Mike Sager's Blog
April 19, 2014
ON FACING YOUR BIGGEST FAILURES
I have come nearly 2,400 miles to speak about my failure. The theater is full. The house lights are dark. The spotlights are bright, shining in my eyes. There will be a video posted. Unless the internet goes the way of the floppy disk, anyone will be able to watch for all eternity.
My allotted time is nine minutes.
Why did I agree to do this?
The last time I appeared as a performer on stage—not as a lecturer or a speaker but as a person with a program to memorize and spew—I was in the 8th grade.
My good friend Kluger had convinced me to take the part. Rehearsals were well underway. One of the lead actors had dropped out for reasons I can't remember. I don't know what possessed me. Kluger was cool, popular and a good singer, and all the girls liked him, a redheaded kewpie doll who would go on to play the leads in Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret—think Joel Grey (born Joel David Katz) with his original nose. I remember I played an attorney. I don't remember whether I was the defender or the prosecutor. I think I appeared in every scene over three acts. I do recall one line I said repeatedly: "Where were you on the night of January 16?" (I must have been the prosecutor.)
That a bunch of junior high school students in an upper-middle class Jewish neighborhood on the outskirts of Baltimore were performing Night of January 16th, a play by the angry objectivist Ayn Rand, remains a puzzle to me. Maybe one of the teachers was trying to stick it to somebody? The year was 1969 or 1970. There was tumult in the air, unrest on campuses and in the streets. Older brothers I knew were being drafted and sent to Vietnam, others were fleeing to Canada. For our part, we little pishers were growing our hair long and fighting tooth and nail with the administration, demanding to be allowed to wear "dungarees" to school, outlawed at the time.
Another puzzle is why the hell I agreed to step in. I'm not the memorizing kind. Numbers, spelling, proper nouns, multiplication tables. Whatever side of the brain it is—I can never for the life of me remember if it's the left side or the right side—I have the side that's creative.
Of course, to act in a play one needs to memorize one's lines. (I guess I didn't really consider that. Do 13-year-old boys really consider anything?)
For the first several performances, I did the third act with the help of a clipboard, a convenient prop for a lawyer. Nobody could blame me. I had walked on to save the production.
For the last performance, I went off-book. Somehow, during the first act, I fed Kluger the wrong line—and we jumped ahead into the third act. Suddenly, we were on a runaway train. Unsure what to do, we broke from the script and began ad-libbing until we worked our way back to the first act again.
I'm sure some people didn't notice. Or maybe some of them thought it was funny, like a skit from Saturday Night Live.
Only it was really happening, and I was up on stage in front of everyone, with the house lights dark, the spotlights beaming down and nowhere to run.
So now I have to go onstage and do this semi-prepared monologue about my greatest failure—which was not, by any means, the very public early death of my acting career, though that particular memory remains posted in my permanent experiential dictionary as the definition of "mortify."
I guess I've failed embarrassingly at a lot of things over the years. I remember trying out for pitcher in Little League and losing the handle on a pitch—it sailed way up high and hit the top of the backstop and the coaches were, like, Next. The following year I switched to lacrosse.
I remember the band teacher in elementary school figuring out that I hadn't learned to read the notes in the upper register, necessitating a humiliating public demotion from first clarinet, having to stand and change seats with some former loser who was being promoted to my place. Somehow I ended up playing the bass clarinet, lugging the big-ass thing to school everyday.
Or the time I tried to run for student government president. Or the time I tried to build my girlfriend a coffee table for her dorm room. Or the thirty-some rejection letters from major newspapers I collected on my way to becoming a reporter.
Not to mention all the women over the years who've said no—to a date, a dance, a roll in the hay, each a little failure. And all the relationships that didn't work out. Three months, one year, six years, two decades. Or having to give away half my money to somebody because she decided she wanted out.
Early in my career, my editor, now a famous author, told me: "Sager, whatever you write is either great or terrible."
Sometime after that, I made up this little motto for myself: Dare to be bad. The first time I ever wrote the words was in a story called "Hunting Marlon Brando". I went all the way to Tahiti to discover that the famous reclusive (and by then, gargantuan) actor was in his compound on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, where I eventually found him. Some people hated the story—namely, the higher-ups at the grand newspaper that had commissioned the piece for its Sunday magazine and had paid the considerable expenses. But other people loved it. Objectively speaking, if not for that story, you might not be reading me now, 30 years later.
Anyway, the longer I've followed that little motto, Dare to be bad, the less often anything has actually been bad. I don't think it's immodest to say that terrible has long been left behind—though the vissitudes of life continue daily, failures large and small are a regular part of the program.
Nobody wants to fail. Nobody wants to fall down and hurt himself and have to pick up and start all over again. Nobody wants their precious kids to fail, especially these days, an era when children (and their parents) have come to expect a trophy for participation.
But fail we must if we are to move ahead—which sounds really obvious, I know. Except I speak to a lot of people, and I teach and I counsel. And what I know is this: The prospect of failure causes many to crumble; they don't even try. Lives of quiet desperation? That's fear of failure.
Which to me seems like the worst possible prison. One to which you sentence yourself.
Which is what I'm doing in East Lansing, Michigan, at the Wharton Center for Performing Artson the campus of Michigan State University.
I'm participating in a little movement called Failure:Lab. Started by a quartet of thirtysomethings from Grand Rapids, the gatherings bring together students, faculty and members of the community to hear stories of failure from people who've gone on to success despite horrific failures. Tonight I'll be "performing" along with MSU's athletic director, a Detroit emcee who was in the movie 8 Mile and a woman who became pregnant at age 13. In all, six failures will present. In between each there are pallet-cleansing musical acts and an opportunity for everyone in the audience to tweet their impressions. There's also a form on which each audience member summarizes the lessons learned.
The catch—for both the performer and for the audience—is that you're not allowed to tell what lesson you've learned from your failure. You're just supposed to lay it out there nakedly. All in all, it's pretty brutal—though when I got a few laughs along the way I ad-libbed a bit and went over my allotted time. Luckily I was the last act.
To me, the most interesting part has been the audience takeaway:
Happiness is only real when shared.
Life is not always about you.
Sometimes you never know what's in front of you until you open your eyes.
You need to take care of your own needs, but also the needs of others around you.
Don't have kids until you're ready.
Don't ever spend $13k on crack.
I'm not going to tell you what I talked about. You'll just have to watch.
I'm sorry in advance if I seem a little nervous. They wouldn't let me use a clipboard.
LINK: http://failure-lab.com/mike-sager-the...
To read more by Mike Sager and The Sager Group, please see www.MikeSager.com or www.TheSagerGroup.net.
My allotted time is nine minutes.
Why did I agree to do this?
The last time I appeared as a performer on stage—not as a lecturer or a speaker but as a person with a program to memorize and spew—I was in the 8th grade.
My good friend Kluger had convinced me to take the part. Rehearsals were well underway. One of the lead actors had dropped out for reasons I can't remember. I don't know what possessed me. Kluger was cool, popular and a good singer, and all the girls liked him, a redheaded kewpie doll who would go on to play the leads in Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret—think Joel Grey (born Joel David Katz) with his original nose. I remember I played an attorney. I don't remember whether I was the defender or the prosecutor. I think I appeared in every scene over three acts. I do recall one line I said repeatedly: "Where were you on the night of January 16?" (I must have been the prosecutor.)
That a bunch of junior high school students in an upper-middle class Jewish neighborhood on the outskirts of Baltimore were performing Night of January 16th, a play by the angry objectivist Ayn Rand, remains a puzzle to me. Maybe one of the teachers was trying to stick it to somebody? The year was 1969 or 1970. There was tumult in the air, unrest on campuses and in the streets. Older brothers I knew were being drafted and sent to Vietnam, others were fleeing to Canada. For our part, we little pishers were growing our hair long and fighting tooth and nail with the administration, demanding to be allowed to wear "dungarees" to school, outlawed at the time.
Another puzzle is why the hell I agreed to step in. I'm not the memorizing kind. Numbers, spelling, proper nouns, multiplication tables. Whatever side of the brain it is—I can never for the life of me remember if it's the left side or the right side—I have the side that's creative.
Of course, to act in a play one needs to memorize one's lines. (I guess I didn't really consider that. Do 13-year-old boys really consider anything?)
For the first several performances, I did the third act with the help of a clipboard, a convenient prop for a lawyer. Nobody could blame me. I had walked on to save the production.
For the last performance, I went off-book. Somehow, during the first act, I fed Kluger the wrong line—and we jumped ahead into the third act. Suddenly, we were on a runaway train. Unsure what to do, we broke from the script and began ad-libbing until we worked our way back to the first act again.
I'm sure some people didn't notice. Or maybe some of them thought it was funny, like a skit from Saturday Night Live.
Only it was really happening, and I was up on stage in front of everyone, with the house lights dark, the spotlights beaming down and nowhere to run.
So now I have to go onstage and do this semi-prepared monologue about my greatest failure—which was not, by any means, the very public early death of my acting career, though that particular memory remains posted in my permanent experiential dictionary as the definition of "mortify."
I guess I've failed embarrassingly at a lot of things over the years. I remember trying out for pitcher in Little League and losing the handle on a pitch—it sailed way up high and hit the top of the backstop and the coaches were, like, Next. The following year I switched to lacrosse.
I remember the band teacher in elementary school figuring out that I hadn't learned to read the notes in the upper register, necessitating a humiliating public demotion from first clarinet, having to stand and change seats with some former loser who was being promoted to my place. Somehow I ended up playing the bass clarinet, lugging the big-ass thing to school everyday.
Or the time I tried to run for student government president. Or the time I tried to build my girlfriend a coffee table for her dorm room. Or the thirty-some rejection letters from major newspapers I collected on my way to becoming a reporter.
Not to mention all the women over the years who've said no—to a date, a dance, a roll in the hay, each a little failure. And all the relationships that didn't work out. Three months, one year, six years, two decades. Or having to give away half my money to somebody because she decided she wanted out.
Early in my career, my editor, now a famous author, told me: "Sager, whatever you write is either great or terrible."
Sometime after that, I made up this little motto for myself: Dare to be bad. The first time I ever wrote the words was in a story called "Hunting Marlon Brando". I went all the way to Tahiti to discover that the famous reclusive (and by then, gargantuan) actor was in his compound on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, where I eventually found him. Some people hated the story—namely, the higher-ups at the grand newspaper that had commissioned the piece for its Sunday magazine and had paid the considerable expenses. But other people loved it. Objectively speaking, if not for that story, you might not be reading me now, 30 years later.
Anyway, the longer I've followed that little motto, Dare to be bad, the less often anything has actually been bad. I don't think it's immodest to say that terrible has long been left behind—though the vissitudes of life continue daily, failures large and small are a regular part of the program.
Nobody wants to fail. Nobody wants to fall down and hurt himself and have to pick up and start all over again. Nobody wants their precious kids to fail, especially these days, an era when children (and their parents) have come to expect a trophy for participation.
But fail we must if we are to move ahead—which sounds really obvious, I know. Except I speak to a lot of people, and I teach and I counsel. And what I know is this: The prospect of failure causes many to crumble; they don't even try. Lives of quiet desperation? That's fear of failure.
Which to me seems like the worst possible prison. One to which you sentence yourself.
Which is what I'm doing in East Lansing, Michigan, at the Wharton Center for Performing Artson the campus of Michigan State University.
I'm participating in a little movement called Failure:Lab. Started by a quartet of thirtysomethings from Grand Rapids, the gatherings bring together students, faculty and members of the community to hear stories of failure from people who've gone on to success despite horrific failures. Tonight I'll be "performing" along with MSU's athletic director, a Detroit emcee who was in the movie 8 Mile and a woman who became pregnant at age 13. In all, six failures will present. In between each there are pallet-cleansing musical acts and an opportunity for everyone in the audience to tweet their impressions. There's also a form on which each audience member summarizes the lessons learned.
The catch—for both the performer and for the audience—is that you're not allowed to tell what lesson you've learned from your failure. You're just supposed to lay it out there nakedly. All in all, it's pretty brutal—though when I got a few laughs along the way I ad-libbed a bit and went over my allotted time. Luckily I was the last act.
To me, the most interesting part has been the audience takeaway:
Happiness is only real when shared.
Life is not always about you.
Sometimes you never know what's in front of you until you open your eyes.
You need to take care of your own needs, but also the needs of others around you.
Don't have kids until you're ready.
Don't ever spend $13k on crack.
I'm not going to tell you what I talked about. You'll just have to watch.
I'm sorry in advance if I seem a little nervous. They wouldn't let me use a clipboard.
LINK: http://failure-lab.com/mike-sager-the...
To read more by Mike Sager and The Sager Group, please see www.MikeSager.com or www.TheSagerGroup.net.
March 23, 2014
ON THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
You get to a certain age, you wake up to piss. For me it's around five in the morning.
Of the various changes you go through as the years pass, this one's not so bad—at least for now. In the pre-dawn stillness I can hear the crash of the distant waves. Sometimes through the window I'll see the bright moon hanging in the leavening dark, a time known in Spanish as la madrugada, the early hours before twilight and the rooster crow.
I move toward the bathroom in a state of ethereal half-sleep and do my business. After 57 years on earth, I have no need to see my penis in order to find it. And since I live alone, I don't even have to raise or lower the seat.
Returning to bed, I always note the time on the alarm clock. Generally, life still owes me another 90 minutes of sleep before my self-imposed wake-up call, which actually seems pretty satisfying. These little wakeups used to annoy me, another irrefutable physical sign—like back hair and arthritis—of my inevitable decline. Now I think of it more in terms of having a little nap to start the day. It shows, I think, how much attitude matters.
Sometime over the past few years, this pleasant and necessary ritual of my middle years became corrupted by the appearance of a random stubborn noise.
I'd be standing there mid-stream with my eyes half-shut when all of a sudden I'd hear it: Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
A rhythmic sound. Periodically uniform. Five or six knocks in a row. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And then nothing for an imprecise span of time. And then again. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
If the house was very quiet, I'd occasionally hear it during the day. For long stretches I didn't hear it at all. But it always returned, most often at night, the noise seemingly localized in the wall and ceiling adjoining my bathroom commode. Eventually, I discovered the tapping also could be heard in the reciprocal bathroom on the other side of the wall. It sounded as if the wind was causing something to sway, perhaps a copper pipe, which in turn was knocking against something wooden. From the nature of the sound, the rhythm of the knocks, it seemed as if (I intuited?) this pipe was acting in the same fashion as a clapper in a bell. I imagined a pipe somewhere that wasn't strapped down properly, pushed by the wind, slapping a 2x4.
At some point, I engaged a plumber, but the sound wasn't in evidence that day—of course.
"Maybe you have a ghost?" the plumber joked, taking my credit card.
The way he looked at me, I could tell he was thinking more along the lines of bats in the belfry.
Nights turned into weeks. Months into years. Despite my regular use of saw palmetto [www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/... helps to keep the prostate pliable and is used by some topically as a cure for baldness—I continued to rise in the early morning hours to take my piss.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
The longer the knocks persisted, the more annoyed I became. My lovely little sojourn through the dark and quiet oasis of la madrugada had been ruined.
Instead of beholding the hypnotic beauty of the full moon I began to entertain a recurring psycho fantasy: I'm bashing holes in the wall, hunting down the fucking tapping noise once and for all.
As long as I'm being so intimate about my plumbing, let me confess that the shower in the reciprocal bathroom, the only other shower in the house, has never worked properly. It became clear many years ago that the tile wall had to be removed and the guts replaced. If you're a homeowner, you know how these things go—I knew if I started, I'd end up remodeling the entire room. Where I live, a modest bathroom renovation comes in at about five figures. As a result, my son has shared the shower in my master bath for his entire life. Which was fine. I've never much encouraged overnighters anyway. So sorry, the shower in the guest bath is broken.
Now my son is a freshman in college. Since Thanksgiving he's been talking about his first Spring Break, that great rite of college he's been watching for so many years on MTV. Breasts and booze and parties, oh my. Something epic was in the offing.
By New Year's Eve, he had a plan for himself and his friends—at last count a total of five artsy kids with tats, piercings and various hair colorings, in addition to his best friend from high school and his visiting girlfriend, respectively an offensive left tackle and a varsity basketball player.
Their destination: sunny San Diego.
And more particularly, our house.
I called the contractor. In one day, the old bathroom was in my driveway.
Inside, the guest bath was reduced to studs and concrete.
And there was a new sound—like a file rasping against metal bars.
Nobody had any trouble hearing it, either.
Night and day, it continued nonstop.
Rasp, rasp, rasp, rasp, rasp.
They re-plumbed the shower, patched the drywall, laid new tile. I wrote a bunch of checks and charged a bunch of stuff at the hardware store.
The rasping disappeared.
But the tapping came back.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Louder and stronger than ever.
And constant. Unrelenting. 24/7.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
The contractor took pity on me. We grabbed a ladder and I climbed to the roof. I crawled around one side of the attic; he stuck his head up through another side. Nothing. The only place you could hear the noise was in the two bathrooms, in the walls and ceilings adjoining the commodes and the new shower—the place we'd completely stripped and rebuilt. We'd had the walls and ceiling open, fer chrissake. There was nothing to find.
On the last day of construction, the plumber came back to hook up the new sink. The boss came along. As the plumber was working, the boss, contractor and I walked around the house again, rehashing the peculiar history of my egregious phantom tapping.
As we were listening in my bathroom, throwing theories against the wall, the tapping sound suddenly stopped.
The kids are due this weekend. I haven't heard any more tapping, though I admit I'm kind of waiting for it. The boss plumber says it was probably due to a build-up of water pressure. But even a guy like me, whose toolbox consists mainly of string, tape, glue and a checkbook, knows that the set of variables doesn't fit his conclusion.
In the meantime, I've regained the pleasure of my lovely little sojourn through the dark and quiet oasis of la madrugada. The other night the Pacific sky was especially clear. There were a zillion stars.
The winter crescent moon was beacon-bright. It resembled a smile.
To read more by Mike Sager and The Sager Group, please see www.MikeSager.com or www.TheSagerGroup.net.
Of the various changes you go through as the years pass, this one's not so bad—at least for now. In the pre-dawn stillness I can hear the crash of the distant waves. Sometimes through the window I'll see the bright moon hanging in the leavening dark, a time known in Spanish as la madrugada, the early hours before twilight and the rooster crow.
I move toward the bathroom in a state of ethereal half-sleep and do my business. After 57 years on earth, I have no need to see my penis in order to find it. And since I live alone, I don't even have to raise or lower the seat.
Returning to bed, I always note the time on the alarm clock. Generally, life still owes me another 90 minutes of sleep before my self-imposed wake-up call, which actually seems pretty satisfying. These little wakeups used to annoy me, another irrefutable physical sign—like back hair and arthritis—of my inevitable decline. Now I think of it more in terms of having a little nap to start the day. It shows, I think, how much attitude matters.
Sometime over the past few years, this pleasant and necessary ritual of my middle years became corrupted by the appearance of a random stubborn noise.
I'd be standing there mid-stream with my eyes half-shut when all of a sudden I'd hear it: Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
A rhythmic sound. Periodically uniform. Five or six knocks in a row. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And then nothing for an imprecise span of time. And then again. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
If the house was very quiet, I'd occasionally hear it during the day. For long stretches I didn't hear it at all. But it always returned, most often at night, the noise seemingly localized in the wall and ceiling adjoining my bathroom commode. Eventually, I discovered the tapping also could be heard in the reciprocal bathroom on the other side of the wall. It sounded as if the wind was causing something to sway, perhaps a copper pipe, which in turn was knocking against something wooden. From the nature of the sound, the rhythm of the knocks, it seemed as if (I intuited?) this pipe was acting in the same fashion as a clapper in a bell. I imagined a pipe somewhere that wasn't strapped down properly, pushed by the wind, slapping a 2x4.
At some point, I engaged a plumber, but the sound wasn't in evidence that day—of course.
"Maybe you have a ghost?" the plumber joked, taking my credit card.
The way he looked at me, I could tell he was thinking more along the lines of bats in the belfry.
Nights turned into weeks. Months into years. Despite my regular use of saw palmetto [www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/... helps to keep the prostate pliable and is used by some topically as a cure for baldness—I continued to rise in the early morning hours to take my piss.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
The longer the knocks persisted, the more annoyed I became. My lovely little sojourn through the dark and quiet oasis of la madrugada had been ruined.
Instead of beholding the hypnotic beauty of the full moon I began to entertain a recurring psycho fantasy: I'm bashing holes in the wall, hunting down the fucking tapping noise once and for all.
As long as I'm being so intimate about my plumbing, let me confess that the shower in the reciprocal bathroom, the only other shower in the house, has never worked properly. It became clear many years ago that the tile wall had to be removed and the guts replaced. If you're a homeowner, you know how these things go—I knew if I started, I'd end up remodeling the entire room. Where I live, a modest bathroom renovation comes in at about five figures. As a result, my son has shared the shower in my master bath for his entire life. Which was fine. I've never much encouraged overnighters anyway. So sorry, the shower in the guest bath is broken.
Now my son is a freshman in college. Since Thanksgiving he's been talking about his first Spring Break, that great rite of college he's been watching for so many years on MTV. Breasts and booze and parties, oh my. Something epic was in the offing.
By New Year's Eve, he had a plan for himself and his friends—at last count a total of five artsy kids with tats, piercings and various hair colorings, in addition to his best friend from high school and his visiting girlfriend, respectively an offensive left tackle and a varsity basketball player.
Their destination: sunny San Diego.
And more particularly, our house.
I called the contractor. In one day, the old bathroom was in my driveway.
Inside, the guest bath was reduced to studs and concrete.
And there was a new sound—like a file rasping against metal bars.
Nobody had any trouble hearing it, either.
Night and day, it continued nonstop.
Rasp, rasp, rasp, rasp, rasp.
They re-plumbed the shower, patched the drywall, laid new tile. I wrote a bunch of checks and charged a bunch of stuff at the hardware store.
The rasping disappeared.
But the tapping came back.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Louder and stronger than ever.
And constant. Unrelenting. 24/7.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
The contractor took pity on me. We grabbed a ladder and I climbed to the roof. I crawled around one side of the attic; he stuck his head up through another side. Nothing. The only place you could hear the noise was in the two bathrooms, in the walls and ceilings adjoining the commodes and the new shower—the place we'd completely stripped and rebuilt. We'd had the walls and ceiling open, fer chrissake. There was nothing to find.
On the last day of construction, the plumber came back to hook up the new sink. The boss came along. As the plumber was working, the boss, contractor and I walked around the house again, rehashing the peculiar history of my egregious phantom tapping.
As we were listening in my bathroom, throwing theories against the wall, the tapping sound suddenly stopped.
The kids are due this weekend. I haven't heard any more tapping, though I admit I'm kind of waiting for it. The boss plumber says it was probably due to a build-up of water pressure. But even a guy like me, whose toolbox consists mainly of string, tape, glue and a checkbook, knows that the set of variables doesn't fit his conclusion.
In the meantime, I've regained the pleasure of my lovely little sojourn through the dark and quiet oasis of la madrugada. The other night the Pacific sky was especially clear. There were a zillion stars.
The winter crescent moon was beacon-bright. It resembled a smile.
To read more by Mike Sager and The Sager Group, please see www.MikeSager.com or www.TheSagerGroup.net.
March 8, 2014
HOW LOVE CHANGES AS YOU AGE
The dental hygienist was up to her elbows in my mouth when she started telling me about the upcoming wedding of her son.
Her son is roughly 10 years older than mine. I've never laid eyes on her kid, but I know him anecdotally—every six months or so for the last 15 years, the hygienist and I have exchanged updates. A good lookin' guy, a former club baseball player who went back East for college. Since graduation there have been some far-flung romances—including a foreign-exchange student and an extended trip to Brazil. (And the real worry: Would he ever return home?) Later there was a benighted, Before Sunrise-type liaison that played out in some suitably offbeat Eastern European locale.
Now he's 28 and feeling ready to settle down. He's finishing grad school. He has a fiancée. He's got a job offer from a big firm. His whole life is laid out before him.
"The fiancée wants the big wedding—$360 a person just for the food," the hygienist vents.
The chair motors upward for me to rinse: I hope her daddy's rich, I offer.
The hygienist was wearing the usual blue mask and fluffy disposable hat. She shook her head. "They cut the guest list way down. Like out of eight cousins, only two are invited."
I swirl and spit. What does your son say?
"She's always wanted the whole storybook wedding. It's what little girls dream about, right?" The chair begins to motor back down. "Of course, his father and I eloped."
She rolls her eyes, big and blue, accented nicely by the blue of her scrubs and accessories.
***
Back at my desk, I check my e-mail. I pull up a thread of an ongoing, if infrequent, back-and-forth with an old flame and former co-worker. She's got three kids and a longtime companion. "We both love sleeping by ourselves," she wrote. "He says I keep the room too hot (guilty as charged) and stay up too late (also guilty). Blah, blah, blah. He snores like a motherfucker and likes to listen to books on tape. WITHOUT headphones. Oy vey. Even if I COULD sleep, I couldn't.
"No more kids here, lots of empty bedrooms—problem solved! Which is not to say we don't spend 'time' together, but sleep is sleep. People think this is strange. I think it makes perfect sense. We are each fully formed people with our own lives. We intersect at the places that are comfortable. It suits us."
***
My mom and dad met when he was pressed into service as her escort to the junior prom. They dated throughout high school and college and his med school (interrupted by his service in the Korean War) before they wed. They were married for 56 years, until my father's death. Of course, the relationship still lives strongly within my mom. She keeps fresh flowers at his grave.
When I was young, I will admit, I also had a storybook notion about my romantic future. Though I didn't envision a big wedding, white dress, kids or a picket fence, for many years I envisioned having a partner for life. Someone with whom I'd grow old. You know, a relationship like my parents.
But looking back over the four or five decades of my dealings with the opposite sex—I can remember "having a girlfriend" as far back as the third grade—my experience of love hasn't been like my parents' at all. Instead of one great romance, it's been more like a series of romances, all of them great in their own ways, some of them terrible, too. The hometown girl, the first woman with whom I co-habitated. The fiancée whose father appreciated my power to earn but didn't care much for my particular religious heritage. The ad saleswoman. After three months of dating we married spontaneously—in Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, on the same day the NASA spacecraft Challenger crashed, January 28, 1986. She went packing after four months, though the divorce took a year to work through the courts.
What can I say? I was 29. Looking back, I spent my twenties trying to get hitched. Unconsciously, I just thought that's what you did.
The thirties had a different tenor. The quiet hairdresser who was so sweet and willing. (She drove over to my house for booty calls!) I was traveling a ton at the time; her last relationship had been with her married Moroccan boss. I called it off after a year. It was kind of perfect in a way, but it didn't seem fair to continue. Then nearly two years with a smart, sexy editrix. We once fucked in broad daylight in the shadows of a guard tower at that fort in Puerto Rico. She later left me for the guy she was cheating on me with—exactly the same way we met.
After a few more dalliances, I found what I thought was my dream girl and I married "for real." Two years later, there was a son. Diapers, army men, flashcards, little league, the annual school fundraiser, basketball tournaments in East Jesus.
Eighteen years later, the wife got happy feet and danced away.
***
Four years later, I'm on the other side.
A side, like the backside of the moon, I could not have envisioned.
The boy is in college. I'm divorced.
My bank account is lighter by half, but my spirits—the usual angst and my touch of clinical anxiety notwithstanding—generally soar. I live by myself again. I can do whatever I please.
And the serial monogamy continues.
She wants me to call her my girlfriend. I'm trying. It seems odd for a man of 57 to use that term, which sounds so teenager-y and embarrassing. Can there not be more dignity in middle age? I'm not a boy. And she's not a girl. She has an important job and substantially out-earns me.
When I break it down, however, the term might not be so far off. We are a lot like high school sweethearts. We have separate domiciles and separate lives and pretty much separate friends. (Although unlike high school, we have multiple places to do it whenever we want.) At the end of the evening, we sleep alone, content in our houses.
It might sound weird, but at this stage of our lives, the thing my girlfriend and I have most in common is each other. Neither of us is looking for their missing piece. Neither of us wants a warm lump on the other side of the bed. We are both complete on our own. And she has several furry canine lumps. And I have to get up and write. And we are from very different cultures. And we have our odd little habits. And we like our lives how they are.
But people have to eat and drink and watch movies. And people need someone to whom they can talk and confide and complain, someone to depend upon, someone's hand to hold, someone to hug. And there is chemistry between us that is the stuff of love, an inexplicable urge to be with that person—and also to get it in. It's great being so darn mature this time around.
***
The hygienist said to me: "Why should they spend all that money on food and drink when they could just take a nice trip? They'll probably end up divorced anyway. Most people do, right?"
Well, perhaps.
But he should do it anyway.
If memory serves, the celebration of my now broken second marriage was the best party I ever attended. It featured some of the finest jazz players in Washington D.C., all of whom were our friends (or their friends) and played their asses off. I enjoyed myself immensely. I might not care to see the mother of my child ever again, but I will always remember how great our wedding was. And, of course, bitter or not, there were other milestones of life that we shared together as well. Things that have made me the man I am today, not the least of which was fatherhood, which I fought against at first with a zillion stellar reasons and all of my being. What an idiot, huh?
I entered this adulthood thing believing in our culture's notion of One Great Love. But what I've learned is that love is more like a television series than a movie. Meaning that there's not just one story arc, there are multiples—a series of story arcs. I have also learned that love is a condition that's ongoing and ever-maturing, that intersects with others at times in similar and wildly different ways but exists most strongly within ourselves. As we grow, hopefully we learn to better be who we are. What we need from others changes. We learn how to ask.
I'm not sure if the hygienists' son will stay with this girl four months, twenty years or half a century. But what I'm sure about is this: Love is different at different ages. It presents itself in different forms. Only one thing remains static: You can never, ever predict how it will go.
To read more by Mike Sager and The Sager Group, please see www.MikeSager.com or www.TheSagerGroup.net.
TO READ ON LINE: http://playboysfw.kinja.com/how-the-d...
Her son is roughly 10 years older than mine. I've never laid eyes on her kid, but I know him anecdotally—every six months or so for the last 15 years, the hygienist and I have exchanged updates. A good lookin' guy, a former club baseball player who went back East for college. Since graduation there have been some far-flung romances—including a foreign-exchange student and an extended trip to Brazil. (And the real worry: Would he ever return home?) Later there was a benighted, Before Sunrise-type liaison that played out in some suitably offbeat Eastern European locale.
Now he's 28 and feeling ready to settle down. He's finishing grad school. He has a fiancée. He's got a job offer from a big firm. His whole life is laid out before him.
"The fiancée wants the big wedding—$360 a person just for the food," the hygienist vents.
The chair motors upward for me to rinse: I hope her daddy's rich, I offer.
The hygienist was wearing the usual blue mask and fluffy disposable hat. She shook her head. "They cut the guest list way down. Like out of eight cousins, only two are invited."
I swirl and spit. What does your son say?
"She's always wanted the whole storybook wedding. It's what little girls dream about, right?" The chair begins to motor back down. "Of course, his father and I eloped."
She rolls her eyes, big and blue, accented nicely by the blue of her scrubs and accessories.
***
Back at my desk, I check my e-mail. I pull up a thread of an ongoing, if infrequent, back-and-forth with an old flame and former co-worker. She's got three kids and a longtime companion. "We both love sleeping by ourselves," she wrote. "He says I keep the room too hot (guilty as charged) and stay up too late (also guilty). Blah, blah, blah. He snores like a motherfucker and likes to listen to books on tape. WITHOUT headphones. Oy vey. Even if I COULD sleep, I couldn't.
"No more kids here, lots of empty bedrooms—problem solved! Which is not to say we don't spend 'time' together, but sleep is sleep. People think this is strange. I think it makes perfect sense. We are each fully formed people with our own lives. We intersect at the places that are comfortable. It suits us."
***
My mom and dad met when he was pressed into service as her escort to the junior prom. They dated throughout high school and college and his med school (interrupted by his service in the Korean War) before they wed. They were married for 56 years, until my father's death. Of course, the relationship still lives strongly within my mom. She keeps fresh flowers at his grave.
When I was young, I will admit, I also had a storybook notion about my romantic future. Though I didn't envision a big wedding, white dress, kids or a picket fence, for many years I envisioned having a partner for life. Someone with whom I'd grow old. You know, a relationship like my parents.
But looking back over the four or five decades of my dealings with the opposite sex—I can remember "having a girlfriend" as far back as the third grade—my experience of love hasn't been like my parents' at all. Instead of one great romance, it's been more like a series of romances, all of them great in their own ways, some of them terrible, too. The hometown girl, the first woman with whom I co-habitated. The fiancée whose father appreciated my power to earn but didn't care much for my particular religious heritage. The ad saleswoman. After three months of dating we married spontaneously—in Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, on the same day the NASA spacecraft Challenger crashed, January 28, 1986. She went packing after four months, though the divorce took a year to work through the courts.
What can I say? I was 29. Looking back, I spent my twenties trying to get hitched. Unconsciously, I just thought that's what you did.
The thirties had a different tenor. The quiet hairdresser who was so sweet and willing. (She drove over to my house for booty calls!) I was traveling a ton at the time; her last relationship had been with her married Moroccan boss. I called it off after a year. It was kind of perfect in a way, but it didn't seem fair to continue. Then nearly two years with a smart, sexy editrix. We once fucked in broad daylight in the shadows of a guard tower at that fort in Puerto Rico. She later left me for the guy she was cheating on me with—exactly the same way we met.
After a few more dalliances, I found what I thought was my dream girl and I married "for real." Two years later, there was a son. Diapers, army men, flashcards, little league, the annual school fundraiser, basketball tournaments in East Jesus.
Eighteen years later, the wife got happy feet and danced away.
***
Four years later, I'm on the other side.
A side, like the backside of the moon, I could not have envisioned.
The boy is in college. I'm divorced.
My bank account is lighter by half, but my spirits—the usual angst and my touch of clinical anxiety notwithstanding—generally soar. I live by myself again. I can do whatever I please.
And the serial monogamy continues.
She wants me to call her my girlfriend. I'm trying. It seems odd for a man of 57 to use that term, which sounds so teenager-y and embarrassing. Can there not be more dignity in middle age? I'm not a boy. And she's not a girl. She has an important job and substantially out-earns me.
When I break it down, however, the term might not be so far off. We are a lot like high school sweethearts. We have separate domiciles and separate lives and pretty much separate friends. (Although unlike high school, we have multiple places to do it whenever we want.) At the end of the evening, we sleep alone, content in our houses.
It might sound weird, but at this stage of our lives, the thing my girlfriend and I have most in common is each other. Neither of us is looking for their missing piece. Neither of us wants a warm lump on the other side of the bed. We are both complete on our own. And she has several furry canine lumps. And I have to get up and write. And we are from very different cultures. And we have our odd little habits. And we like our lives how they are.
But people have to eat and drink and watch movies. And people need someone to whom they can talk and confide and complain, someone to depend upon, someone's hand to hold, someone to hug. And there is chemistry between us that is the stuff of love, an inexplicable urge to be with that person—and also to get it in. It's great being so darn mature this time around.
***
The hygienist said to me: "Why should they spend all that money on food and drink when they could just take a nice trip? They'll probably end up divorced anyway. Most people do, right?"
Well, perhaps.
But he should do it anyway.
If memory serves, the celebration of my now broken second marriage was the best party I ever attended. It featured some of the finest jazz players in Washington D.C., all of whom were our friends (or their friends) and played their asses off. I enjoyed myself immensely. I might not care to see the mother of my child ever again, but I will always remember how great our wedding was. And, of course, bitter or not, there were other milestones of life that we shared together as well. Things that have made me the man I am today, not the least of which was fatherhood, which I fought against at first with a zillion stellar reasons and all of my being. What an idiot, huh?
I entered this adulthood thing believing in our culture's notion of One Great Love. But what I've learned is that love is more like a television series than a movie. Meaning that there's not just one story arc, there are multiples—a series of story arcs. I have also learned that love is a condition that's ongoing and ever-maturing, that intersects with others at times in similar and wildly different ways but exists most strongly within ourselves. As we grow, hopefully we learn to better be who we are. What we need from others changes. We learn how to ask.
I'm not sure if the hygienists' son will stay with this girl four months, twenty years or half a century. But what I'm sure about is this: Love is different at different ages. It presents itself in different forms. Only one thing remains static: You can never, ever predict how it will go.
To read more by Mike Sager and The Sager Group, please see www.MikeSager.com or www.TheSagerGroup.net.
TO READ ON LINE: http://playboysfw.kinja.com/how-the-d...
February 22, 2014
WHAT RICK JAMES TAUGHT ME ABOUT GETTIN' HIGH
The basement rec room of the mini-mansion was dim and narrow. Colored light filtered through a stained glass window, illuminating the dust motes in the air, which smelled of sandalwood and something medicinal, like ether.
Descending the stairs as directed, I called out tentatively. I knew from experience he didn't like to be surprised:
Rick? You here?
"Who askin'?"
His voice was so familiar. Gravelly, phlegm-tinged, stuffy-nosed—like a country preacher with allergies. We'd talked a lot on the phone.
"What'd you bring?" asked Rick James, a.k.a. Super Freak.
We'd met first at Folsom State Prison, when I was writing about him for Rolling Stone. He'd served two years, convicted of assaulting two women while under the influence of crack. He'd been released in 1996. This was a couple of years after that. Somehow I'd become his phone pal. He'd call me late at night. Once from his hospital bed after his hip replacement. Another time after his stroke. I even know the two women he was partying with the night he died in his sleep from heart failure at the age of 56 in August 2004. One of them is an accomplished designer. (She points out that Rick never uttered the catchphrase "I'm Rick James, bitch!" until after it was made popular on Chappelle's Show. After that, he said it all the time. He was tickled by the coinage.)
Stepping further into the room, I produced from my sock a plastic sandwich baggie, knotted at the top. Rick was sitting at one end of the sofa, wearing short dreads strung with decorative beads that framed his face, which seemed bloated. His infamous come-fuck-me eyes were bloodshot, the lids half-mast. He tore open the baggie with his teeth and emptied into his large leathery palm a chunk of freebase cocaine, white and crystalline like an aquarium stone. He nicked it with the edge of his long, manicured thumbnail. The rock was hard and crisp and shimmery white, clearly not purchased on the corner. Street crack is piss yellow and full of holes like a moldered piece of Swiss cheese; it crumbles like sandstone. This was more like tumbled marble—an antique from the early 1980s, before the advent of "blowup," which dealers started adding to the mix to increase the weight. The high has never been the same.
Rick raised his eyebrows. He was, of course, a connoisseur. During his heyday, he had a guy on staff who cooked his coke for him. Later, Rick cooked it himself, usually in his bedroom in a soup ladle or a serving spoon.
"Where you get this shit at?" he asked, smiling appreciatively.
***
I'd come to visit Rick in person because I was working on a novel called Deviant Behavior about a young father suffering his own Dante-esque run of post-partum depression. I told Rick about my themes: Prohibition. Control. Denial of the human urge.
"Idle hands are the devil's playground and whatnot," he said, catching the drift. "I got my PhD in that shit. What you wanna know?"
"It seems like everything pleasurable anymore is considered evil or life-threatening," I said, offering my thesis. "Fat, sugar, carbs, cigarettes, sex, marijuana. If everything is bad, if we have no hedonistic outlets, where does that leave us?"
"You mean like priests?" he laughed, musical and gravelly at once. "Look here. It's unhealthy to hold that shit in."
Rick retrieved a glass ashtray from the arm of the sofa and transferred it to the coffee table. He placed my rock in the tray and sawed into it with his thumbnail, extracting a wedge-like chunk.
"Sounds like you got plenty of theories," he said. "What do you need me for?"
He picked up the chunk, dropped it into the bowl of his water pipe. Parting his lips to accept the stem, he raised a butane lighter—a metallic click, the whoosh of pressurized gas, an ice blue cone of flame. Then he abruptly stopped. He lowered the lighter thoughtfully.
"It ain't only humans who get high, you know. Coke was discovered when the people in the Andes Mountains noticed they llamas were eating it—man just followed they lead." Like an eccentric professor, he waved his pipe for emphasis. "Elephants in the wild have been observed eating fermented fruit until they fall over drunk. Same with birds and other species—been observed flying into trees, stumbling off cliffs, all kinds of crazy shit. There's this scientist at UCLA who wrote a book about it. He says that getting high is a natural urge.
"People would rather blame the devil than look in the mirror," he chuckled, raising the bowl again.
****
I've been thinking about Rick because I just read A New Leaf by Alyson Martin and Nushin Rashidian. From what I can tell it's the most up-to-date assessment of the confusing and rapidly changing landscape of marijuana policy in this country—a place where 49.5 percent of all drug arrests made last year were for pot and 87 percent of those were for possession only.
Today, medical cannabis is legal in 20 states, with more than one million registered patients. It's well documented that marijuana has medical uses. As a person with chronic spinal problems, I can personally attest to its efficacy. But I didn't have any medical issues at age 12 when I bought my first manila envelope of shake in a bathroom stall on the second floor of my Sunday school.
Now, at 57, I have a medical prescription that was signed by a doctor who must have been 90. He had a hard time separating the several pages of my medical questionnaire in order to find the place to sign; his signature was an endless tortured exercise of shaky strokes. I mean, really. What a charade. But at least I'm supposedly legal. I've written too many stories about the drug war not to know that crazy shit can happen to somebody who gets caught with a little weed. Right now, theoretically, that piece of paper stands between me and a possession charge. Not that I'm giving anybody any probable cause if I can help it. (Unless you count writing this column.)
In January, laws took effect in Colorado legalizing the production and sale of cannabis forsocial use. There's been a lot of attention to the story; most of it sniggering personal-interest stuff, one long Cheech-and-Chong joke. But what's significant about Colorado is they dropped the whole pot-as-medicine discussion and just went ahead and made it available, without moral judgment, to those of age. Yes, marijuana contains ingredients that have healing and palliative properties for some. Yes, hemp is a God plant from which you can make almost anything. But the reason most people smoke pot is to get high, to take the edge off and chill.
By taking the medical bit out of the pot debate, we are left with the notion of marijuana as a product used for recreational consumption, a.k.a. purposeful self-intoxication—exactly like alcohol. Doctors recommend a glass of red wine every day for good health, sure, but that's not why most people drink. We drink to catch a buzz. We drink to unwind. We drink to follow our natural urge toward pleasure. And yes, a lot of people keep drinking until they are sloppy alcoholics and ruin everything around them. But hey, the shit's legally available on every corner.
Maybe if Rick had chosen pot instead of crack I'd still be talking to him on the phone. I'm pretty sure he'd have drunk himself to death by now if he'd chosen otherwise. That's kind of where he was headed when he stopped crack for a while.
I have this huge young friend who went away to college on an athletic scholarship. He used to smoke pot, but before he left for school he gave it up; there were pee tests in his immediate future, zero tolerance, the whole nine. He likes to have fun, but he's also risen before dawn every morning for the past decade or so to work out. No way was he going to screw it up.
With gusto he joined the team and did what kids do on campuses these days—he drank heavily. It's only natural. It's even expected. People need an outlet, right? Like Rick James said, "It's unhealthy to hold that shit in."
James is right. From movie stars to humming birds, everyone needs to get high, to take the edge off our difficult and busy lives. (And, of course, the college pee tests includes other drugs as well.)So why not hunker down with the fellas and drink a couple of cases. A couple of fifths. It's legal. What's the harm?
One night my young friend drank so much he blacked out on his feet. He fell dead forward like a mighty tree and hit his face on a rock.
Thankfully, there was no important damage, just this big scar on his nose. Yet every time I see him, I can't help but think: Somewhere between prohibition and Rick James, there's got to be a thoughtful middle path.
read this piece on line at kinja/playboy:
http://playboysfw.kinja.com/what-rick...
Descending the stairs as directed, I called out tentatively. I knew from experience he didn't like to be surprised:
Rick? You here?
"Who askin'?"
His voice was so familiar. Gravelly, phlegm-tinged, stuffy-nosed—like a country preacher with allergies. We'd talked a lot on the phone.
"What'd you bring?" asked Rick James, a.k.a. Super Freak.
We'd met first at Folsom State Prison, when I was writing about him for Rolling Stone. He'd served two years, convicted of assaulting two women while under the influence of crack. He'd been released in 1996. This was a couple of years after that. Somehow I'd become his phone pal. He'd call me late at night. Once from his hospital bed after his hip replacement. Another time after his stroke. I even know the two women he was partying with the night he died in his sleep from heart failure at the age of 56 in August 2004. One of them is an accomplished designer. (She points out that Rick never uttered the catchphrase "I'm Rick James, bitch!" until after it was made popular on Chappelle's Show. After that, he said it all the time. He was tickled by the coinage.)
Stepping further into the room, I produced from my sock a plastic sandwich baggie, knotted at the top. Rick was sitting at one end of the sofa, wearing short dreads strung with decorative beads that framed his face, which seemed bloated. His infamous come-fuck-me eyes were bloodshot, the lids half-mast. He tore open the baggie with his teeth and emptied into his large leathery palm a chunk of freebase cocaine, white and crystalline like an aquarium stone. He nicked it with the edge of his long, manicured thumbnail. The rock was hard and crisp and shimmery white, clearly not purchased on the corner. Street crack is piss yellow and full of holes like a moldered piece of Swiss cheese; it crumbles like sandstone. This was more like tumbled marble—an antique from the early 1980s, before the advent of "blowup," which dealers started adding to the mix to increase the weight. The high has never been the same.
Rick raised his eyebrows. He was, of course, a connoisseur. During his heyday, he had a guy on staff who cooked his coke for him. Later, Rick cooked it himself, usually in his bedroom in a soup ladle or a serving spoon.
"Where you get this shit at?" he asked, smiling appreciatively.
***
I'd come to visit Rick in person because I was working on a novel called Deviant Behavior about a young father suffering his own Dante-esque run of post-partum depression. I told Rick about my themes: Prohibition. Control. Denial of the human urge.
"Idle hands are the devil's playground and whatnot," he said, catching the drift. "I got my PhD in that shit. What you wanna know?"
"It seems like everything pleasurable anymore is considered evil or life-threatening," I said, offering my thesis. "Fat, sugar, carbs, cigarettes, sex, marijuana. If everything is bad, if we have no hedonistic outlets, where does that leave us?"
"You mean like priests?" he laughed, musical and gravelly at once. "Look here. It's unhealthy to hold that shit in."
Rick retrieved a glass ashtray from the arm of the sofa and transferred it to the coffee table. He placed my rock in the tray and sawed into it with his thumbnail, extracting a wedge-like chunk.
"Sounds like you got plenty of theories," he said. "What do you need me for?"
He picked up the chunk, dropped it into the bowl of his water pipe. Parting his lips to accept the stem, he raised a butane lighter—a metallic click, the whoosh of pressurized gas, an ice blue cone of flame. Then he abruptly stopped. He lowered the lighter thoughtfully.
"It ain't only humans who get high, you know. Coke was discovered when the people in the Andes Mountains noticed they llamas were eating it—man just followed they lead." Like an eccentric professor, he waved his pipe for emphasis. "Elephants in the wild have been observed eating fermented fruit until they fall over drunk. Same with birds and other species—been observed flying into trees, stumbling off cliffs, all kinds of crazy shit. There's this scientist at UCLA who wrote a book about it. He says that getting high is a natural urge.
"People would rather blame the devil than look in the mirror," he chuckled, raising the bowl again.
****
I've been thinking about Rick because I just read A New Leaf by Alyson Martin and Nushin Rashidian. From what I can tell it's the most up-to-date assessment of the confusing and rapidly changing landscape of marijuana policy in this country—a place where 49.5 percent of all drug arrests made last year were for pot and 87 percent of those were for possession only.
Today, medical cannabis is legal in 20 states, with more than one million registered patients. It's well documented that marijuana has medical uses. As a person with chronic spinal problems, I can personally attest to its efficacy. But I didn't have any medical issues at age 12 when I bought my first manila envelope of shake in a bathroom stall on the second floor of my Sunday school.
Now, at 57, I have a medical prescription that was signed by a doctor who must have been 90. He had a hard time separating the several pages of my medical questionnaire in order to find the place to sign; his signature was an endless tortured exercise of shaky strokes. I mean, really. What a charade. But at least I'm supposedly legal. I've written too many stories about the drug war not to know that crazy shit can happen to somebody who gets caught with a little weed. Right now, theoretically, that piece of paper stands between me and a possession charge. Not that I'm giving anybody any probable cause if I can help it. (Unless you count writing this column.)
In January, laws took effect in Colorado legalizing the production and sale of cannabis forsocial use. There's been a lot of attention to the story; most of it sniggering personal-interest stuff, one long Cheech-and-Chong joke. But what's significant about Colorado is they dropped the whole pot-as-medicine discussion and just went ahead and made it available, without moral judgment, to those of age. Yes, marijuana contains ingredients that have healing and palliative properties for some. Yes, hemp is a God plant from which you can make almost anything. But the reason most people smoke pot is to get high, to take the edge off and chill.
By taking the medical bit out of the pot debate, we are left with the notion of marijuana as a product used for recreational consumption, a.k.a. purposeful self-intoxication—exactly like alcohol. Doctors recommend a glass of red wine every day for good health, sure, but that's not why most people drink. We drink to catch a buzz. We drink to unwind. We drink to follow our natural urge toward pleasure. And yes, a lot of people keep drinking until they are sloppy alcoholics and ruin everything around them. But hey, the shit's legally available on every corner.
Maybe if Rick had chosen pot instead of crack I'd still be talking to him on the phone. I'm pretty sure he'd have drunk himself to death by now if he'd chosen otherwise. That's kind of where he was headed when he stopped crack for a while.
I have this huge young friend who went away to college on an athletic scholarship. He used to smoke pot, but before he left for school he gave it up; there were pee tests in his immediate future, zero tolerance, the whole nine. He likes to have fun, but he's also risen before dawn every morning for the past decade or so to work out. No way was he going to screw it up.
With gusto he joined the team and did what kids do on campuses these days—he drank heavily. It's only natural. It's even expected. People need an outlet, right? Like Rick James said, "It's unhealthy to hold that shit in."
James is right. From movie stars to humming birds, everyone needs to get high, to take the edge off our difficult and busy lives. (And, of course, the college pee tests includes other drugs as well.)So why not hunker down with the fellas and drink a couple of cases. A couple of fifths. It's legal. What's the harm?
One night my young friend drank so much he blacked out on his feet. He fell dead forward like a mighty tree and hit his face on a rock.
Thankfully, there was no important damage, just this big scar on his nose. Yet every time I see him, I can't help but think: Somewhere between prohibition and Rick James, there's got to be a thoughtful middle path.
read this piece on line at kinja/playboy:
http://playboysfw.kinja.com/what-rick...
February 6, 2014
ON FORMING A GROUP OF ONE'S OWN
I was working through my e-mail early Saturday morning when a pair of shadows dancing across the periphery of my desktop monitor interrupted the cacophonous silence of my home office.
Distracted, I swiveled around in my chair and squinted into the rising sun. Through the ingenious translucent window shade I could see the silhouettes of a couple of hummingbirds feeding on the brilliant orange flowers of the giant succulent (Aloe marlothii) that lives beside my office. A quick Google search confirmed my recollection that the species, which I bought for myself a decade ago and never fails to bring to mind the plant in Little Shop of Horrors (Feed me, Seymour!), is native to South Africa, as are many of my favorite strange plants.
Marlothii‘s seasonal inflorescence is a compound panicle, a woody stalk with many branches covered with tiny fluted flowers that draw all manner of insects and bees and colorful birds. When the flowers dry and fall, the remaining skeleton resembles a giant thorny antler harvested from a huge and fanciful beast. Over the years, I’ve exhibited an assortment of these unique specimens as sculptural pieces, planted in crushed rock in a large glass vase in the entryway of my house. With no co-workers anywhere in sight, no water cooler to gather around or morning staff meetings to attend, this is the kind of mission that typically occupies my break times (if not the more humdrum tasks of laundry, errands or foraging for food).
Accustomed as I am to spending the bulk of my time alone, engaged in my solitary craft, I’ve had the unique experience over the last year or so of starting my own business. I guess it happened for a lot of reasons. Some of it had to do with growing up—a desire to wield a modicum of control in an increasingly complex time. Some of it had to with the way work is changing for many of us; rarely can anyone just do one thing anymore.
Let me tell you how it began.
For the first six years of my working life I was a devoted employee of a large and respected newsgathering organization. In professional situations, I was introduced as “Mike Sager from the Washington Post.” It was as if Mike Sager was my given name; from the Washington Postwas my family name. Post-Watergate, pre-internet, my family was great and powerful. I was a loyal and dutiful son. I might have been a little pisher, but I had the kind of business card that could put me in a room with the president of the United States—and it did.
When I left the Post, at age 27, looking to follow my muse, newspapers were still thriving. What I was giving up was something my co-workers and I ruefully called the “golden handcuffs.” I wasn’t just leaving a job. I was leaving a big important job.
And I was leaving home—the place where I’d been plucked from the ranks of copy boys and promoted to reporter, trained by the best, allowed to make my mark, the only place anybody had ever heard of me.
Which never really registered until after I quit, when I went to the stationery shop to order business cards (which is what you had to do in those days).
Mike Sager?
Who the hell was he?
As the years of my freelance experiment progressed, I learned that the independent contractor had to wear a number of hats. Doing the job I loved—writing and reporting—was only part of it. I was also responsible for cold-calling new clients and making professional contacts, drumming up work, navigating the political atmosphere of the various workplaces with which I was tenuously associated by estranged remote. I had to send out invoices, keep track of expenses and deductions, hunt down payments from (comparatively) rich but stingy institutions, deal with lawyers and agents, make projected income tax payments, create and contribute to my own pension and find health insurance.
I was, in other words, the salesman, the factory, the work force, the accounting department, the public relations department and the CEO. Maybe it was the isolation, or maybe it was the influence of my recreational activities, but somewhere along the line I began to think of myself as The Sager Group—the many faces of Mike.
Whenever anything out of my control would happen, I would take it like a man. I would bravely say and do whatever it was I was supposed to say and do—if the Post taught me anything it was an almost-military appreciation of company loyalty and chain of command. I would tell myself I was doing the right thing, the adult thing. And I was. At the very base of things, I’m eternally just a cog in the wheel—one has to honor that reality in any field. Ultimately, at the top of my list of things to do is to make a living. Over time, there would be others to support as well, people who would depend upon me and my 10 fingers for housing, food and general upkeep.
Yet, even as I was doing all this heroic bucking up, I would also take a moment to acknowledge a smaller universe. The one in which I was trying my hardest and doing my best. The one in which I was eternally the sun.
I’d tell myself: “He might be So and So, but I’m the president of The Sager Group.”
I was an overweight and unexceptional child who couldn’t spell or seem to memorize multiplication tables. (I was the only student sent from the “smart class” to the “dumb class” for math). I also got bad grades in in conduct. I remember spending much of third grade with my Formica and metal desk pushed up against the teacher’s stolid wooden island at the front of the room, her idea of making me behave, I suppose.
While my upbringing at home wasn’t without the usual catalog of family neurosis, my parents and sister loved the shit out of me and treated me like I was the greatest. When something went wrong for me, my mother—who grew up Jewish in the not-so-tolerant American South during the eventful years of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust—used to bolster my confidence and mend my social wounds by telling me: “Nobody’s better than you.”
What she meant, I’m positive, was “You’re as good as anybody else. You are equal. You have the same possibilities in your life as all others, don’t let anyone tell you differently.”
In testament to the importance of semantics and repetition when it comes to marketing, mind control and other forms of propaganda, however, I think what I ended up getting from my mom was a slightly different message—the actual words I heard over and over again: Nobody’s better than you.
So I’m eternally stuck in this weird place. I feel entitled by dint of what my mommy always told me.
And yet, at the same time, I know that nobody else on the planet particularly feels the same way.
One evening about two years ago, I sat down at my office desk with a sharpie and a sheet of printer paper and, like some kind of daydreaming teenager in his bedroom, drew a sketch for a logo for The Sager Group.
Twenty-eight years or so since conception, it took only a few seconds to poorly render the same silhouette I see almost every morning projected against my computer monitor by the rays of the rising sun—my own bald head. Then I scribbled these goals: Produce great stuff. Work with people you love and admire. Harness the means of production. Help others enable themselves.
Since then, The Sager Group LLC has published 11 books (six more in the works), produced two rap concerts at the House of Blues, several music videos and three short films. A partial roster of participants in my little venture include: A pair of Romanian programmers (one in Transylvania whose surname is Vlad), the writer/producer from Seinfeld who coined “yada yada,” a documentary filmmaker who learned his trade shooting porn, a former student who grew up to be a lawyer/entrepreneur, a master proofreader who assisted Woodward and Bernstein with their Watergate stories at the Post, my best friend from fourth grade (he formalized the logo), an ex-running back for the Baltimore Ravens, a PhD from a Jesuit college who shape-shifts into a writer of young adult, romance and vampire novels, a man once known in the media as the “Teen Tycoon” and a former Navy Seal and his brainy Taiwanese wife who keep my technology running.
I haven’t broken even yet—and there’s no way I’m giving up my day job—but I’ve had a lot of fun, learned a shit-ton, met some cool people, collaborated with adored and respected friends and even made some worthy entertainment. The Sager Group does the stuff I want to do, but the product doesn’t matter. It’s the idea we’re talking about here—the same principals could easily be applied to making furniture or apps or building houses or starting an investment bank or a hair salon. It’s all about breaking off a small piece and making it happen. So I still might be in the red, but it’s not that bad. I’m positive I would have spent more had I taken up golf.
Instead, I’ve created my own little universe.
Distracted, I swiveled around in my chair and squinted into the rising sun. Through the ingenious translucent window shade I could see the silhouettes of a couple of hummingbirds feeding on the brilliant orange flowers of the giant succulent (Aloe marlothii) that lives beside my office. A quick Google search confirmed my recollection that the species, which I bought for myself a decade ago and never fails to bring to mind the plant in Little Shop of Horrors (Feed me, Seymour!), is native to South Africa, as are many of my favorite strange plants.
Marlothii‘s seasonal inflorescence is a compound panicle, a woody stalk with many branches covered with tiny fluted flowers that draw all manner of insects and bees and colorful birds. When the flowers dry and fall, the remaining skeleton resembles a giant thorny antler harvested from a huge and fanciful beast. Over the years, I’ve exhibited an assortment of these unique specimens as sculptural pieces, planted in crushed rock in a large glass vase in the entryway of my house. With no co-workers anywhere in sight, no water cooler to gather around or morning staff meetings to attend, this is the kind of mission that typically occupies my break times (if not the more humdrum tasks of laundry, errands or foraging for food).
Accustomed as I am to spending the bulk of my time alone, engaged in my solitary craft, I’ve had the unique experience over the last year or so of starting my own business. I guess it happened for a lot of reasons. Some of it had to do with growing up—a desire to wield a modicum of control in an increasingly complex time. Some of it had to with the way work is changing for many of us; rarely can anyone just do one thing anymore.
Let me tell you how it began.
For the first six years of my working life I was a devoted employee of a large and respected newsgathering organization. In professional situations, I was introduced as “Mike Sager from the Washington Post.” It was as if Mike Sager was my given name; from the Washington Postwas my family name. Post-Watergate, pre-internet, my family was great and powerful. I was a loyal and dutiful son. I might have been a little pisher, but I had the kind of business card that could put me in a room with the president of the United States—and it did.
When I left the Post, at age 27, looking to follow my muse, newspapers were still thriving. What I was giving up was something my co-workers and I ruefully called the “golden handcuffs.” I wasn’t just leaving a job. I was leaving a big important job.
And I was leaving home—the place where I’d been plucked from the ranks of copy boys and promoted to reporter, trained by the best, allowed to make my mark, the only place anybody had ever heard of me.
Which never really registered until after I quit, when I went to the stationery shop to order business cards (which is what you had to do in those days).
Mike Sager?
Who the hell was he?
As the years of my freelance experiment progressed, I learned that the independent contractor had to wear a number of hats. Doing the job I loved—writing and reporting—was only part of it. I was also responsible for cold-calling new clients and making professional contacts, drumming up work, navigating the political atmosphere of the various workplaces with which I was tenuously associated by estranged remote. I had to send out invoices, keep track of expenses and deductions, hunt down payments from (comparatively) rich but stingy institutions, deal with lawyers and agents, make projected income tax payments, create and contribute to my own pension and find health insurance.
I was, in other words, the salesman, the factory, the work force, the accounting department, the public relations department and the CEO. Maybe it was the isolation, or maybe it was the influence of my recreational activities, but somewhere along the line I began to think of myself as The Sager Group—the many faces of Mike.
Whenever anything out of my control would happen, I would take it like a man. I would bravely say and do whatever it was I was supposed to say and do—if the Post taught me anything it was an almost-military appreciation of company loyalty and chain of command. I would tell myself I was doing the right thing, the adult thing. And I was. At the very base of things, I’m eternally just a cog in the wheel—one has to honor that reality in any field. Ultimately, at the top of my list of things to do is to make a living. Over time, there would be others to support as well, people who would depend upon me and my 10 fingers for housing, food and general upkeep.
Yet, even as I was doing all this heroic bucking up, I would also take a moment to acknowledge a smaller universe. The one in which I was trying my hardest and doing my best. The one in which I was eternally the sun.
I’d tell myself: “He might be So and So, but I’m the president of The Sager Group.”
I was an overweight and unexceptional child who couldn’t spell or seem to memorize multiplication tables. (I was the only student sent from the “smart class” to the “dumb class” for math). I also got bad grades in in conduct. I remember spending much of third grade with my Formica and metal desk pushed up against the teacher’s stolid wooden island at the front of the room, her idea of making me behave, I suppose.
While my upbringing at home wasn’t without the usual catalog of family neurosis, my parents and sister loved the shit out of me and treated me like I was the greatest. When something went wrong for me, my mother—who grew up Jewish in the not-so-tolerant American South during the eventful years of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust—used to bolster my confidence and mend my social wounds by telling me: “Nobody’s better than you.”
What she meant, I’m positive, was “You’re as good as anybody else. You are equal. You have the same possibilities in your life as all others, don’t let anyone tell you differently.”
In testament to the importance of semantics and repetition when it comes to marketing, mind control and other forms of propaganda, however, I think what I ended up getting from my mom was a slightly different message—the actual words I heard over and over again: Nobody’s better than you.
So I’m eternally stuck in this weird place. I feel entitled by dint of what my mommy always told me.
And yet, at the same time, I know that nobody else on the planet particularly feels the same way.
One evening about two years ago, I sat down at my office desk with a sharpie and a sheet of printer paper and, like some kind of daydreaming teenager in his bedroom, drew a sketch for a logo for The Sager Group.
Twenty-eight years or so since conception, it took only a few seconds to poorly render the same silhouette I see almost every morning projected against my computer monitor by the rays of the rising sun—my own bald head. Then I scribbled these goals: Produce great stuff. Work with people you love and admire. Harness the means of production. Help others enable themselves.
Since then, The Sager Group LLC has published 11 books (six more in the works), produced two rap concerts at the House of Blues, several music videos and three short films. A partial roster of participants in my little venture include: A pair of Romanian programmers (one in Transylvania whose surname is Vlad), the writer/producer from Seinfeld who coined “yada yada,” a documentary filmmaker who learned his trade shooting porn, a former student who grew up to be a lawyer/entrepreneur, a master proofreader who assisted Woodward and Bernstein with their Watergate stories at the Post, my best friend from fourth grade (he formalized the logo), an ex-running back for the Baltimore Ravens, a PhD from a Jesuit college who shape-shifts into a writer of young adult, romance and vampire novels, a man once known in the media as the “Teen Tycoon” and a former Navy Seal and his brainy Taiwanese wife who keep my technology running.
I haven’t broken even yet—and there’s no way I’m giving up my day job—but I’ve had a lot of fun, learned a shit-ton, met some cool people, collaborated with adored and respected friends and even made some worthy entertainment. The Sager Group does the stuff I want to do, but the product doesn’t matter. It’s the idea we’re talking about here—the same principals could easily be applied to making furniture or apps or building houses or starting an investment bank or a hair salon. It’s all about breaking off a small piece and making it happen. So I still might be in the red, but it’s not that bad. I’m positive I would have spent more had I taken up golf.
Instead, I’ve created my own little universe.
January 12, 2014
THE MANLY VIRTUES OF DOWNTOWN ABBEY
I was raised in the early '70s in the suburbs of Baltimore County, Maryland—a yellow school bus, a brick rancher, a ten-speed, and a bag of weed.
And yet, Downton Abbey feels to me a little like home.
See, my dad was from a small Virginia town important for its connections to the Civil War. He attended a military academy and a historic southern college; he served as a reservist in the Marines. He dressed impeccably, shaved on Sundays, walked ramrod straight, like a cadet on review. He opened doors, lit cigarettes, helped women with their coats, pulled out chairs. He loved rules. He excelled at following them. I think it helped make him feel as if he had a modicum of control in a messy, unpredictable world.
My mom was from a different tiny town nearby; think of her as the daughter of Driving Miss Daisy. As a boy, I was tutored in her gospel of manners, what was proper and not. The RSVP, the thank-you note. Which fork and knife and glass, what to do and say on which occasion, the proper way to address others. Crass people who didn't know this kind of stuff were roundly ridiculed (in public in a hissing whisper that was audible and mortifying).
You can say Downton is a horror show, a depiction of a regressive time before multiculturalism and political correctness (and even human rights), when everyone was expected to know their place and their role. There was no question about manners and behavior: Everything was codified—how you should dress, eat, toilet, marry, and spend every moment of your day. All you had to do was march along.
A most alarming thought.
Or … a comforting one.
We live in a time of nearly unlimited choice. What plan and provider? What brand and what warranty? What course of action? So much research to do. So much keeping up. So much deciding. So much freedom—it's like having a second job.
Now imagine having a user's manual … for life.
Back in the Downton days, one was born into a code of answers. There was no messy need to figure out what the heck you were supposed to be doing on this planet. (Combined with a strong belief in religion and lots of family money, you could basically live on autopilot, spending your days blissfully changing outfits and eating meals.)
In certain respects, my parents' need for rules, conventions, and predictability has been the wind in my sails, sending me off toward nonconventional choices, which seem more appropriate in today's polycultural world. Through it all, however, I have remained my parents' son. I open doors. I send thank-you notes. I try to do the socially polite thing. If I don't actually know my place, at least I know my place among others. A guy can be a rogue operator and still be a gentleman.
But tell me, if you could engineer a life on paper and you were the engineer, would you not try to live something like the good lords and ladies of Downton Abbey?
Imagine having a little bell to ring for service.
Any time.
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And yet, Downton Abbey feels to me a little like home.
See, my dad was from a small Virginia town important for its connections to the Civil War. He attended a military academy and a historic southern college; he served as a reservist in the Marines. He dressed impeccably, shaved on Sundays, walked ramrod straight, like a cadet on review. He opened doors, lit cigarettes, helped women with their coats, pulled out chairs. He loved rules. He excelled at following them. I think it helped make him feel as if he had a modicum of control in a messy, unpredictable world.
My mom was from a different tiny town nearby; think of her as the daughter of Driving Miss Daisy. As a boy, I was tutored in her gospel of manners, what was proper and not. The RSVP, the thank-you note. Which fork and knife and glass, what to do and say on which occasion, the proper way to address others. Crass people who didn't know this kind of stuff were roundly ridiculed (in public in a hissing whisper that was audible and mortifying).
You can say Downton is a horror show, a depiction of a regressive time before multiculturalism and political correctness (and even human rights), when everyone was expected to know their place and their role. There was no question about manners and behavior: Everything was codified—how you should dress, eat, toilet, marry, and spend every moment of your day. All you had to do was march along.
A most alarming thought.
Or … a comforting one.
We live in a time of nearly unlimited choice. What plan and provider? What brand and what warranty? What course of action? So much research to do. So much keeping up. So much deciding. So much freedom—it's like having a second job.
Now imagine having a user's manual … for life.
Back in the Downton days, one was born into a code of answers. There was no messy need to figure out what the heck you were supposed to be doing on this planet. (Combined with a strong belief in religion and lots of family money, you could basically live on autopilot, spending your days blissfully changing outfits and eating meals.)
In certain respects, my parents' need for rules, conventions, and predictability has been the wind in my sails, sending me off toward nonconventional choices, which seem more appropriate in today's polycultural world. Through it all, however, I have remained my parents' son. I open doors. I send thank-you notes. I try to do the socially polite thing. If I don't actually know my place, at least I know my place among others. A guy can be a rogue operator and still be a gentleman.
But tell me, if you could engineer a life on paper and you were the engineer, would you not try to live something like the good lords and ladies of Downton Abbey?
Imagine having a little bell to ring for service.
Any time.
READ THE STORY ON THE WEB: ,A HREF="http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/... link text>
Read more: The Manly Virtues of Downton Abbey - Esquire
Follow us: @Esquiremag on Twitter | Esquire on Facebook
Visit us at Esquire.com
January 3, 2014
HIGH TOLERANCE IS SOMETHING YOU DEVELOP OVER TIME
Thirty Rules of Tolerance gleaned from my new novel, HIGH TOLERANCE, as seen on Esquire.com
The fullness of one’s schedule is not always the best indicator of the fullness of one’s life.
When you tell the truth consistently it’s easier to remember what you said.
The other human beings in our personal dramedies never perform exactly the way we might expect or fantasize, and neither do we.
A ticket to the writing game is a box seat in a stadium of self doubt.
With homeownership comes people with leaf blowers.
You gotta keep your pimp hand strong to survive.
Theory of Originals: Strive to be number one in a class of one. Don’t compete; form your own line.
If you’re not your own best editor, someone else will come along with a dull blade.
Leftovers never taste the same.
In Hollywood, if you aren’t going to be the richest or most famous or most powerful person in the room, it pays to be a little Zelig-like—not so strongly one thing or another, a version of yourself that reflects the prevailing sentiments held by the richest or most famous or most powerful person in the room.
When you reach high, you can fall hard. The great ones learn how to bounce.
Success is like standing in a field watching a sunset—it’s the most beautiful time of day, but it’s also the time of day when all the bugs come out.
Sometimes you have to tell a woman what she wants. Sometimes they hate it when you do that.
Why must some Mexican citizens be smuggled across the desert into America by coyotes when others can just drive across the border to shop in La Jolla?
Heartbreak is the opposite of love, just as decay is the opposite of life. With one you always have the other.
Shit ain’t fair or unfair. It just is.
Hard work, well enjoyed, builds a man, makes life, day by day.
What did people do before they spent all their time on their personal communications devices?
Always have something to fall back on besides your keister.
Like it or not, life’s best course is usually adaptation.
When peoples’ stories don’t add up, when it doesn’t seem plausible something happened a certain way… chances are it didn’t.
Just Kidding: Universally the most insincere phrase uttered in polite company, usually meaning the exact opposite—I’m not kidding at all.
You can’t grow inside a box.
You feel better one day at a time. Except on the days you don’t.
Go the extra twenty-five feet.
You can’t know things before you know them.
Luck comes more quickly when you’re doing instead of waiting. At the very least, it makes the time go faster.
A great ass is the best revenge.
The hard part is making it look easy.
Sooner or later, shit will splat in your face. Some might get in your mouth. You may not deserve it but there it is. It’s how you cope that takes your measure.
The above was gleaned from Mike Sager’s new novel, High Tolerance, available now on Amazon.
The fullness of one’s schedule is not always the best indicator of the fullness of one’s life.
When you tell the truth consistently it’s easier to remember what you said.
The other human beings in our personal dramedies never perform exactly the way we might expect or fantasize, and neither do we.
A ticket to the writing game is a box seat in a stadium of self doubt.
With homeownership comes people with leaf blowers.
You gotta keep your pimp hand strong to survive.
Theory of Originals: Strive to be number one in a class of one. Don’t compete; form your own line.
If you’re not your own best editor, someone else will come along with a dull blade.
Leftovers never taste the same.
In Hollywood, if you aren’t going to be the richest or most famous or most powerful person in the room, it pays to be a little Zelig-like—not so strongly one thing or another, a version of yourself that reflects the prevailing sentiments held by the richest or most famous or most powerful person in the room.
When you reach high, you can fall hard. The great ones learn how to bounce.
Success is like standing in a field watching a sunset—it’s the most beautiful time of day, but it’s also the time of day when all the bugs come out.
Sometimes you have to tell a woman what she wants. Sometimes they hate it when you do that.
Why must some Mexican citizens be smuggled across the desert into America by coyotes when others can just drive across the border to shop in La Jolla?
Heartbreak is the opposite of love, just as decay is the opposite of life. With one you always have the other.
Shit ain’t fair or unfair. It just is.
Hard work, well enjoyed, builds a man, makes life, day by day.
What did people do before they spent all their time on their personal communications devices?
Always have something to fall back on besides your keister.
Like it or not, life’s best course is usually adaptation.
When peoples’ stories don’t add up, when it doesn’t seem plausible something happened a certain way… chances are it didn’t.
Just Kidding: Universally the most insincere phrase uttered in polite company, usually meaning the exact opposite—I’m not kidding at all.
You can’t grow inside a box.
You feel better one day at a time. Except on the days you don’t.
Go the extra twenty-five feet.
You can’t know things before you know them.
Luck comes more quickly when you’re doing instead of waiting. At the very least, it makes the time go faster.
A great ass is the best revenge.
The hard part is making it look easy.
Sooner or later, shit will splat in your face. Some might get in your mouth. You may not deserve it but there it is. It’s how you cope that takes your measure.
The above was gleaned from Mike Sager’s new novel, High Tolerance, available now on Amazon.
November 15, 2013
GO ASK SAGER: WHEN YOUR CAREER PATH REACHES A FORK IN THE ROAD
Three weeks into my law school career, I was sitting on the hood of my car in the large parking lot behind my new home, a high-rise apartment building in Arlington, Virginia. It was a hot afternoon, the Friday before Labor Day weekend. Heat eddied off the asphalt; the humid cacophony of insect sounds was in full effect across suburbia. Every so often, a commercial jet would lumber past overhead, so low it seemed you could almost reach out and touch it… or shoot it down with a rifle. I had unknowingly rented along a major approach to National Airport, which is now called Ronald Reagan National Airport, a fact that continues to leave me aghast. I was 21 years old; somehow I’d been accepted into one of the top law schools in the country. Three more years of hitting the books and my future as a hotshot legal eagle seemed pretty much assured.
There was only one problem: I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a writer.
Only I had no idea how I was supposed to make that happen. All I had to show for myself was a major in history, a column in the student newspaper and one semester working as an intern for an alt-weekly called Creative Loafing.
Having a profession to fall back on seemed like a logical plan. The play: Go to law school; get an important high-paying job; branch out into writing. Surely it would be one way to distinguish myself from the hordes of other people who wanted to be writers.
Of course, this entailed actually having to show up at law school for three straight years. Early on, it became clear it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. My classmates were serious. Some of them even wore ties. The first social event we attended was dedicated to the purpose of forming study groups, which turned out to be a good thing, because every time I cracked the books at home alone I’d become extremely drowsy and want to take a nap. I still remember our first lesson in contracts. “The Case of the Hairy Hand” (a.k.a. Hawkins v. McGee), was adjudicated in 1929 but was still being trotted out to create the impression that contract law could be interesting. If a monstrous hairy hand couldn’t keep me awake, I didn’t know what could. Three more years of this?
I’ve never been good at doing things I don’t love, but I didn’t know this yet. I’d chosen law school not because I liked it or wanted to do it—I’d clerked as an intern for a lawyer my junior year of college and loathed almost every minute—but because it seemed the mature course of action. I was now an adult, and that’s what adults did, right? Make a plan and stick with it no matter what. Who was I to argue with the wisdom of the generations that came before me? Or with the wisdom of my parents, who were footing the bills. It’s not like my graduating class had reinvented the wheel. I was smart enough to know I was still a little pisher.
So there I was, sitting on the hood of my car in the parking lot, a young man with a bright future as a high-powered lawyer, facing a Labor Day weekend full of study.
I began to sob.
“What’s wrong?”
I looked up to find my girlfriend’s twin sister, a hot little blonde in a halter top.
I don’t think either of them would mind if I said here that their last name was Ries, and they’d been known in high school as the Ries Pieces, after the candy. Twin sis had driven to town to stay with us for the weekend. (You can see why I might have thought I had things figured out, right?)
We’d known each other for six or seven years at this point. I explained my crisis of conscience, that what I really wanted to do was write. I told her about the day the light had gone on. I’d been leaving my frat house on the way to take the law boards for the first time when the phrase spoke itself to me: “I just want to see how far I can go.”
Twin sis looked at me as if I were nuts.
“If you don’t like law school, why don’t you just quit?”
Until that moment, I’d never even considered the option.
Thirty-some years later, I am sitting at a beautifully handcrafted wooden bar listening to a serious young woman wearing a Mohawk, a men’s white dress shirt and a complex multifaceted nose piercing spew adjectives relating to a long list of small-batch rye whiskeys offered by the establishment. We are on the pier near San Francisco’s Embarcadero. As her mouth forms the words, I become convinced that someone, somewhere, is staying up late at night assigning endless lists of wonderful-seeming adjectives to every food and taste in the known universe and disseminating them to the masses of waitstaff who service the world’s overstuffed foodies.
On the stool to my left sits a younger friend. It’s been some time since I’ve seen him in person. He’s put on a few years and grown himself one of those mountain-man beards; his jeans are cuffed, exposing lace-up boots. Although he looks as if he’s just lumbered down from a survivalist encampment in the hills of Marin County, he’s a supertalented digital type. His company is onto something. He’s a vital part. The money’s not there yet, and he’s packing in the hours, and it will be another year or two before anything gets launched—but if you’re looking into a certain kind of rose-colored crystal ball, there’s a real chance their baby has a bright future.
Or it could die.
Or someone else could do it sooner and better. (Whatever the hell it is. It’s top secret.)
Or… a zillion other scenarios could go down.
“The thing is,” he’s saying, “there’s this headhunter from New York. He says he can get me a ton of money. And he says I’m a wuss if I don’t take it.”
“Did you punch him out?”
My friend laughs. “He didn’t exactly use that wording.”
“But you did eat ramen noodles for dinner more than once last month, did you not?”
He raises his hands in surrender. He looks thin. This fancy place is his choice, but I’m buying. Since college, he’s been living in a group house in a marginal neighborhood. He’s got outstanding student loans. He’s got older, working-class parents. Dreams and responsibilities—it’s a tough tag team to face. If one of them doesn’t kick his ass, the other is fully capable.
We talk a little about making life’s choices, and how some courses of action are, like driving directions, easily Google-mapped: You feed the coordinates, you follow the well-marked path, you take the well-marked exits, and you pretty much know what to expect. A profession to fall back on. It’s the mature and logical choice.
In other cases, the choices are more uncertain. It’s a bitch, but that’s just how it is. And chances are you have only yourself to blame, because you, too, are only good at doing what you love. It’s like one minute you’re driving along the highway, and the next you’re yanking the wheel hard right and plowing through the guardrail, destination unknown. Because you want to be the best you can be, and this is what feels most right, and anything is worth that feeling—or at least nothing is worth not being able to feel it.
I tell him about that day so many years ago in the parking lot in Arlington.
I just want to see how far I can go.
I’m still going.
Mike Sager‘s new novel, High Tolerance, A Novel of Sex, Race, Celebrity, Murder…and Marijuana is available now on Amazon.
This article was originally published on Playboy for iPhone. For more exclusive content and the best articles from the latest issue of Playboy, download the app in the iTunes Store.
There was only one problem: I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a writer.
Only I had no idea how I was supposed to make that happen. All I had to show for myself was a major in history, a column in the student newspaper and one semester working as an intern for an alt-weekly called Creative Loafing.
Having a profession to fall back on seemed like a logical plan. The play: Go to law school; get an important high-paying job; branch out into writing. Surely it would be one way to distinguish myself from the hordes of other people who wanted to be writers.
Of course, this entailed actually having to show up at law school for three straight years. Early on, it became clear it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. My classmates were serious. Some of them even wore ties. The first social event we attended was dedicated to the purpose of forming study groups, which turned out to be a good thing, because every time I cracked the books at home alone I’d become extremely drowsy and want to take a nap. I still remember our first lesson in contracts. “The Case of the Hairy Hand” (a.k.a. Hawkins v. McGee), was adjudicated in 1929 but was still being trotted out to create the impression that contract law could be interesting. If a monstrous hairy hand couldn’t keep me awake, I didn’t know what could. Three more years of this?
I’ve never been good at doing things I don’t love, but I didn’t know this yet. I’d chosen law school not because I liked it or wanted to do it—I’d clerked as an intern for a lawyer my junior year of college and loathed almost every minute—but because it seemed the mature course of action. I was now an adult, and that’s what adults did, right? Make a plan and stick with it no matter what. Who was I to argue with the wisdom of the generations that came before me? Or with the wisdom of my parents, who were footing the bills. It’s not like my graduating class had reinvented the wheel. I was smart enough to know I was still a little pisher.
So there I was, sitting on the hood of my car in the parking lot, a young man with a bright future as a high-powered lawyer, facing a Labor Day weekend full of study.
I began to sob.
“What’s wrong?”
I looked up to find my girlfriend’s twin sister, a hot little blonde in a halter top.
I don’t think either of them would mind if I said here that their last name was Ries, and they’d been known in high school as the Ries Pieces, after the candy. Twin sis had driven to town to stay with us for the weekend. (You can see why I might have thought I had things figured out, right?)
We’d known each other for six or seven years at this point. I explained my crisis of conscience, that what I really wanted to do was write. I told her about the day the light had gone on. I’d been leaving my frat house on the way to take the law boards for the first time when the phrase spoke itself to me: “I just want to see how far I can go.”
Twin sis looked at me as if I were nuts.
“If you don’t like law school, why don’t you just quit?”
Until that moment, I’d never even considered the option.
Thirty-some years later, I am sitting at a beautifully handcrafted wooden bar listening to a serious young woman wearing a Mohawk, a men’s white dress shirt and a complex multifaceted nose piercing spew adjectives relating to a long list of small-batch rye whiskeys offered by the establishment. We are on the pier near San Francisco’s Embarcadero. As her mouth forms the words, I become convinced that someone, somewhere, is staying up late at night assigning endless lists of wonderful-seeming adjectives to every food and taste in the known universe and disseminating them to the masses of waitstaff who service the world’s overstuffed foodies.
On the stool to my left sits a younger friend. It’s been some time since I’ve seen him in person. He’s put on a few years and grown himself one of those mountain-man beards; his jeans are cuffed, exposing lace-up boots. Although he looks as if he’s just lumbered down from a survivalist encampment in the hills of Marin County, he’s a supertalented digital type. His company is onto something. He’s a vital part. The money’s not there yet, and he’s packing in the hours, and it will be another year or two before anything gets launched—but if you’re looking into a certain kind of rose-colored crystal ball, there’s a real chance their baby has a bright future.
Or it could die.
Or someone else could do it sooner and better. (Whatever the hell it is. It’s top secret.)
Or… a zillion other scenarios could go down.
“The thing is,” he’s saying, “there’s this headhunter from New York. He says he can get me a ton of money. And he says I’m a wuss if I don’t take it.”
“Did you punch him out?”
My friend laughs. “He didn’t exactly use that wording.”
“But you did eat ramen noodles for dinner more than once last month, did you not?”
He raises his hands in surrender. He looks thin. This fancy place is his choice, but I’m buying. Since college, he’s been living in a group house in a marginal neighborhood. He’s got outstanding student loans. He’s got older, working-class parents. Dreams and responsibilities—it’s a tough tag team to face. If one of them doesn’t kick his ass, the other is fully capable.
We talk a little about making life’s choices, and how some courses of action are, like driving directions, easily Google-mapped: You feed the coordinates, you follow the well-marked path, you take the well-marked exits, and you pretty much know what to expect. A profession to fall back on. It’s the mature and logical choice.
In other cases, the choices are more uncertain. It’s a bitch, but that’s just how it is. And chances are you have only yourself to blame, because you, too, are only good at doing what you love. It’s like one minute you’re driving along the highway, and the next you’re yanking the wheel hard right and plowing through the guardrail, destination unknown. Because you want to be the best you can be, and this is what feels most right, and anything is worth that feeling—or at least nothing is worth not being able to feel it.
I tell him about that day so many years ago in the parking lot in Arlington.
I just want to see how far I can go.
I’m still going.
Mike Sager‘s new novel, High Tolerance, A Novel of Sex, Race, Celebrity, Murder…and Marijuana is available now on Amazon.
This article was originally published on Playboy for iPhone. For more exclusive content and the best articles from the latest issue of Playboy, download the app in the iTunes Store.
October 27, 2013
GO ASK SAGER: “The Talk” Is Always Ongoing—No Matter Your Age or Circumstances
Thirty-one stories over Las Vegas, I’m in the Will Smith Suite at Planet Hollywood, my iPhone pressed against a panoramic window. To the west the sun is setting over craggy red mountains; snow is evident on a farther range. Down on the Strip the lights have begun to twinkle; the fountains across the boulevard at the Bellagio erupt resplendently every 30 minutes, after which I crave a cigarette. Classic rock thumps percussively from hidden speakers, mixing in the overly conditioned air with the permeating nicotine haze and the cloying scent of industrial room freshener. I feel kind of light-headed and nauseous, a little bit out of sorts. No wonder everything that happens here stays here. As soon as you roll past the landmark “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign, it’s as if you’re infected with a weird sort of neurological malaria. Look around: Everyone is glistening.
My phone is set to a horizontal format. The foreground is framed by the faux Eiffel Tower on one side and on the other by the colorful faux Montgolfier hot-air balloon that stands guard at the entrance to Paris. (To include the skyline, I exclude the faux Arc de Triomphe.) In the middle distance are the colossal white towers of Caesars Palace, one of the grandes dames of the Strip, refreshed and reinvented over the years, cosmetically enhanced, like so many who come here, hoping to experience the fabulous and expensive things they’ll likely want to forget… or to remember forever… or to post on Facebook or, possibly, YouPorn. In Vegas, everyone’s a star in their own movie.
The sidewalks below are already crowded. Cleavage and high heels; fluted, foot-long drinks with straws; the scents of perfume, hair gel and pheromones mixing in the neon dusk. Trampled underfoot is a carpet of paper handbills for escort services, handed out every few feet by socially marginal minimum wagers. On this visit I have noticed a new phenomenon: An inordinate number of women traveling together in groups. A hungry, yet overfed, gleam in their eyes, they seem intent on taking back the night—Bridesmaids meets The Hangover meets Thelma and Louise. Everyone is looking hot hot hot, dressed as if they’re hoping at some point to undress in a hurry.
The first time I came to Vegas, I stayed in an RV campground behind Circus Circus in my cat-shit green VW pop-top van. This was just after college graduation; I was driving across the country with my girlfriend, a hot little blonde I’d managed to keep since high school. The camping facility was entirely asphalt; the VW’s air conditioner didn’t work while parked. I remember vividly waking up at four in the morning. The temperature outside was 104 degrees. I felt like a turnover in the oven. Whatever else happened to me in Vegas stayed there. I don’t think we stuck around long; I was in a hurry to get back because I was scheduled to start my first year of law school. I remember putting a quarter in a slot machine, losing and feeling unmoved. It was the last time I ever gambled. Nothing wild happened. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get laid. It was too fucking hot.
Thereafter, up until now every time I’ve come to Vegas I’ve been a father and married man. Because I travel for work, I’ve never been on a boys’ trip. I’ve never hired a hooker here, though I know guys who do so regularly. In fact, all but three of the previous times I’ve come here have been for work; the rest were with my wife and kid—we never got the babysitting thing figured out when it came to vacations. But I’ve hung out with some cool people here. Kobe Bryant and the U.S. Olympic basketball team. UFC impresario Dana White. And Oscar Goodman, the former mob lawyer turned beloved mayor. His term limit expired. Now his wife is mayor. I flew here once to interview another guy named Mike Sager. Oh, and I spent the longest two weeks of my life here, doing daily interviews with Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil so I could write his autobiography.
I can honestly say I’ve never done one thing in Vegas that had to stay in Vegas. (Most of it was for media—I revealed it to millions.)
But now I’m divorced, and my kid’s a freshman in college. My nest is empty, as you might know. I’m in Vegas in a suite, but I’m not working.
I take my snapshot of the fountain. I text it to my son. I let him know I’m here and that I’m meeting up later with my comedian friend, Warren Durso, for his show at the Plaza Hotel.
***
I can’t remember ever having “the talk” with my father.
Then again, Dr. Marvin Sager was an ob-gyn. There were “family planning” books to be found all over the house—if you figured out where to look. When I was in middle school, in the late 1960s, my dad was a member of the Board of Religious School Commissioners at my temple. His first assignment in this liberal era: Bring sex ed to Sunday school.
And so it was that my dad was standing in front of the room, drawing diagrams and showing films, teaching us our Xs and Ys. He had this goofy little adage: At our age, the best birth control was boys keeping their hands in their pockets and girls keeping their legs crossed. My dad was a warm guy, a good teacher. It was the only class in Hebrew school I was ever good at. (I went three days a week for many years.) In fact, I was darn enthusiastic about the topic—one of the few academic courses that had ever seemed truly relevant.
When it came time to have The Talk with my own son, child of the internet age that he is, it felt as though I was playing a scene from a sitcom. There was an assembly scheduled for the fifth graders. Parents were encouraged to introduce the coming attraction. But the fact was, he’d been reading my Playboys and surfing the web without supervision for years. He knew what was up and kept trying to avoid sitting down with me.
When we finally did get around to broaching the subject, the theme that emerged organically was this—The Talk will always be ongoing.
And so it has been.
***
Three years ago, my wife left me. For a long time afterward, I wasn’t much interested in a social life; or if I was, I didn’t know where to begin.
Being somewhat advanced into his teens at the time of the breakup, my son eventually conspired to live primarily with me. Things being what they were, I was overjoyed to be able to devote myself to him. If I did date, it was never within his sight or on his time. If ever I went out, I was usually home and fast asleep long before he was. Though I have many fond memories of putting my little boy to bed, there is nothing so vivid as the memory of my big boy coming home late at night and kissing me goodnight.
“You’re always home,” he once teased, implying that I had no social life.
“And you like it that way,” I teased back.
Mr. Grown-up nodded yes, unabashedly, a rare show of teen openness.
Nowadays, with him away at college, we communicate mostly by text. I feel at once close and far away. I kind of know what he’s doing. And I kind of don’t. I wonder what my own parents must have been up to when I went away to college. I called home every Sunday from a pay phone and talked about myself, I’m sure. Somehow we all managed to survive.
***
The sky outside the panoramic window darkens. I take a swig of my rye and lemon iced tea on the rocks, something I invented this summer. A mannequin dressed in a hooded tracksuit, once worn by Will Smith in a movie, glows headless in a glass case behind me. From the direction of the bedroom, I hear the squeal of a metal faucet, the splashing sound of cascading water.
And then the wall, the part just beyond the glass case holding Will Smith’s tracksuit, begins to slide slowly sideways, revealing…
A large Grecian tub!
“Come on in, the water’s great,” my female friend calls out enticingly.
Down below I can see all the little people, swarming expectantly like ants. Everyone is looking hot hot hot. The fever of Las Vegas is upon them.
My iPhone dings.
“COOL VIEW,” my son texts, referring to my iPhoto.
“GOING OUT TO DINNER SOON,” I text back.
“TELL DURSO HI,” he responds.
I switch keyboards to emoticons, choose a fist and a kiss.
I press send.
And then I undress in a hurry.
See the piece on Kinja: http://playboysfw.kinja.com/the-talk-...
My phone is set to a horizontal format. The foreground is framed by the faux Eiffel Tower on one side and on the other by the colorful faux Montgolfier hot-air balloon that stands guard at the entrance to Paris. (To include the skyline, I exclude the faux Arc de Triomphe.) In the middle distance are the colossal white towers of Caesars Palace, one of the grandes dames of the Strip, refreshed and reinvented over the years, cosmetically enhanced, like so many who come here, hoping to experience the fabulous and expensive things they’ll likely want to forget… or to remember forever… or to post on Facebook or, possibly, YouPorn. In Vegas, everyone’s a star in their own movie.
The sidewalks below are already crowded. Cleavage and high heels; fluted, foot-long drinks with straws; the scents of perfume, hair gel and pheromones mixing in the neon dusk. Trampled underfoot is a carpet of paper handbills for escort services, handed out every few feet by socially marginal minimum wagers. On this visit I have noticed a new phenomenon: An inordinate number of women traveling together in groups. A hungry, yet overfed, gleam in their eyes, they seem intent on taking back the night—Bridesmaids meets The Hangover meets Thelma and Louise. Everyone is looking hot hot hot, dressed as if they’re hoping at some point to undress in a hurry.
The first time I came to Vegas, I stayed in an RV campground behind Circus Circus in my cat-shit green VW pop-top van. This was just after college graduation; I was driving across the country with my girlfriend, a hot little blonde I’d managed to keep since high school. The camping facility was entirely asphalt; the VW’s air conditioner didn’t work while parked. I remember vividly waking up at four in the morning. The temperature outside was 104 degrees. I felt like a turnover in the oven. Whatever else happened to me in Vegas stayed there. I don’t think we stuck around long; I was in a hurry to get back because I was scheduled to start my first year of law school. I remember putting a quarter in a slot machine, losing and feeling unmoved. It was the last time I ever gambled. Nothing wild happened. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get laid. It was too fucking hot.
Thereafter, up until now every time I’ve come to Vegas I’ve been a father and married man. Because I travel for work, I’ve never been on a boys’ trip. I’ve never hired a hooker here, though I know guys who do so regularly. In fact, all but three of the previous times I’ve come here have been for work; the rest were with my wife and kid—we never got the babysitting thing figured out when it came to vacations. But I’ve hung out with some cool people here. Kobe Bryant and the U.S. Olympic basketball team. UFC impresario Dana White. And Oscar Goodman, the former mob lawyer turned beloved mayor. His term limit expired. Now his wife is mayor. I flew here once to interview another guy named Mike Sager. Oh, and I spent the longest two weeks of my life here, doing daily interviews with Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil so I could write his autobiography.
I can honestly say I’ve never done one thing in Vegas that had to stay in Vegas. (Most of it was for media—I revealed it to millions.)
But now I’m divorced, and my kid’s a freshman in college. My nest is empty, as you might know. I’m in Vegas in a suite, but I’m not working.
I take my snapshot of the fountain. I text it to my son. I let him know I’m here and that I’m meeting up later with my comedian friend, Warren Durso, for his show at the Plaza Hotel.
***
I can’t remember ever having “the talk” with my father.
Then again, Dr. Marvin Sager was an ob-gyn. There were “family planning” books to be found all over the house—if you figured out where to look. When I was in middle school, in the late 1960s, my dad was a member of the Board of Religious School Commissioners at my temple. His first assignment in this liberal era: Bring sex ed to Sunday school.
And so it was that my dad was standing in front of the room, drawing diagrams and showing films, teaching us our Xs and Ys. He had this goofy little adage: At our age, the best birth control was boys keeping their hands in their pockets and girls keeping their legs crossed. My dad was a warm guy, a good teacher. It was the only class in Hebrew school I was ever good at. (I went three days a week for many years.) In fact, I was darn enthusiastic about the topic—one of the few academic courses that had ever seemed truly relevant.
When it came time to have The Talk with my own son, child of the internet age that he is, it felt as though I was playing a scene from a sitcom. There was an assembly scheduled for the fifth graders. Parents were encouraged to introduce the coming attraction. But the fact was, he’d been reading my Playboys and surfing the web without supervision for years. He knew what was up and kept trying to avoid sitting down with me.
When we finally did get around to broaching the subject, the theme that emerged organically was this—The Talk will always be ongoing.
And so it has been.
***
Three years ago, my wife left me. For a long time afterward, I wasn’t much interested in a social life; or if I was, I didn’t know where to begin.
Being somewhat advanced into his teens at the time of the breakup, my son eventually conspired to live primarily with me. Things being what they were, I was overjoyed to be able to devote myself to him. If I did date, it was never within his sight or on his time. If ever I went out, I was usually home and fast asleep long before he was. Though I have many fond memories of putting my little boy to bed, there is nothing so vivid as the memory of my big boy coming home late at night and kissing me goodnight.
“You’re always home,” he once teased, implying that I had no social life.
“And you like it that way,” I teased back.
Mr. Grown-up nodded yes, unabashedly, a rare show of teen openness.
Nowadays, with him away at college, we communicate mostly by text. I feel at once close and far away. I kind of know what he’s doing. And I kind of don’t. I wonder what my own parents must have been up to when I went away to college. I called home every Sunday from a pay phone and talked about myself, I’m sure. Somehow we all managed to survive.
***
The sky outside the panoramic window darkens. I take a swig of my rye and lemon iced tea on the rocks, something I invented this summer. A mannequin dressed in a hooded tracksuit, once worn by Will Smith in a movie, glows headless in a glass case behind me. From the direction of the bedroom, I hear the squeal of a metal faucet, the splashing sound of cascading water.
And then the wall, the part just beyond the glass case holding Will Smith’s tracksuit, begins to slide slowly sideways, revealing…
A large Grecian tub!
“Come on in, the water’s great,” my female friend calls out enticingly.
Down below I can see all the little people, swarming expectantly like ants. Everyone is looking hot hot hot. The fever of Las Vegas is upon them.
My iPhone dings.
“COOL VIEW,” my son texts, referring to my iPhoto.
“GOING OUT TO DINNER SOON,” I text back.
“TELL DURSO HI,” he responds.
I switch keyboards to emoticons, choose a fist and a kiss.
I press send.
And then I undress in a hurry.
See the piece on Kinja: http://playboysfw.kinja.com/the-talk-...
October 12, 2013
GO ASK SAGER: The Game Never Stops Calling, Even When Your Body Won't Answer
I’m parked in a folding chair in a dollhouse of a YWCA gym, sitting on the sideline, wearing my official NBA-logo socks. Voices rise and fall, sneakers squeak, a ball pounds the vintage hardwood floor—the familiar sounds mingle in the stuffy humid air with the smells of floor wax and ammonia and the rising stink of men past their athletic primes spilling vainglorious effort into headbands and knee wraps and reversible jerseys, a vital piece of equipment necessary to the orderly commerce of the Regular Game. Nobody wants a sweaty man boob in his face.
Out on the court, the action proceeds, five-on-five with a couple of subs, the usual Monday night suspects, a game that has been convened here for almost a decade.
A big guy with twinkletoes anchors the paint. You can tell he’s been working on his drop step; the hook is pretty eccentric. A white guy in orthopedic knee-high stockings makes a lot of shots—all of which have zero arc and barely clear the rim. There’s a dark, handsome guy; someone mentions later he’s a male model. He has a sweet release with perfect backspin, but his knees are wrapped like a mummy’s; running up and down the court, his Ultra Brite smile winks on and off like a neon sign, switching between pleasure and pain.
An Asian guy with a red mouthpiece chucks three-pointers. A mixed-race guy in low-tops works his handles, ping-ponging around the floor, dishing unselfishly to less mobile teammates. A skinny guy with jet-black hair plays point guard. He keeps stealing the ball for breakaway layups. Nobody tries to catch him.
I’m here because I’m visiting a friend. His name is Peter. He’s my age, 57—probably the oldest guy on the court. This is his regular game, one of two he attends religiously every week. Peter stands about six-foot-one and had some hops in his day, one of those lanky wing players—a Jewish kid from New York who still takes his game seriously. Right now he’s guarding Twinkletoes in the post. Peter’s irregular nimbus of longish white hair is flying every which way. His face is a mask of indignant determination; two plays ago he caught an elbow in the mouth. He’s already made a couple of blocks and a bunch of rebounds; a little later he’ll pull a nice up-fake for a put-back in heavy traffic and then hit a three. On his shin he’s sporting a pair of Band-Aids. Last Monday night a ball was headed out of bounds. It had to be saved because… he doesn’t remember why it had to be saved. Or what the score was. Or who was on his team. Or even what happened on the play, other than the fact that he barked his shin on a cabinet and shins tend to bleed profusely.
The ball was going out of bounds, for Chrissake. When you’re a player, you play.
Even when the little things become problematic.
Like lateral movement, stopping and starting, bending your knees, running up and down the court.…
***
Growing up, sports were my life. I was that boy who always had a ball in his hand. The glory of a perfect head fake was never more than a bike ride away. Absent others, I could amuse myself for hours at a time shooting baskets, practicing bicycle kicks or playing catch against a wall with my lacrosse stick. During the winter, my pal Boots Friedman and I would spend entire days playing one-on-one in my basement with a tennis ball and a piece of metal strapping we formed into a basket and screwed into the cinderblock wall.
As it happened, all that practicing paid off. Despite a 2.8 GPA in high school, I was invited to attend Emory University and to try out for the soccer team. I made varsity as a freshman, sat mostly on the bench for a year and then quit to pursue a more well-rounded agenda, which included a career as a writer.
But I continued to play sports; it couldn’t be any other way. Intramurals were my first taste of the spirit behind the Regular Game, where people make a special effort to come together for the love of playing and also for the personal glory, that sense of self you get from completing a perfect no-look assist, catching a high pass on the sidelines and keeping both feet in bounds, smacking a walk-off homer in a company softball game—those great little moments for the personal highlight reel.
Twenty or 30 years from now, nobody will remember.
Except you.
In the Regular Game, you’re always LeBron.
***
Peter takes a pass under the basket, gathers himself, fakes a shot on Twinkletoes and throws it back out to Knee-High Stockings on the perimeter. As it happens, I’ve been guesting at Peter’s regular games since we were both in our 20s; my favorite was the Tuesday night game in the tiny gymnasium at PS 6 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, on 81st Street between Park and Madison. After playing, we’d always hit a diner, four to a booth. In high school and college, if you’re lucky, you make good friends and learn to appreciate the value of male company. Forever afterward, as life changes and contracts and becomes more work- and family-oriented, you feel the loss. On these nights of the regular game, I once again had fraternity—a primal need a man never outgrows.
Back then, a number of decades ago at Peter’s regular game, I was the guy on the perimeter, on the receiving end of one of Peter’s passes, thrown now as then with a good dose of hot sauce, the mark of a real player. I remember one night in particular. I was new to the mix. I’d spent the whole night passing. Now the game was on the line, and I had the ball. I feigned the shot (my trademark head fake), shook the defender, drove for the basket… and surprised everyone with a perfect running hook shot that floated above the outstretched fingers of the big guy in the middle. It wasn’t a conventional choice of shot—more of an old-school move, something I learned from my father in the driveway, perfected during my long hours of one-on-none. I can still remember my teammates’ hoots of ironic appreciation—a fucking running hook! Game over.
On this night, Knee-High Stockings is too eager to shoot. He forgets to catch first; the ball slips through his fingertips and bounces out of bounds, right to me, sitting on a folding chair, watching the action in my NBA-logo socks.
For a moment, I’m that boy again.
Standing on the sidelines at the high school court watching the big guys bang, wanting so dearly to touch the ball, to be asked to play.
But instead, I’m this older guy with a bunch of injuries, most of which are related to sports. About a year ago, a neurosurgeon told me, “You’re one face-plant away from paralysis.” I’m sure he was being glib. You know how some of these surgeons are. Look at me. I’m upright. So what if I can’t turn my head very well, much less head fake. I have my reel of personal highlights to remember. And nearly every day I walk four miles in the steep hills around my house. Or sometimes I walk the boardwalk. There are lots of college girls around here who like to run in the afternoon.
I just have to make sure I don’t get distracted and trip.
Mike Sager's new novel, High Tolerance, A Novel of Sex, Race, Celebrity, Murder...and Marijuana is available now on Amazon.
This article was originally published on Playboy for iPhone. For more exclusive content and the best articles from the latest issue of Playboy, download the app in the iTunes Store.
Out on the court, the action proceeds, five-on-five with a couple of subs, the usual Monday night suspects, a game that has been convened here for almost a decade.
A big guy with twinkletoes anchors the paint. You can tell he’s been working on his drop step; the hook is pretty eccentric. A white guy in orthopedic knee-high stockings makes a lot of shots—all of which have zero arc and barely clear the rim. There’s a dark, handsome guy; someone mentions later he’s a male model. He has a sweet release with perfect backspin, but his knees are wrapped like a mummy’s; running up and down the court, his Ultra Brite smile winks on and off like a neon sign, switching between pleasure and pain.
An Asian guy with a red mouthpiece chucks three-pointers. A mixed-race guy in low-tops works his handles, ping-ponging around the floor, dishing unselfishly to less mobile teammates. A skinny guy with jet-black hair plays point guard. He keeps stealing the ball for breakaway layups. Nobody tries to catch him.
I’m here because I’m visiting a friend. His name is Peter. He’s my age, 57—probably the oldest guy on the court. This is his regular game, one of two he attends religiously every week. Peter stands about six-foot-one and had some hops in his day, one of those lanky wing players—a Jewish kid from New York who still takes his game seriously. Right now he’s guarding Twinkletoes in the post. Peter’s irregular nimbus of longish white hair is flying every which way. His face is a mask of indignant determination; two plays ago he caught an elbow in the mouth. He’s already made a couple of blocks and a bunch of rebounds; a little later he’ll pull a nice up-fake for a put-back in heavy traffic and then hit a three. On his shin he’s sporting a pair of Band-Aids. Last Monday night a ball was headed out of bounds. It had to be saved because… he doesn’t remember why it had to be saved. Or what the score was. Or who was on his team. Or even what happened on the play, other than the fact that he barked his shin on a cabinet and shins tend to bleed profusely.
The ball was going out of bounds, for Chrissake. When you’re a player, you play.
Even when the little things become problematic.
Like lateral movement, stopping and starting, bending your knees, running up and down the court.…
***
Growing up, sports were my life. I was that boy who always had a ball in his hand. The glory of a perfect head fake was never more than a bike ride away. Absent others, I could amuse myself for hours at a time shooting baskets, practicing bicycle kicks or playing catch against a wall with my lacrosse stick. During the winter, my pal Boots Friedman and I would spend entire days playing one-on-one in my basement with a tennis ball and a piece of metal strapping we formed into a basket and screwed into the cinderblock wall.
As it happened, all that practicing paid off. Despite a 2.8 GPA in high school, I was invited to attend Emory University and to try out for the soccer team. I made varsity as a freshman, sat mostly on the bench for a year and then quit to pursue a more well-rounded agenda, which included a career as a writer.
But I continued to play sports; it couldn’t be any other way. Intramurals were my first taste of the spirit behind the Regular Game, where people make a special effort to come together for the love of playing and also for the personal glory, that sense of self you get from completing a perfect no-look assist, catching a high pass on the sidelines and keeping both feet in bounds, smacking a walk-off homer in a company softball game—those great little moments for the personal highlight reel.
Twenty or 30 years from now, nobody will remember.
Except you.
In the Regular Game, you’re always LeBron.
***
Peter takes a pass under the basket, gathers himself, fakes a shot on Twinkletoes and throws it back out to Knee-High Stockings on the perimeter. As it happens, I’ve been guesting at Peter’s regular games since we were both in our 20s; my favorite was the Tuesday night game in the tiny gymnasium at PS 6 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, on 81st Street between Park and Madison. After playing, we’d always hit a diner, four to a booth. In high school and college, if you’re lucky, you make good friends and learn to appreciate the value of male company. Forever afterward, as life changes and contracts and becomes more work- and family-oriented, you feel the loss. On these nights of the regular game, I once again had fraternity—a primal need a man never outgrows.
Back then, a number of decades ago at Peter’s regular game, I was the guy on the perimeter, on the receiving end of one of Peter’s passes, thrown now as then with a good dose of hot sauce, the mark of a real player. I remember one night in particular. I was new to the mix. I’d spent the whole night passing. Now the game was on the line, and I had the ball. I feigned the shot (my trademark head fake), shook the defender, drove for the basket… and surprised everyone with a perfect running hook shot that floated above the outstretched fingers of the big guy in the middle. It wasn’t a conventional choice of shot—more of an old-school move, something I learned from my father in the driveway, perfected during my long hours of one-on-none. I can still remember my teammates’ hoots of ironic appreciation—a fucking running hook! Game over.
On this night, Knee-High Stockings is too eager to shoot. He forgets to catch first; the ball slips through his fingertips and bounces out of bounds, right to me, sitting on a folding chair, watching the action in my NBA-logo socks.
For a moment, I’m that boy again.
Standing on the sidelines at the high school court watching the big guys bang, wanting so dearly to touch the ball, to be asked to play.
But instead, I’m this older guy with a bunch of injuries, most of which are related to sports. About a year ago, a neurosurgeon told me, “You’re one face-plant away from paralysis.” I’m sure he was being glib. You know how some of these surgeons are. Look at me. I’m upright. So what if I can’t turn my head very well, much less head fake. I have my reel of personal highlights to remember. And nearly every day I walk four miles in the steep hills around my house. Or sometimes I walk the boardwalk. There are lots of college girls around here who like to run in the afternoon.
I just have to make sure I don’t get distracted and trip.
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