Scenes From a Divorce #5: The First Epiphany

For years before the divorce the choice seemed impossibly cruel: I would have no life because of my kids; or they would have no life because of me. It was an un-escapable trap, a knot I couldn’t untie: I remember writing in my journal “This is the trick where Houdini drowns.”

Then the marriage ended and we were all struggling to get to the surface.

But the bitterness and regret remained. I had given up all hopes for a writing career by moving to Nantucket (occasional articles for the now-defunct Beacon, didn’t count).

Climbing a thirty foot ladder in a twenty mile North East wind, on a ten degree day in February, with a fifty pound pallet of roof shingles slung over my back, I actually believed for a moment that the plane which had taken us from Los Angeles had crashed and I was literally in Hell. Angry wife, screaming child, frozen weather and a job that left me sobbing with fatigue and unable to make a fist at he end of the day – it would take a very inventive Devil to make things any worse. Or so I felt at the time.

I blamed myself for failing as a writer; I blamed my wife for enforcing the deal we made, uprooting us back to this barren sandspit full of haughty rich people and trogloddye carpenters if I failed to meet the deadline for success. Perhaps I would have welshed on the deal, broken up with her, stayed on in the sunshine taking meetings and trying to put a screenwriting career together, but by the time we left she was pregnant. She had a hostage so I gave in to her demands and we headed east.

Soon we had two kinds and the paradox grew with them: they were the only light in the darkness, but I was in the darkness because of them. My marriage continued to crumble and I started to regret everything. Bitterness took over.

Regret and bitterness. Each one feeding off the other, accumulating like mildew on a damp wall and yet miraculously banished, bleached and rinsed away, by two moments of simple clarity.

This was the first one:

They had been visiting her parents in Los Angeles for a few weeks, as they did every summer. I met them at the airport. The NTSA had tripled the security and there were National Guard soldiers, armed and in full uniform, patrolling the terminal.

“Well, this is going to wreck the rental season,” Lisa said, giving me a brief hug as we waited for the luggage. The kids grabbed my legs.

No matter what subject Lisa was talking about, she wound up talking about real estate. I can laugh about it now. Someone was dying of cancer? Were they selling the house? 9/11? Oh, it was devastating for the real estate market. Chernobyl? You can pick up a nice three bedroom ranch style next to the reactor for a song these days.

Lisa was in her element on Nantucket. She was fascinated with the wealthy people she worked for. She told me one day after a parent teacher conference, that the man to whom she'd just sold a house made -- she had actually figured it out with a calculator -- he made my yearly salary every fourteen and a half minutes. Of course that was before my dollar an hour raise.

I looked down at the kids, Tommy in shorts and a t-shirt, Caroline in a summer shift that Lisa must have paid a small fortune for. I couldn’t begrudge her the expense, though I knew Caroline would grow out of the dress in a month or two. Buying kid’s clothes was one of life’s great pleasures, fleeting as a four-star restaurant dinner, doomed as a sandcastle. Tommy’s brown hair was wind scattered, Caroline’s red hair was tied into a pair of perfect braids. But they were a matched set of smiling round faces. You could almost forget they were at war with each other.

“Did you get us something?” Tommy asked.

“Hey – you went off-island. You’re supposed to bring me something.”

That gave him pause.

“How about a hug?”

“Sounds good.” I lifted him up, thinking, whoa, he’s getting big. He was a sturdy little nine year old, but he’d been a baby last week. Time was going by so fast it felt like a wind, blowing hard out of the north, pulling the air out of your chest.

“I got you something,” Caroline said. Tommy writhed in my arms to stare at her, outraged at this bit of sibling one-upmanship. “When we were at Trader Joe’s.” She wrestled her back pack off and rummaged inside. After a few seconds she pulled out a bag of unsulfured dried apricots.

“Your favorite!” she crowed. It was true. She was learning my vices.

“I saw the new Ian McEwan novel at Borders,” Tommy said. “”I wanted to buy it for you. But I didn’t have any money.”

“You spent your allowance,” Lisa pointed out.

“I saved mine,” Caroline said smugly.

Tommy thrashed for a second, trying to get loose. I knew he wanted to pounce.

“I didn’t even know there was a new Ian McEwan novel,” I lied. “So that’s a great present. We’ll go to Mitchell’s tomorrow and pick it up. Maybe we can find you a book, too.”

“What about me?” Caroline demanded.

“Both of you. We’ll have our own private book fair.”

“You spoil them,” Lisa said, grabbing the first of the suitcases.

“Oh yeah. Books. The scourge of today’s youth.”

I grabbed the other suitcases and we started out through the terminal toward the parking lot, the kids dancing in front of us, the squabble forgotten. They stopped to pet a pair of Bearnese Mountain Dogs. We paused and watched them charming the harried woman holding the leashes. Tommy said something and she laughed, while the dogs licked both sides of Caroline’s face.

Standing there, it occurred to me in a sudden absolute irrefutable bolt of awareness -- that having children made regret impossible - at least for all the time up until the exact moment of their conception. It was so obvious: if you had done anything different, or even done the same things in different order, your children might not exist. Certainly, given the way you rolled the genetic dice every time sperm met egg, they wouldn't be the same people. Looked at that way, not even a disastrous marriage could be considered a waste. I glanced over at Lisa, seething with impatience, worried about dog germs, distrusting strangers, eager to get back to the office and check the new listings. Across the floor, Caroline was teaching the dogs to give their paws, shaking them solemnly as if the dogs were graduating from high school and she was handing out diplomas.

I slung a duffel bag over my shoulder, took Lisa’s arm and guided her toward the kids.

I was thinking: an ordeal, and a tragedy, but not a waste

And I’ve never felt a moment of regret since – at least not for the time before Tommy’s birth. Since then – there’s been plenty. But it’s a lighter load.

The other moment? The one that scrubbed the bitterness out of my life?

I’ll save it for next time.

Scenes From a Divorce #4: Trimming the Hedge

My grandmother used to say :”Don’t eavesdrop. You’ll never hear anything that makes you happy.”

Good advice.

So why stalk my ex-wife? Why would I do something so alienating and disturbing and off-putting? Because I needed to feel connected. That’s the absurd paradox of it. You need to touch that severed life. It’s like a phantom limb after an amputation. In your dreams you’re still clutching a baseball bat, playing piano, dancing. Awake, it torments you with impossible flicker of sensation.

I wanted information, that was all. Just to know what she was doing, and eventually, what she was thinking. To be fully included in my utter exclusion, a voting member of my own disenfranchisement, in complete control of my helpessness.

It wasn’t strictly stalking at first. It began with drive-bys. I would check her house or Ned’s when they were supposed to be working and the kids were in school. At night when I really needed to know what was happening, I had the kids with me and they shackled me to the house. I had thought of hiring a baby-sitter while I spied on Lisa, but she would have found out about it eventually. Everyone talked to everyone else about everything. Some stray comment from the baby-sitter’s mother and I’d have to deal with the inevitable self-righteous interrogation from Lisa: where was I on a school night? Why did I leave my children eating pizza with some teen-ager when they needed a good dinner and help with their homework?

Etcetera.

No, I was virtually under house arrest and Lisa could do as she pleased.

Still I checked on her whenever I could. Opportunities came up. The kids had sleep-overs, sometimes both of them on the same night, and I got a free evening to snoop. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t care. People paid detectives to do this kind of thing. The police even did it, when they had a potential suspect. It was like a stakeout. That sounded good; all I needed was the coffee and the doughnuts. As a rationale, it worked pretty well until I progressed to the next stage. This one was somewhat harder to justify. Even naming it made me a little queasy. Was it “On-site surveillance”? Or perhaps “Illegal search and seizure”? But I wasn’t seizing anything and how could it be illegal to visit your own house? Even if you did have to break in, because your wife had changed the locks? And it wasn’t much of a break in, anyway: Lisa still hid the key under a shingle, the classic Nantucket security procedure, roughly analogous to hiding your money inside your shoes at the beach.

But I didn’t kid myself. Breaking and entering was what the police would call it. Criminal trespass, at least. Which was appropriate: I felt like a trespassing criminal when I sneaked into the Polpis house one clear windy December afternoon, looking for evidence of Ned. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find--- an extra toothbrush in the bathroom, Ned’s brand of beer (Stella Artois) in the fridge; perhaps a bottle of unfamiliar aftershave in the bathroom, perhaps a Yanni CD on the coffee table. Something that would connect me to her life now, let me into it, if only as a voyeur.

I found Lisa’s diary in her underwear drawer, during a quick furtive check for new racy lingerie. But she was still wearing the same old plain cotton panties. The diary was tucked under them, the pink and gray flowered cover held shut with some sort of elastic ribbon. I picked it up gingerly, memorizing its exact position in the corner of the drawer, careful not to disturb the tidy pile of clothes above it.

Whatever Lisa was thinking about me, whatever she was feeling about Ned, whatever was really going on in her life now, it would be described in this book. With one bold gesture, I could find out everything I needed to know. I looked down at the small hard-covered volume, turning it over in my hand, simultaneously knowing I could never violate my ex-wife’s privacy by reading it; and studying the elastic ribbon to be sure I could replace it exactly, if necessary.

I stood suspended there for more than a minute; then I heard someone at the door. I flinched as my mind starting running the numbers, calculating the magnitude of my catastrophe. My car was in the driveway, there was no hiding that. I needed a good excuse. Was there anything of mine here I could have come to pick up? No, I’d cleared out of the house weeks ago. Something for the kids? But they’d have to lie to back me up and that wasn’t happening, that was a line I wouldn’t approach, much less cross.

My mind was a blank.

I stood still, not breathing, listening hard.

There were no other sounds, just the wind pushing at the north side of the house. After another minute I slipped out of the room and walked to the head of the stairs. I could see down to the front door. Envelopes were scattered in front of it.

The mailman. Of course.

I let out a long breath. I was safe for the moment.

But it was dangerous to be here. I should put the diary back and get out while I still could. Lisa was probably on her way home right now. She had only gone to pick up the kids at the Boy’s and Girl’s club. Even with the usual traffic jam on Sparks Avenue and a stop for hot chocolate at Fast Forward, they couldn’t be much longer. I didn’t want to be caught here and I didn’t want to be caught leaving. It would be best to go back the long way, and loop around through ‘Sconset; even seeing me on the Polpis Road would arouse Lisa’s suspicions.

I went back into the bedroom, but I paused at the dresser, listening to the low whimper of wind in the eaves. I stared down at the book in my hand. I couldn’t seem to put it back. I studied the way the elastic ribbon was looped around the cover, hooked over the top right and the bottom left corner: easy to replace. If I was actually going to do this thing.

The silence goaded me. I could feel time pushing past me like a crowd on a train platform. It was now or never, because I knew I would never be able to summon the nerve to do this again.

I took a quick breath, opened my ex-wife’s diary and started reading.

I can’t go into the details, but it was bad. It made me think of the new Krav Maga classHes they’re offering on the island. It’s a close-quarters Israeli martial art. I had watched the teacher pull a student to him by the back of neck and pantomime a series of blows, from the knee to the groin from the forehead to the nose, from the elbow to the throat. That was what this felt like: being yanked into some brutal parody of an intimate embrace, trapped there and beaten.

I read a description and thought, had I been cruising Ned’s house at that moment? Or helping the kids with their math homework? Or possibly - and this would be perfect sick irony - lying in bed, draining off the fluid pressure of my own longing with the image of my ex-wife’s breasts which, I knew now, I would never see or touch again.

There were a few sentences that I’d never be able to forget, images that would permanently mark and disfigure me, like scar tissue.

And somewhere in Heaven, my grandmother was shaking her head sadly, too kind to say “I told you so.”

But reading the diary had at least one good result. It disinfected me of any further interest in Lisa’s activities. Some critical portion of the love I felt for her had been replaced by a cold, glinting hatred. You really think I’m going to have a meltdown over you?, I thought as I drove away from the house that afternoon. Don’t hold your breath. And don’t bother dangling the chance that we might get back together in front of me to get me to do you any more bullshit favors, you manipulative bitch.

I’m over it.

The resolves came quickly after that. The stalking was over. I had more important things to do than scratch that itch. I would do my work, take care of my kids, leave my ex-wife alone.

I would trim the complications out of my life, prune it like a hedge and let it grow back full.

It was time to start living again.

Scenes From a Divorce #3

How did I figure out that Ned was sleeping with my ex-wife?

It started with the wedding ring.

I had wanted to sell my ring back to Kim England’s jewelry store where I’d bought it in the first place. Getting rid of the thing felt like an essential act: I needed to purge the totems of my marriage. The white circle on my finger was bad enough, but it was already disappearing. Soon there would be no physical evidence of my previous condition.

Tommy and I had run into Kim England at the Stop & Shop one afternoon. I stood chatting with her in the dairy aisle while Tommy investigated the gaudy packages of kids’ yogurt. Kim chatted about various things: some crazy billionaire wanted two hundred of her little golden lightship baskets for a wedding on Saturday. He couldn’t seem to grasp the idea that it would take months to make that many baskets. He just offered her double the price. When she still had to refuse, he tripled his offer. Finally he stormed out in a rage. I smiled – this was probably one of the guys who threw tantrums at the airport because they took fog personally.

The conversation ambled on. I told her I was baffled by many things, even in the diary aisle. What was the difference between one and two percent milk? Why were yogurt containers getting so tiny? Why would anyone actually buy margarine? Was “Cheese food” really cheese? Was it really food? Were brown eggs better than white eggs? Did that prejudice bode well for a diversified society? Kim shrugged; maybe it just meant that tans were fashionable. I mentioned the ring of pale flesh on my ring finger and the conversation went on from there. Kim offered to buy the wedding band back.

I had no idea that Tommy was even listening.

But he was. He had taken the divorce much harder than his sister, who seemed to cruise through life’s entanglements like a yacht through kelp. Tommy was the opposite: he got caught in the sea-weed, it wrapped around him and immobilized him and even if he made it out of the water he was picking the stuff out of his hair for days afterward. The thought that his father might sell the sacred symbol of his parents’ marriage, of their family, of his home, just for money, for forty pieces of silver, horrified him. It turned my wedding ring into some piece of junk you’d unload at a yard sale. The things that mattered most to him meant nothing to his father, that was the worst part. He was alone. He felt like an orphan. He couldn’t say all this of course. He was seven years old. So instead he stood in front of the Sponge Bob yogurt boxes and started sobbing.

I got the message.

I apologized to Kim England and hustled Tommy out of the store as fast as I could. We spent the better part of two hours, first in the car driving around the island and then at home, talking about it. I apologized a couple of dozen times. The crying chugged to a halt. Finally we compromised. I didn’t want the ring and Tommy did, so I’d just give it to him. Tommy liked that idea, but when I described the incident to Lisa a few days later, she said Tommy might lose it, as he lost everything else from his band trumpet to his math homework to his left sneaker.

“I’ll hold it for him,” she said. “Until he’s old enough to take care of it himself.”

That had seemed like a reasonable solution.

Everything had seemed startlingly reasonable, in fact -- until the evening when the actual hand-off occurred. It was after the Christmas band-chorus concert. Jenny was in the chorus and Tommy was in the band, so I had to be there for the duration. These concerts were unavoidable. As the ordeals of parenthood went, they fell somewhere between orientation night and Little League games. On this occasion though, the chorus sounded pretty good, running through the usual selection of carols. The band was excruciating as usual, every instrument playing in its own key. Though the school administration was courteous enough to keep the house lights on during the performance, I couldn’t even read any more; Jenny had actually caught me at it last year, all the way from the back of the stage to the back of the auditorium. She had her mother’s sharp vision; and her temper.

I found Lisa in the lobby outside after the concert. She was chatting with her yoga teacher and some dowdy woman from the Land Bank. Ned was hovering nearby. There was a break in the conversation and it seemed like a perfect opportunity. I dug into my pocket as I approached.

“Hey, Lisa – before I forget.” I handed her the ring. “I figure you could put it on the mantel or something, where he could see it but not actually put his hands on it. Or whatever. It’s up to you.”

“Okay” she said. She seemed off balance, tricked into silence.

I dove through the gap. “Well, okay then … see you around. Ladies,” I nodded to the two women. I ignored Ned. Twenty seconds later I was outside in the clean, biting cold of the December night, congratulating myself on handling a potentially awkward situation with skill and grace.

I should have known better.

The phone was ringing when I got home. I picked it up and Lisa started in before I could say a word.“I can’t believe you did that.”

“Excuse me?”

“How could you?”

“I’m not sue what-- ”

“In public that way? In front of my friends? That is so sick.”

“Lisa -- ”

“Was it just to humiliate me? Well it worked. Congratulations. Throwing your wedding ring at me as if it was a piece of trash, as if our whole marriage was nothing but some -- ”

“Wait a second. I didn’t throw it at you. I just -- ”

“Ned thought it was childish. That’s what he said. Pathetic and childish.”

“Ned?”

“He saw the whole thing.”

“What the hell does he have to do with -- ”

“He happens to be a very shrewd judge of character.”

I sighed. She was using the ‘happens to’ formulation: it was a sarcastic invocation of coincidence that she lapsed into when she was most outraged. As if to say, “Fine, I’ll pretend that this self-evident truth is random, if you’re too stupid to see the obvious.”

I took a breath. “Look, that ring means nothing to me. I didn’t want to do the whole ring thing in the first place. That was your idea, remember? I’ve been meaning to give the ring to you and this was the first chance I got. Period.”

“Fine. Whatever. I have to go.”

She hung up.

Thinking about it later, the thing that struck me most about the conversation was Ned’s comment. It was overly emphatic, strangely partisan. In my experience there was only one reason why a man would adopt a woman’s point of view so eagerly. It wasn’t because he had suddenly discovered a mutual interest the bizarre protocols of divorce. It wasn’t because he was a chivalrous debater who liked standing up for over-matched losers, or because he believed what she was saying and felt a moral obligation to fight for the truth.

No, sorry. It was because he was fucking her. It was the only sensible explanation.

Ned was fucking my wife.

Ex-wife, sorry. I still couldn’t get my head around that one.

The breath caught in my throat like a piece of food. I forced some air down. Maybe I was wrong. Lisa always said I was impossibly cynical, so cynical I was like a credulous child. “A kid takes everything at face value,” she had explained to me once. “You always see some creepy agenda. But it all comes out to the same thing. Neither of you can deal with the real world at all. Maybe you were that kid once. Maybe that explains it.”

Maybe she was right.

Maybe Ned was just being nice.

Maybe.

But I had to know for sure.

That’s why I sneaked into her house and read her journal.

But that’s another story. We’ll save it for next time.

Scenes From a Divorce #2

It was normal, that was the strangest part.

As usual I was puttering around the house while everyone else slept, taking the refrigerator dough out, rolling it flat, dusting it with cinnamon sugar, curling it up like a rug, cutting it into disks and setting each one on a pat of butter and some crumbled pecans in the muffin tins. They’d have to rise again, for another two or three hours.

The kids got up just as I was finishing, same as always. And, also as always, my job changed at that point: now I had to keep the noise level down so that Lisa could sleep. Perversely, she loved sleeping in on Christmas morning. Perhaps because it enforced a level of consideration she didn’t feel she got under normal conditions.

It was quite a challenge. Keeping eight and nine year olds from charging up and down the halls, playing with noisy toys and fighting with each other at the top of their voices was exhausting and futile. It was like trying to keep the dog from barking when she rode in the car. Short of a sedative dart or a roll of duct-tape, it wasn’t going to happen.

So the morning was stressful, as usual. Everything happened in proper order – the stocking gifts unwrapped, while Lisa took endless pictures and we drank coffee and ate the sticky buns. Of course the difference was that this year I could escape. I would take the kids for the rest of the morning so she could have her private Christmas with Ned; but by the late afternoon I would be alone.

I watched my wife, she still felt like my wife. This cosy fake domesticity was unraveling my tenuous sense of perspective. Lisa moved around the room in her casually sexy thermal underwear pajamas. I could only glance at her, the nipples pushing against the soft cotton of the ribbed top; a furtive sighting into the drooping V neck when she leaned over to pick up her coffee cup. In an hour another man, someone we had laughed at together, would be lifting that shirt over her head, easy and proprietary after how many years of mute envy and longing? Ned had circled our dying marriage like a vulture and now it was time to feast on the carrion.

Driving back into town with the kids squabbling in the back seat, drunk on chocolate santas and cinnamon sugar, I saw Ned’s truck heading the other direction. He would be unwrapping his own Christmas gift in a few minutes.

The kids didn’t like my silence. It was unnatural and they sensed something was wrong. I started singing “Deck The Halls” and they joined in happily.

We were almost a family again while the song lasted.

Scenes From a Divorce #1

It was finally over.

I stumbled through the darkness in the brittle November air. I could hear the wind chattering in the trees, and distant surf on the south shore. There was the sound of a car engine in the distance, faint and growing fainter.

She had finally said it.

“I don’t love you any more.”

I banged my fists on my thighs, throttled and gasping. I hadn’t even grabbed my coat. But I couldn’t be in the house with her for one more second.

And this was how pitifully little she knew me – she couldn’t understand why those words would stop a conversation. Didn’t I know it already? Wasn’t it obvious?

She was right, too – I had no business being surprised. We had been in the middle of the unspoken knowledge for years. It was like living in Chernobyl as desperate Russians were starting to do again now: ignoring the obvious and waiting for the symptoms to show.

Someone in a Ford ranger offered me a ride. I shook my head, waved them on.

I was talking to myself and I didn‘t want anyone else to hear. Only crazy people talk to themselves. Fine. I felt crazy tonight. I spoke to the black asphalt under my feet:

If there’s no love, what’s the point? It’s waiting in a movie line in front of a closed theatre. It’s soggy cereal, it’s tepid coffee, it’s cold toast and hard butter. It’s corrupted computer files and broken shoelaces and the look on the doctor’s face when he brings you the biopsy report. It’s dread and boredom, fear and guilt, it’s every putrid emotion. It’s years and years of more of the same. It’s waste. It’s not even tragedy. There are no heroes. It’s smaller than life. It’s the tea scum that won’t come off the inside of your cup, it’s the glare of sunlight on chrome in your eyes. It’s skidmarks in your underwear and nail clippings in the carpet. It’s the juice at the bottom of the garbage bag.

Shit, in other words.

Without love it’s nothing but shit.

I ran out of breath. I found I was crying. It was a physical response, like a cramp. I walked and walked until I realized I had no destination. I was just stalling. I couldn’t stay out much longer in the cold. There was no one I could stay with in this alien place, no one I could trust to hear my story.

There was nowhere to go but home.

So I went there.

Mad Men, Mad Money: An Open Letter to Matthew Weiner

The negotiations for the third season of Mad Men continue this morning, and you must have more leverage now, after winning a second Golden Globe award, despite the corrupt, debased and laughable nature of that prize, awarded by a 'foreign press corps' that ignores most of the actual foreign press and whose benediction can be purchased, in the immortal words of George Orwell, "over the counter, like so many pounds of cheese."

I know you're angry, Mr. Weiner. After all, you wrote the pilot of Mad Men more than a decade ago, only to have it rejected by everyone --including, most recently and scandalously -- HBO. I mean -- you were working for them, writing classic Sopranos episodes, and the script was virtually hand delivered to the bosses there by David Chase, the most significant creative figure in the cable channel's history. And they still rejected it!

Maybe you felt it was a come-down to broadcast the show on AMC; after all, they'd never done a dramatic program before and practically defined the two-bit, small-time identity of basic cable. Now the show's a hit and they won't give you the contract you want -- which really means the vindication, the acceptance and the love you want. So you're getting tough with them. It's understandable on one level -- we live in a free agency world where a Matt Cassell, who hadn't started as quarterback since high school, can come off a rookie season and demand whatever he wants as a free agent.

But there's a crucial difference. Lots of people watch football. Very few people watch Mad Men. We're talking fifty million people versus maybe a million, tops. AMC doesn't generate that much money from your show; even the lowest rated newtwork sit com gets more viewers. So this really shouldn't be about money. You make enough. It's a fact. Most of your elite, highly educated, fiercely loyal audience are wondering how they're going to make their mortgages next month and whether they'll even have a job next year. You can imagine how little sympathy they have for you. Many of them are creative, and the idea of actually getting their dream project on the air, with an audience of a million people and the creative freedom to realize it properly, is a fantasy they don't even dare to consider. You've been given this extraordinary opportunity, and made a masterpiece. A million bright, loyal, discerning people wait for the next installment like the crowds on the docks in Manhattan waiting for the next chapter of Little Dorrit. Some gratitude is in order. Maybe even a sense of obligation, to them and to yourself, to continue doing your best work, to maintain that unique relationship with so many perceptive, admiring strangers, and bring Mad Men to it's ultimate conclusion.

So, for everyone's sake -- yes even AMC's and Lionsgate's -- put your anger aside. Your grudges are childish. Your bitterness is unbecoming. Your work has a spark of genius. Get out of your own way and do it.

Everyone will thank you. Even your own characters. Even Ken Cosvgrove, who would kill for an audience the size of yours; or Harry Crane who would die for the kind of respect you command; or Freddy Rumsen, who frankly could just use a job right now.

Even Pete Campbel would thank you, whatever angle he was playing and however ulterior his motives. He might even blackmail you to take the deal. Don't let it come to that. Just do what you're good at and ignore the rest. That's what Don Draper does. He made partner. You're making something much better. You're making Don himself, and Betty and Sterling Cooper and everyone in it. You're making art.

If you stop for all the wrong reasons, you'll regret it forever.

Campaign '08:The Unspoken Issue

Watching the network and cable news discussion of the election has left me with a queasy sense of dislocation. They talk about Ayers amd Palin, they discuss duelling tax plans and insurance benefits, ACORN and the Hanoi Hilton; Reverent Wright and wolf hunting from helicopters. But no one seems willing to come out and discuss what may very well be the deciding factor in this Presidential race.

That's the word, I just said it, I guess it just popped out:

Race.

Most people refuse to mention it. Pundits don't say it on the air and 'Joe Six-Pack" certainly doesn't say it to the person from Gallup or Pew who calls asking questions. It's like the race of the black husband in the new Jonathan Demme movie. Rachel Getting Married: elaborately, conscientously, surreally ignored.

But this is a racist country. A shocking -- and at this terrifying, teetering point in the history of our Democracy, an unguessable -- number of people are going to step into that voting booth on November 4th and in that Constitutionally mandated solitude and privacy, cast their ballot in favor of the nutty old white guy, no matter how creepy he seems, no matter how ugly his campaign or how schitzophrenic his political history.

Why? Because he's white.

I'm sorry. I wish it wasn't true. But the fact is, people are talking about this, in a slimy set of code words: Obama is a 'terrorist' and 'arab', 'unamerican' ... alien ... in other words: black. All the hard core racists I know self-righteously deny it, and this elaborate counter-language allows them to have it both ways. But it doesn't fool me. And because McCain is such an appallingly bad candidate, mindlessly lockstepping to the catastrophic policies of the people who tried to destroy him eight years ago ... because he is so erratic, so bankrupt of ideas, so angry, so unscrupulous, this election becomes a classic controlled scientific experiment, a 'litmus test' for the American public. I mean, let's face it: there is NO OTHER REASON to vote against Barrack Obama. He's calm in the face of violent aggression, measured in thought, shrewd in policy-making, a stirring orator with real ideas and a history of consistent political action, a man with no demons or scandals in his past (Ayers was the best they could come up with), a shrewd passionate leader with a new agenda for a country that's just about to adjourn. He's running against a senile, amoral, war-mongering buffoon. Which adds up to one unavoidable fact: this election is going to be nothing less than a referendum on American racism: a civics test for the class of '08, a final examination in tolerance and the American ability to see beyond our personal prejudices to the greater good.

I hope we pass it. We can't afford to fail.

A Haiku For the Bailout

Sometimes the world offers a kind of visual haiku that expresses all the density of meaning, all the layers of reality moving through the world and under it and behind it, at once. A man takes a woman's hand on the street and she leans into him like a swell against a seawall; a CEO talking on his cellphone ignores both the new puddle he steps into, and the pale rainbow from the recent storm, sketched on the water-blue sky over his head.

I was reminded of another such moment today, when I read that Citicorp had purchased Wachovia. The latter company has quite a presence on Nantucket: various corporate officers own homes here and their annual party features a fireworks display that puts the town's to shame. And who pays for that lavish artillery barrage? Well, you and me, of course, the taxpayers who will be bailing these people out this week or next week, when the right compromises can be finessed.

And what a perfect, oddly sinister metaphor to show where our money went: fountains of sparks illuminating their own spider-legged trails of smoke in the flash of light against the stars, rockets and roman candles, bouquets and brocades; lovely but pointless, extravagant but ephemeral, conspicuous consumption etching its temporary fossil into the soft stone of the summer night.

Then it was over.

The rich people had their fun and it was time for dinner and another round of drinks. For everyone else? Cold cinders on the beach Monday morning, and a long work week ahead.

Scenes We'd Like to See #3: The Debate That Should Have Been

Why do we always do this? Why does every Democrat take the podium like a dishrag and let himself be wrung out by the Republican – who is invariably a moronic bully with nothing a few catch phrases and a cocky attitude in his favor? Where are our catch-phrases? More to the point, where is our anger, our passion, our simple human energy? Obama, like Kerry and Gore and Dukakis before him, seemed to have been coached by his ‘handlers’ to avoid showing any anger or outrage. He was flat-lining last night. Who are these handlers, anyway? I suspect they all work for Karl Rove. What strategy could have been more catrastrophicly foolish and wrong-headed? How many times does caution have to fail before we learn that it's the most dangerous tactic -- that the measured drone of the policy wonk means death in the polls and doom at the polling place?

You know what Obama should have said as well as I do – you were probably shouting it at the screen, just as I was. By the fifth or sixth time that smug demented geriatric bully repeated his ludicrous sound bite about Obama “not understanding” and “not getting” something, I needed Obama to shout back:

“I don’t understand? I don’t get it? You have been wrong on everything! You were wrong on Iraq. You were wrong on Education and the environment. You were utterly wrong on deregulation. You fought for deregulation during the Keating Five scandal! You were so profoundly involved with the Savings and Loan melt-down, desperately trying to roadblock any regulation or investigation, that your were publicly scolded by your own colleagues. You think Iraq is the main front of the war on terrorism – why? Because George Bush told you so. You think we’re hunting Al Queda there? Al Queda wasn’t even there before we came! Saddam hated bin Laden and the feeling was mutual. You were so eager to prove we were winning the war that you walked through a Baghdad street market – and ripped off a rug salesman – just to prove it. Except you were surrounded by soldiers and guarded from the air by two attack helicopters. That market wasn't safe and you knew it. Your visit was photo op and a lie. Are you going to deny that now, and lie some more? Because America is tired of the lies and mistakes and corruption that you and your party represent.”

Or how about McCain's “The surge is working” line? Obama got trampled there. Why not tell the truth:

"Yes, it’s ‘working’ -- if you call a minor slow-down in the killing and a few more safe neighborhoods in Baghdad a victory. But there’s no democracy in Iraq, no working army, nothing like a self-sustaining government. You’re kidding yourself! No, you’re lying to yourself. But you can’t lie to the American people any more. Not when you're on the stage with me."

Finally, when McCain trotted out the tired old lie about Obama raising taxes on people making $42,000 a year, Obama muttered something about it not being true and just let the crazy old geezer trundle on.

This is what he should have said -- and it didn't have to be ad-libbed. No quick thinking was required. Obama's people knew MCCain was going to pull these tricks. I knew it, and I’m a small-town housepainter. They’re savvy political operatives. They should have been ready with this response:

“Excuse me, Jim. I’m sorry, but I have to stop this right here and respond to the Senator. I have stated here that he is lying about my tax program, but he goes on lying about it as if I said nothing. He doesn’t listen or he doesn’t care. But maybe this will get his attention: I swear in front of every American citizen watching this debate tonight, that if what he says is true, if I really aim to raise taxes on families making under fifty thousand dollars, if he can find anywhere, in any speech or interview, in any statement or private correspondence, on my website, in my advertisements and pamphlets – anywhere – evidence that I actually said that, I will walk away from this campaign and cede the election to the McCain-Palin ticket. But listen to me, now! If he cannot find the evidence for this slanderous and inflammatory accusation, then HE MUST DO THE SAME. He must agree to terminate his campaign – not suspend it in a cheap meaningless theatrical gesture – but end it, if he cannot substantiate his claims about me. He says he’s telling the truth. Will he put his hopes for the Presidency on the line? Will you do that Senator – see, Jim, now we’re talking to each other! – because either you act like a man and do it, right here, right now, or you admit to the American people that you’re a liar.”

And McCain would have folded like a rusty beach chair.
And Obama would have won the election, right there and then.
But he didn’t. And maybe he never will.
And if McCain wins, it will be Obama's fault. Obama and his crack team of advisors. Or maybe they're just on crack. That might explain it.
This election is Obama's to lose, and he’s losing it. He's doing a superb, classically Democratic job of it. Just like Dukakis and Kerry and Gore, Oh my.
It’s Greek tragedy and it's farce, it's the Oresteia meets the Honeymooners. And it’s making me physically ill.

The worst part is, I’m absolutely certain that John McCain’s “Health care plan” won’t help me at all.

Mutant Powers for Grown-Ups #1: Epiphany Man

Here’s a question: what’s the most annoying thing about a annoying person? It’s not necessarily what they do. It’s what they think about what they do. It’s their attitude. A standard piece advice for beginning fiction writers is that the villain should always believe he’s the good guy. There’s a reason for that. The villain actually does believe he’s the good guy. Bush thinks he’s bringing Democracy to the mid-East. Cheney thinks liberals want to turn America in a Socialist dystopia. McCain thinks off-shore drilling will free us from our dependency on foreign oil.


And that’s the creepiest thing about them.


We all know the asshole who seriously believes that everybody else, everyone around him, everyone he’s ever met, is an asshole – that explains why he has no friends and even strangers cross the street to avoid him. We’ve all known the obnoxious motor-mouth who actually believes she’s ‘a good listener’ despite the fact that she hasn't shown a heat-lightning flicker of interest in anyone else’s life in decades, and can keep acquaintances on the phone literally for hours with the operatic drama and traumatic details of her own.

One of these people marched into my apartment twenty minutes after I had found out that my father died, stared at the shell-shocked group on the couch and started talking about her day at work. When my girlfriend explained the situation, this lunatic said “Oh,” – just a little pot-hole in the road to swerve around --and then re-launched: “So, anyway, the all the cooks hate me and they won’t give me my orders and then I have to explain that to the customers, I mean without seeming rascist or whatever, and when I try to talk about it I just get the cold shoulder. The one guy? His name’s Raoul? He actually had the nerve to say …” and on and on.


We just stared at her, dumbfounded.

And I realized that this woman had no idea of how she sounded, or what we were thinking at that moment, or to be more inclusive, who she really was: her nature, the truth of her character. Alcoholism is not the only mental disorder whose primary symptom is denial. And how many wives and husbands and parents and children and siblings and friends of alcoholics have yearned to hear them say “I have to stop drinking, it’s ruining my life,” before their life is actually ruined?

One Olympic level marathon talker accidentally heard an answering machine tape of a phone message – not even a live call, just a message, going on and on, ceaseless as a cicada, tedious as a cricket, subtle as a woodpecker – and was appalled.

“Do I really sound like that?”

Oh yeah. That was kind of a taciturn moment, actually.


But it was soon forgotten, that’s the point.

The only lasting value to that brief moment of clarity was it made me realize what the coolest mutant power would be. Not shooting beams from my eyes, or levitating objects, or growing metal claws out of my fingers. No, my power would be much more devastating. With a single blast I would make people see themselves with absolute clarity. Not who they think they are, but who they really are. On top of that they would get some vivid consensus flash of the way other people see them. The jerk who thinks he’s admired and efficient and envied … kind of a Renaissance man, actually … gets the blast and suddenly realizes, not for a second like the friend with the phone message, but permanently, as an absolute reconfiguration of the synapses, that he is in fact an inept blowhard, a bully and a fool; that people despise him and laugh at him behind his back. That his name itself has come to be a kind of joke, a slang word for an incompetent bungler who thinks he can do everything perfectly.

Iceman can encase you in a block of hardened snow; I think my power would be far more paralyzing.Cyclops can hit you with a bolt of sheet energy from his eyes; but you can recover from that attack.

Once you realize the truth, there’s no going back. Remember the first time you saw the flash in the upper right hand corner of the movie screen just before the reel change? Someone had to point it out to me. But now I always see it, and I always will.

Maybe my victims will take this knowledge and change. Maybe they’ll just get some kind of aneurism and collapse. Maybe they’ll spend a year or two whimpering in the fetal position. There’s no way to tell – I can’t predict that.

Hey, I’m just the messenger.

The classic Twilight Zone ending to the story of this power is that I blast someone, they move unexpectedly and it turns out they were standing in front of a mirror. The blast ricochets right back at me and I see I’ve turned into a pompous, power-crazed tyrant myself.
So I never unleash the power again.
Too bad, because the world could really use it.

The Home Bureaucrat

For the last three months I’ve been struggling with the UMass bureaucracy to secure financing for my son’s semester abroad. My daughter is a social worker who spent most of the last two years helping her clients ( HIV positive homeless people) navigate the diabolical HUD paper-work labyrinth.

In the middle of yet another endless phone call (on hold for ten minutes until disconnected by the bursar’s office hang-up robot)I had a vision of what ordinary domestic life might be like if it were organized along the same lines.

In this fantasy I become the power-crazed institutional functionary. My girlfriend asks for a cup of coffee in the morning. Normally I make a pot when I get up. Not any more.

“Of course,” I say. “I’ll just need the coffee request form 676-J. When you get that signed by the Early Morning Activity office -- ”

“Early Morning Activity Office? What are you talking about?”

“We’ll need their approval. You can fax the form over to them after you’ve gotten it notarized."

“But I just -- ”

“When that’s approved you can turn it in for a single-cup-of coffee voucher --”

“Single cup off coffee? Who drinks a single cup of coffee?”

“Well, many people do, I assure you. There’s no need to be short with me. I didn’t make the rules. For multiple cups you’ll need an excess-of-ten liquid-ounces variance from the Hot Beverages Office.”

“The what?”

“It’s all very tightly controlled. We can’t have people just guzzling coffee willy nilly, M’am.”

“But, I – it …How long is all that going to take?”

“Hard to say. Depends on the brewing method. If you use the standard Mr. Coffee drip machine, and you have the sales slip and proof-of-purchase voucher, it could be as short a time as two weeks. But that has to be submitted with coffee-brand form and the grind specification sheet. The problem is, you can’t access the grind specification software until you have full approval on the coffee-brand form. That requires three signatures, one from each of the Morning Protocol offices. And you have to take those in personally. I’d get there early. Word to the wise. The lines can be brutal. Ironically, they often offer coffee and doughnuts on those lines, when they get too long.”

“You’re insane.”

“Being rude isn’t going to move things along any faster, M’am.”

“I just want some coffee.”

“Well of course. We all do. If it was up to me I’d just pour you a cup and be done with it. But I could get into a great deal of trouble for doing that. I’m sure you don’t want that to happen. I could lose my job.”

“Your job? You’re a housepainter!”

“I was. Now I’m District Supervisor for Caffeinated Beverage Distribution. So let’s stop whining and get started on this paperwork. You do have five forms of identification, don’t you? We require five forms of identification.”

“No one has five forms of identification!”

“Coffee drinkers do. As of January 1st, 2008. What can I say? It’s people trying to cheat the system. They make it worse for everyone. They think coffee drinking is a right. But in fact it’s a privilege and the sooner you appreciate that fact, the better it will be for you.”
I offer her a tissue as she starts to sob quietly, and pick up the phone to discuss tea-bag allocations with my supervisor. I’m good at this. I’ve been on the other side of it for months. I’ve learned the lingo.

I’d apply for the job, but there’s too much paperwork.

Live Blogging War and Peace #4: It's All in the Details

To paraphrase Leo himself, every bad book is the same; every good book is good in its own way.
This is because good writing is specific, bad writing is vague. Good writing thrives on details, bad writing generalizes. My Dad once told me the worst possible sentence to write in a novel. He had crafted it carefully, over the years: “Tannhauser was one of the great wits of Europe, and he held the entire table spellbound for hours.” It sounds good, but it tells you absolutely nothing. A friend of mine described an artist’s work-table in his perennially unpublished novel as “A chaotic cosmos of appurtenances”. I knew when I read it that this vague and almost contentless string of words was one of his favorite bits of writing in the whole novel. I’m glad it gave him pleasure as a writer; as a reader it gave me less than nothing. Compare that to this first glimpse of Nikolai Andrevitch Bolkonsky’s study:

The immense study was filled with things obviously in constant use. The big table with books and plans lying on it, the tall bookcases with keys in their glass doors, the tall table for writing in a standing position, on which lay an open notebook, the lathe with tools laid out and wood shavings strewn around it – everything spoke of constant, diverse, orderly activity. By the movements of the small foot shod in a silver-embroidered Tartar boot, by the firm pressure of the sinewy, lean hand, one could see in the Prince the still-persistent and much enduring strength of fresh old age.

The interesting thing here is that this is not some bravura performance piece paragraph – just another example of the workmanlike strong writing that animates every line of the book. In one paragraph he gives us the vivid image of the Prince’s lair, as well as the beast who inhabits it. We see it and more than that, we feel it -- along with the still potent personal magnetism of “le roi de Prusse” in his fresh old age. The small foot in the Tartar boot! That’s the kind of detail you never forget, the sort of small thing that accumulates gradually over a thousand pages, like the individual snowflakes that come together to comprise city-closing epic we end up calling ‘The Great Blizzard of ‘86”.

And it happens one snowflake at a time, every one of them modestly hand-crafted quietly unique, just like Leo’s sentences, every one of them good in its own way.

To paraphrase Leo himself, every bad book is the same; every good book is good in its own way.

Un-Popular Culture

Is it just me?
I hate everything that’s popular. Harry Potter. I don’t get it. I can’t follow it.I read one of those books and ten seconds later I can’t remember a thing about it. There’s a good Wizard teacher guy who's really bad and some bad wizard guy who’s really good, and some bad guy with no nose and a cute girl no one is ever going to sleep with. And a war about who’s the greatest wizard or something. And house elves. I have no idea.

Or how about George Lucas? This has to be the most idiotic guy who ever made a billion dollars. Everything has to be so insanely obvious – the bad guy is darth sidious and darth plague-us, in case you had any doubts about these giant thugs in black. They’re evil! Why not Darth scurrilous? Or just go with darth Evilis? Darth scumbagus Darth assholus, Darth what-a-total-dick -this guy is -us. And come on -- really ... did he have to call the big weapon the Death Star? What actual villain would ever call it that? They’d call it the Peace Star. Hello, George – all the real villains think they’re the good guys. Like you! And what’s with these worlds? Every world is one thing. A world that’s a desert, a world that’s a swamp. A world that’s a city! How insane is that? Is there a suburb planet?And where do these city planet people they get their vegetables from? The farm planet? And beef from the stockyard planet. I bet that place smells good. It’s the stupid universe.

Then there’s Pixar.
Is everyone sick of pixar yet? It’s always the same movie: bugs or fish or something inanimate ... talks! Like toys or cars or robots – It’s a talking car! It’s a talking doll! This time its a robot that squeaks. That’s it – something inanimate has feelings. And takes a journey. Enough already! What’s the next one? You can fill in the blanks yourself, like Mad Libs.
CHAIRS! The little kid's chair wants to be a big chair :“The master wants to throw me away. They’re redecorating!” and the evil baraclounger rules the house and there’s a lovable old couch that’s lost a pillow and Randy Newman will write some crap song - “You can sit on me”.
Even better – Pixar Disney presents --
MISCELLANEOUS APPLIANCES! With Dane Cook as the can opener. Not the crumby old can-opener – that’s Wally Shawn “OOO I hope this fancy new Can opener doesn’t take my job away!” Or else --
BRUSHES! The adventures of a toothbrush who wants to be a hairbrush! Chris Walken as the wily old paint brush! It’s a world with nothing but brushes in it. There’s more where that came from. Just buy the ticket. We don’t care.

I've had it. Maybe that's why I was reading Pale Fire while my friends were waiting on line to see Batman. I know what's going to happen in Batman. He's going to be tormented and conscience-stricken and then he's going to kick ass anyway. And stuff is going to blow up.

I'm sick of stuff blowing up, too. And guys walking away from the explosion in slow motion. It's one of those fresh new cliches, where everyone thinks they're doing something original. But they're not. You know who was doing something original? Vladmir Nabokov, in Pale Fire.

So I'll stick with that.

Live Blogging War and Peace #3: Pierre Bezukhov and the Tip-Toeing T-Rex

Sarah Hughes wound up sitting on the ice occasionally; Tiger woods has missed some easy putts. Dylan sings off key, Hemingway wrote Across the River and into The Trees, and Faulkner described a rainbow -- in terms of the rainstorm that preceded it -- as “the chromatic arch of its insubstantial armistice.”
We all make mistakes. Even Tolstoy.

I caught him cheating this morning, trying to gloss over a plot hole. It’s odd, because he uses a sleight of hand one sees much more often in bad movies than in great books. The trick is to set up something awful to build suspense: there’s really no way out of this one! Then you bob and weave a little, and save the day with no real explanation. Like in the incomparably awful Mr. and Mrs. Smith when brad and Angelina are trapped in the motel surrounded by SWAT teams … and the next thing you know they’re hiding from the troops under a grate in the street. How did they get there? Don’t ask! Just eat your ten dollar popcorn and drink your slurpee. Something else is about to blow up.

Here’s what Leo does:

Pierre Bezukhov is Count Kiril Buzukhov’s’s illegitimate son. The old man is dying and has written a letter to the Czar to legalize Pierre’s claim to the family fortune. Prince Vassily Kuragin and his various money-grubbing relations are expecting the inheritance (They’re cousins). They're already spending the money in their heads and the thought that Pierre might waltz in and steal their fortune has them spinning in a grotesque frenzy of rage and greed. Their solution is to steal the letter before it can be sent to Moscow. It’s in a portfolio near the dying man's bed, while the Count lounges and mutters in an arm chair at the other side of the room. It's an easy caper, because the Count’s back is turned and he’s only half conscious most of the time, anyway.

Standing against them is good old Princess Drubetskoy, who knows she stands to benefit if Pierre receives his patrimony. She’s off having a cup of tea in a different room when the theft takes place and it seems impossible for her to stop them – or even realize what they’re doing.

All is lost!
And then … for some reason, the thieves linger in the anteroom instead of making off with the document (or just tearing it up), giving Anna time to catch them. A wild tug of war ensues and Anna wins it and Pierre gets his inheritance. It’s hugely entertaining, but dragged along in the slip-stream of Tolstoy's narrative brio, the nagging question lingers: how did that work exactly? Why did the Kuragins wait around to get caught?

I was reminded of a similar lapse from a more recent master story-teller: at the end of Jurassic Park, the heroes are trapped in the Visitor’s Center by a pack of velociraptors – once again, all is lost. The carniverous dinosaurs circle the hapless humans, but when the first one leaps he gets bitten out of the air by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It’s a perfectly engineered moment and the audience practically explodes with relief and exhilaration. But later that night it must cross some peoples' minds to wonder ... how exactly did a tyrannosaurus Rex get into the Visitor’s Center in the first place? All through the film, the enormous creatur e's distant footsteps have caused the ground to tremble the liquid to jiggle in coffee-mugs. But this guy must have been walking on tip-toes, like a cartoon mouse in front of a sleeping cat. Because no one noticed him, not even the raptors, for whom the T-Rex is a primary predator.

It makes no sense – but I had to see the movie three times before I noticed.

I suspect that at a certain level, knowing the narrative force they can throw behind a scene, these great storytellers just don’t care. They’ve moving fast, they have the momentum: we want the family to survive the creepy dinosaurs and we want Pierre to defeat the creepy Kuragins. We want it so much that the details don’t matter, at least that’s the gamble.

Ultimately, it’s one that Spielberg loses. And Tolstoy loses, also.

A moment like this is lazy. It’s diminishing. In a lesser book it wouldn’t matter, but the first 80 pages of this one set the bar too high for this kind of cheating.

Still, the fact remains: striding through the narrow corridors of his immense, labyrinthine story, the giant stumbles occasionally; those great flailing arms, gesticulating to make a point, can knock things down, and there’s going to be some breakage.

As I blunder through my own novel, I find that truth perversely consoling.

Snakes and Ladders

As a painting contractor, I find myself turning into the harried patriarch of a dysfunctional family of ladders. It started when my son and I began naming them. The biggest one, the forty foot aluminum extension ladder whose upper rungs are held in place by bungee cords, we named Mongo. The next bigggest one, a brand new 35-footer, naturally became Mongo Jr. And that was where the trouble began. He didn't like the "junior" stuff, he wanted his own name and he felt, with some justification that he was a lot more ladder than the senior man on the crew. He had his own rope, for one thing, which made extending him to his full height easy. Mongo has to be jumped against the building while standing on the lower rungs. He hasn't had a rope for years. Most of the time,Mongo just lies there -- we only need him for the highest peaks and he is insufferably smug when he finally gets to make his appearance. "Guess you need a real ladder now," he seems to say. The only way to get a few more feet of usuable hight from Mongo Jr. is to attach a "stand-off" -- a bracket that holds the ladder off the building and improves the angle for painting. But MJ hates the bracket. He thinks it stigmatizes him as vertically challenged. I tried to explain that the points of the bracket are wider than most windows and "stand-offs" are usually used to paint window casings. But he's not buying it. None of the ladders like the stand-offs. It's like having crutches cuffed to your arms. I'm like -- "Hey! I'm just trying to paint a house here!"

My next biggest ladder really is handicapped. He used to have adjustable legs so you could use him on uneven ground. You can imagine the resentment that caused! Because of course had had to brag about it. "Maybe you should get a cinderblock to put under Mongo's right leg. Or you could just let a professional ladder to the job." Ugh -- insufferable. But now the adjustable legs have rusted and the only was to make "Leggy" as we call him useful is to bind his slats with more bungees. The bungees would like a little credit for making the whoole motley crew functional, but no one cares what the bungees think. Now every time I have to put a shingle or a plank under one of Leggy's feet to level him the others pounce. "Nice professional look, there, Legster" "You sure you can handle this?" How am I supposed to paint off a ladder who's having a breakdown? It's nerve-wracking. Next are the twins. Two twenty foot, "Mr., Home-owner"- style, lightweight ladders, "Slim" and "Jim". You can't use one without the other getting upset, and both of them feel like flimsy second class citizens. As to the step ladders -- don't get me started. Everyone treats them like dirt, but of course they have their own hierarchy. The fancy fiberglass eight footer sneers at the ever more wobbly wooden six footer who won't even talk to the poor aluminum three step we call "Bubby". You get them all on top of a van's ladder racks , it's like a box of snakes.

But I'm a good Dad and I love them all. You don't want to play favorites with heavy grade aluminaum, when you're forty feet up in a thirty knot wind.
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Live Blogging "War and Peace" #2: Pride and Grovelling

Starting War and Peace reminds me again of the huge advantage books have over movies and television. The daunting effort required to recognize and connect the marks on the page, to configure vocabulary and grammar into a convincing narrative full of people and conflict and weather is in fact fiction’s secret weapon. Your very engagement with the writer, your collaboration in the manufacture of your particular War and Peace, provides a far richer experience than the passive IV drip of television, or the carnival ride of a typical summer movie. It’s the difference between moving into a house and helping to build it.

With a writer as great as Tolstoy, the act of completing his suggested world has a kind of giddy presumption.: Leo describes Pierre Bezukhov … I see Seth Rogen in John Lennon granny glasses. I half expect a howl of protest, but Leo doesn't complain. It goes on -- we build a common Petersburg, a common Moscow, a common Bald Hills (Prince Bolkonsky’s estate) together. None of it may resemble the real places or even the places Tolstoy imagined in his study at Krasnaya Polyana … but they belong to me as much as him; they form the essence of our bond.

I remember my first glimpse of the real Pamplona, Spain; it in no way resembled the hill town that Ernest Hemingway and I had constructed together. So I did what any good reader would do: I forgot about the actual town and never looked at another photograph of the place again. The Pamplona of The Sun Also Rises is a prized possession, my true ‘intellectual property’.
I have no interest in imposter towns whose only claim is that they’re ‘real’
Real is overrated.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.
Anna Scherer’s soiree.

I think Tolstoy may have invented this idea of throwing all the characters together at a party and peppering the reader with a dozen little scenes that would have been cumbersome and time-consuming to set up separately. Everyone is introduced and so are the major themes – not just War and Peace, but war and money. After reading Jane Austen I’m no longer surprised by the overwhelming venality of the characters in classic literature.

But the desperation of Anna Mikhailovna Drubskoy to secure her son Boris’ military position and get the dough to outfit him properly feels sadly familiar. This is the evergreen universality of these nineteenth century masterpieces: the never-ending scramble for cash. I admire Anne Mikhailovna: she’s relentless, shameless. Her self-flagellating maternal determination that makes it easier, in the end, for a Prince Vassily to give her what she wants. Anything, if she’ll just go away and shut up. There’s a lesson there for desperate parents. I used it when I was trying to secure a co-signer for my son’s college loan.

Humiliate yourself and persevere: that’s what Tolstoy taught me today.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Consciousness

I’ve been hitch-hiking for the last week. I live at one end of my little island and most of my work happens at the other end, so I’m usually on the road a lot. But with one car off-island and the other in the shop – and taxis costing twenty dollars a trip – I decided to stick my thumb out and take my chances.

It was frustrating at first, but it woke me up, the way re-arranging your routines always does. Just waiting for a ride was instructive, watching all the fat SUVs full of fat people with their faces pulled tight against any eye contact with the beggar at the side of the road. I was amazed at how many of them didn’t pick me up. I’m not an axe-murderer and I live in a small island; the news would get around if we had a mad hitch-hiking killer-rapist in town.

But as car after car blew past me, metaphors seemed to coalesce around the experience. It reminded me of so many other moments in my life when I had left some small portion of my fate in other hands. In the ocean, waiting for a wave; or sending out stories and waiting for the response. Normally you get the form letter rejection slip, but once in a while the letter comes back without your own handwriting on the stamped-self-addressed envelope and you know you made contact with a stranger, and that stranger wants to introduce your work to a wider world. Eventually a car picks you up as well.

I said to old time Nantucket home builder Neils Van Vorst, when he pulled over, “You’re one in … let me see – two hundred and eleven.” He was a little shocked by the number, but there’s an upside to the ordeal. Hitchhiking filters the world for you: all the annoying jerks drive right by and invariably the people who actually pick you up are interesting, generous, smart, funny – and cool. Neils had to stop by a house he’d just finished building on the water; I stayed in the car and petted his terriers, reading the scatter of literary magazines on the rubber mat at my feet. On the way out to Polpis we talked about politics and the Conservation Commission and Vladimir Nabokov; I showed him around the old cow shed where Annie and I live, when h dropped me off. I knew he’d appreciate it.

A high school poet picked me up; a local actor and piano tuner gave me a ride. So did a new Dad who had to move his child seat into the bed of his pick-up to make room. Old money Nantucket rich people gave me rides and we bemoaned the island’s decline; new arrivals picked me up and we rhapsodized its glory. A real estate agent offered me painting work; a local newspaper editor asked me to write an editorial about my vagabond status.

It was an extraordinary week, and I thought to myself – to hell with the car! I have too big a carbon footprint anyway. I’ll hitch all the time now – unless I’m moving ladders or clearing out a job site, or something.I was asleep before in the soft futon of my old routines, and I was missing everything! Now I’m awake. Hooray for me!

But of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. I have my car back and I’m driving it happily, air-conditioning on, big-footing my carbon trail all over Nantucket, just the same as ever. Never has anyone been so eager to get back to sleep.

But I have to say ... it was fun being awake, while it lasted.

Live Blogging "War and Peace" #1

For me, one of the great pleasures in reading an approachable classic like War and Peace is the chance to meet Tolstoy face to face as it were, take his story one word at a time and derive a self-made opinion of everything he sets in front of me. The greatest novel ever written is not some monolith for Kubrick’s 2001 apes to caper around, grunting and throwing bones, cow-towing to the critics; it’s a living narrative that sets out, whatever its other ambitions, to entertain its audience. I love that about Tolstoy. Though he dwarfs me as a writer, as a reader he approaches me as an equal, as a respectful but exigent friend who needs to be amused, beguiled, thrilled.

Everyone starts with the same materials, the blank screen or sheet of paper, the keyboard or the pen, the same twenty six letters. There’s a kind of fierce democracy to that, a level playing field; or is a mine field? You feel it at my MFA residency sitting in Noble Hall at Vermont College, listening to a student reading one night and a faculty reading the next afternoon. The wild-eyed kid’s garbled ungrammatical account of catching his parent’s making love and – for example – Larry Sutin’s latest admixture of Kafka and Dinesen, precipitated with the mysterious reagent of his own lucid vision and wry humor into a compelling and mysterious potion, both start the same way, with a nervous man standing in front of an audience; with scratches on paper. In that context the difference is particularly stunning. Clearly words can be used to sharpen thought or to dull it. As Orwell points out in Politics and the English Language, many writers just piece trite phrases together as if they were “assembling the pieces of a prefabricated henhouse”.

I remember the exact moment when I turned away from the consumption of this kind of writing forever. It was about three quarters of the way through Leon Uris’ Trinity. The effortless sentence – you just know it flowed out of him with the giddy sluice of inspiration – was this: “His role was to ferret out brewing insurrection and nip it in the bud.” Not just four clichés, but four clashing and incongruous clichés jammed blithely together in the clattering rush of another day’s work. Many years ago, before computers, when an IBM Selectric was state of the art, Leon Uris gave my father some deeply considered writing advice. “You have to go faster. Get an electric typewriter.”

Over the years, I have come to believe that there’s some middle ground, some leafy suburb between the woods and canyons of literature and the grid-lock city streets of genre fiction (not to mention the graffiti-smeared urban blight of the sub-genre world).

That middle ground is my favorite landscape, and I would define it upward as a type of literature, rather than downward as a classier version of trash … in human terms: a young heir in jeans and a t-shirt, rather than a bum in a tuxedo. And of course it’s a sliding scale, with almost infinite gradations. The work I prefer, the work which has no official title, perches right on the border of literature, the rough undeveloped sections of that suburb, perhaps: the last house on the dead-end street whose back yard merges with a tangle of bushes that becomes the forest; the ranch style teetering on the border of the wetlands with the perpetually flooded basement; the canyon house stalked by coyotes.

Despite carrying the ‘genre’ stigma, these authors, these suburban pioneers if you like, combine the most enjoyable aspects of high literature and low. They don’t dig as deep into their characters’ psyches as the masters who dwell in the deep woods; but they reject the trite puppet shows of their inner-city brethren. They create the vivid dream that John Gardner talks about, they allow you to live in the particular world of a unique human sensibility and let your own perspective be colored and enlarged by the exposure.

I realize now that almost all the writers I love at least own property in this fringe area: genre writers like Len Deighton, John LeCarre, P.D. James, Dennis Lehane and Philip K. Dick; and masters who understand the power of plot, from to Faulkner to Graham Greene and John Fowles, to contemporary writers like Vikram Chandra and Michael Chabon.
And of course, standing genially above all the others, Tolstoy himself.

Tolstoy shares a craven common urge with the genre writers who followed him: he wants you to turn the page. It democratizes his greatness, somehow. It’s endearing. And it makes a book written 150 years ago about events transpiring 50 years before that absolutely present, an urgent transaction between two minds, an intimate seduction and a great mutual project.
I’ve always wanted to read War and Peace, but found the length daunting and the translations stilted. When I heard that Pevear and Volokonsky, who did the sharp and engrossing translation of Anna Karenina a few years ago, were working on Tolstoy’s masterpiece, I was thrilled. Perhaps I would finally be able to read this intimidating tome, this Everest of literature. Then it occurred to me that it might be interesting to chronicle the climb; if others chose to take it with me, we could share our thoughts and de-mystify the experience of reading a classic.

That’s the plan.

I’m standing at the base camp, among the litter of other people’s oxygen bottles, hoping you’ll join me, hoping we won’t be turned back by bad weather or the cold. If your lungs are strong enough for the thin air, and you’re not scared of heights, organize your equipment and get a good nights’ sleep.

We start our ascent tomorrow, at first light.

The Thing With Feathers

Hope is a strange emotion. It’s addicting but dangerous, like some kind of new street drug, except that we manufacture it ourselves, like endorphins or adrenaline. And we stand in a somewhat different relation to those other chemicals: the body releases them involuntarily, at moments of physical exertion or stress. Hope is active, intentional, a gesture of the imagination, an attempt to conjure the future. To actually allow yourself to hope for something you care about deeply requires a peculiar unacknowledged bravery that not everyone can muster; it opens a troubling chasm of vulnerability at your feet, and looking down into that gulf of disappointment creates a dizzying vertigo.

Much better to play it cool, pretend it doesn’t matter. We have invented a whole patois of self deception on this point: ‘Easy come easy go” “That’s the way the cookie crumbles” “Que sera sera” ‘So it goes” “Who cares?” “Roll with the punches” “Lighten up” “Big deal” and the ever popular “Whatever”. But things don’t go easily, we all care and we take most of those punches right on the point of the jaw. Still, indifference remains the perfect combination of pose and protection. We act blasé while we prepare for disappointment in advance. We tell ourselves not to “get our hopes up” though we know the secret shameful truth that actually having your hopes up is one of the few clean cheap thrills you can get in life and flinching in advance doesn’t make it sting any less when the rejection finally comes.

Sustained hope in the face of relentless setbacks and failures can be toxic, though it feels nourishing – sort of like trying to live on Chai tea and muffins. My friend used to say of my Hollywood ambitions, “Until it happens, it didn’t.” And I would answer, “And when it happens it was always going to.” But releasing those hopes has been liberating, Hope requires the stamina of youth, when the seemingly limitless procession of days ahead lend any prediction a diaphanous plausibility. A five year old toddler dreams of becoming an astronaut; a twenty year old boy writes his Oscar acceptance speech on the bus to work. A fifty-year old man is happy just to make it through another week. There’s no more time for dramatic re-inventions and astonishing second acts. I won’t be going to law school or clown college any time soon. Win or lose, I am what I am: accepting that mortal tautology sounds despairing. But it contains an element of bliss, a caress of relief, like a vein of warm water in a frigid lake. I can happily call myself a ‘hobbyist’ and get on with my work. Emily Dickinson put it best: “Publication is not the business of poets.” She knew what she was talking about on that score; she made obscurity into another art form. But she understood hope well enough. She called it ‘the thing with feathers that perches in the soul/ and singe the tune –without the words/ and never stops at all.” I always wondered whether that line was a tribute or a admonition.

Away from that relentless bird-song I’ve found my own refuge, pecking away at the keyboard in privacy and silence. But hope is a tough old pigeon and not so easy to escape. It feeds on litter and perches on the fire escape, strutting snd fluttering over it three inches of hard-won territory. And so I find myself doing hopeful things like contributing to Open Salon and even –on a cockeyed impulse – contacting an editor who expressed interest in seeing more of my work. She’s reading my new novel now, as I comb the Open Salon website for comments and wonder feverishly if the last post will be an Editor’s Pick. So I guess I haven’t shaken the addiction after all and I probably never will.
I never could stay on a diet.

So please, O! charming editor who actually returned my phone call on a dreary Tuesday afternoon and chatted for half an hour about Hillary Clinton and Alice Munro, please read my book and like it and publish it, and send it off into the world with a full page ad in the New York Times. And while I’m waiting, I’ll have a Chai latte.

Make it a double, with a pistachio muffin on the side.

PLugged Nicholl

Mac Dixon, the first Artistic Director of the Theatre Workshop once remarked to my fiancée, “Only mediocrity succeeds on Nantucket.” It was a harsh comment, but even three decades later it continues to resonate because with every passing year the idea becomes more and more of a universal axiom. In politics, in corporate America, even in the building trades, the inept and the mendacious succeed while the gifted and hard-working fall by the wayside. From Jimmy Carter’s defeat at the hands of the charming but catastrophically foolish and ideologically blinkered Ronald Reagan to the more recent electoral nightmares, to the sub-prime lending scandal that may yet bring down the entire American economy (Someone decided it was a good idea to give mortgages to guys living in refrigerator boxes), the plague of dull-witted, pedestrian greed rages on. For the most part I’ve become numb to it, but occasionally the phenomenon hits close to home and I have to face it.

In the community of aspiring screenwriters the Nicholl Fellowship – a screenwriting contest sponsored by no less an organization than The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, stands as an almost unattainable measure of achievement. Blogging screenwriters compare notes on the harrowing triage of talent … who made it to the quarter-finals and the semi-finals. More to the point, they discuss the mysteries of the judging: why their script never placed at all, how to improve, where to find the secret code that unlocks this exalted prize. There are websites devoted to coaching neophytes in the arcana of this contest. I should mention I never entered the race because as a member of the WGAw, I’m automatically disqualified. This quest is for amateurs only.

I had never seen a winning screenplay until today. This one is being shot on Nantucket and a friend of mind is helping to hire the extras and scout locations. I read the script and I confess to being stunned by it, stunned the way you feel when you crack your shin on a coffee table in the dark or miss a step going down a ladder: a physical jolt of outraged surprise. Because this script is bad. The dialogue is stilted and laden with exposition. The characters are barely sketched in, rounded off to the nearest cliché. A local sailor was asked to check the sailboat details; every single one was wrong. So are the points of local color. A shrill local rants against tourists, referring to them as wash-ashores; whereas anyone who lives here knows that a washashore is a resident who came from somewhere else. My son was amused by the local girl telling the off-island boy that “We always go to Jetties for The Fourth Of July – it’s crowded but it’s a tradition.” He said, “Right, because I’ve lived here all my life and don’t know anyone with a boat or a house with a view of the harbor.” The script is a symphony of wrong notes, a trite family drama complete with the callow grandson who learns important life lessons and the curmondgeonly old grandpa who teaches them. None of this would be of even passing interest (I read dozens of scripts just this bad and bad in just this way when I was reading for production companies in L.A.) except for the astounding, jaw dropping fact that this commonplace bundle of lazy plot points and sticky sentiment won the Nicholl. It beat out literally thousands of other screenplays, at some of which were probably pretty good. The scripts that won Project Greenlight on HBO – and the films made from them – were just as awful … as are so many more traditionally produced movies and TV shows. So something is going on here. But what?
Perhaps it’s true: mobs and morons rule the world. Certainly the wrong people seem to run everything. The notion may be economically disheartening and politically frightening, but it’s kind of liberating artistically. The opinions that make one cringe and cower (people have seriously considered giving up writing after not placing in the Nicholl three years in a row) are in fact nothing more than the senseless noise Truman Capote was talking about when he dismissed critics with the phrase, “The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.” So not winning the Nicholl isn’t a defeat and humiliation, after all: it’s a badge of honor. It’s a credential. It proves you’re not mediocre. Unfortunately, Mac Dixon was right: much of the time, in every profession, in every art and craft, mediocrity succeeds.

And not just on Nantucket.

Genre Fiction smackdown: Aristotle Vs. Chandra

In Greek tragedy plot was primary. Not much has changed in the realm of genre fiction. A publishable mystery can lack interesting characters every bit as much a Greek heroic poem; it can lack insight and metaphor, aphorism and a sense of place, as long as the simple two stroke engine of what-happens-next is turning over. This is not to say that most published mysteries are so thinly-written and debased. Many detective novels have fascinating characters and settings, sharp writing, vivid imagery. But they could have been published and read without those things.

Only one element stands as essential.

Take the analogy of music. If you’re writing ‘house music’ for a German disco club, nothing really matters but the beat: bang-bang-digga-digga, bang-bang, digga-digga on an endless loop. A simple 8 bar blues melody can be floated on this current, like a canoe. You can add key changes and witty lyrics as Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard of the rock band Postal Service do. That might be analogous to teak brightwork on the little boat; or titanium paddles from Hammacher Schlemmer. But no one dancing at the 90 degrees club on Dennewitzstrasse would care … even if the words were in German. Only the current matters: diving into that swift water and being pulled downstream.

They’re dancing to the beat, not the lyrics.

But Aristotle is discussing the writing of plays; that’s why his work applies so well to screenwriting, and has been so extensively ‘anthologized’ by Syd Field, Robert McKee and others.

"Plots are either simple or complex, since the actions they representare naturally of this twofold description. The action, proceeding in the way defined, as one continuous whole, I call simple, when thechange in the hero's fortunes takes place without Peripety or Discovery; and complex, when it involves one or the other, or both.These should each of them arise out of the structure of the Plot itself, so as to be the consequence, necessary or probable, of the antecedents. There is a great difference between a thing happening propter hoc and post hoc. "

Of course by Peripety he is referring to the reversal of fortune, usually in the second act (and some would insist, on page 78) that is the core of both screenwriting advice, and most modern screenplays. Along with unity of action, the idea that nothing extraneous can be permitted in the story, that the gun over the mantel in Act One has to go off by Act Three, as Chekhov instructed, we can see the basic parameters of the modern screenplay emerging. Authors like the ones mentioned above, the first to realize the relevance of Aristotle, have made a fortune from his work without fear of copyright infringement.

Whether these strict rules – and the reductive way they are applied -- are healthy for the cinema is a subject for a different essay. The question here is: can these principles be applied to the novel, a much longer and naturally more discursive medium. The answer is clear, at least in terms of genre fiction: yes, of course. But in the realm where genre fiction approaches literature, where the conventions of the mystery novel, for instance, are played with, investigated, even subverted, can these rules still hold true?

There’s an instructive example on Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. This is a sprawling 900-page book that encompasses much of Indian history in the twentieth century. It’s a portrait of modern Bombay, and study of Hindu-Muslim politics and simultaneously a compelling procedural police novel. Simply put, Chandra is doing everything I’d like to do. Though I am to some extent in retreat from those ambitions, it’s still inspiring to see them accomplished with such breath-taking skill and audacity.

In the first third of the book, Sartaj Singh and his partner Katekar investigate a murder. Three successful young thieves have had a falling out; one of them winds up dead. Sartaj’s work on this case runs parallel with the larger story, in which he seeks to understand why Bombay’s most powerful gangster chose to kill himself and his mistress in the basement of a newly built fallout shelter. Several other cases also intertwine throughout the story, but by the middle of the book the murder sub-plot has been resolved. Sartaj and his partner discover who the boys are, and plot to catch them in the act of fencing their loot. The ambush goes awry and Katekar is killed; Sartaj shoots the murderer as he flees down an alley. So a faceless killer is lying in the dirt, and the case is closed, but Sartaj derives no satisfaction from the senseless slaughter. It feels both pointless and grotesque.

Throughout the book, Chandra introduces chapters he calls ‘insets’, which present stories of marginal significance to the main plot. Anjali Mathur, the chief government agent working with Sartaj, was mentored in the service by her father’s best friend; one inset shows his early days, fighting the Chinese in the Hindu Kush. Another reveals the fate of Sartaj’s Aunt Navneet, who perished during the Partition.

These are sidelights, apparent violations of the Unities, but Chandra gets away with them because they deepen our knowledge of the book’s characters and their world. Plus they are compellingly written. Aristotle didn’t have much to say about the benefits of a muscular prose style, though you could cobble together a sense of it from his descriptions of Thought, Melody and Spectacle.

Near the end of Sacred Games, Chandra seems to push his fascination with the peripheral too far. In a final inset, he describes the life of a small town boy from Rajpur named Aadil Ansari. Aadil loves reading and becomes the first boy in his village to finish high school; he even goes on to college, working for two years in between, driving trucks and maintaining them, to pay for his schooling. He studies Zoology and in a just world, he would have become a university professor. But college is a torment because of money. Often he can’t afford to both eat and buy books. Meanwhile his rich friends laugh at his complaints and call him a typical weak-willed bumpkin when penury, stress and exhaustion force him to quit school. Of course, no one offers to help. These friends of his are a familiar type: born on third base, certain they hit a triple.

So Aadil goes home, to work his family plot of land. Requests for help from the local Raja get nowhere; and on top of that, the Raja is actually stealing Aadil’s family land, one thin strip at a time. There is no law court to dispute this encroachment: the government is corrupt from top to bottom. Aadil becomes bitter and winds up joining the Communist party. He’s the perfect candidate for a Marxist revelation. Eventually he becomes a full-fledged revolutionary, blowing up buildings and committing assassinations. It’s only when he witnesses a horrific episode of mutilation and torture that he becomes disillusioned with the cause.

He flees to Bombay, moving frequently to avoid being recognized. He goes back to his books, reading botany and biology texts for the sheer pleasure of it. He hires some boys to do his marketing and other errands, but his funds are running low. He is an expert at military operations, and he trains the three boys in the skills of commando-style larceny: careful planning and artful use of the threat of violence.
This is the first moment when you get a narrative twinge at the back of your neck. Three boys?

That sounds familiar.

The boys become successful and eventually have a falling out. Two suspect the third is talking more than his share of the proceeds. They confront him; it turns into a fight and then into a murder. Aadil tells the boys to leave their lodgings and meet him two days later at a certain hotel. But the police are onto them and the rendezvous becomes a catastrophe. The boys are arrested. As Aadil flees in panic, he kills a policeman. He is shot himself, and dies in the street.

Then you realize: this is the faceless thug who killed Katekar.

The revelation opens under you like a trap door and you plunge into the troubled understanding that there are no faceless thugs, that every incident has layers of irony and tragedy that make you cry for the whole human race.

So in one devastating coup de theatre, the Unities are preserved: nothing is irrelevant and everything is connected.

And Vikram Chandra wins the prize – the summerslam championship belt goes to Sacred Games: the Great American Literary Genre Novel.
Take the month of August and read it.
Sorry about the spoiler.

American Idol Wrap-up

Well, American Idol is over for the season, and the right person won, much to everyone's amazement. By the time they got to the announcement, at the end of a lavish two-hour variety show spotlighting over-the-hill singers as diverse as Bryan Adams, Graham Nash, George Michael and Donna Summer, I had almost forgotten the point of the evening. I never vote myself. That's a line I can't being myself to cross. Voting would somehow be going over to the Dark Side.

I remain a neutral observer. Still, it came down this year to a choice between David Cook, a genuinely talented, bright, amusing guy who never even intended to enter the competition (he just showed up at the initial audition to support his brother) -- an actual musician with some measure of charm and charisma ... and David Archuleta, a creepy 17-year old choirboy homunculus with a demented stage Dad and a tendency to squeeze his eyes shut and clutch his stomach while he sings. This kid has basically wanted nothing else but TO BE THE NEXT AMERICAN IDOL since his days as the first karaoke fetus. (He may still be the first karaoke fetus). Preteen girls -- who must make up a majority of the voting audience -- find his neutered threatless self-effacing persona attractive. And of course, he can sing. Technically, he's one of the best singers they've ever had on the show. But there's an unformed, sort of ... larval quality about him that most adults found vaguely repellent. Anyway, he's been the preumptive winner since the creepy afternoon seven years ago when he trapped some of the kids from the first season and serenaded them with his inhuman prodigy version of I am Telling you I'm Not Going from Dreamgirls. It's on youtube. You see the wormy little boy bellowing out the melodramatic finale that's meant to be sung by a huge black woman and you can see Kelly Clarkson thinking "Whoa, thank god I'm not going have to compete with this freak! I'm smiling, I'm clapping okay? Now get him the hell away from me."

Archulleta has been twirling through his performances in a kind of smug I've-already-won-it fugue state, lapping up the robotic, predictable condensed milk praise of the judges (Randy: "You could sing the phone book, Dawg" Yes, but could he sing the yellow pages? Paula: "You're just so beautiful and wonderful and I could hang you on my rear view mirror to make my car smell all musical and I'm so high I can't even see straight right now." Simon: "That was brilliant."). Cook meanwhile, just performs his ass off and has a good time.

So we were all gritting our teeth, waiting for the inevitable, consoling ourselves that even second place finalists do very well (sometimes better than the winners) in the real world of record sales. And then, in a startlingly appropriate reversal that seemed to set the Universe right for a second or two, Cook won it. He was as stunned as everyone else. I hate to think what Archuleta's father said to his son after the show: "You didn't sing it the way I told you! You didn't smile enough!Your phrasing was off! You've ruined my life! Can you dance? I'll teach you to dance! There's a dance contest starting next week! Toe heel, toe heel, back forward -- come on DO IT!"

Cook had to sing the usual treacly winners' song, supposedly written by Idol viewers and chosen in a contest, but in fact manufactured on some Orwellian 'versificator' machine that assembles standarized chord changes, familiar melody lines and trite sentiments for the consumption of the proletariat masses (The usual sludge about dreams coming true and this is the best moment of my life and whatever), but he was too dazed to really care. I felt the same way. When they announced the winner I yelled "YES!" so loud I scared my normally unflappable pug, who must now be convinced that humans really are insane. Well, I have seven months to redeem myself, reading books and watching the Weather Channel, until Idol starts all over again in January.

I hope it's enough time.