Cowboys and contestants

Rollin', rollin', rollin'
Though the streams are swollen
Keep them doggies rollin'
Rawhide
—“Rawhide” Theme, Ned Washington and Dimitri Tiomkin

The ‘60s TV show “Rawhide” aired past my bedtime. The only memory I have of it is that guitar-driven, adrenalin-pumping theme—from the same man, Tiomkin, who composed the music for “High Noon”—rustling up to my room from the den where my father lounged, himself probably half-asleep until that first crack of the bullwhip and then Frankie Laine’s singing had him sitting up in his saddle and me reaching under the bed for my toy six-shooter.

Give me hokey westerns over the embarrassing humiliation and greed of today’s “reality” programming any day. I ask you, who would you rather have your kid emulating? Some self-centered putz who wants to be Donald Trump’s apprentice, or Paladin of “Have Gun Will Travel”? A devious, scrawny "survivor," or Hoss of “Bonanza”?

I never got to see Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates in “Rawhide.” I wouldn’t get to see a Clint Eastwood western until several years later when, one fateful summer day, allowance in hand, I bicycled to the local movie house with a few 9-year-old friends—each minus our parents’ permission—to catch a matinee screening of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

An ad in the newspaper had caught our attention. It featured Clint wearing a cowboy hat and a poncho, lighting a cannon's fuse with the same match he’d used to fire up the cigarillo jutting from his bearded mug (at least that’s how we read it). "Who is this guy?" we asked. The tagline read, “For three men the Civil War wasn’t hell. It was practice.”

My friends in tow, I asked my mother if I could see this movie that had us frothing at the mouth. "What does The Long Island Catholic say?" she asked as she folded sheets by the basement washer. For Catholics of the World War II generation, following the dictates of the Church went pretty much without question.

My friends and I checked The Long Island Catholic, a weekly journal that authoritatively rated films on behalf of the Church. The paper gave it a “B,” meaning “Morally objectionable in part for all.” That was one rating away from "C," for “Condemned.” No way was my mother going to let me see this one. If I wanted to see this film, I was going to have to do it without permission, from her or the Church. Who is this guy? I thought. I had to find out.

Inside the theater, director Sergio Leone’s epic tale of buried treasure in the Old West unspooled before our eyes. I remember being blown away by the panoramic desert vistas, the outfits caked with dust, the sweat beading on sunburned brows. I remember the actors, each looking like he’d been riding the trail for weeks, each determined to claim that buried treasure for himself: Clint, as the quiet, sharpshooting “man with no name” (I guess that answered my question); Eli Wallach, as Tuco Benedito Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, Clint's sometimes cool, sometimes reckless Mexican sidekick; Lee Van Cleef, as Angel Eyes Sentenza, the baddest bad-ass gunslinger I had ever seen. This western was 180 degrees from “Gunsmoke.” Even the guns sounded different: they didn't go "bang"; they squealed death.

I most remember Leone's lingering closeups of the eyes of these desperadoes: calculating (Clint, the "Good"), angry but contained (Angel Eyes, the "Bad"), fearful and frenetic (Tuco, the "Ugly"). What a great film, buoyed by a now ubiquitous Ennio Morricone score and completely deserving of the claim, “The best cinematic meditation on greed since 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'"

Somehow, at 9, my friends and I understood what “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” was all about. Maybe it had something to do with striking out on our own for the first time in our lives. Returning home later that day, we strapped on our holsters and started playacting the film, looking for that treasure, each of us studying the others' eyes, calculating.

Momma, don’t let your sons grow up to be reality show contestants. Let them be cowboys.

True west

It's a foggy spit of a Wednesday night, and I've just joined my songwriter/guitarist friend Tom at his going-away party. The walls of his apartment are scrawled with sayings—some original, some pilfered—from the felt-tipped pen of the guest of honor. Typical of Tom.

"Wife: It is what it is.
Husband: What is it?"

"Respect the man with strings"

"It don't take an apostle to answer His call"

"Gone but not forgotten"

"What?"

"You can't always do what you're told"

Tom currently lives on the second floor of a neat two-family house in blue-collar Franklin Square, Long Island. But he's leaving for California next Tuesday. He's re-won the heart of a woman he first dated 20 years ago when he was a tour guide. She's since been married and separated, and today she busies herself with accounting and raising two children. Tom called her on a whim and went out to see her a few weeks ago; they plan to marry next June, after her divorce is finalized. Sometimes it just happens that way, but knowing Tom as I do, I am a bit concerned, as are most of the friends gathered here.

On the ledge by his living-room window, Tom has arranged a collage of photos he took of his fiancée and her teenaged son and daughter. The mother has a big, disarming smile. In one photo her daughter peers at the camera from under a floppy hat with an expression that seems to ask, who is this guy?

Tom has always been an in-your-face kind of guy with a penetrating wit. Sometimes he can be a turnoff, sometimes a blast of fresh air. Once in Manhattan he happened upon Faye Dunaway during a stroll along Fifth Avenue. The six-foot-four Tom sensed the actress looking up at him as they waited out a red light. He looked down and when he saw who it was blurted, "You know, I'm a lot taller in person." Ms. Dunaway burst into laughter, grabbed Tom's arm and proceeded to take him window-shopping, asking and mulling his opinions on the exhibited fashions.

By and large, Tom is just another guy whose idea of a party is a cowboy hat and guitar, Budweiser in the fridge, plenty of close friends and John Prine on the stereo. That's not the Tom that concerns his guests right now; we're all genuinely happy for that Tom. The Tom we're concerned about has thrown away his medication, stopped seeing his psychiatrist and proclaimed himself mentally sound, a man who was misdiagnosed as bipolar when all he really needed was the love of a good woman. A bitter poem he's written about psychiatrists and taped to a wall contains the line, "Sensitive hearts, screwed by insensitive minds."

There is truth in that. Many psychiatrists today believe the treatment of all mental illness is measured in doses, and not much else. Little-to-no attention is paid to their patients' feelings, beyond their value as "symptoms" in the diagnostic workup. "Take this as prescribed and call me in a few weeks," is the standard instruction. "We'll see if we need to adjust your dose or try another medication then." I understand that professional distance is a requirement of the vocation. But psychiatry—and psychiatrists—can do better.

This Thanksgiving I'm grateful for friends like Tom. I pray this new love in his life out west survives and overcomes the illness that has plagued him most of his adult life. The skeptic in me worries.

I'm also grateful for the people who care about friends like Tom, people like the party guest who stole Tom's pen to write these parting words on a wall:

"Landlord,
Use oil-based primer and 2 coats of paint.
Good luck"

Quitting smoking (again)

Cold turkey has got me on the run
—"Cold Turkey," John Lennon

Drat-drat-drat-drat-drat.

The remorse runs like a leaky faucet. Nicotine hunger is back. Making shaky that first cup of coffee in the morning. Surging through my keyboard-busied hands. Riding shotgun with clear thought. Amplifying every other hunger.

Dagnabbit. It had been months, most of the year even. And then a cool fall night, the backyard garden of Rudy’s Bar, a few pints, some animated political conversation, and the next thing you know, I’ve bought a pack and I’m inhaling like a tossed-back fish.

I’ve got it under control, I convince myself. I can confine my smoking to the occasional night out. Not a good sign. For the first month or so I limit myself to a pack on weekends. Then one conspiratorially lazy Sunday afternoon I go out and buy a second pack. The rat habit has gone back to the trough. A bad sign. A danger Will Robinson sign.

Why do we smoke? For me, it's two words: Humphrey Bogart. I want to be Rick in Casablanca. I want to be that world-weary cynic with a heart of gold, a taste for whiskey and an unflagging sense of right and wrong. I mean, I named my dog Ilsa, okay? But I don’t want to be like Bogart and die at 58 of throat cancer.

There may yet be an agreeable ending to this particular melodrama. A saving grace of age is recognizing the bad signs earlier on because they’re all so familiar to you by now. I’ve been down this road many times before, some times longer than others. I’ve smoked with a vengeance for 2 or 3 years, stinking up my clothes, my hair, my apartment, sending Ilsa to the couch to bury her nose in the throw. Smoking is not good. Smoking is bad. One of these days it will sink in.

For now I suffer the pangs of withdrawal for the umpteenth time. Is it these pangs or honest anger I feel about the release yesterday, the 41st anniversary of his assassination, of a video game called “JFK Reloaded”? Consider that more than a few people came together to see this thing through from concept to completion and on to the market. More than a few minds bought into the idea that people would pay money to assume the role of a virtual Oswald—to see if they could finish off the 35th president of the United States in three shots as his motorcade swings past their virtual perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. "Blood effects" are left to the discretion of the user.

Don’t get me wrong, I breathe the First Amendment and praise free enterprise. But these are disconcerting times. Artists and the literary elite have no problem creating works that express their death wishes for President Bush. And now we have a video game in which a dead president is resurrected to be murdered at our leisure, on our computers. It almost makes you want to light up.

Going home (again)

The tollbooth clerk twirls a lock of her hair with a pencil while her left hand multitasks like it’s used to going it alone. I hand over four singles. A patch of Manhattan under a gray sky fills my rearview mirror. Bye-bye Midtown Tunnel. Bye-bye for now, my kind of town.

“Here’s your receipt.” I pop the clutch and gun the accelerator, the receipt clenched between my lips. My Mini Cooper springs ahead like I just said “hike.” A quick flip of the shifter to second gear and now we’re really unwinding; third gear’s straight ahead and I have just enough time to turn up the stereo. Brian Wilson sings about not belonging anywhere.

Each time things start to happen again
I think I got something good going for myself but what goes wrong

Immaculate self-pity, but the Mini’s having none of it. Motor on, old chap, motor on, it hums in overdrive. Traffic chokes the city-bound lanes of the Long Island Expressway but it’s fairly smooth sailing heading east. The Mini flies past billboards of aloof, half-dressed models, slows down a bit by the perpetually clogged Queens Boulevard exit and then screams with glee at the sight of open road and acres of bony, leafless trees as we enter Nassau County. I think of something Stymie of the Little Rascals once said, “I don’t know where we’re going but we’re on our way.” Aye, and there’s the rub. I’ve driven this route many times before, but I never know what to expect when I reach my mother’s. Whoever first said “you can never go home again” obviously didn’t have to mind an at-home elderly parent. I do, however, appreciate the sentiment.

The Mini slows to a stop before a red light off the exit ramp. Enough of “Pet Sounds,” what’s going on in the world today? I eject the CD and flip through the dial. Fallujah is not secure; Fallujah is secure. Fallujah will go down as one of the great combat victories in the annals of the US Marine Corps. Condi’s got style but no substance, says some talking head on NPR. Yeah, and Madeleine Albright has a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Arlen Specter again tries to placate his conservative critics with doublespeak that would make John Kerry envious. Sorry Arlen, next time think before inserting ego in mouth.

I steer the Mini into my mother’s driveway. Two minutes later I’m standing in her worn kitchen. We hug; I could be 5 or 40. It’s a confusing moment: at 5 I was a happy little soldier in this place; at 40, with my father deceased, I tried unsuccessfully to get her to sell. A potholder she’s had forever reads, “Clean enough to be healthy, dirty enough to be happy.” But the house could use a face-lift.

Out comes a tray of muffins and two coffee mugs. “So how’s by you?” she asks.

“I’m OK. And you?” She has no complaints. I study her face; the lines seem to run a little deeper at each visit. If she dies here it’s her choice, and I’ve learned to accept that. The important thing is, she looks well today; that’s something I can take back to New York, along with the leftover muffins.

In plain sight

It's a spectacular autumn night, cool, crisp air suffusing the city's glow and that old cover of blue beyond. A sliver of moon holds court over a steady run of lit-up aircraft. Venus and Mars are somewhere, but nary a star outshines the ambient light.

I've written 3 entries now and I hate filling out "profile" forms, so I suppose it's time I write a little about myself in plain sight. I'm a lifelong New Yorker and Mets fan, born in Kew Gardens, Queens, and raised, "Leave It to Beaver" style, in the leafy-green suburbs of Floral Park and Garden City, Long Island. I graduated from SUNY-Binghamton in 1983 with a BA in journalism (a self-designed major), and bicycled across the US (New York to Oregon) when I was 23. After 9 semi- chaotic years on my own back in Long Island, I packed up and left for Manhattan in 1992, the single greatest move of my life. I've lived on the Upper West Side, near the Central Park Reservoir, where I logged many runs; and in the West Village, in a great old tenement on Macdougal Street. I've been in Hell's Kitchen for 7 years. A village snob when I first moved here, I've grown to love "the kitchen," political differences with my neighbors notwithstanding (if you dish it out you can take it, as I have, mates).

My occupation is writer and editor, and nowadays my specialty is health care communications. I used to be a songwriter, and today compose the occasional ditty on a 1928 Martin koa uke, real bright sound. I still like several of my songs, and if you buy me a beer and hand me a guitar I've been known to play a few. I can guarantee most of you haven't heard them before.

Politically, you could say I'm a conservative Democrat, if such a beast exists these days. Like Bill Bradley, who I campaigned for in 2000, I believe in the "party of the little guy," but my party has lost its way. It's time to retool. I was a fairly active liberal for many years. I protested the building of the Shoreham nuclear power plant (which never opened, obsolete behemoth it was), volunteered for the homeless, belonged to the Sierra Club. I served with the American Red Cross at the 1-year anniversary observance at Ground Zero, and hung wreaths, dolls, poetry, crayon drawings and other items on a fence by the South Tower site on behalf of families of victims there. I collected rocks for an Asian couple who lost a daughter; they were going to use them to build her a backyard garden.

People more eloquent than I have said it many times before, but 9/11 changed me completely and irrevocably. I will never cheapen that day with rhetoric along the lines of "I'm so over 9/11," a woefully pathetic statement uttered, ostensibly for ironic effect, in the Sunday New York Times Magazine last summer. And, oh yeah, I voted Bush 2004, along with 544,359 other New York City folk, an increase of 145,633 over the president's 2000 total here. So more than a few of us dissenters reside in the land of "anyone but Bush."

That's about all I'll let on for now. If you hate or like what you're reading, keep reading and leave a post; if you're blog shy, e-mail me (you can do it via my profile link). I enjoy correspondence.

PS: Props to nausikaa for the kind referral at: theconscientiousobject.blogspot.com
Politically curious readers will want to check out her posts and links. She's good-looking, too (back off blograts, she's taken).

Peace and quiet

Finally. Friday's rush-hour blare has dwindled to the chug of a solitary bus idling outside on West 49th Street. But the rain’s been relentless, playing hard and emphatic under the white street light outside my window.

I’ve got the Mississippi Sheiks on in I-Tunes, “Your Good Man Caught the Train and Gone.” Bruised vocals, in perfect sync with a slightly off-kilter guitar. A fired-up fiddle that reads the singer’s mind, darting in and out of the guitar fills like a hopped-up turnstile jumper. Old blues; real blues. Not even a few rock stars play the blues like this anymore. Eric Clapton’s last effort, a tribute to the great Robert Johnson, was a slippy, overproduced disaster. The late Kurt Cobain sure could make the genre his own, as he brilliantly demonstrates on Nirvana’s cover of Ledbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” But singing the blues is a risky business, something you shouldn't try unless you can rip yourself apart in public and still be able to live with yourself in the morning. Not an easy balancing act, that.

It’s been a long, busy week, but it’s also been quiet, mostly. Iowans should know that quiet does exist in New York City. You’d never know it reading the city’s papers. It’s not the kind of quiet that settles on an Iowa cornfield, quiet in the literal sense. That's an impossibility in this great, overbearing metropolis. It's also why any New Yorker will tell you that every so often you have to escape the city and go to places not entirely unlike Iowa to keep it all together (eg, upstate New York). Call it blue town goin’ red—if only for a long weekend.

In Manhattan quiet is experienced internally, and for as long as it lasts the hubbub of big city life goes on but doesn’t intervene. It's a welcome detachment. But then days like Friday roll in—days that rain on a million short tempers—and, well, so much for quiet in the glorious, wormy apple.

The weekend’s a question mark. Arafat’s dead. Do I celebrate? Not according to The Nation, which extols the virtues of Arafat the founder of the Palestinian liberation movement while berating him for the few good-faith concessions he made to Israel and the international community. How can I take seriously an editorial that calls the 2000 Camp David proposal for the creation of a Palestinian state “inadequate and insulting”? I’ll readily admit that Israel’s land grabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip contributed greatly to Arafat’s later recalcitrance at the negotiating table. But clearly the editors at The Nation are not living in the real world when they denounce the label of Arafat the terrorist as “so much propaganda and mythmaking.”

The Nation can keep right on stewing over the failure of realistic minds to grasp its utopian vision for the Palestinians. I’ll follow our president’s lead in asking God to bless Arafat’s flawed soul while hoping the new Palestinian leadership grasps the significance of this moment and the opportunity it presents. And Sunday, weather permitting, maybe I’ll take a drive to a place not entirely unlike Iowa, if only for an afternoon.

Wake-up call

It’s 5:45 AM and here comes my faithful canine wake-up call, 56 pounds of angelic mutt, half-Lab half-golden retriever, or so most people think. I hear the “click-click-click” of paws in need of trimming on the hardwood floor. Her tail peeps over the crest of the bed like a shark’s fin breaking the waves as she negotiates the narrow path between the left side of the bed and the wall. Now her cool, moist nose is in my face.

“Thwock-thwock-thwock,” her tail beats against the wall. I rise slowly and turn to face her, letting my legs hang over the side of the bed. “Hi, Ilsa, how are ya, pal?” I say, half asleep, patting her rump.

“Thwock-thwock-thwock…”

Ilsa performs her ritual morning greeting, shaking her caboose as she dances between my legs. This routine never gets old.

I head for the water closet, entertaining a half-baked thought of how humans might relate to each other if they had tails that betrayed their emotions. (Yes, you really do think the oddest things when you first wake up.) The tiles are freezing under my feet. Better layer up, it’s going to be cold outside.

Soon we’re heading north on Eighth Avenue towards Central Park. The Bible-black dead of night slowly yields to an elderly gray as time rewinds to play another day. Whoever said there are no second chances in life couldn't have got it more wrong. Life is nothing but chances.

Traffic is sporadic along the avenue, mostly hacks, garbage and delivery trucks, the occasional bus and early risers driving to the office. Ilsa pauses to do her thing on 50th Street, and I dig into my pocket for a cleanup bag. Across the street about a dozen bundled-up people exit the subway, also bound for work, no doubt. A quiet dignity defines the morning commute. In addition to a paycheck, work brings value and purpose to our lives. Nobody works harder than Americans, and no Americans work harder than New Yorkers.

On the move again, Ilsa and I pass a Korean deli; outside Mexicans in sweatshirts and aprons trim flowers while a radio plays Latin pop. On Broadway and 57th Street the smell of freshly brewed coffee escapes the Pax Café. The corner newsstand displays the day’s headlines. On the front page of the New York Post appears a photo of a cigarette- smoking American GI with the headline: “SMOKIN’: Marlboro men kick butt in Fallujah.”

Before entering Central Park, Ilsa and I stop by the Columbus Circle Gallery to see what’s on display in the windows. In one window a lithograph of Picasso’s Portrait de Marie-Therese makes every other original and repro on display look second-rate; such is the danger of standing a Picasso—even a repro Picasso—alongside most anything else. In the other window appear framed limited-edition photographs of the iconic personalities of the baby boom generation: Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, JFK, The Beatles, Sinatra. For a moment I wonder what faces will define the generation coming of age today. And then I remember the cigarette-smoking GI on the cover of today’s Post.

It's "1918" all over again

“The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.”
– H.L. Mencken

President Bush has won the election outright, and this weekend all around Hell’s Kitchen, gross, indignant defiance simmers in a cauldron of idiot’s rage. To cite but one example:

At Carney’s bar off West 58th Street, a forty-something still exhibiting the grooming habits of prep school—a Massachusetts native, as it would turn out—reads The Wall Street Journal, a nearly finished pint of Bass within easy reach. He overhears the man seated on his right blurt the words “Bush” and “ecstatic” to a friend. He pays closer attention.

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea to switch horses in the middle of the fight,” the man continues. “Kerry’s own pollster [Mark Mellman] presciently observed ‘we simply do not defeat an incumbent president in wartime.’ And I’m fairly certain there’s precedent in that.”

The Massachusetts native sets his paper down and turns to the man, surmising yet another nut that voted for Bush.

“As a disgruntled voter and lifelong Red Sox fan, I take certain pleasure in telling you you’re wrong,” he intrudes, standing up. The ambushed Mellman sympathizer—a New York native, lifelong Democrat and Bush 2004 supporter, as it would turn out—is clearly taken aback.

The Red Sox fan/Kerry man grabs his coat and continues, “The incumbent was defeated in 1968. During the Vietnam War.” Pleased by his distorted gloat, he beats a hasty exit, his personal indignation avenged. Try that on for size, you misguided ignoramus.

Oh those Kerry supporters. Never sticking around to hear a little nuance with respect to their arguments.

As most readers of this blog will know, Nixon and the Republicans did indeed end the eight-year reign of Democrats in the White House in 1968. Giving the devil his due, the results of that election clearly voiced the misgivings voters had with an incumbent administration they rightly perceived as being hopelessly bogged down by a tragic war that had already cost thousands of US lives. But an incumbent president was not unseated in 1968. Lyndon Johnson chose not to run for reelection that year. Instead, it fell to the hapless Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s second in command, to take the fall.

The irony of the Democratic Party, besieged by antiwar protests, losing in 1968 should not be lost on us in 2004. Nor should the hubris of Kerry supporters—the big city liberals, academic elites, celebrity millionaire knee-jerkers and mainstream media—raging on against the dying of the light. The silent majority has weighed in on their self-righteous hysteria. It has mulled over “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And it is not amused. Now old-school New England–bred liberalism has 59 million reasons to fear “2004” becoming the greater nation’s permanent “1918” retort to its obsolete and out-of-touch ideas.

It’s high time the Democrats set about reinventing themselves before they’re swallowed up by their growing irrelevance.