Unrealistic Expectations

I found myself lecturing a whole bus full of people on the subject of unrealistic expectations the other night. Not what I’d planned and not one of my best moments but these things happen. What can you do?  Life is to be lived and it’s unscripted. Sometimes you have to speak up and try to electrify the somnambulant moment with a few choice words.

Let me explain. I was trying to get down town. I had tickets for a lecture by Richard Dawkins. It began at 6pm so by the time I finished work at 4.30pm in La Jolla I had no time to waste. With the unpredictable Friday traffic and parking I figured my best option was to take the bus. The Downtown Express leaves campus at 4.39pm and the schedule promised a downtown arrival by 5:17pm via a brief stop at the Old Town Transit Terminal.  It sounded perfect but the Padres were playing the Dodgers in the season opener at Petco Park and it was also Good Friday so there could be a cruise ship or aircraft carrier at the port so I suspected it might be a little tight.

The bus arrived on schedule and I was surprised to find the freeway pretty clear. In no time at all I was lifting my eyes out my book to gaze at the sparkling water and palm trees of Mission Bay. It was ten to five, ‘Great’, I thought, ‘I might even be able to squeeze in a quick pint in the Ulysses Grant.’

I realize now this was an unrealistic expectation. Public travel is often hindered for no good reason by the public. Every bus or train around the world usually contains at least one mad person and at least one dangerous idiot. I don’t know why this is, it might be a ploy by automobile companies to ensure solo car use, it might be a Federal requirement or it might just be the statistical social odds, whatever it is the ‘public’ part of ‘public travel’ often gets in the way and causes delays.

Recently, I was held up by an obese lady on a motorized scooter who was too heavy for the hydraulic lift used to carry disabled people on board. I had to wait for twenty minutes while she was raised up and down a half a foot while the driver tried to make it work. In the end she got off the scooter and gingerly climbed onto the bus through the front doors like the rest of us. The lift was fine bringing the bike on board without her.

Several times in London I’ve missed appointments because of suicides on the tube. The train would stop and word would arrive of a jumper on the track at Waterloo or Kentish town. There would be a group sigh and 1.2 seconds of socially permitted passenger interaction involving no more than eye rolling before the shutters of English stoic etiquette encased us all again in silence. Sometimes there would be an electronic map available showing the hold up spread around the whole tube system in flashing red. It was hard not imagine the red as the suicide’s blood flowing on the tracks, filling up the deep underground veins of London from St. Pancreas to Shepherd’s Bush. 

We pulled into Old Town and fell back into my book. I was reading, ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ by James Hogg. It’s a gothic crime story from 1824, at its core is a fascinating study of religious fanaticism. It reminds me a lot of Crime and Punishment but with the added kick of being set in Edinburgh. I became consumed by a wonderful description of the justified sinner harassing his estranged elder brother at a tennis game and so it took a while for me to realize, as I turned page after page, that the bus had not been moving for some time. I looked at my watch. Somehow it was already 5.15pm, the time we supposed to be in the Gas Lamp District, and we were still in Old Town and the driver had turned off the engine.

There was a young man talking to the driver at the front of the bus. Some other passengers were slowly getting off with confusion on their faces. There had been no announcement. I went to the driver and asked her what the hold up was.

‘We’re waiting for the police,’ she said. ‘The woman in the purple hat hit him on the head with her bag.’

The young man had a sulky look on his face.

‘Are you ok?’ I asked.

‘Yes’ he said.

I looked around the bus for the woman in the purple hat. There was nobody that fit the description.‘So where is she?’

The driver pointed off across the station towards the metro stop. It was busy. The woman in the purple hat was long gone.

‘It looks like she got away,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should get off the bus and wait for the police and then we can continue downtown.’ The boy shook his head.

The driver spoke up, ‘I’ve been told to wait here until the police arrive.’

Amazing. I was stunned. There’d been a minor incident with what sounded like an unstable woman and now a whole bus full of people and countless others waiting down town were going to be held up for an indefinite period of time while a young man tried to get his pound of flesh for a blow to the head I could only deduce amounted to a cuff.

‘You do realize they could be hours?’ I said. The driver shrugged. People behind me asked what was going on. The young man, who was about eighteen or nineteen didn’t respond.

‘I don’t think you’ve had much experience of the police,’ I said. ‘But trust me on this. This is not going to be a high priority for them. They are not going to set up an incident room with a team of detectives…’

‘What’s going on?’ shouted someone from the back of the bus. It was then that I spoke to everyone, filling them in on the situation.

I can’t remember exactly what I said but I think I referred to the boy as ‘naïve’ and explained how we had to sit here until he had a learning moment with the police and realized he was not in an episode of CSI. I asked a couple of passengers who’d sat near to the boy what they’d seen and the incident had been so fleeting it had barely been noticed by anyone other than the victim. So, pontificating like Ignatius Reilly from ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ I expounded that the police are at best a social ideal and that reality renders them out numbered, under funded and riddled with the bitter and incompetent just like any large bureaucracy… At one point I also changed tack and tried to suggest the driver should speedily take the boy to the nearest hospital to have him checked for concussion…

I don’t know what I was hoping to accomplish exactly. I think I hoped to get the boy to step off the bus and have the driver continue the route. It didn’t work and I kind of knew I would fail but I felt like I had to try. At twenty to six the next bus arrived and I boarded it with the rest of the passengers, leaving the young man and the driver alone on the other bus waiting for justice to arrive with all lights flashing.

I was late to the lecture but as luck would have it I didn’t miss a thing, since the start was delayed by protestors from the cult of Christ getting in the way and trying to engage everyone with their wacky ideas of a three-tiered universe and the ‘blood of the lamb’ washing away ‘our sins’ etc etc.

My unrealistic expectations, the young man’s unrealistic expectations and the Jesus freaks unrealistic expectations all kind of balanced out for me at the end like the cozy and lazy ending to a bad TV show or blog post.

Notes Towards a Holistic Index of Waterfalls

Most Beautiful and Frustrating:

McWay Falls, Big Sur, CA

One of the few constantly running beach waterfalls in California. McWay Falls at the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park is located on a private beach surrounded by fences and signs proclaiming heavy fines for anyone who attempts to get closer than 500 feet.

Loudest Frog Chorus:

La Mina Falls, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico

13 Species of Coqui frog live within El Yunque rainforest. Their competing choirs serenade you as you swim  in the series of waterfalls that run through the park.

Most Likely to be Bestrewn with Rainbows:

Vernal Falls, Yosemite National Park, CA 

If the sun is out, there will be rainbows on this frothy mist producing show off. Busy trail in the high season, lots of tourists breaking bones on the wet rocks while volunteer medics and park rangers shake their heads at the overwhelming variety of improper footwear on display. Fat squirrels and chipmunks beg food from picnickers. Half Dome towers above, leading you on and on to yet more beautiful vistas.

Most Significant in the History of Preservation:

Lower Yellowstone Falls, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming


When painted and sketched by Bolton boy Thomas Moran in 1871 from the vantage point now known as Artists Point there was no such thing as 'a national park'. His landscapes of the falls in the Grand Canyon wilderness of the Yellowstone were presented to Congress on the floor of the House of Representatives and so captured the mood of the nation that the first national park was established to preserve and protect this landscape forever.

Best Swimming after Drinking Mai Tais and Gorging on Chocolate Covered Macadamia Nuts:

Kilaniapia Falls, Hilo, Big Island, Hawaii

Get a room at the Inn, swim in your own private falls. Watch wild pigs grunt and frolic around the nearby nut trees.

Simply the Best:

Mooney Falls, Havasupai Indian Reservation, The Grand Canyon, Arizona

Your reward for a ten mile hike down the remote south west rim of the Grand Canyon is a series of ever more jaw dropping waterfalls you might think could only exist in a Pixar Animation about The Garden of Eden. The warmest, bluest water bubbles up from heated underground streams and flows through the canyon like silk. The hike down to Mooney Falls involves climbing through caves and hanging off bits of improvised ladder.

LOL Cats

Take down the missing posters

They litter the street

Mr. Cuddlepuss is now

A furry turd

At the bottom of the canyon

This is coyote country.

Lament not his passing

You were but his captor

He may even have willingly

Exchanged his life

For a few hours of freedom

In the great outdoors

Away from your maudlin embrace.

I know we see things differently

I know you were part of the group

Who kept changing the Wikipedia page

To read ‘Human Companions’

Rather than ‘Cat Owners’

But if I was to lock you up my house

And make you poo in a small gravel box

I don’t think you’d fight so hard

To call me a ‘companion’.

No, I will not lead you to the furry turd

The idea of you picking it up

And carrying it back to our building

Crying and concocting

Some deeply strange funeral ceremony

Near to the communal BBQ

Fills me with rage.

Wake up woman

This mawkish zoophilia

Is twisted and obscene

There are people everywhere

Waiting for your smile

And you won’t have to work so hard

To personify them

Since they are already infused

With deep human thoughts

And emotions.

Goodnight Seattle

Took a little trip to the Pacific North West a few days ago. Some people told me the place was cool. They were wrong. I now understand why Frasier doesn’t leave his apartment much in the TV show and it’s not because of the cost of outside broadcasts.

The city is so obviously the home of grunge. Never more has a city spawned a more apt music. The oppressive, dank cave-like atmosphere resonates the mood of distorted guitars and sad apathetic lyrics so perfectly I think Nirvana didn’t so much as record music as describe the tortuous effect of having to spend time in Seattle.

If you’re tired of London – the saying goes - you’re tired of life. If you’re tired of Seattle then you’re tired of the smell of fish and wet dog hair, the deification of Starbucks, miserable gloomy people and the angry homeless.

The supposedly beautiful and historic Pioneer Square was full of boarded up shops.

The Freemont Troll was being repaired from water damage.

There were locals in Seahawks hats waving placards in which Obama was portrayed as Adolph Hitler. OK, they could have been plants conjured for some tea-party rabble rousing and not locals but it didn’t add to the overall impression and their were people dropping money into their collection bins.

I was looking forward to seeing the Olympic Range and the San Juan Islands in the bay of the Puget Sound but it wasn’t possible. It was overcast and gray the whole time I was there. I questioned the locals, “the, clouds come in and sit on us for months,” said one poor chap in the Grand Central Bakery. There was a lost look in his eyes that said, ‘kill me now’.

Another friend who sometimes goes there for work told me the sun appeared one afternoon last year and everyone just left the office and went outside. The freak occurrence of nice weather was so rare – work abandonment was allowed and expected. People gathered on corners pointing at the sun and giggling.

At the famous Pikes Place Market the big draw is watching market traders dressed like deep-sea fishermen throw small and expensive packets of fish back and forth to each other like embarrassed teenagers forced to play hacky-sack for the old folks.

At the ‘Space Needle’ they wanted to charge us a hundred dollars to go up to the revolving restaurant to get a better look at the oppressive gray nothing, the industrial docklands, the frozen people marching about like the poor citizens of Pepperland after the attack by the Blue Meanies.

The Bardahl sign and the farmers market are not worth the trip to Ballard. Unless of course you’ve never seen a farmer’s market and can’t possibly imagine an old neon sign for an oil company.

I suppose it’s not all bad. Wild Ginger is as fine a restaurant as you’ll find. The Musiquarium at the Triple Door is a decent bar with live Jazz and Blues. The Arctic Club is a nice hotel. Stick to these if you have to go there.

The Biggest Losers

While spring-cleaning the TiVo last week I found we’d recorded the season finale of The Biggest Loser. It must have captured in error but as soon as I set it going I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The only reality show I usually have time for is Not Torture on Al Jazeera. Watching Republicans get water-boarded until they accept climate change and universal healthcare is remarkably cathartic but this final episode of Loser was pure TV gold.

If you don’t know the show, it’s essentially a chronicle of obese Americans crying about being fat and eating too much and wanting to lose weight. You can pretty much work out the whole show by watching the promos they run in any of the two million ad breaks that occur during live American sport broadcasts. Or so I thought.

For the season finale they travelled to a desert in Somalia for the big challenge. The fatties were made to hand out food aid to starving children and refugees. Ugh, those poor people. It’s sad and tragic, you’ve seen it all before; flies on their faces, distended bellies, and emaciated skeletal adults with eyes full of pain.

It’s truly a failure of humanity that the starving are still with us. I think people like to pretend we solved the world hunger problem in the 80’s or early 90’s, when the first wave of charity fatigue swept in and Kevin Carter committed suicide.

At first the contestants pitched in with the aid workers and distributed food to the starving but then the aid trucks drove away left them behind. The look of fear on their faces was priceless. The tears of pity for the children stopped and they began to get a little crazy. I paused it and went and got a beer and a little cold chicken.

The night passed with them huddled up next to a refugee camp crying in the dark and scaring each other with talk of lions and rebel soldiers and dysentery.

The next day the contestants had to help out the aid workers again, unloading sacks of grain in the hot African sun with only a handful of rice and an apple for breakfast. It was brutal and relentless and it went on and on and on. I’m sure the network producers planned it, by starving them like the refugees, but I was soon watching as one of the teams was caught on hidden camera stealing bags of Hershey Kisses for themselves from the aid trucks.

Yep, actually stealing food from starving children.

“It’s survival of the fittest,” said one of the contestants when confronted about the theft.

“No,” said the actor who played Tony Soprano who had been flown in as a surprise ‘special guest’ for some reason I couldn’t fathom, “It’s survival of the Fattest”.

Cue the dramatic music and tearful look of sorrow and recrimination.

Incredible. The world in a nutshell, right there. Over-consumption versus starvation in a one hour TV special. It was deep and deeply sick. My head is still spinning about it. Surely a new low, turning aid relief into the backdrop of a chintzy Reality TV show?

The whole world could be fed and clothed on a fraction of the money we choose to spend on our military and needless over consumption.

Of course you had to expect the riots across Africa and Middle East that followed the international airing of the show. The burning of the American flags, the viral footage of the fat American stealing chocolate from the mouths of refugees leading Hilary Clinton to apologize at the United Nations. Incredible.

I’m sure you missed it all however. The capitalist American media propaganda machine barely mentioned it at all. There was a two- paragraph story on it in Variety under the headline: ‘Biggest Loser Wins new season while causing International Incident’.

To make matters worse, the winning contestant turned out to be one of the chocolate thieves, much to the chagrin of the show's hosts.

Halloween 2011

One question I am often asked towards the end of October is: ‘Do you have Halloween in England?’

I’ve been asked this question and responded to it enough to realize that I am not being asked if the ancient pagan fall festivals like the Celtic Samhain that predate American culture and grew into what we now know as ‘Halloween’ exist over the pond but rather if groups of children dress up and go from door to door soliciting candy with the phrase ‘trick or treat’.

I do hear there is some trick or treating in the U.K. now but it is all still relatively small scale and has not really taken off so I answer ‘no’ and go on to explain:

‘We don’t do Halloween, we celebrate Guy Fawkes Night instead on 5^th of November and that fulfills our need for the pagan fall festival.”

This statement, if the enquirer is actually seeking a dialogue and not merely chattering along the soundtrack of their preselected thoughts, will provoke the further question: ‘What is Guy Fawkes night?’

I then explain that it is a night devoted to making an effigy of the Catholic Terrorist, Guy Fawkes, and burning him on a large bonfire as a warning against Papist imperialists.

At this point most people check out, sometimes voicing the thought that I might be making it up or stating that they, ‘never know when I’m joking’.

To give these people fair due, I do have a droll sense of humor that can bend towards the surreal. For example, I have been known to state with apparent sincerity that ‘Bjork’ is actually the Icelandic word for ‘shrill little troll’.  However, Guy Fawkes Night is real. I’ve just checked Wikipedia and it’s not a vivid delusion of my own concoction.  We called it Bonfire Night in my area as a child and many Guys were made and burned in my youth. Large public firework displays accompany the bonfires now. I also hear that things are changing and it’s becoming more like ‘Halloween’. The homemade bonfire toffee, the black chewy treacle drooly deliciousness of my youth, is being replaced by generic ghost and ghoul themed candies. Children are not building effigies as much as they once did and are not parading them around and asking strangers for ‘A penny for the Guy’ as is traditional.

The funny thing is, that while I know what people mean when they ask me about Halloween, namely the children and the masked promenading for candy I’ve never actually witnessed this myself in America even though I’ve lived here for many years. 

It is only now that I’ve had my first real experience of the great tradition. We’ve just never lived in a neighborhood with kids so it’s mostly been a time of adult costume parties with horror film themes. In Chicago we lived in the top floor of an enclosed apartment block. In San Francisco in ’96 it was a crazy street carnival but again, no children.

We’ve observed Dia de Los Muertos a couple of times in San Diego, once going over to Tijuana and last year touring the decorated graves in Old Town, but I’ve never really seen the full of convoy of kids going door to door with the old ‘trick or treat’ routine.

I’m am therefore very happy to report that it does in fact exist and it is as delightful, charming and hilarious as episodes of sitcoms and nostalgic Ron Howard movies would have you believe.

My friend JR lives in South Park and it’s a cute neighborhood with set back houses with lots of young families. He invited us over to sit on his porch and drink a beer and hand out candy with him. Last year he said it was so busy that he ran out of candy in an hour.

We arrived about seven and it was all in full flow. He’s a set designer and he’d covered the porch with fake cobwebs and the neighborhood was alive with people. Most of the costumes were home made. Mario Brothers were popular. There were a lot of Princesses. The young ones were the cutest, struggling up the steps in bumblebee stripes and having difficulty managing their stuck on wings. They often had to be coached in the one key line by grinning, doting parents.

‘And what are you tonight?’           

            ‘A cape.’

            ‘A CAPE!’

The things children say, it’s always funny. A confident fat kid arrived and declared he was Zoro but he looked more like a mariachi and was lacking a sword. One kid told us she was ‘A Chinese person’, which was odd and launched us into a big discussion about political correctness.

There was a toddler dressed as a shrimp who was just way too adorable.

JR wore a false beard and was trying to instill a new set of rules this year since he’d run out of candy last year because parents had helped themselves to the treat bowl. This did not seem right and in fact there was a definite awkwardness about some of the exchanges at times with people who were way too old to be collecting candy. So he and his roommate had got an adult basket together for those too old to get treats. The adult basket contained condoms. It was an interesting idea and it proved difficult to enforce since the parents really wanted candy and not condoms and many of the parents were middle-aged Latino women, with little English and were probably Catholic and had received instruction not to block their husband’s semen in any way, so it was kind of embarrassing to see the look on their faces when they discovered what they’d got.

‘I feel more comfortable giving condoms to the men’, said JR after a few dips in the adult box.

‘Yeah, you’ve got to be careful, you could get in trouble, some of the young women dressed as slutty vampires might actually be underage.’

The teenagers on the cusp of adult hood were my favorite group. They were all clearly struggling with the idea that trick or treating may not be ‘cool’ or age appropriate for them anymore and yet they obviously enjoyed being out at night with friends and getting free candy. You could see the cognitive dissonance at play on their faces, teens who normally put effort into trying to be accepted as older suddenly have to decide that they are in fact not older and it’s fine for them to dress up as a chipmunk and go and pick up mini chocolates from the neighbors.

JR put each of them through the whole ritual, making them deliver the trick or treat line and then forcing them to explain their costume. Each question was a challenge with the subtext, are you really old enough to be doing this?

One sulky teen told us she was ‘From the 80’s’. Another one said she had come as ‘Prom Night’.

But of course, it’s not really about the chocolate. Candy is cheap and plentiful, the teens were arriving with iphones, they could probably buy all the candy they could ever want. There is a lot more to Halloween, there’s something in the atmosphere of the night, the smiles, the costumes, the tradition. It’s social connectivity. It’s good, I get it

Surface Surface Truth Surface Joy

By Andrew Barclay Newsham

            Sam had a smile on his face as big as an upturned umbrella and it poked out into the bar and disturbed the locals. He was feeling good, damn good. So what if it was perhaps a little too good for the Lumber Mill Grill? There was no law against being happy. There was no law against smiling. To hell with them if they thought he was a nut.

            He raised his glass of beer and saluted the small group of men who perched like vultures upon saggy leather stools at the end of the bar. They pretended not to notice him and glared stiffly at a small television that was tuned to a baseball game.

They are the nuts, thought Sam, for not smiling. How could they not? It was all too ridiculous. It was delicious. Absurd. Everything was as vivid as a peach.

            As soon as he’d come in he’d gotten off on the wrong foot with the bartender. It was the smile but it was more than the smile. He’d ordered a German beer, the man had been friendly and pleasant. As he waited for his drink he’d read a framed piece of embroidery on the wall. The other wall decorations were antique black and white pictures of logging and lumber mills. The embroidered patch stood out, such frames normally referenced God or country wisdom but this did neither. ‘You can eat an elephant if you take small bites’, it said. He asked the bartender about it.

            “I guess it means you can do anything if you set your mind to it,” said the bartender.

            “Like eating elephants?”

            “Yes,” said the man.

            “Are you some kind of monster?” asked Sam. He was joking. It was clear it was a joke. How could anything accompanied by such a smile be considered otherwise?

            But the bartender had frowned. That had been the beginning of the sour note that crept into their relationship.

            “It’s just a saying,” he had said defensively.

            “I know, I know,” said Sam hastily. “I’m only joking. It’s strange though, when you think about it, like, if you really set your mind to it you can really fuck something up.”

            The bartender shrugged and retreated behind the shield of his profession. “Would you like any food?” he asked.

            “Do you have any elephant? Maybe a deep fried ear with onion rings?”

            “No, but I can recommend the ribs.” He gave Sam a menu and then walked away, down to the end of the bar and the little gathering of regulars staring at the television.

            The television was old and small. Sam guessed it couldn’t have been more than thirty-six inches wide. Such a screen would be laughed out of all the bars he knew. Most bars in New York City, if they had televisions and were not cultivating an air of refinement, now went for giant screens that could be seen from the moon. But this wasn’t the city. He was a long way upstate. This was different world almost, like the Land of Oz. This was Podunk, New York. Population 2037.

Seeing these old men gathered around such a small screen was like something from the past. And who watched baseball anymore? Other than the World Series? Eight million games a season of virtually no importance. Grown men throwing and catching. Two or three big teams winning everything by virtue of buying up all the best players. The whole sham was deader than a legless turtle.

            Sam imagined a legless turtle on the pitcher’s mound in Yankee Stadium. The place was packed, people knocked back weak beer, hotdogs and peanuts like mindless cows, as if it was all perfectly normal. A team of umpires yelled out the innings without a pitch being thrown or base being stolen, the only movement being the senile bobbing of the turtle’s head as it strove to comprehend its missing legs. During the seventh inning stretch everybody stood up and sang ‘take me out to the turtle…’

Sam began to laugh. The bartender and a couple of the old men shot him suspicious glances. He waved at them, as if he was on a boat. They looked away quickly.

Ten minutes later one of the men left the group and walked towards him. Sam swiveled in his seat to talk to him but he’d only come to get something from the bartender who had followed him up. The bartender got level with Sam and then bent down to open a padlocked box.

Sam decided to talk to the new guy anyway.

“Good game?” he asked.

The man shook his head and stared at the bartender’s back.

“Who’s playing?” persisted Sam cheerfully.

 “Mets v Padres,” said the man. He spoke without looking at Sam. He wasn’t old. He was in his mid-thirties. He had a thick black moustache on his top lip like a coal brush.

“The Padres of San Diego?” asked Sam, continuing to probe for conversation.

The man looked at him. He had sad, clouded eyes. “Yeah,” he said.

“You know Padres are military chaplains who may carry weapons onto battlefields,” said Sam.

“No kidding,” said the man. He wasn’t interested, his eyes had already gone back to the bartender who had come up with a long cloth package in his hands.

            “But obviously,” joked Sam, “I don’t think the baseball players are actual Padres. Just as the Cleveland Indians are not actual Indians or The Florida Marlins actual fish.”

            “You never know,” said the man casually.

            “No,” said Sam enthusiastically. “You never do know.”

            The bartender handed the man the package. “Here you go Lloyd,” he said. The man took the package and laid it on the bar. It was tied at either end with two pieces of string. He undid the knots and rolled back the cloth to reveal a shotgun.

            “Hey,” said Sam, “You’re not a Padre are you?”

            “No,” said the man flatly.

            “I mean, carrying the gun…”

            The man had ignored him and studied the gun closely. What he was looking for Sam could not tell. After a few moments he seemed satisfied and tied it back up.

            “Will you be in later?” asked the bartender.

            “No…” said the man hesitantly, “um… I’ve got to polish my bowling trophies.”

The bartender nodded and the man walked outside.

            After he had gone, the bartender sighed and knelt to relock the box under the bar. When he stood back up Sam asked him for another beer. As he set about pouring the drink Sam asked him what it was all about.

            The bartender shrugged.

            “But what does it mean?” asked Sam.

            “What?” asked the bartender.

            “Bowling Trophies. It’s a metaphor right?”

            The bar tender shook his head. The man made him uncomfortable. He was glad for the business but he couldn’t work him out. They didn’t see too many tourists out this way and he didn’t fit easily into any box or category. His happiness was too loud. The smile was unsettling and his conversation veered towards the perverse. He wasn’t drunk, so that left other drugs or love or lunacy. There were other reasons of course but he knew those three things were the main suspects. People just didn’t get that happy. The bartender thought about religion and then realized he would count that under ‘lunacy’.

            “OK,” said Sam. “That man takes a shotgun off you, studies it like a hawk and then walks off saying he’s going to go polish some bowling trophies…”

            “He’s a good bowler,” said the bartender.

            “So, you’re telling me everything was right there on the surface?”

            “I don’t know what you mean.” The bartender grabbed a cloth and began to wipe the bar.

            Sam knew he was making the man uncomfortable. His mood was veering towards the euphoric. He looked at the bar. It was perfectly clean and didn’t need wiping. It was a displacement activity, unless he was wiping away the stain of the shotgun. It had left no physical stain but maybe there was a psychic one.

            “You gave him a shotgun,” he continued.

“It was his,” said the bartender.

“OK, but then you asked him if he was coming back. He said no, that he was going to polish his bowling trophies. Now you’re saying there was nothing hidden in that. That it was all there, right at the surface for me to see. That he is really going to go and polish some bowling trophies...”

            The bartender shrugged. “He likes to keep them clean.”

            “More than clean by the sounds of it. Shiny. Clean and shiny. Sparkling like Gabriel’s Trumpet. Like ornamental brass.”

            “No harm in it.”

            “You’re damn right there,” said Sam. “But who does that? And what about the gun?”

            “Are you a cop?” asked the bartender.

            “No,” Sam chuckled and shook his head. “I know it’s none of my business. I understand that. I’m just a harmless stranger passing time in your fine saloon.”

            “OK then,” said the bartender and he walked away, back down to the locals.

            Sam took a deep breath and laughed to himself. It was an odd town that was for sure and yet he also knew it was just like any place really. Any place in America where a man could drive home to spend a pleasant evening polishing up a collection of bowling trophies. It seemed ridiculous but then everything seemed ridiculous. And to question it, to point it out, to reach for your fellow man to try and weigh and sample the magic and mystery of the moment, why that could only bring forth fear and suspicion. No, he wasn’t a cop. But would that make it any more valid if he was? Did he need to be a cop to question the undeniable oddity of that moment? There was a gun. That was something. An ominous implement. One could dwell on the gun. But this was a rural place. It was possibly not so strange. What would signify crime in the city was nothing more than a farming or sporting tool out here. But there was also mention of bowling trophies. That was something else. This was no play. This was no staged moment. This was life in rural New York, way upstate. Podunk. Some kind of run down old logging town. Or maybe it wasn’t? The Lumber Mill Grill might never have been an actual lumber mill. It could be a fallacy, a construction. The old pictures on the walls of felled trees and grim squared jawed men in checked shirts merely reproductions. Or not even reproductions but complete fictions, photo-shopped images carefully selected by Chinese businessmen to create an atmosphere and inspire a warm nostalgic comfort. This kind of thing happening everywhere. The authentic was replaced by the fake. It had gone on so long now that the authentic had begun to imitate the fake. It made your head spin, or rather it would do, if you ever thought about it, if you ever scratched beneath the surface. What good were axe handles and mining helmets anyway, in this modern robotic age, other to adorn the walls of bars?

The bowling trophies existed. The bartender had said as much. Sam imagined them. Shiny. Golden. Kitsch. A source of pride for a lonely man with a shotgun. Had the man really been lonely? Yes, thought Sam. He’d been sitting with the locals down the far end of the bar but loneliness was more than simply being with people. Sam had known loneliness. He’d felt it vibrating off the man like black smoke.

He knew it was nothing but conjecture but he couldn’t help his mind spinning through the permutations like a ball bouncing round a roulette wheel. The man had entered competitions and he had knocked down a lot of pins and they’d given him big shiny metal objects which he displayed and polished. Symbols. Medals. Trophies. He had propelled his ball better than anyone else on the day. As he polished he remembered the wonderful moment in which he won them, the roar of the crowd, the deadly curve of the ball rolling on the shiny polished surface of the lane to smash down the pins. Maybe it was all there? Maybe it was all right at the surface? Maybe it only seemed strange to him, a man from the Big Bad City? He’d fallen into a dark pool of cynicism, a place where nobody would willingly spend time treasuring bowling trophies. Maybe they were right to look at him with suspicion. He had been flying on autopilot for too long and now he was taking notice of the world, really taking notice, he was behaving like an alien.

            ‘To hell with them,’ thought Sam. He raised his glass to his lips. It didn’t matter. Bowling trophies, that’s all it was. No big deal. He wasn’t the one going home to clean them. He was happy. That was all that mattered. The world was a wonderful place full of interest and intrigue. It was as vivid as a peach. And ridiculous. However way you looked at it. That was the truth. However way you cut it. Whatever your belief system, scientific or myth based. Or myth based and scientific. There was the beer you had. The beer you were yet to have. The sunny day. The cool bar. The comfortable chair. The old embroidered frames about eating elephants. The suspicion over a smiling stranger. The passing moment full of endless potential. The baseball game, two teams of men focusing intently on hitting and chasing a ball around like dogs. And all the pairs of eyes watching them, in the stadium and on television in rooms and offices and bars like this one. Sublime and ridiculous. And what was it all about? Could people really believe there was a God? With everything in his plan? For his pleasure or as a test? No no no. the sheer weight of everything was just plain ridiculous. Of course mankind had to come up with the idea of a God, with a human face, some kind of higher power and off-stage presence to make our every action seem worthwhile. It’s comforting, otherwise what have you got? Mindless pointless pain and hatred and animalistic drives and pig headed incompetence. The best thing mankind could do would be to waste time peacefully, harmlessly, without killing or hurting each other or the environment. Pray, polish the bowling trophies, drink a cool beer, watch baseball, play baseball, chase the ball as happily and as harmlessly as a dog. Keep it all on the surface. Least you could do is smile, laugh at the absurdity of life.

            Sam took a deep breath and shook his head.

            So what if he was feeling a little nutty? Was it so bad? He was generally a happy person but this was something else. It was unusual to feel so damn good. He told himself not to stress and analyze it. What good could come of that? No, better to keep it all at the surface. Take it all at face value. The smile was at the surface and yet didn’t it also reflect his mood? Yes it did, he was smiling all the way to his core. Maybe that was what people were finding do disturbing?

            He’d driven up out of the city with his friend James. James had come to deliver a bunch of crap to his aunt who lived in this here Podunk, New York. For reasons Sam could not explain James had decided to deposit him in this bar and would pick him up later. He was out of the city for a day trip. It was nothing too big, nothing too grand. But he was feeling damn good. The feeling had grown within him as he’d left the city, following the Hudson River upstate into gorgeous greenery. Was it just a change of scenery? No, it was more than that. And possibly not even that.

            At the end of the bar the bartender quietly told the regulars about his last interaction with the smiling stranger. The regulars now consisted of three men. Tom, John and Abe.

            “He says he’s not a cop,” said the bartender.

            “I can tell he’s not a cop,” said Abe knowingly.

            The men agreed that Abe could probably tell if he was a cop because Abe had a brother who was a cop. In this silent and unspoken way he was considered worldly in terms of the law by the other men.

            “Why’s he smiling like that?” asked John. It was the third time they’d asked the question amongst themselves.

            “I think he might be religious,” said the bartender.

            “He don’t seem religious,” said Tom. “He’s not trying tried to sell it to us yet.”

            “Give him time,” said John.

            “He’s just a fool.”

            “He said Lloyd was polishing his trophies up to shine like Gabriel’s trumpet or some such,” said the bartender. “And he knows a lot about Padres, the clergy not the baseball team.”

            Sam couldn’t hear what they were saying but he knew they were talking about him. It just made him smile all the more. The fact that they were wondering what he was smiling about when he didn’t really know what he was smiling about only added to his joy. He didn’t know why he was smiling. Other than he was happy, inexplicably happy. And that everything was ridiculous, silly to the very core if you thought about it.

            He rolled off his seat and went to the jukebox in the corner. It was an old machine from the fifties, a beautiful dome and chrome relic, with yellow glass and mechanical flippers that flicked through albums of available songs.

            There was Tony Bennett. There was Dolly Parton. There was Willy Nelson and Johnny Cash. There was a Woodstock album. There was Little Anthony and the Imperials. There was a lot of Frank Sinatra. There was Otis Reading and Marvin Gaye. The white crooners sang mostly from a position of reflection, from a lofty ivory tower of mastery over their feelings, ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few but then again, too few to mention’. The black soul singers sang mostly from the heat of battle, in the molten midst of emotion, ‘Please Please Please, Try a little tenderness’.

            Sam put in a quarter and selected a song called Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop by Little Anthony and the Imperials. The music began tumble out of the speakers. The Imperials sang the title over and over while Little Anthony provided a rhyming narrative about a woman dancing. A man was in a ‘native hut,’ when a woman arrived with a dance that put him in a ‘trance’. The lure of the female. The joy of sex. The simple surface pleasure of skin on skin. Sam laughed.

It was ludicrous. That this should be recorded. Practiced. Performed. Scratched into vinyl. Encased in an old rock and roll jukebox in Podunk New York. Released by a silver coin with a picture of an eagle on one side. ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop’ sang the Imperials. Sam began to dance. The old men stopped talking. Sam danced towards them.

            “Little Anthony and the Imperials,” said Sam as he danced closer.

            The old men stared at him, mouths agape. Sam danced now like a hula girl, he shimmied to the left and then shimmied to the right.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I’m smiling?” he asked, speaking loudly over the music.

The men looked at each other but did not speak.

            As Sam turned in his dance he saw that his friend James had pulled up outside the bar in his station wagon. It was probably just as well. He didn’t know if he’d be able to sit back down after dancing. He didn’t know what he’d do. The men were scared of him, they really had no reason to be so but such feelings could easily congeal into open hostility. He bent low on his knees, rocking from side to side and danced around to face the men once more.

“I am only at liberty to tell you this,” he said. “Either there is a reason for it or there isn’t.”

He twisted away from them and danced out of the bar, timing his exit perfectly with the end of the song, a one man conga line lost in his own carnival.

            The old men watched him go in stunned amazement. On the television the Mets turned a triple play and none of them saw it.

Later that night, the man called Lloyd finished polishing his bowling trophies and then put the shotgun into his mouth and blew his brains out. He was very careful not to get any blood on the bowling trophies.

            The smiling stranger and the suicide of their friend became linked very strongly in the minds of the locals of the Lumber Mill Grill in Podunk New York although they really weren’t connected at all. Whenever they talked about it the conversation would always end with one of them intoning that Lloyd had always been likely to do it since his father had gone out exactly the same way.

            On several occasions, over the next few years one of the old men would put the song on the jukebox and dance on his own, imitating Sam. They would all laugh and the bartender would give them free drinks. Then they would talk about Lloyd.

            “If only he’d have stayed and seen the nut dance…” one of would say wistfully, as if that would have changed everything somehow.

            On a shelf above the jukebox now sat a collection of bowling trophies. The bartender had put them there after they’d been brought over by Lloyd’s cousin a few days after the funeral. The bartender liked the look of them although he never polished them and they attracted a lot of dust.

He was the only one who knew that the trophies all had different names written on the plaques and Lloyd’s wasn’t on any of them.