above the Hudson, the seagulls wheeling across the sky, caterwauling in all that openness.

Now Showing

When temperatures climbed well over a hundred degrees for the third straight week, you could take refuge all afternoon in the Panorama for a buck and a half. It never mattered whether you walked into the luscious dark in the middle of the second act of The Guns of Navarone where Gregory Pack had to shoot the informer--it didn't even spoil the picture to know that she had been spying for the Nazis all along--since the second feature would wipe clean the action of the film you joined in medias res, and by the time the Guns of Navarone cycled back for a second showing three hours later, you were numb with candy and soda and air so cold you wore goosebumps.

I had long suffered my parents' long-winded recollections of going to the movies for five cents and spending those black-and-white afternoons of the Bronx and Brooklyn in a theater that not only offered two feature films, but a day's worth of newsreels, cartoons, short subjects, and boxes of raisinettes for three cents. When I was young, we went to Radio City and the music hall featured the line kicking, high-heeled legs of the Rockettes along with comics and side-show artists--and then you got the feature film, too.

But now I view my childhood days, golden and luminous, where Russ and Bruce and I would hop on our three-speed Schwinns and zip through the scorched avenues of Sepulvida, the asphalt already sticky by 11 am as we rode off to the Panorama and parked our bikes outside--without having to lock them against thieves--and ducked inside for at least five hours of shows.

They didn't care then how long you sat in the theater if you were reasonably behaved, and since the films rotated around the dial, you could cower at the brutality of mind control in The Invaders from Mars, then swoon at Haley Mills in The Parent Trap, and then slide back into a repeat nightmare of aliens drilling into the heads of suburbanites and planting mind-control chips in their brains.

No one yakked their brains out during the pictures; we sat rapt at the action on the screen; and no one had to sit in the blue glare of so many cell phones while kids wrote text messages or tossed popcorn at each other. We were in sacred space with tacky floors. At home, celluloid monsters stamped through Tokyo on tiny, black and white sets, but in the Panorama, green and red dinosaurs that lived in the center of the earth chowed down on wayward explorers across a 70-foot expanse of screen, their hideous screams blaring from overhead speakers!

I never had to explain, returning home, that I spent the entire day in a movie theater; my mother understood it was what you did during the heat of day. I desperately yearned to escape the bonds of suburbia with its tidy lawns and self-same thoroughfares to the salt-sea treehouse that the Robinson family built on their deserted island. I prayed for a loyal, cast-iron friend like Tobor the Great, a mechanical buddy assembled in a government lab by a nerd in a white coat (Tobor, by the way, is "robot" spelled backwards). The brilliant beaches of Zuma and Malibu lay just over the pass from our house in the Valley, but I was content to sit in the Panorama (a quarter of the way back, in the center) and imagine I was Moondoggie, buried in sand to my neck and kissed on the mouth by Annette Funicello while the gulls screeched insanely overhead.

You did more than escape the heat those afternoons in the Panorama. And afterwords, Bruce and Russ and I would race through the dirt lots, nosing each other off like Saberjet pilots, skidding around parked cars and screaming out Gregory Peck's lines all the way through Mission Hills, through the alleys and backstreets, blessed with good fortune and a belly full of popcorn as the evening sun ducked beyond the Santa Susana Mountains and we knew that dinner was on the table and it would soon be cool enough to sleep, to dream.

Officer Gardner

In the fall of that year came the very day for which I had held my breath so many years. I drove up Highway 101, leaving the San Fernando Valley in my spiffy ragtop Buick--the sweet ride that I bought for $500 to replace the dead Rambler--through the flat and baking subdivisions of southern California, up into the verdant hills of the coastal farms that lined the route with fruit stands and orange juice stalls, beyond the plains and misty fields of the Salinas Valley where migrant workers bent to rows of lettuce and artichokes and strawberries in the late afternoon sun, past Gilroy and Morgan Hill, suddenly into the last prune-tree orchards where new subdivisions burst through in the Santa Clara Valley to the campus of the college--once founded as the California Normal School--where I'd spend my freedom.

That year, Allen Hall (since demolished) was a long, brick dormitory with three floors, the first of which was reserved for coeds and the top held alternating rooms of men and women. It was the only mixed dorm of its kind in California for the era, and I played the idea of roommates and sex across my mind like tumbling cherries and bells of a slot machine as I drove the last few miles, wondering if I'd land in the paradise of the upper floor.

Apparently I had no such luck, but my hopes soared when I checked into Allen at the front desk and saw from a list that I had been teamed up with Lynn Gardner on the second floor. I had but a few bags to haul up the stairs, listing to the booming stereos rocket out songs I had never heard in my sheltered life in Granada Hills, brutally strident guitar leads mixed into the pre-semester air of Mexican reefer and delight seeping out the closed dormroom doors in the hallway as I made my way to my cell in the honey hive.

The room was narrow but bright, and overlooked a lawn to the one-way bustle of 10th Street and its convenience stores, laundromat, burrito place, a liquor shop, and used bookstores. Paradise!

Miss Gardner had yet to check in, so I captured the bed against the brightest wall, spread out the bright floral sheets--neon green by choice--and sat on the bed, leaning against the wall and drinking down the relief of having escaped the tyranny of family, weeks before the sudden realization of deep severance and loneliness would creep through, but for now, amazed at my fortune, listening to the blaring television through the brick wall that separated my space from the room shared by fellow journalism majors Benjamin Reed and Gary Rubin. They had their own TV!

I popped over to introduce myself, jumping back as from a frayed wire from the proffered joint that Rubin held out, still in my ardent opposition to all things immoral -- a posture that would weaken and collapse along with so many other unwritten oaths I had taken in as little as a month at Allen. But for now, I retreated to my room to wait for Miss Gardner.

It was after dark that I heard the key in the latch and the door opened to a lanky, tousle-haired lad from a bumpkin town in the California Gold County, a valise in each hand, moving into the light, a well-scrubbed, hugely gentile face, my roommate.

"Lynn Gardner," he announced, dropping his bags on the opposite bed and holding out his hand in easy friendship as my heart fell to my knees, through my ankles, down beyond the linoleum floor, past the coeds who were only a stairwell away in their beds on the first floor, through the rich loam of Santa Clara farm soil, falling like heavy obsidian, coursing through the fiery magma, all the way to the other side of the globe where small Chinese school children were pecking through a breakfast of rice and tea.

"Surprised?" he said, kicking off his shoes and flopping on his bed. "Yeah, I get that."

After a while we stopped talking and Gardner spread out his sheets and we turned out the light.

We whirled through the first semester in disparate orbits. I joined the tribes of the marching band and journalism students, Gardner his small and alien planet of criminal justice majors. I learned to roll fat joints and sip on soda-pop wine; he learned the use of the nightstick and the California Criminal Code. I loved my newfound anti-war march of Neil Young's Ohio; Gardner loved Creedence Clearwater's Out My Back Door, with its paean to small town life.

And yet, and yet, we were fast friends, yakking late into the night about the girls who stole through the halls at Allen with six packs of beer, hopping into bed with you like they were visiting old family. Even wannabe cops could handle free love.

Outside of Allen, away from Officer Garner--as my pals and I would refer to my roomie--we called cops "pigs", hated the tramp of jackboots and flailing nightsticks at the anti-war rallies, hated anything in a uniform. I guarded my tongue in friendly conversation with him, yet I truly never thought of Lynn as a pig. He liked fast cars; I liked fast guitars. We danced around topics like the war or religion with ease.

I took delight in Lynn's odd tic for sleepwalking. Once he climbed out of bed at three in the morning, went into the dorm bathroom to shave, shower, and comb his hair for class, then wandered casually back to the room, dressed in his shirt and slacks, and climbed back into bed and snored.

In our second year, we moved out of the dorms into a swank, swinger's apartment complex on the East Side, an expensive two-bedroom place in a lush setting with a creek, swimming pool, and workout gym safely tucked inside a locked gate, all made affordable when split among four students. Gardner and I took one room while Rubin and another man shared the other. By then, Gardner was donning a uniform and riding by night with sworn Santa Clara police officers. By then, Rubin and I would buy pot by the pound, divvying it up among our friends, thereby getting our own for free.

One afternoon we were cleaning out the stems and seeds on a screen we had taken down from one of the scenic windows that looked out over the creek and Japanese maples, waggling loose the detritus and putting the shake into baggies, when our uniformed Gardner burst in, furious! He had been riding with his pig pals on duty and nearly invited them in for a beer. How would that have helped his fledgling career?

He marched up to us, pulling out his can of mace and spraying the tear gas into his handkerchief.

"Here!" he said, holding the noxious stuff up to my nose. "Try some of my stash!"

And so ended the Gardner era, an era of tolerance and wildness and rides in his fast car up to Gold Country to drift down the American River in rubber inner tubes, or try the pie at one of the rustic diners off of Interstate 80.

Two lanes forked out from that afternoon. I took the path to the left, with attendant decades of pot and insanity. Officer Garner went east to the right, to a job with the Placer County Sheriff's Department, a long and prosperous career that he finished up with the Sacramento County force.

Oddly enough, I would eventually move, sober and relatively sane, thirty years later to Auburn and a home in the hills, growing up finally in the town where Lynn was raised. Out my door I saw mule deer and a pond and wild turkeys scurrying through the brush. But by then, Officer Gardner was but the stuff of folklore among my friends and among the officers in town who told me they once had known him.

He had married--I later learned--a woman named Lynn.

No Labor-Saving Machine

"No labor-saving machine, nor discovery I have made, nor will I be able to leave behind me any wealthy bequest to found a hospital or library, nor reminiscence of any deed of courage for America, nor literary success nor intellect, nor book for the bookshelf, but a few carols vibrating through the air I leave, for comrades and lovers." -- Whitman.

No greater ignominious remembrance of high school--save the can of deodorant that was left in my band locker to suggest I shower more often--mines the depths so deeply as the lack of my own car to park among the throng of Chevys, Fords, and Chryslers that idled in the dirt field beneath the eucalyptus trees outside Granada Hills High School. Instead, I walked a half mile every morning, marching to the cadence in my head of surf music, sweet soul, or skiffle to the blue-and-white irregular buses of the Los Angeles Transit District.

In my junior year I climbed in the back seat of a rumbling Bel Aire filled with clandestine cigarette smoke and the intimidating, anti-social rant of the Blue Cheer's Summertime Blues or Jagger's incandescent Under My Thumb, riding with neighborhood seniors in a carpool arranged between our mothers. At least now my commute ended in the dizzying tribal pulse of the dirt lot where guys revved their engines and girls finished up their make-up in so many rear-view mirrors.

To be a senior and not have a car in Los Angeles was to fall into the grimiest category of loser, yet my own parents, first-generation New Yorkers who lived a near lifetime on subways, buses, or on-foot along canyons of glass and concrete, saw us as obnoxious postwar babies with a never-ending belief in entitlement. And, my mother was quick to note, we listened not to the moonglow swoons of Vaughn Monroe nor the torch songs of Eydie Gorme, not to the dulcet pop sounds of Rosemary Clooney, not to the tasteful zariba of notes stacked up in the glissando of Artie Shaw--but in the screaming, distorted sex-calls of Jan and Dean, white boys from the beach who were the pre-British invasion harbingers of the Pat Boone sound wrapped around Gibson guitars. Sigh.

So in my senior year, I rode proudly around in the Dodge Coronet that belonged to the mother of my girlfriend Martha Louise. It was a dangerously fast car with a four-barrel carb and a radio with bristling muscle, and we drove up to the top of Tampa, where concrete slabs were laid out for the booming subdivisions that today look out over the twinkling lights of the San Fernando Valley, and we fogged up the windows with heavy breathing. We listened to Sam Cooke and Jacklie Wilson. Or the Ronettes. Ronnie Spector's voice conjured up the beehive hairdos of Chicanas at the school who--rumor had it--hid razor blades in their tight sprayed coronas in case it came to violence over their guy. Just thinking of it made me weak, not like the dizziness of the tilt-a-whirl, but a magical, sudden plunge in the lower belly that felt like falling in love with the wrong girl.

If there was a god, he lived in Marty Wynhoff's soul-rattling kisses, in the glowing Los Angeles sky where it bubbled up over the slumbering housewives and worker bees, blotting out the stars themselves, the light aglow on the dashboard radio dial, a tangible god in the Temptations', Just My Imagination, Running Away With Me.

In that year, Marty and I won tickets to appear on Ninth Street West, a dance show on Channel 9 in LA where teens would pack onto the narrow stage, wheeling around bulky cameras while the DJs spun the Top-40. We took the Coronet over Cahuenga Pass and drove the Hollywood Freeway across Sunset Boulevard to the studio, the radio pulsing out Paul Mauriat's Love is Blue, and I Wish It Would Rain, and Love Is All Around, and Reach Out Of The Darkness. The show theme was sleep-overs, and Marty and I put on red-felt sleep hats with white puff-balls at the peak, and we spun around the floor, stealing kisses under the hot stage lights.

Finally, toward the end of my senior year, I inherited part-time privileges of my mother's Rambler American. It was not the '55 Chevy of my dreams with a wide profile and chrome trim, not the mad Buick with fins or woodie surf wagon, or modified, lowered Plymouth that throttled out its song through glass-pack exhaust, but a tinny, narrow, ugly straight-mobile that looked like you dropped your feet through the floor like some cartoon character and wore the car around you like a naked-man's barrel. But, temporarily, it was mine.

On Wednesday nights I parked it at a friend's house and we took his blue El Camino cruising along Van Nuys Boulevard, blasting out The Chambers Brothers and Clarence Carter and The Rascals. People Got to Be Free. And then came the turning point. Late one night we pulled into the parking lot behind the Muntz audio store and found a four-track tape player cast away into the dumpster.

Russ had a spare set of speakers, and plenty of stereo wire, and the four-track (apparently hidden in the dumpster by a Muntz employee who hoped to return for it later) went into the Rambler. After he neatly tucked the speakers into the rear deck, Russ flocked the firewall with white angel hair.

It was not the car I would proudly back into an open space in the dirt lot at the high school--I parked it in the paved lot where the students with sadly uncool cars hid themselves along with the rides of faculty members--but it had sounds of its own, and I could disappear into Ike and Tina Turner's cover of We Can Work It Out and, later, after Marty broke it off, I could slide into a deep veil of sadness to Carole King's It's Too Late, with all the attendant self-pity and adolescent gloom as the nation bellied deep into its fiery crash landing in Vietnam, not the chirpy hope of Surf City, but the dark torment of In My Room, not the portentous Sunshine of Your Love played out the windows of the Victorians in the Haight, but of the cloud-swept broken tenements across the bay in Oakland where the Temptations crooned, I Wish It Would Rain.

At the end of that shadowy year now clouded by decades, the head gasket went out on the Rambler and the oil pan filled with water, killing off the engine with a sudden flood.

Shipping Out

In our garage on Gaviota Street you could find a fabulous miscellany of keepsakes to fuel the imagination. Of particular delight was the huge steamer trunk into which my mother had packed for safekeeping trinkets from her marriage. There were salt and pepper shakers from her honeymoon to Niagara Falls, and doilies and tablecloths from an era when she'd decorate the Passover table, photo albums of aunts, uncles, and cousins from a bygone life of comfort in Brooklyn: pictures of sun-kissed relatives frolicking on Brighton Beach or necking in Prospect Park.

I was always drawn to the quartered storage section of the steamer trunk that held my father's war memorabilia. There was an officer's samurai sword and seppuku blade he had collected in Tokyo, Japanese coins in odd shapes formed around a cut-out center, paper money from ports of call in Brazil and the Pacific Islands.

He had assembled a photobook of snapshots of Rio's Sugar Loaf, rising like a dream of happiness from Buenos Aires, pictures of himself--a chief petty officer in a white liberty uniform with jaunty sailor's hat--mugging with his buddies outside a bar on shore leave, a snapshot of him towering over a geisha in her kimono in a Tokyo street, the rubble of the bombed-out city behind them.

My father, to whom I owe my debt of gratitude for the wicked magic of puns and wisecracking humor, wrote a delicious line of parody beneath each photo. Today it's a wondrous keepsake of oxymoronical history told in a montage of wartime snaps tempered by an irony that life would one day in an imaginary future be filled with peace, prosperity, and funny-bones for all.

My favorite: a photo of my father in an outrageously over-sized helmet sitting behind the anti-aircraft guns on the USS Patoka, the tanker on which he served through both Atlantic and Pacific campaigns. He wears a steadfast grimace as he aims the "double barrels-of-trouble" skyward at imaginary formations of Mitsubishi Zeros and suicide planes.

His appended caption: "If the Japs had ever seen this picture, they never would have surrendered."

While I attribute my ever-sustaining love of music to my mother (who played the violin as a child and spun countless records of crooners on our turntable), it's my dad who infused a happy admixture of irony and wanderlust in my veins. The trinkets and lore in the steamer trunk fuelled my lifelong fascination with Japan, with world travel, and with the absolute necessity to carve a wicked pun in the face of mortal combat--real or imagined.

I grew up with my share of plastic machine guns and war toys, marched soldiers across parade grounds I had scraped in the mud outside our garage, played frogman in the Doughboy swimming pool that my folks had erected in the backyard.

By junior high school I had mixed feelings about it all. I hated the Vietnam war, collected my own scrapbook of photos torn from the pages of Newsweek, shots of helicopters ferrying out the wounded after a pointless battle in the Mekong Delta, writing my own wry and cynical remarks about the lies of the Johnson Administration--all remarkable for a 12-year-old. But I still loved military hardware, having been raised in the mid-1950s mythology of peace through might. I loved to pause during the day when then heavy pop and roar of the propellers of a vintage DC3 or Neptune submarine-chaser flew over the playground. I loved the B-36 bomber most of all, with its six rear-facing engines and obscenely long fuselage that accommodated hydrogen bombs.

But in my second year at Granada Hills High School, the U.S. Navy (doubtlessly faced with grim press in the middle of the War) had launched its own public relations campaign, enticing adolescents to join the ranks for a weekend as Navy journalists. The notice came to my high school journalism class and said I could come, armed with notebook, camera, and a best friend, down to the barracks in San Pedro for a weekend tour of duty. How could I refuse?

My chum Matt Garbutt and I took a Navy bus from the Valley to the Depot, racing each other to capture the top bunk in the barracks when we arrived that evening. In the morning, we woke at reveille, attended classes on Navy operations, ate a huge breakfast of eggs and potatoes, and then were shuttled out to the harbor where a mine sweeper waited to take us to sea. Navy photographers took photos of us posing in the open doors of Marine helicopters, walking across the gangplank to our ship, standing with the smiling crew in their blue utility uniforms.

It was a mistake. The sweeper had a wooden hull, to protect it from the magnetic detonation of harbor mines, and so bobbed like a cork on the mild Pacific waves outside San Pedro harbor. Worse, it ran on diesel fuel, belching out fumes that would make even the most hearty soul lean over the rail and puke. In less than a half hour out to sea, I was green and spinning, having chucked my eggs and potatoes overboard, and spent the balance of the "Day in the Navy" rolling in agony in the First Officer's bunk, trying to keep down the saltine crackers he fed me before abandoning me to hours of a steady pitch and roll.

A few weeks later, a manila envelope from the Navy came to my home. It contained a certificate attesting that I had completed my Day, along with a glossy 8x10 photo. Before we left the dock--I had neatly forgotten-- they had taken a picture of me where I sat behind the double barrels of an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the deck. I had pasted my father's ruthless determination across my mug.

At that moment the shutter had clicked, I had been too excited to recall the photos of flag-draped coffins stacked neatly on a pier from Newsweek, the infamous picture of young Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked through the streets outside Trang Bang, the clothes burned off her body by American napalm.

It was one hell of a photograph that the Navy sent in an effort to recruit me.

If the Commies had ever seen that picture, they never would have won the war.