Trouble in Shangri-La

 

 

The author F. Scott Fitzgerald is credited with saying: “The rich are different from you and me.” And Ernest Hemingway, curtly shooting down Fitzgerald's mythologizing the rich, responded: “Yes, they have more money.”

The whole quote from Fitzgerald goes as follows:

“Let me tell you about the rich. They are different from you and me. They posses and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it's very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

--

I have never known people with that kind of money. That kind of money is Old Money and it's in the billions. Think of Andrew Carnegie or Rockefeller wealth that's so massive it can be invested to keep their descendants not born yet in the pink till 2100 and beyond. It's so old it became “respectable” wealth.

New Money, and there are a few I know of, is disgusting. New Money is filthy. New Money has no pedigree, no claim to a Family Coat of Arms that goes back to Henry V of England. This New Money can never find legitimacy due to the fact Old Money families will never let them in the “good” country clubs and respectably knight them. The Old Money clique is pretty tight. This drives the New Money types crazy to the point where some have tried to marry off their daughters to some penniless but landed British aristocratic earl or duke just to claim a relation. No joke, some did that.

The few New Money types I know aren't even close to those pure bloods, at best, the richest one I knew had around $5 million and none of them would even be invited to a golf game in East Hampton. They'd be arrested at the door if they didn't “kindly leave the premises when asked too.” Again, Old Money does not associate with...”those people.”

So how did they get their money? What did they do with it? Where they happy? Are they different?

–

Alan ,who is dead now, inherited his from his Dad who wisely invested in ESSO oil from the 1940's. ESSO became Exxon in time and his Dad kept purchasing that stock till the day he died. There upon Alan took it over and never spent a penny of it nor add to any stock purchases. Alan, instead, just followed a career in government, bought a modest house outside DC and put up with his wife's weekly antique hunts. Since Alan's wife died before him and they never had any kids, we used to bust Alan's balls about him leaving it all to his wife's nieces and nephews who, as far as we could tell, were the type to use the cash to hire a Lear jet, fly to Las Vegas to bet it all on a Black 13 roulette slot.

“Alan! You're gonna leave it to them? Really? You said yourself you can't stand them!”

“Well, who else will I leave it too? They're the only family I have!” And then there is a pause...”Shit...that niece I bought an electric piano for...she's too dumb to learn anything more than 'Chopsticks!' On top of that, I paid for her entire time at UMASS Amherst and she gets a 2.1 GPA? I fear it'll be wasted on all of them!”

Alan died over the summer, and they got it. We can't tell if they've blown through it all yet.

The Exxon stock never did turn Alan into a dick nor heighten his own self worth, but he damn well knew what that kind of money could do for him. All it was was a massive fluffy pillow should his workaday world somehow collapse. His problems with it came to his ungrateful and sort of worthless relations.

--

Carl, who I knew for a couple of years before he took off to Phoenix, inherited $2 million. His Dad was this rare engineer who made very specific parts for the Apollo program back in the 60's and certainly charged NASA an arm and a leg for it. NASA paid because this guy was Einstein smart and solved quite a few problems for the space agency. You want good people? You have to pay for them.

Carl, inherited the company when Dad died but since Carl had no clue to this kind of engineering, sold it all off. He didn't inherit his Dad's brains but was no moron either, he just aimlessly tried one occupation after another, trying to fit in with the friends he made. He came off as a trust fund kid you'd see sometimes on skateboards down by Thayer St in Providence. They want to live a “normal” life but eventually were always found out by their poorer friends. Carl's problem, was that he tried to buy friends, in that he'd pay for everything as they hung out. Well, if someone pays for it all, they tend to stick around till the money dries up or are found out. Then poof...they're gone. Carl constantly found out he had nothing but “fair weather” friends and dumped them when he discovered that, but I suspect unconsciously, he'd repeat that process. His main problem was just loneliness. He told me he never could fit in at Moses Brown nor anywhere else and that's what plagued him for years. Even that gold digging bitch he married didn't bring joy for him. He eventually saw her as a high-priced whore. That marriage lasted barely a year and in the end he was glad to pay her to leave.

I haven't seen him in about 20 years and have little idea what he's doing in Arizona, probably the same thing. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

The only bonafied rags to riches story I know of is Kathy. Now she was born to modest means but had this drive...insane drive to achieve and to be rich. She was usually a A+ student, winning awards left and right in school and finally being accepted at Brown due to her intelligence. She had majored in mathematics, high mathematics solving stuff like this:

That was easy stuff for her. She plied that into business math and landed the job as Chief of the Bond Desk at Merrill Lynch in NYC. Her job was to analyze companies on their probabilities of turning a profit. She was good at it (read: $$$$$$) to where she and her husband bought a condo on Central Park Upper East. Big bucks!

The bond desk at Merrill wasn't enough though, she wanted a slot in the top room, the governing board. Well...high finance back then still didn't think women were cut out for this kind of work, even if Kathy could do math in several dimensions in far away galaxy. Her “pushy bitch” demeanor wasn't well liked even if she could bring the company millions in profit. She knew well enough there was a political game involved too and tried her best to work it. She may have succeeded if it weren't for the 2008 recession that killed the Dow by nearly half of it's value.

Merrill Lynch was in danger of being wiped out completely had it not been for having to cave into other more solid finance houses and getting bailed out by the Bush Administration. It survived, barely, but the consternation in the board room and other offices created tons of firings. Kathy was axed.

Being an unemployed millionaire didn't sit well with Kathy. From I heard, that Shangri La condo had quite a few fights between husband and wife over...money. He telling her that it was time to downsize, live within their means and not hope for a recovery anytime soon where they'd be paying for $500 tickets for the “good seats” to shows on Broadway. She held the belief that one day she'd be rehired by Merrill Lynch if and when the economy found stable footing.

Well, the fights didn't abate and the two separated. Merrill Lynch never did hire her back and she had to “settle” for a position at a bank in Stamford, CT for a paltry $225,000 year. The 5^th Avenue condo was sold and she and her husband reconciled and moved to a smaller life. From what I hear, they're worth a little over $3 million today. That to me, isn't “bad” but to Kathy, who forever was climbing, achieving...it just wasn't good enough. The problem now is that she is my age and I know that this age does not bring with it a ton of mental or physical energy or drive to make it to the top. However, I have to hand it to her, she came from Pawtucket slime to standing in the world's financial center, moving mountains for a while. She made her pile of cash w/o inheriting it, though she became slightly nutso in doing so.

So are the rich different? Not the New Money types that I can see. They're just as fucked up as any middle class family you can come across. Do they think they're better? I doubt that as they harbor personal failings and that isn't easy to hide. When you become old enough to read faces, it's pretty damn evident what they're really thinking about. One fact will slip or a quick lack of eye contact which betrays the entire story. It shows too easily.

Are they happier than the rest?

Here's what I know of people. Whatever situation you find yourself in, large or small, you tend to fill and occupy it's confines to the fullest. You live in every inch of that acreage, wide or narrow. I know of retirees whose lives have shrunk to watching tv, shopping for food and walking the dog. That's it. Within that world, they find something to bitch about. There are a few I know of who can rent an entire floor at Bretton Woods in NH and their worlds are larger, spacious and yet...still yet they bitch about what doesn't go right. Or like one of their kids flipping the Escalade and now are facing DWI charges (ongoing story that is!).

I've yet to find anyone who was ever satisfied for long. Kathy, the bond desk girl once said, “After a while it's not about the condo, the clothing, the best vacations, it's about forever chasing the numbers, making new kills, ever increasing the pot...that becomes your reason to be alive, happy..for a bit..when it wears off and I have to find a new 'hunt' to chase down.” As for the retiree I know, it's about finding programs on the TV that interest him, keeping the fridge stocked, but that requires him to have to wander into the world he has little patience for now, to replenish, constantly.

None of the joy lasts. It's all transitory. You chase down a dream, fill up on it, then it passes and you chase another.

Are the rich different? I tend to agree with Hemingway, no they are not. They just have more money is all. But they live life, it's wins and losses, more stylishly. I on the other hand, will wipe my nose with my sleeve if no one's looking. I was always Shanty Irish and the nobler, better Lace Curtain Irish will never accept my kind. 

 

Kicthen Tables...

 

 

The Irish, by nature, cannot cook unless they're taught how. The reason for this is due to what you can grow in Ireland which is mostly root crops. Though at one time wheat was grown but that was exported and finally abandoned when it was discovered that beef gave a bigger bang for profit on export. With cattle you need grazing lands and wheat fields don't cut it. The peasants can subsist on potatoes as they needed far less acreage to produce enough food for a year. If the Irish peasant didn't like it, tough cookies, he didn't own the land and had no say. If he kept complaining the Constabulary showed up to rip up the thatch roof on his house. Know and keep your place, you Irish pig!

So there you have it, dull root crops to eat. Throw it all in a pot to boil too. Add spices and herbs? Well, that took away land from growing root crops and all you had was native caraway, sage, thyme and rosemary. No problem, the English suffered too from a lack of natural flavoring and their food was just as dull. The only farmers of herbs and spices, the few that were available happened at the Irish monasteries and the monks there were looking to distill medicines out of them.

Know who had killer herbs, spices and access to trade routes? The Italians. Basil, bay leaves, oregano, black pepper, cloves, coriander, cumin, lavender, GARLIC, cilantro, fennel, mint, saffron, blood oranges, lemons... If they couldn't grow it they could barter for the really odd stuff coming out of the Arab states and even as far as China for ginger.

Imagine what you can cook with that vs. the Irish. Geography makes the cuisine!

**

My Mom unfortunately never could cook. Her idea of spicing up a meal was to toss McCormick's Dried Onion flakes onto burgers. I could smell them burning in the grease from my room upstairs. One time when I was 8, playing with an F-4 Phantom jet model I had, I could smell the McCormicks and I got a low grade headache. It sounds awful to say but my Mom's meatloaf was either boring or...disgusting. My brother and I would fetch the ketchup bottle out of the fridge and douse the meat with it. When asked by our Dad one night, at the kitchen table, with Mom present, why we did that my brother and I answered, almost in unison...

“To kill the taste.”

I shit you not. Talk about a total lack of manners and sensitivity to Mom! Odd thing though, not a word of rebuttal came from Dad or Mom when we said that. So...they agreed?

On Sundays it was the BIG meal when families did such things back then. Every god damn Sunday it would be “eye of round” roast. My brother and I could smell it being over cooked from our rooms and we both we dreaded it. We both could not help but to complain about it at the kitchen table as kids do. To my parents, this was a feast because it apparently was “expensive” and being kids from the Depression, this was a rare treat. If fact we were told oh-too-many times by our Dad how lucky we even had meat this good. “Shut up your complaining and eat it...I just had sandwiches for Sunday during the Depression as a kid!”

So out of the oven came this small blackened meteorite. It was served with boiled potatoes and boiled carrots. If not carrots, then those awful canned Le Sueur grayish peas. My Dad wanted the ends of the beef because they were the most cremated. I hoped that I'd get a piece closer to the center because it may be, by luck, more tender. The grayed slice would be plopped on my plate and I'd start cutting it like a surgeon, to debride out all the veins of gristle that ran through it. I'd make a little pile of them to the side of the plate. Why? Because at the time many of my teeth had apical abscesses and it chewing anything tough made them hurt. That was why I prayed for the center cut, there might be a chance it was soft enough and I excised the gristle anyway. As for the root tip infections in my teeth, that's another story for another time. (Hint: School nurse involvement!)

So, my brother and I would gag it down as quickly as possible. We eventually had learned to stop complaining and bolt the food down and we'd be away from the table as soon as we could. Later, if we were lucky, there might be a good movie on channel 56. Sunday TV was tough as it was all news shows and f'ing golf. If I ever see Jack Nicklaus...I may spit on him for hogging the TV channels so much with his damn golf career. They lionized him then like they did with Peyton Manning or Tiger Woods now. Look, if all three died crashing into a gasoline tanker truck, tasting their own blood and burned like that eye of round roast I once knew, golf and football will not cease to exist because they're gone. Sorry guys, you are NOT Gods.

Anyways...

On rare occasions, my Mom would buy a Chef Boyardee's Italian (yes, specified as “Italian”) Spaghetti & Meatball kit. It came with pre-seasoned tomato sauce, spice packets for making the meatballs, instructions and a small can of Parmesan cheese. She once re-read the instruction booklet in some disbelief as it said to simmer the sauce and meatballs for 30 minutes.

“That sounds wrong...seems too long.” she opined to us once. Hell, what did she know. This from a women who never once bought dried granulated garlic for the cupboard.

Even through the wait, my brother and I were salivating as this sauce bubbled away. The kitchen actually smelled wonderful for once. He and I dove into it once it was on our plates. Re read that, we scarfed down the Chef Boyardee for God's Sake. It's crap compared to a slap-together red sauce you might make yourself in a hurry.

**

It wasn't all misery. We used to go out to restaurants too. That was a nice reprise from the grub at home. One of Dad's favorites was Valle's by the airport in Warwick. I had like it because I discovered cubed steak there, nicely pre-chewed food for my sore teeth. He for the slabs of meat he could get on his plate. Add to that baked potatoes drowning in butter and decent, properly done veggies for once, I was a happy camper.

Except for one time...and a few hours later...not.

There was a special for blueberry pie one day at Valles's and my parents both ordered it. I instead wanted vanilla ice cream and my Dad put up a stink about how “I can get ice cream anywhere” and “This is the best blue berry pie around.” My Mom interceded by telling Dad, “Oh just let him have the ice cream” and he relented. When the desserts arrived, Dad, to rub it in, kept commenting to my Mom about how “wonderful” the pie was. He laid it on thick enough to where I just sat their, trying to enjoy my own ice cream hoping he'd just shut up.

Later on that night, when I was lying awake in bed, I could hear my Dad puking his guts out into the toilet with my Mom telling him:

“Richard! It was the pie! It tasted funny...spoiled to me when we ate it!”

“No it wasn'.....Arrrrgggh...Oooog (Splash!). Hack! Hack! Hack!......Ooooooog...a-huck, a-huck, a-huck....Arrrrrppp!” (Splash!)

Upstairs, I lay there in bed listening to this, with a mile wide smile on my face. 

 

 These peas...are the foulest things ever.

I May Not Know Art but I Know What I Like!

 

Cannon Beach

Cannon Beach Oregon is an artist/beach resort community I visited nearly thirty years ago. A friend and I were winding our way up Route 101, stopping at various spots if they seemed interesting enough before finally hitting Astoria and then to home. If you're from New England, you might recognize Cannon Beach a bit from the architecture. There are Cape Cod style houses out there that were built by...New Englanders who migrated out there so long ago.

I was more interested the beach area, to finally say I had been in the Pacific ocean, all of three inches of it as the water in late July is ice cold still. After I accomplished that, we headed into town to see what it was about. I was hoping to see one of the art galleries that didn't charge you to go in. Always on the bargain hunt I am! We find one, go in and I start looking at the paintings on the wall. Cannon Beach is known for it's seals lazing on rocks, docks, its beaches and guess what most of the paintings featured? Seals.

Seals done Jackson Pollock pop art style, photo-realism seals, surrealist seals and seals in art deco.

As I scan them, I notices the little card underneath the frame which tells you the painter, year and price should you want to buy it.

“$7,000?!!” I nearly blurt out. “For a fuckin' picture of a seal?”

I move along the wall, now more curious about pricing than the seal itself.

“Hey..M...c'mere” I say. “Look at THIS one...$27,000!!”

I look at the signage on the bottom of the painting to see if it is a van Gogh. It's not. It's someone called Martin Fernsby. “Who the f is Fernsby? Did I miss one of the greats in the art world? Am I that uncultured? Do I still use my sleeve to wipe my nose (well, yes I do, when no one's looking.).”

The painting was a seal, on a rock, silhouetted against a foggy, humid sunset of the Pacific. Big God Damn Deal I think. I see nothing special. OK, one thing special, it was a transparent water color so it looked ghostly, but not for $27k. You can take a zillion of your own pictures of seals in Cannon Bay if you want, even porn ones if they are frisky enough. 

 

 One of many Seals in Cannon Beach

**

Pawtucket runs an art festival from late August to mid September and I do attend it if I can. I can easily find parking because I am a local and know where to park and walk all of 50 yards to it. The festival culminates in Slater Park where artists and vendors set up shop and you peruse it at your leisure. By leisure I mean you can look at all the folk art, crafts and whatnot without the artist haranguing you to “buy something.” There are some tents that do show some pretty clever sculptures, paintings and Olde New England folksy artifacts.

I used to attend the Scituate Art show but gave up on it because I got sick and tired of the artists following me around their tent, breathing down my damn neck hoping I'll buy something. You know who does that with pure irritation? Cardi's furniture salesmen. These sharks circle the front door and follow you in like a bleeding surfer, hurriedly paddling to shore, waiting to snap the board and you in half. The Scituate artists aren't too much different.

I know one guy who does the art festival circuit. He's a glass blower/metal worker and will pack up his equipment and wife into the RV and hit the New England/NY festival circuit. He's retired now so he can do this full time. I once asked him how much it costs him and how much cash he can make.

“Oh, a good summer with good weather? May to October? I can get about $24,000”

I was stunned. That kind of money from glass and welded coffee table statues. I then tell him of my annoyance at the artists trying to pick pocket me.

“HA! I know what you mean, but realize this, a lot of these guys work shitty jobs and do the art to supplement their income, so they're really gonna go at you when they see you linger two seconds longer than usual in front of an item, knowing you like it.”

I then tell him that the prices I see seem ridiculous. “They'll charge you $5,000 for Popsicle stick art work if they can...they're trying to make a living and if you are willing to pay...”

No. I am not willing to pay.

What's good about the festival here, is that it's not big enough to draw that kind of vendor...and they are vendors. It's local artists who don't do the circuit and couldn't afford to anyway. Good. Keep it simple. I did part with a twenty because I saw some handcrafted bowls, carved out of tree trunks, due to the fact I needed one. Ok, that guy I will support and he's reasonable.

The event ends with the RI Philharmonic doing a free concert by the Ten Mile river, under a telescoped stage with a super cool line array sound system. I had gone by the sound engineer a few times to gawk and drool at his equipment. Four laptops were running with controls for power management, mixing boards and what not. I have a similar system in my living room except it's TINY compared to that. I knew the guy running the “board” was good because he was using what all experienced sound engineers use to reference a system, Steely Dan's Aja album.

The conductor for the philharmonic tried his best to engage the rubes in the audience with classical music. Hell, I am such a rube, I know some classical but I can't speak of it to sound informed in any manner. So he did the hits everyone else knows and also popular movie sound tracks. You should hear the theme to Star Wars done live. You can hear the rosin rasping the hell out of the strings. You can even hear the reed in a saxophone/clarinet vibrate when it's live as well. I have yet to hear any stereo system get that close. Hi fidelity isn't live, but you try like mad getting it close as possible. But it..never.quite.makes.it.

The conductor I guess, wanted to try one classical piece on the audience to raise them out of their gray, uncultured and crotch scratching lives. He introduced a piece done by Aron Copeland, who I've heard of before and when he was done speaking of him, you heard the crickets in the woods beyond chirping away.

“Not that kind of audience huh?” he said. The audience laughed.

“I can get some spoons and jugs for you if you want! We can have a real hootenanny!” He was of course joking.

Was it worth it? Sure. To see them perform live in Providence, you have to shell out $71 or $600 if you want the whole series.

Anyways, the festival is worth it in my eyes. The smaller the better and less pretentious without the huckstery of the better known shows. There were no $9 caramel apples at the one I attended and no $27,000 seals.

 

Coming to Accords

So what does that mean? In the song, he wishes for a perfect, mechanical heart built in the Rust Belt that never gets old or broken, ever.

 

 

Most mornings, I wake up with a song playing in my head. I don't know why but it's a habit. Why wouldn't it be for me? I love music if you couldn't tell by my forever posting songs no one listens to anymore (or even like). Then there's the amount of cash I've spent on stereo equipment over the years trying to perfect that sound. In the world's “Things to do with your life,'' that's fairly noble...No? Hell, at least I'm not working on an ardent meth lifestyle.

Today I woke up with Jackson Browne's “The Pretender,” which isn't a bad song to arise to on a summer Saturday morning. After I get up, I make the rounds through the house. Turn on the computer, synch it with the stereo system and then grab a Coke. Once that is done, I click on MVY's station out of Tisbury and the day has now officially started. I then get curious about Browne's The Pretender so I Google that and I get a Rolling Stone article that impales the song and it's music.

“Dude, you don't know a fucking thing about what Browne's writing about” I say to myself as I read it. “You haven't lived with loss nor absurdity...you're lucky!” When I was young I'd take this critic for his word because he's a published critic, a professional! Now after piling on the decades, any critic's judgment is seen through my own eyes and that experience is as valid as theirs, perhaps more. 

 

**

Unfortunately for all of us, because it never lasts, our best creativity happen when we are young. There is a time in our 20s', say 30's where we “peak” and everything we touch, generally turns to gold, or at least silver. It takes almost no effort really as we are bustin' out, blooming all over. That is the nature of youth. It's supposed to happen that way. It's why you see the discographies of various artists simply just hit it, again and again, so effortlessly when they're peaking.

Browne is 72 years old now. His latest album, which so few will listen to, is called “Downhill From Everywhere.” In it, he still is looking for that perfect love, the Answer To It All and some hope for that fruition he's been searching for. In his defense though, he does reconcile the dreams he has with real life. He knows that even at his age the hope is still there, even if it's not realistic to ape the younger dreams.  Hope however, never stops nagging you to advance. It won't stop till you've spun out your line and are too worn out to try. Browne sees this coming and realizes life can be just too unknowable to solve, so he harmonizes the opposing truths as well as he can.

I remember George Harrison's last album and a song called “Stuck Inside a Cloud.” I had thought, with Harrison's lifelong devotion to Hinduism, all those yogis and tapping into the deepest of the deep, he'd have some answers. But in that song he admits he wasn't any closer to The Answer at all, even to the last when the throat cancer was taking him out. Whether he recoiled it all I don't know.

I digress with that, somewhat...

Browne writes a song about Barcelona where he gets, for a brief time, a feeling of being young once more. The strikingly different sights and culture of that city wake him up a bit. He mentions that he passes young women on the street and can't help but feel that spark to chase them, but realizes at 72, it would be a joke! He mentions his “Use by Date” has long since passed. The millions he has made over the years could find a young gold digger to pay attention to him but it's false and he knows this.

There are countless times I'm reminded of just how old I am, how far away I am from those salad days I did once own. At an old haunt of a beach I used to hang out in '94, I was walking up and down it, with a pair of giant Celestron binoculars, watching the rich frolic on their yachts and those tough motherfuckers who clam for a living, forever pulling on those rakes. Even 1,000 yards away, I could make out what they were up too. By the way, the well off like to piss off the side of their pleasure craft at times, not that I wanted to see that but when they think they're 1000 yards from anyone and all alone...

The only thing I needed to complete my white haired, old guy look was a metal detector.

As I walked along the beach, I came upon a women, perhaps barely 25, spread out on her blanket, her skin glistening from tanning oil. There are a few who still do purposely tan I was surprised to find out. As I got closer, I could tell how hot she was. I kept telling myself, “Don't stare! Don't stare!” but I had to look. Inside I heard myself “Go ahead, talk to her...she's alone...”

“Are you fucking kidding yourself?” the other part of my brain said. “What possible future would she have with a guy who's pushing 58? Never mind any of the other things she may want, like someone who doesn't nearly die panting while climbing a moderate sized mountain that doesn't qualify as one of New Hampshire's '48's'”

I kept walking and kept my mouth shut.

How did I manage to reconcile that? Barely. But I had this thought. It all keeps repeating, every generation that comes along gets to play for a while while young. And I knew that she, and some boys her age out there, are playing that game, enjoying it as well as they can. I had my time, now it's theirs. It hasn't stopped because I got older nor will it stop.

Good for them!

Dark Humor

 

There's a reason why “Easy, happy” stories don't get written. “Tom had to get a biopsy done as the Dr's noticed a spot on his pancreas. They successfully got the sample and sent it out. After a week, Tom got his results. The test was benign with no hint of cancer.”

The End.

Ok, now what? Where do you go from there? He celebrated for a few days? Ok, that wears off fast...No story there.

That's why you have to have a problem in a story. Conflict, grief, doom and gloom. OK, I'm being facetious but it's true. It can't be all puppies and ice cream because life isn't like that. More often, there is no resolution to more than one of life's problems or at best, an forever updating sloppy fix to it. These stories don't have to be novels and can be short. In fact, here's the world's shortest, saddest story.

Hemingway was challenged along with a few other writers to come up with the shortest, most miserable story they could create. When they all met again to show what they had done, everyone thought Hemingway instantly won. Here's the story he wrote.

“FOR SALE: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”

Immediately your own imagination fills in that tiny sentence, doesn't it? It's supposed to. You were led there to fill in the ugliness.

How interesting would be: “FOR SALE: Baby Shoes. $20 Bucks.” No real human drama to pull you in.

Even something like Twain's “Tom Sawyer,” is like this. Yes, it was turned into a family-friendly, sugary Disney flick but Sawyer's world included: Murder, child abuse, hinted at child sexual abuse, serious and medically damaging alcoholism, dragging a river looking for bodies, racism and a great argument negating the Protestant Work Ethic.

However, the story ends with Huckleberry and Tom surviving and finding the gold. Bad Injun Joe gets “his” from slipping off a ledge and dying. There's a hint that Becky and Tom may get married one day. Finally, the town widow manages to get Huckleberrie's first bath in eons as the boy felt bathing was pointless.

The point being, they had to go through a ton of shit to get to that ending. Otherwise it would've been boring as hell just to hear about two boys rafting on the Mississippi, occasionally picking their noses and telling one another how bored they were.

And...that's why I write some of the shit you see here. I could write Disney stories but they'd be five sentences long. Where do you go with them? Believe me, I have far more interesting things to show you but they include humanity's usual messiness and some stories I have look messier than a Harley crash on 95. If and when I upload those...well, we'll see. But they would be guaranteed to keep your interest and you'd forward them to people you know.

That last piece I wrote about, Gia, gave me second thoughts. Some will know who I was really talking about as there were enough clues. The part about disparaging her name bugged me but everyone who knew her then was aware of what was going on. That was no secret. Add to that, it's been 25 years and the past is dust, except for guys like me who keep digging it up as it were an Egyptian crypt. I could've written about how Gia was somewhat instrumental in my meeting that girl where I felt, “Ahhhhhh...my God..Look at HER! She's sooo pretty!” It was one of those reactions where I, the male, the GUY...remembered, for years, every single thing she was wearing that night and what we spoke about when we first met. But no, that story I had written about already. So I got over my initial hesitancy and spoke of Gia.

So a quick story with conflict and consternation where I looked like the asshole to someone. There, I satisfied the First Rule in Telling Stories.

**

My brother, and I, both understood black humor. To put ourselves in with great company, so did Mark Twain who once remarked, “...I haven't heard of anything funnier since the orphanage burned down.” You'd have to understand black humor to get it. Hint? If you ever had to live with complete absurdity, there is only one way do deal with it, you laugh as there is no other answer that will work. Think I'm nuts? Read up on Albert Camus then get back to me. My brother and I had major thinker-ers from the Sorbonne, Cambridge and Heidelburg backing us up and we didn't even know it! Our black humor was a universal reaction and it was quite common.

We both had a great respect for the truth and both honed our bull shit detectors. As kids, we both saw the incredible garbage grown adults would toss us and then demand “respect” only because they were adults. That will not do. Dark humor is great for ferreting out horse crap and holding up the truth as we saw it, to the light. If it deflated adult egos, too bad. And IF it deflated your adult ego, by the words said by a kid, then you have MUCH work to do on yourself buddy!

It's also why I can come off as politically incorrect. There are heaps of BS on both sides of the political spectrum and don't try to install a particular belief in me I know to be horseshit. I have a piece on women's liberation that I've been tweaking a while and the working title? “Is It True Women Can Do No Wrong?”

I can hear the seething now. If I upload that and I will have my balls sliced off. My point, political correctness can be a gag order on free speech if taken too far.

Anyways, back to dark humor.

My brother was older so he came up with most of the comedy. He eventually ended up writing comedy for a local Providence magazine and he spared no one from his barbs. Why? Well, in order to be seen as “fair” and that you are not attacking a particular group, profession or whatever, you attack EVERYONE and mercilessly too. Everyone including orphans, the ill, whitey, the Irish, Girl Scouts and anyone else for that matter that seems to enjoy a protected status.

At 15, my brother took a bunch of my Dennis the Menace cartoons and re-wrote the captions with the most politically WRONG, bizarre, twisted yet highly honest interpretations of life. He used Dennis because of the action that was drawn in them. Peanuts cartoons are kids just standing there, Dennis actually moved around and that lent itself to many jokes. They were begging to be written!

So, one night and due to the fact I had bunch of those old cartoons in the trunk of my car, I was telling a girl I know about them and how funny there were. Well, you'd think you'd know someone well enough when you decided to open the good wine to share with them...

“What? What's the matter? You don't like Sangiovese wines? You just spit it on the floor!”

I get the cartoons out of my car, go back into the bar and plop them down before her. I had done this countless times with others in the years past and I was expecting her to laugh so hard she'd start tearing. It has in the long past with countless others!

But...

She's just flipping the pages, not saying a word.

I'm waiting and am getting curious about the silence.

Finally, she stops on one and bellows out, so the whole bar can hear.

“What the FUCK is this!?? YOU think that's FUNNY?!! This is the SICKEST shit I've EVER seen!!”

To be honest, I was really taken aback. Not anyone, in the past 30 years, had ever reacted so strongly and sooo negatively to them. Add to that a bunch of heads in the bar were turning to us to find out just what it was I had done.

So I quickly start back peddling, explaining and trying to put into context just what they were. Well, what was the point now, she was so damn emotional that 1 + 1 equaling 2 wouldn't have tallied in her head. It's impossible when some women get like that. Think that's cruel and untrue? Ask any guy...and other women how some can roll a snowball down a hill till it grows and flattens a ski village at the bottom of it.

It's called, “Blowing Things Out of Proportion.” I heard my Dad yell that at my own Mom more than a few times in the past.

So relying on my de escalation training I had from another job, I cooled the situation down. How do you do that? One very helpful thing is NOT to add to it. You don't toss gas on a fire. For a good week after when I saw her, she looked at me like I was something she'd scrape off the bottom of her shoe.

**

For a while I wondered about that reaction as it came out of nowhere. I finally talked to another in the bar about her reaction and decided to show him, privately out by the car, the cartoons. He was laughing his ass off when he read them. When we got back in, he had mentioned that “Did I know her Dad was a Pentecostal minister?”

“Uh..no...really?” I say.

“Yep... from deepest Arkansas, the entire family were Holy Rollers, well some were. She goes from absolutely loving her family or hating their guts, it depends on the day.” I'm told.

I think...”O-Kaaaaaay...that explains a lot.”

I had caught her on her “religious” night I think when I showed that stuff to her.

So, for your entertainment, I've scanned and uploaded what my brother did in his off time. I give you two options you can pick from as you read the cartoons. One day I'll tell the story of how he pissed off the Bruce Sundlund administration when he published a comedic piece on the Governor. 

1. If you are offended, I apologize.

2. Or if you are offended, go fuck yourself. 

    

    

   
   
   
   
   
   

   
   

    

 

Die Young, Stay Pretty

 

 

That's Gia Carangi. She was called the world's first super model and up-ended the industry back in the late 70's when all they promoted were tall, thin ash blonde women. Gia shows up as a stark opposite and threw those models off the magazine covers left and right. She was also one of the very few models who used little or no makeup whatsoever, she didn't need it. If you get that famous that fast, the notable photographers like Richard Avedon beg you for a shoot.

However, growing up in shitty circumstances like she did, learning and enjoying being feral as an early teen didn't help her in adulthood. She was raised in a crazy household and that doesn't teach you about how to anchor your life to some secure point nor find a harbor in a storm. So, get real rich and famous as a young adult and knowing nothing of how to navigate life, you smash up on the rocks quickly.

Before Gia discovered drugs while in NYC people said was a charm to be around. No negativity or darkness. However, the drug usage grew (lastly heroin) and due to this and a host of other problems, she became too unreliable, too erratic to be employed in the fashion business. Her bouts of anger, storming out of photo sessions or not even showing up at all wasn't helping her career along much. The photographers began to complain of the track marks on her arms and tried to touch them up in the developing room. It wasn't long after when no one would hire her.

She burnt through her cash and ended up homeless in NYC's shooting galleries. Feeling sick one day, she goes to the hospital and after a bunch of tests, she was found positive for the AIDs virus from sharing needles. This was the mid 80s when this diagnosis was a death sentence.

She died in 1986 and from what those saw who visited her then, she was emaciated and covered head to toe in those skin cancers AIDs patients were prone too. It was months later that the fashion industry had learned of her passing and just one photographer friend from then, sent a Mass card to her parents. Otherwise the business did nothing to remember her.

To replace the mega bucks Carangi used to bring into the agencies and recreate that “look,” they found Cindy Crawford and the fashion world dubbed her, “Baby Gia.” 

Angelina Jolie played Gia in a biopic and said about her character: "When she's free and just being herself, she's unbelievable; that's the tragedy of Gia's story. You think, 'God, Gia didn't need drugs -- she was a drug.'"

 

**

I'll have to be careful about how I write this next story and the reason why is that you're not so supposed to speak ill of the dead or disparage their reputation. So I'll have to tread carefully but tell the truth as well as I can. Yes, the person I will speak of is dead and has been so for over 20 year now I believe. I'll call her Gia.

Since I'm an awful stalker on Google looking up people I used to know, I looked up Gia and she didn't exist. So I put a search through Google images and the first picture that showed up shocked me. I swore it was Gia. The picture linked to a Facebook account that was open and I hit it up.

It was Gia's daughter. I had found out at Gia's death that she had two kids but that's all I knew. The girl on the Facebook page looked like a ghost I knew from long ago. This spectre I saw was a near clone of Gia from then. Spooooky! I never bothered “friending” because all I had were the ugly stories about her Mom.

**

I briefly hung at “Horton's Lot” by the Teknor Apex Chemical complex as a late teen. More truthfully, I was pestered and dragged to hang there by J, who for some reason liked those kids. They all were your real lower blue class types. Their parents worked in shit factory jobs then and because they and their kids were closer to “the street,” they were rougher and more prone to pound the shit out of each other, including the girls.

J. and I show up one night at the lot and Gia (16), Eric(19) and Sue (17) hop into my car and we take off to drive around aimlessly. I had known Eric from the lot but not the two girls. So after a bunch of “Hi's” we talk and listen to the radio. The two girls were pretty in their own right but Gia had something else...a cuteness...a personality that was very engaging. Her heart was in the right place and that can make a girl look even prettier. It's that freshness anyone has, before life beats the shit out of you. Hopeful, full of energy and showed promise. I knew many teens then who were already wrung through wringer and were too soon ruined. But not Gia. Not yet.

Eric and Gia were in the back seat and from the conversation I figured out they were a couple. I had learned that as Gia was trying to hold Eric to a promise he'd “buy her those earrings” she saw at the flea market.

“That's it! Hold him to it!” yells Sue from the front seat to them. Girls must stick together you know! For about thirty minutes the chatter from the back seat is typical teen couple shit, arguing somewhat with protestations of love seconds later.

After a bit, the back seat gets real quiet and I turn my head around to see what's gone wrong. I then see Gia's head slowly bobbing up and down on Eric's lap and I quickly turn my head back to driving. Whoops!, I shouldn't have seen that I think. Sue had turned around too but kept watching.

“Wow, this chick Gia doesn't care at all, and neither does this Sue.” I thought.

A few months go by and I get to know the two girls better. Gia was a pure goofball personality wise. It was a nice goofball mind you, nothing that would suggest malice at all. I figured there was some mental damage along the way that made her ditzy silly. But the problem with that is that there was plenty of pot, coke and pills then and if she took any of those at all, her ditzyness was raised 300%. That also made her an easy target for the boys as well. When the beer and pot made her brains run out of her ears, her panties ran off too. Apparently, the girls of that little clique at Horton's Lot didn't really care that she was like this. Your lower classes start early when it comes to anything “adult.” To add to that, we were just out of the 70s where shctupping anyone you wanted was fine.

I was there at the Lot for a few months when I started to hear my inner smoke detector going off. The boys at that lot were far too willing to be pre-criminals and I could see where this was going to lead, graduated criminals with degrees from the ACI. I didn't want to be associated with this and as the old saying goes, 'You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.' So I stopped going there.

No loss. I wasn't about to caught up in their little petty conspiracies and car thefts. Also, I had turned myself into Mr. College Kid by then and that was the path I wanted to follow.

But, on occasion, we'd drive by there and stop for a few minutes because someone from our original haunt in Slater Park had wanted to go and one night I saw Gia again.

She was high as shit. She had shaved one side of her head down to crew cut style and swept the rest of her long hair over the other side into this puffed up 80s style. She wore torn jean cut-off shorts and her tee shirt was tied up into a mid riff. She was bouncing from car to car, sloppy drunk. When she had some to ours I was already outside, leaning against the hood

“Ronnnnnny!” She had remembered me. I got the hug and sloppy lush's kiss and she had asked me how I was and all that. Before I could get her into a conversation, she had seen something shiny over there and ran off. She still possessed that nice open hearted innocence in her but she was a mess. Life, I guess, even in her state, had not made her bitter and ugly yet. Or perhaps she was too numb to notice anyways. Perhaps she wanted it that way.

By my car, on the side walk against the fence, were three girls I had remembered who still hung at the Lot. After Gia had run off the girls made their pronouncements to themselves.

“Fuck...what a pig!” “Wonder what different kinds of DNA will be in her stomach tonight?” “God...she's sooo disgusting!” The panel of judges ruled her as a bonafide skank and this, coming from girls, is solid sentence of social death.

This, coming from real lower class girls who lost their virginity by early 15 and who could beat on a Pawtucket cop w/o any reservation if need be. That's a heavy judgment when your condemned by them!

Those girls could tell I had heard that and one says, “You haven't been here in a while...you know what Gia's doing now?” I'm asked.

“Her Mom threw her out of the house....she's been fuckin' n' suckin' guys for a places to live now...the last one let her sleep in his car only!”

Then a couple of years go by w/o seeing her.

**

J. who used to bug me to go to Horton's Lot to begin with, now had a small apartment on Barton St. He was in a longish process of leaving RI anyways so our crew didn't visit him much. He was on his way. But one night he had gotten ahold of me and said Gia was just recently staying with him.

Gia and I were alone in my car as J. had gone back inside. She looks at me and asks, “Do you have a washing machine and dryer...J doesn't and this building doesn't either.” Gia's entire life was in a Hefty bag she had thrown in the back seat of my Nova.

I thought about it...and gave in.

She looked haggard now for a 20 year old. Her hair was a bit greasy and you could see the skull pushing through her face a bit. She had lost quite a bit of weight when she had no reason to begin with. She just looked plain worn out and tired. That bouncy ditz I knew were replaced by a look in the eye I've seen in schizophrenics, it's a wolf's look that's always on guard, ready to spot any danger at anytime and ready to flee, or pounce. Those stupid jokes she used to tell weren't needed as they no longer served her, that was substituted by hard core survival duplicity and strategy. Life had sure changed her these past years.

She tells me to leave and blow off J., to just leave him at his apartment.

“He thinks he's gonna get some but fuck that!' she tells me. I guess she was tired of that as well and had an ounce of dignity left.

We get to my house and I sneak her in, then down stairs and she starts dumping her clothing into the machine. She then walked away from me over by the furnace to block my view but I can see somewhat. She pulls off her tee shirt and quickly puts on as far too large sweat shirt I had for her. When she pulled that shirt, I saw her stomach and it had about 6-8 largish mosquito bites with bruising all around them. What was weird was that the mosquito that bit her loved Euclidean geometry, a nice straight line of them.

It hit me what those marks were. “Well, at least she ain't mainlining it.” I thought.

The wash took a couple of hours so we took off driving and I hear about her life, as she told it but it was full of lies and horseshit, trying to cover up what a mess it was now. I didn't bother to extract the truth out of her, what was the point? I let her ramble on.

We get back and collect her stuff and she says to go back to J's house and I drop her off there.

Another five years go by.

Snippets of her life came to us in dribs and drabs. She was living in the shittier parts of Providence. I heard nothing more till around 1999.

**

Rhode Island is a small town. You will hear about people you haven't seen in decades eventually. Since I was friends with the EMT crews on Pawtucket's fire department, I'd hear all sorts of weird stories and on rare occasions of calls these guys went on where we knew the person.

I was talking to D and we were hitting old memories when I mentioned Gia.

“Oh, shit..I was on that call.” D says.

“What call?” I had no idea where this was going.

“Ok...we get a call that two kids were across the street from their home, telling their neighbor's that 'Mom won't wake up.' So the neighbor shrewdly kept the kids at his house and he goes across the street. He was the one who called.”

“We found her in her bed, dead as a door nail. The cops and medical examiner have to come so we wait and when they arrive, they find out who she was...I swear, they knew what to look for and they found it, needles, pills, heroin and the works.” Like I said, in RI, your life is known by all.

I say, “Wow, she finally did it! Straight down!”

“Not really,” D goes on, “her life went to total shit and she got into a rehab program, managed to get off of it, get a job, rent that house and got her kids back from the state. What the medical examiner suspects, she fell off the wagon, got the drugs and shot herself to the moon. She fucked up dosing herself.”

She was 28.

Since it was the Pawtucket FD that went on that call, I asked D. “Where was this house? I didn't know she was back in Pawtucket again.”

“Hell, it's three blocks from YOU...Over by Beverage Hill...It's a good area, a nice house too, clean inside, lawn cut and all.”

I had no idea she was less than a half mile from me, or that she had gone that way.

**

  

It's been years since I used to sneak back to Gia's daughter's Facebook page just to look her photos, all grown up at 22. “You have Mom's face...you're Gia.” I'd say to myself. After a bit I stopped looking, you process stuff from the past and move on. It's what we all do.