Liars and Saints

I'd finished my pie and was having a second cup of coffee when I saw him. The midnight freight had come in a few minutes before; and he was peering in one end of the restaurant window, the end nearest the depot, shading his eyes with his hand and blinking against the light. He saw me watching him, and his face faded back into the shadows. But I knew he was still there. I knew he was waiting. The bums always size me up for an easy mark. I lit a cigar and slid off my stool. The waitress, a new girl from Dallas, watched as I buttoned my coat. "Why, you don't even carry a gun!" she said, as though she was giving me a piece of news. "No," I smiled. "No gun, no blackjack, nothing like that. Why should I?" "But you're a cop--a deputy sheriff, I mean. What if some crook should try to shoot you?" "We don't have many crooks here in Central City, ma'am," I said. "Anyway, people are people, even when they're a ...

Like most people trying to get by in something like the regular current of American life, I don't act like a total asshole to most people I meet, and am generally regarded as *pretty nice* -- mainly because I leave myself vulnerable to hearing out other people's crises and complaints for longer, on average, than would be merely polite. And the fact is, I do tend to like people in practice, even though I've built an airtight case against them in principle. It's a natural response, I guess, to being raised by relatively kind parents who taught me to be polite and decent and to rely on the company and help of others, but to also consider myself smarter and, on some fundamental level, more deserving of complete fulfillment than anyone in the world besides maybe my sisters. This may be why, when my girlfriend, Julia, asked me to meet her at the house of a recent acquaintance of ours, a New Age-leaning woman named Anna whose family, through what specific brand of plunder I ...

I'm writing from Naxos with a brief review of "Jell-O Girls," and, like many of my odd little reviews, this one will contain "spoilers," so beware! - Should you read it? Yes. It's a triumph. I have some quibbles. The opening section is the weakest; it's where Rowbottom tries to inhabit the inner life of her (long-dead) grandmother. These passages feel false and overly generic, and it's unclear to me what is gained by trying to write about a real person in this hammy faux-novelistic way. There just isn't the right level of detail. I would have liked--better--a candid, short essay from Rowbottom: "I didn't know my grandmother, and I have bits and pieces via hearsay, and here is what I have tentatively inferred." Also, a note on socioeconomic stuff. Rowbottom is correct to report on a big complaint about Betty Friedan; with "The Feminine Mystique," Friedan was writing for a very small (white, wealthy) section of the femal...

Some Bruce Springsteen miscellany. -There's so much that I admire in "Hungry Heart." First, I like the way the jaunty melody contrasts with the sad, sad lyrics. (This reminds me of the superficial peppiness of the "Walking on Broken Glass" melody.) When writers do this, I think about Chekhov, and how he took supremely depressing stories and labeled them "comedies." I guess the idea is that, given time, even the most apparently cataclysmic human situations look small and foolish--because humans are actually tiny, and humans are fools. -Another thing I love in this song is that the narrator doesn't really try to explain his foolishness. He abandoned his wife and kids in Baltimore! (This later seemed to inspire Jason Robert Brown: "He left his wife and kids in Portland on a whim.") The abandonment wasn't a step toward greater self-realization: "Like a river that don't know where it's flowing, I took a wrong turn and I ju...

My father appeared at the corner. Paused for his evening paper. Topcoat and hat to mark him as a clerk, not a laborer. I only raised my head above my knees when I saw him--although surely something, some sinewy energy, some delight, tensed and trembled itself through my thin back and shoulders as I gazed down the sloping street. The boys playing stickball parted once again for a passing car: it was the ebb and flow of their game. I turned away from them, raised a hand to the balustrade to get ready to spring. My father was a thin, slight man in a long coat. His step was quick and jaunty. He wore shoes with a high shine. I waited until he was halfway toward home. And then I flew, across the sidewalk and into the air as he lifted me--the newspaper held tightly under his arm the only impediment, it seemed, to an ascent that I saw in my own imagination as equivalent, somehow, to the caps the boys had thrown into the air when the umpire made his call. I would not have been surprised to he...

I'm headed to Greece tomorrow night! One of the great, and sometimes maddening, things about travel is planning a reading list. I put more thought into this than into clothing, sightseeing. In Jack Viertel's "Secret Life of the American Musical," Viertel admits he is not an ideal traveler, because he just thinks about musicals while he is wandering through ruins. So, for example, he spent his own Greece trip contemplating "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." (That's when he knew he needed to write a book about musicals. And maybe his trip was to Rome, not Greece. See! I'm so deeply aware of geography and history!) I know already that I will spend a fair amount of my Athens time pondering Disney's "Hercules." Specifically: Did anyone acknowledge Disney was clearly ripping off Howard Ashman's gospel trio from "Little Shop of Horrors"? Would the gospel chorus, in "Hercules," have any chance of suc...

Maeve sat in front of this window, at the head of the table. She wore a navy-blue dress with long, slim sleeves and a round neckline, and anyone in the room who had not thought it earlier thought now--perhaps inspired by the perfect simplicity of what she wore--that there was a kind of beauty in her ordinary looks, in her plainness. Or, if they didn't think to call it beauty, they said courage--more appropriate to the occasion and the day--not meaning necessarily her new-widow's courage (with its attendant new-widow's cliches: bearing up, holding on, doing well), but the courage to look out onto life from a face as plain as butter: pale, downy skin and bland blue eyes, faded brown hair cut short as a nun's and dimmed with gray. Only a touch of powder and of lipstick, only a wedding band and a small pearl ring for adornment. Of course, they'd thought her courageous all along (most of them, anyway, or--most likely--all but my father), living with Billy as she did; b...