Pimpgnosis

I’m a weight loss regimen at the moment.  So far I’ve managed to get rid of the Texas 15 simply by becoming a semi-vegetarian.  The next goal is to get rid of the dissertation 15.

As it happens, the primary method by which I can cut down my caloric intake is to reduce the booze.

Who would’ve guessed that wine was fattening?

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Part of the fraughtness of this instinct for activism is the obvious flaws in the models with which I’ve been provided over the years. From that passing parade of boarders, friends, cousins, colleagues and homeless people I learned a few simple lessons of what it means to take up a political life.

Lesson #1: Accomplishing great things for others comes with a toll to oneself.

About ten years ago now – wow, can it really have been so long? – my parents and I took a trip to Cambodia. We were there to see the sights, of course, but also to visit with a longtime friend of my mother’s, someone she knew from her women’s group. The trip was fun and interesting for many reasons, not the least of which was seeing Angkor Wat.

Which is, for the record, really quite as amazing as it looks in the pages of National Geographic.

However, the sights are not what I wanted to talk about.  See, the friend whom we went to visit had undertaken a kind of mid-life career shift driven by a total dedication to moral seriousness.  In the early 90s, after Pol Pot’s genocidal tantrums had finally been put to an end, (thanks largely to the bayonets of the Vietnamese, and with very little help or even attention from us Yanks), just after the Paris peace accords had opened up the possibility of a government in Cambodia that might not attempt to kill every last person in the whole place, our family friend applied for a USAID grant, bought a plane ticket, and made herself a new life as a non-profit entrepreneur.  She has since spent the better part of the past two decades teaching those damaged by land mines how to raise chickens, repair small engines, and dig wells, helped not a little by a healthy dose of the kind of “up with people” ingenuousness that has largely disappeared from the American post-70’s cultural complex.  As an example, I would cite that not only does she attempt (and, largely, succeed) at getting former enemies to dig wells together, she teaches them to sing to a tune that I swear is straight out of the Methodist Sunday School hymnal.  She has managed to convince ex-Khmer Rouge to come out of the jungle and become part of an army led by Hun Sen, and perhaps more to the point she is getting the wives and sons of those same Potistas to commit to raising export-quality pepper in a region where anything other than subsistence agriculture was last seen under colonial auspices, and before then under the Khmer empire.

And for these efforts what is her reward?  To have her house occupied and stolen from her.  To have former aid workers attempt to appropriate her organization for their own personal enrichment.  To spend her free time socializing with such Le Carre extras as Canadian dwarves, Italian foreign agents, French backpackers, and blind masseurs.

I could tell other versions of this same story – the UFW organizers whose marriages didn’t last, the Democratic activists who got lupus instead of jobs at the White House, the red-diaper babies who spend their retirement running the ACLU in states better known for Aryan Nation activity but whose own kids go on to get MBAs and work for Disney – but the point remains the same: not only does one not receive a reward in this life for charitable activity (that would rather defeat the purpose, after all), but one is more usually punished in ways one could never expect. 

This is not a gospel lesson that Mr. Joel Osteen or Mr. Rick Warren typically teach, but there it is.

Lesson #2: You can get your reward, but it does not come from your principal political efforts.

We have another friend, someone my parents know from many years of work in the building.  Indeed, she was one of the principal geniuses behind the “Grits-Off,” a fundraiser for Loaves and Fishes that, I am sure, never ceased to surprise the good nuns who ran that place.  Any event that helped the homeless through the bizarre medium of a competitive grits-cooking contest to which such local luminaries as Josh Pane and Cal Worthington were known to put in an appearance and which one year featured my mother in a sunflower yellow hoop dress complete with parasol (that year’s theme was equal parts “let them eat cake” and “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no babies!”) has got to have raised at least one eyebrow among the Catholic Worker crowd. 

And yet, such efforts did not lead to this-worldly rewards for my parents and their friends.  To the extent that they were able to cash in their chips and buy the house on Orange Grove Boulevard, it came through political consultancy, a career choice that I learned early on to regard with only slightly less moral horror than pandering.  In some cases a this-worldly reward came through inheritance – but that is a dicey proposition, at best.  Our friend who runs the NGO in Cambodia, for instance, is currently in chancery with her sister over the division of her father’s estate.  Phrases like “horse farms” and “coal mine royalties” tend to crop up when this subject is raised.  Or they may come through slumlordery, a family habit usually acknowledged only privately (the rewards for which are, in any case and all other things being equal, not that great).  In fact, the only acquaintance I can think of at the moment who has remained “pure” from the profit motive has gone from local office to a national appointment to semi-retirement in the arms of a white lady in Land Park.  This does not precisely constitute a house on Orange Grove Boulevard (he lives, if you are curious, on Sutterville Road) but it is not, it must be admitted, all that different in principal from dating a union-busting dragon lady and living in Curtis Park.

Lesson #3: There are worse things that selling your soul for the house on Orange Grove Boulevard. 

I know one person from high school who went into political consulting.  I know another who works in the building.  Both have run to fat and wear ill-fitting suits.  In one case they were absolutely befuddled when I started dropping names of current legislators and consultants (“Wow.  It’s like you know more people in the building than I do!”); in the second they were befuddled when I declined their friend request on Facebook.  In neither case did I conclude that the smart money these days is in political consulting. Or working in the building. 

The problem with selling your soul is that you don’t actually know its price.  And as anyone with any sense at all will tell you: the first rule of bargaining is to know the value of that over which you are haggling.  Said differently, if you have to ask…well, you know the rest of that phrase.  Or, as the WASPs have always held, and with good reason: you never, ever, touch the principle. 

Capitalism is an ugly business, of course. It is exploitative at its very core, fundamentally amoral, and deeply deeply implicated by evil. And yet it is the system that we know, it is the nexus in which we move and breath and have our very being.  And because it is the game in which we find ourselves rolling the dice (etc.), we are but fools if we do anything other than endeavor to know the rules and understand the stakes. To deal other than openly and knowingly with forces beyond our personal control is not simply stupid, it is to invite predation, to enable and abet the temptor. See the Dream of Scipio if you need a fictional version of this lesson. 

Wow.  Well that got real serious, didn’t it?

Where was I? Oh, yes: don’t ever sell your soul. But at the same time, don’t ever expect a reward for behaving right.

Lesson #4: Sometimes it’s best not to take things too seriously.

One final anecdote: Some months ago, there was coup in Honduras.  Now, let the record reflect that Honduras does not (at the moment) appear to be descending into the kind of chaos that engulfed El Salvador in the late 70s and early 80s.  That said, anytime there is a coup in Central America, the script is so well-known, the house receipts so predictable, that all one really needs to do is call in a casting director, identify some new leads, bring in the character actors, and sit back and (ahem) enjoy the show. 

This particular coup had more than the normal interest, however, as by pure happenstance my dear father got cast in a bit part in the melodrama.  He was there when the shit went down, as they say, pursuing his latest interest in building woodworking schools with the help of the carpenters union, delivering surplus medical equipment donated by the nurses union, conveying out-of-date Spanish textbooks donated by a retired librarian, and holding the flashlight while a dental assistant from Pumpkin Center, Alabama pulled abscessed teeth.  All this as part of a larger effort to help establish a network of clinics staffed by doctors trained at the Medical School of the Americas, the seminary of Castro’s efforts to evangelize all of Latin America with a gospel of free medical care.

As I indicated, the script never changes: Castro would be one of those character actors aforementioned; he always, always makes a guest appearance.

Having learned that long-ago lesson of the 80s, my family has not been content to let this latest imbroglio slip us by.  There has been no need to shelter refugees in the basement this time around (thank goodness), but there has been occasion to shepard mid-level Zelayistas to AFL-CIO conferences, to see that the call was in fact put through to Hilda Solis’s office, to fulminate with rage at Hilary’s vacillating perfidy, to introduce certain individual to our local Congressperson with the proviso “Just so you know, Doris, our friend here will be among the first to be assassinated should we let the coup succeed.”

And, of course, there has been an uptick in the number of short-term boarders moving through the place.  Including one fellow who, over a dinner on the front porch of baked salmon, braised organic greens, and a nice pinot noir, told us the following tale:

In the final day or two leading up to coup, then-president Zelaya received an invitation to dinner at the American Ambassador’s residence.  It was to be a “private affair,” he was assured – nothing formal, just a friendly chat over dinner.  Our narrator was at that time working as an advisor to someone in the president’s cabinet; both he and the cabinet minister sensed something wrong – they had read this script before – and hatched a plan. 

Our narrator drove the car, along with the president and the cabinet minister.  Once arrived, the president got out and entered the ambassador’s residence alone.  It is an imposing structure, and the formal dining hall is on the second floor.  The president took the stairs at a leisurely place.  Once he arrived in the hall, he found not just the Ambassador, but also the kitchen cabinet of the opposition, the primary half-a-dozen guys responsible for plotting his ouster.  “Well, well, Mr. Ambassador!  I thought this was going to be an informal chat among friends.  I didn’t realize you were asking me to sit down at table in the presence of my enemies.” 

Before the Ambassador could reply, the cabinet minister noisily clambered up the stairs, breezily sashayed past the guards at the entrance to the dining room, and plopped herself down at an empty spot at the table.  Brushing her hair back over her ears, she looked around and said, “Well, my goodness Mr. Ambassador, this reminds me of a joke I once heard.  Why has there never been a coup in your country?”

The punchline to that particular gag was, needless to say, in the next morning’s Times.

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Oh, Christ.

One question.  That’s all I ask, really.  Just one question.

When did the Democrats become the party of the f*cking petit bourgeoisie?

Naw, fuck dat noise. Naw, fuck dat FUCKING PETIT BOURGEOISIE horseshite.

Ahem.  What was I saying?

Oh, right. 

So, I somtimes teach a class that, among other things, purports to prepare a person for the art of deconstructing a state of the union address.  Literally. 

What, then, am I to make of a speech whose major points — and please, PLEASE, correct me if I am wrong — consisted of telling the American people that the Democratic Party is the party of small business entrepreneurs, of “free trade” with Columbia (Columbia?  Really?  This from the nation that brought us illimatible synonyms for “purple heart,” and “goof ball” and “kibbles & bits?”), of “clean coal” and “bipartisanship?”  What precisely do we trade with Columbia?  ’cause I will guarantee you it doesn’t add up to our current accounts deficit. 

Fuck dat noise. 

Really? What am I to make of such a speech?

That our president wants to make nice with a bunch of jasper jackasses?  That “oh, really, if I’m only nice to you, maybe we can pretend that it’s just about ‘values’ and “civil disagreement” and not “oh, right, you fucking hate negros and homuhsexshuls” when your talking about “welfare” and “heritage” and “tradition?”

Some very simple advise:  if ever you want to deconstruct a public speech, then ask yourself a question: what does this have to do with the price of labor? I realize that’s old school Marxist, but trust me.  It helps to cut through the bullshit real quick.  And the quickest way to understand where a president stands on the price of labor is to know where he stands on (a) free trade, and (b) universal health care.

More later.  I promise.  I am too, too, distraught to make full comments at the moment.

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One of the consequences of growing up the child of activists is that one has always to reckon with a legacy of high moral seriousness. Scratch that. Of course, I should suppose everyone experiences this sort of dilemma. It is therefore probably a species of oedipal self-indulgence to claim that there is anything special about the angst of explicit and implicit comparisons between one’s own and one’s parents’ ethical accomplishments. It is even, perhaps, a marker of moral hypersensitivity to regard this sort of comparative angel-wrestling as fundamentally whiny, even onanistic. Young Werther’s sorrows, after all, really only interested Goethe. Lotte could have cared less.

In any case. 

I was thinking my relative lack of lifetime ethical accomplishments as I was (surprise!) reading Didion. Specifically, her small eponymous book on El Salvador. It is a depressing piece of reportage, opening with an extended passage from Conrad and heading downhill from there. It is depressing precisely book because what “happened” in El Salvador in the early 1980s was awful, and made no less awful because what “happened” there “happened” with the full consent and aid of the United States government, our government. 

I was young when the events there happened. My memory of them is largely connected to candlelight vigils on the steps of Memorial Auditorium in the rain, and the putative knowledge – shared in hushed tones – that people we knew might, just might, be harboring illegal political refugees in their homes. These memories are vague, of course, and probably inaccurate. We went to many candlelight vigils when I was a kid – it was rather the done thing among the leftist activirati in the 80’s – and it not entirely beyond possibility that what I have in my memory is a vigil on say, nuclear disarmament, or disinvestment in South Africa. It is also not entirely beyond possibility that my “memory” of family friends harboring illegal political refugees is a mish-mash of poorly-understood adult conversation and a school assignment involving Anne Frank.

Those rumors of bravery, of “making a difference,” have always echoed in the back of my mind.  We didn’t hide activists then – or at least not Salvadoran human-rights refugees. Ours was, to my young eyes, a more pedestrian sort of sanctuary: just-graduated cousins out from the South doing their wanderjahr in California, recently-divorced state workers who needed a pied-a-terre in town during the week, agricultural inspectors in between their tours of the migrant labor camps, former colleagues recuperating from major surgeries, political consultants who never quite got the big appointment lined up after the campaign, even (once) an actual homeless person. But no Salvadoran human-rights refugees. 

It is in its own way a testament to my parents’ generosity that they opened their home to such a parade of oddments (I should note at this point that the arrangements were usually not wholly altruistic. Rent was paid in every instance I can recall except for the homeless guy). But even in the din of that parade I could here the echo, the sense that we could always be doing more. No one had to hide in the closet when the FBI made a courtesy call. For that matter, the FBI never made a courtesy call. You see, perhaps, what I mean when I refer to moral hypersensitivity, to political penis-envy. That a twelve-year old could feel inadequate when the INS fails to raid their house says everything about being twelve, and nothing about the comparative moral accomplishments of said twelve-year old’s parents.

And yet. That sense of ethical unease, the echo in the back of my head, followed me to graduate school. Now I should say that I most certainly did not go to graduate school with the intent of “changing the world,” of becoming an activist. I read Weber my senior year, and taking him to heart, embarked on the decidedly different task of disenchanting the world. In one way this goal is morally purer than engagement in the hurly-burly of politics; one does not have to make compromises in academia, at least not the obvious ones one makes in politics. Read differently, however, it is a refusal, a passing of the cup, a decline to the invitation to participate in the only struggle worth getting bent out of shape over. Either way, choosing academia was fraught with its own oedipal twists, not least because my father was thrown out of graduate school for organizing a union among the janitorial and grounds-keeping staff.

So, you see, that echo was there when I read Jeffrey Paige’s Coffee and Power with what my professor thought was a refreshing knowledge of the issues, especially in one so young. It was there when I learned that a colleague’s grandfather had been forcibly “re-educated” when he made the mistake of publishing an article in a journal later deemed inappropriate by the authorities. It was there when another colleague, sick of reading dry, depressing sociology of education articles, left after one semester and enrolled in an M.Ed. program with the intention of becoming a high school principal. It was there when I applied to be the “public service fellow” at the graduate student union. And it was most especially there the night yet another colleague – himself the child of leftist academics in an unstable Latin American country, because every one of us had had to wrestle with his own angel – told me the following joke:

Q: Why has the United States never had a military coup?
A: Because it doesn’t have a US embassy.

This joke, I would remind the reader, was funnier in the years before Bush v. Gore. It was hilarious as first-year graduate student, in the second Clinton administration.

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Instead of getting three days off a month, without pay — which is the equivalent of a 15% pay cut…

The proposal is to work those days, but for 5% less money now (which is to say, permanently.  Or, if you prefer, a demotion) plus 5% less money that I may or may not get back someday.

This is what is known in the trades as a “shitty deal.”

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Every once in awhile you play unwitting host to a bedroom farce.

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Paganism is stoopid. 

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.  I’ll let ya know if anything changes.

Now I know why they didn’t make us read it my freshman year of college.

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“It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another’s brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent…”

It is bizarrely cheering in its own way, to think that perhaps I ought to thank the fucker for having taking my credit cards.

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The Midtown hipster talking party (Gen Y version).

One of the benefits of being a regular patron at, say, your average retail establishment is that you get to know the people behind the counter.  This process is generally helped by tipping.  It also helps to share a liberal point of view.  This is especially true for coffeehouses.

Recently Da Partner and I attended the birthday party of a barista we’ve come to know.  This party occurred at what in Boston would be called a triple-decker, though in this particular case there were six apartments rather than three.  Da Partner and I fully expected to be the oldest people present.  However, we figured that we should attend nonetheless, bringing a gift certificate to the BBQ Spot as a present for our host.

I need not describe the apartment in any real detail.  It was precisely what you might assume it would be, upon being told that it was in Midtown and inhabited by two baristas.  It was, for all practical purposes, interchangeable with apartments in SES-equivalent neighborhoods, inhabited by SES-equivalent occupants, in cities such as Boston, Portland, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.  It was not precisely “one of those railroad apartments that all those horrible yuppies are living in now,” (darnit! no link, because evidently no one has thought fit to memorialize that quote from Last Days of Disco) but it did have a Hollywood bathroom sandwiched between the two bedrooms.  And because of who happened to live there, and who and how they preferred to entertain, it had a stained-wood bar in the living room, stocked with better wine than my father typically serves.  Though I should hasten to add that this is not, in fact, a high standard.

We were not the oldest persons present, as we soon learned.  Two gentlemen gregariously introduced themselves* to Da Partner and me, during the course of which one of them revealed that he was just barely younger than myself.

Now, I should reveal at this point that at this sort of party I often find it quite difficult to turn off the sociologist.  The dilemma lies less in the possibility that I might not enjoy myself in doing so (I always do), or even that when I do so, it is as a sort of consolation prize for attending an otherwise boring event (I do this even when the evening delivers utter hilarity).  Rather, the dilemma lies in the fact that engaging in this kind of participant observation can quite quickly descend into completely unfettered bitchiness.**  This temptation can reach Wildean levels of acuteness when one’s interlocutor is such a regular pot-smoker that his eyes are totally bloodshot.

Thus it was that I found myself subtly pumping my new-found friends for information:

Moi: So.. how do you know the hosts?
Mr. Bloodshot Eyes: We go to BLANK all the time.  What about you guys?
Moi: Oh, the same.
Friend of Mr. BE: Hunh, I wonder why we haven’t met before.  We’re there all the time.
Da Partner: We’re usually there in the morning, on our way to work.
Mr. BE: Oh, well we’re usually on the patio, playing chess.
Moi: Chess, really?  Really?  I’m…impressed.
Mr. BE: Why?  It’s not as hard as you might think.  It’s easy to pick up.  We’d be happy to teach you.
DP (á moi): What, aren’t you going to tell them?
Moi: No, I was thinking I would keep it in my back pocket.
FoMBE: (evidently not catching the aside): Oh, yeah, we play blitz all the time.  It’s super-easy.  See, you get a clock, and you play fast for like two, three minutes, and then by that time all your major pieces are gone so it’s not so hard anymore.  Except, of course, for the horsie.  That’s always tricky to move.
Mr. BE: Oh that’s just the way you play.  It’s really just a different style.  You don’t have to do what he does.
FoMBE: Sure, sure.  But it’s harder in blitz to think more than one move ahead of time.
Moi: So do you guys ever play down at the Senior Center?
Mr. BE: ….
FoMBE: Sure, he plays there.  He’s even beaten some of them.
Mr. BE: Just a couple of times, really.  There they don’t play blitz.
Moi: So, where are you from, then?
FoMBE: Santa Rosa.
Moi: Like Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa?  Or someplace near there?
FoMBE: Well, Rohnert Park, actually.
Moi: What about you?
Mr. BE: Oh, I’m from around here.
Moi: Really?  Which high school did you go to?
Mr. BE [looking at me quizzically]: Ponderosa.  Why do you ask?
Moi: Just curious.  Dude, isn’t that in like Placerville?

At this point I think Mr. Bloodshot Eyes may have realized that I was not exactly playing the conversation straight, and so the group drifted apart, as they do at this sort of party, for the purpose of getting another beer (Friend of Mr. BE) or chatting up a girl (Mr. BE).  Luckily for us, the entertainment didn’t stop there, as our host introduced us to someone who, in his words, “would soon be going to school in Boston, like we used to.”

Now, as the readers of this blog are surely aware, when told that someone “went to school in Boston,” this constitutes the starting round of a game whose rules are as hermetic as cricket and as variable as mao, the game of “dropping the H bomb.”  This game is always best played with 3 or more, but can constitute cruel sport indeed when one of the players does not know all the rules.

Mr. Peacoat: Really?  You guys lived in Boston?  So where’s a good place to go out? [opening thrust]
Moi: Go out as in like dinner?  [parry right]
Peacoat: Sure.  Or other things, you know.  I’m sure you fellows would have recommendations.  [advance, thrust again]
Moi: Oh, well, we haven’t lived there in 7 years.  I’m sure everything’s changed.  We mostly knew stuff in Somerville and Central Square.  [parry, false opening] What sort of program will you be in? [tossoff of a thrust]
Peacoat: A joint MBA/JD program.  [parry left, thurst]
Moi: Well, there’s a candlepin bowling joint in Jamaica Plain that serves decent pizza and beer.  [parry, feint]  Other than that, I’m really not sure what’s still around from when we were there.  [counterfeit retreat] So where are you from? [feint, thrust]
Peacoat: Chico. [first blood] Speaking of beer, I think I need some more.
Moi: What, to dull the pain of having grown up in Chico? [pressing the attack]
Peacoat: Uh….sure.  (returning with beer)  [retreat, call for ruling]
Moi: So… what part of town will you be living in? [feint, thrust]
Peacoat: I haven’t decided yet.  [having learned the lesson, parries down and to the right]
Da Partner: Which school will you be attending? [bored with the show, joins the melee and goes straight for the jugular]
Peacoat: [caught off guard, he admits the name of a former proprietary institution that specializes in offering law degrees to working professionals.  This, within the standard rules of the game, constitutes an essentially mortal blow made all the more painful because the wounded man does not know it]
Moi: Oh, well that’s right downtown then.  I wouldn’t know anyplace right around there, but I’m sure there are plenty of options.  [declining to participating in the slaughter, wiping my gloves and epee from the spattered gore]
Peacoat: Yes, it’s right downtown.  [tacitly admitting defeat, even in ignorance of the outcome]
DP: So you said you were from Chico, right?  Surely you’re actually from Paradise or some such? [slapping him with his glove]
Peacoat: Wha…?  Er, no.  Colusa, actually.  [stunned by the blow]
Moi: Can I get you another beer, perhaps? [reaching down to give him a hand up, only to sucker-punch the poor fellow]
Peacoat: I’m still working on this one, thanks.  [getting up on his own]
Moi: So you must be, what, finishing up at [a perfectly good school not quite in Sacramento] then? [offering him a set of bandages and aloe for his wounds]
Peacoat: No, I’m in the Government department at [some other, but not as prestigious, local institution]. [tearing at the packaging, unable to stanch the bleeding]
Moi: Excuse me for a moment, my glass appears to be empty. [exuent]
Peacoat: So, what do you do? [gamely entering the fray again, thrust]
DP: “Landscape Architecture”. [parry right]
Peacoat: Oh, so you must be a liberal, then. [down, thrust]
DP: Sure, but why do you say that?  [parry, swipe, thrust]
Peacoat: Anything to do with the environment is for liberals [parry, thrust clumsily, missing the target entirely].  Me, I’m an independent [Retreat.  Discards former weapon and chooses another].  Socially liberal, mind you, but fiscally conservative.  Like for instance, I’m happy we bombed Japan – I’m all in favor of bombing small countries, ha, hah!***  [grandly slashes the empty air with his new saber, preparing for his next attack].  But you would hate my father [slash].  He’s a real fascist [slash, slash].  And not like just a conservative fascist.  I mean like a fascist fascist. [slash, slash, slash]
DP: Is this some sort of distinction between Sarah Palin and John Birch?  [parry, thrust, home]
Peacoat: Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. [a wound so clean he doesn’t even feel it]
DP: I see, and what specifically makes you think I would hate your father? [pricking the new wound deftly]
Peacoat: Well, I’ve worked for him for three summers now digging trenches to store waste oil. [weak, unsuccessful parry]
DP: Oh, that’s nothing.  We used to live in Texas; where I worked documenting the clean-up on ranches where they used arsenic pits to de-louse cows before sending them to auction. [pitching his sword point down to the floor, quivering, at the feet of his bleeding opponent]
Moi [returning from the kitchen, surveying the carnage]: So, what did I miss in this conversation?
Peacoat: You know, I had this friend once who told me that every girl wants a little piece of me in her.  He meant it as a compliment, but it’s really an insult, I think.  What do you guys think? [stripping to a singlet, offering to wrestle]
DP: I think we need to go home so that I can get up for church in the morning.  [picking up his sword for another day and wiping it clean].****

And that, as they say in the trades, was game set and match for that conversation.

Baristas, unlike urban planners and academics, do not tend to accumulate books.  Instead, they tend to accumulate art.  The art produced (and displayed with the appropriate lighting) by the two hosts was of two sorts: one roommate made large impressionistic oils, generally of single individuals in uncluttered backgrounds.  A blend of Hopper’s choice of subject, Keleti’s technique, and the Wyeths’ color palette.  One piece , in particular, seemed inspired by the scene in Amelie where the subject’s face (a young woman in the mid-ground of Renoir’s Dejeuner au Canotiers) is half-hidden behind a large coffee mug from which she is taking a gulp.  The other roommate’s chosen genre consisted of postcard-sized reductions of the publicity stills for all of Almodovar’s movies, arranged in shadow-boxes backlit by the streetlight shining through the piano-window.

According to one of the baristas, these pieces were potentially available for the taking.  Provided the interested party offered an explanation of why they appreciated it, wanted it, why it inspired them, what they wanted to do with it.

This was, in other words, a talking party taken to its highest logical form.

The Christmas marathon.

“(There is no other business in Sacramento, no reality other than land – even I, when I was living and working in New York, felt impelled to take a University of California correspondence course in Urban Land Economics.)”  (“Notes From a Native Daughter”)

This holiday, for whatever reason, everyone decided to throw their parties, not just on the same weekend, but on the same day.  Thus we found ourselves attending three events: a young professionals talking party (inner-suburbs version), a young professionals talking party (Midtown alley version), and that rarest of rarities, a games-night party.

The inner-suburban YPTP occurred in a “starter home” for a conventionally pretty, slender brunette with large eyes, slightly younger than myself (these dealies do have types, as you can see), and her husband, a labor lawyer who routinely sues the firm for which Da Partner works.  No hard feelings taken either way, of course.  This was the first time in awhile I had been to a party with children (who amused themselves alternately by jumping around in the mini-bounce house in the study, or whacking quite loudly at their wooden tool sets).  Children, by the way, are an optional feature – much like the Tudor-style leaded-pane picture window in the living room, or the skylight in the kitchen – at parties thrown in this neighborhood.  It does not matter whether the hosts are from here, or someplace else; I have been to at least one party thrown by someone from around here that occurred not 4 blocks away and also involved screaming children in a mini-bounce house.  In any case, the wife’s parents were in attendance; mother took care of the canapés (spanikopita and pigs-in-a-blanket, etc.) while dad told stories – and I swear I’m not joking about this – about his time working for an aerospace firm in the Bay Area.  After 15 minutes of this, more guests arrived, including the gentleman responsible for the Midtown hipster party (Gen X version) who, as it happens went to undergrad with the wife hosting the party.  He brought along his girlfriend, a conventionally pretty slender brunette with large eyes who is exactly my age and works as a labor lawyer, but at a different firm from the husband hosting the party.

Because…what have we learned on the show tonight, Craig?

That’s right, kiddies: it’s that kind of town, even when it’s not that kind of party.

Or, to say the same thing in jargon: class and status, when operating in combination, provide social closure like a mothafucka.

The midtown-ally YPTP occurred in, well, one of those light industrial spaces that surely must once have served as a stable, then as a repair shop, now as an art gallery, bakery, sushi restaurant, non-profit organization or, indeed, professional services office.  A space with gloriously high ceilings, way more wood than is ever used in commercial construction these days, and a poured-slab concrete floor.  A space, in other words, that is totally suited for a dance party, complete with Bose sub-woofers, LED-projected music videos, a keg, and, because this is a YPTP, canapés that were functionally interchangeable with those served at every other YPTP described in this series: brie, dill-and-garlic jack, rosemary-flavored water crackers, spinach dip, a Costco vegetable platter and, unless my memory does me a disservice (which is entirely possible, given the hour at which I arrived at this event), petit-fours.  The price for all this lovely spread?  A donation to – wait for it… — a charitable organization founded by someone not unknown to the readers of this blog.  I arrived shortly before the niece of the lead singer of Sacramento’s Most Famous Band (not Tesla) made her appearance.  Because even the children of the aerospace engineers have their gentry.  Sadly, I missed DP completely embarrassing himself dancing on a cube with the daughter of the founder of a rival professional-services firm.  I made up for this by swing-dancing with a young lady (strikingly pretty, curvaceous, blonde; you see I do not quite share the tastes of my caste) who was the last person but one with whom I shared the pleasure of a game of dropping the H bomb.

But I have left the best for last, the fabled games-night party.  This occurred, thank Christ, not in second-floor walkup in a gated community in Natomas, for lord knows everyone would’ve had to park at the liquor store across the six-lane arterial.  Instead it occurred it a far more suitable location, a two-bedroom pre-war with a built-in, French doors, and parquetry.  This is the kind of apartment whose SES-equivalent occurs not in Central Square, Alphabet City, the Mission or Japantown, but rather Porter Square, Tribeca, Parnassus Heights, and Silver Lake.  It is an apartment made for entertaining – as witnessed by the fact that everyone had a place to sit.  The food was entirely different from a YPTP.  Instead of canapés there was bone-in ham, scalloped potatoes, green-bean casserole, and a cake from Freeport Bakery.  The drinks table was slightly disconcerting in its utter lack of nonsense.  In the manner of a story I once heard,***** there was only hard liquor, and the differences lay in the taste, not the brand.  As one wag put it, it’s amazing what you can do when put to the challenge; tequila and Martinelli’s go surprisingly well together.

And of course, of course, there was a game.  Now a word must be said about the game chosen by the hostess.  It is tailor-made to produce in-jokes, but in the playing context of which insider humor constitutes a potentially double-edged sword.  Clever wordplay – homonyms, off-color puns, pop-culture references – is de rigueur, but one can be too clever by half.  On this occasion the play was stopped, twice, to clarify for all present (a) the meaning of an in-joke from a previous game, and (b) a phrase drawn from French structuralist social criticism.  Charades figure prominently, and the end result is an exercise of competitive demi-telepathy.

When I teach, I tell my students that they should not be surprised if, during the course of writing an essay, they come to quite a different conclusion from where they started.  It occurs to me now, having engaged in this little exercise in auto-ethnography, that perhaps my local informant was wrong.  Perhaps there do not exist two types of parties in Sacramento, but only one.  I had forgotten something I’ve said quite often, but in a different context: games are merely an excuse for conversation, something to keep the hands and mid-brain occupied while the harder fore-brain work of socializing is going on.  They are what one does when you’ve told all the stories you know and the time has come to invent new ones.  And the game favored by this hostess in particular is conversation distilled to its component essences: description, gesture, and the condensation of meaning into code.

Is it any wonder that the smarter emigrants to this town – such as my cousin – never refuse an invitation to this sort of party?

*This, by the way, is a key difference as compared to parties in Boston.  There you never introduced yourself to someone at a party.  Introductions are usually more deftly played, to avoid the necessity of such a breach of decorum.

**This temptation is made all the more acute, of course, by the potential for producing subsequent blog posts.

***Some species of racism (e.g., “tell it to the Japs!”) are buried so deep they can be temporarily forgotten, assumed not to have been transmitted between generations.  But when brought to the surface they tellingly reveal, like some recessive trait for “Mongolian Blue” or “weak blood,” what for want of a better word I shall call the ethnic difference between the children of the aerospace engineers and the local stock.

****I have no real excuse for having engaged in this exercise in conversational cruelty, though I can think of at least two false ones.  Such as the fact that the fellow was clearly the finest piece of ass ever to graduate from Colusa High.  Or that he was from a well-off enough family that he must have had access to tetracycline and orthodonture as a teenager, to judge by his, how shall we say, purty little mouth.  These are not in and of themselves unforgiveable faults.  What really set me and DP off was that he was well aware of these advantages, and dared to trade upon them by flirting with us, jointly, while at the same time maintaining his ostensible (but totally laughable) status as a heterosexual.  Invitations to view the gang shower, when made directly and unapologetically, can be dealt with discreetly.  When made indirectly and ashamedly, they are insulting to everyone concerned.

*****The story goes like this: there once was a lady whose husband, upon his death, left her a legacy of 60 acres on Block Island.  This set her up rather well in retirement: there was a 2-acre zoning limit, she expected to live only to about the age of 90, and she found that selling off one parcel at a time once every other year or so paid handsomely enough to enable her to travel, maintain a subscription to the symphony, and even to subsidize her daughter’s habit of collecting antique rugs.  She used cut-glass jars in which to keep her liquor and was known to remark when mixing drinks: “gin, vodka, they’re both clear.  What’s the difference?”  As bracing as the question may be, let the record reflect that she stocked those cut-glass jars with Bombay and Absolut.

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The Midtown hipster talking party (Gen-X version).

After my first year of adjuncting, I was invited to the tenure party of two members of the department.  It was in a charming little restored bungalow in Midtown, one-story, hard by the levee, likely built to house a worker at the Blue Diamond plant and his family.

No-one but myself was from Sacramento.  I could not even begin to guess where everyone else was from, except to say that the host (and his mother, who was there) grew up in Berkeley.

There was bric-a-brac on the shelves.  A stereopticon (with vintage views of Yosemite Falls), and a coffee-table on which it sat (there was a coffee-table.  This is something by which my current living room has never, to my knowledge, been adorned.  Hand-carved Chinese camphor-wood chests, yes.  Coffee-tables, no.).  There was a wooden wheelchair, as well as assorted antique medical equipment.  And books, upon books, upon books.  Not simply standard grad-school works (Adorno, Zisek, Bourdieu, Foucault, Gramsci) and standard straight-guy works (The Monkey Wrench Gang, Encounters With the Arch-Druid, Cat’s Cradle.  But thank God no Atlas Shrugged.  And no I will not link to anything having to do with that vicious pedantic bitch), but books of which I had never heard (and I know some abstruse shit, mind you.  These to-me unfamiliar works were packed between the Houllebecq and the Vollman and the Murikami).

This was a party at which I could ask someone present, in all seriousness, which of the great works of canonical anthropology they would recommend.  And for which I would receive a candid answer (anything by anyone with a hyphenated last name, which is to say anything British).

This was a party at which the only person who got sloppy drunk was moved to do the dishes in her inebriety.

It was a party at which, when I was exchanging vitals with the only other adjunct present learned that (a) she too had left a terrible place because it was awful beyond bearing (in her case, Utah), (b) was married to a park ranger for the Stone Lakes Wildlife Refuge, and (c) has to date the best response when told for whom I actually work (“get the f*ck out!”).

It was a party at which the potluck crudité consisted largely of vegetarian options, this being a crowd of academics.

This was a party thrown by a man who not only raises vegetables in his back garden, he keeps rescue chickens.  A man who, when I threw a wine-tasting/house-warming party, brought a bottle of Zinfandel pressed from grapes grown on his grandfather’s ranch in Geyserville.

This was, in other words, a party, and a house, such as I might have if I weren’t me, but instead straight and raised in Berkeley.

It was, nevertheless, a talking party.

The young professionals talking party (suburban tract-home version).

“Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one’s past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly from room to room.  I decide to meet it head on and clean out a drawer, and I spread the contents on the bed.  A bathing suit I wore the summer I was seventeen.  A letter of rejection from The Nation, an aerial photograph of the site for a shopping center my father did not build in 1954.”  (“On Going Home”)

The parties to which Da Partner gets invited are, almost by definition, talking parties.  A recent example was thrown in a postwar two-bedroom ranch, the kind of house described so eloquently by Howard Kunstler, complete with a two-car garage facing the street, because of course this particular neighborhood (Meadowview) was created specifically so that members of the striving lower middle class could conspicuously consume their painstakingly acquired two-toned-with-the-whitewall-tires status markers while commuting to and from the Army Depot.  If it was not this particular neighborhood that was developed by Didion’s own father, it was surely one just down the street.

I spent a good deal of my childhood in houses like this; my babysitters in elementary school lived nearby.  In fact this house happened to sit across the street from the school I attended in 6th grade.  I even recognized the subway tile in the bathroom and the marks in the plaster where the oil-heater grill in the living room once stood.  I gather these houses, even if they did not precisely come out of a catalog, were manufactured with a limited range of customization options, such as avocado enamel for the kitchen sink, or sea-foam tile for the bathroom, or perhaps fieldstone instead of brick for the fireplace if one chose the deluxe model, all the better to maximize the profit margin for the builder.

Again I knew no-one there, except – because this is that kind of town, even when it’s not that kind of party – a woman who lived on my street when I was a child and who, because history does not repeat itself but rather rhymes, really does have Marfan’s.  I am always shocked when people recognize me from when I was 10.  I should have thought that I had changed somewhat in the intervening 25 years.

The food offerings were interchangeable in form with the tenure party, except that the crudité included bacon-wrapped shrimp and several platters of Costco sushi.  The drinks featured rather less wine but more beer.

As I knew no-one there, I had no-one to talk to.  I did not recognize most of the books on the shelf – my usual refuge in times of boredom – though this was in part because a surprising portion of the texts were for children (there were no children present.  I never learned whether the presence of these books was a sign of sentimental attachment to childhood mementos, avuncular affection, or unsettled domestic arrangements).

This led me to contemplate the yard.  Lower-middle class mid-century suburban yards are somewhat puzzling (actually, any yard, properly contemplated, is puzzling).  This sort of yard is usually of a size that makes anything other than a pushmower somewhat superfluous.  In this day and age, however, pushmowers are practically speaking an affectation of a particular and quite narrow slice of the consumer demographic interested less in “convenience” and “horsepower” than in “capturing carbon” and “exercise,” a slice of the consumer demographic that may consist largely of the author and one or two rescue chicken-raising hippies raised in Berkeley, a slice of the consumer demographic who would in any case avoid at all costs living in a mid-century suburban ranch (no matter how ironic or swoopy moderne the adopted decorating style).  As a result, taking care of this particular yard probably presented more than the usual level of maintenance hassle.  There was one plum tree, one Concord grape vine, and one blackberry bush.  Plus a lawn that, so far as I could tell, tended toward the rangy (in Texas, this sort of thing would have been kept down, to prevent chiggers).  There may have been other fruit-bearing plants, but this was difficult to tell from my particular point of view (the living room picture window) due to the lack of any ambient light.  The vantage thus presented a kind of simulacrum of a actual, you know, ranch, complete with representative markers of the local produce market (sans tomatoes, but being an annual this may have been lack of initiative on the part of the homeowner).  This vantage faded into a background of such utter darkness that, upon first glance, one slipped into the illusion of viewing the endless vista of a “big spread.”  A second glance, of course, revealed the existence of a fence just high enough to block out the porch lights of the neighboring houses in the next cul-de-sac.

The view thus taken in and deconstructed to a fair-the-well, I turned to the party guest who happened to be standing next to me.  Just for shits and giggles, I related to her an anecdote from Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” where she describes the kind of person that attended New York parties when she was in her twenties: people who all had side-businesses of a “curious and self-defeating nature,” such as “importing French lawn furniture to sell at Hammacher Schlemmer,” and who were “not very engagé” about anything except their own lives.

I don’t know quite what I was expecting to result from telling this little amuse oreille.  I was not expecting for my interlocutor – a conventionally pretty, slender brunette with large eyes, only slightly older than myself – to tell me how she and her husband sold time-shares in Costa Rica to supplement their income working for the state.

I was certainly not expecting for the host to come up and ask us if we wanted to take a look at his French etchings.  Evidently – and this is something Da Partner told me after we had gone home – the host is well known (but not by me, evidently) for inviting guests at his parties, particularly those of the female persuasion, to view his collection of high concept, almost-ready-for-release (in coffee-table book format; he already had a publisher lined up) black-and-white photographs on the subject of bondage porn.  The “hook,” as they say in the marketing biz, was that these images were in 3D; we were even provided glasses so as to view them properly.

As pointed invitations to view the gang shower go, I will say that at least this one required a more-than-usual degree of aesthetic connoisseurship.  And, for the record, I was invited to this viewing only in my capacity as a potential critic.

As we left, I told Da Partner that if he was looking for a Christmas present for me, he might consider Sontag.

This was, as the reader may guess, yet another talking party.

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