Mostly out of laziness

My first task is to find a place to live. I figure that if I can earn $7 an hour—which, from the want ads, seems doable—I can afford to spend $500 on rent or maybe, with severe economies, $600 and still have $400 or $500 left over for food and gas. In the Key West area, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes—like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord’s Doberman pinscher. The big problem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond my reach. All right, Key West is expensive. But so is New York City, or the Bay Area, or Jackson, Wyoming, or Telluride, or Boston, or any other place where tourists and the wealthy compete for living space with the people who clean their toilets and fry their hash browns. Still, it is a shock to realize that “trailer trash” has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to.

So I decide to make the common trade-off between affordability and convenience and go for a $500-a-month “efficiency” thirty miles up a two-lane highway from the employment opportunities of Key West, meaning forty-five minutes if there’s no road construction and I don’t get caught behind some sundazed Canadian tourists. I hate the drive, along a roadside studded with white crosses commemorating the more effective head-on collisions, but it’s a sweet little place—a cabin, more or less, set in the swampy backyard of the converted mobile home where my landlord, an affable TV repairman, lives with his bartender girlfriend. Anthropologically speaking, the trailer park would be preferable, but here I have a gleaming white floor and a firm mattress, and the few resident bugs are easily vanquished.

The next piece of business is to comb through the want ads and find a job. I rule out various occupations for one reason or another: hotel front-desk clerk, for example, which to my surprise is regarded as unskilled and pays only $6 or $7 an hour, gets eliminated because it involves standing in one spot for eight hours a day. Waitressing is also something I’d like to avoid, because I remember it leaving me bone-tired when I was eighteen, and I’m decades of varicosities and back pain beyond that now. Telemarketing, one of the first refuges of the suddenly indigent, can be dismissed on grounds of personality. This leaves certain supermarket jobs, such as deli clerk, or housekeeping in the hotels and guest houses, which pays about $7 and, I imagine, is not too different from what I’ve been doing part-time, in my own home, all my life.

So I put on what I take to be a respectable-looking outfit of ironed Bermuda shorts and scooped-neck T-shirt and set out for a tour of the local hotels and supermarkets. Best Western, Econo Lodge, and HoJo’s all let me fill out application forms, and these are, to my relief, mostly interested in whether I am a legal resident of the United States and have committed any felonies. My next stop is Winn-Dixie, the supermarket, which turns out to have a particularly onerous application process, featuring a twenty-minute “interview” by computer since, apparently, no human on the premises is deemed capable of representing the corporate point of view. I am conducted to a large room decorated with posters illustrating how to look “professional” (it helps to be white and, if female, permed) and warning of the slick promises that union organizers might try to tempt me with. The interview is multiple-choice: Do I have anything, such as child care problems, that might make it hard for me to get to work on time? Do I think safety on the job is the responsibility of management? Then, popping up cunningly out of the blue: How many dollars’ worth of stolen goods have I purchased in the last year? Would I turn in a fellow employee if I caught him stealing? Finally, “Are you an honest person?”

Apparently I ace the interview, because I am told that all I have to do is show up in some doctor’s office tomorrow for a urine test. This seems to be a fairly general rule: if you want to stack Cheerios boxes or vacuum hotel rooms in chemically fascist America, you have to be willing to squat down and pee in front of a health worker (who has no doubt had to do the same thing herself.) The wages Winn-Dixie is offering—$6 and a couple of dimes to start with—are not enough, I decide, to compensate for this indignity.

I lunch at Wendy’s, where $4.99 gets you unlimited refills at the Mexican part of the Super-bar, a comforting surfeit of refried beans and cheese sauce. A teenage employee, seeing me studying the want ads, kindly offers me an application form, which I fill out, though here, too, the pay is just $6 and change an hour. Then it’s off for a round of the locally owned inns and guest houses in Key West’s Old Town, which is where all the serious sightseeing and guzzling goes on, a couple of miles removed from the functional end of the island, where the discount hotels make their homes.

At The Palms, let’s call it, a bouncy manager actually takes me around to see the rooms and meet the current housekeepers, who, I note with satisfaction, look pretty much like me—faded ex-hippie types in shorts with long hair pulled back in braids. Mostly, though, no one speaks to me or even looks at me except to proffer an application form. At my last stop, a palatial B & B, I wait twenty minutes to meet “Max,” only to be told that there are no jobs now but there should be one soon, since “nobody lasts more than a couple weeks.”

Three days go by like this and, to my chagrin, no one from the approximately twenty places at which I’ve applied calls me for an interview. I had been vain enough to worry about coming across as too educated for the jobs I sought, but no one even seems interested in finding out how overqualified I am. Only later will I realize that the want ads are not a reliable measure of the actual jobs available at any particular time. They are, as I should have guessed from Max’s comment, the employers’ insurance policy against the relentless turnover of the low-wage workforce. Most of the big hotels run ads almost continually, if only to build a supply of applicants to replace the current workers as they drift away or are fired, so finding a job is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and flexible enough to take whatever is being offered that day. This finally happens to me at one of the big discount chain hotels where I go, as usual, for housekeeping and am sent instead to try out as a waitress at the attached “family restaurant,” a dismal spot looking out on a parking garage, which is featuring “Pollish sausage and BBQ sauce” on this 95-degree day. Phillip, the dapper young West Indian who introduces himself as the manager, interviews me with about as much enthusiasm as if he were a clerk processing me for Medicare, the principal questions being what shifts I can work and when I can start. I mutter about being woefully out of practice as a waitress, but he’s already on to the uniform: I’m to show up tomorrow wearing black slacks and black shoes; he’ll provide the rust-colored polo shirt with “Hearthside,” as we’ll call the place, embroidered on it, though I might want to wear my own shirt to get to work, ha ha. At the word tomorrow, something between fear and indignation rises in my chest. I want to say, “Thank you for your time, sir, but this is just an experiment, you know, not my actual life.”So begins my career at the Hearthside, where for two weeks I work from 2:00 till 10:00 P.M. for $2.43 an hour plus tips. Employees are barred from using the front door, so I enter the first day through the kitchen, where a red-faced man with shoulder-length blond hair is throwing frozen steaks against the wall and yelling, “Fuck this shit!” “That’s just Billy,” explains Gail, the wiry middle-aged waitress who is assigned to train me. “He’s on the rag again”—a condition occasioned, in this instance, by the fact that the cook on the morning shift had forgotten to thaw out the steaks. For the next eight hours, I run after the agile Gail, absorbing bits of instruction along with fragments of personal tragedy. All food must be trayed, and the reason she’s so tired today is that she woke up in a cold sweat thinking of her boyfriend, who was killed a few months ago in a scuffle in an upstate prison. No refills on lemonade. And the reason he was in prison is that a few DUIs caught up with him, that’s all, could have happened to anyone. Carry the creamers to the table in a “monkey bowl,” never in your hand. And after he was gone she spent several months living in her truck, peeing in a plastic pee bottle and reading by candlelight at night, but you can’t live in a truck in the summer, since you need to have the windows down, which means anything can get in, from mosquitoes on up.

At least Gail puts to rest any fears I had of appearing overqualified. From the first day on, I find that of all the things that I have left behind, such as home and identity, what I miss the most is competence. Not that I have ever felt 100 percent competent in the writing business, where one day’s success augurs nothing at all for the next. But in my writing life, I at least have some notion of procedure: do the research, make the outline, rough out a draft, etc. As a server, though, I am beset by requests as if by bees: more iced tea here, catsup over there, a to-go box for table 14, and where are the high chairs, anyway? Of the twenty-seven tables, up to six are usually mine at any time, though on slow afternoons or if Gail is off, I sometimes have the whole place to myself. There is the touch-screen computer-ordering system to master, which I suppose is meant to minimize server-cook contacts but in practice requires constant verbal fine-tuning: “That’s gravy on the mashed, OK? None on the meatloaf,” and so forth. Plus, something I had forgotten in the years since I was eighteen: about a third of a server’s job is “side work” invisible to customers—sweeping, scrubbing, slicing, refilling, and restocking. If it isn’t all done, every little bit of it, you’re going to face the 6:00 P.M. dinner rush defenseless and probably go down in flames. I screw up dozens of times at the beginning, sustained in my shame entirely by Gail’s support—”It’s OK, baby, everyone does that sometime”—because, to my total surprise and despite the scientific detachment I am doing my best to maintain, I care.

The whole thing would be a lot easier if I could just skate through it like Lily Tomlin in one of her waitress skits, but I was raised by the absurd Booker T. Washingtonian precept that says: If you’re going to do something, do it well. In fact, “well” isn’t good enough by half. Do it better than anyone has ever done it before. Or so said my father, who must have known what he was talking about because he managed to pull himself, and us with him, up from the mile-deep copper mines of Butte to the leafy suburbs of the Northeast, ascending from boilermakers to martinis before booze beat out ambition. As in most endeavors I have encountered in my life, “doing it better than anyone” is not a reasonable goal. Still, when I wake up at 4 A.M. in my own cold sweat, I am not thinking about the writing deadlines I’m neglecting; I’m thinking of the table where I screwed up the order and one of the kids didn’t get his kiddie meal until the rest of the family had moved on to their Key lime pies. That’s the other powerful motivation—the customers, or “patients,” as I can’t help thinking of them on account of the mysterious vulnerability that seems to have left them temporarily unable to feed themselves. After a few days at Hearthside, I feel the service ethic kick in like a shot of oxytocin, the nurturance hormone. The plurality of my customers are hardworking locals—truck drivers, construction workers, even housekeepers from the attached hotel—and I want them to have the closest to a “fine dining” experience that the grubby circumstances will allow. No “you guys” for me; everyone over twelve is “sir” or “ma’am.” I ply them with iced tea and coffee refills; I return, midmeal, to inquire how everything is; I doll up their salads with chopped raw mushrooms, summer squash slices, or whatever bits of produce I can find that have survived their sojourn in the cold storage room mold-free.

There is Benny, for example, a short, tight-muscled sewer repairman who cannot even think of eating until he has absorbed a half hour of air-conditioning and ice water. We chat about hyperthermia and electrolytes until he is ready to order some finicky combination like soup of the day, garden salad, and a side of grits. There are the German tourists who are so touched by my pidgin “Wilkommen” and “Ist alles gut?” that they actually tip. (Europeans, no doubt spoiled by their trade union-ridden, high-wage welfare states, generally do not know that they are supposed to tip. Some restaurants, the Hearthside included, allow servers to “grat” their foreign customers, or add a tip to the bill. Since this amount is added before the customers have a chance to tip or not tip, the practice amounts to an automatic penalty for imperfect English.) There are the two dirt-smudged lesbians, just off from their shift, who are impressed enough by my suave handling of the fly in the piña colada that they take the time to praise me to Stu, the assistant manager. There’s Sam, the kindly retired cop who has to plug up his tracheotomy hole with one finger in order to force the cigarette smoke into his lungs.

Sometimes I play with the fantasy that I am a princess who, in penance for some tiny transgression, has undertaken to feed each of her subjects by hand. But the nonprincesses working with me are just as indulgent, even when this means flouting management rules—as to, for example, the number of croutons that can go on a salad (six). “Put on all you want,” Gail whispers, “as long as Stu isn’t looking.” She dips into her own tip money to buy biscuits and gravy for an out-of-work mechanic who’s used up all his money on dental surgery, inspiring me to pick up the tab for his pie and milk. Maybe the same high levels of agape can be found throughout the “hospitality industry.” I remember the poster decorating one of the apartments I looked at, which said, “If you seek happiness for yourself you will never find it. Only when you seek happiness for others will it come to you,” or words to that effect—an odd sentiment, it seemed to me at the time, to find in the dank one-room basement apartment of a bellhop at the Best Western. At Hearthside, we utilize whatever bits of autonomy we have to ply our customers with the illicit calories that signal our love. It is our job as servers to assemble the salads and desserts, pour the dressings, and squirt the whipped cream. We also control the number of butter pats our customers get and the amount of sour cream on their baked potatoes. So if you wonder why Americans are so obese, consider the fact that waitresses both express their humanity and earn their tips through the covert distribution of fats.

From: “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich. Available in bookstores everywhere.

Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders–a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.

With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the tellers stuck a “POSITION CLOSED” sign in her window and walked to the back of the bank, where she leaned against a desk and began to pass the time with a man shuffling papers. The women in front of Anders broke off their conversation and watched the teller with hatred. “Oh, that’s nice,” one of them said. She turned to Anders and added, confident of his accord, “One of those little human touches that keep us coming back for more.”

Anders had conceived his own towering hatred of the teller, but he immediately turned it on the presumptuous crybaby in front of him. “Damned unfair,” he said. “Tragic, really. If they’re not chopping off the wrong leg, or bombing your ancestral village, they’re closing their positions.”

She stood her ground. “I didn’t say it was tragic,” she said. “I just think it’s a pretty lousy way to treat your customers.”

“Unforgivable,” Anders said. “Heaven will take note.”

She sucked in her cheeks but stared past him and said nothing. Anders saw that the other woman, her friend, was looking in the same direction. And then the tellers stopped what they were doing, and the customers slowly turned, and silence came over the bank. Two men wearing black ski masks and blue business suits were standing to the side of the door. One of them had a pistol pressed against the guard’s neck. The guard’s eyes were closed, and his lips were moving. The other man had a sawed-off shotgun. “Keep your big mouth shut!” the man with the pistol said, though no one had spoken a word. “One of you tellers hits the alarm, you’re all dead meat. Got it?”

The tellers nodded.

“Oh, bravo, “Anders said. “Dead meat.” He turned to the woman in front of him. “Great script, eh? The stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.”

She looked at him with drowning eyes.

The man with the shotgun pushed the guard to his knees. He handed up the shotgun to his partner and yanked the guard’s wrists up behind his back and locked them together with a pair of handcuffs. He toppled him onto the floor with a kick between the shoulder blades. Then he took his shotgun back and went over to the security gate at the end of the counter. He was short and heavy and moved with peculiar slowness, even torpor. “Buzz him in,” his partner said. The man with the shotgun opened the gate and sauntered along the line of tellers, handing each of them a Hefty bag. When he came to the empty position he looked over at the man with the pistol, who said, “Whose slot is that?”

Anders watched the teller. She put her hand to her throat and turned to the man she’d been talking to. He nodded.

“Mine,” she said.

“Then get your ugly ass in gear and fill that bag.”

“There you go,” Anders said to the woman in front of him. “Justice is done.”

“Hey! Bright boy! Did I tell you to talk?”

“No,” Anders said.

“Then shut your trap.”

“Did you hear that?” Anders said. “’Bright boy.’ Right out of ‘The Killers’.”

“Please be quiet,” the woman said.

“Hey, you deaf or what?” The man with the pistol walked over to Anders. He poked the weapon into Anders’ gut. “You think I’m playing games?”

“No,” Anders said, but the barrel tickled like a stiff finger and he had to fight back the titters. He did this by making himself stare into the man’s eyes, which were clearly visible behind the holes in the mask: pale blue, and rawly red-rimmed. The man’s left eyelid kept twitching. He breathed out a piercing, ammoniac smell that shocked Anders more than anything that had happened, and he was beginning to develop a sense of unease when the man prodded him again with the pistol.

“You like me, bright boy?” he said. “You want to suck my dick?”

“No,” Anders said.

“Then stop looking at me.”

Anders fixed his gaze on the man’s shiny wing-top shoes.

“Not down there. Up there.” He stuck the pistol under Anders’ chin and pushed it upward until Anders was looking at the ceiling.

Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank, a pompous old building with marble floors and counters and pillars, and gilt scrollwork over the tellers’ cages. The domed ceiling had been decorated with mythological figures whose fleshy, toga-draped ugliness Anders had taken in at a glance many years earlier and afterward declined to notice. Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter’s work. It was even worse than he remembered, and all of it executed with the utmost gravity. The artist had a few tricks up his sleeve and used them again and again – a certain rosy blush on the underside of the clouds, a coy backward glance on the faces of the cupids and fauns. The ceiling was crowded with various dramas, but the one that caught Anders’ eye was Zeus and Europa – portrayed, in this rendition, as a bull ogling a cow from behind a haystack. To make the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopy eyelashes through which she gazed back at the bull with sultry welcome. The bull wore a smirk and his eyebrows were arched. If there’d been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said, “Hubba hubba.”

“What’s so funny, bright boy?”

“Nothing.”

“You think I’m comical? You think I’m some kind of clown?”

“No.”

“You think you can fuck with me?”

“No.”

“Fuck with me again, you’re history. Capiche?”

Anders burst our laughing. He covered his mouth with both hands and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” then snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, “Capiche – oh, God, capiche,” and at that the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head.

The bullet smashed Anders’ skull and ploughed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus. But before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neuro-transmissions. Because of their peculiar origin these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory. After striking the cranium the bullet was moving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lighting that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, “passed before his eyes.”

It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did remember. He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him – her unembarrassed carnality, and especially the cordial way she had with his unit, which she called Mr. Mole, as in, “Uh-oh, looks like Mr. Mole wants to play,” and “Let’s hide Mr. Mole!” Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth. He did not remember standing just outside his daughter’s door as she lectured her bear about his naughtiness and described the truly appalling punishments Paws would receive unless he changed his ways. He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will – not “Silent, upon a peak in Darien,” or “My God, I heard this day,” or “All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?” None of these did he remember; not one. Anders did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, “I should have stabbed him in his sleep.”

He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenian prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could recite Aeschylus, and then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in the Greek. Anders did not remember how his eyes had burned at those sounds. He did not remember the surprise of seeing a college classmate’s name on the jacket of a novel not long after they graduated, or the respect he had felt after reading the book. He did not remember the pleasure of giving respect.

Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did not remember shouting, “Lord have mercy!” He did not remember deliberately crashing his father’s car in to a tree, of having his ribs kicked in by three policemen at an anti-war rally, or waking himself up with laughter. He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.

This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders: an oppression, like the heat.

Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his from Mississippi. Anders has never met Coyle’s cousin before and will never see him again. He says hi with the rest but takes no further notice of him until they’ve chosen sides and someone asks the cousin what position he wants to play.

“Shortstop,” the boy says. “Short’s the best position they is.” Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle’s cousin repeat what he’s just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he’s being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn’t it, not at all – it’s that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself.

The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant,

They is, they is, they is.

From: “The Night in Question” by Tobias Wolff. Available in bookstores everywhere.

Walkabout Jones invites writers to enter our short story contest. In partnership with Artists Collective www.artistsforaccess.org we’re giving a $1,000 prize to the winner. See our December 15th entry for full contest rules. Stories should be between 200-2,000 words, just like this one. Send entries to: “Short Story Contest” at artistsforaccess@gmail.com

A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. I was living in New York at the time, on Ninety-fourth between Second and First, part of that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan. It was an uninviting block, treeless and barren, lined with soot-colored walk-ups that cast heavy shadows for most of the day. The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.

None of this concerned me much, for I didn’t get many visitors. I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate company exactly. I enjoyed exchanging Spanish pleasantries with my mostly Puerto Rican neighbors, and on my way back from classes I’d usually stop to talk to the boys who hung out on the stoop all summer long about the Knicks or the gunshots they’d heard the night before. When the weather was good, my roommate and I might sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes and study the dusk washing blue over the city, or watch white people from the better neighborhoods nearby walk their dogs down our block to let the animals shit on our curbs—“Scoop the poop, you bastards!” my roommate would shout with impressive rage, and we’d laugh at the faces of both master and beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed.

I enjoyed such moments—but only in brief. If the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself. I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.

I remember there was an old man living next door who seemed to share my disposition. He lived alone, a gaunt, stooped figure who wore a heavy black overcoat and a misshapen fedora on those rare occasions when he left his apartment. Once in a while I’d run into him on his way back from the store, and I would offer to carry his groceries up the long flight of stairs. He would look at me and shrug, and we would begin our ascent, stopping at each landing so that he could catch his breath. When we finally arrived at his apartment, I’d carefully set the bags down on the floor and he would offer a courtly nod of acknowledgement before shuffling inside and closing the latch. Not a single word would pass between us, and not once did he ever thank me for my efforts.

The old man’s silence impressed me; I thought him a kindred spirit. Later, my roommate would find him crumpled up on the third-floor landing, his eyes wide open, his limbs stiff and curled up like a baby’s. A crowd gathered; a few of the women crossed themselves, and the smaller children whispered with excitement. Eventually the paramedics arrived to take away the body and the police let themselves into the old man’s apartment. It was neat, almost empty—a chair, a desk, the faded portrait of a woman with heavy eyebrows and a gentle smile set atop the mantelpiece. Somebody opened the refrigerator and found close to a thousand dollars in small bills rolled up inside wads of old newspaper and carefully arranged behind mayonnaise and pickle jars.

The loneliness of the scene affected me, and for the briefest moment I wished that I had learned the old man’s name. Then, almost immediately, I regretted my desire, along with its companion grief. I felt as if an understanding had been broken between us—as if, in that barren room, the old man was whispering an untold history, telling me things I preferred not to hear.

It must have been a month or so later, on a cold, dreary November morning, the sun faint behind a gauze of clouds, that the other call came. I was in the middle of making myself breakfast, with coffee on the stove and two eggs in the skillet, when my roommate handed me the phone. The line was thick with static.

“Barry? Barry, is this you?”

“Yes…. Who’s this?”

“Yes, Barry… this is your Aunt Jane. In Nairobi. Can you hear me?”

“I’m sorry—who did you say you were?”

“Aunt Jane. Listen, Barry, your father is dead. He is killed in a car accident. Hello? Can you hear me? I say, your father is dead. Barry, please call your uncle in Boston and tell him. I can’t talk now, okay, Barry. I will try to call you again….”

That was all. The line cut off, and I sat down on the couch, smelling eggs burn in the kitchen, staring at cracks in the plaster, trying to measure my loss.

From: “Dreams From My Father” By Barack Obama. (1995) Available in bookstores everywhere.

I don’t think it’s an accident

Not so the megalines. It’s no accident they’re so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decayaction of the sea. Our ship, The Nadir, seemed to have a whole battalion of wiry little third world guys who went around the ship in navy-blue jumpsuits scanning for decay to overcome. Eventually, toward the end of the trip, I found a capstan, a type of nautical hoist (like a pulley on steroids!) with a half-dollar-sized patch of rust on the side facing the sea. My delight in this tiny flaw was interrupted by the arrival, even as I stood there, of a crewman with a roller and a bucket of white paint. I watched as he gave the entire capstan a fresh coat and walked away with a nod.

Here’s the thing: A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay. But on a luxury cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to “triumph” is via the rigors of self-improvement (diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest time-management seminars), to which the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep of the Nadir is an unsubtle analogue.

But there’s another way out, too: not titivation but titillation; not hard work but hard play. See in this regard the ship’s constant activities, festivities, gaiety, song; the adrenaline, the stimulation. It makes you feel vibrant, alive. It makes your existence seem non-contingent. The hard-play option promises not a transcendence of death-dread so much as just drowning it out.

The whole first two days and nights are bad weather, with high-pitched winds, heaving seas, spume lashing the portholes’ glass. For forty-plus hours it’s more like a North Sea cruise, and the staff goes around looking regretful but not apologetic, and in all fairness it’s hard to find a way to blame Celebrity Cruises, Inc. for the weather. The staff keeps urging us to enjoy the view from the railings on the lee side of the Nadir. The one other guy who joins me in trying out the non-lee side has his glasses blown off by the gale. I keep waiting to see somebody from the crew wearing the traditional yellow slicker, but no luck. The railing I do most of my contemplative gazing from is on Deck 10, so the sea is way below, slopping and heaving around, so it’s a little like looking down into a briskly flushing toilet. No fins in view.

In heavy seas, hypochondriacs are kept busy taking their gastric pulse every couple of seconds and wondering whether what they’re feeling is maybe the onset of seasickness. Seasickness-wise, though, it turns out that bad weather is sort of like battle: There’s no way to know ahead of time how you’ll react. A test of the deep and involuntary stuff of a man. I myself turn out not to get seasick. For the whole first rough-sea day, I puzzle over the fact that every other passenger on the Nadir looks to have received identical little weird shaving-cuts below his or her left ear–which in the case of female passengers seems especially strange–until I learn that these little round Band-aidish things on everybody’s neck are special new super-powered transdermal motion-sickness patches, which apparently nobody with any kind of clue about luxury cruising now leaves home without.

A lot of the passengers get seasick anyway, these first two howling days. It turns out that a seasick person really does look green, though it’s an odd and ghostly green, pasty and toadish, and more than a little corpselike when the seasick person is dressed in formal dinner wear.

For the first two nights, who’s feeling seasick and who’s not and who’s not now but was a little while ago or isn’t feeling it yet but thinks it’s maybe coming on, etc., is a big topic of conversation at Table 64 in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant. Discussing nausea and vomiting while eating intricately prepared gourmet foods doesn’t seem to bother anybody. Common suffering and fear of suffering turn out to be a terrific ice-breaker. Ice breakering is pretty important, because on this ship you eat at the same designated table with the same companions all week.

There are seven other people with me at good old Table 64, all from south Florida. Four know one another in private landlocked life and have requested to be at the same table. The other three people are an old couple and their granddaughter, whose name is Mona. I am the only first-time Luxury Cruiser at Table 64. With the conspicuous exception of Mona, I like all my tablemates a lot. Besides me, there are five women and two men, and both men are completely silent except on the subjects of golf, business, transdermal motion-sickness prophylaxis, and the legalities of getting stuff through customs. The women carry Table 64′s conversational ball. One of the reasons I like all these women (except Mona) so much is that they laugh really hard at my jokes, even lame or very obscure jokes, although they all have this curious way of laughing where they sort of scream before they laugh, so that for one excruciating second you can’t tell whether they’re getting ready to laugh or whether they’re seeing something hideous and screamworthy over your shoulder.

By midweek it starts to strike me that I have never before been party to such a minute and exacting analysis of the food and service of a meal I am just at that moment eating. Nothing escapes the attention of Trudy and her best friend Esther: the symmetry of the parsley sprigs atop the boiled baby carrots, the consistency of the bread, the flavor and mastication-friendliness of various cuts of meat, the celerity and flambe technique of the various pastry guys in tall white hats who appear tableside when items have to be set on fire (a major percentage of the desserts in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant have to be set on fire), and so on. The waiter and busboy keep circling the table, going “Finish? Finish?” while Esther and Trudy have exchanges like:

“Honey you don’t look happy with the potatoes. What’s the problem.”

“I’m fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Don’t lie. Honey with that face who could lie? Frank, am I right? This is a person with a face incapable of lying.”

“There’s nothing wrong Esther darling, I swear it.”

“You’re not happy with the conch.”

“All right. I’ve got a problem with the conch.”

“Did I tell you? Frank, did I tell her? Frank silently probes his ear with pinkie. “Was I right? Trudy I could tell just by looking you weren’t happy.”

“I’m fine with the potatoes. It’s the conch.”

“Did I tell you about seasonal fish on ships? What did I tell you?”

“The potatoes are good.”

Mona is eighteen. Her grandparents have been taking her on a Luxury Cruise every spring since she was five. Mona always sleeps through both breakfast and lunch and spends all night at the Scorpio Disco and in the Mayfair Casino playing the slots. She is six two if she’s an inch. She’s going to attend Penn State next fall, because the agreement is that she’ll receive a four-wheel-drive vehicle if she goes someplace where there might be snow. She is unabashed in recounting this college-selection criterion. She is an incredibly demanding passenger and diner, but her complaints about slight aesthetic and gustatory imperfections lack Trudy and Esther’s discernment and come off as simply churlish. Mona is also kind of strange-looking: a body like Brigitte Nielsen or some centerfold on steroids, and above it, framed in resplendent blond hair, the tiny unhappy face of a kind of corrupt doll.

Her grandparents, who retire every night right after supper, always make a small ceremony after dessert of handing Mona $100 to go have some fun with. This $100 bill is always in one of those little ceremonial bank envelopes that has Franklin’s face staring out of a porthole-like window in the front, and written on the envelope in red Magic Marker is always “We Love You, Honey.”

Mona never once says thank you. She also rolls her eyes at just about everything her grandparents say, a habit that very quickly drives me up the wall.

Mona’s special customary gig is to lie to the waiter and maitre d’ and say that Thursday is her birthday, so that at the formal supper on Thursday she gets bunting and a heart-shaped helium balloon tied to her chair, and her own cake, and pretty much the whole restaurant staff comes out and forms a circle around her and sings to her. Her real birthday, she informs me on Monday, is July 29, and when I quietly observe that July 29 is also the birthday of Benito Mussolini, Mona’s grandmother shoots me kind of a death-look, although Mona herself is excited at the coincidence, apparently confusing the names Mussolini and Maserati.

For me, at the end, I find myself in my plush seat, going farther and farther away, sort of creatively visualizing an epiphanic moment; trying to see the ship itself with the eyes of someone not aboard, imagining the Nadir right at this moment, all lit up and steaming north, in the dark, at night, with a strong west wind pulling the moon backward through a skein of clouds—the Nadir a constellation, complexly aglow, angelically white, festive, imperial. It would look like a floating palace to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, treading water, out of sight of land.

This deep dissociative trance lasted all through the next day and night. This period I spent entirely in Cabin 1009, in bed, mostly looking out the spotless porthole, with trays and rinds all around me, feeling a little bit dulled but mostly good—good to be on the Nadir and good to know that soon I would get off the ship, that I had survived (in a way) being pampered to death (in a way)—and so I stayed in bed.

And even though the trance made me miss the final night’s talent show and midnight farewell buffet and Saturday’s docking (at which there was apparently even more crepe and waving and explosive goodwill) reentry into the stresses and demands of quotidian landlocked real-world life wasn’t nearly as bad as a week of absolutely nothing had led me to fear.

David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. He was best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest” which Time Magazine put on its list of 100 Best English Language novels. At the time of his death, David taught English at Pomona College. He was 46.

At the age of fourteen I accompanied a classmate to a Raleigh park. There we met with some friends of his and smoked a joint by the light of the moon. I don’t recall being high, but I do recall pretending to be high. My behavior was modeled on the whacked-out hippies I’d seen in movies and on tv, so basically I just laughed a lot, regardless of whether anything was funny. When I got home I woke my sisters and had them sniff my fingers. “Smell that?” I said. “It’s marijuana, or ‘grass’ as we sometimes call it.”

I was proud to be the first in my family to smoke a joint, but once I had claimed the title, I became vehemently anti-drug and remained that way until my freshman year in college. Throughout first semester, I railed against my dorm mates: Pot was for losers. It pickled your brain and forced you into crummy state universities like this one.

I’d later think of how satisfying it must have been to them—how biblical, almost—to witness my complete turnaround. The reverent mother becomes the town slut, the prohibitionist a drunkard, and me a total pothead, and so quickly! It was just like you’d see in a made-for-tv movie:

Friendly fellow from down the hall: Oh, come on. One puff’s not going to hurt you.

Me: The heck it won’t! I’ve got some studying to do.

Handsome roommate of friendly fellow: Let me give you a shotgun.

Me: A shotgun? What’s that?

Again, the handsome roommate: You lie back while I blow smoke into your mouth.

Me: Where do you want me to lie?

I remember returning to my room that night and covering my lamp with a silk scarf. The desk, the bed, the heavy misshapen pottery projects: nothing was new, but everything was different; fresh somehow and worthy of interest. Grant a blind person the ability to see, and he might have behaved the way I did, slowly advancing across the room and marveling at everything before me: a folded shirt, a stack of books, a piece of corn bread wrapped in foil. “Amazing.” The tour ended with the mirror, and me standing in front of it with a turban on my head. Well, hello there, you, I thought.

I let a college kid give me a shotgun, and the next twenty-three years of my life revolved around getting high. It was pot, in fact, that led me to smoking tobacco. Ronnie and I were by the side of the highway, making our way to Canada, and I was whining about having no marijuana. The sameness of everything was getting on my nerves, and I asked if cigarettes made you feel any different.

Ronnie lit one and thought for a minute. “I guess they leave you sort of light-headed,” she told me.

“You mean, like, nauseous?”

“A little,” she said. And I decided that was good enough for me.

As with pot, it was astonishing how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life was a play, and the prop mistress had finally shown up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.

“Well, that’s one hell of a reason to poison yourself,” my father said.

My mother, however, looked at the bright side. “Now I’ll know what to put in your Christmas stocking!” She put them in my Easter basket as well, entire cartons. Today it might seem trashy to see a young man accepting a light from his mom, but smoking didn’t always mean something. A cigarette wasn’t always a statement. Back when I started, you could still smoke at work, even if you worked in a hospital where kids with no legs were hooked up to machines. If a character smoked on a tv show, it did not necessarily mean that he was weak or evil. It was like seeing someone who wore a striped tie or parted his hair on the left—a detail, but not a telling one.

I didn’t much notice my fellow smokers until the mid-eighties, when we began to be cordoned off. Now there were separate sections in waiting rooms and restaurants, and I’d often look around and evaluate what I’d come to think of as “my team.” At first they seemed normal enough—regular people, but with cigarettes in their hands. Then the campaign began in earnest, and it seemed that if there were ten adults on my side of the room, at least one of them was smoking through a hole in his throat.

“Still think it’s cool?” the other side said. But coolness, for must of us, had nothing to do with it. It’s popular to believe that every smoker was brainwashed, sucked in by product placements and subliminal print ads. The argument comes in handy when you want to assign blame, but it discounts the fact that smoking is often wonderful. For people like me, people who twitched and jerked and cried out in tiny voices, cigarettes were a godsend. Not only that, but they tasted good, especially the first one in the morning, and the seven or eight that immediately followed it. By late afternoon, after I’d finish a pack or so, I’d generally feel heaviness in my lungs, especially in the 1980s, when I worked with hazardous chemicals. I should have worn a respirator, but it interfered with my smoking, and so I set it aside.

I once admitted this to a forensic pathologist. We were in the autopsy suite of a medical examiner’s office, and he responded by handing me a lung. It had belonged to an obese, light-skinned black man, an obvious heavy smoker who was lying on a table not three feet away. His sternum had been sawed through, and the way his chest cavity was opened, the unearthed fat like so much sour cream, made me think of a baked potato. “So,” the pathologist said. “What do you say to this?”

He’d obviously hoped to create a moment, the kind that leads you to change your life, but it didn’t quite work. If you are a doctor and someone hands you a diseased lung, you might very well examine it and consequently make some very radical changes. If, on the other hand, you are not a doctor, you’re liable to do what I did, which was to stand there thinking, Damn, this lung is heavy.

From: “When You Are Engulfed in Flames” by David Sedaris. Available in bookstores everywhere.

To be perfectly honest,

The enormous success of the Left Behind books and movies (which depict the earth during Armageddon as a delicious chaos with airplanes suddenly stripped of their believer pilots, busses flying off highways, blood-soaked atheists realizing their tragic mistake far too late) helped spread these beliefs, so much so that dispensationalism is now more or less the default doctrine of most Southern Baptists. If you enter a megachurch practically anywhere in America these days, you can expect that much of the congregation will be actively awaiting the end of the world.

But you can’t have Armageddon without certain preconditions, and most important among those is a final battle that the prophet Ezekiel predicted will take place between a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russia) and God’s chosen people, Israel. Most end timers believe the key alliance here will be between Russia and Iran and that only following a savage military confrontation between those states and Israel, probably of a catastrophic nuclear nature, will Christ reappear and begin his glorious second reign.

Thus the whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to “hurry God up” in his efforts to bring about this key showdown.

Practically speaking, this manifests itself in the form of American evangelical Christians endorsing pro-Israel policies. Support that Israel has been happy to receive despite the fact that church doctrine also envisions the mass conversion of all Jews to Christianity after the final battle—with dire consequences for those who don’t. I wonder exactly how most Israelis would feel about the sudden warmth being shown to them by American evangelicals if they knew for instance that ardent end timer Hal Lindsey had predicted the “mother of all holocausts” for those Jews who refused to convert at the second coming.

Pastor Hagee, that drawling, white-haired-barrel-organ voiced Texan with the kindly smile, who gives such powerful ministry on TV, is one of America’s chief pitchmen for Christian Zionism. He founded a group called Christians United for Israel, whose mission is to rally Christians to Israel’s cause. According to the Washington Post, Hagee has regular access to the White House and many followers among George Bush’s staff.

When I first started reading about Hagee and about the felicitous alliance between the American religious right and the hard-liners in the Israeli government, my first reaction was to applaud it as a brilliantly cynical piece of international politics. Whether it was conceived in the corridors of Mossad headquarters or in some dreary archcapitalist think thank funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation (and I’m guessing it was probably some combination of both) I had no idea. But it was unmistakably an ingenious solution to the problem of how to rally southern conservative Christians a few generations removed from their cross-burning Klan days to the cause of Israel. And if it turned out it was dreamed up by the same guy who figured out how to get laid off Midwestern factory workers to whoop for free-trade Republicanism by plastering the airwaves with French kissing men, I have to say that guy deserves some kind of special medal—a Triple Order of Satan, or something like that.

But during the election season, I started to wonder if this kind of thing might eventually backfire on the people who concocted these ideas, if indeed they were dreamed up from on high. As a temporary electoral gambit designed to garner support for Israel, it’s brilliant, but lets not forget that it doesn’t work unless you get tens of millions of people really believing that the world is about to end.

I wonder sometimes if the cynics in Washington think that they can get away with just bending the yokels’ ears once every four years, cashing in on election day, and then going back to the grimy you-scratch-my-back money politics that dominates everyday life in the beltway. I think those people forget that after every election day, even after they’ve been forgotten by Washington, those yokels are still out there, thinking, waiting, watching. Their minds change. And if their needs are not tended to, they drift away. And if you’ve gotten used to making political decisions based on the Book of Revelations, you can drift pretty far. I wanted to see how far—I was going to join the church.

From: “The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire” by Matt Taibbi. Available at bookstores everywhere.

In past moments of national division,

The incessant media bombardment of images (of salacious bodies and mindless violence) on TV and in movies and music convinces many young people that the culture of gratification—a quest for insatiable pleasure, endless titillation, and sexual stimulation—is the only way of being human. Hedonistic values and narcissistic identities produce emotionally stunted young people unable to grow up and unwilling to be responsible democratic citizens. The market-driven media lead many young people to think that life is basically about material toys and social status. Democratic ideas of making the world more just, or striving to be a decent and compassionate person, are easily lost or overlooked.

This media bombardment not only robs young people of their right to struggle for maturity—by glamorizing possessive individualism at the expense of democratic individuality—but also leaves them ill equipped to deal with the spiritual malnutrition that awaits them after their endless pursuit of pleasure. This sense of emptiness of the soul holds for wealthy kids in vanilla suburbs and poor kids in chocolate cities. Neither the possession of commodities nor the fetishizing of commodities satisfies people’s need for love and self-confidence. Instead, we witness personal depression, psychic pain, and individual loneliness fueling media-influenced modes of escapism. These include the high use of drugs like cocaine and ecstasy; the growing popularity of performing sex acts at incredibly young ages; and the way so many kids have become addicted to going online. This disgraceful numbing of the senses, dulling of the mind, and confining of life to an eternal present—with a lack of connection to the past and no vision for a different future—is an insidious form of soul murder. And we wonder why depression escalates and suicides increase among our precious children.

This is why so many, too many, of the youth of America are drifting, rootless, deracinated and denuded. They have hardly a sense of their history, little grasp of what shapes them, and no vital vision of their human potential. Many have been reduced to a bundle of desires targeted by corporate America for consumption. Their armor of life is often too feeble to enable them to withstand the emotional trauma generated by a fast-paced capitalist culture of consumption that confronts them. In short, many lack the necessary navigational skills to cope with the challenges and crises in life. This is why so many are enacting the nihilism of meaninglessness and hopelessness in their lives that mirrors the nihilism of the adult world—often they are so disillusioned in large part because they can see that the adult world itself is so bereft of morality.

Yet some young folk do persevere and prevail: those who are dissatisfied with mere material toys and illusions of security. They hunger for something more, thirst for something deeper. They want caring attention, wise guidance, and compassionate counsel. They desire democratic individuality, community and society. They know something is wrong with America and something is missing in their lives. They long for energizing visions worthy of pursuit and sacrifice that will situate their emaciated souls in a story bigger than themselves. A grand story and a large narrative, especially democratic ones, can channel their longings into mature efforts to contribute in a meaningful way to making the world a better place.

Like every younger generation, our kids today see clearly the hypocrisies and mendacities of our society, and as they grow up they begin to question in a fundamental way some of the lies that they’ve received from society. They also begin to see that their education has been distorted and sugarcoated and has sidestepped so many uncomfortable truths. This often leads to an ardent disappointment, and even anger, about the failures of our society to consistently uphold democratic and humanitarian values. This new sense of conscience in young people is a profound force that adult society should take more seriously. In fact, we should understand the expressions of this moral outrage as having a profound kind of wisdom, even as we must also help to channel that outrage into a more productive sense of commitment to find a positive way forward.

From: “Democracy Matters” by Cornel West. Available at bookstores everywhere.