In the Kitchen with Vance and Craig

My friend Andrew used to say that relationships are very much a series of negotiations about outsourcing. That is, contracting to one’s partner jobs one would rather not perform, often in exchange for another task instead. For example, after what felt like an endless decade of pushing a lawn mower for hire during my adolescence, I had absolutely no desire to mow my own yard in either of the houses we owned. I outsourced that to the Craig Corporation, who didn’t find the chore as off-putting. In return, Vance Industries got stuck with weeding duty—which I didn’t exactly enjoy, but which was better than looking at the exhaust end of a lawn mower.

A lot of these trade-offs tend to be wordless exchanges that evolve with the relationship. I tend to be vague about dates. I mean, really vague. The kind of vague that makes patients with advanced Alzheimer’s seem really on the ball. My most common question about dates is not along the lines of What is today, the 16th? or even It’s Friday, right? No, I’m more likely to wrinkle my brow, try to get a few feeble brain cells a-sparking, and mumble, “Hey, um, what month are we in?” My absent-mindedness in this area does not make me an ideal bill-payer. Craig has learned over the years that it’s therefore probably best to take care of recurring payments himself. Creditors probably think so, too.

In return, I have been the one who scrubs the toilets and the bathrooms. It’s a grungy task, but someone’s got to do it. Honestly, I don’t mind it in the least. It’s just some spraying and some wiping and some mopping. Plus it smells good, after. I can wash my hands when I’m done and still feel cleaner than if I’d sent checks to the utility companies. Toss in most of the cat pan duties, and I’d say it’s still a fairly even exchange.

My parents had their own trade-offs. My dad hated proofreading his own articles, so my mother would fire up a pot of coffee and light up a cigarette and have at it while he, in exchange, would make school sack lunches for us. He performed mysterious rites under the hoods of the cars while she tended the vegetable garden. And though he did all the grocery shopping every Saturday morning, she was the one who for a time did all the cooking.

Cooking duties were probably the biggest bone of contention between them when I was growing up. My mother disliked cooking, and her nature rebelled against the then-common assumption that she should be the one stuck at the stove merely because of her gender. However, my father’s repertoire in the kitchen consisted solely of one dish: a chili made with ground beef, a can of kidney beans, a can of tomato sauce, and a whole mess of Minute Rice. Even with my dad making chili once a week and with him guaranteeing a take-out pizza or Arby’s sandwiches for everyone on another, that was still five dinners a week she had to plan and prepare. (Forget breakfasts and lunches. As soon as we were weaned from her breast milk, we were pretty much on our own for those.) As far as she was concerned, that was still five meals a week too many.

And she let us know it, too. During a particularly self-pitying moment in my childhood she sat down with a pencil and a pad of paper, performed a rapid series of calculations on the ruled pages in her impeccable hand, and figured out how many more dinners she had to prepare until both her children had graduated high school—the point at which she felt her indentures ended, apparently. For years after she’d chip away at that number, meal after meal. “Two thousand, one hundred and seven,” she’d growl as she’d chuck down a plate loaded with pot roast in a uniform gray, some potatoes on which she’d taken out her frustrations while mashing, and a few watery green beans that had come from a can. Or, “One thousand, eight hundred and forty-five,” as from the other side of the room she’d fling sodden chunks of meatloaf and lukewarm store-bought rolls.

I’m shortchanging my mother’s cooking a little. The dishes she genuinely liked turned out well—like cornbread from scratch or fluffy angel biscuits or any of the stews that struck her fancy. Occasionally she’d be inspired to try a Julia Child recipe that she and my father would enjoy. She claimed she made a good steak and kidney pie, but since the prospect of eating kidneys had me hiding behind tall furniture rather than coming anywhere near the kitchen table where we ate, I never found out. She didn’t like desserts, but she made good cakes and tortes and pies. Most of the everyday dinners, however, she approached with the same enthusiasm of a condemned man his noose.

I’ve been reminded of my mother in recent months because we’ve been planning—at long last—to move again in the early new year. The one-bedroom flat in which we’ve been living since 2011 is cute and cozy, but it’s also so cramped that about eighty percent of our old Detroit household has been in storage for two and a half years. Long enough, that is, so I no longer remember what’s in any of those dozens and dozens of boxes that have never been unpacked since they left Michigan. Originally when we took up residence in our current place, we thought we’d be there for two months, three months. Six months at the most. I laugh now at what naive children we were.

Anyway, the house to which we’ll be moving actually looks as if it might be nearing the completion of its renovation. Since November we’ve had to spend a little bit of time picking out appliances and countertops and knobs and all the other things that keep HGTV in business. I’ve outsourced my vote in these matters to Craig because I really don’t care if the floor is sandy taupe or taupey sandstone, nor do I have a strong opinion on the entire Oval Knobs vs. Round Knobs debate. For all I care the knobs can be molded from the late Gore Vidal’s nipples, the floor can be electric blue, the cabinets a metallic faux crocodile, and the countertops made of recycled porcelain from NYC subway urinals. I just want my chest freezer back, dammit.

Early in the renovation process we were over at the house looking at the gutted kitchen and the taped outlines of where the cabinets and the appliances would be installed. “I must have a good working triangle!” Craig declared, as in the air he made wild gestures. “Refrigerator! Stove! Sink! I must have space! Working space! Counter space, to prepare my meals!” He bit his lip, wheeled around, and narrowed his eyes at one corner of the room. “I wonder if we could get a professional oven.”

Reader, I smirked. I couldn’t help it. I just found it funny. Perhaps it was more of a snort than a smirk, because it made Craig wheel around. Hands on his hips, he glared at me as if he were Gordon Ramsay demanding to know where the fuckety fuck were his fucking Yorkshire puddings, and I was some contestant on Hell’s Kitchen asking, What’s a Yorkshire pudding, again? In answer to his unspoken question, I cleared my throat and said, in my mildest tones, “I just think it’s cute that you pretend to know how to work an oven.”

He stiffened. He regarded me as Dame Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey might stare down a jocular tradesman who asked if she kept a flask of hooch up her bustle. “I beg your pardon.”

“Well honey,” I said. “You never cook. You don’t cook.”

Which is verifiable. I didn’t say he can’t cook. He just doesn't.

It’s true that in our early life together he had to be gently trained a little on Things Not To Do In A Kitchen, like putting a piping hot pan directly onto a glass refrigerator shelf (the shelf shattered). And it’s also a fact that long, long ago, he would on occasion attempt to prepare dinner with new and exciting recipes. His blood-rare pork tenderloin was not a personal favorite of mine. We also both still shudder at the memory of his Southern Hamloaf—a mound of ground ham studded with golf ball-sized onion chunks. Curiously, while the meat managed to bake to a consistency of hot Underwood’s Deviled Ham (I’m not claiming that’s a good thing, mind you), the onions remained raw and cold. I’d say the dish tasted like a goddamned salt lick with some goddamned raw onions, but I don’t want to be unkind to either the salt lick or the onion industry.

In point of fact, the only meal that Craig had prepared in the kitchen where we’ve lived for nearly three years was his chili—which is the exact same chili my father used to make in my youth. Ground beef, a can of kidney beans, a can of tomato sauce, and a whole mess of frozen microwavable brown rice. (Not Minute Rice. We’re not savages.) Yes, as I’ve realized many times throughout my life, I have married my father.

Now. I have to be fair and point out that the above conversation took place in the early autumn. I was knocked flat on my back sick for a good six weeks during the months of October and early November, and didn’t have the strength to sit upright, much less stand in the kitchen cooking. While I was recuperating, Craig really stepped up to the plate for mealtimes. By ‘stepped up to the plate,’ I don’t entirely mean ‘went to Taco Bell and regarded me worriedly while he chewed his burrito’, either. He fiddled until he turned on the oven, he fired up the gas range, and he made some credible meals. From recipes I printed for him in large type and verbally annotated from the living room sofa with helpful tips like “CUT THE POTATOES INTO QUARTERS!” or “MAKE SURE YOU SPRAY THE PAN FIRST!”

Helpful . . . condescending. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

As I resumed my health, though, I’ve noticed that he hasn’t exactly insisted on preparing meals again. I’ve been back in the kitchen, happy to be back on my feet again. He’s back in the living room, watching Chopped and fantasizing about his new kitchen.

Last week, in fact, we went over to the house and let ourselves in so that we could look at the installed cabinets and countertop. Craig stretched his arms wide and extended his fingertips in a Christ-like pose. “I cannot wait,” he intoned, with hushed reverence. Then again, “I cannot wait to begin . . . my work!”

He sounded like an elderly French chef stepping into a professional kitchen after a forced indenture of three years heating up McMuffins in a microwave. He sounded like Isadora Duncan, long scarf sweeping the boards, stepping onto the stage of Covent Garden after being long away.

I snickered, of course, and reached out to touch him gently on the arm in a conciliatory way so I could tell him that yes, Madame Isadora, the cans of kidney beans will be arranged to his rigid mise en place. Before I could get in my good-natured dig, however, he narrowed his eyes at me. “Zip it,” he growled.

I let the man dream.

Man Bites Shaggy Dog

There I was, settling down in my seat at the Starbucks where all the off-duty drag queens hang out, when on the other side of the armchair opposite, I saw Patrick Stewart.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Here in the metro NYC area we ordinary people spy celebrities from time to time. My friends have had fabulous sightings. Fabulous. Laurence Fishburne. Meryl Streep. De Niro. Even out here in the not-so-far-flung suburbs we have Meryl (again) dining at the little restaurant down the avenue, or Laura Linney filming at the little civic center, or Tyler Perry eating lunch in the church. Why, Beyonce and Jay-Z recently dropped by for a quick lunch at the local Cosi. Why, I can’t imagine. I mean, Cosi has a fine Cobb salad, but if I were Beyonce the only way I’d slum it at a chain like Cosi would be if I’d wandered out for the day with less than twenty bucks slipped into my skin-tight gold spandex catsuit. Am I right?

Stellar celebrities abound here. That is, I haven’t seen any of them. But I’ve heard. For a very very long time, my only celebrity sightings have been of the minor Z-list reality TV show variety. No, I don’t mean the time last summer when we went to that taping of America’s Got Talent at Radio City Music Hall and saw Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn and a wee, Pee-Wee-Herman-doll-sized Zac Posen. That hardly counts as a celebrity sighting at all, because Heidi was paid to be there, since she was judging the domino-felling, talking-dog, juvenile-stripper contestants. Tim and Zac were just at her side to be supportive. Besides, they were so far away.

Which in the end was probably a good thing, since it prevented me from lunging like the rabid fan-boy I am at Tim Gunn to tell him I was one of the only five people who actually made it all the way through his book Gunn’s Golden Rules and that if I were ever invited to his apartment for an overnighter (hint, hint) (and not that way, you pervs. Just to sleep on his futon after a long night of gossip and rumination about Art and Fashion!) I learned from Chapter 10 (“Be A Good Guest Or STAY HOME!”) not to mess with the remote controls on his coffee table like his niece did when she was trying to watch cable, because the cable service is on component rather than Aux 2, since Aux 2 is connected to his DVD player and besides, why would anyone, related or not, be so presumptuous as to mess with Tim Gunn’s remotes? All that might have been a little bit too much to yell at him from the warm embrace of the arms of the NYPD officers restraining me, after all.

No, the celebrities I saw . . . well, let’s just say the word sad is particularly apropos. There was the time we were walking through Hell’s Kitchen and I had a good chinwag with Chris March. Chinwag might be overstating it a tad. We were walking past Starbucks—not the drag queen Starbucks where I either saw or didn’t see Patrick Stewart—one chilly early spring afternoon. Sitting by himself on a bench outdoors sipping a piping hot Chai Cookie Latte was someone I recognized. My brain registered the face and, in that instantaneous way it occasionally does, immediately came up with a match in my database. You know this person . . . ! it told me. Cheerfully ignoring the little warning from my central processor that it was still searching, I raised my hand and yelled out, “Well heeeeeey!” in the manner one does when one sees an old friend and can’t immediately remember his name. I didn’t want to be guilty of rudely snubbing someone a buddy, after all.

Mr. March looked up from his Chai Cookie Latte in surprise, and responded exactly as someone does when accosted by someone yelling out “Well heeeeey!” in a super-friendly manner. “Heeeeey!” he said, startled.

We both wore big smiles on our faces as we stared at each other in silence. Then, right on time, my brain finished its data search. You know this person . . . from TV! My smile froze into something a little more terror stricken. He started to wear the rictus of someone thinking, Holy hell, what have I gotten myself into? Then, both of us realizing we had absolutely no basis of acquaintance whatsoever, we both said “Take care!” at the same time and with a great deal of forced gaiety.

I scrambled down the street after Craig. “That was Chis March,” I growled at him.

“Who?”

“Chis March,” I repeated. “Project Runway. Chris March.”

“Who?” Craig asked, looking around.

“You know!”

“Where?” he craned his neck around, but by then all that was left of the designer were the skid marks he’d left on the pavement in his speedy attempt to get away from the crazy guy.

Note: I don’t know for certain that Chris March was drinking a Chai Cookie Latte. That was my authorial imagination filling in a few of the details to make the experience richer for my readers. But he seems the type. Am I right?

Then there was the time a few months later we were walking by a row of townhouses in the Village. “Hey,” I said, when we passed a window. I stopped us in our tracks. “That’s that guy,” I said, nodding inside, where a hairdresser was taking care of a client.

“What guy?” asked Craig.

“That guy!” I said, exasperated. “That guy on that awful show we watch.”

“Which awful show we watch?” he said. My previous reply, I had to admit, didn’t exactly narrow the field. We watch a lot of awful shows.

“You know!” I groped around for the answer. “The A List: New York.”

“Which guy?” Craig wanted to know. “The dumb pretty one?”

“Don’t talk about Rodiney that way,” I pouted.

“The one from The Amazing Race?”

“No.”

“The bitchy one?”

“The hag?”

I shook my head. “No. The one who isn’t any of those.”

We both stared at the hairdresser for a brief moment, then shrugged at each other, and went on our merry way.

My luck turned briefly on a brisk winter afternoon earlier this year when I was walking down Seventh Avenue and passed Harvey Fierstein straggling in the opposite direction. He was wrapped in some kind of bedraggled-looking wooly jacket usually seen on wrinkled Russian babushkas and was carrying an armful of folders. He looked very tired. Oh hey, said my brain, there’s Harvey Fierstein on the way to Kinky Boots rehearsals! Not wanting a repeat of Marchgate, I managed to keep my hand down as we passed. Then a huge gust of wind assaulted us at the cross-streets. Harvey staggered and yelped. When I turned around, my brain thought to itself, Oh hey, there’s Harvey Fierstein, dropping all the Kinky Boots scripts!

I thought the sighting was quite the coup for me, until my friend Eric rolled his eyes upon hearing about it and informed me that everyone saw Harvey Fierstein. He made it sound as if ol’ Harve was the celebrity panhandler of Seventh Avenue, wandering around dressed in eccentric costumes inspired by Little Edie Beale, pleading to be recognized.

I confess: the information deflated me.

But Patrick Stewart. I mean, come on. Genuine celebrity gold right there. Sure, he might’ve had a tendency to slum it with a ray gun in that Star Trek series or being wheeled around those X-Men movies, but even as he was battling the Borg he did it in an acting style intended to make sure you’d never forget he was trained in Shakespeare, damn it. That’s one hundred percent pure class, right there. And he was sitting not six feet from me.

Or was it really him?

I’d gone into that particular Starbucks after a long afternoon walking around Manhattan with my husband. We’d gone to an art house movie. We’d done some Christmas shopping up Broadway and down 23rd. We’d spent a very long time in Home Depot looking at kitchen cabinets. I had a meeting of my Men’s Knitting Group/Downton Abbey Fan Fiction Society scheduled for later in the West Village, so we parted paths with plans to meet up again after my session. Which is how I ended up in the Village ninety minutes early for the knitting group, looking for a place to sit for a while.

Now, when I lived into Detroit, I would wander into my local Starbucks and occasionally find its six four-person tables occupied by one person apiece. I would look at those six occupied chairs and the eighteen empty chairs and put my hands on my hips and stalk out, harumphing something like, “There’s no place to SIT in this joint!” In New York City, where space and privacy both are at a premium, I have downgraded my expectations so severely that I can walk into a packed coffee shop and spy an unoccupied flat space atop the overflowing trash bin on one side of the room, and on the other a retro diner stool missing its seat so that it resembles a medieval-era anal torture spike, and complacently think to myself, “Oh, there’s puh-lenty of seating!”

But for some reason, I was lucky enough to get an actual armchair at this Starbucks. An armchair by the window! And nobody had vomited in it! I made a beeline for its upholstered comfort, stepping over assorted bags and arms and legs while clutching my skinny mocha, and sat down with a contented sigh. There were five or six similar armchairs set around the coffee table where I set my beverage; they were all occupied by well-dressed African-American men. They ignored me. As I pulled out my iPad to read, I kind of gathered, by the multiple Oooo gorls and the lengthy conversation about dress construction, that they were drag queens with some down time before their show. Normally this discovery would have fascinated me, but that’s when I spotted—I believe I might’ve mentioned it before—the man who may have been Patrick Stewart.

There he was, ensconced on the window side of the large communal table crowded with about sixteen people. He was the only one who wasn’t engrossed in a laptop or iPad or smartphone or other electronic device—a bald older gentleman with a sharp nose and intelligent eyes that danced over the pages of a trade paperback copy of À la recherche du temps perdu. All right. I couldn’t see the title. It could’ve been 50 Shades of Grey, for all I know. But he seems the type. Am I right?

Anyway, the point is that he was reading it like it was À la recherche du temps perdu. He held the book aloft so that his profile was plainly visible. Like a hand mirror prop, he held it. He read the hell out of that book in a manner intended to make sure you knew he’d held a mirror like that when he played Lear, damn it! And my helpful brain thought to itself, Wow! That’s Patrick Stewart!

Why in the world would Patrick Stewart be at a Starbucks in the West Village, I asked my brain?

Um, isn’t he going to be in some play in town soon? You know. One of the ones without songs and dancing or anything interesting?

I had to concede the point. Patrick Stewart was indeed performing in town. It was certainly conceivable that he had a Monday evening off. But really? The best thing he had to do in his spare time was to read Proust at a Starbucks in the West Village?

Why not? asked my brain.

Really? Patrick Stewart? At the communal table, no less, crowded between a Jamaican nanny with two loud lily-white brats and a congested student in flaccid corduroy who looked like he smelled like skunk?

My brain faltered a little there. Well. . . .

Come on, now. If you looked at the guy’s face, it wasn’t really Stewart-like. He looked too seedy. You’d just jumped to that conclusion because of his shiny head. After all, not every bald guy is Patrick Stewart. Some of them are Bruce Willis and William Frawley.

Maybe you’re right, said my brain. Oh god, yeah. I see it now. That’s not Patrick Stewart at all. Doesn’t look like him a bit! What a big phony that freak is!

“Ex-cuse me,” said a deep but feminine voice to my left, distracting me. The guy next to me had leaned over the coffee table to touch me lightly on the knee. He was probably the most effeminate of the drag queen cadre. Even though it was a cold and blustery day, he wore Capris with no socks and a pretty pair of orange sandals and a loose T-shirt in a particularly intense teal. He nodded at the iPad on my lap. “But do you happen to have an iPhone charger with you? My battery is fixing to expire.”

Did I have a battery charger? Hah! I scoff at such questions. My man purse is a veritable Mary Poppins carpetbag from which I can pull the entire contents of Radio Shack on demand. “Why, sure,” I told him, reaching into its bottomless depths and producing a little charger and cord.

He plugged it into the outlet between us. His phone chirped happily as he connected the other end. “Why thank you, kind sir,” he murmured through lowered lashes. “Why, I bet when you walked into this Starbucks, a pretty straight boy like you never thought he’d be sharing his charger so intimately with a queen like me, now, did you?”

I cheerfully declined to deny the pretty boy part of his inquiry. But I did say, “Oh, I’m not straight.”

My new friend’s head immediately swiveled around to his comrades. “I told you,” he said, in shady tones of victory.

When I picked up my iPad again, that big bald phony who skulked around the West Village trying to make people think he was Patrick Stewart—like anyone cared what that fraud did—had risen from the communal table and was making his way to the door. The man in Capri pants immediately lunged from his armchair, though he carefully set his phone down in the seat to make poachers knew it was occupied. “Oh, Mr. Stewart!” he cried, tripping gracefully across the crowded seating area. “Mr. Stewart! I loved you in Jeffrey!” I heard him say.

Well, god damn.

I watched as Mr. Capri Pants engaged in a minute-long conversation with the actor that concluded with them actually hugging. All the while I was cursing my bloody luck. I could recognize (kind of) Chris March. I could spot that guy from that show who wasn’t the other guys on that show, you know? I could even pick Harvey Fierstein out of a crowd—even though Harvey Fierstein is apparently the roach of the celebrity world and everyone has suffered an infestation at some time or another. But sit me six feet away from Patrick Stewart? That’s when my idiot brain decides I’m just looking at some bald poseur reading some awful novel who's parking his keister and killing time until his trendy hot yoga class on 14th Street.

When it comes to the rarified realm of spotting big cheeses, apparently I need to stick to the aisle where they stock the celebrity equivalent of Velveeta.

Am I right?

Blame It All On Carter

If you see me stumbling around Stop ’n’ Shop, having a conversation with myself in two different voices, it’s not because I’m schizophrenic. Honestly, it’s not. It’s because of former president Jimmy Carter.

First of all, math is not my strong point. I count on my fingers. At certain sums I’m adept. A two and a one? Three. I and other mentally capable five-year-olds can do that one right off the top of my head. Four plus four? Eight, right? But then I get to one of the additions that’s traditionally tough for me, like eight plus five. You might not see it, but my fingers are pulsing and my lips are silently working as I count out nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen.

Yes, I count on my fingers. I’m not proud of it. But I’m brave enough to admit to it.

Through much of school I was able discreetly to disguise my dependency on such babyish methods. I fingered my way through the multiplication tables, I twiddled my digits during long division. I managed to hit my stride during the year of geometry, but then faced setbacks during Algebra I. I didn’t understand algebra. Why had all these mysterious letters wandered in? What were they doing sidled up amongst the numbers? I had enough social difficulties in eighth grade without this worst and most confusing integration.

It didn’t help that my Algebra I teacher was a sweetheart and a pushover who happily agreed to teach the ‘gifted and talented’ class in which I’d been plonked. Since mostly I was talented at being lazy and gifted at schmoozing As out of teachers without doing any actual work, I breezed through Algebra I without actually learning anything about the basics of algebra.

It was quite a shock when in tenth grade I landed in Algebra II and began carrying home Ds and Fs on my homework and report cards. My parents at first thought it was because of the teacher. And it was, really. It was the teacher giving me failing grades that I deserved because I had no idea how to balance an equation. There were four or five of us in the class from my Algebra I year, however, and we were all in the same boat. Our parents decided to hire a tutor for us from the local seminary, however. We must’ve been gifted enough—or as I suspect, frightened of our parents’ wrath—because within a couple of months we’d caught up to the rest of the class and I managed to score a respectable, though not enthusiastic, B on my final report card.

Trigonometry was the bane of my senior year. I was fascinated by Miss Bibby, my teacher, who during those late nineteen-seventies apparently set a course for her personal style using Pam Grier and Blaxploitation films as her north star. She taught her class in a stern and unsmiling manner, pointer gripped as tightly in her hand as might a dominatrix brandish a whip, dressed in super-tight pants with flares and a faux-fur jacket, or in high and shiny patent-leather lace-up boots with stiletto heels, a thigh-high skirt, and a diaphanous top that exposed plenty of her ample cleavage. She was addicted to wigs. One day she’d show up in a long ponytail that hung down to her butt. The next she’d have an enormous Coffy-style Afro. (“You call her Coffy and she’ll cream you!”) As fascinating as Miss Bibby herself could be, I sat there day after day in the classroom feeling futile about what we were doing there. I knew I’d never use trigonometry in my future. I never saw my parents calculating a negative sine.

It was when I was fifth or sixth grade that Jimmy Carter really pushed the Metric Conversion Act that had been passed in 1975. In the school system it was a big deal. The metric system was the future of America! We were the only country in the world that hadn’t been metricated, and it was going to happen by 1980, by gum! In math and science classes we watched movies about the metric system and how natural and easy it was to use. We gleefully abandoned traditional twelve-inch rulers in favor of the newer, shinier, more novel metric versions. We were the future, we were told over and over again.

We were also instructed to become little evangelicals for the cause. Our teachers wanted us to use the metric system at home, and gave us the formulae so that we could annoy our parents by telling them it was 13 degrees Celcius outside, or rolling our eyes when they mentioned such hilariously outmoded and antique conventions as ‘miles’ or ‘inches’. The metric system was in, baby, and we were the vanguard!

I actually loved the metric system. English measurements were based on weird fours and eights and twelves, but the ten-times table was easy. Converting three hundred and seventy inches to feet required a lot of work, but all I had to do to convert centimeters to meters was move the decimal point. Those decimal points weigh nothing. And of course I, who was gifted at avoiding as much work as possible and talented at mental torpor, very quickly decided that if the metric system was the future, I’d make a clean break from those English measurements that were as current as, say, dentistry with pliers, or rapid transit via velocipede.

So I simply never learned how many cups were in a pint, or how many pints were in a quart, or how many quarts were in a gallon. It was too much math. Too many fingers to count. Then the rest of the seventies was disco, and CB radio, and the Iran hostage crisis. Then came the eighties and Ronald Reagan, and the metric system was absolutely not the future any longer. People stubbornly stuck to their ounces and their pounds, their bushels and pecks and miles and pints, and like Ishmael, I alone was left to tell the tale of a time when we were promised—promised—that everything could be divided by ten.

But back to Stop ’n’ Shop. There I was, two days before Thanksgiving last week, pushing around an overloaded cart. Connecticut mommies were swerving out of my way as I passed, because like someone without adequate access to mental health care I was talking to myself in an erratic and eccentric manner. In two different voices. Only I wasn’t, really. I had my iPhone clutched in my hand as I stared in panic at the canned goods, knowing that the pie recipe I was using required two cups of pureed sweet potato and how the hell many was that in ounces? Did I need the big can or the small can? Or the one that looked like it should be purchased by a Mormon survivalist? “How many ounces are in two cups?” I asked Siri, in a frenzy.

Siri always obliges when I’m in a demoralizing panic. “There are sixteen! Ounces! In a cup!” it replied, soothingly.

I raced to the dairy aisle. “How much is two cups in pints?!”

“Two cups! Are one pint!”

“Oh my god, how many god-damned teaspoons are in a god-damned gallon?!”

“There are seven hundred! And sixty-eight! God-damned teaspoons! In a god-damned gallon!”

Siri’s cursing is pure wish-fulfillment in the last one. But I get the sense that Siri would loosen the tie a little bit and let loose with profanity outside business hours.

Either way, when I’m lumbering through the supermarket, crashing my cart into little old ladies and mumbling questions to myself that my coat pocket answers and then counting on my fingers, I’m sure I’m a sight to see. And in the meantime, no matter how many times I ask the same questions over and over, I never remember. It’s too late for me. My brain is too feeble and aged to forge the new neural paths for junk I should’ve learned in fifth grade.

Damn you, former president Jimmy Carter! That Metric Conversion Act turns me into a social outcast whenever I set foot in a grocery store!

I Sniffed These Candles So You Don't Have To

For most of the month of October I was sick. Sick as a dog. If I wasn’t shivering and shaking hard enough to jar the fillings from my teeth, I was sprawled on the sofa licking my parched lips and listening to the sounds of the buzzards circling the desert sands upon which I seemingly had been abandoned. I was weak. I was miserable.

But thanks to the specialist I’ve been seeing, I’m feeling better. Thanks for asking. And then my husband, sweet guy that he is, decided to cheer me up by taking us on a quick weekend getaway to Vermont. He had it all planned out; we’d stay at a historic little bed and breakfast in the mountains, we’d maybe visit some kind of place that sold (what else) maple products, we’d visit the Ben and Jerry’s factory, we’d explore downtown Burlington.

He even, as I found out on the morning of our departure, had selected where we would eat that night. “I’ve found the perfect restaurant,” he told me.

“What’s the name of it?” I asked, contemplating my socks.

“Um, I’ve forgotten.”

“What do they serve?”

“You know,” he said. “Smoked . . . things . . . and pig stuff.”

“Mmmm,” I said, rubbing my belly. “Smoked things and pig stuff. You know, honey, the world of advertising daily mourns that you did not share with them your abundant descriptive gifts.”

“Shut up!” he said. With affection, I’m sure.

I’ve never been to Vermont before. I didn’t know the danger that lurked on the freeway between here and there. It wasn’t until we’d traversed Connecticut and most of Massachusetts that I even noticed a highway advertisement for the Yankee Candle Factory flagship store. Out of politeness, I wasn’t sure whether I should mention it or not. When I saw Craig craning his neck in order to read the details. I kept my mouth shut.

To say that my husband, in the past, has had a little bit of a candle addiction problem is an understatement. When we moved three years ago, I had to dispose of two giant Hefty bags full of unused candles—it felt like about two hundred pounds’ worth of wax that I hauled out to the curb or dumped on friends’ doorsteps. He doesn’t use the candles, mind you. He just buys them. Then he hides them away from the light of day while talking to himself, like Gollum with the One Ring. Taking him to the Yankee Candle flagship store seemed like it would be a little bit like driving a recovering alcoholic to the Smirnoff Factory Outlet, or parachuting a heavy cocaine user right into El Salvador with unmarked treasury bills strapped to his chest.

But, you know. It was a mini-vacation. And he’d gone to all the trouble of arranging the bed-and-breakfast and a dinner of pig stuff. When we passed an urgent last-chance! turn here now! billboard on the road and I saw that longing look in his eyes, I couldn’t resist. “Do you want to go?” I asked. “We can go.”

I still have the bump on my head from the hard swerve he took onto the exit lane.

What I recall of the Yankee Candle flagship store is as a feverish dream; I’m still not sure how much of my memories were actually potpourri-induced hallucinations. From the outside, I was led to expect that the store itself would be perhaps a little larger than the average mall candle franchise. Once inside, however, I realized it was a Tardis-like never-ending expanse of rooms full of wax-filled bottles in every shade of the rainbow opening into other rooms containing even more candles in even more eye-popping colors and nose-stripping scents, opening into confusing corridors lined with popcorn and fudge vendors that circled back into even more rooms filled with even more candles. I vaguely remember a room filled with artificial spruces and Christmas candles in which fake snow blew down onto us from the ceiling. There was a room full of gargoyles and candles of a deep purple hue. For over an hour we wandered without direction from place to place, uncertain what would lie around the next corner (but still pretty certain all the same that it would involve candles) and wondering when it would end.

If there is a Limbo, it’s a lot like the Yankee Candle Factory flagship store. We basically were trapped in an Escher engraving, if Escher had ever accepted a commission from the Association of American Beeswax Manufacturers. And along the way, I smelled a lot of candles. A lot of candles. In fact, I regard my excursion into the dark heart of the Yankee Candle Factory as a selfless act. I actually smelled these candles so that you, reader, would not have to. And these are the conclusions I have drawn about what the candles claim to be, and what they actually smell like. Here goes.

Cozy Sweater: Ass.
Autumn Wreath: Spicy ass.
Leather: Sweaty chapped ass. And not the good kind.
Fluffy Towels: Bounce fabric sheets.
Cream Colored Ponies: Sweet Jesus, who thinks of these scents? Another Bounce fabric sheet dipped in vanilla.
Merry Marshmallow: The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, after he’s exploded in Ghostbusters.
Mmm, Bacon!: Easily the worst scent of the afternoon. Liquid smoke extract with no hint of pig stuff whatsoever.
Queen Anne’s Lace: What? Queen Anne’s Lace doesn’t even have a scent. If it did, it would be the smell of highway gasoline fumes and burnt-out tires.
Turkey and Stuffing: There was one holiday in which Craig’s mother turned up with a turkey that smelled so rancid I was convinced she’d gotten it by accident from a hospital for turkeys with incurable leprosy. I had to excuse myself from the kitchen and dry-heave in the bedroom, the scent was so awful. It turned out that she’d forgotten to retrieve the plastic bag with the neck and the gizzard from the turkey’s inside before she baked it. This candle smelled worse than that.
Red Velvet: Vanilla.
Shortbread Cookie: Vanilla.
Snowflake Cookie: Vanilla.
Almond Amaretto Biscotti: Vanilla. And ass.
Cherries on Snow: Why in the world would you take your cherries out into a snowstorm, much less leave them there? Are cherries even in season at the same time it snows? Why can’t you just eat your cherries inside and in a bowl or dunked in a nice Cosmo? Get it together, people! Cherry-scented ass.
Patchouli: Hippie ass.
Man Town: Musk, and ass.
First Down: There’s a photo of a football on the jar, but basically it smells like an assy locker room in which everyone has a scorching case of athlete’s foot.
Whiskers on Kittens: Cat ass.
Riding Mower: Grass.
Treehouse Memories: The sweet scent of autumn leaves, mingled with traces of sawdust from the freshly-hewn wood forming the sturdy floor of a child’s treehouse . . . in which someone has let rip an enormous fart.

Don’t thank me. You’re already welcome.

Stephen Schwartz Ruined My Goddamned Youth

My parents’ musical tastes crystalized sometime right around 1960. Folk music filled the metal rack that held their portable record player—and by ‘portable’ I mean that if you wrapped both your paws around the handle and really put your back into it, you could probably move the device a few inches without needing a furniture dolly. (Do it twice and you wouldn’t have to work out the rest of the week.) Odetta and the Kingston Trio knocked boots with the Limeliters, and they all cowered before the mighty typhoon that was Harry Belafonte.

But they also had a great appreciation for show tunes. If earnest folk music took up half their collection of LPs, what they called ‘soundtracks’ filled the rest. “Original cast recordingsssss,” I can hear some Broadway queen hiss, anxious to show both his fangs and his 45th Street cred. Whatever. To my parents they were soundtracks, and the soundtrack of my youth was equal parts songs about holes in a bucket and hammering in the evening all over the land as well as considering yourself part of the furniture and blossoms of snow blessing my homeland forever.

When the cast album of 1776 came out, it intersected so neatly with my parents’ profession as history professors that they wore out the vinyl. We were the first household I knew to own the concept album of Jesus Christ Superstar; when it came out the recording was regarded as blasphemous in traditional circles, but it was fairly de rigueur among a certain type of academic intellectuals. My mother had a soft spot for My Fair Lady. My dad was more of a South Pacific kind of guy. Both of them, however, regarded The Music Man as a high point in the American musical theater. When the first cast album I ever bought with my own money turned out to be the original Broadway version of Evita, my mother sniffed a little and said it was all right but no Fantasticks.

There was one show, however, that was absolutely forbidden from my parents’ household. Cast album, soundtrack, or symphonic interpretation—they were all banned. In fact, so thorough and effective was the prohibition that it wasn’t until I was thirteen I knew the show even existed. My seventh-grade language arts teacher was a weedy little man with a wispy Benjamin Franklin ‘do who’d wanted to be a professional poet in his youth. Sadly for him, his only backup career was teaching literature to ungrateful little public school kids. His big bid for ‘relevance’ was to have us read first Romeo and Juliet over the course of two weeks, and then compare it in the next two to West Side Story.

And I was all like, West Side Whaaaaat?

I honestly hadn’t ever heard of it. Leonard Bernstein I knew. We’d played the Candide overture in citywide band. But while a couple of the girls in my class instantly were able to warble out strains from “Tonight” and “Maria” when they heard about what we’d be doing, I was totally in the dark. The teacher, when he wasn’t grabbing remnants of the lank long blond hair that still clung stubbornly to either side of his otherwise bald skull and saying private prayers to a stone-faced God who’d condemned him to harsh penance at Henderson Middle School, seemed to assume that we all knew the gist of West Side Story. And he was probably correct to do so. A good twenty-one years after its premier, the musical certainly wasn’t as current or hip as he seemed to assume, but just about everyone had seen the movie on TV at some point and knew it had that lady from The Electric Company in it. West Side Story was simply a part of the culture at the time.

Except my culture, of course. I went home and looked to see if my parents happened to have a copy of it among their soundtracks. No such luck. On my own initiative, I took the bus to the Richmond Public Library and checked out the original cast album from the music library. I’d just put the needle into the overture and pulled out my paperback combining Romeo and Juliet with the screenplay of West Side Story when my mother came home.

She gave me the coldest stare I’d ever gotten. “What,” she intoned frostily, “is that.”

I told her it was West Side Story.

“I know what it is!” she barked. “Don’t you know that’s banned from this house?!”

With astonishment, I had to tell her that I didn’t even know West Side Story was a thing until that week, so how could I know it was banned? She told me not to be mouthy. Once I’d convinced her that I wasn’t trying to be all teenaged-defiant on her by bringing proscribed Broadway tunes into our Presbyterian household and that I genuinely had a curiosity to know what the songs sounded like that we were discussing in language arts class, she set her lips into an unamused line, marched over to the file cabinet where we stored miscellaneous items, and returned with a pair of over-the-ear headphones.

It was the nineteen-seventies. The headphones were more cumbersome than the biggest gem-bedecked headdress ever donned by a showgirl at the Ziegfeld Follies. They were so heavy that if I didn’t sit up perfectly straight and keep my neck rigid, I’d find myself thrown off-balance and sent sprawling down to the floor. Once she’d planted them over my ears, I saw her lips moving with warning.

I had to remove the headphones to hear what she’d said. “What?”

She glared at me. “Don’t let your father find out.”

I found out later that the ban wasn’t for political reasons, like our family’s boycott of Volkswagen. Nor was it like the family ban on tuna because of the high mercury content and what the fishing industry did to those poor dolphins. My parents simply didn’t want West Side Story in the house because during their early twenties, the album was so heavily played, and its songs so relentlessly covered by every popular artist imaginable and on every radio and television channel, they reached a point of saturation from which they still hadn’t recovered. My mother said listening to “Maria” made her sick to her stomach. Which, considering her Crohn’s Disease, probably wasn’t hyperbole. She really would hug her midsection and stumble from the room, feeling unwell.

And it’s a reaction I understand as an adult, since I have my own West Side Story. It’s Godspell. Please. Never play any of its songs in front of me. Not unless you want to see me clutch my tum-tum and run for the bathroom with a sour face, while I pass copious amounts of gas. Seriously.

My distaste for Godspell arises from the period in the early nineteen-seventies when Biblical stories suddenly became fodder for mainstream musicals. Jesus Christ Superstar hit like an earthquake, but its counterculture leanings and anti-government undertones were too dark in texture for any of it to be included in church services. Even its gentler songs, like “Everything’s All Right” or “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” would have had the older and crankier members of our church banging their canes on the sanctuary floor and grumping about demon rock-and-roll. A couple of years later, though, my church youth choir was romping singing the softer, playground rock of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and more especially, Godspell.

The church I attended was down the street from both the Union Theological Seminary and the Presbyterian School for Christian Education. The first was the more serious school for aspiring ministers; the latter was the more laid-back institution for full-time future Sunday school teachers who loved construction paper craft projects and the scent of paste glue. Both, in the early nineteen-seventies, were havens for post-college youth with long frizzy hair, conscientious objections to the Vietnam War, and unreasonably optimistic upbeat visions for a Coca-Cola future in which children of all races clasped hands and sang about wanting teach the world to sing in perfect har-moh-nee.

Because we were the closest Presbyterian church to these two Presbyterian educational institutions, our Sunday school classrooms overflowed with these stinky hippies. To a one, every single seminary kid came in convinced that with-it new approaches like folk-rock services would keep us kids interested in that cool cat Christ, so hey, let’s do the lotus position on some bean bag chairs and rap about The Big Guy. Jesus Christ Superstar was too dangerous to bring into the sanctuary, for several years Godspell was the pablum we were fed multiple times a week.

Oh, it was dreadful. I shudder when I think about how many Sundays we youth pranced around our sanctuary with false smiles painted wide, hands extended into jazz fingers that Bob Fosse would’ve envied, chanting endless choruses of “Day by Day.” I am quite certain that the nursing home citizens upon whom we inflicted the fake enthusiasm of our “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord”, though they pretended to nod along, were in reality praying for a swift and merciful death. Every semester, when a new batch of the permed and denimed seminary students would invade the hallways of our education wing, they’d arrive with Big Ideals and Bright Ideas and construction paper and a copy of that god-damned LP of Godspell under their hairy, stinky armpits. The first thing they’d want to do would be to tell us to join hands, close our eyes, and sway back and forth while we sang a few rounds of “Bless the Lord” together. And I would want to throw up all over again.

I honestly can’t listen to Godspell today. I reached the saturation point during the Nixon Administration and forty years hasn’t erased the stench. Just hearing a few bars of that crap sends me instantly back to a place where all the bean bag chairs were of a particular shade of orange I’ve never seen since (thank The Big Guy) and where even the most well-ventilated room couldn’t eradicate the funk of stinky hippie sandal feet. I had to sit through a high school production of the show a few years back and my stomach was in such turmoil that by the time the kids were beseeching me to learn my lessons well, I was convinced I had appendicitis.

Christ, I can’t even see a Superman T-shirt without foaming at the mouth.

You might be wondering what’s prompted me to reminisce about Godspell. It’s simply that recently we went to see the revival of Pippin on Broadway. You might’ve heard about this production. Basically it landed at the Music Box and immediately began crapping out Tony and Drama Desk awards for itself. Everyone kept telling me it was the best Pippin ever. And my reaction to that statement was to recoil in horror and turn up my nose, much as if someone had offered me a big banquet plate of liver and onions and assured me it was the most scrumptious urine sponge I would ever put in my mouth.

Because basically I equate Pippin with Godspell, Stephen Schwartz’s other score doomed to countless bad college and community theater productions. (Perversely, I like The Baker’s Wife.) Both are earnest as hell. Both are relics of the hippie era. Both employ jazz fingers.

But when I got cheap tickets to the current production, I went with an open mind. You know what? It probably is the best Pippin I’ve ever seen. It’s colorfully staged, and energetically performed, and peppered with great performances. I loved Rachel Bay Jones as Catherine. The sets are eye-popping.

Yet I still dislike the musical itself, and it all boils down to the character of Pippin. My personal tolerance is low for watching a young hero whine—through hummable Stephen Schwartz songs—for three hours that a meaningful life hasn’t simply been handed to him on a velvet pillow. To Bob Fosse and anyone under the emotional age of fourteen back in the day, all that adolescent angst might’ve been fascinating. I simply find Pippin’s never-ending dissatisfaction to be a drag. The show might as well have been entitled White Male Entitlement: The Musical!

Pretty as this new production was, it still left me wanting to stand up in my seat and shout STFU, PIPPIN! Quitcher bellyaching, PIPPIN. Rivers might belong where they can ramble and eagles might belong where they can fly, but assholes belong in a pair of Hanes, PIPPIN. And the damned show still has jazz fingers.

Then the circus performers would come out again and do some fire-breathing tricks and distract my irritation at the source material. That’s probably the way I like my Pippin: with as much diversion as possible to keep me from remembering what show I’m watching.

Still. At least it isn’t Godspell.

Beware of Falling Objects

In recent months I treated myself to a ticket to a certain Broadway play. There was singing. There was dancing. There was a big-name star, and some smaller-name supporting actors whom I recognized. But no, I shan’t say which play it was, because I’m about to give away the show’s ending—and frankly, I don’t need anyone shrilling at me that I’ve utterly and irrevocably ruined a theatergoing experience for them by discussing plot points.

Because I am definitely going to discuss this particular plot point, by gum. God knows the only thing more annoying than someone who insists you insert **SPOILER ALERT** in front of statements concerning age-old plot twists like **SPOILER ALERT** “…and then they hung Jesus on a cross” or **SPOILER ALERT** “Who knew Rosebud was a sled?” is someone who has no actual intention of reading the book, seeing the movie, or watching the play, but loves castigating people for not typing **SPOILER ALERT**.

Anyway.

So I went to see this play. I enjoyed the play. It was a perfectly decent play. I laughed. I cried. I tapped my little toe to the musical numbers. I held my breath during the big-name star’s climactic monologue. I realized the final scene was coming, and I set aside my Playbill so that I could break into applause at the appropriate moment. I was ready.

Then it happened. The last five seconds of the show. Because, after the big-name star took center stage and uttered his last line—well, I can only really describe it by reconstructing the play’s final stage direction, which apparently read:

(OUR HERO looks up into the fly space. Then a stage light drops on his head and kills him. Curtain. THE END)

Everyone around me was applauding. Me, I was on my feet shouting, “WTF, MISTER PLAYWRIGHT?!”

Because it really was that bad an ending. Could it be argued that beaning your star with a falling object is a trenchant way of expressing the absurdity of his very existence? Mmmmmaybe. By some pretentious grad school student, that is. I’m more likely to argue that the guy who wrote the damned thing is probably so scary as a personality and considers himself so much above criticism at this point in his career that everyone associated with the play and its production was probably terrified to approach him and say, “Um, hey, did you know that this ending would get you a raised eyebrow and a D+ in a freshman playwriting class?”

For me, the sheer stupidity of the ending negated all the good things that had gone before. I had two whole hours of good will erased by the play’s final half-dozen seconds. I mean, it’s months later and I’m still grinding my teeth over it.

The ending reminds me, in a way, of the days when I used to love reading Anne McCaffrey’s science fiction novels. They weren’t good, mind you. I just loved reading them. McCaffrey had a canny way of hooking you into her unlikely settings through relatable characters, and for a good twenty years she was at the top of both her game and the bestseller charts. Then the books started to decline in quality as she aged. The good guys seemed a little too much like fuzzy carbons of good guys she’d previously written; the bad guys got a little too mustache-twiddly and one-dimensional. They were bad because . . . well, not because of anything real that had happened to them, but simply because McCaffrey needed someone to work the protagonist’s last nerve.

Then came the book that ended it all for me. I think it was one of the late Pern novels. All the protagonists—because McCaffrey never settled for one good guy when she could have twelve or thirteen of them—were terribly stymied for dozens of pointless chapters because of one bad egg. He’d show up, yell at the good guys, then stomp off in a fit. Right at the book’s end, when absolutely nothing has happened and you’re wondering how in the world McCaffrey’s going to resolve everything in the remaining four pages, a meteorite drops out of the sky and hits the antagonist in the head. Then he’s suddenly no longer a threat any more, being, you know, headless and all. THE END.

It was at that point I kind of wanted to hunt down McCaffrey, gently stroke her hand, and say, Anne, honey. You’ve made a few bucks. Why not retire and enjoy them a little, hon? Bless your heart.

So I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that as a general rule, ending your work by beaning your characters, sympathetic or un-, with precipitating objects is not a good idea. Want to start out the action that way? Go for it. A random house on the noggin did wonders for The Wizard of Oz. But as a resolution for all your fiction’s ills, it’s not going to work.

As a matter of fact, I’ve spent most of the morning wondering if there are any works that might improved by doing a Gallagher smash on the protagonist’s head. “Though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands—not until a metallic rock hurtling from without the earthly planes reduced both their worldly estates to ash and cinders!” doesn’t seem to work in Sense and Sensibility. It might be tempting to see the Republic of Gilead brought to its knees by a meteorite shower in The Handmaid’s Tale, but it wouldn’t be likely, and it wouldn’t do any justice to Margaret Atwood’s meticulously-imagined world. And I don’t think that even in Avenue Q, a stray stage lamp killing a faux-Muppet could be played for laughs.

Just beware of falling objects, folks. They might bring your drama to an end, but they don’t solve its issues.

Detroit Broke My Heart

A lot lately has appeared in the press on the subject of Detroit. It hasn’t been confined to last week, when the city filed for bankruptcy. Over the last few years, journalists anxious to have a byline attached to a story of depth have descended upon the Motor City to pound out paint-by-numbers profiles of the decline of an ailing post-industrial municipality.

They make identical references—the Opera House, the Heidelberg Project, obligatory mentions of Cass Corridor, Eight Mile Road, and the Delray neighborhood. They all trot out the ruined beaux-arts grandeur of the Michigan Central Station. They round things out with facile comments about returning blocks upon blocks of former neighborhoods to urban farmland, and then top off the article with a shot of a house in ruins (and there are many) in silhouette against the silvery, Emerald City-like GM world headquarters in the background. Carpetbaggers, I think of them.

Most descend upon the city like birds on carrion, feast on its misery, then quickly fly home to their comfortable homes in cities that aren’t Detroit. There they dole out delicious morsels of schadenfreude to an audience that also isn’t in Detroit. And those readers have the luxury of comforting themselves from afar, no matter what their circumstances, with the notion that at least they aren’t wallowing in a blue-collar hellhole. I find such reporting a cheap and easy form of misery porn, a swift way to cash in on the hardship of others while thwacking heartstrings of faux-sincerity and solemn melancholy that just might, in the journalist’s imagination, attract the notice of a Pulitzer committee.

Not, mind you, that Detroit’s population sometimes acquits itself much better. The city’s residents can be obdurate in their insistence that nothing’s wrong, even as they avert their gazes from chunks of the urban landscape falling to pieces around them. Residents of the extensive southeastern Michigan suburbs also turn blind eyes to the woes of the city’s core, either making vague noises of renaissance as they occasionally visit the city’s sports stadiums, or carrying out lives that never require them to tiptoe an inch south of Eight Mile.

I lived in Michigan for twenty-one years. For more than half that, I lived within the city limits. I chose Detroit as a young man. I relocated feeling excited at the notion of living in a large, diverse, and gritty urban area. I was anxious to contribute, in my own small way, at a time when the city was desperate to shed its image as the country’s crime and murder capital; I wanted to be one of its many advocates of all races and stripes who lived and shopped and labored within its limits. I went to school there. I worked and taught there. I bought my first house within the city boundaries.

And over the years, little by little by little, Detroit broke my heart.

People have a hard time believing some of my Detroit stories. When I relate the tale of my first Devil’s Night in the city, back in the dark days of the nineteen-eighties when it was popular sport for vandals to commit arson on abandoned structures, I speak of looking out from my fourteenth-story apartment across a black landscape where flames roared unchecked in every direction. Everywhere I looked seemed like a city on fire. It’s an image more appropriate for a post-apocalyptic movie than for anyone living in downtown areas that aren’t Detroit.

When I talk about how on the Fourth of July and New Year’s, for over a decade, we cowered sleepless on the floor after midnight while Detroit residents—our neighbors—shot endless rounds of ammunition from their guns into the air for hour after long hour, it sounds to outsiders like the stuff of fiction. But it happened. Not once. Not two unconnected times. It happened every year, as did the resulting damage and injuries and even deaths from the falling bullets.

Residents of the city itself considered these things commonplace. Some assume that every city is a maelstrom of raining lead and hellfire on national holidays. They would be wrong.

Detroit broke my heart. I moved into the city as an enthusiastic kid who pretended not to be unnerved when, within mere hours of arriving in my new home, I watched a squadron of police shake a rain of shoplifted knives and illegal guns from the coat of an adjacent shopper in a local market. I lived there as a young adult who accepted everyday vandalism and even sexual assault as part of the norm; I talked to friends and family about the importance of supporting local businesses though as I found them increasingly scarce, or was persuaded to abandon those left because of crime in their parking lots. I carried in my head a mental map of the most recent car-jacking spots so I could avoid them; I knew exactly which homes in the university district were crack houses, or likely to become so in the near future.

As a home owner in one of the nicer neighborhoods within Detroit’s borders—so called because city cops and firemen lived there in abundance—I watched as week after week, month after month, more homes barricaded themselves behind grilles of iron bars over the ground floor windows and doors. The cops and firemen moved out. I saw bungalows around mine start out painted and cheerful, and how over the course of a handful of years they became shabby and peeling from neglect. I saw their windows broken; I watched them become abandoned.

I learned I couldn’t put out Halloween pumpkins or Christmas decorations. I’d wake up to find the former smashed in the streets, and the latter stolen. If I planted perennials for the spring, I’d walk out into the front yard and find not just the flowers plucked, but the entire bulb uprooted and taken. Annuals would disappear, nothing left behind save for empty depressions. No one would take the weeds.

Anything not locked in my house or in the garage was likely to vanish, even those things I’d though safe behind the metal fence surrounding my back yard. I got to the point at which I was more irritated by, than chilled to the bone from, strange footprints in the freshly-fallen snow that marked a trail of someone poking around of my back yard and looking through my rear windows. I learned how to steel myself, upon coming home from work, to the sight of screens and storm panels removed and tossed into the yard so that a would-be intruder could test my windows. My home was broken into multiple times—once while I was sleeping, by a gang of a half-dozen.

Detroit broke my heart because it made me confront my constant failures. It made me feel weak when I thought I couldn’t endure for another year the thefts, the bullets, the unending crime. It made me feel ungrateful when I looked at the landscape and found little but ruin and decay and ugliness. I had to watch as the administration of the university in which I’d poured my enthusiasm became overrun with career carpetbaggers of a suburban sort—mostly white men and women who would orate hollow support of a city for which they didn’t care and in which they never tarried as they hurried back to their Grosse Pointes and Bloomfields and their Novis—while its minorities and city-dwellers were passed over for long-deserved promotions. And that made me feel I’d wasted years of effort.

The city made me feel like a battered spouse for defending it to outsiders—which I would, for a long time, before I realized that its only response to my so-called loyalty was to smack me hard in the face yet again, as soon as anyone’s head was turned. When I was bowed and beaten by too many home invasions and exited to the suburbs, it reproached me both for my former youthful idealism, for abandoning it. When I left Michigan altogether, and felt my head clear of all kinds of ugliness I’d taken for granted over the decades, I felt as if I’d made a poor investment of twenty-one years of my life.

That’s how Detroit broke my heart.

My experience is my own. It doesn’t generalize to anyone else.

There’s enough Detroiter in me still that when I see these news stories online capitalizing upon the city’s woes, I automatically click. I feel compelled to tsk at both the assumptions and shortcuts the carpetbagger journalists take and at the dreadful realities the stories still expose. There’s enough Detroiter in me still that I become angry at the ignorant and judgmental conclusions to which outsiders leap when they’re confronted by the city’s conundrums. Three days of Detroit might make fodder for some blogger’s earnest condescension or for some photographer’s Flickr account. But to me it’s mere catastrophe tourism—a roller-coaster tour of decay on automatic tracks. Those insights aren’t merited. Just experienced at their most shallow level.

Not that my insights are much better, I grant you. But I earned ‘em. I’m still trying to grapple with the lessons of my Detroit decades. It’s a place where I came into my own, even as the city and its economics and the ignorance of those within and without the city limits all attempted to thwart me at every turn. It proved my strengths and endurance even as it exposed my naiveté and weakness. I find I resent Detroit while still remembering a young man’s love for it.

Speedy journalistic fly-bys intended to increase page visits will never capture the quixotic essence of issues that have been decades in the making. Covering Detroit as a disaster zone panders to the quick haunted house chill, the flash of reassurance we feel upon glimpsing a poverty and desperation we hope never to experience.

It’s easy to toss up an image of Detroit’s most abject ruin against a shiny skyscraper meant to embody hope. It’s an obvious contrast. However, these cookie-cutter photographs capture neither the hopes and dreams of the people who live and work within these buildings, nor the contradictory stubbornness that makes Detroit’s population reluctant to change. They ignore the many harsher juxtapositions that Detroiters endure and take for granted day by day and year by year, as they dwell surrounded by a past in shambles and look forward to a future that’s at best uncertain.