The SMITH Diaries Project

Ten Years Ago My Job Didn’t Exist

August 10th, 2006 by Tate Hausman

Campaign life is brutal. I plugged away until one in the morning yesterday, got up at seven, and started all over again. 99 days left until V-day. 99. That’s a number that gives me anxiety for two reasons: one, how the FUCK can we possibly get everything done in only 99 days! and two, 99 more days of this!? Are you crazy?

Par for the course, I guess. People in my line of work all too often give up their lives for the cause. Or the crusade. Or the candidates, in this case.

Ten years ago, my job didn’t exist. Five years ago, it was a glimmer in the eyes of some thickly-glassed geeks and forward-thinking political hacks. Today, it’s a given for any campaign. But it still isn’t clear what to call me. Web Consultant? Internet Director? Technology Manager? Online Organizer? In short, I use the Internet to win political campaigns.

Right now I’m working for two fantastic, progressive candidates ? one in upstate NY, the other in the African-American suburbs of DC. I’m going to leave out their names, not because my affiliations are secret, but because I’d rather not have search engines pick up a reference to either candidate in this context. This diary is entirely my own opinion, completely unrepresentative of my campaigns or candidates, and Google shouldn’t get any ideas to the contrary.

I can tell you this — both of my candidates are incredibly exciting to work for. They both hold dear a vision of the world that I’m fighting for: a world where Americans look out for each other, where we have each others’ backs, where we fight for the common good and strive to succeed by working together, not stepping on each other to get ahead. And get this! They both have a real chance of winning. Great politics + great odds = great candidates. And I found two of them. What are the odds? (I’ll tell you ? about 40 out of the 535 memebers of Congress).

So the hours hurt, yes, and the never-ending stream of work …well, it never ends. But if Democrats win back the House? If we can check this crazy administration and lame-duck it for a few years? Then the marathon at a sprinter’s pace will be worth it. “I know that come November 8,” said one of my candidates last week, “whether we win or lose, we won’t have left anything on the field.” Amen. (He then went on to disavow sports metaphors because they’re a little too warlike, and we’re campaigning against the war. Gotta love a man with a tight message.)

And besides, after going all out in ‘03 (Huffington for CA Governor), giving it everything I had in ‘04 (Dean, then Kerry), and spending all of ‘05 gearing up for more, now I feel … seasoned? No, that’s not exactly right. My job doesn’t allow for seasoning. It’s always new, always changing. Being the Online/Tech/Data /Wait-What’s-a-Blog? Guy keeps you learning, constantly. My set of tactics and knowledge base have probably doubled since the ‘04 cycle. And I command only a fraction of the knowledge out there. There’s inherent pleasure in expanding one’s horizons, but can you ever feel in control ? even a little ? when the Web is growing and changing constantly underneath you?

Ironically, we Web strategists are the very victims of the information age, constantly swamped with brave new worlds to explore and exploit. There’s an expectation that the “Web Guys” are on top of every new trend. As if we all blog, and tag, and Digg, and cruise MySpace, and YouTube, and mash Google Maps, and download every new and trendy Web2.0 widget that comes across our path. Yeah, right. When trying to elect your guy, you’re usually forced back to the basics ? raising money, bringing in volunteers, maybe pushing a little message.

So seasoned is the wrong word. But there’s a certain calm that comes with age and experience. The interpersonal dramas of a campaign affect me much less. I take everything less personally. The big picture is easier to see, and the hurt of losing an internal strategy debate (or even just a wording choice) heals over quick. Which brings me to my current struggles.

Those of you who’ve heard me spout campaign philosophy have inevitably gotten bored of the word “distributed.” As in distributing the power, access, and technology of a campaign out to the grassroots. It’s a philosophy that’s come back into vogue with the Web, but as a theory its been rattling around idealists’ heads for centuries.

The opposite model — command and control — almost completely dominates campaigning today. Campaigns run on central authority, and the most centralized campaigns usually win. This model leaves little room for distribution of anything other than check-writing capacity. Maybe a little phone-banking or stamp-licking slips in there, but otherwise, there’s not a lot of room for the grassroots effort. There’s certainly no room for IDEAS and INNOVATION to bubble up from the grassroots.

This has been my conundrum during these current campaigns. How can I convince my superiors to embrace an untested, fairly radical model when their only blueprint for success is the old model? No campaign wants to be the trailblazer. You only get one shot, the theory goes — better stick to what we know can win. Only doomed losers take big risks. Play it safe, or play it on the bus ride home.

Few of my fellow campaigners study the worlds of network-centric advocacy and distributed campaigning and the power of the edges. They don’t get the newsletters I get. They don’t read the books I read (with one notable exception, Joe Trippi, who actually wrote one of the better books on the subject, and is working on one of the campaigns with me.) How could I possible expect to overturn decades of campaign strategy with a half-baked set of theories and unproven arsenal of tactics?

So, in the end, it’s back to 1.0 uses of the Web — fundraising, volunteer recruiting, and maybe an online ad campaign. And I can’t complain, because I’m still learning, and more importantly, my candidates have damn good shots at actually winning. After all, that’s what counts in the end, regardless of process. Period. (Right?)

Up Next: Iris & Dot, the Faceless Volunteers

Goodbye, Mr. Thompson

July 24th, 2006 by Jason Thompson

The night for the eighth grade dance arrives and, never having attended a school function before, curiosity inspires my wife and I to attend. Young ladies in silky evening gowns totter on high heels beneath an illuminated floral archway to join the suited boys, invariably shorter, at circular tables around a temporary dance floor in the school assembly hall; a handful of bolder students bump and grind to the loud Oaktown rap music blasting from the speakers on either side of the stage; small groups huddle together to have their portrait snapped by a professional photographer; pink sherbet punch flows liberally. Spotting me enter the hall, the only staff member present aside from the principal, 10 or so of my students run up to me beaming and shake my hand. I have never been welcomed so enthusiastically. I introduce them to my wife, “Mrs. Thompson” (a name, until this point, by which she has never been known.) My students smile and ask us to pose in pictures with them. They love me. “Are you coming back next year?” asks Eva, one of the brightest students in the year (she wants to be a psychiatrist when she grows up; she’s a girl for whom anything seems possible.) I can’t bring myself to tell her.

A few days pass and it’s time for the middle school promotion ceremony. Overwhelmed by paperwork, I’ve missed the rehearsal, which means I don’t get to present any of the awards. Most of my straight-A students win prizes for their distinctions, curricular and personal, with Eva winning the “Lionel Wilson Award” in honor of her all-round brilliance. Dillesha, a bossy, athletic black girl so respected by her peers that some of her teachers have devolved a measure of disciplinary authority to her, wins awards for dancing and leadership. Her teacher chokes back a joyful tear as she announces Dillesha’s honor. It strikes me that the only time I have been moved to tears as a teacher was when one of the students shocked me with an electric biro. I envy the depth of her pride.

It’s the last week of term, or “Passion Week.” Students sign up for a range of supposedly fun activities offered by teachers in line with staff passions. There’s wiffleball and woodland field trips; a Playstation soccer tournament and sex education. Based on my five years experience as a documentary film researcher and producer in London back in the ‘90s, I offer documentary filmmaking. Based on a student’s suggestion, I assign my 30 aspiring auteurs to make a movie about the Bay Area “Hyphy” movement. What is Hyphy? How do you go Hyphy? Is Hyphy a good or a bad thing? These are the questions the film will attempt to answer. Some of the students, led by prize-winning Dillesha, will perform a Hyphy dance, while others take turns recording the action on my handycam. The rest are variously assigned the roles of writer, producer, presenter, and poster designer. There aren’t enough jobs to go round. I have drastically miscalculated the scope of activities required to engage 30 energetic teenagers for an entire week, but, not knowing what else to do, and half my mind already checking my bags at San Francisco International Airport, I press on regardless.

After a day spent planning and getting into groups, we go into production. Day Two goes well. Dillesha is a formidable lieutenant and the students essentially march to her tune; we film some dances and interviews. By the end of Day Three we have shot everything and the administration clamps down on the chaotic state into which Passion Week has by this point degenerated, with wiffleball players and video gamers wandering into the documentary team and vice versa, many students simply strolling the halls at their leisure: from now on, all students must stay in their assigned Passion Week classroom for the duration of the day. Returning to Room 131, my students hot and bored, I struggle to devise a schedule for the next day, planned for the edit (in which I can envisage involving perhaps three or four highly motivated students at most), wondering how, without the freedom of the corridors to absorb the attention of the indifferent, I am possibly going to survive Thursday trapped in Room 131 with the remaining 27 members of my team. I call Los Angeles. The rep assures me my passport will be ready in Washington, D.C. by the following morning, leaving them 24 hours to FedEx the document to me in San Francisco in time for my scheduled departure four hours after the final assembly of the school year.

I arrive at school at eight in the morning on Thursday, the last day of Passion Week, to discover that my editor has not shown up. Nor has Dillesha. The UK Consulate, where my Los Angeles expediter’s D.C rep has supposedly camped out since it opened at 9am, eastern time, will close at 2pm, leaving me three hours to wait until I can hear definitively whether I will indeed be making good my escape to London the next day. I ask a colleague, friendly with some television people, to track down an editor at the last minute. I put on the beatbox and ask Dillesha’s crew to dance. “Only if you dance first,” says one. I do my best to imitate their frenetic gyrations and the students laugh hysterically. Time passes. The students run out of tracks they like dancing to. We discover that students have erased a large section of the previous two days’ footage by students rewinding the video to watch what they had shot and then pressing record when they were done, despite my constant warnings about this very risk.

Tick, tock: the call comes from LA. No passport. I want to cry. Two students are making out at the back of the class; Dillesha’s crew have given up; a parent calls complaining that her son has been reprimanded for going AWOL from my production and wandering the halls and wants to know what he was supposed to be doing because from what she can gather his assignments amounted to approximately nothing; I tell the parent hesitantly that her son is welcome to help the camera crew and she immediately bridles at the word “welcome” (“What do you mean, ‘welcome’ “ Isn’t he supposed to be engaged in a constructive activity every hour he’s in your building? Because if he isn’t, I have no problem taking him home, and he knows that.”); with a jolt of embarrassment I recognize the obvious truth of the parent’s words, because, yes, I am supposed to have engaged her son in a constructive activity every hour he was with me. This is no less than every child deserves; no less than the task of teaching demands.

This blindness to obvious responsibilities is why my production has gone to hell and why I’m not going to London, and although I have been here before, it seems — running up credit card debt, drinking too much, locking my keys in the car with the engine running — this pathological tendency towards self-sabotage seems unabated, the lessons of grown-up life unlearned. Like the student who kept getting detentions and was eventually expelled for smoking grass on campus, I am trapped in a self-defeating cycle, yet I don’t have poverty to blame. I call my wife in search of succor, but she is far too angry to requite my self-pitying need. “No, you’re not having a meltdown now,” she says, alluding to the panicked crises that punctuated my depressive episode on a more or less daily basis. She hangs up offering to call the UK Consulate on my behalf.

Amazingly, the Consulate agrees to grant me an emergency passport, a concession normally granted only to the bereaved, out of sympathy for my plight at the hands of the fraudulent Los Angeles agency (who return my check a week later), but I must leave for the Consulate in downtown San Francisco immediately. I ask a colleague to cover for me while I drive into the city, leaving the students going Hyphy in Room 131, my laptop switched on with the grading program running, a half-eaten blueberry muffin atop my stack of papers. I get my passport, feeling as if I’ve been granted a miraculous reprieve from a perfectly just sentence (“If you don’t fucking learn from this,” my wife warns, “this marriage isn’t going to work long-term”), returning to school the final day of the year to find that my colleague, despite having agreed to cover for me, had not effectively conveyed this message to the vice-principal who, drawn to the noise in Room 131 and the chaos unfolding therein, sent all the students home early. And where was Mr. Thompson? The principal wants to know. “We thought you’d left the country,” he says. I apologize for the confusion I’ve caused and we shake hands, a more formal goodbye than I had hoped for.

I return to my room and type in the rest of my grades, stack the desks and chairs in the middle of the room, take the student art off the walls and clear my desk. The last assembly is beginning. The principal announces, to cheers, the school’s 100 percent college acceptance rate for its seniors for the second year in a row: somehow the system is working, it seems, despite rather than because of me. As the students are dismissed, I say goodbye to the few staff members and students I know I will miss. “Goodbye, Mr. Thompson,” says Eva. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for us.” I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve the remark but I smile and say, “You’re welcome.”

Growing Pains

July 17th, 2006 by Jason Thompson

Six black girls dance to a rap track in the middle of the classroom, while three Latino boys fumble with a digital video camera. Another 15 students sit idly around the classroom perimeter, some asleep, others watching a DVD on television, while still others walk aimlessly in and out of the room. While I try to wrangle the students into some kind of order to shoot a documentary on the Bay Area “Hyphy” movement, as we had planned for the last week of term, the school principal telephones me to ask if I have entered my grades into the computer system. My grades are a day late and I am holding up the entire school, he says testily. Before I get a chance to respond I get a call on my cell phone from the passport services agency in Los Angeles I had hired to expedite my British passport application. (Having let my passport expire, and not being organized enough to get my application together with the one month’s notice required by the British Consulate prior to a planned vacation to visit friends and family in Europe at the end of the school year, I had hired an agency that promised — falsely, as it turned out — to expedite the application in a mere five days). “I’m sorry, Mr. Thompson,” says the agency rep, “but our Washington contact went to the Embassy this morning and your passport still isn’t ready. They say we should come back tomorrow.”

I am due to fly to see friends and family in Europe with my wife and three month-old daughter the following evening. My passport will not be ready in time for my vacation. Surveying the chaos of the classroom, gazing at the stack of ungraded papers piled on my desk, thinking of my London friends’ reaction to my passport screwup and my principal’s dismay at my tardy grading, I feel a wave of anxiety and gloom crash over me and sense that I am being dealt a long overdue life lesson about responsibility to myself and others. As I leave teaching — a one-year experiment, following an unsatisfying three-year stint in the nonprofit world — for yet another career, will I ever learn to feel at home in my work, without wanting to run away? Aged 35, a husband and father, nominally in loco parentis for 55 teenagers as a Humanities teacher, will I finally grow up?

Cut back to a month ago and the first signs that my fledgling attempts at classroom crowd control are actually beginning to take effect: how did I end up in such chaos? Well, it crept up gradually. For roughly a week after I made my students line up outside class in the blazing California sun to practice “standing quietly” before I let them inside, they start to behave themselves. The jellybeans and paper planes stop flying; I don’t have to shout over a chorus of chatter to make myself heard. But the respite is short-lived and soon I am again facing a constant fight to hold my students’ attention. With three weeks remaining until the end of the year, and the prospect of low grades apparently not acting as a deterrent, I begin to lose hope. Then a professor from California State University, Stockton, comes to observe me for my teaching credential and is so mortified by the extent of misbehavior that he asks the vice principal to give me more support. (The students, if you remember had had eight months with another teacher, who eventually left because she couldn’t handle them, prior to my taking over in late April; I was facing an uphill battle to get them back on track.)

The vice principal, embarrassed by the complaint — the misbehavior potentially reflecting poorly on the administration rather than on me, the rookie teacher — agrees to take action. Within a week, six students have been suspended; one expelled for smoking pot on campus (he had the bright idea of recording the act on a cell phone camera, which ended up in the hands of the vice principal via a friend turned informant); that same student arrested by a security guard — handcuffed in the computer lab, right in front of his astonished and somewhat intimidated peers — after mysteriously turning up in class fully dressed in school uniform the day after his expulsion for tagging another neighborhood school; a second student also expelled for the tagging incident.

Make no mistake, mine is by no means the only eighth grade class with problems. At the end of the year, only 50 percent of eighth graders will be promoted to ninth grade. And the students are being suspended for more than just misbehaving in my class. Yet I sense that as the newbie I have borne the brunt of the acting out.

My reaction to the suspensions is twofold. The class is more manageable and my day less stressful. But I wonder about the efficacy of a public education system whose only ultimate reliable behavioral lever is to kick the bad kids out: isn’t that precisely what progressive educators were working so hard to avoid, the school as sorting machine? At the same time, from my own perspective as an overwhelmed teacher, I’m not quite sure of the realistic alternative. Smaller class sizes definitely help, allowing teachers to give more individualized attention to students and concentrate less on crowd control, but that means more money, which is sorely unavailable. Ideas, anyone? Anyone?

It probably would have helped if my heart was more in the job, but to be honest I’d first started thinking about leaving only a couple of months after arriving back last fall. Maybe K-12 public school teaching in the American inner city just wasn’t for me; maybe the thought of escape is more an old coping mechanism I’ve developed to deal with difficult situations ever since my troubled adolescence in an unhappy home; presumably some combination of the two factors left me unable to fully invest myself in the daily grind of planning, grading and instruction. Whatever the reason, I must admit to finding my inability to ever get totally on board with my teaching gig a little troubling. Sure, the money sucks; the kids are out of control; the bureaucracy is maddening. But on a deeper level, the level where I’m looking at the trajectory of my “career” from documentary producer (1999) to technology journalist (2000) to FAO Schwarz toy demonstrator (2001) to grant writer (2002) to teacher (2006), I’m a little bothered by the fact that, finally landing in a position of some responsibility, those rows of impressionable faces looking up at me, (some) hungry for knowledge, I chose to bail and go back to school myself (this fall I’m starting a full-time, five year PhD program in clinical psychology).

Was I jealous of my students? An Englishman lost in America, a few years shy of 40, still lacking purpose and direction, somewhat recklessly unbothered by taking on close to 200 grand in debt? Okay, I’m excited about this new direction, too; proud of my GRE scores; confident that, after an episode of severe depression last year (now, mercifully, after extensive therapy and medication, in full remission), I’ll be able to learn more about the condition and ultimately help others with it. But in life, unlike in grade school, it seems the graduation from one level to the next is determined less by straightforward moves up a linear scale and more by elliptical switchbacks, weird turns in the path whose direction often only makes sense much later and sometimes not even then. If I’m promoting myself from public school teacher to psychology grad student, I want to feel that I got a decent passing grade in the gig I’m leaving behind, not that I’m anxiously exiting myself after a spell of bad behavior. I want to be the proud valedictorian of this phase of my life’s progression, or at least finally confident that the next phase makes sense, not the serial burnout.

But I make these self-analytical observations in retrospect. Back in the classroom, with two weeks until the end of school and my European holiday, my grades are due, my students’ research papers are past their deadline, there are three kinds of test to get through, Oakland is suffering a heatwave, I’m supposed to be planning a documentary production for the last week of term, my British passport hasn’t arrived from the United Kingdom Consulate despite daily anxious calls to my Los Angeles expediter and my wife is getting antsy about the prospect of a 10-hour transatlantic flight with our crying baby daughter alone, I’m getting worried about being stuck in San Francisco while my wife and child go to visit my friends and family without me, my students start asking how they can raise their grade from the Fs they got in their previous reports and hand in chicken-scratch scribbled essays for assignments due weeks before, my pile of ungraded papers stacks higher and higher. I find myself curiously mesmerized by online research papers about developmental neuropsychiatry, a subject somewhat germane to a memoir I’m writing, but extremely germane to my need to dissociate; to think about anything other than the 25 rambunctious adolescents in front of me (to read psychology, rather than practice it).

As my departure date draws closer, my desire for escape intensifies, and each passing moment grows increasingly uncomfortable. Thoughts of my reunion with old school friends in London loom larger than the occasion ostensibly warrants. I will be seeing friends I have known since I was younger than my students after two years on different sides of the Atlantic, during which time I have switched jobs, overcome major depressive illness, and had a daughter. The reunion with old school mates, emotional touchstones against which the story of my life seems simultaneously allied and measured, seems like a kind of psychic report card marking my developmental milestones. If I miss my flight to London because I can’t get my shit together to apply for a passport on time, what does that say about how much I value the people supposedly most dear to me, the extent of my supposed recovery, the state of my life? Will I make the grade? I call Los Angeles. The papers pile still higher.

Up Next: The money sucks. The kids are out of control. The bureaucracy is maddening. And Mr. Thompson heads to the Hyphy School Dance.

I hoped he would kiss me in one of the darker rooms of the party

July 12th, 2006 by Frida in the City

KEY
A: French-speaking guy
B: Short, bald guy
C: Sports nut guy
D: Graphic designer guy
E: Guy with girlfriend
F: Thai-speaking guy

(new for this chapter)
G: Italian guy
H: European jailbait
I: E.?s girlfriend?s ex-boyfriend

I’m trying to take it a little easy this week, not only because my party left me a little tired, but also because my patience with guys I really don’t have chemistry with is wearing thin. G. kind of gave me a wake-up call.

I met G. online about three years ago when I first moved to the city. He had just arrived, too, from D.C, but you’d swear he was FOB from Italy. How can a guy who has lived in D.C. for eight years still have such a strong accent? But at the time, my type was Eurogeeks. Things fizzled out, but we remained friends. We met at a great wine bar, and he is looking much better than in the past—seems someone had a long talk with him about dressing for success or somesuch because I distinctly remember an Ernie-looking red and blue striped rugby shirt that made me cringe three years ago. I asked him for his opinion on why C. isn’t making any moves. His theory? C. feels like with online dating, someone better is just a click away. H. makes me realize why do I care anyway? Is he worth it? I have to say no. Then he says, “There are guys who you want a relationship with and others you just want to fuck because you’re horny” (which came out as “Faack because you’re ornie,” with his accent). It made me happy that our ill-fated romance has become a friendship. Of course, I’m hoping that he sees what he missed out on and asks me out. Though I might just ask him out myself.

Managed to avoid most of my invites for Friday because, as I mentioned, I am losing my patience with certain candidates. D. acted like such a dork at my party that even though I want to do my own version of What Not to Wear on him, I don’t want to see him anymore. Dodged his invitation to attend a friend’s art opening by saying I had plans. Even though I decided I wasn’t going to waste any more time with C., I asked him if he wanted to come over and watch a movie, but he has a friend in town this weekend. I am convinced it is an ex-girlfriend who he still has feelings for. No, I’m not paranoid.

The opera date with A. was fantastic—now this is a date! He wore a suit, picked me up, and ordered the wine. He even got me a rose—VERY hokey, I know, but he is trying. We had polite dinner conversation until I realized he is quite senior at his office for such a young guy, and I am intrigued. Asked him more about how he handles all of the responsibility, and he came off as a truly capable and confident person. At least he has that going for him. Seems, though, that he has an underdeveloped sense of fear. Not only was his driving erratic again, but he proceeded to tell me about how he stops crimes on the street (having grown up in the city, you know someone can have a gun at any moment—what nut would get involved?) I told him I saw two guys grabbing an old woman’s purse once, and he asked, So what did you do? Um—NOTHING! I am not crazy. I was watching from a bus and, besides, she was fine and the muggers were stopped a block away by the police. While we got along fine, during the opera, I looked over at him, saw his pudgy little fingers and decided once and for all I don’t want them anywhere near me.

Today I took H. around the gallery—another tour. He was the one visiting from Europe I had eye sex with at my party. Two years ago, I would never have tried getting to know someone geographically unavailable. When I invited him, he said how could he resist a tour with such a good-looking private guide? Yum! I had hoped he would kiss me in one of the darker rooms. Until the actual tour. He was younger than I remembered. I felt like Mrs. Robinson. He was a little disappointed that my interest fell flat, but I’m sorry, giving a European guy his one experience with an older American woman is not my gig.

OK, I HAVE BEEN WRONGED. Well, not wronged exactly but certainly trifled with. C. was supposed to call this weekend, but since he said he had a friend in town, I let it slide and e-mailed him yesterday to confirm our plans for hanging out tonight. Even though I said I wrote him off, I’m a glutton for punishment. He e-mailed back and said he’d like to hang out, but his weeknights were booked with all of his new sports leagues. How much sports can someone play? Well, I’m not waiting around—it’s obvious that he is not that interested in me. Guys are taking me to the opera and buying me flowers, and what is he doing? Nothing. This time I am really writing him off.

A friend advised that I clear the air with him by gently coaxing him to say why he hasn’t kissed me yet, but I guess I’ll never get the chance. Why can’t he just tell me he’s not interested? That’s what I do with guys I know I’m not into. I would appreciate the same courtesy. But I have to admit that instead of getting obsessed and waiting for his calls, I continued to date heavily and meet new people. So I didn’t waste any time on him, which was a first for me. (Waste of time = holding off on dating other people because you put too much faith in one person too soon.) If I can ever get A. on the phone then I’m going to tell him I’m not interested in anything romantic right now, and then officially I will be dating no one.

C. still hasn?t called—after six dates it’s bad manners to just fade out, so I will tell him so over e-mail. I never just fade away no matter how brief my contact with someone. I don’t expect men to follow this same code of conduct, but six dates does mean he has to provide some explanation, right? Not very smooth, but at least I get my thoughts out and continue my crusade of having people respect one another on this small planet we share.

F., Thai-speaking guy, has resurfaced on a social networking site. I noticed that he had viewed my profile. I viewed his, and boy, his pic does not do him justice (if the ladies out there in cyberspace only knew. Will write to him and see if I get a response. If not, will have friends who work in his department at the university stalk him at the photocopier.

Now—and I seem to sink lower every week—I am going to an NBA Finals party that E.’s girlfriend invited me to saying there would be plenty of cute guys there but one in particular, I. Again, European with a delicious accent—and her ex-boyfriend.

I hate sports.

Up Next: Sexy politicians and one bad kisser.

Backed Up in the Big Easy

July 7th, 2006 by Cree McCree

You know that old adage about how you should always take an umbrella along if you don’t want it to rain? Same thing applies to hurricane season, and if New Orleans gets through this one without an evacuation — let alone a major hit—it’s got my mom Millie, my sister Jill and me to thank. The three of us took out a massive insurance policy against the worst happening by spending the past few weeks in a state of emergency, engineering our own private evacuation.

Getting Mom out of the strike zone to a nursing home in Joliet, Illinois (where Jill and her family live) became an urgent priority in late May, when a nasty fall broke Mom’s wrist, precipitated a heart attack, hospitalized her for two weeks and kept her totally bedridden in her senior residence until just a few days before Jill wheeled her onto the plane up north.

It was a Herculean effort, involving military-style maneuvers across the landmines of the American health care system; mounds of legal and bureaucratic paperwork; the deja-vu-all-over-again logistics of contracting a mover and downsizing her possessions just six months after she moved here from Ohio; and the sheer emotional stress of never knowing when the next crisis phone call would come (for a while, it was at least once daily, including a few in the dead of night).

Though Jill and I had our doubts in the beginning, Mom eventually pulled through like a trooper, goaded by a crack team of physical therapists who got her to meet once unthinkable goals, from sitting up to eat in her wheelchair to actually walking across the room using a special walker that supports her broken wrist. And to keep our spirits up, there was plenty of comic relief.

The grand prize for situational humor goes to LaJuana, the youngest of Mom’s 24/7 home healthcare “sitters” and the only one with major ‘tude. Loathe to do anything that did not fall strictly into her job description as “sitter,” LaJuana spent nearly every minute of her on-the-job hours on her butt, glued to her cell phone, listening to music (I assume) when she wasn’t actively conversing. But she sprang into uncharacteristic action during a “crisis” precipitated by Mom’s first BM in her bedside commode.

Mom’s PT Caroline called to report the exciting news of the chamber pot deposit — a feat achieved, she added, no thanks to LaJuana, who refused to help with the heavy lifting. Not long afterward, the phone rang again. This time it was LaJuana, and she was in a state. Seems the BM in question hadn’t fully gone down when Caroline flushed the toilet, which was threatening to overflow. Well, I asked, isn’t there a plunger?

“Dunno, but it smells bad. You gotta come right away.”

So I rounded up my husband Donald, along with a plunger, bucket and mop, and hightailed it over to Malta Park. A sullen LaJuana greeted us in the lobby; she’d left Mom alone upstairs (presumably because it “smelled bad”) until the emergency plumbing squad arrived.

Up we went, expecting to find the bathroom floor flooded with water and sewage. Unh-unh. The toilet was merely backed up, with a wad of napkins covering the offending BM. And next to it, plain as day. was a big ol’ toilet plunger. So why hadn’t young LaJuana availed herself of this handy tool? Not in her job description. Or as she herself so comically and succinctly put it:

“I ain’t usin’ no plunger!”

That dirty job fell to Donald, who drew on his years as New York super to make short work of it, despite the extra obstacles posed by LaJuana’s cover-up efforts. Mom, mercifully, slept through the whole shebang. As for LaJuana, she was axed before the end of her shift, but her catchphrase will live forever.

“I ain’t usin’ no plunger!” is the perfect bureaucratic excuse for the arrested recovery of New Orleans, which continues to drown in a sea of red tape while government agencies keep the system backed up with arbitrary regulations and deadlines.

How bad is it?

On June 30—amid an extreme drought in a parched, flood-damaged city laden with flammable debris that’s been sparking constant blazes—FEMA sent an email to our severely understaffed fire department that essentially said: sorry guys, your deadline’s up. We’re taking back our two fire-fighting helicopters unless you start paying for them. At midnight tonight. On the eve of Fourth of July weekend in a town whose pre-Katrina fireworks laws were so lax we never had to our leave own porch to watch spectacular corner pyrotechnics. A town where M80s competed with Glocks as the celebratory device of choice in the ‘hood. A town where the armies of returning knuckleheads were as unlikely to heed official warnings that they cool it this year as they are to stop shooting each other in Central City.

What were the Knuckleheads at FEMA thinking?!? They weren’t. Deadline’s up, end of story: “I ain’t usin’ no plunger!”

In other words: tough shit.

Sure, the state stepped in at the 11th hour (kind of like Donald with his plunger) to cover the city’s financial shortfall, averting the immediate ‘copter crisis for at least a few weeks. But this kind of bureaucratic blindness has become a running joke that’s not all that funny anymore.

What is funny is our running family joke. We successfully managed to get Mom out of the hurricane zone—and into Tornado Alley, as the zone’s known around Joliet.

Oh well. As Jill points out, with only 20 minutes warning for a twister, at least we won’t have to worry about evacuating Mom again.

Tito Puente Played Here

July 6th, 2006 by Brad Wieners

With the snow flurries now a freezing rain, I scanned the storefronts on 43rd Street for a five buck umbrella, decided the last thing I needed was another of those flimsy, inside-out-after-the-first-gust pieces of crap, and quickened my stride in the hopes of making the Port Authority Bus Terminal before the rain soaked through. There was snow on the ground — it had been pleasantly falling for a few hours, and two or three inches had accumulated — but the temperature had risen to 33 or 34 degrees Farhenheit, thus leading to my least favorite weather. If you haven’t had the pleasure, sleet, as it was once called, more often a part of the “wintry mix” in contemporary metereological parlance, sucks. If it’s going to be cold and wet, why can’t it just snow and make everything beautiful? At the same time, it was just as well I was all-but-running because I really hadn’t given myself time to sort out where the ticket window for the bus line I was taking was located within the vast mall of the terminal, or how to get from there to the gate before the bus departed.

Since November things had been moving fast. At Thanksgiving, Gus and M and I flew to California for the big holiday feast with Oma and Opa. (My stepmother and father had decided they wished Gus to call them by Dutch endearments for Grammie and Grandpa after two years just concluded as ex-pats in Amsterdam.) Not only did Oma and Opa reiterate their willingness to help us with the loan of a down payment, they insisted we not miss our chance. They’d become champions of the cause. (Yes, it was time to get in the game!)

Much more surprising and welcome news: Wells Fargo Bank — WFB in my dad’s e-mail lingo — had pre-approved M and I for a loan equal to what we’d need for a mortgage on the house we liked in Nyack, the second one we’d seen. We’d gone back a few times to look around and see other places, but hadn’t improved on the one hundred year-old colonial/ arts & crafts home the realtor Bill showed us our first afternoon in town. Hearing that someone else had put a bid in, we moved to counter and began the somewhat tedious (but in its way, fascinating) process of home inspection, plus gathering the designs and zoning info on the new home going-up next door. Our seller had bought the home we wanted from a 90-some year-old widow’s estate when she passed away. He subdivided the lot, beginning construction on a new house next door that would turn out to be nearly twice the size of the one we had begun to think of as “ours”. The construction is what likely kept ours on the market almost a full year. In any case, a few days into January, we’d promised a princely sum, and it was high time I tested the commute: to determine if Nyack, on the opposite side of the Hudson River from the direct rail into NYC, was, perhaps, a bridge too far from my job in mid-town Manhattan.

Exasperation at one’s fate is the anxious, resigned vibe of the Port Authority. The stacked and overbright yet grungy floors are pretty much an architectural rendering of Dante’s circles — and I entered in the worst New York state of mind, angry at myself for choosing this night for a trial run, and, thanks to my wool overcoat, smelling like wet dog. In line for a bus ticket, I nearly burst a blood vessel in my forehead as the person before me “discovered” the strip on their credit card had been demagnetized. A few minutes on, I made the bus while the line was still shuffling through a glass door into the diesel smog, but the coach was humid, the windows fogged, the seats mildewy — and yet, close at it was in there, the coach was somehow cold at the same time: as a defrosting measure the driver had turned on the air conditioning. I took a seat and caught a ghostly image of my forlorn face in the window, soon flashing on one of the other times I’d been through the Port Authority, 15 years before, flat broke on Halloween, and traveling back to Cali on a ticket bought with cash wired by a girlfriend, enough money in my pocket for one meal, and facing 72-80 hours on the Greyhound. I had a sudden panic that I really hadn’t made any progress in life — that no matter how hard I worked, I ended up on buses from hell. This despair was soon deepened by the special terror of being alone on a dark coach behind fogged windows on a rainy night not knowing if you’ll recognize your stop in time, and momentarily too paralyzed to ask the bus driver to alert you. I got over that and asked the driver to let me out at Broadway and Main Streets, Nyack, where, an hour and change later, I stepped into the slush of my prospective hometown a little worse for the wear. The sleet, at least, had begun whirling back into snow.

The walk to the Best Western was longer and a little creepier than I remembered. M and I knew a couple of people in the Nyack area, but not well enough that I could call on short notice for a sofa, and this, of course, added to our trepidation: Were we going to make the same mistake we’d made with Brooklyn, moving to a neighborhood where we knew no one?

The Nyack Best Western, aka The West Gate, is up at the New York Thruway, a half mile from Broadway and Main, and it would fit easily in a David Lynch movie shot on location on the Lo Hud. It’s one of those Holiday Inn-ish places on the Eastern Seaboard that once had a social scene, and may yet. It has a solarium, a truck stop type restaurant, and a cocktail lounge with a big Latin music bill on Saturdays — one where, I later learned, the great Tito Puente once frequented (and maybe played as recently as 1995; he died in 2000). The room I was assigned had none of Puente’s vitality, only the desperate air of traveling salesmen and sad trysts.

For my own lonely night, I’d packed three binders worth of reading from WFB on our mortgages and insurance and whatnot, along with 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask. I did my very best to study these documents, but quickly grew blurry-eyed and fuzzy. Taking a break from the financial docs and legalese to check some e-mail, I recovered one from a friend from a week or two before. He’d written to tip me off to notables who lived in the Nyack area. M and I knew from bombing around town and reading promotional literature about the painter Edward Hopper and the actress Helen Hayes, but according to my correspondent, Bjork and Matthew Barney had a place near Nyack, as did Bill Murray and Toni Morrison and the born again Baldwin brother, Stephen. Not bad, I thought. I mean, really, if it’s good enough for Bill Murray

Funny, but as trivial as this was, local celebs did speak to M and I’s unresolved feelings about moving out of the city. Before Greenpoint, Brooklyn, we’d lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a fast-changing neighborhood where pretending not to notice famous people required real skill. Had these frequent brushes with fame changed our lives? No, not really. But the proximity to fame had meant something to us, and sitting in that dreary West Gate I saw it pretty clearly. It wasn’t a matter of being star-struck, although we were that from time to time. When everything isn’t going quite as you hoped and you haven’t caught your big break, encounters with folks who have had their talents recognized and rewarded keeps the dread sense of the impossible in check. Would Nyack, I wondered, cut us off from that weird optimism - the secondhand thrill of being around cultural producers that lent your own dreams more plausibility?

The next morning, I made my way through the spongy snow to the bus stop for the Tappan Zee Express, a shuttle to the Metro North railway. I was none the wiser about the many financial instruments available to home buyers, but I had managed to sign several forms in duplicate, and I boarded the bus confident that the “Cherrytown” on the destination board above the windshield really meant Tarrytown.

On the bus I met a woman who’d had a daughter within a day or two of Gus’ birthday and I quizzed her mercilessly on the ride into Grand Central. How reliable was the Tappan Zee Express? Was her husband, at home with their daughter, feeling isolated? Was it do-able with a little one?

Learning that this my first time on either bus or the train inbound to Manhattan, she was able to put my experience in perspective. “This is the only time,” she said, “the bus has ever been late for me” — it was three minutes behind — “and by far the worst weather of the year … If you still want to move here after last night and today, I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

Up Next: "Closing Day." The way our attorney said it, it sounded both cursory and experimental, somewhere between a baptism and major surgery.

Oaktown Tweens Get Hyphy In Da Classroom

June 8th, 2006 by Jason Thompson

A few days before I left on paternity leave, an African-American teenager ran down the street in front of my school firing a gun in the air. Cops were soon patrolling the school grounds, and a television news helicopter flew overhead, eager to see if Oakland’s double-digit homicide rate had risen again.

Luckily it hadn’t, and nobody was hurt. But the incident left me spooked. Previously I had thought nothing of wandering from school during my lunch break up 105th street to buy a coffee in the corner store, ignoring the drug dealers loitering outside. But the crackle of gunfire reminded me that East Oakland is a dangerous neighborhood, especially for an Englishman in a shirt and tie.

I came back from my paternity leave to find that the principal had given me a new assignment. An eighth-grade humanities teacher had resigned after losing her temper with a student and hitting him in the face. While I was away, the school had coped with a string of substitutes, but the principal was happy that I was back. The school has a mixed record with subs, including one nervous character who leapt out of the window and ran away when he mistook the sound of a file folder falling on the ground outside his classroom for a gunshot.

My predecessor had lost her temper because of a simple fact: the students were out of control. Nobody would stop talking. Within minutes of the students’ arrival the floor was littered with paper balls and airplanes and jelly beans. Students threw books at each other, wandered about the classroom, listened to music on their headphones, gobbled candy bars, did their makeup. One gave me an electrified pen as a practical joke. “Listen up, people,” I barked in my best imitation of an Army drill sergeant. But the people did not listen. I started talking about the causes of the American Civil War, a subject about which I knew virtually nothing except it had something to do with slavery. I am neither American nor a history teacher, and the task would have been challenging even if the students were silent.

I tried reasoning with them, telling them that if they studied hard they could go to college and get the job of their dreams. I tried sending the most disruptive students out of class. I tried counting backwards from ten. I yelled. But the mayhem continued. My class even goofed around during the state standardized tests that began a few days later. Facing the prospect of seven weeks of this chaos before the end of the semester, I felt daunted and frazzled. I spent my prep period asleep in my chair, desperately trying to catch up on some of the zzzs I’d lost as a new father.

When I was in the English equivalent of the eighth grade, I went on nuclear peace rallies and discovered masturbation. I won a school prize for a moody existential poem about Armageddon and how much I hated my parents. I caked my scalp with hair gel and sprained my left wrist trying to impress a girl by break-dancing to the Grandmaster Flash song “White Lines.” (I knew all the lyrics, even if I thought the white lines that blew away were chalk dust on a children’s playground.) I was only just a teenager, old enough to start sneaking booze at my parents’ wine-and-cheese parties but too young for a plausible fake ID. Marketing gurus hadn’t yet conceived of tweens, so I hovered in the developmental hinterland between the end of childhood and the start of adolescence, an overgrown cherub with pubic hair.

That hinterland is where my students live. A few are dedicated to their studies, but the majority receive Ds and Fs because they refuse to do any work. Hyphy, the Bay Area dance and cultural movement led by rapper E40, is a major influence on many. My students are too young to drive but idolize the car stunts of young men in baggy white tees, dreds and shades, driving pimped-out sedans at illegal Oakland car shows where young women face off in frenetic dance competitions. “Going dumb,” E40 calls this anti-establishment hedonism, but as I remind my students, E40 spent his childhood reading the dictionary and studied art in college before pressing nine records and putting the Bay Area back on the hip-hop map. E40 is very far from dumb, even if my students take his music as an endorsement of not doing their homework; even if some identify truth in the words of black nationalist rappers dead prez and believe that the public school system “ain’t teachin’ [them] nothing but how to be slaves.”

The sad irony of the dead prez educational manifesto, I told myself, is that students who drop out of school are more likely to find themselves enslaved by minimum wage jobs than those who pay attention in class and work hard. The only civil war in which the United States is likely to engage itself in the foreseeable future, I told myself, is in Iraq, not for the empowerment of black people on American soil. But rather than lecturing my students about my own politics, I had them break into groups to discuss the lives of abolitionists.

I had the groups give themselves names, and one of the groups called themselves Da Krakheadz. (I wondered to myself what Grandmaster Flash or any of the anti-drug godfathers of hip-hop would make of urban children who romanticize addiction.) I reminded myself that, as child psychologist Erik Erikson theorized, the central task of adolescence is to discover one’s identity, which necessitates risk-taking-hence the joking flirtation with crack-and I wondered if perhaps to get smart and mature you have to get a bit dumb first. But understanding child psychology brought me no closer to actually controlling the children in order to teach them. My patience waned. After telling story after story of rebellious behavior to my wife, her patience waned, too. When a student commented on my body (”Mr. Thompson, you got a big booty”), my wife got angry on my behalf. Something had to change.

At the suggestion of a colleague, I scrapped my lesson plan for the day and had the students practice lining up outside the classroom and walking in quietly. Twenty-five minutes later, my students were finally sitting down at their desks, reading silently. My exercise had been somewhat militaristic, and part of me worried that forcing compliance might end up proving dead prez right. Even though I’m now a father and a teacher, part of me is still an anti-establishment teenager, uncomfortable in taking on power, even if I sincerely believe it is for my students’ benefit to do so. But I had seen the consequences of a classroom without structure.

After silent reading, we started an exercise in persuasive essay writing. Prescilla, a bright and likeable Latina girl, wrote a paper trying to convince her parents that she doesn’t want to fund her college education by joining the army, as they want her to. “Nobody can make you join the army if you don’t want to,” I said. “Really?” she said. I nodded. We got to work on her essay, and thinking of this young woman not going dumb but studying hard and escaping the chaos of East Oakland gave me a flush of pride.

Up Next: As the end of the school year approaches, two students get expelled for smoking dope on campus — and I start writing report cards.

Bipolar and Proud of It (I think)

June 8th, 2006 by Cree McCree

The whole world was watching when we re-elected “Our Mayor Ray Nagin,” and I’m glad the old swashbuckler won. Me, I voted for Mitch Landrieu, but that’s a mere technicality. I was coin toss undecided until the moment I pressed the button, torn between two candidates I actually wanted to win — a first for me in the voting booth, where I usually hold my nose and go for the lesser of two evils. Having two good guys to choose from is a luxury anywhere and unheard of in a state where now-jailed former governor Edwin Edwards narrowly defeated now-jailed former Klansman David Duke with a “Vote for the Crook” campaign.

(Insert William Jefferson freezer joke here.)

The good news is we got the election out of the way just before the start of hurricane season. The bad news is we got the election out of the way just before the start of hurricane season.

I haven’t seen a “Bipolar and Proud of It” bumper sticker yet but I expect to any day, with the highs and lows of today’s New Orleans. Sure, Jazz Fest was a spectacular success, testament to the power of musical healing, as I reported for High Times. And just last month, the Aquarium of the Americas reopened to much hoopla, restocked with more than 4,000 marine species temporarily lost to the floods. But they’re still finding human bodies — two in the last week alone. That brings the total known death toll to 1,577, a figure memorialized on Memorial Day with 1,577 flowers tossed into the 17th St. Canal. It’s hard not to be jolted by these constant reminders of the precarious thread we’re hanging by, especially when the Army Corps of Bunglers holds all the strings as deadlines come and go for fixing the city’s breached levees and canals.

Every edition of the Times-Picayune reads like the Bipolar News. Jarring juxtapositions also abound on local TV, where a rousing commercial for Abita beer that was produced pre-K is in heavy rotation as a post-K anthem. “Celebrate the good things/they’re all around in this town,” a chorus of voices sings, swelling into the tagline: “We are Louisiana true.” Cut to the next spot. “We lost everything,” says the bravely smiling blonde sitting on a brand spanking new couch at Gallery Furniture in Houston, which is touting its $79 flat fee for delivering replacement bedroom sets and living room suites to New Orleans.

Life where I live in the unflooded Strip ain’t that tough, of course. A roofing crew, conveniently headed by our next-door neighbor, has nearly finished the new House of Boo roof, with the insurance company picking up most (and probably all) of the tab. Our fence is repaired and painted, awaiting my finishing touches of purple and green stripes. And my stepdaughter’s husband who works for the state says he can get us a generator tax-free so we can run the fridge, TV, computers and a fan during the next hurricane power outage.

The fan’s for my 90-year-old mom, who’s not used to the heat. She just moved here from Ohio in December and is living in Malta Park, a senior residence a few blocks away. The plan is to bring her to our house if a Cat 2 strikes, since a “mandatory” Cat 2 evacuation won’t actually be enforced, and House of Boo was only grazed by Cat 3 Katrina.

Or at least that was the plan before she fell and broke her wrist and suffered a heart attack at the same time.

Now Mom’s up in Touro hospital, wired to heart monitors, her good right hand splinted, unable to do much of anything except listen to classical music on NPR (she refuses to watch TV). She’s not terminal, but she’s got days, maybe weeks, of recovery ahead. She may ultimately need to go into a full-fledged nursing home, and there’s no way we’re casting her fate to the vagaries of Louisiana’s nursing care system, site of countless post- K horror stories. My sister Jill’s coming down this week from Joliet, Illinois — where we’ll most likely move Mom when she’s strong enough to travel. That means uprooting her yet again just after she got settled, which will be tough on her (and us). But it sure beats drowning in a nursing home.

As for Donald and me, we’re still getting that generator. It seems like a wise investment, especially since he’ll be on tour in Europe for the entire month of September — the height of hurricane season — leaving me and five (or more) cats to fend for ourselves if the big one hits (again). Assuming, of course, we all make it through June, July and August. (Not to sound all manic-depressive about it.)

And yet, and yet… the spirit of this town is undeniable. It’s why I chose to live here and why I chose to came back.

Case in point: Over Memorial Day weekend, I hit the 33rd annual Greek Festival in Lakeview, site of some of the worst post-K flooding. The ornate Orthodox cathedral was completely restored, the crowds trying gamely to dance to bouzouki bands were bigger than ever, and the spitted spring lamb was divine. Opa!

A little further down the Bayou St. John, hard-hit Mid-City was celebrating its own Boogie on the Bayou. The heavens opened when I arrived, pouring much-needed rain on the grounds and putting the main stage band on hold. I sallied forth with my big umbrella, in search of some musical action, and it didn’t take long to find. Mardi Gras Indians were keeping the beat under one canopy crowded with festers, while brass band horns held sway in the tent across the way. Then the sun came out and everybody kept on keeping on, greeting friends in the beer line, scarfing pizza from Slice and dancing barefoot on the wet grass.

And everywhere, all over town, in random piles of debris, wild sunflowers are blooming. On the eve of hurricane season, that’s got to be a good omen, right?

He put his hands on my waist in a way that is just not normal when saying goodbye to anyone who is not your girlfriend

June 1st, 2006 by Frida in the City

Key to Men Mentioned Below:
A: French-speaking guy
B: Short, bald guy
C: Sports nut guy
D: Graphic designer guy
E: Guy with girlfriend
F: Thai-speaking guy

Had my first date with A. After a tour of the gallery, which never fails to impress, we went for French food. I had learned from my colorist the night before that the place was BYOB. I was horrified at the thought of going through the entire date without a drink, so I tried to figure out a time when I could get to a liquor store, but no luck. Turns out, he already had a bottle ready to go. Not red, he apologized, knowing that’s what I like from the first time we met, but white goes better with the house specialty of fish. He seemed to have thought of everything. The extent of the truth of that last statement would become clear later on.

We have a lot in common and have no end of things to talk about, even waxing nostalgic about the time we lived in France with a mutual understanding few people share. As he drove me home-or, as he almost got us killed several times driving home-he asked if I’d like go to the opera next Sunday as he had tickets. After the sole meuniere, wine, and good conversation, and because I am a snob and wanted to go to the opera, I agreed. He later e-mailed that the opera had been sold out but he got tix through a concierge service he uses. I don’t know about you, but the only people I know who use concierge services are people like Madonna. My friend insists he got the tix ahead of time just in case the date went well so he’d have somewhere else to invite me. Again, the perennial problem: not attracted to him. He’s younger than me but looks middle-aged before his time because of his weight. Still, I wanted to give him another chance.

Friday night I was absolutely exhausted, but a friend had invited me to his first real dinner party, so I had to go. I suspected that after all of my whining he was actually trying to set me up with someone. It was all single people and the most interesting group I’ve met at a dinner party, ever. All were affiliated with the arts. One guy has an exhibit of his work at the local art museum, one woman teaches studio art, another film, one guy was an exhibition designer, and the hosts were artists. Even if the guys (three of them, and three women, good planning, my friend) weren’t physically appealing, they would still be fascinating. But then in walked G., and you could have knocked me over with a paintbrush. Why couldn’t I have been warned? To say he was hot would be an understatement.

I engaged him in some polite conversation about his background: he’s a fiction writer (!) and teaches Thai (!!) as a full-time faculty member (!!!) at an Ivy League university (!!!!). He’s a white guy with blond hair, and the last thing you expect is for him to be fluent in Thai, and Malay, and a host of other languages. He lived abroad for years, worked as a translator, and, I would guess, slept with most of the exotic beauties he came across. He was too good to be true so I wondered if he was gay, but no gay vibe. Nervous, I tried to impress him with what I knew about Asia, foreign languages, etc. When I told him I went to an Ivy for grad school, I thought I had him. This worked on the last really hot guy I dated, too-something about them wanting smart women who’ll respect them for their brains and not their bodies. He flirted with everyone, and everyone molested him with their eyes in return. During a smoking break outside, he touched my arm, and what did I do? Freaked out, avoided him the rest of the night, Googled him the next day, saved the pic I found on my hard drive and learned that in the future, I should pretend all hot guys I encounter are gay so I can keep my nerves in check.

Saturday was the night of my singles party. By the end of it, we had gone through 30 bottles of wine, and I was shocked the next morning when I spotted an unopened bottle of red, like a lone survivor of a plane crash. My invitation stated that even if you were part of a couple, if you didn’t bring at least two single people, you would be denied entry. I didn’t make everyone abide by that strictly, but several new single people did show up, and it really made the party pop. I made sure people of all orientations had someone they might like to meet, but the number of actual connections made remains to be seen. I’m thinking it’s around two.

My place was packed, people were smoking weed in the bathroom, and several people stayed until 4am playing charades and Pictionary. Had serious eye contact with a friend of a friend visiting from Switzerland-yum! I must have been obvious because he said we should all get together soon because he leaves in three weeks. I thought Europeans just overwhelm you with eye contact as part of their mannerisms, but I think when I returned the stares, he got a different idea-the right idea. He looks about 23.

The two guys E.’s girlfriend said she’d bring were out of town. E. was as hot as I remembered, and she was so tall and gorgeous that she made me uneasy. When they left, I gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and he put his hands on my waist in a way that is just not normal when saying goodbye to anyone who is not your girlfriend. I know it is a clich?, but I felt like electricity was moving from his hands into my body. I needed a bit of a rest after that. His girlfriend and I, suspecting we have a lot in common and could be great friends, are having drinks on Wednesday next week. She gave me some background on their relationship, and the tale gets more sordid with each detail. Seems she expends a lot of energy on making sure he behaves. He once begged her to take him back. Why is she telling me this? Because we’re friends or because she thinks I’m a threat?

A. just called-screened it. He liked the Madonna comment I made to him via e-mail earlier. According to his message, he’s off to the gym. Can he lose enough weight for me to actually be attracted to him? Seems really into me, so I must end it after the opera. I don’t like leading people on.

Last but not least was my date (number five!) with D. on Sunday night. The restaurant was perfect for a Sunday-good food, cheesy Hungarian band playing. Now that I think of it, D. was really excited to take me there. Was that his idea of a top-notch restaurant? Oh God, it might have been. I had decided I was not going to take no for an answer when I invited him upstairs. I was prepared for battle, but didn’t have to be. He readily accepted and I thought, “Now’s my chance.” We talked for a good long time and he tried sitting as close to me as possible. But then…bupkes. No one made a move, and he had a sore throat, so I thanked him for coming up. We lingered at the door-the fact that he wasn’t running away was a good sign-but then he drops, “I don’t want to give you my cold.” Translation: I am not going to kiss you. I stammered something about not caring since I had had a lot of colds recently and he gave me a polite kiss on the lips. It was too chaste a kiss for there to be any spark, but still I feel as if I’m making progress with him. Could it be that he just needs to really get to know me before his shyness will disappear? Is he seeing other women? Does he think there’s someone better around the corner and wants to take it slow? I think there might be someone better around the corner, too, but I wouldn’t mind sleeping with him already, geez. This is a lot of work.

Usually I’d be over the moon like some high school girl after her first kiss with a new boy, but at 35, it was too little, too late for me to be all starry-eyed. He keeps proposing that we do things that take a long time-like playing 10 games of Scrabble, offering to help me move two months from now, joining his basketball league so we’ll hang out every Wednesday (again with the ball). I think the best tactic is to get him good and drunk in some dark bar somewhere. Something’s going on though-how can a guy have so little sex drive?

Up Next: A Night at the Opera

Such Frauds

June 1st, 2006 by Brad Wieners

A few days after M received the impassioned email from the divorcé selling her colonial in Nyack, we borrowed my brother-in-law’s Jeep, packed Gus into his car seat, and drove north up the Palisades Parkway. It was an unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon in November, and this helped the incorporated village of Nyack to make a fine first impression.

As we pulled in, people were out: a peleton of wannabe Lances in stretch jerseys and Lycra shorts whisked up the main drag. A bookshop clerk arranged discount books and old National Geographics for a sidewalk display. I was pleased to see a shop manager, a black man, directing the cleaning of his store windows. I’m white, and some of my best friends are white, but one of my fears of the ‘burbs was homogeneity, and I liked right away that Nyack was, just to look around, less Wonder Bread, more multigrain. Mid-block M spied an Eileen Fisher, her favorite clothier, and so while she found a place to take an urgent pee and quick-checked what the Eileen Fisher had in stock, G and I found parking. We agreed to meet Mommy at the corner across the street from the Eileen Fisher-the corner, it turns out, where the realtor Sanders Properties has its offices.

Gus, in pursuit of a peppy punting dog, broke the ice. The pup he was after, a Corgi, was panting just inside the Sanders office, and G, about the same height from the floor as the Corgi, gave chase on all fours.

I introduced myself to the realtor on duty, Bill, a slightly regal gentleman who, I’d learn later, had once run a major New York ad agency. He set aside his crossword to listen with practiced, but not insincere interest as I explained our tentative search for a new home. By the time we were done chatting-M found us inside-we had a date to see three or four homes after lunch. Bill was good at his job.

Out on the curb M and I flashed each other the same “who us?” look, shrugged, and then laughed nervously. We had no idea what we were doing. Speaking with Bill, I had been stumped by the rather straightforward and necessary question: What can you afford? We honestly did not know what we could afford, or if we could afford anything at all. The last time we’d ordered our Equifax credit reports, the news had not been particularly good, and we had yet to approach a bank about a loan.

What we did know is that it was high time that we “got in the game.” Perhaps Bill Safire knows the provenance of this phrase, but in American vernacular, I can tell you with some authority that it is what people who own real estate tell people who don’t about the crucial need to own real estate. “Even if it’s not everything you dreamed, get the house,” they say. “You need to get in the game.” That way, the argument follows, you can leverage the heck out of your equity. The logic’s similar to how it takes money to make money. But to hear some homeowners talk, even one house puts you in position to become a mogul. Or maybe that’s a New York thing. Once in the game, anything was possible.

If we weren’t confused about the need to get in the game, we still didn’t know if we’d be allowed to play. Though our salaries had improved-that I even had a salary was promising-we were still down to the wire each pay period, staying just above the waves of our consumer and IRS debt. M’s eldest brother had been telling us how he wanted an investment property, and maybe we could live in and manage it? And my father had said that he and my stepmother were willing to help us with a down payment, drawing in part on his parents’ estate. These were, we believed, real offers of financial support, but how much and when remained indeterminate, contingent on us coming up with a plan. In short, the money to buy a home was more notional than actual at the moment Gus chased that Corgi into Sanders Properties. So much so that at one house we visited, M turned to me and whispered, “I feel like such a fraud right now.”

As it was our first time looking for a place to purchase, as opposed to an apartment to rent, much of what was surprising to me about the experience probably sounds na?ve-like realizing that home shopping requires you and yours to act like high-rollers, to front as a couple, as if you’re in on a con. The other thing that struck me most about house hunting is how intimate you become with the strangers you meet in their homes, how personally intrusive the whole deal is. With a prospective purchase at stake, I wanted to know more about the tenants, and especially the tenant-owners, than I’d ever wanted to know about former renters. It was as if I was going to buy not just their former living spaces, but also their lives. And I wanted to know if they were leaving the place haunted.

In at least one case, I liked the seller-or my idea of his life-better than the property. The tenant-owner was a man who must be one of the better wooden boat builders in the world because one of the best boatbuilding outfits in the world, in Southwest Harbor, Maine, had hired him, and that was the reason he was packing up his wife and two boys and selling the house his grandfather had built himself in 1918 (a year that used to seriously haunt me, but doesn’t now that 2004 happened.)

This man’s house, on Nyack’s Mansfield Street-was straight out of Frank Capra, a tasteful doll house for grownups that, during our visit, was between fall harvests: leftover Halloween decorations mixed with the first hints of Martha Stewart Thanksgiving on the porch, windows, and hutch. Lots of wood, an open floor plan, a vintage oven that apparently functioned as well now as when it was installed in the 1940s. In the attic were Lionel scale trains, and in a shed out back was what looked like a Model T. The boatbuilder’s son was home during our visit, and he could barely conceal his anguish, and, beneath it, an inherited pride in that house.

A sucker for world-class artisans-especially slightly anachronistic ones-I wanted to be worthy of this man’s family home, and to convince his hurt son that Gus would come to deserve it. The location was good, too-less than a minute to the shuttle bus over the Tappan Zee to the commuter rail into Manhattan. The price wasn’t right, though, and the house itself was a bit of a wooden boat. And that’s one of the other things that hits you when house hunting: it forces you to be realistic about just how handy you are, even at your most optimistic.

“It’ll be different when we own,” I tried, talking myself into the boatbuilder’s house. “Then I’ll want to work on the house.”

“You say that, and you might want to, but you won’t,” M replied, rather harshly, I thought. Still, she wasn’t wrong, and together, we had to face it: I like to effect repairs the way I cook-without reading the recipe (instructions). And this improvisational approach works a lot better at the stove than while inside the broiler trying to repair it. Which is another way of saying, I like to imagine I’m handy, but I’m not. M is handier, but understandably likes a greater say in the scope of projects she’ll end up tackling. No Frank Capra boatbuilder’s family house with train sets for us.

Another house we saw that first afternoon, though-just north of town, but at the lower end of Nyack’s inflated price scale-had us excited. As did the town, and when we packed Gus into the Jeep to go home to grimy old Greenpoint, we knew we’d be coming back to look some more. And then, just as I was about to drop into the Jeep, Bill spoke up from the opposite side of his SUV-audible, but invisible.

“Oh, Brad?,” he said.

“Yeah, Bill-” it felt necessary to reply in the exaggerated affirmative, to let him know I could hear him since I couldn’t see him.

“There’s a rowing club in Piermont, the next town over, and they’re always looking for new members.”

“Hey, that’s great! Thanks -and thanks for your time today.” I closed myself into the Jeep and put the key in the ignition and then got a spinal chill: how the hell did he know that I might like to row? I turned the Jeep on, pulled from the curb, and as I drove, quickly rewound our afternoon’s worth of chat. Then I asked M if she remembered my saying something about rowing. No… No, she hadn’t.

By the time we were on the highway home, headed past Piermont, I was checking the rearview for Rod Serling. After all, it’s not paranoia if the suburbs really are controlled by Body Snatchers. M, who grew up in a small town, and despairs of the lack of privacy in smaller communities, felt it, too-if not quite so melodramatically. Do you suppose he Googled us? But even then, was there anything about my having rowed in college on the Web? Do realtors have special databases? We hadn’t given him our socials, had we?

By the time we reached the George Washington Bridge, I’d relaxed a bit about it, and assured myself I must have dropped a hint somewhere that I liked rowing. However he’d managed that parting line, it only proved again that Bill was good at his job. For I now had a house and an idea of my new life to dream on. In the dream, it’s daybreak on the Hudson, and mist is rising off the river, and the shell beneath me is hissing through the water, and the morning is so quiet, so still, that I can hear the dribbling droplets of water fall from the oars as I square the blade to take the next stroke.

Up Next: If It's Good Enough for Bill Murray...

 
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