Who Asked Me?

I’m in Mazzone’s True Value hardware store buying a quarter-inch pressurized cap for the water line that used to go in to my old refrigerator’s ice maker. I’m fairly pleased with this fifty cent purchase – it’s early in the day and I’m under the illusion that I’ve taken care of another problem. But I should be more cognizant of the signals around me, including the big kid with the square head, board shorts and oversized Jets jersey, asking the Mazzone employee in all earnestness if they sell machetes. I tell myself it’s none of my business, and that he’s likely confusing it with some sort of gardening implement. Heading toward home, I take particular note of the various Virgin Mary front yard displays in this South Brooklyn neighborhood. These multi story brownstones are all pushing two million (and higher) despite a supposedly slumping market, but some folks still aren’t selling and a little gentrification isn’t going to prevent the Holy Mother from getting her props.

Back at the digs I attach the cap to the copper water line and turn the cold water back on, anticipating pushing my new fridge in place and admiring a job well done. But it doesn’t form a seal and there’s a touch of dampness on the side of the copper. So I’m off again to the discount store a few blocks up, to procure some threaded plumber’s tape. Another one dollar purchase – I’m up to a buck fifty now, but am getting some exercise in the process. Never mind the panicking girl running with hands over mouth from behind the register, crying that her wallet’s been lifted. I’m willing to turn my pockets out in proof of innocence if it means getting home and forming a tight seal on my old freezer line. I pick up a few bottles of Gatorade at the shady bodega on the corner, planning on putting the cooling powers of my new appliance to the test. An hour later I’ve gone through both bottles and the entire roll of plumber’s tape, and of course the leak is even worse. Sweating though my third t-shirt of the day, I get the inspired idea to disconnect the line entirely from under the sink, and cap it there. Ten minutes later I’m again soaked, this time a result of the water spraying in all directions. I’ve gone from a passably damp quarter inch copper pipe to a tapped Harlem fire hydrant in full summer glory. I shut off the cold water, bite the bullet, and reach for my phone.

I don’t know any plumbers in the area, but after a few calls I settle on a firm called “Einstein’s” – an unlikely name for the trade, but there’s something reassuring about the girl’s voice on the other end of the line. I tell her that it’s a straight forward job and shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, and she explains that it’s seventy-nine dollars for a service call and estimate. The guy arrives promptly and when I ask him if he’s Einstein he offers the appropriate response in a thick Brooklyn accent. “If I was, would I be doin’ this job?” We’re off and running. I explain that I’ve bought a new refrigerator and had trouble trying to cap the water line that went to the old unit’s ice maker. He looks under the sink, tells me it’s no problem, and then, with a straight face says “what it’s gonna be is two hundred and eighty-nine.” I tell him he’s got to be kidding, and he offers a slight grin and some form of explanation relating to escalating costs. What can I do? If I send him away I’m out eighty bucks and back where I started. I tell him that it’s almost as much as I paid for the new refrigerator and he suggests that I “shoulda got one with an ice maker.” Fifteen minutes later all is in fine working order, except my credit card, which has been swiped to the tune of three hundred and change.

Later in the evening I’m enjoying some hand-made ice, watching sheet lightning flash between the thick clouds over Jersey. Again with the weather – it seems like I never stop with this. But the entire area’s like some electrical appliance that gets plugged in come June and stays charged through early September. Sometimes it’s a better idea to let the water run.

I used to have a love – hate relationship with baseball, but in recent years it’s evolved into an indifferent – somewhat less indifferent relationship. I played as a kid. My brother’s a big fan and the game occupies as much of my dad’s frontal lobe as eating or sleeping. Back in 1987 I attended enough Giants home games to be named an honorary usher. But somewhere along the line I lost interest…not all interest, but the kind that maintains a constant awareness of pitch counts, even when traveling abroad. I didn’t outgrow the sport. I still believe it’s a beautifully constructed game whose imperfections only lend to its appeal. Arguing against inter league play or the designated hitter is as valid a means of putting a bar idiot in his place as any. And I can still get excited about and follow individual players (the Giants’ pitcher Tim Lincecum being a current example.) I just don’t get as pumped up as I once did. But this doesn’t preclude my knowing more about the game than your average fan. As we’ve reached the halfway mark in the 2008 season, perhaps it’s time to share some insight.

You only get to pick one team per lifetime. A lot of so called “fans” seem unclear on this concept. While it’s perfectly acceptable to follow other teams and players and to root for specific teams once your own has failed to reach post season play, you can’t “adopt” another team as your own. Proclaiming a team one’s own is a rite of passage and something that often occurs on an involuntary level. Typically speaking, your father’s team is your team – although this rule isn’t automatic. It’s OK for adolescents to experiment with “other” teams the same way they might drugs or growing a mustache before they’re ready. But at a certain age, typically in your late teens, you must commit. I’ve committed to practically nothing in my life, and yet I still understand this. I am a Giants fan, end of story. You don’t go away to college in San Diego and “become” a Padres fan. Baseball is about suffering, not reinvention.  And it isn’t like marriage or the church; you can neither weasel nor grow out of it. One life, one team. If this is too difficult to grasp, switch sports or become a Buddhist and put your faith in returning next time as a Mets fan.

Guys over thirty-six should not wear jerseys with player’s names in public. I realize that this is going to dash whatever hope a certain segment of the population has for ever achieving an individual sense of style, but something needs to be said. When a kid or younger person wears a player’s jersey in public it says “I really like this player, and while I realize that any aspirations for a professional sports career are likely delusional, I’m still allowed to dream.” This differs from the intoxicated oaf sporting “25 Giambi” on his back, despite enjoying long standing employment with the local pipe fitters union and being ten years Jason’s senior. OK, you’re a fan .. I get it. And you really like Giambi. Your overt exuberance and ability to almost scream his name correctly after twelve beers already suggest this. Let’s leave the dressing up to the kids. My aversion to this breed of fan may have a knee jerk element and be related to Ken Young, a middle aged white guy from the Giants games of my youth. Young sported an impressive boiler, resembled Barney Rubble, and not only wore a jersey, but a full uniform with batting helmet. The batting helmet would have been the capper (completely disallowed unless you’re Clint Howard in “Gung Ho”) had it not been for one other detail: Young also wore Willie Mays’ name and number twenty-four on his back. Mays was the greatest Giant, and possibly the greatest player, to ever put on a uniform. I wouldn’t know where to begin in listing what was wrong with Ken Young assuming his persona. To this day it’s slanted my stance on the civilian jersey wearer.

You weren’t that great a player in your day. Maybe it’s the pastoral mythology or hanging on to the American Dream, but something about baseball breeds delusion. And among the more delusional offshoots of the game none is as inexplicable as the number of guys secretly harboring the idea that they could have played on some sort of competitive level. These fantasies don’t transfer to football and basketball. You don’t find many middle aged guys sizing up Warren Sapp or Kevin Garnett and thinking “if only I’d stuck with it.” Yet something about baseball engenders this Peter Pan reality substitute. Perhaps it’s because there are still professional baseball players who are constructed like somewhat normal human beings. Although this is an increasingly rare phenomenon – I once attended a game in San Francisco and stood by the clubhouse entrance (a perk for season ticket holders with “Field Level” seats.) These are not small boys, not by any standard. On occasion someone like the above mentioned Tim Lincecum comes around who, despite being five foot ten and a buck-seventy, can throw a baseball at close to a hundred miles an hour. These exceptions may be what make baseball great, but they are far from proof that you could have done it. Standing in the box while this guy threw you one hard curve without giving in to the temptation to bail or collapse would be more than any mortal could hope for.

Let’s break it down: looking back on it, there were several categories with which to associate when you were young. There were the guys who didn’t play, the guys who played but sucked, the guys who fell in to that vast middle range, the guys who were good, and the guys who were among the elite three or four best in your high school. Among these select elite, if you went to a large enough school, there might have been one or two who were good enough to play college ball, and maybe one who was good enough to earn a minor league contract. The odds are that even he, the elite of the elite, never played pro ball. Sure, there are exceptions and somebody had to go to high school with Barry Bonds, but someone had an algebra class with Albert Einstein too. As with this rant, it’s time to let it go.

I wouldn’t belong to any club that would accept me as a member
-Groucho Marx

I’m not certain on the definition of a successful writer, but when your novel’s title enters the modern lexicon as an independent entity, you’re probably doing OK. Such was Joseph Heller’s experience with Catch-22. The book has been praised as one of the great literary works of the twentieth century, but I’m more impressed with the idea that the phrase will live on forever. I read and discussed Catch-22 in high school – the topic of an oral book report for Stan Buchanan’s English class. Stan played next to Bill Russell on the 1954-55 NCAA Champion San Francisco Dons basketball team, and described himself as the “last of the great pee-wee forwards.” Most people would list this accomplishment as the pinnacle of lifetime achievement, but Stan spoke of walking the streets of Kansas City alone in the wee hours following the championship game, with an oddly empty feeling. The thrill, it seemed, was in the climb and in beating the odds. Now, despite the victory, it was all over. I’m not certain, but I suspect there was some form of catch-22 in Stan’s experience. Fortunately, Buchanan had another specifically idiosyncratic talent: teaching the novel The Great Gatsby. I count winding up in his freshman English class and having him present this book as one of the lucky breaks of my life.

I don’t think my Catch-22 oral report represented the pinnacle of personal achievement for me either, but Stan Buchanan was impressed and told me that I was a smart guy. I was too much of a goofy kid to take the compliment seriously, but I do remember him repeating it to emphasize that it wasn’t the sort of praise that he threw around lightly. I recall small bits from my report, including my mentioning that in order to appreciate the basic premise of the book, one would have to be open to the idea of war being an absurd concept. My Uncle Ned, I suggested, wouldn’t dig the novel. I also mentioned that Joseph Heller spent some time as a screenwriter, working under the name “Max Orange.” This was one of the questions on the test that Buchanan later gave to assure that the class had been paying attention to the various reports: “Who the hell is Max Orange?”

The catch-22 in “Catch-22” is deceptively ingenious. A fighter pilot wants to get out of flying missions, and in order to do so must be declared insane by a military psychologist. The very admission that he wants to stop flying these potentially fatal missions is proof of his sanity, and he’s sent back to fly. While not in the same league as The Great Gatsby, it is a decent book. And the idea that life is filled with catch-22s has come back to me repeatedly over the years. Some of us, it would seem, are better at both spotting and creating them.

The Scottish are a bit like Joe DiMaggio – they don’t get it. The great Yankee Clipper reportedly failed to comprehend the Simon and Garfunkel line “where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” and his own status as a national icon. “I’m still here,” Jolting Joe protested. “Haven’t they heard of Mr. Coffee?”

The passport official at Edinburgh Airport recommends the whitewater rafting up north. “It’s nothin’ like ye’ve got in America .. but it’ll git yer blood pumpin’..” But it isn’t Colorado we’re after, replete with ball cap wearing vacationers fresh from a spending splurge at The North Face and anxious to stave off increasing signals that middle age is taking hold. It’s the rolling hills of lush green. The fresh air. The ample helpings of mince and tatties that Oor Wullie dug into while Fat Boab waited patiently outside the hoose, in the shed. (OK – that last one may apply only to me.)

And the weather. Don’t get these people started on the weather. “Ach, I cannae believe it’s been rainin’ since ye got here – we haven’t seen one wet day fer all of May ..” It’s a documented fact that most of the UK (and particularly the English) regard Americans as a thick lot of uncultured morons. But there’s a limit to what even we will swallow. If it never rains here, why is everything greener than a Boston bar when the Celtics are playing? Why does the satellite shot on the news have a permanent dotted outline where the country is supposed to be? Why is that entire dining room set making its way down the River Tay? But still they persist, as if the subject of weather is akin to a misguided cousin prone to taking in high school girls lacrosse games and about whom the family doesn’t speak. Let it go – we’re not that stupid. We knew where we were going and don’t suspect a misprint on our tickets to Scottsdale.

The sign posted outside Saint John’s Shopping Centre on the High Street in Perth boasts “Now open late nights Wednesday until seven.” When do these people sleep? Perhaps it’s our long established independence from England that they wish to emulate. Indeed, the Scottish Nationalists seek secession from the UK, sighting rights to ample North Sea oil supplies as sufficient means. But I tend to place some value in the opinion of long time Perth resident and former City Planner Denis Munro, and his reticence regarding the matter. His concerns over who would fund the legions of his dole-seeking countrymen are well-founded, and a stroll through town shortly after the pubs close is enough to give one pause for thought. That’s a lot of North Sea oil, indeed.

There isn’t any oil, as far as I know, in the hills east of Pitlochry, just north of Perth and south of the Highlands. There is, however, the smallest distillery in Scotland – Edradour – where they produce a fine, handcrafted single malt whisky. There’s an older Scottish gentleman with white beard and kilt who will show you the facilities and offer a complimentary dram. And if you’ve hiked the two and a half miles up from town and take the trail back down, there’s an expanse of farm land and mountains in the distance for which no words could do apt justice and no inclement weather could spoil. Scotland needs no apologies. The place speaks for itself.

I think you’d better call John ’cause it don’t look like they’re here to deliver .. the mail.
-more Neil

I was showing someone an old comic strip of John Spears the other day, by way of explaining who he was. It was in a large album of other strips I’d done, with titles like Dad in: The Diet and Jim Moye in: Jim Moye, Intercom. The response came back “you really missed your calling,” which was a bit confusing, given the album in front of me. Nobody called, but I still drew them. I suppose I may have failed to understand the potential global appeal of Dad in: Painfully Shy, but at least I got it down on paper.

This particular early nineties Spears strip featured him crashing through the restroom door of our company lunchroom after he became convinced that someone was blocking his exit from the other side. Of course nobody was – he had simply failed to turn the handle and unlock the door. The resulting expressions on the faces of print department veteran Kevin Chan and his domino playing cronies were strip-worthy in themselves. I’d used the Coyote-Roadrunner effect of exact body outline to represent Spears breaking on through to the other side. In reality the door was broken at the lock and badly splintered. As others shuffled in for their lunch breaks and observed the structural carnage, “Spears thought he was trapped” was the only explanation necessary. I suppose we can all relate, at different times in our lives.

I guess I’m whoring the old boy out a bit by writing about this, but my conscience can live with that in light of my limited audience and the Powderfinger obscurity of my references. “He’s got a webpage,” my mom informed a neighbor the other night. A little too close to “she also tap dances” from where I was standing. That was one consistently admirable quality about Spears – no matter how brutally and insightfully over the top the depiction, he preferred it to not being noticed at all. He was never one of those to profess not wanting the attention while secretly craving the reverse. And you can always replace a lunchroom door.