Scammers

Telephone scamming goes on everywhere, I imagine, but somehow the Academy of Telephony and Thimblerigging (AT&T, by coincidence) has pinpointed our community for extra effort.

We are supposed to be intimidated by a voice coming over this newfangled talk box, or senile enough to be convinced that we all have grandchildren unjustly jailed in Mexico. Some of us are, unfortunately, and are taken for varying sums of money despite weekly warnings in our community newspaper. Others succumb to threats that their electrical service will be cut off unless they pay ransom immediately.

For this latter scheme to work, the voice must be authoritative, and fluent enough in the language to sound like a representative of a major utility company. That’s one side of the industry, and it has no redeeming features.

The other branch, while even more annoying, does serve a social function. It provides entrée to the job market for recent arrivals. Almost all the calls I get, and at times there can be two or three in a day, are from people to whom the language is obviously of only recent acquaintance.

That creates an extremely frustrating situation: you can’t insult the operatives who call you. I’ve tried. I’ve used every obscenity I know, suggesting feats of physical insertion I know to be realistically impracticable -- but they don’t understand. They plow ahead with the sales story, not realizing that they’ve been told off in terms a native recipient would respond to with, if within reach, a poke in the speaker’s eye.

What use, then, are the carefully hoarded obscenities you so seldom get to use if not to tell off a telephone scammer? Yet what should be the satisfaction of letting loose to verbally demolish an adversary becomes in this case a futile gesture. You have brought up your most devastating linguistic artillery but the target, armored with unknowingness, doesn’t feel a thing. New arrivals should be required to take classes in Obscenities, especially if they’re going into telephone work.              

Farming

We have tomatoes! I mean actually growing in our “garden.”

They are growing in the derelict planter box in the narrow planting area between the  patio wall and the public/common lawn. There are also green peppers growing in a pot by the doorway.

This is incredible news for a brown-thumber like me who’s been called a herbicidal maniac. Even the way the tomatoes are growing reflects that.

I had bought a you-don’t-have-to-do-anything planter box last year. Everything was in it: growing mix, fertilizer, and anything else that was needed except water and your choice of seeds. I added those, but I think that in an overdose of caution I must have put too many seeds into the box. True to the advertising, the seeds grew -- all of them. The tangled mass of stalks and leaves yielded a total of six stunted tomatoes. Even so, I was not much  disappointed because  in view of my record with this sort of thing I hadn’t let my hopes get too high.

The planter box was discarded, removed from its prominent place on the patio railing and dropped into the narrow planting area and forgotten. And now it’s growing again. Unattended and mostly un-watered, it has a sizeable green tomato and another smaller one, and numerous blossoms that apparently turn into the tomatoes.

The green peppers, which came out of nowhere, are small but perfectly formed, and I have eaten two. Not quite as flavorful as the store kind, but that’s only because the commercial growers work all sorts of treatments on them. These are organic; nothing in that pot but soil mix. The tomatoes are presumably working on what remains of last year’s fertilizer, but they’ve never seen any pesticides, and that’s close enough to organic for me.

We’re looking forward to a real treat. Store tomatoes aren’t worth buying. They have no flavor, and I remember reading that, tested for vulnerability to collision damage, they outperformed Detroit automobile bumpers. I’ve been slashing them apart and smothering them with black pepper to make them edible. And all that seems about to change. If the desert winds keep warming the days as they usually do this time of year and the nights don’t get too cold, we could have a real harvest.   I can taste them already.  

When New Beginnings Get Old

OK, enough with the lit’ry stuff.

Was it only a few weeks ago that I swore off commercialism and “ascended to the realm of the creative writer”? My novel was obscurely but finally (self-) published, I had enlisted in a short-story-writing group, and I had entered half-a-dozen contests.

Now, as the contest results come back, I am informed, in case I didn’t know it, that fiction is not my strong suit. The fact is that the writing habits developed over decades of business/commercial/technical writing do not lend themselves well to fiction. The novel was an exception -- something I felt strongly about -- and had the leisure to complete -- 47 years from first draft to publication.

Most of the time, however, I was working to shorter deadlines and in shorter forms. What develops out of that, for me, anyway, is a style that is short to the point of being terse, and an eye for removing excess words (in my own writing, or others’ if I’m entrusted with editing it). This blog is an exception to some of that, but the material I dealt with in a business capacity was factual.

This does not go down well in fiction. The winning entries behind which I have been finishing (far behind) are tales spun out at lengths I would once have considered novellas. More importantly, they seem always to appeal to the emotions.

I’m not opposed to emotion in writing, and Lord knows there are subjects to write about today that will arouse them. But that’s real emotion. The emotion in fictional work is by definition contrived, and I find it difficult to generate. However, there’s a lot of instruction available at the writers’ group I joined, and I will continue to study the techniques revealed there.

For now, though, I’m retreating to my comfort zone. For the next while I will be writing articles for trade publications and, with two friends of the graphic persuasion, offering proposal building services. Our niche will be mid-level contractors who would like to win government business or subcontracts from larger corporations but don’t have the resources to build the necessary proposals. We will help them get into the game. 

Luke

I should probably camouflage his identity. Call him “Luke.”

I thought of him as “walking wounded.” One of life’s people who could never catch a break.

He was gay, and had grown up in Texas, which must have been a tough combination back before we knew him in L.A. I can pinpoint the time because it was right around when President Kennedy was assassinated, 1963.

He had a strong resemblance to the young Abraham Lincoln; tall and rangy, hollow-cheeked. Or maybe it was to Raymond Massey’s portrayal of Lincoln.     The resemblance ended there, of course.

He succeeded in writing some articles about the Old West for some Old West magazines, but he wasn’t “a writer.” He wasn’t anything consistently but picked up work as he could. He’d wash dishes in a friend’s restaurant when business was good and the friend could afford it. Somewhere along the line he had made contact with a fading movie star, and had become her gopher. She exploited him shamelessly but, star-struck, he didn’t see it that way.

We had introduced him to another gay friend (who was spoken for), and Luke affected a transparent and annoying pretense of “forgetting” Richard’s name if the subject came up -- his way of telling us he wasn’t interested. Not at all.

His own sex life, as far as we understood  it, seemed to be a series of encounters from which he usually emerged scathed. Meeting “Gabe” was probably the best thing that had happened to him in a long time, and we were happy to see it develop into a stable relationship. They were an unlikely couple for background and appearance, but it worked. Gabe had a steady job and things settled down.

It really looked like it would go on that way, but Luke had a heart attack. He wasn’t very old, but I imagine the stresses of his life had something to do with it. When we heard about it we visited him in the hospital, and he seemed reasonably alright. But he had no insurance, and I tried to think of some way to bring him in under mine to keep him there. Of course  there was no way, so immediately he was “stabilized” the private hospital shipped him out to County General.  

I don’t mean to make that sound like a death sentence; I’m sure the medical people there try hard to treat people right. But I’m just as sure they must be overwhelmed, because it’s a huge hospital and you have to figure they’re getting the bad cases and a lot of them. Anyway, Luke died there before we ever saw him again. I think we spoke to Gabe once or twice afterward, but that was the end of it.

Fifty-odd years later I still try to think of what we shoulda/coulda/mighta done, but I haven’t come up with anything. Like I said, he was one of life’s losers, and he just wasn’t destined to get any breaks.  

Russ

  

He’d been a “club fighter” in his early years in Boston, but somehow had gotten off that path and away from what it might have led to. I knew him as a fellow writer when we worked together at the L.A. Times.

There was still plenty of the tough kid about him, though. When he and the owner of the bar we frequented found themselves in disagreement on some point, they squared off. I, in my innocence, thought they were joking, and did an imitation of a referee separating them in the ring. They weren’t joking, and I had positioned myself to have my teeth unintentionally but effectively rearranged, from either of two directions. That may have been all that prevented things from running their course. I’d never been with the circus, but it was in that grand old tradition: if things start to look ugly you send in the clowns.

At heart he was a sports writer and went on to write and publish a skiing magazine. It was at the time Jean and I and two partners were struggling with a mailorder/handcrafts/giftwares business near Yosemite National Park. He “discovered” us one winter and featured us on his front page for ski enthusiasts heading to Yosemite. I don’t know if it actually created any business for us, but it was a wonderful gesture.

But the greatest thing he did for us came when we finally gave up the business and returned to L.A. It was Russ who took us out, almost the first evening we were back, to dinner at Little Joe’s restaurant and bar downtown. It’s hard to describe the feeling. Fresh from seven years in a backwoods community that hadn’t yet made it out of the 19^th century, he transported us to an ambience of soft lights, good food, the buzz of conversation of people who sounded like us, and billows of cigarette smoke. We knew we were really home then.               

Poncho

The weather is holding remarkably here for January. The rain in the first week lasted about a day, and at the end of the week it was blue skies and warm. It has not really rained since. Of course it can’t last, but it makes for an amazing January while it’s here. Other parts of the country are seeing floods, and I think New York is having unseasonal warmth (the January 11 New Yorker cover portrays people bathing in a warm Rockefeller Center ice-rink-turned-swimming pool). Everything is out of kilter.

In anticipation of a rainy season, which we’re assured is coming, I bought two army surplus rain ponchos several months ago.  That first week’s rain provided the occasion to unwrap them, or maybe “unfurl” would be the better description.

Each comes tightly wrapped in a plastic ball about the size of a softball. Once out of its envelope, however, it unfurls into what proves to be a large sheet of black plastic with a hood in the middle. You stick your head through a hole in the plastic sheet and into the hood. A drawstring lets you pull the hood tight around your face. The rest of the sheet then drapes itself  around you shapelessly but effectively. It is impossible to fold it back into that softball-size envelope.

There are multiple snaps and laces, as is typical of army gear, but there is a particularly ingenious aspect to this item: snap two of them together and you have   a tent.

A hat rounds out the ensemble. The “boonie” hat is also black, this time of canvas, with a wide brim to divert the water away from the face. As you would expect, it has a chin strap. I’m not yet clear on whether you perch it atop your hood -- that would seem redundant -- or wear it instead of the hood, maybe in lighter rain. In any case, fully attired in my rain outfit, particularly with that black hood drawn tight around my face, I look like the Grim Reaper, but I am near-impervious to water damage. 

Random Images

There are images that stick in my mind that are so unimportant I can’t imagine why I remember them. And they stay for decades.

A highschooler in track team uniform puts on a burst of speed to outrun a friend. That’s it. No beginning and no end. I didn’t know either of the people.

It’s something like a dream, but I know it wasn’t. I can show you where I was standing at the time. Besides, dreams can be significant at some level; this image is meaningless for me. But for whatever reason, the shutter in my brain snapped at that moment, and the image was recorded somewhere in its billions of cells.

My uncle is in the Navy, 1943. Visiting us, he goes down the steps from the street taking his whites to the apartment house basement where there’s a washing machine.

We’re walking the family dog in an overgrown lot favored by dog-walkers An exotic-looking butterfly perches on a leaf. To get a closer look at it, a man hits it with the end of the leash in his hand and destroys it.

A day at the beach with friends. The reflection of the sun bounces off the water a particular way. I’ve been to the beach hundreds of times; why do I remember this day? Nothing special happened. Thirty years earlier, a different beach: a lifeguard gathers half-a-dozen of us kids one evening and hands out sets of commemorative stamps showing, if I remember this part right, pictures of state capitols. It’s bizarre; I couldn’t have explained it even then, but I remember it.  

The “snap of the shutter” has to be more than just an analogy; I think something resembling that must really happen, physically or chemically. The image is set in just that moment, and it remains. There’s a lot of research going on today into how the brain works; I’d like to see someone pick up on this. I’d volunteer to strap on the electrodes.  

Does it happen that way to everyone? That would be my guess, but I could be wired in some strange way. Then, too, I’ve heard that one of the first signs of dementia is increasingly vivid memory of past events. I think it’s accompanied by forgetfulness of current ones, but I don’t remember that happening.