A Cautionary Tale

Reckless and curious, a damn fool if
ever there was one, I married an elephant
old enough to be my mother, if I too
had been an elephant or if elephants
gave birth to human children, which some
book or another once convinced me they did.
This, I now know, is part of my problem:
I've read too many of the wrong sorts of books.

Still, the old elephant loved me,
and I love her even now.

We lived in Tanzania, where there
was very little for me to eat,
and where we were shunned by the other
elephants and I was constantly being
stalked by other wild animals and men.

You know what they say about married couples
eventually starting to resemble one another?
We were apparently a textbook case --or rather
I was. Despite having very little to eat,
I gained a great deal of weight.
My hair fell out and my skin grew leathery
and was covered with coarse bristles.

My wife's name was Tanika, or so I called
her --my lovely Nika-- and as I became
less and less a man and more of an elephant
I could not help but notice that Tanika
no longer looked at me the same way.

I gradually forgot the words to the
Johnny Cash songs she loved to hear me sing,
and my hands became so useless I could
no longer play the guitar, although
I could not have played the guitar
even if I were physically able,
as my guitar had been trampled
by other resentful pachyderms.

Even as I was feeling acute
disappointment at the fact that
I had not grown a trunk, it was becoming
increasingly clear that my bride
now regarded me as a freak.
She had fallen in love with a man
--that was her kink, I guess--
and could not disguise her displeasure
at the changes in my appearance.

Eventually there was some sort of
council of which I was not a part
(elephants only), and Tanika was
persuaded --I like to believe she
had to be persuaded-- to allow me
to be captured by one of the groups
of men that now always seemed to be
in the vicinity, studying me intently
with binoculars from the safety
of their Land Rovers.

The writing was on the wall,
and I didn't put up much of a fight.
I had once been an idealistic young man,
and had gone to Africa with the Peace Corps
to help people. To this day there's no way
to satisfactorily explain how a man falls
in love with an elephant.

All I know is that though
I had hoped I might be magically
re-transformed into the man I had been
before my folly, this has not happened.
I suppose I am tragic. Modern medicine
could do nothing for me, and I can't
deny that the transparent disgust with which
I am regarded by the medical profession
has caused me no small amount of humiliation.

I am not allowed to talk now.
I appear on stage for five minutes,
my legs shackled for dramatic effect,
preceded by a sad, sooty old dwarf
who breathes fire while standing atop
the shoulders of a giant who is
misrepresented as the "largest living
man in the world," a second-generation
Russian from New Jersey.

What, I often wonder, could I say if
I were allowed to speak? "Look at how
perilous love is? See the extent to which it can
make a man alien even to himself? Consider these
things and try to understand me when I say it was
worth everything I have suffered and will continue
to suffer to have loved and been loved, to have
experienced the extent to which love can transcend
the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of form
and transform a man in ways that are not even
visible to the naked eye?" But I do not say
anything, and take small comfort in the fact
that so many of those who gaze upon me
remain utterly convinced that I am not real.

Hitting Repeat: The Gathering Of The Broken Dreams

There will come a day when the terminally disappointed and disenchanted will meet in a giant hangar somewhere in Kansas. Every dashed dream and broken heart from all over America will converge there on the edge of some dusty little town to awkwardly mingle and avoid eye contact. Just as in Vegas, in the hangar there will be no natural light and no clocks, and the only way to mark the passage of time will be by the exhaustion in people's eyes.

Among those who will make the discouraging trek: The man who once upon a time dreamed of becoming an astronaut and grew up instead to become an unhappy insurance adjustor. The woman whose naked body was never seen --let alone touched-- by anyone outside a doctor's office. The failed writer of science fiction novels who lived with his mother until her death and, oafish and sweating, stalked about his old neighborhood in camouflage and, well into middle age, raced remote control cars up and down the sidewalk in front of his house. The jilted lovers, brides left at the alter, and infertile couples. The boy who asked Santa Claus for a Dukes of Hazzard pinball machine and received instead a Slinky, a seemingly small and isolated letdown that nevertheless in time planted the seeds for a lifelong pathology of disenchantment.

Also present: Beauty pageant rejects, disgraced public servants, neglected children, actors that never got a break, persistent writers of ignored doggerel, congenital ingrates, bitter misanthropes and alcoholics, those for whom an adolescent crisis of faith became crushing and permanent, brooders and pipe smokers, and all manner of neglected or talent-less musicians, artists, and philosophers.

You can be sure the sleepless will be there, standing in zombie pockets at some remove from packs of the pathologically shy, the socially awkward, and the chronically fatigued.

Should you make the pilgrimage you will be joined as well by stalled middle-managers, the perpetually startled, orphans, gimpy quarterbacks, cheerleaders who grew old gracelessly, bankrupts, and scores of broken refugees from Nashville, Hollywood, and New York.

There'll be quite a crowd, to be sure, and you're virtually guaranteed to recognize all sorts of old friends, neighbors, and former co-workers, and they're certain to bitch ceaselessly, provided they haven't been made entirely mute by their disappointment.

God knows there'll be plenty to bitch about: It will rain every day, the food will be lousy, and the accommodations will be sadly lacking. Entertainment --for lack of a better word-- will be provided by an assortment of some of the worst garage bands, barbershop quartets, choirs, magicians, mimes, ventriloquists, and baton twirlers you've ever seen.

As the evening wears on a bullhorn will be passed among the congregation of the disappointed, and each person will be allowed to shout out one sentence or declaration.

It's interesting, if fruitless, to speculate what those present might make of this brief opportunity to express themselves. How many do you suppose will use their moment in the spotlight to merely blurt terse, general condemnations laced with profanity? How many, however disappointed, will declare some enduring love or eternal regret? You can certainly imagine that there will be a great deal of stammering, and many will simply attempt to articulate some already broken promise, ineffectual apology, or impossible wish. Others, of course, will have nothing to say.

Should you or I find ourselves there in that awkward crowd of the bruised and broken what words would we find to speak to the assembled? What might we say to the better, happier people we --all of us-- should have been? And do you suppose there will be even one among us who will have enough small courage or faith remaining to utter some message of hope?

Finally, at some point in the endless night, black and white balloons will be distributed, and on command they will be released to rise slowly up into the dark and distant rafters of the hangar. This gesture will mean different things to different people, and to some it will mean absolutely nothing at all.

The River Dreams

For quite some time after I returned from that place I was seized by horrors, great, quaking nightmares that shook me awake every morning just before dawn. It was almost foolish the things I imagined and was afraid of. I would hear the rain falling beyond  my drawn shades, and was certain in my sweat and insomnia and  liquored fevers that the heavens were throwing down blood, that if I would dare to crawl to the window I would see blood almost black in the lamplight, cascading in the gutters. Mahler's Ninth Symphony traveled again and again, all night, through my little bed stand tape player.

They had killed each other in such great numbers and flung the bodies into the river. I saw them huddled together and wobbling, bloated, slowly turning in the seething red froth at the bottom of the falls. We all saw them, the bodies, most of them clothed, their various bright garments swollen with gas and air so that they looked from a distance almost like something festive, balloons perhaps, or colorful balls that had gotten trapped there over time.

We didn't know a damn thing about any of them except that they were dead, and the killing had been brutal, blunt, Stone Age business. They'd used clubs, axes, machetes.

In the dark, with no moon, we'd toss and turn in our sweltering tents and hear them down there, slapping against each other. There was a smell, of course, but that was the one part of it that was more or less expected. That, and the flies. Eventually, sooner rather than later, someone was going to have to go down there and fish them out. First, of course, there had to be documentation, an investigation, some attempt at identification. We were told they were bringing in some experts and equipment from the capitol. There was already a team of French doctors on hand, setting up their big white field tents. They weren't going to save any lives, but somebody had to provide the grim corroboration. I heard one man talking quietly about the "facts of the matter," and the use of the word "facts" in such a context seemed to fall somewhere between absurdity and obscenity.

I don't suppose I need to tell you that you never forget something like that. I'd walk up the path to the camp to listen to the radio and smoke a cigarette with the others, but the next thing I knew I'd be going back down the trail for another look. I had to see enough of it, I suppose.

That was such a beautiful country --that specific place, even, was absolutely stunning, if you could imagine it without the bodies. Not, of course, that such a thing would ever again be possible.  

(Image: Abel Pann)

Why Not Try To Make Yourself Useful?

Ruckert had  precious little in the way of dining options out in his neck of the woods (a phrase, incidentally, that he loathed, that he found utterly inexplicable, but which nonetheless was used so often in his neck of the woods that it had become, even for him, a helpless verbal tic for which he could think of no substitute that didn’t somehow sound pompous), and the closest takeout establishment was a filthy little chow mein place that --other than an insurance office that looked like the museum of an insurance office, and a long-abandoned museum at that-- was the sole remaining tenant in a moldering 50s-era strip mall that appeared to have once been the home to a half-dozen businesses. This strip mall was located just outside the scant remains of a town that had been mostly abandoned when a stretch of interstate highway was completed twelve miles to the west back in the late 1970s.

From every indication the Chinese place was an original tenant, and its existence in that godforsaken place, let alone its continued survival, was to Ruckert one of the great local mysteries. He also regularly thanked the otherwise forsaking God for its presence; were it not there he would have to drive eighteen miles to find a place to eat. The ruins of the town that was still home to the Chinese restaurant were a manageable six-mile drive from Ruckert’s home. He drove there often for takeout, sometimes as often as several times a week. And though he never ordered what he considered an unseemly amount of food for one man, the old Chinese woman who was always at the cash register routinely tossed three fortune cookies into his bag. Ruckert couldn’t decide whether it was a taunt, or a gesture of generous pity, an attempt to stack the odds in her clearly downtrodden customer’s favor. Either way, Ruckert hated fortune cookies (the cookie part; he wouldn’t consider putting one of the things in his mouth). He was, however, superstitious, and thought he was somehow tempting fate by not removing and reading the fortunes themselves.

Ruckert also felt it was wrong --cheating somehow-- to open all three of the cookies that the old woman put into his takeout bag, and increasingly of late he had found himself engaged in some absurd deliberations as to which of the fortunes to extricate from the inedible cookies. Sometimes  --and the helplessness of this behavior infuriated him-- he would close his eyes and engage in a sort of shell game, moving the three cellophane-wrapped cookies around on his kitchen counter and eventually plucking one from the bunch.

He nonetheless struggled with the question of what to do with the remaining cookies and the unread fortunes, and had long since gotten in the habit of stashing them in a drawer next to his stove, a drawer that was large and deep and designed apparently to hold cookware, but which was now literally crammed with unopened fortune cookies. Ruckert resisted the urge to open a second cookie when his first selection yielded a particularly unsatisfying fortune --and this, he felt was increasingly the case; more and more often the excavated cookies yielded not fortunes, but blunt statements, proclamations, and even demands (many of which he found shrill). He had saved every fortune he had ever received,  and kept them in an old cigar box he had found in his basement. One day, he thought, he would do something with them, although he had absolutely no idea what that would be.

Then, during a particularly rough autumn when he was feeling even more emotionally vulnerable than usual and found himself resorting to takeout Chinese on an even more alarmingly regular basis, his fortunes started to seem overtly hostile, and even menacing, and Ruckert began to suspect deliberate taunting on the part of the old Chinese woman at the restaurant. He couldn’t imagine how such a thing was possible, but he became more fiercely convinced that some elaborate joke was being played on him. For several weeks he stockpiled the evidence, and fumed, even as he continued to patronize the restaurant.

“Those who have no luck never worry about it running out.”

“Live apart, die alone.”

“Dreams are hard to catch once they disappear.”

“Unfinished things - a sad story.”

“Soon you will be done. Great relief.”

“A fatal flaw is hard to change.”

“Far away. More far all the time.”

“Do what you say, or be silent.”

“Ask yourself: Why does no one call?”

“Work uncomplainingly, and without reward.”

“A fool is struck blind when confronted by a mirror.”

“Why not try to make yourself useful?”

Ruckert was not a man for confrontations. An old colleague had once accused him of being passive-aggressive, but Ruckert steadfastly refused to believe this was true or even to understand what it meant. He had heard the phrase tossed about so recklessly for so many years that he felt it was safe to conclude that it was meaningless. Passive, he would admit to that. It was one of his growing inventory of handicaps. And his aggression was fierce, but almost purely or exclusively manifested itself as fits of private rage and bellowing and knocking things around. He was also still partially capable of considering that he was being paranoid about the fortune cookies.

This came to an end the night he cracked open a cookie and read the words, “The just punishment for a man who wastes his life is the life he leads.” So furious was he that he broke his policy of longstanding and tore open a second cookie, smashed it on the edge of the counter, and fished the fortune from the crumbs that were now scattered on his kitchen floor. As he held the fortune up to the light under his oven hood, Ruckert noticed that his hands were trembling and he was bleeding from a gash in one knuckle.

“I am a surgeon to old shoes,” the fortune read.

He spoke these words slowly aloud. What the hell? He went to his computer and googled the phrase, which he discovered was some bit of inexplicable nonsense from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. He then typed in the phrase from the first cookie and got a batch of quotes from Schopenhauer, none of them with the exact phrasing, but close enough that there was no doubt the Chinese were either paraphrasing or working from a bad translation.

In a rage, Ruckert stomped back into the kitchen and yanked open the drawer containing his backlog of fortune cookies. The cellophane on the first one he grabbed from the heap refused to open, and he twisted and tore at it for several moments with no success. He removed a steak knife from the dish strainer and hacked and sawed at the wrapper, his anger escalating as the cellophane refused to yield. Next he tried a scissors, but even they proved helpless against what he assumed was a petrified wrapper. After a protracted, absurd, and ultimately futile effort with the scissors, Ruckert put the fortune cookie back on the counter and smashed it with his fist. The wrapper still would not give, so he spent several moments twisting and turning the thing with his fingers, trying to remove the fortune from the fragments in the cookie while it was still enclosed in the wrapper.

Despite his best efforts only two words came into view. They were barely legible, disclosed or obscured as they were by the printing on the wrapper. Ruckert fetched a tweezers from his medicine cabinet, as well as a small magnifying glass --a remnant from his childhood-- from his desk. He made a further attempt to tweeze the entire fortune into a free and clear place within the wrapper. Unsuccessful, he was still left with only the two words --illegible with his poor eyesight-- partially revealed. He turned on the overhead light in the kitchen, and bent over the recalcitrant wrapper with his child’s magnifying glass. There were not, in fact two words, but rather one word and a fragment: -ld laughs.

-ld laughs, he thought. -ld?

He racked his brain for words ending in -ld, but given his state of agitation, had  a difficult time.

Bold.

.          

Cold.

           

Should.

           

Sold.

           

Old.

           

Gold.

           

Would.

He scrutinized the words again through the magnifying glass; yes, no mistaking it, the word was “laughs,” and the phrase presented logical and grammatical problems with many of the combining options he was coming up with. In one final act of desperation he struck a match and held it to one corner of the wrapper. In an instant the entire package erupted in flames in his fingers, and Ruckert, howling, flung the burning fortune cookie into the air --a helpless impulse-- and it landed on the counter, where it immediately ignited a roll of paper towels, which promptly fell over and set fire to a dish towel.

Suddenly Ruckert’s kitchen counter seemed to be a conflagration. He fanned at the blaze with another towel --a foolish decision, he immediately realized; too late, alas, as the flames were growing higher and clearly scorching the underside of his kitchen cabinets. Ruckert could also see the counter top beginning to bubble and curdle. He cursed the fact that he owned no fire extinguisher, he, the son of a man who had run a hardware store for forty years. He tried to remember: was it wise to attempt to douse a fire with water? In some instances, he seemed to recall, it was counter-productive, but he had no idea what those instances might be. Meanwhile, his smoke detector had begun to drone at a deafening volume.

What the hell, Ruckert thought, did not firemen use hoses to bombard fires with water? He grabbed an old plastic ice cream pail from under his sink, filled it in the sink, and spastically flung the contents in the direction of the blaze, which seemed to have run out of readily flammable material. The roll of paper towels, however, were burning more fiercely than ever, and churning up a shower of sparks and ash. The kitchen had filled up with a toxic-smelling smoke. He filled the pail once more and this time dumped it more slowly and carefully on the fire. This second application of water succeeded in reducing the pile of burning items to a damp, smoking heap of smoldering embers, allowing Ruckert the opportunity to remove his dish strainer to the stove top and, using a pot holder, sweep the mess into the sink and extinguish it completely using water from the tap.

His counter top was ruined; several layers had been melted away, and the result looked like the sort of mottled, blistered, and textured monstrosity he’d too often encountered on museum walls. The fire contained, Ruckert turned his attention to the braying of the smoke alarm, located in the hallway outside his bathroom. He had to fetch a chair to reach the contraption, which turned out not to be simply a battery-operated model, but rather somehow wired into the house’s electrical system. It was probably, Ruckert thought, connected to the circuit box in the basement, about which he knew nothing. At a loss, he twisted the disc free of its base and yanked the wires from the ceiling, an action that resulted in a loud pop and flash, followed by a shower of sparks and smoke.

God almighty, he thought, he would burn the place down yet.

Ruckert stood for a long moment beneath the hole in his ceiling, until he was reasonably satisfied that his bungling would not be the (at least immediate) source of another fire. He then sat down on the chair beneath the ruined smoke detector. Only then did he realize that he was hyperventilating and sweating profusely.

All this, he thought, over a fortune cookie.

But as he thought about it a bit longer, and replayed the calamitous chain of events in his head, he realized that he could not view this incident as purely quixotic. The fortune cookie thing was somehow of grave importance to him; the whole episode continued to smack not of fate or absurdity, but of conspiracy. Ruckert got up and went back into the kitchen. He was appalled by the whole mess, but particularly appalled --and outraged, horrified, even chilled-- to discover that the fortune cookie that had started it all had been entirely erased by the fire.

He looked at the clock on his microwave oven; it was 8:22. He felt certain the Chinese place was open until nine. He found a menu in his silverware drawer and dialed the number. After a half dozen rings a woman answered; Ruckert was sure it was the old woman who routinely rang up his order.

“What is the source of your fortune cookies?” Ruckert demanded.

“We get them from our regular supplier,” the woman said in what sounded almost like a slight English accent, which he had never noticed before.

“Are you familiar with the fortunes they contain?” Ruckert asked.

The woman clearly hesitated.

“Somewhat,” she said. “I open them sometimes for amusement.”

“And you’re willing to swear to me that you don’t meddle with them in any way?” Ruckert said.

“I’m not sure I understand,” the woman  said.

Ruckert sighed. “I have a problem here with a particular fortune,” he said. “Only a fragment of it is legible.”

He spelled it out for her. The woman hesitated again, and then finally said in a cold, deadpan voice, “You cry. The world laughs.”

Ruckert was suddenly aware that he was bent over and resting his head on the stove top. “May I please ask you in what possible way that can be construed as a fortune?” he said.

“I am not an oracle,” the woman said. “I am not a philosopher or a psychologist. I give you three cookies and still you complain.”

With that she hung up the phone.

Ruckert then spent an hour sitting on his kitchen floor, surrounded by puddles of water and soot, opening each of the fortune cookies in his huge drawer. Halfway through the pile he understood exactly what was happening, understood that he was trapped in a nightmare from which he would never awake, yet he plowed through to the end.

Every one of the cookies was empty.

Schopenhauer And Spinoza On Dogs

I don't read philosophy for answers to the meaning of life or any of the other ridiculous questions that have caused lunatics to bang their heads against the wall for as long as humans have been able to babble. What attracts me again and again to books of philosophy is the marginalia, the odd biographical details and digressions and just plain absurd minutiae that these characters cough up on such a regular basis. The best biographies --hands down-- are of the philosophers. The unhappy little hunchbacks who waddled around the streets of their towns and endured the taunts of rock-throwing children (Kierkegaard). The closet gnomes, martyrs, and maniacs. Empedocles wrote, "Wretches! Utter wretches! Keep your hands from beans!" Three of Ludwig Wittgenstein's eight siblings committed suicide. Kant wrote a treatise on rainbows. And the great master of gloom Schopenhauer took issue with Spinoza's Ethics over what he perceived to be their disregard for the virtue and dignity of dogs.

I was reading Schopenhauer's History of Philosophy last night when I discovered the old crank railing against Spinoza for "his as unworthy as false deliverances about animals."  From assertions in the Ethics Schopenhauer concludes, "Dogs [Spinoza] seems not to have known at all. To the monstrous proposition with which the 26th appendix [of the Ethics] opens...the best answer is given by a Spanish literateur of our day (Larra, psuedonym Figaro), 'He who has never kept a dog does not know what it is to love and be loved.'"

I spent two hours rooting around my apartment for a copy of Spinoza's Ethics in order to locate the passage that so offended Schopenhauer. Here it is: "Besides men, we know of no particular thing in nature in whose mind we may rejoice, and whom we can associate with ourselves in friendship or any sort of fellowship; therefore, whatsoever there be in nature besides man, a regard for our advantage does not call on us to preserve, but to preserve or destroy according to its various capabilities, and to adapt to our use as best we can."

I'm officially on the side of Schopenhauer in this important argument, by the way, and was pleased to later run across this additional tribute to dogs (in his own splendid Ethics): "Hence comes the four-legged friendships of so many of the better kind of men, for on what indeed should one refresh oneself from the endless deceit, falseness, and cunning of men if it were not for the dogs into whose faithful countenance one may look without distrust?"

James Bond, Only A Girl: Part Two

Ella was on the front porch, blowing into an empty bottle with a straw, shivering a fly that was trapped there at the bottom. The fly was woozy and slick with cola, and was rolling and tumbling in the little bottle hurricane that Ella was producing with her straw. The fly was done for, Ella knew that much. It had gotten itself into a pickle, and would spend its last moments at the bottom of the bottle, drunk on cola and flopping itself unconscious.

Roland Schramm came around the side of the house with a globe in his arms and crawled down under the porch. Ella's grandmother had thrown out the globe because it had a dent in Asia, and Roland had fished it from the trashcan out back. Roland's dog, Perry, followed him everywhere and was under the porch with him. Perry was a first-class leaper, and a shy dog.

Roland lived across the back alley and went under Ella's grandmother's porch all the time to smoke. Ella could see him now through the slats of the porch, hunched beneath her with his head down and his dog curled up in the dirt. The smoke from his cigarette came up through the floorboards of the porch. Ella didn't mind the smell; it smelled just like Roland under the porch. Her grandmother no longer made a stink about Roland smoking under the porch, because if you hollered at Roland he would spray paint on your garage or break things. It was easier to just let him go under the porch, where he kept a stash of motorcycle magazines with pictures of men with tattoos.

Ella was bored. It was no good, being a girl in the world. The yards and bushes and woods all around her were full of dirty boys, chasing each other with sticks and throwing things and still hollering into the darkness when she was already in her bed. That's unfortunate, her grandmother would say whenever Ella complained about her life.

Have a heart. That was another of Ella's grandmother's sayings. If her grandmother were to come out to the porch and see Ella torturing the fly in the bottle, that was exactly what she would say: Have a heart, Ella. That poor fly is one of God's creatures.

Ella had never seen her grandfather, but he was in the world somewhere, and her grandmother was sour about it. There was a card on her grandmother's bed stand, which had been  there all the years that Ella could remember. The card featured a funny drawing of a man in a tuxedo. The man was holding a tray on which was a sparkling diamond ring. Inside the card someone had written "If you're loving me like I'm loving you, baby, we're really in love." Those words, her grandmother said, were written by Hank Williams, but the handwriting was Ella's grandfather's. They weren't, her grandmother said, worth the paper they were written on.

At least once a day Ella's grandmother would drag her in under her chin, wheeze what sounded like tears into her hair, and murmur, "Bless your little pea-picking heart. Where in the world would I be without you?"

Ella could not begin to formulate an answer to her grandmother's question. All day the old woman sat at the kitchen table, scribbling away at her word search puzzles and watching a television that was on top of the refrigerator. Every afternoon in the summer Ella's grandmother would send her up the street to the Gas-and-Go to fetch a bag of potato chips and a can of diet Cola. Her grandma would give Ella a five-dollar bill and instruct her to get something to eat for herself as well. Ella would ride her bicycle to the library downtown and spend the remaining three dollars and twenty-five cents making photocopies of beautiful women and beautiful clothing from fashion books and magazines. Shoved in the drawer of her nightstand and  tucked in her school books Ella had hundreds of photocopies of exotic clothing --and shoes; Ella loved shoes-- the likes of which she had never seen in Prentice. She also liked to make copies of photographs of sports cars. Ella wanted to be a secret agent like James Bond, only a girl. In her dreams she was often driving a stolen Jaguar through the streets of Prentice.

Ella's grandmother was her father's mother, and she would seldom give Ella information that was helpful in forming an impression of a man she could no longer remember. "He liked to put rocks in his pockets when he was a boy," her grandmother would tell Ella. "I used to have a basket full of them down in the laundry room. Eddie's rocks." When pressed for more information, Ella's grandmother would say things like, "He used to listen to a radio that was the shape of a motor oil can," or, "He loved tomatoes." One time she told Ella that her father had been a crackerjack jumper, the best in his class. "He got a ribbon for it," she said. All of these details didn't add up to much in Ella's mind, and her conversations with her grandmother regarding her father always boiled down in the end to the fact that Ella's father hadn't amounted "to a hill of beans." Men, she was told, were good for three things: running off, killing each other, and making babies they wanted no part of. Ella's father, it turned out, was good for all three.

These were the things Ella knew about the world, but she was determined –and certain—that one day soon she would know more. Whenever she was reading a book she had checked out from the library there would come a point where she could no longer contain her excitement, and so she would mark her place, put the book aside, and say to herself, “It’s getting really good.” Her life was not yet like the books she loved, but it was going to be like those books. It was going to get really good.  When she told her grandmother this, the old woman would throw her head back and let loose with her crazy blackbird laugh.

House Of Coates

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Catch And Release: My Photographic Education

How many words do you think you can run through your head in a day?

It depends on how many words you have in you, am I right?

Images, though, they're something else; they represent a bigger, more universal language. All you need to do is look around and keep your eyes open. Yet I could pretty much guarantee you that there are people all over this country who are all but visually illiterate, people whose visual vocabulary is as impoverished as their command of the English language. They don't really look at anything. Show them a photograph of a nook or cranny in their own house and they wouldn't even recognize it. They've done all sorts of studies and experiments on this phenomenon, of course, asked people to identify their neighbors or co-workers from photographs, or to describe the cars their neighbors drive. You'd be surprised by how many people can't do this, can't even come close.

I once went to an exhibition of Irving Penn's photographs, which I find occasionally astonishing but more often than not overly cool and stylized. At any rate, there were all these beautiful images of very common objects --frozen food, for instance, or a scrap of litter from the street-- and people were lined up gaping at these photos as if they were looking upon something wholly exotic or unfamiliar. Which, of course, they were.

It's what you look at that's important, my father always told me. What you choose to see. He was a photo nut, and he was always pointing stuff out. Do you realize, he'd say, how much compelling drama and pain and boredom and joy goes entirely unseen in this world?

That was the way he talked. Look around you, he'd say. Take in the details. His one great dream had been to be a photographer, but he'd never been able, he felt, to come close to capturing what he thought he saw and what he felt was truly there. One day he dug a hole in the backyard and buried his cameras alongside the graves of our two dogs, which was exactly the sort of thing he'd have loved to see someone else do.

Look, he'd say, calling my attention at a stoplight to a stray hand protruding from the shadows of another car and drumming with long, thin fingers on a bright yellow patch of the driver's-side door. Look, he'd say, isn't that beautiful? That's an Eggleston photo, right there.

I remember a few of his photos, and whether they were successful or not I couldn't say. But I do remember a photo of a fiddle underneath a bed, nestled amid the dusty sprawl of shoes, books, and magazines. There was another of a plump strawberry sitting next to a burning cigarette in an ashtray. These things were what he was looking at, he would say, but not what he was looking for. That was one of his favorite questions: What are you looking for?

People, he said, didn't see the trees for the forest; they couldn't see the beautiful moments all around them, lost in the stream and bustle of life. That was the wonder of photography, of seeing the world concentrated through one lens, one eye closed, the other pressed tight to the camera, focused. Those were the pictures my father remembered, those moments when he'd zeroed  in on something with his camera, or seen something he'd never before realized was there, never mind if it somehow mysteriously vanished in the developing tray or at the photo lab. He knew what he had seen, even if he had not quite captured it.

He used to drag me down to the public library, where he would build big stacks of photography monographs on one of the long white tables upstairs. We would sit there for hours while he slowly turned the shiny pages of those books, pausing over each photo to say, Look, look at that, or, just as frequently, I don't see it. I can't tell what she was looking for.

He liked the periphery, photographers who found things in the margins and shadows. The frame isn't always what or where you think it is, he'd say. Get outside the frame and you get away from the self-consciousness that photography has instilled in so many people. If people think they're being looked at or watched, even if by a camera --or perhaps especially if by a camera-- they become actors, actors hiding in their own skin.

He would open the pages of a book of portrait photography --by August Sander, perhaps, or Mike Disfarmer-- to illustrate his points. You see, he would say, portraits can be fascinating for what they reveal, but also for what they disclose, and on entirely different levels. They work when the subjects have either fierce delusions or no illusions at all; the best and most fascinating portraits of all --and you will notice this often in these works of Sander and Disfarmer-- are of these last types, people who are comfortable in their own skin, or who are not yet truly conscious of the power of the camera. You could look through thousands of contemporary portraits and never stumble across a single such photograph. The camera has made a pet of the average American. Point a camera at someone and they retreat into the dreams and archetypes of childhood; they become mugging clowns or vamping starlets. I love it when people recoil from the camera, my father said. These are the people I give my heart to, the people with the fascinating peripheries.

It's a gift to look away, my father also told me. Few people even know how to look around, but the really special people learn to look away. Think about what I am saying: in any situation --in every situation-- there is always something that commands attention: the focus. The people in power and the people who manipulate desire know this; the mythmakers understand this as well. It is hard to look away from that focus of attention, whether it is a beautiful woman walking down the sidewalk, a movie screen, or the batter in a baseball game. Yet if you can teach yourself to look away you will see all sorts of startling and wholly unfamiliar things; you will see not just reactions and response, but indifference and an infinite variety of furtive behaviors that are absolutely human. You will see things that no one ever looks at or sees closely.

A great photographer, my father said, can find desolation in even the brightest colors, romance in squalor, heartbreak and loneliness amid jubilation, and beauty in even the most ordinary objects--maybe beauty is not even the correct word. Grace, that's perhaps more accurate.

Look at this, he would say, absorbed in a photo of a rack of candy bars or the inside of a freezer. Look how mysterious this world is. Isn't that the message of every one of these photographs: Can you even begin to imagine?

Photography was my father's obsession, but he had plenty of other strange habits. I suppose, really, that you could define him as a constellation of strange habits. Among his many peculiarities was the fact that he never ate anything much beyond  breakfast cereal and cottage cheese. He couldn't keep a job, and would go so far as to admit, It's awfully hard to hold down a job when you don't have a work ethic. It didn't seem to bother him in the least that he bagged groceries or worked as a night clerk at a local motel. He'd claim that he couldn't afford to invest any of his available pride in anything the "real world" would consider a job. His real work was looking at photographs, and finding --but not taking-- photographs in the world around him. Certainly no one was going to pay him to do either of those things in a little river town of fewer than 5,000 people.

Movies, he said, were a poor substitute for photographs, and television was even worse. Yet even when he watched a film my father would be studying the margins and the backgrounds, looking for his own stills, the things no one else would ever notice. I want to stop time, he would say. There’s too much movement in this world, and too many fantasies that are the stuff of nothing but pathetic dreams. I just need the instants, and they tell me everything I need to know about the world we’re living in.

My father hated America, or at least he hated  what America was becoming and what it had allowed itself to become. This was 20 years ago; I can only imagine what he would make of the place now. He seemed to have an almost foreign perspective on America; he saw the country from some great and distorted distance, and condemned as imperialism all laissez faire capitalism. The biggest victims of America's cultural imperialism, he would tell anyone who would listen, were Americans themselves. I can't afford to be an American, he would say. It takes more energy than any civilized human being should ever possess.

Yet for all his contempt of America, my father never went anywhere else. He never even visited New York except in photographs. I think he actually thought of himself as European, or at least he saw the country primarily through the eyes of European  intellectuals, artists, and, especially, photographers. Foreign photographers took the best pictures of America, he said, because they saw things differently. That was another of his pet phrases: I guess I just see things differently, he'd say whenever somebody in our little town bothered to disagree with him, which was less and less often the older he got.

My father certainly didn't have an easy life, and I know his frustrations were compounded  by the fact that he had so little access to the images he craved. He never had any money, and there wasn't even a bookstore in our town, so he was left with the limited resources of the local public library. He always used to say that the only American institution he supported without reservation was the public library. I'm sure my father drove the librarians crazy with his requests for inter-library loans; most of the monographs he was interested in had to be borrowed from the collections of larger libraries. There are an infinite number of things to see in this miserable town, he would say, but they’re still not enough. For the missing things you have to look elsewhere.

The only camera he kept after he gave up on himself as a photographer was a cheap 35-millimeter that he hung onto so that he could make personal photocopies of his favorite images from the collections he pored over in the library. When he was dying he burned even these, and when I expressed my dismay he told me that the photos did not belong to him, and they certainly didn’t belong to me.

The world is the only gallery of photographs that matters, he said. Looking isn’t hard, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look hard all the same and hold on tight to every startling thing that catches your eye.

The Malliest Mall Of Them All

First I worked in this place in the Food Court that sold French fries and pretzels. My boss was a Vietnamese guy who called himself Mike. Then I moved down another floor and worked at this place that sold nothing but total shit --no vision, none whatsoever: Rattling plastic frogs that croaked and paddled about in a tank of water, incense, big, hideous rugs with pictures of polar bears and lions and Bob Marley, and lousy Green Bay Packers stuff. Then it was on to a shell place where honest to God I once worked an eight-hour shift and never had one person set foot in the door, not even any of the Japanese or the old people from South Dakota. All day long I had to listen to CDs that had like harps and the sounds of waves and some other irritating noise that I think was supposed to be the shrieking of whales but that mostly sounded like seals being clubbed to death. That got fucking old in a hurry so I got a job at a place that sold nothing but lava lamps and Star Wars shit and Bill Clinton masks. Then there was a candle place that reeked so bad that I couldn't get through the day without guzzling an entire bottle of Nyquil and sneaking one-hitters in the bathroom.

I did have some standards, I guess. I never worked at the NASCAR place.

I eventually ended up in a cheesy little religious kiosk where I sat there on a stool and did crossword puzzles and read Heavy Metal magazines while the Jesus plaques, crosses, and Bible verse bookmarks gathered dust. You know you're working a shit job when the first thing on your checklist of responsibilities is "dust merchandise."

Even the guy who worked the sausage-and-cheese kiosk got more chicks to stop and talk to him, and the stooge who ran the place told me I couldn’t talk on my cell phone, drink Mountain Dew, or wear my Chuck Taylors.

That was pretty much my “fuck this” retail moment. I'm a graphic designer now.

Little Village: It's A Small Town

Bloom of fireworks above a black field, the idle of insects throbbing from the damp ditches. Distant petroleum carnival of light, dark steeples, and a water tower announcing the presence of a town. Is that the rattle of a snare drum from somewhere out in the fields? Tell me again what lives in that place beyond this darkness. The bonfire will signify what again? When it all goes up in flames what is it we'll be burning?

I like this song, it reminds me of something. I can't put my finger on it, but it involved, I'm sure, a night just like this. We were in a car, listening to Slim Dunlap and going somewhere else, or perhaps just somewhere.

Somewhere else came later, I suppose. Back then there was only this. Remember? When there was only this? It was never enough. Perhaps that was the problem. You can't put your finger on it. I love that about you, how you can never seem to put your finger on it, and how badly you would like to put your finger on it. Things, in general, the way they don't seem quite real to you, within reach. Graspable. The way you're always saying Hold out hope, as if it could mean the many things it could mean. Not just a clinging to, not just something desperate, but an offering. Something extended. Something shared.

I love these quiet roads, just outside what is our life, that feeling of being lost in a still unfamiliar place, of being plunked down on another planet, looking out with dim longing and dimming wonder at the distant glow of the puzzle that will never be home. Can't say. That's another one of yours that I love, as if you mean it, as if there's some mysterious proscription, as if you honestly cannot say, cannot utter whatever words might explain, whatever words might possibly make a difference.

Because --and this I choose to think and believe-- those words are still forming in you, still turning over and lining up in your head, still drilling and taking shape and preparing for the long march up into the light, when they will become, magically, truth, the truth we're going to need to turn finally and forever away from that dark, still-mysterious planet barely rising across the black, empty fields.

Paradisus Bestiarum: A Note From The Registrar

Many people are understandably concerned  about the status of their beloved companion animals in the afterlife. We receive queries on the subject all the time. Before I address that issue, however, I'd like to clear up a few semantic misunderstandings regarding Paradise.

We're decidedly old school up here, as you might imagine, and so far as we're officially concerned you're all animals --find a Latin dictionary and  look up animus or anima sometime; while you're at it you might find  it curious, if not instructive, to note that animus, a word that originally connoted mind and spirit, is now commonly defined by humans as a feeling of hostility. Something to think about, I suppose.

At any rate, what you tend to think of as animals are here regarded as beasts, and the admission criteria for beasts is a complicated business. The rules and regulations have evolved slowly over many centuries. I can, however, tell you that no beast, not even  the most ill tempered, poorly behaved, and ferocious, goes to hell. We don't hold these creatures responsible for their behavior, and when they die or are killed, they are simply dead.

There is, though, a place for beasts in Paradise; there are, in fact, a number of places. Some of them are what you  might think of as sanctuaries or refuges, where the majority of the beasts are segregated from the population of human animals.

Most of the bestial sanctuaries are actually, in fact, offshore, a couple islands just off the coast that have been set aside for cats, primates, and  horses. As with humans, however, not all cats, primates, and  horses are admitted to Paradise, although virtue is not the determining criteria for these beasts. To enter Paradise --or rather, to be granted eternal refuge on these Paradisiacal adjuncts-- a cat, horse, or monkey has to have had  the sort of relationship with a human whereby it was perceived by its human companion to have been in possession of a soul. Such relationships constitute what is officially called "Empathic Baptism."

This is admittedly a rule that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it's been in place since the last major amendments and revisions to the admissions criteria were signed into the Book of Law at the end of the 19th century.

Some of the more intelligent beasts have traditionally been granted  special exemptions in Paradise. An ocean was created to accommodate certain aquatic creatures, a decision that was not without controversy, particularly after dolphins rather quickly found eternity boring and petitioned for removal, a request that was, following much deliberation, reluctantly granted. There are no watercraft in Paradise, and very few of the human animals partake in swimming, even though the activity is permitted under certain circumstances.

Dolphins, we were led to understand, are naturally curious and social beings, and they compared the ocean in Paradise to an aquarium with few visitors and even fewer diversions. They also complained that God seemed to show insufficient interest in them.

Dogs are the only beasts given a blanket pass to Paradise proper --good dogs, I should say, but there have been very few remembered examples of dogs having been denied admission. I have to admit that, being a dog person, I find this arrangement more than satisfactory. There are, though, plenty of people --activists, mainly-- who carp about the issue all the time, but it's the way things are in Paradise. This is essentially a very conservative place, where proposals for even minor changes are frowned  upon and  met with stiff resistance from the governing council. There are also, I should say, a lot of people here who have no apparent love for beasts of any kind, and this is a constituency that  is constantly complaining about the absence of meat from our diets. If we had a democratic system in place here and the matter of admitting beasts was put to a vote I have no doubt that the creature lovers among us would be soundly defeated.

Certainly people recognize that if you open the gates to cattle and chickens and  rats and the like you're going to have a big problem on your hands in a hurry. The mortality rate and  life expectancy of most beasts makes any sort of concessions or compromises on this point problematic, to say the least. We're already packed in so tight that social interaction  is all but impossible. The streets are always so crowded that, with the exception of my daily trips to the office (my job, like all jobs here, is a volunteer position) I virtually never leave my dormitory, and I'm forced to share my bed with the six dogs who spent most of their earthly lives with me. It's admittedly not the most comfortable of arrangements, but I guess that's the price you pay for attaching yourself to other living creatures, and I wouldn't think of making a fuss.

I had a neighbor for a time --a woman from Portland-- who bitched so loudly and for so long over the refusal to grant an exception for her ferret that she was eventually shipped back to Purgatory until she learned to keep her yap shut.

I can't say I was sorry to see her go.

LinkedIn Profile For Jergen King Bergen III ("Jergie Bergen"). Removed By Site Administrators On 2-11-12

Entrepreneur, musician, actor, disc jockey, filmmaker, truck stop sushi pioneer, former lead singer of the influential Mason City, Iowa prog rock band, Muffalo, and Facebook legend.

In 1984, Jergie was named a Northeast Iowa "Mover and Shaker" by the Cedar Rapids Weekender. Longtime fans might remember Jergie's controversial and short-lived stint as the host of the drive-time "Houston, We Have a Problem" program on Houston, Minnesota's KATU, where he was fired for repeatedly spinning Musique's "Push, Push in the Bush" and "White Lines," by Grandmaster Flash, often juxtaposing such perceived affronts to public morality with Tony Orlando and Dawn's "Tie a Yellow Ribbon ('Round the Old Oak Tree)" and chestnuts from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

In the early 1980s –almost 10 years after the breakup of Muffalo—Jergie attempted a musical comeback, assembling the band Blind Somebody Something, a group whose sound predated such recent acts as The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Black Keys, and North Mississippi All Stars. Blind Somebody Something proved to be a hard sell in the musical climate of the period, however, and broke up after less than one year. They did once open for Butch Vig's Firetown at People's Bar and Grill in Ames, Iowa, and recorded an album of material (“TOO FAR OUT ALL MY LIFE”) that remains unreleased.

Undaunted, Jergie launched a film production company, Bergen International Pictures, and produced, wrote, and directed "Saturn's Slatterns," a low-budget science fiction film shot in three days in and around Dubuque, Iowa. Phantasm magazine, which called the film “one of those unwatchable travesties that seems tailor made for the sub-human, late-night bong marathon crowd,” estimated the budget –perhaps facetiously—at $178. In 1987, BIP released two films for the Asian video market: “Machines of Anticipation, Part One: The Neanderthal Nymphomaniacs," and "Alligators of Atlantis.”

Around this same time, Bergen made a number of appearances in regional theater productions. One such appearance earned a rave from the Mount Carroll Independent, whose Clair Church wrote: "In the role of Inspector Poirot, Jergie Bergen --channeling, it sometimes seems, Rip Taylor one moment, and a seriously inebriated Albert Finney the next-- quite literally steals the show, to the point that some may wonder whether what they are watching is, indeed, a production of 'Murder on the Orient Express' or something altogether different, chaotic, and almost unpleasantly manic. Part of the show's perhaps unintentional entertainment value is watching the other actors recoil from Bergen's Poirot with what seems to be genuine fear."

On September 17, 1992, at the 5,155-seat McElroy Arena in Waterloo, Iowa, Jergie staged his most ambitious project to date: "Antietam On Ice," a production involving more than 600 Civil War reenactors (aboard ice skates and in authentic period costume) from all over the Midwest. "AOI," as it is known in Bergen lore, was largely financed by investments from members of Jergie's mother's longtime bridge club, and featured a rock opera written, performed, and recorded entirely by Jergie Bergen. The work --notable for its loud, sustained stretches of cacophony, distortion, and multi-tracked screams and howls that showed off Jergie's astonishing vocal range-- described the bloodiest single-day battle in American history. The actual recreation of the battle, however, was --owing to time constraints and the unwieldy cast-- hastily choreographed, and the production (staged on the anniversary of Antietam) was plagued by problems of synchronization, poor sound quality, and numerous skating mishaps. The Waterloo Courier, which did not run a review, nonetheless featured a short news item that described the resulting chaos and noted the paid attendance of 79.

By the mid-'90s, Jergie had fallen on hard times. A legal dispute led to eviction from his mother's home, and he found himself back in Waterloo, where he worked as a disc jockey at a roller skating rink and lived part of the year in the press box at a local junior college's football facility.

In 2000, Jergie attempted yet another comeback, this time as a businessman. A $90,000 payoff on a $3 Iowa Hot Lotto Sizzler ticket enabled him to buy controlling interest in 750 condom vending machines, the majority of which were already installed in the restrooms of truck stops, convenience stores, and bars over a three state area (Iowa, Southern Minnesota, and Southwestern Wisconsin). From August 2000-November 2008, Jergie traveled more than 70,000 miles a year on the Bergen Rubber Route (see "Iowa's Condom King," Des Moines Register, August 11, 2005).

It was while driving the Rubber Route that Jergie had the inspiration for truck stop sushi, and in less than two years, working out of a production facility in a former Rocky Rococo's pizza parlor in Mason City, he managed to place his product --Double Nickel Sushi-2-Roll-- in over 150 locations in the upper Midwest.

On November 16, 2008, Jergie's Ford Taurus was found at a rest stop overlooking the Yellowstone River in Montana. The keys were in the ignition and Jergie's wallet was on the front passenger seat. In the trunk, authorities found numerous heavy canvas bags containing almost $25,000 in change. Jergie also left behind a note bequeathing his identity, along with full ownership of his Facebook page, to Christian Byrd, the Brussels-based founder of the Jergie Bergen fan club.

Today, despite ongoing heartbreak and occasionally severe identity confusion, Byrd continues to gamely --and to the best of his ability-- carry the Bergen Brand to a new generation of acolytes.

In 2011, Italian filmmaker Angelo "Angie" Santangelo (“The Wild Child of Perugia”) began to assemble archival footage for a documentary: "Jergie Bergen: There Ain't No We, Bro." The film is tentatively slated for a summer 2013 release.