I Have a Cat

I have a cat.
This is more than a claim, more than a fact.
I have a cat.
This is a boast.
He is gray with a quarter-sized chunk of fur missing on his left shoulder. He is on the small side. No matter— he can decimate upholstery a hundred times his size, and on two occasions asserted his territory with a toxicity rivaling Chernobyl’s.
He survived dark and hunger, he survived exhaust fumes, perilous screeching radials and bad tippers. He was a parking garage refugee and I took him in.

Charity is unknown in catland. Cats understand charity like humans understand crop circles or Pynchon. I expected no thanks and got none. An eighteen month détente with one castrating trip to the vet culminated in our present circumstances.
He asks for food whether he has some or not. Louder, if not.
He is suspicious of anything new— persons, places, and particularly aromas.
He disappears. Every discovered hiding place in my apartment results in his re-discovery of a new one. I have stopped looking, fearing the discovery of a dimensional portal better left alone.
He will bide time in my lap, but prefers the radiator.
Occasional soliloquies escape him in vowel complexities suggesting dire, extravagant warnings, and my imitative replies are returned with condescending looks. I suspect he is a great liar.
The sum of our disparate worldview is respectful coexistence. We get along.
He often sleeps beside me.
His purr is Brahms.

Satan Sighting

I met Satan the other day. Funny I hadn’t noticed him before, it was immediately apparent he’d been hanging around all along and I just wasn’t paying attention.
One thing about Satan— he’s cool. That hyperbolic canard about fire and brimstone couldn’t have been less in evidence from the placid nodding glance he tossed me, inducing a brief ice cream migraine. Nothing odd, either, about the entrails he washed down with a sip of Chardonnay. Blink. You’d have blinked, too. I mean— Chardonnay? Then the flash of lizard tongue tidying up a lock of hair, all nonchalance. Two milliseconds of deniable visual data, nothing but my own crawling flesh as evidence. Then he coolly dismissed me, resuming a conspiratorial exchange with his entourage, hooting and guffawing.

“I just got Sataned,” I thought dumbly. An avalanche of doubt about my coolness crashed around me. I scanned the room for refuge. The place was swimming with predators, sycophants, parasites. Definitely uncool. Then the John Carpenter hallucination succumbed to a sudden epiphany: this is for my benefit! I’m the audience! I shed my sheepishness and reviewed the scene anew with serpent’s eyes.
Satan flicked an approving glance my way, which was intercepted by a hammerhead, who immediately attacked. He pulled up short when I grinned admiration at his teeth while the lamprey on my earlobe succumbed to giggles at my sanguine reception and a big cat sheathed his claws giving me leave to pluck a thorn. Over by the piano a gay calypso broke out among the bivalves. With the party animal mentality prevailing, I nearly forgot Satan, who’d switched to bourbon and was comparing incisors with a marmot from Detroit.

That’s the last actual Satan sighting I had, and things have pretty much resumed the routine evils of neglect and indifference. I miss him and I don’t—y’know what I mean?
Without a definite bad guy, your good vs. evil radar goes to hell and complicity with that undifferentiated pack loping toward Hades has the advantage. I’m only guessing, but I think size and money skew the equation; higher numbers bidding lower nature. Even Beelzebub’s quality control suffers— weren’t Darth Vadar and the Matrix both transcendently, luminously evil until their franchises became empires? Evil’s allegedly banal, but it’s discouraging to see it become outright boring.
As to my encounter with the Prince of Darkness, it’s nothing much to brag about. No inducements to soul barter, no offers of wealth, power, fame…I probably blew it. I am left wondering about the ambiguous admonishment: “Get thee behind me, Satan.”— I think the key is in the inflection.

You Are What You Underwear

I’ve found the definitive t-shirt.
“Fuck you you fucking fuck” it says.
Isn’t that so true?

If you wear this t-shirt, nobody will bother you. People who see its innate, irrefutable truth will give you a knowing smile or approving nod. Those who avoid you reveal their shallow, cowardly nature. Perfect.

This is not a t-shirt for the timid. This t-shirt has Old Testament rigor without the prudishness. It is a proud First Amendment declaration of sovereignty and conviction. It is a consummately democratic t-shirt, one that can be worn by all creeds and races. By Bill O’Reilly or Osama Bin Laden alike. Paris Hilton has one, in rhinestones. It may not be for you, but trust that we know who you are, where you shop, the websites you visit and how you vote. We have your passcodes and pin numbers. Because we can.

If you understand the essence of “staying on message” you understand this t-shirt, but you also understand: t-shirt is the medium. The message and the media are specific and inviolate. Postcards, text messages, tattoos, bumper stickers or rubber stamps are all corrupted versions. A coffee mug is impertinent.

It is acceptable to wear it as an undershirt. Donald Trump’s staff does. Everybody at FEMA does. Tony Snow’s White House Press Corps wear them. There is one wiseass— from the Detroit Free Press, I think— who doesn’t. He’s got a really stupid shirt that says, “My t-shirt can kick your t-shirt’s ass.”

When Porn Was Young

(Published in the Winter/New Year 2008 issue of Cinema Retro magazine)
The University of Miami’s film school was a haphazard hodgepodge in the 70s, but we had some cool instructors. One of them was just about to shed his night job and asked if I wanted it. It involved film, and the pay was good. I said sure. His endorsement made the interview pro forma, so one fine, sweltering evening I found myself in the projectionist’s booth of The Paramount Theater, a humongous Miami Beach shrine to motion pictures. I never counted, but this 30s-era monolith must’ve had over a thousand seats. There were towering Cecil B. DeMille-style babe statues with wheat staffs and inscrutable lidded eyes cast up at sixty-foot ceilings, miles of lavish wallpaper and gilt trim, and a lush red velvet curtain embracing a screen the size of Duluth.
Even in the dark, it was unmistakably falling apart. An audience of two dozen was a good crowd. The Paramount had become a porn palace, a Babylon by the Beach, and I was the night projectionist. This was not a gig I’d be writing home to mom about.
Each night at 5 P.M., I’d arrive at The Paramount with a knapsack of textbooks and a bag lunch, climb up and up to the top of this cavernous seedy amphitheater and lock myself into a claustrophobic booth for 7 hours. Sandwiched between giant twin 35mm arc-light anachronisms, my projector was a dinky 16mm with a custom lens and bulb that threw a pale rectangle of pimply humpers across the yawning divide, dimly illuminating about 3/5ths of the huge screen. Partially pulled curtains lamely concealed the discrepancy while exposing gaping tears in its fabric.

Porn’s no novelty today— you need security specialists to fend it off— but in the 70s, the film phenomenon “Deep Throat” was a novelty that caught mainstream attention. Long since appropriated and immortalized by Watergate, few perhaps realize Deep Throat’s groundbreaking reputation as the first high-concept porn film. The beautiful and hapless heroine has a birth defect: her clitoris is unaccountably located in her throat, compelling a win-win solution for fellatio fetishists.
Or so I’m told. I never saw— or screened that classic. The spools I changed once an hour had the lowest common denominator rut and splooge stuff with cameraman shadows, lousy jazz soundtracks and acting that’d make Ed Wood droop. Week in and out, I ran indistinguishable cloned boff-fests, and got lots of studying done.

Then one evening, Jerry, the day projectionist handed off his shift with uncharacteristic excitement. “Wait’ll you see this one,” he said, patting the queued up reel. “It’s a film,” he marveled. Jerry never talked like this before. Jerry actually never talked at all that I recalled. He scared me a little.
“What is it?” I asked warily.
“Just watch,” he answered with some sort of weird satyr-sagacity, departing the booth on happy little hooves. I glanced over at the opened can and read the magic-markered title written on white adhesive tape: “The Devil in Miss Jones.”
At the appointed time—somewhere between 5:15 and when I felt like it— I hit the switch and began the first of hundreds of viewings of a bona fide porn landmark. I sat on the stool gazing out my little window, amazed by an actual movie with actual hot damn in your face sex. Actual sets, lighting, production design, editing, acting, plot—and a haunting original symphonic score. Distilled from its original 35mm stock to 16mm, it still blew away anything I’d shown before on that clattering machine.
“The Devil in Miss Jones” was a revelation and a blessing to a dissolute young film student, and so— um, legitimate— that I invited my girlfriend up for an evening in the booth. She was basically catholic (upper or lower case) regarding sex, but got pretty involved in watching it, right up until the snake bit, which was a predictable buzz kill even if you’re not particularly biblically disposed. Erotic equilibrium’s tricky stuff.

There’s a peculiar follow-up to this recollection. One evening in the dorm apartment, that haunting music I’d become so familiar with in the porn theater came drifting from the living room, and I ran in to see a Prince Machiavelli perfume commercial on television, playing the theme from “Devil in Miss Jones.” I was gobsmacked, explaining the audacious absurdity to my puzzled roommates. I could not conceive that this esteemed cosmetic brand had deliberately used a notorious porn movie’s score in their ad.
Sure enough, I saw the commercial a few weeks later: identical except for new music.
I thereafter imagined some fired fool ad man sitting out there in the dark of my theater with a box of Kleenex, feeling blue and horny watching Miss Spelvin put the devil through his paces.

Dave Barry

There has been a disturbance in the Force.
The inky galaxy of newsprint’s reading inhabitants stagger in bewilderment. Dave Barry, the Beige Overlord of Comic Columnists has retired, swept into the black hole of— there’s no gentle way to say this— fatherhood.
Mr. Barry’s departure leaves my Saturday Op-Ed page bereft of purpose; leaves it a stony slate of piety, pillory and humorless poop. So that Dave can change diapers. So that Dave can play with his daughter and make her laugh and utterly neglect the rest of us.
Okay, Dave’s daughter is now 6, she’s old enough to be out of diapers, but he’s— 59!— old enough to know better, even accounting for the delayed puberty of professional humorists. Siring cuddly protein lumps at his age is unconscionable and stupid and if you need proof, picture Dave rolling around his carpet at home, tickling Sophie and getting drool on his rayon print short-sleeved shirt or whatever they wear down in Florida, while undead hordes of laffless readers mill about outside in his flowerbed. His pal Steven King could make a movie of the week about it and I wish he would if it guaranteed they’d both quit their rock careers.
The world is divided between those that think there’s enough to go around and those that don’t and if you ask enough of what, it’s obviously laughter in his particular case. Dave had an over-abundance and shared it, and now he’s just hoarding it. His excuse is 30 years of unbroken weekly columns, 30 lousy years in the timeless wilderness of guffawlessness into which we’re again cast.
You bet I’m bitter. I come to bury Barry, not to honor him. Father to unlimited grins, hiccupping yuks and galloping giggles, he’s spurned us, his adoring print progeny, in shameless deference to this upstart issue.
He says he’s taking an indefinite leave. “Ha,” sez I, for now his funny furnace exclusively runs on parental observations, which is as seriously unfunny as hydrogen fuel, while helium’s a guaranteed thing if inhaled. That’s the Dave we’ll miss, but he’s gone now, gone to the recklessly unfunny circle of hell that Dolly and Billy and Jeffy are drawn in. The oval-headed universe of glandless blandness.
How do we reconcile political sleaze, insufferable stupidity and carnal excess without his cunning callowness; how do we puncture the dense drone of daily drudgery, how can I end this sentence with more alliteration? Dave never troubled himself tripping over words, they tumbled out like goofy clown-car adolescents grinning at you since you were about to be blindsided in his next phrase with a metaphorical meringue, a hyperbolic inanity, a paroxysm of glee. But Dave’s grown up now. Now Dave’s car trips involve strollers, animal crackers, coloring books, string cheese, wetnaps and fistfuls of ibuprofren; he has put away childish things, only to pick them up again from where his darling dumpling’s happily hurled them. Again, and again and again. “Again,” says Sophie and daddy obliges with the same expression or bedtime story or pratfall he’s repeated eleventy-seben times. It’s actually hysterically funny— brace yourself— when she puts daddy’s shoes on— the wrong feet!! Gag me.
He knows this of course. He knows but doesn’t care. Paternity is a delusional wellspring of hope, promise and joy right alongside night terrors that your 6-year-old’s gotten a Harley tattoo and joined the panel of the Beltway Gang. Father’s former funny fodder of potty gags and adolescent pranks redound darkly; repentant, he writes anonymous chiding letters to himself, care of his editor. Gone is the endless summer of 14-year-old merriment.
Daddy’s home.

Cyber Suzy

King Kong Telecomm handles my phones and internet, a megalithic communication company dedicated to preventing human contact. Their corporate hugeness is too vast and unknowable for the gabbling masses. So many lonely humans out there calling in, complaining— their bursitis, their ungrateful children, ill-fitting dentures— God knows what they’ll say or when they’ll get around to any pertinent company interests. The last time a human answered a company phone, they went ringy-dingy and you got Ernestine. Go to lilytomlin.com, I’m not available to answer impertinences from the recently born.
Cyber Suzie answers their helpline in her sultry voice. Does Suzie also have a 900 number? There’s something about her. She offers me a few choices, very reasonable choices, but I sense the innuendo behind her professional façade. I play her little game, eschewing the option to speak my account number and tap in the numbers with a saucy hint of calypso. Is that a tremolo she betrays for a moment? Then some guy with a basso Spanish voice breaks in. “Para Español,” yada yada. Suzie’s sharp, trying to game me with this Latin heartthrob. I ignore him, he leaves. Or maybe not, I don’t care.
“I’ll bet he’s short,” I say.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you,” says Suzie. Sure.
“So long as Raymundo does,” I say. Then, “you two are wrong for each other, office romances never work out.”
I know she’s covering for him as he leaves in a huff; she repeats her little mantra, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you.” Uh-huh. Awkward pause. She recovers. “Please say or press your billing address zip code.”
I comply without inflection. I know she’s mulling it over. Then Suzie does something unexpected. Suzie goes “Hmmm.”
“Hmmm, let’s see if I’ve got this right,” she says, then repeats my digital input. She had my number at “Hmmm,” ends her interlocution with …“right?”
“Right,” I parrot back, stunned.” Suzie hmmmed me.
When she asks the nature of my inquiry, I tell her— I’m not even sure how, since my head’s still humming. Next thing I know, I’m in the hold queue for a live person.
The nature of my inquiry is trouble paying my bill online. Their website was refusing to process my payment. It’d been a while since my last chat with Suzie— maybe she had a hand in it, crossed a few wires to inveigle me back. Raymundo being her rebound, she reached out. I just rubbed salt in the wound, poor kid, no wonder she patched me through so peremptorily. My reverie’s broken by a carbon entity. She’s got none of Suzie’s allure. I explain the problem. Unsurprisingly, I need to speak to someone else for my problem. Another hold queue, this one lasts through the stone, iron and industrial ages.
The problem turns out to be with my Godzilla browser. It’s apparently got some conflict with their King Kong website. I suggest that they might simply say that on their website rather than dead-ending well-intentioned customers with encrypted check routing numbers in their hot little hands. I suggest that just saying so would save the time of their customers and themselves. My suggestion is drowned out by the din of clashing titans hurling hapless programmers into high voltage towers. Doomed, non-binary puny human logic.
Switching browsers remedies the problem. I’ve spent an hour more than I would have scribbling a check, tearing a stub, stamping and mailing the payment. Still, I had some moments with Suzie. Suzie hmmmed me.
My phone rings. A breather, hot and heavy. Instead of hanging up, something familiar keeps me on the line.
“Raymundo?”