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Distant Replay

Monday, September 29, 2008

One of my guilty pleasures is watching the TV show “Cops”. The show where cameramen ride along with the police and crimes/chases/apprehensions are shown as they happen (or so it seems, anyway).

When people ask me about this, I tell them “I like watching people get in trouble who aren’t me.” Which is truer than I’d like to admit, really. You watch this show and it’s amazing the things people will do and say in when the police have caught you in the commission of a crime. A lesson in human nature, on some level.

But there is something deeper in it for me. The memory of my own close encounter with the cops. No handcuffs were involved, but the incident left an impression that is still there, more than 30 years later.

Kenner, Louisiana. The spring of 1978. I had driven down to New Orleans to see a friend of mine who was a Top-40 deejay at one of that city’s big AM stations (yes, AM radio was once the #1 music destination). Casey (not his real name) and I had worked together at a Baton Rouge station until he had hit the “big time” down in the Crescent City. I had been in college at the time, and had subsequently graduated and begun working in local TV news.

The purpose of my visit was simple: we were going to drink and smoke as much dope as we could. Casey was older than I was, and he had a way of talking to women I had never been able to master. I liked hanging out with him. He had a small apartment in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, which is why I was there.

The story wouldn’t be complete unless you know about the car I was driving that night – a 1977 Ford Pinto wagon – dark green, in the interest of full disclosure. This is important, because this car had a great hiding place for a baggie full of pot: the plastic cover of the emergency brake lever. If you pulled this cover back hard, you could get it off, and there was just enough room for the baggie. Snap the cover back on, and it seemed to be permanently attached.

I had just driven in from Baton Rouge. It was a Friday night. I had just bought a bag of dope, and I had a freshly-rolled joint in my shirt pocket. The roach from the joint I had smoked was in the ashtray. The bag, of course, was stowed my secret hiding place. I was 23 and clueless.

A couple of blocks from Casey’s apartment I roll through a 4-way stop. Red lights come on behind me. And I go into this blind panic. I step on the gas (remember, this is a 1977 Ford Pinto), and try to run away. I careen into the parking lot of an apartment complex, screech into a parking space, shut off the engine and lights, and lean over so I can’t be seen. Of course, Kenner’s finest is right behind me.

The officer gets me out of the car and immediately smells the aftereffects of the joint I’d recently smoked. He looks in the ashtray and finds the roach.

“This is why you ran?” he asked. I nodded.

“Any more dope in the car?” I shake my head. “Well, I’m going to look, and if that’s all you have I’ll let you go. But if I find any more, I’ll arrest you.”

I nod again. I stand at the front of my car, with the lights of the cop car shining in my eyes. I see him pulling on the emergency brake cover, and I think my heart is going to stop. But the cover stays put. He lets me go with a lecture about how stupid it is to run from the police. 

I get in my car and drive away, my heart thumping like a bass drum. I get to Casey’s apartment and breathlessly tell him the story. He looks at me and laughs.

“Guess he didn’t see this” he said, pointing to my shirt pocket where the outline of the joint was clearly visible. With the light shining on me while I stood at the front of the car, this thing must have stood out like a sore thumb. How this cop missed it is a mystery.

So nothing happened to me as a result of this. But every time I watch people running away on “Cops”, that frightening feeling comes back to me, like somehow this Kenner policeman is going to track me down 30 years later and give me my just desserts.

It’s funny how my mind has a catalog of incidents like this – a rogues’ gallery of my weakest and most embarrassing moments – which it seems to spring on me to relive at odd moments. It never seems to do that with all the happy moments.

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My Dark Places

Monday, August 18, 2008

I’m a funny guy. I make a lot of jokes, and I can make people laugh. I write funny stuff too – for years I’ve written a fake Christmas newsletter (“this year Cee Cee won the Nobel prize for physics and flew on the space shuttle”) which we send out with our holiday cards. People look forward to getting it. My last post, The Case of the Threadbare Diaphragm, was me improvising on a funny idea.

 

So why are my short stories so dark? Over the past two years I’ve written eighteen stories. And with the exception of a couple that I wrote basically as improvisations, they are all about great loss and its aftermath. Over the weekend I read over these stories, and I realized that all my central characters are basically the same person – a watcher, a person frightened by the onrushing changes that life brings, and who keeps trying to arrange and control his/her life to make it less scary. This, of course, is an illusion. And the stories are about the moment this illusion is shattered.

 

I’ve never thought much about where story ideas come from. I get an idea, and I try to write it the best way I know how. I’m working on another one right now, and as a result this trend, this tendency, the attraction to these dark places, has really been on my mind.

 

The non-improvisational stories I write are all about trying to communicate an emotion, a feeling. I want to put the reader into that moment where the carefully-built foundation of a character’s life is torn out by events beyond his/her control. Nothing is left, and the character finds him/herself alone on some unfamiliar beachhead of life, facing the very uncertainty he/she worked so hard to avoid. That sense of isolation, powerlessness and fear of the unknown – that’s the moment I’m after.

 

Unsurprisingly, this is a page right out of my own life. I’m a watcher, and although my life doesn’t scare me the way it used to, the memory of those “beachhead” moments is always with me. With improvisation, I can stay at the surface and be funny. But when I dig down deep, this is what I seem to hit.

 

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Neither, probably. It’s just a thing. My experiences are my experiences – and whatever they are they form the emotional basis of my writing. I think sometimes that my stories are a way of processing these moments of loss, putting them into perspective. Was that what Hemingway did? Fitzgerald? Cheever? I don’t know. What I do know is that the act of writing them (and, heaven knows, so far no editor has shown any sign of wanting to read them) has made me a better writer. Perhaps, too, my dark places have become a little less dark in the bargain.

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Improvisational Writing

Sunday, June 29, 2008

I’ve always enjoyed improvising stories or pieces of stories in a very short time - especially when I’m given words or phrases that must be used in the story. For some reason, such challenges really tap into my funny side. At other times, I’ll simply hear things that will immediately get me into “improv” mode, and I’m off and running.

This happened recently when I heard a friend telling the story of, as a teenager, discovering her mother’s contraceptive device. Later that same night, I also heard the name “Pepe Spaziano”, and I got an idea about a low-class detetcive. This is what resulted. I was at first tempted to call it a story fragment,  but the more I read it the more I wonder if it is in fact complete. See what you think.

The Case of the Threadbare Diaphragm

It was a hot Saturday afternoon in August. I was in my usual position on the couch, watching Dizzy Dean and the Game of the Week while trying not to spill any more malt liquor on my undershirt. In a minute I was going to have to get up and apologize to my wife Cookie, who was still crying in the kitchen. I had accidentally smacked her in the eye while swatting away the flies gathered atop the canned bean dip and chips on the coffee table. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

There was a feeble knock on the screen door.

“Come in,” I said, not moving.

It was Quincy, the girl from next door. She stepped in gingerly but was unable to avoid kicking a couple of empty malt liquor cans. She was holding some kind of round plastic thing. The look in her eyes reminded me of a trout I’d seen at the fish market on Wednesday.

“Mr. Spaziano, you’re a detective! You have to help me!”

“I know I’m a detective. But not now. Van Lingle Mungo is pitching for the Dodgers.”

“I found this in my parents’ bedroom and I don’t know what it is and I accidentally punched a hole in it and now I don’t know what to do!”

She started to cry and put her hands to her face. But since she was still holding the thing, she managed to hit herself in the nose with it, punching her nostrils through. For a moment it hung there, looking like a very odd piece of clown makeup. She screamed, pulled it off and flung it at me, bringing a sudden end to the malt liquor vs. undershirt standoff. Fortunately, the couch was Naugahyde and wouldn’t know the difference. I examined the object.

“A diaphragm. Well used, if you know what I mean.” I winked at her. She didn’t get it.

Just then Cookie lumbered in from the kitchen, pulling behind her the tablecloth she’d been using to wipe her nose.

“That reminds me,” she said, looking right at me. “I’ve been meaning to dust the cobwebs off mine.”

 

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The First Rule of Prosthetic Club

Friday, April 18, 2008

If you’re familiar with the film Fight Club, you know that the First Rule of Fight Club is, “You do not talk about Fight Club.” That’s the Second Rule as well. Tyler Durden was very clear about that. (If you haven’t seen Fight Club, I highly recommend it.)

I belonged to a different club: Prosthetic Club. I’ve strapped a prosthetic limb to my leg every day since I could walk. And the First Rule of Prosthetic Club was always: “You do not talk about wearing a prosthetic.” I made up that rule when I was still in elementary school, and I followed it zealously. The last thing I wanted to do was to call attention to the thing that made me different from the rest of the world. Tyler would have been proud.

Somewhere over the years, the prosthetic morphed from being something I didn’t talk about into a shameful secret I was desperate to protect. The membership in Prosthetic Club, I realized, was limited to me and me alone. I could only survive in the “normal” world by keeping my secret safe, because obviously if people knew about it they would reject me as a repulsive cripple. Being the smart guy I was, I figured this out all on my own – there was no one I could ask about it, and anyway talking would violate the First Rule.

Hiding this secret took a lot of effort, and soon I developed some serious drug and alcohol problems in order to keep a lid on things. Later, I got sober and began looking at and addressing some of the deep-seated issues I had about being born with a disability and how I saw the world through the lens of that disability. Little by little, I started to change my attitude about it, and I thought about it less. But the legacy of Prosthetic Club lived on. It never occurred to me that at some point I would actually feel comfortable talking about my missing hand and foot or the prosthetic. That just seemed like something so far beyond the limits of possibility that it wasn’t worth trying for. I just kept working at changing my attitude.
Fast forward about 15 years, and I’m visiting Sam and Grace, a couple of old friends back in my home town. We’re talking about my getting back on a plane the next day, and I mention to them that I now have to take off my prosthesis in the security line, put in through the x-ray scanner, and strap it back on once I’ve gone through the metal detector. Very inconvenient, I say.

“I never knew you wore a prosthetic,” Grace says to me. No surprise there, I think.

Suddenly Ricky, their precocious eight-year old, comes running in from he next room.

“You wear a prosthetic limb?” he asks.

“I sure do,” I say.

“Can I see it?”

Sam and Grace protest, but I don’t mind. I nod and pull up my pants leg.

“Can you take it off?”

“Absolutely,” I say. I take off my shoe and sock, unstrap the Velcro, and hand it to him.

He takes it from my hand, wide-eyed.

“Wow!”  He looks at it for a moment, and then turns to me with a big and mischievous smile.

“Can I take this upstairs and scare my sister with it?”

I roar with laughter.

“Go ahead,” I said. 

Ricky straps it on so that it looks like he has an extra leg. Dragging it like Igor in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, he goes upstairs, barely able to contain his glee. In a few seconds we heard a gasp from his teenage sister Carrie, and then both kids run down the stairs, laughing. None of them even guess at the significance of this moment; and I am completely unprepared for how comfortable I feel. Something very deep inside me has changed.

We stand there for a long time, the five of us in the kitchen, with Ricky holding the prosthetic and all of us laughing at this delightful and unexpected episode. 

The final meeting of Prosthetic Club had just been adjourned.

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New Cat on the Block

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Dexter at HomeAfter months of mourning the loss of Baxter, we recently decided it was time to try having a cat again – this time with a new strategy. As previously noted in the blog, our old cat KC is a carrier of the fatal kitty disease (FIP) which claimed Baxter’s life, so we had to arrange things so that there could be absolutely no contact. My new office above the garage was perfect, especially since I had imagined Baxter as an office cat.

We went to our vet’s to look at a stray they had up for adoption, but he wasn’t what we were looking for. There were some pictures there of other cats being housed at the local animal shelter, and among them was a cat that looked a lot like Baxter. We decided to go and have a look.  When we got there, the attendant told us the cat in the picture had already been adopted, but that we were welcome to look at the animals they did have. I walked into the small room where the cats were kept, and I gravitated immediately to a cage near the floor, where a white kitten was looking right at me. Not waiting for the attendant, I immediately sat on the floor and opened the cage, whereupon this kitten jumped on my shoulder and began purring at maximum volume. 

It was all over from that moment. He had been found on the street that very day, so we had to wait five days to see if anyone would claim him. No one did, and this cat, christened Dexter (nothing to do with the TV show), is now prowling my office like he owns the place.

Two things interest me about this. One is the immediate bond we had from the moment I saw him – who knows how and why things like that happen? And second is Dexter’s age. Based on the best estimates the vet could give us, it seems that Dexter was born at almost exactly the same time that Baxter died. Something highly appropriate about that, in my mind (and if it’s only in my mind, so be it.)

Over the years of my recovery, I’ve learned to pay attention to my gut feelings (once I became able to have feelings). I don’t get them all the time, but it’s amazing what they can tell me.

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Me & The “Bench Guy”

Monday, March 31, 2008

I’ve been working lately on building a Web site for my prosthetist, which has given me the opportunity to explore some interesting issues related to my own disability. A few days ago we were going over some potential photography for the site, and one of the images was of a young and healthy looking guy sitting on a park bench, wearing an above-the-knee leg prosthetic. The look on his face really spoke to me: despite his obvious “handicap”, he was smiling and happy and not hindered in the slightest.

My prosthetist mentioned that the image might be too specific – communicating that he only handled leg prosthetics.“You may be right,” I said, with sudden realization, “But it’s his expression that matters. What we want to communicate is not about the prosthetic, it’s about the result of the prosthetic. This guy has lost a leg, but his quality of life is intact.”We talked about it some more, and we concluded that in this case it wasn’t even necessary to show one prosthetic or another in the site’s imagery. Communicating the quality-of-life idea was paramount. People were what mattered.

After so many years and after being fitted for so many leg prostheses myself, this experience really brought home to me what an emotional process it can be. Thanks to my prosthetic limb (and to my wonderful prosthetist, Kevin Calvo), I can walk straight and true and without a limp – most people I know don’t even realize I wear it. That’s important, but for me how I feel inside is another key component. I still, at a very deep level, feel a small sense of shame at having to deal with my disability – as if my prosthetic is the physical manifestation of an “other-ness” I can never escape.

That’s not true, of course, but the only way I can process those feelings is to make them part of the fitting process. I’m lucky that Kevin and I can talk about this easily, and I have no doubt that my leg prosthesis is better as a result.

Like the guy on the bench, today I am smiling and happy and unhindered. And just as I continually need to fit and adjust my prosthesis, so too must I continually work on the emotional issues that go with it.

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A Wakeup Call From the Universe

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

I got a call last Tuesday from my old pal Beon. We were both Top-40 deejays on AM radio 30 years ago. He still lives down in New Orleans so I don’t see him very often, but we talk every couple of months.

“I had a heart attack and emergency triple bypass surgery,” was the news.

Beon was in Tampa on business, felt chest pains, went to the hospital and was told that he had to have the surgery that day if he wanted to live. He’s only 56, and on the mend now, with a positive prognosis – providing he cuts out salt, fat and just about anything else that tastes good. A real challenge in a food city like New Orleans.

I was still absorbing all this when my phone rang at 6:30 a.m. on Thursday. My brother Art calling. Something had happened to one of my octogenarian parents, I thought. Which one?

“Don is in the hospital. Emergency bypass surgery.” Don being our other brother. He’d been having chest pains and had gone to see a cardiologist for a stress-test. During the test, the doctor stopped him and said he had to go to the hospital immediately. He didn’t have a heart attack, but he had a 99% blockage in one of the arteries leading to his heart – a clot in a place so common that it has its own nickname: The Widowmaker. Don is 49 – three years younger than me.

Like Beon, Don’s surgery was a success and he’s home again. But to say that I’m freaked out by these two events happening in the same week is an understatement. I am seeing the world in a very different way.

There is a history of heart disease in my family. All my mother’s siblings either died of a heart attack or stroke, or have had a bypass surgery. My mother has had a heart attack. One of my uncles died of a heat attack at age 48, as did one of my cousins. Another cousin died of a heart attack at age 60.

I’ve always paid attention to this family history: annual physicals, careful blood pressure monitoring, a reasonably steady exercise regimen for over 20 years. All my “numbers” are OK. “You’re very healthy for a man your age,” says my doctor. But still, my first call on Thursday was to that doctor to get a referral for my own stress-test. And by the way, when did I become “a man my age” anyway?

It’s hard to hear news like this and not conclude that the Universe is sending you a clear and forceful message. My rate of salad consumption is way up, while burgers and pizza are down like home prices. The sweats and sneakers are out of the closet and I’m back out there walking.

OK, Universe. You have my attention.

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On the passing of a friend

Sunday, December 9, 2007

It’s an old story: Man meets cat. Man loves cat. Man loses cat.

Sounds silly in the writing, I know. But I’ve never before lost someone or something so close to my heart (surprising, at age 52), and the hole this wonderful animal left behind seems no closer to being filled than it did the day I said goodbye to him. 

I met Baxter when he was less than a week old - he was rescued from a trash can and being cared for at our vet’s office. One look at him and I knew he was the cat for me. We were in the middle of building my new office above the garage, and the thought of having a cat to share the space while I was working was irresistible. For the next two months, I made weekly visits to the vet’s office to play with Baxter. Then in mid-June he was at last ready to come home with us.

The next two months were hilarious - having a kitten in the house was so much fun. Baxter loved being in my office (my old office in the house). He would spend hours sleeping on my desk and climb up on my shoulders while I was on conference calls. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were bonding at a deep level. I found myself hurrying home from meetings to see what he was up to. To see his face running toward me when I opened the door was priceless.

Then Cee Cee and I noticed he was getting lethargic. This scared us because we had lost a cat previously to FIP - a 100% fatal pulmonary disease. His symptoms looked the same. We watched him for a couple of weeks, and when he didn’t get better we took him to the vet - and sure enough, he had it too. Since the disease is relatively rare, our vet suggested that our other cat KC might be a carrier of the FIP virus - and tests later confirmed this.

Baxter lived only another two weeks - he died six months to the day after he was born. And I do not exaggerate when I say that the act of bringing him to the vet and witnessing his passing was among the hardest things I have ever done. Now, over two months later, the hole which opened up in my life that day is still there. I have moved in to my new office, and it is a wonderful place. But I keep wanting Baxter to be here with me. Because KC carries this disease we can’t get another cat to replace Baxter - which makes his absence even larger. And, of course, KC at age 14 has no interest in a new career as an office cat.

What does all this mean? I don’t know. I’ve heard people for years mourning their various losses, saying that after awhile it becomes a little easier, day by day. This hasn’t happened yet for me. Maybe I just haven’t had my share of grieving and loss until now, and it feels alien and unjust to me. I find myself sitting at my desk talking to Baxter, telling him that he did not deserve his fate. I mentally shake my fist in the face of God and curse His unfairness to this innocent creature - as if I didn’t know that life is full of things that are unfair and senseless. Even though there was no way we could have known about KC’s condition, part of me feels responsible for his death. The crazy things you think about when you’re sad.

So Baxter Boy, this one’s for you. Hopefully your picture will live forever in cyberspace, as you will live forever in my heart. Goodbye, my friend. You were truly one of a kind.

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One Last Fish

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

I learned a few days ago of the death of my cousin Jim, who suffered a heart attack fishing off a pier in Galveston, Texas. Jim, who was in his mid-70s, had had a weak heart for many years. It ran in his family - as will become clear in a moment.

I loved Jim and his family - his children were actually about the same age as me and my siblings. When I was growing up they lived just a few blocks from our house, and we used to visit them often. Jim was a dedicated outdoorsman whose home was filled with hunting trophies - very different from our house. I think now that my father’s experiences as a Marine in the Pacific during WWII had burned up any desire he had to shoot things. So listening to Jim’s stories - often told along with my other cousins and uncles who enjoyed the outdoors - brought me into contact with a world I never experienced firsthand. Jim was always laughing, telling jokes, enjoying his life to the fullest. A great guy to be around.

His younger brother Carl was cut from the same cloth - both as an outdoorsman and as a man with a weak heart. Seven weeks before Jim passed away, Carl suffered a fatal heart attack while dove hunting in Mexico. His doctors had warned Carl that his heart condition was increasingly serious, and that he should avoid strenuous physical activity. But Carl was not a man to sit at home and do nothing. He made the conscious decision to continue living his life the way he wanted. He traveled to Mexico for the hunting trip, as he had done many times before. He died doing the the thing he loved to do.

So it was with Jim. Same warning, same conscious decision. Along with his son Mike, he went to Galveston for the fishing trip he’d been looking forward to. On that day, his line was in the water. A fish took the bait, and Jim snapped his rod back sharply, setting the hook the way he’d done since he was a boy. As he reeled the fish in, he looked at Mike, said “Oh no,” and collapsed. One last fish. Like his brother, Jim’s life ended exactly the way he wanted it to - not in a convalescent’s bed, but with a fish on the line.

Jim and Carl inherited their troublesome hearts from their father Ernest, a master plumber who built a contracting business that survives to this day. In the early 1960s Ernest’s doctor told him that his heart was failing, and recommended that he stay in his office and leave the plumbing to his sons. He decided instead that he loved his work too much to give it up, and not long after that passed away while climbing a ladder on a jobsite.

Not many of us get to choose how we go, and I suppose even those who do seldom have it work out the way it did for these guys. Like their father, Jim and Carl were loving, honorable, hard-working men who touched many lives (including mine). I can’t help feeling a deep sense of admiration for the way they stuck to their guns (and fishing rods) to the very end. May we all have that much courage.

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Seriously Writing

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was a TV news producer in Baton Rouge, my job called for me to write a complete show script in the space of about 20 minutes, twice a day. I vividly remember shoveling paper into and out of my typewriter and pounding out the words as fast as I could think them. It was a sprint to the finish line, driven by a looming and unmoveable deadline. It was also great training, forcing me to organize my thoughts into short, punchy sentences that together formed a cohesive whole.

These days I do a lot of technical writing in the form of white papers and other formal documents, in addition to the advertising and PR writing I’ve always done. My TV news training serves me well for these jobs, because the same basic needs must be met: organized thoughts, short sentences, cohesive whole, looming deadline.

But I’m discovering that this is not the best way to approach the writing of fiction. In my case, at least, this kind of writing is more like a marathon than a sprint. But it’s hard for me to adopt that mindset because I’m so used to my traditional work method - which has been pretty successful for me over the years. Richard Ford described this marathon idea as “having enough empathy with my characters to make me patient with the details.” Looking at the story I’m working on now, I can see where I’ve been hurrying those details in order to get to the finish line faster - with obvious consequences to the end result.

If I’m serious about improving my craft to the greatest possible extent, then I need to change the way I think about the act of writing. Forget the finish line and concentrate on having empathy with my characters. Get the details right. This, of course, requires what Flannery O’Connor called “going deeper” - reaching inside myself and unlocking those doors I’ve kept closed because I chose to concentrate on more “practical” forms of writing.

So we’re talking about the dreaded “D” word (discipline). And the equally dreaded “C” word (commitment). Writing can’t be a hobby - it has to be a job. Am I willing to do whatever it takes? You bet.  

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