Monday, March 30, 2015

Agents, Money, Indiana, and The Bottom Line

I haven't been writing very much in here because I have been preoccupied with revising and polishing BEEZUP.  I managed to tighten it by three or four thousand words and am quite pleased with the result.  Anyway, I'm taking a brief break from all that because there are all these ISSUES that have been building up and I need an outlet.  Of course, my renewed quest to get BEEZUP published is the perfect place to start.

Money!  I try never to worry about money or fairness.  People roll their eyes when I say that, but it's really true; therefore, the money driven questions surrounding the attempt to get an agent, or find a publisher, infuriate me.  I know.  I know.  I'm living in this romantic dream I've grown up with.  I'm wanting life to be like Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" where Owen Wilson's character brings his finished manuscript to Gertrude Stein for her comments and she passes it on to Hemingway who alerts Max Perkins and the next thing I know I'm drinking champagne cocktails with Scott and Zelda at The Plaza.

It hasn't  been like that.  If you look at publishing sites and the like, you will eventually (immediately) encounter advice on how to snag an agent.  You will learn about Query Letters and each site will offer pretty much the same formula:  first sentence sums up the book/project and grabs attention, one paragraph points out the highlights of the book/project, short bio, number of words, genre (Romance, Mystery, Young Adult, Erotica, etc.), intended (niche) audience.  All of this advice is intended to help you SELL your book/project.  All this info you are supposed to cram into one page is designed to show the prospective agent/publisher that your book will make a profit.  I came across two potential agents who needed me to include a marketing plan!  A marketing plan?  I just spent the last two years writing and rewriting a fucking book.  I never once considered a marketing plan.  Audience?  How about people with eyes?  Niche audience?   People with eyes who can also read.

Enough whining.

Conventional wisdom says that my reaction to the verities of the market and that pesky invisible hand that keeps inserting itself in the most uncomfortable places is naive.   I disagree.  Why is it that the first question we have to ask about something new is how much will it cost?  How will it raise taxes?  Will my insurance premium rise? Will it hurt the job creators?  Will it add to the deficit?  The debt?  Entitlements?

It seems that conservatives have been clever enough or powerful enough or well-funded enough to have set the agenda, establish the definitions.  For instance, Obamacare.  When the interminable debate over the ACA was going on, I read everything available.  You know, I don't remember a single argument from morality.  No one seemed willing to simply assert that it is Good with a capital G for everyone to have access to health care.  Instead, everyone argued about money and socialism.  Even if Obamacare wasn't working and health care costs weren't rising at the slowest level in my lifetime and millions more weren't insured and the economy wasn't recovering, wouldn't it still be a Good idea?

The event that brought all this to mind was the recent anti-gay legislation masquerading as religious freedom in Indiana.  The immediate backlash was wonderful wasn't it?  One major corporation after another is pulling out.  Good luck recruiting college students and athletes next year.  The governor, apparently moved by the economic impact of his homophobia, expressed his outrage at the intolerant reaction to the legislation.  Unless he gets an influx of cash from the Kochs, you can bet he and the state house will renege.  Business people don't like this mean spirited legislation.

At first glance, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy toward businesses and their well known sense of civic responsibility.  The CEO of Apple lambasted the anti-gay legislation in Texas that makes Indiana look a little like Boulder.  He encouraged other corporations to join Apple in the fight against exclusionary laws.  The reason?  It's good business.  Profits grow.

I'm glad Apple is fighting the "good" fight.  It makes me happy every time I drive by Hobby Lobby and the parking lot is nearly empty.  I hope Indiana goes bankrupt.  Texas too.  It'll serve 'em right for not paying enough attention to the bottom line.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

PUNY-NESS

Was there any doubt, when reading ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, that Dr. Stockman was a giant of a man surrounded by puny people, curs nipping at his heels?  When he picked up Katherine at the end of the play and twirled her around, knowing that they were going off to start a better life, a better world, it was thrilling wasn't it?

There's just nothing thrilling anymore.  Even things that happen on an athletic field, or field house, have lost their luster.  There is no one out there who is larger than life and as soon as someone looms above us, you can count on our 24/7 media to lay him/her low.  Peyton Manning might be a great player on the field, but he doesn't spend enough time out in the community.  Von Miller is a monster pass rusher, but he gets high.  Johnny Manziel is, well, Johnny Manziel.  Ty Lawson comes back late from the all-star weekend.  Nothing is thrilling because we only seem to have the time or the inclination to focus on puny little nothings, little behavioral flaws magnified by the relentless scrutiny of the media.

It's everywhere.  The Supreme Court is taking the next two months to rule on the meaning of FOUR WORDS in the Affordable Health Care Act.  Four words!  Is wasn't that long ago that they stopped the presses by ruling on hanging chads.  Scalia and Alioto and Thomas (if he could speak) all spout Fox News speaking points about such crucial issues as same-sex marriage and how many immigration agents can dance on the head of a pin.  When they do tackle a "big" case, they end up gutting the Civil Rights Act, or deciding that corporations are really people.  I've walked by the Supreme Court building in Washington.  I couldn't help but think that its magnificence only serves to make the small mindedness of the denizens of that place stand out even more.  With the possible exception of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there "be no giants" there.

Republicans like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz whose only agenda item is to play to the selfish screaming of their base, want to wrest power from Obama and his party.  But when they do come into power, when they do control both houses of Congress, all they can do is tear down, make us afraid.  They have no ideas of their own, at least no ideas that anyone has expressed.  Instead, they rant and rave about how issues that have already been decided by simple progress--gay marriage, internet regulation, American exceptionalism, Obama's birthplace, illegal immigrants coming to take all those jobs we prize so highly--are all going to spell the end of America as "they know it."

And the thing is that in that poisonous atmosphere it is virtually impossible to rise above the noise, the chatter.  It is pretty obvious that the citizenry of this country is not well informed.  They don't take the time to read about the news; instead, they listen to whichever "news" outlet is the loudest.  When an individual arises out of the masses who is larger than life, we don't trust him or her.  Maybe he went to a snooty ivy league college.*    Maybe he's fabulously wealthy and can be seen wind surfing on the ocean off Cape Cod.  Maybe he's from Kenya, a Manchurian candidate who from birth was groomed to bring about the end of our exceptional country.

Bill O'Reilly and the rest would call me unpatriotic, but I think the only thing exceptional about our country is how puny it is, how puny its wants and needs.  The kind of hope that Obama started his campaign with back in 2007, is anathema to anyone who likes the status quo.  This country is always less rancorous when we have a Republican in the White House because, with the exception of Eisenhower, Republican presidents only react to the rest of the world, they rarely ask us to dream.

And that is how it should be.  Dreams are the province of the states; when we have a dreamer in the White House, that's Orwellian.  Just ask Cory Gardner whose recent election to the Senate shows just how small minded, petty, and puny we really are.

*Yeah, yeah, I know that George W. Bush went to Yale, but he spent most of his time getting drunk in his frat house and avoiding the draft.  In other words, he's a good old boy.


Monday, March 9, 2015

The Carpet

  

It is conventional wisdom that when you are a child in a poor but loving family, you never realize just how impoverished you are.  At least that is what my mother always tells me whenever I visit her apartment in my sister’s basement in Estes Park.

“We were poor Jimmy, but we never acted like we were poor.”

That is always my cue to nod my head in slow and steady agreement.

“Well that’s just because you worked so hard and I never really needed anything.”  That response never fails to make my mother’s eyes sparkle and her lips just perceptibly purse in assurance of her triumphs at single-parenthood.

She wasn’t completely single.  It is true that she left my father back in Illinois while she, her four children, her sister, and her mother resettled in Colorado.  But technically she was not alone.  My aunt was with us.  My grandmother, an Illinois saloon keeper, champion arm wrestler, and basic Jack of all trades, was also there to take care of the kids—my little brother and I—while my mom, aunt, and two sisters went out to make a living.  So like I said, she was not alone; she was just husbandless.

But my fatherless state, just like my poverty, wasn’t something on which I dwelled.  He was just a vague memory.  I could, for instance, remember Sunday mornings when the rest of my family went to ten o’clock mass.  I would be exempt because of my recent bout with and year long recovery from rheumatic fever; my father would be exempt by virtue of his professed atheism.  On those mornings he would make fried egg and tomato sandwiches on white bread with the tomatoes cold and crisp and the hot yolk of the eggs mixing with the pulp of the tomato and the plastic doughiness of Wonder Bread.  It was our own secular communion.  Now, sometimes on Sunday mornings I whip up those egg and tomato sandwiches and think about my father.

My father’s child support for the four of us was a court ordered $25 a week which he dutifully sent, minus ten cents for postage.  I remember that check for $24.90 every week.  I can still see the pink tint behind the numbers and the pink and blue line running from the twenty-four to the ninety on the face of the check.  There was never any note and the check didn’t even have my father’s signature

Of course, when my mother talks about us being poor but not noticing it, I don’t bring up my father’s checks.  I also don’t bring up the carpet.

* * * * * * * * * * *

After an initial stay in a ratty one bedroom shack on highway seven, my mother and aunt somehow managed to buy a two bedroom home with a sun porch and full unfinished 
basement on highway thirty-six right across from Lake Estes.  It was in an old reclamation project created to house the workers and engineers who built the Lake Estes Dam twenty years earlier.  It had a nice living room and a tiny dining room with an even tinier kitchen.  (We had some memorable Thanksgiving dinners in that tiny dining room, although one wonders how it was possible to make a twenty pound turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and beans and pumpkin pie in a kitchen barely big enough to turn around in.  And how did we get as many as fifteen people around a table that could barely seat six.)  Mom and her sister shared a bedroom; my sisters slept on the sun porch.  My grandmother had her own room.

My brother and I slept in a room built in the basement next to the coal burning furnace it was my job to stoke every day.  Once a week a local coal delivery truck would pull up to our backyard, place the chute from the truck into the coal bin and deliver our week’s supply.  Those were the worst days to be in the basement because the dust from the coal exchange hung everywhere.  I had a punching bag in the basement that my mother gave me one Christmas in a half-hearted attempt to get me to learn self-defense. I always avoided working the bag on coal delivery days because I would come upstairs streaked with black lines of sweat pouring down my face and I would have a hard time breathing.  And when I dusted our room once a week, the rag would come up nearly black with the week’s worth of coal dust hanging in the air.  If I contract emphysema in old age I will at least know the cause.

Coal miner’s lung not withstanding, the real problem with the house as my mother saw it was that the house was carpetless with hardwood floors throughout.  I know that in this day and age most house shoppers actively look for places with hardwood floors.  Real estate advertisements list hardwood floors as selling points.  But for my family, who had just left a three-story Victorian with hardwood floors in Freeport, Illinois, they meant drudgery and cold feet.  The hardwood floors also were a sign that we were poor and my mother saw it as her mission in life to weed out from around the house the tell-tale signs of our economic woes.

The solution came to her, like so many others, right out of the pages of READER’S DIGEST.  The whole family was gathered around our Zenith watching GUNSMOKE when my mother found it wedged somewhere between “Laughter Is the Best Medicine” and “Life in these United States.”  It was a quarter page ad from some carpet maker in Duluth asking my mother if she was tired of the feel of bare feet on cold, bare floors? if she was tired of getting on hands and knees to wash floors? if she was longing for the warmth and comfort that only wall-to-wall carpeting could bring?  The answer to all of those questions was a decided yes.

Mom first introduced us to the ad during a commercial.  Imagine what it would be like, she said, to be watching Matt and Miss Kitty while curled up on a floor covered with plush carpeting.  Imagine what it would be like to sit on that floor, back propped against the couch, a bowl of popcorn in easy reach.  Imagine what it would be like to invite friends home from school so they could see and revel in our new floor covering.  Why we would be just like the Bartletts who had shag carpeting in every room of their house.  You could be sure that June Bartlett didn’t get down on hands and knees to clean the floor.  All she had to do was plug in her Kirby vacuum cleaner and stand there offering minimal guidance and it would do all the work.

She painted a compelling picture and I spent a goodly portion of that night dreaming about the rewards wall-to-wall carpeting would bring.  Friends would come running after word of our largesse got out.  I would stop going through so many pairs of socks because I would be frolicking barefoot on our luxurious floors instead of sliding across the unadorned wood in stocking feet.  My mother would be happier and my grandmother’s back would not hurt so much from scrubbing the floor.  (We all knew that it was really my grandmother who did the heavy lifting in the house cleaning department.)  Well, we all got caught up in my mother’s excitement and encouraged her to send off to the Duluth Carpet Mills for more information.

The week waiting for the response from the carpet gods in Duluth was a great one for my mom.  She always felt so good about herself when she scored a victory in the family war against squalor.  On those rare evenings when we would have a really nice cut of meat for dinner, for instance, my mother would be so proud of what she had provided.  No meat loaf tonight, her face would proclaim.  Kiss that tuna casserole goodbye.  I remember one glorious day at Moorehead’s Super Market when my mother bought a prime rib.  (In my mom’s eyes prime rib was the holy grail of foodstuffs.  In her taxonomy of taste a shrimp cocktail, prime rib medium rare, a baked potato, and a bottle of Lancers was the meal that all people of taste—Cary Grant, say, in all those Doris Day movies—were ordering at the Brown Derby or Chasen’s.)  Her eyes widened and her head shook as she weighed the rich marbling of the beef against the price.  She stowed it safely in the cart and then did the unthinkable:  She picked up a pound of shrimp.

“Jimmy, get a bottle of that cocktail sauce down there.  This will go so well with the prime.”

I liked the way she said “prime” like we ate it every day.

But the prospect of a carpet was better than the prime rib.  It lasted longer and the anticipation was twice as sweet.  Most importantly, as my mother explained at dinner the day the people from Duluth sent more information, we would all have a kind of stake in the carpet.

The major selling point of the original ad in READER’S DIGEST was price.  Where a traditional approach to carpeting our home might cost $1200, the Duluth approach was something like $179.99.  Of course, that did not include installation.  Mom was quick to point out that if we just made our measurements exact, we could do the installation ourselves. 

The brochure stressed that the carpet would be made from the fibers of old coats and sweaters and throw rugs we had lying around the house.  Just gather up the items—the more items, obviously, the larger the carpet—and ship them to Duluth.  Specify the dominant shade you would like in the final product, provide measurements for each room and hallway, and before you know it the United States Postal Service WILL DELIVER YOUR NEW CARPET TO YOUR DOORSTEP!  

It was at this point that, contrary to my mother’s injunction, I began to feel poor.  The blithe comment about old sweaters and coats lying around the house did not apply to our household.  I had a brown wool sport coat and gray wool slacks I wore to mass on Sundays.  I also had a corduroy winter coat with a red flannel liner, a couple of wool stocking caps, and my first communion suit.  On the wall above my bed hung a Navajo rug I dyed in a crafts class one summer when I was still in Illinois.  I loved that rug.  

My brother, who was only six at the time, didn’t have much to worry about.  True, he did have a first communion suit, but he needed it.  The only other item with any potential was his blanket which I figured he should lose if I had to give up my rug.  He was too old for a blanket anyway, both of my sisters insisted, especially when they saw boxes of old school sweaters go out their door.  But even my mother’s wistful dreams of running her bare feet through the thick pile of our carpet were not strong enough to endanger Stevie’s ratty blanket.

I was the big loser among the children.  My mother glommed onto my first communion suit without a second thought.  And then, in order to have enough carpet for both bedrooms, my prized Navajo blanket was added to the shipment.  I also lost one green sweater from Wards with a series of snow covered pine cones emblazoned across the chest.

My grandmother, the oldest, literally had the most baggage and thus the most to give up.  Several sheared wool coats that made her look “sharp” when she dressed for mass in the wintertime, three or four wool suits, boxes of sweaters, and her favorite stocking cap all made it into our shipment to Duluth.  When my mother ultimately added all of the throw rugs in the house to the pile, my grandmother could no longer take it and quietly disappeared.  

When it got close to dinnertime and Gram was still unaccounted for, my mother sent us out on searching expeditions.  I walked all the way to the shore of Lake Estes to see if Gram was by her favorite fishing hole.  She wasn’t.  I knocked on Carmack’s door across the street.  No Gram.  She wasn’t in her room.  She wasn’t anywhere.  Finally, right before we sat down to eat, the rattling of the stoker impelled me to go downstairs and shovel some coal.  When I opened the door to the coal bin I found Gram lurking in the corner and clutching a sheared sheepskin coat that was evidently one of her prized possessions.

“Is your mother out there?”

“No, Gram.  She’s upstairs making dinner.”

“Is she still looking for clothes to send to Duluth?”

“Not any more.  I think everything is boxed up and ready to be shipped.”

After a few more assurances, Gram lugged herself and her prized coat out of the coal and I helped her upstairs where she quietly grabbed her meatloaf and took it and her coat to her room.

“Oh, she’ll get over it when she sees the new carpet,” my mother insisted, but you could see the first shadow of doubt cloud mom’s face.

“She might get over it, but I’m never going to get over losing my letter sweater,” my sister Jeri offered right before she went to her room to brood.  

My oldest sister, Mary Jo, looked at her despondent sister in one bed, briefly contemplated following Gram into the coal bin, but instead left home the next day.  While it is true she had been planning on leaving ever since she graduated from high school, I couldn’t help but think it had a lot to do with her depleted wardrobe.

With similar sacrifices from my mother and aunt, we packed up the items, specified tone and measurement, and sent the whole thing off to Duluth.  In two to three months we would be wiggling our toes in wall-to-wall carpeting.

The house felt different in those three months.  We were no longer walking on bare, cold floors; we were imagining walking on plush carpet.  When we sat down to watch GUNSMOKE, we were no longer sitting on bare floors; we were luxuriating on the carpet we know would be ours any day now.  We became, well, middle class.  

I came home from school the second week of May and there they were:  five card board shipping tubes, each containing the precisely measured carpet for one room or hall.  My mother sat on the front porch holding the end of one opened tube on her lap as I walked up.

“Jimmy, come over here.  Look at it now.  Is that green?  We asked for green.”

“Well, it’s kinda green.  There’s some red and blue in it too.  It’s not like it is any one color.”

“I know.  I know.”

I left mom on the porch and went into the house.  My grandmother, who decided to end her brooding once the carpet arrived, was sitting in the living room looking at an old picture my grandfather had taken of her in a sheared sheepskin coat  that had since become part of the tangle of fibers composing the carpet.  She would look at her picture, then look out the window at the carpet, shake her head, and take a big pull on a Schlitz.

“I know what’s wrong,” my mother said as she staggered in off the porch.  “We are just looking at a small part of the carpet.  When we get it all down it will look fine.  You’ll see.”

We immediately launched into carpet laying mode.  We removed the furniture, laid out the surprisingly well measured carpet, tacked it down, and replaced the furniture.  Of course our job was simplified by the fact that we had no pad to worry about.

We had the carpet in by 8:30 and it did end up having an overall tone that, for want of a better term, you would have to call green.  My grandmother started popping corn and we all got into our pajamas ready to watch GUNSMOKE.

We all sat there, just as my mom had described, on our new carpet, propped up against the couch, pop corn by our side.  It was that great episode where some hot headed young man comes into town to make trouble.  Miss Kitty warns Matt of the danger he faces, as does Doc.  But Matt faces the young gun and plugs him right between the eyes.  They bury the punk on Boot Hill and all convene at the Long Branch for drinks.

We were surrounded by our new luxury when my mom came out in her bare feet to give the installation her final approval.  

“C’mon mom.  This is a great episode.”

“I’ll be right there.  I want to put some socks on.”

-30-



Sunday, March 8, 2015

Obama's Selma Speech: Bill O'Reilly's Take

"I Was There."

I'm looking forward to checking with MEDIA MATTERS in the next few days to see how the right wing nutjobs manage to spin the President's Selma speech into an anti-American rant.  I mean, if looked at the RIGHT way, there are lots of things to be outraged about.

For instance, Obama "played the race card" again and again.  He managed to talk about the heroism of a young black firebrand like John Lewis and then just a couple of sentences later highlights his own racism by suggesting that the White presence in Selma diluted the power of the message because White people can't' sing!

I can just hear Bill O'Reilly now.  "Look, I was in Selma.  I stood firm on that bridge when I covered the whole thing for FoxNews.  And let me tell you, I know the tune to 'We Shall Overcome,' in fact I'm pretty sure that I'm the one who came up with the lyrics.  I didn't see you there Mr. President, so don't go lecturing me with your revisionist history.  Next thing you'll be talking about Gandhi.  Hey, I was right there in that cell with him when he went on his hunger strike.  I lost forty pounds.  But that's okay, because I've only gained back fifteen."