Hey Vern

When the porch is the perfect place to work, but the neighbor comes by for another charm offensive. This happens when he is in conflict with another neighbor. He and the yoga teacher’s boyfriend went at it yesterday. I have to say goodbye to the honeysuckle smell and shocking American goldfinch yellow and funny sparrows bathing in dirt and work inside.

I've found the only weakness in this wild garden here. There is one square of the porch latticework through which Dennis the neighbor can see me as soon as he steps past his screen door. Our eyes lock. My peace is over.

After a brief discussion of the longed-for effects of rain on his red gravel dust, Dennis skips the other project topics and tells me about Vietnam. That’s because I ask him. We saw eye to eye a few days ago (“I’d like to see socialized medicine in this country”). He told me the problem with this country is greed. I ask him now how serving in Vietnam influenced his opinion of this country. He did two tours there, the second one playing guitar with the Bob Hope band.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that we won that war because we lost only 60,000 men and we killed 3.5 million of theirs,” he says.

"You know Nixon wanted to nuke them," I say. "Kissinger had to talk him out of it."

His voice gets gentle then: “We’re not murderers.... We have a lot to learn from the Vietnamese. They live with nothing. Here it’s a disaster if your washing machine breaks down.... The Soviets wanted to take over the world, we went in there and showed them our might, and now it’s safe for Americans to walk around Moscow and for Russians to walk around over here.... Yeah, we had to go into Iraq. With or without WMDs. Saddam himself was a WMD.”

“I have noticed a lot of Russians on the boardwalk here.”

“Yeah, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea,” he said.

Worried he might ask for my testimony to the police, I nonetheless ask him why he and his neighbor were screaming yesterday. He says the neighbor sprayed his wife with water while hosing his flowers. “The problem with America is everyone just cares about themselves, their own little world and that’s it,” he says. “I’m going to have the police come by and talk to him.” He makes up a story about the neighbor coming over to his house and slamming the door on his finger. “I’m sorry you had to hear that,” he says.

I tell my friend Danny these Dennis stories, because Danny has met Dennis. I tell him how Dennis spent $3,000 to change the color of the gravel that covers every foot of his yard and driveway. I tell him how Dennis stands in the rain to watch the gravel change to a darker red. How Dennis got a free roof put on by complaining to the guarantor about cheap Mexican labor. “Worthless piece of shit,” says Danny. “That’s $3,000 that could have gone to Darfur or New Orleans.” It’s hard to argue with that. It’s also hard to see someone as completely worthless. There must be something in him.

Lying in the hammock out back reading Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, about a necrophiliac murderer whom we sympathize with, I notice the Jersey sky has gone crazy. The pink isn’t just to the west where the sun has gone but it stretches all the way straight above me and beyond. There are countless ripples in the western clouds and a pink bivalve over me. These things disappear quickly, so I put on my sandals to walk down to the bay. A friend calls on the cordless phone but I’m so transfixed by the sky I walk out of range and he’s gone. The entire bay is red. I stub my foot on a rock. Blood on the middle three toes. I sit on a ledge by the water and place the white phone beside me. A mother pointing to the water keeps saying did you see it did you see it to her kids. I look for a whale, then back to the water itself. Nothing comes to mind, but that’s all right. How often do you see water so red.

On the porch, writing about Spain. Closing my eyes and trying to remember. Staring at the breeze in the trees and trying to remember. Then a sound floats up, the most beautiful Spanish guitar. The fluttering leaves are showing their lighter undersides, like the twirling dresses of the Spanish dancers I never met, nor even saw. The music is not coming from some corner of memory but from Dennis on the porch next door. He's playing on the guitar that, come to think of it, he once told me he made by hand.

Not just to woo

Dang, you know it’s hot when you drink three cups of coffee and take a nap in the hammock. E.L. Doctorow’s “The March” on my chest. Yoga unthinkable. Run to the beach not even crossing my mind. Day tagging out to evening. A breeze on my chest in my half-sleep making me think I was back along the Camino. That winter nap I took on the crest of the mesa. When I woke I could see for ten miles, a castle on a hill in the village I had come from, my seed glistening from the bush branches near me. So many days in the cold I couldn't remember what a hot day felt like.

Well here it is. I did take a bike ride to the beach. At a baseball diamond I had to get off and sit on a bench to see what happened to my baseball dreams. How vividly could I envision showing up at the park for a game in this heat? Or the fastball seeming to rise as it approached? What was wrong with my swing exactly? Not so vividly. The bench was so hot it instantly made me sweat. Once again, either it was too far away or the mind’s not sharp enough to see it. Back on the bike to the beach, where I formulated a new theory of love based on a teenager in a pink bikini doing little jumps in the surf with her boyfriend.

That that little blond boy will be lovestruck his whole life over her, long after she’s left him in her wake, that he is in the one percent who actually once had her, ninety-nine others less lucky, this girl conveying that larger-than-life feeling, rooted in physical beauty of course but more than that, that every boy has one like her, only in his mind, and that men will always sing love songs for this reason and not just to woo.

Beach breeze

I find myself back at the beach. The beaches all have the same feel on the eastern seabord, this Jersey beach and the ones in Maryland and Delaware I grew up going to, the same pizza joints and boardwalks and salt-sea smell laced with danger and possibility, the smell wafting into the window in the room at Ocean City’s Wellington Motel where I lost my virginity, a room that came equipped with a mirror that I consulted while Wendy, whom I had met the day before and was an aspiring secretary from Pennsylvania who had tried all kinds of drugs and would say “cha” to everything for some reason that made a little more sense at the time, but not much, was in the shower, as if I were looking at an organism that had metamorphosed from juvenile to adult in the span of a minute.

That was the time they called “Beach Week,” the obligatory trip to the beach after high school graduation. I was with Rick, boyhood friend. We had tried to score a free room with two sets of people we had in the haze of high school gauged to be friends, but both of which we realized as they were turning us away were perhaps better thought of as acquaintances. That’s how we’d wound up in our $25 room at the Wellington. Across the hall was Wendy and her big-boned friend Karen, whom Rick had kindly agreed to take to the beach to play Frisbee while Wendy and I discussed secretarial school.

Wendy had a very slight gap between her front teeth every bit as elegant as Letterman’s and Madonna’s, but Rick still teases me about it, to the point where all my friends think I lost my virginity to a toothless woman, or, as they said in our day, Leon Spinks.

I say there’s danger in the sea breeze not for the primordial reason there should be, namely that it could so easily suck us out to our deaths, but for the more cultural reason that none of the countless other beaches in the world that I have visited have felt as charged with machismo as these eastern beaches. Rick and I, both being skinny, could not walk down the boardwalk without guy after guy intentionally trying to slam his shoulder into our shoulder to provoke a fight. In the arcades where we played Zookeeper and Donkey Kong Junior and Mrs. Pac-Man it was the same thing, we had to avert our shoulders because we weren’t interested in fighting. There was one game on the boardwalk where you punched a bag and your force would be rated. I slammed that thing with all my fury then tried to pretend I hadn’t almost just sprained my wrist.

"Down on the boardwalk they're gettin' ready for a fight," sang Springsteen. I squat on the boardwalk and see the Asbury Park Press sings today of gun murder, not fists. And the governor in an outquote saying “de minimis,” perhaps using Latin to demonstrate full recovery of his brain after the car accident. A black woman beside me squats over a two-foot-high parking meter, as if trying to insert it, to the delight of her friends.

I don’t remember ever seeing a non-white person on the boardwalks of my youth, although I’m sure I did. Today, there’s everyone. A Chinese kid screams in my ear so loud that I stand up from my squat. Four Russians dribble a soccer ball up the boardwalk. A Central American family throws a volleyball back and forth in the sand. Two black women call down to me from a motel room. I wave and they whoop like guys on Bourbon Street.

Four retirees with metal detectors have finished their day’s scouring for treasure. A woman gestures with her metal detector as she yells, “I’ve never seen a poor Jew, and I’ll tell you why.” I slow for the answer, but can’t stop because then the answer might not come. Instead she repeats a little louder, perhaps because it’s getting dark, “I’ve never seen a poor Jew, and I’ll tell you why!” She says “woo-aye” in that whiny New York accent that is sometimes Jewish, sometimes Italian. Most of her words blow away but a phrase rises up dancing on the wind as if a message sent from the sea itself: “Help each other.”

A police car passes slowly but there’s nothing it can do about the ancient story unfolding beside me, the sibling power struggle. “Dad says we have to go home now,” a big brother yells down to the sand, but the little brother refuses to budge. Big calls mom on his cell: “Sam’s being Sam. He’s walking to the shore now.” His face filled with loathing for the creature half his size.

A girl passes me on a green bicycle, her body so perfect I immediately think “European.” She actually checks me out then her head snaps back forward at the sight of my face, as if she’s shy or I’m a monster. Perhaps it’s my three-quarter-full beard.

There were no guns in our time. The only threats other than the fists of the assholes were the sexual predators, one of whom asked Rick into his trailer. Well, first he sat beside him on a bench and asked, “Aren’t you into pulling your dick out at night?” Then he asked him into his trailer. And Rick, though he’s straight, went, though nothing ended up happening. As Rick points out, when you’re that age you just do what adults say.

I pass by two teens playing baseball catch, a boy and girl, perhaps siblings. Her body launches a choir of angels, and I almost ask if I can play. I remember how I hated it when guys hit on my sister, like the time two boys tossed a football into the sand near our towels just so they could talk to her. And she actually went swimming with the guy, whose name I can almost remember. I wanted to shout, “Didn’t you see what he did? It was a trick!” This memory has nothing to do with why I don’t sit on the bench to look at this girl jumping around, to see exactly how high her boy shorts go in the back. Instead it is the sense that with my three-quarters beard and awkward solitary demeanor I might be considered one of the sexual predators Rick and I dreaded.

The European passes me again on her green bicycle and I briefly consider sprinting after her, though I know my endurance won’t hold out. Instead I walk barefoot in the sand. A young couple I assume to be from the city is collecting trash and putting it in a barrel. I see tags from new clothing, and I wonder who thinks it’s okay to take the shirt and toss the tags onto the sand, my mind offering its recurrent bait on humanity, on why humans are destined to destroy everything they touch, but I don’t take it. It’s a lot cleaner than Chowpati Beach in Bombay and after all there was that couple picking up trash.

The sea, the sea, why do I feel nothing. Where’s the music, the sadness, the magic of existence. Oh, I would tremble with the power of nature every time I met it when I was younger, whether it was the sea or the forest. I would have to walk away from whomever I was with so I could be alone with this great mystery. I would figure out nothing; it was enough just to contemplate it. Where is that now? I squat in the sand and time my breaths with the sea’s, inhaling and exhaling. That shimmering, that palpitating, that incredible feeling, it seems to have faded forever. Perhaps I can get a slice of it sometimes with music but I don’t know where it went. Now I can just breathe with the sea, and maybe the Eastern thinkers would see an advance in that, that I see this connection now between the sea’s rhythm and our own, and that the rest was illusion—but no, it was not illusion, of that I am sure, as sure as I am that this is no advance.

What happens to the perceptual mind as we age? Rick and I took a return trip to the beach a few summers later. This time we had an acquaintance named Boisseau who acted like a friend by letting us stay with him. He was a few years older. We sat and watched while these men and women in their 20s talked about things like home improvements. One woman said, “Oh, he watches public television? I respect anyone who watches public television.” Then they went on talking about nothing for hours. “Rick,” I said, “We gotta get outta here. And if you ever see me talking like that, please put me out of my misery.”

It was like we were peering into the future, and it was a horrifying picture. Today I stood in the front yard and listened to the neighbor talk about the details of his roofing project. The words all started to run together, although by this age I had had a roof put on myself and so knew enough to keep the conversation going. Why was I keeping it going? There was the character interest, to be sure, the vague urge to see how this crazy guy’s mind worked. But that wasn’t enough to stay this long. Ira Glass popped into my head. Not because I admire him, but because as a busy person he would have to extricate himself. What would he do? I was a busy person, and I was having exactly the conversation I vowed never to have in my life. I was waiting for him to end it, but he never would. I was like the kid being talked into the beach trailer, except that this wasn’t a trailer of sexual predation but a trailer of suburban void. Equally fearsome, since they both meant a form of death.

“Hey, I should get going,” I said. “The sun’s going down and I gotta get over to the beach.”

Little Cowboy Cabbie

In a life of adventure travels, the cab ride to Caracas airport yesterday will have to rank.

The guy was right on time, 11:30, which was good because I was pressed for time. Before we left he looked under the hood and reported that he needed a new part (I didn't understand which). Traffic on the highway was thick because of student demonstrations. He had the windows open and the smog on the stop-and-go highway was gagging me. He was very accommodating, turning on the air (No AC, but air) and checking its flow and looking back to see whether I was sweating.

We listend briefly to Tracy Chapman's "Revolution" then to a talk show in which the hostess mentioned "Yankee imperialism" and said Chavez's commitment to the poor did not change once he was elected, unlike Lula in Brazil. It was Che Guevara's birthday, and they were celebrating in Argentina. "Are you a follower of Che?" he asked. "Si, como que no," I said.

He was a short man who could have used a phonebook to sit on. His arms were nearly fully extended in the reach to the wheel. He wore glasses and his nose was so small I looked in the rearview to see how it was holding them up.

I didn't ask if he was a Chavista, because it was obvious by his choice of radio station. The country was divided, and you could tell which side someone was on by looking at their color or clothes or what TV or radio station they had on. This guy's color and clothes could have gone either way, but the radio station was a giveaway. There is no neutral in Venezuela, all information is either pro- or anti-Chavez and pro- or anti-socialism.

To avoid the highway traffic, he asked me, "Should we take the Old Highway?"

It sounded ominous. Why was he asking me for advice? "Is it faster?" I said.

"It's longer, but no lines," he said.

"So it's faster?"

"I think it might be better."

We spent the next hour winding along mountain roads through the barrios that contain the impoverished heart of the country living in shacks. We were going about five mph, but he kept pointing across the valley at the highway, which was at a standstill. "Look! Look!" he kept saying, staring across the valley instead of at the trucks headed right for us around the bends. "Cola! (Line!)" he said. "Cola! Cola! Cola! Cola! Cola! Cola! Cola!Cola!Cola!"

He was excited about his choice to take the old highway, which was more a thin winding road than a highway, but soon we were deep in the mountains. People were darker-skinned here. They looked nothing like the rich white student demonstrators. Trash filled each crease in the mountain.

At a fork, he made a wild guess. "I got lost, I got lost, I got lost," he said. But he had chosen the right way. We slowly passed a sweating, perhaps drunk man who was either angry or confused at the presence of a taxi in this barrio. He peered in the window to see who the passenger was. The driver reached back and locked my door, then reached behind him and locked the other door. "It's very dangerous here," he said, "many thieves. Muchos chorros."

Going around these bends, he was passing trucks and buses without knowing what truck might be coming our way. The plastic bag with my snacks kept sliding back and forth across the back seat. Once, he swerved at the last second away from an oncoming truck. He gasped through his teeth. "The trucks are abusive!" he said. "They are in my lane." He hit a wet patch and lost control of the car for a moment. The wild jerks of the wheel reminded me of the video games we used to play, the driving ones where you hit an oil patch and yank the wheel so hard the machine shakes. He kept looking in the rearview for my reaction.

There was another split in the road and again he guessed. We were lost again, but this time too he had guessed right. He handed me his card and said, "If you ever need a ride to the airport call me." Hmm, you have a broken car, you got lost twice, nearly killed us eight times, took us through barrios where we could have been carjacked, and you give me your card?

He was thrilled when we finally spotted the airport from the top of the 9,000-foot mountain. He raced us down the snakey road, and guess what he got me there on time! After that incredibly long detour, I thought for sure he would double the price, but he stayed true to his word--100,000 Bolivars. He looked so proud of his work. "You see," he said, "the old highway was better."

"Thank you," I said, "it was an adventure."

He laughed. "Yes, an adventure!"

TGIFriday's in Caracas

What's the worst smell you've ever encountered?

For me, I would have said any of these Third World capitals, the exhaust spewing down the streets like a river. Much worse than vegemite or Tibetan butter tea or the urine jar my roommate kept on his bookshelf in Bratislava with its roof of mold. Would have, that is, before yesterday, when I walked into the bathroom of the TGIFriday's where my mom and I were eating. Therein, I smelled fresh sperm so strong that I couldn´t breathe. A pudgy guy with his hand in his pocket and a disheveled, peaceful grin came out as I went in. I'm sure it was his sperm. The problem was I had to wash the hamburger juices off my hands and arms and so I had to spend a good five minutes bathed in the sperm smell, scrubbing my arms. Finally I just gave up on trying to rinse them, and forget about drying my arms with those air dryers, so I walked out with my arms lathered in soap, so I'm pretty sure everyone thought it was my sperm.

I thought about a couple of my U.S. friends, who spend a good deal of time trying to manage the public space and questions of appropriate comportment and would have gone to the manager with:

"Your bathroom smells like fresh sperm! I suggest you do something about it, because frankly I've lost my appetite and may never set foot in a TGIFridays again, even on home soil. I know you can't stop people from having a nice public wank, but you have to spray something in there before you have a puke problem to contend with."