Category: Offbeat

Whistle while you irk

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Here he comes. Yes, he is coming. I don’t see him. I hear him. From afar. He’s whistling, oh-so carefree, head swaying, body grooving. And he’s doing it loudly and without a whit of shame or self-consciousness. Notes swirling from his pursed lips for all to hear.

This middle-aged guy, this oblivious songbird, comes to the cafe almost every time I’m there, which is a lot. He sports sunglasses, a down vest, chinos. And he strolls around whistling, sometimes to a song of his choosing, often to whatever is playing on the cafe stereo. Tweetle-lee-dee …

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Why am I so vexed by a man who whistles merrily about a coffee shop? Whistling, it’s said, is a symptom of happiness. One site muses: “Are whistlers so insanely happy that they have some overly elevated level of joy? So much so that it bubbles up and spills out in the form of air molecules passing over the tongue and through their lips?”

If so, am I just madly envious of this fellow’s happy mien? His ability for unfettered glee to pour out and tweetle in everyone’s eardrums unbidden? He’s not a bad whistler. He’s actually fairly adroit, a mini jazz-flute maestro vamping on his facial wind instrument.

No, I am not envious. I have no idea if he’s inflated with uncontainable ecstasy, though he appears pretty content and confident with his hands-in-pocket swagger. It’s that his music is like a yappy-dog bark, nails on a chalkboard. Then again, I can’t whistle enough to call a dog.

Yet I give him license. Whistling Willie, I’m convinced, is simply indulging a bad habit. His tuneful penchant is pure reflex, like the drummer who instinctually taps the table with his fingers. We all have tics, mannerisms and foibles, even if they’re not as piercing and public as full-throated whistling. The dude’s just doing his thing.

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The lip-doodling is pretty damn distracting (otherwise I wouldn’t be grousing) when I’m trying to read and write. “If you’re an anti-whistler type, short of duct tape, how can you keep your focus when Tweety Bird starts up?” asks the above web site, Screenflex (a portable room divider company!).

There are no answers. There is only discipline. Tune out the tunesmith. But it’s not just the “music” that kills me. It’s the brazen indifference to his fellow folks, inflicting, without a flinch, his own song list on strangers, like the lunk who hoists a blaring boom-box strutting down the street for all to hear, no matter individual taste and basic social decorum. It’s the principle.

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My whistler, my personal Bobby McFerrin, who’s probably a swell human being, despite the cloud of patchouli cologne he resides in, just needs a touch of self-awareness to wake him up — perhaps an actual whistleblower to call him out, bawl him out, and slip a cork into that irksome “O” on his face.

Living in a vacuum

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Housesitting at my brother’s place and the biweekly cleaners are whirring, whooshing and wizzing their arsenal of electrical contraptions, a cacophony of vacuums, dusters and busters. 

It’s a racket, and the animals shudder and hide. I won’t see them for a good two hours. Then they’ll re-emerge with bristled fur and indignant scowls. The word balloon above their collective head will read: You S.O.B.

Who, after all, is partial to the rambunctious suckery of the vacuum cleaner? It’s a veritable monster, roaring, devouring.

I’m more a Swiffer guy. That gauzy glide across wood and linoleum, affably gathering dirt and dust, soundlessly, like cotton candy. But rugs and carpets demand plugged-in hardware, and there goes the neighborhood.

Right now, a cleaner is banging a handheld duster against the wooden window blinds and it almost evokes Latin percussion. A drummer, I’m tempted to pull out my cowbell and a tom-tom and fashion some dance jams. But suddenly there are multiple flushes from the bathrooms and a buzz has been decisively killed.

Obviously I could split this joint, go to a cafe to write, see a movie, vandalize some Teslas. But it’s too warm and I can manage the madness for a couple noisy hours. 

Yet I feel a little odd sitting about while they clean around me. On an ancient episode of “Seinfeld,” Jerry riffs about being home when the maid comes and gets all embarrassed that he just as well have cleaned but, you know, you’re here and all, and he offers a wincing apology and a pained shrug.

This isn’t like that. This is my brother’s abode and I’m but an innocent bystander. I’m on good, first-name terms with the lead cleaner, Delsy, and we banter a bit and joke about the animals. Then she hits the “on” switch and my brain rattles in its tiny pan, and I either leave or tolerate it. Today was the latter, as noted. I don’t know where the hell the pets are.

Delsy is cool. A young mother from Guatemala, petite with a helium voice, she once polished the wood floors so well that I slipped on my ass and about broke in half. That’s a compliment. She’s good. And when I’m there, she’s sweet as can be. She has the laugh of a cartoon elf. 

She runs a mean vacuum, scouring the carpets and attacking the stairs. She even sucks the sofa with that terrible tube. It’s all good, if benignly violent. 

And then it’s over and Delsy and crew politely exit, while the animals skulk out of hiding, wanting nothing more than to bite me. 

Sole asylum

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

So we’re wandering through the smashing Henry Taylor exhibit at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan and, like that, flash-bam, my right foot spontaneously combusts. It burns and sizzles. I seize up and sit down like a premature geriatric. Wincing happens. Cursing occurs. And yet nothing diminishes the pleasures of the show one bit. The art is exquisite — raw, funny, moving. I’m between awe and ow.

The foot becomes an issue. The pain, the throb, the burn. And we still have miles to trek through the unforgiving corridors of the city. The day is young, and it is often excruciating.

A day later, I call the podiatrist. An X-ray of my right foot is taken. I wait in the doctor’s minute room, slouching on the elevated exam bench, whose thin tissue covering crunches at the tiniest move, like aluminum foil, or tracing paper.

The doctor at last enters, assistant in tow, and she asks me to denude the offending foot. As I peel off my sock, I intone dramatically, “Behold the monstrosity.”

She laughs. I was expecting a scream. My foot is an objectively ghoulish sight. 

Pro that she is, the doc instantly unriddles what’s before us, which is, in all its homeliness, sort of poignant. It’s something Cubist, maybe Surrealist. Perhaps a strain of elephantiasis.

What’s really happening is a honking medley of maladies: a bunion, a hammertoe and a flat foot. Hearing this, blinking dumbly, I inquire about a wholesale foot replacement, say, a grocery cart wheel, or a deer hoof.

Ignoring me, she administers a very gnarly cortisone shot into my toe while her assistant sprays a freezing liquid on the entry area so I don’t shriek like Axl Rose. The needle goes in deep. And deeper. I swear I hear the crunch of bone. A choir of angels sings.

Amazingly, my foot feels instantly better. The burn is extinguished. The doctor cautions that the cortisone could last a week, two months, forever, we don’t know. I’ll take any of those. She has me order an $11 toe splint from Amazon and suggests I buy fancy insoles. She checks to see if my insurance will cover the insoles she can provide, at $450, but, no, of course not. They will not foot the bill.

I sort of hobble out of the podiatrist’s office. My foot feels so much better. I’m walking on air. I’m about to do a little jig, until, out in the sunshine, I realize what a heel I’d be. One step at a time. One step at a time.

Eerie and incandescent, my X-rayed foot, a web of symptoms.

The days of our lies

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

“My days were pervaded by a gray drizzle of unrelenting horror.”  — William Styron

Woke up this morning mad hungry, my stomach whining like the undersea song of the humpback whale. I immediately craved French toast, or better, eggs Benedict. It was tragic. I didn’t have ingredients for either dish. Whatever. 

The dog heard me stir and scampered up the stairs and swan-dived onto the bed and stepped on my chest and licked my face. His mouth reeked of turkey dog mush — his scrumptious breakfast. For about four seconds I was turned off of food. When that passed, I remembered my breakfast predicament. Then that passed. I settled on a lowly bowl of granola. 

Mornings are rough. An inveterate night person — I perk up when the sun drops, nocturnal as a bat — “rise and shine” are curse words. While my dreams are reliably sweaty ordeals, haunted by ghosts of past, present and future, waking is almost worse, and lying in bed, eyes wide open, is immaculate torture.

That is when my mind somehow turns on me, lashing with mean, warped thoughts about almost anything, even the good stuff. For example, visions of my upcoming trip to Sicily become uncontrollably negative. I blow out of proportion everything bad that can happen, until I’m practically paralyzed with dread. I’ve nearly cancelled my trip based on these furious falsehoods. My therapist won’t return my calls.

Certain pills are meant to contain the mental carnage. I have those. And once I’m out of bed at, say, 9:15 a.m., things improve some. The “gray drizzle” quoted atop this post mostly burns off and I function like a mildly adjusted person, despite flashes of angst and misanthropy. (The self-flagellation hardly stops.)

It’s not all dread and roses. Nor is it “unrelenting horror.” Not always. It’s something in between — a little bit country, a little bit rock ’n’ roll; sweet and savory; the holy and unholy; the ripe and rotten. In the end, it doesn’t much matter. Really, it doesn’t matter.

Eaten by earworms

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Two songs from the early ‘80s are banging about my brain and I can’t purge, flush or exterminate them. I go to bed with them, and they alternate, like an A-side and a B-side. And I wake with them, wailing away while I brush my teeth, shower, get dressed, make coffee. Such are pesky earworms, those maddeningly sticky tunes that get jammed in your head like taffy to teeth.

I won’t name the songs, because they’re obscure hard rockers that long ago went poof in the annals of music history. They’re sort of embarrassing. (Heard of the defunct bands Violation or Vandenberg? Thought not.) 

Yet somehow my teenage lizard brain fished out these tunes from the primordial goo of the ’80s and decided it would be nostalgic fun to hear them over and over again. The songs are notable for dynamic drums, which as a fledgling drummer I studiously emulated. (I still enjoy the drums on both tracks, but they don’t inspire me as they used to. Feh, I say now. I can do that.)

So my head burrowed into the random past and found these songs, and now I can’t shake them. It’s been a full week and they won’t go away. I finally listened to them on Apple Music, a grave mistake that merely branded them further into my brain. 

Earworms can be joyful or torturous. Classic torments are the Chili’s “Baby Back Ribs Jingle” and anything by Barry Manilow. Happy ones are, say, the Chili Peppers or anything by Abba. I’m spit-balling here.

My vexing earworms fall between good and evil, the gray zone that’s almost worse than flat-out terrible. Earworms — that’s what they call ‘em. But these are more like ear boa constrictors. They suffocate you before they devour you. Whole.

Holey sheet!

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

There is a hole in my bed sheet, a vast and tattered Dickensian hole, through which my foot pokes each night and touches the mattress pad, and it makes me feel derelict, woebegone and like a pauper of improper bed linens. And it’s true. I have allowed my sheets of some 20 years to come to this! I sleep on rags and do nothing because, face it, they’re still pretty comfy and, well, I’m lazy.

Until now. The other night my left foot slipped inside the ragged hole and got caught. This, in the wee of the morning. I pulled and twisted my foot, but it was, to all intents and purposes, stuck. 

Despite the late hour, say 3 a.m., my rage awakened at my entangled foot and I swore out loud. And I yanked my foot out of the rupture with such violence, I compounded it, tore it into a massive aperture so grave it could never be remedied. It was catastrophic. And yet, miraculously, I still dozed off into the ether, likely dreaming of silky 800-thread count Egyptian cotton sateen sheets. (Either that or BBQ wings.) 

I woke up almost happy my wretched old sheets were at last finished. When I say they were 20 years old, I really mean … they were about 15 years old. Still. They were cheap. Now they’re a heap. 

On Thanksgiving night, taking full advantage of one of those Black Friday mumbo-jumbo sale thingies, I ordered shiny new sheets from a reputable linen company and I saved 39 bucks in the bargain. No fewer than two days later the sheets arrived, folded yet fluffy, nary a hole to be found. 

Color? Graphite. Style? “Classic Percale Core,” which they compare to 5-star hotel threads. I don’t know what half of that means, but I’m embracing it. I don’t stay at 5-star hotels. Trust is involved.

A couple days later, I am washing the new sheets — they say you should rinse out factory dust, lint and chemicals before using them (alarming, yes). Currently, they’re in the dryer and I’m making a martini, chillaxing during my ongoing linen adventures. By the time they’re done, warm, soft, and sound, I will hopefully be three sheets to the wind. 

The hole, like Hell’s maw.

Pissed off

~ Chris ~ 6 Comments

There I was, in third grade, using the urinal in the school bathroom, wearing a brand-new t-shirt emblazoned with mutant-monster football players growling and slobbering on the field (I’m not sure why; I didn’t even like football), and a kid named Tom Rainbolt stood directly behind me, yanked down his pants, and soaked my backside with a hot stream of pee. 

It was as disgusting and logic-defying (and, years later, funny) as it sounds, especially since Tom and I were cordial, practically friends. In shock, and suddenly wet and warm, I bawled and ran to the playground and flagged down a so-called yard duty — a volunteer adult supervisor with a whistle around her neck — and spewed between tears, “Tom pissed on me!” Yard duty: “He spit on you?” Me: “No, he pissed on me!”

Chaos. Kids circling around, the shaken yard duty escorting me to the principal’s office while seeking Rainbolt in the scrum of gasping, giggling children. He was easily detained, like he didn’t even try to slip out. Was I embarrassed? No. Traumatized. 

I was cleaned up and given a used, undersized kindergartener’s t-shirt to wear, which I concealed with a windbreaker zipped to the neckline. Rainbolt was busted, sent home, though I can’t recall what his full punishment was. I wish I did, that sonofabitch. 

What was he thinking? He wasn’t thinking. Kids do exceedingly stupid things, and I did my share. Frog torture, doorbell ditch, dog poop dumped on front porches, tossing shotgun shells into fires, trying to lure a friend into a subterranean booby trap and bury her alive (a very poorly thought-out ruse) — all of this was done in grade-school, and that’s only part of it. 

And yet I’ve never gotten into a physical fight with someone, ever — though I should have clocked Rainbolt. And, except for that doomed frog, I’ve never engaged in animal abuse (unless you count me boiling some Sea-Monkeys).

“Boys will be boys,” they say with a smirk and a shrug. I call bullshit. Boys will be monsters — I’m sure girls will too — peeing on each other, picking on each other, normalizing violence, torturing kittens, setting fires, stealing, vandalizing. I’m generalizing — not all kids are little bastards, and most might even be angels — but empirical evidence tells me boys are drawn to trouble, only reeled in by good breeding and good sense, and maybe a slap on the wrist by Pops or the cops.

And so my little fable ends here — all of it true — with this moral: Boys, always check behind you when you plant yourself at the urinal. You never know who’s going to hose you. I can laugh about it, and I almost forgive Tom Rainbolt his puerile shenanigan, his repellent stunt, which was probably just an experiment to see how far he could spray. The more I think about it, I almost empathize with the little jerk. Boys, after all, will be boys. Those monsters.

The reluctant bachelor

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

In my 30s, a pair of well-meaning coworkers nominated me for a title in a big-city glossy magazine that makes me blush even as I type this so many years later. 

The magazine was a strenuously vapid thing, slathered in food and lifestyle pap, all of it mawkishly upbeat. To attract page after Technicolor page of blaring ad copy, it was shamelessly obsessed with ratings and lists: Best Barbecue! Best Campsites! Best Burgers! Best Places to Get Off!

City magazines with ample ad revenue are like that. They traffic in pretty pictures of manicured affluence, catering to the beauty-salon and doctor’s office crowds. Without being trendy themselves — they are woefully unhip —  they try to manufacture trends. Only dingbats actually pay money for the periodical, which is so cloying, you could barf. 

That said, I admit up front that I participated in this paragon of sub-journalism. My coworkers nominated me for one of those knuckleheaded lists: the city’s Most Eligible Bachelors. I was flattered. I was humbled. I was mortified.

The magazine editor phoned me for a preliminary interview. And I blurted: no. I rejected the nomination. It was way out of my comfort zone. I wasn’t so desperate for a date. And this introvert definitely didn’t need the exposure, my bewildered mug spread next to an ad for the hottest tanning salon or 40 sparkly, smiley real estate agents.

I thanked my deflated pod-mates, the lovely Sarah and Sharon, and also apologized. I was being ungracious, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. 

My dis was apparently a big deal. Friends expressed dismay. My disappointed mother scolded me like I was eight. The topper: Ira Glass of “This American Life” called for a possible segment — man turns down most eligible bachelor nomination, how zany is that? — that, fortunately, never panned out. 

And yet, I’m only human.  

Forward a year: Same routine, but this time, for better or worse, I caved. I did it. I’m not sure why. I was strafed by anxiety. But I thought, what the hell, man up. 

During the in-office interview with the editor, I explained my job (movie critic, which I said wasn’t nearly as glamorous as it’s cracked up to be), noted my hobbies (world travel, books, film, drinks, drums), and things I’m not so crazy about (dancing, reggae). Asked the inevitable question of what I look for in a woman (sigh), I said something like someone bookish, worldly and intellectually curious (what a dope).

This is the story of someone quite bashful scraping himself out of his dark, lonesome shell. A comment the editor solicited for the article from one of my dearest friends, Courtney, included these bits: “His eccentricities are very endearing … Once he lets you in, you discover a kind-hearted soul.”

Yeah. That might be a bit much. But there I was in this glossy magazine with nine other “most eligible bachelors,” practically shaking in my boots with self-consciousness. Each of us filled a full color page, with no ads. In the photo, my head is enormous.

The issue hit the stands (and the beauty salons and doctors’ offices) and I braced for the worst. But instead: crickets. No one called, emailed, berated me, ridiculed me, asked me on a date, nothing. Disappointment? No, massive relief. 

I guess the moral of this tale is to get out of your self-defined — and in my case, distinctly neurotic — safe zones and take a chance on something new, even alien. I ate a whole cobra in Vietnam and got detained by Hezbollah in Beirut. A cheesy little spread in a city magazine is comparably nothing. Really. Nothing.  

Take a risk. It might be gut-wrenching. It might be exhilarating. Or it might be … crickets. 

Farewell, Fido

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“I don’t want to be buried in a pet sematary/I don’t want to live my life again!”

— “Pet Sematary,” the Ramones 

I once had a pet rat named Becky. After two and a half years of feisty play and impish scampering, tug of wars and belly tickles, she got terminal cancer and I had to put her down. I placed her remains in a decorated wooden box, dug a hole in the hard Texas dirt, and buried her in my backyard.

I repeated this ritual with three other pet rats — Phoebe, Tammy, LaShonda — and it shattered me every time. My yard became a veritable pet cemetery, a rodent resting place, and each grave should have cautioned me: Never again. I didn’t learn.

I also buried a blue betta fish named Alvy in the ad hoc graveyard. He thrived for four swishing years in a big sparkling bowl. I nestled the old man in a matchbox and set him in the ground, saluting him for his gratifying longevity. I miss the fish.

If you care one lick, laying your pet to rest is undiluted trauma. The platitude holds: pets are family, loving and adored, like hairy children who only live to their teens, if that. So integral are they to our lives, you swear they speak English and read minds. (I’m convinced Cubby the dog is really a tiny man in a dog suit. I keep looking for a zipper.) 

And so we honor them in death as in life, with a sentimental flourish and teary respect. Or at least we do in the modern age. There was a time when “people disposed of their dead pets in the river, or might have sold their bodies for meat and skin,” notes a CNN essayist. I know of modern folks subjecting their late Spots and Trixies to taxidermy, which is not only creepy, it’s selfish and disrespectful and twisted. 

Burial and cremation are popular send-offs. Barcelona, Spain, is set to open its first pet cemetery next year, with plans to carry out 7,000 animal cremations a year. Why? “Constant public demand,” they say. Barcelona is home to 180,000 dogs alone. Surely there’s just as many cats. (Rats? I bet.)

In 1983, Stephen King published the popular horror novel “Pet Sematary” about some macabre happenings surrounding a buried cat that is resurrected, or some such nonsense. The book spawned a 1989 movie (with “cemetery” also intentionally misspelled for plot purposes), which featured a cat-chy theme song by the Ramones.

The book and film helped spread the idea of the pet cemetery. And yet pet cemeteries are not some freaky esoteric brainchild of ghoul-meister King. There’s one in London’s Hyde Park, founded in 1881. New York’s legendary Hartsdale pet cemetery was founded in 1896, followed by Paris’ Cimetière des Chiens in 1899. 

About a hundred years later, I founded my own pet cemetery, at age 6, in my family’s pretty and serene Japanese-style garden in Santa Barbara. (This preceded the rat resting place by decades.) Surrounded by bamboo, moss and a statuary fountain, the graveyard contained goldfish, salamanders and other mostly water-bound critters. I’ve been at this a while.

On film, celebrated director Errol Morris made his debut with the acclaimed 1978 documentary “Gates of Heaven,” about the pet cemetery business and the souls who rely on it. It’s alive with vivid characters who are wrenchingly emotional about their dearly departed four-leggers.

Critic Roger Ebert, who named the film one of his 10 all-time favorites, wrote about “the woman who speaks of her dead pet and says, ‘There’s your dog, and your dog’s dead. But there has to be something that made it move. Isn’t there?’ 

“In those words,” Ebert writes, “is the central question of every religion.”

That pretty much says it all.

Becky the rat, at play.
Becky at rest.

Gene Simmons and me

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Recently, while sifting through thousands of old photos left behind at my late mother’s home, I came across a shot of me on Halloween, age 11. At that time, I was a fanatical follower of rockers KISS — lustily, irretrievably, hoarding trading cards, t-shirts, records, temporary tattoos, magazines, posters, all of it. 

For shits and giggles, I present to you my tween attempt to be KISS frontman/demon Gene Simmons: 

The real deal.
Me. Hey, I tried.