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Things to die for
Burn me up and hurl the ashes to the wind.
(Preferably by the Golden Gate Bridge, not in Texas. Please.)
That’s what I’ve instructed my family to do with me when I croak. My Dad jokes that he’ll just flush me in powder form. That’s good, too, as long as I swirl down a toilet in Paris. There’s the rub, pop. Enjoy the trip. I will.
The famed joint I visited outside of London in 2004.
I’m all deathy again. Mostly because an article in The New York Times science section recently lead me to two places: Funeral Consumers Alliance at funerals.org and Mark Harris’ newish book Grave Matters: A Journey through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, which I own but haven’t yet read.
(Even so, I’m sure it can’t beat my favorite funeral book, and one of my favorite death books, Jessica Mitford’s classic “The American Way of Death.” Just how sick am I?)
Both the site and the book court you to better ways of burial/disposal. Embalming — totally unnecessary, even Victorian-barbaric in my mind, pointless and, worse, terrible for the environment. My favorite proposal is Harris’: to have your cremains dropped into the sea in a “reef ball,” all about which you can, and should, read here. Talk about sleeping with the fishes.
A reef ball. Zany.
Talking about death, but of the non-human variety: I drove to Shreveport, La., for a story a couple days ago, and I’ve never ever seen so much ROADKILL. Dogs, cats, possums, armadillos (which I’m now convinced are born dead, as I’ve never seen a live one, except in cartoons), skunks, squirrels and, really weird, giant birds. I’m surprised I didn’t see giraffes, wildebeests, dolphins. The birds, by the way, were buzzards that nibbled and tore at the dead beasts, and were then squashed themselves by vehicles roaring at 70 mph down interstates and farm roads. Splat.
And on the grisly topic, Tammy the Rat Made of Magic, killed her first huge water bug last night. Reddish-brown, shiny and fat, it was a shelled behemoth, a baby lobster crittering across my concrete floor.
Until it met the unrepentant jaws of Tammy. Crunch, slurp, crunchcrunchcrunch. As legs fell off and Tammy chewed away, a rusty slop hit the floor. By then even I was repulsed, and I snatched the hulking shell away from the rat. No longer is Tammy a virgin to the wild. She is a killer. And she’s full.
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Turkey calls
If the hectoring carpet salesmen leave me largely alone, my journey to Turkey will have far better odds of flat-out rocking.
Really, sir, “my friend,” I don’t need a carpet. I will let you lead me to your shop, where, of course, we will sip hot apple tea and talk about our families and countries for what feels like eternity. But I am buying nothing. I will allow you to do this once, perhaps twice. After that, talk to the hand. Or the foot. Don’t squander my time, and yours, friend-o.
These three blameless tourists got trapped by their new bestest friend in the middle.
I almost strangled half dozen carpet-hawkers during my last Turkey trot, in 1999, a quickie of four days in Istanbul. (For a dead-on account of what it’s like dealing with Turkey’s ubiquitous, indefatigable, irrepressibly annoying carpet guys, click HERE). It snowed one day, dripped and drizzled the next. Finally, our last day rewarded us with glorious springy skies and climes. Gorgeous. I walked the city for eight hours straight, barely stopping for snack or sip.
That night, we went to the city’s most famous old Turkish bath. The guy washed me like a dog — buckets of water dumped over me to rinse the soap and shampoo — then scraped about a pound of nasty dead skin cells off my body with a spatula thingadooey. After that, we went to a bar and smoked a hooka with a needy, affable guy named Ali, who clearly wanted to be adopted and taken home by a pair of young Americans. Ali: the human puppy.
Turkey it is for the spring trip. Russia was a growing pain, like a tumor. The costs, the bureaucratic hurdles, the 1989-style Web sites, etc.
From Istanbul, to which I plan to devote a week, I will branch off southwest to the battle grounds of Gallipoli and Troy, then southward down the Aegean coast to the Roman ruins of Ephesus, then due east to Cappadocia.
My first nights in Istanbul will be at the Hotel Poem, a sweet boutique hotel in the heart of Sultanahmet, which is historic Old Istanbul, mere strides from the Blue Mosque, Hippodrome, Hagia Sofia and the blue, spangled waters of the Bosphorus.
Blue Mosque
I’m already there, in a waking dream.
Now. Who wants to rat-sit a toothy, toothsome little girl named Tammy?
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Take Friday off — it’s World Rat Day
Tammy, the greatest living rat in the galaxy, has learned many things in her 10 months of life: the joys of hummus and belly massages, that sofas can be reduced to rubbish in mere hours with dedicated industry, that coffee is hot and unsavory, that the Tooth Fairy is a lie.
Her latest epiphany is that soil in a potted plant makes a cozy napping spot. She used to dig it up, crunch the leaves, even climb the small tree’s trunk and get stuck up top, causing firemen to be alerted for a rescue that trivializes the profession.
Tammy caught in the napping act, startled awake:
And then stretching and yawning like a jungle cat, giant, ferocious, bizarre:
She remains a furry demon with a big, curious mind of her own. What she doesn’t know is that World Rat Day — which the late Becky and I missed last year — happens Friday.
Read about the goofy, Web-generated holiday here.
Heck, everyday is Rat Day at Casa de Chris. She has free run of the place once I get home from work, then she’s plopped back in the cage at bedtime. She watches Asian movies, sips wine, gambols up and down the stairs, chews books and DVD boxes, steals whole pages of newspaper in her teeth and drags them to wherever she’s nesting that day.
She’ll have a babysitter this weekend — the kind, kooky Courtney — while I see some of the family in Jersey.
Then, in May, it’s off to Turkey. I’ve scratched Russia. Longish story coming later.
A top e-mailed story at The New York Times this week is “It’s Not You, It’s Your Books” by Rachel Donadio.
It’s a good bit about using what someone reads, or doesn’t read, as a litmus test for potential romantic partners. Many people do this, be it with movies or TV shows. A woman has to like, if not love, “Annie Hall” in my relationships, for instance.
But one part of the article rubbed this book-snot wrong: “Let’s face it: this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period.”
Hmphh! Meet that “rare” guy.
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From Russia, with angst
I’ve been exasperating every co-worker within earshot with my splendid all-new Russian accent. It’s a fine thing.
Admittedly, since I only acquired it about a day ago (it may have installed itself in my sleep), this mellifluous tool of rolled R’s and nasal O’s needs tuning and practice. But it’s pretty terrific already. I sound like a cross between Harrison Ford in “K19: The Widowmaker” and Borat, with an exhilarating drizzle of Yakov Smirnoff that brings it all home — home to Mother Russia.
I plan on learning three and a half Russian words before I visit Russia in May, relying mostly on my new accent to pull me through sticky situations, such as common greetings, ordering borsch and vodka, securing Hermitage tickets and bribing the police.
It’s a musical gift, my Russian accent. I consider it an art, demanding cultivation and honing, and commanding respect. And yet this thing, so full of loveliness and joy, is met by colleagues with snickers, scoffs, head shakes. Swift slaps are not uncommon.
They are mistaken. Clearly they are poisoned by jealousy. A Russian accent this crisp and authoritative isn’t heard with regularity in our parts. The intimidation factor must be formidable. For that I apologize.
Still, I must practice. (Aye moost prakteez is more like it. See?)
The journey itself — two fat weeks in early spring, after the arctic thaw, we hope — takes me to the usual suspects: Moscow and St. Petersburg, with sojourns to grassy towns in the so-called Golden Ring outside Moscow. I will wear a hat made of moose flesh.
KGB! Pravda! The Kremlin! Red Square! Lenin’s tomb! The Museum of GULAG History!
(Today’s lesson: GULAG is an acronym for “Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitel’no-Trudovykh Lagerey i koloniy,” or in English: “The Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies.” Thanks, Wikipedia!)
Russia, already, is a pain. In affairs of international bureaucracy, namely acquiring a tourist visa, demands are high and strenuous. First, I must get an “invitation” from a hotel or a company that does these things for a $30 fee. Then I have to fill out a detailed two-page visa application which costs another $131 to process at the Russian Consulate in Houston.
Is the Cold War still a’crackle? Putin seems to think so, and accordingly we all pay. The visa application wants to know if I’ve ever abused drugs (is vodka a drug?), if I have any specialized skills or training related to fire-arms, explosives or biological and chemical materials (maybe) or if I’ve ever suffered a mental disorder (no comment). I also had to list every country I’ve visited in the past 10 years (which to my surprise tallied 19 nations).
Plenty attracts me to Russia, but it almost seems like its government discourages visitors.
Then you read sketchy news at tourism sites, such as the two places where you shouldn’t drink the water are Moscow and St. Petersburg. Delightful.
And these fun facts:
“Groups of children and adolescents have been increasingly aggressive in some cities, swarming victims, or assaulting and knocking them down. … Some victims report that the attackers use knives.”
“Foreigners who have been drinking alcohol are especially vulnerable to assault and robbery in or around nightclubs or bars, or on their way home. Some travelers have been drugged at bars, while others have taken strangers back to their lodgings, where they were drugged, robbed and/or assaulted.”
“Unprovoked harassment of racial minorities is not uncommon and may occasionally involve violence. Travelers are urged to exercise caution in areas frequented by ‘skinhead’ groups and wherever large groups have gathered.”
“A common scam in Russia is the ‘turkey drop,’ perpetrated mainly against foreigners at crowded tourist destinations. Generally, two or more individuals working together attempt to lure a pedestrian into a confrontation after catching his/her attention by dropping a conspicuous wad of currency on the ground. Typically one individual ‘accidentally’ drops the money on the ground in front of the pedestrian, while the second either waits for the money to be picked up by the pedestrian, or picks up the money himself and offers to split it with the pedestrian. The individual who dropped the currency generally returns around that time, aggressively accusing both his cohort and the pedestrian of stealing the money. This provokes a confrontation that may cause the pedestrian to remove their wallet to prove their innocence, generally resulting in the pedestrian’s money being stolen.”
“It is not uncommon for foreigners to become victims of harassment, mistreatment and extortion by law enforcement and other officials. Police do not need to show probable cause in order to stop, question or detain individuals.”
- “Extortion and corruption are common in the business environment. Threats of violence and acts of violence are commonly resorted to in business disputes.”
Best vacation ever!
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A tale couched in rattitude
I own a way overpriced purple sofa that appears to be made of cloth, foam padding and the same junk synthetic cotton wisps you find in bootleg Shrek plush toys at itinerant carnivals.
It’s about 10 years old and starting to wear, disgorging its gimcrack guts. I replaced it as my main couch last year with something better, spiffier. I relegated it to the downstairs, a space filler, a token of tackier times.
My rat Tammy has at last discovered the ragged purple dinosaur. Just hours after meeting it, Tammy, who looks like this …
… did this:
I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or cry. Instead, I broke out in one-man applause. I think a nice Italian cheese is in order.
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Air Kisses
It took about a week to rinse myself of the freak-show spectacle that was Mini-KISS, the all-little people tribute band that “performs” KISS songs, fully dragged-out in the group’s face-paint-and-glitter regalia.
Mini-KISS played Valentine’s night at Speakeasy, a bar I otherwise don’t haunt for myriad good reasons. (One being former fratboys with quasi-disco fashion sense and their scary spray-tan girlfriends. It’s the Cabo/Bridezilla crowd.)
Almost scarier were Mini-KISS, which enthralled and appalled, gratified and grossed-out.
First, the quartet doesn’t play its Shrinky Dinks instruments — guitars the size of skateboards — instead faking it to pre-recorded tunes (not original KISS recordings, but a kind of KISS Muzak track). The Minis do, however, really sing. Never has the art of musical vocalizing been so molested.
Second, the pocket-sized posers demonstrated zero proficiency on their instruments, like kids doing air-guitar wildly at all the wrong parts.
The drummer was the worst. This ersatz “Peter” — played by a woman! — tapped her sticks on random skins and cymbals with sheepish, almost panicked incompetence. When she’s supposed to be holding a beat on the high-hat, she’d bop dreamily at a tom-tom. No drum part in the song, no problem! Lil’ Peter drummed away, in a blind fog of blasphemous fantasy.
Fun, yes it was. A burlesque of the grotesque — always a good time. Watching the players frantically adjust their cheap, constantly shifting wigs was a guilty amusement.
Yet it was also, plainly, a cultural, perhaps moral tragedy — a train wreck featuring a Lionel train set and four teensy dolls writhing on weensy plastic tracks.
The audience was visibly horrified as the lead singer, apparently blasted on beer, fell over, not once, but three times. He was like a sow bug on his back, foreshortened limbs flailing, trying to get back on his platform boots. He introduced himself as Ace, then, accurately, introduced the guitarist on his left as Ace. He forgot, burp, that he was pretending to be KISS frontman Paul.
Ethical considerations were not dismissed. Exploitation is bad. Auto-exploitation is just sad. At one point, I wasn’t sure if I should sing along to mangled renditions of “Shout It Out Loud” and “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” or collapse in tears.
I elected to relax, and to laugh. Not laughs clouded by conscience, but freewheeling “What the — ?” laughs. All was fine. Once the nightmares stopped just the other night.
(No, wait …
… the nightmare continues.)
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An eensy-weensy pucker for V-Day
Do you really not know what I’m doing tomorrow for Valentine’s Day?
Like, really?
Duh:
Details HERE.
And the official site HERE.
I expect miracles, and more.
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Shut up and write
It’s been a literary week, though I have been weakly literary, literally.
That last bit: I haven’t written much, and what I have written has failed every crucible of literary legitimacy. Meaning: My work fairly, foully, stunk this week.
Yet the week stood up, head high, tweedy, with pipe, as literary. I had coffee with personal hero David Mamet for an hour Monday.
Mamet
(After Mamet and Woody Allen, who’s left in my personal pantheon to chat with? Shakespeare, I’ve heard, is dead. Ian McEwan, Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, Hal Hartley, Cormac McCarthy — sure, but nothing urgent. Really, bring me Michael Mann and I could retire. I hear 100 readers running to call Mann so that I will indeed go away.)
Monday night I heard Mamet speak at UT. Last night I heard novelist Jim Crace read and speak at UT. Crace, a crisp, short Brit, wrote two books that buckled me with their truth and grace (rhymes with “Crace”): “Quarantine” and “Being Dead.” (A miraculous quote from the latter book has hung, really smally, on my walls for years.)
I’d like to be literary, but I think the sneakers and hoodie subvert the notion. I write on the side, away from this cursed page (whose last entry was six weeks ago) and the Statesman’s Movies pages. But it’s rot, for naught. Says me.
I feed on the words of others. Claire Messud’s exhaustive novel “The Emperor’s Children” — thick, heavy and glimmery, like bullion — knocked me out in its breadth and descriptive control, though I hated almost every character. (Couldn’t she have killed off, or at least maimed, Ludovic Seeley and Marina Thwaite? Sweet catharsis, that would’ve been.)
In my periodic Shakespeare brushing-up, I’m now rereading “Othello,” to be followed by Olivier’s (surely rickety) film version.
Crace, visiting the spoiled, entitled-feeling kids at the Michener Center, read from his novel-in-progress “Heroes.” (Yes, he acknowledged, having a popular TV show of the same name is quite unfortunate.)
The politically charged book is partly set in Austin. It’s the political book he wishes he could have always written, even if it’s compromised by his incorrigible “bourgeois” artistry. (Self-effacing, dry, extremely British is he.)
“I’m going to read some of this immensely bad book to you,” he half-joked, then read the first chapter, which, if not sizzling, did entice. (Could be a dud. I could not get into his most recent novel, “The Pesthouse,” which read like an undercooked take on McCarthy’s “The Road.”)
Larraine is moving to Chile to teach for a while. An excuse for me to venture way down south, say, Argentina, Chile, Easter Island (big heads!).
Maybe. But a stubborn urge for Europe hectors and squawks. Shush, you. Shush.
2008: Sigh
My doctor says I should be “on top of the world.” He said this twice last week during my annual physical.
I told him he was raving mad. I reside, supine, on the floor of a canyon, I said. I am on the bottom of the world. Antarctica, I think.
Actually, no. That’s just my dark side making its hourly cameo, my facetiously overblown sense of the fatalistic and gloomy. But I can’t help thinking that if I’m on top of the world, it’s in the James Cagney/”White Heat” way: “Top o’ the world, Ma!” And then I go up in a mushroom cloud of industrial flames.
Exaggerate, yes I do. Things are swell, thanks, and I’m looking forward to a spectacular 2008. I head to Sundance soon and I’m mulling my next global adventure, in which curry and monkeys will not be involved.
(Ideas, all followed by question marks: Russia? Hungary? Iceland? Mexico City? Brazil? Haiti?)
I don’t mind the doctor. I bring stacks of online printouts that have alarmed me and compel my doc to shake his head and pinch his brow. He does that a lot when I’m there.
Even the nurse shook her head this time. I complained about having to get all nakedy for my checkup. Shaking the head, she sighed, “Oh, Chris.”
Then she hooked me up to the EKG monitor — I of course asked to have my fluttery heart checked — pressing electrode stickies to my torso. I asked all the usual questions: Will this hurt? Will I be electrocuted? How do I get me one of these doodads? She responded by shaking her head.
My heart is super, I should be on top of the world. Some inflamed sinuses should not stop this galloping machine! Even my feet looked fit and hale to Dr. Good News.
Next step is the blood sample. Let’s do it now, by golly!
What have you eaten today? Doc asks.
I had some cheese a few hours ago.
Nope. Next time, after you fast.
It was just a little bit of cheese, mouse-size bits.
No. Next time.
Just do it now! I’m ready. I’m psyched and in the mood. My vein cries for a needle! Let’s go.
He told me to beat it, but not before I shook him down for a bag of prescription pill samples. Sort of like the toothbrush and sugarless gum you get after seeing the dentist.
I’ve been tearing through new books like Tammy tears through noodles and newspaper. My bookmark these days (I switch them from my stash every few books) is a crisp 100 rupee note that bears Gandhi’s wizened mug, beautiful Hindi script and small patches of shimmery rainbow stuff.
Finally (finally, pant) finished Denis Johnson’s mammoth and majestic “Tree of Smoke,” 624 pages of thunderbolt prose. I don’t have much to say about it, except: Man.
I moved on to David Mamet’s dogmatic treatises about the venality and stultification of the Hollywood beast in “Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business.” Like it or not, Mamet is something of a genius, an iron intellectual with conviction, style and relevance. My mind dwarfs in his presence.
What else … Glossed through Norman Mailer and Michael Lennon’s dense “On God: An Uncommon Conversation,” which prompted me to grab and spend time with my ratty Penguin paperback of Nietzsche’s blazing “The Anti-Christ.” (Fine way to spend Christmas Day.)
Flipped through Jonathan Gould’s “Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America” and “Plato’s Republic (Books That Changed the World)” and read extensive chunks of “The Essential Marcus Aurelius” and “The Star Machine” — a sprightly study of the old star and studio systems — by Jeanine Basinger.
I saved for last Alex Ross’ acclaimed “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.” I survived 80 pages before seeking out sections I was more interested in, such as the bits on Stravinsky and Duke Ellington.
Ross isn’t enough of a stylist to hold my interest, even in his New Yorker articles. He has no voice, which undermines his authority. His book, like his magazine work, feels somehow soft and critically wimpy. His scholarship is solid, sometimes impressive, but he hews to a tone of textbook objectivity and aridity that leaves me limp.
Now on to Roth’s “Exit Ghost,” then Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir “Fun Home.”
(And spending many nights with Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 definitive, four-hour film version of “Hamlet.”)
A tiger in San Francisco mauled three young men before the cops shot it dead. Why do I care more about the tiger?
Tammy, then …
… and now:
A friend just emailed me this, a, um, perfect start of the new year:
I had a dream and you were in it. Baking bread. You were really floury.
Just thought I’d share. Do you ever bake?
There is absolutely no reason — none — that you should read this
Gunk on my mind:
- Crazy heart flutters that most likely augur a fountainy chest explosion, a la “Alien”
Tangerine-Mango Madness Blow-Pops (the inner gum of which could make your jaw muscles swell, blow and pop)
I am far too old for any of this.
Watching “Juno” — again — and making Rice Krispies treats with a gal pal (no, really, I know)
Russia?
Christmas. Is that a new Febreze flavor?
Annual Xmas Eve bar haunt
The heaving chore of “Berlin Alexanderplatz”
Roller coaster accidents
The special effects in “Blade Runner”
Burning the best old country music mix CD for a friend, then getting Dolly Parton jammed in my head for a week
The unfailing resplendence of The New Yorker critics’ prose
The green tea and incense I got in Nepal
The funny T-shirts I bought in India
Denis Johnson’s towering novel “Tree of Smoke” — its girth, beauty and ability to crush all my writing dreams
India, churning
Tammy the rat, who naps in my laundry and plays like a tiger
My Bloody Valentine, Elliot Smith, the “There Will Be Blood” soundtrack, KISS
Heartache (the other kind)
Plastics
My 10-year-old house plant, still hale, still happy. And really long.
Top 10 lists
Going to Sundance and demanding an exhilarating time
The elusiveness of everything
Dad
The term “junk”
How much I hate steel drums
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and all its astonishments, aesthetic and emotional and philosophical
Swiss cheese
The intractability of Third World pollution, some of which is in my body
Animal suffering
Ganesha and his ridiculous origin myth
How great it was hearing zero pop-culture news, from American television to Entertainment Weekly, while in India
The violent death of my beloved tailor on South Congress (shocking and sad)
A rare breed of peanut bar candy miraculously appearing on my desk
The AC/DC magnet set from Courtney, which shook me all night long
Moving to Europe
What I look like wearing a snow cap
Wind-smooshed, tongue-flapping faces of dogs sticking their heads out of car windows
Mortality, always
That one song. Yeah, that one.
Sushi
Cannibalism in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and in “Sweeney Todd”
Never answering my phone
Scuba diving
- Nothing. Nothing at all.
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Midway through a night of South Austin lights
The ground is foot-matted hay, lumpy and ankle-unfriendly. (Wear sneakers. Old, soiled ones.) Five portable toilets at the front gate. That’s all. They’re filthier than death. After lots of human traffic, someone must have overturned them, put them right, and thought, “OK, that works.”
We would have it no other way, because the fabled way of the carnival midway is locked in cracked fool’s amber. I smell corn dogs. Corn on the cob. Popcorn. The carnival makes a killing on the bumper crop of corn. Cornival.
Plump stuffed animals made in Thailand, China, Mexico, out of cheap felt and sawdust, many of which freely flout copyright laws (that’s you, Wile E. Coyote and Spongebob), wearing smiles of yarn string, ping-pong Muppet eyes jiggly, googly.
I want to toss a ping-pong ball and win a goldfish, which will be dead when I wake up the next day.
You might have seen its strip-club, light-bulby brilliance from Ben White and 71. Plunked between South Congress and I-35, this spare but gratifying carnival unloads and screws together its rusty rides a couple times a year. We went last weekend. Before that I went in 2003. I should be there every time. Thrill rides, clanky and violent, remind me to drive carefully.
Last night was a gas. Metal contraptions tossing rag dolls through the neon-strafed sky. Blinking lights and the orange ember of an exotic cigarette from India we shared in line, and on the ferris wheel, whose seats weren’t the feet dangly kind, but tea cups that could hold four or more people.
We rode the ferris wheel (it cost four tickets! FOUR) and a 10-year-old girl named Marissa was put in our cart. She was solo. We talked to her and made her laugh. She’s Latina and bilingual and unreasonably sweet-tempered.
Other rides, they tend to blend. Like a blender. Toss, hurl, flip. Upside-down laughs. Hair whipping. My camera case went weeee and tumbled many stories from cage to ground.
Those rough-hewn carnies, big guys with southern accents and mustaches, are perfect gentlemen. Help you in and out, grab a lady’s hand and make sure her shoulder harness is down and secure. “Yes, ma’am. Yes, sir.”
A warm, sugar-dusted funnel cake, a pile of fried batter, $5 — 25-cents for a paper towel. A lump of heaven (as in, it will kill you and send you to heaven).
Tilt-a-WHOA.
The carnival — junky, funny fun— spins through this weekend, Dec. 16, so the congenial carnies told us.
I saw little boys swinging plastic swords that lit up with blinky blue lights.
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Out of the bag, with zero lives
After that James Blunt song, death is pretty much the worst. Yet I think I rescued a large dead cat from further indignity after it was popped by a car Saturday night on South Congress. Luckily, I didn’t witness the event, which would have wrecked me.
Right outside my place, it laid on the dark asphalt curled in a furry parenthesis. Blood and viscera were absent, and the body was still soft and warm when I picked it up with cradling hands. Its mouth formed a scary cat rictus, all its fangy teeth showing, giving the poor thing an evil tint, as though it was hissing or seething. Maybe the expression captured a final frozen meow of insult, of torment and release. Poo cars.
The cat was a big heavy thing, its abundant long brown fur soft as down. A healthy animal, save for being dead. Mind reeling with confounding thoughts of life, transience, the meaningless of the cosmic punch line, which aroused a wry grin, I carried it to the lawn and set it down. Out of instinct, in a sad valedictory reflex, I stroked the cat for several seconds. Then I walked away.
A bewildered Erica was along for the ride, wondering why I would even consider the idea that a corner bodega or a CVS might carry a small but respectable selection of cheeses.
I can hope. I can still get flustered when said hope is dashed by the reality of one lame block of Wisconsin cheddar, or something orange. I didn’t need Brie, just something white. Swiss would have cut it.
A futile quest between two stores that reversed the bumpkin/sophisticate equation at my expense. (“A yokel walks into a pharmacy looking for fancy cheese …”)
Back home, cheeseless, we watched a special screener DVD of “Juno,” a crackling little comedy that here and there blindsides you with arch life insights. It comes to town before year’s end. Go.
Car in shop. A drag. An extended warranty keeps tears at bay. This is a big one. This is one that makes you want to swap your real car for a soapbox dealie.
Dealership (it’s that bad) paying for a rental car for a few days. Landed a 2007 PT Cruiser that’s spotless but smells funny. PTs are the sort of car I instinctively hate, just hate. A trendy gimmick vehicle, cute until there’s four at every stoplight.
I like mine. Drives solid. Good stereo. It looks exactly like this, except for different windshield wipers.
Monkeys don’t like to hang out with you unless you bring food. Even then they’re temperamental brats. They lurch and grab all greedy and mean. I fed a tangle of wild street monkeys crackers last month in Udaipur, India.
This one clearly adored me.
Stay away from the mommas with babies. Tear your eyeballs out.
Tammy is great, just awesome. The dishwasher she vanquished is back and running at relatively little cost and effort (stress on relatively; stress on stress). Very infrequently do I feel like strangling the gorgeous rodent teenaged rascal.
Oh, a new hole eaten through the bathroom rug! How adorable!
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Appetite for destruction
They were amused, they were. Calmly, without a speck of spite in my voice, I told them “a rat did it,” and they sympathized and tsked and offered polite pejoratives for the wily rodent as a species — a genus that invades your dwelling and proceeds to gnaw it down one plumbing or electrical fixture at a time.
Chomp chomp, out go the lights.
In this case, nibble nibble, in comes the flood.
As I shopped around for a replacement part, they all assumed the culprit was a wild rat, which of course, unacquainted with the eye-squinching bliss of tummy rubs, will heedlessly chew the exotic wiring and esoteric pipes and tubing that keep the house running with a sort of invisible industrial alchemy. (Who knows how all that tangled stuff works?)
“Yup, a rat got it,” the plumbing expert said on first glance of the mauled tube. He couldn’t help me.
“Mice are terrible, they get into everything,” chuckled the amiable GE saleswoman by phone. In exchange for my credit card digits, she promptly put in the mail a replacement part, all for under $17.
Mice? No. Now the hard part: “It was a rat. My rat. My pet.”
“Oh!” GE woman’s exclamation came bundled in a surprised laugh.
(My condo handiman, who helped me pull out the dishwasher and locate the leak, thought the damage had been done by a dog.)
Here’s what Tammy the brat rat achieved while I was in India for three weeks:
She must be proud.
The pet-sitter, bless her rat-spoiling soul, apparently granted Tammy far too much unsupervised running about. Tammy discovered new nooks, irresistible crannies. She chewed things she’d never met before. And she developed the attitude of a child who hasn’t been reined in for a while. A hellion born of freedom.
She scurried under the dishwasher and ravaged the rubber connector on a water tube. I did not know this. I turned on the dishwasher. Splish-splash, it went inside its sealed box, that hurricane of heat and soap.
And then, like the pooling blood in a Coen brothers’ movie, a thin tide of water crawled into the kitchen. It was a relatively minor mess, but a major pain.
New rules, a meaner, more vigilant eye, govern Tammy now. It’s back to the old days. Less destruction, more tummy rubs.
I don’t recall if this has happened after any of my other travels, but I dream of India nightly.
Where next? is the enticing question. Right now my mind cranes its neck and looks with cocked eyebrow at Russia. And then I envision golashes, and my mind sits up straight and rubs its chin. It has many questions.
I would have quoted Kipling; this just seemed more apt
I’d love to quote Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now,” when he utters what I believe is the film’s opening line, which goes, and I paraphrase so as not to offend coddled ears, or my bosses: “Saigon … shoot.” (Insert real expletive at your will.)
So, me: “India … shoot.” (It worked much better when I was actually in Saigon two years ago.)
But India inspires such sentiments, such damning words, such gnarling, seething frustration. It can’t be verbalized. It must be felt. Scarcely have I experienced such combustible eruptions of bewildered exasperation. I might have literally pulled hair out. Not mine.
(Actually, similar exasperation was enjoyed last night, when, as I was trying to clean a house that had languished still and musty for nearly a month, a freshly filled vacuum cleaner toppled and tumbled down about 15 metal stairs, bursting open and expelling billows of accumulated filth and dust. My chest nearly exploded, which would have made neat symmetry with my head, which reliably dismantled itself.)
India rocked me, clocked me. I loved it. I despised it, growlingly. It was surreal, unreal, a twirl on the roulette wheel. Will I step in cow doo, again? (Yes, sir!) Will this guy hassle me? (Of course he will!) Will my next flight or train be on time? (Oh, silly western boy!) Is this the meal that will poison me for 24 hours? (Sure is!)
Also from “Apocalypse Now”: “The horror … the horror.”
It’s too easy to slip into the gloppy swamp of annoying episodes. They were bountiful. And they’re fun to chisel into colorful anecdotes for the children. Suddenly I’m this animated raconteur, arms gesticulating, eyes popping, voice shifting octaves and cheap accents. I feel like Jerry Lewis.
Way too much to splurge on this blog. Saving most of the trip, the crunchy, dirty, hard-earned specifics, for the book and privileged ears. My travel journal, a classic Moleskin, literally swells with street-level stories, newspaper clippings, post cards, ticket stubs and other ephemera harvested during three weeks of hard trekking. It’s smeared in stickers of Hindu imagery — deities and gurus, Om symbols and, hesitatingly, “swastik” symbols. It’s worn and torn. And it’s priceless.
Free-association is appropriate for the Pollockian images splatted in my head after seven cities (Delhi, Agra, Varanasi, Jaipur, Udaipur, Mumbai, Kathmandu) over three weeks: lazy, bony cows; a headless dog bobbing in the Ganges; dreadlocked holy men in loin cloths and painted faces bathing in that brown, trash-choked river; oily-faced hash dealers, eyes forcefully squinty and voices hushed into croaks from using their product too often; giggling street urchins following me like the pied-piper, my pipe being my camera and the veneer of wealth; the Taj Mahal, a gargantuan pale marble perched in a white-hot noon sun to the point of bedazzling languid spectators; a man beating a burning funeral pyre with a long bamboo stick to break apart the corpse; sad, skittish, mangy street dogs, many crippled and sick; noisy and bright Bollywood movies in capacious movie palaces, where patrons chatter, nosh popcorn and take cell phone calls; cheap, delicious dishes of mutton and chicken but mostly veggies, 98.9 percent of which didn’t make me ill; frothy banana lassis!; the majestic Himalayas, proud and snowy, from the plane flying into Nepal; a pack of feral dogs chasing a family of monkeys on the cliffs of Elephanta Island; slums, slums, slums; filth, filth, filth; blowing black gunk from my nose every evening; enlisting pleased bell boys to fetch beer after hours for an inflated price; amputee dwarves begging outside a Delhi mosque; beautiful flower- and incense-strewn mini-shrines everywhere.
I’d go back. Maybe not next month or next year. But I don’t think I’m through with India. It’s big and boggling enough for a courageous encore.
Some photos in the entry below.
India in images
Back from India (with a few days in Kathmandu, Nepal, too), a little ruined, a little refreshed. It’s the most mad, maddening, incoherent and bluntly incredible place I’ve been. The head continues to swim (in brown Ganges fluids).
Some quick pix, with explanations possibly coming later:
India through soot-colored glasses
People keep telling me to send an email when I get to India next week and drop lines as days pass, just so they know I’m there, safe and well, and that I haven’t run off with a cow, water buffalo or a false deity who lies about how many arms she really has.
And I keep telling them to turn on CNN every morning to see how this loony American is doing so irresponsibly and inexplicably far away. An international incident a day is what I predict, with local and world news covering the latest umbrage with jostling shaky cams.
I see myself in nothing but a loincloth, sporting a foot-long beard, arms spread, spinning through dusty streets littered with beggars, rotting food, donkeys, camels and bovines, delirious, lost, probably shouting gibberish and demanding a personal audience with Ganesh, Shiva or the spangly Shilpa Shetty.
The image inarguably evokes hoary Indian stereotypes, a cartoon version of what a green Yank thinks India is like. It’s all I have until I get there, when the smells and sights and soupy, choking air whack me like a subcontinental tidal wave and knock me on my butt. That’s when I start laughing madly.
So, my hotel in Delhi. I get there Wednesday night after approximately 56 hours of flying and 12 kayaking. A man will be waiting at the airport to drive me there. He will hold a sign with my name on it. It will say “Foolish Boy.”
The Hotel Ajanta, that’s my place. This is the exterior in a spruced publicity photo:
This is (on the left) in an untouched tourist’s photo:
I have reservations. Reservations about the location, the noise, the service …
Faithful readers know that I totally wish I was in 1880s Victorian London and best friends with the Elephant Man, aka Joseph Merrick (Joe to me).
My enthrallment with EM started in 1976. I was a tiny child with goofy teeth and a consuming obsession with “Jaws.” It exploded in 1980 upon the release of David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man.”
I still enjoying reading about him and watching the nine-hankie movie. I own the original movie poster, plus two small Japanese versions of it that I bought in Tokyo.
A while ago I searched the Web for an Elephant Man t-shirt. I wound up at a tribute site to Merrick, which offered links to a shop where you can buy EM coffee mugs (I bought one; it’s amazing kitsch) and these weird drawings of Merrick.
I won’t even try to explain the art, though I can’t not comment on it.
(You’ll have to turn your head for the first one. I can’t seem to rotate it.)
Ack! What? It’s Joseph as a child. Thing is, at this age, his disease had not progressed so badly that he really needed a hood. And I’m pretty sure he never made and wore a child-sized hood anyway. That was an adult thing.
Here’s a picture I took of Merrick’s actual hood at the London Hospital in 2004:
The next one kills me. It might be the best work of art I’ve ever seen, or the absolute worst. Some kind of warped genius is at play:
It’s titled “At One with Nature,” and as you see, Merrick is indeed at one with … a tree trunk.
Tammy is great, thanks. She remains a furry demoness — full of vim, nibbles and plant destruction. She’s drizzled on me only twice. We were watching “Meerkat Manor,” so I understand.
The evening weather, for once, was nice the other night. I opened the sliding doors on the balconies, let cool air waft in. Time for bed, I shut the screenless doors, got Tammy dinner, but couldn’t find her.
In the morning, after a panicky search, I realized I’d locked her outside on the third floor balcony. She was shivering, curled in a ball in a corner and a little damp. She looked like a sad stray dog.
I feel like the guy who leaves his kid in the car when it’s 100 degrees out.
The rat is fine. They are a hearty species. She will be missed while I’m away.
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Watching her climb is like a shot in the arm
I own a short tropical tree, no taller than a 4-year-old child, and Tammy likes to climb it. She nests in the upper sprays of long, sturdy leaves and chews. She chews the bark and the greenery. She looks like a tiny white monkey, puckish, ridiculous.
Getting back down remains the obstacle (ask a cat). I won’t help her. As a frisky and sassy adolescent, she gets a firm lesson in problem-solving. You got yourself up there, young lady, you get yourself down.
And now what are we going to do about those tattered leaves? Go to your cage!
On the descent, her elastic body stretches. Her rib-cage, as rats’ soft skeletons will do, collapses and her torso goes flat, her back paws still in the foliage for support, her front paws groping for terra firma. She’s practically vertical, snout pointing to the floor. The spectacle makes her papa proud.
Tammy is slightly over three months old. No longer the embryonic, unnervingly fragile fur-fleck I bought on July 4, she’s curious and kooky, tackling my hand and play-biting it, then scampering off, wheeling across the floor, and returning to wrestle with my fingers. Repeat.
She sometimes hangs out alone upstairs on the third floor — she seems to enjoy the hike to the summit — but hasn’t ventured down to the first floor on her own yet. She likes chicken bones.
My arms hurt like sports casualties after my shots last week for hepatitis A and typhoid. (I’m at Dominican Joe as I scribble this junk. A guy just kissed his pregnant wife. How cool.)
I was told to wave and stretch my arms to get the liquid toxins moving through my muscles and alleviate soreness. But that night at the premiere of Ethan Hawke’s dopey “The Hottest State,” where I had to sit still, the pain screeched. The always great Paramount staff gave me Advil. (After the movie, Norah Jones walked behind us to the after-party. She’s as big as the period at the end of this sentence.)
The shots and office visit tallied an OK $201. I talked the doctor down from tetanus and he agreed I was covered for all the other stuff, since I got them as a child and before my 1995 Thailand trip. Ick. Vaccinations, the mere idea, make my stomach turn. I laid down for my shots, and stayed supine for a good five minutes afterward.
India will make it all worthwhile. I am afraid of getting sick there. The place is filthy, crawling with dangerous microbes, germs, gunk.
People tell me to get some loose fitting clothing and all that. Forget it. I’m touring India wearing a NASA space suit. Lumbering I will amble, sweaty and soaked and, just maybe, safe.
This is suitable travel garb for 95-degree tropical/desert climes, right?
And then my head exploded
Bollywood isn’t a feverish film genre. It’s an exotic drug that I can’t believe is legal in Texas. I know the movies are banned in Kentucky, Ohio and Georgia, which is appropriate and just. Consider us lucky.
Bollywood movies aren’t merely watched and experienced. Bollywood infects you molecularly, pours sequins and glitter into your blood, which then turns neon-orange and starts dancing hysterically and lip-syncing with woozy breathlessness and facial calesthenics.
Am I a wee late to the sorcery of Bollywood? Totally. Like so many, I appreciated its native insanity from a healthy distance, the better to avoid eyebrow singes and flesh scaldings.
Heat. The movies are all about heat — erotic heat, dancing and singing heat, melodramatic heat, fluttering-eye heat, crazy-action swooping-crane-shot heat. Billowing-silk-sari and ’80s motorcycle-jacket heat. Bollywood is the most pungent cheese available, and its own heat melts it into buckets of masala queso. Bring chips, and naan.
Last weekend I watched the sensory-molesting B-wood classic “Main Hoon Na,” a 2004 masterpiece of overkill starring Bollywood royalty Shahrukh Khan and Sushmita Sen, who is a former Ms. Universe and whose hair mysteriously blows in the breeze no matter where she is, be it classroom, bathroom or under a waterfall.
Caroline, who so wishes her first name was Amrita, is my BW expert (she actually owns Barbie dolls of Khan and simmering starlet Kajol), and she brought the DVD over to witness it on my elephantine HDTV. She offered astute running commentary that taught me much. And like any good teacher, she ignited latent passion and active curiosity. Now I’m all about Bollywood.
Anyway, the movie, hyperkinetic and loud and explosive, made my concrete walls rumble, possibly crumble. We were delighted. Tammy the rat chewed Caroline’s slip-ons and toes in elation. Aftward, she destroyed my plant.
Caroline left me only one B-wood movie to watch on my own, “Don,” starring the celestially suave Khan. More would be dangerous, we both agreed. I only own one fire extinguisher.
If you don’t think I’m taking like 10 Bollywood studio tours while I’m in Mumbai/Bombay, the Bollywood capital, then you need to go see “Om Shanti Om”. It’s as simple as that.
Revel, sigh, roll around in all that is Shahrukh Khan, aka, SRK:
As a gauzy dreamboat that sails in the calm, sugary seas of his own magnificent self-regard
As a fan’s smitten pencil sketch tacked above her bed, next to drawings of unicorns and a poster of ‘Disney’s High School Musical,’ which flirts with Bollywood in ways we won’t speak of
As an exuberant Pepsi shill — sweet, bubbly, sinful, whorish
With Sushsmita, a vision that turns my heart to mush-mita
As a Barbie doll. Speechless.
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A room at the inn, Indian style
I’m shopping for good-deal hotels in Delhi, India, for a few nights in October. Since things are extravagantly cheap there, I don’t want to pay more than $40 a night — a lot considering many tourists go for the $10 flophouses.
Hours of online research have winnowed options to two or three lodgings, and the best bet appears to be a joint called, with a kiss of kitsch, Hotel Relax.
A young European traveler at VirtualTourist.com posted this about the place:
Hotel Relax is a “palace” in the middle of the mess of a vegetable market at Paharganj. When I arrived there I thought, “My god, what I am doing here,” but afterward I get very well with the place and I think it can be my favourite place to stay in India.
You are in the very middle of real India (or what I think it must be ). Imagine a vegetable market at India. Rubbish all around, cows, people shouting — a real mess, but a mess with lots of enchantment: lot of smells :)) colours :)) sound :)) and all around you. … You will have big rooms with big bathroom, all clean and with a beautiful terrace for rest and watch the vegetable market from the top.
Here’s a shot of what could be my neighborhood from that “beautiful terrace”:
Think it has Cinemax?
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Book-lover blues
This recent headline made me ill: One in four read no books last year.</
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Hola. Ship Tammy down here in a shoebox. I’ll feed her empanadas and teach her Spanish. Hope all is well! It’s getting chilly in Chile.
... read the full comment by Larraine | Comment on Turkey calls Read Turkey calls
True story: I once broke up with a man because he said his favorite book was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”
And he had never even read the whole thing.
p.s. “Night of the Hunter” says of the little
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