Nancy Rommelmann

My review of James Nestor's wonderful new book, Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, appears in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal. Mr. Nestor is a very brave guide, indeed. How brave? Here's a clip:

While trying to "crack the ocean's mysteries," Mr. Nestor puts in with a group off Réunion who tag bull sharks in order to track and understand their movements. The ragtag crew blasts the German metal band Rammstein to attract the sharks (who also like AC/DC). And he takes a ride in an unlicensed submarine hand-built by a New Jersey prodigy named Karl Stanley and run off the coast of Honduras. There are no liability waivers to sign. "If something bad happened, all passengers, including Stanley (who pilots every dive), would die," writes Mr. Nestor.

Read the review, and buy the book; I think you will love it. 

photo of Hanli Prinsloo

It's been a fabulous month of essays here on the blog, and I thank all the authors. Go re-read them, and buy their books, and mine, too.

We are going to wrap it up with one of the best. Erika Schickel and I met over the printed word, as contributors on the media website LA Observed. We read each other's work for a few years before we became  part of the Bad Girls of LA Lit (that's a teenage Erika in the photo). Her work rides the edge between humor and anxiety, hide and reveal, love and heartbreak. It's a precarious place to write from, but boy, can this girl smoke it. Here she is xx

Ten Cents a Dance

I was a dreamy, romantic child, growing up in Manhattan.  Our family’s record collection was full of soundtrack albums that my film critic father brought home from work.  These records formed the nexus of fantasy and self-esteem.  I spent endless afternoons memorizing show tunes and choreographing elaborate dance sequences.  All I needed was a twirly skirt, maybe a pair of tights on my head to simulate long, flowing braids, and I was the star of my own personal, MGM musical.   My inner world was one of Technicolor excess where people dressed in improbable colors and fans blew chiffon scarves into infinity.   Our couch was Ziegfield stage, a large teddy bear stood in for Gene Kelly and in this world, I was perfectly myself, beautiful, creative and free. 

When I was about eleven I became fixated on a song from movie I had never seen called “Love Me or Leave Me” starring Doris Day.  The song was full of pathos and mystery, and something almost dirty that I almost understood.  It told the story of a lonely, haunted woman working in a dance hall, living for the amusement of rough men -- something that in my film-addled, horny, pre-pubescence, I devoutly aspired to be. I played this song over and over every day for weeks, memorizing it, choreographing sultry moves to it, trying to sing it just like Doris Day:

I work at the Palace ballroom, but gee that palace is cheap
When I get back to my chilly hallroom, I'm much too tired to sleep
I'm one of those lady teachers, a beautiful hostess you know;
One that the palace features, at exactly a dime a throw.

My parents’ bitter divorce when I was twelve launched me into a life of petty theft and heartbreak and I blossomed into a full-fledged fuckup.  My mother needed an enemy, and with my father out of the house, she logically turned to me.  I was happy to oblige, and engaged in some high-risk behavior that eventually got me shipped off to boarding school, then kicked out of boarding school.  At twenty-four I landed in Los Angeles as the lonely, haunted woman I had once dreamed of being.  

Broke, with a degree in English Literature and no job skills, I was combing the back of the LA Weekly classifieds one day, looking for a fast way to come up with rent that wasn’t prostitution, when I came across an ad that screamed “Earn $400-$600 a night as a hostess at Club Flamingo!” 

The club was downtown on 12^th street.  I walked up the wide, creaking staircase of an ancient building to the second floor and asked for the manager.  The bouncer walked me past the dance area.  A mirrored ball sprayed colored dots across a rough, empty floor.  There was a bar area, and a long banquette, where a few bored girls sat, legs crossed, their pumps dangling off their big toes. 

Marty, sat behind a huge, oak desk in an office cluttered with ashtrays, posters and cracked disco balls.  He explained the rules: “No alcohol or drugs, cigarette smoking only on breaks in the designated area.  Single men are not allowed on the dance floor, no leaving the club with customers, no blowjobs, no hand jobs, no grinding.”   He pointed to a closed circuit TV screen next to his desk.  “Every inch of that dance floor is on camera.  If you break any of these rules, I will fire you.  We run a clean joint here.” 

And with that, I became a Taxi Dancer.

Ten cents a dance, that's what they pay me
Gosh how they weigh me down.
Ten cents a dance, dandies and rough guys, tough guys who tear my gown.

Of course, with inflation, it was more like ten bucks a dance.  The house took half and I got the other half, plus tips.  On my first night I took my place on the red vinyl banquette alongside the other dime-a-dance girls – I was the only Caucasian in the lineup.  The dandies and rough guys looked us over from bar tables.  In heels, I was good a foot taller than just about everyone in the club.  I thought that was going to work against me, but it turned out, I spent very little time on the banquet.

My first customer was a stone-faced Hispanic man who followed me out to the dance floor just as “Hello” by Lionel Richie was starting up.  As in Doris Day’s days, taxi dances were timed by songs.  He put his hands on my waist and drew me close.  It felt strange to be held by a stranger.  We did an awkward shuffle, my forearms resting on his shoulders, my hands dangling in the air behind his back, a gesture that connoted a kind of vintage insousiance and got me out of actually touching the man.  I didn’t quite feel like Doris Day, but the night was young.  We didn’t speak, and he didn’t even really look at me.  I could feel his palms sweating through my thin nylon top.  It made me feel cold and clammy.

“Hello” ended and I took him over to the desk to punch out and pay up.  He didn’t tip me anything.  Already I felt I was failing.  What had I done wrong?  How was I fucking this up?    Back in the days of the twirly skirt I had known who I was: a dreamer, a limerick-lover, a joke-teller, a girl with a dead-on Julia Child impression.  But all that had long ago disappeared, and I had learned to live outside of myself, looking to men to tell me who I was.  I had moved west to be a movie star and find myself, instead I found myself draped over an old man with gold teeth at the Club Flamingo who was telling me about his discount auto parts business.  I was as far away from myself as I could possibly get.

Seven to midnight I hear drums, loudly the saxophone blows,
Trumpets are tearing my ear-drums, customers crush my toes.

By the end of the first week I started to get the hang of it.  I danced with a chatty, chunky fellow in a loveless marriage.  He wanted to tell me his whole sorry story, from his Bahamian honeymoon right up to that very evening when he got in his K car and drove in from Bellflower.  He kept me swaying through four songs, sliding his hands up and down my back, stopping just at the top of the crack of my ass.  He was misunderstood, he said, put-upon, a good provider, a man’s man, married to a cold bitch.   I nodded and cooed my sympathy.  When I clocked him out he tipped me ten bucks. 

Back on the banquet I chatted with a girl named Angela who was the only dancer there who would talk to me, the other girls clearly hated me.  “There are two kinds of girls here,” she said,  “respectable girls and Corner Girls.”  She pointed to the far, dark reaches of the ballroom where couples were nearly motionless, but for the subtle, curved, jungle boogie of the dry hump.  “Those girls think they will make more in tips if they let guys take liberties.  But it’s bullshit.  And watch out for the pillar,” she said, pointing to a large, square pillar in the center of the dance floor.  “Guys will try to get you back there because it’s the one area in the ballroom where Marty doesn’t have a camera.”

I danced with a lot of Japanese businessmen who all asked me to remove my high heel shoes, but I towered over them in stocking feet anyway.  I tried to make conversation, but they didn’t have enough English.  They were as far from home as I was, and their loneliness rolled off of them like Tsunamis.  They were silent and polite, and I felt like a big, tacky neon sign in their arms.  The ancient parquet floor of the Flamingo was ragged from years of wear, and the splinters snagged my nylons and lodged in the soles of my feet as we danced.

Sometimes I think, I've found my hero
But it's a queer romance;
All that you need is a ticket,
Come on big boy, ten cents a dance.

I took a bathroom break.  The ladies room was cavernous, with broken sinks that dripped, and soap dispensers filled with powdery Borax.   I was washing my hands when two girls came in, one of them bee-lined for the sink and began furiously yanking out paper towels, dabbing at the front of her mini-dress.  “The guy fucking came on me!  I’ve got jizz on my fucking dress, Mija!”

“Damn Alicia, that’s what you get for being a Corner Girl.”

“Fuck you Yvette, I got kids to feed.”

I went back out to the banquette and was immediately picked out by a slick trick in a shiny suit and pointy shoes.  He asked me questions about myself.  I told him I was a runaway, that my father beat me, that I had three kids and was trying to put myself through school.  He barely listened as he tried to dance me toward the pillar.  I tried to dance us back out into the open.  He danced me right back to the pillar and slid his hand up my shirt.  I let him linger a moment before I pushed his hand away.  He tipped me twenty bucks.

Fighters and sailors and bow-legged tailors
can pay for their tickets & rent me
Butchers and barbers and rats from the harbor
are sweethearts my good luck has sent me.

The cries of anguished, empty men rebounded off my own, hollow heart.  We were the same, wandering around in a world that didn’t really want us.  We were all in limbo there at the Club Flamingo, dancing to bad Top 40 songs, feeling the meter running as we killed time, waiting to punch out.  Three weeks of my life disappeared into the halflight of the Flamingo like cigarette smoke in a turbine. 

The Foot Doctor was a regular at the club.  He rented girls, bought them Cokes and then rubbed their feet for a paid hour.  It was a solid arrangement.  My feet felt like raw hamburger, so I let him go crazy.  He looked at me with soft, wet eyes as he cracked my toe knuckles.  I purred with pleasure.  He told me he was falling in love with me. 

Though I've a chorus of elderly beaus,
stockings are porous with holes at the toes
I'm here till closing time
Dance and be merry it's only a dime.

I let men take greater and greater liberties.  I became a for real Corner Girl, letting customers dance me behind the pillar and grind into me.   In the outside world I knew what I was doing was wrong, but the Flamingo felt like the arena of my confused soul made manifest.  The rules didn’t apply there.  I was sexually and psychically aroused by the power I had over men.  I never made $600 dollars in a night, but I came close.  I would drive home to my chilly hallroom, my purse crammed with small bills, my clothes rank with sweat and Hai Karate.   I would stand in a scalding hot shower at three AM, trying to wash it all off of me, but I couldn’t because it was inside of me

In my fourth week at the Club Flamingo I danced with a polite black gentleman named Bill.  He held me at a respectful distance, not too far, not too close. He spoke in full sentences and asked me about myself.   Because he was the first intelligent person I had met at the club, and because I liked him, I decided to tell him the truth:  I was new to Los Angeles.  I was from New York.  My father was a film critic, my mother a novelist.  I had graduated from an Ivy League university in June.  His eyes bugged out in disbelief.  “What are you doing here?” he asked me. 

“I don’t know,” I told him.

He put me at arm’s length and looked me in the eye.  “The choices you make today will affect the rest of your life.  Choose carefully, Young Lady.”

I drove home that night through the spooky, deserted streets of downtown Los Angeles, and knew I would never return to the Club Flamingo.  The next time I put on stockings and drove downtown, it was during daylight hours to work as an office temp – which was prostitution of another sort.   

It would take me another two decades to understand what Bill meant, and by that time it would be too late.  I made a lot of bad choices based on the bad notion that I was intrinsically bad.  But now I know I wasn’t really bad, I just got swept up by a song and gave myself away.

Sometimes I think, I've found my hero
But it's a queer romance;
All that you need is a ticket.
Come on, come on big boy, ten cents a dance.

Speaking of knowing: B. Frayn Masters is one of those people in Portland that everybody knows, whether as producer and co-host of the storytelling series Back Fence PDX, her writing in McSweeney's, her general all-about-townness. I know her from when we were both judges of a short story contest sponsored by a local jewelry maker, a cool concept and the winners of which we hashed out over beers. Frayn's story below (which originally ran on Airplane Reading) swirls around in the sweet spot that is excitement + anxiety + booze, and is today's Mayday essay.

Is There Something I Should Know?

On a plane back home from Portland, OR, to Burbank, CA, I flopped into my spacious window seat. A few months earlier, through a humor-driven letter pleading with Alaska Airlines customer service to up my miles, I was, in fact, awarded thousands of miles and awarded VIP status. The latter allowing me to upgrade to first class, at no charge.

Sliding my computer into the ample space in front of me, and then rolling on cherry lip-gloss—I pulled out a book. Feeling a wee bit self-satisfied with my false entitlement in the big seats, I ordered red wine from the menu where everything costs nothing.

After opening my book, I looked up and saw the First Class flight attendant bumbling around all aflutter. Tightly embracing an electric guitar case, she shot a self-aware expression at the passenger approaching her. It was an expression of someone who couldn’t believe what was happening was happening, this was her one chance to reveal the perfect expression she’d rehearsed since she was 9, her skin opened its pores like big mouths to suck in every atom of the moment. Her eyes, now tearing, were locked on this person as she motioned broadly to the seat next to mine. To that person I could not yet see she said, “You’re, you’re, right here. I’ll put your guitar in a very special place.” The skin on her arms had now basically grafted to the case, her cheeks flushing in tandem with her frozen grin, exposing the ghost of braces.

“Right. Good. Thank you.” Then. There he was. Incredibly fine, 40-ish, tall, timeless, bespectacled, angular jaw—looking so, so, so, SO very familiar.

I did a quick Nancy Drew. Guitar = band. His age = popular in the ‘80s. His style = pop band. His melting my panties English accent = English. The bedazzled flight attendant = famous with ladies. Nothing.

He ordered red wine—we are so totally alike! His poster-ready face spoke to me. My fear of take-offs vanished.

Not knowing exactly who he was sort of worked to my advantage. Our conversation flowed like whiskey over ice. We talked about music, though I could never get him to spill anything specific enough to help me out. He asked about my writing! We talked about the books we were reading, and that we shared a soft spot for P.G. Wodehouse.

He excused his lyrical self to the lavatory.

Craning my neck to casually look at his area, I saw something, there on his seat; it was imprinted like a shroud…bent to the shape of his squarely muscled bottom. It was his boarding pass. I craned further, while remaining buckled in. The name on it gave me no help. It was so ordinary in contrast to his brilliant presence.  Who. Is. He.

We read, sipped wine, and laughed.

We landed.

Time slowed, my head angling downward, smile: coy. A dash of bangs covering my eye, gushing like the flight attendant—his hand came toward mine, his fingertips graced my right index knuckle—my skin jolted—“It was very enjoyable flying with you this evening.” I have no clue what I said back.

My roommate Krista picked me up outside the airport. Once we merged into traffic I said, “Hey, who’s John Taylor?” Her eyes widened, “From Duran Duran?!?”

Oh shit, of course. “I just sat next to him!!”

Krista slammed on the brakes and slugged my arm, hard. “I can’t fucking believe you sat next to John Taylor and didn’t know who he was, you dumbass!”

We went home. We got out the record player, the posters, and the records. We turned 13 for the rest of the night.

Back in 1997, Buzz magazine contributors attended a monthly luncheon at Maple Drive in Beverly Hills. We may not have been glamorous in our day-to-day lives, but for this we dressed, we chatted, we ate shrimp salad. One afternoon, a young man was seated on my right. His thick Russian accent was surpassed by his very thick black-brown hair, a vertitable plank of hair. I asked him what he did for the magazine.

"Caricaturist," Roman Genn said, to which I said, oh, my stepfather is David Levine, the longtime caricaturist for The New York Review of Books, whereupon Roman -- who denies he did this but I am telling you, he did -- dropped to his knees in front of my chair and said, "What? What did you say? What?" And then there was a burble of how he'd been looking at and studying Levine since he was young, that my stepfather was a master, the best, and I said, yes, yes, you should meet him.

Meet they did, and hang out many times. Roman would call my mom and Dave's apartment in New York, saying, "Hello, hello, it's KGB!" at which my mom would shout, "Dave, it's Roman!"

Roman and I have stayed steadfast friends for more than 15 years. He was at my wedding party; he was one of the first people to take note that David, so very sadly due to macular degeneration, could no longer draw. And still he visited, until Dave died in 2009. Whenever Roman contacts me, he asks, "How's Mom?"

So there's the friendship, but there has also been watching this talented, talented man grow and grow in his talents, the lacerating caricatures he draws for the National Review and other publications, the oil paintings of public figures. I know Dave (who was not easy to  impress) would have admired them, including the one of Churchill below, illustrating the quote, "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

When I moved from LA to Portland in 2004 I knew one journalist who lived here, if only by name. "You should meet Michael Totten," my buddy Matt Welch told me. "He's blogging some cool shit about Iraq."

Michael was, as well as writing an outstanding piece on Libya for the LA Weekly. He did not know any journos in Portland because the market here would not pay him for his work, and so when we met, it was with a clear and mutual thirst for a colleague determined to write serious journalism, to further succeed doing so.

And boy, has he, putting out three nonfiction books in as many years, and now, turning to fiction. As I quoted Michael in a short interview that recently ran in a local magazine, "I've always wanted to write about the end of the world, and now I have."

An Excerpt from Resurrection: A Zombie Novel

Parker had been married once. Met his future wife at a trendy café named Spinoza’s in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. It was the kind of place Parker always hated, not only because he didn’t fit in there but because it attracted the kinds of people he wished never colonized his neighborhood to begin with—the young, the hip, the beautiful, and the moneyed. Ballard used to be an honest and slightly gritty place for men who worked the docks, the ship locks, and who made things with their hands. It was never intended for soft people who lived in undeserved luxury and made boatloads of cash clicking away on their laptops.

The only reason he went into Spinoza’s that day at all was because he needed the bathroom. But when he saw a young woman sitting there by herself with her newspaper and a latte, he couldn’t help himself. He decided to order one too and see if he could gin up the nerve to take the empty table next to her.

There was something about her, though he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Not even after they married could he figure out what it was. She was attractive, sure, but not the most attractive he’d ever seen. She seemed friendly and approachable enough, though he had no idea why he would think that since she was just sitting there reading the paper. There was just something … gravitational about her, like she’d been engineered just for him.

He ordered awkwardly at the counter. He’d never had a latte, a cappuccino, or an Americano. He didn’t even know what they were. But he couldn’t just say “I’ll have a coffee.” They didn’t have regular coffee in those kinds of places.

The pretty woman with the newspaper sat far enough from the counter that she couldn’t hear him fumble his order, and thank heaven for that or he wouldn’t have sat next to her. She looked so peaceful and content, so at ease in the world as she flipped strands of her brown hair over her ear.

He didn’t intend to hit on her or ask her out for a date. He just wanted to enjoy the pleasure of her attention even if it only lasted a couple of seconds.

She sat by herself at a table for two. He sat next to her at another table for two and placed his drink in front of him. It looked like a dessert. He expected it to taste like one too, like a coffee meringue pie or something. Normally he drank plain old coffee, black, but the creamy and bitter whipped goodness in his mug, despite being foofy and gay, was outstanding. Wow, he thought. This exists?

“This coffee is extraordinary,” he said.

“Isn’t it?” the woman next to him said. The corners of her eyes crinkled up when she smiled over her mug.

God, Parker thought. I love this woman. He didn’t know why. He just did.

Her name was Holly and she was a regular at Spinoza’s. She had gone to school with the café owners. He told her he was new to fancy coffee and she seemed delighted to explain all the options.

They were so very different, but they were married in less than a year.

He built cabinets for a living. She worked in an office downtown as a paralegal. His friends were working class. Hers were professional. He loved the outdoors. She enjoyed fancy meals out. He drank beer. She liked red wine. Once in a while he embarrassed her when they went out with her friends, and he knew he seemed a little rough around the edges in mixed company, but she loved him and he couldn’t imagine living without her. She had a soft and gentle soul and seemed to appreciate his brusque masculine qualities—she was genetically hard-wired to do so, after all—until one day he hit her.

He didn’t mean to. Really, he didn’t. It just happened. They were arguing about money, which was a stupid because they both made plenty. He wanted a motorcycle and could afford it. She wanted to spend the money on granite kitchen counters instead.

She might have talked him into it, too, but instead she said she was tired of being a slave to his lower-class lifestyle.

He’d never hit anybody before. He looked like the type of guy who had been in a couple of fights, but he hadn’t.

He didn’t hit her too hard. It was really more like a slap. He didn’t strike her with a closed fist, didn’t break any bones, didn’t make her bleed, didn’t even leave a mark that lasted more than five minutes. But he did strike her cheek, and he’d never forget the sound or the look on her face when he did it.

Her entire life shattered in one instant.

She’d never forgive him, not in her heart, and he knew it.

He could not have been sorrier. That slap hurt him more than it hurt her. It sounded ludicrous when he said so, and she screamed that it was the most outrageous thing she ever heard, but it was true. It changed him as a person. It sentenced him to be a different kind of man for the rest of his life, the kind of man who hit women. A domestic abuser. A wife-beater. He never did it again, nor would he ever—no, really, he wouldn’t—but he would spend the rest of his days as a man who had once smacked a woman.

 Eventually she could look at him again, and a little while later she could talk to him again, and eventually she even had sex with him one last time, but it ended in tears, and at that moment he knew it was over. She never slept with him again. Never even hugged him again. She left a few months later and said she was sorry but she wouldn’t be back. She cried when she left and she even said that she’d miss him, but she was true to her word. She never came back.

That was two years ago. Parker thought about her every day since. After the plague swept the world, he worried about her so hard he vomited.

What happened to her? Was she alive? Did she get bitten? Was a distorted version of her out there somewhere, diseased and warped beyond recognition? What would he do if she came at him on the street baring her teeth? Would he shoot her? Would he smash in her skull with a crowbar?

Would he smash in her face if he had to?

Buy the book, Resurrection: A Zombie Novel

Several years ago I was having dinner with a former editor, a man a few years older than I.

"Don't you hate going to dinner parties these days," he said, "where everyone is over 50 and just wants to go to bed early?"

I myself love going to bed early, but anyway, I had to tell him I did not know about these dinner parties, as many of the people I knew and hung out with were in their 20s and 30s, an effect of having a then-21 year-old daughter, and a husband whose business employs mostly young people, young people who sometimes become friends.

Natalie Briggs is one of these people. I adored her when she worked for Ristretto, where we bonded over books and pastry; I know very few people who can simply look at a scone and tell you why it is worth eating, or more often, why it's not, and deconstruct the reasons why. One might apply the same forensics to writing.

Several months ago, I saw Natalie read her poetry and was struck with a thought I would like to have more often, that here was the real thing. 

I Hope They Coming Crashing Down Into Our Bed

Our skylight shattered in the storm, the footsteps of men on the roof, and the downstairs neighbor is singing, his song coming through the floor, inside the bareness of my feet. So one fear defeats another, the moving now knows to never grieve and today I have been speaking from my dreams. A thick tornado has buried me sand. There are few who get to die this way, by storm, but the grey-yellow clouds are the same color as your teeth. It is me who is maybe a little bit insane, but it is your mouth in the sky.

Five years ago today, two children were found in the Willamette River. Eldon Smith, age four, had drowned. His seven year-old sister Trinity had screamed for help for 40 minutes and was rescued by a couple living along the river. Their mother, Amanda Stott-Smith, was arrested for forcing her children off the bridge. She was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison before the possibility of parole.

I started writing about Amanda and the children and those impacted by this incident -- the family, the friends, the cops, the lawyers, the cops, the community at large -- the day after it occurred. There were people close to the situation that did not want me to do this; many others, including members of Amanda and her ex-husband's families, felt quite the opposite, wanting to tell me what they knew, of the years of deception and double lives leading up to the crime. Hearing the sentencing judge pronounce, “No one will ever understand how this happened” and reading editorials that espoused some version of, “No one could ever have seen this coming,” had left them troubled, even angry. They troubled me, too, as they did not answer the question of what drove Amanda to the bridge that night, a question I set out to find answers to, and did find.

I have put the book to the side several times to publish other books, or because I could not figure out how to tell the story. The manuscript is currently 300-pages long. I expect To the Bridge to be done within the year. Below is chapter 2. It was May 29, 2009, when we all, or nearly all, knew little to nothing about how what happened, happened, and were looking for answers.

To the Bridge

I went to the Sellwood Bridge three days after the arraignment. I told my husband I was going to buy watermelons, but instead I drove to the bridge. I had to see where Amanda took her children and, so far as we knew, threw them over.

The Willamette River cuts Portland in half, east from west. Ten bridges span the river within city limits, the Sellwood Bridge being the southernmost. To get to this bridge from the east side, you drive east on Tacoma Boulevard, past one-story homes with fenceless front yards and then, lest you wind up going over the bridge, you turn north. The closest cross street is Sixth. I parked on Sixth across from Riverside Corral, an old sailors’ bar-turned-strip club, and wondered if Amanda had, too.

I walked the long block to the bridge’s walkway and saw the sort of memorial that is spontaneously set up for children who have died in public: stuffed bunnies and teddy bears, one Mylar balloon that read, “We’ll miss you,” and a white board onto which people had written their good-byes and God blesses. Some of the writing was in children’s large wobbly script (“To the bravest girl in the world! We are sorry to hear about your brother”). Tucked amongst the wilted bouquets were notes, including one in a little girl’s loopy handwriting that read, “I hope your new birthday life goes well.”

I continued onto the bridge, my goal being the highest point in the span. The walkway was maybe three feet across. Approaching cyclists must and do ring their bells; people cannot easily pass one another. The bridge has one traffic lane in each direction. There is no sidewalk on the south side. If Amanda walked her children onto the Sellwood Bridge, then she walked where I was walking.

As I continued along the bridge that Friday, I thought, maybe Amanda did not park and walk. Maybe she stopped the car on the roadway. This seemed unlikely. Had she stopped the car, she would have caused other cars to jam up behind her, and been seen by cars coming from the other direction. Even on a dark night on the poorly lit bridge, someone would have seen her taking children from the car and thought, what the hell? I did not think she could have taken that chance.

The next time you are out, or perhaps you can do this in your own living room, look at the size of four- and seven-year-old children. They are small. You can lift them from beneath their arms and pass them over a waist-high rail with little trouble. Two would be more trouble, especially if they were kicking and screaming. They would have been dead weight had she taken them warm and sleeping from the car.

But I did not think the children were sleeping, because I did not think Amanda could have parked on the roadway, gotten them out, thrown them over, and sped off without being seen. It was too busy and too tight a roadway. I was not even taking into consideration that she might pause for a moment after dropping one child, then another over the rail and into the river seventy-five feet below.

Did she look down? Did she see them in the water? She would have heard them, not merely because we know the girl, at least the girl, was screaming for help, but because a mother, whether she wants to or not, recognizes her child’s cry. I had this happen in a hospital full of squalling newborns. Under doctor’s orders to walk, I was on the other side of the maternity ward when I heard crying and knew it was my baby and, as fast as the stitches allowed, got to my room to see she had been brought there, where she waited, screaming for me.

I had no idea how long Amanda waited on the bridge after she threw her children, or if she waited at all. If she parked her car on the roadway, she could not have waited. She would have to have gotten back in the car and driven off.

I did not think she parked on the bridge. I think she walked the children onto the bridge. Is it possible she made a game of the walk? This seemed an unlikely scenario; that she had the largeness or smallness of heart to tell her children, we’re going to play a game. One does not want to see the children skipping, at one in the morning, along that narrow walkway. Though one is inclined to think, there would be no skipping. It is scary enough in the daytime, for an adult, to walk here, feeling the velocity of the passing cars, your waist brushing the too-low rail. It is too easy to imagine going over that rail. Even when you know you have no intention of going over. Looking at the water below, I experienced the heat flash you get on the backs of your thighs when you look down from a great height.

It’s unlikely the children experienced this. It was dark. It was late, past most young children’s bedtime. Their adrenaline would have been pumping for other reasons: How mad was mommy? What was happening? They were too small to see over the railing, to see how far down the water was. What could they know of their fate? Being thrown off a bridge in the middle of the night was out of the purview of what seven- and four-year olds need to know.

I was having a difficult time thinking their mother told them what she was going to do. But I had read the following, and it made me unhappy to know it:

“A massive search was launched about 1:20 a.m. when 9-1-1 calls started coming in from people who heard the screams of children and an adult woman coming from the river.”

Where were they when Amanda was yelling? Did she make the children stand with their backs against the concrete railing, with its church window-shaped cutouts? It is possible the boy was small enough to crawl through one of these cutouts. Certainly, neither of the children stood as high as the rail. They may have stood with their backs to the rail, the breeze of passing cars pushing them against it. They must have been extremely frightened: What were they doing here, with cars passing by, perhaps honking? Perhaps their mother had to wave cars on, to say, “We’re okay, we’re fine,” and the children would have thought, are we?

I did not know if Amanda was ranting or silent. I thought the latter would be scarier to a child. Perhaps she was in a mood so bad, a mood the children could not hope to navigate; that all was chaos. Perhaps she told them what she was going to do. Perhaps she made them stand together atop the rail and told them to hold hands. Maybe she told them, they had to do this. While it seems heartless to inflict the information on them, I preferred this to seeing them tossed in their sleep. This way, they knew their fate, impossible as it was, and in the case of Trinity, were somehow able to gird for it.

Eldon had no chance. How, at four years old, in a moving river, in the middle of the night, do you survive? You don’t. You take in some water, and you take in more. I imagine his sister would have been holding on to him. We know she did, at least part of the time, because they were found next to each other in the river.

I imagined everyone who heard about the children wished they could have helped; that we could all line up on the bank of the river in the middle of the night and each offer Eldon one more breath. He had only his sister in the water with him. She did the best she could. She screamed. She yelled.

And where was their mother? Can we imagine her standing on the bridge, watching her children drift north, wondering when they would stop crying? Was she afraid someone would hear her children? Was that what got her back in her car and gone fast, the fear of capture being broadcast with each of her daughter’s screams?

Or did she sleepwalk back to her car? Or did she run? Was she crying? Was she yelling? Was she white and cold? Did she feel victorious? Was her heart pounding? Did she turn around? Did she shout the children’s names? Did she almost call over the railing, “You’ll be okay, swim! Swim!” It was a clear still night, a windless night, the only reason, David Haag said, that he was able to hear the girl’s screams. As I am sure her mother did.

Only two living people knew what happened on the bridge that night: Trinity, who had been released from the hospital in good physical condition and interviewed by detectives, and Amanda. No witnesses had come forward; so far, there was no one to claim they had seen anything, on or off the bridge, until the children were found in the water.

On this Friday on the bridge—the day Trinity was released from the hospital, two days before her brother’s funeral—the weather was glorious. There were barely ripples on the Willamette; the air was soft; the trees on the west bank were in full leaf. The landscape was indifferent to what had happened six days before.

As I stood at mid-span, beside a second smaller memorial of bouquets tied to a lamppost, a motorboat passed underneath. It slowed, the driver turning back to look up at the bridge. He looked up for a long time. Perhaps he was thinking; that’s a long way for two little kids to fall. He was also looking at me, wondering, perhaps, whether I was part of this story. 

I did not meet Annabelle Gurwitch until we found ourselves on the same stage, or rather the same back porch at Sandra Tsing Loh's house, for the first annual Bad Girls of LA Lit. Annabelle was smart and sly and stylish and adorable, as she had been since I'd first seen her on TV, as co-host of Dinner and a Movie:

Yes, that Annabelle, so hot, so funny. You want to know how hot and how funny? She's managed to make a book on menopause funny and a bestseller, I SEE YOU MADE AN EFFORT: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50, the book has been featured on every station and in every paper, Annabelle has made it a triumph, look at what a triumph on Bill Maher! Seriously, watch that clip ("My bedroom is a minefield of erection killers" - haw!) and try not to fall in love, I dare you. I adore her, that's you, Annabelle.

The Scent of Petty Theft (originally excerpted in Los Angeles Magazine) 

The rich are different than you and me. Fitzgerald’s line repeats in my head as I pull my dusty Prius into the driveway at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It has been years since I have been a guest in such an opulent setting, but I am neither intimidated nor overly impressed, because I am as comfortable at my corner burrito stand as I am in a five-star hotel. I have transcended class. I am an artist.

This is the narrative I have crafted for myself since I was nineteen and flat broke in New York City.  I didn’t see it then, but it was my youth, a certain amount of beauty, style really, and the promise of a big career that allowed me to travel between classes. This combination can give you an all-access pass to the enclaves of the wealthy, but there is a time limit. There’s a grace period you’re allotted when the future is ahead of you, before people in your industry start saying things like, I’m so impressed with all the ways you stay creative, which translates to, It’s astounding that your body hasn’t been found decomposing in a flea-bag motel in the high desert. I am not becoming anything anymore.  That’s the kind of thudding honesty that occurs at fifty and it’s that kind of thing that can lead to petty theft.

I’ve arrived to discuss my duties at a charity event being held at the hotel that evening [NB: This is the same venue where Julia Roberts hooked her way into Richard Gere’s heart in Pretty Woman.]

Monica, the catering manager, who I’m introduced to, is professionally attractive in the way that every woman working here today is. Tall, in good shape, but not so beautiful that she takes up space in your head, We sit down in a cozy alcove on a silk damask settee and I sip what is probably the most expensive latte I have ever ordered. How do I know that? The price is written in Arabic.  We’re discussing the event, but I’m distracted, maybe it’s because I’m shivering. It’s as cold as a meat locker. Glancing around, I see that I am surrounded by expensively maintained skin, capped teeth, and two sure signs of wealth: women with hair so blond and so immovable it can only be described as starched and, though we are nowhere near a body of water, 75% of the gentlemen present wear nautically themed jackets, brass buttons polished to perfection.

And I am gripped by a sense of dread that this might be the last time I will be invited into a place where even the air smells expensive.

It turns out that hotels have started pumping fragrances through their air vents to aromatically enforce their brand.  The Beverly Wilshire’s aroma, Purple Water, has been designed to reach into your reptilian brain and mimic the smell of old money.  It has notes of leather, cigars, and cooked peas.  If an odor had corporeal form, Purple Water would be wearing an ascot. [The W Hotel chain, with its hipster appeal, uses a micromist diffusion system to infuse the atmosphere with a scent that’s uniquely calculated to encourage the spending of lots of dough. W’s scent, named “Bling,” calls up champagne, stainless steel and sex. Perhaps they harvested wrist sweat from Sean “P. Diddy” Combs during a VIP event and worked from there.]

The hotel’s Purple Water works its magic on me and I hear myself announcing that I’m going to be so tired after the event, I will need to need to stay overnight. The event planner actually agrees to this and after lunch I head up to my suite.

 My hotel room is well appointed and maintained in a way that my home, built in 1932, will never be with its corners that don’t meet exactly.

 There are no watermarks on the suite’s tables, no cats have sharpened their claws on the upholstery, and the walls bear no children’s handprints or bicycle skid marks. In fact, the paint looks so fresh I have to touch it to determine it’s not still damp.

 It also has a feature I always think of as the true sign of luxury: a heavy door separating the toilet from the rest of the facilities. It’s like Vegas: what happens there stays in there. 

 I open a bottle of Asprey hair conditioner in the bathroom and inhale deeply. I proceed to stuff every single bath product into my purse and call down for more. I took home rolls of toilet papers from the nightclubs where I worked in the 1980s, yellow legal pads from the offices I worked in the 1990s and there was also that time I was sent to audition for the director John Hughes at a hotel in New York. I sat with another actress, who I assessed as so plain I was genuinely saddened that she’d never work in film or television, though I’d greatly admired her stage work. That actress was Cynthia Nixon.  Afterwards, John candidly admitted to not seeing me in the role, I thanked him and on my way out stopped to use his bathroom.  I stole every amenity in plain sight and a few more from the housekeepers cart in the hallway. I couldn’t stop myself then and I can’t stop myself now.

A card on the marble bathroom vanity reminds me that guests are invited to go to the spa, so I have to take them up on that as well. Who am I to turn down the invitation? 

The spa changing area is paneled in dark mahogany, the lighting indirect and muted and there are no windows. It’s like a tomb, a bomb shelter, or the inside of a bank vault.

There are cut orchids everywhere. There’s even one in the pocket of the spa robe.

And an attendant appears and inquires whether I am experienced. Is he making a Jim Morrison reference? No, he means, have I tried The Experience Shower. It would just be impolite to refuse. I push the first of three buttons in front of me. This one is labeled Atlantic Swell.  Streams of water lash my back; the pressure varies and moves from side to side like I’m being tossed in the middle of the ocean. I startle and turn when I feel someone’s hand tapping me hard on the shoulder, but no one is there. It’s The Experience Shower’s many nozzles ratcheting up the pressure. I must be farther off shore now, as I’m drenched by torrents of hard rain. I begin to feel seasick.  I saw The Perfect Storm. This might not end well! The lights in the shower area move from yellow to green to purple.   Was the person who designed this on acid or in the employ of the C.I.A.?  It was like The Experience Shower was trying to get information from me. I switch to Caribbean Rain. It’s a gentle sprinkle, falling softly, but it soon becomes chilly so I try the mist setting. A slow swirl of cool mist envelopes me. 

When I emerge fully Experienced, I check the full-length mirror to see if I’ve sustained any bruising, but I am intact. Pulling on my robe, I again think of that line—the rich are different than you and me—and then I remember the rest of the sentence-- and we will know them by their showers. No, that can’t be right. I know that, but my brain got jangled during the monsoon and it seems true. In less than five minutes, I’ve been drenched with enough water for several large families to cook and bathe for a week. How, I wonder, will I ever go back to my state mandated low flow shower head with its 2.5 gallon per minute limit?

I know I can’t stay in the spa all evening. I do have a job to do after all, so I head upstairs, change into my clothes and proceed down to the ballroom. It would be too tedious to explain my duties, but they involve two and a half hours of facilitating a panel about the preservation of wetlands that includes an elderly philanthropist, a noted film producer and an American alligator. One of them urinated on my lap during a spirited moment. After the show, I see that mistress of efficiency, blandiful Monica, and ask her to point me in the direction of a bathroom. She says there is one I can use just down the hall. I follow a hallway that narrows until I’m practically brushing past the walls.  The lighting starts to look different, dimmer, and even the paint looks less lustrous. The hallway ends in a stairway lit by a single naked light bulb. Where am I going, Anne Frank’s bathroom? I open the door at the top of the stairs. It’s a restroom. There’s a row of individual stalls separated by dented metal dividers and an industrial soap dispenser with a greasy pinkish film coating the pumping mechanism. Water drips into a rust-stained cracked sink, and rough, brown paper towels are stacked haphazardly in a pile on the windowsill. It’s simply outrageous.  Where’s my bathroom with the heavy door? Where are my products? It doesn’t smell like any kind of money here, old or new. She’s sent me to the bathroom for The Help. I am not The Help. I am a guest. I turn, march down the stairs, run out of that hallway and search until I find a hotel guest bathroom.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I would like to say I was kept awake horrified by my own self-involved, entitled, elitist behavior, but that would not be accurate. After dousing myself with more Asprey Purple Water, I lay awake because the pillow had my initials monogrammed into them. That’s something I am still a little confused about. Do they keep stacks of initialed linens?  Surely there must be an algorithm that predicts the frequency of combinations otherwise the linen closet would be immeasurably vast? Was my head resting on the same pillow used by Alan Greenspan? Do they remove the embroidery after you check out or was I expected to take the pillowcases home? It was truly vexing. Plus, I didn’t want to waste one minute of how pleasurable the bedding felt by sleeping.

In the morning, I head back across town where the air is hotter, the streets are dirtier, where a sticky cough drop and half an Ativan can be found in my bathrobe pockets.

Buy, I SEE YOU MADE AN EFFORT: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival from the Edge of 50, here

I have known Amy Alkon since the mid-1990s. I was sitting at the Farmer's Market with Cathy Seipp, waiting for others to arrive at the every-season-or-so writer girls breakfast Cathy used to call us to, and up walked two very tall, very glamorous women. One was Monica Corcoran, now editor-in-chief of Capitol Couture. She was wearing a sailor-stripe top and twill trousers, very chic. The other was in a floor-length mermaid-sheath of a dress, heels that made her six feet tall, powder-white skin and red red lips.

"Hi! I'm Amy!" she said, and extended her hand, which I recall as being gloved to the elbow, though I know this could not have been the case at ten in the morning, it is simply the spell Amy casts, the perfect manners, the ring of her voice, the laughter, the conviction to speak her mind, to--as I have learned as we've celebrated books and marriage and linked arms when Cathy was dying--to stand alongside, to have your back.

Also, to tell you when you're being a jerk--and how and why not to be. Amy writes the funny, wry, science-based, long-running syndicated column, The Advice Goddess (from which the below Q & A is culled). She also hosts the weekly Advice Goddess Radio, blogs copiously, and is the author of 2009's, I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners int impolite society, and the upcoming Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck,  out in June but available now for pre-order. 

Save the Wails

Are guys scared of politically active women? My boyfriend of two months just broke up with me over my support for animal rights, and I’ve generally had difficulty keeping boyfriends because of this. This boyfriend was bothered by two incidents. In the first, I got into an argument about zoos with one of his friends at a party. Another time, we were driving alongside a car with a pro-hunting bumper sticker, and I rolled down my window and shouted something to the driver. I’m trying to do good -- protect creatures without a voice. Does that mean I don’t deserve a boyfriend?

--Yes, I Stand For Something

Men tend to like it when a woman screams passionately, but it’s less sexy if what she’s screaming is “McDonald’s is murder!”

But, wait -- you’re trying to do some good; don’t you “deserve” a boyfriend? You, like the rest of us, deserve not to be run over by a truck. The Declaration of Independence also spells out that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” stuff we’re all supposed to get. That’s right; you have a right to chase happiness. It doesn’t get delivered to your door. (“Sign here, please.”) And the reality is, every requirement you have for a boyfriend and every, well, nonstandard practice you have (like Wicca, being a serious Civil War re-enactor, or a hobby of throwing fake blood on people in fur) narrows your options. The size of a person’s dating pool is determined by their level of hotitude factored with how hard they are to be around. (An annoying 9 might still have many romantic opportunities, though with limited staying power.) 

And just a guess, but for at least some of these guys who dumped you, maybe the problem wasn’t so much your support of animal rights as it was your lack of boundaries in expressing it. Even a guy who’s with you in principle on sticking up for Bambi and the lab rats might not be comfortable with your transforming every social gathering into an animal rights protest rally. Also, consider that there’s a difference between speaking your mind and yelling it out the window at someone who has announced in writing on their vehicle that they are likely armed.

In other words, you can refuse to ever bend your principles, or you can have a man in your life. This isn’t to say you have to start wearing snow leopard legwarmers and eating baby seal McNuggets; you probably just need to divide the world into political and social forums. Social forums would be reserved for pleasant cocktail party conversation -- even if a guy is gnawing meat off a skewer and you long more than anything to stick him in the eye with it and say, “See how you like it!”

When you start dating somebody new, ask him what his comfort zone is regarding your activism, and either respect the boundaries he needs or be honest if you can’t or won’t. If you come to see a relationship as a party of two, each of whose needs matter, there’s a good chance you’ll find a guy who’ll at least be there to bail you out of jail -- maybe for years to come -- until you two finally retire to the country to run a lentil rescue. (Some say they scream when you drop ‘em in boiling water.)

Buy Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck here

Where do I start with Mark Ebner? I knew him only a little when I lived in Hollywood; I better knew the late Andrew Breitbart, with whom Mark wrote the "nasty but truthful polemic" (as Andrew inscribed it to me) Hollywood, Interrupted. That book published in 2004, the year I left Los Angeles, and that might have been that, in terms of knowing Ebner, but no. My little tiny novel The Bad Mother publishes in 2011, and who comes roaring to the front to help, but Ebner.

"Roll that log, baby," he told me, and then helped me roll it, and has ever since with every new work; he is a champion, a sweetheart, he makes a gal feel like a gal, he shows up at the parties. For all the trash people talk about Facebook, I am grateful for it, and Ebner's one of the reasons. And he's a fantastic storyteller, right in your face, right now, now!  Buy his books, you will eat them like candy x

Flori-duh, excerpted from the new true crime book Poison Candy by Elizabeth Parker and Mark Ebner

There’s a reason they call it Florida. 

Discovered in 1513 by the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, the patron saint of plastic surgery and perpetual youth, who allegedly came there seeking its fabled rejuvenating waters, it was christened “La Florida” or “Flowery Land” for its exotic vegetation and boundless verdure.  And yet, today it represents a narrow corridor between the people of North America, drawn to its warmth and facile money – the newly wed and the nearly dead – and the people of Central and South America, coveting unlimited opportunity or safe harbor – seeds and spores blown on a wild wind.  The cultural collision that occurs along this unintended isthmus produces a strain of humanity that can best be described as florid – an exotic mélange of hothouse flowers and preening psychopaths and gold-plated warriors and vulgarians of every stripe, channeled into a giant cocktail shaker and agitated to a high froth.  Criminals and visionaries who appear interchangeable.  Beauty for the harvesting.  Human orchids.

Those who set out to tell its tales are often accused of hyperbole, gilding the lily to marshal its perfumes and colors and violent sensations for dramatic effect.  But really, we’re stenographers at best.  No one could improve on the rich cast of characters routinely on public display -- especially in the crime blotters and the tabloid record. 

That’s certainly the case in the sinuous public saga of Dalia Dippolito, a dusky immigrant beauty whose Egyptian Muslim father and Peruvian Catholic mother settled in the mecca of South Florida to provide their children the best chance at a bright future.  Dalia took that chance and gambled it as high as the table stakes would go: Becoming an escort by at least age 18, parlaying those skills into work as a part-time madam and sharpening her talons for the first easy score and willing flesh she could sink them into.

That score came along in 2009, when she was 28, in the form of Mike Dippolito, a good-natured, hapless ex-con with a war chest of cash and a nagging weakness for cocaine and call girls, both of which had been a problem for him in the past.  In a six-month span, she moved in, convinced him to divorce his wife, married him, got her name on the deed to his townhouse, embezzled his money (again and again and again, in breathtaking ways), worked overtime with a small army of abettors to get his probation revoked, gaslighted him into believing that hoods and gangsters were out to get him, messed with his mind, faked being pregnant – and when all of that couldn’t get her what she needed from him, paid someone to have him killed.

I was the lead Prosecutor in that case, and I ultimately secured a conviction in the two-week trial in West Palm Beach -- one week on, one week off while the Judge attended to other business, and another week to complete testimony.  In the nearly two years beforehand, I was in a privileged position to observe all of the players in sometimes painful detail, who together were the envy of any pulp novel:

There was the designated victim and my lead witness, a South Philly hustler and would-be bruiser with a soft creamy center, like Rocky Balboa with tribal tattoos, able to attend his own would-be funeral, like Tom Sawyer, due to the unlikely intervention of a shady character with criminal connections. 

That Good Samaritan, a West Bank-born gun-toting baller and professional card counter with a would-be check-cashing/convenience store empire – not a terrorist, but he played one on television – only intervened when he finally realized his sex-for-barter good-time girl was just crazy enough to dispatch her husband and leave him the designated fall guy.

Her other other boyfriend, a bicoastal mall contractor living in New York and clueless patsy who enabled her endless scams in order to hasten their own promised life together.  Somehow, he didn’t get the memo on women who kill and the men who volunteer as their victims.

The stone killer from the notorious local Buck Wild Gang who similarly saw this tiny spitfire as a loose cannon and liability and severed his business relations with her, only to be convicted on gun charges in a racketeering trial in the next courtroom over.

The calls-‘em-as-he-sees-‘em Brooklyn-born career cop who criticized his superiors’ decision to put trial evidence on the Internet and allow a Cops crew to tag along, who wound up as human ballast when his run-ins with Internal Affairs provided a pretext for the inevitable appeal.  

The respected defense counsel who failed to recognize the crucial distinction between a lion tamer and lunch. 

And that’s before we even get to the fake Haitian hitman.

I had a full plate to deal with.

Buy Poison Candy here

I met Leah Umansky last summer, when she flew from New York to read from her book, Domestic Uncertainties, at a series of poetry events on the West Coast, including one at Ristretto Roasters.

"Hello!" Leah said, sweeping through the door, a downright sexy blonde, smiling smiling, heels clicking, twenty people trailing behind her, and right behind them handsome smiling Luke B. Goebel, Leah's friend who'd read with her, who'd arrived in the RV he was traveling in, and behind him, twenty more smiling people, the room was buzzing in a way I'd never heard, and here was Dena Rash Guzman, a Portland poet and friend of Leah's, and might she read, too?

I am forgetting what order they read in, but not, never, that each hit the ball so far out of the park that part of me feared the next must comparatively ground it, but no, that ball just kept going, it was breathtaking, adrenaline-making, everyone filling with a giddiness that burst once the readings ended, we all went on talking and laughing, and I thought, if this were what literary readings were like, I'd go every night, I'd be an addict, and also, that this was all Leah's doing, that she brings it with her.

The following is from Leah's new chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream.

Don Discovered America

That’s not true: America made Don.  It plucked him from the heartlands just like that: self-contained and self-sufficient. Then, he multiplied: country boy/war hero/fur dealer/ad exec/woman-slayer.  He had you at hello. He had you at minx. He had you at, you smell good.

He was the new idea.  He was that riffing.

                                                                                He had you at hello.

                                                                                He had you at minx.

                                                                                He had you at, you smell good.

                                                                                [You do smell good, America]

But, Don, the common cure for breakfast isn’t LIFE, it’s a serving of good old-fashioned competition.  

                                                                                                [but, you already knew that]

A little makes the grass grow greener; makes the skyscrapers….

                                                                                                       [wait … scratch that. ]

*

I am a force of good, but even I know that wanting and having are two different things. 

I want you to make me think, and make me not think.

Sure, I’m a girl, but I’m uncovering the looks. I’m reinforcing the discovery.

I’m recovering from the first shatterings.  When push comes to shove, I want sight.

         [Here’s a fact from Don: 45 % of people see the color blue as the same color]

I want you to see what I see.  My blue.  See my blue.   I want to be the 55%.  Be with. Try one on with me. 

Buy Don Dreams and I Dream here.

When you grow up in a neighborhood as tiny as Brooklyn Heights, you tend to know every face, every house, here is the marble flagpole base where B. gouged out a pyramid chunk of forehead, here stood the liquor store on Montague (with a big sign that said LIQUOR) where, at age 11, you could pick up a bottle of Tangueray for your dad, and speaking of dads and liquor, here is where Mr. X and his friend enjoined 15 year-old you one hot summer night to show them again how you did cartwheels, and asked a third time, which is when you saw by the streetlight in front of the little park that the hot glaze in their eye was incited not only by the gin.

I make this all sound dastardly. It was not, it's my DNA, and Manny Howard's too. I don't even need to ask him if this statement is true, I know it is; it's every Heights' kid's from the era, mid-70s to 80s, when the neighborhood and indeed the city was ours. It also allows me to ask Manny, a helluva writer and the author of My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm, for an essay for May's essay-a-thon, despite our not having seen each other in 30 years. The piece, which first appeared in Man with a Pan, is one of my favorite to run this month.

Stunt Foodways

To secure the love of a beautiful woman, I once loaded a dead pig into the back of my late-model Chevy Blazer. I pressed my buddy Malachi into service, purchased four fronds from a banana tree, a yard of chicken wire and two yards of burlap. I liberated two-dozen granite cobblestones from behind the flimsy fencing of a municipal landscaping project and drove the Blazer one hundred miles east, straight out to sea and to the tip of Long Island. I had a promise to keep.  It mattered little that I had only the vaguest notion about how to deliver on it.

Lisa and I met one night in the dead of winter. If her affection for her “summer house friends” wasn’t the first topic of conversation, it was the second. It became very clear very quickly that if I didn’t win their approval, Lisa and I were going to have a problem. This was going to be trouble if I fell hard for this hard-charging, beauty from Jackson, Mississippi.

Spring came quickly, summer too. A reckoning was upon us both. No stranger to the grand gesture, early one Wednesday morning, over coffee, I announced that the coming weekend I would prepare a special feast for her Summer House Friends. I would roast a whole pig.

The declaration had the desired effect. I received an email from Lisa shortly before lunchtime notifying me that the entire house had been made aware of my plan and were excited by the prospect of a roast pig for dinner on Saturday night. As an aside, Lisa inquired where I intended to roast this pig?

On the beach, of course, was my confident reply.

“Have you ever roasted a whole pig anywhere before?” asked Malachi, after I described the caper, a fever dream revealing itself to me as I spoke.

“How hard can it be?” my incredulous reply.

Malachi said that he thought that roasting a whole pig might be quite difficult, never mind enormously time consuming. “How about burgers?”

I explained that the whole point was to put the residents of the Summer House on their heels. Get them watching the pig. Take the focus off me. Everybody loves burgers, but this was too big a job for burgers. Lisa had told me that her friends were enormously curious about this new boyfriend named Manny. She said that more than one of the guys (protective of her in a brotherly sort of way, she preempted) had inquired after my lineage.

Malachi and I arrived on Friday evening; Lisa met us in the driveway and made the introductions. I barely retained a single name. To my surprise there were nearly two-dozen residents of The Summer House.The alarming numbers had nothing to do with my inability to engage socially, however. The pig was all I cared about. We needed to dig a deep pit in sand, as well as prepare a fire, and super-heat those granite bricks, all before breakfast the next day.

That night, with help from Lisa’s protective brotherly types we dug the pit. While the cobbles baked, Malachi and I stuffed the pig with papaya, jalapenos, limes, and various bright fruit. We wrapped the critter in banana fronds, sealed the leaves with soaked burlap, and encased the package in wire. Finally, we lowered the ungainly cocoon onto the granite bed and covered it with four feet of sand. Everything was going just the way I planned it.

I spent the intervening hours trying to learning everyone’s name and attempting to limit my beer intake. We unearthed the pig. It was hot and fully cooked, but it looked to my horror like an East River floater. The beast wasn’t roasted. I had steamed it in the sand. At best you could call it poached, but it was a wrinkly abomination. Not at all appetizing.

The assembled crowd had doubled in size but no one in it understood what had happened. They were all drinking, and they were getting hungry. We only had moments to make it right. The sun was setting and the women were rooting around in beach bags for sweaters and shawls.

Malachi delivered a clear-headed appraisal, “We’re fucked.”

Not yet, I thought. The meat might have been deathly ugly, but it was cooked. To make it tasty and appealing, we just needed to hack it up in into grill-sized hunks and caramelize it. I retreated in-land to buy as much charcoal as I could find in town. Malachi organized a surreptitious collection of kettle grills from neighboring decks. We finished off the pork on an assembly of flaming Taiko drums set at odd angles in the sand. Their orange glow was the only light to eat by.

This instinct for the culinary high-wire act has manifested itself regularly since Lisa and I married and started a family. I’ve shucked hundreds of oysters for a driveway crammed with parents in order to celebrate our daughter’s second birthday (and I’ve found numerous, similarly flimsy excuses to repeat the effort). I have tempted the fates by preparing paella for fifty, cooked outdoors on the grill. “This is the traditional way paella is prepared,” I boasted to any guest who dared approach their host, the dervish at the grill. Nobody needed to know I had never made the dish before.

I can trace the source of this unwieldy urge to overreach directly to my father, a trained chemist from England who worked here on the Mercury rocket mission for NASA. He made a mythical, breathtakingly spicy curry whenever he entertained at home. In fairness, though, my impulse for stunt cooking is a dangerous mutation of his much more benign intentions.

I can recall sitting cross-legged in my footy pajamas under my parents’ kitchen table, the bare bulb at the ceiling casting harsh light over the mayhem beyond the table’s unvarnished maple legs. Every time my father assembled his friends, he served a curry. I marveled at his ability to single-handedly prepare a massive pot of pungent curry while presiding over a riot of nineteen-seventies booze and dope-fueled, shaggy manliness. It was a meal I was encouraged to share, always with the same disastrous, and apparently hilarious results.

            I know now that this vindaloo was less the orthodox sweet and sour stew, with its uniquely Goan amalgam of the Portuguese colonial influence married to the region’s countless culinary traditions, and more the Brick Lane pot of fire. But, like most things my father bothers doing, this curry was imbued with potent storybook origins. According to dad (though, mind you, he had me convinced that he was a Spitfire pilot during the War and I believed him right up to the moment that I could do enough math to suss that, when the conflict ended, he was not yet eight years-old), his vindaloo recipe came to our kitchen directly from a much grander one half a world away in India.

One evening long ago, while he was studying at Imperial College in London, dad succeeded, after many failed attempts, to convince a fellow post doc candidate to phone his mother at home in a wealthy suburb of Delhi. Dad wanted the recipe for a proper Indian vindaloo. They squeezed into a public phone box, and dad fed coins into the slot to keep the line open while his mate interrogated his mum. “And you know, old Johnny had never once been in the kitchen of his own house,” he’d remark with equal incredulity whenever he retold the story.

When mom and dad emigrated to America, dad carried his curry with him. In Brooklyn, he measured the single teaspoon of fenugreek, counted out four brown cardamom pods, husked two tablespoons of dried coriander seeds, measured ½ teaspoon of turmeric with masterful precision, brushing excess grains of the impossibly yellow powder from the spoon back into the plastic bag. Resealing it with a red, paper-covered wire twist tie, he’d return the bag to its place in the cupboard. This exactitude did not come at the cost of the mayhem, but despite it. And though much of dad’s work was done with a steadily emptying glass of Johnny Walker Red in one hand, his fidelity to that recipe, scribbled into a laboratory ledger and delivered over thousands of miles all those years ago, served as his keel. It drew dad and his posse: Peter, Richard, Mark, and their wives and girlfriends together as they free-poured drinks, cracked endless quarts of Rheingold, and fired up yet another joint. I sat, spellbound, uniquely privy to the secret rituals of grown-up joy.

Years later, bound for college and committed to the recreation of the social magic conjured by that vindaloo, I hectored dad for the recipe. By then, it had been at least a decade since dad had made a vindaloo. He and mom split when I was eleven, and adventurous, time-consuming, boozy curries had been replaced by dutiful dinners that sacrificed ambition on the altar of practicality. (The rotation was as follows: a consistently medium-rare roast top round rubbed with salt and diced garlic served with steamed broccoli and what was then, in the eighties, called wild rice, but came out of a cardboard box; a sautéed quartered chicken served between a large helping of Uncle Ben’s brand white rice and a tomato ragu and next to steamed green beans; spaghetti accompanied by a sauce of tomato and ground meat, seasoned primarily with bay—or on occasion fresh clam sauce with a side of steamed cauliflower). Dinner was served promptly at 7:30 every evening that my sister, Bevin and I spent at his apartment. We were latchkey kids, free to do whatever we wished until then, but attendance at dinner was an immutable rule.

He got no argument from us. The ritual was a balm; his studied resolve a legitimate anchor. Raising children takes determination, dedication and, most of all maybe, a keen sense of timing. If dinner had not been ready for the table as Bevin and I tumbled through the front door every evening, the delicate table fellowship he worked so hard to build would not have stood a chance.

What I could not know then was that dad was locked in what he believed to be a life and death battle with entropic collapse. His marriage had failed. He was not going let this calamity take his family too.

My birthright, that curry, my demand for its secret signaled the end of that battle for family coherence and the age of Family Dinner.  When I asked him for the recipe, he balked at first, and insisted that he’d forgotten all about it. But I pressed and he succumbed, quietly pleased, I hope, by my plan to carry his vindaloo into the future.  And, so, from memory, recited the recipe while I scratched it in black ink onto the unlined pages of a black composition notebook. And, in time, his vindaloo achieved minor celebrity status on my college campus.

With Family Dinner a thing of the past dad and I have occasionally teamed up for a cooking adventure. Easter was the occasion for one of our most desperate acts. In a moment of perverse revelry we conspired to cook a rabbit—“the Easter Bunny! Brilliant!”—we chortled as we drove to a live market in Sunset Park, one of the few places in the city a rabbit could be reliably had back before the dawn of all this culinary to-do. We used a cookbook as our guide, but we must have gone terribly off course along the way because the result was a soggy, pallid sop.

In stunt foodways success is always preferable, and an at-the-buzzer-save is a delight, but it is not a necessary outcome. Carrying the plastic shopping bag with our still-hot, skinned rabbit across the street from the urban slaughterhouse to the car was its own discreet victory. While Easter supper lay in ruins on the plates before us we were, of course, horrified, confounded by the unpalatable pulp, but the yucks and sniggers that dish has generated in the decades since puts stewed Easter Bunny solidly in the win column. Effort is its own reward.

            The time for Family Dinner has come for Lisa, the kids, and me. But I have not given up on stunt cookery. I spend a portion of each day dreaming up the evening’s meal. Gathering the ingredients as I charge home from work, I arrive home and plunk the groceries on that same maple kitchen table of my youth. I fire up the stove. The patter of public radio news is the only companion I can abide. There are onions to dice and wilt, wine to reduce, greens to blanche, and marginal meat to braise. Each evening I set out fully intending to make every Family Dinner an adventure. And just about every evening I fail.

            My daughter, always an unwilling participant, refuses to eat anything that isn’t whiter than she is. My son is as eager to please as I once was, and just as sensitive to some of the more outlandish ingredients and preparations. Lisa is appreciative, but she has her limits. This never ends well, she reminds me, and it’s just dinner.

It doesn’t help that I have no operative sense of myself in time. Often, dinner, in all its inventive glory, is served late. The kids are exhausted. And, because of my repeated, unrealistic insistence that unlike its predecessors this meal is will be on time, Lisa has been forced to feed the kids stopgap cheese and crackers. They are usually not the least bit hungry.

They moan.

I bark.

Lisa shuttles them off to bed. There is no fellowship at my table and the only adventure is cooling in the kitchen. When I reported these misadventures and my frustration back to dad, he’d grin widely and clap his hands together enthusiastically, just twice, then grip them firmly. “That’s very, very funny E-boy,” he’d pronounce enthusiastically.

Recently dad was taken grievously ill. The ferocious disease has visited numerous indignities upon him. Cruelest among these, though, is that it has robbed him of both clear speech and appetite. And so, while puzzling over what I can feed Dad that will nourish him and deliver him even the most fleeting enjoyment, I am more convinced of dinner’s dual purpose; and yes, suddenly painfully aware that a man has only so many dinners in front of him.

He has no interest in the blandest of food now. My response, more a reflex, may prove to be stunt cookery’s finest hour, or its undoing. I reach for that now-battered black composition book—a return to origins, of a sort. There, his curry recipes, scratched onto its rotting, sauce-streaked pages in the ambitious if impatient scrawl of a devoted, much younger son, are now crowded in among other recipes that I have collected along the way. I set the book open on the counter and place four yellow onions on the cutting board: garlic, two to three cloves, chopped rough; garam masala, three tablespoons; turmeric, one tablespoon; green cardamom pods, one tablespoon; celery seeds one tablespoon; red chilies, one-half to one tablespoon (to taste). I conjure a curry and deliver it to him sitting on the couch in the apartment I grew up in. It proves strong medicine, our curry, and for a time it rekindles in him what burns in us both.

Buy My Empire of Dirt here

Destination Gacy, my e-book released today by Shebooks, tells the story of a drive I made cross-country with a pen pal of John Wayne Gacy’s, to visit the serial killer in prison in the weeks before his execution. I originally sold the story -- my first feature -- to Details. I wrote a draft, faxed it (this was 1994) to the editor, who told me to read Griel Marcus's Dead Elvis and write another draft. I did, during the month I was on Martha's Vineyard with my mother and four-year-old daughter. Every day when they went to the beach, I stayed in a cool back bedroom and taught myself how to write. Just before I faxed in the new draft, my editor decamped for Vogue. The new editor killed the story sight unseen.

Gacy had at this point been executed, and I was left holding what I thought meant something, or at least meant something to me; that, were I able to sell it, it would get me where I wanted to go. I sent it to Playboy and received a nice (handwritten!) note from the editor but no sale. I sent it to Harper's and heard nothing. It is crude but also accurate to say I hauled the story around like a corpse. Anne Thompson, then film critic for the LA Weekly, came to my rescue. "Let me get it to someone at the Weekly," she said. The Weekly wanted it. I went in to copy edit, sitting (as I recall) at a stool by editor's feet, knowing nothing about how feature editing worked, so that when he said, "We'll put a drop cap here," I asked, what's a drop cap? I did not have the courage to ask whether it would be on the cover. The morning the paper published, I was waiting at the newsstand on the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga. A pile of Weeklies was tossed off a truck, and on the cover was my story. 

I've had a lot of people in the intervening years ask to read the piece. There was no way to do so; the Weekly did not digitize in ’94. Gacy has not left the public imagination; he granted few interviews of length. I am glad for the opportunity to update the piece and see it published anew. As for getting me where I wanted to go: I have never stopped writing about sociopaths, and it was some kind of fortune to have started here.

DESTINATION GACY

As some of you know, Tafv (rhymes with "lava") Sampson is my daughter. I will not write an extended intro here, because she is shy of my bragging about her, and also because if I wrote all I wanted about her beauty inside and out I would break the Internet. I will write the following about her work: when my best friend (and Tafv's godmother) lived with us in LA in 2001, she gave us a digital camera, which Tafv asked if she could use. She shot things in the yard and the kitchen. She showed these shots to Din and me. She was 11 at the time, and as Din and I looked at an image of the electric burner on the stove, an image that was clearly art, we asked ourselves, how did she do that?

The answer, or part of the answer, is that Tafv understands composition in her skin. Some people call this talent. I think talent is something you hone, but yes, she has aptitude, and desire, what desire; she shoots and shoots and shoots and shoots. Her work is often compared with that of Nan Goldin, though I doubt Tafv, now 24 and studying at the International Center for Photography in New York, seeks to emulate. She shoots where she is and what she loves, her friends, drag shows, club life, her mama's book cover(s); stills from a short film she wrote, the world as it appeals to her. She posts some work at tafvsampson.com.

Below, some photos from my darling girl, my treasure.

See more of Tafv's work at TafvSamspon.com

I met Carl Adamshick when he was reading his poetry at Loggernaut, the quarterly reading series that uses Ristretto Roasters Williams as its homebase. As usual, the place was packed. My husband Din, who can probably think of 6,892 things he'd rather do than be at a poetry reading, listened to Carl and said, "He's really good." I thought so, too, and before the evening broke up, pressed into Carl's hand my novel The Bad Mother, which had come out the month before.

The next day, Carl texted me to say he'd stayed in bed all morning, it was raining outside and he'd read my book, which he thought was great. How could I not fall head over heels in platonic love? And here we have stayed, reading each other's work, meeting for coffee, dragging each other along to meet crazy drunken people, hashing out how we might help each other during some rough times. 

In additon to being a poet, Carl is the is the co-founder of Tavern Books, a non-profit poetry press. He is the author of Curses and Wishes, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second poetry collection, Saint Friend, will be published this August with McSweeney's. The piece below is from a work in progress.

Music

The day Melody became pregnant she traced a pig tattoo with a moon in its belly. The boy said when he was twelve he got a tattoo of a sickle moon, just a thin curve of black ink on his upper arm. It looked like a closed eyelid, something asleep dreaming of night. Floating between the tips was a star. A moon that shed no light. When he was fifteen he covered it with a pig. The pig was in profile and looked heavy. Melody moved her finger along the black edge, which her eyes followed, and then in turn, something within her followed that following; her finger a stylus making a kind of etching in her mind. She pressed her thumb to its belly, trying to feel its moon. Sitting between his legs on the hood of a car Melody could feel his erection against her spine. 

The boy with the pig tattoo had these blue eyes, was super-white, and hairless. He had been in the sun all summer, but his chest still managed to have a snowy glow at dusk. She kept seeing him at the river. He was just like the others. Melody never said no. The boy with the pig tattoo did what he thought she wanted. They walked to the old roundabout. The concrete wall was still there and so was the stretch of track running its center. They climbed down into the pit overgrown with weeds. Two twenty-foot trees with red, star-like leaves grew on either side of the track. He told her his grandfather worked here, that train engines would come into a big wooden structure and he would turn them around.

Lyric did two things when Melody said she felt pregnant. She laughed, thinking it was cute Melody wanted to be like her and her mothers. But the laugh seized Lyric as they sat at the table and didn't stop squeezing until her stomach was a small fire. Who have you been with? Lyric’s thought-question was so loud Melody answered: someone. Lyric stood and gathered the bowl in front of Melody. She was certain her child wasn't pregnant, was certain she knew everything about Melody, from what she liked in the bowl and the temperature of the milk in it, to the color she most frequently drew horses, to the way she would wrinkle her nose when she was told she'd have to spend the night at Song's. What Lyric was also certain of was that her child hadn't menstruated. But fear kept hold. The notion of someone like air spreading fire in her stomach. Not knowing always gave Lyric a sensation of being at a funeral, feeling wholly alive by example, yet sad and formally helpless. In the kitchen, washing the white bowl, she felt as if night emanated from her heart.

Melody never mentioned the tattoo or the name of the boy who lived with it on his skin. She feared they would attack him. Everyone keeps aging at the same rate, having birthdays on the same day, but they keep getting closer and closer in age. They are mothers. Then they are friends; all the daughters closing the gap. Once Note was all the years older than Cant, now the percentage is lower. They are both old. Their lives will become one when they stop living, when the earth swallows them whole. The mothers all share words and clothes. They have each other’s eyes and hands, hair. So when the stories tumble into ears the ears are like their own understanding and reassurance, their own knowing; where the sounds and thoughts with their echoes vanish or say yes.

Melody was in the high weeds within the ring of crumbling stone, her eyes fixed on the dark pig scraped into that pale upper arm, when she entered the house of motherhood. She was alone then. She held her secret like a glass vase. She liked knowing something the mothers didn't know. But she couldn't wait to tell them.

All that year of Music growing within Melody's tiny body, Lyric couldn't look anyone in the eye, would drive to the bridge so she could walk over the raging river, stare down on the water whitening around the rock. She would walk the thin sidewalk late at night thinking of big trucks, thinking of the trains running on the tracks that cut through the pines. She spent weeks in bed wondering about the importance of food, thinking if she were thin enough and the truck was moving fast enough she might disappear in a halation of blood, that all the pain might rise and she could live without herself.

It took words. It took her own words explaining love as a phantom limb before the ache was something she could put on a spoon and eat like a sweet. She could feel love, but it wasn't there. Sometimes at night that invisible ache would leave her body and walk down the hall to stand in front of the mirror. Then, she would feel light, released, and love her mothers and the things in her room. She would feel purposeful. Lyric would hear the invisible, hours later, on the floorboards by the bathroom. She would hear the creak of its return, take her eyes from the ceiling, and welcome it home by turning on her side and letting it enter slowly through her back.

Melody thought everything was perfect. The way her horses were taped to the window. The way the sun came through their bodies. She thought the evening was perfect. She had no idea how anything worked. She knew she couldn't mention the boy. She saw a building filled with grown-ups. Outside the building horses ate hay in lantern light; their silver shoes hammered into their hooves. Everyone was dressed nice, seated and waiting. She walked down an aisle with green carpet. The train of her dress carried by something hidden. Happy she had been chosen.

 Scene: Office park somewhere in the San Fernando Valley

Time: Mid-1990s

Characters: Samantha Dunn, staff journalist at Weider Publications (ed: You can't remember more detail than this? NR: No, I recall Sam being at, like, nine of the magazines), agreeing to spend her lunch break with a visitor, a freelancer for said publications.

Conversation: (ed: Really? This is how you're going to frame this? NR: Will you relax, please?) Sam seems very worldly, and though the same age as the visitor, to have lived several more lives. Everything she's achieved, she's done on her own, which the much-babied visitor admires no end. They walk around the parking lot for an hour; there is much laughing; also, subterranean issues in common: the underemployed first spouses, the books they struggle to finish, that each is deeply ambitious if not quite yet with the courage, or the map, to say, this is mine for the taking.

Scene: Patio of Les Deux in Hollywood

Time: 2000-ish

Characters: Hundreds of wonderful people, and at the center, Sam, at a party for her book, Failing Paris. Her visitor, now a longtime friend, stands nearby holding a copy of the book to her chest, so pleased to watch Sam sign books. The visitor hands over the book and asks Sam, "Are you excited?" Sam smiles. She is radiant, and she has something to tell the visitor. "There is no satisfaction after the last word on the page," she says, a lesson the visitor does not understand until she does xx 

Mom Drank Too Much

I always knew alcoholism would kill my mother. But that hasn't stopped me from trying to understand why.

Mom drank too much.

When I say that I don’t mean she got tipsy on one-too-many martinis at the country club. I don’t mean she downed a few extra glasses of merlot while she was cooking meatballs in the kitchen. What I mean is she poured the kind of scotch that comes in plastic gallon bottles into an iced tea tumbler. She took the iced tea tumbler to her thin lips and drank in gulps, as if it were water and she had been trekking the Sahara. The contracting muscles of her neck always reminded me of the way a snake moves, and it seemed she had to have scales lining the inside of her throat. She never coughed or sputtered, never grimaced at the raw burn of all that ethanol. 

She drank like that every day I remember, every day from five o’clock until she was so drunk her green eyes filmed over, fish-like, as if she were looking up at the world from under a great sea. 

At some point she would stand up, sway slightly, and announce, “Time for beddy-bye!” in a sing-songy voice that was so at odds with the deep ring of the way she said every other thing. The fall of her feet down the hall was a thudding, heel-first series of strikes. 

Never, that I saw, did she suffer a hangover.

The fact that her drinking could outweigh the absolutely magnificent brilliance of her mind and her encyclopedic knowledge and her nuclear-powered charm should be proof of its magnitude. 

--Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Mom would often quote Dylan Thomas with a wave of her cigarette, and it was also true that she recited from memory vast passages from Shakespeare, Thoreau, and Rudyard Kipling. She knew what to do with a socket wrench; spoke passable Arabic and Spanish and tied knots in maraschino cherry stems with her tongue. She remembered all the elements of the Periodic Table; did long division in her head; had been an Arthur Murray dance instructor with a specialty in the rumba. She had been in the Air Force and became a crackerjack emergency room nurse who knew how to deliver babies—in fact so often did she cover for a golf-loving OB GYN who never answered his pager that, if you were born in a certain hospital out West in 1971, and you are a girl, odds are your grateful parents named you Deanne, after the woman who brought you into this world.

Yet, when anyone who knew my mom describes her, they’ll say she drank too much. Maybe, if they are being nice or if they didn’t know her well, it won’t be the first thing on their list, but eventually they’ll bring it up. Trust me. I’ve spent a lifetime listening to people trying to break the news to me. “I know,” I’ll tell them. Or even, “Thanks for the news flash.” Or sometimes, “LIKE YOU THINK I DON’T FUCKING KNOW?” 

The fact that her drinking could outweigh the absolutely magnificent brilliance of her mind and her encyclopedic knowledge and her nuclear-powered charm should be proof of its magnitude. I could talk about all the damage her drinking caused me but mostly caused herself—all the ruined relationships, the firings, the evictions, the wrecked car, the cuts and bruises, the money squandered—but now, in the months after she’s dead, these are not the things that occupy my mind. What does occupy my thoughts, in fact what has taken up residence in my head and rattles my skull late into the night, is the wondering: What, really, was she thirsting for, and how could it have been slaked?

Being Irish was a big part of her story. She did in fact look like she’d been sent over from Central Casting: wavy auburn hair, green eyes, an upturned nose, lightly freckled skin. But her mannerisms, her way of talking and walking, the way she dressed as a young woman—those were all so startlingly similar to the way Stockard Channing played the character Rizzo in the movie version of Grease that now I find myself watching that musical, over and over. See, we never took home videos.

She wore ridiculous t-shirts that said “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, They’re Up to Something” even when it wasn’t St. Patrick’s Day. She would crack you upside the head first and ask questions later—which is to say she had a streak of the prizefighter in her. Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers blared from our turntable on booze-soaked Sunday afternoons. A shillelagh leaned in the corner by the front door of every home we ever lived in, I kid you not. At any moment a weird-faced, dancing Leprechaun could materialize in the center of our living room. 

Okay, so there I exaggerate, but that kind of blarney is part of the package.

She spent the long afternoons and weekends of her childhood in the company of Great Aunt Ethel and Uncle Jim O’Brien. My grandmother—the one single, good-looking divorcee in a small town—had cocktails with friends or went to New York City on trips for the town’s one department store, where she was the lingerie buyer. 

Uncle Jim indeed had come straight from Dublin; he was for my mom the practical father, the man who did all the things her own father didn’t do after he left to start another family in another town.

I wonder now what it was like for her to be a forgotten only child, sitting in that careful house with two aging relatives, lace dollies on the furniture and a framed picture of the pope staring down from the wall.

Did Mom listen to Uncle Jim talk as he nursed his Jameson’s, telling tales about the emerald place he’d left in that sentimental, morose way of the immigrant idealizing the motherland, and did the deepest part of her resonate with the feeling of exile? Exile if not from a place then from the mother and the father for whom she longed?

Did the thirst start there?

Mom had her first drink at the age of 14, a cocktail called a Pink Lady (that’s gin, grenadine, light cream—any kid raised like I was has the equivalent of a bartending school education by age six). The picture of the portentous occasion was snapped at a touristy bar in Manhattan in 1952. Mom, face shiny, baby fat straining the seams of her nice dress, sits next to my exquisite grandmother, who looks like a movie star in a pillbox hat and Mona Lisa red lips. Gram looks like she should be accompanied by Rock Hudson, but instead it is just some dumpy Irish guy named Patrick with a bit of a gut and a wife and five kids back in Pennsylvania. Who takes her teenage daughter on a date with a married man she’s having an affair with, and also buys her a drink? Gram did, that’s who, but that’s maybe another story. 

I wonder if Mom was sizing him up, if she was imagining this Patrick walking through the door after work every night, smiling at the sight of her, saying, “How was your day at school, macushla?” I see her eyeing him and putting that Pink Lady to her lips, the grenadine sweetness and the gin burn mixing with the desire for something she did not have, conflicted feelings fusing in that moment, alcohol and wanting now confounded in the pathways of her brain for the rest of her natural life. 

Then again, maybe she’d been feeling awkward and uptight sitting there with her mother and old Patrick (didn’t she go to school with his kids?), but the second the gin hit her system all tension melted, the moments becoming somehow manageable. Maybe even pleasant.

Somehow I got the idea early that maybe if I were successful enough, I could kill this quenchless thing.

Of course, drinking killed her. The byzantine epic of her death goes something like: broke a glass in her kitchen; stepped barefoot on a shard; tried to treat the cut at home; it became infected; her foot went gangrenous and half of it had to be amputated; emergency surgeries of all manner were required; she comes home, a secondary infection sets in; she goes septic; dies.  

Still, during all of that, the thirst.  

I want to be clear here: I know about drinking. I have a veritable black belt in Al-Anon. Disease, genetic predisposition, environment, psychological factors—yes, yes, I know. I know it all, and yet none of it seems enough to explain that quenchless thing of my mother’s. Maybe biology and psychology and sociology and whatever other -ologies we invent can explain and contain the addictions suffered by some. For others, the immensity dwarfs our science. 

Somehow I got the idea early that maybe if I were successful enough, I could kill this quenchless thing. I hoped—hoped in secret, because I knew better by then—that the birth of my son, Mom’s beloved grandson, would finally make the thing evaporate. Even that, no. Over the course of my life I have raged at this thing and run away from this thing, I have screamed at this thing and beat up this thing, I have tried to intellectualize, and ultimately to accept, this thing. Now that she is gone, what I have come to feel is a strange sort of objective curiosity, perhaps even a bizarre kind of reverence.  

A little story to illustrate: She returns to our home after having been in the hospital for two months. She hobbles up the steps—half her foot amputated —and goes straight into the kitchen. I’m in the living room with my son when I hear her rummaging around in the cupboard. 

--Mom, what are you looking for? 

--Where the hell’s the vodka you had in here? 

The next day, when the ambulance came, she’d downed more than half a  liter of booze. See, the thing is, I knew she’d do that. I knew it from a lifetime. Yet, I still cried.

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Shortly before my daughter Tafv moved to New York in 2010, she was involved in all manner of interesting projects, including a weekly radio show on the college station with two girls I'd never met, Hannah and Nouel, about whom Tafv was full of admiration: they were so smart, she said, so creative; they wrote, they painted, the played instruments, they were the sorts of people Tafv wanted to be around; people who, I could see, made her want to make art. I met these girls only briefly, in my hallway shortly before Tafv left. I was not sure I would see either again, until I passed beneath a 30-foot high a billboard featuring a pixieish platinum blonde in a red-white-and-blue leather jacket...

"Isn't that Tafv's friend Nouel?" I asked my husband. A week later, I saw her again, tousled and topless on the cover of a publication; then somewhere else, in drag; or naked, her body folded like a grasshopper, or perched on the edge of a skyscraper in black wig and jumpsuit. It was like learning a new word and then hearing it all the time. Nouel was the new word, one people were drawn to to actuate fantasy. Each time, she was mesmerizing, a little feral, and thoroughly, completely, 100% engaged with the camera, with which she seemed to be having a whispered conversation.

Four years later, Nouel is one of Tafv's best friends and, along with Robin Hilleary (who Tafv shot for the cover of Transportation), her muse; you can see photos Tafv took of the girls on a 2012 road trip. In addition to being so pleased to have Nouel, one of several daughters I've been bequeathed, in our lives, I get to follow her work and watch as she, more than anyone I've known, lives art every day. 

I met Debra Gwartney when I was assigned to write about her and her book, Live Through This, a Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters. I urge you to read this book, a book that sits on my bookshelf in the section marked Star Chamber, alongside Didion, Katherine Boo, William Langewiesche and John Krakaeur. Debra as a writer is their equal, and, after allowing me to sit with and meet and cry with her and her daughters, and having our lives continue to intersect in good and hard times, has become a treasured friend.

This essay was originally published in the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of Oregon Humanities Magazine, with the title, "On the River." 

Why I Live Where I Live

Rain pounds on the roof today, thrumming its familiar rhythm and boiling the river below our house, but I’m set on believing this weather will lift, giving me one more sunny afternoon, at least one, to languish on our new deck before autumn sinks in. Two cedars that cracked and fell during a storm last winter —one slamming into the other, noisy dominoes—got split and planed and transformed into this very deck overlooking the McKenzie. It smells like forest duff when it’s sun soaked. It yawns under me like a cradle.

Most days during my third summer living on property that’s been my husband’s home for four decades, I ventured out to the cedar deck after noon, arranging myself on a soft orange chair, laptop screen tipped into a shady corner. I was convinced I’d get work done this way, outdoors, stirred air, twinkling field of sorrel, mosquitoes and horseflies be damned, and I did accomplish enough, I suppose, though I was often drawn to the surface of the water, the blue rafts, the green, the yellow, that bounced by—voices of raucous merry-makers reaching me before the flashes of colors that signaled their boats. In the gaps between happy, wet tourists I listened for the osprey chicks growing up in a nest atop a Douglas fir snag across the river. Their cries sometimes jarred me to my feet. I jogged down our drive for a better look—worried the nest was invaded or had crumbled, the chicks abandoned on a bare limb. But, no, the youngsters just wanted food. I pushed my toes into the edges of the cold water, reminding myself of the frantic note in a hungry baby’s call as if, despite the consistency of every previous meal, this time she might be abandoned.

I’m learning how to live here on the river, the sounds, the smells, the air of it, with many lessons still to come. When I’m away—me, a relatively fresh presence in this place that, in general, takes its time in the accepting or not accepting, the blooming and the dying—my husband usually finishes his phone calls by saying that my place misses me. That statement takes me aback no matter how many times I hear it. My place missing me. Does it?

I was born in a tiny mountain town in Idaho and, like many children there, began looking for a way out before I could speak. I went on to college with my young parents, and then we moved to Boise. But oddly, only Missoula and not Boise, measured up to my early notion of city; that was because my grandmother often drove my sister and me over the harrowing Lost Trail pass to shop in Montana’s metropolis. We ended these journeys with a bowl of cream of mushroom soup—red dash of paprika across the bubbling surface—in the lounge of the rambling Red Lion. City stuff. Sophisticated, urban—or so I thought then—that called to me with its voice of enchantment.

When I was sixteen, my parents took me to San Francisco. In the cab from the airport, I tipped back in my seat to study sky-high buildings and jammed sidewalks, the hustle of busy pedestrians—people going somewhere—and I said, “I’ll live here.” Maybe they laughed, I don’t remember. The idea was lofty, and in fact has never lit on solid ground. I haven’t moved to San Francisco, Boston, New York, not to Paris where I was certain I’d end up for at least a year once my children were out of the house, not to Istanbul where I’d awake with the call to prayer. No. I’m here. On the edge of a river in Western Oregon, an hour from a grocery store, a decent hike to a neighbor’s, and still in the middle of the extended handshake of welcome. Or is the place still testing me? As in, what are you doing here? I sit on the deck and inch toward a peace we all search for at one time or another. Belonging.

I do get to cities, frequently, am fortunate that way. The latest was New Orleans, with a night view out the hotel’s forty-seventh floor a cavalcade of sparkle disrupted only by the black line of the Mississippi. In the light of the first day, I got out of the shower and discovered what looked like a tiny pebble stuck on my thigh. After I looked closer, I realized I’d carried with me, all the way from the McKenzie River Valley, a tick. I’d plucked ticks from children and pets, but, still, I called up a YouTube video on the best method of extraction. My husband watched the film, too—both of us more fascinated, I think, with the easy tap into technology than the information it imparted (match and pop bottle, bad; sharp tweezers, good). As the only possible internet provider in Oregon said to me recently, “Ma’am, you will never get a connection at your house.” When it rains—and since we get about one hundred inches here a year, that’s a common occurrence—there’s no cell phone reception indoors, which means I stand under a cluster of two-hundred foot drippy Doug firs to take calls. I complain about this lack of modern technology to about anyone who’ll listen, howling about the sacrifices I’ve made to become a rural denizen, denying the note of relief in me, the ease that I’ve discovered comes with silence.

The tick, rotund, popped right out, gripped as it was by my pointy tweezers. I placed it on the hotel’s fancy room service menu so I could study the creature under the desk lamp. I’d picked up my McKenzie hitchhiker, I guessed, on my last minute run up to the creek behind our house, or the few minutes I’d spent leaning against the rail of the deck to watch the river, to listen for the osprey nearly fledged, before I departed for a week. The tick wasn’t exactly the friendliest reminder that home waited for me, but as someone who’s waited a long time to belong somewhere, anywhere, I received, loud as I could sitting there on the 47th floor in New Orleans, the message. Your place, hey, it misses you.

Buy Debra Gwartney's Live Through This

Memory is a funny thing, what seeps in and what slips off. David Rensin most remembers our first meeting at a party; I am wearing a catsuit. I first see us standing together at an LA Press Club event at the Park Plaza Hotel and, shortly thereafter, my attending a book release party for one of David's books (he writes about one a year), a nighttime event at a fancy art gallery in Beverly Hills, everything and everyone is sparkling, David is signing books and I am thinking, he is one successful guy. Not long after, I realize I am going to know David forever, and tell him so. He is okay with this. We pass each other many thousands of pages of writing over the years, including what's below, a chapter from the book he is writing with Aria Sheeks, tentatively titled The Skies Less Traveled, and which is today's Mayday essay.

WELCOME TO AFGHANISTAN 

My flight is on final approach to Afghanistan’s Kabul International Airport when it slips into a dark gray blanket of winter overcast. The left wing sparkles in a shaft of dying sunlight and morphs into a faint outline slicing through the clouds.  Fat raindrops pummel and smear the cabin windows. Visibility drops like a final act curtain. When the pilot pulls back the throttles to raise the aircraft’s nose, the damn thing creaks like rusty farm truck. My stomach is already in knots.

Big men in country club casual and military fashion pack the coach section of this old Kam Air 737. They jabber through the landing instructions and check out the flight attendant’s ass when she walks the aisle to make sure they comply. I kick my bag under the row in front of me, flatten my cheek against the cool Plexiglas port, and take shallow breaths. The stink of testosterone, cheap booze, and the flight attendant’s heavy perfume has made me nauseous. 

When we break through the low ceiling, I’m in an alternate universe. Kabul’s battered sprawl rushes up below, all of it squeezed into a narrow valley of the Hindu Kush, itself six thousand feet above sea level. Most of the city is blanketed in a light dusting of still-falling snow, but no helping of Christmas-y white can obscure the dour buildings and ramshackle homes that stretch across the sepia and gray Parvan Valley—all proof of the entropy that punishes a country at war for years. Or centuries. I’d read that structures built by Ghengis Khan and Alexander the Great can still be found everywhere. So much history. Still so primitive.

Already I’m having second thoughts about being here.

Yesterday I was in Dubai, a city of glass and light that erupts Las Vegas-like from the desert on the Persian Gulf. After a 14-hour flight in from JFK, I forced myself to wander through the neighborhood around my hotel; anything to fight jet lag. High-rises sparkled above broiling streets. More than once I ducked inside a building to get out of the intense sun. Braying car horns and street noise gave way to murmured conversation and the whisper of air conditioning. The surprisingly colorful lobbies—deep reds, royal blues, and heavy custard yellow—contrasted with the white-garbed men in their thawbs, gliding across the cool marble floors. When I finally hit the fatigue wall I doubled back to my room, shucked off the brittle, sweaty clothes I’d worn for more than 24 hours, and crawled into a blissfully cushy bed. I told the front desk to wake me at 4am, and to get me a car to the airport.

Even before sunrise, Dubai International’s Terminal Two overflowed with private military contractors, businessmen, and squatting Muslims chattering in Arabic and Farsi. Some had red-dyed beards, variously thought to mean that they were honoring Mohammed, or that they had been to Mecca.

I, however, was not headed to God, but to the godforsaken.

It is January, 2007. From Kabul I’ll fly north to Bagram Air Base and the Blackwater Security compound where, assuming that nothing goes horribly wrong, I’ll live on and off as one of the company’s forty local military contractors. My job: to fly personnel, cargo, medical supplies, mail—and the occasional load about which I will never ask questions—on short take-off and landing missions, in a crappy little aircraft, around a freak show of a country.

Thirty nine of us are men.

I am the only female pilot Blackwater has ever sent into the field. 

The plane banks sharply and groans again. I can hear bags play bumper cars in the overhead bins as we begin our wide base leg to line up on the runway. Outside, at about 11 o’clock, a magnificent pillar of orange stone thrusts straight up in the near distance. But all I can think of is that it must be the same massive rock that a Kam Air flight had smacked into less than a year earlier, killing everyone. Coming in under heavy seasonal cloud cover on instruments only, the pilot got confused and set his altimeter incorrectly. He thought he was four hundred feet higher. He wasn’t.

And then there’s my friend and former roommate Noel. Only weeks after arriving in Afghanistan for Blackwater, he flew into the side of a mountain at 15,000 feet, outside of Bagram Air Base. Six people died. The weather was perfect.

Inexplicably frustrating doesn’t begin to describe what I’ve heard.

The flaps drop and with a deep whir the landing gear locks into place. Not far to go. A notorious prison nicknamed the Wagon Wheel Inn because of its iconic shape flashes by to port. Rumor is that one guest is an American, a CIA operative that the CIA very much wants to forget. And perched on a bluff near the runway’s edge, a rusty Russian tank hunkers abandoned, its long barrel pointed impotently north at Bagram almost 40 miles away.

A few feet above the runway, the pilot abruptly rolls the plane side to side, as if buffeted by a strong crosswind. But there is no wind; he’s just jockeying the throttles on short final—a rookie move. Then the rear wheels hit with a thwack-thwack-thud, and we roll in as if the captain simply gave up once he’d touched the blacktop. He gets no spontaneous applause for his technique.

“Thank you for flying Kam Air,” our flight attendant says. She’s a smiley face with an indeterminate Eastern Block accent. “Welcome to Kabul International Airport.”

I wish her mood were actually infectious. Instead, the back of my neck is a swamp of cold adrenaline sweat. I might be on the edge of another panic attack—the kind I started to get after spending a month on a Blackwater contract to help clean up post-Hurricane Katrina. Or it could be just nerves. It’s probably just nerves.

My backpack feels heavier than I remember as I file into the terminal. I’ve been around the world but have never felt this disoriented. Although I am surrounded by mountains and sand, I feel like a fish that has lunged for the bait, gotten hooked, and reeled in, only to discover that there’s much more to the world than she imagined. Out of the water now, she sees the sky, the lake, the rod, and the asshole with the Budweiser grin trying to get her into the wicker basket. Her last thought: Holy shit! I had no idea. Just throw me back. I promise I won’t tell the others.

But who am I fooling? This is what I wanted. I’d better make the best of it.

***

I stood in the customs line at Kabul International while agents inspected documents, and soldiers with anxiously-gripped AK47s scanned the crowd. Most times, my being young, blonde, and cute—or so I’ve heard—had its advantages, but there, the last thing I wanted was to stand out. Fortunately, I was surrounded by large men in 5-11 SWAT gear and trendy Carhardtts heavy-duty work pants, guys whose egos and testosterone I’m certain only came in household sizes. I didn’t know anyone, so I chatted-up the hulking, scruffy guy ahead of me. Todd. His polite drawl filtered through a wad of chew. I figured that if my Blackwater contact, Kamal, didn’t show up, I wanted someone to lean on. Todd looked like he could handle it.

 “Jus’ hold a five dollar bill in your hand so the customs guy can see it,” he said, when he caught me nervously stuffing my long blond hair into my black beanie. “And you’ll be good.” He was right. My backpack and I sailed through the checkpoint—five dollars lighter. I trailed Todd outside.  

“Gonna be okay, now?” he asked. Todd checked the line of cars at the curb for his ride

 “Sure. No problem,” I lied. Maybe Todd would catch on and be chivalrous; maybe he’d stick around without me having to act like a lost puppy. But he didn’t bite and my stupid pride stopped me just short of pleading.

“Good meeting you,” I said.

“Yeah. Good luck.” Todd sauntered away, massive and unafraid. He never looked back. I needed a smoke. But a few drags made my mouth taste like an old chimney, and the nicotine didn’t help my nerves. Where was Kamal? Surely someone carrying a Blackwater sign would be easy to spot in this mash-up of blocky, Russian-era buildings and raw landscape. The whole place reminded me of a black and white U.S. propaganda documentary I’d seen in high school about the Cold War. The people seemed just as eroded and weathered.

I ground out the butt with my heel and tried to think of a Plan C. That’s when a wiry man jogged toward me across the parking lot. Like John Cusack hefting his boom box in “Say Anything,” He held a sign reading “Blackwater” over his head.

“Blackwater?” he asked

“Kamal?”

“Yes!” His grin revealed white teeth more perfect than Julia Roberts’. Sparkling light brown eyes and olive skin offset thick black hair. Kamal was maybe an inch taller than I was. “OK, we go,” he said. “‘Kay?”

He led me to a dark green Toyota Hilux nearby and we climbed in.

“You’re supposed to take me to another plane, right?”

“Weather too bad today for the plane, ‘kay? I drive you to Bagram myself. First we go to American Embassy ‘kay?”

“Okay.”

Kamal wasn’t actually asking, but I didn’t want to be rude. Instead, I hung on as he squeezed into city traffic, sped up, slowed down, jerked left and right, and weaved through a sea of vehicles that pulsed and changed shape like a jellyfish. Kamal worked the horn, yelled at other drivers in Farsi, and thought nothing of splashing pedestrians—mostly men lashing donkeys, kids playing in the rubble, and women in burkas who looked like badminton birdies—with the sticky mud that was everywhere.

At one point during this Afghani version of Mr Toad’s Wild Ride, Kamal veered around a corner and passed two cows. One lounged in the dirt wearing a regal blue face mask adorned with fake gems and a matching saddle. The other, undressed, hung from a meat hook. Then suddenly we were in a small plaza in front of a fifteen foot high concrete wall that looked as if it had been blown up and rebuilt more than once.

“’kay, we here,” said Kamal. “’kay?”

“Here? Where?”

“American Embassy. We change cars ‘cause this one out of gas, ‘kay?” He pointed at an identical Toyota Hilux, except in blue. We did a quick Chinese fire drill and swapped vehicles. “This is U.S. embassy compound,” Kamal explained through his Pepsodent smile. Okay. So where are the gates, the guards, the guns?

Five minutes later we were in another deserted courtyard—until two WrestleMania-sized Americans, presumably Blackwater Security personnel appeared from nowhere.

 “Stay here,” Kamal ordered. No cheery “’kay?” this time. He huddled with one soldier while the other, a gigantic African-American, strolled slowly around the vehicle’s perimeter with a portable bomb detector.

Kamal’s solider handed him a paper bag from which he pulled a thick bundle of U.S. currency. From another bag he scooped two heaping handfuls of bullets. He stuffed the cash and ammo into his cargo pants, and retightened his belt to keep his trousers from sagging.

“We go now, ‘kay,” Kamal said. His smile had returned. The courtyard was empty.

Kamal rumbled down a two-lane dirt road fronted with mud-walled homes. Kids played in the road, scrambling aside for the occasional Humvee.

Kamal took the Kabul-Bagram Airport Road north. At each checkpoint he left the car and spread greenbacks and bullets around to the armed soldiers like party favors.

I closed my eyes and inhaled the smell cold high desert and diesel fuel. The tires whined. My anxiety became fatigue and resignation. What would be would be.

I’d just about zoned out when something heavy, warm, and wet puddled between my thighs. I didn’t need to look down to know that I’d started my period—perfect fucking timing—and was probably bleeding through my pants. I had tampons in my backpack, but for the sake of modesty and flexibility, I wasn’t about to attempt the gymnastic program required to put one in while riding next to Kamal. And I couldn’t ask him to pull over to let me wander briefly into the bushes, to take care of business. That kind of stupid move would surely have made the Darwin Awards headlines: “Civilian contractor scampers off to change tampons in IED-infested Afghan mine-field.” 

Instead, I put my left hand in my lap, squeezed my ass cheeks and knees together, and toughed it out for God and country, hoping Bagram Air Base would soon appear on the horizon.

Buy David Rensin's "All for a Few Perfect Waves: The audacious life and legend of rebel surfer Miki Dora"

It's essay a day in May on the blog, work from friends, old and new. Today, a poem from Wendy Chin-Tanner, who I have not known long but in a sense pre-know. We both went to Saint Ann's School, which means we are stippled with the same DNA in a way that's hard to explain. "We need to meet now," she essentially said, after reading The Queens of Montague Street and learning I lived in Portland, too. Wendy, poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown, also did something I find very generous: when her book, Turn, was published this spring, she invited others to read from their work at her book party, a beautiful party. 

SHAME

I did not swallow

but held it

folded like a secret

in my mouth.

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It's May, and a huge number of writer friends have new books out, myself included. I will run an essay each weekday in May from some of these folks, links galore. Go read! 

Today (and why not everyday?), let's hear from Sandra Tsing Loh, who I have known since our days at Buzz Magazine in Los Angeles, and about that: a friend who was also a Buzz columnist and whom I shall not identify (oh, okay, it was Tom Christie) once told me about being taken to lunch by an editor a year after Buzz closed, and the editor saying, "Of all the writers there, Sandra was the real star," and then, perhaps from the look of "did you just say that to me?" on Tom's handsome face, realizing what she'd just said. But it's true! And I say this as a fellow Buzz columnist and, in this century, Bad Girl of LA Lit.

In anticipation of Sandra's reading on Monday May 5 at Powell's City of Books, here's our recent exchange about the change that dare not speak its name. 

Hi Nancy,

So looking forward to seeing you in Portland, where I'll be talking about. . . the NEW menopause! Oh, the glamor! (As the late great Donald Rawley would say, although I'm sure he could mix up a fabulous martini-based elixir to quell hot flashes.)

For your May blogapalooza, I'm attaching a link to my original (Best American 2012, I'm not too shy to add) essay "The Bitch Is Back," in the Atlantic Monthly, which was the inspiration for my new memoir, THE MADWOMAN IN THE VOLVO: MY YEAR OF RAGING HORMONES.  Note that the word "menopause" occurs neither in the title nor sub-title, as WW Norton's (terrific and supportive, I'm not too ungrateful to add) marketing department said the word "menopause" is a killer. . . Even though women ages 45-60 are America's biggest demographic group (50 million of us) and by 2015 almost 1 in 2 U.S. women will be, yes, MENOPAUSAL!  That's right. . . almost half! I'm wondering, in fact, if menopause is the next feminist issue?  (Clunker sentence: contains both the word "menopause" and "feminist"!)  Nancy (I love repeating the word "Nancy," it's bloggily intimate), when I first got my period (at 11, a bit early) I cried.  I couldn't believe what I was being told.  "What?  You're telling me I don't just get a period ONCE and then I'm a 'woman'?  You're telling me from now on to like forever this violation is going to be happening to me every single MONTH?  You are shitting me!"

In the end, I'm quite delighted to have birthed my two now 12 and 13 year old daughters out of my "bagina"(once I had to fill out this odd LA Unified School District form which asked the types of "births" my daughters had and I put down in block letters: "OUT OF MY VAGINA").  Thank you, wacky female body, not for the horrible pain of labor--that blew--still questioning evolutionarily why that is absolutely necessary?--but for those awesome hormones that lent such romance, in my girls' very early (still nursing) years, to that "new baby smell."  Sometimes I catch a whiff of Mustela baby lotion and I sniff the fumes of those feelings.  

Having a baby and nursing it and being awash in all that estrogen, oxytocin and more was a peak life experience, hallucinogenic, one of a kind, a giggle, a laugh, perfect contentment, amazing.  It was also nuts and sleep-deprived and crazy, and as a friend of mine said, "If you have a child, that will be the best thing in your life, and if you don't, something ELSE will be the best thing in your life."  (For the record, he is married, no kids, two dogs--they are quite happy.)

That said, my 29 years of fertility was a lot of tampons to go through and I don't miss it.  (Recently, when interviewing awesome Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I foolishly asked him: "Do you still ballroom dance?" and he erupted: "I don't STILL do anything!  I did ballroom dancing for a while, now I do other things!")  Man, I cried when I got my first period, so when the little red hen(?) finally goes away, it's celebration time! Menopause  isn't "the change."  Due to our much longer lifespans (to almost 90), women are fertile less than a third of our  lives. . . so in fact the brief cloud of estrogen of FERTILITY that sweeps over us is "the change," not menopause.  In menopause, in fact, a woman's hormone levels return to those of a pre-adolescent girls (with higher levels of free testosterone).  So menopause is less "the change" than THE RETURN. . . to ourselves.  It's like you first lived on earth, then you went to the moon for a while, had a successful mission, and now you've returned to earth.  WELCOME HOME!  (And congrats, you have almost half your life left.)

I wonder, then, why menopause should have such negative connotations.  (You know, of women becoming dried-up, old, unsexy, crepey, bloated, invisible, a mustache sprouts, there is schvitzing, irrationality, dish ware is hurled, etc., etc.)  Sure, it's inconvenient: estrogen made a Stepford wife in a yellow apron who set the table and fed a family of 12 year after year when they could have helped out and done it themselves, now in menopause she is HURLING those dishes.  I think the negative connotations ("You're old! You're ugly! You're invisible!  You don't MAKE EGGS ANY MORE!  It's all about the eggs!  You have lost your egg-making ABILITY!  Poor you!") are perhaps a combo of society's general stupidity (older people of both sexes aren't particularly revered) and maybe a female tendency to beat ourselves up anyway ("I can even make eggs any more!  No eggs!  Even though I never wanted to in the first place!") like it's yet another kind of failure (along with not doing Pilates and Kegels, coupled with my inability to avoid fried food if it is put in front of me) (I have a boyfriend who fries bacon on the weekends--I yelled at him, "You can have a happy girlfriend or a relatively un-fat girlfriend, you can't have both!") (he as usual deemed me nuts) (bacon is the best food on earth, I digress).

But in fact, I think we're at an interesting time in evolution.  Look at politics, for instance.  In the old days, it was: "A woman can't be president!  She gets her period, goes nuts, hits the red button!"  How ridiculous.  As we've seen, estrogen is FAR LESS a handicap than fuckin' testosterone.  How many of our most promising male (Democrat, as I am) politicians were ridiculously undone by their frickin' zippers, in the most illogical ways, where it really leaves you with some head-scratching?  "What?  An intern?  Who was bi-polar?  With a history of blackmail?  Right there in his office?  Under surveillance cameras?  Two hours before the debate?  With Vladimir Putin on the phone?"  I mean it!  Clinton, Edwards, Hart (insert 12 more names here). . . What the FUCK?  Take some fucking pills to manage your testosterone problems!  They're a drag and getting in the way!  But it is interesting that men tend to be considered the norm and women are supposed to be medicated.  (Oprah never does a show saying, "Men should take pills to want sex less," it's that "Women should take pills to want sex more.")  Why are we talking about estrogen?  We should be talking about testosterone!  

And then of course you chuckle when thinking about Hillary.  One misstep about baking cookies (baking cookies!) and she has never erred again.  She is now ruled neither by estrogen nor testosterone.  She has got a full complement of both conventionally male and female weapons in her toolkit, and she will live forever.  Interesting times! 

To conclude this note, instead of menopausal women, I think of us a Freewomen.  (I should retweak the title of the movie 12 Years A Slave.)  I myself love being 52.  It's awesome.  Best time of my life.  Fun.  Great. My girls rock my world.  I love my man.  There is every kind of bacon.  (And perhaps one day. . . grannnnnndchildren. Grannnnnchildren.  The Mustela will ride again!)  Oh, and there's lots of work to do.

(By the way Nancy, you have always been hot.  Eerily, you seem to only be getting hotter over the years.  What gives?)

Here's the link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-bitch-is-back/308642/

xos,

S

Hey Sandra -

I'm going to LINK the Atlantic piece but I'm going to run THIS (unless you tell me otherwise), maybe even keep the part about me being hot.

I will add that getting a period at all is a 20th century phenomena. Before b-control most women were constantly pregnant or nursing so you got maybe a period a year. 

I have noticed there's a certain swanning when it comes to friends who still bleed, as in, "Oh, yes, I still get my period." Translation: I am still juicy and desired. I get mine but it's probably manufactured by the pharms.

My first period (age 12), I lied and told my mom I was vaulting over a parking meter (which we Brooklyn kids did) and hit my cooch. "Well," the gynecologist said, "it must have brought on her period." Sha, as if he didn't know.

xx Nancy

Buy the book, "The Madwoman in the Volvo"

It's May, my front steps are covered in green spinners from the walnut tree, and a crazy number of writer friends have new books out, myself included. Each weekaday in May, I will run a piece of their work, with linkage galore, go read more!

We lead off with a chapter from Finding Bethany, a new memoir by Glen Klinkhart, a homicide detective in Anchorage. Glen and I have a friend in common, the very smart Sabrina, who two years ago said to me something along the lines of, "You both deal with murder a lot, you should meet." Until then.

Chapter 8 - Day 23

It had been twenty-three days since the boys had gone missing. We had amassed enough leads, narratives and analysis reports to fill two entire filing cabinets. I kept myself busy each day by going over the day’s lead sheets. Patsy, our full time police clerk, entered data into the computers provided by the FBI. The laptops were designed to help track, monitor and classify leads in large cases. Although I appreciate technology, I still insisted on going through each lead sheet by hand. Not everything always got entered into the computers and every once in a while I would catch something that failed to make it into the system.

“Any more lead sheets?” I asked.

Nope, that’s all I have for now,” she answered.

“Do you want me to get you a sandwich?” I asked. “Ham and cheese again?”

“Yes, please and a Diet Coke.”

Patsy looked down next to her at a pad of yellow note paper. “Klink, on your way out you might want to check with dispatch about a shoe someone found,” she said.

I spun around. “Shoe? What shoe?”

“Dispatch took a call earlier today about a tennis shoe found near one of the ponds. We sent an officer over to check it out. I don’t see any notes for any follow-up so it didn’t look like anything.”

Patsy ripped the sheet of paper from the pad and handed it to me. According to the dispatcher, approximately two hours earlier a citizen called into APD and reported seeing a single tennis shoe near the pond. The report had no description of the shoe and no information as to where exactly the shoe was found in relationship to the pond. I asked Patsy which officer was sent to the call.

“Officer Washington. He went out about 9 A.M.”

Thirty minutes and two requests later my phone rang as I was driving to pick up lunch.

“Klinkhart,” I answered.

“Hello, sir, this is Officer Washington.”

Rookie officers were always polite and formal, especially when they had to call a detective. I laughed to myself. I was only thirty-six years old for God’s sake.

“Washington, please call me Glen,” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” he replied. I smiled to myself and got right to the point, “Washington, you went out on a call a few hours ago that referenced a found tennis shoe near the pond. What can you tell me about the call?”

“Well, sir, I responded to the area,” he said. “I located a single child’s tennis shoe. I collected it and I wrote a report.”

“Where exactly did you find the shoe? I couldn’t tell by your report. Along the trail? By the sidewalk? It’s important that I know exactly where you found that shoe.”

“Actually sir, it was under water, near the edge. I had to use a stick to reach it and pull it out.”

I hesitated for a moment. “What color was this tennis shoe?”

“Red and black, sir,” he replied.

Instantly I hit the brake pedal. My car screeched to a halt. I slammed the car into reverse and spun around.

“Where is the shoe now?” I asked.

“I brought it to the station and I hung it up in the drying room. Did I do something wrong, sir?” the young officer asked.

“No, Washington, you did exactly what you were supposed to do. Thanks.” Without saying goodbye I hung up the phone. I floored the gas pedal. The car lurched forward as the transmission kicked into a higher gear.

“They are in the fucking pond!” I screamed out loud.

The Anchorage Fire Department dive team was already in the water by the time I arrived at the pond. Onlookers gathered to watch. As I got out of my car I asked the other police officers on scene to please keep people back. I already knew what was about to happen.

The surface area of the pond was not that large. You could easily throw a rock from one side to the other. Though it was only a few feet deep at its edges, the pond itself was ten-to-fifteen feet deep at its center. 

The divers were moving through the pond going from side to side. Bubbles rising to the surface gave away their underwater positions. Each diver would come up every so often and give a thumb down signal, indicating they’d found nothing. Yet. Each of them would then move forward a yard or two and the process began anew. I watched for a few minutes until the sergeant arrived. He scrambled out of his car, his clothes askew, looking hurried and disheveled.

“Find anything yet?” he growled.

“Not yet, but we will,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he asked with one eyebrow raised.

I looked back at him with all the bitterness I could muster and said, “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

Another five minutes passed before one of the divers again came up to the surface. This time he gave a “thumbs up” signal.

All heads turned towards me. I didn’t blink. I just stared at the pond. It was all I could do to keep from completely losing it. The diver went back under the surface of the water. A few minutes later he came back up. This time I could see that he had a hold of something. He held it just above the surface of the water. It was the top portion of one of the legs. The foot had no shoe on it, just a gray sock.

A few minutes later the other diver indicated he had also found a body under the surface of the pond.

“I knew it,” I muttered under my breath, “I fucking knew it.”

Sarge heard me and shot me a glassy stare. I turned and started to walk away.

“Where the hell are you going?” he shouted.

Malcolm and Isaiah’s mother needed to hear the news from me first and not from the media. I tossed back, “I’m going to notify the mother.”

“Too late,” Sarge said as he pointed to the parking lot. “Looks like she knows already.”

I turned and saw Angel being escorted from a car and towards the police perimeter. The media surrounded her with cameras and microphones all pointed right at her. Her attorney, Rex Butler, was at her side, holding her arm.

I felt sick. I felt defeated and I felt angry. I started to walk back to my car.

“Klinkhart!” The sergeant yelled. “Get over here.”

I stood my ground. I’d had enough.

Sarge stomped over to me. He leaned over and spoke closely but loudly into my ear, “You’ll be personally escorting the bodies to the coroner’s office.”

I nodded and stood there waiting and watching as they brought the boys over, each in his own body bag. Two firemen and two police officers easily lifted each of bright orange nylon bags into the back of the ambulance. Body bags are designed to fit adults; with the boys in them they simply drooped in the middle.

I walked over to the ambulance and stepped up and into the back of the vehicle. The sergeant followed. I turned and looked at him. I expected yelling. Instead, he looked at me and for the first time that I could recall, he had nothing to say.

Without a word we each began to prepare to examine the bodies. Instinctively we both donned rubber gloves.  Sarge took one body bag and I took the other. Without thinking I quickly stuffed my tie into my front shirt pocket so it wouldn’t touch the corpse or any bodily fluid.

Senior Detective Joe Hoffbeck taught me the trick. His advice had saved me from having to throw away many a good necktie over the years.

As I undid the zipper of the body bag I looked down. The face staring back at me was the very same one that I had seen in the photograph on my desk for the past 23 days. It was the face I had seen every night when I closed my eyes. It was the face of a five-year old boy named Isaiah Johnson. He wore a maroon jacket and blue jeans. Just as I knew he would.

The cold March temperatures had preserved Isaiah well. The only evidence that he had been in the water for three weeks was some discoloration and wrinkling of the skin, especially around the fingers and hands. I looked at his body for any signs of external trauma. There were no bullet holes, no knife wounds and no blunt force trauma to his small head or other extremities. Each article of clothing was exactly as it had been described to me by his mother on the day he and his brother went missing. I searched his pockets and found nothing. As I grabbed the top of the zipper I took a moment to look at Isaiah’s face one last time. It was a face I would never ever forget. This was the boy that I had been looking for. And now here he was lying in the back of an ambulance.

He was cold, he was wet and he was dead.

“Find anything?” asked Sarge.

“Nope. No trauma, no signs of foul play,” I said, “It appears they’ve been in the pond ever since the night they disappeared.”

“You’re not the expert,” Sarge said. “We’ll let the medical examiner determine that.”

As he spoke Sarge stepped out of the ambulance. He gave me a look like I was some kind of disobedient dog that was being told to “stay.” He reached over and closed the doors to the back of the ambulance, leaving me in the dark. The sergeant pounded his fist twice on the rear of the ambulance and it lurched forward.

I could do nothing else except sit in the darkness with two dead boys to keep me company and wonder what the hell I was going to do next.

Buy the book, Finding Bethany

Reprinted from the Sunday Oregonian

By NANCY ROMMELMANN/Special to The Oregonian

The relationship began with Walter Kirn agreeing to drive a crippled dog from Montana to New York, to be adopted by self-professed dog-healer Clark Rockefeller. It ended 15 years later in a Los Angeles courtroom, with Rockefeller (born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter in Germany in 1961) on trial for homicide, and Kirn learning that the man who passed himself off as an international art dealer, financier and member of the Rockefeller dynasty; a man Kirn had considered a friend, was a fraud and a murderer. Kirn, a journalist and author of the novels "Up in the Air" and "Thumbsucker,"wrote an account of the relationship, "Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade."

On a recent visit to Portland, Kirn stopped by The Oregonian and discussed how he spent years rationalizing away doubts about Rockefeller, and the disturbing truths one learns through intimate interaction with a sociopath.

You wrote, of your relationship of the man you knew as Clark Rockefeller: "I'd worked as hard at being conned by him as he had been at conning me. I wasn't a victim. I was a collaborator." When did you realize he was a con man and a liar?

Only when he was arrested, disavowed by the Rockefellers and named a suspect in this murder trial did it come home to me that he'd been lying. That he was a complete artificial being. The time that I knew him as Clark Rockefeller, I thought that he was a lot of things: a braggart, an eccentric; insecure, patronizing; a narcissist. But I never thought that he was a fake.

You never investigated which branch of the Rockefeller family he was from. Did you put your journalist's hat to the side?

Oh, totally. I wasn't getting to know him as a journalist. I was getting to know him as a person. Often when you're a writer or a journalist, there are people who feel uncomfortable around you. You have to make clear to them that you're not on the job when you're at their dinner party. I was actually concerned that he know I was not a spy, not acting as a reporter when I was with him.

The one sense in which I was not seeing through him but not completely genuine when I knew him, was that I felt like he was my window into a kind of being; into a kind of society and experience that I might not get otherwise ... My big mistake, finally, with him, and I think the mistake all people make with psychopaths, is we project our own humanity onto them. We keep on in this fantasy that they have some resemblance to us. In his case people say, "Oh, but I think he loved his daughter," or, "Oh, but he loved animals." He got this animal because an animal that's crippled and draws oohs and ahs from people is the perfect cover for a person who has no empathy and has no feelings and who's trying to masquerade as a human being. I've come to learn that the determined and gifted and genuine sociopath has far more power to deceive than we realize.

Did you always sense there was something odd about him?

Yeah, I thought he was a very strange person who had personality defects that might be the result of growing up in a completely sheltered and unreal fashion. But, I really didn't. All cons are completely transparent in retrospect. When you are inside (the con), you are being worked on by somebody who's constantly monitoring your signs of doubt. They're on the alert for skepticism constantly, and when they see it growing in you, they make another move that wins you back.

He was able to read you faster than you were able to read him.

Absolutely — because I'm not sitting there reading him. I'm sitting there having a drink in a club with him, or trading stories. I'm not on a double track on which I'm seeking to manipulate and take advantage and gather intelligence. It's like being with a spy, you know? The Russians will send over one of these beautiful female spies who will seduce a hundred men, all of whom think that she liked them, yet in retrospect it's all so clear that it happened quickly, they came on too strong; they feel like a fool.

The reason con artists get away with what they get away with is, their victims are ashamed of their own blindness and their own gullibility, and they tend to just quietly go away. People don't tend to tell the story that I tell in this book, and for a good reason: it seems to make them out to be foolish or selfish, greedy, perhaps. I knew going into this story that I was revealing a point of view, that of the dupe, that isn't very well represented in literature, fiction and nonfiction, because it's so unflattering to the human mind and ego to think it can be played in this fashion.

For the writer, seeing people as possible subjects becomes reflexive; their stories get in your blood. Does the title of the book reflect this?

Well, in a way, yes. It's the nature of a journalist, the nature of a writer, to want to tell stories and want to describe characters. And I finally was allowed by circumstances to be allowed to do that. I consciously stopped myself when I (first) got to know him. I thought: this guy's obsessed with his privacy; he fears for his safety. He's being very open with me about his goofiness. I could make him look terrible, but I won't do that.

He knew how to give you what you needed to not write about him.

Yes. Yes. People ask me, how did he get you to trust him? And my answer is: he pretended to trust me. He would tell me things that were sort of crazy and maybe not that flattering, and I thought, wow, I have to be worthy of the fact that this person is being so unguarded with me by not burning him. I was excessively deferential, excessively empathetic, excessively concerned with his comfort. And not just because I was afraid he would not like me. I felt, as I often have, this assumption that as a writer I was someone who would exploit any personal relationship. In the end, I'm not as good as I wanted to pretend I was, because when it became clear that I was free to write him; that he was a fraud, that he was a murderer; that I owed him nothing, I was delighted by the fact that I didn't have to restrain myself in a way that I thought I had to.

Was meeting Rockefeller your good fortune or your bad fortune?

As a writer it was my good fortune. As a person it was my bad fortune. As a writer, it gave me insight. But no one would voluntarily spend this time with a psychopath. No one would voluntarily let their life get enmeshed with a murderer or someone capable of chopping up a body and burying it. It was truly traumatic to realize I was somebody whose weakness for a good story and whose ability to tell a story to himself, really put himself in danger.

When we learn how deeply sociopaths dupe people, and sometimes murder people they've made a show of caring for, we can very badly want justice. I've written stories where I imagined strangling sociopaths who, in some cases, were already dead.

I can tell you, as I sat there in that courtroom, next to the sister of one of his victims, and I saw Clark looking up at the bones of his victim on a screen with his little glasses, peering at them as though they're some archeological dig that he's got an academic interest in, I was as angry and disgusted with another human being as I think I ever have been. If the judge had said, "Does anybody want to come up and strangle this man?" I might have wanted to put my hand up and say, "Right here!"

The man you knew as Clark Rockefeller was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison. Is revenge sweet?

No, it isn't sweet. It's satisfying in a sense that you do get a feeling of completion. Not many people who've been lied to and played for the fool get to see the person convicted for murder and put in jail. But what I learned about myself, and what I learned about other people, and the presence of the sociopath in our society, was so unsettling I kind of wish I could have gone through life without knowing it. I got to see a story through to its end. For a journalist, a writer, that's satisfying. But as a human being, I got to find out just how evil operates in our world, and I got to find out that there are people among us that we might try forever to understand through the prism of our own experience, but who will always remain alien, predatory and dangerous.

Nancy Rommelmann's "Destination Gacy: A Cross-Country Journey to Shake the Devil's Hand," about her trip to interview serial killer John Wayne Gacy on the eve of his execution, will be released as an ebook in May.