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The first draft is coming along very well. I will be turning it in at the end of the year for a scheduled publication in June for Father's Day. Right now I'm writing a flashback about my mother and what I remember about her. It's a little rough going. I was sixteen when she died, twenty-eight years ago. Still, there are a few images, a few emotions, that I can revisit as if they happened this morning.
I have been here since September and am falling deeper and deeper in love with the city. The streets are full of so many stories. I was taking the A train to Brooklyn the other day when I saw, scribbled in jagged silver marker on the back of a mid-subway platform newstand, this: "Dear Mom, I fucking hate your guts." Wow. What brought that person to that point in time? Did they just get out of a particularly juicy session with their analyst? Did they have a fight on the subway and scrawled right there in front of their mom? Did they write it there because they know their mom always takes the A train to work?
Then later on the speeding A train a gang of black teens noisily crossed between cars and seemed to instantly take over the place. Everyone seemed on edge. They obviously came in with a purpose. One sat down next to me with a boombox, the others cleared a space in front of the doors and then one after the other they started to breakdance, flipping, spinning, leaping on the moving train. When they were done the entire car burst out in applause.
Of course as a nation this Thanksgiving we can all give thanks that the reckless reign of King George is coming to an end. It still doesn’t seem all that real to me. I’m hoping that it will sink in after the first of the year when Madame Speaker is sworn in and the balances finally start to get checked and the checks finally start to get balanced. Just imagine if those guys had actually won the midterm? Who knows where their magical thinking would have led the nation? Like the nutjob revolutionaries in Woody Allen’s Bananas I could imagine shadow President Cheney decreeing that all Democrats had to wear their underwear on the outside so he could keep track of how often we changed them.
I still feel anxious for the long-term survival of the planet but I am a little less sure that Cheney is going to nuke everything southeast of the Mediterranean before his term is out.
So, for the Democratic Miracle in the year 2006 I will forever be thankful.
However personally, Thanksgiving has always been a hard one for me. Like most of us I have the platonic ideal of Thanksgiving in my head and yet the reality almost always disappoints. Ever since my mom died when I was sixteen my little family of my sister, my father and me wandered the earth every November, adopted, for the evening, by various friends. When I was married we had a couple of good ones, where all our single friends and friends with smaller kitchens descended on our house for a day-long feast. Now that it’s just the kids and me, a single dad like my dad, we again get invited to eat with gracious, loving friends. I appreciate it. I appreciate it more than they know. But a part of me also wishes that I could a fill my own long table, just for one night, with people who shared my blood.
Maybe I should start making more babies. That way, by the time I’m 70, I’d finally be able to populate a banquet.
There must be some job we can find for the Juice. Something, anything that will keep him away from the subject of the ex-wife that he enjoys joking about having killed. As nimble as he once was he’d be a knockout on Dancing with the Stars. As surreal as the entire arrest, pre-trial, trial and post-trial have been he’d be a natural for The Surreal Life. If millions tuned in to watch Flava Flav’s Flavor of Love think how many eyeballs would tune in to watch O.J.’s Love Juice.
People say crack is addictive. Crack is bubble gum next to the addictive power of fame. Orenthal James Simpson was one of the very most famous, most revered athletes of the 1970s. Stadiums overflowing with adoring fans chanted his name. Most superstar athletes retire from fame by their mid-thirties, pop up on sports shows now and again, maybe open a sports bar/car dealership/shrine to their past glory.
Not Mr. Simpson. He became almost better known as a stunt-casted actor and rent-a-car pitch man than for his past on the field. Did you know that he was seriously considered for Schwarzenegger’s role in The Terminator? (Hey, maybe that should be the plot of T4? O.J. goes back in time, books the job, doesn’t kill anyone and Schatzi, another fame junkie, ends up emceeing body building contests on Venice Beach.)
By the early Nineties O.J. was pretty much forgotten. Were it not for the murders he never would have gotten such a strong hit of the fame drug ever again. Now it rules him. Whether it’s trying to cheat his satellite TV provider or now his Hannibal Lecter impersonation for Reagan Books, O.J. will do whatever it takes for another hit of that fifteen minutes.
I just wish he’d finally learn to kick his fame habit and get a job with regular hours. He should follow the lead of another fallen athlete, Mike Tyson. The former champ has reportedly signed up to be a male escort on Heidi Fleiss’s new Nevada “Stud Farm.”
When she was a baby it was Mustela everything. Mustela, in case you don't know, is an imported line of baby lotions more expensive than Chanel. By the time Chet came around we had moved on to whatever Rite Aid had on sale. Now that I'm bathing them alone I just use what I use, Old Spice High Endurance Body Wash. Ava is probably the only 8-year-old little girl in the world who smells like James Coburn.
Being Sunday, I washed her hair, and am particularly proud of the part I made. Just a few months ago the parts I gave her were as crooked as a creek. I've been studying the other black girls in school and perfecting my technique.
Ava and Chet also vy to see who can get out of the tub first. Don't ask me why. I told them the one who gives me less grief. Chet immediately chimed in with, "I love you so much daddy." No fool he.
He was cool and real and smart. He didn’t have the menace of Mike Wallace nor the avuncular safety of Morley Safer so he pried open hard truths in his very own way. He always seemed accessible and authentic, never bothering to hide his disgust or surprise when, say, Michael Jackson crowed about sharing beds with young boys. The only time I ever saw him lose his cool was when interviewing Lena Horne. He was so excited that he was wobbling. If she had leaned over and kissed him he would have spontaneously combusted.
As a black journalist I consider him a dad and mourn his loss.
Phew. It doesn’t seem quite real. I’m so proud of Nancy Pelosi. Not as a Democrat, but as an agent for change. Forget about traditional notions of left and right, Dem and Repub. There will be plenty of time to squabble over specific social issues later, but our nation is on fire and all of us: left, right, Democrats of all stripes and moderate Republicans, need to roll up our sleeves and stop this lunatic administration. All of us as Americans are sailing together in this ship of state and until about midnight (E.S.T) last night the madmen of the current administration were drunkenly at the helm. Bearing us right towards a waterfall. At full speed.
The growing legion of famous conservatives coming out with books slamming the Bushies is proof that we of the traditional left and right had a common enemy.
That enemy was vanquished last night and all of us have the opportunity of our lifetimes to redirect our nation.
As in almost all things, Bill O’Reilly is both underinformed and just plain wrong. He calls progressives, “America haters.” Having recently moved to Manhattan I took my kids to the Statue of Liberty last week. We were about the only Americans out of hundreds of tourists. It was the first time for all of us and seeing such an iconic image for the first time up close and live stole my breath. As the boat sailed right under her chin I looked up in her face and was surprised by my own tears. An instant later this thought sprang to my brain: “How dare those bastards turn the land of freedom into the land of torture.”
Americans across the political spectrum can agree that our safety is precious, but so is our liberty. The Foxian Bushbots have forgotten what being American really means.
Last night’s great win also reminded me of the last scene in the film, The Candidate. Robert Redford wins, and asks his Karl Rove, “Now what?” His Karl Rove just walks out the room without saying a word.
“Now what?”
Speaker-designate Pelosi’s first hundred hours platform is a thrilling start. But the larger issue is how to knit together the older more liberal Democrats with the gang of more conservative freshmen. Yes, the answer does come from racing to the center, as CNN’s pundits repeated all last night. But the center must be defined by the victors. Old and new Democrats cannot allow themselves to be wedged apart by wedge issues, though if I were Republican strategist I would spend my every waking hour scheming to do just that. The netroots progressives, Howard Dean and the DLC centrists all have so much more in common than not. We need to do what we are not been very good good at at all: coming together. Liberal is not a dirty word and neither is conservative. We need to move beyond labels and focus on values. I think we’d all be surprised by how the values from the left to the right are virtually indistinguishable.
For example, everyone except the Bush Corporation is in favor of aggressively going after the war profiteers. Let’s turn Henry Waxman loose and throw those evil vampires under the jail.
Everyone agrees that the Iraq War is headed only for more failure and misery if we do not radically change course. Most everyone except BuschCo. is now ready to compel the Iraqi government to stand up faster by establishing timetables for U.S. troop redeployment. Centrists who had long opposed such timetables like Barack Obama and Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria have finally come around. I think Zakaria’s plan for the war makes the best out of this waking nightmare and anyone who cares about Iraq and the safety of our soldiers there should study it.
So yes, now comes the hard part. But the hard part is also the fun part.
My five-year-old son graduated to taking a shower instead of a bath four times a week at the start of the school year. It’s faster for me than a bath. Weekday evenings are already hectic. I pick him and his eight-year-old sister up from afterschool, feed them, play with them and then get them bathed and off to bed by eight so I can keep writing my new book (which is about them and me and the women in between and which is due at year’s end).
Last night he decided that taking a shower instead of bath would literally kill him. “I don’t want to take a shower! Nooooo! I want to take a bath!” I allowed this sirening to go on for longer than it should have because I was trying to watch “Broken Government,” a surprisingly excellent CNN special report. Then, in a calm voice I told him to either get in the shower or go to bed, an hour earlier than normal. He threw himself in front of the TV and shrieked, “Get me President Kerry’s phone number! Get me President Kerry’s phone number!”
That got my attention.
“Why?”
“Because I’m gonna call him and he’s gonna put you in jail for making me take a shower.”
His big sister started to explain that Kerry wasn’t the President but I shushed her. She likes to think of herself as the first mate on our battleship, repeating verbatim every order issued by me, the captain (“Bearing one-seven-niner,” “Aye-aye captain. Bearing one-seven-niner.”) So when I bark an order to both of them, “Clean your room,” she immediately turns to Chet and shouts, “Clean your room.”
“Chetty.” I told him, “Kerry isn’t the President. And Presidents usually don’t meddle in the bathing rituals of citizens. However if any administration were ever inclined to so meddle you couldn’t pick one more enthused to do so than the present one, lead by President George Bush.”
This quieted him for a moment. Then he again shrieked, “I don’t want to take a shower!” and spun himself on his side on the floor like one of the Three Stooges.
I understood his anxiety and his confusion over the presidential persona. These midterms are driving me nuts too.
Like so many others I worked so hard on the Kerry campaign, hellbent on winning this country back from the anti-democratic corporate interests that had stolen it. A friend and I drove to Las Vegas from LA to canvas on election day to help push Nevada blue. Going door to door through endless, soulless subdivisions, I walked dozens of miles and was even chased down the street by a hungry, snarling pitbull. But the celebration that night would have made it all worth while. Everyone was talking about the Zogby poll that assured everyone that Kerry had already won.
The morning after, heartbroken and hungover, I instantly went from inhaling every political blog on the web to a cold turkey abandonment of anything even reeking of news. It took me months for the cloud to lift.
I am sure that the frenzied vitriol that accompanied Kerry’s recent flubbed joke from Democrats was really about latent resentment at his not having fought hard enough to win last time.
These midterms are different. Not since Watergate have citizens had a better chance to take back their government. I think a lot of us haven’t jumped on those moveon.org call parties because we’re afraid of having our heart’s broken yet again.
I say, go to moveon.org and make some calls. Do whatever you can to get out the vote for change.
This is it. Our last stand to rescue the Republic.
