“What does it mean truly, to be invisible?” Devi S. Laskar writes, “Her stillness, her ability to remain calm while high-decibel insults are hurled inches from her face and ears. To pretend nothing has been said. To pretend deafness.”
Laskar’s compelling debut novel The Atlas of Reds and Blues is the story of a second-generation Bengali-American woman who, after remaining invisible, still and calm throughout a lifetime of racist interactions, is pushed over the edge during an unfounded raid on her home. In her refusal to acquiesce, the narrator, known as Mother, is shot by a police officer, and lies bleeding on her driveway. This is where we find her at the beginning of the book. What follows are vivid scenes from Mother’s life depicted in gleaming, lyrical prose — an exploration of persevering as a woman of color, a mother and wife, sister and daughter, as well as a writer, in contemporary America where she is time and again treated as inferior.
The novel builds upon a traumatic incident from Laskar’s own life when agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided her family’s home at gunpoint. Although the legal matter was eventually dismissed, many of her family’s personal belongings were confiscated and never returned. The book imagines a fundamental difference — what if she had refused to be docile and was shot? Read more…
Elisa Albert | Longreads | February 2019 | 17 minutes (4,343 words)
They never empty the dedicated shitcan in the dog park. It’s always full to the brim, overflowing with poop bags, swarming with flies and wasps. Which is odd, because all the other trash cans get emptied on the regular, and the fields are mown like clockwork, every other week. Dilapidated Department of General Services carts are often seen cruising around, taking care of park business. So what’s up with the perpetually overflowing dog park shitcan? It’s the enduring mystery of summer. You can smell it from forty paces in the infernal heat.
I call the DGS every couple days to complain about the overflowing shitcan, and always speak to the same lady. We are buds.
Hey, so the poop-bag thing still hasn’t been dealt with, I say.
Yeah, she says. Okay, gotcha. I’ll let them know.
I imagine writing a short story about our relationship, me and the DGS lady. About how we eventually come to share some singular kinship based on our limited exchanges. About how our different lives are ultimately defined by a common emotional struggles. Very Raymond Carver. Maybe we eventually have a fight, or a misunderstanding. Maybe we carry private knowledge of one another like a sacred oath, far into the future. Maybe we pass on the street and don’t register a thing.
Barely seven minutes into her black-history elective on the morning of April 16th, Juanita Douglas was asking her students a question she’d never asked in a classroom before, not in 24 years of teaching in Chicago’s public schools. She’d been preparing to ask the question for over a year, and she knew that for many of her students the conversation that followed would be painful. Disorienting. She didn’t like the idea of causing them pain. She didn’t want to make them feel overwhelmed or lost. But she thought, or at least hoped, that in the end the difficulty would be worth the trouble.
It was only second period. Several of Douglas’s students — a mix of juniors and seniors — were visibly tired. A few slumped forward, heads on their desks. I was sitting in the back row, so I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought one or two might be fully asleep. Some were stealthily texting or scrolling through Snapchat. Others were openly texting or scrolling through Snapchat.
After a few seconds, Douglas repeated the question: “Do you know Jon Burge?”
A ragged chorus of noes and nopes and nahs.
“Tell me again what year you were born in,” said Douglas, who is 54 and likes to playfully remind her students that they don’t know everything about the world.
2000. 2001. 1999.
“Okay,” she said. “Well… Welcome to Chicago.”
Like so many new curriculum units in so many high schools across America, this one began with the teacher switching off the lights and playing a video. Who was Jon Burge? The video supplied the answer. Burge was a former Chicago Police Department detective and area commander. Between 1972 and 1991 he either directly participated in or implicitly approved the torture of at least — and this is an extremely conservative estimate — 118 Chicagoans. Burge and his subordinates — known variously as the Midnight Crew, Burge’s Ass Kickers, and the A-Team — beat their suspects, suffocated them, subjected them to mock executions at gunpoint, raped them with sex toys, and hooked electroshock machines up to their genitals, their gums, their fingers, their earlobes, overwhelming their bodies with live voltage until they agreed: yes, they’d done it, whatever they’d been accused of, they’d sign the confession. The members of the Midnight Crew were predominately white men. Almost all of their victims were black men from Chicago’s South and West Sides. Some had committed the crimes to which they were forced to confess; many had not. The cops in question called the electroshock machines “nigger boxes.”
The video cut to Darrell Cannon, one of the Midnight Crew’s victims. He spoke about getting hauled by cops into a basement:
I wasn’t a human being to them. I was just simply another subject of theirs. They had did this to many others. But to them it was fun and games. You know, I was just, quote, a nigger to them, that’s it. They kept using that word like that was my name… They had no respect for me being a human being. I never expected, quote, police officers to do anything that barbaric, you know… You don’t continue to call me “nigger” throughout the day unless you are a racist. And the way that they said it, they said it so downright nasty. So there’s no doubt in my mind that, in my case, racism played a huge role in what happened to me. Because they enjoyed this. This wasn’t something that was sickening to them. None of them had looks on their faces like, ugh, you know, maybe we shouldn’t do this much. Nuh-huh. They enjoyed it, they laughed, they smiled. And that is why my anger has been so high. Because I continuously see how they smile.
Text on the screen explained that Burge was fired in 1993, following a lawsuit that forced the Chicago Police Department to produce a report on his involvement in “systematic torture,” written by its own Office of Professional Standards. After his firing Burge moved to Apollo Beach, Florida, where he ran a fishing business. In 2006 another internally commissioned report concluded that he’d been a torture ringleader, but still no charges were brought; the Illinois five-year statute of limitations for police brutality charges had by then expired. In 2008 FBI agents arrested Burge at his home, and creative federal prosecutors charged him — not with torture, but with perjury. In a 2003 civil case, Burge had submitted a sworn statement in which he denied ever taking part in torture. In 2010 a jury found him guilty. After the trial, jurors pointed out that the name of Burge’s boat — Vigilante — hadn’t helped his case.
As soon as the video ended and Douglas flipped the lights back on, her students — most of whom were, like her, black — started talking. Their confusion ricocheted around the room.
“How long did he get?”
“Four-and-a-half years.”
“He only got four-and-a-half years?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“I really feel some type of way about this.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I’ve got it on my phone.”
“He didn’t torture them alone. Why didn’t anyone else get charged?”
Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2019 | 29 minutes (7,983 words)
In December, I turned in the first draft of my second book. I assumed that when I finished it, I would stand up and scream. Actually scream “YES!” followed by a stream of sundry obscenities, then collapse on the floor and make my husband take a picture for Instagram.
Instead, I was in a quiet back room of Hillman Library, on the University of Pittsburgh campus, drinking a 99¢ mug of coffee, googling Erich Fromm quotes, when I suddenly realized I was done, and I just sat there mildly stupefied, then caught the bus and went home. It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap. It sucked, but in the way most serious creative endeavors suck, with a lining of deep gratification that afterward allows one to pretend that it was all in the service of a mystical something and not really, at base, insane.
It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap.
What made this second book so difficult was research: not the process of doing it, not compiling and organizing it, but the quandary of how to make it creative. How to write a book that felt like it spoke to huge questions — the meaning of life, what matters and why, all the things one gets misty-eyed about around a bonfire — via gobs of information.
A still from video released via the Thai NavySEAL Facebook Page on Wednesday, July 11, 2018, shows rescuers with an evacuated boy at the Tham Luang Nang Non cave, Thailand. (Thai NavySEAL Facebook Page via AP)
In the summer of 2018, 12 members of a Thai junior football team and their coach were successfully rescued from a cave in which they’d become trapped when heavy rains caused sudden flooding. The rescue options ranged from unrealistic to torturous to deadly to mad. At Maclean’s, Shannon Gormley tells the story of the rescue divers who chose “mad” — and succeeded.
Dr. Harry believes the risks of sedating the children beat the risks of not sedating the children. The lead divers believe the same, and the Thais believe the experts know best. The children cannot dive; the children will panic; the children will drown their rescuers and themselves. That is why Dr. Harry is going to do this: inject 12 kids with a sedative so powerful it will knock them out cold.
Ketamine: a horse tranquilizer, an operating-room drug, a soon-to-be cave-rescue pharmaceutical product in its early testing stages on rock-entombed human minors.
If only it were so simple. The children’s drugs will need to be topped up with half-doses along the way. Dr. Harry cannot dive every child out himself, but the divers are not medical doctors. Dr. Harry must give a dozen cave hobbyists and small-business owners a crash course in do-it-yourself anaesthesiology.
If anyone dies—and many divers think they will be lucky to save two or three of the kids—Dr. Harry will bear much of the burden. He is not licensed to practice medicine in Thailand, let alone teach other foreigners to practice. Though Thailand and Australia have offered some assurance that he won’t suffer legal consequences for his young patients’ probable deaths, a conscience and a name are not so easily protected.
Cave divers are solitary creatures, Dr. Harry will later say to the cameras he normally avoids. And as he instructs laymen how to sedate a bunch of boys in the dark before dragging them through a flooded, stalactite-strewn tunnel, Dr. Harry is very alone.
He thinks the drugs might help some children survive. He’s going to try, anyway. That’s the plan. But you never know.
Michael Musto | Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (2,035 words)
Like a really good book, life has given me way more chapters than I ever expected. Alas, I couldn’t have predicted that as an Italian-American kid growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 1960s. It was a time of hippie-dippie love and peace — which I read about and saw constantly on TV — though those warm and rosy feelings were apparently reserved only for the young; older people were considered business suited, untrustworthy, corrupt, and pretty much doomed. At the local movie theater, I had the misfortune of catching the 1968 youth exploitation drama Wild In The Streets, in which anyone over 30 was forcibly retired and those over 35 were rounded up for re-learning camps. Seeing this flick at an impressionable age, I wasn’t worldly enough to reject its ideas or realize it was a youth fantasy as perpetuated by the suits. I thought it was a true harbinger of things to come and was horrified by every melodramatic moment. The movie haunted my adolescence, and I went to school sensing that hitting 30 was going to mean the end of meaningfulness, so I’d better live and achieve to the max until I was ready to be carted away.
Well, I’m 63 and not only not retired or in an internment camp, but I’m actually doing pretty well. I have a weekly column on a popular site called NewNowNext.com, I get freelance offers (like this one), and I’m asked to appear on TV and in documentaries to give my opinions on various pop cultural topics through the years. What’s more, having produced four books, I’m often asked by agents and publishers to crank out some more. Shady Pines is not beckoning me in the least — but I wish I’d have anticipated that fact, not only as a kid, but in my late 20s, when I thought I had already peaked as a writer. Yes, I felt like a has-been at 28! Read more…
In 1982 travelers’ wisdom dictated it was a liability to have a stamp on your passport for Israel. This traveler’s wisdom, we relied on it all the time, though I could not tell you where we picked it up, exactly. And it did not help us when we went to Greece, where we’d hoped to find work and found nothing but vacationers and a few abandoned construction sites. Traveler’s wisdom guided us to take the ferry to Haifa, Israel, where we picked up farm work, enough to line our pockets with what little cash we heard we’d need for our target destination. This unofficial information was how we’d planned our route, leaving London in winter, our sights set on India.
Word was India would not issue you a visa if you showed up with a passport covered in Israeli stamps. You could, however, get a second passport issued from the embassy in Cairo and use that for traveling in parts of the world that were anti-Israel. We had been working in Israel, harvesting bananas, cleaning houses. Egypt was the launch pad to nations further east, a stepping stone on the way to India. That’s why we were going to Cairo, to get new passports.
We. Me, a California girl of 18, swept up in the transient population of unemployed British and German 20-somethings after a summer tour of Israel. That thing where Jewish kids go to The Promised Land to become one with the tribe, to form a bond with Israel. It didn’t work on me. I was instead drawn to the backpackers, the first edition of Lonely Planet’s India guidebook, and a middle class English non-Jew, Alastair, in his 20s, tall and skinny with deep-set blue eyes and a simmering anger at the world. We worked, we saved, and one day we decided we had enough money to go to Cairo and get new passports, and from there, continue to New Delhi. Read more…
Jeff Gold has lived many lives. He was the first employee at Los Angeles’ Rhino Records back in 1976. He served as VP/Marketing and Creative Services at A&M Records, and as Executive Vice President/General Manager of Warner Bros, where he worked with everyone from Iggy Pop to Herb Alpert. He’s currently one of the most active, respected music archivists and record dealers in the world, a status he cements through frequent donations of historically important memorabilia to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He helped drummer Ringo Starr catalogue the first copy of The Beatles’ White Album, numbered #0000001, which sold for $790,000. While searching through the collection of Rolling Stone magazine cofounder Ralph Gleason, he found a previously unknown, live recording of Bob Dylan playing Brandeis University in 1963. And he also identified 149 acetates full of unreleased songs that Dylan made during the Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning sessions — they’d sat in a Manhattan apartment for decades. Those are monumental musical discoveries!
At his core, Gold is a dedicated listener who’s collected records since his parents’ collection first enchanted him at the age seven or eight. He just loves music, and he’s turned that love into a multifaceted career. If you’re an Iggy and the Stooges fan, you have him to thank for a few things.
Various Stooges message boards have breathlessly wondered how an unknown Stooges outtake named “Asthma Attack” ended up on the 2010 deluxe reissue of their debut album, TheStooges. And there’s been whispers about who found John Cale’s original, rejected mixes of that album. We now know — Gold found them, waiting in Danny Fields’ unpaid storage locker. Gold’s diligence saved those recordings, along with the earliest known live Stooges recording: live at Ungano’s in 1970, from certain death.
Somehow, no one had formally asked Gold about how these recordings were discovered, so I did. I’m just an excited fan, too, and since a documentary impulse drives a lot of my writing, I wanted to save the story of Gold saving music, and share it with you, fellow Stooges fans.
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Aaron Gilbreath: How did you get to look through Danny Fields’ storage unit?
Jeff Gold: Danny and I have a very close mutual friend. That guy knows that I am always looking for memorabilia to buy, and he hooked me up with Danny who had a lot of stuff he wanted to sell to raise some money. So I flew from Los Angeles to New York [around 2002]. Danny was one of those guys who saved everything, so he had file cabinets full of stuff. You’d look up ‘1971,’ and there would be everything from postcards from Lou Reed to a Christmas card from his printer thanking him for his business, or dry cleaning receipts, you name it, and it was indiscriminately saved. I just sat on his floor for days and went through it, file by file, item by item, and pulled out anything that I was interested in buying. I found lots of amazing stuff that Danny was very happy to convert to cash. I probably spent two and a half days at his place the first time, then came back a few months later for round two. While I was looking I said to him, ‘Hey, do you have a storage locker?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I haven’t really paid the bills in a while, they’re bugging me.’ I said, ‘Danny, you have to pay the bills. If you don’t pay the bill, they open up the lock and sell the stuff at auction or, if it looks uninteresting, throw it away.’ He sounded very uninterested. I said, ‘How about I pay the bill and go look and see if there’s anything I can buy from you?’ He said sure. So he called the place up, which was maybe five blocks from his house, and told them that I was gonna come pay the bill, which was three or so months in arrears, and that I had permission to look in the locker. It was a funky storage locker. With no lights and no windows, this place was a dark jumble of boxes. I kind of looked around for a couple of hours and pulled stuff out.
Fannie Mae Davis migrated to Detroit from the South in 1955. By the time she started taking penny-bets from the neighbors, she was supporting five children and an ill husband who was unable to continue working at Detroit’s auto plants. The Numbers was an illegal underground betting scheme, a specific 3-digit system where players picked their own numbers. Born in Harlem in the 1920s, it spread throughout the country, mainly by way of African-American neighborhoods, although it was played by everyone and continues to be played in some communities today. It found particularly fertile ground in Detroit, due to booming industrial jobs and a large working- and middle-class African-American population. In 1970, police estimated that 1 in 15 Detroiters, or 100,000 people, played the Numbers every single day (except Sunday, when business was closed).
As the Numbers grew, so did Fannie Davis’s good fortune. As she climbed the ranks in bookmaking, from a bookmaker to a “banker,” she brought her family into the middle class and the American dream. Success came with a catch: she could tell no one outside her family how she made her money.
Even when Michigan started a legal lottery in 1972, Fannie found a way to keep the business going. Meanwhile, she was able to own property, raise her children in comfort, and provide them with an education. Still, she paid a price for her success in worry and instability, constantly girding herself against the next “hit” — a major payout for a winning number that could wipe her savings out completely. Read more…
Reading Tom Zoellner‘s Tucson Weekly piece “Interstate 10: A Personal History,” about the road between Phoenix and Tucson, I knew immediately I was meeting a native desert rat who knew my home turf. I grew up in Phoenix and went to college in Tucson, so I’ve driven that same stretch of interstate countless times. During my drives, I used to sketch ideas for ways to write about it, about the dry land it travels through and all the active roadside businesses and decaying relics of yesteryear. I never got past the note-taking stage, which is partly why I am so excited to see someone else write such a worthy homage to what Zoellner calls the state’s “most reviled” stretch of road.
People loathe it and do it on auto-pilot. By paying close attention, Zoellner functions as a tour guide in a place you’d never expect to want a tour, narrating all the interesting, ugly, and odd points along the way, as well as his connections to it. Ultimately, his piece is as much about the land as it is about learning to see past our own boredom and prejudices, to cast the familiar anew. When I read the word “caliche” on the last page, it made me homesick. Only a desert rat knows what caliche means, and seeing it in print warmed my red-chilé-colored heart. Zoellner talked with me about writing this piece and the nature of placed-based writing.
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You lived in Phoenix but grew up in Tucson. When did you get the idea to write about this stretch of desert highway?
I suspect every commuter has a funny ongoing relationship with the buildings and objects outside the window on their regular drive — little physical mysteries. Who lives in that house? How did that ugly sculpture get there? Does anyone really feel socially elevated after going to “Elite Car Wash?” These musings, often pointless, are the background noise of real thought, like a radio station playing a song of which you’re barely cognizant, and I realized with a jolt while on I-10 that the essential spool of these half-awake thoughts had not substantially changed since I was 12 years old. Nor had the highway, really — it was just as uninviting and shabby-looking as ever. And it occurred to me that this was Arizona’s most unloved highway, but it was also the one most traveled by a statistically overwhelming margin. That became the central paradox of the story, and pretty much everyone who lived in Arizona would get that instinctually, and likely have a similar interior relationship with this road.
Had you made other attempts to write about it? I ask because I did — I sketched notes for a piece about it for years while driving it — and I’m excited to see that you succeeded where I failed.
Writing can take place in the mind long before your fingers ever hit the keyboard. Stephen King has a wonderful simile about writers as paleontologists who are not so much creating material from scratch but merely excavating fossils that have existed in the subconscious for a long time. In that sense, I’ve been writing this piece since I was a sixth grader with no awareness that anything was being created. And so one day, while making my umpteenth Phoenix-Tucson drive for unrelated reasons, I just scribbled a note on every “old friend” that I saw out the window, as well as the same brief and entirely-predictable thing I always thought when I spotted it. The actual piece took less than two hours to spit out once I sat down. It had already been “written.”
What did your Tucson Weekly editor think of this idea at first? Were they like, “Why would anybody write about that boring drive?”
This was first pitched to Arizona Highways, the legendarily well-illustrated publication of the state highway department that has been touting the visual glories of the state since 1925. I thought they might enjoy a counterintuitive take: “You’ve seen enough of Monument Valley. Now here’s what you didn’t know about the state’s most butt-ugly road!” Suffice to say, this wasn’t for them. I’ve been friends for two decades with Tucson Weekly editor Jim Nintzel, probably the state’s most astute political reporter. He was good enough to give it a try.
Have you read or been influenced by other road stories, a genre that might be called roadside journalism or highway literature?
One of my favorite books is U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America, a collection of essays and photography published in 1953 by the under-appreciated American writer George Rippey Stewart, and then brilliantly updated by Thomas Vale in 1983 in a book called U.S. 40 Today: Thirty Years of Landscape Change in America.
Picacho Trading Post, demolished. Photo by Aaron Gilbreath
What’s it like writing for an alt-weekly right now? Some still seem unpredictable, fun, and adventurous.
When I was a daily newspaper reporter, I wished for the kind of length and freedom enjoyed by alt-weekly writers. I’ve been lucky these last few years to occasionally freelance an article for a few of them.
As you say in the essay, the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) razed most of the town of Picacho, which had been there since the 1880s, and no media outlets wrote about it. Did you discover that while writing this, and is this essay sort of your way to correct that?
Yes on both questions. Picacho deserved a much better civic obituary than I could give it, or that it ever got. ADOT couldn’t tell me much of anything about the decision to virtually eliminate it for the widening of the SR 87 interchange. It was a vanishing whose paper trail seemed thin enough to have been anchored in the 19th century rather than the 21st. Highway villages have an odd relationship with history — built to serve people who are going someplace else, who never stay and who barely give it a close look or remember it.
What are your ideas about the way we relate to physical locations, and about writing about a personal relationship with place?
It’s extremely hard. You could write a ten-volume set about a small place, and still feel like you didn’t capture its real essence. The center will always retreat from your grasp. Maybe that’s why I’m attracted to motion seen behind windows.
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