Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 27

Even Now: Anthony Bourdain and the Suicide Solution

Oh, forgive me father, for I have sinned
I've been through hell and back again
I shook hands with the devil
Looked 'em in the eye
Looked like a long lost friend
Oh, anything you want, any dirty deeds
He's got everything -- except what I really need
Keeping me temporarily satisfied
But not one thing I've tried
Filled me up inside or felt like mine
Mine, all mine.
-- Van Halen

The living's in the way we die.
-- Ah-Ha

When celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain took his own life in a Paris hotel room a few months ago, the reaction of the press taught me a lot about the way suicide is approached in what is sometimes called “the national conversation.” Journalists circled around the story in tornado-like fashion, whirling details into our collective face for weeks afterward. We were briefed on every detail of Bourdain's upbringing and career, the various high-profile feuds in which he'd engaged, the details of his relationship with actress Asia Argento, the aggressive role he'd taken in what is known as the #metoo movement. We got reams of tributes from fellow chefs, television personalities and internet celebrities, and were constantly reminded about his hit television show, “Destination Unknown,” and his bestselling books, including “Kitchen Confidential,” which briefly became a scripted TV series. The actual details of his death, however, remained curiously elusive, even after sufficient time had passed for them to become public, either by virtue of official pronouncements or leaks to the press. Many of the reports I read repeated the same line almost verbatim: Bourdain had been “found unresponsive” in his hotel room by fellow chef Eric Ripert, and had later been pronounced dead. It took me some time to confirm an early rumor that had fleetingly appeared on the Net immediately following the news of his demise: Bourdain had hanged himself.

To concentrate on such a morbid detail may strike the reader as pointless or macabre, but the reluctance of the press, which under ordinary circumstances pants like a horny high school student at the thought of tragic or salacious details, especially as they regard celebrities, to come clean about the manner in which Bourdain shed this vale of tears is illustrative of a much greater problem in our society, to wit: the way we deal with suicide, and the conditions which drive people to commit it.

In every country and culture, there are social taboos, subjects that cannot be broached without considerable backlash. British society, for many centuries, was governed by the principle summed up in a single sentence: “It simply isn't done.” And that which was “not done” was not only not to be done, it was not to be discussed. Such a system was surprisingly effective for ensuring that topics like venereal disease, homosexuality, alcoholism and drug abuse, bankruptcy, social inequality, deformity or retardation in children, spousal abuse were swept under the societal rug. On the other hand, it created an environment in which the undiscussed also festered, for the simple reason that no problem can be solved unless and until it is first acknowledged. In American society, there are relatively few social taboos that remain universal throughout this remarkably vast and diverse nation, but mental illness and depression are high among them, and suicide, the unholy spawn of these bastards, probably chief. The press reported honestly that Anthony Bourdain killed himself. In showing a squeamish reluctance to discuss the manner by which he took his life, however, they made it clear that when it comes to suicide, it is simply “not done” to go into too many details. Even now, in an age when the Internet has made accessing atrocity as easy as clicking on a hyperlink, suicide remains shrouded in mystery.

The conscious motive behind this is probably decent enough, i.e. to spare the family, loved ones and fans the gruesome details, but the decency is misplaced, because the unconscious driving force behind the motive is undoubtedly embarrassment. To kill oneself is seen as a shameful and disgusting act, and so it is easier to write that Bordain was “found unresponsive” than “found hanging from a luggage strap.” The idea is that softening the details grants the dead person dignity. That it may. What it does not do, and I understand that I am repeating myself here, is drive home the horror of suicide and the conditions which precipitate it. These need to be discussed fearlessly, ruthlessly and honestly. To describe the circumstances of a particular death is simple enough if one is willing to skirt the taboo, but to discuss the series of events which trigger self-destruction is more difficult, because it is here that the the fears and loathings which created the taboo in the first place confront us.

Let us take celebrity suicide. This has become so common that it is difficult for the press to keep up with it. Robin Williams died by hanging. Fashion maven Kate Spade killed herself the same week as Bourdain. Chris Cornell of Soundgarden hanged himself, and not long afterward so did his close friend Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. Stephanie Adams, a former Playboy playmate, threw herself off a building. Tony Scott, director of mega-hits like TOP GUN and BEVERLY HILLS COP II, jumped off a bridge. Michael Ruppert, author of PRESIDENTIAL ENERGY POLICY, which became the basis of the popular documentary THE COLLAPSE, shot himself. In each case there is a tendency, perhaps understandable, to ask why one should be feel sorry for wealthy, often famous people who can't find a reason to live but evidently can find at least one compelling reason to die. Yet the rash of celebrity and quasi-celebrity suicides is simply a bellwether of a much larger trend in American society, one which tends to cut across economic lines. According to the CDC, the suicide rate in the United States has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, rising by 25% overall, with twenty-five states reporting increases of up to 30% in that time period. Suicide is now the tenth leading cause of death in this country, claiming 42,773 lives each year – and this, at a time when prescription of psychiatric drugs is at an all-time high: approximately 33 million adults are on medication, i.e. 10% of the entire country; but the figures for children are especially appalling. Information supplied by the mental health watchdog CCHR indicates that 2.1 million kids are on antidepressants; 1.2 million on antipsychotics, and 1.4 million on anti-anxiety meds.

These figures obviously demands a series of questions, but the most obvious, and the most pressing, is why. The United States, for all of its problems, is one of the crown-jewel nations of the earth. Education is free until the eighteenth year. Credit allows people of low economic standing to live a full class above their means. Compared to much of the rest of the planet, we possess an abundance of food, natural resources and living space. We have no fear of foreign invasion and the threat of nuclear war is a faint fraction of what it was during the Cold War. Political violence of the sort that plagues much of the rest of the planet is almost non-existent, and the cost of living in many areas is ridiculously cheap. Even some of our more rampant issues, things like the obesity epidemic, the increase in diabetes, psychological problems with body image – “first world problems” as they are now called – cannot be taken all that seriously since they are symptomatic of our own tendency toward excess. Yet Americans are killing themselves at a greater rate than ever, and this increase began several years before such landmark events as 9/11, the Iraq War and subsequent “Global War on Terror,” the Great Recession, and the election of Donald Trump, all of which have been blamed for increasing national anxiety.

It's even worse than you think. In 1999, the year our suicide rate began its upward spike, America was enjoying a seldom-precedented period of all-around prosperity. During the previous decade, the Gross Domestic Product continued to increase by roughly 4.5% a year, while unemployment steadily declined from a high, in 1991, of 7.3%, to a scant 3.9% in 1999. The domestic political situation was stable, democracy was on the march all over the world, and there was less to fear, in concrete terms, than there had ever been since any period since the Jazz Age. It is logical to conclude, then, that the motivation behind these deaths came from circumstances which were not economic in nature, nor driven by anxieties about nuclear war, pandemic or any other possible catastrophe. It is also logical to conclude that contrary to all American propaganda going back to the time of the Declaration of Independence, physical comfort, economic prosperity and material wealth do not provide much of a shield against internal despair. Americans have been taught from birth to believe that wealth and especially fame provide happiness, but the rash of celebrity deaths and the suicide rates among the middle, upper middle and rich classes argue decisively otherwise.

According to Medbroadcast, the chief cause of suicide is “major psychiatric illness - in particular, mood disorders (e.g., depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia).” The next is “substance abuse (primarily alcohol abuse).” Others include a family history of suicide, which is probably linked to genetic predisposition to depression, and “unbearable emotional pain,” which is hardly distinguishable from depression. The common theme here is obvious: suicide is driven by things we Americans prefer not to talk about.
And because we do not talk about them, we further isolate those who suffer from them. Not surprisingly, feelings of isolation are one of the chief precursors of suicide. Because of our taboo, people beginning the process of “suicidal ideation” (the process of normalizing suicide in one's thoughts) often feel, or have been made to feel, that they are weak, dysfunctional, damaged, or helpless; when they speak out they are shamed for making others uncomfortable ("First world problem over here!") and when they remain silent their suffering grows. It is a vicious cycle and one which frequently ends with a gunshot.

In America, we have a peculiar habit of looking at effects without discussing their causes. This applies to every aspect of American life, most notably mass shootings, but in the case of suicide it is particularly egregious. Despite the skyrocket in suicide throughout our land, the social taboo remains firmly in place. We are allowed to express dismay, to vent anger, even to grieve, but not to ask the larger questions, or the largest one of all, why. Instead, the ugly truths are avoided or sanded-down so as not to alarm or offend. Unimportant or secondary factors are endlessly discusses while, without exception, the crucial ones are smothered in silence. We hear the sirens of the coroner's wagon, smile a sickly smile and say, "There's nothing to see here, folks!" We whistle past our own graveyards.

In regards to Bourdain's suicide, the causes were obviously complex and may never be fully understood. At the heart of every suicide, even those provoked by severe mental illness, there remains at least a small element of mystery. But as part of the broader trend of the increase in American suicides, I can venture a few educated guesses as to the critical question of "why?"

The original draft of the Declaration of Independence drafted the mission statement of the new nation as "life, liberty and the pursuit of property." This last word was viewed as a bit too vulgar and was altered to "happiness." No one, however, has ever been fooled by the change. In America, "property" and "happiness" are believed to be synonymous, interchangeable. Having one means having the other, and anyone who has achieved material prosperity who does not exhibit happiness is viewed as spoiled, weak, ungrateful, and altogether disgusting. You have more; therefore you ought be happier than those who have less. By the very act of their unhappiness they are challenging the American mantra, in a sense committing a sort of societal treason.

The social psychologist Erich Fromm famously wrote that humanity in the industrial age had two choices -- to have, or to be. Those who "had" believed happiness lay in the acquisition of material goods and the satisfaction of material desires. Those who wanted to "be" believed that happiness -- the meaning of life -- lay in experience, self-discovery, and finding harmony with the larger world. The former camp tended toward narcissism and egotism, which in turn isolated them from the rest of humanity and from the world as a whole. They were materially prosperous but internally destitute -- "alienated," in Fromm's words, and often unhappy. They sought to alleviate their unhappiness by the further acquisition of wealth, and when this failed, their unhappiness increased, and with it their isolation.

In contrast, the latter, those who wanted to "be" were interested in inner activity, which Fromm described thusly:

"To be active means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which - though in varying degrees – every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to be interested...to give."

This is a tremendous rejection of the creed that money buys happiness, and in my personal experience it is true. As Lawrence Sanders once wrote, greed does not lead to satiety; greed leads to greed. The pit is bottomless. But understanding this is not the American way. In the face of mounting unhappiness, of an ever-climbing suicide rate, of an entire generation of children who have to be medicated, or think they have to be medicated, simply to function in our society, we have doubled-down on the idea that wealth, power and fame are the definition of happiness and even raised them to the status of moral virtues. The Jenners, the Kardashians, the Hiltons and those of their ilk have become a species of demigod, all the more admirable for the fact that they have done little or nothing of practical value to earn their success. In this we now resemble the British Empire at the height of its decadence, having made a Golden Calf of the flesh while neglecting the needs of the soul. And what happened to the British Empire?

It will no doubt come as a surprise to some that the rates of mental illness, even severe mental illness like schizophrenia, drops in any nation during time of war, as does chronic depression. It may also come as a surprise that in tribal societies, mental illness and depression are almost unheard-of. This phenomenon was examined by Sebastian Junger in his illuminating book Tribe and his conclusion was simple: what we call civilization, with its tendency toward egotism, isolation, selfishness, and materialism, not only neglects the deeper needs of the human soul, it creates a disharmonious relationship with the environment, the effects of which we are only now just beginning to understand.

I am not advocating throwing all your possessions into the sea and living in a cave somewhere on roots and rainwater. As the Police once sang, we are spirits in a material world, and we are ruled to some extent by material considerations. We need clothes, food, running water, a roof over our heads. These things provide us with comfort and security. But they do not provide us with happiness and if we spend our lives pursuing them to the exclusion of all else...well, he who dies with the most toys, still dies. It's what he does in the years and decades beforehand that matters. What did he learn about life? What did he learn about himself? What did he learn about the world and his place within it? None of these answers can be found in an interest statement. Nor can they be found by swallowing pills and placing a bag over your head. Suicide is not a solution to anything, it is simply an escape from the problem. That such an obvious sentiment even needs to be uttered is a devastating commentary on the mentality with which we have been raised.

Anthony Bourdain was rich. He was also incredibly famous. By any American metric he ought to have been happy. Yet he killed himself. Again, I don't claim to know precisely why. News continues to break which indicates possible motives, and the hollowness of materialism may have had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with his decision. But the fact remains that by the logic upon which this country was founded, he should never have wanted to take his own life. Only the working class, the poor and the homeless ought to do so. Yet among those segments of our society the rate of suicide is so low as to be practically non-existent. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that the struggle simply to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads leaves little time for the sort of extended anguish that leads to suicide; but the more unpleasant truth is that those on the lower margins of our society know instinctively what all living things know, but which materialists have forgotten, to wit: the meaning of life is in living.

The Way It Was When

I found myself in Hollywood again. I can't remember the date or the circumstances, but it was a beautiful evening – balmy, with a breeze that ruffled the palm trees nodding over the boulevard like sleepy sentinels. My destination? Burbank, and home. But though traffic was mysteriously light – almost non-existent – I found myself in no hurry to get there. Between the weather, the open road, the superb tunes rolling out of the radio, and my general state of relaxation, I was enjoying myself thoroughly. As I shot past the Hollywood Bowl to the 101 Freeway, equally and suspiciously free of cars, I was struck by a realization which made me laugh out loud: quite by accident, I had re-discovered the joy of cruising.

Cruising, or in the parlance of my parents, “going for a drive,” is something which used to be an important part of my life. It is one of the few distinct pleasures which I remember from high school, which otherwise was not all that pleasurable of an experience. The ages between, say, twelve and sixteen are a continuous struggle to define oneself as a adult, at a time when one is still actually a child both physically and mentally, and the acquisition of a driver's license bestows upon the teenager a precious commodity: temporary freedom. You may live, as I did, in a too-small house with too many people and animals, and spend the rest of your time jammed in school with a couple of thousand other equally frustrated young humans; you may exist in a state of simmering sexual frustration, the victim of hormonal mood swings and the quasi-tantrums that result from them. You may be oppressed by parents, homework, chores, bullies, elder siblings, and the sense that one's life is not your own and there is no such thing as privacy; but when they hand you that license and a set of car keys, everything changes, if only for an hour or two, here and there.

When I was about seventeen I had a specific ritual I followed, beginning the spring and ending somewhere in the fall. When the weather was just right, in that period of day known as the gloaming – when the sun is down but light still fills the sky – I would swing into the '77 Olds Cutlass Supreme that was my temporary chariot, fire up every one of the 350 cubic inches in its engine, set the four-barrel carburator to rumble, and have myself a drive.

I grew up near the Potomac River, among trees and ivy and rolling hills. It was suburbia, but not the sort that desecrates the landscape; the houses all seemed like hobbitons, growing up out of the earth in the shade of the trees. Natural phenomena, as it were. Just a few minutes from my house were single-lane railway bridges, fast-moving streams, brooding woods, and sprawling fields unbesmirched by a single man-made structure. In the summers, after a thunderstorm, mist would hang thickly over the woods and the open pastures; in the fall, the sharp October air was full of the spice of decaying leaves and woodsmoke. All of this was perfect backdrop for cruising. I would steer the great Cutlass through the landscape, passing the homes of schoolmates, inhaling the perfume of growing things, and listening to the mix tape I'd jammed into the dashboard player. In those days, every kid was armed with a tremendous collection of mix tapes, mostly recorded off the radio, and there was one for every mood. Nowadays you say, “There's an app for that.” In those days you said, “There's a mix tape for that” – “that” being your state of mind. If you were angry, if you were lonely, if you were feeling confident, happy or just plain horny, you had a collection of songs you could fall back on to enhance those feelings. The construction of a mix tape was a science that had to be carefully apprenticed before it could be mastered; I could probably write a book about the techniques necessary to produce the perfect one, if I thought anyone would read it. At any rate, I had more tapes than I could count, but there was one in particular which always accompanied my when I went cruising. After all these years I can only recall two songs on it – Guns 'n Roses “Patience” and “You Don't Move Me Anymore” by Keith Richards – but the effect it produced in me on those lazy, moon-lighted evenings in the summer I can remember perfectly. It was a sensation of freedom, coupled with the knowledge that in that moment you were completely unreachable by telephone, parent or teacher. Nobody knew where you were; nobody could tell you what to do or how to do it. Cell phones did not exist. GPS tracking did not exist. When you got in that car, you were like a deep-sea diver with a thousand feet of water over his head: immersed in, yet disconnected from, the world around you. Returning from a good cruise produced in my teenage body and mind the exact feelings which a cigar and two fingers of Irish whiskey produce in my middle-aged ones: peace and contentment.

At the moment of my Hollywood epiphany, I realized that it had been nearly a dozen years since I had simply “gone for a drive.” When I moved to Los Angeles in '07, I quickly discovered that the traffic here, along with the inadequate road system and the brutality of the summer and early fall weather, were not conducive to cruising. Indeed, nobody around here drives just for the sake of it. Though L.A. is famous for its car culture, the automobile here is either a status symbol or a means to an end. The idea that it can be used as a balm for one's soul is not even considered. Conditions simply make it impossible. The circumstances which allowed me to cruise by accident were simply a set of perfectly aligned flukes which I'd never experienced before and have not experienced since. Nevertheless, having “gone for a drive” by accident, it got me thinking about how much life has changed since my cruising days, since the times I used to spend hours in the basement or in my room, patiently waiting for the right song to come over the radio so I could add it to my latest mix tape. I realized that I am now old enough to mourn The Way Things Were When.

Being born in the early 70s, I have layers and layers of intricate memories of a now-extinct society, a world before cellular phones or mobile devices or the Internet, before microchips in cars, before recycling, before CDs and MP3s and podcasts, before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, before streaming services and cloud drives, before almost everything which makes our modern society work. A world in which “going for a drive” was a significant act, and creating a mix tape was a rite of passage, like a Native American boy's learning to track a deer. A world of newspapers, cassette tapes, watches, Walkmans, Atari computers, VCRs, 200 lb television sets with rabbit ears, and mail-order catalogs with six-to-eight week delivery times. A world of Encyclopedias and TV Guides. A world in which it was not possible or even desirable to be called or contacted at any time. A world in which the simple act of climbing into a car unplugged you from the world.

Lest you think I am simply indulging in nostalgia, let me say that I am quite well aware at the world of the 70s, 80s and early-mid 90s was hardly perfect and we who lived through those times are were old enough to make conscious judgments of them knew it even then. There is no word in the English language for the frustration which a person feels when he desires a technology or a device which does not yet exist, but I felt that frustration quite keenly as a child, a teenager, and a young man. Simply put, we knew a much more sophisticated world was around the corner, a world of instantaneous gratification and all-hours convenience, but we weren't there yet. We were stuck with cassette tapes and clunky VCRs and a choice between ABC, NBC or CBS; stuck with telephone cords that inevitably twisted into knots, and the very real possibility of breaking down a lonely stretch of highway in bad weather with absolutely no way to call for help. So no, this is not nostalgia; not all nostalgia, anyway. It is simply an awareness that time is marching on, and that as it so marches, certain pleasures which were unique to my generation have been left behind in its dust, probably forever. Cruising – at least in Los Angeles – is one. Assembling mix tapes on clunky tape-recorders is another. But the list, if I were to sit down and really think about it, is immense.

In Anne Rice's novel Interview With A Vampire, the character of Armand explains to the neophyte vampire Louis that the reason the undead do not really live forever is because very few of them have the stomach for immortality. The vampire, Armand explains, is born into a particular era and belongs to that era alone; as time passes, language changes, clothing changes, custom changes, architecture changes, and at some point, the vampire finds itself unable to relate to the present. It is still looking for the accents, the styles, the sounds of its own era, now long extinct and never to return. In the end the loneliness, the imposed isolation, the sense of being “in but not of” the world becomes unbearable, and the vampire steps deliberately into the light and destroys itself. I do not, of course, feel that way just now – like destroying myself, I mean. I'm way too young for that. But I have come to understand the grumbling, the carping, the endless complaining my grandparents were guilty of as far back as I can remember – a constant, ne'er-ceasing lament about the Way The World Was When. They talked about things like coal-fired stoves, milkmen, nickel beers, listening to soap operas on the radio, and the pain-in-the-ass necessity of having your collar turned or your hat reblocked. They talked about how you had to wear a suit or a dress to a movie theater and how a dollar could buy you a steak dinner with all the trimmings and a cold beer and still leave you enough money for the tip and the trolley home. At the time, I didn't want to hear any of that sort of talk and it is only recently that I have come to understand what a wonderful insight it gave me into the world in which they experienced their own youth. But it also lends me an understanding of just what it feels like to be the Vampire Armand, struggling endlessly to keep up with a life that never stops moving, that allows each of us a certain time to be both “in and of” the world, and then slowly begins to pull away from us, to make us living anachronisms, who bore the younger folk with our tales of The Way The World Was When.

I do not, at present, have children, but I do have a niece and a nephew and sometimes, when I am regaling them with tales of my own childhood, I can see the boredom glassing over their eyes. They cannot relate, and there is really no reason why they should: they belong to a different world, one which is growing more different, more alien – to me, anyway – with every passing year. Yet at the same time I cannot look at them without feeling a twinge of pity. Just as I will never know what it is like to go to school in the horse-drawn sleigh that pulled my grandmother through Indiana snow, they will never – so long as they live in Los Angeles – know the joy of cruising through somnolent streets on lovely summer evenings, alone with their thoughts, knowing they are unreachable, untouchable, totally, wonderfully alone. Nor will they ever grasp the complex mixture of method and patience which was required to construct the perfect mix tape. But I'll tell you this much, friends and neighbors: they don't know what the hell they're missing.

Where the Beechwoods Used to Be; or, why I love Secondhand Bookstores

Say what you like -- call it silly, childish, anything -- but doesn't it make you puke sometimes to see what they're doing to England, with their bird-baths and their plaster gnomes and their pixies and tin cans, where the beechwoods used to be?

-- George Orwell, "Coming Up For Air"

Only a fool stands in the way of progress...if this is progress.

-- Captain James T. Kirk

I grew up in a house filled with books. I mean this literally. Both my parents and my older brother were voracious readers, albeit readers with different tastes, and there were bookshelves almost everywhere -- the living room, the den (which we called "the sunporch"), the upstairs hallway, the various bedrooms, even the basement. Excess books were to be found in the attic, the garage and, in the case of rare volumes from past centuries, in the breakfronts in the dining room. My father read scholarly history, biography and works on politics, along with some historical fiction: big, hard-backed, intimidating-looking works of almost Biblical proportions. My mother devoured mysteries by the freightload -- probably forty or fifty a year, mostly paperbacks, which to me seemed more approachable and less frighteningly adult. My brother's tastes were eclectic indeed: comic books, science-fiction, pictorial volumes on cinema, collections of essays and short stories by writers as varied as Harlan Ellison and George Orwell, this, that. It was damn near impossible to go anywhere in our house without encountering books, and being a child of a curious nature, I started first by looking at the pictures (if any), then reading the descriptions on the flyleaves of the dust jackets, then making tentative efforts to read the books themselves. Most were way over my head in terms of subject matter, but that didn't stop me, and I delighted in the literary smorgasbord I could sample at will: a novel about ancient Rome, a biography of Al Capone, stacks of Fantastic Four comics, mysteries written by Lawrence Sanders and Agatha Christie, the collected adventures of Sherlock Holmes, sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuin. Believe it or not -- and you may not, if you're thirty or younger -- one of my favorite pastimes was yanking a random volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica off its shelf and just turning the gilt-edged pages for hours, marveling at the pictures, diagrams (some of them transparencies or fold-outs), sketches and maps. Today this sort of thing is done via the soulless instruments known as Google and Wikipedia; but Google-Wikipedia have nothing on the pleasure of sitting in an easy chair with a big, leather-bound volume tooled in gold, reading about crocodiles or the Battle of Hastings or the Sahara Desert or the Xyphoid process or any other of ten thousand random people, places or things that make up this world.

Growing up, my family had an obsession with moviegoing which was pretty impressive, but the one thing which rivaled it was our tendency to make Viking-like raids on bookstores. No such establishment in the Maryland - D.C. - Virginia area was safe. There was nothing my father liked better to do on a Saturday during the early 1980s than pack us into the car, hunt down a book merchant, and loot him empty. Everyone got a book, and some of us got two or even three. My mother spent a lot of years in a state of frustration over the staggering sums of money we -- meaning her husband -- spent on this passion. In those days, of course, bookstores were not what they are today or were just ten years ago; the mega-chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders did not exist. Crown Books was probably as big of a chain as existed and the individual stores were not very large, and no, you couldn't get a cup of coffee or a Danish and no, you couldn't get wi-fi because it didn't exist and neither did the Internet. A bookstore was just that -- a store with books in it. Nothing else. But that was fine with us, and especially with me.

You see, the family obsession with the written word carried with it its own aesthetic. When you grow up surrounded by books, you constantly encounter certain tactile and olfactory sensations which get bound up in your mind with various concepts and emotions, all of them positive. Thousands of books create a smell of paper, leather, linen and dust which permeates not only your nose but your childhood; touching those pebbled leather or scratchy linen covers brings forth memories of sitting by the fireplace, reading in perfect comfort and security into the late hours of the night. The associations are pleasant, and they linger into adulthood. So it's little wonder that entering a bookstore now, especially a secondhand bookstore, plunges me immediately and totally into some of the happiest days of my own early life.

The secondhand bookstore has distinct advantages in my mind over the firsthand bookstore for several reasons. Firstly, the moment you walk through the door your nostrils are confronted with the smell of thousands of decaying, dust-coated tomes full of foxed paper -- to me and other bibliophiles, a terrific sensation. Secondly, the lighting is almost invariably dim, giving the whole place a hushed, intimate atmosphere. Third, the fact that the books are all used means that the place is full of nearly extinct, out of print editions, old volumes from past centuries, and other impossible-to-find works, often by long-dead or obscure authors. Perusing stacks of these old mummies often yields great treasure, for the fact that a book has become utterly forgotten by no means excludes it from greatness, and should you find some long-forgotten great work, you experience the special pleasure of being let in on a dusty old secret known only to a select few.

There is of course another reason I prefer secondhand bookstores to the big conglomerates, of which Barnes & Noble is, now, I believe the last representative; they are privately owned and, for this and the fore-mentioned reasons, are in possession of a soul. And as our nation continues down the path of gentrification, cultural homogenization and corporatization generally, soul is an increasingly rare commodity anywhere. The secondhand bookstore, like the mom-and-pop grocery, the independently-owned hardware, toy, dime or record store, the hobby shop and the family-owned diner or coffeehouse, is increasingly in the process of being exterminated. This extermination is cold-blooded, deliberate and seemingly irreversible, which is odd because nearly everyone -- every human being with taste or aesthetic feeling, that is -- prefers to do business with the small businessman rather than the large if given any kind of choice at all. And is not merely sentiment that drives this preference. So long as small businesses of any kind proliferate, the customer is sure to be treated honestly and fairly in the vast majority of his dealings; what's more, if he is a repeat customer, he will also be treated personally. All of these qualities are absent from corporations and chains. They are run not by owners but by managers, and staffed by underpaid employees who like as not get no benefits and are treated poorly or indifferently by their employer, and have neither the incentive nor the native interest to please the customer. Going to a Barnes & Noble may be a positive experience to the Bibliophile insomuch as it is full of books and coffee, but in comparison with a good secondhand bookstore it is rather like tinned peaches versus ripe peaches taken directly off the tree. The former gives you the simulacrum of the thing you want, and the latter gives you the reality.

Whenever I move to a new city or state, the first thing I do is run down a mental checklist of the things I will need to locate after, or even before, I unpack: A friendly pub. A good restaurant. An honest mechanic. And a bookstore, preferably secondhand. Until a few weeks ago I was a habituate of a place in Burbank called Movie World, located downtown on San Fernando Boulevard. The title of the store was deceptive; while Movie World did sell movie posters, old VCR tapes, cinematic publicity stills, television scripts and various other ephemera related to Hollywood, it was by and large simply a used bookstore. And what a used bookstore. From floor to ceiling were stacked tens of thousands of hardbacks, paperbacks, magazines, leatherbound collections -- you name it, it was there, coated in dust and jammed in so tight against its fellows you practically needed a crowbar to pry it free. Indeed, Movie World was a firetrap of the first order, overstocked to an unsafe degree (there were literally avalanches of magazines and books that blocked entire isles), and not terribly well organized, though the gentlemanly owner tried his best to do so. He had, he told me, once run three secondhand bookshops, but the other two had folded and he'd been forced to cram the stock of both the others into his sole remaining store. Truth be told, I didn't mind; in fact I rather liked the ramshackle appearance. After the brightly lighted, sanitized, everything-in-its-place appearance of a Barnes & Noble, the existence of this kind of store, where every square foot was heaped with such a freight of books and old magazines and rolled-up posters and dog-eared 8 x 10 headshots that you wondered why the floor didn't collapse, was a positive joy for me. What's more, it was directly around the corner from my gym. I could roll up in my car, work out for an hour, then wander into Movie World and inhale its intoxicating scent as I hunted the isles for something new to read. Like as not I'd then eat lunch across the street, enjoying the first pages of my spontaneous purchase -- a pleasure all the more pleasurable for not being shared.

I patronized Movie World for years. Occasionally I'd go inside with a friend, but in a sense, Movie World was my friend and there was no need for further company. I don't know how many purchases I made there, but the number must be very great indeed, and included some terrific finds: old army manuals from WW2, out-of-print classics like Beau Geste, trashy adventure novels covered with mustard stains (I hope they were mustard stains), smashing autobiographies of obscure actors. Shopping there -- or just wandering there, without buying anything -- became a settled part of my routine. I really didn't need any of the stuff I bought, especially the scripts for episodes of forgotten 80s television shows like Matt Houston, but that was part of the fun. Nobody ever died because they didn't buy that old steel ammunition box from WW2 they saw in the junk shop window; on the other hand, nobody who hasn't paid hard-earned cash for a useless item simply for the joy of possessing it has lived a day in their life. Anyway, one day late last year -- I'm sure you knew this was coming, though I'm not sure I did -- the owner informed me that after decades in business he was finally retiring -- he'd sell off his entire stock, give away what didn't sell on his last day, and vacate the premises he'd occupied sometime around the year of my birth. If I may extend the metaphor, it was rather like having a good buddy tell you he's decided to leave town forever and head for the opposite side of he earth, where you can never visit. It reminded me of a similar experience I'd had in Bethesda, Maryland, in the early 2000s, when Second Story Books was forced by developers to shut its doors to make way for some fucking abomination of an art gallery that nobody wanted. In that case, it was less like losing a buddy than witnessing a murder you are powerless to prevent and equally powerless to avenge (unless you burn the fucking art gallery to the ground, which I may or may not have seriously considered). In both cases, though, these individual tiny incidents belong to a much larger trend -- a cultural massacre, a sort of slow-rolling genocide of everything which possesses soul in favor of everything which does not.

When Movie World shut down, I struck out in search of a replacement, but I've yet to find one which truly fills that particular niche within my soul. A very well-maintained secondhand bookstore does in fact reside very close to me in Toluca Lake, but in my first visit to the place I found it a little too well-maintained: too bright, too neat, too organized. Even the presence of several cats, sleeping peaceably atop stacks of books, couldn't quite give it the atmosphere of run-down, homey charm that I associate with a "real" used bookshop. It occurred to me as I left (having bought two books; hell, I'm not wasting a visit) that the mom-and-pop operations, even where they survive, have had to change their character somewhat in order to compete, or feel as if they are competing, with the big chains. Thus the cleanliness, the harsh lighting, the absence of dust. But it is precisely these things, in my mind, which lend the secondhand store its final coat of charm. Shops like that don't really give a shit whether you have allergies or expect to be served coffee or fume because there's no wi-fi for your android phone; not because they are indifferent to your wants, but because they concentrate on your needs. Customer service is sometimes more than satisfying petty desires in the consumer; it is sometimes slipping past them and reminding you, via a book avalanche or a handful of dust-bunnies, why you actually came into the store in the first place.

In his minor masterpiece Coming Up For Air, George Orwell brilliantly and evocatively told the story of a harassed, disappointed, much put-upon London everyman named George Bowling who rebels against the cold, mechanistic, heartless trend of the modern world by trying to revisit the idyllic country town of his boyhood, only to find that it has been utterly destroyed by the wheels of "progress." In confess that sometimes, as I comb through Los Angeles for a proper secondhand bookstore and a re-connection to the best days of my own childhood, I feel much like poor old George Bowling, who discovers there is no refuge from the bright lights and dead souls that surround him. Yet all is not lost. The hulking chain stores like Borders, which helped obliterate the secondhand store nationwide, are themselves being driven out of existence by Internet-based booksellers like Amazon: Borders ceased to exist almost a decade ago, and Barnes & Noble is sluggishly dying. Some will of course decry this as the final doom of the brick-and-mortar bookstore, but I see the strong possibility of a different future, because I know I am not alone in my passion for the tactile experience which is part and parcel of entering a bookshop. Human beings are gregarious animals and while they may enjoy the convenience of online shopping, it doesn't exactly fill up a Saturday afternoon for the family. The market abhors a vacuum, and if the last of the big chains goes into extinction, I foresee the rise of a new generation of bookseller -- one who bridges the gap between the cold, "full service" store which serves coffee and biscotti and carries mostly new releases from big publishers, and the dusty, dimly-lighted, no-frills secondhand store about which I have just waxed rhapsodic-nostalgic for the last few thousand words. This new sort of bookstore will carry heaps of old used books, but also sell coffee and have the latest bestsellers. It will have a lounge where people can read and get wi-fi, but the furniture will be secondhand and mismatched, and anyone talking on a cell phone will be told roughly to get the hell out. And best of all, it will be privately owned and privately run, designed and organized to the owner's whims and personal tastes. Said owner will not be a mere manager selling a commodity which to him might as well be pork bellies or wheat futures, but rather a bibliophile who passionately loves books, and reading, and the whole atmosphere which can surround both. Beechwoods can be cut down, you see, but they can also be replanted and regrown. All it takes is love, courage...and a little bit of soul.

Breaking Brad: or, why Grammar Nazis is good for ya

Like most people, I often want to beat the shit out of that subspecies of human we refer to as “the grammar Nazi.” You know, that sumbitch that's always telling you it's “whom” and not “who” or “me” and not “I.” Who tells you the comma should be a semicolon, or that you ended the sentence in a preposition and shouldn't have, because it "just isn't done." You know, that guy.

Unlike most people – I say this uncomfortably, with some upper-lip sweat, but I've gotta say it – I must confess I am occasionally that grammar Nazi. I've pulled on the black boots and carried the whip and Luger of the full-fledged, heel-clicking, monocle-wearing, grammar-syntax-spelling-punctuation fascist. Hail grammar!

Schizophrenic? Never been diagnosed. Hypocrite? Possibly. Morally correct? Here is my argument that I am. And it starts with a little discussion about brads. Yup, you heard me, brads.

A brad, for those of you who don't know, is a little brass paper fastener, about 2 ¾ inches long, which is used to hold together bodies of paper too thick to be stapled. It can be truly said that Hollywood runs on brads. They are the ammunition for its machine gun, the cream for its coffee, the peanut butter for its jelly. You can't have Hollywood without brads, because without brads, every script in this town would fall apart, literally, just like that. Given that every script has at least 90-odd pages, and there are hundreds of thousands of scripts in this city, it would be a total disaster. An explosion in a confetti factory. Doom.

Now, it so happens that hole-punchers make three holes: top, middle and bottom. So in theory, each script requires three brads. But in reality, only two are used: one at the top and one at the bottom. The middle is left empty. Always. In fact, if you submit a script to a studio, and they see it has three brads in it, or they see that it has brads in the top and middle, or middle and bottom, holes, they will throw it in the recycling bin faster than you can say “broken dreams.” They will not look at the title. They will not read the first page. They will not hand it a blindfold and a cigarette. They will just pull the trigger.

If this seems capricious or cruel, well, it is – cruel anyway. But it is not capricious. It has a very definite rationale, a cold and ruthless purpose. The purpose is to save time.

Hollywood is a town of wannabees. I say that with no malice. Nearly everyone here, myself included, is aspiring to be something other than what they actually are at the moment you meet them: actors, comedians, musicians, producers, directors...and scriptwriters. And a million wannabe scriptwriters means a million scripts. Those scripts pour into studio offices all day, every day, all year long. A friend of mine here told me his own office gets six hundred a week. Theoretically, every one of these has to be read and then summarized so it can be rejected or moved on for further study. It is verboten to simply throw away stacks of scripts because you, the studio reader, don't feel like reading them or are utterly overwhelmed by the influx. After all, you might be chucking away the next Godfather or Citizen Kane or Star Wars. But there is one exception to this rule. It is unwritten, but it is universally practiced. If a script comes in with three brads, or improperly placed brads, into the garbage chute it goes, and no one will bat an eye. But why, you ask – why? The answer is that because the rule about brads is so well known, it is assumed – with some degree of justification – that anyone who doesn't know it is a slovenly amateur whose writing won't be any better than their script etiquette. Their scripts can be destroyed unread with a clear conscience. So the tradition goes, anyway.

Okay, you say, now I know about brads and this arcane folkway of Hollywood script-readers. What the heil does that have to do with grammar Nazism?

When I am on the internet, be it Facebook or Twitter or the comments section of any website whatsoever, the first thing that strikes me is the aggressiveness of the posts. The issue people are posting about doesn't matter: gardening, politics, martial arts, kittens, the starship Enterprise – all irrelevant. The human being, safe behind anonymity and a keyboard, is evidently quite the little Ghengis Khan, and will launch a full-fledged, often vicious verbal attack on anyone or anything who disagrees with them in the slightest way on any subject. But when I look at attacks on the internet of any kind, especially those directed at me, one of the first things I take note of is the way they are executed. Is the attacker coherent? Do they write in complete sentences? Is there a structure to their argument? Are the spelling, grammar, punctuation and so forth they use correct or reasonably so? Do they commit any logical fallacies? It's a quick mental checklist, a sort of red-pen rundown I perform automatically, just the way the bleary-eyed script-reader checks each new arrival on his desk for the proper number and arrangement of brads.

You see, it all comes down to credibility. If someone is calling me ignorant who cannot spell the word, if someone is calling me stupid who writes two pages without using a comma and capitalizes more or less when they feel like it, I can assume with reasonable certainty that they are idiots or badly educated and that I can safely ignore what they have to say. If, on the other hand, they can write a proper sentence and construct a proper argument, I will probably listen (meaning read) and if it is not too insulting, give it a fair hearing before I respond. The person may be a jerk, but they know how to use the bloody brads. So to speak.

Snobbish, you say: many intelligent people lack schooling or are just plain bad writers. By red-penning their thoughts instead of arguing with them, I'm being cruel and unhelpful and even sidestepping the debate, whatever the debate may be. This is undeniably true, and it is undeniably unfair. But then some very good scriptwriters have failed the brad test and had their stuff shitcanned because of a misplaced paper fastener, and that, too, is unfair. The hard truth is the script-reader must have ways of thinning the herd. He must establish minimum prerequisites, a run of basic criteria, which if not met disqualify the script-writer, or else he will never get anything done at all. He must, in short, learn to discriminate. And isn't that a loaded word? Applied one way it is a horrible act. Applied another way it is a compliment – the ability to discriminate between, say, between shit and apple pie is important if you are hungry. And that is what the internet is: shit and apple pie. And it's a lot of the former and very little of the latter. We must have a way to discriminate between the two, and it seems to me that gauging the "English IQ" of someone who writes you a snarky or argumentative message is not a bad place to start.

Notice I said start, not end. Someone may be writing you who speaks English as a second or third language, or who is using voice-to-text, or is in a great rush or under pressure or had to drop out of school in eighth grade to get a job to support themselves. These people ought to get passes. I am speaking here mainly of people who are being aggressive, obnoxious, rude, insulting, and just plain nasty. If they are also sloppy in the bargain, why let them off? Why bother sifting through the chaos of their poorly-formed thoughts? Better to simply to lay hands on the grammar Nazi whip and let fly. It will infuriate them, it will make them look foolish, and when you get tired of it you can always destroy their arguments using a less persnickety weapon, like logic. The fact is that Grammar Nazism is often used by people who have no actual answer to an argument and want to distract their opponent and any onlookers from this fact; in that regard it is a logical fallacy itself. I do maintain that is not a legitimate substitute for an argument, but when your attacker is not making an argument but merely slinging mud or spewing nonsense, it is a viable option. The English "brad test" is designed to separate those who don't know the rules from those who do: it does not finish the selection process, but starts it.

I think we can all agree that Grammar Nazism is a terrible thing to be subjected to. I've been on the receiving end of that whip several times and it stings my ego terribly and makes me want to beat the shit out of the person using it – especially if, as I just said, they don't have an argument to make and want to harp on my misuse of a comma or some other trivial nonsense. But that is the nature of weaponry. It can be used by you, or it can be used against you, so it's best to establish a kind of Geneva Convention of Grammar Nazism. Perhaps we could establish a cultural rule that forbids hissy-fits over things like missing semicolons and dangling participles under certain definite conditions, while excusing G.N.'s of their G.N.-ism when a written statement is so egregiously sloppy and stupid that it practically begins to be deconstructed with a rusty scalpel. Perhaps that is a good idea. But in the mean time, goddamn it, I will retain my Grammar Nazi uniform and eight-headed whip and use them, or not, as I see fit. It so happens that I enjoy the screams.

The Best of the Bad: My Favorite Movie Villains

Face it. Half of what's fun about going to the movies can be summed up in three words: the bad guys. In addition to generally getting the best dialogue (and the best tailors: who dresses better than the Nazis?) the villains or super-villains of cinema allow us to focus our free-floating hatreds and dislikes on one atavistic image, one sneering, gloating face. Everything that sucks about our own lives can be crammed into a single pinata of evil. And if and when the villain is defeated, well, we achieve a vicarious, cathartic release which we are often denied in real life. You can't kill your boss, the office bully or the asshole who just wrote you a $350 ticket for being three inches too far from the curb, but you can watch as appropriately magnified versions of these people are shot, blown to pieces, socked on the jaw, or just told to go fuck themselves.

Now, by definition, every movie must have its antagonists -- those characters whose purpose is to thwart the desires and goals of the heroes or heroines. In some movies these antagonists are not evil or even bad, they are simply obstacles which must be got around -- or through -- for the good guy to get what he or she wants. A good example of this would be "drill instructor" or "tough coach" films where the D.I. is the antagonist but not a villain. These folks are disqualified from my list, so you won't be seeing Louis Gossett, Jr. here even though he did kick Richard Gere's balls into next week win a fight in "An Officer and a Gentleman."

In other films, of course, the baddies are pureblood evil itself, with absolutely no redeeming qualities at all. They have no psychological depth and seem to revel in killing, torture and other nastiness. But simply being evil is not enough to qualify for my own personal Murderer's Row of cinematic goons and goonettes, any more than being able to hit a ball with a stick makes you a Major League ballplayer. To truly wear the Black Hat, you've gotta be bad, and being bad is more than acting that way. You've gotta have that extra something: bad charisma, rabid animal magnetism, kommandant presence, call it what you like.

So, for the record, here are my top 20 Cinematic Villains of All-Time. Actually I chose 21, so call this "The Blackjack of Evil." Here goes....

Evelyn Draper (Play Misty For Me). Long before "Fatal Attraction" gave us rabbit-boiling as a stalker hobby, aficionados of cheating on their wives, fiances and girlfriends had their illicit erections shrunk by the sight of knife-wielding psycho Evelyn (Jessica Walter). In this strangely forgotten horror/thriller, Clint Eastwood is a disc jockey who picks up a sultry stranger at a bar for a one-night stand. Unfortunately for him, one night of pleasure turns into a whole lotta nights of terror. Seems Evelyn is not quite ready to let him go, and she expresses her unwillingness in this direction by stalking the ever-loving shit out of Eastwood's character and his (legitimate) girlfriend. Seeing the cinematic tough guy of all tough guys driven to the point of hysteria by the hit-and-run tactics of the demented Evelyn is enough to scare anybody, but the relentless and increasingly terrifying methods she uses to express her displeasure make this movie, and this bad girl, very hard to forget. There is a scene where she cuts the eyes out of one of his paintings which is horrifying to watch. Trust me, you will never be able to have casual sex with an obsessive psychopath again.

Sergeant Waters (A Soldier's Story). Sgt. Waters is one of the most psychologically complex bad guys I have ever encountered in cinema. A career black soldier in a still-segregated U.S. Army, Waters is tough as nails, a First World War hero who pushes his men hard and punishes mistakes without mercy. Sounds like the typical movie NCO, right? Wrong. See, Waters has a serious hate on against a particular type of stereotypical Southern black man he refers to as a "Geechee." Geechees, in his mind, drag the black race down by making it impossible for white people to respect them.
So, as a half-hobby, half-crusade, Waters (Adolph Caesar) selects the Geechiest black men in his units and pushes them toward destruction -- prison, suicide, he doesn't care, so long as the Geechie is destroyed. Waters is a nasty piece of work, scientifically vicious, yet his grievance is so totally sincere, and the racism he himself is subjected to is so intense, that you pity him even as you despise him. Waters is never so terrifying as when he recounts how a soldier in his segregated outfit allowed himself to be publicly humiliated in France in WW1 for money by wearing a tail and eating bananas to amuse a white audience. "And would you believe," Waters mutters over his drink. "That when we slit his throat, the fool actually had the nerve to ask us what he had done wrong?"

Frank Nitti (The Untouchables). Billy Drago is one of those actors whose face tells the whole story before he utters a single word. Blessed by genetics with the mug of a total villain, Drago plays Al Capone's vicious right-hand man to a T of evil. Within moments of the movie's opening, he has already murdered a little girl by blowing her to bits with a bomb, along with everyone else in a homey little candy store, and it's all downhill from there. Later he brutally murders not one but two of the audience's favorite good-guy characters, and then has the audacity to taunt the do-gooding Eliot Ness about it with these words: "You're friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Think about that when I beat the rap!" Shit, any man who machine-guns Sean Connery has to be truly awful.

Rick Masters (To Live and Die in L.A.). You can always judge a bad guy in this manner: on a scale of 1 – 10, how badly do you want to see him die? With one or two exceptions I can't think of a villain I hated more than the sadistic counterfeiter played by Willem Dafoe in the L.A.-noir film “To Live and Die in L.A.” Masters is not only bloodthirsty and extremely cruel, clearly relishing the terror and agony of his many victims, he's also insufferably smug. There were times I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle the ugly fucker myself. Dafoe would go on to achieve fame as the almost saintly Sergeant Elias in “Platoon,” but I've never forgotten the way the mere sight of him on the screen made me want to simultaneously kill the sonofabitch and cover up my testicles less he shoot them off me. And yes, he really does shoot someone in the balls in this movie.

The Kurgan (Highlander). With his hulking stature, huge cold eyes, and marbled facial features, not to mention his savage voice, Clancy Brown makes one scary-ass bad guy in any movie. In “Highlander” he plays the immortal warrior Kurgan, who was raised, we were told, by a nomadic people who threw their children into pits full of starving dogs to fight over meat. It shows. This is one mean motherfucker. Enormously tall, dressed in a punk outfit cut to look like a gladiator's armor, and sporting a row of safety pins in his neck and a sword the size of the Empire State Building, Kurgan positively delights in killing and mayhem, and not just with his sword: in one scene he drives around Manhattan running people down for the sheer fun of it, all the while mocking his victims and the terrified woman he's taken hostage. Referring to Sean Connery's character, who he beheads midway through the film, Kurgan boasts: “I took his head and raped his woman before his blood was cold!” And he says this in a church. Nasty, nasty piece of work. (Connery is now 0 - 2 against my villains.)

Warden Norton (Shawshank Redemption). Villains are like ice cream; they come in every flavor. One of the worst kinds of baddie is the towering hypocrite, who preaches one thing and does quite the other, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more hypocritical prick than Norton (Bob Gunton). The warden of Shawshank prison, he not only uses his inmates as slaves, allows his sadistic henchmen to torture them, and prevents an innocent man from being released, he does this for money...all while quoting the Bible. This would be bad enough, but Norton actually seems to be as pious as he pretends; you get the feeling his fussy manners, severe crew-cut and avoidance of profanity aren't an act...which makes him all the more appalling when he calmly watches atrocities go on all around him with a faint, sanctimonious smile. Picture a totally demonic Ned Flanders and you've got the Warden. Hell, any villain who refers to a scantily-clad woman as “Miss Fussy-britches” has to be pure evil.

Thulsa Doom (Conan the Barbarian). Many cinematic villains like to twirl their mustaches and revel in their own evil. The ancient sorcerer Thulsa Doom is of a very different class. He's the cult leader type, unflappable even in the face of imminent danger, always in control of his emotions and quite the debater. He's also absolutely pitiless. In the opening of “Conan,” he kills Conan's father by unleashing war dogs on him; chops the head off Conan's mother; slaughters every adult inhabitant of Conan's village; and sells Conan into slavery. All before the opening credits are even dry. Not a bad intro. Yet Doom is far from a wild, bloodthirsty maniac; on the contrary, he's so even-tempered, so calm, so reasonable in his arguments that it's hard not to like him a little, even when he's ordering people fed to giant snakes. His best bad-guy moment comes when, instead of screaming at Conan for seeking revenge, he gives him a fatherly lecture rife with disappointment. And then has him crucified. That's a bad-guy microphone drop if ever a Wiz there was.

Antonio Salieri (Amadeus). If I ever needed anyone to play the Devil, not as towering Leviathan of pure evil but a subtle, sympathetic Satan whose terrifying depths of villainy only slowly come to light over the course of a movie, I would pick F. Murray Abraham, who justly won an Oscar for his mesmerizing performance as a man so consumed by jealousy that he carries out a diabolical plan to murder the target of his obsession, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But it is not mere jealousy that drives Salieri, a composer who at first actually admired the brash young genius; it is the belief that God has betrayed him by investing that genius in such a crude, vulgar, boorish figure as “Amadeus” turns out to be. Much of Salieri's grievance against Mozart, and even God, perhaps, is justified; what is not are the terrible lengths he goes to obtain revenge against both. This is a man who is fully conscious of the fact that what he is doing is totally evil, even by his own sense of right and wrong, and does it anyway. It's difficult to watch, and impossible not to.

Segeant Barnes (Platoon). Americans tend to think of their military men with haloes over their helmets, but Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a soldier whose close-cropped curls might just conceal horns. A scar-faced veteran of many tours in Vietnam, Barnes is tough as nails and a first-class leader; he's also a merciless killer who isn't too partial about what gets in front of his gun. Over the course of “Platoon,” Barnes doesn't just grease Viet Cong; he blasts an old woman between the eyes, threatens to massacre an entire village, and then kills one of his own men who has proffered criminal charges against him. In one memorable scene, he laments, “them politicians back in Washington, tryin' to fight this war with one hand tied to their balls." And then declares, "Ain't no time or need for a courtroom out here.” One of the most interesting comments about Barnes is actually rendered by his mortal enemy Elias: “Barnes believes in what he's doing.” And indeed he does. Which is what makes him so goddamned scary.

Darth Vader (Star Wars). A man who truly needs no introduction, everyone's favorite Sith Lord is no ordinary villain: enclosed black armor, black leather, and a black cape, speaking through a vocabulator that makes him sound every bit as wicked as he is, the artist formerly known as Anakin Skywalker set the bar for bad behavior in “Episode IV: A New Hope” and “Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.” I've seen a positive crap-ton of movies, but I have never, before or since watched an audience hiss when the antagonist enters a room. Honest to God, the audience hissed. I thought that was the sort of thing people did in 19th century opera houses in Sicily when they didn't like the tenor, but I'm here to tell you it actually happened. Vader, the archetype of the “fallen angel” character, is a volcano of villainy. In his first on-screen appearance in 1977, he crushes the trachea of a rebel leader and then hurls his corpse into a wall so hard it rebounds like a ping-pong ball. This sets the tone for all sorts of future mayhem, but he's never more evil than in the sequel, when his violence is directed as much at his own troops as the enemy. Whether killing incompetent admirals, torturing his daughter or shortening his son by a hand, Vader is, as Ice Cube might observe, the wrong nigga to fuck wit.

Gordon Gekko (Wall Street). If Antonio Salieri represents the hidden side of Satan, earnest and sincere, then Gekko is his public face: handsome, charismatic, charming...and always looking to make a deal. Michael Douglas plays this utterly unscrupulous corporate raider with a relish bordering on glee, and it's impossible not to be seduced, even though you know the seduction won't end well. Indeed, while Gekko exults in making money, it's not really the money he's after, it's the sheer thrill of making it, and he's so addicted to that rush he doesn't give a fuck who he hurts or what the consequences are. When his protege asks him “How much is enough?” his answer, with all the bullshit scraped away, comes down to: greed doesn't lead to satiety. Greed leads to greed. The pleasure is therefore in wanting, not having. But of all his pleasures, none is sweeter to him than corrupting others into his way of thinking, and isn't that what the devil does best?

Hans Gruber (Die Hard). With his droll manners and tailor-made suits, the former East German radical turned “extraordinary thief” has a special place in the Great Hall of Villains. This gentleman poses as a terrorist to execute a bold and bloody robbery that he knows will lead to the deaths of dozens of innocent people, including a pregnant woman. Does he give a fuck? Not even a little one. Though we get little of Gruber's backstory in the movie, it's pretty clear he's the sort of disillusioned ex-radical who makes the very worst kind of criminal: the type with zero beliefs at all. Gruber (Alan Rickman) not only doesn't give a shit about “collateral damage,” he doesn't give two about his own men. Just the money he came to steal. Yet somehow, despite all of this, he manages to convey a moralistic disdain for both his nemesis John McClane, and for American culture generally. He'll show us about greed and materialism!...by being greedier and more materialistic than any of us! I can't see this guy on screen without thinking: “You've been struck by a smooth criminal.” *

* The gangster in Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" was Billy Drago!

Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street). Before he was debased into a sort of cartoon character by a string of increasingly moronic sequels, this extra-crispy revenant from hell was one of the most terrifying baddies ever to keep you awake at night. Played by the normally cuddly Robert Englund, Fred Krueger was a vicious child-murderer sprung on a technicality but brought to savage justice by the parents of his victims, who burned him alive. Years later, however, Freddy returns as a malevolent spirit who invades the dreams of his killers' children, terrorizing them to the point of insanity before slashing them to bloody ribbons with his trademark razor-tipped glove. Vicious, cunning and sadistic, Freddy hit audiences where they felt safest – in their beds and in their dreams, turning them into terrifying nightmares where failure to wake up meant horrible death. I can honestly say this bastard robbed me of many a good night's rest when I was in my tweens, and I still find the slice-and-dice he performs on some of his victims, including Johnny Depp, unsettling today. Though he has limited screen time, Englund manages to fairly crackle with a mixture of dirty, snuff-film sadism and capering, evil glee. This is one villain who loves what he does and wants you to know it.

John Kreese (The Karate Kid). Few movies take less time to establish just what their bad guys are made of than “TKK.” When we first meet John Kreese, he is instructing a class full of impressionable young karate students. The following exchange occurs:

Kreese: Fear does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Defeat does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Prepare! What do we study here?
Cobra Kai: The way of the fist, sir!
Kreese: And what is that way?
Cobra Kai: Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, sir!
Kreese: We do not train to be merciful here. Mercy is for the weak. Here, in the streets, in competition. A man confronts you, he is the enemy, and an enemy deserves no mercy!

Kreese, the founder of Cobra Kai Karate, is the perfect Black Hat. He's a bully, he's a bigot, he's an egotist, and his attitude rests entirely in his fists. But his bigotry is really his best quality, because it's so marvelously hypocritical. He refers to Mr. Miyagi as a “slant” and a “slope,” which is really breathtaking when you consider that he's mocking mock of the same race of people that invented the martial art he's devoted his life to and from which he makes his entire living. Bad as he is, he's never badder than when he infamously instructs his star pupil, Johnny, to “sweep the leg” when fighting the heroic Daniel. The look of betrayal on actor Billy Zabka's face when he realizes just what sort of man he's chosen to be his idol, mentor, and father-figure is as evocative as it is haunting. This is child abuse at its psychological worst.

Tommy D. (Goodfellas). Aside from Rick Masters, I can't think of anyone I wanted to see die more than Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) in Martin Scorsese's unbeatable gangster epic. Tommy, a Mafia associate angling hard to get his button, is one of the worst human beings ever to cross the silver screen. He's pathologically violent, casually sadistic, and so unstable that you have no idea what the hell is going to set him off from one moment to the next. Whether he's attacking a waiter for daring to ask him to pay his bill, casually murdering a bartender for talking back to him, or slaughtering a made man for failing to show him respect he isn't due and hasn't earned, Tommy is a parole board's worst nightmare. He has no conscience, no remorse, no pity, and neither the ability nor willingness to restrain his impulses toward violence. Imagine a wagon full of old dynamite, sweating big beads of Nitro as it jounces along a badly rutted country road; that's Tommy. Every time he makes an appearance you know someone is going to die horribly. Maybe even Tommy himself. But hey, he isn't all bad. After killing the hapless Billy Batts, he apologizes to Henry with the immortal words: “I didn't mean to get blood on your floor.”

Amon Goethe (Schindler's List). Like Tommy D., Goethe (Ralph Finnes) was, unfortunately, a real-life human being. A low-ranking officer in the Death's Head branch of the SS, he ran a small forced-labor camp in Poland during WW2, but Goethe's introduction to the audience is chillingly deceptive. He comes off as self-involved, cynical, and a bit profane; the sort of corrupt sensualist that the film's hero, Oskar Schindler, can easily relate to and work with. But Goethe is no love-able scoundrel, no rouge with a heart of gold. Actually he has no heart at all. What he does possess is a decided taste for murder – the more casual and capricious, the better. Throughout the movie Goethe kills for cause, for whim, and for no goddamned reason at all; his morning “exercise” is to shoot lollygagging camp prisoners from his balcony with a hunting rifle. He's such a crook and thief that even the SS doesn't really like or trust him. But it's with his psychological torture of his Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch, on whom he has a sort of perverse crush, that achieves his apotheosis. “I realize,” he tells her one night. “That you're not a person in the strictest sense of the word.” No line he utters could sum up the character of this gentleman better. It's said that Ralph Finnes was so convincing in the role of this homicidal psychopath that one of the Holocaust survivors visiting the film set actually wet herself when she laid eyes on him. It's easy to understand why. He's the Angel of Death with a drinking problem.

King Edward I a.k.a. Edward the Longshanks (Braveheart). The Scots are a notoriously difficult people to subdue. This has been known from the time of the Roman emperors, who subjugated what is now England and Wales but decided it was in their best interests to simply build a wall up north to keep the goddamn Scottish savages out of the rest of the country. As late as WW2, it was observed that, when taken captive by the Germans, “the Scots resorted to the sort of behavior that made Hadrian build his wall.” Well, in “Braveheart,” Edward I (Patrick McGoohan) is determined to ensure his dominance over the troublesome country to the north, and he will stop at absolutely nothing to do it. Before we even see his character on screen, he's already shown his mettle by inviting Scottish leaders to a parlay under flag of truce – and then having the lot of them hanged. In the course of the movie, he murders his son's lover by throwing him out a window, initiates a program to breed the Scots out of their own by letting his nobles rape Scottish women, and once again violates a flag of truce by inviting William Wallace to a meeting and there trying to assassinate him. As if all that is not enough, he's cheap, too. When asked in battle if his archers should lay down a barrage before he sends in his Irish conscript soldiers, the King replies, “Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing.”

Khan Noonian Singh (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). In 1968, Ricardo Montalban was cast on the low-rated cult TV series “Star Trek” to play a genetically enhanced war criminal who had escaped Earth in a cryogenic spaceship and drifted in suspended animation, with the survivors of his army, among the stars for centuries before being rescued by the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Montalban later remarked that he enjoyed the role but, as a busy character actor, quickly forgot it. He was probably surprised when he was asked to reprise that role fifteen years later for the second feature-length “Trek” film, “The Wrath of Khan.” If so, the surprise didn't hurt his performance. In the television episode, Khan repays James T. Kirk's hospitality by hijacking his ship, but is defeated and exiled on a remote planet with his followers. In the movie, Khan escapes and embarks on a brutal revenge mission against Kirk, who he blames for the death of his wife. Bristling with charisma, masculinity and an ego as big as the universe he wants to conquer, Khan thrives on his own hatred; it's nitrous oxide for the engine of his vengeance, and heaven help anyone who stands in his way. Khan enslaves Federation officers using parasitic slugs, slaughters hapless Starfleet cadets, and tortures and then kills scientists who try to hamper his plans. At one point, taunting Kirk, he says, “I've done worse than kill you, Admiral. I've hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me – as you left my wife. Marooned for all eternity at the center of a dead planet. Buried alive.” Kirk's epic response: “KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!” is one of the most memorable one-line comebacks in cinematic history, and the sort of thing that can only occur when a great hero has a great villain to fight with. I'm convinced that if TWOK had been a drama and not sci-fi, Montalban would have won an Oscar like Douglas, Caesar and Abraham did.*

* Berenger and Finnes were nominated for Oscars for the afformentioned roles but stupidly did not win.

Lord Humungus & Wes (The Road Warrior). Okay, this is cheating, but sometimes a “bad” is actually a tag-team affair. In “The Road Warrior” our redoubtable lone-wolf antihero, “Mad” Max Rockatansky, is vexed by an army of nomadic bandits led by Lord Humungus (Kjell Nillssen). Humungus is a hulking wall of muscle who wears a steel hockey mask, a loincloth, and issues decidedly not-hollow threats and demands in a savage yet highly educated growl from the loudspeaker on his souped-up dune buggy. His men kill pretty much everything they can, including dogs, and like a spot of rape first if they can manage it. Like many evildoers, the Lord of the Wastelands blames his victims for their suffering: “Once again,” he lectures the defenders of a desert fort who he has been besieging for months. “You've made me unleash my dogs of war.” The biggest of these “dogs” is Wez (Vernon Wells), a goggle-eyed psychopath whose stare could make a face bleed, and who has almost no dialogue except things like “Kill! Kill! Killlllllll!” Wez, unlike most baddies, doesn't need a signature weapon to do his killllllllling; he can put you in your grave with a head-butt. Nor does shooting him work; he'll just pluck the arrow from his body and give it a masochistic lick. In an interesting departure from convention, Wez is gay, and the death of his lover drives him, if this is possible, even more crazy than he is at the beginning of the movie. It also affords a rather amusing scene where a gust of wind shows us that Wez does not care for loincloths.

Pamela Voorhees (Friday the 13th). Most people think of “Friday” films as the bloody playground of one Jason Voorhees, he of the hockey mask, machete and bad attitude generally. But in the iconic first film the villain is not Jason, but her batshit-crazy mother Pamela, played by Betsy Palmer, an accomplished stage actress who took her role in the movie so she could buy a new car. Palmer's motives may have been mercenary, but her performance as the knife-wielding mommy of Crystal Lake's least popular citizen is unforgettable. Like many crazy cinematic killers, Mrs. Voorhees has a legitimate grudge; her only son, the deformed Jason, drowned when camp counselors decided to leave him alone so they could make love. That mistake causes a lot of people to pay a grisly price, not leastwhich is Pamela herself. The slow reveal of her insanity at the movie's climax, cultimating in a scene where she begins speaking in Jason's voice (“Get her, Mommy! Kill her! Don't let her get away!”) is so disturbing that it frightens me even now as I write this, at 3:11 pm on a sunny California day.

In compiling this list I'm sure I've forgotten a few who would qualify, and excluded others who, for one reason or another, I don't consider real villains but merely antagonists. These are simply Black Hats who made a deep impression on your humble correspondent. If there are any I missed who made an impression on you, please let me know.

Why Trump? Why now?

At breakfast a few weeks ago, while reading the Los Angeles Times, I encountered these words about Donald Trump, written by an op-ed writer named Stephen Almond:

I have spent many anguished hours pondering how it is that a man of such low character and dubious qualifications occupies the Oval Office. I've spent even longer trying to understand his presidency. I've pored over polls and research papers, absorbed an ocean of think pieces. None has solved the mystery.

The opening three sentences go a fair country distance toward explaining why Trump was in fact elected in the first place, and why there is a substantial chance he will be elected in again in 2020, should he somehow escape the various legal entanglements which now hamper him. “I've poured over polls and research papers,” Mr. Almond tells us, and “absorbed an ocean of think pieces. None of them has solved the mystery.”

Polls? Research papers? Think pieces? Are you kidding me? Why would analyses written by ivory-tower intellectuals, themselves invariably liberals to a man (or woman), yield any useful information about Donald Trump or the people who voted for him? Asking a university professor, a member of a political think tank, or a professional journalist to “solve the mystery” is about as effective as inviting a professional soldier to perform brain surgery, merely because he knows how to handle a knife. As I have stated before – in this very blog, no less – there is no group of people less qualified to explain the Trump phenomenon than the professional journalistic class and its various hangers-on: pundits, pollsters, academics. They do not “get it.” They will never “get it.” There are a number of reasons for this, foremost of which is their own political outlook, which prevents them from seeing this country as it actually is; but the reasons go beyond the blinders all political partisans wear. The fact is, this class of people are endeavoring to use a scientific process to examine human motivation, which resides deep within the human heart and is about as likely to yield its secrets to a microscope as a bank vault is to open because you mutter the words, “Open sesame.”

When Trump was elected, the dismay, horror and anguish of the left and a large chunk of the political center produced a collective wail so deafening that for weeks and even months after he took office, it was impossible to “hear” anything else in the press. The seven stages of grief began their grisly march through newscasts, op-ed pieces, blogs, newspaper articles, news magazines, even comedic monologues. Shock was followed by denial; pain by guilt (“Why did we sabotage Bernie's candidacy?”); anger by a species of bargaining (“Wait until 2018, when we get the Senate back!”); and most recently, depression. There is not a lot of evidence, however, that the last and most important of these stages are being approached, much less embraced. A year into Trump's presidency I still see few signs that the “upward turn” – reconstruction, “working through,” acceptance and hope – are on the horizon. The left is anger-locked, unable to get past its fury that a thrice-married, many-times bankrupt reality television star twice convicted of civil fraud by the United States government defeated “the most qualified candidate in history” and assumed the office once held by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In a sense, this is understandable. Being defeated by a moral and mental mediocrity is difficult to accept, as any intelligent, sensitive person who was ever bullied in junior high school by a sub-literate moron can tell you. Nevertheless, it happened, and unless the left and center-left grasp why it happened, it may very well happen again.

As I have noted before, and despite the almost hysterical insistence of the mainstream press and the left generally, America remains a “white” country when viewed in strictly demographic terms. By the last census, the total population is 318 million; if we exclude the fifteen million of those who are here illegally and cannot vote (despite what The Donald claims) we come to a figure of 303 million, of which 200 million identify, or are identified by the rules of the census, as “white.” Of course, “white” is largely a meaningless term (indeed, the absurdity of the concept of race is never more evident than when one tries to quantify it), since many classified that way are, in fact, nothing of the kind. Still, the census gives us a good, if very broad and crude, notion of the basic racial makeup of the country. Two hundred million “whites” out of a population of 300 million means two out of every three American citizens is “white.” This is a fact which sticks hard in the craw of many liberals and center-leftists, especially those who live in big, racially and ethnically diverse cities like New York, Los Angeles or San Fransisco. The reality they see is the reality they more or less assume obtains for the rest of the nation; but as anyone who has ever driven through, say, Kansas, or southern Illinois, or rural Pennsylvania will tell you, it is not actual reality. Perspective is everything when forming a worldview, or for that matter, trying to solve the “mystery” which so puzzles Mr. Almond.

According to public records, about 128 million people voted in the 2016 election -- 63 million for Trump, 65 million for Clinton. But of the white people who voted, 58% cast their ballots for Trump, and no less than 63% of all white men. While Trump's deepest support lay in whites in the age demographic 45 – 65, he also received the majority of white female vote as well: 53%. This fact seems rather astonishing when one considers that Trump was running against a well-known female candidate with extensive educational and public service credentials, but it remains a fact: more than half of white people who voted, voted for Trump. More than half of white women who voted, voted for Trump. It is these figures which baffle, dismay and outrage so many pundits, journalists and “political experts.” In their minds, America is a steadily liberalizing country, fast doing away with religious belief and embracing the concepts of democratic socialism, cultural diversity, and internationalism. When they are smacked upside the head by evidence to the contrary, they are gobsmacked, flabbergasted – choose your archaic term for bone-deep and unwelcome surprise. As I said, they don't get it. The question “why?” is at least as important as the question of why so many white people voted for Donald Trump – and would probably do so again, given the chance. Almond's “mystery” is in fact two mysteries. I aim to solve both.

I have noted previously that 2016 may be the year most remembered as that in which journalists discovered there is actually a white working class. On the face of it, the fact that the media did not grasp the existence of a population which may number as many as 76 million men and women – just under one in four Americans – seems absurd, but the evidence is too plain to ignore. These polished, well-educated, seemingly intelligent people, whose entire job is to keep a finger on the pulse of this nation and to understand the working of its innermost mind and heart, were as ignorant of this horde of blue-collared white folks as Columbus was of the New World when he blundered into it. It took Trump's election to open their eyes, but even when awakened, their political leanings forced them into an Orwellian state where they were unwilling to draw any conclusions from their discovery. Thus, the tiresome, almost nauseating insistence that Trump's election was solely the product of white racism.

Of course, some Trump supporters are racists, and others on the borderline of racism. The evidence of this, too, is impossible to ignore. (Trump himself make frank and open appeals to xenophobia during his campaign, and continues to do so.) But the fact remains that of all the people I know personally who voted for Trump, I would characterize none as genuine bigots. At worst, some have slight prejudices, but if pressed, if put in a situation where they had to abandon those prejudices or double down on them, I truly believe every one would choose the former rather than the latter course. To a man (and woman), they voted for Trump because they quite simply reject the vision of America which the left has been peddling for decades. Yes, they resent the “cultural diversity seminars” forced upon them at work, the unpaid “racial sensitivity trainings,” the mandatory “gender identity education courses” for their children; yes, they are frustrated that it is easier to obtain, at many major universities, a copy of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto than it is one of the United States Constitution; yes, they weary of watching liberals gnash their teeth over the issues of transgender bathrooms and the fact that illegal immigrants might not be able to obtain driver's licenses and health care when millions of actual American citizens have neither; yes, they worry that liberals turn a blind eye toward outrages perpetrated by radical Islam while seemingly condemning Christianity and promoting atheism at every opportunity; but the most common motive for a Trump vote is not purely political or religious-racial-ethnic but economic in nature. When I listen to interviews with the more articulate and intelligent of his supporters throughout the country, what strikes me again and again is the narrowness of their concerns. We live in an age of one-issue voters, and the one-issue which seemed to drive so many working-class whites to pull the lever for Donald Trump is simply the fear of being left behind.

If you are old enough to really recall the 1990s, you will probably remember them as an era of unrivaled economic prosperity and generalized optimism. The economy was booming, jobs were plentiful, the Cold War had ended in bloodless triumph, democracy was on the march all across the world, and so determined was Bill Clinton to smash racism in America that he was only half-jokingly referred to as "the first black president." It was scarcely noticed by many of the big media outlets, or even by the middle class itself, that the decline of skilled and highly-paid unskilled labor jobs in the U.S. continued to decline, that coal miners, factory workers, farmers and other salt-of-the-earth Americans were not being swept along by the rush of free-trade "prosperity" embodied by the NAFTA agreements, but rather watching in kind of baffled fury as their own incomes and prospects shrank and kept shrinking. This erosion predated the presidencies of Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43, but it certainly continued and perhaps even accelerated during their administrations. The white working class certainly felt abandoned by Obama, who neither understood nor seemed to sympathize with them – the condescending remark he made about “guns and Bibles” was as offensive to many in this country as a flippant joke about “fried chicken and watermelons” would have been to black people had it been uttered by a white president. Indeed, the very nature of Obama's presidency was bound up with the idea that those who had traditionally been excluded from the American Dream – minorities in general – were finally seeing their moment arrive. This moment was undeniably overdue, but it offered little comfort to the West Virginia coal miner now two years unemployed, the small businessman in Kansas choked out of business by red tape, the Pennsylvanian master welder who saw his job at the Caterpillar plant exported to Korea and was told to go get a job at Wal-Mart instead. More importantly, when he vented his grievance, he was generally told by the media and intelligentsia to shut up. The complaints of white men were of zero interest to the left and center-left; their very existence was only tolerated if they toed the left-wing line. The miner was told he was environmentally destructive; the farmer that he lived on “stolen” Indian land (as if his critic did not!); the factory worker was dismissed with the sentiment that “we don't want to hear white men complain about anything." The evident motive of these dismissals was rooted in a feeling that the time had come to right old wrongs; the problem was that it ignored the fact that two wrongs do not constitute a right. If it was wrong to subject black people to Jim Crow and systematized, institutionalized racism, if it was wrong to harass and punish gays merely for being gay, if it was wrong to oppress and devalue women – and it was – then it was equally wrong to negate the apprehensions of the supposedly privileged white male, to dismiss them with contempt, to tell him, in effect, that his time had passed and he ought to go quietly into that good night. And it was not merely morally wrong, but stupid. It would have been far more sensible for the left to try to win over the working class white man than to call him a ignorant, uneducated bigot whose feelings did not matter. In choosing the latter course the American left not only alienated millions of potential voters, it ignored its own history, to wit: in the 19th century, the left found its strongest support among the working class, which was being ruthlessly exploited by its capitalist masters, regardless of race or ethnicity. As late as the mid-20th century, the white union worker walked, to some extent, hand-in-hand with the left-wing intelligentsia; with socialists and borderline socialists; with Jews, blacks Latinos and other minorities; and with the broad masses of the Democratic Party. But times had changed, and the leaders of liberalism and progressivism had moved up in economic status, concentrating on the coasts and the big cities and universities, and gradually severing their ties with the workers whom they once idealized, recruited and to some extent, led. A different political landscape emerged, one in which the blue collars which had once been die-hard Democrats began to vote increasingly Republican, and to become more vulnerable to the kind of demagogic, blame-them tactics employed by Trump and people of his ilk. Politics abhors a vacuum; if the needs of a group of people are not fulfilled, or at least addressed, by one party, then they will be adopted by the other. When the left disowned the white working class, they set in motion a chain of events that handed the keys to the White House to Donald Trump.

Trump's election campaign contained very little of substance. Unlike, for example, Bernie Sanders, who was more than willing to get into the nuts and bolts of many of his proposals – perhaps even to his detriment – Trump mainly spoke in generalities and was deliberately vague about how he would execute such ideas as he had. However, on certain points he was quite specific, and the most important of these, more important than his infamous border wall or proposed Muslim ban, was the idea that he cared for, and would protect and serve, the American worker. Trump was a businessman and presumably understood business better than any professional politician. He would “get tough” with our trade partners, throw out harmful or useless trade agreements, punish U.S. corporations who shipped jobs overseas, and slash business and banking regulation to the bone. Anything that inhibited the economy would be thrown out; anything that added jobs, be it drilling in national parks or allowing every manner of filth to be poured into the atmosphere, soil and water, would be permitted. In a very real sense his agenda was Reaganomics on steroids, an idea that government governs best not when it governs least, but when it governs not at all.

Liberals were aghast at this, and many centrists as well, but again, they failed to understand the appeal this sort of talk has to a proud third-generation coal miner who has been out of work for two years and cannot reconcile himself to pumping gas, flipping burgers or stocking shelves for $6.75 an hour. It is often, and rightly, said that when a man's belly is empty, his only concern is with filling it; it is only when he is full that moral, philosophical and spiritual issues begin to concern him. Concern for the environment, for a justice system that serves everyone, for an America where it is not necessary to remind people that Black Lives Matter – all of this is virtuous. But none of it is likely to be of great concern to the man in question when he cannot pay his mortgage, cannot afford health care, and cannot see any prospect of doing so in the future. Hell is not necessarily a place; it is simply the absence of hope. And if nothing else, The Donald offered hope to people who had none.

It so happens that I listen to a lot of progressive radio, and in recent months I've been amazed by the insistence that “we (meaning the left) don't need the white working class at election time.” This has been repeated so often that I suspect many progressives actually believe it. They think they can get back in office by putting up candidates whose appeal is rooted almost exclusively among blacks, Latinos, gays, and white liberals. To me this represents a simple doubling-down of mistakes already made. But again, the question is one of ideology versus reality. All ideologues, of any party, dismiss reality at the exact moment it comes into conflict with their political beliefs. The left doesn't “get” the election of Trump because they have chosen not to respect, or even to admit the existence, of a huge, seething mass of people who do not approve of their agenda, and have the power to vote against it; and rather than trying to win these people over – and many could be won over – they have continued to insult and negate them. Flipping the coin, Trump was elected because he grasped, if only by accident, that this mass did in fact exist, and that, if properly galvanized, it might vote for him. Whether it will vote for him again in 2020 (assuming he is able and willing to run) I don't know. But I do know that unless the left can find a way to approach the blue-collar white worker more sensibly and respectfully, it may, at that time, once again find itself on the outside, looking in.

Nightclubbin'

So I guess I must have just been dreaming
When I thought I heard myself say no
Anyway it looks like no one heard me so here I go
'Cause when you're in the company of strangers
Or just the strangers you call friends
You know before you start just how it's going to end
When the doors swing open and all the drinks are passed around,
Anytime the pickings look too easy...hold me down

I can't remember why I like this feeling
When it only seems to let me down
Soon I find I'm searching for the exit from the ground

If I think the room is turning faster
Then I think the music is too loud
By then I've lived another broken story to let me down.

-- The Gin Blossoms

We're only immortal for a limited time.

-- Rush

Before anything else, the sense memories. Smell and sight, taste and touch. And sound, sound, sound.

If we begin with our noses, we must observe that the scent of a nightclub changes over the course of one's time there. When one first arrives, and the place is still largely empty, it is a coldish smell, the smell of air conditioning in an empty space, tinged with the nasal sting of disinfectant and the heavier, muskier odor last night's beer. It is an unwelcome smell, somewhat unpleasant, but there is a positive Pavlovian response to it nonetheless. Just as cheap, cloying perfume may nevertheless remind one of sex, the fickle odors of the empty nightclub serve as reminders of all the other good nights that began this way – amidst that chilly, unwelcome, unwholesome odor.

As the evening stretches into night and the trickle of patrons becomes a steady flow, the temperature of the air changes and with it, the smell. All those young bodies burning at 98.6 degrees soon warm things up, and more pleasant scents intrude: perfume, cologne, hair spray, fresh beer, puffs of cigarette smoke. This is the smell that the earlier smell promised; that of youth, infused with hormones and anticipation. It is not the smell of sex; it is the smell of the possibility of sex.

Later, toward the end of the night, when the clock tells us that it is in fact morning, our noses will once again tell us a story. By that time the smoke will be much thicker, mingled with the underscent of someone's furtively puffed joint; deodorant and designer-imposter body spray will have yielded to the rank odors of dance-floor sweat; and the bathrooms will give off a powerful stench of urine and vomit. Once in a great while an unseen door will bang open, admitting a welcome flood of cool, cleansing air, but the moment is always too brief; only at the very end, when the lights come up and everyone is revealed in all their sweat-plastered, lipstick-smeared, runny-mascara'd glory, will fresh air intrude into this dank, humid, nostril-clogging effluvium that a thousand people have conspired to make.

And that is just the nose. Our eyes, too, have observed the arc of appearance as the night wore on and out. Expensive haircuts unravel into matted, sweat-soaked strings. Makeup smears and runs. Shirts with starched collars wilt into wet dishrags; blouses bead with the stains of spilled drinks, or become wetly transparent. The haughty-faced beauty in the tight yellow tube dress, who sauntered into the place at nine-thirty looking as bored and disdainful as a princess wandering among paupers, is at one forty-five a streaked and staggering mess, gulping down a tenth Sea Breeze while the guy who she met an hour ago dry-fucks her from behind in the shadows of a busted speaker, hard enough to send her sequins flying. Another girl weeps hysterically in the corner as she regards a broken high heeled shoe. A young man who arrived clean-shaven, freshly barbered and dressed to the very nines now looks like a dirty drugged-out wino, staring at the world through eyes of red glass, dropping dollar bills all over the dance floor as he struggles to open his wallet. Men and women are scribbling their phone numbers on napkins, scraps of paper, the backs of hands, the inside of wrists; some, who cannot wait, are fused together against pillars or alley walls or the sides of rain-jeweled cars in the parking lot. Others, less lucky, nurse lips split by sudden, angry fists, or stare unhappily at the rents and tears and dirt-stains on clothing which has been roughly handled by bouncers or boyfriends. Faces express lust, dismay, humiliation, drunken ecstasy which tomorrow may resemble shame.

Touch in a nightclub has many, many meanings. As with smell it tends to change over the course of the evening's revelry. When one first arrives everything is cool and slick – the drinks, the countertops, the vinyl covers of the stools. Later, if one is lucky, one touches other things: smooth skin heated by exertions on the dance floor, clean sweat, tongues flavored by the drinks that coursed over them. But even this changes as the hours whirl by: hot skin grows clammy, silky hair dampens and grows coarse, the mirrors that cover the walls run with condensation that soaks through the back of one's shirt. Touch goes from the objective to the thing to avoid; at the same time the increasing overcrowdedness make it unavoidable. Bodies press bodies press bodies, willingly and unwillingly. Every now and again one places a hand somewhere and withdraws it in disgust, having encountered a puddle of liquid, a streak of slime, a smear of foam. But there are rewards as well. The mad crush of the crowd sometimes thrusts a pleasing shape against you, breasts to chest, hips to hips, in forced intimacy: more than one night's passion has begun this way, accidentally. Brief embarrassment and discomfiture leads to a shared smile, a flash of the eyes that says, "Why not?"

Taste, too, runs the gamut. The first drinks are always delightful; cool and smooth and refreshing. Later, as the drunkenness increases, the palate grows dull; what was a pleasure becomes a ritual devoid of pleasure. Toward the end, every belch brings with it a taste of bile and vomit. And yet the tasting goes on, because when one is young, thirst is bottomless. Like the need for sound.

Of course, sound is the foundation of any nightclub. The enormous edifice of a club is like a glass, which has no purpose unless filled with bass and treble, rhythm, melody and harmony. Not everyone comes to a club for music, but without music there can be no club. It is the music which draws the women, who come to dance; and it is the women who draw the men, who come to fuck. Unlike a bar and most unlike a pub, a nightclub's raison d'etre is the coming-together of bodies. It is a temple consecrated to the gods of lust. The food it serves, the drinks it plies, the endless deafening stream of sound which flows forth from it from the moment of its opening to the last minutes after last call, are all nothing more than ingredients mingled together to produce a specific moment – the moment of orgasm. Yet the sound is deceptive, a merry jingle full of fine print. The specific moment is only bait. It is a promise that is uttered every night but seldom delivered. The torrent of noise, the bass that vibrates one's solar plexus and steals the breath away, the shrieking lyrics that pain the eardrums, the tinkling progression of synthetic noises that all but compel feet to move and keep moving – it's all as sincere as the welcoming smile of a casino greeter, and it has the same motive. Drown out the customer's good sense; give him hope; sell him a fantasy. Then empty his wallet and send him on his way. That is all the deejays deliver, hour after hour, from their elevated dais and cramped little booths; the remote chance of a good time. No loudspeaker blatting from a North Korean public square ever promised more than the siren-song of the nightclub deejay. And if you leave with empty pockets, a bursting bladder and a reservoir of untapped lust, you have the ringing in your ears and the bump of the subwoofers to keep you company while the darkness lasts. Next time you'll get 'em!

All of this came to me – rather, came back to me – whilst I was driving through Hollywood last night. It was not good California weather; the evening was cool, damp and gloomy; a sullen mist hung over the fabled hills, and if the traffic was awful, the crowds on the bronze-starred pavement were thinner and less exuberant than usual. Nevertheless, as I rolled sluggishly past the Boulevard, into the Cahuenga Pass which would take me home to Burbank, I had a chance to observe the people lining up to get into a fashionable nightclub. It was a biggish group, overdressed to an outrageous degree, and bathed in limousine light. The women were less than half-dressed, their nubile twentysomething bodies crammed into skin-tight fabrics that covered not a helluva lot more than the average bikini. The men were also kitted-out for dance-floor battle; hair gel had flowed in quarts, beards been carefully trimmed and anointed, shirts clean but wrinkled just so for that casual-not-casual look. Jewelry, ostentatious and vulgar, flashed every time a papparazzo ignited his bulb. There is a special pathos, is there not, about people lined up at a nightclub door? At the same time they are feeling desperately awkward and helpless before the impenetrable velvet rope, they are also projecting an air of smugness and arrogance which seems to have a physical weight. It is the latter quality that struck me last night. They are young, beautiful and bursting with life's juices; you are middle-aged, tired and eager to go home and watch re-runs on television in your pajamas. They are about to get into X., “Hollywood's hottest nightclub,” (until it goes out of business), you are stuck in traffic in your shitty secondhand car, hoping it doesn't overheat. And yet, oddly enough, though the sight provoked memories in me I hadn't thought of in years, it did not in any way spark feelings of envy or jealousy; not even of nostalgia. My memories came back to me so completely that there was no need, even if there had been a desire.

Life, my father used to say, is cyclical. This is true but not the whole story. Life is cyclical; it is also seasonal. There is a time and place for nearly everything that we do and experience – even the most hurtful, humiliating, damaging things – and when the time passes, it often passes without leaving much behind, like a lighted match consuming itself to ashes. I mentioned nostalgia above; I am severely prone to same; I tend to romanticize and mythologize everything. But I do not feel nostalgia for my nightclub days, and understanding why has brought me a little more peace and happiness than such a petty realization might be expected to produce.

I began clubbing pretty heavily when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. A high-school buddy, one year ahead of me in both age and class, had become a deejay and, after the usual, dismal apprenticeship spinning turntables at cheap weddings and sleazy airport bars, rapidly ascended the nightclub scene in the Washington, D.C. area. His rise was my own; though underage, I found myself admitted to one premier bar and nightclub after the other, given the VIP armband, plied with free drinks, treated by the bartenders and bouncers and dancers as one of the Anointed. It was heady wine indeed to a callow teenager bursting with hormones and the need, common to all teens, to feel more important than I really was. Oddly enough, I can remember only a few of the places I haunted: the Cellar, the Dome, the Guards. But there was one club in particular which, during the now long-gone 1990s, dominated all the others in D.C.: it was called the Fifth Column, in Northwest, and it was located in an enormous Gothic structure which had once been a bank but which much more strongly resembled a church. This cavernous, almost sinister-looking fortress, standing in grim majesty in a desolated and crime-ridden part of the city – a backdrop right out of The Crow – was the setting for all sorts of farcical, embarrassing, comic-tragic, R-to-X-rated shenanigans: drinking, fist-fights, make-out sessions in alleys and the backs of cars, frantic dancing that resembled copulation with the clothes in place. I well remember the feelings of excitement, mingled with fear, which would come over me when I knew I was headed there for the evening; I remember too, the arc which I have described above, the way the huge expectations almost inevitably collapsed into debaucheries which were, in many cases, not even particularly enjoyable. I remember exchanges of phone numbers that were never followed up; I remember meetings which were planned that never took place; I remember scuffles that never quite became fights, threats never acted upon, promises of vengeance for some drunken offense, never fulfilled but endlessly discussed. I remember the heated, breathless dance-floor fumblings that led to clumsy dates that were never repeated, and I remember being shaken down by hard-nosed D.C. police officers whose side hustle was extorting underage drinkers for cash. I remember friendships that revolved entirely around the ritual of drinking, dancing, and drugging, and disintegrated the moment one person or the other wanted to stop, and I remember coming home at three-thirty in the morning during the summer months between college semesters, and my older brother opening the door with bleary eyes to tell me that I smelled like a distillery. I remember the night Madonna was denied entry and roared off angrily in her limo, and the time the backdoor bouncer went into amphetamine psychosis and punched out a windshield with his bare fist. But mostly I remember that it went on for several years, which in your early-mid 20s is an enormous period of time; and lastly I remember that it ended, not because of any outside force, such as the club closing (though it did, eventually, do just that), but because I wanted it to.

As Stephen King once said, everything's eventual, and if you drink from a particular well for too long, the time will come when the taste no longer pleases you. For a period of about three to five years I hit nightclubs regularly and willingly, and even after I had realized how shallow, exploitative and even dangerous they could be – between the fights, muggings, parking lot burglaries, sexually transmitted diseases and occasional stabbings, there was a distinct element of menace at some of them – I kept going, off and on, for some years more. The twentysomething male, and to some extent the female as well, are largely ruled by hormones and by that seemingly endless supply of energy which young people contain. It is a raw, untamed, uncontrolled energy, and when expended it resurges with startling speed, operating through illness, fatigue and hangover without much difficulty. It is not merely there in ample supply, waiting to be used; it demands release, and at that age, it is not a demand that can be lightly or easily refused. The ordinary hot-blooded guy-or-doll has about as much chance of holding back from the desires in his or her blood as a victim of Lycanthropy can resist becoming a werewolf when the moon comes up. But as Rush once said, we're only immortal for a limited time, and when that tide begins to slacken, when the siren-song of the bass and the cheap allure of the half-naked girl (oh so slutty-seeming yet oh so unattainable, oh so many times) begins to wane, the desire to spend Friday and Saturday nights amidst all that writhing, desperate flesh also cools. There are, I admit, many aspects of youth I do miss, but not that, not the feeling of being shoved around by my glands, manipulated into motion by desires I couldn't manage or control, and which made me behave badly and foolishly. Age may rob us of much, but it actually grants quite a bit in terms of the strength with which we grasp the tiller of our own life.

The MMA fighter Dan Henderson observed that the forties were a remarkable time in a man's development, because while he wanted sex just as much as he did when he was younger, it no longer controlled him. I believe he made similar comments about physical ability. “I can do everything I can do when I was twenty,” he quipped. “I just can't do it as fast.” I feel largely the same way. The speed is gone, but so too is the desire to use the speed, to burn the candle at both ends, to gulp recklessly from the cup of life until one's belly swells and the room begins to spin. I still howl at the moon, but I do so at a pace that suits me, and when I strike the mood, not when the mood strikes me. And it is astonishing, perhaps, how little that mood comes around, at least where nightclubs and things of that nature are concerned. In the last twenty years, I can count on two hands the number of times I've crossed the threshold of one, and two of those occasions were industry-related; the first a wrap party for Heroes, the second for a movie I didn't work on but got invited to anyway. I enjoyed both excursions, but I had no desire to repeat them. It is, I suppose, like the time you're in college and somebody's dad, in town to take his son to dinner, shows up to the fraternity keg party. It's great fun. The "old man" drinks and flirts and dances, and he enjoys the hell out of himself and so do you, but the next day he goes home and never comes back. A sip of that cup is sufficient. The season has passed. Why mourn it? Whatever purpose it had has been served, and it deserves neither nostalgia nor regret.

Were I to return to F Street in N.W. D.C. tomorrow, and look up the old Fifth Column, I would no doubt be surprised to see the changes to it and the surrounding neighborhood. I might chuckle a little remembering the big black dude that challenged me to a fight right there by the entrance and then ran away when he discovered none of his friends would back him up, or the time I made out with the blonde pastry chef from Virginia (all I ever learned about her) by the payphone in the back, or the time I made plans for a menage-a-trois with two older girls who I never saw again and who doubtlessly enjoyed a good laugh at leaving me high and extremely dry. I might pause a second to see if my mind's ear could recall the sound of all those techno-beats thundering through the stone walls to the rain-drowned streets outside, or try to recall the faces of the fair-weather friends I ran with in those days, who, sometime around 1995, scattered into the winds and were ne'er seen or heard from again. But I wouldn't do it. I couldn't be bothered. Life lessons come to me with astonishing slowness, but the one I've taken away from this little epiphany is that there are times when the process letting go is not painful. Some periods of life are to be kept close, to be treasured and savored as long as the heart still beats; others -- let's face it -- just ought to be marked, "use once and destroy."

America's Dad, or: Life After Cosby

At some point today, in between washing foam latex zombie hands for The Walking Dead and scrutinizing a cowl used for an alien character on The Orville, I was notified that Bill Cosby had been convicted by a Pennsylvania court on three counts of "aggravated indecent assault." Being a former law enforcement official in that commonwealth, I could a tale unfold about the memories the words "aggravated indecent assault" provoked in me, but in truth those memories were themselves swept away by other, completely different recollections. They were of The Cosby Show.

The Cosby Show ran from 1984 to 1992, and while on paper it was just another family sit-com in a schedule crammed to the rafters with them, this show was different. Not only was the fictitious Huxtable clan black -- there had been other sit-coms about black families -- they were rich, or very nearly so. Yes, The Jeffersons were rich too, but that family was dysfunctional. The Huxtables were a kind of Partridge Family on steroids; black Cleavers for the 1980s, but upgraded in terms of both brains and style. They were funny. They were good-looking. They were smart. They dressed in bold, even flamboyant colors. They prized education and personal character. But what struck me most about this fictional fam was the father, Heathcliffe, portrayed by Cosby himself. In a television world where father-figures were often portrayed as pushovers or comic-opera tyrants, Heathcliffe Huxtable was kind of a badass. Not only was he a doctor married to a lawyer, not only was he bringing in merry bushels of cash that allowed his family to occupy a luxurious brownstone in Manhattan, not only was he funny and knowledgeable about life, he was, well, pretty close to perfect. He had awesome powers of observation and sarcasm. He was an expert at child psychology. He could be warm, engaging or silly, but he could also be tough and implacable. The son of a bitch could even quote Shakespeare. People might disappoint or annoy him, but in the end he always got the better of them and the situations they created. In short, picture any Steven Segal character, minus the violent tendencies and spray-on hair. The perfect -- and I mean perfect -- father figure. America's uber-dad.

The Cosby Show ran for eight years. It was a cultural phenomenon and a ratings smash, and it broke down barriers that had survived the success of other "black" television shows such as Good Times, What's Happening, The Jeffersons, Sanford & Son, etc. After the Huxtables, it would never again be possible to think of black folks in America only in terms of a people struggling against poverty, racism and crime. The sprawling abstraction known as White, Middle Class America had seen hip, prosperous, intelligent, witty black people on television at last and embraced them without reservation. But I confess the racial significance of the show, the way it smashed stereotypes, was of far less interest to me than the fact that it had produced a seminal patriarch.

Now that Cosby has been convicted of heinous crimes -- crimes which may in fact represent only the tip of his particular iceberg -- America will begin the process of systematically erasing his legacy from our collective consciousness. It will be a more difficult task than some may expect. Cosby is a man with an immense career that stretches back nearly sixty years. He was a successful stand-up comedian for decades, won an Emmy for his lead role in I, Spy (1965 - 1968), and starred in numerous films as well as two TV shows which bore his name. Following his infamous 2004 "Pound Cake" speech at an NAACP ceremony, he also became a social activist, albeit a considerably controversial one. Very few stars keep any of their star-power into later life, but Cosby did: in a sense, he remained America's Dad. Now he will begin the process of becoming an unperson. The Cosby Show has already been pulled from television re-runs; soon it will be unavailable for purchase on DVD, and eventually almost impossible to lay hands on. The same thing will happen to his comedy albums and television specials. They will go down the Orwellian "memory hole," ne'er to be seen again.

When Cosby was initially accused of these crimes a few years ago, I wrote a blog about the ancient Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, which would formally obliterate the name of a disgraced person from the public record: coins bearing his face would be melted down and restruck, statues defaced or beheaded, plaques and plinths vandalized, scrolls burned. Barring a miraculous reversal on appeal, the same fate awaits Cosby, in a modernized form. The father figure of all father figures has been toppled, his crown vacated, and in his place is -- who?

Modern television is not the place for father figures or even generic role models. We live in a deeply cynical age in which there are almost no television or cinematic heroes, only deeply flawed protagonists, and even a squeaky-clean, Dudley Doorite character like Superman is presented as brooding, edgy, and "troubled." Thus, make-believe father figures of the sort epitomized by Dr. Huxtable are rather hard to come by, and even when they do exist -- Sam Elliot's Beau Bennett on The Ranch comes to mind -- they are often presented as charming but anachronistic; relics of a bygone era, to be humored as much as respected. This is unutterably depressing, but I take a certain amount of heart in what might be called Fatherhood Row: my own personal stash of first-class cinematic father figures.

One one of the first television dads I encountered and fell in love with was Col. Sherman T. Potter (Harry Morgan), the commanding officer of the 4077 mobile army surgical hospital, better known to millions of Americans as M*A*S*H. Potter was a crusty, hot-tempered ex-cavalryman with a passion for poker, whiskey, cigars, his mare Sophie, and his unseen wife Mildred. He was also a first-class battle surgeon who'd been through three wars and only wanted to retire and spend the rest of his life fishing in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Nevertheless, Potter tackled the awesome responsibility of wrangling a crew of drunken surgeons, homesick nurses and highly reluctant draftee soldiers through yet another war like an absolute pro. He was a tough little customer who could rip you a new one faster than you could salute, but he had a soft, compassionate, unfailingly loyal side that was utterly endearing and made you willing to go to hell and back for the man: he wasn't afraid of his own tears. He had plenty of formal schooling, but his wisdom came from often bitter experience: a long career in the Army, a lot of carnage, a lot of heartbreak. Of course, he wasn't actually a "father" to any of his troops, but they looked on him as one and he knew it and accepted it, even if he did admit it was a "bit of a pain in the ass."

Not many people are too familiar with Friday the 13th: The Series, a Toronto-based horror episodic which ran from 1987 - 1990, but in addition to being enormously influential on later TV shows, it also produced a fine father figure in Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins). Friday was the story of an antique shop whose inventory had been cursed by the devil and whose new owners took it upon themselves to recover all previously sold items before the curses could wreak any more havoc. The owners, Micki and Ryan, were distant cousins who spent a lot of time fighting and the rest of it wondering whether their quest was worth the risk and the pain; it was wise, courageous, kindly old Jack who kept them on course. A bearded, burly teddy bear of a man, he had, like any good pop, an underlying toughness, but it was his ability to sum up situations, to balm painful wounds with some prosaic-yet-profound remark, and most importantly, to lose his cool when the situation required it, that made me love him.

No list of father figs would be complete without Anthony Stewart Head's Rupert Giles, better known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's long-suffering but resolute Watcher. There is no doubt in my mind that the Giles character is drawn partially from Marshak, but the two are as different as they are alike. Giles is fussy, pedantic, polite, and eminently English; he drinks tea, wears tweed and employs sarcasm like a saber; at the same time he has plenty of darkness in his nature and a bad-boy past which befits any good dad (you need to wander from the flock to appreciate the importance of a shepherd). He is often exasperated by his charge, the headstrong teenager Buffy, and on the whole can barely control her -- he is really more of an advisor than a boss, yet over the course of time she and her friends come to appreciate not only his book knowledge but his wisdom and courage, and more than that, his true role, which is patriarch of a de facto family.

Frasier ran for eleven hilarious years, and not one of those years would have been possible without the character of Martin Crane, more than ably played by John Mahoney. The premise of Frasier was actually quite simple -- a sort of "Odd Couple" story of an insufferable snob-psychiatrist forced to live with his irascible, beer-drinking father, a retired cop. In practice the show was genius, and part of that genius rested in the character of Marty Crane. Though barely educated compared to his two genius sons, and possessing about as much taste as your average habituate of Wal-Mart (his favorite object was a disgustingly ugly easy chair), his street knowledge and fatherly wisdom -- sometimes reinforced by a fatherly boot to the ass -- were the perfect counterpoint to Frasier's arrogance and Niles' pomposity. Marty Crane was every dad who couldn't say "I love you" and so tried to show it by taking you fishing. Even if you didn't want to go.

I like very few sit-coms, but the first three seasons of Good Times are as funny as anything I've ever seen on TV, and oddly enough, it was the least comedic of the characters that brought everything together: James Evans, the patriarch of the five-member Evans clan. Poor black Chicagoans living in a crummy project apartment in the 70s, the Evanses struggled against everything: poverty, unemployment, the oil crisis, racism, street violence, a worthless landlord -- you name it. Luckily the scary-as-hell James Evans was more than a match for it. A farmboy from Mississippi who dropped out of sixth grade, Evans had served in Korea and fathered three children with his beloved wife Florida, and believe me, those kids knew they had a dad. With his blazing glare, flaring nostrils and prizefighter's physique, a pissed-off James Evans was not to be fucked with. But he had more than an intimidating, ultra-masculine presence; he was hard-working, decent, and completely in love with his wife. What's more, he was willing to work two miserable jobs if it would give his kids a better life than he'd had. Whatever it takes to be considered a leader -- charisma, command presence, animal magnetism -- the Evans character had it in spades. I once met Carl Weathers, who played Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies, and went nonverbal with awe. If I met Amos, I'd probably shit myself.

The last figure on my list is probably the most inaccessible, and therefore, in some perverse way, the most appealing. Jean-Luc Picard was captain of the fabled Enterprise (D) in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Unlike his predecessor, the two-fisted, quick-tempered, woman-devouring Captain Kirk, Picard was dry, austere, even remote; a thoughtful man and a consummate diplomat, he had enormous patience for insult and threat, resorted to violence only when unavoidable, and seldom dabbled in romance, finding passion a bit distasteful. He was in many ways a paragon of virtue, even a prig, and intimidating in the bargain, with his cold demeanor and icy stare; he ought to have been intolerable as a result. Yet is there any patriarchal figure in recent memory who evokes such feelings of loyalty and respect from his audience? Picard's secret lies partly in his inaccessibility -- everyone secretly wants to please the unpleasable -- but perhaps just as much in the flashes of vulnerability and humanity that he occasionally showed through the cracks in his armor. The fact that we knew that there was a sensitive, flawed human beneath all that virtue brought us closer to him; not close enough, but who is ever really close enough with their dad? That last unbridgeable distance between the commander and the commanded is a key element in the nature of father - children relationships. Even when we somehow graduate from son or daughter to friend and equal, we know, and we completely accept, that we are neither. We will never truly be their friend, and we will never (ever) be their equal. Nor, in our own secret hearts, do we truly want to be. And isn't that the essence of the appeal of the father figure? When we are lost at sea, we follow the North Star to safety; but even if we reach safety, we never reach the star. We emulate our fathers, but we have no real wish to exceed them. Hell, where would the fun be in that?

I suppose, like everyone else, I will now join in the hive-mind expulsion of Bill Cosby from my consciousness. He will become the punch-line of bad jokes, a cautionary tale, a movie with a stern moral people can hashtag and like. I will not even bother to reflect on the cruel irony of an eminent father figure who was, it seems, nothing but a charlatan-hypocrite of the very worst type. Yet if Cosby is already slipping into non-existence without any real regret or remorse on my part, there is a piece of me that will forever mourn the loss of Heathcliffe Huxtable. He wasn't the man Bill Cosby was, but he was the man Bill Cosby should have been.

Killing Time, or: A Free Short Story

A year and a half ago I published DEVILS YOU KNOW, a collection of short stories which I had written over a period of twenty-six years, i.e. between 1990 and 2016. In deciding what stories to include and what to leave out, I had to make some tough choices. I did not want DEVILS to be dominated by any one genre or sub-genre of fiction, but rather by the greater theme of how many ways the dark side of human nature can manifest itself in we troubled homo sapiens. Some of the stories were historical or dystopian fiction, others horror or comedy of the blackest type. And as I had already chosen two crime stories ("Pleas and Thank-Yous" and "Unfinished Business") I decided not to put in a third. As a result, the following story, "Killing Time," has never before seen the light of day. I've always considered that a shame, and since my work schedule has not allowed me to devote the time I wish to this blog of late -- it's supposed to be a weekly and has deteriorated into more of a monthly -- I decided this evening that, rather than do my taxes, I'd format the story and include it here for your reading pleasure (or pain). Those of you who have read my novel CAGE LIFE (or its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN) will recognize a character or two, but knowledge of those books is not necessary: this is a stand-alone story which exists in its own universe. In point of fact, for those of you who are interested in such things, this story predates my novels by a good dozen years or more. It was one of the seeds which ultimately lead me to quit my career in law-enforcement and begin writing full time. For that reason alone it will always have a special place in my heart. So read, enjoy, and feel no guilt that I blew off going to my accountant to entertain you for free. The taxes can wait. As Herman Wouk once remarked, for bad news there is always time.

We had been in the office for fifteen minutes and the silence was getting to me. Outside it was coming down like all hell, and he sat there opposite me on the broken down old vinyl couch, white-faced and miserable under the fluorescent lights, a clump of snow melting on one patent leather shoe. At last I said, "Do you need anything?"

He jumped as if I had shot him, blinked, shook his head no.

"Are you sure?"

He hesitated.

"It's no thing," I said.

He coughed into his hand. "A drink, if you got one."

I opened the desk drawer, knowing that Gino always kept some hootch handy for special (and not-so-special) occasions. "You gotta take it neat, though."

Short, jerky nod. I found a half-empty bottle of Old Crow wedged between the spare work orders and splashed some in a grimy water glass. He rose tentatively, took it, sat back down, free hand-white knuckled over his left knee.

"Salud," I said.

He took a sip, grimaced, coughed again.

“Sorry it’s warm,” I said.

He said nothing, just sat there, gripping the glass, enduring the pass of time like the grind of a dentist's drill. I looked up at the clock: quarter after five, too damn early. Time to kill before Gino showed, and the garage was deserted. Through the grimy office window I could glimpse the darkened repair floor, the hanging racks of tools, the cars suspended on the lifts with their greasy guts dangling like so many slaughtered cattle. Somewhere against the far wall a radio murmured jazz between long warbling bursts of static.

"Damn this garage," I said at last, when the silence became intolerable. "I don’t know why we have to do everything here. We have a social club. But can you get Gino to set foot in the fucking place? No. We have to do everything here. If I was in charge, I’d bust the joint out and get us a nice, big place in Manhattan.”

He startled me by muttering something. I took my feet off the desk and leaned forward.

"What'd you say?"

He did not look up, spoke in a small hoarse voice. "I said, it's a bad move."

"Why?"

He licked his lips several times before he spoke, quietly as before. "A social club, you might as well put up a sign: Hoods doin' business. A dump like this, who the fuck notices anything?" He paused. "A million guys come in, out this place every day, and nobody sees a goddamn thing."

I thought about it. "You got a point. But it's such a fuckin' dump!"

He shrugged, took another sip.

"I thought it was gonna be different, y'know? Cops, robbers, getaways and shit. But ninety-nine percent of it's just sitting around, waiting, doing nothing. Killing time. Like we're doing now." I shook my head. "It ain't what I thought it'd be at all."

He sighed so deeply I thought his chest might cave in. "Yeah, me neither."

"Yeah, but you been in the game a long time now. What, twenty years?"

"Longer."

"That's a long fuckin' time."

"Yeah."

"An' you never saw it coming?"

"Would I be here if I saw it fucking coming?"

"Hey," I said quietly. "You want to watch that shit."

He fell silent. Measuring me with his burnt-out eyes. His pompadour had unraveled and bryl-creamed strings of hair hung down over the graven-lined forehead, giving him the air of a debauched hustler, years past his prime but still looking to score. Abruptly he downed the whiskey in one shot, Adam's-apple jumping, face twisted like the knot in a balloon. Neither of us said anything for a while. I turned to the clock, watched the hands turn. When two minutes had passed I said, "Tell me one thing."

Grunt.

"What's it like?"

"What's what like?"

"Getting your button. Is it really like they say?"

He stared me, blank-faced, then pointed to the whiskey. "Can I get another?"

"Take the bottle."

He poured himself three fingers; the neck jittered against the rim of the glass. "Might as well," he said, and drank it down like medicine. Color crept back into his face, and he sighed. "Well, it's not like they say."

"How?"

"Why you want to know?"

"I just do." I paused and said, "It ain't never gonna happen, most likely. Not to me. I want to know."

He sighed again and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I can't speak for everybody, you know. Just for the guys that I got made with. It may be different now."

"Okay."

"He called me at home. My sponsor. Ettore Bisignario, they called him Tory. Says dress sharp, I'm comin' to pick you up at six. Didn't say why. He gets there, he's all slicked up, suit, tie, thin leather shoes. He drove this huge purple Cadillac, tint windows, might as well fucking carried a neon sign, you know? Some people. We drive for an hour, all over, I got no fucking idea where we're goin', he doesn't say two words. The whole time he's cleaning, lookin' for a tail. In the Bronx we switch cars. Finally we pull up to some fuckin house, just a regular house, way out in the Island. There's cars parked up an' down the street, like a party, only -- no noise. I'm playing it cool. We go inside, he tells me go upstairs. There's five other assholes like me, all dressed up. I knew some of 'em -- Tommy Cuomo and Long Island Mike, and I'd met Big Gus at a wedding years back. The other two were blanks. Nobody said shit. A couple minutes later Joe Rossi walks up--"

My eyebrows shot up.

"--yeah, Joe Rossi. Looked like a mummy in a suit, y'know? Two hundred fucking years old, horn-rimmed glasses, raspy little voice. He says, 'You know why you're here?' And we're like, shakin' our heads, and he smiles like he knows we're fulla shit. That, lemme tell you, was the scariest thing I've ever fuckin' seen in this Life, Joe Rossi smiling. I thought his face was gonna crack. Anyway, my sponsor comes up, and the three of us walk down into the basement -- it was a big fuckin' basement -- and there's the whole fucking Family down there, had to be thirty guys. Captains, Administration, all the fuckin' pezzanovante. Looked like a funeral. And Rossi says again, 'You know why you're here?' And I say, No. And he says, 'You know everybody here?' And I nod. Rossi sits down at the head of this table, and on it there's a knife and a gun and a deck of cards. He starts saying some shit in Italian, somethin' like, 'In onore della Famiglia, la Famiglia e' aperta' -- 'in honor of the Family, the Family is open.' Somethin' like that."
"No shit," I said.

"My Italian sucks," He said unselfconsciously, and produced a monogrammed gold cigarette case from the pocket of his jacket. A puff of smoke rose towards the ceiling as he continued. "After that he says, You are here an' you are gonna become a member of this Family. You accept that?' I says yes. Then he says, his exact words were, You gotta understand, the Famiglia comes before everything. If your mother's on her deathbed and the Family calls -- you come. Do you understand?'

"And God help me, I say, 'Yes.'"

He smoked in silence for a moment, face clouded, eyes filmed with memory. "Next he has everybody around me in a circle, claspin' hands, an' I'm down on my knees. He has me put my hands on the knife and the gun, and he asks me if I'd use these on anybody in here if the Family ordered it. Sure. Then I had to repeat these words in Italian -- Io, Vittorio, voglio entrare la Familglia.
"Saint?" I said.

"They're supposed to use a Holy Card with a saint on it," he explained, swirling the whiskey. "But later I learned they couldn't find any without the fuckin' plastic on 'em, so they used a playin' card instead."

"Handy."

"Yeah. Anyway, he come around the table and I kiss his cheek. I kissed everybody. They locked hands, and I locked hands with 'em. Rossi gave a little speech in Italian, and I didn't understand a word of it. Then he turned to me and said, 'Now, here's your bag of money!' And everybody laughs, 'cause everybody knows that they don't give you no fuckin' money. You gotta give them money, now on. That was it. I was in the Family and I belonged."

He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, dropped it to the tile, covered it with a foot. Finally he added, "Anyway, I don't know what you heard, but that's how it went."

"Ain't that some shit," I said.

He nodded.

"I wish we had some music," I said after another silence. "I can't get shit on that thing 'cept static."

"Sinatra," he said instantly. It was like a one-word history of all that was good.

"Yeah."

"But not that shit he did with Reprise, that stuff with Nancy. Fuck that."

"Yeah," I said. "The old stuff, on -- what? Capitol?"

"Capitol."

"Or Columbia."

"Yeah."

"Tell me somethin' else," I said.

He leaned back on the couch.

"What happened with you an' Gino?"

I watched him pour the last of the whiskey; his hand was perfectly steady. Only a faint sheen of sweat glistened along the alcoholic flush in his cheeks. "It was my fault. I never shoulda trusted that rat motherfucker. But I needed a partner. The operation was too damn big to run alone, just my boys. I needed his arm."

"He's got an arm, all right."

"He's a shooter, but he ain't no earner. He'll run this thing into the ground, kid. Mark my fuckin' words. Anybody can pull a trigger or cut up a body. Not many got the brains to go with the balls. Not many got what it takes to run a crew." He paused and downed the last of the Crow with one lift of his elbow, adding almost casually, "If you were smart, you'd think about coming along with m--"

"Save it."

We stared at each other, and I saw him as if for the first time, saw the repose of self-confident wealth and power turned to ashes: the crumpled blue suit, the gold tiepin hanging like a broken finger from the scalding white collar of his shirt, the dirt-smudged manicure. His lips came away from his teeth, and he said hoarsely, "It's gonna be a war, you know. I got freinds."

"Maybe."

"Maybe. You ever lived through a war?"

"I heard a gun go off."

"That ain't what I axed you."

"No. Okay? No."

He smiled. Nastily. Fear and anger. "You'll be living in motels for six months, eating take-out and sleeping in your clothes. No girls, no gambling, nothing to do but watch cable and wait by the phone. And read the newspaper to see whose body turned up. I don't know what Gino told you, compare, but you're in for a big surprise...."

He went on in this vein for minutes, his voice low and nearly even: jumbled memories of past wars, fragments of forgotten conflicts. Decades of life in the Family boiled into a series of stark images, and against my will I could picture everything: the drab blank-faced anonymous rooms, the fast-food wrappers trampled into the floor, the shotgun shells on the nightstands, the overflowing ashtrays and stale fogged-over air, the boredom, the unremitting tension broken by spasms of shattering violence. Angrily I blinked the vision away.

"If it comes to that," I said curtly, interrupting. "I'll be ready."

The desk phone rang. We both jumped.

I picked it up. "Hello?"

"Hello, my ass." Gino's voice, cutting through the static of a bad connection. "Is it done, or what?"

"He's here."

"I know he's fuckin' there. Is it done, or not?"

"No. I didn't--"

"Jesus." I could almost see Gino fuming. "We're nearly there, you idiot. Get it fucking done!"

Click.

I looked up at the wall clock, cursed. "Get up."

For a moment he just stared, slack-mouthed, whey-faced, clutching the empty glass in both white-knuckled hands, sweating. Then, with painful dignity, he rose, smoothed his tie, buttoned his jacket, pulled himself straight. He nodded; total resignation. We walked out onto the garage floor: cool, dark, overpowering smell of oil. I had to admire the undefeated set of his shoulders, the no-nonsense toughness, even now, at this squalid unexpected end. No begging here, no slobbering pleas for mercy. A real wiseguy in the old tradition, not a posing fake like so many of the others. Perhaps after fifteen years of living in a ever-tightening vice of fear and anxiety he was tired enough to let it end.

But that didn't make it any easier.

Two pops, no louder than firecrackers. A curl of fragrant smoke, hanging briefly in a slanting bar of fluorescent light, and the jingle of brass on concrete. The expression on his face was something like relief.

Gino arrived while I was mopping up the blood.

"God-dammit," he barked as soon as he saw the body. "He's still leaking! When the fuck did you pop him?"

"As soon as I talked to you."

"You was supposed to do it hours ago! I wanted him dried out before we do the friggin' Houdini. It's gonna look like a fuckin' slaughterhouse when we cut 'im! Christ."

"Sorry, Gino."

"Sorry?" He turned on his heel and walked out into the parking lot, popped the trunk of his enormous blue-steel 1974 T-Bird.

I followed him out. "Did you hear anything"

"Hear what?"

"Is there a beef, or what?"

Gino lugged a guitar case out from between a spare tire and a folding jack and set it in the snow. "There will be if they ever find his fucking body."

I looked at Gino, the tall lean-muscled strength bulging through his clothes, the fixed hostility of his face, the inscrutable blue eyes that had never known remorse or fear. Had he even tried to avoid it? I felt the press of forces larger than myself, a dark current that swept me easily, willingly along, to a place where blood was not the side effect of business but its objective. Once upon a time men like Gino had been the lowest of the low, the slimy bottom rung of a long crooked ladder that took years -- decades -- to climb. Now the pawns were toppling the kings, the old making way for the new because the old needed a reason to kill, the young merely an opportunity. Gino slammed the trunk shut with one broken-knuckled hand, dragged the case back into the garage. "Help me with this," he said, setting the case down on a work table.

I stopped in my tracks. "I thought Nicky and them were coming--"

"They are," he said curtly, popping the locks. The lid of the case swung open and the pale light glinted on the hacksaw's teeth, the black-handled carving knives, the shiny curve of a brand-new hatchet. Gino's tools, close at hand and always ready. "In the mean time, we got shit to do."

"You're not gonna--"

"No, I'm not. You are."

"Gino, I can't--"

"You can. It's just like gutting a deer."

"Jesus Christ, Gene, I'm from Brooklyn. I never gutted a fucking clam."

"Oh, take your fucking skirt off, huh?"

"I can't, man. Please."

He looked at me in disgust.

"I just can't."

"Jesus," he said. "At least help me get 'im ready."

We wrestled the body out of its clothes, Gino growing more and more irritated as blood slopped onto his hands, his cuffs, one knee of his jeans. "God-fucking-dammit! If you'd just whacked him out when I told you to!....What the fuck were you doing with him, anyway? Playin' twenny questions?"

"Killing time," I said.

"Jesus," he lit a cigarette with gleaming red hands. "This is no good. We got an hour at least before we can do it."

"Sorry, Gene."

He shook his head. "In the mean time make your sorry ass useful, go t'that incinerator behind the diner on Seaview, the one where we met with those West Side guys that time. Go dump the clothes in it, and the shoes. And pick up some food on the way back. I'm hungrier than fuck."

"Pizza okay?"

"Pizza and hot dogs." He muttered, pocketing the dead man's Rolex. "I got a craving."

Outside was cold white silence, deserted roads, the glare of streetlights ringed with bright coronas of moisture. I disposed of the bag without ceremony, only a vague feeling of relief to be rid of a dead man's clothing. The shoes especially had bothered me, gleaming atop the crumpled ball of the suit, forlorn, empty, like two dogs waiting patiently for a master that would never return. The sight of them gave me a strange qualm, like an omen of things to come. We were at war now; that much was certain, whatever noncommittal noise Gino made. There would be many empty shoes before it was over.

I found an all-night pizza joint, nearly deserted, not far from the diner: flickering neon, long gleaming Formica counter, sprung red-leather stools, little foil ashtrays with nothing in them. I had spent half my life in places like this, lounges and luncheonettes, diners and pizza parlors, social clubs and neighborhood bars; feeding quarters in the juke, making love to my cigarettes, staring down the walls, killing time, waiting for the action to go down. The name of the game was Wait, and I was an old hand.

But it never got any easier.

I thought about him, the dead man who in a few hours would cease even to be a corpse, who had helped me pass the time before his own execution. I was conscious of a strange urge to offer thanks, to make some gesture to his memory, and my eye caught the juke box. I strolled over, looking for some Sinatra -- old Sinatra. But all they had was rock 'n roll.

"It figures," I muttered.

"It'll be about twenty minutes," the man behind the counter said apologetically when I ordered. "We just finished cleanin' the ovens."

"It's okay," I sighed, easing down on a stool by the counter. "I got time to kill."

Just Bleed: or, Thoughts on the Dead Man in the Rain

You bleed just to know you're alive.
-- The Goo Goo Dolls

The day began they most of 'em do in the rainy season here in Southern California -- slowly, groggily, and with a lot of muttered cursing. The alarm jangled at 5:45 AM, otherwise known as the crack of "why am I alive?" I rolled upright, pushed the cat off my lap, stuck my feet into their recently-purchased CVS carpet slippers. I need these wretched slippers in what passes for winter here, because the studio in which I live has no insulation: winters are freezing cold, summers intolerably hot. At moments like these, it's hard not to think back to a few years ago, when I lived in a luxurious top-floor apartment with parquet floors and a view of the Hollywood sign, but 5:45 in the morning is a poor time to reflect on poor choices and the places they lead you.

So I get up. Switch on the light. Feed the cat. Empty my bladder. Rinse my teeth and then brush them, trying hard not to look in the mirror, because who the fuck wants to see this face before the sun's even up? I know what I'll see. Thinning hair, badly rumpled. Baggy bloodshot eyes. An unshaven mug. Christ, I look like a walking momento mori, a kind of advertisement of the horrors of middle age. Now the inevitable question arises: do I bother with a shower? God knows I need one, but what's the point? The clothes I'm going to wear are filthy, why put a clean body into them? Especially when that clean body will soon be surrounded by clouds of dirt, dust, powder, and fuck knows what? Yet if I don't bathe I'll feel as shitty as my clothing all day. So into the shower I go. The water takes too long to heat up and there are brown recluse spiders lurking in the uppermost corners of the stall. I could vacuum them out again, but we have a sort of peace treaty whereby they do not descend upon me when I'm bathing and I don't smash them into paste. As I wash I debate shaving. I don't have the time, but I will need groceries on the way home from work and the hot blonde cashier at the Handy Mart, though half my age, need not know that I am too old to be leering at her. After all, when I do shave I look about 37 and not 45, which is still too old to be leering at her but, overall, seems less shameful somehow. So I shave. My razor is dull, my mirror dirty, but ah, well, the things we do for unrequited lust.

I step out of the shower and back into my shoes lest my wet feet catch on the invisible yet oh-so-present grains of cat litter that inevitably spill onto my bathroom floor. There is a full-length mirror on the back of the door and with the same instinct that makes little boys peel back their bandages, I risk a glimpse at the reflection. This, then, is Miles Watson, voted "Top TKE" in 1997, graduate of the Maryland State Correctional Training Academy, with honors; holder of two Masters degrees, recipient of the first-ever Endowment Award from Seton Hill University, author of 2016's Book of the Year, Cage Life, black belt, historian, and all-around übermensch. Why do I look like shit? Something isn't adding up. Must remember to pose a few pointed questions to God when I get home, starting with, What did you do with my hair?

I struggle into my foam clothes. "Foam clothes" are make-up effects artist's slang for anything you wear to the shop. Since anything you do wear to work is ruined that same day, those clothes become "foam clothes" and you keep them and wear them to work until they disintegrate, whereupon you find some other clothing you won't miss and put that on instead. My shirt is so stiff with foam latex, plaster of Paris, paste-wax and silcone that it feels like body armor; ditto my pants and jacket. Even my shoes are little more than blocks of vary-colored rubber. I buckle my tool belt in place, strap on my kneepads, tie my Maryland State Flag bandanna around my neck and jam a filthy baseball cap down onto my head. Then I open the door and -- hell, it's raining again. Six o'clock in the fucking morning and it's still pitch dark and raining in the bargain. Each drop contains some irony. In just a few months it will be summer, the temperatures will soar into the 100s, and the idea that moisture or cold temperatures can even exist here become a sort of fantasy. But that's SoCal, my adoptive homeland: happy mediums need not apply.

My cat Spike is not happy about the rain either. He wants to roam and hunt in the yard, to do battle with lizards and birds. Rain means another day trapped inside my house. But I'd happily trade places with him. The cat can go to work and I'll lie in bed watching bootleg DVDs of T.J. Hooker in my pajamas. It's a nice fantasy. It ends when I scoot him back inside, grab my food bag (containing breakfast and lunch) and my laptop, and move quickly to my car.

When I was 23 years old I drove a lemon-yellow Jaguar XJ6 and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 32 I drove a forest-green Ford Explorer and had a gorgeous girlfriend. When I was 40 years old I drove a bottle-green Chrysler LeBaron convertible and had a gorgeous girlfriend. Now I drive an ancient Honda whose every part has been replaced at least once, and I have no girlfriend. Like my present living quarters, like my lack of a girlfriend, the very existence of the car seems to indicate a backsliding, a retrogression, a falling-off. People are supposed to move forward as they go deeper into their lives; they are supposed to progress. As I move toward my car in the rain, I wonder whether I hit my peak some years past and failed to notice it.

Ice, in the San Fernando Valley, is quite rare, but I have to scrape some off my windshield nonetheless. As I do so I get fleeting reminders of my old life back East, in Maryland, where I grew up, and in Pennsylvania, where I lived for many years. Scrapers and de-icers and sacks of sand and salt and chains on tires and long underwear and heavy gloves -- all of that stuff is unnecessary in Los Angeles, but I'm strangely nostalgic for it, as I am for snow, and seasons, and fireflies, and summer thunderstorms. Maybe I've lived here too long; maybe I should go. Whatever it was I was trying to prove by moving here in 2007, I've more than proved it. After all, 99% of those who do get off the bus on Hollywood and Vine slink away two years later, broken in wallet and in spirit, never having come within screaming distance of the business they came here to dominate. Not me. I endured more punishment than Frank Cotton did when he opened the box in Hellraiser, but I broke through nevertheless. In a field where even the qualified fail to qualify, I've made a living: the entertainment industry. TV. Movies. Video games. Writing. I've done it all. Granted, I've done it as a foot soldier, a grunt, a spear-carrier, and a flunky, but I've done it. Isn't that a victory? And even if it isn't, can't I declare victory and go home?

I shoot out onto Hollywood Way, heading for the Five Freeway. Sleazy light from the gas station reflects in the puddles on the street. The radio murmurs bad news. My windshield wipers make too much noise, and I'm tired. I went to bed at 9:30 pm but it didn't matter: I may as well have not slept at all. The weight of the day oppresses me in advance. Ever since I was in junior high school I've been cursed with a terrible form of prescience that allows me to experience everything in my day before it happens -- bathing, commuting, working, coming home. That backwards power afflicts me again now. I may be on the Five, zooming west at eighty miles an hour, but in my mind I'm already in the effects shop, listening to the angle grinders and power saws, the drills and generators and walk-in ovens. Movie magic is messy magic; the air will be full of dust and grit and pulverized rubber. Within half an hour I'll have so much talcum powder on me I'll look as if I'd rolled in flour. Soon gooey blobs of foam latex, not yet gelled, will be caked in my arm hair, on my clothing, in the laces of my boots. Clay will work its way into the creases of my knuckles and into my ears and beneath my fingernails. Not long after that I'll get a fiberglass splinter in the ball of my thumb, or get my finger pinched in a mold, or scrape my ribs against an exposed bolt. At some point I'll drink so much coffee that I actually get tired of going to the bathroom to get rid of it, a condition known to all who work early-morning or late-night shifts as "bladder fatigue." By the end of the day I'll have shivered beneath air conditioners and sweated in the walk-in ovens; I'll stink, I'll be dirty, I'll be exhausted in body and spirit. And then I'll have to drive home and try to find the energy to shop, wash, eat, write, exercise, and cook tomorrow's meals, all before 9:30, which is when I have to be in bed.

And hell, now I've got traffic to deal with. I grip the steering wheel in weary rage, feeling betrayed. Bad traffic's for the afternoon, not the morning, and I detest being late. I was so unpunctual as a kid that, as a young man, I began to develop a kind of allergy to tardiness; the thought of it as a 45 year-old fills me with fury. But the traffic is at a crawl. Even with the margin for error I built in because it is raining -- and Angelinos can't drive in the rain -- I may be late. Soon I begin to see why. The police are out in force. Helicopters buzz and prowl overhead. Two lanes are blocked off, and all the cars are flowing slowly through a three-lane chokepoint. Now I observe the first wreckage: twisted pieces of metal, plastic components, shattered glass. A black sedan with its bumper stove in at the middle. A shattered Harley-Davidson lying on its side like a slaughtered cow. A police cruiser with its flashers spinning a merry red in a gray and dismal landscape. A police officer in a yellow reflective vest, standing in the peculiar attitude of a man who has just performed an unpleasant but important act. And that's when I see the body.

It lies some yards from the wrecked motorcycle and the slewed-over sedan, and from the look of it the sheet which covers it has just been put into place. The contours are heavy and masculine, and two feet clad in heavy motorcycle boots protrude from the white plastic, as do the fingers of a single leather-gloved hand. I cannot see the face, but the body is large and powerful-looking even sheeted, even in death, even lying on the wet pavement in the rain. I realize I missed seeing the officer lay in the cover in place by a matter of seconds; he was in the act of standing up straight afterwards when I came upon the scene.

My car rolls slowly past, and I look at the dead man just yards from my window. It has been a long time since I have seen death. Of course, in effects shops I am surrounded by fake death every day: I've handled gallons of stage blood, dragged mangled, burned, eviscerated, vampire-bitten faux-corpses over shop floors and shooting locations, tossed severed "heads" into the backs of trucks, carried bags and bags of fake intestines, fake severed fingers, fake eyeballs into and from make-up trailers. I've stood by as gorgeous young actresses, practically throbbing with the juices of life, were made up to look dead, and helped effects artists transform fit, handsome stunt men into zombies, ghouls and all manner of supernatural unlife. But when was the last time I saw actual death? I can scarcely remember, which is odd, because death used to be a small part of my business: when I was a pre-sentence investigator for the District Attorney's office back in the early 2000s, I occasionally attended the autopsies of murder victims. And once, an acquaintance of mine, a woman who worked at the CVS across the street from my old apartment, was herself murdered while sitting on her front porch one night. But all of that was long, long ago and my life has largely been freed from the specter of violence or unnatural death (even as intermittent as it was) since I moved West. Or maybe it's simply that I haven't paid any attention. There is something about California that makes the idea of aging and dying seem remote and unfashionable, even silly. This brief rainy season aside, it is hard to contemplate infirmity and decay when bathed in sunlight and surrounded by so many people who make a mockery of entropy. I remember meeting Elizabeth Hurley on the set of the disastrous Wonder Woman pilot some years ago. She was exactly half a century old and heart-stoppingly beautiful; perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect body. She could out-dazzle many women half her age, and do so easily. It was heartening to see how thoroughly she had repudiated her age, and in my better moments I knew I could do the same, albeit on a lesser level. I may not be as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful (I may not be anywhere near as handsome as Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful), but under the right circumstances, i.e. when I don't have to drag-ass out of bed at 5:45 to go to a job which is hardly my passion, I can still pass for five to eight years younger than I am, and while genetics must be credited with some of that, I think part of it may have to do with living in this preservation jar called California, this land of endless summer and semi-eternal youth. Had I remained in the East, where every spring is paid for -- with interest -- by winter, maybe I'd have more mileage on my face, more wear-and-tear on my body. Yet had I remained in the East, where the very rhythm of the seasons is a constant reminder of your own mortality, maybe the sight of that dead motorcyclist would not have shaken me the way it did.

When I rolled into work some time later, at precisely 7:15 AM (about 20 minutes later than usual, but not actually late), I found I could not erase the image of the dead man from my mind. I kept seeing him there, still and silent, with his boots sticking out from beneath the sheet which had become his shroud. I kept remembering the rain striking the asphalt and the twisted pieces of wreckage scattered all around him. I kept thinking of how that man and I had both awakened this morning, yawned, and contemplated the day through our respective windows. Our hearts were beating, our lungs billowing, our beards growing and our minds awakening. We were enormous concentrations of specialized cells capable of reasoning and imagination, contemplative thought and a wide spectrum of emotions both subtle and gross. Our brains were storehouses of memories and information that far exceed even the most sophisticated computers. And both of us were the living extensions of huge chains of ancestors reaching back tens of thousands of years -- and, beyond that, millions and even billions of years, to a some single-celled organism that existed in the earliest pre-history of this planet. We were, in a very real sense, related, as all humans are related, though our relations were probably several thousand times removed. And that morning we had set out on the same rainy freeways -- first the Five, then the One-Eighteen -- to reach our respective destinations. In so many ways we were exactly alike, with the important exception that I was still alive and he was now dead.

When you join up with law enforcement, one question inevitably asked during the hiring process is, "What do you consider to be the hardest aspect of this job?" I was asked this question many times by many different organizations and responded in a variety of ways, and my answers, carefully thought out as they were, were always wrong. Shooting someone is not the hardest aspect of being in law enforcement. Having to inform on a partner who is taking payoffs is not. The pressure, the fear, the hostility, the strain on personal relationships, none of that is the hardest aspect of the job. The very worst thing, I came to understand, is the day you are ordered to inform someone that their loved one is dead.

I never had to do this, but I know people who have -- military men and police officers both -- and I truly believe most of them would rather do anything on earth than knock on someone's door with that news. I strongly suspect that in some cases, men have been suspended, demoted, even fired for refusing this duty, and if so, my sympathies are entirely with them, because I do not think I could do it even if you put a gun to my head. And as I drew my morning coffee from the huge samovar in the shop kitchen, I remembered that by this time, the dead man had certainly been identified by the officers on the scene, which meant that soon some luckless pair of detectives or patrolmen would soon have to deliver someone the very worst news they had ever received in their life. In this case the dead man's bed might still retain traces of his body heat; the breakfast table, crumbs of his last meal. A half-read book, never to be completed, might lay on his nightstand, and a dry-cleaned suit, never to be worn again (except perhaps at his funeral), hanging on a doorknob in his bedroom. Very soon, someone -- some wife, some sister, some mother, someone -- was going to answer that phone or the knock at the door, and their own life would change almost as drastically and certainly as the man's had. They would never forget that moment, or that day, and they would relive a thousand thousand times the decision the dead man had made, that morning, to ride in the rain instead of taking a car or getting a ride or hailing a cab or just staying the fuck home. I remembered once reading a book about Vietnam, in which the author recalled being confronted by a Viet Cong soldier in the jungle. The author was slower to draw his weapon, but managed to kill the enemy anyway. Examining the man's body, he saw the Cong had forgotten to release the safety catch on his rifle before stepping out of cover to shoot. "That small detail," he recalled soberly. "Cost the man his life and saved mine." And in fact life -- and death -- are often like that. Our momentous plans, our grandiose schemes, our grand designs for career, life and love often come to nothing, and our destinies turn instead on the smallest possible details -- small accidents, trivial coincidences, offhand decisions, momentary lapses of memory or concentration.

I remember almost nothing about my workday except a curious feeling that I was observing, through imagination or some kind of psychic means, the progression of the dead man. First they loaded him onto the ambulance or the coroner's meatwagon. Then they transported him to the the morgue, where he was tagged and put into storage pending the autopsy. At some point the pathologist would ply his grisly trade and carefully catalogue the injuries which had deprived the man of the life that had once empowered his body. He would then be sewn back together, wheeled into a stainless-steel locker, and kept on ice until released to the funeral home. And whilst all of this was happening, while his relatives' lives were shattered into a thousand pieces by a string of phone calls and knocks at the door, I was engaged in shooting stuff that looked like pink icing into fiberglass molds so that the extras on The Walking Dead could portray convincing corpses. I do remember that I had trouble concentrating or caring about my job that day. I felt shaken and isolated, almost overcome with a desire to go home, lock the door, put on my pajamas and hide from the world. And in fact when work was finished, when the last of the foam latex had been shot and the various molds wheeled into the oven to bake out for the night, I did just precisely that. But on the way home I drove slower when I passed the scene of the accident. The wrecked vehicles were, of course, gone; so too was most of the debris. Indeed, I saw no evidence the accident had ever occurred. The ultimate tragedy of someone's existence had been swept neatly away, and we who had not died on our morning commute reversed it and went home. Hell, even the rain had stopped. But as I sat on my couch on that Friday evening, eating marijuana mints and drinking whiskey and water and wondering whether I shouldn't get back to work on my latest novel, or just jam a DVD into the player and vegetate for the rest of the evening, I realized something had happened to me that day. I had been reminded, in the starkest possible way, that as dismal as life can seem at quarter 'til six on a rainy workday when one is middle-aged and alone and not yet blessed with being able to do for a living exactly what one really wants, it is still life. Indeed, the very act of self-pity, of existential hand-wringing and despair, is a pleasure denied to the dead. And so I finished my day thinking of the end of the previous year -- another rainy day, as it happened. I had driven out to Wildwood Canyon to hike the mountain on New Year's Eve. Halfway up the hill the drizzle turned into a downpour, but I was damned if I was going to quit, and somehow I managed to reach the summit despite being soaked to the skin, freezing cold and caked in mud. Up there, quite literally in the clouds, unable to see five yards, and in imminent danger of being blown off the cliff by scourging winds, I started laughing. My laughter was half genuine, half bitter; the laughter of someone who is experiencing a perfect metaphor for his own life and is fully conscious of it, yet pleased for the consciousness, the ability to feel anything, even pain. A poem entered my head, written by none other than Clive Barker, and before I made my precipitous flight back down the mountain to my car, I recited it aloud. It was an act of defiance, yes, but also of gratitude:

Life is short
And pleasures few
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is