Road Test

   It may have been the baby-blue Volvo wagon, just exotic enough in 1970, with it's aura of socialism and Scandinavian permissiveness to cause Deputy Inspector Brill to distrust us from the start. It might have been the flower-power decal on the rear bumper or even the bale of hay my mother carried around in the back, inexplicably, for years.  My father's note, “Buy Cream”, affixed permanently to the dash with several layers of yellowed packing-tape would have given anyone pause and my brother's pony-tail, bandana and calico-patched jeans as he sat expectantly in drifts of dog hair at the wheel could hardly have helped matters.

   Inspector Brill was from the Joe Friday school of State Troopers, without, perhaps, Friday's sense of humor and dash. He had traveled that snowy morning from Albany to Poughkeepsie in order to administer the road-test to my brother and betrayed his composure with only the faintest sneer of disgust as he brushed off the passenger seat. The outcome of this examination was never in question; from the moment they lurched away from the curb, leaving my mother and I standing hopefully in the thickening blizzard, to the ice-dance that marked the final, horrific, three-point-turn, my brother's failure was a certainty. Inspector Brill scrawled something perfunctorily on his clip-board, tore the ticket out, thrust it at my brother and debarked without a word. An angry check mark in a box under the heading, “Automatic Failure”, was all the ticket bore. No explanation, no description of points failed or needing further practice. “There was no yellow line!”, my brother insisted on the long drive home.

   There are only two things that occupy the imagination of a sixteen-year-old boy and one of them is the driver's license. By the time I graduated from permit to road-test a year or so later, everyone we knew already had a license and some of them were getting tired of ferrying us around. My brother had returned at least twice to Poughkeepsie and Inspector Brill to suffer the same ignominy and was actually considering taking the test in the City. Forewarned and forearmed, my mother and I decided my best shot would be to avoid Inspector Brill altogether and scheduled my test in nearby Millerton. I'm not sure why it seemed always to be snowing for these events, but we left the house that morning at the tail end of two days of heavy snow. The roads hadn't been plowed for several hours and we spun and slid our slow, hair-raising way towards Millerton, arriving a tad late but just in time to see Inspector Brill getting back into his Crown Vic. 

   “You're late!” He barked as our hearts sank at the very sight of him. How could he have found us here? “I have the authority to fail you for being late! Automatic fail!”

   “Please, Sir,” my sainted mother begged in an earnest echo of Oliver Twist, “The roads were hardly plowed and we've done our very best. Won't you give us a second chance?” Brill muttered something about his being able to get there from Albany and climbed into the car. I gripped the wheel and felt my face flush with a level of hatred and rage I'd never felt before. I was careful with my turn-signals, attentive to car-lengths, crosswalks and stop signs. I even thrust my arm out into the raging storm on command to demonstrate familiarity with the already archaic hand-signal. I had just begun to think that I might somehow prevail when Brill demanded that I turn left. I searched the drifts for a left; I hesitated. “Left! Now! Left!” he shouted. 

   I spun the wheel and turned hard left, riding up and over the invisible curb, planting the Volvo's nose about waist high in a drift. That bale of hay in the back came in handy, adding just enough weight to allow the rear wheels to pull us out. I didn't need Inspector Brill - silent, ashen and covered now with dog fur, candy wrappers and discarded balls of vaguely lipsticked Kleenex - to issue a command. I executed a text-book, three-point-turn and drove slowly, silently and carefully back to my ever hopeful mother. And that was my first Automatic Failure. 

  

At some point over the next two years my brother actually did take and pass his road-test in a borrowed, unfamiliar car, at rush-hour in the chaos of the FDR Drive. In a moment of inspired strategy, Mom and I scheduled my next attempt in far-flung Amenia. He'll never find us there, we reasoned, it's practically Massachusetts. Once again we set off for the appointment – this would be my mother's fifth, I think – with me behind the wheel, blue skies, dry pavement and a song in our hearts. We were early and waited, absorbed in a crossword puzzle, under a sign that read, “ Reserved For Road-Test Only”.  We never saw the Crown Vic pull in and didn't look up until Inspector Brill's shadow darkened the driver's side window. “Automatic fail.” He said, sliding the ticket through the window as we stared in disbelief. “This vehicle's registration has expired. Automatic fail.”

The Body in Question

      The drawing appears to be an intimate portrait of my father in the shower. Above the image is the logo of the Lathrop Insurance Agency of Westerly, Rhode Island, which would put us in Watch Hill for a few weeks in the summer of 1961. I remember nothing of Watch Hill beyond the improbable episode of being bitten by a pelican in some sort of local petting zoo, but the drawing is memorable for the anguish it provoked and significant because my father actually framed it and had it hanging in his bathroom until the day he died. I can no longer remember whether I or my brother drew the portrait. Over the years I've managed to convince myself that my brother did it, but in all probability it was my work, as I was the “artistic” one, even then. 

 

   Some time after we returned to New York that summer this snippet turned up and my father asked which of us had made it. Dad's delivery could often seem a bit forbidding – a trait I admit to having inherited – and a perfectly simple question could easily become fraught with dark implication by its tone alone. Thus, the two of us glanced briefly at one another and I waited, as I always did, for my brother to speak first. Being older and therefor wiser, and given that the image in question focused on my father's crotch, my brother quite appropriately denied having anything to do with it. Sensing trouble and taking my cue from him, I, too, demurred. At this we were led upstairs to my father's study, made to sit side by side on a low, embroidered prayer-bench and told that we would remain there under incessant interrogation until one of us told the truth. This was the incipient moment from which my father developed his theory that the lie superseded the act, a theory we would reject time and time again in ensuing years, opting always for the lie first and the grim truth as a last resort. On this sad afternoon we were steadfast; neither gave an inch as the hours crept by, despite our mother's frequent, sobbing transits through the room an my own wet pants. This ordeal, of course, resolved and, though I've blocked the facts of it, I suspect my brother may have confessed – rightly or wrongly – in order to end the stand-off and proceed to the whipping.

   In my work as a house painter my partners and I are often compelled to move furniture around. I'm rarely shocked anymore by what these maneuvers turn up, but you'd think people might make an effort to inventory their intimacies prior to our arrival in order to avoid that sinking feeling upon realizing they'd left the spicy little devil-suit under the California King. I've come upon at least two of these in my career: one complete with horns, pitch-fork and a label that read “Fredrick's of Hollywood”. Before the computer age brought erotica into every household I'd routinely discover stacks of Playgirl and Penthouse amidst the dust-bunnies and detritus and these discoveries couldn't help but change the way we regarded our clients.

On one occasion, forced to remove the drawers from an impossibly heavy bureau, we discovered each drawer packed with thousands of erotic, Polaroid selfies. So prodigious a cache, in fact, that one was forced not only to reflect on one's own paltry sex-life, but to wonder where on earth these people found the time and energy to create such a massive trove. Perhaps they were only pausing, briefly and breathlessly, to have their apartment painted; although, it must be said, very little painting got done that afternoon.

    

Yesterday Harper cornered a porcupine in the hedgerow along the cove. I was fussing with something on the mower and noticed the dog fixated on a spot in the gorse. I figured it was a tennis ball somehow out of his reach and eventually went over to fetch it for him. There, wedged between bayberry and rugosa and only a few inches from Harper's muzzle was the sleek, salt and pepper back of a young hedgehog. Curled up like that and facing away from Harper, she was about the size of a soccer ball, presenting her back and protecting her tender bits. Grabbing his collar, I dragged the dog back to the house and picked up a shovel, the first thing that came to hand on my way back down the hill. I prodded at the poor thing, not at all sure what I was going to do, what I was capable of doing. She turned in her logy, sleepy way to face me and our eyes met. She had beautifully soft, brown, Beatrix Potter eyes. And there we stood, sharing an intimacy that must only exist between the executioner and the condemned while, from behind me, Suzanne gently intoned, “You're only protecting your dogs. You're only protecting your dogs....”

High Infidelity

 

In the first seasons of “Boardwalk Empire”, my Grandfather, Walter Edge, then a Senator from New Jersey, is often depicted enjoying the attentions of Atlantic City showgirls and strumpets as payment for favors he may or may not have bestowed on Boss Nucky Thompson. In his autobiography, Governor Edge, not surprisingly makes no mention of Boss Thompson or showgirls, although there is some question about receiving a smooch and hair-tousle from Josephine Baker some years later in Paris. 

There's a possibility he was between wives as Prohibition dawned, and, as my Grandmother was some twenty-eight years his junior, we'd like to think he wouldn't have required the company of showgirls, strumpets or other men’s wives. In any event, until modern media brought it to our attention, any indiscretions Governor Edge may have indulged in under the Boardwalk had been kept under wraps.

From the infamous “wide stance” to shenanigans on the Argentinean Appalachian Trail, much has been revealed in recent years concerning the infidelities of our most prominent and powerful politicians. Of course, this has been going on since the dawn of modern politics when Warren Harding was discovered pleasuring Nan Britton in a White House coat closet; we’ve just abandoned any sense of propriety that might have helped protect the likes of Dwight Eisenhower, F D R, Lyndon Johnson and Nelson Rockefeller from the sort of public disgrace and humiliation we've all come to expect and relish from the current crop of miscreants. With our global indulgence in the endless post-mortem of John F. Kennedy’s life, that reticence has gradually unraveled and vanished. Of the many trappings of power and entitlement that flow from these lofty positions, it seems that the compulsion and ability to attract paramours in the total absence of any physically attractive attributes is irresistible. Poor Jimmy Carter got busted just for thinking about it. And then, of course, there's Anthony Weiner, the man who embellished on Jimmy Carter's imaginary infidelity by bringing his own virtual perfidy into the computer age.

    

It was our privilege some years ago to attend a wedding reception at the Governor's Mansion in Princeton hosted by the young and attractive executive couple, Governor and Mrs. James McGreevey. Shaking hands with them over a spot of small talk in the receiving line, one could scarcely imagine the spectacular humiliation awaiting this rising star. There's something even more torrid, salacious and compelling when the protagonist not only switches partners but genders as well. Whereas a high-powered pol might have survived a few affairs back in The Day – boys will be boys, after all - this extra little frisson, the “outing” of the likes of Larry Craig, Mark Foley and McGreevey, pretty well drives a stake through the heart of any old whore-dog’s future. The further to the Right these transgressors are, the closer to the Scriptures they purport to cleave, the more fascinating their infidelities, which shouldn’t surprise us given the behavior of their counterparts in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

   How Bill Clinton not only survived his own blush-worthy humiliation but seems to have risen anew as an elder statesman and possible asset and councilor to the next President may take years to sort out. Why women in power haven’t felt the need to stray and strut their stuff – or at least haven’t been caught at it yet – is also an open question. From Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir to Nancy Pelosi and Michelle Bachman, the possibilities are endless! Maybe having a powerful and entitled woman in the White House will put a temporary end to such philandering, at least at the executive level. It's hard to imagine Hillary buns up kneeling in the coat closet with some young page but, then again, it's just as hard to picture the likes of Warren Harding, Dwight Eisenhower or Lyndon Johnson in there, either!

My Midlife Crisis

 In the early Spring of 1967 my father returned from a business trip to San Francisco sporting a lavender Nehru jacket, wide-stripe, brown on beige elephant bells and improbably pointy, jet-black Beatle-boots. A massive, golden Peace symbol hung from the heavy rope of cheap beads around his neck and what appeared to be ruffled cuffs protruded from his sleeves, accentuating an array of mood rings that might have shamed Liberace. 

 

   Dad had been out west for several weeks helping the State of California set up an Arts Council - a job which necessitated rubbing elbows with artists and entertainers – and had spent an evening at the Fillmore Auditorium in the company of Bill Graham to see Wildflower, an entirely forgotten group of the moment that neither of us had ever heard of. He brought us each a copy of  Wildflower's debut album, which we viewed with contempt and never bothered to play.

   Had my brother and I been aware of the concept of the “midlife crisis”, we might have recognized the onset of this condition and regarded Dad's sudden transformation more charitably, but, to a pair of aspiring hippies itching to let their hair grow over their oxford collars, the old man's new ensemble was ridiculous and vaguely threatening. Even before the Summer of Love we knew there was something in the air and Dad's impending embrace of our nascent culture was simply not acceptable. Nonetheless, an  aura of permissiveness and experimentation accompanied Dad's transformation: he bought a massive wok and took up ethnic cuisine, invited other grown-ups in bell bottoms to parties where they listened to Wildflower and played Twister, and generally ignored my brother and me as we stumbled and poked our way around the periphery of the Age of Aquarius.

   The real crises may have arisen the following year when Dad just as suddenly gave up exotic food and spices – including ginger and soy sauce - because, according to my mother, they reminded him of Hippies. He derided  Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy, the candidates of his Minnesota roots, as “pantywaists” and announced his intention to vote for Richard Nixon. He bought a fifty gallon drum of Paraquat and began spraying. He put Lester Lanin and Percy Faith back on the hi-fi and generally ignored my brother and me as we contemplated marching on Washington and Wall Street.

   Given the date of death for each of my parents – if we go strictly by the numbers here – my own midlife crisis must have occurred in 1992, when I was 37. After years of grim solitude and enforced bachelorhood I quite suddenly met and married my wife, Suzanne, acquiring in one fell swoop an instant family in the form of our daughter, Zinzi and a magnificent two-year-old golden retriever named Ryster. I sold the cream-puff, 1964 Mercury Comet, bought a house and started worrying about a college fund. I created a feeble resume and applied for a job in the admissions department of the Portland School of Art, for which I submitted to an equally feeble and ultimately fruitless interview. We've been married, for better or worse, ever since.

   And that's it. No torrid affairs, no Lamborghini, no walk on the wild side. No cerise Mohawk, nose ring or tiny tattoo. No conversion to Bookmanism or Judaism. No skinny jeans, no beret, not even a spaniel; we've had four more goldens since Ryster. Of course, what with the much touted longevity available through modern medicine, the best may be yet to come and it's remotely possible that I haven't reached mid life yet. I'll try to keep you posted, but I think you'll know it when you see it.....

Bread in The Bone

   My mother was born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth and spent most of her life in a sort of comfortable and casual denial. She displayed little in the way of entitlement or fancy, preferred worn out corduroys and moth-eaten sweaters to haute couture and was happier with the menagerie of orphaned animals in her life than most of the people she may have had to endure over cocktails or caviar. She enjoyed a bohemian education in Greenwich Village and Paris, subsidized by her father, of course, and became a remarkably fine painter despite that privilege.

   My father was born with the frigid, bitter spoon of rust-flecked iron from the shores of Lake Superior in his mouth. He grew through his Depression-era adolescence nurturing an overwhelming ambition to leave Duluth and surround himself with as much of the Main Line, Newport and Watch Hill hoi-polloi as he could possibly muster, the fancier the better. If his first improbable success was getting a full scholarship to Princeton; his crowning achievement was marrying the Governor's daughter.

    To the extent that we become our parents – and most of us reach a point where, despite our best efforts, we accept this as a fait accompli, – then it would be nice to think we absorb not just the bad or tiresome traits of our fathers or mothers but a more moderate stew that might include the sweet stuff as well. By the time the four of us came along, it's safe to say that some of the silver-plate had worn off the spoons in our own mouths, leaving beneath the wooden kitchen spoon, redolent of all the fabulous dishes of Rome and Paris, the gardens, orchards and vineyards of Provence and some pretty good guidance in the examples of our parents on how to go forward.

   While my brother and I hauled rocks out of the fields for twenty-five cents an hour to satisfy some God-forsaken vision of my father's we could not possibly imagine, my mother, followed by a passel of devoted livestock, would wire old bottles over the buds of fruit trees in the hope that the fruit would ripen inside. Dad planted orchards of peaches and pears, Mom pressed cider, made cheese, learned to use a scythe and took up the cello. Dad would eventually turn these fields, through dint of dark rage, Fitzcarraldian determination and back-breaking labor, into fifty or sixty acres of fine vineyard. Mom would cut down the bottles with lush pears inside and fill them with brandy made from a pressure cooker still and vats of sticky, pear mash.

  In the Autumn I'd take a group of friends up from the City to help with the grape harvest. We'd spread out in the rows early Saturday morning armed with snips and bushel baskets, methodically clipping solid, compact, heavy bunches of grapes the size of footballs and lowering them gently into the baskets amid the buzzing of thousands of harmless, drunken fruit wasps. We'd lug the stained and sticky baskets out to the head of the rows where Dad would drive the tractor up and down the lanes collecting them. Most of that variety might be picked by noon and we'd all trudge, exhausted and sore, down to the house for a massive luncheon of ham and quiches and cannelloni and garden salads and trout and cheeses and fresh, french bread and pear tarts and apple pies and gallons and gallons of cider, wine and potent Poire. All grown and raised and baked and fashioned, somehow, by my parents. This was always a mind-blowing experience for my city-mouse friends who, by four o'clock, would be draped over couches and chairs and sunny bits of lawn, full to the brim and fast asleep.

   This morning I made hot sauce out of the cherry and Anaheim peppers from our garden. I could have just gone up the hill and bought some hot sauce - probably better hot sauce -  if I'd really needed hot sauce. Which I don't. I've got a pear tree out there, too, which I keep forgetting to wire up with bottles in the spring because I'm too busy hauling rocks out of the garden or turning the hard, thawing soil in the beds. I've got jugs of raspberry and tarragon vinegars in the cupboard because I am genetically programmed to make these things every year. Somewhere I think I may have that still. I've got a brother who makes cheese, he can't help himself, and all four of us would almost rather cook than eat. In one way or another we have all been pursuing this thing, this stew, this style all our lives and have our parents - for better or worse – to thank for it. God only knows where they found the time for all of this and all of us.

FAT BASTARD

   

My first serious attempt at losing weight came about many years ago as a result of the shock and horror I experienced after sitting for a new passport photo. I had gone to one of those storefront photo places and paid good money for a half dozen shots from which to choose. The best of them looked more like Herve Villachaize than me and that image, still gracing my passport today, has led to more than one uncomfortable encounter with Homeland Security. I'd recently had an annual physical at which I'd been greeted by my comedian-doctor with, “You are one fat bastard!.” This was the same doctor who said, while snapping on the glove just prior to investigating my prostate, “I just want you to know, I ain't your bitch...”, so I paid perhaps less attention to the fat comment than I should have. But the night I spent at the hospital sleep-study for snoring, sitting in a fluorescent lounge watching “Touched By An Angel” with a group of four-hundred-pounders squeezed in to johnnies pretty much did the trick. Too much neck weight, I was told.

 

   Cabbage soup was the current cure and the recipe hadn't changed much since the siege of Stalingrad: simmer shredded cabbage in water to cover until soft. Enjoy. This seemed to work pretty well, particularly as eating nothing at all soon became preferable to another bowl of cabbage soup.  I found myself reading the fine print on the calorie section of everything at the supermarket. In fact, I could spend hours grazing the aisles picking up tasty looking items, reading the labels and putting them down again. I wasn't missing the food so much as the cooking, and this led to experimenting with all the “fake” and fat-free items then beginning to crowd the shelves. I made a cheesecake from fat-free cream cheese, fake sugar, zero-calorie egg product, one of those Keebler, severely reduced graham cracker crusts and a variety of CoolWhip which, according to the label, had nothing whatsoever in it at all. In fairly short order I managed to lose forty or fifty pounds, gave up a few chins and the diet and commenced to fatten up again.

   Here in Maine it's fairly common to round the end-cap of the Entenman's aisle to find oneself up close and personal with a vast expanse of bulging lavender stretch-pant. Endless winters of bad TV, coffee brandy and crock-pot Mac n' Cheese have set the standard for both the male and female form. Whereas a few of us fat bastards continually binge and purge, most of the folks I see waddling around the Shaws or Walmart parking lots seem pretty content and unconcerned with their prodigious girth. The cars and trucks they're squeezing into or being helped out of list to one side after years of unevenly distributed weight, and sport bumper stickers that say “Fat Chicks Have More To Love” and  “I Don't Skinny Dip I Chunky Dunk”.

There seems to be a touch of anti-Government, “Don't Tread On Me” sentiment rolled up in all this as well, a reaction perhaps to Mrs Obama's garden or Mr. Bloomberg's soda ban. Our own powerful Senator Collins has led a tireless and successful campaign to force the Federal School Lunch program to accept and include the potato. Lobster or salmon may have been a better choice.

    I'm pretty much down to my fighting weight these days; been working on it now for a few months with my friend Malcolm. We share carrot sticks and the occasional bag of popcorn for lunch at work. I broke a tooth last week and the abject terror involved in speculating about a remedy for that has worked wonders, too. Tomorrow they are removing that tooth together with a few of its neighbors..... leaving me without much chew. I suspect this will help keep the weight down as the winter months approach and images of comfort food crowd the imagination. I'll be reaching for that coffee brandy, though....

    

SMALL CHANGE

  

 

   My brother and I hit the hustings for the first time in 1961 on behalf of Lefkowitz, Gilhooley and Fino. I was six, my brother eight and we spent hours, maybe days, standing on the corner in front of Daley's Saloon brandishing hand-made signs for the ticket and singing the ubiquitous jingle of the campaign:

How can you miss

With a ticket like this

Lefkowitz, Gilhooley and Fino

You'll be safe in the Park

Anytime after dark

Lefkowitz, Gilhooley and Fino

I supported this trio because my brother said we should and I have no idea why he felt that way. Perhaps it was because of the steady stream of sound-trucks belting out that jingle throughout the City, but I don't remember either of us having any particular ax to grind with Mayor Wagner. Indeed, I am surprised to discover that Lefkowitz was a Republican and I suppose I can no longer claim to have never backed one. For my part, I was happy to do my older brother's bidding and happier still to be standing by the swinging, saloon doors of Daley's, a place of nearly overwhelming mystery, redolent of stale beer, fresh pee and soggy sawdust on the tile floor, just visible through the murky, afternoon bar gloom. After a week of this we tired of campaigning and opted instead for the more immediate satisfaction of preparing hot mustard and Tabasco sandwiches for the neighborhood drunk. It's safe to say we were more astonished by how little effect these had on our victim than Lefkowitz's loss that Fall.

    

    

Around the time of my ninth birthday in the Spring of 1964, the Johnson – Goldwater contest had pretty well wound my entire elementary school up to a fever pitch. The candidates enjoyed a fairly even split among the student body and we busied ourselves with pasting Johnson bumper stickers on our book-bags, trading campaign buttons and arguing vociferously about The Bomb. When Bobby Rayburn made some disparaging comment about Lyndon Johnson's ears or nose one afternoon, I felt compelled to defend the President and a scuffle ensued. A teacher pulled us apart, took us to the gym and forced us into a few rounds of regulated fisticuffs with gloves on. My nose was bloodied and my enthusiasm for campaigning never recovered. Knowing what I know now of Lyndon Johnson, I'm not sure his honor was worth my shedding blood for. Certainly his nose and ears were not.

    

I've never been interested in the slightest in running for office. And, at least since 1964, I've felt no desire to actively campaign for a candidate. I'd like to think that politics wasn't as nasty and deceitful back in the day as it has proven to be of late, but I know that's not true. My grandfather, a self-described Republican progressive Governor, Senator and Ambassador, was far enough to the right to ban the use of the Roosevelt name within his house. My great-Grandfather, a diplomat, enraged over a tiff with his boss, switched parties and campaigned against his own father in the 1896 Presidential campaign. 

   It's hard to imagine that Lefkowitz, Gilhooley and Fino were up to the sort of dirty tricks, bald-faced-lies and misinformation we all take for granted in politics today. Not with that happy, catchy jingle pouring out of every radio. But then again, they lost.