Sunday Reading: The "Lives" Parody

I'm not a journalist. I write for self-expression, or fun, or sanity, or to give myself the illusion of power in a powerless world. It can be a kind of desktop activism, and a spiritual exercise. I've rarely been paid for my writing, though I certainly would relish the opportunity to be paid for expressing myself. Anyone who reads this blog knows I'm not shy about expressing my opinion. But I also just like the beauty of words, the turn of a phrase. I'm happy with our twenty-first century internet overstimulation. I read things that stimulate my mind and imagination, and things that I wish I'd written, that I wish I'd had the clarity to express.

I grew up with the tradition that Sunday was a day to luxuriate in reading, starting with an excursion out the door to buy the Sunday Times. There's a weekly column on the last page of the New York Times Sunday Magazine called "Lives." For years this column has annoyed the hell out of me. I'm not sure what the column is supposed to achieve each week, but it's usually a first-person nostalgic journey through someone's difficult life learning experience. Except that by the time you're finished reading the short page-long story, you're left with a vague distaste for the story's writer and a sense that you've read something strangely inappropriate that you wished you hadn't. "Lives" columns usually don't have happy endings, and while that might mirror the episodic disappointments present in anybody's real life, the cliche-ridden predictability of these stories is a marvel. I was talking with friends about the column and we realized we all often turned to the "Lives" column first just for a kind of sardonic laugh.

Here's a couple typically bleak recent excerpts:

"After all, my life as I know it began 23 years ago, when, in a freakish accident, I was hit in the head by a ceiling fan in our home in Fort Worth, Tex...." — Sept. 16

"The house keys are peeled from a ring. Sometimes they thank me. Sometimes they cry....At least I don’t make them turn out the lights one last time as they leave. That’s my job." — Sept. 23

"And then a few months ago, his mother called. She said her son had taught his last class of the semester, cashed his paycheck and padlocked himself in a hotel room with an ample supply of crack, heroin and alcohol. An autopsy confirmed he died of an overdose." — Sept. 9

"George dares me to send this former classmate a friend request on Facebook, “for closure,” and I do. I am almost giddy... A day goes by. No response. Then a week. Then another week. I quietly delete the request. And there I am again, the 12-year-old girl who can’t look herself in the mirror." — July 29

You get the idea. There are familiar patterns: a random multiculturalism, the illusive nature of hope, the ever-presence of random tragedy, a sense of oversharing navel gazing that has nevertheless failed to make its author more self-aware. After laughing at a few columns with friends, we weren't convinced that someone wasn't pulling a fast one by submitting parodies to print. We thought, what if we wrote actual parodies of a Sunday Magazine "Lives Column"? And so that is what I've done. With my profound apologies I offer it up for your Sunday edification. Please note this is a work of deeply off-color fiction.

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LIVES

My parents quickly warmed to my choice of brides.

Soon after I introduced them to Susan, they opened their lives to her. My mother and Susan would go shopping together at the mall; they’d luncheon during the week when I was at work.

I was first taken aback at this added dimension of intimacy. Susan seemed to enjoy my parents’ company more than I did, sometimes.

Of course Mom and Dad had to tell Susan all the family stories. No childhood embarrassment was taboo. The time I had almost ran over the neighbor’s cat with my first hand-me down car. And there were the tales of Frankie, the twin who was lost one sad winter to a case of pneumonia none of us understood until it was too late.

“Oh Frankie was a special little boy, Susan,” my mother regaled late one warm summer evening. We were in the screened-in porch. “He used to pick dandelions from the front lawn and hand them to me in the kitchen. He’d hang on to my apron and say ‘I love you mommy’ and I’d tell him he was my special sailor boy.” My mom pushed back a tear.

“It was funny, Susan, your George here,” she pointed at me, mom did, “he was a nice boy, but not giving and generous like Frankie. Oh heavens, I remember when we were toilet training those boys…”

“Mom, must you?” I tried to interject, tried to salvage some of my own dignity.

“Oh hush, George.” She laughed as a memory surfaced. “Anyway one day little Frankie came out of the bathroom with his hands outstretched, full of a mess, saying ‘Mommy look what I made all by myself! Am I a good little boy? Mommy’” Mom and Dad both chuckled in the memory. Dad turned away as the chuckle turned into a little sob. “Oh yes, Frankie, I told him, you’re a good little boy. Mommy’s little sailor. But let’s go wash our hands now baby. Oh that child, he sure tried hard. Not like our little George here. Isn’t that right George?”

Mom gave my ear a good tug and walked in to the kitchen to refill her tumbler of wine.

Susan and I were married later that year. It was a beautiful time. Sadly Dad passed on the very next year; I got promoted at work and we decided to start a family. Mom wasn’t handling the loss of Dad too well so Susan and I talked it over and decided we would invite Mom to move in with us. Susan was pregnant and Mom could help with our new arrival. Susan’s parents has returned to their native Malaysia and I knew she could use the help and support.

Neither of us realized what kind of state Mom was really in. She had taken to drinking just a little bit too much, too often. And at first we were able to dismiss her sudden lapses of memory as quaint senior moments but it soon became clear things were not all right at all.

One day I came home from work and she called out to me “Oh, Frankie! Where have you been!” she grabbed the sides of my head and embraced me tightly. “Mom, it’s me, George…Frankie’s gone, don’t you remember?” The blissful look on her face soured immediately.

“Oh George…it’s only you. Leave me alone.”

“Can’t you see your mother’s tired, George? Leave her alone.” I was surprised at Susan interjecting like that. We went to bed tense, a wooden silence between us for the first time.

The policemen who rang the doorbell the next evening said that they didn’t have a chance in that downpour, the semi was coming too fast, the driving rain causing a chain of events nobody shorter than God could have prevented. Susan was gone. Mom, who had been driving her home from a baby shower, was in ICU.

I rushed to the hospital. Mom was hooked up to tubes and machines. Groggily, she looked my way. “Frankie? Frankie!” Awareness straightened the smile on her face. “Oh, George. Only you. Where’s my little sailor boy Frankie?” Dried blood caked the weak hand she lifted up from the bed questioningly.

I went into the small hospital bathroom. I strained, I reached back, and filled my hands with love for my mother.

“Mommy? Mommy do you love me?” I raised my hands to her as I came out of the bathroom, dripping, reeking. She smiled.

“Yes Frankie. My perfect little boy.”

Belief Without Doubt?

"Stones from the River" is the story of a young German woman growing up before, and living through, the Second World War. Written by German-American author Ursula Hegi, it's not a new book: a copy has been floating around my office and it was my turn to read it. It was published in the early 1990s and at some point achieved the dubious award of being an Oprah book club selection. Anyway the perspective of the book's heroine, Trudi Montag, is quite unique. She's an outsider in her community since she was born a "little person," or dwarf. It's a satisfying story with, of course, more than its share of tragedy given the setting. Trudi isn't an international spy or resistance hero, she's just a person trying to live her life, though her personal morality helps her to make important decisions to reject the national chauvinism and anti-Semitism rising with the Nazification of the world around her.

Anyway one passage caused me to fold up the corner of the page it resonated so clearly. It's about the time she hears Hitler give a speech shortly after he took over the government. At the risk of invoking the dread Godwin's Law, I thought this little bit of fiction shined a spotlight on a phenomenon I worry about in our own trying times. Which isn't to say any of the current wave of political demagogues out there are quite so genocidally single-minded or precipitously bound for dictatorship as was Hitler. History doesn't repeat itself exactly, but it makes one grateful that the current crop of hateful idiots out there in the public square seem to lack the charisma necessary to truly rise above the mobs in which they are ensconsed.

Here's the excerpt:

"He was not nearly as tall as she'd expected from newspaper photos, and he look straight at her when he talked, not excluding her like the assistant pastor, Freidrich Beier, who spoke above her head as if she were too insignificant to be included.... Herr Hitler's mouth moved independently of his eyes. There was something wrong with his face: the features didn't work together. But he looked directly at her — at everyone in the swollen crowd — like a magician performing some amazing trick of singling out everyone at once, and it was that gaze — filled with an immeasurable greed — that held all of them while his high-pitched voice spun silken ropes around them.

She fought the excitement of his gaze and voice because what he wanted from her was only too familiar — belief without doubts — something she'd resisted since first grade.

She fought him by reminding herself what her father had said to Emil Hesping — that they lived in a country where believing had taken the place of knowing..... Trudi had a sudden image of him, alone in his bedroom.... The greed she'd felt in him, the greed which had sucked all those people into his influence, was still in the room with him, and she was seized by a deep fear for the world." [emphasis added by me]

Isn't that it exactly? "Belief without doubts" and "a country where believing has taken the place of knowing" seem to sum up exactly what I find so terrifying about the right-wing in America. There is no factual discussion to be had; no argument that can be won on its own merits. In line with yesterday's musings on lies and liars, today's demagogues are free to say whatever they want because people are greedy for easy solutions, for easy answers, and they know that there is an audience out there who will not question or doubt what they say. Trying times indeed.

Image is a 1933 German propaganda postcard from the online German Propaganda Archive.

Echoes of a Past Life - Confessions of a Pornographer (part one)

I moved to New York City in 1981 to work on a socialist newspaper. The job was great, the salary subsistence level. It didn't take me more than a year or two to realize that the Big Apple was no place for no money, so while I continued for a while to design the paper on a volunteer basis, I jumped at the opportunity to take a real job for real money. My socialist paper gig had taught me the basics of professional graphic design and the publishing biz, so when my friend David said he knew of a typesetting job at a magazine company he thought the two of us could share, I eagerly agreed.

The magazine company was looking for an evening shift to cover its expanding roster, and yes as long as everything got covered, the two of us could divide up nights. Eventually David moved on to his real interest of journalism and the shift was all mine. We arrived at the office late each afternoon when everybody else was getting ready to leave. We were handed a manila folder of typed manuscripts ready to be typeset on their state-of-the-primitive-art CompuGraphic editwriter, a prehistoric dinosaur level computer with a spinning filmstrip that exposed rolls of photosensitive paper; which would then be developed in a special kind of dark-room simulating processor machine. The job was basically retyping and coding manuscripts to turn them into galleys of type that would be cut and pasted up by the art department the next morning.

There was one detail about Modernismo Publications that we needed to know. While Modernismo published a line of high-end knitting magazines in seven European languages, its bread and butter came from "Adult Sophisticate" magazines. The daytime typesetter preferred to work on the knitting magazines: she wanted little to do with "Adult Sophistication," which, it turned out, were codewords for smut. Modernismo published a line of pornographic gay magazines: Mandate, Honcho, Playguy, Torso and Inches, and a line of heterosexual skin magazines: Juggs, Legshow, and Cinema Blue. While I was there they started an absolutely hilarious boxing magazine called Fight Beat but that's another story.

Anyway, being a red-blooded young gay man I was familiar with the gay magazines. Mandate had literary pretensions, combining legit fiction and cultural writing with fantasy stories and skin spreads, plus the occasional travel feature and actual news story. Honcho was a little edgier, focusing on hyper-masculine models, gearing its taste in fantasy in the direction of the leather crowd. Playguy, despite its catchy name, was a sort of sad orphan, showing skinny young models who looked younger than their of-legal-age-IDs, catering no doubt mostly to the dirty old man set. It was the cusp of the AIDS epidemic and while the disease was eventually going to cut a swathe through the magazine's editorial and art staff, as well as through its audience and cultural sensibility, these magazines all still adhered to a late 1970s hedonistic sensibility of newfound freedom and openness in gay male sexuality. I thought it would be a hoot to work on these.


Modernismo was owned by George Mavety, a big man almost always seen smoking a cigar. He was a sort of poor man's Larry Flynt. Rumored to have an actual family somewhere, it was not unusual to see him keeping company with some busty young blonde. Mavety was a classic entrepreneur, and while heterosexual himself, he knew the value of his property. His cultivation of gay pornography was shrewd and successful: the gay mags were staffed all with gay men and given a fairly independent editorial voice. But Mavety was well immersed in the pornography world as a whole. One day a Japanese skin magazine came to the office and took photos of the place for a feature they were writing on the American trade. That's me at my typesetting machine in the top center of this photo montage from Japan's "Bachelor" magazine. (Modernismo eventually became Mavety Media Group; George Mavety died in 2000; his gay magazines finally shut down just a year or so ago)

Of course I had to work on Modernismo's heterosexual magazines as well and that was an education. "Juggs" and "Legshow" were not "Playboy." "Juggs," whose tagline was "The world's dirtiest tit-mag" was all about women's breasts, the bigger the better. It featured chubby models, older models, pregnant models ("lactating lovelies"), anyone who would display absolutely huge breasts. Ironically, Jugg's reigning "Tit Queen," a frequent centerfold and regular columnist was the original Candy Samples--no relation to my current Drag Queen friend of the same moniker--whose breasts were each larger than her head. "Legshow" was for the legs-and-ass crowd. Both mags were mass market hardcore, which meant they could compete with anatomy textbooks for their raw display of female genitalia, but being sold on newsstands they could not show penetration or actual sex. These magazines had no literary or cultural pretensions, just crude raw fuel for male masturbatory fantasies.

The difference between the gay and straight pornography I spent my evenings typesetting was a fascinating lesson in objectification and fantasy. I'll leave a fuller discussion of that for another essay. But I took the job and became a kind of working-class cog in the real pornography industry...it was a crazy job. I'll talk about what it was like to work as a pornographer in a third essay.

Fast forward a year or two: I left Modernismo for a job at a small family-owned type shop. Turned out I was a really good typesetter. It wasn't just typing: my typographic sense and design talent and my ability to get these primitive computers to churn out better quality turned out to be a marketable skill (for a little while, anyway) and after a couple years typing smut it was time to move on. But who doesn't need extra money? I had remained friends with the editor of the straight mags at Modernismo and I asked him if I could write some stories for him. I figured even if I was a textbook Kinsey 6 of a gay man I had lots of experience in reading these stories as I typeset them, so how difficult could it be to write them? I knew I was planning to take a spring and summer off to travel to Nicaragua, and I figured I could write stories from there, send em in, and keep a small paycheck going.

I was thrilled that he agreed. He greenlighted the one story I wrote before my trip and then I sent him a small handful of stories I typed out on my trusty manual typewriter from Managua. And I got paid; not a lot, but enough to soften the blow of my return to the States after a summer away.

Now here's the thing. I wasn't going to write gay pornography, not stories I actually found hot. I was going to write crude Juggs-style porn. The stories for Juggs were hilarious to me. Compared to the gay stories with romantic subtexts, the straight stories were raw exercises in titillating escapism where average Joes lived among ravishing women wanting nothing more than pure physicality, unencumbered by actual responsibilities or real-life complications. I wanted to take the stereotypical scenarios from straight porn and the vile objectification and rude language and ridiculous cliches and see if I could subversively produce a story that I thought was amusing. And so a new pseudonym was born, Sergeant Babs "Bust 'Em" Brady.

The stories I wrote are filthy dirty, full of words I would never use and can't believe I'm going to retype for this blog. But they make me laugh every time I read them. I don't think they're exactly erotic; they're meant to be subversively over-the-top. I still had--and have--a commitment to a certain kind of (sex-positive) feminist ideal, and I didn't want to completely betray my principles, even if the scenarios I had been typesetting for so long blurred crucial lines between rape and consensuality. But I thought it would be hilarious if I, a gay man, writing in the voice of a heterosexualized lesbian, could write satirical caricatures of straight pornography and have them published as actual pornography, and that is what I did. Here is the first of these stories. I have two more of them sitting by my 'puter and will continue these in later installments of "Confessions of a Pornographer."

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"You're Under a Breast"
by Sgt. Babs "Bust 'Em" Brady
Originally published in the December 1986 issue of Juggs Magazine


[Editor's note, 2013. I decided after thinking this over and over that this writing was just too rapey to let stand. It was done with some humor that does not survive the moment, as an in-joke, and because, frankly, I was a little angry and bitter, at a lot of things. I'm not going to apologize for writing it, that would be disingenuous, but I'm gonna say it wasn't my proudest moment. So I'm pulling the actual porn story I wrote. In so doing, I'm not taking a stand against porn, or analyzing the complicated human psyche that might eroticize rape in an abstract fantasy setting; but I am taking a stand against saying that there's anything funny about actual, real rape. And I will not be adding the two other porn stories I wrote to the "Echoes of the Past" series. Sorry if you've been waiting all these years for the follow up. Live and learn. Respect each other. —ISH]

Echoes of a Past Life - A Pile of Witchcrap

One of my goals in The Cahokian is to hold up a mirror to the world: to explore what "we" say about ourselves, whoever that "we" might be. "We" have a remarkable ability to delude ourselves, and to create defining myths out of wishful thinking. There are many good things about the United States, for example, but most of us living here would rather not think about all the things documented in my "Anti-Americana" series. Of course these outsider images of America are caricatures themselves, telling a different version of the story but not necessarily a complete one either.

The communities I have participated in all have their own identity myths; myths which are informed by facts but surely by the selective reporting of them. We fool ourselves in taking these myths too literally, I think. The politically active "out" lesbian and gay community loves to harken back to Stonewall, for instance, to the police raid on a corrupt mob-owned gay bar and the ensuing riotous aftermath. There's nothing wrong with seeing Stonewall as a landmark event in the struggle for gay equality and social acceptance, but focusing solely on it discounts a lot of other things that happened inside and outside the gay community in the 1960s and 1970s that led us to where we are today. Wherever that may be.

The Neo-Pagan community was all about self-invention. Neo-Pagans can be brilliant miners and archaeologists of library texts for discovering ancient practices to resurrect in modern times, usually omitting such excesses as human sacrifice. But they can also be poseurs, picking and choosing and blustering, experts at omitting inconvenient facts, and somewhat heartbreakingly gullible to the slightest suggestion of actual ancestral continuity. The foundational myth of Wicca is that Gerald Gardner learned witchcraft from a secret coven of witches in an English forest who had practiced pre-Christian Celtic religion in an unbroken ancestral line since before the middle ages. He validated his tale with some idyllic but questionable anthropology supplied by Dr. Margaret Murray, and voila, Neo-Paganism's instant pedigree.

I wrote the humorous bit of fiction below when I was feeling rather peevish toward Neopagans, perhaps after one too many Pagan festival with overlapping ren-faire/trekkie convention sensibilities, one too many obviously-invented ludicrous traditional claim, one too many bits of play-acting. In truth I think that the time is ripe for a relevant, reverent modern nature religion, and NeoPagans are to be commended for building a real established faith that even has the Pentagon granting pentacle-emblazoned tombstones to fallen Wiccan soldiers. But there are plenty of mysteries of faith upon which to meditate and expand one's consciousness without resorting to making up stories about the magic herbs granny kept in her secret stash, or inventing tales of egalitarian womyn-centered ancient utopias.

Anyway I don't remember what exactly set me off to write this piece, which I didn't finish nor publish (until now!), but I thought it would be funny to tell a de-romanticized shaggy-dog creation myth send-up of Pagan practices. Perhaps, no definitely, it was also obnoxious of me. I was leading up to a punchline I don't entirely remember about the word "witch" deriving from the word "twit." And yet, I think I'm actually making a valid point about how we tell the story of how we got here.

The relationship of our creation myths to the truth is not linear. This dates from about 1994.

The True History of the World: A Pile of Witchcrap
by Ian Scott Horst
(unpublished, unfinished manuscript)

Time: Approx. 30,000 years ago
Place: Somewhere in Europe

It was a cold winter, and the people stayed in the cave for weeks on end to avoid the winds and snows. Since soap had not yet been invented, it was smelly in the cave. Worse, the people were very bored, since yahtzee had not yet been invented either.

Ooga the hunter sat playing with her rocks. She had four of them, and arranged and re-arranged them on top of a bigger rock. There were, of course, lots of rocks in the cave.

Ooga's little son Urggie was playing with mud in the back of the cave. His hands were filthy. Well, actually, he was filthy all over. But as he tried to stand (something he had recently learned to do) he almost fell forward, and he braced himself with a dirty little hand on the cave wall.

"Urggie," said Ooga, looking up from her rocks, "look what you have done! You've gotten little hand prints all over the wall of the cave. Bad little cave-boy! Why don't you come over here and play with these rocks?"

Grogga, who lived with her sisters around the stinking pile of mammoth skins next to Oooga and Urrgie's stinking pile of mammoth skins, sneered at Ooga. "Ooh," she said to her sister Glogga. "I hate that Ooga. She's such a twit, always playing with those rocks. And that brat of hers. Look what he's done to the walls."

"Oh come on, Grogga," replied Glogga. "It's not like there's anything else to do around here. Besides, she says it's kind of like magic how playing with those rocks helps pass the time."

"I still say she's a twit."

Eventually, Ooga died of old age when she was 32. Her children continued to play with rocks, and taught their children how to play with rocks. Their neighbors always called them twits, too.

Grogga and Glogga died a year later when they were eaten by a saber tooth tiger. The tiger thought they were yummy, though the lice in their hair gave him indigestion.

Time: Approx. 10,000 years ago
Place: Somewhere in Europe

Kraka was really upset. "I am so sick of elk burgers. Elk steaks. Elk chops. Elk soup. Is that the only thing around here to eat?" She sat playing with three rocks and an elk bone which had been handed down through her family for generations. "At least I'm not bored, too." Actually four rocks had been handed down to her for generations; she'd lost one of the rocks a few summers ago after drinking too much fermented elk-milk.

There was sudden commotion outside her elk-hide hovel. Kraka heard shouts from the men and women assigned to guard their encampment. She stood, and stepped out of the hovel to see what the commotion was about.

"Let's ask the Twit, she'll know what to do!" said a man dressed in filthy elk skins. A loud murmur of agreement passed through the assembled crowd. The crowd moved toward Kraka's hovel.

"Oh great Twit, we have captured a stranger. What should we do?" From the center of the crowd, a burly man in a dirty elk-leather kilt shoved a small figure before him to the ground at Kraka's feet.

The man was slightly built, and his skin was darker than that of her people. "Hmmm. Too bad. I was hoping you might have found something good to eat," said Kraka. "OK, who are you and why shouldn't we kill you?"

The small man stood, and spoke in a thick Indo-European accent. "I am called Agri in my land, which is far, far from here. I come from the soon-to-be-fabled Fertile Crescent. Madam, if you would please introduce me to your chief I would have a few words with him."

Kraka looked doubtful. She sized up his scrawny thighs and thought that maybe he would be a nice change from elk meat. "Not a good enough answer. You there, Zug, get a spit and light a big fire. Our guest is staying for dinner!"

"But wait! I can show you many miracles!" chirped the small man.

"Look, I'm the Twit of this tribe, and miracles are my department. But OK, I will consult the sacred oracle." Kraka went back into her hovel and picked up her four rocks. Well, her three rocks and one elk bone. She shook them around and threw them in the dirt. Well, OK, there was a lot of dirt in the hovel: She threw them in the part of the dirt that she had specially tamped down for the purposes of magic oracles.

She gazed at the pattern of objects. "Hmm. The three of rocks and the one of bone. That's the same answer I got last time. This... this... is a synchronicity!" Kraka went back outside. "The oracle has spoken. It says to explain your miracle. And it it really is a miracle, we may let you live."

Agri reached into a small purse hanging from his waist and held out a handful of seeds. "This is the miracle."

"It looks like a handful of wild elk-feed to me," said Kraka, eyeing the seeds dubiously.

"Yes, it does. But if you place these seeds in the ground and water them well they will grow plants that bear a hundred more seeds. And when they grow you can grind them, mix them with water, and cook them and eat them."

The gathered members of the tribe began laughing wildly. "Elk-feed! He wants us to eat elk-feed! Hah hah hah..."

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," said Kraka. "Who would want to eat elk-feed but an elk? Go on, Zug, get the spit."

"I beg of you, give me a chance!" cried Agri.

Now Kraka, being a Twit and all, thought maybe she shouldn't be so rash. "OK. Plant your elk-feed. If what you say is true we will spare your life."

Agri carefully dug rows in the dirt and planted his precious seeds. The guffaws of the crowd were deafening.

A week later Kraka had grown impatient. She had been right; the thigh meat was lovely juicy change from elk.

But not long after that little shoots appeared in the dirt that had been furrowed by the late foreigner. And not long after that, the shoots grew into a field of lovely tall plants. And soon, as the foreigner had promised, thousands and thousands of little seeds sprouted from the tops of these plants.

Kraka was still skeptical, but recalled the words of the foreigner anyway. "What was that he said? Grind them and mix them with water?" She did as she remembered and soon had a messy yellow paste. She wrapped the paste in leaves and placed the bundles carefully around the edge of her fire. Soon a delicious aroma came from the bundles. She unwrapped one and nibbled at it. She couldn't believe it, but she had never tasted anything so delicious. It was crunchy and crispy (because yeast would not be invited until her great-great-great-granddaughter's time) and sodium free. She realized that her world would never be the same. Her head whirled with the thoughts of the potential of this new food. She realized this new thing would change her people's culture forever.

Kraka called together her people. "My people," she proclaimed, waving a piece of her hot-baked goody, "I have made a miracle. I name this new food after me. We are nomads no mo. We shall build permanent huts instead of hovels. We shall cultivate the fields. Let the arts and sciences flourish, whatever they are. And let our new ways, our new culture, be named for the mysterious stranger who brought the first of these seeds to our land. I proclaim the birth of Agri-culture!"

Months passed and the people flourished. Many of them, including Kraka herself, got very fat on the new food. No longer was it just elk burgers, but now elk burgers on whole wheat or white crackers, chicken-fried cracker-crumb-breaded-elk in white gravy, and elk popovers. Rigda, one of the tribal artisans, and the world's first chubby chaser, fell immediately in love with Kraka.

"Oh Kraka, I worship you. Let me carve a statue of you," he pleaded with her, basking in the glorious afterglow of one of their 30-second joinings.

At first Kraka was unsure of Rigda's intentions. But after seeing how lovingly he carved stones and bones into a curvaceous interpretation of her ample pulchritude, Kraka was overjoyed. Soon her new field-side hut was filled with little statuettes carved in her image.

Time: Approx. 9,950 years ago
Place: The same place in Europe

Azarak was Kraka's grandson. He was not the Twit of the tribe, though many thought he was a twit indeed. His older sister had inherited the spiritual reins of the community. In truth, Azarak was a bit of a laughing stock.

Once he, his sister Grelda and their friends were exploring a cave not far from their village. The cave was dark and deep, and their torches illuminated many strange and eerie paintings on the walls.

Poor Azarak suddenly had an attack of flatulence, the embarrassing noise reverberating in the darkness for several minutes. His sister and her friends made him feel like a fool, running around him in circles in sing-song childish voices teasing about the echo his farting had caused. [Wow, that is one seriously mean in-joke! "Ekko ekko Azarak!" is an allegedly traditional Wiccan chant. --ish]

He grew up unhappy and miserable, and vowed his revenge. The moment came when a travelling trinket salesman passed through the village on his way to the coast. Well, actually, he was not, strictly speaking, a salesman, since selling had not been invented yet. He was really a travelling barterman.

Azarak was sitting in the dirt outside the family hut scratching his fleas when the barterman walked up.

"Say, lad, I'm trying to invent commerce only I can hardly find anything in these parts worth bartering for. Everyone already has plenty of elk hides. Do you have anything I might be interested in? I'll make it worth your while."

Azarek remembered his sister's cherished collection of figurines handed down to her from her grandmother. "Well, I might. Come on in."

He lead the barterman over to a particularly squalid corner of the hut, and pulled aside a tattered, mouldering elk-hide. "My sister says that her grandfather made all these statues of my grandmother. He said he worshipped her."

The barterman remembered how on his travels far and wide people were always asking for figures. "I'll take them. What do you want in return?"

"What do you have," asked Azarak.

The barterman opened his elk-hide sack. "I have sticks. I have stones. I have elk bones. I have..."

Azarak's eye caught something in the sack. "What's that?"

"That? Oh that's very special. It's a new invention. It's called a bowl. It's been carved from a piece of wood far, far away from here. You use it to eat with."

"To eat with! What's wrong with using your hands?"

"No, no. You put food in it. They you stick your hands in the food."

"Oh, neat. I want that."

"Well, it's quite rare. You'll have to offer me something else as well."

Azarak thought a moment. "My sister has magic rocks. You can have of them." He looked around the hut and saw a particularly worn elk-skin bundle. He unwrapped it, and pulled out one of the three rocks inside.

"You say these are magic rocks"" asked the barterman. "What do you mean, magic?"

"My sister is the Great Twit of this village. She uses these rocks to consult the oracle."

"Well in that case, it's a deal. Here you go sonny."

And the barterman handed Azarak the rough wooden vessel, grabbed the proffered rock, and began to load the figurines into his sack. Azarak rubbed his hands together in glee, knowing how mad his sister would be upon discovering that one of her magic rocks and all of her family heirlooms were gone.

"Thank you, lad. Well now, I'll be on my way. I'll be back this way again in the spring. You see if there's anything else you want to trade. Remember me, the name's Hum-El. Bye, kid." And with that the barterman walked out of the hut and down the worn and rutted path out of the vilage.

Azarak's glee soon began to turn to worry. "What if my sister is angry with me? What have I done! She's the Twit!" He looked at his new prize with a sick feeling in his stomach. He farted.

"I better put this thing in place of the magic rock. Maybe she won't notice the difference,"he thought, as he stuffed the wooden bowl into the bundle containing the two remaining rocks and the elk bone.

And lo and behold, soon thereafter his sister was called upon to throw the sacred oracle. She cast the contents of the bundle into the dust and looked at the results with shock and disbelief. "I don't believe it! The two of rocks. The one of elk-bone, and one of, what is this thing? Some kind of cup or bowl? That's the first time this reading has ever happened. This is a powerful omen!"

And much to Azarak's dismay, his sister's standing with the tribe increased. His disappointment was short-lived, though, as he died soon after from eating some rotten elk-meat that had, it should be noted, turned completely green after sitting in the wooden bowl for two entire weeks. His sister always remembered the time she had teased him, and vowed to be kinder to her other brothers ever after.

Time: 3,000 years ago
Place: Still someplace in Europe

Gwindel thought of herself as a sharp dresser. And it was only right for the Twit of the tribe to care about her appearance. Gwindel would sit by the pond outside the village gaze at her reflection. She stuck leaves and flowers in her greasy, stringly hair and marvelled at the effect. The she would wrap a piece of elk skin around her head. This she loved even more. Once, she held an elk-skull to the top of her head. This was her favorite. She strapped the antler-bearing bones to the top of her head with strips of elk-leather and pranced about the paths of the village, singing rhymes her foremothers had passed down to her.

Gwindel loved to put things on her head.

[And sadly, dear reader, that is where the manuscript ends, except for a couple notes for future chapters, including one line of dialogue: "Ann, you have harmed none. Do what would wilt it." --ish]

The Littlest Mermaid (part 2)

A few months later Eddie and I were sitting at a cafe table. It was a Saturday morning and the broad avenue by the beach was full of tourists. We were hungover but nothing sunglasses and thick coffee couldn't cure. We had celebrated last night. I had a job!

If you had asked me, though of course you didn't, I would have told you why my pockets were empty. Beauty. Light. Color. Art. It was my camera that led me here, to this city by the ocean. The way the sky was changed by the expanse of water; the way the light reflected off of both changed the faces of the people and the buildings, how sun bleached truth out of makeup and color-washed plaster.

I had shown my photos to someone in the clubs who had a friend downtown. The next time I saw him he handed me a name and address scratched on a scrap of paper. "Darling go see him! I told him about your photos!"

I found the address. "Studio Som Novo" read the sign. At the front desk I asked for the name on the paper. "Gustavo... I am here to see Gustavo." The girl looked at me dubiously over the rims of her glasses, but nevertheless got up from her seat. As she walked away I was sure the little extra shake of her behind was for my benefit. When she returned from an inner office she gave me the up and down. "Senhor Gustavo will see you." I smiled at her, despite the upturn of her nose.

Gustavo wore an ill-fitting suit. But he was friendly. He rose from his desk to shake my hand. "Gigi said you were an excellent photographer."

I was surprised that he called my friend Gigi. Apparently Gilberto and Gustavo knew each other somewhat better than I had assumed. It was a long time before he let go of my hand.

I had come with a folder of photos, and I spread them out on his desk. Faces of people. Bright colors from the market. Children playing on the beach. Musicians. Dancers.

"Nice. Very nice. I need someone with your..." he looked me up and down, a lecher's gleam in his eyes "...talents!"

"We try to put out records every week. Some sell. Some don't. You will take pictures. You get paid if they sell. I will introduce you to our creative director."

And so it began, my humble career. I stopped by where Eddie worked, that salon in the big hotel downtown. I fanned the bills out Gustavo had given me as a small advance. "Baby we are going out to celebrate!"

That was last night. The rest of the evening I remembered dimly. So many drinks. Much laughter. There was that fight at one bar, a drunken tourist laid low across a table, drinks and plates smashing onto the tiled floor, when he refused to stop talking to some tough guy's girl. At some point Roberto found us, he was high as a kite, asking if we had seen Zizi and her American boy. No, we said, and he shuffled off, eyes fixed on a young tourist sitting alone at the bar.

I sipped from my cup and squinted behind my dark glasses, glad for the coffee, which was hot and sweet. Eddie was reading the paper. "Hey look at this." He spread the paper down in front of me, pointing to the full-page advertisement.

"GREAT CONCERT FOR IEMANJA THE STAR OF THE SEA
Sr. Henry Gilson and His Orchestra
featuring A Pequenina Sereia and Her Guitar"

And there in the picture below the gaudily laid out headline was that girl. She looked small and out of place photographed on some bandstand between a row of violinists and three flautists. She gazed at the camera with the look of a deer caught in headlights. The concert was not at some bar or club, but a regular hall. And it was that very week.

I brought the ad to Gustavo that Monday. "Oh yes. Henry's little mermaid. Not much of a nymph, is she? Still a lot of baby fat on that one," he said.

I asked him if he had heard her sing. "There is something about her."

Gustavo pursed his lips. "Henry has been after me to put him on a record. You go to this show. Take pictures. See if you can coax a smile out of your little sea nymph. Everybody needs a pretty girl on their record cover, otherwise it doesn't sell. If you can make her look good maybe I will give Henry what he wants. Iemanja eh? Henry's soul must be blacker than I know."

Feeling dismissed I turned and left his office. I walked around the offices and met my new coworkers. At the front desk the girl with the glasses handed me an envelope with a few bills and two tickets. "Senhor Gustavo says make sure you get a nice photo. No pretty pictures no sales. And no money means this shithole closes down and I am not going back to that typing pool."

I raised my eyebrows. I had no idea our little desk girl had the mouth of a sailor. I assured her I was up for the challenge. I pocketed the envelope.

"So do you have a girlfriend?" she asked not quite coquettishly as I turned to leave. Surely I waited too long to answer. "Pahh," she spat, "another faggot. Just like the rest." She turned back to her desk and waved me out the door.

A few nights later I put a few rolls of film in the pocket of my only suit and slung my cameracase over my shoulder. I was meeting Zizi for a cocktail before the show. I had called her up from a payphone and asked her if she would like to come along.

"It's an assignment for my new job. But it's quite an event. And all very voodoo."

"Oh how exciting! Shall I wear some flouncy white skirt and wrap myself in beads?"

I assured her that was not necessary. This was a society event not some wild ceremony out in the slums. Zizi showed up in one of her usual outfits, a trendy Parisian cocktail dress. A smart little hat with white lace. A madly huge crucifix was pinned with flowers to her breast. "I told Daddy and Grandmama where I was going and Grandmama cried that I was going to be carried off by white slavers. She insisted that I wear this."

The crowd at the hall was huge. But it was not a crowd of the mothers and fathers of the saints but the usual ladies and gentlemen of nighttime society. A few trendy concert goers, women with beautiful skin the color of coffee mellowed with cream had chosen to wrap their hair with intricately folded scarves.

(to be continued)

Orchestra of Morning (part 1)

My name is Hermes and I am tired now and ready to go home. Though I did not come to this shore, this beach to tell you that, nor did you come here to listen to me talk about myself. You came with me to hear about Sereia.

It's finally quiet here, as dawn laps at the shore, the air wet and salty. The air is heavy as my eyelids now, heavy as the cuffs of my pants rolled above my ankles, wet and stained with water and sand.

Flowers lie crushed in the sand behind us as we gaze now out in the water. Did I say quiet? The breeze brings a laugh, a note from a guitar, a crash of a wave. the call of a bird. If the drums of the night are silent now the concert of the new day has begun. I crouch in the shallow water, and rinse my hands of sand and nicotine. I look up again, trying to guess which small paper boat, now flotsam on the waves, sprinkled with petals and fine ash, its precious cargo of candle stub and bits of bone surrendering to the immensity of the ocean. Good-bye Sereia.

"I remember when I first saw her," I tell you. And I am brought back to that night, so many years before. That old club, right on the beach. Quite the scene. It was before I met Ze, too, that old crowd I ran with. Eddie, Zizi, Roberto, and that American boy, what was his name? He was so easy to tease. So serious until he started to drink. Then the object of everyone's attentions, all of us trying to sound so sophisticated, so serious, so grown up.

We were at a table near the stage, hanging lights and clinking glasses and laughing women and the breeze from the sea. Very chic these club patrons, for the night, though who went the next day to their fancy office jobs and who went out looking for the next hustle and who was there drinking off the tabs of friends was anybody's guess. And the subject of much gossip. Zizi always had money but then her father was rich rich rich and though he didn't love it when his only daughter spent his money buying drinks for faggots and negroes he loved to see her beautiful and admired and never told her no. So now you know two of my secrets, the only one that embarrassed me being the one that my pockets were empty.

Musicians filled the stage, and the din of the club narrowed with expectation and polite applause. Oh now we think we are so sophisticated in our tastes with so much to choose from. Very liberated. But then it was all the season of the bossa nova. It made our drinks more delicious, and it caused our bodies to move involuntarily, charging the air around us with cool erotic tension.

This band was like any band that played at this club by the sea and it made us delirious with each other. Zizi kissed that American boy and Eddie rested his hand on my thigh beneath the tablecloth and we were very happy. Zizi stood up to dance, the American boy oh so drunk and clumsy smiled awkwardly and did not follow. Eddie, whose ass was made for the bossa nova, saved the day and rose to carry Zizi off to the dance floor. Roberto, who it must be said spent most of our evenings together gazing longingly at the American boy's blonde hair, slid over to Zizi's chair to engage in subtle flirting with that poor sodden soul, oblivious I used to think, to Roberto's intentions.

Which left me to gaze upon the band and the most remarkable creature I had ever seen. She was playing the guitar. This was no statuesque beauty. Short, with mysterious dark eyes, skin much whiter in color than her bandmates, she couldn't have been thirteen years old, and I realized she could really play. Thick auburn locks fell over her face as she played; bangs heavy on her forehead; a small birthmark on her left cheek. Concentration framed her face as she strummed her guitar. When she started singing it was with the voice of a girl, yes, but a girl who felt things she couldn't have understood, could she? It was haunting, sad, this first song she sang, oh yes lilting in our tropical way, but full of the pain of life beyond thirteen girlish years.

The song ended and she bowed her head into darkness and a smattering of applause and couples changing on the dancefloor. And then the drummer began a fast song, and she looked up, darkness wiped from her face, and she sang exuberantly joined by other members of the band. Freed for a moment from something this girl's eyes twinkled and her compact, androgynous body swung to a different sort of life with this new rhythm.

The song ended and I swear before she left the stage Sereia's dark eyes met mine. Such old old eyes. The deepest saddest gaze I have ever seen. And then the drummer, a very big and very black man very much older than thirteen wrapped his arm around her neck and led her backstage, laughing and gesturing to the other players as they disappeared from sight.

Zizi and Eddie returned and shortly after the waitress brought us more drinks. Surely eventually Zizi handed one of us a wad of paper to settle our bill and we walked out upon the nighttime street to push Zizi into a taxi. Roberto--of course--offered to walk the weaving near senseless American boy off to his pension, leaving Eddie and me to walk down to the dark sands to lie for a while in the invisibility of a moonless night.

"That girl...that singer," I said. "She was something special." Eddie laughed and smiled and kissed me. Here, on the beach, in the sand. And for a moment I forgot about Sereia. For a moment.