Arrivals and Departures

Athena is calling.

Athena is a toddler our three-year-old daughter Paulina met at the beach, which was serendipitous because we’d just come down the hill from visiting the Temple of Athena. The village over the mountain where Athena and her parents were living was scenic yet somehow charmless and hostile, like much of the rest of the country. They’d abruptly left a half paid off apartment in Moscow so her father wouldn’t be conscripted. Maybe there are no worse things than being sent to fight in Ukraine, but something had drawn us to this coast in a moment of total disillusionment and despair. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It wasn’t supposed to happen to us.

We met at the University of Nevada in Reno. She was from Russia, and trying to stay past her high school exchange program. I was a refugee from a $1400 shared rental in Santa Barbara. Let’s just say we were compatible—I won’t belabor the point. Before Lena, I used to think that love was cerebral, all about liking the same books and music. But checking those boxes before you give it a test drive is a boring, navel gazing recipe for failure.

In the beginning we used to road trip a lot, mostly over to Tahoe or Santa Cruz on the weekends. We didn’t party. We didn’t drop in on old friends. We didn’t have any—it was just us. At one point we had to make it back from Truckee on 87 cents’ worth of gas purchased with the change in my ashtray, after fucking in a meadow along a creek, off a dirt road. Within three months she was pregnant and we got married by an Elvis impersonator at a drive-thru, with a handful of her exchange student friends.

We were 22 when we sealed the deal. She’d been pregnant for a month and we’d only known each other half a year. Our families were nonplussed. Both sides felt strongly that getting married instead of getting an abortion was stupid and naive. For a long time after we met, a part of me wondered whether she’d have married me if she already had citizenship, and a part of her wondered if I’d have married her if she hadn’t got pregnant. It was a tense but workable equilibrium.

Lena’s mom was a mail-order bride married to a trucker from Reno. He used to make a minor sideshow out of pretending to dress me down but Lena wasn’t really his daughter and he didn’t really give a shit about the situation. Conservatives love to indulge those little fake cowboy formalities. He had a pension from the Navy and Tatiana worked the perfume counter at Macy’s. They lived in a second-tier subdivision and drank quite a bit but never went too crazy with it.

Lena was living in the dorms when we met. Her real dad was in one of the big towns in the Urals, where he was in a long term romantic relationship with the wife of his paraplegic neighbor. He’d been a Red Army infantryman in Afghanistan and thought it was pretty cool that I’d done a deployment to Iraq. He used to send me books I couldn’t read, in Russian, about warfare and military history, with little hand-scrawled notes he insisted Lena translate for me, about exactly why he disagreed with each author and what each book’s redeeming qualities were. It was cute and I always knew I liked him.

Within seven years of marriage we had a couple more kids, three total. We never used protection and never had a planned pregnancy. Making ends meet was stressful, and for a few years I worked menial jobs while she finished her engineering degree. Then I took the family down to Vegas for a few years to do law school, which was rough, especially since Lena was working full-time. We were always in debt and our fights were explosive, in a little two-bedroom balsa wood apartment. But we stuck it out.

By the time we’d been together a decade I’d been a lawyer for a year and we’d only had one vacation alone together—two nights at Harrah’s in South Tahoe. Our summer trips with the kids were all to crappy water parks and campgrounds, never anything nice or too relaxing. The best we’d ever managed was a week in Santa Cruz, but she hadn’t seen her dad in twelve years and it was time to meet him, no matter the cost. Only problem was that war had just broken out in Ukraine. On a Russian passport you couldn’t really enter Europe or the U.S., and Americans couldn’t get a visa for Russia either. That left Turkey, so we set a calendar date for six months out and blew our savings on airfare and hotel reservations.

Turkey is like the crappy water park of countries—you have to fly right over Nice and Florence and Salamanca to get there, but we didn’t care. We were excited—until we found out Lena was pregnant again. We were in our mid-thirties by this time, just barely getting financial ground beneath us. Neither of us was thrilled by the news. For some odd reason Lena’s nausea was intense and wouldn’t let up even after she’d been pregnant for six weeks. Her birthday was three days before we were supposed to leave town. By the time we started getting ready to leave, she was thirteen weeks, just showing but not obviously pregnant. That was when we got the results of a screening which indicated to a near certainty that the baby had Down syndrome. When the nurse first called with the test results, I asked the baby’s gender, since that was part of what the screening was supposed to show. The nurse stammered at first, as if humanizing the child by conceding it had a gender went against protocol, but she told us it was a girl.

At first I brushed off the news—there had to be a mistake. But we scrambled to get an appointment, parked the kids with babushka, and went to get a placenta sample taken for a diagnosis. I thought we were opposed to abortion, so it seemed pointless to follow up on the screening with a diagnostic test. Why would we do a diagnostic test if we weren’t going to have an abortion? But Lena was hysterical and under the circumstances I wasn’t going to start arguing with her.

In guise of ethnic art, the OBGYN clinic had these slapdash pueblo style archangels painted on wooden boards all over the waiting room walls. I sat beside Lena in the darkened exam room while they extracted a cell sample and we left the clinic in tears. It was a Catholic hospital, and on our way out I noticed a plaque on the outside of the building with St. Jerome’s prayer. I tried to take hope but I also knew that if I stopped to dote on this curio Lena would smell bullshit and it would only make things worse. And she’d have been right, because in my heart of hearts, when I said the prayer to myself in the car it wasn’t for the baby to be born alive, it was for the placenta sample result to show the baby wasn’t retarded. We drove home, sucked it up, and hid our agony from the kids while we packed, knowing the dreadful news would come in Istanbul and in that dark hour we would have to bury our grief again and keep going. If we’d been resolute in our beliefs there’d have been no need for this charade, but you never stop burying things you take to the grave.

The first thing you do when you find out you’re pregnant with a lemon is start googling like crazy. That’s what Lena did, at least, and it quickly became clear to her that if we had this baby, we would be lifelong hostages to the insurance industry and the hospital system, and that not even St. Jerome could bring the tab within reasonable proportion. Down syndrome is more than an intellectual disability. Contrary to what you see in the media, the vast majority of these kids are physically disabled, some severely. Many have significant behavioral issues—violent outbursts, sexual impulsivity. As adults their aging parents can’t care for them, and eventually they’re parked in miserable facilities. Even if the siblings ever visit, no one wants to take them home. We also read that having a retarded child breaks marriages at an overwhelming rate. And Lena said that it was clear to her from perusing message boards and blogs about the topic that many of the mothers standing up for these children are well-to-do, cognitively dissonant stay-at-home moms, whereas we were both working full time with three kids, and I was $120K in debt for law school. I couldn’t see any of this as an argument for taking our daughter’s life—but I couldn’t not see it that way, either.

The other thing you do when you get a Down syndrome diagnosis is vacillate maniacally. At first, when it was clear to me that Lena was leaning heavily toward getting an abortion, I rationalized this and my thoughts became ice cold to an extent I hadn’t thought possible, like it was my lips moving but another person’s voice coming out, and expressing these rationalizations to Lena made her recoil and agonize badly. The night before our flight, our eldest son Max had a nightmare that Lena killed herself and he found her body in the twilight, wearing a bathrobe, hanging from the ceiling beam in the bedroom with her toes pointing down at the Sesame Street chair from Paulina’s kiddie table, kicked-over and laying sideways on the carpet.

Once onboard the flight from Dallas, packed into coach and taxiing on the runway, I did a 180, perhaps as a way of imploring God not to abort me in that airplane. Clarity cut through in the tremors of takeoff: what we were premeditating was the murder of an innocent child, our child, just because she was different. There was no way around it. There still isn’t, and I knew I would be a Cain on the Earth forever. Worse than Cain—at least Abel was a grown man. Hell, Abel was annoying, but our daughter never offended anyone. What angel would ever protect us again? I tried to imagine what my late grandparents would think about the situation, and was troubled to reflect that despite their professed religiosity, all four of them would’ve favored practicality, and that their sadness in the situation would’ve been for me and not for the baby.

Trying to shepherd a family of five through the throngs and public restrooms and airport security and passport control all the way from Reno to Istanbul was a slog, and Lena was doing it three months pregnant with a baby we were planning to murder. We were tense. There was something cute and endearing about the Turks, however, almost from the moment we encountered them. They’re an absolutely charmless people, but practical, and from the time we got in line to board Turkish Airlines in Dallas, it was a very family-friendly atmosphere. It was an overnight flight, but the kids were well behaved, even Paulina, who was fussy at that age. One of the reasons Lena was so settled on aborting was because she was working from home and Paulina was very rambunctious. 

We had an Airbnb on the European side. The hills were steep and the alleys were narrow, but while the neighborhood wasn’t clean, it wasn’t seedy or menacing either. Our apartment was cramped but it had a terrific view of the Bosphorus, within easy walking distance of Goleta, Istiklal, Besiktas, and the Quay. Our upper story balcony was directly facing the Crimean Memorial Church, a dignified and understated moss-and-ivy smothered 19th century stone Anglican affair built to commemorate Britain’s Crimean War fallen. For the entire week we spent in Istanbul, every day, five times a day, massive loudspeakers from the mosques inundated the city with the azan, and every morning the bells from the church across from our apartment rang out in a cacophony. Lena and I fell silent when these rich sounds intruded. God was watching and we were in flagrante delicto. And not in a good way.

It was late when we arrived, but we had to stay up because Lena’s dad wouldn’t get there until after midnight. I found takeout and walked it back to the apartment up the eight stories of narrow, creaky wooden stairs in our five-hundred year old building. Ivan arrived around 1am and his meeting the kids for the first time was very touching in spite of the language barrier. He was a short, skinny bald man, formerly blond, with piercing blue eyes and rough hands and a nose flattened from fistfights ancient and legendary, wearing Belorussian leather shoes that the soles were trying to escape from, and he cried when saw Paulina. We decided we would walk up to Istiklal in the morning and find him a pair of New Balance.

After a few more days in the city—Maiden Tower, the Blue Mosque—we tracked down a rental car and headed south, to Assos, where we had reservations for five nights in a little coastal resort. It was a nice place with manicured lawns and clean bungalows and a pool and kids’ play area. We were the only foreigners but all the other guests were families, upper middle class Turks mostly from Ankara. When we first got there the kids ran off to the pool with their grandpa. Lena and I found ourselves alone in the room and had a moment of abandon after spending six hours in a hot car. I caught her taking off her make-up and started fucking her over the bathroom countertop, but when she saw her pregnant body in the mirror she burst into tears. I finished anyway.

The place where we were staying had this garden patio style restaurant where we ate every night, right across from the beach. There was no church or mosque anywhere around, but there was soft jazz and classic rock playing over little loudspeakers mounted on the side of the building, and our first night there when we sat down to dinner they were playing Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven. My heart turned to cinderblock in my chest.

The next morning at the beach, Ivan started in about military topics. I knew enough Russian to get by with him, and at some point I started trying to burnish myself with this stupid story about a philosophical conversation I’d had in the Army. It was late at night on patrol outside Mosul and one of my buddies started expounding an amoral theory of war where he tried to justify civilian casualties, even children. I had of course taken the opposite view, which was the point of telling this story to Ivan. He took a drag off his cigarette, squinted into the sun and said, “A real soldier would never hurt a child.”

After we came home we all caught COVID. Lena recovered quickly but the day of the abortion I was running a 102 degree fever. The night before, I sat up late. The kids had been running back and forth to the yard earlier in the day with the screen door standing open, and as I sat staring blankly at the walls a grasshopper popped up out of the corner behind a bookshelf. Normally I would kill a cockroach, but grasshoppers are not so repulsive, and before I’d even thought about it I had the creature trapped in a Solo cup and opened the sliding glass door to let it out. The utter incongruousness of this act of compassion with the abortion we had planned for the morning overwhelmed me and I began trembling like I never have in my life. My sleep that night was strangely deep and anesthetic.

It was the summer solstice. The waiting room was large and empty, except for a very young girl sitting beside a grey haired man, apparently her father, who when I glanced at him shot back an icy look right in my eyes that said, who the fuck are you to judge me?

They put us together in a dark, freezing exam room. We decided to give the baby a name, and wept unconsolably. Then the moment arrived and the nurse came to take Lena to the operating room. The way I understood it, they were going to pump her full of fentanyl and vacuum the baby out of her. It sounded gruesome. Almost stumbling, still febrile, I walked in a daze through the freezing corridor, into the waiting room and past reception. There was an armed security guard in the front. My car had been sitting in the sun about an hour and it was warm inside. I fell asleep with the windows up and woke up an hour later to the news that I was the proud father of a healthy baby girl. I saw Lena sitting up in a hospital bed nursing our newborn and I felt drawn to them like a vision of light. Then I realized that I’d only been dreaming. The buoyancy of the dissipating image turned to a sense of distance and abandonment. I knew that I had directly felt my daughter’s soul and the shame and grief I now felt were bottomless, all the more so because I knew that I would bury it and continue like nothing happened. The whole thing was a concession, a capitulation, to everything elderly and mean that we’d been resisting when we found out we were pregnant for the first time all those years ago, and decided to get married.

For two weeks we were completely broken and non-functioning. The haze of grief and remorse was intoxicating, like adrenaline from shock, and for some strange reason we were extremely horny and fooled around a lot, even though we couldn’t actually fuck. But eventually, it wore off, and as we made our way back to work and routine a real dark night of depression and guilt came down on us. It’s been about a year now and I guess you could say we’ve been back to normal for half that time. But when I go outside at night and gaze up at the canopy of heaven I feel nothing. The stars are cold, atheistic and indifferent to me now, and I to them. Athena’s mom is still sending Lena recorded messages on WhatsApp, of Athena babbling to Paulina in Russian. Paulina has a plastic bracelet Athena gave her, and she keeps pointing to it and telling everybody she got it from “my Athena.”

Cold Fusion

A miasma of death envelops January

I could be in old Mexico, Morocco

But I have a family

On snow days, slow motion

You glimpse a flicker of time’s backside

The God of Israel, as it were

Sternly mocking

That you may know everything’s gonna be alright, even when it isn’t

And won’t be

When you reach a place of resignation without indifference

The drip, drip, drip of pain on a window, on a soft surface

I couldn’t have known I would be here but now it all seems so predictable

The Time Has Come to Believe Your Eyes

A Twitter mutual asks what I think about Elon Musk in the wake of his latest antisemitism scandal. Some preliminaries….

First of all, Elon Musk is a megalomaniac with a horrifying long-term vision for humanity that is as soulless as it is grandiose—a 100% dark triad personality, fortified by Aspergers. Like anyone at his strata of the game, there is no tactic too low for him, and no lie he won’t tell. It’s important to note, in this connection, that Musk commands an army of directly paid influencers and apologists, both in the mainstream press, and on social media. And that’s before mentioning his legions of volunteer sycophants on Twitter, many of whom are now being compensated indirectly through X’s new monetization scheme.

Second, Musk’s public commitment to “free speech” on X is belied by a history of oppressively silencing his critics, and lashing out at them in attempting to silence them even in instances when he fails at doing so. Especially given his flip-flopping on issues like COVID, I think it’s fair to surmise that his political stances are part of an overall schtick aimed at exploiting populist resentment, much like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson. Musk is a ringmaster and on Twitter he’s in his element the same way Tucker is in a TV studio and Trump is at a campaign rally.

That all being said, behind every great fortune lies a great crime, and every crime’s truest accomplice is a rationale. So of course there’s a layer of sincerity to some of the views Musk expresses. The best lies, after all, are half truths. But sincerity is on a spectrum, and with anti-semitism we see a great deal of sincerity from Musk. This is, first, because anti-semitism is one of the only political views he risks anything by expressing, Jews being overrepresented at his level of the game—and yet he expresses this view anyway. For some time now he has interacted jocularly with open neo-Nazis on Twitter. He knows what he’s doing, and that everyone else does too, because it has been reported on periodically going back several years. Ultimately, Musk is an extremely competitive goy rubbing shoulders with extremely competitive Jews, and unease in that position would be understandable.

Second, I believe Musk’s anti-semitism is sincere because it’s the one controversy where he does the most waffling and backtracking and talking in circles. There’s an allure to this ideology that militates against the mental guardrails corporate leadership always places around controversy. Indeed—if any crime’s truest accomplice is a rationale—anti-semitism has frequently been not only a moralistic rationale for authoritarianism and corruption, but a common theme among autistic savants like Bobby Fischer and Ezra Pound, with whom Musk has a few obvious things in common. I may be mistaken, but I hear an echo of Tacitus and Paul (describing Jews as common enemies of mankind) in Musk’s “team humanity” bilge, and this impression can be bolstered by his pointedly (obnoxiously) timed offer of Starlink to Gaza, and the “cycle of violence” nonsense he emitted on the Lex Fridman podcast about a week later. It is also bolstered by plausible claims made by inveterate neo-Nazi Lucas Gage, a widely followed Twitter influencer who purports to be Musk’s close, personal confidante. Gage has posted a screenshot that appears to show Musk’s contact info on a cell phone, with the actual numbers hastily scratched out using the most rudimentary PDF marker tool; and another screenshot that appears to show a friendly text exchange with Musk, where Musk says, I can’t keep protecting you if you’re going to keep ranting about Jews all the time, to which Gage responds that Elon knows what a menace Zionists are; and Musk replies, “unfortunately I think you’re right.” The two then agree to play video games later that evening. The images appear authentic and Musk has never bothered to deny Gage’s claims.

I could go on: Musk’s bitter ongoing custody dispute with babymama Grimes, a Jewess born in Ukraine (he absconded with their children, and she said publicly that he won’t let her see them); his beef with Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg… I think that for a high IQ goy surrounded by Jews a distaste for our people’s somewhat clandestine, at times almost telepathic sense of separateness is unsurprising, if not to be expected. It represents one of those psychological doors that money and power and cleverness by themselves will not be keys to. And if blood memory is needed to fill any gaps in this theory there’s Musk’s grandfather on his mother’s side, a mad savant conspiracy nut and (surprise?) chiropractor, who moved his family to South Africa because Canada in the 1950s was too liberal.

The bottom line is that when he tweeted “You have said the actual truth,” Musk told the world, and the Jews, exactly how he feels. He literally, “said the actual truth” about his views. In law we call this sort of thing a statement against interest—meaning, it’s almost certainly sincere because by saying it, the speaker has something to lose and nothing to gain. That he may feel differently with a change of weather, a warm glass of milk, or a public chastisement from investors is immaterial, and no reason not to take him at his word. In the long history of modern anti-semitism, figures like these always equivocate; even Father Coughlin denied being anti-semitic! In the wake of these events, the pundits and influencers—including many conservative Jews such as Chaya Raichik and Yoram Hazony—now proffering apologetics for Musk are simply stooges, the right-wing mirror image of Rabbis for Ceasefire and Jewish Voice for Peace. In the midst of world opprobrium against Israel’s latest war, those pushing the meme that anti-semitism is fundamentally a left-wing problem are forgetting the worst pogrom ever committed on American soil, just five years ago in Pittsburgh, in the midst of an unprecedented wave of internet fascism.

Over the last several days, a lot of Musk fanboys on the right, including some Zionists, have challenged me on Twitter about this subject and defended Musk as having backtracked or “clarified” his comment. But again—that comment was a statement against interest, whereas the backtracking and the “clarification” are motivated by bad publicity and loss of ad revenue. We played these games for a decade with Ford, Lindbergh, Coughlin and even with Hitler; the results are well known. Obviously Musk is not a dyed-in-the-wool ideologue and his views will wax and wane. But regardless of how we might rank and qualify its varieties, in the end—after the intellectual gesticulations have subsided—anti-semitism is a malevolent spirit, and we would do well to gird for battle exactly one hundred percent of the times we identify it.

Brotherhood of Man Pt. XIII

It was a grey winter Saturday in Tel Aviv. The wind was howling, whipping rain around in sheets, the sea lapping violently against the jetties. Sam was in bed reading a book when he heard a terse, demanding knock at the door of his studio apartment. Opening up, he saw Damien on the landing, sweaty and heaving, stooped over, hands on his knees.

He looked up. “I need you to do something for me,” he said, struggling to catch his breath. There were three rectangular wooden boxes stacked behind him. Red cedar. Damien exhaled decisively and stood up straight, pointing back at the boxes. “I need somewhere to store these.”

“What are they?”

He lifted the top box, grunting as he hauled it inside. “Three soldiers killed in Lebanon. You’d be doing me a huge favor. A service to the country, actually. I just need to keep them here for a little while.” Grunting, he gingerly set the box down in the tiled entryway.

The request was so odd, Sam didn’t know how to refuse. They hoisted each of the other two coffins, one man to each end, until all three were stacked lengthwise along the wall opposite the kitchenette, facing west, toward the window and the balcony. They were so heavy that it seemed unlikely Damien had carried them all the way up the stairwell on his own. It was as if he simply materialized with them on the landing.

The two made their way back toward the door. In just three months, Sam would be going into the army and Damien would be getting out of it. 

Damien could see Sam was anxious. The two made eye contact for a moment. “There’s a creature in Lebanon,” Damien said, with tremendous gravity.

“A…. creature?”

“Something paranormal. In a cave southwest of Kfar Shouba. These air force commandos went in the night before last to try and extricate it. We recovered their bodies before dawn today.”

“Cut the shit! Who’s ‘we’? What creature?!?”

“All we know for certain is that it’s virulently anti-semitic. Or…. we thought we knew. But the reality may be a lot more complicated.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Damien gazed over Sam’s shoulder out the window, hesitating, then looked Sam dead in the eyes. “Based on radio traffic we received from these boys before they met their fate, we have reason to believe that the creature is…. That the creature is….” Damien shuddered.

“That the creature is what?”

“That the creature is Jewish.”

Sam felt flecks of rain whipping into the apartment from the window opposite the doorway. He turned around and saw that the shutters were open—but he hadn’t opened them. When he turned back around, Damien was gone. The front door was shut, but Sam hadn’t heard it close. A sudden, howling gust of wind slammed him against the drywall as it blew the shutters off the window frame and tore the cover off the top coffin in the stack, revealing the exsanguinated body of a nineteen-year-old in a khaki class-A uniform, white as a sheet, his lifeless eyes wide open.

Sam met his gaze. Then he awoke in a cold sweat.

The Only Good Journalist

Would those who believe the world is run by Zionism please explain how this BLM-tier agitprop made its way onto—nay, became—primetime CBS?:

It has all the bells and whistles. There are the melanotic, dystopian-future studio anchors. There’s the grave intonation, the “human rights” framing, the clergyman inveighing against disproportionate force, the ideologue “expert” holding forth primly on events she witnessed only seconds of on a janky bystander phone camera (an American law professor, no less, drawing very very serious conclusions in the almost total absence of reliable evidence). The repeated claim in this and related reports has consistently been that Israel is “targeting” journalists. Who the hell uses a euphemism when accusing another of murder? It’s very strange.

I’ve seen as little of this current snafu as the little Rutgers law prof on CBS did, but I’m 100% certain that after years of traversing and reporting from the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akleh’s death came as a surprise to Shireen Abu Akleh. All the reports about her death contain expressions of shock from her colleagues in the West Bank press corps that anything like this could ever have happened—in the fucking war zone of Jenin. These people feel no sense of danger from the IDF, and Israel has conditioned this expectation by protecting them. Obviously, if Israel was “targeting civilians” the Palestinians would be far more circumspect about affronting the IDF. If, indeed, Israel was “targeting journalists” (as the frivolous line now goes) there’d be no journalists in the West Bank.

But the West Bank is crawling with journalists, reporters and camera crews as far as the eye can see, from everywhere in the world. (I was there some years back as an IDF serviceman – it was like being on Cops.) Due to the intense diplomatic and media scrutiny Israel always elicits, the West Bank exists in a kind of fishbowl, where smarmy, collegiate members of the international press corps (many of whom fancy themselves partisans in the conflict) feel just the right ratio of danger to safety—not unlike yuppie patrons of a dive bar in an up-and-coming urban neighborhood. Where else can you stalk an army raid of an insurgent safe-house, filming all the while—as a supporter of the insurgents—and still make the Brasserie for a digestif by midnight?

Relative to other theaters of battle, this state of affairs is unique in all the world. Detroit is not so safe. For journalists to enjoy cover of democratic scruples in Afghanistan or Iraq meant embedding with the occupation force and parroting its side of things, at least to a degree. Lebanon on a good day is no less dangerous for the western press than Gaza is on a bad one. Syria? Forget about it. Those reports get filed from Athens. Ditto the whole of Africa and just about anywhere in the former Soviet space where live fire is being lain.

The distinct motives on either side bear examining as well. What the Israeli army was doing in Jenin was pursuing a band of insurgents (to put it restrainedly) responsible for the murder—the deliberate homicide, with malice aforethought—of women and children. No one who truly believes that Israeli soldiers deliberately kill non-combatants could possibly feel the need to be so coy as to refer to this euphemistically as “targeting.” While we don’t know which side’s bullet ultimately did her in—and if it turns out to’ve been Palestinian you can be sure the calls for “accountability” will abruptly fall off—we do know that Shireen Abu Akleh chose to put herself at the scene of a firefight, as a media partisan for the murderers of children, to slander their pursuers. Not unlike the peaceful protests we see stateside many an election year, these journalists are championing crime, and undermining social order.

 

We Are Hyperborians, Lebowski

Of all the dumb schisms in the DR, Christian versus pagan is by far the most persistent. What’s dumb about it is the longing for a static attachment to creed, which is very Christian but negates paganism entirely. The unnamable is the eternally real. Religion is just an abstraction; a mature man recognizes truth wherever he finds it.

But while I feel strongly (and, over the years, pretty consistently) that in its broad strokes Christian metaphysics is sound and perhaps superlative, as for this alt-right schism, I have to say that Christianity carries a great deal of wistful baggage that paganism does not, and I think the one question that puts the lie to the devotion of alt-right Christians is to ask whether they could worship Christ if they knew for certain he’d been a black man.

On Easter Eve I had a vision, a kind of night-reverie, where I saw an image of the living Christ, all sparkly and bedecked in golden light. But when I dared to gaze more closely I began to realize—like the lookout in Blazing Saddles—that the Lord is a nigger. In a split second the part of me that was perturbed by this—and it was deeply perturbed—welled up, and then burst. All of a sudden I began laughing maniacally. Imagine my relief—if that is Christ, then all debts truly are forgiven. 

Could an alt-right Christian have reached such a conclusion from this experience? Of course not. He’d have to fall on his face and fellate this Jobu, right alongside all the rainbow-flag Episcopalians and George Floyd mourners, because the widening-gyre god of Christianity and that of the liberals is one and the same. He is small, this Christian god. The true Christ has not given us leave to examine him so closely. And if the DR stands for anything, it is the first ecstatic stirring of something well and truly beyond, something nameless and timeless and sufficient unto itself, that inhabits a part of us that we’ve forgotten.

After visiting the village of Leukerbad in the Swiss Alps, James Baldwin wrote:

For this village, even if it were incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

Baldwin is one of my favorite authors, a writer’s writer whose talents were sharpened against the lifelong deficit that came into focus for him so dramatically in that village in Switzerland. To say Another Country lies outside the Western cannon is just false. But in our day you’ll never meet a black man so self-deprecating, because the West—which Baldwin frankly acknowledges is something racial—is dead.

In The Rebel, Camus posits that rebellion can only have meaning in Western civilization, “where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities.” (If you don’t believe him, try thinking of a counter-example. It’s like rhymes with orange.) What’s bemusing about this remark is that it applies equally well today in the inimical context: whereas Camus was writing as a leftist and, essentially, an egalitarian, bemoaning the inequalities in western civilization and supposing that rebellion is always aimed in the direction of greater equality—that type of thinking is precisely how western civilization’s egalitarianism today covers over the great factual inequalities of nature, and it is in favor of that natural inequality that today’s rebel asserts himself. Stripped of Camus’s obvious intent, the statement that rebellion can only have meaning in the context of western civilization is profoundly racist and authoritarian.

That is why American pop culture’s association of rebellion with blacks over the past century is so deeply unsatisfying. Despite periodically having to defend myself in school from non-white terror, by a complex system of mental canal locks I was never allowed to view this problem directly. The whole culture around me awarded these people a kind of animal authenticity that it forbade me, as a white boy, because my parents’ generation had traded it for easy living. From a very young age I recall perceiving the post-industrial domestic hedonism, the corporate pop-psychology and consolidation of ownership of the Clinton-era boom years with foreboding. I remember when Office Space and American Psycho belonged to the left. Contrarianism itself was something liberal, and it was from that perspective that I first understood the whole edifice of modern comfort and convenience as a kind of facade, sclerotic, doomed to expend itself utterly, its dying energies devoted to an endless capacity to rationalize—and here we are. Yet this clarity was obscured by the cataract of a saccharine and fanatical egalitarianism, so that rebellion meant rejecting the possibility of order and dominance utterly.

It was seeped in that weltanschauung that I came of age right around 9/11. The widespread anti-war sentiment of the Bush II aughts was characterized by a masochistic rectitude, something vegan, estrogenic, and dogmatically unreconciled to the Jungian shadow, and it seemed to me that this ideology correlated more closely with the lithe nihilism and having-it-both-ways of bourgeois corporatism than its purveyors were ever likely to admit. Zionism became a way for me to reject all this. In 2002, Israel had narrative. America’s then-narrative was that a man who cohabits with a goat and sounds like Noam Chomsky incinerated the World Trade Center because he hated consumerism, but that God was thankfully on the side of Spencer’s and Hot Dog on a Stick. Israel’s narrative, on the other hand, was that the plucky little Dwarves had persevered against odds and fought their way back to Erebor. Israel was the Joker to First World campus liberalism—unabashedly militarist, colonialist and racial (at the street level, if not always the diplomatic one) with none of the false motives that came to characterize America’s foray into the middle east. For example: because Jews believe that the soul of a person whose corpse is scattered in pieces can have no rest in the afterlife, when a Palestinian IED destroyed a tank in the early 2000s, the IDF sent a massive force into Gaza and cordoned off the area so that infantrymen under rabbinic supervision, crawling on hands and knees, could recover every last scrap of human flesh for identification. Make of this superstition what you will: what other modern country would ever deploy its armed forces to protect the souls of the dead?

But when you drink Zionism to the bottom of the glass you find exactly the kind of alienation that Baldwin experienced in the Alps. It’s not just bad mustache man and the Arch of Titus. It’s the cathedral at Chartres, Shakespeare, Beethoven, the Hermitage, the fucking Pyramids—for Jews these are all just symbols of persecution. The reason why Jew of Malta is long forgotten while The Merchant of Venice will never be forgiven (despite Marlowe being a thousand times more anti-semitic) is because Merchant is accurate.

For a long time, the Indo-European world understood itself intrinsically as something distinctive, unitary, imbued with special destiny and incontestably superior to any given runner-up. The swastika, for example, can be found all over the place in late 19th century America. It was still emblazoned on the leather binding of the yearbooks at my alma mater as recently as 1932. So it’s silly to trace the decline of the West to Plato or St. Peter or the French Revolution. The West wasn’t even getting started back then. It wasn’t until the period circa 1880-1945 that the transcontinental railways were built, the British Empire spanned the globe, Shackleton and Hedin made their expeditions, and Siberia, the Yukon, the southern capes and the heights of the Himalaya were all finally conquered. 

Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia is a remarkable travelogue of Argentina in the 70s, that memorializes this outpouring in the form of anecdotes from elderly British and German settlers living at that time in the southern Andes, who still remembered the influx of Europeans three-quarters of a century earlier, their conquest of the remotest lands, and the Odyssean sailors who transported its wool to market in London and Seattle, following nigh to the heels of Tennyson’s ancient mariner. Kipling, Jack London, the pre-Raphaelites, the Beaux Arts, and especially the children’s literature of that period all testify to the self-awareness of the West as something unitary and incomparably dynamic. The decline begins around the same period: the cynicism and malaise portrayed in Chekhov and Oscar Wilde, the banker’s coup of 1913, and the Great War, which precipitated maudlin Nazism, Wickard v. Filburn, the Stalinist purges, and the unseemly domestication of the American 1950s.

No literature encapsulates the awareness of a constricting malaise during this time better than the Lost Generation. When I was in high school in the 90s, back when reading was mandatory, The Great Gatsby was still mandatory reading. Tom Buchanan was taught as anti-racist satire, Meyer Wolfsheim shrugged off as a product of the book’s time. But Gatsby is incredibly based and prescient: not only is the portrayal of Jews there (and their relationship to the kind of arrivism  revealed in Gatsby’s fawning remark over lunch about the criminal Wolfsheim’s superior intelligence) exactly what it seems, but Tom Buchanan is not being smeared as a racist—he’s being smeared as a degenerate. Call of Cthulu was contemporaneous and its message is likewise deeply racial.

The Sun Also Rises is also incredibly based, with the capricious and overcompensating Jew, Robert Cohn, too googly-eyed and childish to ever be loved; the lapsed Catholic narrator, Jake, who’s too cynical to ever love again; and the bankrupt and cuckolded aristocrat, Michael, drowning in debt and drink. Likewise the ruined old nobles of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, overtaken by the merchant Lopakhin, of peasant origin, and played off by a Jewish orchestra. Lady Chatterley (and Forster’s Maurice) are altogether cast from the same mold.

I once read somewhere that The Big Lebowski is about the death of God, with each of the characters representing one of the several inadequate, cookie-cutter responses that Western culture has been acting out ever since, trying to cope and compensate. And yet the one personality the film seems to have left out entirely is that of the fascist. There are nihilists and a neocon, yes—but no Nazis. Or are there? 

It’s always dark in The Big Lebowski. Most of the action takes place at night. It seems to me that the various characters do indeed represent the empty masks we cling to like buoys of fake meaning on a sea of dread, as we navigate a dark night. The nihilists’ mask is simply the pretense of not wearing any. And this pretense may have many analogues, but fascism is certainly one, because it is pathos-laden and purely vindictive. It cannot resurrect an age of martial valor. It can only lower itself to the challenge of bestiality and dementia.

Consider the recent demonstrations by operatives of the so-called Rise Above movement, and their slogan, “white lives matter”:

Perhaps the principal conceptual shift that occurred during the 2010s was the passing of the torch of (advocating for) consumerist creature-comfort to the liberal class and its orcs from the withered hand of (more or less) conservative middle America, whose vanguard now takes to the streets to annunciate exactly the same kind of simpering and pathos-laden victimology the blacks once did. Indeed, this is the entire tendency of right-wing politics today. Does a virile and forward-gazing people need to debase itself in this manner? The unnamable is the eternally real, and true dominance is always implicit.

For everyone else, there’s the so-called dissident right.

Rise of the Normie Fascist

I’ll show you no nut November

“Progress and civilization, religion and the ideal have closed life in a mortal circle where phantoms most grim have erected their viscid reign.” —Renzo Novatore

“Beware of those who talk much of their ‘justice.'” —Nietzsche

It would be difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the 2010s alt-right merged completely into basic conservatism. It didn’t happen all at once. For me, I think the first sign came a few years back, when the tattooed, pot-bellied pastor at a boys’ church activity group I take my youngest son to told the parents (apropos of what, I can’t recall) that “Strong men make good times, good times make weak men,” etc. But there have been lots of little moments like these over the past ten years, Yarvin on Tucker being the most recent. Or when The Tim Allen Show parroted the “white people built civilization” trope (evidence in itself of an exhausted and humiliated kind of zeitgeist), or when rumors were going around that Steve Bannon was fond of Julius Evola. And who can forget this Chestertonian slop-gob, which made quite the rounds a few years back:

It’s always sad when your comedy heroes confess to being humorless. The verbiage, the sentiment…. It’s a perfect illustration of Wilde’s definition of a cynic. Note the outrageous abuse of the word “stygian”—the Enlightenment was a milestone in the history of consciousness. Its assassins are who is lurking in wait, and they’re all so…. tiresome.

In 2012 I was in college when I encountered a John Derbyshire article on TakiMag. Before long, I was reading Jack Donovan (lol), then Radix and Alternative Right. It was all so heady and subversive. At the outset, the alt-right was equal parts Tyler Durden ontology and Tom Buchanan shitshow bombast. But the sense of alienation it spoke to was so raw, the venue it emerged in so incompatible with the catharsis of being punched in the face, that within a very short while the alt-right went from vital to senile, from skewering puritanism to purity spiraling. An old story, I suppose. The moment of clarity for me came in 2013 when an alt-right page on Facebook shared a Counter Currents article condemning the Kansas City JCC shooter—for purely tactical reasons, “optics” and the like. At that point I dropped any notion of ingratiating myself. Leftists will resent anyone for not being fat, sick, and nearly dead, but right-wingers can only resent Jews.

Fascism is just another form of groupthink for the miserly and the vindictive, seeking a scapegoat to absolve themselves of introspection. Of course, no one is going to value intellectual freedom who doesn’t have a use for it. One interpretation for the profusion of “what is to be done” discourse from pseuds on the online right is that something is moving, and social changes are being willed into reality. (You’re stupid if you believe this.) Another interpretation is that what we have here are vast mental fistulae of fantasy and escapism, of fetish and taboo masquerading as real life. It’s undeniable that these subcultures are influencing some to improve their habits, but the most basic mechanisms by which ideas are being exchanged nowadays are parasocial and enforce conformity. Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him? We say that social life is being mediated through technology, but that’s not really accurate. By mediating reality through the internet, we’ve removed all other mediating factors once implicit in experience. Emotional results are achieved as directly as the effect of an intravenous drug.

The danger of ideology, of dogma, to human freedom and radical individuality is amplified a hundredfold by these developments. Again, not everyone has a need for intellectual freedom, for the examined life, or for radical individuality. But the world has a need for these things, a vital need, and the longer they’re being simulated by replicants with their religion and their ethnicity in their bio, the drier the desert becomes. For as I have sung many a time in the shower:

When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and ‘faith.’ To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly—these are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are antagonists of the truthful man—of the truth…. The believer is not free to answer the question, ‘true’ or ‘false,’ according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic—Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon—these types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses—fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons.

The party-men of the alt-right are on trial this week, in a federal court in Virginia, and things look to be going badly for them. Little do they (and their opponents) realize that they’ve already won. They got what they wanted—they radicalized the normies. Conservatism in 2021 is completely isolationist. Jews are about as popular as they were in 1937. Old-time religion is enjoying a resurgence. The Great Replacement is on Fox primetime. Everything is “based.” Alt-right memes and tropes are everywhere among normie conservatives and Trumpists, who in 2021 are finally as alienated as the readers of Radix were in 2012. The only problem is, they’re no less stupid for having been radicalized. The circus of American public life absorbed these poison darts, and carried on. The vanguard led its child army to the Holy City, and the windswept streets whispered “Rosebud,” and a promo code for MyPillow. (Thanks, Jack Posobiec.)

Pay careful attention. I say this as a Pale Horse-before-it-was-cool conspiracy theorist: such an outcome is far, far beyond the abilities of Dr. Woland, Project Monarch, or the Elders of Zion. It depends on the constitution of the human creature—and his apotheosis, the American—something that can only be ascribed to the sick sense of humor of God Almighty. The problem was not hatched in a Prague cemetery, it was ordered loud and clear with a Dr. Pepper and a large fry.

Some carnival barker called Darren Beattie—a self-styled genius whose star is rising among right wingers, because they lack all sense of style—proposes that the antidote to left-wing moral fervor is right-wing moral fervor:

Juxtapose the slogan ‘Silence is violence’ with ‘Don’t tread on me.’ ‘Silence is violence’ is morally imperialist, and it will always beat ‘Don’t tread on me,’ and [this] registers the fact that the left, for all its faults, has the moral high ground, and that’s why they win. And so, until Republicans can be just as confident in being protectors of civilization against barbarism and destruction and defend civilization as such with the same kind of moral fervor that the left attempts to tear it down [using] words like ‘racism’…. Until they’re prepared to do that, they will lose. And so that’s the moral framework, and having the moral high ground gives you the confidence to hold frame in a discussion.

Where to begin with these brain contusions? The Republicans as “defenders of civilization”! “Civilization” is a buzzword, an affliction to which its sufferers apply the snake oil of moralism the way a junkie uses smack. This right wing junkie hates the left because the left has better smack. He needs the good stuff because getting help is out of the question—he cannot work for a living, he’s too far gone. “I’ll see your AOC and raise you a Father Coughlin and a No Nut November.” Is public discourse not insufferable enough? Who that lived through the summer of George Floyd could possibly want more moralism? This lunatic’s will to power is a game of blackmail anybody’s mother-in-law could beat him at, yet he intends to “defend civilization” with it. Sad!

Here is what this Beattie’s “moral high ground” looks like in practice:

The French and Indian War? Why not the Battle of Thermopylae? These dimwit spergs are everywhere now, with nothing to say for themselves but this Ancestry.com trivia. Outhouse intellectuals, consumer dissidents and high school football has-been dad bods who’ve learned the word “oligarchy.” The oligarchs couldn’t wish for choicer enemies, Beattie’s moral rectitude is the extent of their power. These litigious little loyalty oath fetishists make me tired. The awakened Saxon would like to please speak to a manager.

Literally Violence, Pt. IV

With no job I was pretty discouraged, so I decided to join the military. This was an old, recurring fetish of mine. You know: heroism, adventure, they’ll be sorry when I’m dead; that sort of thing. There was a recruiting center out by the mall south of town, off the highway. I took a bus.

The building was a U-shaped strip mall, with a PayLess, a coffee shop and a dojo all facing the surrounding parking lagoon, and the recruiting offices arrayed around an inner courtyard in back.

First, I went to the Navy. The recruiter was a big horse-faced ruddy peckerwood who looked to be playing snake on a flip phone when I walked in. After making me wait a minute he looked up and smiled wide, right at me. “Good to see ya, brother. What can we do ya for?”

“Well, I’m thinking about joining the service.” I walked over and reached across the desk. His red hand was massive, his handshake smothering. I took a seat across from him.

“You’ve made a bold decision. Boy I’ll tell ya, joining the Navy was the best thing I ever done in my life.” Judging by his folksy accent, he didn’t seem to be from the area. “I’ve been to Hong Kong, Saipan, Australia, the Philippines, paid off m’truck.” He jerked a massive thumb in the direction of the window facing the back lot, where a Dodge Ram was parked, lifted on ridiculously large tires, with Monster Energy decals and a star-spangled Punisher skull on its tinted back window, and an “America’s Navy” sticker on the bumper. Then he leaned forward, looked left, looked right, then straight at me with one eyebrow raised. “You ever been to a brothel?”

“Uh, no?” There was an awkward pause. I looked down at my feet. He leaned back, sighed, and put his feet up on the desk.

“Well, I’ll tell you what. Decision’s yours, but I’d sure like to make it easier on you by having you take a practice exam and get some idea of what you’d be qualified to do for America’s Navy. You got your driver’s license, state ID card, something like that?”

“Uh, I think I left it in the car.”

In the summers it’s always foggy in Santa Carla. I walked back out to the front and looked up at the soupy grey sky. Then I went back around again, but along the opposite side of the building so the Navy guy wouldn’t see me go into the Marine recruiter’s office across from him. I waited there in the front entrance for a couple minutes until a neckless, Sponge Bob shaped little Hispanic Oompa Loompa came waddling intensely from the back in jogging gear and dropped a Walkman loudly on the front desk. Scowling, he pointed at me and asked, “You think you got what it takes to be a Marine?”

“Uh…. Yes?” We each took a seat across from one another at the desk.

“Name’s Marquez, but you can call me Sarge,” he said, self-importantly. “It’s rough out there nowadays. Unless you wanna join one of these inferior branches of service and jack off all damn day, your only other options is pretty much delivering pizzas.” It was clear he had practiced this little monologue many times over. “So, what do you do for a living right now?”

“Uh, I uh, I’m uh….” I paused for a minute. “I’m a stand-up comedian.”

An awkward couple of seconds passed with him staring at me blankly. Then all of a sudden, this taciturn little beaner let out a belly laugh like he’d just heard an incredible joke. “No way!” he bellowed. “Hey Richie, Satchmo, come on out here.” He swiveled around, shouting down the hallway around the corner from his desk. “We got ourselves a comedian!” He turned back to me, smiling ear-to-ear with his mouth agape and a vacant look in his eyes. Before long a rail thin blond-blue farmboy-looking high school jock in fatigues materialized behind Marquez, along with a diminutive black dude in gym shorts, a Marines t-shirt and thick glasses.

Marquez leaned back in his ergonomic chair, arms akimbo. “Let’s hear a joke!” They all had the same open-mouthed smiles, preemptively transfixed in anticipation of raucous laughter.

I lobbed a one-liner. “Uh, I go to hospitals and sell imaginary friends to sick kids.”

Crickets. Same fixed, grinning stares.

“Yeah, that one’s no good. Okay, okay, how ‘bout, uh…. Oh! I know.” I cleared my throat. “You really gotta watch out for undercover cops in this town,” I started. “The other day a homeless dude asked me for fifty cents. I told him, ‘Suck my dick!’ and next thing I know I’m under arrest for soliciting prostitution!” Their faces just stayed the same, all three of them, like wax figurines. Vacant eyes, gap-jawed grins. It wasn’t just that the material was lousy. They didn’t realize they’d missed the punchline.

“Hey, listen guys. I think I left my ID in the car.” I left and walked over to the Army office.

Behind the front desk sat this tall, gangly Asian in coke-bottle glasses with a snide, jaded mug. The name on his shirt was Park. He glanced up from his paperwork, gave me a once-over, then back down at his desk and continued filling out the form he’d been working on. “You sure you wanna do this?”

“Well, I like a kiss before I get fucked.”

“Can you count to ten and touch your toes?”

I gave a demonstration.

“Know how to read?”

“Backwards and forwards.”

“Well then you’ve got the makings of a goddamned hero.” He looked up and motioned toward a chair. “Have a seat.”

Back: Part III

Literally Violence, Pt. III

That first semester in community college went poorly. My weed money was running out, and my dad wasn’t going to help me if I wasn’t passing my classes. I could’ve begged him for help and promised to change my ways, but that would’ve been a lie. Groveling was not beneath my dignity, but lying was. So instead I just forgot to enroll in spring classes, went downtown the day after Christmas and got a job bar-backing at Fred’s Tiki Lounge, a dive bar so filthy your shoes stuck to the floorboards whenever you tried walking around in it.

Fred was a greying, mustachioed little gay Jew who liked to wear denim short-shorts and Hawaiian shirts with his ginger chest hair flaming out the top. He had a house promoter, this gangly, sullen hipster named Lonny Abrams, and a gimpy, ginormous bald biker doorman called Forehead. On slow nights, Forehead used to summon me to his stool in the front entrance for special assignments. He’d be getting off his flip phone, hand me the key to a padlock and specify some boarded up shack down by the beach where he wanted me to hop the chain-link gate to the overgrown back yard, wade through the cat feces and rusty cans (that part was never specified) and bring him back the box of laptops in the tool shed without asking questions (that part was amply specified). Or else he’d tell me to go down to the trestle, look for a guy in a tracksuit with a camouflage backpack, and bring it to the office around back of the club. He never paid me less than $250 cash for these odd duties, and I never thought about the legal ramifications, because the unknowable consequences of refusal or failure were far less pleasant to contemplate.

Anyway, Lonny Abrams used to put on a stand-up comedy showcase every Wednesday night. Stand-up’s pretty ballsy, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, so one week I slapped together a routine, and Lonny gave me a four-minute warmer set that went so well, they let me keep going for ten minutes. Flush with success, the following week, as I was writing my next routine, I hit on a real edgy theme that I figured was sure to gratify the counter-culture crowd by pushing the limits of free expression.

That Wednesday night I was in high spirits as I mopped the bathroom floors and replaced the urinal cakes ahead of the show. When the time came, Lonny introduced me, and as he handed me the microphone, I could see through the stage lights that the crowd was decent sized. I cleared my throat. “In this diverse, wonderful country of ours, there are so many ways we can all get along. But to make clear just how many, I wrote for you a song. The yellow, black and brown are here, the beige, pink, red, and tan, and they all have different ways to appreciate their fellow man. Some are gay, some are straight, but in our own special way, we all know how to hate. You could be a slope who hates darkies, a mick who hates spics, or a wee parish priest who thinks kids are for tricks. You could be a raghead sand nigger suckin’ camel cock for kike money, and if you think it ain’t funny, go blow yourself up for bus money!” I had another couple dozen stanzas of this, but before I could go on, my mic stopped working and the lights in back of the house came on. The place was dead silent. Then, as Lonny ran over to hustle me off stage, I heard a lone guy, way off in back, heaving with maniacal laughter.

Forward: Part IV

Back: Part II

Literally Violence, Pt. II

After this inauspicious start to adulthood, I graduated high school with a 1.9 GPA, and spent the summer scrapping on a downtown high-rise construction site. Then I enrolled in community college for the fall and rented a room in a ratty old house off Highway 1. The other housemates were a female Asian grad student who was never there and a big, ruddy PG&E lineman from podunk inland named Brad, who had a blue heeler and a van, and spent all his free time up the coast, surfing. I was selling pot and had a pretty good book of business.

One of my customers was my dad’s paralegal. Her husband was a cop, but they’d been married too young and she was clearly checking out of the relationship. She’d recently had ginormous fake tits installed, and was not discriminating when it came to getting attention. One afternoon she dropped by for an eighth. We smoked and one thing led to another, but I came the moment she wrapped her fingers around my dick. With a disdainful flap of her hand she flung my load onto the carpet, gave me a look like, are you fucking serious?, and after that it was just business. She referred me a lot of customers though, and her best friend became a regular.

Dana was an ER nurse in her early thirties. She bought an eighth every few days, and would always hang around after and smoke me out. One day we were passing her little glass pipe back and forth and she goes, “Lacy says you have a big dick.” Well, that was that, and for a few months it was a pretty good deal. I knew she was fucking other guys, but I had no particular feelings for her and I always wore a condom. She even started referring me business from the hospital, and pretty soon I had a couple of doctors dropping by regularly. One of these guys, a squirrelly little Arab anesthesiologist, was also fucking Dana, and I used to invite him in to smoke with me, just to be cheeky and shame him with his bad habits.

This whole arrangement went south real fast. For one thing, I broke my right hand in a fight downtown and had to have surgery. After that I got a rather large prescription for Vicodin and my grades started dropping, worse than they already were from my everyday weed habit. Winter was coming, and finals week with it. Also Brad, the lineman whom I was subleasing from, was starting to get wise to my weed business and although he didn’t say anything at first, I could tell he didn’t like the customer traffic, which was considerable.

Meanwhile Max, my high school bestie, was getting further and deeper into hard drugs, living on the streets and hanging on the periphery of a local latchkey whiteboy gang that used to run heroin for bikers. Occasionally, one of the lower ranking members of this cohort would show up at my place trying to fence a stolen fixie or a laptop for a small amount of pot, and when I told them cash only they were not happy with me.

One night, Max showed up drunk with one of these colleagues, a vicious skinhead named Neal. It was late, and it was cold, and to refuse them a place to crash would’ve meant a definitive break from Max and this whole cohort. I let them into the front living room and put on a movie, but I was wary, and they started roasting me for it, passing a fifth of Ancient Age back and forth and cracking wise about what an uptight cunt I was. This recompense of my hospitality displeased me, and I decided I would prove them right. “Hey guys,” I said. “Come out on the front porch with me and have a smoke.” I handed them each a Camel and they followed me to the front. Then I locked the door behind us. They eyed each other.

It was drizzling. There was a big moist nasty old sofa on the front balcony, and we all sat down. As I lit their cigarettes I said, “Listen, guys. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.” Max slouched where he sat, supremely entitled, took a long drag and exhaled it.

“You’re a miserable, arrogant little prick Sam. You need to relax,” he deadpanned. He wasn’t even trying to make it seem like teasing anymore.

“I don’t need to do shit. I said get the fuck out.”

“And what if I don’t?” he snarled. He thought I was bluffing.

I rose with a start, my eyes boring down into his, and said “Get the fuck up.” He stood straight up into my face and blew smoke. “What if I fucking don’t?” He was still calm, but this time he was louder. It was potentially now two against one, and I was intimidated and resentful of being regarded as a pushover. The moon glowed near full behind storm clouds to the west. The house was set into a steep hillside, with big eucalyptus trees towering up behind it almost touching the clammy grey sky, and it had an abnormally long staircase running from the front balcony down to the sidewalk. Max and I were face to face, nostrils flaring. He grabbed me by the front of my shirt. That was when I shoved him backwards down the staircase. Then I shot an icy glare over at Neal, unmitigatedly, zoologically prepared to immediately and severely injure him by any means necessary. Neal was too drunk and stunned by this whole turn of events to react. It was just he and I there on the balcony now, and he froze in place, avoiding my eyes and regarding the situation with a calm if mildly disturbed kind of moron’s perplexity.

Max tumbled backwards; flew, really, in an arc. His heels reconnected with the stairs about a third of the way from the bottom, his backside at a 45 degree angle to the street, at which point he fell straight back over the sidewalk, his head crashing into the mailbox, which flew off into the street in one direction as Max rolled to the other, veritably splattering onto his side with an eerie, semi-liquid thud against the pavement. The impact to his right shoulder had saved his head, possibly his life, and amazingly he was still conscious. As he got up he clutched the shoulder like something there might be broken. Then he started off ploddingly down the street with the slow caution of a newly walking toddler, muttering incoherently, clutching himself like a mental patient. Neal took a drag, stood up, and scampering down the stairs followed Max off into the night.

Around that time Dana had gotten exclusive with a neighbor of hers in the condo complex where she lived. I wasn’t particularly hurt by this, but the motivation to be available to her as a buddy and a sounding board was gone. One day while I was waiting to re-up and struggling through some homework I’d put off until I couldn’t really finish it, she blew up my little old school Nokia about a thousand times, leaving voicemails, trying to get a quarter ounce. I was irritated about my homework, irritated to not have weed, and it bothered me to be treated like a recalcitrant waiter, so finally I picked up and got very testy. In response to this, she drove up to my place an hour later with this guy, who followed her as she stormed up the balcony. Easy girls never want to accept that their opposite-sex friendships are all predicated on pussy, and as I opened the door to be confronted I noticed that the guy she was with was rather large. I guessed she’d finally found somebody with a bigger dick, and I did not appreciate the attempt at intimidation by security retinue. “Dana, what the fuck are you doing?” She glared at me, intensely hurt, and stormed back down to the car. Her other half just shrugged and followed her down the stairs.

The next afternoon, Brad came back from surfing up the coast and told me there’d been firetrucks and helicopters everywhere at Wilder Ranch because some girl had killed herself out there by jumping off a cliff. High school classmates I hadn’t heard from all year started calling, and it turned out the girl was a friend of mine. Kelly was this depressive and painfully shy poetess with big saucer-blue anime eyes. She was rail thin and small-chested with a cute overbite and wore her dark red hair in a bob. As freshmen and sophomores we’d hung out in the same cohort of AP-lit nerds and thespians, and all the guys had a crush on her. Apparently she’d gone off to some liberal arts college in Vermont and started hearing voices. Maybe it was the onset of schizophrenia, maybe something happened to her out in the north woods, or maybe both, but she’d decided on Christmas break to kill herself in Santa Carla. That was her assessment of adulthood, and it was valid.

Every tree has its own separate fall on the west coast, some change color sooner, some later. It was one of those blustery days in December when the stragglers all lose their leaves in one morning. The funeral was held in the big Episcopal church up by the UCSC campus, where I’d fingerpainted in the rec room as a kid. 

Everyone from my high school class was home on Christmas break. It was a grim reunion. The chapel had huge, stained-glass windows and rows of pews leading down a carpeted incline to the pulpit. The family sat in front—genteel liberals in cashmere and corduroy. Her dad was an old lawyer with close-cropped white hair, doughy and intensely mainstream in a way that’s hard to take seriously, but staid on that day. Our true core is off limits outside those rare blips on the calendar when everything shatters and cackles at you. That wasn’t true of his daughter. She saw through everything. I guess she even knew the price of eternal youth.

Kelly had the cutest lips when she was alive. It wasn’t that I had feelings for her after that first fall in high school. We never dated. But that syrupy little mouth was like seeing a turkey leg when you’re dying of starvation. I had to hand it to her—in suicide she took on an unattainability that was really hot.

To get from the chapel to the buffet we had to walk this gauntlet of folding display boards where the family hung up every piece of artwork Kelly ever produced. She was a very good artist. She used to draw these transmogrifying human figures, kind of like an R. Crumb cartoon, but with skinny people. She was extremely private, but when you’re dead you can’t stop your relatives from going through your things. The worst part about the way she went is that she never lived to see all that self-consciousness go numb.

After the funeral we all went to the woods to drink. This was a back-peddling concession on the part of those who’d always done better in school. It’s amazing how much distance an acceptance letter and nine months can put between people. Everyone was away at a four-year, going places, meeting new people, while I was still selling weed in Santa Carla, getting ready to drop out of community college.

After the funeral, Dana called me, apologizing for our spat and asking if I could sell her an ounce. This surprised me because I didn’t often sell that much at a time. We met at my place. She was a mess. Sweatpants, no makeup, pale, her eyes watery. She collapsed into me at the front door and started sobbing into my shoulder. I carried her to the couch. She started to tell how this guy, her neighbor, had gotten her pregnant, how she really loved him and thought he was the one, but when she told him she wanted to keep the baby, he disappeared. It was her day off; she’d spent the morning at Planned Parenthood. I didn’t know what to say. We smoked, I fed her, and she passed out on the couch. Sometime in the middle of the night she woke up and drove off. Someone told me later that she’d left town, but I never heard from her again.

Forward: Part III

Back: Part I