L Train, 6 p.m.

I was on the L train crossing town from 8th Ave. to 3rd.  It is March, the last month I will ever see the 10th St. apartment in which I grew up and my father died.  I am living here now, have been for a few months, dealing with Ray’s artwork.  Anyway, I was on the L train and I notice this pretty girl sitting down in the crowded car.  She’s pretty, but she also has a sweetness to her, she seems too young for her looks.  The world hasn’t gotten its hooks into her yet, and she is unspoiled.  She feels quiet, and self-possessed, but a little wary too, as one must be on a New York subway.  

I go about my business, which is just to stand there while the steel lozenge lurches east, taking in the multifarious stimulation of the impossibly various group.  Then I sense movement to the left and there is that wonderful moment you sometimes get in New York where someone offers something generous and kind and the other person’s reflex is to refuse it: No, I’m okay, I’m not in need of help or succor.  Please, you don’t need to … and then the acquiescence … the gorgeous melting where they think they might accept it, I am so tired and these bags are so heavy and maybe it’s okay … and before you know it, the woman with the shopping bags is dropping onto the bench, and the pretty girl is moving away, in my general direction, with no particular awareness of me, as far as I can tell.  Who knows how she sees me, if she sees me at all?  An older man, an unshaven man, a fat man, a tall man, a man with a funny hat.  Perhaps I am something like her father, or the kind of presence her father warned her about.  But she is savvy enough to know not to meet my eye, even if she were inclined to, even if the smallest speck of curiosity about another human being on the subway train arose in her.  And she just stands there and seems engrossed by the advertisements that promise healthy, attractive skin in just 2 weeks, thanks to a revolutionary new citrus technique devised by a board-certified dermatologist in Astoria.  

But I am aroused by her kindness.  Not sexually aroused, but roused in the heart, as if my heart had been sleeping and an unlooked-for moment of human soulfulness had disturbed my sleep and forced me to look around the car with eyes scrubbed clean.  “That was very nice of you,” I said to the girl.  And just around the time I got finished saying the word “was,” she looked up into my eyes, and they twinkled, those eyes, the way eyes twinkle when a person is really smiling, and then the rest of her face followed, a smile shy and tentative in the mouth but bold in the irises.  “Thank you,” she said.

Which is all it takes, really, to rediscover a small portion of faith in life, in people, in the notion that there might be something worth saving in us after all, something worthwhile.  So pummeled are we by the technology and the politics and the noise and the media and the loss of something, we don’t remember quite what it was but it has traveled far from us, just far enough that, like Tantalus, we reach out for it always but it stays just beyond our reach.  Some thing we used to love about life, some fun, some warmth — that surely went along with fear and pain too, but baby with the bathwater! we got full-service numbing.  We numbed the pain, and we numbed the joy.  I mean joy!  Not some bargain-basement, third-rate passing moment of pleasure.  But the real thing, the joy of falling in love — with people, with leaves and sunsets, with riffs and pastels, with the truly comic shenanigans of the mind.  This we forget.  Except we don’t completely forget, and when it seems to hover in the distance there’s something we recognize, something vaguely familiar, and we want it to come closer so we can examine it.  And when she smiles, and her hazel eyes glitter, and she says thank you, we too feel ourselves touched by something we’d kept in a room with the door shut.

All this transpired in the time it takes the L to get from 8th Ave. to Union Square, and when the doors opened, the girl turned around and gave me an even more lovely smile: “Have a good evening,” she said, and walked out of my life.  I felt joy in that moment, and the crazy thing is you can get to the point, if you’re lucky, where encounters like these don’t end when the girl walks off the train.  Because it was not the girl at all, but the possibility of the girl, the possibility of communion, of a shared smile between strangers.  Something not corrupt or cynical, something not corporate!  Something that required no technology or additional information.  Just a smile, unbound to history, to place or time.  And in the smile is born hope.

Chili: Part the First

Every now and then, you make something good.  And then you want to tell someone.

Well, when I make something good like a poem or a few pages of prose, I don’t want to tell anyone.  I like to enjoy it in a solitary, alienated kind of way, for as long as the joy will last, and I can tell you it doesn’t last long.  But when I make a dish and it’s just beyond expectations, I think: Someone needs to know about this.

So, last week we got a flyer saying there was going to be a block party in the neighborhood: a chili cookout.  Lu said: “Make some chili, Paul.”  I said, “The flyer doesn’t say it’s a chili cook-off, or a chili fest.  They say bring something, but they don’t say you have to bring chili.” 

“Make the chili, Paul,” said Lu.  And that was pretty much all there was to it.

So I let the whole idea ferment, or fester rather, for a while.  After a few days, there was an email in my inbox.  “Are you on track to make the chili? It’s this Sunday.”  Lu and I communicate by email, even though we’re often in the same house.  Sometimes it’s better not to have a face-to-face.  Anyway, I emailed her back and told her I hadn’t decided what I wanted to make yet, but I was on it.  I didn’t hear anything back.

So, on the Thursday before the block party, I suddenly experienced an empty echoey cavern where frantic busy-ness had been, and the whole chili thing popped into my head.  Shit, I thought.  I’d better get on it.

Truth is, I don’t know much about chili.  Oh, I’ve made the usual bowl of slop that we’ve all made at one time or another:  hamburger meat and canned kidney beans, garlic, onion, chili powder, maybe some canned tomatoes and cumin.  Cook that mess about an hour, stick some in a bowl and throw some sour cream or shredded cheese or onions on it; add Tabasco as warranted.  Nothing to write home about, but it more or less gives you the same greasy experience every time.  It’s reliable.

This time, however, I was resentful.  I resented having to make the chili in the first place.  I resented the type casting: “Oh, Paul will make the chili.  We don’t have to worry about it.  We’ll take credit for it later, but for now, he’s the food guy – let him make it.”

It’s true, maybe no one really thought this.  But resentment is a seductive thing; sometimes just an idea is enough to get you riled up.  And riled up I was.

When I get resentful, there’s a good chance I’m going to get obsessive.  Put a Paul obsessed in the kitchen and weird shit can happen.

Anyway, I decided against burger, and then I decided against beans.  Somewhere along the line I’d heard that chili con carne in its most pristine form has no truck with beans.  If you can use the word “pristine” to refer to chili.  You’ve heard about this too, I reckon, and I don’t know if you’ve done something about it, but I was resentful, so I thought I would.  You’re not going to get one fucking bean out of me, I thought, with bitter satisfaction.  

Then I decided against tomatoes.  And I decided against chili powder.  They don’t call it “burger with powder”; they call it chili con carne.  Gotta figure the chili pepper part was important to the Mexicans whose special province chili con carne seems to be.  Well, maybe it’s not, who knows.  Maybe it’s really the Guatemalans who dreamed it up, or some prehistoric Incan fool who got lost on the way to the virgin sacrifice and wound up in Mexico.  Maybe it was this Inca, let’s call him Pedro Inca, who in a melancholic cloud brought on him by his unintentional visit north, thought he would, by way of therapy, do something completely unexpected.  He would eat meat and chili peppers at the same time.  And he did so; and he found that it was good.  And maybe, just maybe, Pedro Inca was lionized by the local Aztec food critics for this sly gambit or maybe he was robbed of the glory of his invention by Pedro Aztec, who assassinated him with a fossilized rattlesnake to the heart and then impersonated him at the annual awards ceremony.  And this is why we associate chili con carne with the Mexicans.  It’s possible.  We can’t really know for sure.  And it doesn’t really matter.

It wasn’t the provenance of the dish, but its gestalt.  I was determined to aim for authenticity of spirit rather than geography.  So I started with peppers.  I knew chili peppers were the central players in this drama.  But which peppers?  Of all the peppers with which our modern world is blessed, which peppers would be the right peppers for my chili con carne?

I got in my car and I drove over to the local Whole Foods.  And I saw they had fresh chili peppers, and these peppers looked good.  This is what they had:

Anaheim

Serrano

Habanero

Poblano

Cubanelle

Jalapeño

The usual suspects.  This wouldn’t do.  This wouldn’t do at all.  This was not the way to my authentic chili con carne.

I made a bee line for the Best Way a few blocks from my house, a supermarket catering to the Hispanic community here.  I looked in their chili pepper section, and this is what I found:

Anaheim

Serrano

Habanero

Poblano

Cubanelle

Jalapeño

 The usual suspects.  O false and traitorous hope!  O strumpet Best Way, luring in the innocent seeker with the hope of authenticity, and leaving him bloody and battered on the floor of your commonness!

Even the supermarket known for catering to the Hispanic community had sold its soul to the white man.  The gringo.  But was I to be defeated by a passel of honky peppers?  I tracked down the manager.

“Where are your authentic Latino chili peppers?” I demanded.

“In the authentic Latino produce section,” he replied, laconically.  “Next to the authentic Latino yucca.”

“You call those gringo peppers authentic?” I cried.

He rolled his eyes and walked away.

And as my eyes followed his turncoat ass waddling down the aisle, I saw a wall that beckoned to me.  As I approached, I could see it was a huge wall of dried chili peppers.  My heart sank.  Surely the most authentic pepper would be a fresh one, not a dried one.  But wait!  I reasoned thusly: If dried peppers are fresh peppers with the water taken out, could not dried peppers be made something like fresh by returning the moisture to them?

I eyed the bags of peppers with a fevered lust.  I picked my peppers.  Not pickled, and not a peck certainly, but peppers nonetheless were picked.  I picked the mild New Mexico chilies and a bag of fiery Arbols; I picked some fruity Anchos and some smoky Chipotles.  I was no longer conscious of my actions; my hand reached out as though guided by an unseen force.  This was the combination I sought: New Mexico, Arbol, Ancho and Chipotle.  These would be the rock on which I would build my church of chili con carne.  These would be my Four Musketeers.

End of Part the First

The Lobster Wars

La Wife was out shopping and I was thinking about dinner. So I sent her the following message:

"Give me crustacean or give me death."

After 15 minutes, I heard nothing back, and I was beginning to worry. So I followed up:

"Come back WITH your crustacean or ON it."

I thought that would get her attention. She could handle my own demise, but was she willing to face the Spartan ultimatum?

Apparently so. Quoth La Wife: bupkis. So I decided to go all pop culture on her.

"A day without crustacean is a day without sunshine."

I could sense her resolve was weakening. So I went for the coup de grâce.

"Love means never having to say you're hungry."

I got the following reply:

"To be or not to be, that is the crustacean."

Oh snap! Touché!

 

 

 

Goodbye to All That

So, I finally left Facebook.  "Leave" is a good word, because it doesn't necessarily mean you're gone for good.  "I'm leaving for the mental health clinic at 2, and I should be back by 5."  On the other hand, when Wilma "leaves" Fred, you assume that it's probably for good.  Me, I'm not making any big plans either way.  I'm in kind of a live-in-the-moment moment.  Right now I don't want Facebook in my life.  What happens later is anybody's guess.  I'm a fuckin' bodhisattva.

To get rid of Facebook -- because you can't actually delete your account -- you need to unfriend all your "friends," which is probably why most people don't do it -- it seems like kind of a harsh step.  But if that's what's necessary, I can get with it.  It means I won't hear about all their shit, and they won't hear about mine.

I used to have like 300 names on my list; then I had 22.  I put the whole thing on a diet.  Now, though I've kept the people on it I most wanted, it's time to step away.

Facebook has always been a guilty pleasure with me, as I guess it must be for a lot of people.  I go there to avoid doing other stuff.  It's a cheap form of camaraderie, a simulacrum of community.  And sometimes more than a simulacrum.  But usually just a simulacrum.  It's the closest you can get to not being alone without having to actually be in the same room with someone.  But it's kind of like the Ring of Power in The Hobbit.  It's cool, but you pay a price.  And for me, the price is wasted time, avoidance of real life, encounters with people that are limited and virtual where nothing much grows, it's just kind of like a CD on autorepeat.  

Anyway, that's the way it is for me, so as the Poet says, hasta la vista, baby.  I leave you with this passage -- and you will know its author in a trice -- certainly germaine to our so-called political discourse of today.  And it is more true to the spirit of a "commonplace book" than most of my other entries:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

 

Dive Shop

On Cape Breton Island, and I’m fairly sure, in other places as well, there is a lovely purple flower that springs up at the side of the road in early summer. All flowers are sexy – they have to be, given that their purpose is almost entirely procreative – but some are sexier than others. Myself, I’m not especially turned on by sunflowers, but then, I’m not an insect. Maybe for an insect, size matters, I don't know.

But I digress. This is a very alluring flower, even for me, though I am unlikely to pollinate it. Close to the stem, it’s a kind of periwinkle blue and then about a third of the way up it changes abruptly to a rich, deep purple. I’m not sure what the adaptive purpose of this is: Why not have the change be gradual? It seems like more work to make it a hard right turn. But this is just one of many questions I don’t have the answer to.

Anyway, the plant that makes this purple flower is not really a plant in cultural terms, though it is of course biologically one. Culturally, we humans would call it a “weed.” Now our purple plant, like the honey badger, don’t give a shit. But we call it a weed because it is not a plant we find useful in any way. That’s why we have the word “weed.” It’s one of those cool words whose entire definition is that it is not something else. Like “alien” (not a citizen, not an earthling). A weed is very definitely a value judgment word. It is good to be a plant that serves human kind, either by being useful or beautiful. It is bad to crowd out the plants we have decided are good.

For that’s what a weed is especially hated for – its otherness and its superior strength. If a weed gets in your flower bed, you better run your ass off to Home Depot and get some nasty toxin that will probably make your grandchildren spontaneously grow two heads if they get within 20 feet. Because though very little in life is certain, it is a lock that the weed is going to kick your peonies’ little asses in about half an hour.

So this beautiful flower that grows by the side of the road on Cape Breton Island is a weed, which means that it’s hardy. Year in, year out, they arrive, they flourish, they paint the landscape with a color that serves as a much-needed foil to the deep greens that are this area’s leafy protagonist. They are the ruby red lipstick to the hills’ pale, powdered geisha face, they’re the flag flying on Iwo Jima, the lighthouse in the mist, the poet in a room full of fry cooks. 

But it wasn’t enough for me that they dotted the canvas with beauty. I wanted some for myself.

So, I went to the old woman on Airdrie Hill. She knew all there was to know. It was impossible to even guess at her age. She’d been here in Cape Breton for as long as anyone could remember. And I told her I wanted the purple flowers.

The old lady was known as McFoo. No first name. She wore a kilt and a yellow tank top, which I must say was not suited to a woman of her indeterminate years. She smoked a joint the size of a Cuban cigar and wore a Toronto Maple Leafs cap.

“You can’t have the purple flowers,” she said, picking something out of her yellow teeth.

“Why not?”

“They don’t like you,” she said. And laughed.

I told her they didn’t have to like me, they just had to grow on my land, within sight of my little cabin, so my wife and I could see them in the morning when we woke up.

“Dream on,” spat McFoo.

“Look,” I said, “do you have the seeds or not? Look at this place. How could you not have some seeds for the purple flowers? 

“I’ve got ‘em.”

“Well then?”

“I’ll give them to you, but you’re not going to be happy with the result. It’s a weed, boyo! Dontcha know what that means?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I don’t think you do. What it means is they don’t do what they’re told,” she said.

The old woman went into a back room and I heard her throwing things around there; it sounded like professional wrestling. Glass shattered, wood snapped and the cabin floor shook. There was a lot of grunting. Finally, she came out with a small Zip-Loc full of what looked like miniature pumpkin seeds. 

“Here ya go,” she said, and tossed them vaguely toward my hand. “And good luck with that,” she muttered as I walked out the door.

I didn’t waste any time. I planted those purple flower seeds in a bed right by my cabin and covered them with rich soil. I watered them when the weather was dry. I even threw in a little fertilizer from time to time. Every morning I went out there with my coffee to see whether any little weeds were poking their heads out. But nothing. Nothing.

The summer came and went, and no flowers appeared. The sun shone and the rain fell, and they didn’t come.

 

“They don’t like you.”

I’d returned the next year, convinced that McFoo had sold me a bill of goods. The first thing I did after opening up the cottage was to go pay a call on the old woman, who, unaccountably, was still with us.

“You gave me old seeds or something,” I said.

“All seeds are old,” she said. “They’ve been with us since before there was an ‘us’.”

“Don’t get philosophical on me, McFoo, I want the real thing this time. I don’t know what you gave me, but I did everything right and they didn’t grow.”

“Don’t like you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Got it.  Please give me some seeds that will work."

“No seeds will work. I told you that before.”

This was getting me nowhere.

“Okay, how about you just give me some more seeds – the best you have.”

The crone was ready for me. She’d had the seeds in the baggie before I even came in, and she grabbed them off an old scuba tank that was leaning against the wall and handed them to me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me yet,” she said. She had a new outfit – the kilt and tanktop had been replaced by a tie dye turtleneck, plaid pantaloons and a pair of pink high-top Cons.

“Well, thanks anyway.”

“No, thank you,” she said, and winked.

I bought a truckload of soil from the local nursery and three bags of pig shit. I got a soil tester from Home Depot that would tell me the amount of nitrogen, phosphate, etc., in the dirt. I went for a long walk along the shoulder of the main road and examined the conditions: the amount of sun the purple flowers got, the quality of the soil, the exposure they had to the wind. Then I went back to my cabin and recreated the closest possible environment. I spent a day digging out the nutrient-poor, clay-rich dirt from a 10x10 patch of ground and filling it in with the truckload of soil. I mixed in the pig shit and carefully deposited the seeds in holes dug 8 inches apart, as some guy on the Internet suggested. And I waited. The smell was bad. Something good had to come from this.

Two months later, there was nothing.

“Maybe it’s time to try something else, sweetie,” said my wife.

“That bitch.”

“What?”

We drove home at the end of the summer, and I was a complete turd the whole way home.

Four more summers. Four more summers with no purple flowers. Every piece of shitty little ground on the side of the main road had them, but all my efforts were for naught. I tried everything. I haunted gardener web forums. I even hired a highly recommended horticulturist from Halifax.

“I can’t explain it,” he finally said. “Usually, you have to work pretty hard not to get these weeds.”

So I gave up. I gave up on the sexy purple flowers that I had wanted to gaze at with my wife for five years. The flowers that I thought about while I went about my business in the real world. The flowers that had defeated me. The flowers that didn’t like me.

Then this summer I returned to Cape Breton, and there was an empty feeling inside me because I knew I wasn’t going to have this dimension in my life anymore. I felt silly for having tried for so many summers, for having let McFoo get inside my head, for being a city slicker totally out of his element with the simplest realities of natural life. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be here anymore. Things were tainted.

Then I turned into the mile-long dirt driveway that led to my little cabin on the shore. I drove 20 yards and stopped the car. I turned off the engine and got out. All along the road, for as far as the eye could see, were the purple flowers. I couldn’t believe it. I got back in the car and drove the curves slowly toward the sea. They were everywhere – deep purple splashes against the backdrop of green tree, brown earth, and limpid blue sky. I kept waiting for them to stop, but they never did. I parked the car at our little gravel parking field and walked down the Hansel & Gretel path to the cabin. Unlocked the door and walked through, walked to the window and saw the Strait of Northumberland and Margaree Island. I saw the cliffs receding south into the distance. And I saw the purple flowers. They were all over the place, lovely and erotic and irrepressible. They were everywhere … except the patch of ground where I’d been trying to grow them.

I drove back to the old woman’s house on the hill, but it was boarded up. On the front door was a scrawled sign etched with a knife into a piece of pressure-treated lumber – “Gone to Florida.” I asked at the grocery store in Inverness what had happened to McFoo, and the bat-faced woman at the register said she’d won a hefty lottery prize and had gone to open a dive shop in the Keys.

And that, my friends, is a true story.

Simply Irresistible

About three weeks ago, riding the Volt bus back to DC after three months of being a single parent taking care of demented dad and troubled offspring, I had this weird idea of doing a music video for my wife Lu for her 50th birthday.  And as soon as I thought of it, I knew what the song would be.

The older I get, it seems, the more I realize it's important to hearken to the urgings of instinct.  My father, a man not known for generous impartings of wisdom, once accompanied me on a visit to a Franz Kline retrospective in Philadelphia, and at one point I, a callow 22-year-old, confounded by all calligraphic black slashes on canvas, noticed him spending a lot of time looking at one in particular.  It looked to me like a lot of the others, so I asked, "What's so special about this one?"  And he said two words: "It works."

I have to say I wasn't totally buying this as a piece of art criticism, but even at the time it made an impression on me.  It's taken me many years to understand that there is in fact a reality that's beyond the power of logic to arrive at and the power of words to express.  It's this unmistakable sense that something "works."  It's not that it obeys certain rules -- or in the way I would experience it, manages not to break them.  It's not that it "expresses" something.  You can't justify your sense of it, you can't persuade people of it; they have to see it with their own eyes or hear it with their own ears if they can.  And this quality of "working" inheres in the thing itself, not in someone's perception of it.  People, with their peculiar, disorganized mentalities, born of experience and DNA, come and go.  They pass the Kline or the look in a woman's eye or the way this stream tumbles over those rocks, and they see that it "works" (i.e. is perfect as it is) or they don't, but it doesn't matter if they see it -- the working is there.  Things work or don't work.  They are like a conspiracy or a joke; like my Timex: They work or don't work.

If we are lucky enough to perceive something working, to bypass the thicket of irrelevant thinking and arbitrary ideas we adopt just so we'll have something to say, then the organ that pierces this veil is instinct -- not the instinct of an animal to mate or fly south for the winter, but a peculiarly human instinct, independent of reason, that grasps all at once, as if in a gestalt, the rightness of something.  In this moment, if we are lucky enough to experience it once or twice in our lives, our hard-won individuality dissipates, and we are simply the vessel of a perception, the only true perception possible under the circumstances.  And it's this faculty of a species that allows us to know that something is working.

On the Volt bus bouncing down I-95, I suddenly saw everything whole.  I knew how it would end up, and I knew what would make Lu happy on this, one of the more treacherous birthdays we encounter.  I knew the pieces and players, the phases of its life history, the structure of the entire thing, and it wasn't because I was specially adept, but because the god of Love spoke to me and instructed me on the thing and how it would work.  Whether it was possible never even entered into it.  I knew it was impossible.  But when a god speaks, we do well to listen.

So the rest of it unfolded as it had to, despite the inevitable resistance -- the way the copper in a wire resists the flow of electrons, the way clay resists the pressure of the trowel.  The resistance, from people and circumstance, was part of it, it had a crucial role.  And in the end, we had a music video for Lu, made by many people who care for her, to remind her that she isn't alone in this hard world.  These people were brilliant and funny and generous and they worked hard, though this wasn't really the point.  And there are flaws in the final product if you want to measure it against some standard you think is important.  But this surely isn't the point.  The point is that it worked.  We showed the video after dinner at a little Spanish restaurant on Broome Street on the evening of 24 March 2013.  She said it was the best thing ever.  I know that too, but I also know why it was.

This is the audio for that thing we made.  If you want to see the "thing as a whole," email me and I'll invite you to a Dropbox folder where you can see the video.

The Musicians

Chris Biondo, Bass and Keys
Freddy Kunkle, Drums
Lenny Williams, Backing Vocal
Clyde Spillenger, Lead Guitar and Vocals
Paul Spillenger, Guitar, Lead and Backing Vocals

 

Download Simply Irresistible

 

Bluefish

So I’m walking up 5th Ave. on a crackling cold day in February.  It’s around 11thSt.  There’s a man standing on the sidewalk near the curb, looks to be kind of a blue-collar guy, and he’s talking to this older woman who’s wearing a fur coat.

She’s probably in her 70s, very upper crust.  I’m thinking he’s maybe the super in her building.  She’s friendly, and he is too.  She’s put together excellently – nice shoes, an elegant hat, and what look to me like diamond earrings.  Episcopalian.  She’s relaxed and smiling and wearing this full-length fur coat, I don’t know if it’s mink but it might be.  The truth is I don’t know much about fur coats and couldn’t tell mink from rat.  But whatever it is, it’s classy and looks warm.

Now I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the modern world and so I don’t really live in it, but I’m aware it exists; I’m not a complete troglodyte.  Working on it, but I’m not there yet.  So I know that people have problems with fur coats – fur in general as a fashion statement or whatever.  Chrissie Hynde, Steve-O, Cloris Leachman even.  (So what's up with Cloris Leachman?)  And I get it.  You’re killing an animal to get its fur to stay warm when you don’t really need to since there are synthetic ways to stay warm now.

So, this woman in a fur coat is standing talking to her super and then another, younger woman walks up and stops and says to the rich lady, “That’s disgusting.”

“What?”  The elegant 5th Avenue dame thinks this woman might have a screw loose.  It is, after all, New York.

“Do you have any idea how many animals you killed just so you could make sure everyone knows you got a lot of money?  To make a coat like that – 20 foxes at least!”

Okay, I say to myself, at least we know it’s fox now.  Meanwhile, I’m trying to look invisible.

“It’s not fox,” says the lady, still a little startled.  “It’s sable.”

“Even worse!” cries her accuser.

So I look at this angry woman, and I am pretty sure she would never wear a fur coat.  She’s dressed in Champion sweat pants, a fleece (the modern kind, not the kind Jason was looking for), and sneakers; she's carrying a Duane Reade bag.  She’s around 5 foot 4 and weighs in at like 250.  She’s no fashion plate.  In fact, I would say the contrast between the two specimens of female humanity could not be more stark.

The super takes this opportunity to chime in.  “What is your problem?” he says with a certain edge.  Now I know from his accent he's of Latino or Spanish origin, not a rarity among New York supers, at least in the neighborhood I grew up in.

“My problem,” says Fleece without looking at him, “is that this woman is killing innocent animals.”

“I didn’t kill any animals,” says Upper Crust.

“Well, you didn’t do it with your own hands …”

“I didn’t do it at all,” Upper Crust says. “This coat has been in my family for three generations.  I inherited it, and not wearing it wouldn’t bring back those 19th-century sables that gave their lives to make it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Fleece, sweating.

“Why doesn’t it matter,” the super wants to know.

Fleece has been waiting for this question.  She sees it coming like a sweet little floater drifting out over the plate.  Yum yum, she thinks.

“Because when you wear something like this,” she says with a wave of contempt at Upper Crust and her lovely coat, “you tell everyone else it’s okay to wear fur, to buy it, to commit these crimes against life.  You’re a walking advertisement.  People see it and suddenly it’s easier to for them rationalize buying this shit.  You legitimize it!”

As I say, Fleece sees the super’s question as a gimme, a nice round pellet sailing languidly home.  And it is.  But as so often happens in these circumstances, she gets greedy.   She swings for the stands when she could have smacked a solid single to left, maybe even worked a double out of it.  You don’t want to get greedy.  There are pitchers out there who make a living off this kind of thing, offering the fat, juicy one because they think the batter won’t be able to resist.  And Fleece does not resist.

Upper Crust’s eyes fill with sadness.  I'm not sure she's accustomed to people using the word "shit" with her.  But it's sadness not shock that spreads over her face.  If you want to call the look patronizing, you’re free to do so.  I won’t stop you.  It’s a perfectly reasonable gloss.

The super doesn't care whether the lady in the fine, fine sable is being patronizing.  Maybe yes, maybe no.  He’s enjoying the moment, because he knows what comes next.  That’s the thing about New York supers: they understand the dynamics of power.

“I’m sorry, miss,” says Upper Crust, drawing out the word just a hair longer than she has to.  “But I leave others’ moral decisions to them.  It’s all I can do to make my own.  If they take my choices as endorsements, that’s really their business.  We can’t live our lives as if we were role models for every impressionable …,” and here she laid her hand on her hip to show a little steel – “for every impressionable nincompoop and sap who happens to walk by.  If you want to live like that, you go ahead, my dear.  But it doesn't interest me.  And by the way --" (a sweet little break on the ball here) -- "neither do you.”  

And with that she turns her attention to the 5th Avenue traffic, gliding downtown like a bowling ball.  I believe she might be looking for a cab, but she doesn’t hail anything.  I think she's just enjoying the moment.

So the big swing has coughed out a dribbler to the pitcher.  Fleece doesn’t even bother legging it out.  She opens her mouth to say something, but the super beats her to it.

“Abi, you gonna take care of that bluefish tonight?

Fleece gives her father a fit-to-be-tied kind of stare.

“You know, papi, you’re really embarrassing me,” she says.

“It’s okay,” the super says, “I don’t think anyone’s listening anymore.”