Steve Dublanica's Blog, page 16

Falling To The Ground

Just before my beloved dog Buster died I found out we had mice.

It was late in the evening and, as I was keeping vigil over Buster, I heard a scuttling sound in kitchen. When I looked up a brown mouse shot across the kitchen floor and dove underneath the stove. Just great. Buster had very few teeth left and when he ate lots of his kibble ended up on the floor. The mice were probably having a feast every night. Because I had so much on my emotional plate I decided not to tell my wife. I knew she’d freak. One crisis at a time.

After I put Buster to sleep I was a mess for a couple of weeks. The worst part was coming home after work and not having him amble to the door to greet me. His scent still lingered in the house and I swore I could still hear his nails clattering on the floor. One night I woke up to the sound of him barking. As was my routine those last months, I swung myself out of bed to give him a pain pill and pet him until he went to sleep. But as soon as my feet hit the floor I realized he was gone. Now he’s just some ashes in a wooden box on my china closet.  After sixteen years I had become so habituated to Buster’s presence that his absence left a profound silence. His brother dog Felix is still a bit bewildered and my daughter says she misses him. Me too, honey.

When the worst of the emotional storm passed I told my wife about the mice. As I figured, she immediately pulled out the fridge and looked under the stove and found mice droppings. “We have to do something about this,” she said. “This is bad.”

I sighed. I hate killing things. Sure, I like hamburger and don’t usually think about the cow, but I’ve never been keen on snuffing things out. I tell my daughter not to squash bugs. I avoid ants on the ground. If I find a fly in the house I perform catch and release. And I had just put my dog to sleep. I knew it was an act of mercy but I found it very unnatural to walk into the vet’s office with a live, albeit very sick dog, and then leave without him. I just couldn’t bring myself to kill some mice.

But I have a kid and mice can bring all sorts of nasty things into your home. So I went down to the hardware store and bought some old fashioned mouse traps. “Just put peanut butter on them and that’ll get ‘em,” I said to my wife.

“What about those other traps?” she said, looking askance that the devices. “The glue strips?  Or poison?”

“A mouse trap will kill them quicker,” I said dispassionately. “If their spine or neck isn’t broken instantly they’ll die from the trauma within a minute.” When Buster died he went peacefully and without distress – but that was in a controlled environment. If I had to kill something I wanted it to be quick.

The next day I found a field mouse dead in the trap. It looked like it died instantly but then again, I could have been kidding myself.  Since my five year old girl thinks mice are Cinderella’s friends, I made sure she was out of sight when I fished its corpse from behind the fridge and walked to the garbage cans on the side of my house.

Looking at the dead mouse I remembered a line from the Gospel. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to the dead mouse. “I’m very sorry.” Then I tossed him, trap and all, into the garbage.

Back in the house my daughter was playing with her toys, unaware of the tiny tragedy that had just occurred. I remembered the first thing Natalie asked me after I told her Buster died. “Is he alone? Does he have food to eat?” I know children her age are very concrete about death, but the question pained me because I didn’t have an answer. When a friend of mine’s brother died young he told me, “I find myself hoping Larry’s all right. That he’s not alone.” Where is Buster now, other than in a box on my china closet? How does it end for all creatures great and small?

I’m a bit of an amateur theologian. I think life, death and what might come after is bound up in the question of what time truly is.  But the day I killed the mouse all I wanted was my dog back and all my highfaluting musings suddenly seemed hollow and empty.  I don’t know a goddamn thing.

Later that night, after everyone was asleep, I went drink in hand to that box on the china closet and looked at  it. Eventually I’ll do something with Buster’s remains. My wife says she’ll buy a little shelf and place him on it with his picture. Maybe I’ll bury him in the backyard he liked to sun himself in – underneath a bed of flowers with a little marker with his name on it. But until I figure it out, he’ll be on the china closet.

“You were a very good dog, Buster,” I said, toasting the box with my bourbon. “A very good dog.”

I downed my drink and went to bed, hoping Buster was in his Father’s care.

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The Coors Light Mystery

When the cable installer rigged up my new television service a few days ago he had to open up the drop ceiling in my basement to install some new wiring. But when he pushed up the ceiling tile a small surprise was waiting for him.

Two empty beer cans fell on his head.

“Who likes Coors Light around here?” he said, chuckling.

“They’re not my husband’s,” my wife said. “He’ll drink Coors Light but he’ll never buy it.”

“I prefer Fat Tire or Lagunitas myself,” I said.

“You drink Pabst though.”

“Only when I’m trying to be a hipster on a budget.”

My wife examined the cans. “It says copyright 2013,” she said. “So we know there were up there since at least then.”

“We moved here in 2015. Could have been the people here before us.”

“Who hides beer cans in drop ceilings?”

“Drunks,” I said. “That’s who.”

“You think they were alcoholics?”

“People who hide bottles or otherwise conceal their drinking usually have a problem with booze.”

When I think about it, the guys who pick up my recycling have a good idea how much I drink. They’ll usually find five or six beer cans in my bin every two weeks and maybe a bottle of wine. After six months in my liquor cabinet, I recently finished a disappointing bottle of Basil Hayden bourbon and tossed it in with the other empties. The guys on the truck must have thought I was on a bender.

“Could have been kids, though,” I said. “They’ll hide beer cans from their parents.”

“But the people who lived here before didn’t have children,” Annie said. “At least not living with them.”

“Maybe a neighbor? A guest? Who knows? And those people didn’t live here very long, remember? The guy was here on business and the lady said she couldn’t wait go back to Southern California. So maybe it was the people before them.”

My house was a rental property before my wife and I bought it and we’re always getting mail for the previous occupants. When I went on one of those “spy on people” websites that promise to tell you what a train wreck you ex-lover has become (Bankruptcies? Divorce? Arrests?  All for $29.95!) I punched in my address and found ten people had lived in my house during the past twenty years. As you can imagine, my home was a little beat up when we bought it.

Before it was listed, my realtor caught wind the house was for sale and arranged a tour. When we arrived the lady of the house was home and asked us to take off our shoes and then, after some small talk, disappeared. When the husband came home he didn’t say hi and made a beeline to the garage where he fiddled with his computer. That irked me.  It was like we weren’t even there. The house was nicely decorated and impeccably neat. Scratch that, it was scarily neat. Not a mote of dust anywhere. I found the husband’s shirts crisply hanging exactly one inch apart in the closet and his shined shoes arranged with military precision on the floor. Dirt, it seemed, was anathema to them – though perhaps not Coors Light.

A year later the pair showed up unannounced at our door, asking if they had left a wrought iron garden piece behind. I said they didn’t and, truth be told, I didn’t want them to come into the house and see how messy it was. Later a neighbor told me they had wanted to buy the house but, for some reason, they didn’t. Maybe that’s why they were so standoffish. I once has a landlord sell my apartment out from under me and I didn’t like it when prospective buyers were traipsing through my place either – but there was something off about the previous tenants. Maybe they were mad at us. Maybe they were mad at the former owners. Maybe it was all in my head. I’ll never know.

But when I looked them up on those espionage websites I found they had moved out of their SoCal rental to decamp to a more affordable state. Actually, they moved around a lot. When you look at my house on real estate websites the pictures are of the former tenants’ tasteful decorations, not mine. An ad for their recently vacated house in California was decorated the same way – right down to the Tiffany lamp in the bedroom. I should have been a private eye.

It’s possible one of them had a drinking problem. I’ve known lots of people who were neat and orderly on the outside but complete slobs on the inside. A crazy neat house could be a sign of compulsive behavior and, when they don’t get help, those kinds of people tend to self-medicate, sometimes on the sly. But I wouldn’t mind if some of the previous occupants’ neatness rubbed off on us. My wife and I sometimes disagree on what level of mess is acceptable and, when you have a small child, that mess can be epic. But I’ve never felt the need to run into the basement to quaff down booze and then hide my empties in the drop ceiling. However, if bottles of Fat Tire start falling on the heads of the next people who move into my house then you’ll know I succumbed. But that probably won’t happen. Annie and I are pretty neat where it counts.

But the Coors Light Mystery frustrated me. I’ve always felt the need to know other people’s stories. That’s why I write. I also fancy myself as a low rent Phillip Marlowe or Harry Bosch – a detective always trying to tease patterns out of chaos. But two beer cans is flimsy evidence and conjecture is not enough for a conviction.  So much about life and people remains stubbornly cloaked in a cloud of unknowing. I’ll probably never find out why those beer cans were in the ceiling. Then it hit me.

A few days after we moved into our house my old and much loathed cable company sent an installer to hook up our television service. He was in that basement too. Maybe he had a couple of cold ones while he worked and hid them in the ceiling. I have a friend who once dug graves and he said it wasn’t unusual to dig up old steel beer cans when they had to stick a widow next to a long predeceased husband. I’d probably want a drink if I was digging a grave too – but hooking up cable? It can’t be that bad. Then again, maybe the installer thought I was standoffish and odd and needed booze to cope. Who knows? He had the time, opportunity and maybe I was the motive. I’m no bowl of cherries either.

But the Coors probably explains why my cable never worked right.

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I Should Be Better, But I’m Not.

A few weeks ago, I got sick of my cable company’s usurious fees, terrible customer service, out of date equipment, degrading internet speed and them being assholes in general. So I canceled, signed up with one of their competitors, and arranged an installation date. I will not name my old provider because I’m fairly certain the new provider will also turn out to be an asshole and I’ll be dancing this dance again in a year or so.

The day the my new company’s installer arrived he told me that he couldn’t hook me up because was a problem with the power lines and the telephone pole’s structural integrity. “I ain’t going up there,” he said. “Call the power company and have them fix it.”

I wanted to call the installer a chickenshit but went with. “But I cancelled my old service! They’ll go offline in three days!” instead.

“You never cancel until your new service is up and running,” the installer said. “Don’t you know that?”

There had been series of snow storms recently and I had the sneaking suspicion that the power company was going prioritize  hospitals, nursing homes and schools over my bandwidth needs. Unfair but true – as the power company confirmed by saying it’d be three weeks until they could spare a man to fix things. Three days later my television went dark. No more HBO, Netflix, Hulu, You Tube, data streams, or on demand video. “Well,” I said to my wife, “We can pretend it’s the 80’s again.”

Eric Sevareid once said, “No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.” I’ve always joked that if the Chinese pulled a digital Pearl Harbor by taking out the internet people would start throwing themselves off bridges within a day. Once, when I was living with a roommate, a summer squall knocked out our power for three days and my web surfing roomie began to look like he was kicking heroin. Since Internet withdrawal’s a bitch, my wife went to the local library and borrowed a mess of Disney films and kiddie books to keep my daughter entertained. My wife and I used our phones to get our data fix until our cellular data plan decided to run out of gigabytes and forced us to ration what we had left. So, once or twice a day, I’d turn on the cellular data to quickly sip some bandwidth in order to get my mail and messages. I felt like a submariner raising his periscope in enemy waters. Run silent, run deep.

Oddly enough, my five year old daughter had no problem being cut off from the lifeblood of the web. Sure, she groaned over my wife and I suddenly not using our smartphones as pacifiers, but she enjoyed watching that Cinderella DVD eight times. My wife and I have been very careful with Natalie and the Internet. When she was four she’d throw tantrums when we took her iPad away so, since exorcisms are not recognized parenting options, we just banned it from the house. So Natalie was already used to digital deprivation. My wife and I, however, were not.

After two weeks my wife said, “This is getting old.”

“If I have to watch that Cinderella DVD with Natalie one more time,” I said, “I’m going to become a feminist and burn my bra. And was Walt Disney deranged or something? All the parents die in his movies and their kids end up going on a grand adventure and live happily ever after. Parents are extraneous in his world!”

“Let it go,” my wife began to sing. “Let it go….”

“You’re not helping.”

“Hey,” my wife said, patting my thigh, “There are other things we could do to entertain ourselves.”

“If we end up with another kid,” I groaned. “We’re naming him FIOS or Optimum. And he’ll be evil.”

My wife uses the internet to Facebook, chat with her friends and surf IMDB to see which old TV show has the highest cast member mortality rate. Some of those shows were cursed. Me? I use the internet to tempt my daughter with old cartoons so she’ll brush her teeth. (Exorcism isn’t a parental skill but bribery sure as hell is.) I also use it to stoke my pocketknife obsession on You Tube. I found a guy called “Advanced Knife Bro” who produces short, funny and well-made videos that basically calls out “knife nerds” like me for using our pocket jewelry for nothing more manly than opening a bag of chips. But I noticed  both Annie and I used the internet to “zone out” when the demands of work, parenthood, and marriage got to be too much. Probably not a good thing but hey, at least we aren’t  hitting the bottle – yet.

Finally, the power guy showed up and began cursing out the cable company. He agreed with my assumption that the cable installer had left his man card in his other pants. “There’s nothing wrong with that line,” he said. “Those cable guys are such delicate flowers.”

So I called my new provider and made another appointment. “About four days,” they said. “Monday morning at 8. That okay?”

“Please…..hurry.”

The night before the installer was due to arrive we got slammed with six inches of wet, heavy snow and I was convinced the installer was going to bail. I stayed up late watching Trumbo on DVD and didn’t get to bed until 3:00 AM. Imagine my surprise when the installer rang our bell at 8:00 AM sharp.

“I can’t believe he’s here.” I said to my wife. “Go downstairs and let him in.”

“Why me?”

“Because you have cleavage and I do not. You want the internet back? Whatever it takes.”

After my wife made oinking noises and compared me to a pimp, I brushed my teeth and went downstairs. If the installer had any problems with me being naked under my bathrobe, he gave no sign.

“And I glad to see you,’ I said, hopefully not to eagerly.

“I’ll have you up in a half an hour,” he said. “It’s an easy install.”

“Really?” I said. “The last guy said the power lines were a problem.”

The installer grimaced. “You don’t need to go on the pole to do this job,” I nodded, realizing the guy didn’t want to badmouth his colleague for being a lazy bastard. Considering my sexist remark to my wife, I also thought it was a neat double entendre.

While the man worked, tripping over toys and our dog, I went into the kitchen to make coffee. “Hey honey,” I said. “You got a ten spot in your purse? I’ve got no cash.”

“What do you need ten bucks for?”

“To tip the guy.”

“What? I don’t remember tipping cable guys in your book.”

“It’s still a nice thing to do.” I said, which was bullshit. I wanted to grease him so he’d put me on the top of his list in case he had to come back later.

“I don’t have any cash either. Offer him some coffee.”

“I did. He said he was good.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”

When the installer finished he gave me a tutorial on my new system’s features showed me how to use the remote. After I made sure I could get all my gizmos online I handed him five bucks in crumpled singles.

“Buy yourself a cup of coffee.”

“Thanks, man,” the installer said, looking very surprised.

After he left my wife said, “Where did you find five bucks? And didn’t you want to give him ten?”

“That’s all Natalie had in her piggy bank.”

“You’re impossible!” my wife said.

Yep, I tried pimping out my wife and stole from my kid – all for cable TV.  As I drank my morning coffee and scrolled through hundreds of channels with nothing on, I realized digital withdrawal had turned me into a bit of an asshole. Maybe that’s been the evil plan of the telecom conglomerates all along. Get ‘em hooked, drive up the price and then treat the customers like shit. Sounds like every drug dealer I’ve ever run across. I shouldn’t fall for their machinations. I should be better than that, but I’m not.

In any case, something tells me my wife and I won’t be trying for Fios or Optimum tonight.

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Django Unchained

Django used to hang out with my dog “Buster” at the dog park. A very cute pooch. His owner is having trouble paying his vet bills. Any help you can give him would be most appreciated. The GoFundMe link is here,

Thank you.

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Clean Cups

This morning my daughter climbed into my bed and prodded my shoulder. I was already awake but pretended to sleep, adding an exaggerated snore for emphasis,

“Wake up time, Daddy,” Natalie said. “Wake up time.” I snored again and was rewarded with a giggle.

Little fingers danced on my face and then got hold of my beard and gave it a tug. “Wake up!” Natalie said, again. When I opened my eyes my daughter’s face was inches from mine, her eyes filled with adoration and mouth graced into an angelic smile. Not a bad alarm clock. Not bad at all.

“It’s daytime! I have to go to school! ”

Downstairs I could hear my wife rattling around the kitchen packing Natalie’s lunch for the day. Annie takes our daughter to school and I pick her up – but I know the morning routine Is the hardest.  No matter how involved a father is, mothers always end up doing more of the work.

“Time for breakfast,” I said, carrying Natalie out of bed. “What do you want? Waffle with peanut butter? Some apples?”

“Yes, please.”

In the kitchen I popped a waffle into the toaster, thinly sliced up and apple and then artfully fanned the slices onto a plate. When the waffle popped up I slathered it with peanut butter, cut it in half and then gave it to Natalie with a glass of milk. “How nice!” Natalie said. If there’s one thing I learned in the restaurant business it’s that presentation is important.

As I watched Natalie eat, however, I felt a pang of sadness. She will turn five next month and this sweet and innocent time of beard pulling and giggles won’t last forever. My daughter’s already started kicking me out of the bathroom. But that is the way of the world.

Shaking the sadness away, I threw a load of towels into the washing machine, gave my old dog his meds, refilled the water and food bowls and then started emptying the dishwasher – my usual morning chores. As I started putting the dishes into the cupboard, a scene from a British TV show called Fleabag popped into my brain.

During the episode, the female protagonist is on a woman’s retreat when she runs into a man she once had an unpleasant encounter with at a men’s retreat next door. The man had been sexually inappropriate at work and his job sent him to this workshop as a condition of staying employed. Both the man and the woman are very damaged people trying heal themselves and they shared a cigarette in an awkward truce. And as the man says what he wants out of life he said something moving and remarkable.

“I want to take clean cups, out of the dishwasher, and put them in the cupboard. at home. And the next morning I want to watch my wife drink from them. And I want to make her feel good.”

Stacking cups and the saucers, I relished the sound of clinking porcelain and how the morning light sparkled off the clean plates waiting in the dishwasher. Then I fixed Annie and myself a cup of coffee and walked into the dining room. Annie was looking at something on her phone and my daughter was babbling softly to herself. As my wife thanked me for the coffee I realized she looked beautiful and my daughter looked happy. Watching them as I sipped from my clean cup, I realized that if this moment was the summit of my life, it would be enough.

Breakfast finished, I kissed my wife, hugged my daughter and waved to them as they climbed into our minivan and drove away. Then I went back into the kitchen, put the breakfast plates into the dishwasher, cleaned the counters, poured some more coffee and then sat on the couch. In the silence I listened to the clock tick, my old dog drinking from his bowl and the wind blowing softly outside. That’s when happiness stole into the room and caught me by surprise.

Fame and fortune, power and glory, triumph and success all have their place – but they pale in comparison to the sweetness of a daughter’s smile, a wife’s kiss and clean cups in the cupboard.

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The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

 

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

 

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

— John McCrae

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A Little Touch of Harry in the Night

It was Sunday night and my wife and I were having cocktails at Musso and Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard. Using the mirror behind the bar, I watched an older man putting the moves on a twentyish platinum blonde in a tight red dress who reminded me of Jean Harlow. Even though her suitor wore a watch that cost more than my car, Jean’s body language telegraphed disinterest. L.A. is a young person’s town and I doubted this guy made the chronological cut. Then again, neither did I.

Sipping our Sidecars and Pisco Sours, I watched the man’s face settle into tired resignation as he realized he wasn’t going to see this girl naked. As my cocktail worked its magic the poem “The Naked and the Nude” popped into my head. I couldn’t quite remember how the poet differentiated between two words that, at first glance, mean the same thing. “As love from lies, or truth from art” … or something like that. In L.A. the difference could be important.

“Another one?” Sonny, the bartender asked, pointing at my empty glass.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

As Sonny expertly mixed my drink I watched Musso’s red jacketed waiters as they glided silently through the dining room, handling their customers with confident ease. Even on my best day waiting tables I couldn’t have held a candle to them. When my new drink arrived, I made a silent toast to my old profession – and the difference between amateurs and professionals. Then again, when I have ever been a professional at anything? I haven’t written a book in years.

Sensing my sudden sadness, Annie nudged my arm and gave me a comforting smile.  Los Angeles used to make me feel invulnerable. Not anymore. Fatherhood and turning fifty have seen to that. The City of Angels has lost some of its luster – like I’ve seen behind the curtain and it’s all a showman’s trick. Maybe that’s why Robert Graves’ poem was rattling around my head. I looked over at Ms. Harlow and tried seeing the real woman hiding beneath the thick layers of makeup and studied nonchalance. Was she naked or was she nude? It’s hard to tell sometimes.

After tipping Sonny heavily, my wife and I left the restaurant and strode out onto the marijuana scented boulevard, trampling forgotten stars beneath our feet. As we made our way past the homeless, the hucksters, the tourists and the insane, I threw a glance at where Phillip Marlowe’s office was supposed to have been. As I looked at his office window, I imagined the detective puffing on his pipe while Ms. Harlow sat on the edge of his desk, showing him a lot of leg. Phil probably knew what Graves was talking about.

Deciding to take the scenic route, we drove our car down to Sunset, made a right onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard and then popped onto Mulholland Drive. As we travelled over the mountain’s spine I looked to my left and saw the city’s glittering skyscrapers piercing the fog like defiant pinnacles of light. The first time I saw this view I felt like I was on top of the world, now it did nothing for me. What had changed? Invulnerability was always an illusion, “By Gorgons with long whips pursued.” After spiraling down a small road, we hooked a left onto Woodrow Wilson and walked into our rented house in the Hollywood Hills. After falling into bed and each other’s arms, my wife and I fell asleep.

A few hours later, the alcohol processing out of my system snapped my eyes open. Knowing sleep was impossible, I crept out of bed, cracked open a beer and walked out onto the deck; watching as the San Fernando Valley blazed with incandescent fire below. Because of the light pollution there were no stars in the sky but the million dollar homes sparkling precariously on the slopes of the Santa Monica mountains felt like a consolation prize.

As I breathed the night air a police helicopter came thundering over the hill behind me and raced towards Universal Studios. Settling into a hover, it ignited its powerful searchlight and began sweeping the top of the theme park’s massive parking deck like an avenging seraph. I wondered if it was looking for the bad men my daughter asks me about every day. After a few minutes the helicopter broke off and flew south over the 101 through the Cahuenga Pass.

The chop of the helicopter’s rotors faded away and the highway sounds amplified by the canyon reasserted themselves. Music from a nearby home carried a woman’s crystalline laugh along its current and engine noises from a powerful car careened off the hillsides, hiding the direction of its source. Scuttling sounds in the brush made me turn my head, wondering if the coyote I heard the previous night was peering at me from the shadows.

Turning back to the valley I sipped my beer. I’ve been struggling to write a book about my seminary days and, considering everything that’s been happening with the Church, it’s been a tough slog. Talking to innocents destroyed by evil clad in the trappings of the sacred has taken its toll. Since the cathedrals of my youth have turned into charnel houses and the old hymns sound like dirges, I’m not surprised L.A’s charms eventually dimmed. I never could hide from the fact that things are never as they seem. But, feeling like an amateurish homicide cop working amongst murdered souls, I grew depressed and set the book aside. Back out of all this now too much for us.

Looking over the edge of the deck, I peered at an empty lot where a house once stood. Now it’s just a ruined foundation on the chaparral covered hillside but, like Phillip Marlowe’s non-existent office near Musso’s, it’s also where another literary detective hung his hat– Harry Bosch of the LAPD. When my wife rented this house, she had no idea it’d be right across the street from where the novelist Michael Connelly had Bosch make his fictitious home. Firing up my E-reader, I figured it out within minutes. And as I read Connelly’s description of the shimmering valley below Bosch’s windows I realized, for a few nights at least, the old cop and were seeing the world with the same eyes.

I’ve been reading about Bosch adventures for almost thirty years. What are the odds I’d inadvertently end up across the street from his house? Blame it on the drink, but I couldn’t shake the sense the universe was trying to tell me something. Bosch was a murder cop on a burning mission to speak for the dead. Perhaps my 50th birthday trip to L.A. was God’s way of telling me duck under the crime scene tape around my own life and search for the truth. Like a big murder case it’ll seem too big to handle but, like Bosch, I’ll go where the evidence takes me, fighting sly men grinning “a mock-religious grin, of scorn at those of naked skin.” Time to get off my ass and knock on doors.

Draining my beer, I remembered why, despite its faded allure, I still love Los Angeles. For me it’ll always be the land of the detective – of lone men like Marlowe and Bosch –  teasing patterns out of chaos and setting wrongs right. Of course, they’re just figures of literary wish fulfillment, archetypes representing our collective urge for justice.  No one person could become them and it’d be foolish to try. But I’m glad they’re there to inspire and push us. They remind us of the difference between the naked and the nude, what is truth and what is lies. Throughout my life they’ve always been there for me.

Standing on my rented deck, I watched as the lights of the Valley raged against the darkness, reminded that angels still take flight. Tipping my beer towards Bosch’s house I sighed deeply, grateful for a little touch of Harry in the night.

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Like Summer Grass

“So, what do you do?” the well-heeled man asked me.

I was in the middle of munching on a canapé so I held up a finger and continued masticating. As I did so I remembered that, in France, it’s considered rude to ask people what they did for a living. But we weren’t in France.

After washing down my tidbit with a sip of champagne, I answered. “I’m the social services guy for my town. Run the food pantry, help people with the electric bills, stuff like that.”

“Professional do-gooder, huh?” the man said.

“Have halo, will travel.”

“Tell me,” the man said, “Do the people who go to your place deserve the help they’re getting?”

“I don’t understand that you mean,” I lied.

A smug look played across the man’s face. “I mean, do you ever see people loading up on food and driving away in a Cadillac?”

“It happened once,” I said. “But it was an old Cadillac.”

“Lots of those people cheat the system,” the man said. “Welfare queens you know.” Those people?

“A small group of people cheat,” I said. “But most of my clients work, often two jobs.”

“Do you check them out? Run financials?”

“Yep.”

“Do you have a cutoff?”

“Everything is on a case by case basis.”

“And our tax money is paying for all this?”

“Actually,“ I said, “Taxes only fund my salary . Everything else is donated. The food, the money, everything.”

“You don’t say?”

I nodded.

“But by helping people out,” he said. “Don’t you think you’re perpetuating their sense of victimhood? Teaching them someone always going to bail them out?”

“That I’m making the problem worse?” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard that argument,” I said. “But it’s an abstraction. I don’t deal in abstraction. I deal with people.”

“You’re ducking the question.”

“Probably,” I said, shrugging.

“I worked hard for everything I have,” the man said. “I don’t like my tax dollars promoting idleness. Too many people today with their hands out, gaming the system.”

“Rich people game the system too,” I said. “Remember those landlords in Manhattan who got tax breaks for not jacking up the rents on moderate income families but then charged full market rates anyway? That’s sort of like welfare fraud.”

“But in many cases,” the man said. “That was perfectly legal.”

“So that’s okay?”

“It’s legal. A businessman would be a fool not to take advantage of the breaks the law provides him.”

“But those very same landlords depend on fire and police services,” I said. “But they make it so those people can’t afford to live in the city they serve.”

“What can I say? Life isn’t fair.”

“True,” I said. “But it could be fairer.”

“If only wishing would make it so,” the man said, smiling as if he had scored a point.

“Is that how you made your money?” I asked. “Wishing you’d be successful?”

“Like I said, I worked very hard to get where I am.”

“Did you make sacrifices?”

“Of course.”

“Making life fairer for people requires hard work too, “I said. “And sacrifice. Wishing never made anything so.”

“So, you’re telling me it’s wrong to be successful?”

“Not at all. But do we need 20,000 square foot homes when 10,000 would do nicely? Or a billion dollars when 500 million would suffice?”

The man snorted. ““That sounds like class warfare to me.”

“Ever hear about a billionaire named Chuck Feeney?” I said. “Made his fortune in duty free shops?”

“No.”

“I think he’s still alive,” I said. “Gave like 99% of his money to charity. Said he hopes that last check he writes bounces. Wants to die broke.”

The man said nothing.

“Listen.” I said. “I’d like a little more money for myself too. But there’s got to be a point where enough is enough. Too many people are poor when they don’t have to be.”

“How old are you?’ the man said.

“Fifty.”

“And still idealistic,” the man said, shaking his head. “You’re probably too old to learn any better.”

“True,” I said. “But when we reach the end, everything we know or think we know will burn away like summer grass in a wildfire.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Neither do I.”

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Karma Comes For the Archbishop

Two days ago, the news broke that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Archbishop Emeritus of Washington D.C., had been accused of molesting a 16-year-old altar boy when he was a New York City priest in the early 70’s and that the Pope had removed him from public ministry until a canonical investigation can be concluded. That means McCarrick, who was ordained a priest in 1958 and a bishop in 1981, is no longer allowed to publicly present himself as a member of the Catholic clergy. The Cardinal stated that he didn’t remember any such incident and maintained his innocence, but said he would submit to the Pope’s order out of “obedience.”

But the real bombshell came when the bishops of the New Jersey dioceses of Newark and Metuchen stated that three allegations of sexual impropriety towards adults had been leveled against McCarrick when he ran those dioceses in the 80’s and 90’s and that two of the claimants had received out of court settlements.

When I read this my insides churned. McCarrick was appointed Archbishop of Newark during my freshman year of studies in a college seminary operated by that archdiocese. I can’t remember when I first heard the whispers about McCarrick, but I do recall that they were widespread and persistent. The seminary scuttlebutt was that McCarrick would take a shine to an attractive seminarian or young priest, invite him or a group of them to his shore home and then sexually harass or exploit them. I never met a person who claimed to have been abused by McCarrick. I have no firsthand knowledge of McCarrick’s alleged activities. My own interactions with him were pleasant and, the one time I was alone with him, nothing untoward happened. But by the time I left seminary I knew to stay away from him.

In the subsequent years, two former priests went on record accusing McCarrick of sexually harassing seminarians and priests. Many laypeople I encountered also knew about the bishop’s supposed activities – making it the worst kept secret in local Catholicism. So, it isn’t much of a stretch to conclude that most of the priests and bishops in New Jersey, nay the Tri-State area, also knew. Much like an ecclesiastical version of Harvey Weinstein, everyone knew about McCarrick’s “casting couch.” 

I left the seminary long ago but this incident has reopened old wounds. The anger I feel is substantial. When I was eighteen, becoming a priest was the most important thing in my life. Looking back, I understand how a clerical predator could use a naïve seminarian’s fear of losing his vocation to extort sexual favors and keep him silent. I know several seminarians who had sexual affairs with priests. To be fair, some of these seminarians were acting out sexually and/or had agendas of their own, but I know that many of them were groomed and then exploited by the very priests they trusted. And that had fatal consequences.

A few years ago, when I was researching a book I was going to write about the seminary, I discovered one of my classmates, whom I will call “Bill,” committed suicide. As a teenager, Bill had worked in a New Jersey rectory headed by a priest who, in the 1970’s, had been sent away for “treatment” after it was discovered he had been sexually abusing students in a Catholic school. This priest wasn’t kicked out of the priesthood and for twenty years was the pastor of a parish where I think he molested Bill. To be clear, Bill never told me that this priest molested him but, judging from Bill’s troubled behavior in seminary, later suicide, and the fact this priest was eventually drummed out of the priesthood for sexual abuse, with the diocese paying millions in damages, I think the evidence is compelling.

That this abusive priest was not kicked out of the priesthood at the first sign of trouble is a sin crying to heaven for vengeance.  Bill was also ordained to the priesthood and that shouldn’t have happened either. The Church not only failed to protect Bill but, in a very real way, contributed to his death.

And that’s why I’m so angry about McCarrick. This kind of abuse destroyed lives. I understand there are many fine priests and religious out there who are fighting the good fight. My late godfather was one of them. But now many priests and bishops will have to grapple with the knowledge that they knew what McCarrick was doing and that most of them, with rare exceptions, did nothing to stop it. The damage that was done is incalculable.

But karma’s a bitch Ted and it’s finally come for you.

Make no mistake about it, these revelations will rock the American Church to its core. If a Cardinal can get busted, then no clerical predator is safe. This is the #MeToo moment for the Church and I’m sure more stories will come out. The hell with worrying about “giving scandal to the faithful.” They’re grownups. They can take it. The truth shall set you free.

However, McCarrick’s fall has given me a sense of closure. For years, I wondered what would have happened if I had become a priest. Sometimes I’ve thought that I had turned my back on my best destiny, that I missed my true calling. That “what if?” has been steadily eroding for years, but McCarrick was the final nail in its coffin.

Now I know beyond a scintilla of doubt that that leaving the seminary was one of the smartest and healthiest things I’ve ever done.

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Anthony Bourdain 1956 – 2018

Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential inspired me to write my blog Waiter Rant. When that blog became a book in 2008, Anthony provided a very gracious front cover blurb which undoubtedly boosted the book’s success. I owed him a great deal.

My wife woke me to tell me of Anthony’s untimely passing at the age of 61. I was quite saddened by the news. Anthony was a keen wit, an excellent writer and, under his hangdog bad boy exterior, possessed a poet’s heart. I will miss him.  My condolences to his family, friends, and professional colleagues.

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