Review: To Rome with Love

There are two sorts of people—those who find exquisite pleasure in Woody Allen’s films and those who shrug their shoulders in bemusement at them. The exquisite pleasure felt by the first group arises from Allen’s sophisticated comedic idiom, a delectable mélange of his trademark neurotic humor (an acknowledged source of inspiration for Larry David when crafting Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm), his romantic intrigues (which indulge in the unfathomable and often laughable whimsicality of love) and the rich cultural, musical, and artistic references that pepper his scripts.  Those who shrug their shoulders in bemusement do so most often because they find Allen’s neurotic comedic digressions more abstruse than absurd and his films too loosely-connected to sustain emotional investment.

Allen’s latest film, To Rome with Love, is at once one of his most charming and one of his most loosely-connected. As such, it will no doubt satisfy and vex the two parties above.  In terms of comedic bite, quality of character definition, or cleverness of plot construction, it does not rival earlier masterpieces such as Hannah and Her Sisters or Crimes and Misdemeanors. But like recent offerings Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris, it entices with lovely European backdrops, quirky characters struggling with romantic, artistic, and indeed existential dilemmas, and with a first-rate cast.

The film opens with an apt metaphor for the comedic charivari that is to follow:  a Roman traffic cop, standing at one of the city’s most chaotic intersections, calmly introduces himself, framing the happenings that follow. What follows is a series of comedic cinematic interludes woven together only by virtue of the fact that all occur within the ancient walls of the cittá eterna. In their sheer randomness, these interludes partake of the controlled chaos of Roman traffic.

There are recent precedents for this kind of multi-pronged plot (or plurality of plots). Some are delightful (Love Actually, Paris, je t’aime come to mind here). Others, like Valentine’s Day, are vapid and unoriginal. None of the individual storylines in To Rome With Love is overly compelling, but taken together, the tales provide light and witty diversion well worth an afternoon at the movie theater. There are no great metaphysical revelations here, only slightly sophisticated fun at the box office. Indeed, one would be wise to choose two hours with Allen’s flawed but likeable characters in Rome than with the prodigiously obstreperous and equally insipid crew of Marvel’s Avengers. As one has come to expect from Allen, most of the storylines revolve around romance, more precisely around the ambiguous feelings that love creates: the thrill of temptation, the delicious naughtiness of infidelity, the guilt that washes over after the act is done. Temptations are most often given into here; ambitions are realized (either in reality or fantasy worlds), and everything seems possible in Old Rome.

Not all of the storylines are played out in English, adding to the film’s charm. Penelope Cruz makes an appearance as a high-class hooker who seduces a demure and otherwise uxorious fiancé, masquerading as his fiancée after his intensely prudish catch them in flagrante delicto in their hotel room. Cruz dazzles not just with her incomparable beauty but with her linguistic skills (her Italian is nearly flawless). Roberto Benini (known to most for his role in Life is Beautiful) acts out the role of a middle-class Italian whose humdrum life has inexplicably been endowed with the importance of a luminary. One of the smartest scenes in the film involves a television interview with Benini over how he had buttered his toast that morning.

Allen himself makes an appearance as a retired opera director, and he has lost very little of his comic panache. In one of the film’s more clever scenes, he hears father of his daughter’s Italian fiancé, a middle-aged and generally joyless mortician, singing Puccini in the shower. The father, played by Fabio Armiliato (in fact a renowned tenor off-screen who has performed at La Scala and the Met), cannot manage to sustain his vocal brilliance outside the confines of a shower, so Allen’s character manages to use his clout to enable an avant-garde staging of Pagliacci involving a tenor performing perpetually under the steady flow of a showerhead.

Jesse Eisenberg, known most recently for his role as Mark Zuckerberg in the Social Network, is involved in another of the film’s notable scenes. He plays an American ex-pat architect in Rome, bristling with the neurotic-comic energy of Allen himself. As so many of Allen’s characters, he is involved in a steady but ultimately humdrum relationship, and once exposed to his wife’s best friend, a petite nymphette with a knack for name-dropping and brainy references (Ellen Page), he has no recourse but infidelity.

Yet the real highlight of the film is Alec Baldwin as the cynical dating consigliere to Eisenberg’s character, an imaginary role model/companion akin to Elvis in True Romance or Tyler Durden in Fight Club.  Baldwin, with his wry, dimpled and slightly sinister smile, is ideal for this role, dispensing caustic wit with ease and exposing Ellen Page’s hollow pseudo-intellectualism.

If there is one significant flaw in this film (and indeed in Allen’s most recent European offerings), it is the picture postcard quality of the mise en scène. Allen creates here and in the Paris and Barcelona films a simulacrum of European refinement and elegance that knows no analogue in reality. These are, to be sure, among the world’s most beautiful cities, but they should be seen in a more realistic light than Allen offers. Only the scene’s opening sequence properly underscores the fact that Rome is defined more by chaos and noise than Apollonian tranquility, and those who have traveled to the Italian capital can certainly appreciate this fact.

Then again, cinema need not always be about gritty realism, and the fairy-tale element in Allen’s newest films is perhaps well at home in the Old World.    

Moonrise Kingdom Review

Moonrise Kingdom (Review)

Since the bleakness of the Bush years, the doping scandals of Clemens and Armstrong, the near-death experience of Owen Wilson, the laughable shenanigans of Rick Perry, Texans living outside their state have few remaining sources of pride. Texans grasping for pride might cling to their “American by birth, Texan by the grace of God” bumper stickers. Others might turn up the volume to “God Blessed Texas” by the musically-small and generally obnoxious country quartet of “Little Texas.” And still a handful of us might point to Wes Anderson.

Anderson’s latest film, Moonrise Kingdom, may not be his funniest (that honor would belong to Bottle Rocket or Rushmore), but it is his most satisfying. The film draws on Anderson’s characteristic deadpan humor, but it achieves a charm and an emotional resonance lacking in earlier, zanier offerings.  

The film operates on a contrast between the precocity of two runaway children and the inanity of their elders. In this regard, Moonrise Kingdom follows Peter Pan, the Little Prince, and indeed his recent animated film The Fantastic Mr. Fox.  All throw into high relief the superiority of childlike naiveté over adult skepticism and cynicism. Moonrise’s two runaway children calmly negotiate the vicissitudes of the world, the whims of island weather and most of all the injustices imposed on them from soulless adults.

Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a kindred spirit to Rushmore’s Max, is an orphaned scout, a coon-skin cap wearing idealist, misunderstood by all but one—his kindred spirit Suzy (Kara Hayward). A cleverly-engineered flashback reveals that the two had met a year before during a performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde. Sam and Suzy manage, long before the meretricious messaging of the internet or the cell phone, to achieve a meaningful connection through letter writing. They connect and decide to abscond into the island wilderness together to pursue adventure and perhaps the first tickles of amorous excitement.

Yet the relationship that emerges between the two is not spurred onward by the wild-eyed passion of Romeo and Juliet, but partakes of the calm assurance characteristic of couples that have spent half a century together. The wandering pair do not waste words or frolic in the exuberant cooing of young lovers. Their love is of the modest, not the loud sort. In one of the film’s more delightful scenes, Sam pierces Suzy’s ear with a fishhook and attaches a beetle to serve as an earring. In another, a makeshift scout wedding is arranged for the two.  Presiding over the ceremony is a renegade camp counselor, enacting a blood sharing ritual to foster their conjugal union. (He had expected to collect the funds of younger scouts but ultimately allows the newly-weds to keep the fifteen bucks or so.) 

The crew of adults, acted out by the likes of Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, and Frances McDormand, cannot seem to find the same inner equanimity of the supposedly “disturbed youth.” Murray is no great surprise to fans of Anderson’s previous movies, and he delivers a competent performance as Suzy’s laughably irascible father, a comical senex iratus lacking any appreciation for his daughter’s independence, let alone her romantic escapades. The real highlight for many will be the casting of Die Hard action superhero Bruce Willis. Willis has clearly aged; he is still bald, but he has lost the vigor of the actor who used to yawp “yippee kayee MotherF##” and hurtle forth from explosions. He plays a soft-spoken island sheriff carrying on a quiet affair with Murray’s wife (McDormand). One of the more moving scenes in the film involves his adopting of Sam the orphan (Sam becomes at film’s end a kind of junior island sheriff). Other casting highlights include Tilda Swinton as a callous social worker bent on institutionalizing Sam and Edward Norton as an intensely likeable and large-hearted scout leader.  

Islands are of course particularly conducive to escapes from “reality” and its tedious strictures. The escape in Moonrise Kingdom is both temporal (the film is set in 1965 but the island seems hardly touched by modern progress of any sort) and geographic (a fictional island off the coast of New England called New Penzance). One of Anderson’s great successes here is the cinematographic journey across this fair isle. Scene after scene is animated with gorgeous island images -- golden fields kissed by the wind, craggy coastline sprayed by seawater, forests of elms rolling over soft hills. The natural beauty of the island complements the natural innocence of the young lovers.

Anderson’s deadpan humor remains a constant, but Moonrise Kingdom’s real achievement is the careful balance it strikes between comic charm and dramatic heft. This dramatic depth separates Moonrise from Anderson’s earlier work. A film like The Life Aquatic is rich in charming eccentricities, quotable lines, and even comic mock violence, but it does not approach Moonrise’s poignancy.  The real reason for this poignancy is Sam, who is at once the most vulnerable and the most likeable of all Anderson’s characters. Part Oliver Twist, part Max from Rushmore, Sam rejects the hollow conventions of scouthood and civilization and seeks time together with the one person who seems to understand him. 

Moonrise Kingdom is an important step forward for Wes Anderson, and it is exciting to think about what intelligent and offbeat escapist fantasies are stirring still in his rich imagination.

Pinata Tragedy

 

The Piñata Tragedy

By

Maximilian Maier

The piñata was going to be the icing on the cake, Stacy’s chance to prove herself. She was going to show Pedro, her boyfriend of three months, that she was not your ordinary gringo, that she had undeniable Latin flair. As for Maria, Pedro’s five-year-old daughter, she was as good as won. The piñata was going to be symbolic. It was going to represent the ancient image of the wicked stepmother. Every hit that the little girl would deliver to the piñata would help disintegrate any negative image of Stacy that the little girl might have formed in her small, impressionable brain. And what could be better than a piñata to accomplish this? What she wanted was a piñata with a dark theme, preferably a witch, and she wanted to smile and hold the video camera as Maria took her junior baseball bat and beat the evil out of this witch before the fist-pumping throng of Kindergartners.

            She put on her sunglasses, rubbed her lipstick-stained cigarette out in the ashtray, locked the doors in her SUV tight and drove eastward into the unknown. Before he got rich writing screenplays, Pedro had lived in this part of L.A., and he had even invited her to visit his abuela here, but Stacy had never actually said Si to any of these invitations, remembering all of the horror stories that her sorority sisters used to recount about those dangerous quarters.

            This was about atonement, about the conquering of lingering fears. It was time to act like a grown lady, to smash down cultural barriers and jump out of her pale skin, if only for a few hours.

Stacy drove quickly and with a purpose. She glanced up occasionally as the street signs became less and less familiar and the automobiles increasingly less prestigious. She wound her way about, darting in and out of lanes and waving at the victims of her driving.

She expected piñatas to be everywhere in this part of town. I mean, that’s what these people do, right?. They don’t work in offices. They don’t bicker about the speed of microprocessors. They just mow lawns, roll enchiladas, make meals for thirty people and beat the crap out of piñatas when one of their kids has that cumpleaños deal. Stacy figured that there would be piñatas for sale on every street corner, that men with large black mustaches would be waving her down at red lights, leading her to vans chock-full of the stuffed and papery figures. She would put her painted fingernail to her richly red lips and have to decide which was the best for Maria, judging of course on price, texture, overall agreeability of the product, and of course the contents. She would speak Spanish with the locals, raise their eyebrows with her turns of phrase, and find out how good all the candies were that lined the bowels and innards of these paper men, women, and beasts.

Stacy pulled her SUV confidently into a large parking lot that seemed to belong to an impressive tent, probably a food market of some sort. She got out of the car, pressed the button, and the car alarm chirped nervously.

She made her way through the market, saw lots of round ladies examining vegetables, massaging colorful, natural goods with their soft, brown hands, pressing the potential purchases to their dimpled cheeks, laughing and talking in Spanish. Stacy attempted to study and mimic their gestures. She saw in these shoppers a certain propinquity to the natural world that she and most others in her circle lacked. These people don’t read labels. They don’t need the judgments of bureaucratic bodies. They are in tune with natural forces in ways that she and hers are not. They must have inherited this from the Mayans. These were the same people that erected pyramids with symbolic numbers of steps. Why can’t folks in her neighborhood shop like this?

She stumbled in half awe through the market, feeling like a tourist in a faraway land, like one of those globe trekking college kids that report from Thailand or Burma on public television. As she made her way around, she tried to make eye contact and smile to as many folks as she could. Half out of diplomacy, half out of hunger, she filled plastic bags with fruits and vegetables and toted them about proudly, if only to show the others that she ate the same food as they. It was about proving herself, and she even seemed to notice in their benevolent, round smiles an acceptance that just made her want to start giving out hugs by the dozen. Democracy is best celebrated in the supermarket.

 She felt so good about herself that she almost forgot that she was there to buy a piñata instead of squash. She craned her neck as she passed each aisle. There was an air of mysteriousness about the place. The few who noticed her there seemed accepting enough. But they still spoke that language, the one that she had sort of studied for two semesters in college before deciding that she wanted to study a “civilized” tongue like French.

Despite carrying three sacks of fruit in the crook of her arm, Stacy began to realize that her independent search for the piñata was fruitless. So she swallowed, gathered her wits, and approached an amiable old woman.

“Perdón, señora. Dónde están las piñatas?”

The lady’s broad shoulders hunched together and she said, in English, “I don’t know.”

Stacy moved on, saw an employee, a young lady with rich, flowing black hair  and a friendly smile. She had an educated, cosmopolitan look about her, seemed like the kind of lady that would deliver news bilingually on TV, so Stacy decided to skip the Spanish this time.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” she said, tapping the woman on her shoulder. Touching is important, but she did, however, regret the word ‘Ma’am”, deeming it excessively gringo, intensely Southern. “I was wondering if you could tell me where the piñatas are.”

The lady kind of smiled with embarrassment and shrugged her shoulders. From the blankness in her eyes, Stacy assumed that she had not understood.

“Tiene Usted piñatas?”

“Piñatas? We no have here. I sorry.”

“Gracias.”

As Stacy was heading out of the market, an old fellow with a cowboy hat and a dignified mustache, sitting on a metallic folding chair and drinking a Tecate,  shot a look at her that made her feel uneasy. It took her a moment to realize that this look had nothing sexual in it. The guy was not some leering stranger but a security guard, and he was glaring at her not because her boobs looked nice but because she was about to walk out of his market with a bunch of fruit without paying.

Stacy smiled at the security guy, embarrassed, and whispered ‘I’m sorry,” first in English and then more demonstratively in Spanish. He tipped his cowboy hat and motioned for her to wait in line like the rest of the folks there and that’s what she did, although she was beginning to realize that this whole piñata expedition was cutting into her day. Stacy has always been a miser with her time, just like Tommie friggin’ Jefferson, and she has never liked running trivial errands. She waited impatiently in line behind a round woman who seemed to be purchasing enough food to feed half of Guatemala with. To pass the tense moments, she began perusing one of the Mexican tabloids displayed on what she labeled ‘the aisle of desperation,’ the place where gum and batteries and magazines beckon to be bought so that somebody can be a little richer and somebody a little poorer at the end of the day. The tabloid was full of pictures of beautiful people, Mexican soap opera stars and singers, the folks that dance around on Telemundo at those insane hours when the wolves howl out to the desert moon.  These were people of enormous stature in their native land, complete unknowns to her and to most ‘real’ Americans.  Their fates interested her about as much as that of say Pakistani soccer studs. When her turn finally came, she delivered a cold ‘Hola’ to the checker, paid for her fruit, handing over a large bill and almost wanting to tell the lady to keep the change.

The sun did not want to let up outside. It glinted off the buckled black asphalt of the parking lot and turned the car windshields into razors of glare. Stacy got back in and drove around streets with tried and trusted Anglo-Saxon surnames that in these parts were pronounced interestingly. Heavy gusts of air-conditioning blew at her from three directions and she dabbed the sweat from her brow with the base of her palm. She looked over at the digital clock on her dashboard, still not set correctly, the victim of daylight savings time, but more or less exactly one hour off. She realized that she only had a couple of hours before Maria’s party and that the search for the piñata had best be sped up. There would be no more time for dawdling in supermarket aisles, no more free minutes to admire and inspect produce. She could no longer afford to observe. It was all about finding the bloated corpse of a toy with papery feathers, counting off as many bills as the owner of said toy saw fit, and packing it like wild game into the back of her SUV.

She hit two more supermarkets and even a used clothing store before she began feeling desperate. Clerks smiled warmly at her request but scratched their oily foreheads and sent her to other places where piñatas were said to hide and cackle behind other merchandise. These leads all turned out to be false. Piñata, probably the first Spanish word Stacy had learnt, seemed to be a myth, a cruel joke on the gringo, something that real Latinos only laugh about but never beat.

Of course, she could always give up on the piñata altogether. But this was all about proving herself, both in the eyes of Pedro and his daughter. This piñata was going to be magical. It was going to make Maria smile widely and toothlessly and attack Stacy with a hug, like a rabid little terrier. Stacy was going to hop on this piñata, whichever incarnation it should take, and use it to wrench her from the murky depths of gringohood and take her to the kingdom of the Latina.

So the search continued, and seconds continued dripping off the precipice of time relentlessly, vanishing into nothingness. Liquor store doors were thrust open in haste, causing the bells to cling more neurotically than usual. Clerks drew back as an angry blonde lady, perhaps packing heat, pointed her rifle-like finger around and asked about piñatas in sentences that whizzed past their ears like stray bullets. Convenient store clerks with English vocabularies not large enough to fill the back of a travel guide were berated by a hot-tongued woman for their “revolting inability to maintain the timeless tradition of Latin peoples.”

A cigarette dangling dangerously from her lips, the sun still relentlessly bright, Stacy started the car, this time with the intention of leaving behind the barrio and the piñata hiding somewhere in it. The party would have to be piñata-less. This was Fate’s indisputable verdict. She turned off the Latin music that she had so eagerly bobbed her head around to on her way into the labyrinth of the barrio three hours earlier. She sought solace in the familiar sound of string quartets on the classical station, but when she realized that folks might drive up next to her at a traffic light, hear this stuff, and start resenting her even more, she flipped it off for good and drove in silence.

Stacy usually drives like a lady tranquilized by adult contemporary music, but today, she was darting and weaving, making horns attract hands like magnets. She wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all but was too bitter to do so. She imagined all of the store clerks mocking her behind her back. They were probably all tossing about the hundreds of ripe and sprightly piñatas that they horde in the back of their stores and distribute only to those with magic names like Sánchez and Garza.

This was when the miracle happened, the milagro. Like many miracles, the lead-up was unspectacular. Stacy was stuck in traffic. Some sort of accident involving a school bus and a postal truck and flames. Stacy was too concerned with her failed piñata expedition to worry about any schoolchildren being blown up or postal packages damaged.  She was stuck in sullen silence behind a bunch of overcrowded cars. In front of her was a station wagon with no license plate that pooped out more exhaust than Manchester back in the dark days. Her inoffensive vanilla SUV was flanked by two cars that looked anti-social and bestial, one a run-down two-tone Mustang with a grid that looked like shark teeth and flames on its dented doors. The man driving this muscle car was staring lasciviously in her direction, loud, incomprehensible music and static rushing out of his ailing speakers like spunk out of a dog’s dick. As she was sucking on her cigarette and trying to relax, Stacy noticed this leering, and she soon turned her head to the other side. That was what brought her redemption.

The car was maroon and loud, undeniably ugly. It was a ghost from the past, a model consigned to the junkyard of history, an El Camino. Those unfamiliar with this model had better not try to look up images of it online, for doing so has been said to induce instant psychological trauma. Former owners, even occasional passengers of the El Camino are said to wake up from ghastly flashbacks, drenched in sweat, the growl of the car’s engine thick in their skulls. It is no lie that those souls sick enough to have bought this car had higher suicide rates than owners of any other car. The truth in that fact is unimpeachable. Stacy read it from a credible on-line leisure magazine. No car could better express squalor than this one. The driver of this beast of an automobile had a beard scraggly enough to make Tolstoy blush. He had a half-mauled Pop-Tart in one hand and a cigar in the other. There were paw prints on its windows. The vinyl of his seats had been mauled and torn by paws and teeth. The ashtray harbored the ashes of a thousand dead cigarettes.  Techno music boomed out of his back speakers and subjected the world around to a mild earthquake.

Were she not leaving the barrio, on the verge of re-emerging into palm trees and prosperity, Stacy might not have looked any further at this unsightly vehicle. But curiosity swirled in her head and her eyes began to wander from the cab of the car to its rear, like a drunken old man checking out his daughter’s sorority sister at a cocktail party. In a strange way, Stacy found herself admiring the car. There was, behind all of the squalor, a certain nobility in this car. It was like a raised middle finger to all of the SUVs out there.

The back of the car was what really fascinated Stacy. Like the back of a truck, the El Camino offers those lucky enough to drive it enough space to carry life’s burdens in it. While most owners of the vehicle elect to keep this back area empty, perhaps in some attempt to bolster the car’s aerodynamic kick-ass capability, others put their life into it. They put old mattresses that smell like eggs and butter into them and let them fry in ultraviolet light. They toss all the empty beer cans that are cluttering up the front into the back. It is waste disposal of the most efficacious sort. Nobody’s toes are stepped on in the exterior world. The car becomes an isolated instance of being, a bubble of tranquility that does not stir the seas of chaos that all other forms of activity inevitably contribute to.

And yet, this tar-like tarp that concealed this car’s inner system was not entirely effective. Something was sticking out, surging out shamelessly into the exterior world. Stacy leaned forward and squinted to see if she couldn’t figure out what it was. Intrigued, she reached onto the dashboard and picked up the glasses that she is supposed to wear when she drives but never does out of pride. After a moment of careful inspection, it struck her consciousness like a gong.  What Stacy was looking at was a leg, undeniably human in form. She could make out a swollen foot, stiffly jutting out. The foot was even manicured. Its toenails were painted and what appeared to be a high heel encased it. A leg. Una pierna. There was no denying it. This was serious and yet beautiful.

This leg was not of a corpse but of something far more desirable. It was the kind of leg that makes kids shriek with excitement and want to beat. Underneath its flesh was not blood or muck or things that make kids’ eyes puff out purple. It concealed, rather, candies and sugars, lollies and taffy, things that rot teeth rather than spirits. It was, yes, a piñata in the back of this mysterious El Camino, or at least a leg of one.  

There was no time to lose. This intervention was too obviously divine not to merit at least a loud “Gracias, Jesus!” Stacy was so excited that forgot that, and perhaps it would cost her later on.

Stacy quickly honked her horn to get the driver’s attention. This attempt was unsuccessful. Horns lose their potency in traffic jams. The ear becomes inured to their alarmed cry. And besides, this guy had his music on louder than even the angriest horn could honk. Stacy was going to have to get out of the car and confront him in person.

She looked ahead to see if all the mess might clear any time soon and was reassured that it wouldn’t. She left her car running and hopped out and signaled at him with arms flailing like an airport runway worker. He gritted his teeth and squeezed the soft paper of the cigar in his mouth and rolled down the window reluctantly. The music got louder.

“Sir,” said Stacy eagerly, opening up her money purse and showing the stranger green. “I want to buy your piñata.”

“Qué?”

Stacy kind of waved her hands down so that he might turn down the booming music. He kind of frowned at her and then finally realized what she meant by this, complied in a jiffy.

“I see a piñata in the back of your car. I want to buy it. I will pay whatever you like.”

At this moment, something unsettling happened. A head emerged from beneath the steering wheel, a woman’s. She made brief eye contact with Stacy and smiled back awkwardly and yet lasciviously, wiping the running lipstick off her face with the back of her hand. Stacy looked back at the driver and he looked back with embarrassment and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘I’m only human too, lady. B.J.s help make traffic jams more tolerable.’

“What you need?” he asked in English that sounded fragile.

“I need your piñata.”

The man began speaking Spanish fast to the woman in the car and they started laughing. Stacy almost felt a rush of embarrassment come over her as she said this, praying that piñata did not have a second, anatomical meaning in Spanish. Finally, the woman leaned over, pressing her voluptuous body over the driver and sticking her head out the window.

“The piñata is full of things you don’t want. No good this piñata. We’re sorry.”

Just as she was about to roll up the window and smash Stacy’s, and hence Maria’s dream, five twenty dollar bills flew into the car and enchanted its passengers. One could almost distinguish in the El Camino’s harsh idle a brief respite, a purr of contentment, and soon, the engine was off. The driver ignored his lady friend’s shoulder-slapping and loud and fast Spanish admonishments. He proudly emerged from the car and winked at Stacy. She followed him to the back and helped him lift up the tarp.

Stacy felt in that moment like a mortician uncovering a recently slain body for autopsy. This piñata was already hers, but both the woman it seemed to be representing, a hooker, and its condition, rather sordid, made Stacy feel empty. What was there to do? The money had already changed hands. Still, to say that these goods were damaged would be an understatement. Stacy almost wanted to avert her eyes when the man rolled over the stiff paper body. The head had been partially crushed by some of the lawn equipment with which the piñata had been forced to share the back. The area between its temple and its left eye had suffered a nasty contusion, and it seemed to bleed Styrofoam.

“She looks pretty bad,” she said, shielding the sun from her eyes. “Is there anything you can do for her to make her more presentable?”

The man scratched his head and said “Qué?”

“Can you make her pretty again?”

He blinked and looked quizzical. Then, understanding jolted him like a surge of electricity. He nodded and began patching up her face with his worn workman’s hands, mending the ripped papier-mâché, putting some of the Styrofoam stuffing back into the wound and pressing the severed skin back together.

“This okay?” he asked with raised brows.

“I guess so.”

Engines behind them began growling with impatience. The traffic mess ahead appeared to be clearing, the tragic loss of schoolchildren and mail all but forgotten. Stacy’s quick but fateful interlude with the man in the El Camino was ending prematurely, without a sincere look in the eyes and a heartfelt ‘Gracias.’ She took her prize, lifted it with all the strength in her limbs (it wasn’t all that heavy), and jaunted back to the open door of her SUV. As she did this, she thought she could hear the man and his lady friend laughing hard.

By the time Stacy had made it to the ‘safe’ side of town, the party had already begun. An assembly of children was whirling about the backyard, as desultory in their motion as fruit fries, as loud as ailing hyenas. Their shrieks rang out without warning, like sudden gunfire, piercing Stacy’s sensitive ears. Gladly would she have gone inside to smoke a cigarette and cool off in the AC, but Pedro was watching, as well as a convocation of parents and stepparents, standing around with smiley-faces, sipping non-alcoholic beer and spinning yarns about Bobby Ray’s exploits on the T-ball diamond or Juanita’s uncanny ability to memorize time-tables.  

The birthday cake seemed to collapse in the heat of a dying day. The white icing dripped down its walls like sweet wax. A ceremonial song was sung in English and then in Spanish and then once more in English. Miniature infernos were extinguished by three rapid pulmonary gusts. Several animalistic “hoorahs’ and barbaric clapping ensued. Maria birthday girl blushed and chewed on her lower lip with her small, doomed teeth. Then, Pedro emerged, like the high priest of an ancient religion, holding high a knife sharp enough to decapitate a piñata with. The first sacrificial victim of the afternoon was not the piñata however, but the cake, and when the knife tore into its sweat-soaked mush, a sound was emitted that sounded like the last gasp of an animal in the desert. Remnants of this sugary animal were eagerly distributed, clumps of mush spooned onto plastic plates hardly firm enough to carry the weight. Spike, the canine denizen of this backyard, wagged his tail gaily. Good feeling was in abundance. The cake was gone in less then seven minutes. Stacy knew this because she was counting off the seconds.

She had not told Pedro anything about the piñata. She had just knocked on the door with a couple of modest-sized boxes, hastily wrapped in glossy paper, smiling widely. The idea was to wait for the consumption of the cake and maybe the opening of two or three presents before dashing back to the SUV and retrieving the cadaver-like party whore of paper.

Maria began tearing her little fingers through wrapping paper, hardly appreciative of the careful concern that had gone into this gift presentation. Several Barbie dolls, some blonde, some Hispanic, were re-introduced into the world. Smiles were exchanged among mothers, nods of approval offered. Finally, Stacy decided that the time for the great revelation had come. Just as Maria had finished opening up a plastic pony, she clapped her hands in a quick flourish and vanished. No one noticed her go.

Her return was glorious, far more impressive than she had imagined. As she stood in the threshold of the glass sliding door that separated the cool realm of Pedro’s home from the sun-stained and parched yard, the full body of a paper lady in the crook of her left arm, heads turned around, fingers both large and small pointed in her direction, and “Ooohs” of astonishment and gratitude were emitted from mouths rich with bacteria, coffee and cake.

Pedro shook his head and smiled warmly. He wanted to smother Stacy in kisses, to lick all over her body and to hump her brains out. Of course, he had to banish all of the lascivious visions and keep his mind G-rated. This party was too wholesome to pollute.

“Babe,” he exclaimed from afar, “Where did you find that?”

Stacy blushed and shrugged her shoulders.

“I went to see some of your people,” she said with a wink. “Gente muy amable.” Pedro approached her, hugged her, and the piñata, kissed Stacy first deeply on the lips and then, perhaps out of sheer lust for life, or maybe just because the paper lady looked like it needed a kiss before its public execution, he delivered a soft and respectful ‘friendship kiss’ to the cheek of the sacrificial victim.

“Muchas gracias por estar aqui,” he whispered to the piñata. Stacy held her and thought about playing the ventriloquist, maybe starting a conversation in Spanish to the entertainment of all in attendance, but the Spanish phrases that would enable such a conversation evaded her mind in that proud moment.

And boy did she feel good. To think that she had resorted to anti-depressants in recent weeks! Stacy’s euphoria was too profound to spoil by words. She felt tears welling up. She wanted to hug the world and to sing happy songs. She felt like a victorious character at the end of a heart-warming Disney flick. Part of her was hoping that the crowd would rush her and embrace her and lift her towards the skies like a goddess. But perhaps she would have to wait until the piñata in her arm was sufficiently beaten to death for this great instance of triumph to make bright her day.

Using a shoestring as a noose, Stacy tied the piñata to the branch of a sick but sturdy oak. A light breeze, perhaps from the hills or the Pacific, tickled the piñata and made it dance in the air, like a tap dancer who had drunk too much coffee. Children began fighting over the baseball bat. They all knew why this sad figure hung and all wanted a piece of it, all wanted to maim it, beat the life out of it.

Stacy had given a name to the piñata—Lady Jane. Señora Selena was the original nombre that bubbled out of Stacy’s brain, but Pedro shot it down. He disliked, read loathed the idea of using an assassinated pop star’s name, and Stacy cupped her mouth in false concern and said “Oops, I never knew that Selena.” Pedro shook his head and muttered something in Spanish that Stacy didn’t catch.

Lady Jane was fitting. The piñata looked like a gringo, and hence needed a gringo name. She was, after all, as blonde as a Swedish model, though her skin was hardly as soft to the touch. Pedro even cut his finger on one of the dangling paper strands around Lady Jane’s ankle. He bled and called her a puta and punched her in the ass for this. The punch created a small rupture but luckily, none of her goods feel out prematurely. One of the kids at the party saw and heard this nastiness, and the girl, though only six, understood the word puta. She looked up at Pedro and covered her mouth. Her coffee-colored eyes bespoke some strange mixture of scorn and giddiness. Pedro smiled and said Lo siento before she ran off.

Of course, Lady Jane’s black paper skirt was unusually high. Underneath, painted on, was something resembling a thong, though the piñata appeared to have suffered significant water damage. It had, after all, been stuck in the back of a man’s El Camino for untold time.

 Whatever the case, Lady Jane was not dressed appropriately for a child’s birthday. Were she a real woman, and were she in an Italian basilica, she would have been hissed at and sworn at as a harlot. Pedro was perturbed by Stacy’s choice of a sleazy looking piñata, though he didn’t tell her this. But really, why did Stacy have to choose such a shabby looking lady to be beaten into shreds by a stick? Was she trying to make a statement about the dangers of promiscuity? Were the kids supposed to learn to say no to sex by beating the brains out of this paper harlot?

           

 The sun was threatening to go down. It was time to put an end to the whole birthday brouhaha with one last exultant public beating.

Before the birthday girl, hanging lifelessly from the half-rotten branch of an oak, was the piñata.  Maria stood as silent and as solemn as an executioner. Normally, before they thrash a piñata to paper shreds and candy spewing, birthday girls wear blindfolds. It is about defending the hanging entity from unfairly inflicted blows, adding some element of sport to the otherwise senseless beating. After all, it ain’t all about the candy.

            And this time it certainly wasn’t. After her droopy face had been sufficiently licked into a nasty smile by Pedro’s sloppy kiss, Stacy came over to Maria and placed her hands squarely on her shoulder blades. She knelt down and whispered encouragement in the little girl’s ear.

            “I want you to beat the life out of her.” Stacy really wanted to say this in Spanish but fumbled the words around in her head.

            Maria nodded obediently. A safety radius was cleared. Maria was lightly shoved in the direction of the hanging victim.

            “Ahora!” hollered Stacy.

            Maria swung with blind ferocity. Lady Jane was spared this blow.

            “Higher!” called out one of the kids at the party. “Swing higher!”

            Maria missed again. Her swing was embarrassing and elicited scornful laughter from the gathered.

            That’s when Maria got angry. This anger could not be seen. She was, after all, wearing a friggin’ executioner’s mask. But if it could have been witnessed, it might have sent even the most callous five-year-olds home crying, praying that a Power Ranger or Teletubby could rescue their sorry souls from her rage.

            And who bore the brunt of this primordial rage? Well, luckily, the victim was human only in form, not in content. Lady Jane, were she organic, would have died of oxygen deficiency from the hanging. Of course, she wasn’t organic, unless you count the contents inside her, which might rather be described as orgasmic.

            What the hell are you reading now? Is your narrator suddenly getting racy on you, dropping spicy sauce on you at the last moment in some desperate hope that you might find interest on this poorly spun piñata narrative?

            No. And that No is equally valid in English or Spanish. The contents of this piñata were indeed orgasmic rather than organic. And when the proverbial shit (in this case, the orgasmic contents of Lady Jane) hit the proverbial fan (literally, the backyard, more broadly, all those present at the piñata thrashing), there was hell to be paid.

            You see, Lady Jane’s uncanny resemblance to a harlot was more than just uncanny. It was a friggin’ clue to her contents, and nobody, not Stacy, not Pedro, and least of all Maria (who thank Díos was blind under an executioner’s mask), would ever have suspected that those contents would be pornographic.

            Porno mags, DVDs with salacious covers, sex toys, condoms, whips, chains, cock rings, vagina molds, no guns (fortunately), were spewed onto the backyard like innards of a slaughtered pig. Kids were sent running in all directions. Their desultory motion bespoke at once the zaniness of a  Disney flick and the desperation of a slasher film. If only one could have played Strauss’ Trisch-Trasch polka at the right moment!

Pedro took his daughter into his arms and shot facial hate at Stacy, who stood stiff with her hand over her mouth.

            She now thought of the man in the El Camino who had hawked off this piñata. He looked disreputable. He had a five o’clock shadow and missing teeth and a nasty quality in his black eyes. And his car stank. And he was probably being pleasured orally by the sleazy chica in the passenger seat.

           

            The kids were all at home in less than a quarter hour. Stacy tried to apologize to shocked parents but received scant attention, lots of quick and nervous and unreceptive nods as the stunned and pissed parties made haste to their SUVs and the copious protection from pornography and auto death that such powerful vehicles confer. As for Pedro, well, he was out in the backyard, beating all of the devilry to death with the same miniature baseball bat that his daughter had used on the piñata. He whacked at Lady Jane with barbaric force. One blow split off her arm at the elbow and sent condoms flying halfway into the neighbors’ yard, thoroughly violating the principles of aerodynamics. Lady Jane slain, having bled out all the porn and the general nastiness that  once constituted her fully debauched being, Pedro put his hands on his knees and looked down at the agglomeration of smut that lay there on the lawn before him in the near dark. Gasping and desperate, he hollered various profane things at all the porn,  “Ay carrumba!” and “hijo de puta!” being some of the tamer expressions employed. “La cucaracha” was not used, although it might have delighted Maria. The smut was shattered. Were he God and capable of such miracles, Pedro might have reduced the whole heap to salt, just like Gomorrah.

            He stood for a moment and admired the fruit of his work. The twelve DVDs had been shattered into crunchy and sharp material that glistened in the moonlight. The plastic penii were more stubborn. They would be summarily burned. Pedro did not care if burning plastic emitted poisonous fumes and assaulted the ailing ozone layer. This was, after all, L.A., and the air sucked anyway.

           

An Old Story: Written in France in 2005

Van der Meyde’s Inspiring Business Narrative

By

Maximilian Maier

My story is not pretty, but it is so freaking American that you won’t know what hit you. For forty-four years of life, I was the bitch of circumstance, the victim of the New World Order. And now I have the upper hand. Circumstance has presented itself to me in an awfully sexy dress, and the New World Order seems to have brought order to my life.

Here I am, Emperor of a conquered land, feet bare and crusty and shaking on my table, exotic music on the radio, a view of the obedient masses below consuming the goods that God and I brought them from faraway lands. And yet I, myself in a faraway land, here in this distant desert, still pine away at times for the rich green of the homeland.

Like a former President, adored by some across the seas, loathed by many here at home, I hail from Arkansas. More exactly, I come from Wallop, the poorest county in one of the poorest areas north of the Mexican border, a muddy and squalid little settlement of trailers and tents hidden deep in pines of the Ozark mountains. Well, to tell you the honest to God truth, I have never set foot in slick Willie Clinton’s hometown of Hope, but I can assure you that Wallop inspires no such sanguinity. The town is constructed largely of indigenous red clay, spare automotive parts, large homemade signs advertising lemonade and morally acceptable blow jobs, blood and mud. The town hall, the phallic tower of civic pride that every town needs to fuse its energy into, is in my town nothing more than an abandoned motel. The place is so pitiful that the Indians that the settlers ran out of here a hundred and fifty years back would not live here today if you gave it to them as a reservation and urged them to gamble there. But in a nation blessed a thousand times over by the Almighty, America, even sad old places like Wallop can generate wealth, wads of cash in polyester pockets and moustache-arching, family-friendly smiles. My Dad, Nero Van der Meyde, understood this point religiously.

Papa was the scion of crafty Dutch cheesemongers from Gouda that had ventured across the Atlantic and then the Mississippi and protected their cheese and children in the process. We don’t know why my grandfather named him after a Roman emperor, but it sure did something to his unconscious mind. You see, Papa became the most venerable businessman in Arkansas, a state that always had to look wistfully over at the Cadillac-loving Texan fat cats getting rich on their hard labor. He was for Arkansas business what Clinton would later become for politics. One night, sitting at a flimsy old card table, drinking whisky and scratching his oily scalp, bathed in the vulgar yellow of a naked light-bulb dangling ominously from the ceiling, Papa slapped his hand on the table and said “Holy Sheepshit!” and that light bulb came tumbling right down on his head. But that light-bulb was metaphorical, stupid, and you see, that night my Dad came up with the idea to found the world’s first mega store.

Papa beat the Walton clan by a good decade and conquered Wallop’s market with a barbaric yawp of business braggadocio. The thought alone makes me shiver. He was king of the hill, un hombre muy poderoso, capitalism’s favorite son. He smashmouthed the competition, drove them into the ground with all the fury of a maniacal animal torturer, called them dirty names and laughed at them in his sleep. And they feared him prodigiously. That I can assure you. Not even the bravest of their bunch dared set foot in Wallop. Sam Walton himself had nightmares about my Dad. Dad had an aura. They called him the Titan of Arkansas business. The store that he founded bore the name of Titania, and it paid tribute to the Roman gods or something Pops used to say. When it came time to draw up the designs for this superstructure, Papa even ventured across the seas to Rome to let the classical architecture bristle the hairs on the back of his neck. The women were reputedly overwhelming. Papa even designed the store, originally conceived by dull-witted architects according to the standard Arkansas business code as a metallic, barn-like structure, as a modern version of Trajan’s market in Rome. The building was fucking aesthetic. It was bold, man, had all the turtlenecked assholes from France and Germany staring desperately into their frothy beverages and asking themselves why they couldn’t build as brilliantly. And the construction was durable, classical, powerful. . Built to last a thousand years, just like Hitler’s monuments, but not nearly as insidious in its purpose, natürlich.

The store was one of a kind. And when I say one of a kind, I am not bastardizing the expression. Sure, Papa could have set up Titanias all over the Fifty States. He could have established an Empire, initiating the reign of Nero over global retail, becoming hegemon over the Walton clan and sending them and all their pudding-faced, freckled kids to live in government shacks with the blacks. But Papa was obsessed with the idea of singularity. He had one child to inculcate and discipline, one car to caress and whisper love poems to, one gun to lubricate and fire at neighbors, competitors, invading Chinese, one dog to yell at, shoot at, beat to a pulp for shitting on the floorboard of his car, one wife to mount in sweat and fury and frustration, and one God to worship (excepting the occasional sacrifice to Roman deities). The idea of keeping just one store was therefore a logical necessity, stupid.

Architectural awesomeness aside, what made Titania so freaking unique was the aura. I don’t know if it was the sheer size of the place. The massive Corinthian columns at the entrance, the frieze depicting Patton smiting the Teutons, lightning bolts coming out of his tank, Valkyrie flying away shit-scared. I don’t know if the people came just to walk up the one hundred and forty-four marble steps of this temple of Capitalism. But they came, and in heavy, loud, shoe-clapping droves at that. Titania was a magnet for families, station wagons, obedient dogs that took craps on the black hot asphalt lots instead of on the glorious marble floors of Lady Titania (A few obstreperous poodles, perhaps communist spies, were electrocuted for this brand of malfeasance). Wallop, once scoffed at as a dump even by fellow Arkansanians and mud-bunker denizens, soon became an island of consumer ecstasy in an economic wasteland. And Arkansas, once ridiculed by its neighbors as the black sheep in a herd of states, prosperous, God-fearing, and united, soon became the envy of its peers, the factory of presidents and legendary businessman, an awfully nice place to go shopping.

Pa was not a businessman in the modern sense of the term. He did not chew fish oil bubble gum to lower his LDL cholesterol, did not go jogging with health-conscious Vegans or Ivy League queer theorists engaged in a futile quest to bring to their nasty pale bodies something of the unsurpassed harmony of Greek sculpture. Pa found authenticity in those foods that doctors swear off these days. He ate his sausage, lard, and grease hard, loud, and with anger and haste, enjoyed watching fat and blood and canned meats tumble and spurt in Mama’s breakfast pan. When Dr. Aesculapus warned Pa about a coronary disaster, Pa just blew the smoke of his homemade grapevine cigar in the man’s face, fogged up his glasses and said “Coronary? Well go ahead and crown me, Doc!”

Did my Dad have a temper? You bet your bottom dollar. An awful nasty one at that. You can imagine that the sole owner and proprietor of America’s first and greatest mega-store might have a few boxes of merchandise, much of it complimentary samples, lying about the house. Our house was chock full of such gratis goods. Anyway, I was just a raw and unrefined youth, did not yet understand that even the free samples had value, that such kickshaws could be pawned off to the hungry and hasty masses that came sweating into the store. Anyway, perhaps listening to some socialist demon that had invaded my capitalist soul, I took some of these sexy goods, pressed the plastic wrapping to my face and inhaled the freshness and life that new things emanate. And yes, on certain occasions, the demons inside me were so unabashedly communist that I actually pilfered the inviolable property of Lady Titania to hand out to the squalid and lethargic poor of Wallop, and this made Lady Titania, or more precisely the man who gave birth to her, awfully ornery. Pa even used to bite the heads off of all my He-Man action figures just to be a dick. “Proper comeuppance” he would say in his thick accent, my eyes sadly following a rolling rubber head of a former bad mofo like Skeletor, gnawed on as by sinister vermin, glistening with spit and yet stained with tobacco. And one time, feeling hungry like boys in puberty do, I saw some pink coconut snowballs lying on the coffee table, and well, my eager hands couldn’t resist. Well, when Papa found out about this clandestine sugar raid, he just frowned and huffed and got red in his face and yelled “follow me!” And so I did, and he led me into my room. I suspected that he was about to blow up one of my favorite toys with black cats and laugh red-faced and angrily into my face, but he decided to go even further. He walked over to the cage, selected his victim with a nasty, alcoholic grin, and then he made me watch him execute my pet gerbil Lothar. He even made it ceremonial for extra traumatic effect, put on an executioner’s mask and put Wagner loud on the stereo as the sledgehammer roared down over the poor and ignorant beast.

The major turning point in Wallop’s municipal history and my personal history took place at a karate tournament. That’s right, karate is indeed practiced in my home state, and darned well at that. Papa was obsessed with the idea of a Chinese invasion of Arkansas, and he wanted me to be capable of giving those boys “a taste of their own medicine” should they come scampering like mice over our corn fields. When I told him that karate was not Chinese he spat tobacco juice in my face and told me to shut the fuck up.

My instructor was a fucking ninja, an honest to God Nippon Meister in a black hood, and I kid you not when I say that. I don’t know how the guy ended up in Wallop Arkansas, but his mastery of his trade was indubitable and his temper awfully scary at times. He never let us see his face, always skulked around with that ninja mask and hissed and threw plastic, non-lethal Chinese stars at us for fucking up the ancient and venerable maneuvers.

Anyway, the tournament was a big event in Wallop. They set up a big tent on town square and told us to spar, chop, howl out obscenities in Japanese, bleed and wail, do whatever to make the citizens forget Vietnam and associate positive things with Asia and violence. I was kicking serious butt that day, converting the cutthroat business strategy of my Pops into hardcore karate chops and kicks that burst spleens and leave Moms teary-eyed at funeral services. Well, I was in the middle of kicking the succotash out of some Texan nincompoop. I had him on his knees begging for clemency when Pop’s aorta decided not to work anymore, when all that grease and lard and bubbly fat finally repaid the man that had consumed it so copiously. Just as I was about to terminate the Texan with my scalpel of a karate chop, all of the thirteen citizens of Wallop and eight citizens of Waxahachie that had come to bear witness to my lethal mastery were surrounding my Dad, who himself was rolling on the ground, victim of an invisible karate chop to the aorta, wailing in red-faced pain and yet still yelling at me to finish what I had started and wipe out ailing Tex.

Well, I lost my Dad that day, but I made my Ninja sensei awfully proud (a smile was almost visible under his hood). And I won an awfully pretty trophy to boot. This was a significant moment in this life’s journey, one of the few sparkling moments of glory in an otherwise dreary youth. The trophy stayed shiny in my room, and I even keep it in my office today, polish it often so that Iraqi sand does not blow in and violate its proud luster. And I would not be bending the truth to confess to you that the trophy kept me alive during the dark days of adolescence. You may already have some idea of what happened after Dad’s death. A woman took over the family business, at least until my coming of age, and this wasn’t just any old woman, but my mother, the least capable of the cursed bunch. She really botched it, the bitch. I mean if you asked her today about this, she would just smile and offer you some cookie-flavored spaghetti, lovingly assembled on the fireproof kiddy stove that they furnished her with at the nursing home that only reaches temperatures high enough that if you put the palm of your hand on the electric burner for an hour or so you might begin to feel warmth and softly say “Ouch, that kinda hurts.” If you asked me, I’d say the Alzheimer’s did her saturated sponge of a brain a lot of good.

Mama was easy prey for the vultures. They swooped down dastardly and long-beaked on Pa’s store from all directions. There were hardliners from Texas, shotgun-wielding business buttheads with a real distaste for Arkansas. There were sly Japanese, false friends of the Ninja, flying into Wallop on Kawasaki helicopters and offering Mama free Beta VCRs and robots that spat sparks and greetings as a condolence for the loss of a great husband and breadwinner.

And yet Mama remained in mourning for years, even spoke to Papa in the house and made sausage breakfasts for his ghost. And yet the dumb hussy kept talking about romance and love and such shittiness, forgetting that my Pops was all about business and pelf. She had no idea of how to manage a mega-store, the poor spiritualist. She tried the friendly approach, and that was fatal. I can remember putting my hands over my eyes and saying every bad word I could think of when I saw her standing out in front of the store like some kind of Jehovah’s Witness, waving at everybody, kissing kids that weren’t interested in being kissed, winking at single men like a harlot. Anybody who knows anything about the psychology of mega-store clients understands the basic point that this kind of friendly small town behavior is exactly the opposite of what a competent store manager needs to do. Mama’s approach might have worked back in frontier America, back when settlers had to make as many friends as possible not to end up under the tomahawk of a furious Comanche warlord. But what Mama didn’t understand is that customers come to mega-stores precisely to remain anonymous. They come to be alone with the aisles, to have their way with the goods without being subjected to the oppressive eyes of “helpful” staff with headphones and roller skates. They enjoy surveying the merchandise, lifting cans and looking underneath like one might do to determine the sex of a kitten neonate. Grandmothers enjoy polishing fruit in peace with their snot rags, grandfathers the sweet and secret pleasure of a moment alone with an oily yet glossy issue of Lowriderbitchslut Illustrated.

Adolescence is never a piece of cake, and if mine had to be compared to one, I wouldn’t advise you to eat it. Sitting back now in my cowboy hat, cigar puffing palls of carcinogens out of my smiling mouth, cowboy boots tapping the surface of my mahogany desk, I still feel tingles of teenage trauma. The dynamic that developed between Mama and me was like matter and antimatter, thesis and antithesis. Every stunt that she pulled made me turn my back in disgust and do something just as nasty in the other direction. Every baby she tried to bend down and kiss that came into Lady Titania’s womb I spat on. Every old lady that she helped up the marble steps to the Temple I tackled somewhere in the dark depths of the lingerie section. I didn’t care about anything. I was an angry young man, deprived of a great father, cursed with a decadent mother.

And how did my Mama respond to this rambunctious behavior? Well, she never had a clue, luckily for me I suppose but unluckily for her. Perhaps Alzheimer’s began to sink its teeth into her mind at an awfully early age. Perhaps she was still caught in the trauma of the loss of a husband. I just don’t know. But whatever the reason, Mama soon turned to the Dark side. She said Adios to Dios, Adieu to Dieu, and submerged herself in the murky miasma of polytheism, and I am not talking here about respectable Hinduism or Arkansas animism, but good-for-nothing New Age polytheism, insidious and tacky, with all of the crazy-haired blonde swamis and the tacky muzak that they play on their glowing neon sitars. It was simply revolting.

You can only imagine the effect that this polytheism bullshit had on Papa’s one and only divine temple of consumption. Lady Titania hit a spiritual iceberg. The great steamship of unabashed Arkansas Capitalism took a nosedive into icy blue nothingness. And I sat there watching and crying as Mama turned an American landmark into a second-rate Soviet-style second hand store. Fuck you, Mama. The starry-eyed lady let some smooth-talking squirrel chark at her and convince her that all things, animate and inanimate, had a soul, and that it was immoral to sell goods. For Mama, selling a box of devil horned condoms or a buzz-saw or cartridges for a semi-automatic weapon at the mega-store was tantamount to slavery, as it involved hawking off souls to eager masters. Damn that shit pissed me off.

I tried to forget this woe, this cataclysmic drain of a family’s net worth and hence a state’s, no doubt the result of some insidious Texan or Communist conspiracy. While Mama’s mind disintegrated into a cesspool of a thousand lost deities, all of my spiritual energy became focused on one all-powerful and omni-malevolent entity--Señor Diablo. That’s right, the eighties and all the nefarious music hit me hard too. I denounced good President Reagan’s loving smiles and pleasant admonitions and sank into a world of glue-sniffing and Heavy Metal head bashing and yes, I dare say it, anti-materialism. I sought consolation from my earthly woes in the idea of hellfire, the more radioactive the better, consuming everything. I dabbled in Nordic spells and incantations, cursed my mother in a thousand ways, even adopted the sixties kitsch style to paint a wall-sized fresco of the Ragnarok that I eagerly sought to descend upon America nuclearly (this was the only hope that I saw in Reagan). Many the lonely Friday night, candles lit to appease my evil Lord, wolves howling out from the Ozarks, scarcely to be heard though when Judas Priest was rocking hard on the record player, I assembled paper models of Soviet ICBMs, and, head banging hard and lips pooping out nasty lyrics and curses of things wholesome and New Age alike, I crashed those homemade Soviet missiles into imaginary Arkansas mud huts, and when the devil’s voice was real loud inside my head, I even brought nuclear wrath into the breast of proud Lady Titania. I had visions, awfully ugly ones but in my mind prophetic, of infants wailing and kicking in their mothers radioactively rancid wombs, Satan and Stalin laughing their asses off through it all.

Then came the major turning point. One night, staring at the ceiling and sulking at all the poverty and incense in my midst, the sound of a homosexual acoustic guitar strumming away in the living room, Christianity and capitalism mounted a joint Blitzkrieg, and young Hadrian van der Meyde, a.k.a moi, was conquered by love and goodness and the things that make business go round. This Blitzkrieg was mounted not in the empirical realm but in the oneiric, in a fucking dream, and the major players in that dream were named Nero and Jesus, one the father of a lost son, the other the Son of an omnipotent Man. Nero, his right arm crooked and at rest on Jesus’ shoulder, a cigar emitting non-carcinogenic white smoke extending from the right corner of his mouth to heaven, told me in no subtle terms “to pull my fucking act together”, and Jesus, smiling at my Papa’s candor, nodded his head and, speaking in a quiet and soothing Arkansas accent, said that Satan was a “shit for brains that had no place in my life.” I opened my eyes and turned eighteen on that night.

Just as the government was beginning to foreclose on Lady Titania from all directions, I, now a full-fledged adult, stormed into the picture and told them, with all the authority of my Papa, to back the fuck up. And they almost listened. In the weeks ensuing my awakening, I argued long and hard in favor of justice and family domination of a state’s economy, standing sweaty and bothered before committees assembled of bureaucratic dinosaurs sitting there lethargically and indifferently, cigarettes burning in ashtrays before them, next to their doodles of naked ladies (pronounced “neked”), their faces tired, obese, and aging, the bags under their eyes puffy and purple after half a century of dogged smoke inhalation, stress, and paperwork. As I argued, dropping every rhetorical bomb in my arsenal, my metaphors reached farther and farther. My hand gestures and facial expressions attained new levels of desperation. My voice grew hoarser and hoarser, the committees more disgustingly indifferent to my cause, and soon, with Jesus and Nero putting their hands over their faces in some ethereal realm, the assholes down on earth closed the book on Titania. Arkansas got real, real poor after that, and frankly, that bitch deserved it.

Speaking of bitches, a big one was no longer in the picture. While I was struggling to save a local landmark and an international tourist magnet, my mother was organizing sit-ins and peace-pipe smoking contests, trying to find a way to donate Lady Titania to some New Age church to use as their spiritual center, well, I used Papa’s hidden slush fund to hire the slickest Arkansas attorneys, alas not Willie himself, to have her declared incompetent and in dire need of shock therapy, or even better, a firing squad. Law enforcement, to the vehement protests of a handful of falsely cocksure New Age thugs that hung out and dunged out our living room smoking blue things on water pipes and mumbling out praise of false gods and my Mama’s pair of New Age titties, raided Mama’s private collection, seizing water pipes, incense candles, lava lamps, Fleetwood Mac posters, and most importantly her evil, the idols I mean, eighty-seven statues of dishonesty, paganism, and cowardice, ranging from obese and jocular Buddhas to spastic dancing Shivas to truly repugnant modern representations of New Age cult figures. My Mama had managed to assemble the most complete collection of New Age paraphernalia in North America, and what made this so revolting was the fact that she wasn’t even using these idols to make any money. She never charged the assholes to come over to our house and smoke fruit even a pittance to pray to these figures. They exploited the fucking holiness of our domicile, drawing upon its energies, dropping plenty of purple shits in our toilet but no large bills anywhere. So you can imagine that when I saw my mother with arms bound, by handcuffs, alas, and not by a strait jacket (not yet at least), I made haste to shout jeers into her face and to spit nastily into those foggy eyes of hers. This brought her to tears and to her knees but I did not listen to any pleas. I had money on my mind.

And that thought did not abandon me for the next twenty years.

Why did I prefer a foreign land, and an Islamic one at that, to my native Arkansas? Well, as Bill Clinton once said with that smirk of his, “It’s the economy, stupid.” You see, those dark years in which my mother steered proud Titania into that New Age iceberg saw the rise of the Walton clan. Even if the government had not seized the building, I would scarcely have been able to compete with the imperial fleet of Wal-Marts that dominated the business waters of my home state, and you bet that made me homicidal. I considered on more than one occasion exploding one or more of those cheap imitations of Lady Titania strewn about my home state’s good green earth like dandelion seeds on the endless Mongolian plains. I imagined walking in, waving brightly to whatever moon-faced employee they paid minimum wage to stand and say “Welcome to Wal-Mart, sir,” heading straight for the guns and explosive section of the store, packing down the stuff, packing it around, and, perched on my Doo-doo brown ’76 Chevy Nova innocently parked at the farthest fringe of the parking lot, watch that sucker go up in a mushroom cloud, alas not nuclear. But then I realized just how many of those Wal-Marts the Walton clan had planted into Arkansas soil, and the word “futility” stamped itself in nasty, imaginary bureaucratic red ink over my plans for destruction.

America belonged to the Waltons, and Arkansas fell with it, but there was still hope overseas, praise be to Allah. It was therefore time to sail the high seas in search of poon and pelf, and the Persian Gulf, given a sizable American military presence there and the benevolent hand of Christ presiding over business, seemed awfully darned pretty. So I said “Ahoy, Ahoy”, packed up my belongings, the karate trophy, black and white pictures of my Dad posing with a slain boar in front of Lady Titania, awestruck clientele assembled in a semi-circle behind him, even a few old heavy metal records, nefarious and Satanic to be sure, but necessary perhaps to maintain the Van der Meyde killer instinct.

I just had to do what Uncle Sam and Christ wanted me. Back when Saddam was getting ugly and ornery out in the desert (the first time), I volunteered for the special forces, not for the good of the country so much as the opportunity to get over there, get some Kuwaiti pussy and perhaps a few abandoned oil fields, and maybe sell cigarettes on the black market to make money that Arkansas did not want to give me in those hard, recessional times. I loved that fucking place, Kuwait, would have stayed even if Saddam’s ass had not been kicked explosively out of it. I loved the honesty of its flat landscape, the sand swirling up vigorously in the undulating heat. I longed for the day when those endless plains of sand would be blanketed in benevolent, customer-friendly asphalt, when the sun would beat down like a smart bomb on that asphalt and foster many the water mirage on the horizon.

Dreams come true, and this story is case in point that this particular cliché is not just material for cheesy kids’ commercials with comets or shooting stars or astrological balderdash, but that it has some fucking veracity to it. If you don’t believe in dreams coming true, then get your ass to Baghdad. This place is indubitably inspiring, not just militarily or explosively, but capitalistically. There are beautiful businesses arising like miraculous wildflowers out of the infertile and oil-stained sand. There are kind-hearted folks dressed up as Ronald McDonald, dodging bullets and dancing to Little Richard, patting kids on the head and reminding them that Allah and President Bush are old friends, and that buying hamburgers makes them real, real cool and can reduce the risk of terrorism by twenty-five percent.

Speaking of terrorism, in case you have been hiding in some Arkansas mud bunker, fearing thermonuclear Armageddon or Wal-Mart domination, we got the bad guy over here. And for those of you that did hear, those lucky few of you who were lucky and beaming when that Eastern man in glasses rose confidently before the tight-faced journalists and proclaimed, with all the optimism of America in his voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!”, then I profess modestly that that “we” was I. That’s right, I was the special forces agent that seized that mofo in his foxhole. It was I that tore the porno low-rider magazine from his greasy fingers. It was I who called him a ‘buttsnuggler” and jerked and snatched him around like an Arkansas sweathog in heat, shoving that ole’ boy against the cheap sheet rock of his room, against the kitschy image of a Hawaiian sunset that adorned it, and told him, in clear Arabic, that he was fucked. And yes, there was resistance, pockets of it you might say, but I used all of the karate maneuvers that my ninja sensei had taught me as a boy in Arkansas to quash that shit.

And that was God’s way of paying me back for all the suffering with my Mama, all of the trauma of a childhood that saw me lose family honor and fortune, indeed that saw me uprooted from my native Arkansas. God gave me Saddam, I gave Saddam back to Him and to my government, and God and the United States, close friends that they are, gave me one of Saddam’s old pleasure palaces on the Euphrates as a reward for that capture. And the twenty-five million dollar reward provided me with enough capital to launch this superpower of a business.

And if you, cynical punk of a reader that I fear you may be, doubt the veracity of this asseveration, then I advise you to go shopping. That’s right, I want you to shop, and not just anywhere, but in my Xanadu of consumption, the most gorgeous business in the Near East and I dare say the West or the South or wherever, a mega-store that magnets the masses, be they baseball cap-wearing or headscarfed, be they upstart Iraqi Gangsta boys with bright smiles and American semi-automatic weapons or stern Sunnis with money to spend and a desire to see how good ‘ole Saddam once lived and buy some real good stuff at the same time. Head to Baghdad and find out what you have been missing in your generic American Wal-Marts. Come on down, buy wisely and marvel at the splendor. And after your positive consumer experience, slap your friends back in Arkansas or Ohio, in Scotland or Queensland, on the shoulder and tell them that you know Hadrian Van der Meyde, or at least his story, and that this man is inspiring.