The long view and a bit of Faulkner.

Years ago when I was a young almost-man, I studied to be a professor of English literature. But as I was completing my course of study, I almost did the unthinkable. My focus and interest began shifting from literature to history.

I think if I had been born ten years earlier and had needed graduate school as a crutch to keep me out of Vietnam, I would have gone on for a degree in history. 

Of late, I find solace in history. At a time when it seems like all order is gone in the world, that terrorists lurk around every corner and every cop is a criminal, history tells us that these times we are living through are not really extraordinary or extraordinarily threatening.

Last night as I turned the Republican National Convention on TV, I felt armed, somewhat. I had read, I guess before the 2012 conventions, a New York Review of Books reissue of Norman Mailer's accounts of the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions: "Miami and the Siege of Chicago."

Mailer was a hugely gifted writer. And while I was 10 in 1968, he brought those conventions and the candidates to life in ways I missed the first time around.

If you're trying to make sense of our worldwide entropy epidemic, Mailer's 200-page book might not be a bad way to start. Many of the hatreds and fears and forces that are so visceral today were just as visceral in Miami and Chicago almost 50 years ago. 

Back then, we were a country riven by a murderous war. We were a country at war with ourselves. We were a country where it was plausible that soldiers would shoot down (like in some Latin American fief) protesting students.

The world has always been nasty and brutish. Life has always been short. And leaders from Caesar to Nixon to Trump have always been able to leverage fear of other to make electoral hay.

That's my point today--the historical precedent I'd like to point out. Nothing good comes when candidates and political systems operate on the basis of propagating fear. People are easy to manipulate when they're afraid and when people are easy to manipulate bad things tend to happen.

Of late a lot of people have come to me feeling afraid. Afraid of Trumpism. Afraid of our racial discord. Afraid of the economics of inequality.

All I can do is let them know how I cope.

I read a bit of history. I find that we've been through this before, and somehow survived.

Often I think of Faulkner, too. I guess going back to my literary roots.

This is from his Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, December 10, 1950, in Oslo, Norway. My gentle highlights are bolded.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Bombings. Murder. Entropy.

Just about every weekend, my wife and I pile into our restored 1966 Simca 1600 and drive up to a beach in Westchester where Whiskey, our four-year-old golden retriever can swim in the Long Island Sound.

If you want to do this, you have to hit the beach around 7:30, because around 9, the cops start showing up and throwing their weight around. There’s no ostensible reason for them doing this weight throwing, it’s just what cops do.

On the way home we dodge the mayhem of i95, switch onto the Bruckner Expressway and cross the Bronx, either heading over the Triboro Bridge into Manhattan, or saving the $5.44 and taking the free Willis Avenue Bridge.

I’ve done this drive maybe a thousand times in my life, and if you want to know the truth, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I know exactly what lane to be in when and I know where every pothole and storm drain is and know how to avoid them.

At one section, just as you’re crossing over an old drawbridge on the Bronx River, the road precipitously narrows from three lanes to two and you need to make a sharp left turn under the Sheridan Expressway. The road is rotten now but was worse when I was a kid when this was the entry point into the South Bronx and the road was pock-marked like something you’d expect to have seen in Beirut. Back then, in the1970s, a Puerto Rican separatist group dominated the area and had scrawled everywhere under the culverts F.A.L.N: Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional.

According to Wikipedia they were responsible for the following bombings and deaths:

Maybe I am looking too hard for solace in a world that seems with every passing day to be falling further and further into horror.

But, according to "The New York Times," from January 1969 to April 1970, the United States sustained 4,330 bombings—3,355 incendiary and 975 explosive, resulting in 43 deaths and almost $22 million in property damage.

You could say that “The Summer of Love,” was in reality “The Summer of Bombing,” since we averaged over eight blasts a day.

Clearly, this does not excuse, or mitigate, or even temper the horror and terror we are living through now when it seems like your best bet for survival is not to leave your apartment or even raise your head above window level.

Today, it seems everyone has a gun and is ready to use it. And every day it seems that more people are senselessly cut down.

But I write this for a reason.

I suspect as the Republican convention begins today in Cleveland, we will hear how the world has absolutely and perhaps irrevocably fallen apart. We will, I suspect, hear the need for law and order--whatever that means--and the affirmation to do everything possible to stem the time of dynamite-laden trucks into crowds of people. (We will hear nothing about curbing arms that can fire 700 rounds per minute.)

Let's try as viewers, to remember, it was ever thus.

That there are always forces of darkness and entropy looking to tear down civilization. That calls for law and order are usually merely well-coded calls for repression, oppression or some violation of constitutionality.

This is not binary.

The world wasn't at one time "safe," and has now somehow and suddenly slunk into mayhem.

No, it's going on as it always has: cruelly, violently, sadly. 

Try not to, when hearing over-heated rhetoric and demagoguery, over-react.

On a dark and sunny Friday.

This is one of those mornings, and there have been more and more of them lately, where I am finding it hard to write.

Maybe it's because the world seems to be so bent on coming to an end. With horror in France, Donald Trump in the US and god knows what else our eviscerated newspapers and news departments no longer have the resources to report upon.

There seems to be nothing to write about in my little sphere of advertising. It's all been said. 

We have bemoaned the lack of creativity. The gutting of our industry by the money men. The small accomplishments of small executions that no one ever sees. And the lusting for awards--the modern day equivalent of simony.

The summer is half over. And what a summer it's been, with a mass murder every week coming out as regularly as Time Magazine. 

I don't know if the world is truly going to hell in a handbasket or if it's a pernicious example of the availability heuristic. That is, we are aware of today's horrors and have forgotten yesterday's. So it seems like things are getting worse.

I mean on the bright side, we aren't killing 50,000 American boys on our way to killing two-million Vietnamese. Millions of Biafrans aren't dying, nor are millions of Bangladesh, nor millions more by Mao or Pol Pot.

We forget about the horrors of the past. The bombings and the cop shootings and the gunning down of students at Kent State. 

We forget about villages being napalmed and whole countries be Agent-Oranged.

That was all long-ago and faraway.

So we forget.

Maybe in 2030 when we are slaves to machine-masters and the Donald Trump Reich moves into its second decade, we will look back on this summer as the golden age. 

Maybe this is awfully dark for a post on a Friday when I have a non-working weekend ahead of me, a package of spots to shoot and, touch wood, my health.

So, that's all for now.

Try to have a nice weekend.

Try to dip your toes in the sea.

And if you have someone near you whom you love, give them an unsolicited hug, and tell them.

You'll feel better.

And sometimes that's all we can do.

A strange night in the Tempus Fugit. (A repost.)

A lumpy old man was sitting at the bar as I entered the Tempus Fugit. He wore a fedora, without irony, a rumpled grey suit, and an off-white buttoned-down dress shirt with a dark tie.

It was hot outside, hot like a wet towel, a hot that constricted your breathing. Whiskey, my three-year-old golden retriever was restless in the heat. And when Whiskey is restless, well, I am too. So at about three in the morning, I threw on yesterday’s tee-shirt and jeans and walked up to the Tempus Fugit.

In all the years I’d been visiting the place, there was seldom anyone else there. I sat on my usual stool, one in from the end, and Whiskey curled at my feet. The bartender, quick as a whippet was around the mahogany and brought her a bowl of cold water. Whiskey licked at it, then curled into a C, and closed her dark eyes. Back at the serving-side of the woodwork, the bartender pulled me a Pike’s Ale (the ALE that won for YALE!) and placed it in front of me on a small paper napkin embossed with the bar’s name.

I emptied the suds from the juice glass in front of me, and the bartender complied by refilling it. The lumpy man took a Cuban from his breast pocket, offered me one, then lit his. For a moment he disappeared in the haze of his stogie’s blue smoke, then he coughed a few times. Then he began.

“We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Swallow,” he said to me as I swallowed my second glass of Pike’s.

I answered in Shakespeare, and raised him one.

“I know thee not, old man; fall to thy prayers!

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!”

With that, he pushed himself away from the bar. He was old, like I said, and disheveled. But when he pulled himself up to his fullest height, I could see, for a fleeting instant, the man he once was.

His voice boomed as he exhaled some more blue smoke.

“I am Orson Welles,” he commanded. “And who are you. And what have you done?”

I merely stammered. Maybe it was the two Pike’s in rapid succession.

He stared me dead in the eye. He inhaled his Cuban. Then exhaled. Then spoke.

“George walked home through the strange streets of what seemed to be a strange city. For the town was growing…changing…it was heaving up in the middle, incredibly; it was spreading incredibly. And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its skies.”

“Wow,” I said dumbly.

“Wow,” he mocked. “Booth Fucking Tarkington wrote that swill. A second-rate writer of a third-rate novel. And then…”

He examined the lit end of his cigar. He smoothed the leaves of the cylinder then took another long drag.”

“It was to be my apotheosis, my apogee, the continuation of my meteoric rise. My follow-up to ‘Citizen Kane.’ And the Philistines…no, Philistines is too kind, the Helots,” he was shouting now, “The Helots took the film away from me.”

I mustered up some courage. Again, maybe it was the Pike’s talking.

“Actually, Mr. Welles, meteors don’t rise. They fall. They practically, in fact, plummet.”

He stared hard at me. He breathed heavily, rasping. 

“By god, you’re right! They do,” here his laughter coalesced with the phlegm-y rasp of severe coughing fit. After a few minutes, he continued. “They do fall. What’s your name, young man?”

I began to answer.

“No matter,” he interrupted. “I’ll call you Jedediah! Well, Jedediah let’s get drunk. Let’s get good and drunk. Let’s get good and drunk and drive along the coast till we hit Ensenada. There’s a place I know there where a girl costs less than a cigarette.”

The bartender was around the bar by now, leading Welles back to his stool.

“I think you had enough,” was all he said.

I had had enough, too. I passed the bartender two twenties for my Pike’s. And for the entertainment.

“On me,” he said.

And Whiskey and I walked slowly home.

Continued: A long night in the Mexican League.

CONTINUED FROM YESTERDAY...

“We had a pitcher though, that is what I want to tell you about. Ignacio Hernandez….”

“Ignacio Hernandez was just 15 when he played for the Petroleros but even so, he had already been playing for three seasons, maybe four.”

“He was playing for scrub teams when he was 11,” Hector clarified. He opened a bottle of cerveza and handed it to me, then took one for himself.

As the bus bumped north, as the men in the back were playing cards and singing songs—Cookie Rojas had brought along an accordion—Sisto continued solemnly.

“Hernandez was pure Indian, with the dark deep-set eyes and broad shoulders of his people. Like so many indios he was short, he stood less than five feet tall and was almost as wide as he was high. His back was bent from generations of hard-labor, he legs were slightly bowed from the weight of his burdens.”

Now Sisto took a cerveza, opened it, and in one long swig, drained it almost to the bottom.

“He was just 15, he was under five feet tall, but his fastball was like lightning. All of the pain and the hate and the hardship and the suffering of his people, all of that he put into every fastball. He was no longer just playing baseball, he was avenging all the wrongs he suffered, all the wrong his people suffered with every pitch.”

Sisto turned to his window and lowered it. He thought about tossing away his beer bottle, but held onto it. Instead, he cooled his head in the breeze and spit twice into the desert.

“You could tell,” said Hector, “he had a major league arm. Maybe an all-star arm. Maybe an immortal arm.”

Sisto stared ahead and spoke as if in a trance.

“It wasn’t his arm alone. His arm was the arm of his people. His arm said with every pitch, ‘you cannot do this to us. We are men. Attention must be paid.”

“Willy Loman,” I said.

“Si,” Sisto replied. “Senor Salesman.”

“One night, Ignacio was on the mound and was perfect. He struck out each of the batters he faced—the first 15 batters in a row, with no opponent even hitting a foul tip.”

Hector here picked up a bit of the story as Sisto opened another beer.

“In the 9^th inning, the Petroleros were leading 2-0 when Ignacio finally faltered. He brought one of his pitches in high, right into someone’s power and he swatted it out of the park. It was now 2-1, with two down in the 9^th.”

Sisto took back the reins, “Ignacio wanted this game like he wanted every game. As hard as he was throwing, he was still just 15 years old and was still with the head of a boy. He began over-throwing and going wild.

“Quickly, he walked loaded the bases. And now Ignacio was mad. He wanted that last out. He wanted the strikeout. He wanted the win.”

“That’s only natural,” I said. I had pitched enough in high school to understand what Ignacio was going through.

“Ignacio took the ball and massaged it in his glove. He spoke to it. You will be my strikeout, he said. You will be my last strike out.

Again, Sisto opened the window and spit twice more into the desert. He turned back to the story.

“Ignacio became a god,” Sisto said. “Maybe an Olmec god, half panther, half hawk and half human. Maybe he became Jove or Zeus. Maybe he became the Norse god Thor throwing thunder bolts. 400 years of oppression and slavery and carnage and beatings went into his wind up. And then came the pitch.”

Hector added, “The stadium was silent. Like the sky before a big storm.”

“The pitch came,” said Sisto, “And so did Ignacio’s arm. It flew off his shoulder like he was made not of sinew and muscle and bone, but as if he was a rag doll.”

“Wait,” I said. “His arm flew off?”

“That is not the astonishing thing,” said Hector. He spoke reverently. In a low monotone.

“The batter,” Sisto continued “did what a good batter must do with his team down and the bases loaded in the 9^th. He swung heavy from his heels and attacked the pitch like a wood-cutter attacking a giant oak. He hit hard the ball. But the ball was still held in Ignacio’s strong right hand attached to his strong right arm.

“The batter hit hard the ball, but the ball was anchored to Ignacio and instead of flying high and long, held with the weight of Ignacio, the ball flopped slowly back toward the pitcher.”

Hector, lovingly, put his hand on my knee. “The arm and ball flew back. And somehow, guided by the gods, perhaps, that gave Ignacio his force to begin with, guided by those gods, Ignacio’s arm…”

“It reattached itself. And Ignacio threw the ball to first and the ump called the runner out and the game over.”

I stared out the window of the juddering bus. It was midnight and in the near distance I could see the dim lights of a small dim town. A town of nowhere. A town in which one-hundred Ignacios might live.

“That was all for Ignacio Hernandes,” Hector finished.

“He couldn’t pitch anymore?” I asked.

“No,” said Sisto. “He arm was not the problem. He walked out of the stadium that night without even changing into his street clothes. Walked into the night in his spikes and his uniform, back to his Indian village. Back to his Indian girlfriend and his Indian children.

“’Que es suficiente,’ was what I heard him say. ‘That is sufficient.’ And then he disappeared into the night.

The bus caromed through the night.

The rest of the way, we rode in silence.

Que es suficiente.

A long night in the Mexican League.

Though I was just a few months past 17 years old when I played ball down in the Mexican Baseball League in the long-ago summer of 1975, I hung out for the most part, with two of the oldest guys on our squad.

One was my manager, Hector Quesadilla, who took to me immediately and spotted in me the son he and his wife Teresa never had. Of course, Hector, with his patience and his wisdom and his kindness and his toughness was the father I never had, so we got along like red beans and rice.

The other was Guilliermo Sisto, the oldest player on the team at 43 and a player who played for a total of 50 different teams—pro and semi-pro—in various Mexican leagues.

I lived with Hector and Teresa in a small room in their small house about two miles from Estadio Francesco I. Madura when we were home in Saltillo. And I roomed with Sisto—when I wasn’t rooming with Karmen, my inamorata, when we were on the road.

The truth is, and many people have said this to me, I was born old. I never really caroused or rough-housed or drunked like the other guys on the team. I showed up early, stayed late and worked hard, characteristics in many ways, of generations gone by.

One of the things you have to get used to if you ever find yourself south of the border and playing ball in a shoestring league for a shoestring club is bus rides.  We traveled from east to west and north to south that summer, by a rickety team bus, an old school bus painted white, with a huge Seraperos logo on each side.

You got used to soporific rides and soporific conversations and the sun burning the vinyl and your skin, and old Mexican music played on an old transistor radio as we traveled over mountains, through deserts and into the dusty towns and cities where we played ball.

We would sing and tell stories and sleep and wrestle and occasionally want to kill each other. But eventually, we would roll into another town, check into another hotel and play another set of games.

It helped, that summer, to have a good memory, because it was the stories we told—about girls, about fish we had caught, about the lives we led, that made the distances and the tedium bearable.

One bus ride from the back of my head came the 19^th Century poem by Macauley, ‘Horatius at the Bridge’ that was drummed into me in 7^th grade Latin class.

LARS PORSENA of Clusium,
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting-day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
To summon his array.
East and west and south and north
The messengers ride fast,
And tower and town and cottage
Have heard the trumpet’s blast.
Shame on the false Etruscan
Who lingers in his home,
When Porsena of Clusium
Is on the march for Rome!

That was all I could remember of Macauley’s 600 lines. But it was enough to get a laugh and pass the time.

One night, having finished a four-game set against the Diablos Rojos of Mexico City, we had a 12-hour drive due north for games the next evening against the Sultanes de Monterrey. 12 hours is a lot of time to pass.

Sisto began.

“When I was not much older than you, I was playing third base, like you for a team that no longer, as far as I can tell from reading the papers, exists. El Petroleros de Minatitlan, the Oil Men of Minatitlan.”

“Minatitlan is a small city in Veracruz,” Hector added. “It is built on reclaimed marsh. The houses there have all sunk into the ground after they were built.”

“Yes,” Sisto said. “The ballpark sunk too. On days and nights after the rains of April, we were playing up to our ankles in water. There was a right fielder, a fat boy whose name I don’t any longer remember, who ran into the fence going after a long fly ball. He crashed into the fence and was knocked out by the collision. He almost drowned before they revived him.”

“Drowned in right field,” I repeated dumbly.

“We had a pitcher though, that is what I want to tell you about. Ignacio Hernandez….”

PART II Tomorrow

Pablo Neruda on the Far West Side.

On Friday evening I waited on the corner of 46th and 11th Avenue for a car to take me home. I noticed on the side of the truck parked on the corner, a small page of graffiti had been pasted on its panels. You can see it there in the top photograph, above the waves of the sea, to the right of the smiling person-hammer and to the left of the word OPEN.

The poem was "Parthogenesis" by Nobel Prize-winner Pablo Neruda. 

There's no telling what you can find in New York if you're not really looking and what you can find if you are.

I considered myself lucky for seeing this.

It made a rough week better somehow.