Onomatopoeia

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either.

-Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

That brevity is the soul of wit was never more clamorously confirmed than in these, my first few efforts at blogging.

Many thanks to those who faithfully waded into this humorless morass, whether out of friendship or curiosity.

Via hearsay from a favorite nephew I once heard that a dangling participle of a relation had sneered at my predilection for quotes from history and literature. I had always hoped that in the words of wise and great men and women I would find a peg to hang my philosophical hat on; but I see the point he was trying to make. Appropriating someone else’s intelligence as a proxy for speaking the thoughts of my own cracked head is not admirable.

Worse, it looks like trumpeting my reading; which in my case—as I found out at the LA wedding chronicled October 1, below—is a vast shallow lake of Western conceits. At this wedding a brother of the bride and I sat late, smoking cigarettes, at a remote table amidst the empty wine glasses coffee cups and dessert dishes, on the wraparound balcony surrounding the Japanese garden at Yamashiro, the Hollywood site of the wedding feast. For one reason or another, it may have been the fact that the restaurant was CalAsian, when we started talking about books, specifically coming-of-age books, and I mentioned my love for This Side of Paradise, countering, he waxed rhapsodic about the Japanese writers he had known.

I was taken aback somewhat.

The situation seemed immediately as if I were caught in a sudden duel in a foreign country. I was unaware of what my casual and dilettante remarks on literature would awaken (the brother was an administrator at a university), and the atmosphere seemed to suddenly whiff of competition. When pressed he said he had only read them in translation, a small victory for me, I suppose.

Still I was struck with the largeness of the world and its literatures, and how we in America are so seduced by the mass media we have grown. The brother took his leave, and I was left there. Our media culture is like a mammoth dybbuk; thoughtless, amoral, animal, and ready to turn on us at any time.

The Fitzgerald, then, with a loosened and limp Arrow collar, reeking of Rock & Rye or Gin Rickey; Conrad, elsewhere, admirably straddling the centuries and prefiguring the depredation of the West upon innocent aborigines-- himself, though, an avatar of who is “us,” and who is “them--” Charles Dickens, sounding more like a raving lunatic (for instance in Pickwick), than in the character of Sober Social Justice Fighter in which we hope to confirm him on the evidence of Dombey, or Our Mutual Friend; Harper Lee, George Orwell, Flannery O’Connor, et al, resounding to the clang of the ruthless gates of high school English class syllabi slamming shut, echo hollow in the face of the Rest of the World: Murakami Haruki, Forough Farrokhzad, Jorge Amado, he and she and they and it, ever and forever, usque ad finem, to the ends of the earth.

So, then, the blog. This blog. Dragging in a quote whenever focus flags, or making an ungainly free-writing leap from one turgid ice-floe of a paragraph to the next, dropping in a block of unrelated statistics or a flashy image in the vain hope that the ravenous polar bear of profound, tedious, excruciating boredom does not drag my reader under, must stop. If this is to be the root of story, I must abandon all the cheap tricks I have learnt in a lifetime of easy conquests, and the last few years of costume-jewelry, fainthearted taglines that pass for English in the writing of emails and greeting cards. To see; to see, and to make it all merciless, personal.

Once upon a time... I worked in a black-tie restaurant run by gangsters. Later on, one of my customers had another of my customers killed, or so the story goes. The dead man was found in a car-trunk in Lincolnwood. They had often lunched quietly, together. They were both kind, soft-spoken men.

In this eatery I distinguished myself as a snotty, loose-limbed, pot-smoking, coke-snorting, chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking, over-intellectualized, preening asshole, and that was on my good days. Fortunate for me I was so stupid and such an inconsequential loser I was not worth killing. I was broke, in a sick relationship with a sick girl and her sick brother, a lonely brawler, an irresponsible drifter. I wandered the city late at night, along the alleys and railroad tracks, stopped in at North Side gambling dens—The North Shore Club, Bensinger’s Billiards, Chris’s—where I could not afford to buy into a game but liked to look on, and eyeball the hot girls the flashy guys brought in.

At this white tablecoth restaurant the manager was the nephew of the owner. He was a rich, spoiled, sleek, groomed, contemptuous man-about-town, an intellectual lightweight, and although he could read and possibly write, in a primitive way, illiterate. Every chance I had I would silently rebel against him, his very essence. I dressed and got my sharp haircut and cleaned my nails and had my tux and shirts pressed and clean because I had to; this guy loved dressing up, and carried a little handbag with him so the bulge of a wallet would not disrupt the lines of his suit.

We were about the same age, and when he would make some brainless gaffe about what he thought Mike Royko meant in his column, or what he thought was the deeper meaning of a movie, or the historical truth behind the international news, I would slip a smooth little ladylike ice pick into his conversation. Not anything overtly challenging, but the kind of disrespectful indirection that was unanswerable, just like the repressed, weak and insignificant courtier I imagined myself to be. Robin (I have changed the name) would then respond in kind:

“Load my car.”

“Sweep the back-bar.”

“Get Anton’s cigar-case for him.”

Once in the locker room, deep beneath Dearborn Street, I turned to Danny Santa Rosario, a skinny, sad-eyed, curly-haired waiter from Hoboken, New Jersey. Danny’s old man broke Danny's nose for him a couple of times before leaving his mother and Danny’s two little brothers for somewhere else, and at Danny's height of five foot seven or so the nose had an out-sized, but somehow royally Roman appeal. Danny sent money home every week. He had done some time out there somewhere in the East, not very long, for stealing a car. He was quiet and reserved and smooth and polite and a very good waiter.

We all worked twelve hours on, twelve hours off, six days a week. Danny was coming on and I was coming off. I had just bought my first pair of black wingtip shoes, but I had made the mistake of breaking them in on the job. The heavy, double-layered leather creased wrong, and after twelve hours, wearing thin dress socks, the fold of the thick leather uppers had incised big bleeding cuts just above the knuckles of my two big toes.

Robin had been particularly vicious to me that day. "You're hurting us. You should quit. You should give up," he sneered, up in my face. Apparently I had been too "stiff," and "polite," with a regular customer, when breezy, casual, but beneath it a rigidly respectful acquiescence, was ever the order of the day; an order I had in some distracted way contradicted.

My shacked-up girlfriend had slept with another of our “friends;” my girlfriend's little brother had made a half-hearted attempt to cut his wrists, the paramedics took him away; I had to go to work, and I missed a deadline. My editor, at the free Chicago weekly I was writing for, fired me from my story.

Miserably, I would still collect the paycheck, although Nat, the editor, finished it himself, because he was tired of screwing around with me. Nat listened to my sad story, but he had problems of his own. He could not pile on to my misery, so he refrained from telling me what a pathetic unprofessional jackass I was to pour out my tale of serial poor judgment to him, an innocent bystander who couldn't do anything about it anyway, but he did have to reduce his losses.

I pulled the bloody black fabric out of the cuts.

"What I don’t understand,” I asked Danny, a barely throttled girl-sob rising in my chest, “why’s he got to be so personal.” Trembling, I eased my second lame foot out of its shoe. The shoe laughingly gaped at me like a satiated hound.

Danny flicked his comb out of his hairline, and just the right snap of black hair dropped perfectly onto his forehead, next to the part. His complexion was olive and perfect, and he had a porcelain smile that gleamed like the grille of a Buick, when he chose to unleash it on the occasional-- usually-- women guests. His fingernails were buffed but unvarnished, his shirt spotless like a field of snow, and he smelled faintly of Lagerfeld. As I sat there stinking, sweating from a hellish lunch and cocktail-hour of credit-card bankers with obelisk eyes and nasty, obese, over-made-up suburban women at lunch before the opera matinee, he stood over me; a single, stake-thin chord of white and black.

“Personal,” he said, working the word around his mouth like he was trying out a foreign language. Suddenly I remembered at a tasting earlier in the week (we all got to taste the menu we served, for our lunch), Danny made the same face repeating the word, "fair," when someone had used it, as in "fair play."

He looked at me, smiling, and sadly, wisely, said:“Lemme tell you something, it’s all personal.”