Lance Armstrong: A Personal Reflection

Around six weeks ago, in a town tucked away somewhere in the misty green hills of England, a throng of rabid and intoxicated Brits gathered. Now a gathering of rabid and intoxicated Brits is no extraordinary matter unto itself, but this time the alcohol and anger were channeled not at delirious hooligans of the rival army from Manchester, but rather but at a gargantuan effigy of an aging, tired Texan in a maillot jaune.

There, enshrouded in autumn fog, stood the victim. Looking blackly into the void through ostentatious Oakleys, holding in one hand a cracked trophy of the Tour de France and in the other a sign with the words “For Sale: Racing Bike: No Longer Needed,” Lance Armstrong readied himself to take the full wrath of the rabble. He stood with the solidity and equanimity of St. Sebastian, hatred and venom and scorn all over the friggin’ place. A cue was given, and the effigy was soon ablaze. As the flames consumed Lance and his paper mache trophy, a sinister delight rushed across the flame-lit faces of the rabble.

The collective anger here is only indirectly related to alcohol. It is in fact a natural consequence of the loudness of truth. The truth no longer whispers unsure mutterings and allegations; it pronounces evidence with clarity and assurance and volume. The USADA report, compiled after sworn testimony from some 26 individuals closely associated with Armstrong and his US Postal team, reveals a doping program that is positively East German in its sinister opacity and Lexusian in its relentless pursuit of perfection.

The Armstrong scandal raises another critical question—namely, was the Tour de France primarily a race of athletic endurance or rather a doping competition? In a sport where minutiae matter, where a fraction of a percent in performance can make all the difference, the introduction of EPO and blood doping (which experts estimate can have a 10-20% increase in endurance) explode any notion of fair competition. Whether Armstrong was the most gifted bike rider in the race becomes impossible to ascertain. Was he in fact the Übermensch that we all celebrated him as, a slayer of cancer and of rivals in tights, or was he simply a lucky chap whose body responded better to the same dope every other ambitious rider was on?

Be that as it may, this is supposed to be a personal reflection, not a tired meditation on the problem that Lance represents. by saying that I have been positively obsessed with the Lance Armstrong story for the past two months. I find myself binging his name several times daily to see what the latest developments in the scandal are (Google, both as internet presence and as verb, is officially verboten at my place of work, a school somewhere in the Microsoft empire). I spent a sleepless night in early October poring over the 200-page USADA report. I felt like a red-eyed sociopath, but the truth had to be penetrated. I’ve watched and re-watched all that Youtube has to offer on the subject, from the 60 minutes report with former Armstrong teammate Tyler Hamilton to the Australian documentary on the Texan’s doping conspiracy to the now infamous “I’m on my bike” Nike ad. I’ve relived Lance’s climbs up Alpine peaks. I’ve seen footage of former Tour de Frances that I had never watched when I lived in France. I’ve spent hours trying to convince largely indifferent friends and colleagues that the story is worth their time (or at least should be the focal point of every conversation). One would think that I have been hired as an independent legal counsel or media expert on Armstrong, and yet alas, I expect no compensation from either Armstrong or his persecutors. I am just a Texan with a strange sense of complicity in all of this that I myself cannot quite pin down.

Perhaps I will end up one day as one of those bearded weirdos in a public library, loitering with a purpose only I understand, staring darkly at other library patrons from behind a stack of Armstrong conspiracy books and a legal pad. I’ll stop showering, grow unwanted facial hair, wear yellow jerseys that haven’t been washed in years and make JFK conspiracy buffs look square and unimaginative by comparison.

Why the obsession? Well,perhaps the most absurd part of it all is that I do not own a bike--and haven't owned one since I was thirteen or so. 

 I can also say that I have seen Lance Armstrong in person on two occasions in my life—once in Austin in 1998 and once in Paris in 2002, and I further state that neither encounter meant squat to me at the time.

When I first saw Lance in 1998, he was a virtual nobody, and had not yet won any of the seven tours. He was honored before 80,000 Texans lusting for combat on the football field only to fulfill some perfunctory obligation to a “greater good” (as is so often the case before sporting events, where moments of silence are mere interludes to orgies of brute athleticism and commercialization). I looked benignly down onto the cancer survivor from the upper balcony of Memorial Stadium in Austin. I can’t remember if I clapped or looked at my watch . A year later, in 1999, far removed from Austin in the blue hills of Virginia, I smiled when I saw that the ant I had espied from the bleachers had won his first Tour de France—a race I still had zero interest in actually watching.

In 2002, while visiting Paris for the first time, my good Texan buddy and I made a quick trip over to the Champs-Élysées. Lance rocketed past in his yellow jersey, not even bothering to acknowledge us or stop and have a cup of KoolAid. Obstreperous Texans high-fived (the fist bump had not even come into fashion yet) as Lance won another friggin’ Tour. Ho hum. My friend and I stayed above the fray, preferring instead to quiz each other to see who had the larger vocabulary or to search the crowd for some krasivaya devushka. Lance meant little still.

The fascination with Lance was not to begin for another year. I was living in a dorm room the size of a large van, a stone’s throw from the River Rhine. These years in Bonn were, in fact, the glory years of my life to date. I’d spend my mornings on long runs along the river or at a large outdoor swimming pool, where I’d swim and sit under a large tree with a French novel. My afternoons were most often spent in cafes with attractive young women from France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Russia and China (this was part of pre-CIA training). My rent was a whopping $120 a month, and though my freelance English tutoring money had none yet made me a billionaire, I could at least afford a television set.

I spent countless hours watching German and French television from my dorm room, indulging a habit that I had acquired in my days of childhood vagrancy but this time in the service of language acquisition. My television, owing to the trusted precepts of Maierkultur, was minimalistic, but something special happened when I first managed to see Lance climbing Alpine slopes on his bike and slaying Germany’s Ullrich. Sitting Indian-style on my bed with bowls of cereal on my lap, I would pump my fist in triumph as Lance ascended the Alpe d’Huez or the Plateau de Beille with brio.

            When I declare the summer of 2004 the best of my life, I say that not with Bryan Adams mopey-man nostalgia, but with fond memory of my mid-20s, freedom from worldy and practical concerns, devotion to sunshine and soccer and swimming and travel and literature and the exuberance of young love. And for whatever reason, when I recall that summer, I always remember watching Lance at the apex of his dominance, drawing inspiration and vigor from his triumphs and channeling this into various domains of my life. Vicarious living is perhaps the best living sometimes.

Now few would choose to live vicariously through Lance these days. The man who calls himself Mellow Johnny (an Americanization of “maillot jaune”) will drift into a thick fog of shame. My daily monitoring of Lance’s twitter account reveals that his posts, once a steady flow of laconic loudness, have dwindled to the occasional muttering, the sullen and perfunctory pressing of icons on his I-phone to acknowledge the death or birthday of a friend.

           Obscurity will be a heavy burden for an egomaniac like Mr. Armstrong, accustomed as he is to seeing his name embroidered on ugly yellow articles of clothing for the past decade, Elvis-style. And though I, like the rest of the world, now know the man to be a doper, an asshole, a villain, I will continue, at least for the short term, my strange and perhaps slightly unhealthy obsession with Lance--his triumphs and his downfall. I still watch his Youtube highlight reels as much as I read into his doping organization. And when I run the Kona Half-Marathon this June, I will still be channeling my inner Lance, without using the EPO of course (at least allegedly ;)

A Rant on the Penny

If you were to offer me a penny for my thoughts, I would tell you that the penny is not worth my thoughts.

The truth is that the penny is a great blight on American life. Not only is it the world’s ugliest coin, devoid of any redeeming beauty, let alone value, but it serves only to render our desperate pocket and purse searches futile.

How many times do we find ourselves fishing for quarters in a sea of disgusting copper? By this I mean to say that the penny is to the quarter what Tacoma is to Paris. It stains our coin purse copper when it should be nickel and silver.

The truth is that I used to collect pennies as a boy, and ardently at that. As a bright-eyed boy with an obscene “bowl cut,” I had a Mickey Mouse Penny Bank, given to me as a present by my Auntie. When I told her I didn’t “do” Disney, she calmly assured me that if I saved my pennies judiciously, that I would one day become a rich man.

She lied.

I did all that she asked. I tore open couch cushions. I asked benevolent old men for extra change on hot days, holding out my hands like a character in a Dickens novel. I even scoured the pee-stained floors of bus station bathrooms. All this was done to make my plastic Penny Bank heavier with copper. And after around 7 months of exuberant penny-pinching, I was finally ready to take Mickey into the bank and redeem her.

That is when the reality of the penny’s inutility first dawned on me. You see, when I arrived at the bank with my Mickey Mouse bank in hand, the bank teller, a witch no doubt, told me that the pennies were “useless” in this form. I thought that if I handed over Mickey that I could perhaps receive a golden replica or something, but in fact, the bank would not even consider accepting my plastic friend and his copper guts.

“You’ve got to roll up your pennies,” she said, shaking her finger at me and looking at me with pure scorn. She handed me a few odd pieces of paper that looked like cigars with the tobacco sucked out of them and told me that I was to put the pennies inside this roll and then bring them back.

I almost cried. I had worked and saved and scrapped and dirtied my hands, all for naught. And now I was to go home and begin a newer, far less rewarding task of rolling up pennies. But cynicism about the penny had not yet conquered me. I knew that I had to empty Mickey of his pecuniary bowels. To accomplish this, I tore open the plastic fastener and let the pennies flow onto my bed. The sight of pennies “making it rain” on my bed would no doubt have been splendid, but matters were not as simple. What in fact happened was somewhat tragic. Mickey, perhaps in some secret move towards self-defense, refused to yield his contents so easily. The bottom fastener would not budge, despite my efforts and those of all my friends. My younger brother decided that the best course of action was to temporarily decapitate Mickey and thereby bleed him of his copper contents.

“But what about Mickey?"

“You can buy a new one with the pennies,” he said. “You’re gonna be rich, dude.”

So I followed suit. We went out to the garage together and found a pair of hedge clippers. Without any adult supervision (and of course without asking any adult if this was a good idea), we made quick and efficient use of the gardening tool. The blades were sufficiently sharp to decapitate, and Mickey’s head (and the money inside it) was soon ours (or rather, mine).

The sight of the money spewing about was gorgeous. No rapper has ever bathed so fondly in coin. But after taking a bath in slimy copper, I soon realized that rolling these babies up into money cigars was going to be a task far too tedious for me to accomplish alone. So I paid my amigo to help, thirty percent to be exact. As we rolled pennies, he siphoned many off for himself, to contribute to his own penny bank (he was smart and lucky enough to have a regular coffee can).

After immense toil and travail, the money cigars were ready. There were 9 in all.

Now what is especially unfortunate here is that I paid little attention to the question of how to properly roll these bad boys. Some were overflowing, others truncated, ugly, and somewhat deformed. Some looked healthy, like ripe fruit. Others looked drained and sickly, like bananas that had been bullied and insulted in early adolescence.

My fingers nearly bled from all of the money handling. But when my work appeared done, I asked my Auntie to drive me to the bank for the big pay day. When I arrived, the teller (and I kid not when I say that it was the same witch I mentioned earlier) shook her long witch finger at me and accused me of trying to cheat the bank. My monetary cigars were ineptly, dishonestly and vulgarly filled.

The bank wanted nothing to do with my pennies, or with me for that matter.

Forgive this digression. Let’s gather our breath and reflect on the basic “takeaway.”  Pennies mean little. They’re meretricious. They’re cowardly. They don’t roll well. They smell funny. They clog toilets. They are potentially lethal (if dropped from the Empire State Building). They make life harder for all. They taunt the poor and the very young into thinking that they have money. They clutter the pockets of the rich and fill with false security the bellies of starving piggybanks.

Doing away with these copper monsters would be good for all Americans.

 Let us decapitate our national piggy bank and start anew. Sorry, Mr. Lincoln. You can keep the 5-dollar bill and your ostentatious memorial, but we’re tired of your copper head.

 

An American Hero Snatched Into Dishonor’s Mouth

            The few visitors unlucky enough to stumble into the Meisel residence usually remark on the austerity of its rooms. There is not a cushioned item of furniture to be found, save Grandma’s hospital bed, right smack dab in the living room (her bedroom has since been usurped in a seizure of power by the grandson). Before succumbing to the late stages of Alzheimer’s, Grandma Meisel used to give this place a woman’s touch. Now, with Mama getting her hands greasy overseas, working a backbreaking night shift on an oil rig out on the Caspian, Roy heads this household, and he does so with an iron fist.

            Roy tries to manage as best he can. He is currently on a losing streak, but likes to rub his hands together in dark rooms at scary hours of the night and remind himself that all is well and that success is on its way, like an asteroid in the cosmic blackness hurtling toward him.

           

            Roy is up late again. His grandmother yelled at him from her hospital bed for not straightening up better in the living room. He got mad and yelled back, got right up in her face and called her a drain on his creativity and an overall bitch. He watched her face crumple up in fear and he even told her that he wasn’t going to change any of her diapers for the next three days. That’s when she got sad and silent and just looked blankly ahead.

He is sitting Indian style on his bed, a nearly empty jar of peanut butter and a spoon with residual muck resting on his lap. Before him on the bed is an old paper leaflet, yellowed with age. He unfolds it grinning and runs his eyes over its names and numbers. The ink has blurred with the years, the handwriting horrendous, but he thinks he can still manage to make out the names and numbers that count. He whispers something inaudible to himself about serendipity. He mispronounces the word and adds an extra syllable to it, but understands the basic idea and applies that idea to this situation. He dabs at the sweat above his brow with his thumb and takes a sip of beer. He rinses his salty mouth and swallows.

            Roy finally picks up the phone. His face assumes a taut, earnest quality, like an honest man about to go to work for his family, and he begins dialing, pressing his large fingers into the firm gray squares of the phone. Sometimes, dialing numbers at late hours, he imagines that each button he presses is launching a missile in some quiet and distant silo.  Roy glances over at the alarm clock broadcasting the late hour in bloodshot red. 3:12. It’s late as shit, and that’s what makes this even more beautiful. He flips on the recorder so that this call can be immortalized. Posterity needs this kind of brilliance.

            The phone rings three times before some sleepyhead answers it.

            “Hello,” says the old man weakly. Roy recognizes Mr. Maplethorpe right away, the same ass that always used to ask who was calling when he needed to speak to Lisa.

            “Good evening, Mr. Maplethorpe.”

            The man on the other line pauses, probably to rub his eyes and realize how absurdly late it is, and then offers Roy a feeble “good morning.”

            “I have bad tidings,” says Roy, speaking now through a T-shirt, a kind of condom for his voice.

            “What do you mean?”

            “Well, sir, I don’t know how to phrase this. I am not all that great at stuff like this.”

“What is it?”

“Well, Mr. Maplethorpe, there’s been an accident tonight. An awfully bad accident.”

            This is the beautiful part. Roy curses himself the next day for being too drunk to remember this moment clearly. He hears the man gasp at the other end of the line. It is as if his lungs have collapsed and that all the air has been sucked out of him. Roy turns his head from the receiver so that the man cannot perceive his laughter.

            “What do you mean?”

            Roy pauses a moment to put another spoonful of peanut butter into his mouth. Because this peanut butter is crunchy and won’t let itself go down without a chew, stubborn junk that it is, he has to take extra long to resume the evil.

            “Are you still there?” he asks, voice high with false concern.

            What follows is a wailing that for Roy is too funny to listen to. He puts his face in the couch cushion and lets out a string of giddy Ha Ha’s. It is so funny that he almost feels horny. He then hangs up the phone and walks over to the refrigerator to rescue another beer from the cold.

            It is the anniversary of Reagan’s death. The phone call has helped Roy cope. The Maplethorpes are Democrats. 

           

            Roy has just returned from a Veterans’ Celebration, about a five minute walk from home. He attends these meetings with a mixture of patriotic and entrepreneurial zeal. But this is the hard part. He sits on the sofa and puts his face into his hands, bites his bottom lip so hard that it almost bleeds. He sits in the silence, waiting for the fear to spike through him. Then it comes, one by one.  He tries to cover his ears but it is no use. In the distance, too close to his home, the shots begin to ring out. They keep coming, methodical sons of bitches, nastier than any firecracker on New Year’s Eve. He begins gnawing on his palms, tasting the sweat and the skin and the dirt. The shots crackle and fade, one after another. He crunches himself up, just like a frightened doodle bug balls himself up into his carapace when pesky kids pick at him. Each shot seems to whiz past his ears and send a sparkling shiver through his being. He responds to each like a fish being prodded in the water by a cane pole.

Even before this shooting bullshit, this particular afternoon had sucked.  The heat was intense, a big time skin and eye irritant. There is little doubt that its rays inspired at least a few of the skin cells of those present to convert to carcinogenic religions. On days like this, Roy calls the sun a nasty bitch (his words exactly). That never really helps, and it certainly didn’t today. But the sun and all of the heat that it rains down on Roy are only a false excuse. As sexually promiscuous as the sun might be, it was not the real reason for Roy’s premature departure from the ceremony. He did not leave early because he lacked respect for the Veterans. On the contrary, he would polish their combat boots with his tongue if they pointed their fingers and commanded him to. He did not leave because he is ashamed of crying in public. He will gladly shed his tears copiously if he is doing so in the name of the slain. Roy’s real reason for leaving the Veterans’ celebration is far more insidiously psychological. It involves something innate and basically insurmountable. He has waged war on it all his life and has failed as badly as America did in ‘Nam.

There is a medical term, a scary-sounding word with a Greek root to describe Roy’s phobia. Roy doesn’t know it though, and since you don’t even have this condition, why should you either?

For whatever reason, the sound of a gun fired in his proximity brings Roy to tears. These tears burn through the sandpaper skin on his unshaven face. That’s why Roy feels like a failed man sometimes, why he often spreads his arms like a vulture’s wings and beckons for death to come to him in the blackness of night.

When dreams are deferred, souls are cracked in half like frozen glass. When psychological bullshit, insidious genetic predisposition and corrosive societal pressure made Roy’s dream of living and dying heroically for Uncle Sam something unattainable, Roy lost touch with the world. He began to hate his fellow man, particularly those lucky enough to carry and shoot firearms. He started feeling low, even when the sun flared in the sky like a nuclear explosion. He only believes in God because he wants America blessed. He has little hope for metaphysical satisfaction after he has shriveled up in a grave.

Roy was a boy who babbled semper fi in his crib. He clenched his fists and hurled plastic grenades at those that disrespected liberty on the television.  He spent his childhood with imaginary bazookas rolling around and getting muddy in the backyard, imagining himself in the film Red Dawn, firing his arms at Soviet jerks with missile launchers, wiping out all their evil and making loud explosion sounds with his mouth and later wailing in pain on their behalf as they wiggled and writhed in pools of blood that was, appropriately enough, red.

And then came the shocking revelation of his weakness. In his adulthood, Roy has not entirely abandoned hope of recovery. To achieve better insight into his condition, he has counted off large bills to a psychotherapist, a fragile man from Poland named Tadeusz. The therapy sessions were brutal for Roy, sickly groveling before a smug, cigarette smoking and turtlenecked intellectual from a decadent continent. Once, Roy was lying on the couch with a blue headache mask over his face, talking about how he pooped his pants once at the sound of a car backfiring. Upon hearing this, Tadeusz just  kept rocking in his chair lightly to the Chopin, patting his long, thin hands on his pencil thighs, and would finally wipe his hand over his mouth and tell Roy to have more sex.  

           

            School is over with for the day for Nicky, Roy’s kid sister. She is in the living room, relaxing in ways that she loves to relax in, sitting Indian style before a television screen that flickers ebulliently. The internet ain’t yet part of her life, but the tube is, and this is meaningful. The after-school special is on, and it is on loud. Grandma is there too, snoring loudly in her hospital bed, diaper soggy with three consecutive unnoticed urinary releases. Nicky sometimes muffles these snores by taking a cushion from the sofa and putting it over Grandma’s face. This is not about killing a sick and burdensome old lady so that the hymen on her will can be cracked and the coffers of the heirs can be filled. It is about noise reduction, which is to say that the only thing really being suffocated is noise. 

Before the pretty pig-tailed girl is a gift from a brother who has trouble giving. It is a book, and not exactly any old run-of-the mill book with letters that surge crudely out and drip on its jacket. It does not recount the adventures of sorcerer boys and make the awestruck  masses slap their knees and thank Britannia for its humor.  It is, one could say, a book of far greater educational value, intended for the high of brow, the kind of person who puts their hand tight over their heart when they hear the “Star Spangled Banner.” The title reads 250 Covert Chinese Characters: How to Write Them and What They Really Mean. The book, authored by an arms dealer living on an island in the South Pacific, is an introduction to the ‘language of hell,’ a kind of primer for code-breakers and lovers of freedom. Rather than introducing the beginner to the essential vocabulary, to the ancient and venerable characters, such as ‘food,’ ‘good,’ ‘happy,’ and ‘coitus,’ this book is geared towards those that regard China with nothing but suspicion and malice. The characters here are said to be used in Chinese nuclear submarine codes, and this book, one of only six known copies in existence, is rumored to be highly classified information. Roy is himself no bibliophile, has a remarkable mistrust for the written word. Yet when he came across this gem one night on an online bazaar, Nicky’s ninth birthday present was good to go.

Roy comes into the room with his hands in his pockets. Two dimes and a good luck silver dollar jingle merrily within. He is wearing a camouflage T-shirt, two sizes too small to exaggerate the size of his pecs. It is the same shirt he was wearing yesterday for the Veterans’ celebration and for the last two weeks for that matter. His is not as well shaven as a soldier should be, and there is a dollop of toothpaste smeared into his thick red mustache. Despite this, his face is tight and grave.

“What’s going down?” he asks, flaring his nostrils in a sinus-inspired snort. No cocaine involved.

Nicky kind of raises her head up and shoots a suspicious look at her older brother.

“Just learnin’ a little Chinese. Just following orders.”

“Good girl. I like what I see.” He says this gesturing to the stick men lined on the paper. The characters, in actuality fabricated entirely by the author, are said to be the official Chinese characters for the phrases “capitalist scumbag” and “Kill Sam!” The author urges the reader to seek them out and underline them in the China News Daily, and to load another bullet into a pistol each time this is done.

Roy squats and runs his oily index finger across the page.

“What does this one here mean?” he asks smiling. His teeth are crooked and his bank account is not copious enough to crown the rotten of their bunch. Braces are for the weak anyway, he would say. Thomas Jefferson lost his teeth at forty.

Nicky looks up from her calligraphy-stained paper and arches the thin smudges of blond over her eyes. She has not yet mastered the art of lying.

“I don’t know what they mean,” she says ruefully. “What does it look like to you?”

Roy bites his lip and looks darkly at the figure, fixing his gaze on it. He bounces on his knees as he squats and runs his eyes up and down, from character to ceiling. After a moment of contemplation, his head begins to hurt and he repositions the paper upside down. This done, the meaning of this character, undeniably a pictogram, shoots into his head like a stray bullet. Roy has the tendency to view desultory doodlings as labia, and that is exactly what he sees here. Vulgar it is indeed! Two large, grotesquely large labia, joined at the edges and opening in the middle. It is too obvious to conceal,  but he does not want his baby sister thinking about the body and its dirtier sides. Sex is only as good as the Americans it begets. Motherhood and pregnancy can wait until after the war on terror is over, after all of the world’s evil and communist have been smoked out thermonuclearly.

“It looks like crud. Looks evil,” he says flatly.  

“Uh huh.”

“Know the number of the beast,” he says, snapping his finger and aiming it at his sister like a pistol.

Grandma rises briefly from her slumber, removes the boulder-like couch cushion that has been pressing against her wrinkled and frail face. With a grimace on her worn face, she props herself up and gazes blankly at Roy.

“Have you seen Pepe?” she asks weakly, hardly audible with the television booming out a commercial.

Roy casts a nasty look in Grandma’s direction. Why can’t the lady just sleep and stop asking question, mend her friggin’ wounds already like a good soldier.  

“Pepe is fucking dead, Grandma. Go back to bed. This is sleeping time.” It is around three-thirty in the afternoon.

When she receives this news, old news of a dog that in truth was run over by a dog-hater on a three-wheeler some seven years ago, her face kind of crumples up. The wrinkles dig deeper into her forehead, like furrows in a riverbed after a long drought. She rubs her sharp thumb into her right temple and feels confusion wash over her being. Before she begins to cry, she forgets why she is sad.

Roy would not go to the bowling alley if it weren’t the place where cash is made. His only bowling experience dates back to a few unhappy rounds in sixth grade P.E. He  hates everything about the place, the communist uniformity of the pins, the shiny, slippery blackness of the balls, the dorky shoes, the Vaseline all over the floors. But what really undermines Roy’s happiness are the sounds. When the rolling black mass collides with the chalky white and sends the cones flying about in all directions, Roy has been known to put his hands over his ears and drop to the floor cursing, like the crazed men in Vietnam foxholes being bombarded with mortar fire. The few assholes who know about Roy’s real fears, those that he likes to call friends, sometimes take cool sips of their Milwaukee piss and howl “Incoooooming!!” just as the rolling and heavy black is about to collide with the rows of hard dental white. They high five as Roy drops to the ground and assumes the fetal position, slap each other on the back for being dicks.

Roy and the clients meet and greet and take a seat in the corner.

“I have an order coming in tomorrow,” says Roy with an easy voice, sipping some non-alcoholic beer.

The customers, militia men who scorn ‘civilized’ life, care not for words or numbers, smile back at their man.

“What ‘ya got for us, Roy Boy?”

Roy hates when they call him this, fears that it sounds intensely homosexual, probably the title of some San Fran skin flick. He tightens his eyes and takes a sip of one of their beers.

“The goods stuff is good to go, amigos,” says Roy proudly. “And its beauty is for the taking. I have things that you will like. Things that will make you smile. Uzis. Anti-tank. Flamethrowers from WW Dos. Gas masks taken off of dead Taliban.”

One of the men leans back and narrows his eyes. Were smoking allowed in the alley, he would light a cig and blow smoke in Roy’s direction. Underneath the flimsy plastic table around which they are gathered, he places his right foot, tightly packed in a black leather combat boot, over Roy’s, vulnerable in a brown and white bowling shoe. He begins to press and play a little footsie, not because he’s gay but because he wants to know what kind of man he is dealing with. He smiles as Roy’s face loses its relaxed quality, appreciates the pain he sees in it, pain surging to the brain.  

Roy tries to smile but feels like his foot is about to explode under the weight of the combat boot pressing onto it. He kicks himself free and nearly overturns the table in the process. Beer bottles shake dangerously. He is Magic Roy, the man with the good goods, the guy in the camouflage who unpacks truckloads of beautiful and shiny things that kill copiously.

One of the potential customers, a stout man with a baseball cap of a trucking company and a plastic net in the back covering what is left of his oily gray hair, stands up in indignation.

“Well, I don’t see how we can do business here. I have a large wallet, Roy. I love our country more than you know.”

“I ain’t doubting it.”

“And you see where I’m coming from? I want to protect Lady Liberty from all the fucking extremists. They’re out there, looking up her skirt.”

Roy sips their beer again and nods, leaning back on his chair. The footsie play has subsided.  In the distance, a bowling ball crashes into another row of pins. He starts feeling scared but then remembers that the deal can be clinched with the right response.

Twenty minutes later, he is around two thousand dollars richer. Thirteen of these new and crisp dollars are invested in a twenty-four pack of one of Milwaukee’s butter-colored brews. Twenty-five cents are popped into an ailing Ms. Pac-Man game at the gas station. Roy ignores the Taiwanese store owner’s request not to open up the cans right there in the store. He sips reverently from his can, sets it on the base of the arcade game, and focuses all of his mental energy on escaping death on the screen. Roy’s vessel of hope is eaten summarily and ugly sounds are made by the machine. Roy is tempted to spit out his beer all over the machine, like a mad warrior from Germania, but he remembers that honor befits the fallen soldier and that it is four in the AM, just about time to make some more prank calls to strangers.

Roy is not concerned with comfort. No chairs in this house invite guests to sink into them and feel good. All furniture is made of wood that he himself acquired in his business dealings. The sofa in this house rivals any medieval church pew in the trauma it inflicts on the lower back.

What matters to Roy is putting the two most important women in his life through the school of hard knocks. One of these women is eighty-four; the other is nine. One has lost large parts of her mind to Alzheimer’s. The other is learning about the trajectories of North Korean missiles and can name forty-eight of the top fifty most wanted terrorists without batting an eye or thinking, even for an instant, about pink fairy-tale ponies.

            The living room is about overcoming the fear of death. The unlucky few that make it into this house and see Grandma rolling around on her hospital bed usually bite their lip and bite hard to keep all the words of astonishment from flying out of their mouths like wild-faced bats out of a cave. Roy loves watching people react extremely to Grandma. Three women, sure lays, as good as the gold in their purses that he put there, put their hands over their faces and in their drunken state made sounds that remind anthropologists of our relation to the howler monkey.

            Over Grandma’s hospital bed, slightly singed pencil caricatures of Bin Laden and various Iranian rogues and mullahs hang. Foreheads of this gallery of evil have been punctured by what Roy hopes will be taken for bullet holes. His friggin’ phobia made shooting up the pics with actual guns impossible, and he even pleaded with Sergey, his favorite Ukrainian arms supplier, to perform this puncturing for him, but Sergey held out his palm and laughed into Roy’s face, silver teeth shining. Roy shoots them up with red plastic pellets from a Wal-Mart toy pistol, and although this activity terrifies his grandmother, it helps him overcome his primordial fear of weapons.

            Roy views his life as a work in progress. In the bathroom each morning, he reminds himself that things are on their way up. On his toilet is a dogeared copy of Norman Vincent Peale.

Roy has stayed up late recently watching documentaries on the Christian channel. The documentaries are as enlightening as they are spiritually uplifting. Many deal with biblical history and the incontrovertibility of all the veracity in those pages. They often feature the teary-eyed confessions of Darwinists, bearded rogues admitting defeat before the Good Book, kissing the first pages of Genesis with monastic tenderness and dedicating their beards to St. Paul rather than monkey boy Charlie.

Lately though, the documentaries have been less spiritual and more historical, really friggin’ relevant if you ask Roy. History for Roy is like water in a boiler, and it’s a gettin’ hot in there he likes to say.

He is slumped in the sofa, but his lethargic posture is only a front. There is serious thinking going on in his head.  Tonight’s documentary hits too close to home. It is about  the cultural revolution in China, and the Meisel family television, a tired Zenith from the seventies with a frightening antenna on its top, coughs up images of the godless streaking across the screen en masse, a horde of bayonet-stabbers chanting their sing-song language, stabbing all that loves liberty.

Roy begins getting the munchies and shuffles his way into the kitchen.

Nicky is sitting at the kitchen table. She has a coloring book spread out before her. Vulgar pastels fill the almond shaped forms. Boundaries are disrespected. Postmodern tastes appear to pollute the purity of the portrait, a famous mouse created by a man with a dubious mustache and even more dubious political leanings. Coloring books have it rough in this house. Roy has explained to friends and relatives at Nicky’s birthday parties that they are for the weak, for the mentally disabled.

            Roy stands darkly over his sister, arms akimbo, legs shaking with anger, sweat dripping down his five o’clock shadow, stomach still empty. The bag of Cocoa Roons that he had hoped to munch on during the documentary has been fed to the invalid in the hospital bed.

            “I know what’s wrong with you now,” says Nicky, nonchalantly, coloring in her spaces and biting her lip, more concerned with the coloring than with her older bro’s feelings. “I know why you are so angry at everybody, why you act like a bad ass and yell at me and Grandma.”

            “Oh yeah,” he says, pulling out some strawberry milk from the ice box. “What might that be? What the fudge is wrong with me.”

            “Well, Roy, I know that you are really a scaredy-cat.”

            Roy, remarking on her indifferent coloring-book smirk, slams his freshly poured glass onto the butter-colored Formica of the kitchen counter. A ghastly ring of pink Pepto-Bismol-like fluid rises towards the sky, as if out of hell. Roy’s wearing his “God is Awesome!” T-shirt.  A tawdry pink stain lands right on Jesus’ forehead.

            “Assface!” The walls of the old house seem to shiver in fear after the eruption of these two nasty syllables from his mouth. He has a pink milk-mustache and Nicky, who has finally lifted her eyes from her coloring bubbles, notices this and almost giggles. Grandma moans out something incomprehensible in the other room. The television sickly mumbles something about Communist malfeasance. Roy forms a V with his thumb and pinkie and clamps down on his temples. A pick-up drives down the street, reggatón blasting unashamedly out of its rear speakers. The world sucks temporarily.

             

           

            Roy never really expected he would have the balls to deal weapons. I mean, for obvious reasons, the mere sight of guns, let alone anti-tank stuff, make him want to poop his pants.

The elders misjudged him, never took Roy for an ambitious boy. His high school counselor, Ms. Liu, urged him to sack groceries so that he might “shoot to the apex of the rainbow.” This was her standard phrase, used to urge her kids to pursue their dreams, but Roy, having consulted his dictionary to attain the meaning of “apex” and the proper spelling of “rainbow,” saw in that trajectory an ICBM.

He found his suppliers at Veterans’ meetings. Yes, the man is that smart and resourceful. Sure, he spent years building up to this, attending meetings to honor the glorious and the slain, and of course those slain gloriously. He paid what he called a “tithe” to various organizations responsible for insuring that American values are not urinated upon, metaphorically speaking of course, by infidels, homosexuals, communists, bohemians, and various other groups that are too frightful to put on a uniform. These organizations, in turn, respecting both Roy’s love of liberty and his hatred of all things red, not to mention his cutthroat entrepreneurial spirit, furnished the boy with things that make booming sounds. We’re talking shoeboxes full of grenades that never blew up in Vietnam. We’re talking golf bags with bazookas. We’re talking enough bullets to kill entire Chinese provinces.

Roy knew he was getting into trouble. He had never done dangerous stuff before. He wanted to serve his country somehow, though, and of course he wanted to get the monkeys off his proverbial espalda.

An American Hero Snatched Into Dishonor’s Mouth!

If you consider this shoddy wording for a newspaper headline, then you might be right. Yet if you consider the source, then the shoddiness of these words no longer makes your brain itch as much.

 The newspaper that printed this headline was the Oak Hollow Community News. The journalist who thought up the article did so in the drive thru of a fried chicken restaurant. He resides in a nursing home. He once wanted to seduce Roy’s grandmother but was unsuccessful in this endeavor.  He was awfully excited about the story though, so giddy that a nurse was called to change his birthday diaper.

Roy is behind bars now. That’s what is meant by “Dishonor’s Mouth.”  It was not a uniform-wearing agency that made the lucky discovery of hand grenades and anti-tank hellfire. It was, rather, a handy group of senior citizens, some of them veterans, most Republicans like Roy.

It was a phone call that tipped them off. A sister worried about her brother’s mental health and fearful of the explosives in the garage just had to talk.

For the trusty group of local neighbor citizens on patrol, the discovery of warlike items in Roy’s garage was the most astounding incident in Oak Hollow since the serial molestation of dogs by a crazy-haired mailman in the mid seventies.  It was a big time story.

By some in the League of Oak Hollow Veterans, the most formidable poker association in all of East Texas, Roy was a true patriot, a man one should pin a medal to rather than put behind metal bars. Some of those folks have written letters to our hero in prison. “Pick up yourself, youngster. You serve us proud. You’ll deal weapons once more, and we’ll need them.” These and other encouraging words were written by wobbly old hands onto Big Chief Notebook paper and then mailed off to Roy in the Big House.

Now, looking back on his personal debacle, Roy can smile. There was a prison break a few months ago. An East German dude named Arno tried scaling the barbed wire. Guards with shiny aviator sunglasses filled him with holes. All the gunfire made Roy hug his pillow tight and pretend it was a teddy bear. The other inmates still don’t know much about Roy’s phobia, and for this, he is eternally thankful. Should you ever be sent to the same prison, think of him well and do not spread what you have just been told.

           

           

           

Excerpts from "The Soul Pilgrimage," the picaresque novel I've been working on this summer

 

 

 

 

Chapter One: A Prelude to Failure

The idea was to land. To reach the land. To reach the land and to fulfill promise. To reach, fulfill promise, and basically make some positive stuff happen. To kick myself muchísimas veces and to keep heading eastward. Madrid to Moscow, nay, Seville to St. Petersburg. A celebration of life, tennis, Spanish guitar, and perhaps even women and spirituality. Life’s meaning would not be pre-ordained but fought for. Such was to be the purpose embedded in a forlorn life.

 

What got me to Smolensk was a chain circumstances that, if rendered metaphorically, might best be described as a water lily being shat upon by a vulture. The East has beckoned since childhood, since rainy nights in Bucksnort reading Dostoyevsky. My crimes are extensive, my karma a churning piece of coal, but somewhere inside me, there is something like hope.  

As I scribble this reminiscence, we have reached the middle of a winter night in Smolensk. On the frozen steppes outside the prison, wolves are howling at the moon. Somewhere in a forest izba, a wide-faced witch is calmly slicing up the innards of a fox and ciphering my fate. Here, inside the concrete monstrosity, the ugliness of reality shouts into my ear. The guards are buttering toast and grinning at each other at candlelight. They’re exchanging pleasantries in Russian. They’re laughing about my impuissance, both literal and sexual. They’re thinking that slitting my throat would be like cutting through warm butter. They’re thinking they could come over and rattle their billy club through the bars of my prison cell and make me feel bad about myself, maybe wish I’d never been born or something.

I don’t want to understand them anymore, even though I probably could. My Russian was once formidable enough to read Pasternak in the original and woo woeful women online. Breakfast will suck tomorrow, as usual. It is officially porridge with salt and powdered milk that stays clumpy but unofficially it is whatever the cooks decide to maliciously toss in. A few inmates have lost their teeth from calcium deficiency. One guy was trying to catch pigeons in the courtyard with a homemade slingshot. He caught one and was about to open the sucker up for its pigeon meat and then some former Red Army wrestler threw a rock at him and told him to get the heck away from his bird.  

My hygiene, never good even in freer days, is now frighteningly shitty. I once thought about putting up an online dating profile from here, just to have a little fun with the online community, maybe post a webcam pic of me. My fingernails grow outward in irregular patterns and have lots of grub. Some here eat that grub for extra nutrition. The vitamin supply is running low. I swallowed my last Omega 3 pills months ago. My triglycerides are no doubt out of control. But as some Roman said, dum spiro, spero.  I write for posterity, for the chance to share something special with somebody who may chance upon these modest scribblings.

 The circumstances of my incarceration in this assface of a Russian prison will be revealed in due time. But before I delve into today’s nastiness, let’s turn back to pre-history, for you might well find in those adverse circumstances compelling reasons for my generally sordid existence.  

 

 

 

Chapter Two: On My Parents and their Unfortunate Union

 When a sperm is lucky enough to eat its way through the outer lining of an egg, it feels pretty good about itself. I suppose that the only moment of happiness that I enjoyed until the age of 12 or so was this ebullient spermazoidal dance.

Now I have very limited memories of the man whose sperm engendered this dim cellular happiness. By limited memories I mean approximately seven days of life together, and that in the days when I was a pink turd of pain, a perpetual whiner and crier, the straw that jacked the back of my parents’ matrimonial camel. Now father has been a Facebook friend for 3 years. He’s a spiritualist in Thailand. His status updates are pithy and spiritual, motivational and meditational. When not chewed on by the Cerberus of cynicism, I find strength in his words.

And then there is the other father—the one I know second-hand through Mother’s journals. The woman wrote extensively and with a poison pen. Despite her New Age obsession, she detested mankind and one man in particular—my father. There is something about hatred which inspires the most breathtaking eloquence, and if you were ever unlucky enough to chance upon Mother’s memoirs at a garage sale or something, you might appreciate how much venom she injects into her descriptions of the man.

She describes my father was “a lying mule of a man,” a swindler with an obscene mustache and eyes that twinkled engaño. The pictures I have seen of him in his youth confirm that his glance was dubious. Woe to ye who trusted him! He was a traveling tradesman, a confidence man, a poet/janitor, a Marxist and a feminist, a man of modest economic means and unbelievable verbal virtuosity. His genius was undeniable, clear both to the women he wooed and the toilets he plunged. If represented in an oil painting, he might be one of the phallic goblins in Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of hell. Such was his love of disorder and lovemaking.

My father has called himself by various names through his strange career: El Duque, Tito, Jean Paul, Johann Sebastian. He remains fond of telling people he is descended from Spanish nobility, a distant cousin of Charles V or some crap, but if Mother is at all accurate, he was nothing but a street urchin, a picaro, a scrappy dog of a boy that toughed his way out in the mean streets of Seville.  His parents were killed in the Civil War and he grew up in a Fascist orphanage (their last wishes). He came to America under dubious circumstances. The Andalusian mafia was likely involved. There was a boat full of orphans, children of Fascists killed in the Spanish Civil War. They docked in Miami. Father quickly became Marxist and unpopular. He and his comrades crossed their fingers and prayed for Castro and his Russian friends to friggin’ invade, even if the invasion meant thermonuclear ire. The revolutionistas infiltrated the palm-lined streets of Key Biscayne. They hawked leather wares and conned rich folks into thinking they were buying Louis Vuitton purses—all to fund the Cuban military. Their pockets got thick with illegally-earned but ideologically-charged dollars. They strutted about popping collars and whistling at women. They were lewd and loud and basically full of shit, so they basically fit in perfectly down in Miami.

After his Marxism fervor had subsided, Father experimented with hallucinogenic mushrooms. This fundamentally shattered his machismo and basically turned him into a spiritualist. Mother makes mention of a spiritual journey to Mexico. He wandered with Indians and enjoyed colorful quilts and exotic drinks. There is talk of the founding of a cult in Guadalajara. He had Mansonian powers over his subjects but none of the malice. He was a good man, a practitioner of free love and propagating the species. Numerous children came into the world thanks to Father, and these lost hermanos and hermanas no doubt people many parts of Mexico. I will alas never meet them but I wish them well and wonder at times if they, like me, have been messed up by that witch-doctor of happenstance, genetics.

Father’s cult activity naturally made him an enemy of the Mexican government, and more importantly the Church. A task force of Catholic vigilantes known as Los Toros Verdes del Papá tracked his New Age ass down in a Guadalajara dive bar.  They beat him to a pulp, spat holy water in his eyes and told him to love the Lord, not Krishna, and basically told him he’d be crucified if he didn’t get out of town. So Father went north.

I suppose I get my polyglot predilections from my padre.  He was a man of many names and many pretty palabras, could make magic happen with his words. He was an itinerant Alpha-dog of a man, peripatetic and priapic. After his travels through Latin America and the wild oats he sowed, he decided to live with weapons dealers in Cambridge Mass. He himself was terrified of gunshots and never fired a weapon in his life, but they were good friends and they provided for him well. They paid him to make deliveries and he did his job conscientiously. But his intellect whined like a little baby for attention, so he decided to start plunging toilets in big-time academic institutions. For kicks, he’d hang out in universities (usually elite ones in Cambridge), clean toilets for bucks here and there and use his classroom and bathroom privileges to pick up co-eds. But knowledge was as important to him as sexuality. He’d sit in on poetry lectures and smoke cigars in scorn. He’d laugh out loud at the incompetence of the Elders, the Sanhedrin of American letters. He could go toe to toe with the Deconstructionists of Yale and Hopkins, could shout down scholars of Mallarme and Rilke with equal fervor, could run circles around their theoretical and pedantic arses.

Now enough about Papa. He wasn’t even the most important person in my personal development. The asshole abandoned us when I was crying misery into the universe after scarcely a week of life. Mother was far more instrumental in my development, and I mean that in negative way, for me turning out like this has a lot to do with her.

Dalia Fernandez Whitfield first saw the light of day in Cuba, born into a family of plantation-owning hidalgos. When Castro and Che screwed up their lives, they naturally fled to Miami. She grew up in Miami but never met Father there. During the Cuban missile crisis, they decided to flee northward, deeming colonial Massachusetts the safest place on planet Earth (Kennedy would never nuke his home state).

Mother was treated like crap by the white elites of New England, but she no doubt showed their asses up in the classroom. She was a brilliant student, could run circles around her snot-faced New England teachers. My wealthy Cuban grandparents used to drive an obscenely large Oldsmobile around Massachusetts and blow cigar smoke out the window to celebrate her astoundingly high standardized test scores. She spent four hours a day after school playing the violin and solving chess problems for fun.

As she grew up, Mother adopted rebellious airs. She began smoking Marlboros and wearing Cowboy hats at sixteen. She threw her violin into the Charles River after botching a difficult passage in Brahms. Her intellectual acumen got sharper but nobody in school noticed or appreciated this. In high school, she’d slump in her chair in class and think about chess problems. She hurled formulas and Greek letters at her inept high school teachers, like poison arrows at helpless missionaries, and she owned their sorry bespectacled asses in and out of the classrooms. They were nonplussed, the SOBs, and after two and a half years sent her to Cambridge to decide which learning shack to study at. She chose the uglier campus and ended up at the one with the acronym, not the Kennedy club.

Mother’s drug use began in earnest after M.I.T. Speaking of course as a former denizen of her womb, I can testify that this drug use was excessive, even by Hippie standards. Her mushrooms were hand-picked and fully organic. And those shrooms made haze of the collective rationality of mother and fetus, rendering my brain relatively crappy in matters of memory recollection.