Who, me?

Why should George Clooney win the Best Actor Oscar?  Well, he deserves it.  Simple as that.  Will he win?  Who knows.  The Academy isn’t always fair.  Life isn’t fair.  Or even sane.  Couple years ago they awarded a low budget war movie Best Picture over Avatar.  Granted, it was a good film, but Avatar was a great film.  Like Clooney, it had a social conscience.  It broke barriers.  It took “original and bold” to a completely different level.  Most of Hollywood has little that is new.  Instead we get police procedurals featuring serial killers, or vampire sequels.  Often there is product placement for junk food, soda, and gas-guzzling vehicles.  Clooney has been an advocate for the environment and for peace, and has made political statements both offscreen and on (in his movie choices, such as Syriana and Michael Clayton.)  He did humanitarian work in Darfur, and has served as a United Nations Messenger of Peace.  In THE DESCENDANTS he proved once again that isn’t afraid to show his non-glamourous side, without makeup.  He hasn’t colored his hair or gone for Botox or facelifts, although he joked a few times that he has, “can’t you tell?”  Clooney has a sense of humor, unlike his nemesis Bill O’Reilly, who lied repeatedly about him.  Certainly, he has made a few mistakes in his career, and yes, there are other worthy performances this year, notably Jean Dujardin in “The Artist.”  But because he’s a great actor and a genuinely nice guy, I pick Clooney.  Which is also why he has a cameo in my novel The Instant Celebrity.

You know, Hollywood loves to slow down the action, when it’s very costly and violent, in order to prolong the effect of spending all that money (which would otherwise go up in smoke if it didn’t impact you as the audience.)  “Bullet time” was used in The Matrix and copied endlessly afterward, along with slo-mo explosions, where the hero or heroine unrealistically tries to outrun the billowing flames.  That’s what we’re trying to do now, actually.  The economy blew up in 2008, only days after Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson assured us that the banks were worthy of their AAA rating.  Come to find out, though, that old Hank used to work for Goldman Sachs, who were betting (and hoping) most banks would fail.  After bailout, they then awarded themselves billions in bonuses, after paying off both the politicians and the ratings agencies.  (Check THIS out.)  Now the flames of 2008 have yet to reach us down the hole into which we’re falling.  Free fall is peaceful, comforting even.  Which is why you need to tell your friends about NATIONAL SLOW MOTION DAY, in hopes of slowing down the plunge long enough for us to think how to stop the inevitable.  That is, unless you prefer to let the evening news think for you, with Panetta’s race to the bottom brought to you by Red Bull.

Eat a SLOW food meal on Oscar day. Give someone a long, SLOW kiss or hug. If someone is tailgating you, SLOW DOWN. Turn off the TV and listen to a book.

      Dear Brian,
        I’m sorry about last night.  I was there but I couldn’t speak to you.  You don’t know how badly I wanted to, but what would I say?  The truth?  I love you, but I’m afraid.  So afraid of how you’ll accept this.  How could I make you believe that this might work?  Writing is easier than facing you.  Brian, I’m so confused and afraid.
                         –D.

That’s how it began.  With each day, a new letter from this unknown and irritating benefactor of emotion–and every one a little more intimate.  Slowly the fear mentioned in the second letter began to subside as the strength of the feelings increased.  I started getting packages at my dorm too–even during the Christmas break when I stayed on campus and worked full time on the “wax” crew, buffing the administration’s hallways by day, and serving up pepperoni and sausage pizza to the faculty brats at night.  The gifts were small:  things like cassette tapes by my favorite, Spiro Gyra, and batches of homemade cookies.  Always, a note or letter detailed her thoughts or reminding me of how she’d spent the day with me on her mind.  But whether with a gift or not, all those letters had one thing in common.  They each contained the solitary petal of a rose.  “I’m sending you a bouquet one petal at a time,” she wrote.  I don’t know why, but I kept the letters.  Maybe they seemed so unbelievable. . .
     The first Tuesday after Christmas, Debra questioned me about my secret admirer.  She found it all endlessly amusing, and began a deliberate giggling at the mention of my predicament.  I told her what I knew about the girl, which wasn’t much.  She was a home economics major, 20 years old.  She was obviously shy, and liked classical “romantic” music.  Chopin, Brahms, Tchaikovsky–that kind of thing.  When I mentioned that she also liked Italian food, Debra said, “Uh-oh!” and blew out her cheeks like a balloon.  Then she smiled that killer smile of hers and winked.  I took her advice and kept my eyes open for signs of someone watching me or following me.  Because “D” certainly did seem to know my whereabouts and what I was doing with my time.  She knew about Debra too, and seemed to become increasingly obsessed with our working relationship.  Soon after this she started writing about her poor grades, her lack of sleep, and how it might be best if she dropped out.
     Well, this news was too much.  I had to get a message to this girl somehow.  I resented the fact that she was forcing me to consider her feelings in my relationship to someone I felt physically attracted to, even though I hadn’t yet found the courage to make a move from where I was.  Unfortunately, however, I kept picturing myself in the dean of women’s office, asking Mrs. Pauli, “Could you, ah, tell me if there’s, well, someone at the school in the home economics department who’s flunking?  Incidentally, she, ah, likes Chopin’s Nocturnes and ravioli.”
     But that was when Debra got her letter.  She came over to my dorm to show it to me.  It was scrawled in black ink across an index card.

     Dear Miss Hollis,
       You must realize my feelings toward Brian.  I can’t tell you how much it would hurt me if he were hurt.  So I’m asking you, please, please not to encourage him.  You can have whoever you want, but you must give me a chance to talk to him first.  Please help me, and don’t let him know I’ve written you.  Please, until I can get the courage to talk to him.  –D.

     “So what do I do now?” I said, after reading her note.
     Debra looked at me in that way she always had, glancing down until she knew our eyes would meet.  She was sitting on my bunk bed with crossed legs, and I remember she was wearing plaid, wool kneehighs and a tight, gray sweater that day when she said those fateful words.
     “Why don’t we try going out together?”
     Strange how feelings can color the whole world for someone.  In just as many ways as there are people, mysterious influences distill their irony into anything from a magical exhilaration to a sense of terrible, imprisoned futility.
     From mid-January to mid-February, I dated Debra.  We went everywhere together, and she made me discover a side of myself I never knew existed.  A side both I and “D” were witness to for the first time.  Debra and I were very open about it from the start, and made a point of walking together often across the crowded campus.  We kissed passionately whenever we suspected we were being watched.  It tasted deliciously evil somehow too, that taboo against realizing our long dormant attraction.  Our favorite game even became guessing who “D” might be, and we looked for the most despondent faces eagerly, even after the letters stopped.  In a secret way, I believe I was grateful to “D” for giving me the excuse I needed.  Even though I felt–I knew–there was a very high wall between Debra and me.
     Then one night, into the last hour of Valentine’s Day, Debra waited excitedly for me outside my dorm with a box of roses.  I will never forget her face that night, getting back from Gino’s.  So beautiful it scared me.  But I kissed her anyway, losing myself in the unreal warmth of her lips just as I had many times lost myself, late at night, in the foreboding scent of her dark hair with a tie “D” had given me draped across the dorm room door.  A late night fog had drifted over the campus, and holding Debra firmly against my chest, I remember distinctly–even now–seeing two rows of halos converging above the street from the lurid arc light, ending in a hazy silver moon which hung in a low scud of cloud.  And Debra’s voice. . .
     “The funniest thing happened tonight,” she said, breaking free and picking up the open box of roses from the hood of my VW.
     “Tell me,” I said.
     “That girl ‘D’ came to my room with these,” she said, with a studied flippancy.  “Her name’s Darlene Gentry.  She was in your music appreciation class.”
     I couldn’t answer for a moment, and then I said, “What do you mean, was?”
     “She’s gone now.  All she wanted was to give you these flowers.  Only I think she was still chicken. . .can you beat that?”
     Debra was giggling when she told me about Darlene.  I can’t forget that part.  Even now.  It had all seemed like a game up to then, but then I knew her name, and suddenly I remembered her too:  She’d sat just two rows behind my all year–a quiet girl with long brown hair who wore granny glasses and demure clothing.  No one paid much attention to her.  She was a “generic” student–the kind you never notice unless she wasn’t there for a while.  Unreal somehow, and always in the background.  But I HAD wondered about her, and thinking about her again, I realized she hadn’t been to class at all those last few days.  Evidently she’d decided to leave school, and on the occasion of Valentine’s Day, when the dorms were raucous with parties, to risk exposure and rejection by confronting me.  Only the same thing had prevented her, because she took the flowers to Debra instead.  Debra, who thought the whole thing so absurdly amusing. . .
     Inside the box was her final letter.

      Dearest Brian,
        Please forgive me for writing you again.  And please accept this bouquet instead of the many more letters I would send if I could, if it mattered.  When I play the Brahms, I seem to be with you now, as if you were here.  Although it’s painful, it must be enough to remember, to imagine you as happy as I’ve seen you.  Goodbye, then, with love, from no one.    –D.

     I left Debra standing by my car that night, and got on the phone.  Claiming to be a relative, I managed to dial through to the women’s dorm supervisor and ask about Darlene Gentry.  There was a long pause, maybe ten minutes, and then I was being questioned.  Darlene wasn’t at bed check and some of her things were gone.
     So that was the end of it, or almost the end.  When the announcement came of Darlene’s accidental death in Omaha two weeks later, I went out and purchased a copy of the Brahms first concerto we’d been studying in music appreciation class before she’d stopped attending.  And when I laid the needle of my roommate’s battered turntable–so used to blasting rock in those days–down onto the second section of that record, I too thought I glimpsed a soul.  One which might have loved sincerely–and been loved–but feared itself unworthy.  I also recognized and remembered that plaintive melody as one which had once, and has since, haunted me.
     Yet the girl whose image the music seemed to evoke was dead then.  Struck down by a speeding motorist on a straight stretch of road in the middle of a clear, cloudless day.  The driver couldn’t quite pass the breathalizer and claimed he never saw her step out, the report said.  Her step-parents had just returned from vacation, and didn’t even know she was in town.  And there was something else.  Something that makes me think it was no accident.
     Her phonograph had been left on.
     I can still see that sometimes too, in my dreams–the needle tracking endlessly against the center label.  And no one has had to tell me what was imprinted on that label–any more than I have to be reminded what a rose symbolizes.  Because I have a stack of letters in the bottom drawer of my dresser, and inside of each there is a pressed petal of that flower.
     But there’s one final letter to appraise–the one I threw away.  When that stack in my drawer was ten years old, this woman sent it to me as if something had changed between us.  As if what we shared was anything more than guilt.  Not legal guilt, of course.  I mean another kind.
     She said she’d missed me at the reunion, and when she asked around, discovered I was working right on campus, at the library.  She was in town for a full week, but already she’d been to the library several times to see me, and I was always out.  Would I have lunch with her or something?  There was so much to talk about.  Her divorce from Greg Elford, a former school quarterback, had just been finalized.  And she heard I was still single.  Now she just wanted to “make one of her old classmates jealous” before returning to the house she’d won in the settlement.  Jealous, she said, like we once did with that girl from Omaha. . .what was her name?
     I never answered Debra’s letter.  And the one time I walked by her on campus during the week of her stay, she didn’t seem to recognize me.  Although she might not have changed, perhaps I have.  Among other things, what I feel for her now isn’t fear or lust so much as pity.  Maybe because she was never afraid.  Maybe because, being dead inside, she had nothing to lose, and what you saw was all you got.  Whatever the reason, I saw that she was even more a stranger to me, and an accusing reminder that Darlene Gentry had been a stranger to everyone then.  Call it irony if you want to.   Or instinct.
     I saw someone wearing a tee shirt recently which read, proudly, PERHAPS YOU HAVE MISTAKEN ME FOR SOMEONE WHO GIVES A DAMN.  That could have been me in that tee shirt, ten years ago.
     And something told me there wouldn’t be enough time to make Debra understand.        
            -0-

.

(© Jonathan Lowe; originally published in Buffalo Spree)

(Composed by Sherry Hoffman, now deceased; Lyrics by Jonathan Lowe; recorded on cassette recorder at Ventana Canyon resort in Tucson in 1995.)

Make no mistake, writing is work.  Different, of course, than my previous jobs (paying my dues) as a clothing store clerk, dishwasher, wax crew hallway stripper and buffer, wallpaper hanger, paint salesman, short order cook, Wards hardware department manager, and letter forwarder/window clerk.  But work nonetheless.  In school, I worked night shift to pay expenses, while the rich kids went on dates and played sports.  (Rich was defined as having enough money to own a car.)  Later, when my peers were getting married and having kids, I was still working late at the post office (required for those without seniority), and then reading and reviewing books before falling asleep, alone.  Now, in middle age, I’m “unencumbered” as my insurance salesmen former classmates might put it.  No kids, no wife, no time clock job, “no nothing.”  Some would call this horror, others humor.  Writing both, I call it “life.”  It is what it is.  One thing is for sure: it lends a perspective outside the box. . . or rather cubicle.  For humor, check out my interview with possibly our greatest living humorist: Garrison Keillor.  Pages 12-13 at this link.  For horror, there is this story, produced by some fellow night owls in England.  The photo above was taken years ago for a piece I did for Omni magazine.  I was working graveyard shift at the Tucson post office at the time.  The piece was humorous, and although the job was anything but (being as repetitive as an infomercial for reverse mortgages or cooking utensils) at least it allowed me to listen to books.  They owned my hands, but my mind was somewhere else entirely.  Still is.  (insert laugh track here.)

Miraculous Plot is new to audio here.  Postmarked for Death is new to iTunes here.

Of course Hawking is being facetious, but while he’s at it, maybe he should work on a formula to understand men, too.  Like why men are fixated on sports scores–which they would want to know prior to knowing about anything else, including election results, Iran’s missile testing results, or the red-lined China Syndrome status of the nuclear power plant up the street.  Of course nuclear energy has turned out not to be as dangerous as oil addiction, despite the movie.  (If you add to global warming the consequence of wars.)  But the truth is, if anyone is unwilling to be an individual, or to think for himself or herself (instead of getting opinions from TV news sound bites and Entertainment Tonight), they are really not difficult to understand at all.  All you need to do is to track their demographic, like the ad agencies do.  Once a subject’s prejudices are analyzed by establishing their ethnicity, social status, and education, it is easy to target them with personalized propaganda. . . or rather with familiar things they want to hear (pop goes the weasel.)  That way you can control them with a feedback loop of social memes which can be injected like a virus.  Kinda like what Coca-Cola does, linking themselves with love and happiness when what they’re really selling is no more defensible than a recreational drug.  (Tasty but addictive and pro-diabetic, contributing to obesity and a spike in health care costs.)  In politics, we elect a President based on if we think they can win, as if it’s America’s Next Top Model.  And so is it any wonder we get the same rhetoric from candidates who act as if it’s all a game?  You know who pays the price of this win-at-all-cost philosophy of us-versus-them.  Personally, I favor Ron Paul, even if he doesn’t look as Presidential as Romney (or Obama).  Why?  Listen to the man.  He makes sense.  Our bloated military budget would be cut in half with Paul.  With Romney, we could be looking at a third Vietnam in the Middle East.  Are we really doing so well with the other two?  In business and industry, we’ve just about given up making things (other than sugar water, weapons systems, and cigarettes) to the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese.  (Although we spend more on our military than every other country in the world combined.)  So how about we let Coke make a car?  Sure!  The Coke Car, with no seat belts or air bags.  They push other unhealthy products which sell well overseas, so why not?  American cigarettes are smoked by babies in some foreign countries, too, and (after all) also aggressively advertised to kids in far Eastern countries like Indonesia and the Philippines!
    I started by talking about Stephen Hawking, who is a genius.  Now I’ll add a quote from another genius, who was Time Magazine’s MAN OF THE CENTURY: “Nationalism is the measles of humanity.”  Measles is a skin disease.  A surface rash.  Beauty is also skin deep.  In truth, we are all more alike than we are different, and there is no justification for ego in a universe which has been shown to be more vast with each passing decade of examination by science.  We’re all like the man on the ledge.  Human evolution must now move beyond this state of warfare and blood lust and winning at others expense, or else.  If politicians and Hollywood producers and fast food conglomerates and Pentagon generals need another quote from Albert Einstein to consider, it’s this: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.  It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” Even Steve Jobs, whatever his ego, would have agreed with that. 

There’s nothing there.
.
Peter stared at the note for a long time with an oddly familiar surprise, as though he’d written the note himself, but couldn’t remember when.  Then folded it slowly and put it in his pocket.  The sadness had seemed overwhelming, but as he stood it began to lift.  You don’t belong here in winter.  He walked toward the gate of the rose garden, and paused near the entrance to see that on this side the sign above him now read:

                                     THANKS FOR NOT PICKING THE ROSES.

    He looked down at the cluster of barren rose bushes at his feet.  The cluster bore a tiny plaque:  NEW BEGINNINGS.  He reached into his pocket for the note, but it was only ashes now.
    Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
    He felt a tentative smile form on his face.  Happy New Year.  Hadn’t that been the message–that death returned to life?  He stretched out his hand and sprinkled the dust over the cold vines, and with vows to return in the Spring, walked resolutely toward the call center and its waiting piles of waste paper.