At 14, she was 4’10” at the most, with curly light-brown ringlets, pale skin, and grey eyes, a tiny, explosive little firebrand with a sharp tongue and a quick smile. When I could get her to stand still I’d try to ask her about her life—mainly how her classes were going, or what boys she was interested in. And she would turn it on me like lightning, and start guessing—alarmingly good guesses, often.

“So are you going to go out with José? He has a huge crush on you,” I would say.

She would reply, “Oh, what a coincidence that you should ask, since you’re the one getting your ass stared at by Mr. Marcus every time you walk down the hall! Yeah, don’t even lie—I know who those flowers were from! Anyway, so let’s talk. Are we your favorite class, or is 8th period? You can tell me. I already know we’re the only class you brought donuts for last Friday!”

To some degree, I reluctantly confided in her. You never confide in students. It is one of the cardinal rules of teaching. But she solicited these confidences so easily. It was so natural and quick to tell her something: “OK, you’re right, Mr. Marcus did give me the carnations. But he’s twice my age, and I’m not interested, and I’m terrified of getting the rumor mill started—so don’t tell anyone about that, or about the donuts, ok?” She would nod her head understandingly, and put her little hand on top of mine.

School required no academic effort of her. She was already in a class of exceptionally bright kids; they were far and away the most intelligent and motivated group of freshman I have ever taught. Felicia was in another league. During the first month of school, she told me she was bored with the Young Adult novels in the library, so I gave her Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. She finished it in two days (“It’s the best book I EVER read, Miss!”) and moved on to Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, which she disliked, but finished and understood enough to come in and recount for me the various ways in which Eugenides needed a better editor.

“Seriously, this shit’s about 100 pages too long,” she told me. I had liked Middlesex a lot, but there was no denying she had a point.

She should have been enrolled in some kind of “Gifted and Talented” program. She had, in fact, taken the test and qualified for specialized high school placement, but her mom and dad (in a typical lapse in parenting skills) had given their then-13-year-old the job of independently choosing and enrolling in a high school. So she had picked the one closest to her home—ours, with its rock-bottom test scores and constant police patrol. She made solid grades—not what she was capable of, but solid. I tried to encourage her to make an extra effort, citing the incentive of college scholarships for motivated minority kids. And she would just look at me with this expression of “Get real, Miss.” Defeat? Apathy? Disdain? A little bit of all three? I was never sure.

*

Early that fall, a flyer advertising a high school poetry contest was put up in our department office. I mentioned it to the class, and the next day Felicia brought in a poem to enter. Its title was something along the lines of “Why I’ll Be a Divorce Statistic at 25.” She turned it in quite willingly, and that surprised me, because her writing demonstrated more vulnerability than anything she had ever exposed voluntarily.

In the hopes of enticing other students to enter, I made her read her poem aloud in class. She was a cool kid; maybe if the kids saw that she was entering, they would want to do it too.

Usually they listened to whatever she said. The boys were all in love with her, and the girls were all afraid she would kill them, in light of Felicia’s calm threat to a girl who had “trash-talked” her: “Listen, bitch, I swear to God I will stab you in the heart with a pen if you ever do me like that again, you feel me?” But that day they were tired, preoccupied. Maybe it was too close to Christmas break. Regardless, they didn’t pay attention. She stood up in front of the chalkboard reading her divorce poem to a class of 30 kids, all of whom were talking, throwing paper balls at each other, passing notes, and generally acting like the 14-year-old goofballs that they were.

She looked up and stopped mid-sentence. The other kids didn’t notice. She stamped her little foot on the linoleum, registering her impatience, but they kept on talking, acting like she was not even there. I yelled at them, but my belated intervention, while it sobered them, didn’t do much for her. She looked at me forlornly, and then gave up entirely.

“That was discouraging, Miss,” she whispered to me as she slunk back to her seat. The other kids didn’t notice.

After class he handed me a sad, crumpled little piece of paper and I took it home, where I typed it, spell-checked it, and sent it to the contest with a $10 check and a letter explaining that the kid who wrote this poem was from an inner city school, and to please give her the recognition I felt she deserved.

(In point of fact, we would never hear back from the contest. It was probably a scam; I can only conclude that they took the entry fee I paid on her behalf and fled the country.)

She asked me about it, though, a couple of times. “When do you think I’ll hear from the contest, Miss?” It was her study hall period, and I had come barging in because, peering through the window in the door of the classroom, I had seen her sitting uncharacteristically alone. The other kids were looking over at her, confused. Why didn’t she want to play? I walked in and brought myself down to her, desk level. “When will the contest let us know, Miss?” she asked. It was December then; I said I hoped April, maybe May. I didn’t know for sure. I asked her if she was ok. She smiled at me, but there were tears in her eyes. She refused to tell me why.

*

The semesters changed, and suddenly I was not her English teacher anymore. I was working with 10th graders that term, and it was difficult, because they were a rowdy bunch, and by an unfortunate coincidence, all male. I had been assigned to them on the heels of a beloved teacher—a benevolent ex-baseball player aptly named Clausi—who had been very “cool” with them, as they put it. Now that he was on a semester-long leave for shoulder surgery, I was teaching the class. It often felt like they were angry with me purely for not being him.

“What can I do to make you guys not hate me so much?” I asked one day, exasperated. For the past few days they had been throwing baby carrots, stolen from the lunchroom, at my back every time I turned to write on the board. I could never whirl around fast enough to catch the culprits.

“We don’t hate you,” they told me. “We just miss Clausi.”

One of the toughest guys, a kid named Alberto who was a foot taller than I was and about twice my weight, looked at me with a pained expression. “Mister Clausi . . . Miss, no one was like him. He was just like this cool older brother,” he said wistfully.

When he said this, I felt like crying.

In light of my ambivalent relationship with the boys, it seemed all the more important to maintain some vestige of closeness with the class that she was in, a class that, I believed, loved me the way the boys loved Clausi. I came to their advisory period one morning to say hello. Felicia greeted me with her characteristic charm—“Do you miss us, Miss Garon?”—but she seemed distracted.

It was around that time that I found out how much her grades were slipping. Her history teacher was the one who told me. “She’s pulling a ‘D’ in my class,” he said. “She isn’t doing any homework and she basically failed the last test.”

I had never seen Felicia break a sweat in any class. She already knew so much. She watched and understood “The Daily Show” at 14. She made jokes about communism and wore a Che Guevara shirt when most of her peers couldn’t have identified Latin America on a map. She was so much more sophisticated, more worldly than they were. How on earth was she failing freshman history?

I went to her guidance counselor to see what was up. “Yeah, she’s gone down in everything,” the counselor said. She probably was not even supposed to tell me that, the counselor, but she did anyway.

I pulled Felicia from class during her lunch period. I was professional. “You wanna tell me what the hell is going on, girl?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not 7.”

“Right. You’re 14 going on 28. Answer my question.”

“Miss, don’t you think you’re just insecure about your role as a young teacher?”

“Whoa, this isn’t about me! We’re talking about you.”

“Why do you care, Miss?” Exasperation.

“Because I do. Because you’re brilliant, and you know it, and I hate seeing you slip like this.”

“Can I go now?”

“Yeah. Just try and pick your grades up a little, ok? And come see me if you want to talk . . .”

She scampered off.

*

I kept my distance. I tried to give her the space she clearly wanted, as much as it worried me to see her grades going down the toilet. If she had looked happy, maybe it would not have bothered me so much. But when I saw her in the halls, though she was always surrounded by friends, she would laugh with a bitterness that I didn’t recognize. She had stopped coming to see me altogether.

So I went into her advisory class again, ostensibly to see how all the kids were doing. She was in the back of the room, goofing off. Her sleeves were rolled up, and on one of her wrists, there was a little tree. Just like that—a neat little tree carved into her skin, the angry welts reduced to perfect red branches.

I came over and picked up her wrist. “What is this?”

She immediately pulled away, moved her wrists out of sight. “Nothing.”

“That’s not nothing.’”

“My cat scratched me.” Sleeves rolled up. Hands tucked under her arms.

“That’s one hell of an artistic cat.”

She laughed sardonically. “You know it is.”

*

As a teacher, I’m a mandated reporter: legally obligated to inform the guidance counselors if I see a student in a potentially harmful situation. I gave the word. They had her in the guidance office 15 minutes later.
*

As I expected, she was livid. First, she told the guidance counselors that I was a liar and an idiot. She wouldn’t let them see her arms. Then she told them I was stalking her. That hurt. “It’s pretty common for them to say stuff like that,” the guidance counselor told me by way of comfort. “Kids who have never had anyone care about them in their lives don’t know how to handle it when someone demonstrates that they do.” Somehow, that just made me feel worse.

In the hallways, if I saw her, she would turn and run the other way. She wouldn’t even make eye contact with me, or look in my direction. I eventually started taking a different stairwell so that our paths wouldn’t cross anymore.

One of her friends came to find me. “She’s really mad at you, Miss,” her friend Jennifer said. She said this with a note of glee. Jennifer liked drama. Jennifer also liked having someone who was as miserable as she was; she too was a veteran of self-mutilation, but I’d only learn that much later.

“I know,” I said. I gave Jennifer a book to borrow. “You can let Felicia read it when you’re done, if she wants to.”

“She’s really pissed. She, like, hates you.”

I sighed. “Well, tell her I still care about her, and that if she wants to come and scream at me in person, she’s welcome to.”

I talked to another English teacher about it. “Leave your door open,” he said. “You did the only thing you could do, by law. So just leave your door open. Eventually she’ll come back.”

The math teacher and the history teacher both tried to intervene. “Ms. Garon loves you. She cares about you. That’s why she did what she did.”

“I fucking hate that bitch,” Felicia said to them. “She better leave me alone.”

The worst part was that the rest of my special, smart, talented class turned on me, too. Graffiti appeared on the walls: “Miss Garon is a snitch.” I could have pled that this wasn’t the same as ratting out a peer, that I’d done it because I cared about Felicia, or that it was illegal not to. But I didn’t bother.

Except for once. Another student in that class, Naomi, confronted me online. I’d given the kids my screen-name so that they could ask me questions when they didn’t understand their homework assignments. So Naomi sent me an instant message saying, “You’re a snitch.”

“Naomi,” I typed back, trying to rationalize with her, “This incident was not so clear-cut. I think Felicia needed help. I did it because I thought she was hurting, not because I wanted to get her in trouble or whatever.”

“You helped no one,” Naomi typed in response. “To hell with you.”

She signed off before I could respond, and copied and pasted the conversation on her MySpace page.

*

Humiliated by my bad judgment (who in their right mind tries to rationalize with angry 14-year-olds?) and a little bit afraid that I would incur someone’s wrath (administrators or other students, I wasn’t sure), I went and talked to the social worker who was counseling Felicia.

“I know you can’t tell me anything about her,” I said to him, “But I just don’t know what to do anymore. I wish they’d all stop hating me. I wanted to help her, and I feel like it’s totally backfired.”

Then I started crying. I had been holding it in for a while, but at that moment I realized how hurt and sad I was. I loved Felicia. And she hated me. That was the bottom line.

The social worker listened patiently.

“What is it you like about her?” he finally asked.

I thought about it. “I don’t know. She’s just so funny and cute. And so smart. I sort of see her as a little sister, I guess. I’m only a little bit older than she is, when you think about it, and we certainly have . . . well, had . . . a different kind of relationship than I have with most students.”

He smiled.

“I’ve never counseled a student like Felicia either,” he said. “She has this knack for creating drama. She’s crafty: she’ll ask me to tell teachers this, to tell the guidance counselors that, pit them all against each other to get everyone on her side. She’s a nice kid, but she’s a master manipulator. This is something important to know about her.”

He paused, and appraised me with interest.

“You have to be careful not to get too involved with kids like that,” he said. “It’s easy to do . . . all of her teachers have, basically. She’s really good at luring adults into blurring boundaries.”

I thought about that for a while. I was the adult here—how could I fault her for any of this? She was a really messed up kid; that was basically all I would cop to.

Besides, I still felt like a snitch.

“I’ll stay away from her, ignore her, whatever she wants,” I said. “But please tell me one thing: Will she eventually stop hating me?”

He smiled sympathetically. “You know I can’t tell you that. We’ll just have to see.”

*

I waited her out. I kept my door open, like the other English teacher had said, and I put the situation out of my mind. It was easier to do than I thought it would be. I became wrapped up with the class of all boys. I taught them Sex Education during advisory that term, which was, weirdly, the event that finally bonded us all, despite their lingering sadness over Clausi’s departure. They were surprisingly eager to learn what I had to teach them, and earnest about it. They really wanted to know about women. It was sort of sweet.

I took an old plastic box that had formerly held Twizzlers and cut an opening in the lid to the container. “Here’s where you can put in any questions you have about sex that you’re afraid to ask out loud,” I told them.

The questions that came in the box were mostly along the lines of “Ms. Garon, will you marry me?” But it was not horrible. Spring came, the end of the year was in sight, and I started feeling happier again.

And apparently, around that time Felicia started to feel happier too.

*

It started small. Some of the kids were still going on about how I was a snitch. Three full months later. They remembered everything, except their class notes on test day.

“Whatever. I’m over it,” Felicia said to them. The history teacher told me about that later. And then another time, “It wasn’t her fault. She had to tell. She was required by law.”

(That’s my smart girl, I thought privately when I heard.)

I still kept my distance. Felicia started asking me questions. Not to me directly—through other teachers.

“Felicia wants to know if you have more books she can borrow,” her math teacher told me. “I said she should ask you herself, but then she just ran away.”

A few weeks later, another thing happened. This, too, was told to me by the math teacher. Felicia came up to her after class and said, “I’m cool with Ms. Garon now.”

“Well, that’s great,” said the long-suffering math teacher. “But does she know this?”

“I think so.”

“Are you sure? Have you told her?”

“No.”

“So how is she supposed to know?”

At that point, Felicia looked embarrassed again, and did what all adolescents do when they run out of things to say—rolled her eyes and stalked off.

*

The math teacher asked me to help her chaperone a field trip. “Felicia’s going to be on it,” she told me.

I was hesitant. “Is it cool if I come then?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t have asked you if it weren’t.”

“But Felicia . . .” We still hadn’t spoken in months.

“Yes, it’s fine with her. I already asked.”

I went to meet the kids after school, and Felicia ran up to me and threw her tiny arms around my waist, as if nothing had ever happened between us. “MISS!” she said, in her usual slightly bossy, conspiratorial tone. It was good to hear her voice again. “Your outfit is SO last year. We have to do something about this. Now, let me tell you all about this drama I’m having with this boy named Jesus . . .”

I guess that’s 14-year-old speak for “I’m sorry.” I certainly never pressed the issue. But just like that we were “cool.” A few days later she called me on my cell (I had given it to her many months ago in order for her to call me if she was having problems) and left me a voicemail saying, “Miss Garon, this message is ridiculously dorky. ‘At the beep, do your thing?’ What the hell does that mean? You have to change it. Right now.”

Summer came, then fall, and we were all back. I was teaching in a different school in the same building. But Felicia would occasionally come visit me to say hi, and tell me what was going on in her life. She told me that she had started to pick up her grades. We were not as close as we had been once, but I think that is the inevitable side effect of my teaching a different group of kids from year to year.

The most recent time I saw her was a few months before I left the school for good. I was walking to the subway when I saw her goofing around with some friends a few blocks from campus. She seemed, somehow, more grown up than I had ever seen her: her hair was straightened, and she had applied silver make-up flatteringly around her eyes. I was struck by how beautiful she had turned out to be. She ran up and hugged me, and said, “Are you dating that fat guidance counselor Miss? Yeah, I saw you talking to him. What’s going on with you two?” Then she cackled at my protestations.

I don’t know that I have ever been so attached to a student as I was to her, and I don’t know if I ever will be again. Perhaps it’s healthier that way. But I still miss her.

Someone has given my mother a book of “affirmations” by the very prolific and famous Louise Hay. It is sitting here under a bag of the birdseed she can’t put out, because of the bear. It tells the reader that she (certainly a she?) is wonderful in every way (though always open to positive change), that her every decision is a good one, that everything is as it should be. The colorful little book entered this house as a gift, I suspect, from yet another neighbor, a more upstanding one, who is at this very moment monitoring an unwelcome houseguest, the mother of her grandchildren. This ex-daughter-in-law appeared last night, after an absence of a year and a half, in the company of several sinister people, and must be watched lest she get too drunk or drugged and harm or traumatize her offspring, or run away with them, or invite her friends back for more beers with the neighbor’s catastrophically alcoholic husband, or reveal to the children the distressing news that she sleeps in a park when she’s not visiting them. Like many of my mother’s friends, the neighbor woman has a soft heart and a complicated past, and does things like allow dangerous drug addicts to stay in her home in order to reconnect with the sons and daughters they abandoned. The energetic grandmothers of Clackamas County (land of my people, most famous for the trashy figure skater Tonya Harding and the iconic Mt. Hood, east of Portland) find inspirational plaques and books and cards at thrift stores and give them to each other, which is sweet in a way, but I cannot help thinking of ideas such as Louise Hay’s as a degenerative force in this context. “Here I am, world,” writes Louise Hay, “open and receptive to all good.”

People I encounter in my everyday life, when I’m not visiting my family and descending into a trauma spiral, go all misty when I say I’m from Oregon. It is indeed lovely if you’re careful: a visit to Powell’s bookstore, a drive along the coast, lunch in one of Portland’s charming old neighborhoods. If you’re not careful, you end up getting gas on 82nd Avenue at dusk, watching a ruined old man fumble with his zipper for fifteen minutes outside the locked restroom, or you take a hike in the forest and meet my mother’s psycho neighbor, or you sit in the passenger seat as I fight off a crying jag between Shasta and Roseburg. Foresters talk about the “beauty strip,” the line of trees they leave standing along the road; just over the ridge, though, there’s a clear-cut, a hungry bear, a doublewide trailer full of untreated mental illnesses.

Beautiful as it is, in other words, Oregon is a flower “with a base infection” as Shakespeare put it: Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. I’m thinking about corruption because my work has taken me to a lot of foreign places lately, places where the weeds of corruption grow in profusion. Many of my less-traveled friends, relatives and colleagues assume that the minute I enter a foreign country outside the European Union or the Antipodes, I immediately face a thicket of shady and extortionate practices, which is not the case at all. When they read about corruption here, they tend to see the phenomenon as a dreadful alien thing that warps and dirties what is otherwise straight and pure: government operations, morals, the perspectives of hard-working and hopeful women, the breeding grounds of ocean-going wildlife. Lately, though, it feels more like something that exists all the time, and inevitably spills over, like the recent dreadfulness in the Gulf: something latent, something under easily-turned rocks. If you mess around out there, if you do anything, better install multiple safeguards or expect the worst, is the message of that spill. It’s true of oil; maybe it’s true of everything.

Or my own perspective could use some work, maybe. This morning, for example, I watched a plainclothes policeman tackle a scroungy individual on Franklin Street in Astoria, and treated it as a confirmation of my worst expectations, almost a personal affront. We’d gone there, my mother and I, to visit a friend and his partner, to admire their stunning four-story Victorian house, to eat some crab, and contemplate the Lewis and Clark expedition, and wander the fortifications at Fort Stevens, and generally to participate in the exquisiteness, which is available to all, I should not exaggerate my alienation too much. We did all of the exquisite things, but we also scrambled into our car as the violent arrest took place almost at our feet. On recent visits to Oregon, I’ve witnessed a blatant drug handoff – a diaper bag! – on a commuter train, watched as three skinny speed freaks bartered the items they’d boosted that day at several stores in downtown Portland, listened (also on a commuter train) as a father explained to his small son that Eddie doesn’t steal drugs because Eddie doesn’t steal, and fended off a street vendor who insisted that I must buy a soapstone hash pipe. My life is not exactly sheltered – I’ve lived in Southern California for 18 years, ride buses and commuter trains there, and spend time in all kinds of neighborhoods – but only in Oregon, where I was born at Portland’s Emmanuel Hospital and lived until I was of legal age to flee, have I observed that particular variety of flagrant crime combined with what I’ll call drug-induced debasement at such close quarters. I want to love Oregon the way other people love it. But I don’t. I think it is corrupt, ruined to squalor by drugs and alcoholic despair.

Beauty doesn’t help. Last night I watched the ships passing outside the window from Bill and Jack’s guest room after the obligatory drive up the coast, one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world. Enormous baskets of flowers hang from houses and street stanchions, it’s cool and green, people make beautiful gardens and objects and exquisite lives for themselves, lives free of drugs and squalor. I know this. It doesn’t help.

A small boy, a grade-schooler, is missing. His stepmother saw him last, when she dropped him at his school on Portland’s northwest side. Everyone thinks she did it. He’s been missing since June, two months. On our way home today through Portland’s ungentrified immigrant neighborhoods, my mother and I saw a billboard, an appeal for witnesses, written in Cyrillic. The police swear they will not give up until they find him, but there is an air of diffused and mysterious creepiness about the whole thing; certainly it is at least a strange coincidence that during the height of the search, last month, the Portland newspaper ran a two-day feature on the 1962 murder of my young cousin, herself a grade-schooler, who was kidnapped on her way to the store, violated, and strangled. My uncle—strictly speaking her stepfather or adoptive father—did not discuss with the reporter his own torment, where he was for a time treated as a suspect by the police, who subsequently let the case go as cold as the ditch where the killer left poor Mona’s body all those long decades ago.

On my way north a couple of days ago I detoured to the Bay Area to pick up a former student, and dropped her in Portland so that her father could take her on to Seattle. Sara taught for a time in Ukraine and Romania, but couldn’t reconcile what she was doing with her ideals: either she’s making up some deficit, teaching students at a for-profit school what they should have learned in their public schools, or she’s coddling the children of the elite who can’t adjust behaviorally to normal institutions and will never be required to learn anything, or to bribe anyone directly, themselves. She’ll teach next year at a Montessori in the Haight where, I warn her, she will encounter every dietary restriction known to humanity. We can laugh together at its pretensions, gently, because she loves the Pacific Northwest, and while we waited for her dad to arrive her spell held: Portland managed to pass as a friendly and charming place. People really do admire this region, and it is fabulous here in so many ways. I grew up with lawns for croquet and badminton, with piles of strawberries and wild blackberries and home-canned vegetables, with camping trips and football games on crisp fall afternoons. The hydrangeas are intensely blue this summer, the reservoirs are full. Portland has free concerts at the zoo and recycling demonstrations and organized bicycle rides across the bridges. Sara and I drank nice coffee and masked our campground odor with perfume samples at Nordstrom, but then she set off for the north and I called my mother and said I was on my way. During the drive east, to the base of Mt. Hood where she has lived since my father died, I looked around and thought, this is lovely, but something is closing in, this is not for me.

After all these years, we’re authorized to discuss Mona, thanks to this newspaper story. It seems to create some distance for many of us, to authorize some disclosure. A great-aunt finally talks about a cross burned in front of their house, some time in the thirties, in Missouri. They were Catholics and immigrants, and the local Klan made do with whatever despised minorities it had on hand. All four of my maternal great-grandparents also lived for a time in Western Nebraska, where the Klan had an active local chapter, and then half the family moved to Oregon, where antique covenants in neighborhoods like my mother’s ban anyone “not of the Aryan race” from buying property. The phrase is in her deed. Mona’s biological father was from what my grandmother calls “a real poor drinking family,” and there were always hints that he, or someone, brought about Mona’s death, that it was revenge or just a kind of impunity. I’m laying all these facts, all these stories out, like the endless games of solitaire my mother plays to fill wet afternoons, to try to make sense of the contradictions of this place, with its vaunted progressivism and its racist reality, but also of my family’s paranoia, our lack of trust in anything like providence.

On my run this evening an unshaven man in a two-tone maroon Bonneville turned around behind me. He’d probably just forgotten something at the Brightwood store or decided to drink another round at the tavern, but all I saw was a lowlife in a dirtbag vehicle, and for the rest of my run I raced from one inhabited-looking house to another along the rural route. Slow down, I scolded myself, relax. Is that really the choice here, the Subaru-wagon-kids-in-soccer thing, or the trendy-neighborhood-bicycle thing, or you’re down in the ditch with the broken Black Velvet bottles?

Last count I had about 200 relatives in Oregon, so it’s logical that they run that gamut. Some are in law enforcement and probation, some are in medical fields where they encounter drug abusers and other casualties, some are themselves drunks and druggies, in jail or on probation, some are doing okay and some not. One cousin is awaiting a bone marrow transplant in a hospital at the top of a hill overlooking downtown Portland, an aerie so remote and rarefied, separated by a security guard and a locked door from all contamination. He works as a horticulturalist for a small city to the south; in his hospital room he keeps photographs of trees and pocket parks he tended through the winter, before he became ill, that are now in full bloom and documented by his co-workers.

At home, among my family and despite my different last name, I am a Lane, a member of a clan touched by a bizarre and scandalous unsolved crime, not quite a “real poor drinking family,” but still a certain strata, more Tanya-Harding-country than organic-urban. Away from there, abroad, for example, I become a privileged outsider, safe from corruption, which nonetheless exists in all the places I visit. Entire states in Mexico are dominated by scandal and brutal crime. Kenya exploded in violence soon after I left, its population outraged by years of patronage and systemic inequality. My Ukrainian and Russian friends say corruption may destroy their countries. Most worrisome to them: the slow concurrent ruin of all civil systems. Schools buy accreditation, students buy grades and diplomas and recommendations. Everyone – police, doctors, teachers – is paid a pittance, if at all, and makes up the difference through off-the-books work or bribes. This summer, in the beautiful Hapsburg city of Lviv, I lived a block away from the police station and saw handcuffed men with swollen faces marched to and from waiting vehicles every morning; not all of them could have been in bar fights. One expat I talked to refuses to see any doctor who graduated after the Soviet system fell apart; a friend’s sister points with pride to her B average – only students who pay get 5s, the equivalent of an A. We have the gentleman’s C; Ukraine has the intellectual’s B. If grades and diplomas, licenses and laws, mean nothing, another friend speculates, perhaps the nation will begin to rely on people who can demonstrate competence in concrete fashion; perhaps the epidemic of corruption will leave the sufferers shaky, but with a stronger immune system, with a new kind of trust in each other and themselves, with entrepreneurial confidence. This is hard to communicate, to describe, hard to make interesting. My sister-in-law would rather talk about how, during the height of the oil spill, in response to news that human hair worked best for soaking up the contamination, people donated such a mass of cropped locks that they filled the warehouses and cleanup organizers couldn’t accept any more. She is kind of notorious for this: dubious or beside-the-point information that characterizes people as noble and competent, as a nation of recycling, lawn-mowing, library-volunteering Portlanders. Her only comment on the story about Mona: my aunt is quoted directly, saying that her parents paid for the funeral; my grandmother always said that we did. Good thing Nanny has dementia, my sister-in-law says, she’d go nuts if she read that.

My cousin who needs the bone marrow transplant operated a nursery and flower store for most of his life, and only got health insurance a year and a half ago, when he took the city job. He sees the hand of God in the timing of his catastrophic illness. This cousin is a decent, sweet man, but my own decent, sweet father died of cancer, as he knows, and I have to bite back the retort about God apparently being asleep when he needed such providential care. “My body represents perfection,” Louise Hay asks her followers to affirm. “I am vibrantly healthy.”

There are kinds and degrees of corruption, habits of mind and politicians on the take. At least I get a salary, at least my students do not need to pay or bribe me to write letters of recommendation for them or schedule their exams. On our late-night drive from Oakland, Sara wants to talk about this, asks for minute descriptions of the kind of letter I write for an exceptional person, for a moderately promising person, for a problematic person who may nonetheless deserve a chance. It isn’t just my own decision; it’s a kind of systemic agreement that letters for grad school, for jobs, for internships, are part of my duties, and not a favor I confer only on privileged or generous protégés. We both know that is not the case everywhere, and agree that people take it for granted here. When I made a decision several years ago to exclude an unreliable student from a study-abroad trip, his father tried hard to make me change my mind, including money and threats, and I had enough money and security of my own to resist. The form of corruption that troubles me in Oregon is subtler, too subtle to describe to my student, who comes from an entirely different background. It’s a sense that there are two versions of this place, one where personal degeneracy is acceptable, and one where it is not even visible. Money and class create the separation, but there’s something else going on, something I can’t locate; in any case, by birth I belong to a family that knew it was on the wrong side of the divide when Mona died, or maybe earlier, when the Klan came calling.

When I leave Oregon and drive south, when I can kiss Shasta’s sunset peak, sometimes the relief is almost physical. It’s not rational at all, but in Oregon, I’ve come to realize, I’m afraid all the time, of the drug people who live along my mother’s road, of the dope-growers and child-tormenters and chronic alcoholics who inhabit this beautiful green-smothered base of Mt. Hood, along the Salmon River. I’m afraid they, and poor dead Mona, and the poor little kidnapped boy who is certainly dead by now despite all the prayers for his safe return, represent the truth, or, in the words of my new tribe, that they at least represent a truth.

Perhaps there is another truth, even if it’s not for me, however long I study the photograph of the detective who re-opened Mona’s case, who, without any DNA evidence or even a living suspect, with nothing but a box of muddy clothing and old interview transcripts and investigative notes, finally packed everything up and traveled several hours on winding roads to the tiny town in Eastern Oregon where my aunt and uncle hid from their own notoriety forty years ago. He told them that he is sure who did the murder, a former neighbor known for “bothering” little girls. My uncle was sure a long time ago and went to the creep’s house with a gun one night, but came to his senses and let fate take its course, which it did: the killer (everyone says he’s the killer; the case is officially closed) died in a car crash soon after my uncle decided not to shoot him.

The detective has young daughters, which seems like a stupid thing for a newspaper to report to the hostile world. He is a big bear of a man, his scalp scraped clean and shiny. He looks tough, incorruptible. In Mexico, a cop like him would probably end up compromised or dead, but here he can do his job, or so I hope. I hope, too, that he has a safe vehicle for these country roads, where deer jump out unpredictably. This is a selfish hope. My brother, the one with the genteel wife, spent several years working for Multnomah County’s mental health system and explaining, as he put it, to desperate people why no one would help them. Safety for one family means leaving a lot of others behind, like the neighbor’s grandchildren, like the multitude of uninsured or just plain sick people who suffer mightily with no respite, who die every day before anyone is ready to say goodbye, but I can’t help it, I hope to God everything turns out, that my cousin’s bone marrow transplant saves his life, that the detective’s daughters, and my young nephews, and the children and grandchildren of my multitude of cousins, encounter nothing to kill or harm or even affront them, that when they grow up they may stay in this beautiful place without invisible hands clutching at them, that the voices that insist I look around for the very worst that exists are silent for them. Degenerate and blasphemer that I am, I hope that, in the words of Louise Hay, loved and trusted by millions, who wants only the best for absolutely everyone, they may create a life they love to look at.

So I’m working, really working, on a better perspective, but can’t shake the feeling that maybe that this project is itself a form of corruption. The news stories I Google up about the hair booms, for example, have all kinds of people, salons and schools, 4-H clubs and pet groomers, mailing their clippings and discarded nylon stockings to the Gulf during the month of May; it seems half the small-town papers in the country ran uplifting little news items. BP said no thanks, so the charity that organized the hairlift offered to supply cleanup materials to municipalities and conservation organizations and has posted the photos to prove it. Still, everything about it feels kind of photo-oppish, wasteful and greenwashed. BP will send its criminally negligent CEO to Russia, where, a human rights group announced this week, corruption accounts for half of the nation’s GDP. Half! Perhaps they deserve each other. The narcos have massacred dozens more people on a ranch in northern Mexico, and the newspapers speculate it’s because the victims refused to mule drugs across the border. There’s a plume of contamination half a mile under the surface of the Gulf and the neighbors are over again, pouring glasses of wine for my mother, who finally lets me dump the last one down the sink.

It’s hard, she says. The winter nights are so long here. It’s August, Mom, I say. But I know what she means. Who gave you this book, I ask, and she says it’s not from the neighbor, it’s from a different friend, one who is of course taking care of grandchildren, and also supporting – why does this not surprise me? – a mentally disabled daughter and a ne’er-do-well son-in-law. When my mother was feeling unusually depressed last winter, this friend sent her a “blue” package, full of little gifts in that shade. The Louise Hay book is a colorful, vivid robin’s-egg and cobalt. Did you lock your car, my mother asks, and gestures toward the acres of fir, hemlock, larch and pine that begin just a few feet outside her door. You never know around here. They should take that stepmother into a little room, she says, picking up the morning newspaper with its inevitable story about the missing boy, they should arrest her and beat it out of her, what she did with that kid.

In the seventh grade, I asked my father to take me to see Winger, a glam rock band whose greatest hit, “She’s Only Seventeen,” included the lyrics, “Daddy says she’s too young, but she’s old enough for me.” My father said yes, even though the concert was on a school night and he had no idea what Winger was.

When we arrived at the show that evening, the parking lot was a black sea of T-shirts and spandex. It was August of 1989 in Honolulu, and here at the Aloha Tower concert hall, sweat was about to be sacrificed in honor of metal’s dark splendor. A Filipino guy dressed in jeans cuffed to reveal his laced-up boots leaned against the car next to us. Clutching his waist was a woman in a pseudo bra-shirt and studded leather pants. She was armed with a barrage of thick gold bracelets, each etched with her Hawaiian name in black calligraphy. I was wearing a long white T-shirt with a doodle of a spiky-haired character named Fido Dido, whose smile was a confused squiggle against my flat chest. A plastic clip, the same shade of pink as my jelly sandals, held the shirt in a small knot at the side of my hip over my stretch pants. Though I’d later find out my father had been to his own share of misfitted rock concerts in his youth, in this moment, he looked like a geezer with his button-down shirt tucked into a pair of baggy Levi’s. I suddenly wondered why I hadn’t asked to bring a friend along.

Walking into the concert hall, I paced myself five steps behind my father. My head swerved and bobbled, unsure of what to take in. Raspy voices bummed cigarettes around me and I brushed up against a tattooed forearm that read “Youth Gone Wild,” an ode to my favorite Skid Row song. Making our way around the merchandise tables, I almost ran into a pot-marked teenager, several years older than my mere eleven. He raised a brow and shot me a smile.

“You want a shirt, girlie?” my dad asked, interrupting my haze.

I glazed over the selection of graphic tees pinned to the wall in front of us. “Uh, I don’t know.” My head had already flipped back around to look for the cute-enough teenage guy. But he was gone.

“I’m not sure we have something in her size,” said the roadie manning the merchandise.

“C’mon, Dad. Nevermind.” I tugged him away from the table. “Let’s keep going.”

He tried to put his arm around me, but I dodged his move, opening my glittery coin purse to dig around for nothing in particular. My dad kept on walking, unfazed. “I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry for some candy and soda,” he said, heading for the auditorium.

I trudged behind him, moving slower and slower with each and every step.

*
My relationship with my father had been relegated to dates like this ever since I could remember. Not necessarily hair metal concerts, but trips to the mall, afternoons at the movies, stops for shave ice, and other short bursts of entertainment where, up until puberty, I was usually bubbling with giddiness at whatever we were doing together. My father worked sixteen-hour days, therefore making him a special guest star in my life, whisking me away from the suburbs for field trips of fun, even when my parents were married. This setup further worked to my advantage once the two of them had split a year earlier; the guilt of divorce had made my dad even more apt to spoil me, and so at eleven, it seemed perfectly reasonable that the man I loved most in the world would escort me to see the man I had a serious crush on.

Kip Winger was the hairy, good-looking poster bear for the loud, showy music that seemed much more in tune with my adolescent yearnings and confusions than the sugary pop likes of New Kids on the Block. In their videos that streamed nonstop on MTV, glam rockers like Kip, or Nikki Sixx, or Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, were letting me into a mysteriously adult world that I was hidden from on my island cul-de-sac. These hair metal bands seemed both accessible and forbidden, clownish and wild, with their exorbitant face paint, booze-spraying backstage antics and grins that widened at the sight of half-naked women. As more childhood dolls came down from my bookshelves, more posters of Kip’s curly-haired chest and five o’clock shadow went up on my walls. I waited every afternoon to hear his singles play on MTV’s daily request show, and I snuck out into the living room on Saturday nights to watch “Headbangers’ Ball” on the lowest volume possible, so not to disturb my mother. I had no interest in kissing Kip or even touching him; I had no idea how to go about those things. I just wanted to experience the loud, unabashed excitement I saw him make on television.

*

Aloha Tower’s auditorium seemed a little smaller than the arenas I’d seen in most metal videos, but it smelt as naughty as I imagined it would. A mix of stale beer, clove cigarettes and cheap drug store cologne hung in the air as we entered the blackened warehouse space, cleared for a standing-room-only concert. My dad, carrying his box of M&Ms, headed toward the back of the room, aiming for the four lonely bleachers against the far wall. I stalled, turning back toward the crowd that was assembling miles away near the stage. A guy raced past us. Then another. A third belched in my ear. I turned back around to find my dad had already ascended the bleachers. I jaunted to catch back up to him.

I sat at the edge of my seat half-watching the opening band, but spending more time studying the couple with matching teased manes making out near the speakers. Right below our seats, a woman held a mini wine bottle in one hand and stroked her boyfriend’s arm with the other. When she leaned in to whisper in his ear, she licked it.

“Dad, I’m going to the bathroom,” I announced after the opener. He nodded, “Okay.”

In the privacy of my stall, I removed the clip from my shirt and tousled my hair. Then, I lingered for a few minutes in front of the sink to watch several girls reapply their hot pink lipstick.

As soon as I got back to my seat, the room went black, signaling Winger was about to take the stage. People gathered from all corners of the room, pushing toward the front, screaming. I jumped out of my chair.

“Dad, can I?” I asked, nudging toward the stage with the pretty please eyes I used to beg for ice cream on the way home from school.

He swallowed a gulp of his coke. “Go ahead,” he said, leaning back into his seat. His tone was cool, unhesitant. It was another instance of him giving me what I wanted, another testament of our understanding that I was his little girl and he’d never let anything happen to me.

I skipped down the stairs. Midway, I caught myself from appearing too eager and started slowing down. I aimed not for the stage, but for the middle of the action.

I stood in the back of the black-clad masses for a few seconds before working my way between adults twice my size. At four-foot-eleven, all I could see were the backs of T-shirts depicting some band’s world tour ’89. “Pardon me, excuse me,” I said, as I parted through the crowd. The musk of sweat and whiskey now filled the tiny crevices between bodies huddled together, vying for the best view of the stage. Within minutes, I was blocked by a massive wall of pouffed-out heads.

I looked to my right and there was a scrawny guy with hippie-like long hair smiling at me. “Wanna get on my shoulders?” he asked. My bones felt as if they were shaking from the reverb blasting from the speaker stacks off to my side.

“I’m okay,” I told the hippie.

“Well, if you change your mind.”

I turned away, wobbling on my tiptoes, peeking between sleeveless shirts and around stringy rattails and over the bare shoulders of women wearing tube tops. I smiled at a girl who bumped into me and I backed away from a man who grunted his way through the crowd, swashing beer on my shoes. After several minutes of this, I ended up next to the hippie again. “See anything yet?” he asked. I shook my head. He bent down in a squat. The drummer tapped his hi-hat, signaling their number one hit, “She’s Only Seventeen.” I looked down at the back of the hippie’s neck, his hair swooped to one side over his shoulder. The crowd roared. Whoo-hoos swelled the room. I hiked up my long tee shirt to put one leg over his neck. And then the other. He rose off the floor and I was in the air.

I was above the cloud of sweat and as high as several other women who were on other guys’ shoulders, women who were seconds away from being topless, their cleavage falling out of their tiny shirts and their legs wrapped around the necks of bulkier guys who stroked their calves.

“I see a lot of beautiful ladies out here tonight,” Kip shouted mid-song, wiping the sweat from under his curly bangs. Women screamed. Men raised their fists in a “hell yeah.” A voice from across the room said she wanted to fuck him. “Yes, lots of beautiful ladies,” Kip called back to her, and then belted out the chorus without skipping a beat. Women continued to shriek his name. Bras swung in the air. A high-pitched squeal escaped from my lips.

When the song was over, I bent down toward the hippie’s face and asked him to let me down and thanked him. I pushed through the crowd as the band paused between numbers. Far away, I found my father in his seat, shaking a box of candy into his palm. I wondered if he’d seen me above the crowd in my moment of glory. I hoped he had; I hoped he hadn’t. I slowly made my way back up the stairs.

Nicole Carpenter used to go through my city like a walking middle finger. She fought, smoked, dipped, drank and skipped school, and by the time she finally reached her junior year of high school, she altogether dropped out. I met her some years ago in my hometown of Battle Creek, the Cereal Capitol of the world (think: Kellogg’s Cornflakes).

Nicole wore sandy blond cornrows that dropped to her waist and wrapped around her like seaweed. She’d sway her head side to side and fling those braids behind her shoulders, rake back the strays with two acrylic nails, then light up a Newport 100. Nicole was exceptionally petite, about four-feet-nine inches, and could’ve passed for an eleven –year old.

When Nicole found out she was pregnant (at age seventeen), she moved out of her parents’, picked up a job at Arby’s, and moved in to the guy she thought (“I mean, shoot, he prolly is, that muthafucker…he the only one who didn’t wear a jimmy cap.”) might be the father of her baby.

Dad was Nicole’s doctor and had been since she was a little baby. He was in maybe his eighteenth year practicing as family physician, performing everything from wart removal to severing umbilical cords, when Nicole resurfaced, dangling her legs over a paper-wrapped table when he walked into the exam room. That was the same year Dad stopped delivering babies for good, and Nicole was one of the last patients he worked with in the delivery room.

Dad claims he was forced to stop delivering babies because the cost of malpractice insurance had got so high. Mom says she fast-forwarded the decision after Dad got paged in the middle of Midnight Mass for the tenth Christmas Eve in a row, but I think that Nicole, specifically Nicole’s pregnancy, had an affect on the verdict, too. The whole thing just seemed to deflate him.

Being a doctor in such a small town, my dad was a bit of a celebrity. Folks had named their dogs after him (different variations of Phil, Philip and Ptacin) and there wasn’t a time he could zip in and out of Felpaush Grocery without getting impeded by folks for minor medical attention, which can be particularly embarrassing when you’re with him and your hands are balancing items like Pepto-Bismol, toilet paper, Tampons, or anything that revealed to the world that you, too, go to the bathroom. But my dad would take his time with people, put his hand on the shoulder of the ailing individual, lean in as if to whisper a secret and say, “How can I help?” I guess that’s how I learned about patience—by watching him exhibit this untamed (or untainted) compassion. Dad had a Paul Bunyon-sized heart, and my friends claimed he was the Jesus reincarnate.

Mom said he was just a big baby. You be the judge: late one night back when he was a medical student at Georgetown, Dad got mugged while jogging through campus. My father had no cash or money on him, to his name really, but invited the thief back to his “minimalist” apartment anyway, for some fruit and to write him a check. Dad said that if the guy was going to don a black mask and attempt a mugging, he needed the hundred bucks more than he did.

Growing up, my family’s dinner conversations revolved around Dad’s work stories. With our chins resting on our hands and our elbows framing our dinner plates, we’d listen to him talk about our town, about our time and our people. I remember chewing on a square piece of pork tenderloin when he told us the tale about the obese man with maggots that laid eggs in his belly button, or the one about the surgeon who stitched up a guy after a vasectomy and forgot to remove the gauze.

One night (I was about eighteen or nineteen years old) when we were shooting the shit around the dinner table, Nicole’s name came up. My Polish mother said, “Phil, tell de girls about Nicole, you patient with dying baby.” She shook her head. “Dis is such tragedy!”

“Who’s Nicole?” I asked.

Dad put down his silverware and blew out a long trail of breath. “Oh, Nicole,” he said without looking up. “She’s one of my patients.”

“And is driving you Daddy down de wall,” Mom added.

“It’s ‘up the wall’,” my sister Sabina chimed.

“Nicole’s been coming to my office since she was a little baby,” he said, “but I hadn’t seen her in years until she came in for a prenatal exam.”

Mom interjected, “She thinks she Mary, Mother of God.”

Dad sighed again. “Nicole’s a bit dramatic.”

He told us that Nicole’s pregnancy was a rare and complicated. She was born with something called Russell-Silver Syndrome, a rare chromosomal abnormality that caused someone to be very small and look much younger than they were. When she came into my dad’s office for her first prenatal checkup, all fresh-faced and pregnant, Dad sent her to a specialist for extra testing to see if Russell-Silver Syndrome would affect her fetus at all. Results proved that it would not, but something else blipped up in the tests. Nicole’s baby had Anencephaly, a totally unrelated birth defect.

Dad took the paper napkin off his lap, unfolded it and laid it out over the kitchen table. “Anencephaly refers to the incomplete development of a fetus’s brain and spinal cord, and their protective coverings.” He pulled a pen out of his pocket, one with a built-in laser pointer and the word Celebrex written up the side, and began sketching onto the cleaner side of the napkin: a line, a loop, a crescent. “It occurs when the neural tube—a narrow sheath that is supposed to fold and close during the third or fourth week of pregnancy…”—the pen doubled back; a tulip, a pea pod, a tunnel—“fails to close, resulting in failure of major portions of the brain, and failure of the skull and scalp to form.”

I leaned in for a closer look at Dad’s drawing. It looked like a roller coaster. “No brain? No shit?” I asked and Sabina kicked me from under the table.

“Infants born with Anencephaly are usually blind, deaf, and unconscious.”

“And what is ze fate to the babies?” Mom asked.

“When Nicole’s baby would be born it would have already suffered serious brain damage…wouldn’t be able to eat, not even breathe for long.”

“Holy wow,” I said. “Do they suffer, Dad?”

My father put down the pen and handed me the napkin. I folded it up four times and slid it under my plate. “It’s not a painful condition,” he said, “but it is inevitably fatal.”

“Poor baby. Poor her soul. It is very sad,” Mom said, then joined Sabina, who was clearing the table. Dad pushed out his chair, and as he began to stand up I stopped him.

“Wait, what happened next? To the girl?” I asked.

“The specialist explained all this to Nicole and recommended that she terminate the pregnancy.”

“Then what?”

“Dad works at a Catholic hospital, Mira. They don’t do abortions,” Sabina said. She had recently denounced her Catholicism, claimed it was homophobic, sexist and past its prime. I envied that she got to sleep in during church.

“Nicole basically freaked out and drove straight back to my office.”

“Screaming and crying like child,” Mom called from the sink.

“Yes, screaming and crying and causing this huge commotion in the waiting room, demanding to see me.” He carried his plate to the sink. I followed him.

“So then I pulled her into an exam room and tried to calmed her down. Go get your dishes, please, Mira,” Dad said.

I went to the table and returned with my plate. “Then what? Then what did you say to her?”

“Well, we talked. I explained that it wasn’t her fault, that she didn’t cause this and couldn’t have prevented it. I just looked at her and said, ‘Nicole, there is just nothing you or me or anyone can do about this. There’s no surgery to do in the womb, no medicine you can take.’ I just told her, ‘Nicole, your baby just ain’t going to survive.’”

Dad dropped a big spoon into the coffee beans, leveled off a scoop of decaf and tipped it into the coffee maker. He walked over to Mom, who was loading bowls into the dishwasher, put his hands on her shoulders, kissed her forehead and gently pushed her out of the kitchen. He handed Sabina a towel, rolled up his sleeves and plunged a big pot into the kitchen sink.

“I told Nicole that she could transfer medical facilities if she’d prefer to abort the fetus.”

“So did she get, you know, what Beanie said?”

Sabina threw a towel at me and told me to make myself useful.

“She panicked and became frightened by the thought of an abortion,” Dad said. He folded his arms and leaned back onto the ivory refrigerator door, which was checkered with magnets of our old school photos and Mom’s kitchen wisdom quotes. One magnet framed an old family photo: our family wearing matching St. Philip Elementary School sweatshirts, rosy cheeks, huddled in a tripod. One magnet had a cartoon of two makizushi rolls on it. Wake up, little sushi, it read.

“I remember Nicole sitting on the exam table, weeping. She said to me ‘This was a spark that had no chance at life without my help, so if my child was meant to live for five minutes, it is going to live for five minutes.’”

There was a moment of silence, which was quickly interrupted by the buzzing and scraping sound of Mom sliding the electric broom across the tile floor.

“I agreed to ride it out with her,” Dad said in what sounded like a whisper, even over the vacuum.

“Tell the girls about the board, Phil,” Mom said, plowing the vacuum past us.

“What board? What happened?”

“So we continued giving Nicole care—a lot of care—during her pregnancy. She came into the office several times unannounced, saying she felt movement and thought she was having a miscarriage. We were there for her around the clock. But at the same time, the hospital was struggling with the technicalities of the delivery,” he said. “It was like this: the baby would die outside the womb, and in a purely medical sense whether Nicole delivered at twelve weeks or forty weeks, the question was moot. But because of the Silver Syndrome, because Nicole was such a tiny person, she wouldn’t be able to deliver a normal sized baby because it wouldn’t fit through the bones of her pelvis.”

“So what could she do? What were her choices?”

“She would have to have a Caesarian delivery, and for a woman of her size, this was dangerous procedure.” The vacuuming stopped.

“Daddy and Catholic bishop met during de week, during time we had dance class,” Mom said.

“We formed an Ethics Committee. The director of hospital, a lawyer, Al Skipper, the hospital chaplain, and other doctors to determine how early Nicole could be induced without it being considered a termination of—or an unnatural—pregnancy. We finally decided on a time, up to the very minute, of what was considered ‘natural.’”

“Yeah…God’s way,” Sabina sighed.

“So what happened?” I asked again.

“The baby inside Nicole grew. She felt it kicking.”

“What did she do?”

“She dug in her heels and carried the baby through the pregnancy. She learned the sex of the baby. She bought maternity clothes and pink baby clothes. She named the baby. Even the nurses at the hospital knitted booties and made a baby quilt. She hired Reverend Skipper from the Ethics Committee to facilitate the funeral of the baby.”

“And then?”

“And then we induced her when it was the right time.”

“And then?”

“And then Nicole delivered her baby, vaginally.”

“And then?”

“And then after five hours, the baby girl died in Nicole’s arms.”

“Poor her soul, indeed,” I agreed.

A few weeks later I met Nicole. I’m not sure why I did it, but I wanted to meet this person, this girl, this woman. I just had to get her story. It was as if she carried some kind of answer my younger self had been looking for. I found her in a booth at Home Spun Family Restaurant, and as I sat down across from her, a shudder of recognition passed between us. I ordered a coffee while she smoked feverishly.

“Do you wanna see a picture of my little girl?” she asked.

She slid the photo across the table, a 4 x 6 glossy with edges that were beginning to coil and curl towards the center, like a dried leaf. I continued to look at Nicole, afraid at what I might see.

“That’s my lil’ girl Elizabeth,” Nicole said, and I looked at the photo in front of me, which was upside down. Nicole leaned over and rotated it counter-clockwise with her left hand, the hand holding a cigarette, to face me.

The baby in the photo was dead. She was tiny, had a pink cap over her head and looked like an old man. Not much different than any newborn—closed eyes and a pink complexion—but this baby was dead, and I could tell.

Nicole pulled a frilly scrapbook out of her purse and narrated a few more photos: baby Elizabeth in a long white lace dress, Nicole’s parents embracing Nicole on the hospital bed, a cluster of smiling nurses, and a print of a tiny white casket.

“You should be proud of yourself,” I told her.

She said she was. She said, “I’m talkin’ to my parents again, and I may be movin’ back home. This was a blessin’ in disguise I guess.” And while she was talking and smoking, I was thinking to myself Yeah but how does someone move on? Moving on…isn’t that what your baby was doing? Isn’t it your job to try to remember?

A year after that, Nicole came back to my dad’s office to announce she had gotten pregnant again, and that she had given birth to a healthy baby. Mom thought it’d be nice to round up a roomful of baby goods—diapers, a stroller, a crib and a bunch of barely-used onesies from the Salvation Army—and throw Nicole a belated baby shower. She invited nurses, Al Skipper, Dad’s office manager, and some of her own friends (a couple of doctors’ wives who happened to be immigrants, too) to celebrate Nicole’s new life. See look, I thought, there is a reason for everything. God knows what he’s doing. He will always make you happy again. But when the day came and they were all in the waiting room, ready to shower Nicole with their streamers and white frosting baby cake, ten minutes passed, then twenty, then Nicole never showed up. Dad tried to call her and got a droning signal at the other end of the line, a recorded robot voice saying the phone number was no longer in service and had been disconnected. He checked the hospital records, which revealed she had had a baby boy, and that’s it.

With wet eyes, Mom re-donated all the baby goods back to the Salvation Army, took the stroller to Kids R Us and brought me along for the ride. In the car I tried to be the optimist and come up with excuses for Nicole’s absence, but it didn’t fly with her; she’s impenetrable to all types of sugarcoating. Maybe her baby got sick, I said. Mom ignored me. I’m sure Nicole is being a good mommy, Mom, really, she probably just had to work.

Give me break, Mom said. That girl was hussy and we both know it. She probably dump her baby wit de parents and is out tail chasing dis minute.

Mom, maybe she had amnesia, I said, and that’s when I started doubting my sense of the truth. I looked out the windshield of our family’s Chrysler minivan. I felt myself begin to warp into something I had been afraid of—a nihilist, a cynic, a misanthrope, the kind of person who deliberately tore small limbs off trees minding their own business, the kind of person who cursed under her breath rather than smile at someone passing by on the sidewalk, a person who added gray layers to their skin to make it thicker. Impenetrable. I looked up at the stupid face of Jeffrey the Giraffe towering over the doors to Toys R Us and I thought: What if that girl wasn’t the Buddha reincarnate after all? What if I was just not seeing the world for what it really was? Maybe she really wasn’t carrying that nugget of truth I needed so badly. Maybe she was just a girl from Cereal City, U.S.A., who worked at the Arby’s drive-thru on Capitol Avenue, and maybe I really was just a misanthrope after all. A misanthrope living with her parents.

BY ANNABEL SMITH

We arrive in the nameless village early, when the morning light is still thick and golden, marred only by the dark smudge of hills on the horizon. Doctors, nurses, dentists, support staff: a team of ten, we’ve flown into the Dominican Republic for a week of one-day stands. Day four, this is our fourth and final village. Like most foreigners, we’ve brought a sense of adventure and spare memory cards. Unlike them, we won’t be staying at luxury resorts or visiting golf courses. We have come to do good, to make a difference.

Our local partners are waiting for us in blue T-shirts like ours, clipboards ready. They’re clearly excited when our convoy arrives, and greet us with great enthusiasm. We climb off the bus and shake hands warmly. They show us the empty hall they’ve arranged for the doctors and a separate space for the dentists. The neat green community building is ideal, with several private rooms and a large main area filled with benches like pews. We unload the eight black suitcases and mysterious machines from the truck that follows us everywhere. The set-up team gets to work, while the rest of us wander off, knowing the drill, clutching our cameras.

The light is perfect, and I start taking pictures. At first glance everything seems so lush and vibrant that I want to roll around in the colour and soak it in. A wide river crosses the road further ahead and water channels run down the side of the streets. Most houses are wooden, a couple concrete, one or two a patchwork of metal. They’re painted seaside colours, pale pinks and turquoise, and the space beside each has been compressed and smoothed into a compound, some holding small flower gardens.

I walk on in search of new views. Despite so much water, the biscuit-coloured earth is completely parched: each truck and motorbike that roars past throws up a cloud of fine particles that settles back over everything. I pass a few struggling French marigolds and snapdragons and a long-abandoned hand pump. Further from the centre some of the houses are made of dirt. I put my camera away.

I find out later that this isn’t a village but a former banana batey, or company plantation. The big businesses have all gone now, taking the work with them, but leaving the workers behind. There are few jobs except growing enough food to eat. Some fields have been turned over to rice and sugar beet and there are still plenty of banana trees, but in many places all order has been lost and there is only a wild tangle of greens, broken by a few umbrella acacias and glossy mango trees. Villainous bougainvillaea conspires to make a subsistence existence look joyful.

Today is laundry day, and already sheets and shorts are flapping on strings stretched along the roadside. I pass women sitting on their heels in front of large plastic basins surrounded by small piles of clothes. Some smile and wave, many sit back resting as the clothes soak. Small children play in the dirt and sweet little piglets trot about.

The water has been brought from the river in yellow plastic cooking oil bottles; there doesn’t seem to be any soap. By the river I meet a man with a huge spotted sow on a string and I watch admiringly as she wades into the water and happily roots about. The pig is magnificent. The man grins with pride.

Everything is set up when I get back to the makeshift clinic. The doctors have taken over the three private rooms and are already with their first patients. The waiting room contains a scattering of women and children, and no men, which is what we have come to expect. The room will get busier and busier as word spreads through the community, but most men will stay away. A few may come for skin conditions like scabies and impetigo, or even reading glasses, but they will never mention the symptoms of the sexually transmitted infections that we know are widespread here. What good can we do if we only treat the women?

A secure space at the back of the hall has been set aside for the pharmacy, and it’s already buzzing with activity. The contents of the eight black suitcases are laid out on trestle tables: jauntily coloured cardboard boxes and packets; foil pouches; plastic bottles; blister strips. Every item has been donated, and although it looks higgledy-piggledy, each is in its place. Some bear the specialist labels of hospital supplies intended for professionals, others the eye-catching logos created for the supermarket. Some are familiar—Tylenol, Aleve, Advil—others unusual and difficult to identify.

I have no medical training and had expected simply to observe, but nobody just watches here, so I become part of the pharmacy team. When patients have seen one of the doctors they bring their prescriptions to us. We take them, find the right drugs, have them checked, then pass them to Juan, who sits outside the door, guarding the divide between waiting room and pharmacy.

It takes less than half an hour for me to learn how to fill a script on my own and I spend most of that time trying to decipher the doctors’ handwriting, which is universally atrocious. The patterns are very simple because there aren’t many choices. We try to keep the doctors up to date when we run out of drugs, but sometimes we fall behind. Then one of us has to go and face their frustration, which gets angrier as the day goes on. To compensate, we gossip about them, which is easy because they’re all young and good looking. I feel guilty about our laughter when I glance through the door.

Nobody speaks of cancer, TB or HIV. We have no surgical facilities and no specialists. We acknowledge only what we can treat that day.

Globally, nearly 5 million people with moderate to severe cancer pain get no appropriate pain medication. Nor do some one-and-a-half million with stage-four AIDS. Those in the global south are likely to have been diagnosed late and to have no hope. Severe pain means agony. Men, women and children suffer burns, accidents, gunshots, sickle-cell disease and the severe nerve damage that comes with diabetes with no pain relief at all. They may have been lucky enough to receive vaccines, antibiotics or anti-retrovirals, but without pain relief many prefer suicide.

Juan’s job is to explain the medication to the patients: how many tablets to take and when, and that these are not “caramellos.” A Venezuelan with two years of pre-med, Spanish is his first language. He is calm, colloquial and clear. The Dominican patients nod, smile and quietly ask questions. They are a little shy and deferential, but they seem to understand.

But many of the patients are Haitian, not Dominican, and Juan doesn’t speak Kreyol. None of us does. We can manage French between us, in an approximate sort of way, but for those with only Kreyol we carry out a pitiful show of mime and drawings. We have pictures of suns and moons and the empty faces of clocks onto which we draw the times at which the drugs are to be taken. When blank, confused faces look back at us, we know we have failed; at times it’s almost farcical. Juan tries, explaining everything once, then making each person repeat the instructions back to him, as best they can. It’s painstakingly slow, and by the end many of the Haitians simply look frightened.

During quiet moments in the pharmacy I stand watching Juan, looking over his shoulder to the waiting area beyond. Still almost every seat is taken by a woman or a child, their name stuck to them on white labels. Most women are pregnant and many are very young. They wear jeans or shorts and a T-shirt, their hair neatly braided, flip flops on their feet.

I find myself staring at a woman wearing a long white cotton summer dress with a deep handkerchief collar; her hair is short, unbraided and pulled back with a wide Alice-band. She reminds me of Bertha, Mr Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre, for she, too, is clearly mad. She stares at the floor or looks at us childlike and uncomprehending. She is alone, and we can do nothing for her, yet I have an overwhelming desire to walk up to her and take her hand.

The children sit still and solemn on the benches: four little girls at the front, their braids fastened with pale blue bobbles. We work calmly and steadily, but they wait nearly three hours, their heads turning to follow a noise or sudden movement but otherwise their lives suspended. In awe of everything, they are wide-eyed and patient.

Doctors and nurses are constantly walking through the waiting area, sharing equipment, checking on drug availability, joking, laughing or stopping for a drink of water. Many pause to take photographs on their way. Nobody complains; it’s as if they know that part of the deal is that we have our trophies. Every single doctor and nurse finds a reason to walk past the tiny girl in the pale pink froth and the flowery headband, their cameras ready.

I take a break and wander out onto the dirt road towards the intersection that is downtown. The one small open-fronted shop has shelves stacked meticulously with drums of milk powder, bags of rice, cans of condensed milk and bottles and packets of all sorts of things. A huge scale hangs over the counter, where a few sad vegetables are wilting in the heat. The small pyramid of eggs nestled in the shade makes me think of the children I teach in the U.S. They are all well fed, and many are athletes. Most discard the yolks of their breakfast eggs, believing them to be unhealthy.

I walk back past the dentists, who have drawn a huge crowd. Dressed in blue scrubs and white masks they’re deeply absorbed in their work, bent low over their patients, surrounded by the large, strange machines. When I first walked past people were wary and standing well back. Now there’s a party atmosphere as they watch three dental students brandish a huge set of cardboard teeth and an enormous paper toothbrush. They’re showing everyone how to brush correctly: up into the corners and right to the back, then letting the children have a go. There’s much laughter and toothbrushes and toothpaste are handed out to everyone. Some people still look suspicious: a tall woman at the back has clearly been unnerved by the large photos of gum disease being wielded by another student, black teeth thrusting menacingly out of scarlet gums.

I’d forgotten about toothache. How extraordinary it must be to arrive in agony, unable to sleep or eat, and to leave with no pain. To have a rotten tooth extracted under anaesthetic; an abscess drained, a cavity filled, an infection treated with antibiotics. To feel pain switched off.

By midday the clinic is full. It’s hot and sticky in the pharmacy and we all make mistakes, muddling scripts, forgetting to double-check the age and weight of a child, mixing two drugs with similar names. Even when we get it right it feels hit and miss, or worse, hit and run. And what about me—I’m a schoolteacher. What on earth am I doing here?

The children in the clinic are all too small. It’s not only about malnutrition and lack of healthy food, although I wonder whether any child here has eaten five portions of fruit or vegetables in the last month, let alone in one day. It’s also about parasites. Most of these children get little benefit from the little food they eat because it feeds the worms that live inside them. Every child who comes through the clinic today gets two small tablets which they have to swallow in front of us with a glass of bright pink juice. Once their stomachs are their own again, then they will need protein, vitamins, minerals and carbohydrates to build their bodies enough that we can guess their ages. I think of the abandoned hand pump and the happily wading pig. There’s very little time before the next round of uninvited dinner guests arrives.

Everyone needs multivitamins, but our packets specially formulated for pregnant women run out almost at once. We substitute the brightly coloured animal-shaped children’s vitamins, but they are soon finished too. Americans spend $7 billion annually on vitamins and minerals, most of which they could do without. In a land of plenty, it shouldn’t be hard to let food be one’s medicine, as Hippocrates advised, and to send the vitamins to those who truly need them.

The island of Hispaniola is bisected by one of the world’s most dramatic borders, dividing relatively rich, hopeful Dominica from desperately poor, hopeless Haiti. But we are on the good side, where tourism has boomed and opportunities abound. Why, then, do these people have no healthcare or welfare?

During a quiet moment I ask our project director Bob why things are so bad here. He tells me that Haitian men have been crossing the island to work on the Dominican bateys for the last seventy years. During that time many started to stay between seasons and married immigrant Haitian women. The bateys became a unique mix of Haitian and Dominican people and cultures, but with one overriding characteristic: poverty. Because Haitians are non-citizens they are not seen as the government’s responsibility and so do not receive public services. In theory the private companies owning the bateys should provide for them; in practice, few do. Once the companies pull out, the communities are abandoned.

Almost all Haitians come originally from Togo. They have darker skin than most Dominicans, and those who live in the bateys are frequently discriminated against. They are seen as a drain on limited resources, and frequently blamed for the high rates of HIV and TB. They’re often treated with contempt and disgust.

By late afternoon it’s airless and stuffy in the pharmacy and we’re all yawning. The window slats are wide open and three little girls in blue and beige school uniforms have appeared, standing on tip-toes, waving through the blinds. We snack on Oreo cookies and chips to try to keep our energy up, and remind one another to drink plenty of bottled water.

Our drugs are running low. We’ve used nearly all the antibiotics and all the prescription-strength pain meds. We are becoming more generous with the Tylenol, though, giving several boxes to those who suffer from chronic pain. Why not? We’re going home tomorrow, and we need to get rid of them. They have no mystical value for us, we’re long
immune to the miracle of near instant pain relief.

American demands and expectations drove the market to provide tablets, caplets, chewy tabs and gelcaps, day strength, night strength and round-the-clock relief. We need never be in pain for more than ten minutes. In the community where I live and work in New England, pain medication is used largely to enhance athletic performance, so people can play sports longer and harder.

Is it possible to be too well?

At the end of the day, on the bus ride back to our hostel, I wonder what we achieved. We saw over 200 patients, almost all of whom will have benefited from our visit. We eased pain, cleared up infections, cured skin complaints and checked on pregnant women and babies. We taught basic health education and dental hygiene and helped women to look after themselves and their children. Above all, we showed up: we let people know we cared.

Yet I don’t feel like a hero, and I’m pretty sure none of my colleagues do either. Most are asleep, slumped uncomfortably, or gazing silently out of the windows. We all know that although we’ve helped many people, there are far more who have never seen a doctor. At best, we provided quick-fix philanthropy: a cocktail of Advil and good will. At worst we’ve been a distraction that allows boxes to be checked, consciences to be salved and the status quo to continue. What is really needed here is infrastructure: employment, education, covered drains, clean water, sewage disposal and a permanent clinic. We’d like to believe that this island and its people will one day have what they need, rather than just more jolly bougainvillea. We’d like to believe in one day.

BY CHRIS GRILLO

It must have been ‘89 because I was working at Blockbuster at the time. I remember the oppressive fluorescent lighting, the nauseatingly sweet scent of overly buttered popcorn and, of course, the hideous business casual uniforms—all of these flashbacks pummeled by the screeching tires and gunfire soundtrack of some action movie blaring out of the mounted TVs. Not sure what its hours are now but in 1989 this soul-sucking corporation stayed open until midnight 365 days a year, meaning the high school kids straightening shelves and vacuuming the drab commercial carpeting while the tills were tallied in the back office were let out at around 1am on school nights. We made a wallet-busting hourly wage of about four dollars and fifty cents. These were the pre-DVD days and there were rewinding machines behind the register for the person responsible for checking in the returned videos. (The “Please Be Kind and Rewind” stickers on the VHS tapes rarely inspired goodwill.) This unlucky person was also tasked with greeting customers as they entered the store, an onerous job for any self-loathing teenager wearing khakis and a blue oxford shirt. Allegedly there would be a cash reward for any greeter who said “hello” to the regional manager. This never happened as far as I could tell.

It was around that time that the Ramones were playing at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. I thought it was an odd choice of venue—Sag Harbor being such a yuppie enclave out in the Hamptons—but I wasn’t going to pass up this opportunity to see one of my favorite all-time bands. My buddy Jeff and I were planning to drive out to Port Jefferson to Charlie’s house, where his family had moved after 8th grade, and then we’d head out to Sag Harbor from there. Rounding out our foursome was Vinnie, one of the few guys—including myself—on the staff of the Deer Park High School Year Book. None of us had seen the legendary Ramones before and this was a highly anticipated event.

On the night of the show, we arrived at Charlie’s house early in order to give us some time to find the place. We’d never been to Sag Harbor and again, this was 1989: no MapQuest or Google Earth. We spent some time catching up with Charlie’s parents and three younger brothers, marveled at the staggering number of Costco-sized cereal boxes in the kitchen pantry and took turns entertaining Thor, the family’s curious Collie. (While writing this piece, I emailed Jeff to verify parts of the story and he gleefully reminded me how, after returning to Charlie’s house after the show, I had to hide in the closet to escape Thor’s heat-seeking snout. “Thor was under the impression that you had rubbed steak sauce on your nether regions” was how he described the dog’s repeated attempts to burrow his elongated sniffer into my crotch.) After a half hour or so we were ready to head out. It was a winter evening and snow was starting to fall from the darkening sky. We piled into Charlie’s Monte Carlo and made our way east. We were amped, almost giddy, as we hurtled along the dark and mostly deserted Long Island Expressway, the Ramones and other punk and metal favorites blasting out of the speakers at an unholy volume. Not only were we about to finally see the Ramones—the progenitors of punk and celebrated homegrown heroes—but we had folded an unpredictable adventure into the story. We were on our own, lured as much by the independent punk rock spirit of the occasion as by the magic of the band itself.

Of course we got lost. We had seen signs announcing that we had entered the town of Sag Harbor but we couldn’t find the venue. We pulled over and turned down the music. Huge wet snowflakes piled onto the windshield and were swept aside by the wipers. Damp arcs of precipitation blurred our view of the soggy street that lay ahead, illuminated by the headlights. Someone suggested we turn around so Charlie gave a quick glance over his shoulder, pulled a U-turn over the double yellow line and began driving in the other direction. We were pulled over promptly. There was a collective groan followed by a chorus of saltier expressions cursing our rotten luck. We feared we’d never get to the show in time. A few minutes after a surprisingly lenient warning and some hastily delivered directions, however, and we were turning into the parking lot of the Bay Street Theater. We were finally going to see the Ramones! As we drove slowly past the club—tires crunching over packed snow—we couldn’t help but notice that the people in line were not only ten years older, but also neatly dressed in slacks and buttoned-down shirts, the women wearing skirts and clutching glittery purses. The most ominous problem was the pair of gargantuan bouncers checking IDs at the door. Was this the right place? I rolled down my window.

“Excuse me,” I shouted through the snow to a guy near the end of the line. I could have sworn he was he wearing khakis and a blue oxford shirt. “Is this the Ramones show?”

He shrugged and turned around. I rolled up the window. “Dick.”

“Well, we might as well check it out,” Jeff said. “We drove all the way out here.”

Of course he was right but we all quietly dreaded getting out of the car in our torn jeans and Misfits T-shirts only to be turned away by the thick-necked goon squad guarding the door. Our punk-fueled enthusiasm was quickly waning. We waited in line without saying a word for what seemed like an hour. The way I saw it, Jeff and Charlie would probably get in, but Vinnie and I were doomed. Jeff had always been able to grow facial hair and he sported a healthy mustache that night. Charlie, although not as hirsute, possessed a burlier build than the rest of us and was months away from joining the Marines. Vinnie could have easily passed for 13. He was short and scrawny, his Ramones tee stretching well below the hem of his denim jacket and nearly blousing around his knees. As for me, I was often mistaken for someone much younger. An emergency room nurse once told me I needed parental consent before I could have my chin stitched after a college soccer game. “How old do you think I am?” I asked, incredulous, blood gushing down my shirt front. “Twelve, thirteen,” was her humorless reply. I was 21 at the time.

Standing and shivering outside the club, I was already contemplating a cold, miserable night in the car. What would sting even more would be the injustice of it all, the fact that the genuine punks—the ones who had driven 50 miles in the snow to see one of their favorite bands—would be turned away in front of the smug smirks of an indifferent older crowd just looking for a fun night out. I suddenly felt even more out of place. Whenever I picked my head up to look around, it seemed as if contemptuous glances were cast in our direction. It may have been me-against-the-world teenaged paranoia, but the message conveyed in those disapproving stares seemed to be: “What the hell are these derelict kids doing in Sag Harbor?” At least that’s how I translated what appeared to be a thinly disguised disdain for youth, for blue-collar rebellion, and for punk music.

I have to admit, part of me relished this outsider status as it seemed to blend into the punk rock mindset quite seamlessly. I was young and idealistic, my own disdain for consumerism and untrustworthy government emboldened by the “fuck the world” anti-establishment ethos of the punk music I loved. I wrote lyrics from Fugazi songs on my white T-shirts. I grew my hair long. I drank. Yet I still played for the high school soccer team and joined the year book staff. Not exactly outsider qualifications.

Looking back now, I wonder what happened to that person, the passionate, heart-on-his-sleeve young man who naively thought that making bold statements and being a vegetarian could inspire or even actualize change, however small. Have I become complacent in my middle years? Perhaps a bit too cynical or jaded? Sometimes I think the younger, more idealistic version of me still exists—he’s just inundated with the everyday pressures and rigors of adulthood, the sleeplessness and stress of parenthood, and the daunting realization that that nefarious corporate paycheck is actually very much a necessity to help pay for little things like a mortgage, food and daycare. There’s just never enough time or energy for idealism.

“I just hope we can get in the fucking door,” I remember thinking as I stood shivering in my T-shirt.

Suddenly, a glimmer of hope was revealed as we approached the front of the line. The familiar suffocated thump of loud music could be heard through the walls of the club, the volume amplified every time someone opened the door. Now we only needed to find a way to get in. As luck would have it, this potential roadblock was also overblown. The goons gave our IDs cursory glances and quickly ushered us inside. Was it an all-ages show? Doubtful. Was it too cold for them to care? Perhaps. I’d like to think that nothing could have stopped us on that night, that our desire and determination to experience our first Ramones show would not be denied. Nevertheless, we hustled inside, exchanging furtive smiles, and felt the warmth of the crowded room start to thaw our frigid limbs. I saw a poster announcing the Ramones show and pointed; Jeff and I looked at each other with relief. The bored girl in the ticket booth collected our money with perfected disinterest, not bothering to ask whether we wanted to check our coats. There were more business casual types inside, milling around the bar and chatting up the women. Were we really the outsiders? We’d been to dozens of shows before and we’d never witnessed a crowd that seemed so out of place.

Jeff excitedly tapped me on the shoulder. “GBH!” he exclaimed in reference to the rambunctious, punk metal song the DJ was playing, a track from the “City Baby Attacked by Rats” record from the early ‘80s—not that the gold chain and Drakar Noir-wearing philistines populating this pretentious shithole would know the difference.

The Ramones eventually took the stage in their trademark torn blue jeans and black leather jackets. They ripped through a blistering set of their best songs, an unrelenting maelstrom of up-tempo guitars and pounding drums punctuated by a guttural “1, 2, 3, 4!” before launching into the next assault. It was pure, unabashed rock-n-roll cut down to the bare essentials, a 4-chord nirvana doled out in a barrage of two-minute punk songs. We were ecstatic, jumping around the crowded dance floor and soaking it up. What made the show even more meaningful was the fact that the bassist, CJ Ramone, hailed from our hometown of Deer Park. He was a Ramone and he was one of us!

I’m not sure exactly when I realized it—perhaps during “Teenage Lobotomy” or “Beat on the Brat” or “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment”—but it suddenly became quite clear that while we were blissfully bopping our scrawny high school bodies around the club, singing along with their inanely wonderful lyrics (“I don’t want to be a pinhead no more! I just met a girl that I could go for!”), a more sinister element had begun to emerge in the audience. Apparently the older crowd had knocked a few back by this point and was starting to get riled up—you might even say borderline violent. Vinnie, who was standing just to my right, got body blocked into the wall of people in front of us and crumpled to the ground. I spun around to see some ape with his shirt unbuttoned high-fiving his friends and then bounding off in another direction. What the fuck? I helped Vinnie up. He assured me he was OK and we quickly moved off to the side.

“What is wrong with these assholes?” I thought to myself as they maliciously lined people up and barreled over them. Jeff, Charlie and I had been to numerous shows together and although we were metal heads, longhairs, and didn’t exactly fit in with the New York hardcore scene, we were very familiar with the code: You helped anyone up if they fell down. If they had to re-tie their laces, you watched their back so they didn’t get inadvertently stomped by the surging crowd. I once carried an unconscious kid out of the pit during a Murphy’s Law show after he had jumped off the stage and banged his head on the ground. We prided ourselves on being old school (even though we were only teenagers) and we knew that you weren’t supposed to blatantly blindside an unsuspecting person. This was clearly not CBGB’s or Max’s Kansas City, not that we had ever been to those places (I’d go to CBGB’s many times later on but Max’s sadly closed before my time), but this was my first Ramones show and I was going to make the best of it.

Again, the set list is now a blur, but at one point Charlie boosted me up and I surfed the crowd for a minute or so, a thrilling yet foolish maneuver that resulted in my crashing to the floor of the narrow space behind the partition dividing the crowd from the stage. I quickly leaped on stage and found myself face to face with Joey Ramone. I was literally inches from his mic stand and couldn’t help but notice, as security swooped in and dragged me off by the back of my shirt, that Joey had a thick stream of what appeared to be blood and snot oozing out of his nose and down his chin. What stands out the most from this brief encounter is that while part of my brain was occupied by the task at hand (I was being forcefully removed from the stage), another part was focused on the entranced expression on Joey’s face—the eerie, fixated stare from behind his round, tinted glasses and the fact that he didn’t even bother to wipe the bloody phlegm from his chin. Was he so locked into the music that he didn’t even notice? Or was he just high, drifting his way through the set list in a world of his own?

Of course we’ll never know. But while a bloodied and spellbound Joey and the rest of the Ramones steadfastly blazed through their set just as they had done thousands of times before, I was mercifully thrown off the side of the stage and permitted to rejoin the sweaty throng of revelers, a combination of glee and trepidation in my heart. I would go on to see the Ramones at least a dozen times, but this show was my first. It may not have been CBGB’s but I was with my friends and, for a few short hours, we were finally living our punk rock dream.

A few days later—the ringing in my ears having finally subsided—I was standing at the register at Blockbuster, which was comprised of a till and a PC monitor that listed all of the customer’s account information. It was late and I was tired. I absentmindedly took the next customer’s card and scanned it, only this name on the screen was instantly familiar: Ward, Christopher. I looked up and standing before me was none other than CJ fucking Ramone! A sleeveless shirt exposed his tattoo-covered arms, and over his shoulder was slung the same black leather jacket from the show. He was with an attractive girl with lots of earrings, torn stockings and purple streaks in her hair. I told him how much I enjoyed the show. He told me he was having the time of his life. I was awe struck, not only by who he was but also by the sheer improbability of his being in my store during my shift just a couple days after seeing him perform. And he was so cool. Despite his recently acquired status as punk rock royalty, he comported himself with the humility and diffidence of a local kid lucky enough to be living his own dream. His newfound fame clearly hadn’t gone to his head and this fact really resonated with me. I felt as if I could relate to him, like he really was one of us after all. Of course I didn’t charge him for the videos. Blockbuster and its bullshit uniforms could kiss my ass.

This piece was written just before the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America on January 20, 2009.

Has Change Really Come?

Thousands crowd around transistor radios in Nairobi and all around Africa from Goma to Mogadishu. Far away in Chicago, a once upon a time “skinny kid with a funny name” stands before an ecstatic crowd. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” he begins, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” That man, that black man, is Barack Obama. And in that moment, as he speaks and America applauds, as his image and words are beamed to the world from one satellite to the next, across cellular networks and along fiber-optic cables, that son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas is American Zeitgeist personified. We cannot see it in his demeanor but we can hear it in his words: “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

But has change really come?

History is being made in America, yet even as a black man fulfills Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream by being judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin, on the same day, out in California, Arizona and Florida, the wee gains earned by another estranged minority demographic are being rolled back. On this day of momentous change in America that puts a black man on his way to the White House, the right of same-sex couples to live in legal matrimony is denied.

And what more can one expect in the electoral system of democracy where the onus is placed upon millions of individuals to say “yes” or “no” to the existential questions of life and liberty? To choose either Republican or Democrat where the devil they know is somewhere in between? When one man comes and appeals to people of all races and creeds across the pre-set boundaries of Red and Blue, what he gains is the burden of their divergent expectations.

As Obama’s presidency turns from dream into reality, so must these mounting expectations face the cold shoulder of reality. America must realize that Obama’s win is not a revolution. It is an evolution of the American democratic process. It is an evolution to a point of perfecting the political sleight of hand that all democracies aim for: the endorsement by the people of the maintenance of the status quo, or a simulacrum of it, that the power elite can live with. That realization must begin in America and travel the entire globe right down to Obama’s fatherland—my country Kenya.

Who is Obama?

Just like the rest of us mortal, non-American-President-Elects, there are a lot of things that Obama is or is not. What we do not know we can only speculate, but to keep that speculation within reason is to ask too much from most Obama watchers. Some have posited that since Obama is not a descendant of slaves, he does not have the deep seated resentment for white people that is said to characterize most Americans of African descent. But wait a minute, says Ben Macintyre writing for The Times of London, (1) “Barack Obama is no admirer of British colonialism, to judge from his writings, but the discovery that the British authorities tortured his grandfather may well deepen any animosity.”

Obama’s Kenyan grandfather was tortured by the Brits at the height of Kenya’s independence struggle. This story was quickly picked up by all the major papers in the UK and even got a helping hand across the pond by The Huffington Post. (2) I fail to see how his (alongside that of several UK Labour Party MPs in the ’50s) not being a fan of British colonialism makes him a danger to British-American partnership.

That said, Obama is in fact quite distanced from the realities of Kenyan colonial history. Obama did not grow up in a Kenya conflicted by the neocolonialist historical revisionism in school and the whispers of the savage brutality of the white man at home. And if it is true that Obama’s grandfather was arrested, jailed, and tortured for two years, it does not make Obama, by default, a radical.

What is particularly spurious in Macintyre’s article are his attempts to connect Obama’s grandfather to the violence of Mau Mau. The Mau Mau revolt lasted between 1952 and 1960. And even considering Britain’s reaction to it, which was the detention without trial of tens of thousands of Kikuyus and the villagisation of the rest of them, Mau Mau was a Kikuyu problem. If Obama’s grandfather had come from fighting on the British side in the second World War, that he was jailed in 1949 does not mean that he was a member of Mau Mau but of at least one of a host of outlawed organizations. That organization could have been the Kikuyu Central Association (and Macintyre’s article agrees with this), even though he was a Luo, or even a trade union. Such movements were outlawed not because they were violent, Marxist or evil in anyway anyone can think of in modern Britain but because they sought a decent level of African representation in government. The violence would come later, long after Obama’s grandfather had been released from jail, and as Obama points out in his memoirs he was jailed for over six months and later found innocent. Obama does not dwell on it, who are we to?

To accuse Barack Hussein Obama of a genetic predisposition to militarism is, and I say this tongue in cheek, to confuse him with Thomas Baptiste Morello. That is the Kenyan-American who rages against every and any machine of power including Obama. Rocker par excellence and guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, Morello is an ethnic Kikuyu. Yes, he is from Illinois, half Kenyan, half, ahem, Irish American, too. He is in his forties, and though, unlike Obama he hasn’t won two Grammies, he has gone platinum twice. And while Obama’s links to Mau Mau and revolutionaries are rather tenuous, Morello’s father—Ngethe Njoroge, Kenya’s first ambassador to the United Nations—was a once upon a time Mau Mau guerilla, and Morello himself has funded Mexico’s Zapatista rebels.

Obama’s only claim to social change fame is his brief stint as a community organizer in Chicago which was a stepping stone to an illustrious career in electoral politics. But today, Obama is no longer a community organizer nor is he some left leaning university professor, a token black face in the dinning rooms of Bill Ayers and other radical chic whites, he is the President of the United States of America. He is not seeking to engage the system, he is the system. The buck will now stop with him. His job is to protect America’s capitalistic imperialism and the most we can ask of him is that he wears a face not as brutal as Britannia’s.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear?

If Obama is in the least given to ethnic prejudices, then the only person who would have anything to fear in Obama’s foreign policy decisions is President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya. Or so the casual Kenyan observer blinded by the pettiness of our ethnic politics would think.

In late December 2007, Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of a second presidential term after disputed elections. Immediately after this announcement, the country erupted in the most vicious sectarian violence of its post-independence history. To grossly simplify it, the violence pitted members of Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe against all the other tribes and particularly the Luo tribe of his arch rival in that election, Raila Odinga. The blood-letting lasted through January and most of February until a power sharing deal, brokered by former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, was signed on February 28, 2008. Scattered skirmishes continued to erupt around the country until Raila Odinga was sworn in as Prime Minister, and de facto second in command to President Mwai Kibaki. It was the arrival of the tough talking Condoleeza Rice into Kenya with a message from George Bush (5) that pushed the hand of the two principles towards a power sharing deal.

What If?

Would America’s reaction have been any different under an Obama presidency? With an ethnic Luo president of the United States of America? Hardly.

To begin with, Obama is a strong critic of Kibaki and the only statement that he has made that could be construed as being likely to guide his policy towards Kenya is that corruption must end in this country.

But assuming we are to join the long line of Obama detractors and argue that his policy towards Kenya will be informed by parochial and kindred interests, then Kibaki, though a Kikuyu, has nothing to fear. Kibaki and Obama Sr. were friends. Even more than that, Kibaki got Obama Sr. a job as an economist at the Kenyan Treasury. Obama Sr. had been fired from his earlier job as a government economist and alienated from government for his anti-government protests in the wake of his benefactor Tom Mboya’s assassination. (The scholarship that landed Obama Sr. in America and the University of Hawaii, where he met Mary Anne Dunham, future mother of President Obama, was one of many organized by Tom Mboya). This return to political favor, though, would take place after the death of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, and with Mwai Kibaki’s rise to the position of Vice President and Minister of Finance.

What about Raila Odinga, who is from Obama’s Luo community? To openly support Raila in a political contest with Kibaki would be political suicide for Obama. All of America’s far Right would run roughshod over Obama yelling “Communist!” In 1965, as Obama Sr. was finishing his Masters in Economics at Harvard, Raila Odinga was on his way to the Technical University, Magdeburg in East Germany. In the height of the Post Election Violence (casually referred to as P.E.V. these days) in Kenya, many of Obama’s American detractors tried to connect him to Raila Odinga with some going as far as to suggest that Obama morally and financially supported the Raila Odinga presidential campaign. All this was not helped by Raila Odinga having told the BBC last January that he is Obama’s cousin, (6) even though that assertion has been denied by the larger Obama family. This is all eerily ridiculous, a guilt by association where the associations are nothing more than tenuous and easy to brush aside-until, that is, the accusations begin to be doled out of the hands of right wing bloggers, Jerome Corsi, and Fox News.

But that is working on the assumption that Obama’s policy decision towards Kenya will be at all informed by his personal relationships. What does Obama himself say? In an interview that appeared in The Daily Nation, in Kenya, of September 1, 2006, Obama says:

It’s educating people on the issue. There is the perception that if there’s ethnic politics the big man in the tribe is going to take care of you. But if you look at what actually happens, only a handful of people in your ethnic group are taken care of. The rest of the people, they are in the 56 per cent of the country living below the poverty line. So why commit yourself to that kind of politics? Why not look at the agenda and platform and find out what they will do for the 56 per cent who need help the most, who are committed to an anti-corruption agenda, who are moving to try [to] improve the judiciary and the police and criminal justice system? If the focus is on issues and not the ethnicity, not the personality, then you can actually hold people accountable for following through on their promises. That’s got to come, again, from the bottom up, although what we do need is the leadership willing to fulfill that role and give voice to it. Part of the reason I went to give that speech at the university is the hope that the next generation is not tied too strongly to these old perceptions.

Consider: a road accident, early December of 2008. (4) Two cars—a BMW and a Mercedes Benz—race each other down Valley Road, Nairobi. (This is happening in a country where the annual Gross Per Capita Income is less than 700 US Dollars and close to half of the population is considered to live in abject poverty.) The occupants of the two cars are a couple of young Kenyan men heading from one bar to the next. It is 3 a.m. on a school night.

Who are the participants in this drama? In the Mercedes Benz: Raila Junior. In the BMW: Pepe Kamau. To the rescue: Joseph Muhoho. Raila Junior, a Luo, is the son of Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Pepe Kamau, a Kikuyu, is the son of recently retired chief of Kenya’s Criminal Investigation Department. And Joseph Muhoho is the son of the Director of Kenya’s Civil Aviation Authority, who also happens to be the brother of Mama Ngina Kenyatta, Kenya’s first First Lady and mother to Uhuru Kenyatta the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade. (Since the time this piece was written, Uhuru Kenyatta has become the Minister of Finance.)

And there you have it. Kenya’s national cake is not shared along tribal boundaries but class ones. If Obama were drawn into supporting one or the other—Odinga or Kibaki—Kenya’s economic dynamics would not change. Rich Kikuyus and rich Luos would still only get richer while poor Kikuyus and poor Luos become poorer.

Consider: if Obama had been a Kenyan, he would not have grown up as part of this power elite. He would have been his father’s son, (7)and one of the hordes living on the proverbial “less than a dollar a day.” If Obama must remember Kenya, it is only because it makes him proud to be an American. He is what he is today not because of his Kenyan roots, but in spite of them. Obama’s success has nothing to do with Kenya and everything to do with America.

Will Change Come to Kenya?

On the day of Obama’s inauguration, Americans can stand up and cheer, and salute one moment when the words of the founding fathers of their nation ring true: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” On January 20th, Americans will celebrate, and Kenyans will join them.

But the only real change that Kenyans have seen lately is grim. For in my country, the cost of living is always on the rise, the chance of living on the downfall, and what passes for liberty—through our own sham of democracy—is the perennial pastime of recycling political thugs. Shouldn’t we Kenyans, then, leave the Americans to fête their own, and if we must honor Obama, do so by instituting change that we can call our own, change that a significant majority of Kenyans can not only believe in but live by?

LINKS
1. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article5276010.ece
2. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/03/obamas-grandfather-impris_n_1480
39.html
3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/3543882/Barack-Obamas-grandfather-tortured-by-British.html
4. http://allafrica.com/stories/200812050668.html
5. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/world/africa/01diplo.html?_r=1
6. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7176683.stm
7. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/2590614/Barack-Obamas-lost-brother-found-in-Kenya.html

Her skin tells the truth: full, curvesome, with hints of over-ripeness, and yet glorious, glorious. My own skin, alert as a prairie dog.

Those were my salad days, the days of my early summer, they were the days of her early autumn. And it was winter that January, cold, brutal, my first in the realm, tempering the jubilation of an unrepentant ex-acolyte who, by moving to faithless Manhattan, had strained, if not broken, the thick leash of church and home. I needed sex as an aperient, to expunge still powerful strictures from my system. I needed symphonies of carnal love to flesh out the music my body had long been hearing, needed to feast on a buffet of bodies offered willingly, needed to pursue more earthly kingdoms.

She had sensed this at my older brother’s party—my brother, who regaled me with tales of New York on his occasional visits to Manila—sensed the night’s augury, when my eyes gloried in the sight of her décolletage. She picked up on my overwhelming lack of artfulness (praise be to naivete! I recalled thinking later on), sensed that I would be putty (though perhaps not as soft) in her hands.

I thought I was picking her up. Nothing could be further from the truth, but truth to tell, this hound didn’t care.

At her apartment, she said she had been widowed early, and had refused all offers of marriage since. Said she had seen the future and it was to be unrestricted by commitment and ceremony. Said her name was Cleo. No kidding, I remarked. No kidding. Then, I said, I will be your Anthony. She kissed me lingeringly.

“I hope your asp stings.”

Stroke of belly, down.

“Asp and you shall receive.”

And so she did, I did. We did, did, happy as oysters and brisk as rabbits robed in rain. In a marine feast of clam and abalone, seaweed, kelp, we were divers after pearls, weavers of bolts of silk. Alchemists of elixirs made to be swallowed, to transform us into devils and angels, into explorers of the body’s compass, our tongues to be tickled and pickled. And in her bedroom’s opposing mirrors, with their superfoetations, of image upon image, an infinite menagerie, of calves, asses, barnyard fowl (dark and crowing), atavistic, feline (clawed and clawing). I: Young man happily lost at she. She: Cleo, laved by a churning sea. Regal. Found her subject, her scepter, and ruled.

It proved to be a warm queendom, after all, Manhattan, and I, a cub in winter.

Part of a series of New York stories
Copyright Luis H. Francia

It’s just after rush hour on a warm July morning and I’m picking up my mother at Grace’s place in Bridgeport. I have to work at five-thirty in Manhattan and I’m praying that the traffic will behave and I will be able to take my mother to the dental clinic at Norwalk Hospital, bring her back to Bridgeport and make it back to the city on time. I drove to my father’s place in Connecticut after work the night before because I am panicked that I’ll miss the appointment, and it makes more sense to drive to Connecticut from Manhattan after work rather than driving home from work in Manhattan to Brooklyn and then leaving in the morning. Even though I have called my mother a few times to remind her that we are going to the dentist I know that she will not remember. I park in front of Grace’s building and buzz her apartment.

“Hi, Grace, it’s Erica.” No response.

“I’m downstairs.”

“Okay, we’ll be down.”

Grace says that they’ll be right down. That means at least ten minutes. My mother is on Alzheimer’s time and Grace is on Jamaican time which may account for why Grace is so well suited to care for my mother. I’m sure that as Grace is readying my mother she’s telling my mother that I’m downstairs waiting. Grace is probably repeating this several times as my mother repeatedly asks her where she’s going. Despite all this preparation when the elevator door opens and my mother sees me standing there, her face lights up.

“Sweetie, what a surprise,” my mother exclaims and she hugs me, “I miss you.” My mother always missed me, even when she was well and saw me frequently.

“I miss you too,” I say. “Hi Grace.”

Grace grunts. Grace’s not fond of saying hello or goodbye.

“What do you want to do, Sweetie?”

“I’m taking you to the dentist.”

“The dentist? I don’t need a dentist.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“I do? Why?”

“Because you’re teeth are cracked.”

“They are?”

“Yes, they are.”

“I don’t need a dentist to fix my teeth.”

“Then who? I don’t think you want me or Grace to fix your teeth, do you?”

“Why do I have to have my teeth fixed at all?”

“Because they’re broken. The dentist is going to give you new teeth?”

“What’s wrong with my old ones?”

“Open your mouth.”

My mother opens her mouth and I guide her finger inside, running it over the cracked nubs.

“Do you feel how they’re broken?”

“How did my teeth break?”

“It’s complicated. Today is just a check up. We’ll go to lunch after.”

“Or we could just go to lunch and skip the dentist.”

“We could, except that this appointment is years overdue. Ready? Say goodbye to Grace.”

“Isn’t she coming?”

“No she can’t, she has a lot of her own stuff to do. You’ll see her later.”

“Ohhh, don’t you want to come with us, Grace?”

“It’s okay, monmy,” Grace says in her Jamaican accent.

“Why can’t you come with us?”

“It’s okay. I’ll see you later,” Grace says.

“You will?”

“Yes, mommy, you go with Erica now. I’ll see you later.”

My mother kisses Grace, and Grace says “Bye mommy, I love you,” and my mother says, “I love you too, Grace,” and for a moment even though I know how lucky we are that my mother feels so comfortable with Grace, I am jealous. I also know that later when I bring my mother back she will ask why she can’t stay with me and that will upset me too.

I ease my mother into the passenger seat of her Toyota ’87 Corolla, placing my hand over her head so she doesn’t bump it as she’s getting in, and I fasten the seatbelt.

“This is my car,” my mother announces, “a Toyota ’87 Corolla.”

“That’s right, it is.”

“Why do you have my car?”

“So that I can see you more often and take you places.”

“Oh. This is my car, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But you don’t drive it anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s easier for you to be driven than to drive. I’m your chauffeur. Isn’t it swanky, having a chauffeur?”

“Swanky.”

Once we are on the highway my mother sees another small white sedan.

“Look, there’s my car.”

“It looks like your car, but we’re actually in your car, so that can’t be your car.”

“So that’s not my car?”

“No. We’re in your car.”

A little bit down the road, another small white sedan passes us.

“There’s my car,” my mother says.

“I know, there are a lot of cars that look like your car.” I’m wondering how many little white sedans we’re gong to pass in this twenty minute ride. Next time I do this I should put a PBA out for all little white four-door sedans to stay home. Please.

On the highway my mother looks around and asks where we are and remarks that nothing looks familiar. I explain to her that that is because we are on the highway. But in fact everything does look the same and so much of the charm of the area has given way to huge shopping centers with huge stores repeating themselves endlessly from town to town, ugly large scale Andy Warhol’s in taupe and tan.

We pass Exit 17 and my mother says, “Exit 17…”

“Yes…”

“That’s Westport.”

“That’s right. Exit 17 is Westport.”

“I live there.”

“You used to live there.”

“I don’t anymore?”

“No, you don’t. Now you live with Grace.”

“I live with Grace? Where does Grace live?”

“Grace lives in Bridgeport and you live with Grace in Bridgeport.”

“I live in Bridgeport?”

“Yes. You live with Grace in Bridgeport.”

“I live in Bridgeport? How did that happen?”

“Well, we didn’t like you living alone anymore and so for a little while you lived with me in Brooklyn, and then you lived with Susan in Fairfield, and then you lived with Paula at Dad’s in Norwalk, and now you live with Grace and Albee in Bridgeport.”

My mother hasn’t adjusted to all the moving she has done since we realized that she could not live alone

“That’s a lot of bouncing around.”

“I know. I’m sorry…”

“I sound like a bum.”

“You’re not a bum. You’re very popular. We just all want you to live with us. You’re more like a hippy.”

“A hippy? I don’t want to be a hippy. Where are we going?”

“We’re going to the dentist.”

“The dentist? I don’t want to go to the dentist.”

“No one wants to go to the dentist. If you wanted to go to the dentist I would think that there was really something wrong with you. Like, maybe you were having an affair with the dentist. Are you having an affair with the dentist?”

“An affair with the dentist? Who would have an affair with a dentist?”

“I guess somebody might.”

“It doesn’t sound very appealing.”

When we arrive at Norwalk Hospital where the dental clinic is we hold hands as we walk down the corridors. My mother smiles at everyone she passes, and everyone smiles back. The dental clinic has a check-in window in the middle of a long corridor and after we give the receptionist our name and my mother’s social security card we are told to take a seat. We settle into our chairs. My mother stares off into space, and I pull out a book and just as I crack its spine,

“Oh my God, Erica, look at that man,” my mother points to a Mexican man signing in, “He’s so fat.”

“Mom!”

“What?”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Look at him.”

“Here, why don’t you look at a magazine?” It must be awful to have been a fat child and to have endured all that cruel teasing by other children, and then to have grown up and all the childish teasing and taunting ends only to be replaced by four million elderly people with impaired editing mechanisms. I go through the magazine selection on the table, and discover that I am actually challenged to find a magazine more interesting to look at than the fat man. They’re all home magazines, but not good ones. There’s a lot of ad copy and some uninspiring photos. My mother can’t really read anymore, so pictures are usually the way to go. I give her one of the magazines and for a little while, almost a minute, she flips through the pages as though she is actually skimming articles and ads the way a person without Alzheimer’s does. The difference is that she lingers, not on essays or pictures, but on insignificant words in an ad for encyclopedias or a subscription re-newel form, or the one blank spot on the page.

And while my mother stares down each page of the magazine, the last image I have of my friend Wayne pops into my head. Wayne was the owner of a restaurant I worked at in Brooklyn. His boyfriend was the chef and the co-owner and basically ran the place. We all wondered what Wayne did. He hosted and had a few design clients whom he would shop for. Mainly he saw a lot of art exhibits and movies and would come into the restaurant he had designed and sort of brighten the place with flowers and chit chat. He loved everyone who worked there and took a real interest in our lives, and believed in our talents, even if he had never seen us perform, and he understood us in some deep psychological way, like my mother. He also knew everything about the customers. One night he was training a hostess and we overheard him say, “Basically your job is to pollinate the tables. You want everyone to know each other by the end of the evening. That would be an ideal night.” We called it DTW, doing the Wayne. He was just like my mother. They were like Blanche duBois with the indiscretions and histrionics sliced out so that just the poetry remained. And they both had that laugh that culminated in chocking and spitting when they were really amused or naughty.

So Wayne’s at St.Vincent’s Hospital in the city and he is dying of AIDS and I have gone to visit him with my new boyfriend, Jack, an environmental lawyer who is 6’5″ and soft spoken. Jack notices that Wayne is sinking into the bed and that he is too weak to prop himself up.

“Wayne, would you like me to pull you up a bit, on the pillows? I think maybe you could see everyone a bit better that way,” Jack says.

“Oh, that would be lovely,” Wayne says flirtatiously. So Jack adjusts a delighted ninety pound Wayne. One of Wayne’s friends has given him a book of Monet’s paintings and we open it up and he takes one look at “Water Lilies,” and his face lights up as if he has just seen Jesus and Mary appear at the door, and he says to me, “My God! Look at the colors!” I remember how when I was younger and searching for the meaning of life, I imagined that if I was present at a friend or family member’s deathbed that maybe that person would impart some wisdom to me, tell me the meaning of life. But when I was visiting Wayne, I didn’t realize that his excitement over the colors was that wisdom that I was looking for. I was far too wrapped up in thinking that Monet was an artist embraced by the bourgeois and I wanted nothing to do with bourgeois values. When Wayne and I talked later on the phone after my visit he said to me, “I’m so happy that you’re with John. He lifted me up. He saw that I had slipped down in the bed and that I needed help getting back up. He asked if he could lift me up so that I could see everyone better. It was so easy for him to pick me up. He’s so tall. Honey, it’s great to have a big man. I’m so happy for you, he really loves you and he’s a wonderful person. I guess I’m giving you my blessing.”

And I start to feel a lump in my throat as I look at my mother unable to really see what is before her, and I am thinking that her illness will never produce any wisdom and what does it really matter anyway because I am too stupid to get it when it is given, and to understand that wisdom comes in such simple forms; in squares, and triangles, and circles; and that it takes years to fully understand the gifts you were given and that you passed over because of your own prejudices at the time, and I am wishing that I had not spent so much time in juvenile existential despair and that I had married Jack so that at least I could chatter on to my mother about my children, my big children, our big tall strong children, her grandchildren, and bring her news of their development, and my heart is cracking and my mind is racing and the tears are pooling, and I whisper to myself, “Stop it,” for the millionth time since my mother has become ill, “Stop it,” for the millionth time that week, “Stop it,” for the millionth time that day, and I reach out to hold her hand and she squeezes mine back and looks up at me and smiles with all this love in her eyes and I have to distract myself from these thoughts so I go back to my reading and,

“Oh, my God! Erica, look at that man, he’s so fat!”

“Mom, sh.”

“I’m not supposed to say things like that?”

“Well, we just don’t say those things out loud.”

“Oh…because it’s not polite?”

“That’s right. Why don’t you look at your magazine?”

My mother goes back to fake reading, and the fat man goes into the bathroom, and a few moments later, “Oh, look,” she says and points to a picture in the magazine, and then looks at me without naming what she’s looking at.

“It’s a peach. Do you like peaches?” I ask her.

“I love peaches.”

“Me too.”

“Let’s go get some.”

“After the dentist.”

“The dentist? Is that why we’re here? I think that they forgot about us. Which is fine, let’s go.”

Just then the woman at the check-in window calls out our name, which is great timing because I can see the fat man returning from the bathroom.

“Come on, mom, let’s go see the dentist.”

“The dentist? What does he want?”

“I don’t know, let’s find out.”

And we go into the inner chambers of the dental clinic where we wait some more and my mother waves her little Marlo Thomas “That Girl” wave to the children who don’t want to be there and she communicates the same to them and they all get each other. She goes to a baby in a stroller and coos to him and squeezes his chubby leg. She could never resist baby skin.

And then my mother is lying down on the dental chair and the dental assistant is telling me how beautiful my mother is, no make-up, cracked teeth, page boy hair cut, a blonde in need of a little touching up, and it’s true she is beautiful, even while she’s annoyed and grimacing.

The dentist asks me questions.

“What happened to her teeth?”

“She was supposed to have dental work done a while ago, but it was very expensive so she delayed. My sister, who’s a nutritionist, said her teeth started crumbling after she had radiation for a small tumor under her tongue. My sister begged her not to have the radiation, just the surgery, but my mother went ahead. Anyway, do you think that’s why her teeth started crumbling?” I ask him. Things pile up in life. Little problems beget big ones. Maybe the dental problems have caused her dementia. Nietzsche suffered from tooth decay and he became a raging…wait, my mother is not raging or raving.

“I don’t know, could be,” the dentist says. “My concern is her bone density. I’d like to take all of her teeth out at once, because this is probably confusing for her. The sooner we get them out we can begin with the mold and then have new teeth made. I have to find out from the lab if she can withstand that. We don’t want hemorrhaging. What’s your mother’s name?”

“It’s Anne.” Anna Banana plays the Piana.

“Hi Anne,” the dentist says.

“Hello, how do you know my name?”

“Your daughter told me.”

“My daughter. Isn’t she lovely?”

“Yes, she is. So you’re having trouble with your teeth?”

“Who said that?”

“Your daughter.”

“If she says so.”

“I’m going to take a look at them, okay.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“She’s funny.”

“Oh, yeah, she’s sassy. Watch out.”

My mother opens her mouth and the dentist starts to poke around talking about what he is seeing, talking about what needs to be done, talking, and I can’t really hear him because I am thinking about my mother’s brain, webbed with plaques and tangles and the dental tape that is within reach. Plaques and tangles. Plaque. Plaque. I want the dentist to wrap some dental tape around his fingers, flip open her head, and floss her brain. Get rid of the plaque, silly string after mischief night covering her neurons, choking the neurotransmitters trying to tell the other neurons to remember; remember the stove is on; remember the way home; remember the phone call; the meal just eaten; what is old is not new; what is new is not old; where we’re going; where we’ve been; what comes now makes sense because of what came before. Remember.

It’s raining cats and dogs. Thunder, lightening—by California standards, practically a hurricane. The clouds are so thick that even if the sun hadn’t set, it’d be dark. But it has—it’s eight o’clock, so in a sense, it’s twice as black as it’d normally be. Regardless, when Bob Harris gets a call from Long Beach Airport wondering if he’d be interested in flying three people—a man and two women—over to Burbank, five bucks each, he doesn’t hesitate.

“Sure,” he says, and is out the door and on his way in less than five minutes.

Bob’s got a single-engine instrument-rated commercial pilot’s license and owns his own plane. He spends a lot of time at the airport, getting in good with the guys in the tower so they’ll call him when freelance jobs like this pop up. It’s been about three years since he was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, and for the time being, flying is fun, pays the bills.

Bob’s only twenty four, but after combat in the jungles of New Guinea, he figures there’s not much left in life to fear. Nothing can be worse than that, he thinks.

Once airborne, Bob circles around to gain some altitude and even though his radio isn’t working—it sounds like bursting kernels of popcorn—he confidently begins cruising north, just under the sky’s ceiling. Everyone’s getting to know each other, making small talk, when what sounds like a shot is fired. Only it’s not—it’s the engine backfiring, missing a beat here and there.

“Oh shit,” Bob mutters under his breath.

He immediately defrosts the carburetor, thinking that ice must’ve formed around it, but the engine only staccatos more.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” one of the women says, voice faltering. “What’s happening? What’s happening?”
Bob’s too busy to respond. He’s trying to figure out how to save their lives. The hairs on the back of his neck rise like freezing icicles when he realizes that he can’t call anyone for help and that because it’s night and stormy and dark and cloudy, he can’t safely execute an emergency landing.

By now the two women and the man are panicking. One of the women begins beating him on the back, screaming and crying and whimpering and begging him to tell them what’s going on. Frustrated, Bob reaches around and slaps the two people closest to him. “Shut up,” he says.

The plane is consistently losing altitude when the lights of the Burbank Airport appear. Bob’s radio jumps to life and he requests a straight approach. “What’s the nature of your request?” the tower asks. There are other planes ready to land that have been waiting in line longer than Bob.

Unable or unwilling to voice his reality, Bob lies. “I got three passengers that need to catch a connecting flight,” he says. As the plane nears the runway, the engine quits dead. Bob flares out a couple of times, enabling them to make it onto the asphalt. Their landing feels like an earthquake, but they’re alive—and ungrateful. The passengers go berserk and refuse to pay Bob his fifteen dollars. “You’re the worse pilot in the world!” they shout, but he doesn’t care.

“Get the hell outta here,” he says with a smile, just happy to be alive.

***

Bob Harris would be a rich man if he had a quarter for every time he found himself in a situation like this. In fact, now that he’s eighty four, he’d be more than comfortably retired, able to spend his free time leisurely putting around a golf ball or falling asleep waiting for the fish to bite. Although Bob doesn’t live in a world where he gets monetarily reimbursed for near-death experiences, he still takes every chance he gets to put his life in peril. From almost losing his head performing stunt work, to breaking all his ribs (plus his shoulder, scapula, knee and ankle) in a car racing accident, to nearly freezing to death in the middle of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Bob’s never once backed down from going face to face with the Grim Reaper.
This fact has not escaped his notice. “Isn’t that amazing, when you think about it?” he says, shaking his head and looking over his shoulder, as if the Reaper himself might be there, eagerly waiting for his next opportunity. “All my friends are gone, and a lot of them have been gone for years—when I was in my sixties, for God’s sake, they were dying. They died young. None of them were real old, so you don’t want to know me too long.”

Bob works out with my Dad at the gym, and when we first meet (at a Denny’s, where all the waitresses seem to know his name), I can’t help but think that he looks like a miniature, geriatric version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s buff-his torso is shaped like an upside down triangle—and you can tell he exercises regularly. He’s got a full head of crystal white hair, but given his steady voice and appetite for pancakes (easy on the syrup), I assume he’s in his early seventies. When I ask him how old he is, he responds by asking how old I am. “If I had my wish, twenty six would be the age I’d like to be,” he says. “No younger, no older.”

Bob doesn’t stay in shape because he’s vain, and he doesn’t do it because he wants to live forever. He does it because he wants to race—flat track motorcycle racing to be specific. His son, Raider, first introduced him to the sport three years ago (that would be when he was eighty one), and Bob found this relatively young, American-style variety thrilling. Flat track was different than the other dirt bike sports he had previously competed in because riders pass one another as they whip through corners and turns, rather than on straight-aways. There was also the added bonus of a steel-covered boot—a flesh and blood anchor the biker drags in the dirt to prevent toppling over as he rounds these bends.

Bob chooses to describe the sport in a much different fashion: “You race around in a dirt circle and you’re all sideways. It’s so much fun.”

The flat track season begins in February and runs through October, but Bob’s able to practice year-round on a track he and his friends built in his backyard in Acton, California, a dusty, tumbleweed-pocked town about forty-five minutes north of Los Angeles.

Last season, out of three hundred racers, Bob was voted Most Improved Rider of the Year. This was just after he had his most recent up close and personal encounter with the Reaper. It was the last lap of his last race. He’d been able to pass every other biker, except one, who kept sneaking out from under his grip. “I start catching up to him as we’re going down the last straight-away and we go into the turn together,” he recounts. “We’re sliding there, doing about a hundred, and he’s right next to me. I remember thinking, ‘Oh God, if I take him and me out, we’re dead, right?’ And then I thought, ‘I am not shutting down.’ I just kept it screwed on all the way and I beat him.”

***

Bob says he doesn’t remember what year he was born, so I do the math and tell him it was 1923. “That sounds about right,” he says. “I’m so bad—I can’t keep dates.” He does remember, however, that he grew up in Long Beach, California, and that his father worked on the oil wells there. “My mom told me that we lived in a tent on Signal Hill and that when I was a baby she did my diapers in a tub over a bonfire. That’s really something, isn’t it?”

When Bob was about five years old, his parents and his two sisters (one older, one younger) moved to Oakland, where his dad played as a drummer for a few “big bands.” Soon thereafter, his mother and father, who were just eighteen and nineteen respectively when Bob was born, separated. All three kids were sent to boarding houses. Whereas his mother and grandmother eventually retrieved his sisters, Bob spent his entire childhood in boarding homes, attending a total of sixteen different grammar schools.

“My father was a good-looking guy and they should’ve never been married,” he says. “He was a young lover, you know what I mean? He didn’t want kids and he’d only come around about every six months. He asked me one time, ‘Do you love me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I do, but not the same way as if you would’ve raised me.’”

Bob struck out on his own when he started high school, after he began working the graveyard shift at a ball bearing factory, where he earned enough to rent a room for ten bucks a week. He only made it through the tenth grade. After turning eighteen, he decided riding the rails would be far more interesting than going to school and work. One day, with nothing more than a change of underwear, an extra pair of socks and a jacket, Bob and a buddy of his hopped aboard a train with no clue where it was going. “You learned quick what cars to get into and what part of the car to sleep in so that if the freight train shifts you don’t get killed,” he explains. “There were different hobo villages and you learned not to sleep by the fire because it was full of cooties.”

The two left with no more than five bucks a piece and would beg for food from bakeries. “We would say, ‘Excuse me, could I buy fifty cents worth of stale whatever you got? My friend and I, we’re hungry,’” Bob recounts, with a grin that’s up to no good. “They’d give us a whole bag of day old pastry, and we’d get back on the train and as we’d go through the streets we’d wave and throw the donuts at cars.”

Bob stopped riding the rails after a close brush with the Reaper, although his decision had nothing to do with being scared straight. Rather, he just liked the town where the train stopped—or at least nearly stopped. Bob and his friend had been sleeping, and upon waking, they threw open the doors of their car only to be slapped in the face with one hell of a snowstorm. They didn’t know it yet, but they were in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Donner Pass. The two stepped down into the fresh blanket of waist-deep snow and began hiking towards what they hoped would be civilization. Fortunately for them, though clothed in nothing more pants, a T-shirt and a light jacket, theirs was not a Donner Party-esque destiny.

“We were nearly frozen to death when we found a cabin,” Bob says. “We broke into it through a window, found sleeping bags and beans and started a fire. The next morning, the front door opens and there’s the sheriff and the guy that owned the place. We talked him into letting us stay there and went to work for Union Pacific.”

From there, Bob eventually moved on and got hired at a shipyard before he was drafted into the army. Whereas his memory is fuzzy regarding every other specific time and place in his life, it’s sharp enough to draw blood in regards to his years as a soldier. “I went in January 3rd, 1943 and got out January 6th, 1946,” he tells me. It was on the GI Bill’s tab that he learned how to fly planes and earned his commercial pilot’s license, but it wasn’t long before he bored of that as well. “I’ve always liked to do something and not just say I did it, but to have accomplished it and be better than the average person. Then, when I have enough of it, I go on to something else.”

***

When Bob talks about outliving everyone he knows, he’s not just referring to high school pals and long-time neighbors. He’s referring to bona fide cultural icons. “All of my friends are dead,” he says, ticking them off on his fingers like a to-do list. “Lee Marvin’s dead, Keenan Wynn’s dead, Elvis Presley’s dead, Steve McQueen’s dead. I can go on and on through all the other actors and actresses I know—all dead.” Bob’s not showing off. After working for forty years as a television and film stunt man, these long-lost souls were genuinely a part of his inner circle.

Bob was working as a car salesman when he first met Keenan Wynn. The two became friends after Keenan found out Bob had a Jaguar he raced on the weekends. “Lemme give you my address,” Keenan had said. “Come over to my house tonight—I’m gonna loan you a good helmet.” When Bob arrived, the two enjoyed a few cocktails before Keenan brought out the helmet. It was hand-painted with images of Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and Pluto, and much sturdier than the one he’d been using. Great, Bob thought. I need all the help I can get. That weekend he had a race at the Old Paramount Ranch, a particularly dangerous track where three guys had recently been killed.

“I’m sitting in my car, waiting for my race, when two guys come over,” Bob says. “‘We’re from the Los Angeles Times, could we get a picture of you?’ they asked. I thought, why me, I’m not famous, but okay. ‘Could you put the helmet on?’ they asked, so I put it on and they take these pictures. The next morning I get all these phone call from my friends saying, ‘Hey, your picture’s in the sports section.’ I say, ‘You’re kidding me.’ I get the Times and there’s the photo and it’s titled, James Dean Helmet Races Again—that was the helmet that was in the car with James Dean when he got killed! Well I took the helmet right back to Keenan and I said, ‘Man, I didn’t know that was his helmet! I don’t want to be racing in this!’”

After that, Keenan and Bob became close friends and would go dirt bike riding in the desert every weekend with Lee Marvin, Dan Blocker and Steve McQueen. Keenan got Bob his first entertainment industry gig, as a stand in, and then found him work as a stunt driver for a series he was starring in called “Couple Shooters.” Soon thereafter Bob got his Screen Actor’s Guild card and worked on anything and everything from “Bonnie and Clyde” with Warren Beatty to “Diamonds are Forever” with Jill St. John to “What’s Up Doc” with Barbra Streisand.

“Oh, I also stunted five movies with Elvis Presley,” Bob adds. “What happened was I was racing exotic Can-Am cars for Dan Blocker for this TV series he was the star of called ‘Bonanza.’ Our race cars were very valuable and the people filming the movie ‘Viva Las Vegas’ wanted to borrow them. They said, ‘You should use Bob, he’s got dark hair, he’s almost as tall as Elvis and not much older. When I did the driving it worked out well and Elvis liked me, so the next time they did something they were like, ‘Let’s get Bob again.’ Once we became friends it was a given that I’d stunt double for him.”

***

When Bob was still zooming around the track in cars, Patti, his wife, never missed a race. When he won, she would jump in his Can-Am and beam at the crowd while he circled around one final time, proudly waving the checkered flag.

“I’m not going,” she told him one Saturday, just before they were to leave for Santa Barbara.

“What? You’re kidding,” Bob replied, not even looking back as he made his way to the front door.

“No, really, I’ve got other things I need to do today.”

Bob shrugged his shoulders, went back and kissed her on the cheek. He didn’t want to get into an argument before a big race.

When Bob arrived at the track, his close friend Lance Reventlow (heir to the Woolworth fortune and Jill St. John’s husband) immediately asked where Patti was. “She didn’t want to come,” Bob said. Lance cocked his head to the side and furrowed his brow, but let it go at that.

Another one of Bob’s friends, Joe, was buckling in for his race and Bob approached the vehicle, bent down and tightened his seat belt. “Good luck, buddy, see you at the finish line,” he said.

“Hey Bobby, not so tight, that’s no good,” Joe said.

“You gotta tighten it man,” Bob replied.

“Nah man, loosen just a little for me, please.”

“Okay, you got it, you’re the boss.”

The race began and after a few laps, as Joe pulled into the second turn his vehicle began wildly spinning out of control, bouncing off the walls like a pin ball. Bob’s breath caught in his chest while the emergency response team sprinted onto the field. It was no use. Joe was killed instantly.

Bob felt like shit, but racing is like the circus—the show must go on, and after clearing the track of what was left of his friend’s vehicle, his number was up. I’ll win it for Joe, Bob thought. He started off the race strong, made it around a couple of times and increased his speed up to one hundred and forty as he entered that same second turn. Suddenly, someone popped a bubble of gum directly into his eardrum. Disoriented, Bob realized a millisecond too late that he hadn’t suddenly acquired a passenger, his suspension had snapped. He slammed onto his brakes and into the track’s cement wall, beamed off and headed directly toward the grand stands. Bob couldn’t hear the crowds’ screams, but he could see them turning and running for their lives. That’s the last thing he remembers.

He later woke up in the hospital and saw a doctor at the foot of his bed with a metallic clipboard. “Congratulations,” the doctor said. “You made it.” Bob couldn’t move and he couldn’t feel much. He had broken or cracked all of his ribs. His shoulder, scapula, knee and ankle were also broken. All the muscles in his back had been torn loose and three of his vertebrae had been crushed. Nobody needed to tell him he was lucky to be alive.

When Patti showed up at the hospital her eyes were swollen and her nose was red. “I knew it,” she whispered. “That’s why I couldn’t come.”

***

Bob’s not religious. He doesn’t pray and he doesn’t think God’s chosen to spare his life over others. His guess as to why he’s still alive is as good as anyone’s.

“I’m an agnostic,” he tells me. “I believe there’s a maker, I believe that there’s somebody, but other than that, nobody knows. There are just men who think they know. Everything that you read about religion was written by a man. Nobody knows what’s gonna happen and it’s just so silly to worry about it.”