Search Results for: Inc.

The Way We Treat Our Pets Is More Paleolithic Than Medieval

Egyptian mummy of a cat from the Louvre's collection. (Photo by CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images)

John Bradshaw | Excerpt adapted from The Animals Among Us: How Pets Make Us Human | Basic Books | October 2017 | 18 minutes (4,861 words)

 

We have no direct evidence proving that people living prior to 10,000 bce had pets. Any kept by hunter-gatherers must have included species tamed from the wild, which would leave little archaeological evidence: their remains would be impossible to distinguish from those of animals killed for food or kept for other — perhaps ritualistic — purposes.

Since we don’t have evidence from the prehistoric past, we must look to that gleaned from the past century. A remarkable number of hunter-gatherer and small-scale horticultural societies that persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in remote parts of the world — Amazonia, New Guinea, the Arctic, and elsewhere — give us insight into the behaviors of earlier Stone Age societies. We can start by asking whether hunter-gatherers already kept pets when they were first documented, before they had time to acquire the habit from the West.

It turns out that many small-scale “Paleolithic” societies kept pets of some kind: sometimes dogs, but mostly tamed wild animals, captured when young and then brought up as part of the human family. Native Americans and the Ainu of northern Japan kept bear cubs; the Inuit, wolf cubs; the Cochimi from Baja California, racoons; indigenous Amazonian societies, tapir, agouti, coati, and many types of New World monkeys; the Muisca of Colombia, ocelots and margays (two local species of wild cat); the Yagua of Peru, sloths; the Dinka of the Sudan, hyenas and Old World monkeys; native Fijians, flying foxes and lizards; the Penan of Borneo, sun bears and gibbons.

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Little Führers Everywhere

Matthew Heimbach in front of court in Charlottesville, VA. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Vegas TenoldEverything You Love Will Burn | Nation Books | February 2018 | 20 minutes (5,442 words)

The first time I met Matthew Heimbach was in 2011, shortly after my trip to New Jersey with the National Socialist Moment. Our meeting was completely coincidental, and we would both forget about it for several years until we met again. That summer I found myself in the woods of northern North Carolina at the invitation of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My experience with the NSM had resulted in more questions than answers, and I figured that if I wanted to understand the white supremacist movement in America, I might as well start with the “Original Boys in the Hood,” as one of their more popular t-shirts stated.

It took some driving around to find the location of the Loyal White Knights rally. This was another thing that had changed over the years. There was a time, only a few decades ago, when Klan rallies were, if not announced and attended by the public, certainly tolerated enough to be held in the open. In 2011, even in North Carolina, they had been relegated to the backwoods, as far from people as they were from relevance. At the turn-off to a narrow dirt road stood a decrepit old tractor that someone had taken the time to drape in a Confederate flag. It seemed like a clue, so I took a chance and turned left into the woods. Read more…

The Great Online School Scam

Photo: Getty Images.

Noliwe Rooks | Excerpt from Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education | The New Press | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,064 words)

* * *

DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos said her ultimate goals in education reform encompassed not just charter schools and voucher programs, but also virtual education. She said these forms were important because they would allow “all parents, regardless of their zip code, to have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children.” Also in 2013, one of the organizations that she founded, the American Federation for Children, put out a sharply critical statement after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.” Yet another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools, and in a 2015 speech available on YouTube DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.” She then said, “We must open up the education industry—and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry. We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

At the time of her nomination, charter schools were likely familiar to most listeners given their rapid growth and ubiquity. However, the press surrounding the DeVos nomination may have been one of the first times most became aware of a particular offshoot of the charter school movement—virtual or cyber schools. Despite flying somewhat under the mainstream radar, online charter schools have faced a wave of both negative press and poor results in research studies. One large-scale study from 2015 found that the “academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule.” By June of 2016, even a group that supports, runs, and owns charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools, saying, “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country.” The jointly authored research was sponsored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50Can, all groups that lobby state and federal agencies to loosen regulations to allow more robust charter-school growth. As one of the report’s backers said, “I’m not concerned that Betsy DeVos supports virtual schools, because we support them too—we just want them to be a lot better.” Such an upswing in quality seems highly unlikely to happen anytime soon. They are yet another trickle in the stream of apartheid forms of public education flowing down from the wealthy and politically well connected to communities that are poor, of color, or both.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, poor students from rural areas as well as those in underfunded urban schools that primarily educate students who are Black and Latino today face a new response to the question of how to solve the riddle of race, poverty, and educational underachievement. Increasingly, despite little supporting evidence, a growing number of states and local school districts no longer believe that the solution is merely about infrastructure, class size, funding, or hiring more teachers. In states with high levels of poverty and “hard to educate” Black and Latino students, virtual schools are on the rise. Such schools are not growing nearly as fast in school districts that are white and relatively wealthy, nor are they the educational strategy of choice in most private schools. As much a business strategy as one promoting learning, virtual education allows businesses to profit from racial inequality and poverty. Sadly, this particular cure to what ails our education system more often than not exacerbates the problems. Read more…

Watching a Fall

AP Photo/Massoud Hossaini

Christine Spillson | Boulevard | Fall 2017 | 18 minutes (5,070 words)

On the morning of August 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea stepped out a door and into the crowd whose reported numbers would conflict greatly, anywhere between 10,000-20,000, but whose number, reports agree, had been growing in the dark of pre-dawn Owensboro, Kentucky.  Though neither Bethea nor anyone else in the crowd could have known it, this would be the last public execution in the United States. When Bethea arrived for his scheduled hanging, he had his short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the top so that his collar was closed.

He did not wear a necktie.

A path had been cleared for him. A tunnel, walled with human bodies, funneled him towards a stage. On the stage stood a scaffold, in the middle of which, was a trap door marked with an X. The X told Rainey Bethea where he would be standing and where the other men, some in white panama hats some not, should not stand. Not if they didn’t want to drop into history with the convicted man that they guided toward the center.

Rainey Bethea put one shoeless foot forward, pushing lightly down, as if to test the integrity of the space. As he moved onto the X it’s possible that, as Phil Hanna (“the humane hangman”) slipped on the noose he took a moment to whisper, “Remember, I am here to help you.”

The night before he was to be executed, Bethea took his last meal in a Louisville, Kentucky prison. One of the more widely printed pictures of Bethea shows him in the process of eating either lemon pie or mashed potatoes, both of which he requested. The black and white of the photo makes it difficult to tell which he is eating. In the picture, his shirt opens at the collar, revealing a cross tightly circling his neck. He stares out.

At some time between 5:23 a.m., when he arrived at the foot of the stairs, and 5:44 a.m., when he was pronounced dead, Bethea must have had a moment to stare out at the crowd that had gathered to watch him. He stood there watching them watch him watch them. A cycle that loops out into an infinite moment of observation. As he looked out he couldn’t have known that one of the men in the crowd had just told a reporter that he’d driven with six others from Florida to see the hanging. Bethea probably didn’t know that reporters were taking note of license plates from at least half a dozen other states and twenty different counties in Kentucky. The distance that they had traveled to be there didn’t matter, the audience was just a massive white monolith that pressed towards him from the front, the way dawn’s short but lengthening fingers reached toward him from his right, the way the stairs receded from his left, and the way that empty space beneath him pressed up toward his feet until it met the wood that held the X which, for that moment, still held his feet. Behind him, he must have known, there was nothing he could turn to see. Then there was the black hood to cover his face, a courtesy for the audience not Rainey Bethea; after that, he could see nothing at all.

***

My grandmother was there. My mother has tried to provide me an excuse for it. My grandmother, Dorothy Hagan before she was Dorothy Hagan Riley, was seventeen in 1936. She had left school three years earlier, after the eighth grade, to help support her family, her three brothers and two sisters. Her father, Jerome, walked every day to work in his tobacco field outside of town. While the living he made from it was enough to have moved his family from a log cabin with dirt floors and no running water and into a house in Owensboro, it was not enough to be enough. They had not made it far enough from the cabin and from rural poverty not to need more. A picture in my mother’s room shows her in that abandoned house, leaning out of a loft window that looks more like something that belongs to a barn than a home, and I stand below with my sister and my grandmother.

My grandmother, I am told, wouldn’t have gone to see a man hanged. My great-grandfather, I am told, wouldn’t have gone with his teenage daughter to see a man hanged. The definitive proof of this is that he was considered by all to be a Christian man. But they did. They were there. In that Friday’s predawn darkness, my great-grandfather chose not to walk to his fields outside of town but deeper into its center.  They walked together the few blocks from their home on Fifth Street and north towards the Ohio River and the parking lot that sat between First and Second streets (where the city convention center now stands) where the execution was to take place. They are somewhere there, possibly in the picture, definitely in the crowd of men in white hats, white shirts, and women in long skirts. After I asked, after I tried to make sense of it, of why the grandmother who I remember having jars full of those terrible puffy orange “circus peanut” candies, who made the world’s sweetest pecan pie and the South’s best biscuits and gravy, would have gone to watch a man killed, my mother calls me to offer her theory. She has come to it long after I originally posed the question and perhaps as a way to explain to herself why her mother would have been there. What lesson could she have been attempting to learn that wasn’t worth repeating to her children?  My mother tells me about the job in town. She argues that, if it was crowded like I say, then maybe it was hard to get home, hard to get out of the center of town, hard not to attend. She does not acknowledge that there is a distinction between having been there and having watched. I was told that she watched. I also know that it was done at dawn, that it was not evening, that she would not have been leaving. She had left her home early enough to attend.

***

The story of the execution of Rainey Bethea is likely not the story of an innocent man wrongly accused and put to death. It is not the story of a man being railroaded because of a city’s need for closure. Some disagree and the state of the justice system at the time certainly invites doubt but, by the time of his execution, Rainey Bethea had confessed to his crime on five separate occasions and had pleaded guilty during his trial. The first confession started in the back of a police car while being transported between jails after his arrest.

Sitting in the back of a Jefferson County police car, he leaned forward, “I might as well tell you something.” A small shape in the long back seat of the giant black Ford, he tells the two men driving him from Owensboro to Louisville that he entered Lishia Edward’s home, which he had worked in previously, by walking over the roofs of neighboring buildings and then prying at a loose window screen. In this first confession, possibly made while he was still intoxicated from the whiskey that he had been drinking earlier, he admits to choking the 70-year-old woman and then beating her and raping her. In this version, she does not move when he is finished and turns away to search the room for jewelry. By his fifth confession, she is alive when he leaves, and she tells his back as he exits out the window, “I know you.” But there, in his first confession, she doesn’t move as he left. He knew why the police focused on him and shook his head as if he can’t believe it even then, days later: “When I left, I forgot my ring.”

***

The crime that Rainey Bethea was convicted of committing, though horrific, becomes an essential but small detail in the story as it was brought to the nation. It was a story of a woman sheriff and the humane hangman. It was the story of a black man to be hanged by white men at the orders of a white woman in the South, and that was the way that it was presented. It was the story of a county that had elected to charge a man with rape rather than with murder, though the prosecutor believed him guilty of both, because in Kentucky one could punish rape by a public hanging in the town where the crime occurred; a murderer would be executed privately by the state with an electric chair.

In a decade that had seen 103 lynchings by the end of 1936 and would see another sixteen in the four years before its end, the public, court-sanctioned execution of an African American was, even so, a spectacle worthy of note and worthy of condemnation by the media of a country whose states had largely already removed the punishing of capital crimes from the public view. Even in a decade in which 2/3 of those executed by the government were African- American, the public nature of the event made it worthy of wider attention.

Rainey Bethea’s death was the story of a black man to be hanged by white men at the orders of a white woman in the South, and that was the way that it was presented.

The tension was obvious enough for anyone with an eye for drama to notice. The dynamics of race and gender and class were working together to create a story that was hard to look away from. Florence Shoemaker Thompson, the sheriff of Daviess County Kentucky, had been sheriff for only a few short months when Bethea was sentenced to hang. Sheriff Thompson had not run for the job. After her husband died in April of 1936 while in the office, a judge appointed his widow to fill the vacant seat. The appointment came from pity — she was a housewife with four young children that she needed to support — and from practicality — the vacancy needed to be filled swiftly so that law enforcement for the county could continue to function.

In his 1992 book, The Last Public Execution in America, Perry Ryan tells us that “hers is not the story of a feminist” rather “hers is the story of a simple but brave and forthright woman.” He characterizes Thompson as a good cook and an excellent seamstress who just wanted what was best for her children. This portrayal of the woman is reductively simple, just as the contemporary accounts of her go little beyond the picture of her as a sheriff in skirts. The press, and thus much of the nation, wondered if this woman who had only recently stepped outside of the home to work would be able to fulfill the duty required of a county sheriff if an execution was to be served out in their county. Could she, would she, pull the lever to make Rainey Bethea drop? How could they look away until they knew?

***

About a year ago, while eating dinner with my family in Florida, I very awkwardly brought up the topic of the execution of Rainey Bethea. My mother had invited her sister and brother over for dinner since I was home for a visit. I sat on the side of the dining room table that faces the smoked mirror wall that forms one side of the room. It is a relic of the house’s 1970’s origin that my mother finds charming and has refused to change in various renovation projects. I believe that she also thinks that it works to nicely reflect the light from the same era’s smoked glass bubble light chandelier that hangs over the dining room table, another relic of the house’s past that she has determined to keep.

I had watched a segment on The Rachel Maddow Show about the last public execution to take place in America. Maddow started the segment by talking about Florence Thompson inheriting her late husband’s job as the sheriff of Daviess County and the focused media attention that surrounded the execution. The point that Maddow was working to arrive at was that, though it was terrible, there was a sense of transparency to the processes, a transparency that had been notably absent during a botched lethal injection in Arizona. The story continued to stay in my mind as I thought about my grandmother’s connection to the place. I knew that while my mother and her siblings had not been born in or ever lived in that city, they had spent every summer there as children, since it was the town that their mother was from and the place where the majority of her family still lived. So when I brought it up over dinner in a sort of “did you know about this” way, I was surprised that my mother and her siblings looked at me with an “of course we knew that” look. They tell me that my grandmother attended but couldn’t explain why.

“She always just shook her head if it came up,” my aunt told me while we ate dessert. From what I can gather she never actually said a word about it to any of her children. But they never really asked about it. They didn’t ask her why she went. When I ask if she was racist or if her father was racist I get the reply, “No, of course not.”

I try to imagine going to see the execution out of a sense of justice or to get a feeling of closure. These are reasons that are offered for capital punishment, the reasons why they held public executions in the community that was affected by the crime, the reasons that might support my grandmother’s attendance. The victim had lived on the same street as my grandmother. It is said that everyone in town knew Lishia Edwards. Perhaps she felt personally injured. Perhaps she, and what was likely a majority of the Owensboro, felt that to watch the execution was to watch justice being done.

In 2001, when Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, was to be executed, the government received more than 250 requests from those who had lost someone in the bombing for access to view the execution. Oneta Johnson lost her mother in the bombing, her body hadn’t been found until ten days later in the rubble. Ms. Johnson said that she hoped that seeing McVeigh dead might make her feel better. The Entertainment Network Inc. in Tampa, FL tried to sue the government so that we could all watch. They wanted to webcast the footage of McVeigh being executed to anyone willing to pay $1.95. The Entertainment Network Inc. lost its suit.

***

When Bethea was incarcerated in 1935 for the theft of two purses from the Vogue Beauty Shop located on Frederica Street in Owensboro for which he pleaded guilty to grand larceny, he was given a physical at which time his weight was noted as being 128 pounds and his height was recorded as 5’4”. Because of his small stature and slight build, he would, according to the 1947 Army Manual for military executions, need to drop a distance between 7’10” and 7’7” for an optimal outcome. An optimal outcome here would mean that he did not drop too far and too long, which could result in decapitation, or drop too short and too briefly which would result in a slow strangulation that could subsequently take up to forty-five minutes.

G. Phil Hanna would have known this. He might have known these figures and recommendations by heart when he stood waiting at the top of the scaffold that day in August. Bethea’s execution would be his seventieth. The hangman would have known how far a man needs to fall. He would have known that it is recommended that a hanging rope should be made from manila hemp fibers, and should be not more than one-and-a-quarter inches in diameter but not less than three-quarters of an inch. Hanna, by that point, would know that the experts suggest that the rope be thirty feet in length and that the rope should “be boiled and then stretched while drying to eliminate any spring, stiffness, or tendency to coil” and that the “portion of the noose which slides through the knot will be treated with wax, soap or grease to ensure a smooth sliding action through the knot.” A smooth sliding action through the knot would be vital to the execution, so when Hanna bought his hanging rope, or rather had one specially made for him in St. Louis out of a long-strand hemp fiber (which would be softer and less scratchy), he was willing to pay $65.

He knew the importance of a good rope. He kept all thirty-eight feet of it coiled and protected in a special box. He could observe you, estimate your weight and tell you how far you’d need to drop for a good hanging, something that he did to a reporter interviewing him in 1933 for The Decatur Daily Review. “I tie the knot” Hanna said. “Your neck would require about eight turns of the rope.” He knows that a man with a long neck might require thirteen turns of the rope but had learned to eyeball it with accuracy. He then demonstrated the noose’s construction, the twists and turns that he would require of the rope. If it weren’t just a demonstration, if it were a real hanging, he would treat the knot with pure castile soap and then sprinkle it with a scented talcum. If this were a real hanging, he would have gone to the jail and introduced himself to the condemned man by saying his name and then, “I am here to help you.”

The victim had lived on the same street as my grandmother.  Perhaps she felt personally injured. Perhaps she, and what was likely a majority of the Owensboro, felt that to watch the execution was to watch justice being done.

Hanna was a curiosity in the same way the woman sheriff and the town square hanging was a curiosity for the press. He had already earned his reputation of “humane hangman” when he was recommended to Sheriff Thompson because he had his own equipment and the experience and expertise to carry off the sentence. He also didn’t demand any payment. Hanna saw his work of execution facilitator (perhaps a term that he’d appreciate given that he did not like being called a hangman) as vocational rather than occupational and he had never, in any of his seventy hangings, actually sprung the trapdoor.

Having hired Hanna to bring his portable scaffold, his thirty-eight-foot rope, and his experience in sixty-nine previous hangings, Sheriff Thompson was faced with making the decision of who would officially pull the lever to spring the moment that would ultimately kill a man. It was, strictly speaking, her duty. She refused to answer any questions posed by an interested public and a persistent press about whether she would be acting as the executioner. She started receiving requests for “reserve seating” tickets and questions as to when they might be going on sale from people all over the country. She spoke to her priest, she spoke to her friends, but she wouldn’t speak to the press. This was a mistake. By not telling anyone what her decision was she creates mystery. This mystery, the will-she or won’t-she aspect of the story became a mystery that had a defined expiration date and that would end with a death regardless of her decision. How could it fail to sell papers?

Dear Mrs. Thompson,

I am writing you this letter, offering you my services … for several reasons, … First you are a woman and have four children, none of which I am sure would want you to spring the trap that sends Rainey Bethea into eternity. Second, I wouldn’t want my mother to be placed in such an unpleasant position. Third, I am an ex-serviceman and served … in France in 1918 and 1919, and I know just how you would feel after the execution if you went through with it. You may think it wouldn’t bother you, after it is all over, but I know different … Please do not give this letter to anyone for publication … I am not hunting for publicity. I only want to help you.

Your friend,
A.L. Hash

The press didn’t know that Sheriff Thompson had been corresponding with Arthur L. Hash, a former Louisville policeman, and that he had offered to take up this responsibility on her behalf. He cites his wartime service in France as evidence that he knows what she would feel in the aftermath of the execution, even though the death wasn’t the result of a choice that she had made. “You may think it wouldn’t bother you after it is all over, but I know different,” Hash tells her. Perhaps aware that duty and obligation wouldn’t remove the immediate connection between her hand on the lever and the sudden rushing sense of a body moving quickly through space before the abrupt snap. And, of course, it will be witnessed, written about, photographed and talked about.

***

In his writings about incarceration and punishment, Michel Foucault made an observation similar to so many of the newspapers writing contemporary accounts of the execution of Bethea. The public aspect of punishment often turned into a carnival. If the purpose of public execution was once to terrify a population into being law-abiding citizens, to act as a type of control of the masses by the smaller coalitions of people in positions of power, modern public executions slipped further and further from the horror that they sought to inspire. Rather than reaffirming the authority of those in power, public executions started to degrade it and, through the lawlessness of the crowd, offered those attending as witnesses a glimpse of their own collective power.

France continued to behead people in public spaces until 1939 (and continue to behead people in private until capital punishment was banned in 1977). The final public use of the guillotine was photographed by people in the crowd. One person was able to film it. The video and photographic evidence of the social revelry before and after the execution was said to be disturbing enough to the wider French population and the French government that the use of public executions was reassessed.

Of course, this was the very narrative that Foucault was denying. He didn’t believe that the authorities developed some sentiment about the brutality of the practice, that they suddenly saw wrong and cringed from the horror. It was an issue of control.

Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, would likely have agreed but for different reasoning.

The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever…The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification.

For this context, the last public execution in the U.S., we might understand this to mean that we get a greater and greater transference of power from the action and the representation of the action. In an earlier society, the government or those with power had, for the most part, direct and limiting control of the images of a public execution. They scheduled it; they carried it out. Once people have the ability to take these images themselves and distribute them widely and in whatever context they chose, the power of the spectacle transferred from those that once controlled the execution to those who observe it and then redistribute it.

After 1936, control of these images was reestablished. With executions moved indoors, journalists may watch, if they are selected (usually through a lottery system), but they may not bring cameras or recording devices. They may be searched and stripped of all personal items and given a small spiral notebook that they can use. The families of victims watch like Oneta Johnson watched. In several states volunteer witnesses also watch. In Missouri, at least eight “reputable citizen” witnesses are required at each execution. Virginia, reportedly, has a list of twenty to thirty rotating witnesses compiled from a bank of hundreds of volunteers, because six are required to be at every execution. One of the volunteer witnesses, a paint store salesman from Emporia, told one reported that he had witnessed fifteen executions. When applying to be a witness, you must answer the question “why?” Why they would they want to sign up to watch people die. Some write in that it is a civic duty, some admit to being curious. Florida, though it requires volunteer witnesses, has stopped asking why.

In 1936, though, there was no need to apply for a spot. The execution was downtown, public lot, open humid air. The people were crowding and climbing, the press was swarming. The widely distributed narrative of the execution wouldn’t be the one that constructed by the police or the courts or even the guillotine operator or the hangman. It was the details shared in the papers, in the photographs. The execution was constructed characters: the Lady Sheriff, the Humane Hangman, the Condemned Man, and finally a newcomer to the show — Arthur Hash aka “Daredevil Dick from Montana”. These people become the show and it’s a show that we must now watch to the end.

We might watch out of a need for closure; we might watch out of a feeling of obligation to act as a witness; we might watch because we believe that this is justice; we might, too, still be watching because now it is a story and, even if we know the ending, we can’t resist turning the page.

***

On the day of the execution, 1,300 reporters were present and ready to make the news. Twenty-thousand people stood waiting in the dark vacant lot for history to happen. Vendors had set up the day before and sold the crowd hotdogs and soda. Parents brought their children. People climbed trees, climbed buildings, climbed telephone poles, climbed cars, including the one that would take away Rainey Bethea’s body after the hanging. Phil Hanna stood at the top of the gallows and tested the trapdoor three times to make sure they wouldn’t stick or swing up to hit Bethea on his way down.

Then dawn was arriving and the crowd was growing restless. Some had been up all night at house parties. Some had spent the night traveling to town or trying to sleep in the lot adjacent to the scaffold. Some had tried to sleep underneath the scaffold. The people were growing restless for the event that they had come to see. Shortly after 5:00 a.m., when the dark wasn’t as dark as it had been all night, some in the crowd began to yell “bring him out” and “let’s go!”

Rainey Bethea exited the Daviess County jail and walked the approximately 800 feet to the steps of the scaffold. From witness accounts, at this moment either the crowd cheered or grew hushed. Obviously, it couldn’t be both. At the bottom of the thirteen steps that lead up to the trapdoor, Bethea paused. Sitting down for a moment on the bottom step, he said “I don’t like to die with my shoes on.” He removed one shoe and then the other. He took another moment to remove one sock and then the other and to put on a new, clean pair before standing to take his first step up. He was finally at the top and at the literal center of the attention. He knelt before Father Lammers and said his final confession. Bethea’s ankles, thighs, and arms were then strapped together with leather bindings. The bindings made his body compressed and rippled. Hanna slipped on the noose and arranged it so the knot rested behind his left ear.

It became obvious as the moment neared and Sheriff Thompson didn’t appear, that she had chosen someone else to handle the duty of springing the trap. The picture that the press had come for, the headline that they all wanted, wouldn’t be happening that day. It would never happen. Perhaps fearing her presence would make it more of a circus, Sheriff Thompson sat in a car parked fifty yards away. She had chosen to deputize Arthur Hash who climbed the stairs in a white suit and a panama hat, dodging the reporter’s questions about who he was by saying, “I’m Daredevil Dick of Montana. Take a drink with me when this is over and I’ll tell you my name.”

***

In a moment, it will be over. In a moment, the man will drop and the dreadful physics of a hanging will go as smoothly as Hanna promised with his grim expertise. A moment after that, spectators, in a frenetic rush, will descend upon the still, but hanging, body to tear at it, to rip at the concealing hood and shred it for souvenirs. So many wanted a small piece to take home with them. It will be this frenzy, the barbarism, the reports, the headlines and photographs that show to the world a cheering crowd and the total annihilation of the order that this execution was proposed to uphold that would drive future death behind walls and screens and the transparent, illusory distance of the glass observation window behind which sit those that have retained their right to watch.

***

At the top of the scaffold, Hash appeared to be drunk and staggering. His wife, Cordie, hadn’t been able to understand why he would agree to play the role of executioner, possibly not knowing at the time that he hadn’t just accepted it but sought it out. He sought out this role, to be not only one among many in the crowd, but to be one among few at the top of the gallows’ stairs and to be the sole person with the responsibility of pulling the lever which would hang Raniey Bethea. “Can you imagine him doing a thing like that,” Cordie Hash said “when there are other people in the state who would do it?”

Can we imagine?

When the moment arrived Hash seemed unsure of what he was doing. The moment expanded and went on. He fumbled. Finally, someone helped him spring the door.

* * *

This essay first appeared in Boulevard, St. Louis’ biannual print journal, founded by fiction writer Richard Burgin in 1985. Our thanks to Spillson and the Boulevard staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

This Is How a Woman Is Erased From Her Job

Photograph by Kate Joyce

A.N. Devers | Longreads | December 2017 | 26 minutes (6,577 words)

This is a story about a woman who was erased from her job as the editor of the most famous literary magazine in America.

In 2011, the New York Times ran Julie Bosman’s energetic and gregarious profile of Lorin Stein, the latest head editor of the famous literary magazine The Paris Review — a position for which she declared, “Bacchanalian nights are practically inscribed in the job description.” The profile portrayed Stein as an intellectual bon vivant who loved parties, party-boy banter, and debating literature as if it were the most important thing in the world.

We know now that Stein, by his own admission, abused his power with women writers and staff of the Paris Review. He has resigned from the literary magazine and from his editor-at-large position at Farrar, Straus and Giroux in response to the board of the Paris Review’s investigation into sexual harassment allegations and his conduct. We also know, by his own admission, that he did not treat literature as the most important thing in the world.

Stein himself admitted it in a cringeworthy 2013 online feature from Refinery29 focused not only on the magazine’s debaucherous parties but also on the interior decor of the Paris Review’s offices and fashion choices of the staffers, who were nearly all women. “It’s always been two things at once,” he says about the Review. “On the one hand, it’s a hyper-sophisticated, modernist, avant-garde magazine. On the other hand, it’s sort of a destination party.”

We now know, between this and Bosman’s piece, even without details of the accusations or reports printed in the Times, or the far worse accusations listed in the “Shitty Media Men” list, that these are glaringly honest portrayals of Stein’s priorities at the helm of the Paris Review. Unfortunately.

Also unfortunate was the error in Bosman’s piece naming Stein as the third editor to “hold the title in the magazine’s 58-year history, and the second to follow George Plimpton, himself a legendary New York social figure.” Stein was actually the fourth. Brigid Hughes, the editor who succeeded George Plimpton, had been inexplicably left out of the profile. She was also not mentioned in the piece announcing Stein’s successorship of Philip Gourevitch; although there was no factual error, she was simply ignored.

Read more…

The Dead Man Fund

(Lambert/Archive Photos)

Jack El-Hai | Longreads | November 2017 | 7 minutes (1,672 words)

In 1989, Morningstar, Inc., an advisory service, issued a strongly worded and unusual recommendation to its clients who had placed money with a firm then called the Steadman Funds (later known as the Ameritor Funds). “We urge you to cut your losses and get out,” Morningstar counseled. Doubtless, some investors heeded this advice. Many couldn’t, though, because they were dead.

A few years ago, the fate of Ameritor— nicknamed “The Dead Man Fund” — and its unfortunate investors, became entangled with the history of my house. An envelope had landed in our mailbox containing a check in the amount of $10.32 made out to one Anna Mae Heilman. She was nobody we knew, but the name rang familiar to me for some reason. With the check was a letter explaining that the money was a final settlement of Heilman’s investment of 171 shares in the Ameritor Security Trust mutual fund, which had closed down.

It didn’t take long for me to remember how I knew Heilman’s name. When we bought the house, we acquired its abstract, a thick and crumbling packet of legal documents that chronicled more than a century of transactions involving the property. Heilman’s name was in there. She and her husband had owned our house for several years ending in 1971.

Heilman’s tiny payout at a rate of only six cents per share seemed strange, so I began looking into the history of Ameritor and the circumstances of the Heilmans’ sale of our house. I then learned of two terrible misfortunes that afflicted one family. Read more…

The Itch and the Touch

(Alessia Pederzoli / Getty)
 Evan Lavender-Smith | The Southern Review | Fall 2017 | 37 minutes (10,132 words)

I.

Mom called last night to say that when she and my brother went to Good Sam’s yesterday, they found Grandpa John totally naked in the bathroom, his butt basically stuck in the toilet seat, unable to get up, and it was a good thing my brother was with her, Mom said, because dealing with her father when he’s naked is one thing she just can’t bring herself to do. “I can’t deal with his penis,” she said. I told her that I understood, which I do, as often, in recent years, when I’ve been in the position of having to deal with his penis myself, I’ve thought the very same thing, viz., “I can’t deal with his penis.” Mom said that she went into the other room — Grandpa John’s bedroom / dining room / living room — while my brother and a nurse hoisted him from the toilet seat, cleaned him up, and got him dressed. Mom was trying not to cry while describing this scene to me, I could tell; I believe Mom fears crying while talking on the phone with me, worried that if she were to cry, I might get annoyed. Apparently, I am content allowing her to believe that I would get annoyed were she to cry, so she doesn’t. When Grandpa John dies, a death which his GP has suggested is now imminent, I have no doubt that Mom will cry while relating the news to me, but it remains to be seen whether I will or will not get annoyed.

***

Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time at Good Sam’s with Grandpa John. A primary topic of discussion has been Grandpa John’s so-called itch.

“How are you feeling today, Grandpa John?” I’ve often asked him.

“Not good,” he’s often replied. “It’s this damn itch again.”

We’ve taken him to several doctors to see what can be done about the itch. When the doctor asks Grandpa John to describe his symptoms, Grandpa John replies thus: “I itch!” And when the doctor asks him to elaborate, thus: “Everywhere! All the time!”

We took him to a dermatologist who told us we ought to see a neurologist. We took him to a neurologist who told us we ought to see a dermatologist.

Grandpa John’s GP finally told me there’s no reason he should be so itchy all the time. She pulled me aside in the exam room to say, “I’m convinced that the itchiness is all in his head. You might consider taking him to see a psychologist.”

“A psychologist!” Grandpa John said, riding shotgun in the minivan on the drive from the GP’s back to Good Sam’s. “But it’s an itch!”

“I’m just telling you what the doctor told me.”

“Do you know what doctors do? Evan, do you know what doctors do?”

“They practice.”

“You’re goddamn right they practice,” he said. “And that’s all they do.”

I suggested that maybe we should give the topical route another go, maybe stop off at Walmart and try to find something there, as none of the various pills he’d been prescribed had seemed to have any effect on curbing the itch.

In the Walmart parking lot, Grandpa John turned to regard me with his amber fit-over sunglasses. “I’ll wait here,” he said. He fished in his wallet, handed me a one-dollar bill.

“Generic, then. Travel size. Good. We’ll see how it works and go from there.”

In his lenses my reflection remained still for a long moment. He fished in his wallet again, pulled out a hundred. “Don’t bring back any change.”

Standing shirtless in his kitchenette later that afternoon, with his arms raised as high as he could get them, Grandpa John said, “You’ve got to get the whole back. And get it low. Yes, like that. Get it lower. Here.” He unbuckled his belt, pulled his pants and underwear all the way down. “Get the cheeks. Get all over the cheeks and then hit the tops of the legs, the fronts and the backs. Get everywhere. And get the crack. Get it good. Yes, like that. Use the whole bottle, we’ve got ten more. We’re going to snuff out this itch if it’s the last thing we do.”

“Grandpa John told me you cured the itch,” Mom said to me on the phone that night. “I can’t believe it. All those doctors! What’s this special itch ointment you found? He said it was expensive.”

“Johnson’s Baby Oil. I bought a hundred dollars’ worth. No itch-relieving properties whatsoever.”

“I don’t understand,” Mom said.

“I think he just wants to be touched.”

“Touched?”

“He’s already got me penciled in for an hour and a half tomorrow, between church and poker.”

“Gosh,” Mom said, struggling to suppress a laugh, “it must be hell getting old, right?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Nude massage sounds pretty good to me.”

“Evan, I appreciate you so much. And so does he. And so does the itch, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “The itch.”

***

On the days I drive over to Good Sam’s I always take a few minutes to come up with a list of things to talk about to which I can later refer while Grandpa John sits in his reclining chair staring at me blankly. Driving over earlier today — the A/C on full blast, fending off yet another sweltering New Mexican early-November afternoon — I considered the possibility of discussing the Republicans’ foreboding sweep of the midterm elections; my predictions for the upcoming Panthers-Eagles Monday Night Football game; my son’s lack of progress at piano; my daughter’s enrollment in hip-hop dance class; the Yankees’ qualifying offer to D-Rob and the likelihood that he would turn it down; the comical nature of our family’s recent trip to the annual Renaissance Faire; the comical nature of our family’s continued failures to housebreak our new puppy; and, if Grandpa John seemed up for it, Mom’s newly established plan for moving him from his assisted-living place at Good Sam’s over to long-term care at a local nursing home called The Aristocrat. My mental list of conversational possibilities would generally consist of even more items, maybe a dozen or so, but my son and daughter, who’d agreed to accompany me to Good Sam’s this afternoon, would serve, I hoped, as they had during past visits, as readily available means of conversational diversion were things to get silent and awkward between Grandpa John and me, or, were Grandpa John in an especially bad mood — were things to get combative between us, as they occasionally do — as conversational wedges, conversational shields.

“So,” I asked the kids, lowering the driver’s side visor to spare my eyes the afternoon sun’s harsh glare, “what are you guys going to talk about with Grandpa John?”

“Probably politics and stuff,” my son said.

“Probably just football and stuff,” my daughter said.

“Not good. Instead, I should like for you,” I said to my son, “to talk to him about stuff besides politics, because I’ve already decided that I’m going to talk to him about politics, especially about the midterm election results, and, besides, you don’t really know anything about politics. And you,” I said to my daughter, “I want you to talk to him about something besides football, because everybody knows you hate football, and because I’ve already got some stuff planned to talk to him about, about football.”

“So what should we talk to him about then?” my son asked.

“Yeah,” my daughter asked, “what should we talk to him about then?”

“What you guys should do is try to think of stuff to talk about that’s going to make Grandpa John feel better about dying,” I said. “Try to come up with stuff about what it’s like to be a kid, to encourage Grandpa John to conjure up images from his childhood and reflect on them with feelings of satisfaction and contentment about a life lived completely. Maybe think about something that happened recently on the playground at school, or in the cafeteria, or in the classroom, or at PE or something. Poignant interactions with other kids, your frustration with curricular requirements, the developmental travails of prepubescence. Something you did that got you in trouble. I know Grandpa John used to get in all sorts of trouble when he was a kid.”

“He did?” my daughter asked. “Like what sort of trouble?”

“Yeah,” my son asked, “what sorts of things did Grandpa John do to get into trouble when he was kid?”

“Talking in class, forgetting his backpack at home,” I said. “Not taking the puppy for long enough walks in the evening.”

“What kind of puppy did Grandpa John have when he was a kid?” my daughter asked.

“Yeah,” my son asked, “what kind of puppy did Grandpa John have when he was a kid?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe a Yorkshire terrier?”

“A Yorkie? You mean like Bucky?”

“That’s right. His puppy was the exact same breed as Bucky.”

“Cool,” my son said.

“Yeah,” my daughter said, “cool.”

“Not so cool, actually. If I remember correctly, Grandpa John’s Yorkie died at a very young age. Nobody ever took it for long enough walks in the evenings so its muscles atrophied and it just sort of withered away. Please don’t mention that to Grandpa John, though. I know he’s worked hard to forget it.”

A stoplight ahead of us turned red. I decelerated, bringing the minivan to a halt. None of us spoke for the duration of the red light.

After we’d started moving again, my daughter said, solemnly, “I’m going to take Bucky for a really long walk tonight.”

I scanned the rearview mirror to find that my son’s face had flushed red. “Dad,” he said, also solemnly, “I think we ought to take Bucky on a really long walk tonight.”

***

the old man and the outhouse

(as recently narrated to me, for the umpteenth time, by Grandpa John)

Can’t remember who he was, some old geezer from the neighborhood. I’m ten, see, eleven, still in my short pants. The old man’s trudging up the hill to the outhouse on his way to take his morning dump, newspaper in one hand, roll of tissue paper in the other. And I’m in the mulberry bushes with my buddies, see, watching, hiding out. And then I says to them, after the old man shuts the door behind him, I says to my buddies, real quiet-like, “OK, boys, now let’s tip the shit house over with the old man inside.”

***

Did Grandpa John have a dog as a kid? The image I have of Grandpa John’s father, given the former’s disturbing tales of abuse suffered at the latter’s hand, the intensity and immediacy of which has always been compounded by Grandpa John’s fondness for the historical present, does not at all jibe with the image of a yapping puppy running around the house. I guess I could imagine them owning a Doberman pinscher or a pit bull, maybe a German shepherd. I suspect that Grandpa John became a serious dog person only later in life, after his wife, my grandmother, the mortally emphysemic Grandma Blanche, died. While Grandpa John is not the type of man to admit of such a correlation — I can’t hear him saying, “Daily cuddles with this shih tzu eases the pain and anxiety associated with the unfortunate early passing of the love of my life” — it seemed obvious enough: during the twenty or so years intervening between Grandma Blanche’s death and Grandpa John’s matriculation at Good Sam’s, he was to be found without a canine cuddling companion for never more than a few days, that being the amount of time it took to have someone come in and dispose of the old dog’s dead body and then have someone else come in with an assortment of new puppies from which Grandpa John would proceed to make an unceremonious and often ill-advised selection.

What you guys should do is try to think of stuff to talk about that’s going to make Grandpa John feel better about dying.

No pets allowed at Good Sam’s, however. With Grandpa John’s escalating depression and his fondness for super cute dogs near to our minds, we decided, a couple of weeks back — associating Grandpa John’s contentedness, even Grandpa John’s happiness, with Grandpa John’s proximity to a real puppy’s wet nose and a real puppy’s rough tongue and a real puppy’s real soft puppy fur, as opposed to these things’ mere photographic representation all over the walls of Grandpa John’s bedroom / dining room / living room — to smuggle our new puppy into Grandpa John’s apartment at Good Sam’s. But, alas, Bucky’s little contraband nails kept puncturing the heavily bruised, grotesquely translucent, tissue-thin skin on Grandpa John’s hands and arms and cheeks. “Your puppy’s claws and my old-man skin aren’t the best of bedfellows,” Grandpa John said. He sat in his recliner, lesions along his arms oozing dark blood, Band-Aid wrappers strewn across his lap.

“They’re not claws, silly,” my daughter said. “They’re fingernails.”

“They’re not fingernails, stupid,” my son said. “They’re pawnails.”

“Nails, claws, whatever. Words don’t matter,” I said. “What matters is Buck’s tearing the shit out of Grandpa John’s old-man skin. Now, you two, put down your iPads and get him off.”

Grandpa John, bleeding, said, “Buck.” He stroked Bucky’s back, giggling.

“That’s right,” I said. “Buck. We named him after you.”

“No we didn’t,” my son said, playing on his iPad. “You said we named him after Starbuck from Moby-Dick.”

“No we didn’t,” my daughter said, playing on her iPad. “We named him after Star­bucks. Dad took me there to get a cake pop right after we got him from the breeder.”

“You got a cake pop?” my son asked, incredulous, looking up from his iPad. “Dad, is that true?”

***

blind par three

(which often follows “TOMATO” in the manner of a coda)

So me and my buddies, we’re twelve, thirteen, see, and we’re hiding out in some bushes, right beside the green, waiting for a threesome to tee off at the bottom of the hill from where they can’t see the flag. As soon as that last ball hits the green, we all of us scramble to gather them up. They trudge up the hill, the golfers do, take about five minutes searching around for their tee shots. Then somebody thinks to check the hole. The looks of disbelief on those men’s faces, Evan, I’m telling you, their hoots and their hollers. Dancing around the green, hugging each other, kissing. They’re over there crying real tears of joy.

And we’re in those bushes crying a few of our own, too.

***

While driving over to Good Sam’s this afternoon, we approached a stoplight. Although we were the only car at the intersection, the stoplight still turned red.

“How come we have to go to Grandpa John’s all the time, anyway?”

It used to be that Grandpa John could drive himself around. A few days before Mom’s official revocation of Grandpa John’s driving privileges, the kids and I found ourselves in the harrowing position of having to trail Grandpa John in our minivan as he drove his own car, a Toyota Solara, across town, from Mom’s house all the way back to Good Sam’s. It reminded me of watching my son play a racing video game called Gran Turismo shortly after we first got it for him: dashed white lines on the asphalt signifying nothing, other cars on the road existing not in relation to the lives of humans and human families but only to that of the POV car’s maniacal caprice.

Grandpa John’s driving privilege coup de grace occurred after we pulled up behind him at a red light and the sound of a police cruiser’s siren issued from somewhere beyond the intersection. I suspected that Grandpa John wouldn’t be able to hear it, given the recent debacle involving his $5,000 hearing aids, the result of which was that he’d been left with only the left-ear one. As the police cruiser came into view, I flailed my arms wildly in the minivan and repeatedly mouthed the word no, hoping, I guess, that Grandpa John might look up at his rearview mirror and see me, causing him to pause long enough — curious as to why his grandson was acting the fool in his minivan — to allow the cruiser to pass through the intersection unimpeded. The light turned green; Grandpa John stepped on the gas. The police cruiser’s tires screeched; its front bumper came to rest only inches before the driver’s side of Grandpa John’s car, which continued to slowly, nonchalantly traverse the intersection. Aghast, I looked on as the officer flailed his arms inside the cruiser, as he repeatedly mouthed what I presumed to be the word no. Beyond the cruiser, off in the middle distance, the driver’s side tires of Grandpa John’s slow-moving Solara left a dashed white line in their wake.

“Yeah, how come we always have to go to Grandpa John’s? Why can’t he ever drive over to our house?”

* * *

Grandpa John sometimes says to me, “It’s hell getting old.”

“You know what my biggest problem is?” Grandpa John sometimes asks me. “What’s that?” I say. “Old age,” he replies.

“Today the doctor finally gave me some information I can work with,” Grandpa John says to me. “Oh yeah?” “Yeah,” he says to me. “She told me that I’m old.”

“Evan, I have some advice for you,” Grandpa John says to me. “Don’t ever get old.”

“Don’t worry,” I says to Grandpa John. “I won’t.”

* * *

I lived with Grandpa John and Grandma Blanche for a summer back in high school. Grandpa John was a senior VP at Waste Management, Inc., and he procured for me summer employment at a local dump.

I recall a torn wrapper from a packet of peanuts lying on the living room floor, Grandma Blanche telling Grandpa John to pick up the wrapper and put it in the trash. “What do I look like to you?” Grandpa John asked, watching televised golf, popping peanuts in his mouth. He wore an immaculate dress shirt, pleated slacks, ribbed socks, sparkling shoes. “You’re a garbage man, John,” Grandma Blanche said. “Do your job.”

When I returned home from work in the evenings, I was not allowed to enter the house until I had stripped down to my skivvies in the garage, placed my reeking work clothes in a trash bag, and cinched it all the way closed. I deposited the bag in the laundry room and raced across the house in my underwear — fearful that Grandpa John would catch a glimpse of my bean-pole figure and make a gibe about it — to the bathroom, where I showered and then sat on the toilet for twenty or more minutes enjoying the bathroom’s cleanliness, its spaciousness, its austerity . . . a far cry from the state of our cramped and often filthy bathroom back home, let alone that of the Porta-Johns at the dump. I would listen expectantly as the soles of Grandpa John’s oxfords tapped toward me from the hallway, as he knocked on the bathroom door to inquire as to whether I’d fallen in, as Grandma Blanche averred that teenagers require privacy of toilet and he really ought to leave me alone.

There was a rumor going around the dump that all of us worked for the mafia. “You mafia?” we’d ask each other, knee-deep in mounds of trash.

I was supposed to be saving up all my paycheck money for college, but I put aside a little each week for a portable CD stereo, which, maybe halfway through the summer, I finally purchased, positioning it on the marble-top dresser well beyond the foot of my bed. In the evenings, after Grandpa John and Grandma Blanche had released me from further familial obligation, I popped Nasty Nas’s groundbreaking Illmatic into the CD player’s tray and kicked back on that glorious California king with my elbows splayed out on either side of my head as it rested comfortably against the bed’s massive mahogany headboard. My hairless legs were crossed, my bare toes wiggled. In the huge gilt-framed mirror hanging above the dresser on the far side of the room, I studied an image of myself rapping along with Nas. Grandpa John’s house in Palm Springs was immense, palatial, nothing at all like his place at Good Sam’s; the guest room was in a whole other wing from where Grandpa John and Grandma Blanche’s bedroom was, so I was afforded the luxury of appreciating Nas at such a volume as Nas was intended to be appreciated: loud. “The World Is Yours” became my anthem. I recall lying on my bed in the guest room, slipping an eager hand beneath the elastic band of my boxer shorts as I watched myself in the mirror — the world was mine. I immersed and projected myself into the music of black culture, spending every weekend afternoon poring over the hip-hop CDs in the music section at the Palm Springs Barnes & Noble, memorizing track listings, taking assiduous note of rappers’ wardrobes — the world was mine. The large metal label on the back pocket of my Karl Kani jeans had scratched the absolute shit out of one of Grandma Blanche’s Windsor armchairs — the world was mine.

A loud banging issued from the other side of the door. Grandpa John entered the guest room, nude, livid. “Turn down the jungle music!” he yelled. His penis looked like a miniature human being.

We watched a movie together, something racy. During a sex scene, Grandma Blanche briefly removed the oxygen mask from her face to ask Grandpa John, “Why don’t you ever make love like that to me?” She returned the mask to her face; I listened to the cadence of compressed oxygen being released into my grandmother’s lungs. Grandpa John steadied his gaze on her. He replied, “Why don’t you ever make love like that to me?”

When I returned home from work in the evenings, I was not allowed to enter the house until I had stripped down to my skivvies in the garage, placed my reeking work clothes in a trash bag, and cinched it all the way closed.

I remember Grandpa John’s forearms resting on the dining room table, straddling his dinner — as if protecting it from some phantom threat: theft, mice, the swaying of a boat — fork in one hand, knife in the other, or, when not grasping cutlery, his fingers in loose fists, his thumbs pointing ceilingward.

And Grandpa John whiffing a three iron, swearing. Grandpa John repeatedly whiffing a wedge, chipping the ball with his foot.

Grandpa John kneeling in the pew, fingering a rosary, supplicating, trembling, the skin above his socks showing. Grandpa John smelling of Brut cologne, shoe polish, dry cleaning.

Grandpa John muttering curses under his breath while steering Grandma Blanche’s wheelchair up the ramp to the pulmonologist’s.

Grandpa John placing a finger above his left cheek, pulling down the skin, widening his eyes, asking, “Do you see anybody in here who cares?”

The three of us watched Jeopardy! together. Alex Trebek said, “He takes a green group of cowhands, prepares them for the drive, and then leads it.” Grandpa John and Grandma Blanche shouted at the TV, simultaneously, “Who is James Cagney!” Alex Trebek: “He watched the eighteen fourteen bombardment of Fort McHenry from a British ship and wrote a poem about it.” Grandpa John and Grandma Blanche, simultaneously: “Who is James Cagney!” “The name of this two- or three-toed mammal comes from Middle English for —” “Who is James Cagney!”

Grandpa John awoke at 4 a.m. every morning and set to work at doing the dishes, as Grandma Blanche no longer possessed the strength required to load the dishwasher without breaking stuff. The kitchen was on the other side of the house, and yet, as I lay in the guest room bed vying for more beauty sleep before having to get up and get going to the dump, it was as if the racket Grandpa John made in the kitchen sink was happening in my ear. I now believe that the cleaning of those dirty dishes was Grandpa John’s cross to bear; he was announcing his frustration with the conditions of his life — viz., the unassailable fact of his wife’s imminent death — via an exaggerated clanging of pots and pans.

On my last day of work at the dump, Grandpa John insisted on picking me up, giving me a break from the long bus ride home. He rolled up to the chain link entrance in his DeVille, all the windows rolled down, the back seat plastered in thick plastic sheeting.

My coworkers, eyes bulging, mouths agape, looked on.

“He mafia,” one of them said.

***

happy birthday

(specially requested on the kids’ birthdays, in hopes they will better appreciate all the good things in their lives)

My old man, that would be your great-grandfather, he says to me, “No way, Buck.” He says, “Buck, you are fifteen years old.” The old man says, “I seen some war myself and it ain’t pretty. No way am I sending a son of mine off to that hell.” But his answer doesn’t go over too well with me, see, so every day I get up out of that bed and I sit down at that table and I have another go at him. “Don’t forget my birthday’s coming up,” I says. “You gotta sign for me.” And every day the old man says back to me, “No way, Buck, I’m not signing it.” But I don’t let it go, no, you bet your ass I don’t. “Ask your mother,” the old man says. Evan, you did not know my mother. If you’d known that woman you’d know there’d be no chance of her ever signing it. So I keep pestering and pestering the old man every day, see, and when my birthday finally rolls around I get out of bed real early and I head over to him with the form and the pen and I says, “Sign it.” The old man looks up at me, it’s the one time in my life I ever seen that man scared. His hands are shaking, like this. The old man looks down at that form, takes up that pen, signs his name to it with tears in his eyes.
“Happy birthday,” he says to me. I grab the form and I run out of that house as fast as I can.

“Yes, it’s true, I got her a cake pop. In fact, I take her there to get cake pops all the time. Whenever you’re not looking, we hop in the car and go to Starbucks for cake pops. Now, I would kindly ask you to get your puppy off your great-grandfather before he skins the old man alive.”

Grandpa John giggled. Bucky sat in his lap chewing on a Band-Aid wrapper.

“Buck’s named after Grandpa John,” I said. “End of story. Another word about it and no screens for a week. Now, Grandpa John, explain to these two rabble-rousers why everybody used to call you Buck.”

Grandpa John dabbed at crimson blood on his arm with a monogrammed hankie, set the hankie down, returned to stroking Bucky’s back. He cleared his throat. “I believe it was on account of my teeth. But then they gave me new teeth in the navy, better teeth. The name stuck.”

“Did you guys hear that? Grandpa John was in the navy. He fought in the Pacific to preserve the freedom and the way of life you two so enjoy today.”

“Thanks, Grandpa,” my daughter said, without looking up from her iPad.

“Dad, can you sign me in?” my son said, handing me his iPad. “Yeah, thanks, Grandpa. It’s a free app, Dad, I swear.”

II.

The first episode of Ken Burns’s 2007 WWII documentary, The War, is entitled “A Necessary War.” Despite having watched this entire documentary three, maybe four, maybe five or six or maybe even seven or eight times — I watch documentaries on my iPhone to help me fall asleep at night — I can remember little of it beyond what the episode titles call to mind. “A Necessary War”: the United States’ entrance into WWII was necessary, unlike so many other wars in which we’ve found ourselves embroiled, because, in the case of WWII . . . but I’m unable to paraphrase Ken Burns’s argument as to why the U.S. involvement in WWII was necessary; I can’t remember it. Although I can, if put to, knowing Ken Burns’s politics as I do, attempt to fudge a summary, with no small confidence in my attempt’s resemblance to Burns’s thesis as I imagine it’s laid out somewhere in the documentary’s first chapter. Thus: Hitler, the persecution of the Jews, to preserve the way of life all of us so enjoy today; contra Vietnam, contra Persian Gulf, contra the so-called War on Terror, wars that involved the U.S.’s largely unnecessary engagement, viz., there was no Hitler involved, there were no millions of Jews being murdered, and, most importantly, there was no actual imminent threat to those many existential comforts afforded the U.S.’s middle and upper classes by means of our country’s hegemonic, globally oppressive late-capitalist regime.

One morning, a couple of weeks back, after a night spent watching and/or sleeping through the first few episodes of The War, I arrived at Good Sam’s eager to pick Grandpa John’s brain about his necessary involvement in WWII’s Pacific theater. Upon arriving, I found him asleep in his recliner with his mouth wide open, the TV on full blast, his raucous snores duking it out with exclamatory constatives from obnoxious local TV ads. I have been repeatedly admonished by both Mom and Grandpa John to wake up the latter whenever I arrive at Good Sam’s to find him sleeping, as they believe that the palliative effects of family interaction trump those of beauty sleep for Grandpa John, but, as I consider sleep a precious resource, one that should never be squandered, doing so remains rather difficult for me. My first recourse is to lower the TV volume and sit down on one of Grandpa John’s barstools in his kitchenette, pretend to play with my iPhone, simply wait it out. If only I possess the patience to wait long enough, Grandpa John will eventually wake up, I know; but, despite possessing great patience, as Mom’s often told me I do, I do not possess such patience as to sit contentedly amid the sound of Grandpa John’s sporadic grunting, the sight of his spittled chin, and the stench of his apartment’s moldy carpet for very long. My next recourse is to silently approach sleeping Grandpa John, kneel down beside the recliner, and whisper sweet nothings into whichever of his ears contains a hearing aid. My next recourse is to pat him gently on the leg. My next recourse is to grasp him by the shoulders and gently shake him. My next recourse is to pull his hair, gently. My next recourse is to yell at him, gently, or to gently pluck out one of his few remaining eyebrow hairs. My next recourse is to dispose with all gentility and retrieve from one of the cupboards in his kitchenette a pot and a pan, which was my final recourse on this day, the morning that found me eager to pick Grandpa John’s brain about the U.S.’s necessary involvement in WWII.

Standing above an openmouthed Grandpa John, studying his fake teeth, I clanged the pot and the pan together. He awoke, scanned the room to get his bearings, assuring himself that he was still alive. “Evan,” he said, wiping spittle from his chin, “thanks for waking me up.”

“Not a problem.” I sat down beside him. “So, Grandpa John, there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. In my opinion, World War II is the only truly necessary war the U.S. has ever been involved in, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Horseshit!” he replied, spewing saliva in the direction of my mouth.

I placed the pot and pan on the carpet, retrieved a hankie from my pocket, wiped my lips. “What I mean to say is,” I said, “it was necessary for the U.S. to get involved in World War II, in order to preserve the way of life we so enjoy today, in contrast to our engagement in other wars, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, the so-called War on Terror, wars which posed no imminent threat to our way of life. But, in the case of World War II, Hitler was on the march, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, so it was necessary for us to get involved, wouldn’t you agree?”

“You bet your ass it was,” Grandpa John said.

“And so you fought in the Pacific, then?” I said. “At the age of sixteen? And so that’s how you lost your teeth or what?”

Grandpa John did not immediately reply. I’ve often attempted to bait him into telling me about the time he spent, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, fighting in WWII’s Pacific theater. I’m not sure why this interests me as it does. It may be that the details concerning a teenage Grandpa John fighting for his life in the Pacific feel important to me because they contrast so starkly with details concerning my son’s enjoyment of his life: affixing brightly colored plastic interlocking bricks together, depressing buttons on remote controls, gesturing on touch screens. Could it be that I harbor a secret desire to learn of the horror of Grandpa John’s Pacific theater existence if only to project it, in my imagination, onto an imaginary mode of existence suffered by my son, transferring onto my son’s chubby preteen visage the horrors of war as once experienced by Grandpa John, in order to bring tears to my eyes, in order to watch as my son, in my mind, struggles in the face of wartime atrocity to retain some semblance of continued attachment to the peace of mind he so enjoyed back home while playing with his Legos, playing with his PS3, playing with his iPad mini? Yes, it’s true, I am very eager to place my young son’s life in jeopardy, in my mind. Or could it be that I want to know about Grandpa John’s life, to know as much as I can, before he dies? Grandpa John is dying, he’s been dying for some time, but Grandpa John once lived, too, and it’s important that knowledge of his life is given an opportunity to live on, at least for a time, in someone’s mind — in mine.

“Maybe the itch really is psychological,” I said, “maybe it comes from holding in all that stuff about World War II for all these years, never telling anyone about all the innocent people you killed or whatever, ever think of that? Maybe you should tell me about all of those horrible atrocities you witnessed in the Pacific, Grandpa John, and then maybe the itch will finally go away and I won’t have to keep giving you those full-body nude massages all the time.”

“I may be eighty-eight years young, Evan, but I’m not in short pants anymore.” Grandpa John motioned toward the urine- and spaghetti-stained heather sweat pants covering his legs. “Your parenting tricks won’t work on me.”

It could be, also, that I’m eager to hear Grandpa John tell his war stories simply to afford me an opportunity to throw on my narratologist’s cap and study his use of the historical present a bit more. I’ve always been especially attracted by Grandpa John’s manner of narration; while I’ve never considered myself a particularly gifted storyteller, hearing Grandpa John tell his stories evokes in me a hopeful sense that the gifted-storyteller gene yet resides dormant within my genotype, and perhaps the cadences and the colloquialisms and the excessive use of detail associated with Grandpa John’s historical-present narrative delivery will finally trigger the gene’s phenotypical manifestation in me, in my writing, and at long last I will enjoy that role so often fulfilled by Grandpa John over the course of his eighty-eight years — viz., the life of the party — as I will that of the commercially successful novelist whose gruff, vernacular, and largely transparent prose style finds his reader tearing through pages, having fallen inescapably into the world of story.

‘Maybe the itch really is psychological,’ I said, ‘maybe it comes from holding in all that stuff about World War II for all these years, never telling anyone about all the innocent people you killed or whatever, ever think of that?’

“Grandpa John,” I said, “you’re dying, you’ve been dying for some time, but you once lived, too. And it’s important that your life is given an opportunity to live on, at least for a time, in someone’s mind. Ever think of that?”

“In whose,” Grandpa John said, “yours?”

“That’s right,” I said, “in mine. And then I can later transfer memories of your life, as you’ve related them to me, to my kids’ minds, and then they can later transfer those memories to their kids’ minds, and so on, affording you and your memories a kind of immortality. Ever think of that?”

“Here’s what I think,” Grandpa John said. “Let’s cut out the middleman. Bring those kids of yours over here and I’ll tell them my stories myself.”

“Even better,” I said. “To be honest, the itch stuff and the immortality stuff was all a ruse, you’re right. What I really want is for the kids to hear your stories of wartime atrocity and have the shit scared out of them. I want those kids scared straight, Grandpa John. They need to start appreciating all the good things they have in life. And, moreover, I think it’ll be good for my writing to have one last opportunity to carefully scrutinize your use of the historical present.”

Grandpa John asked, “You’re going to do what to me?”

***

tell carl arenz

(a companion piece to “Happy Birthday,” which I’d heard only dribs and drabs of over the years until a few weeks back when Grandpa John, feeling magnanimous after my curing of his itch, finally agreed to narrate it to me in its entirety)

It’s my sixteenth birthday, see, I already got the form signed by the old man, I’m standing in line at the recruitment office in Ottawa, Illinois. “Army or navy?” the officer asks me. “Marines,” I says to him. He looks me up and down. Back then I was a bean pole, Evan, just like you. “How about we go with navy?” the officer says to me. “That’ll work,” I says to the officer. They put me on a train to boot camp up in
Michigan that same day, I don’t even go home for my things or say good-bye.

(“What?” I says to Grandpa John. “Is that true?”)

You bet your ass it’s true. Six weeks later my mother and the old man show up in Michigan, come by the barracks, but it’s already lights-out so the old man tells me through the window they’ll be back the next afternoon to take me out for a steak dinner. I can see my mother out there weeping, she can barely stand to look me in the eye, she’s got both her hands on the window, moving them around like, trying to get at me through the glass. My folks head on back to the motel. Come morning word arrives we’re shipping out that same day, nobody knows where to. My folks show up to get me
that steak but I’m already long gone. For all they know I’m on my way to France.

(“Are you kidding me?” I says to Grandpa John. “That’s crazy!”)

You’re damn right it’s crazy. From the age of sixteen and one day to the age of nineteen and one day I saw my parents’ faces for exactly two minutes’ time. So now I’m on the train, see, and word is we’re headed to Californy to catch a boat to the Pacific, nobody knows where to, and I’m seeing in my mind my mother standing outside those barracks banging on that window, weeping up a storm, falling to her knees and praying to God, “Don’t let it be true, my baby boy’s headed off to war and I didn’t even kiss him good-bye.” Evan, you did not know my mother. That woman’s heart was bigger than . . . that whole refrigerator there. So I’m on the train a few hours, feeling real sore about it, all tore up inside, crying my eyes out, and then, all of a sudden, I start recognizing places I know, some familiar landmarks out the window. “We’re in Illinois,” I says to myself, “and we’re coming up on Ottawa.” I can’t believe my eyes. We pass through Joliet, Morris, then head down into Streator. You know Streator. The train pulls in at the station to pick up some folks, it’s the dead of night, and I’m home, see, we’re just down the road from Ottawa, but what can I do about it? I’m looking out the window, and right as the train’s fixing to go, I make out in the distance this old hobo strolling through the grass. So I calls out to him, leaning as far out the window as I can, with my hands cupped around my mouth like this, I calls out to the hobo, “You know Carl Arenz?” And he calls out back to me, the hobo does, like this, “Sure I know Carl Arenz, who don’t know Carl Arenz?” See, everybody knew Carl Arenz, even the hoboes, he owned the only automobile dealership for miles around, and he’s also my uncle, see, my mother’s younger brother. So then I calls out to the hobo, like this, “Tell Carl Arenz tell his sister John Lavender’s headed to Californy where he’s gonna catch a boat to the Pacific and fight them Japs!” “OK, will do!” the old hobo calls out to me. And then I calls out to him, I calls out to the hobo like this, “And tell Carl Arenz tell his sister John Lavender misses his mother!” “OK, you got it, no problem,” the old hobo says, “anything else I can do for you?” So then I calls out to him, right as the train’s pulling away, I’m choking on my tears because I’m headed off to war and I didn’t kiss my mama good-bye, also because I can tell the old hobo’s already four sheets to the wind and he probably won’t remember any of what I’m saying, so I cup my hands around my mouth like this and I calls out to him as loud as I can, in a mean, threatening way, like he’s in big trouble if he don’t do it, like I’m a real soldier, like this. “You better tell Carl Arenz tell his sister John Lavender loves his mother! You better tell that Carl Arenz give his sister my mama a kiss good-bye from her baby boy John Lavender!”

That old hobo’s eyes go real wide. I think he gets the message that time.

(“Grandpa, that’s incredible. That’s amazing!”)

You bet your ass it’s amazing. Now, I want you to guess who’s sitting on that porch rocking in that rocking chair when my mother gets home from Michigan.

(“Seriously?”)

My uncle quits his rocking, stands up, and the minute she’s stepped onto that porch he places his hands on his sister’s cheeks, gives her a kiss. “From John,” Carl Arenz says to my mother.

III.

When we finally arrived at Grandpa John’s this afternoon, we found him in his reclining chair, earsplitting shrieks from the TV bouncing between his bedroom / dining room / living room’s four walls, his mouth wide open, his body unmoving. My son and daughter stood before him awhile, heads lowered, arms at their sides, trembling hands precariously holding on to their iPad minis.

“Should we go tell a nurse?” my son finally asked.

“Yeah,” my daughter asked, “shouldn’t we go tell somebody?”

“Guys,” I said, “come on. He’s just not snoring for some reason. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“Dad, it’s totally obvious. Look at him. He’s dead.”

“Yeah, Dad, look at him. He’s totally dead.”

He did look very dead, they were right. And yet often I’d arrived at Grandpa John’s to find him thus, absolutely certain of his death until such time as he’d awaken with a start and call out my name, to ask — as I pilfered his drawers for hawkable keepsakes and spare change — why I was going through all his stuff.

I leaned over Grandpa John, listening for his breath, examining his fake teeth. “Sweetie,” I said, extending my hand toward my daughter while training my eyes on Grandpa John’s shriveled uvula, “take your barrette out. I need to borrow it for something.”

“No way,” my daughter replied. “My hair looks fabulous today.”

“Yeah, Dad,” my son said. “Her hair looks really great today.”

“Do you guys still have that dog whistle app on your iPads?”

“But Grandpa John’s human,” my son replied. “He won’t be able to hear it. And even if he could, it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

“Yeah, Dad,” my daughter said, “it wouldn’t even matter. Dead people can’t hear things.”

“He’s still got his hearing aid in.” I pointed toward Grandpa John’s droopy earlobe. “Turn up the volume all the way and position the iPad’s speaker directly against it. I guarantee you that’ll wake him up.”

“From the dead?” my daughter asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

My son flipped the cover from his iPad mini and swiped to unlock. He opened the dog whistle app, placed the iPad mini’s Lightning port against Grandpa John’s ear, fired up the inaudible whistle. After a few seconds, Grandpa John’s eyelids fluttered — and then they opened very wide.

“It’s just like in that book,” my daughter whispered, “with the guy.”

My son whispered, “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”

“How are you feeling today, Grandpa John?” I asked Grandpa John.

“I’m alive, aren’t I?” Grandpa John replied.

I shot the kids a knowing glance. They raised their palms and shrugged their shoulders. Grandpa John wiped the spittle from his chin. The kids sat on the floor, crisscross applesauce, positioning their iPad minis in their laps.

“Guys, Grandpa John is more interesting than an iPad,” I said. “How many more chances are you going to have to come over here and socialize with Grandpa John, on the one hand, versus the other hand, the hand which holds not just these iPad minis but which will, doubtless, hold many future-gen iPad minis? There are no next-gen Grandpa Johns on the horizon. Put them up or else. I’m serious.”

The kids grudgingly closed their smart covers. Embarrassed, Grandpa John fake burped. And then he said: “Evan, today’s the day I’m going to tell your kids my war stories.”

“Kids,” I said, turning to the kids, “today’s the day Grandpa John is finally going to tell us his stories of wartime atrocity.” I grabbed the iPads out of the kids’ laps, sat down on the love seat, pulled my pen and notepad out of my pocket, licked my finger. “Grandpa,” I said, “why don’t we start with the story of how you lost your teeth. Do you need some water? Are we good to go here?”

Grandpa John cleared his throat. “The only thing I need, Evan, is for you to get the hell out of this room. I’ll tell these kids my stories on my own.”

“Yeah,” my son said. “Get the heck out of here, Dad.”

“Dad, out,” my daughter said, “right now. Or else.”

“Grandpa John,” I said, “seriously?”

“Hallway,” Grandpa John said to me. “Right now.”

“Out,” Mom said. “Right now, you two,” by which she meant Grandpa John and me. “I’d like to have a minute alone with her,” by which she meant her mom, Grandma Blanche. “Wait in the hallway,” by which she meant the hallway at the hospital, outside Grandma Blanche’s room.

Grandpa John and I shuffled out. We sat on folding chairs beside the door.

“Don’t you ever smoke,” Grandpa John said to me.

“I won’t,” I replied, pretending to massage that portion of quadriceps beneath the right pocket of my jeans in order to assure myself of the continued presence of my pack of cigarettes.

“Those two women in there,” Grandpa John said, turning to me. “They’re the loves of my life.”

He regarded my slightly askew baseball cap, my XL hoodie, my unlaced Timber­lands. His eyes teared up. He patted the leg of my Karl Kani’s, right near where my cigarettes were.

“Those two, plus you,” he said, gripping my hand, “are the three loves of my life.” He squeezed my fingers really hard. “Plus your brother. That makes four.”

I remember sitting in the hospital room after Mom told us it was OK to come back in, receiving eyefuls of the afternoon sun’s harsh rays as they made their way in through gaps in the window blinds. I remember Grandpa John kneeling bedside, fingering a rosary, trembling, supplicating, and I remember Grandma Blanche’s body beneath a long white sheet. I remember her rhythmic, cartoonish jaw movements, like a goldfish breathing.

I remember the window blinds. Crazy knots in the drawstring, bends in the slats, a couple slats missing. I remember Grandpa John getting up to futz around with the blinds’ drawstring, Mom telling him to cut it out or else. As Grandma Blanche inhaled one last time, Grandpa John was still over there at the window trying to coax the mess of slats into place, as if darkness were more amenable to life. After silence greeted Grandma Blanche’s final exhalation, Grandpa John let go of the drawstring. I remember him turning toward us to say, “To hell with it. It doesn’t matter, anyway.”

After returning home from Good Sam’s and eating dinner, the kids suckered me into accompanying them on their walk around the neighborhood with Bucky. We took him all the way to the stop sign at the top of the street, then turned to make our way back home, west — and there was the horizon, and there, atop it, a big fat setting sun, and everywhere a regal New Mexican sky with quilted streaks of lavender, orange, and green.

“Guys,” I said, pointing at the horizon, “there’s no app for that.” I pulled out my phone, snapped a picture. “Eat your heart out, Apple,” I said.

“Yeah, Apple,” the kids said. “Eat it.”

As we began to make our way home, I instructed the kids to relate to me every­thing that Grandpa John had said that afternoon at Good Sam’s concerning his experience in WWII’s Pacific theater, when I’d stood outside in the hallway with my ear pressed against the door attempting and mostly failing to discern the familiar cadences of Grandpa John’s historical-present narrative delivery.

The only thing I need is for you to get the hell out of this room. I’ll tell these kids my stories on my own.

“No way, Dad,” my son said, zipping up his lips. “Grandpa John told us we had to keep it under lockdown.”

“Yeah,” my daughter said, throwing her arm forward, flicking her fingers. “And he told us to throw away the key.”

Bucky stopped, sniffed at some petrified dog poo, maybe his own. I offered to make the kids a deal. If they would be willing to tell me what Grandpa John told them, then I would be willing take Bucky on his nightly walk, sans their accompaniment, for one week’s time.

“Nope. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

“Something way better, Dad.”

We continued walking. A quarter or so of the sun left above the horizon, I told the kids that if they told me every last detail of what Grandpa John had told them, then they could have an additional hour of screen time on Saturday of the upcoming weekend.

“Are you kidding? That’s practically nothing!”

“Yeah, that’s not a good deal at all, Dad!”

Bucky stopped to sniff at a discarded condom. I offered the kids a final deal. If they didn’t tell me every single last detail of what Grandpa John had told them, not only would they lose all their screen time for the upcoming weekend, but I would never again, for as long as they and/or Bucky lived, accompany them on their walks around the neighborhood in the evenings.

“OK, fine, we’ll tell you. But are those other deals still on the table?”

“Yeah, we’ll definitely tell you, Dad, but what about those other deals you offered us before?”

We stopped at the top of the driveway. The other deals’ continued validity was contingent upon the narrative quality of the story they must now proceed to relate to me, I told them. We sat down together on the short crumbling rock wall athwart the drive, and what little light remained at the horizon illuminated Bucky’s tiny teeth and the kids’ lips and cheeks and eyes as they proceeded to relate Grandpa John’s story of orthodontic wartime atrocity, culminating in an instance of highly questionable divine intervention, thus:

***

how grandpa john lost his teeth

(as told to Bucky and me by the kids last night, at the top of the driveway, right as the sun was setting)

So Grandpa John’s job on the boat is to help aim the big gun at the sky and try to shoot stuff down.

Yeah, Grandpa John’s a gunner’s assistant. His job’s to help gun down them Japs.

(“Don’t say Japs, guys. Please call them the Japanese.”)

And he’s out on the ocean in that boat, in the Pacific Ocean, in the ocean near to where the Japanese live, the island of Japan.

Yeah, he’s out on that ocean, Dad, and then all of a sudden these planes start coming in. Bam bam bam bam bam! It’s crazy! There’s planes everywhere. And those planes are shooting at Grandpa John and his friends. Grandpa John is only sixteen years old during this story. That’s barely five years older than me! Isn’t that crazy?

(“That’s totally crazy, yes. I hope that makes you appreciate all the good things you have in life.”)

So everybody’s running around on that deck and everybody thinks they’re going to die.

Yeah, Dad, everybody’s super scared. Everybody thinks they’re totally goners, even Grandpa John.

And so then a bunch of them boys start heading belowdecks. There’s just too many planes in the sky, see. When you look up at first you think all those planes are birds, like seagulls, because you’ve never seen anything like it before, because the only thing you can think it can be is a bunch of seagulls flying around.

But they’re not seagulls, Dad. They’re Japanese fighter planes trying to kill Grandpa
John.

Yeah, and all of Grandpa John’s buddies, too! All them boys!

And so then Grandpa John’s buddy, the main gunner guy, he, like, totally bails.

Dad, the main gunner guy gets so scared he pees his pants. He has to go below­decks to get a new pair of pants.

No, that’s not what happened.

But that’s what Grandpa said. He said the main gunner guy had to go change his pants.

He was just joking about that part, stupid.

You’re stupid!

No, you’re stupid!

(“Guys.”)

So Grandpa John is all alone up there with the big gun now because his buddy got scared so he has to start shooting the gun himself. Dad, we’re going to have to tell you all about how those guns work because you won’t understand this story if you don’t know anything about how those big guns really work.

Dad, there’s this thing that can get super hot on the gun, see, and it’s the assistant gunner’s job to take that thing off the gun when it gets hot and replace it with another one of those things that’s not super hot so that thing doesn’t get too hot and explode the whole gun.

But Dad, now that the main gunner guy peed his pants and Grandpa John took over the main gunner’s job to shoot, there’s nobody to take off the thing when it gets super hot.

Yeah and Grandpa John’s aiming the gun up in the sky without any help and shooting it all on his own!

And he’s shooting them seagulls down like crazy!

What? No. He’s shooting them Japanese.

Yeah, he’s shooting them Japanese. That’s what I said.

No, you said he’s shooting the seagulls.

No.

Yes.

No.

Yes!

No!

(“Guys, come on. This is important. Please.”)

And Grandpa’s shooting so much that the thing on the gun starts getting super hot, but there’s no one there to take the thing off now because that was Grandpa’s job but now he’s shooting the gun on his own because everybody else totally bailed and went down belowdecks.

He’s shooting that gun at those Japanese planes so much and the gun starts getting super hot and now it’s burning his hands off but he has to keep shooting it or else we might lose the whole war out there!

Yeah, Dad, we’re about to lose the war out there in that Pacific!

And then the gun starts turning bright red like the bottom of the fireplace. But even redder than that, Grandpa John said.

Yeah, way redder. But he still keeps shooting that gun even though his hands are getting totally burned.

His hands are totally on fire, Dad!

Yeah, Grandpa John’s hands are on fire for real now then the whole gun explodes right in his face because there’s nobody to take off the hot thing and that’s how he lost his teeth.

Dad, the gun exploded right into Grandpa John’s mouth! It melted all his teeth!

Not melted them. Knocked them out.

Yeah, that’s what I said. It knocked out all his teeth.

But then this is the really crazy part.

Yeah, this is the really crazy part, Dad. You’re not going to believe this part but it’s true.

Dad, Grandpa John died for a little while out there in the Pacific.

Yeah, Grandpa John died for a little bit. He went to heaven. Did you know about that part, Dad?

(“No, I don’t think I was aware of that.”)

Yeah, Grandpa John totally died. Isn’t that crazy?

(“Totally.”)

Grandpa John totally died and went to heaven and that’s when he had a little one-on-one with God.

Yeah, Dad, Grandpa John had some face time with God, for real, up in heaven.

But Dad, now this is the part that Grandpa John made us swear never to tell you.

Yeah, our lips are totally sealed on this part. You’re going to have to offer us something really good this time.

Like new iPads.

With retina displays.

And not minis.

Yeah and not minis. With expensive cases, too.

Deal?

Yeah, Dad, deal?

(“How about I take away your current ones only for an evening, rather than a fortnight?”)

Deal.

Deal and so Grandpa John says to God, “I sees what’s going on here, God, I sees what you have in mind for me, and I’m not too happy about it.”

Yeah and Grandpa John says to God, “God, listen up. I’ll make you a deal.”

Grandpa John says, “I’m not too happy about any of this because I’m only sixteen years old, see, and I haven’t even barely lived yet and already you have it in mind for me to die.”

“And so here’s the deal, God,” Grandpa John says to God. “You let me live today and I promise I’m going to do something real special for you.”

Yeah, Dad. Grandpa John says, “If you let me live, I’m going to marry a woman named Blanche, and with this Blanche I will have a daughter named Gail.”

He meant Grandma Gail, Dad. That’s your mom!

Yeah, Dad, totally! And listen to this. And then Grandpa John says to God, “God. And my daughter Gail will have a son named Evan.”

That’s you, Dad! Grandpa John was totally talking to God about you!

Totally, Dad. And then this is what Grandpa John says next. This is for sure the best part. Grandpa John says to that God, “OK, God. And then my grandson Evan will have two children of his own. And their names will be Jackson and Sofia.”

That’s us! Grandpa John totally told God about us! Can you believe it?

But now wait, this is totally the most amazing part. Grandpa John says, “Now you listen up, God, and you listen good. I’m making you a real good deal here. If you let me live, there are going to be two kids in the world named Jackson and Sofia, and that Jackson and Sofia are going to be just great, they’re going to be the best kids in the history of the world, even if they fight a lot. So what do you say, God, because this is my final offer. Deal?”

And Dad, you’re not going to believe what happened next. You’re not even going to believe what God says to Grandpa John.

God puts his hand on Grandpa John’s shoulder, like this. And then God says, “Deal.”

Dad, God told him he’s got a deal! And he even touched Grandpa John on the shoulder! Like this!

Yeah and then Grandpa John woke up in a hospital somewhere on some boat.

Yeah, but Grandpa John totally died, Dad, for real.

Dad, it’s true. But Grandpa John totally lived, too.

***

This essay first appeared in The Southern Review, the venerable quarterly journal of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry published by the Louisiana State University Press in Baton Rouge. Our thanks to the author and The Southern Review staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

Is the Internet Changing Time?

Photo: AP Images

Laurence Scott The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World | W. W. Norton & Company | August 2016 | 20 minutes (5,296 words) 

 

Below is an excerpt from The Four-Dimensional Human, by Laurence Scott. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

Power has been wielded through the pendulum.

‘Now all the petrol has stopped and we are immobilised, at least immobilised until we get new ideas about time.’ This was how the author Elizabeth Bowen described wartime life in Ireland to Virginia Woolf, in a letter from 1941. Bowen explored some of these new ideas in her London war fiction, which is full of stopped clocks and allusions to timelessness, the petrifaction of civilian life in a bombed city. Across the literary Channel, Jean-Paul Sartre’s war trilogy, The Paths to Freedom, is, like Bowen’s Blitz work, in part a study on how time itself becomes a casualty of war. In one scene Sartre describes German troops ordering a division of captured French soldiers to adjust their watches to their captors’ hour, setting them ticking to ‘true conquerors’ time, the same time as ticked away in Danzig and Berlin. Historically power has been wielded through the pendulum, and revolutionary change has been keenly felt through murmurs in the tick and the tock of one’s inner life. King Pompilius adjusted the haywire calendar of Romulus, which had only ten months and no fidelity to season, by adding January and February. Centuries later, the Roman Senate renamed the erstwhile fifth and sixth months of the Romulan calendar to honour Julius Caesar and Augustus, thus sparing them the derangement still suffered today by those once-diligent months September–December. For twelve years, French Revolutionaries claimed time for the Republic with their own calendar of pastorally themed months, such as misty Brumaire and blooming Floréal.

The digital revolution likewise inspired a raid on the temporal status quo. In 1998, the Swatch company launched its ill-fated ‘Internet Time’, a decimalised system in which a day consists of a thousand beats. In Swatch Time, the company’s Swiss home of Biel usurps Greenwich as the meridian marker, exchanging GMT for BMT. This is a purely ceremonial conceit, however, since in this system watches are globally synchronised to eradicate time zones. A main selling point of BMT was that it would make coordinating meetings in a networked world more efficient. This ethos severs time from space, giving dawn in London the same hour as dusk in Auckland, and binding every place on earth to the cycle of the same pallid blue sun. As it turns out, we didn’t have the stomach to abandon the old minutes and hours for beats, and the Swatch Time setting that persists on some networked devices is the vestige of a botched coup. Although this particular campaign was a failure, digitisation is nonetheless demanding that we find our own ‘new ideas about time’. For as the digital’s prodigious memory allows our personal histories to be more retrievable, if not more replicable, we are finding in the civic sphere a move towards remembrance that shadows the capacity of the network to retain the past. But while time is not lost in the ways it used to be, the tendency of digital technologies to incubate and circulate a doomsday mood is making the durability of the future less certain. As a result, the four-dimensional human is developing new strategies to navigate a timeline that seems to thicken behind us and evaporate before us. Read more…

A High-End Mover Dishes on Truckstop Hierarchy, Rich People, and Moby Dick

Photo: Getty Images

Finn Murphy| The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road | W. W. Norton & Company | June 2017 | 22 minutes (5,883 words) 

The following is an excerpt from The Long Haul, by Finn Murphy. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

I’ll take the movie stars, the ambassadors, the corporate bigwigs.

Loveland Pass, Colorado, on US Route 6 summits at 11,991 feet. That’s where I’m headed, having decided to skip the congestion at the Eisenhower Tunnel. Going up a steep grade is never as bad as going down, though negotiating thirty-five tons of tractor-trailer around the hairpin turns is a bit of a challenge. I have to use both lanes to keep my 53-foot trailer clear of the ditches on the right side and hope nobody coming down is sending a text or sightseeing.

At the top of the pass, high up in my Freightliner Columbia tractor pulling a spanking-new, fully loaded custom moving van, I reckon I can say I’m at an even 12,000 feet. When I look down, the world disappears into a miasma of fog and wind and snow, even though it’s July. The road signs are clear enough, though— the first one says runaway truck ramp 1.5 miles. Next one: speed limit 35 mph for vehicles with gross weight over 26,000 lbs. Next one: are your brakes cool and adjusted? Next one: all commercial vehicles are required to carry chains september 1—may 31. I run through the checklist in my mind. Let’s see: 1.5 miles to the runaway ramp is too far to do me any good if the worst happens, and 35 miles per hour sounds really fast. My brakes are cool, but adjusted? I hope so, but no mechanic signs off on brake adjustments in these litigious days. Chains? I have chains in my equipment compartment, required or not, but they won’t save my life sitting where they are. Besides, I figure the bad weather will last for only the first thousand feet. The practical aspects of putting on chains in a snowstorm, with no pullover spot, in pitch dark, at 12,000 feet, in a gale, and wearing only a T-shirt, is a prospect Dante never considered in enumerating his circles of hell. The other option is to keep rolling—maybe I’ll be crushed by my truck at the bottom of a scree field, maybe I won’t. I roll.

I can feel the sweat running down my arms, can feel my hands shaking, can taste the bile rising in my throat from the greasy burger I ate at the Idaho Springs Carl’s Jr. (It was the only place with truck parking.) I’ve got 8.6 miles of 6.7 percent downhill grade ahead of me that has taken more trucks and lives than I care to think about. The road surface is a mix of rain, slush, and (probably) ice. I’m one blown air hose away from oblivion, but I’m not ready to peg out in a ball of flame or take out a family in a four-wheeler coming to the Rocky Mountains to see the sights.

I downshift my thirteen-speed transmission to fifth gear, slow to 23 mph, and set my Jake brake to all eight cylinders. A Jake brake is an air-compression inhibitor that turns my engine into the primary braking system. It sounds like a machine gun beneath my feet as it works to keep 70,000 pounds of steel and rubber under control. I watch the tachometer, which tells me my engine speed, and when it redlines at 2,200 rpm I’m at 28 mph. I brush the brakes to bring her back down to 23. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen now. My tender touch might cause the heavy trailer to slide away and I’ll be able to read the logo in reverse legend from my mirrors. It’s called a jackknife. Once it starts, you can’t stop it. In a jackknife the trailer comes all the way around, takes both lanes, and crushes against the cab until the whole thing comes to a crashing stop at the bottom of the abyss or against the granite side of the Rockies.

It doesn’t happen, this time, but the weather’s getting worse. I hit 28 again, caress the brake back down to 23, and start the sequence again. Fondle the brake, watch the mirrors, feel the machine, check the tach, listen to the Jake, and watch the air pressure. The air gauge read 120 psi at the summit; now it reads 80. At 60 an alarm will go off, and at 40 the brakes will automatically lock or just give up. Never mind that now, just don’t go past 28 and keep coaxing her back down to 23. I’ll do this twenty or thirty times over the next half an hour, never knowing if the trailer will hit a bit of ice, the air compressor will give up, the Jake will disengage, or someone will slam on the brakes in front of me. My CB radio is on (I usually turn it off on mountain passes), and I can hear the commentary from the big-truck drivers behind me.

“Yo, Joyce Van Lines, first time in the mountains? Get the fuck off the road! I can’t make any money at fifteen miles an hour!” “Yo, Joyce, you from Connecticut? Is that in the Yewnited States? Pull into the fuckin’ runaway ramp, asshole, and let some
men drive.”

“Yo, Joyce, I can smell the mess in your pants from inside my cab.”

I’ve heard this patter many times on big-mountain roads. I’m not entirely impervious to the contempt of the freighthauling cowboys.

Toward the bottom, on the straightaway, they all pass me. There’s a Groendyke pulling gasoline, a tandem FedEx Ground, and a single Walmart. They’re all doing about 50 and sound their air horns as they pass, no doubt flipping me the bird. I’m guessing at that because I’m looking at the road. I’ll see them all later, when they’ll be completely blind to the irony that we’re all here at the same time drinking the same coffee. Somehow, I’ve cost them time and money going down the hill. It’s a macho thing. Drive the hills as fast as you can and be damn sure to humiliate any sonofabitch who’s got brains enough to respect the mountains.

My destination is the ultrarich haven called Aspen, Colorado. This makes perfect sense because I’m a long-haul mover at the pinnacle of the game, a specialist. I can make $250,000 a year doing what is called high-end executive relocation. No U-Hauls for me, thank you very much. I’ll take the movie stars, the ambassadors, the corporate bigwigs. At the office in Connecticut they call me the Great White Mover. This Aspen load, insured for $3 million, belongs to a former investment banker from a former investment bank who apparently escaped the toppled citadel with his personal loot intact. My cargo consists of a dozen or so crated modern art canvases, eight 600-pound granite gravestones of Qing Dynasty emperors, half a dozen king-size pillow-top beds I’ll never figure out how to assemble, and an assortment of Edwardian antiques. The man I’m moving, known in the trade as the shipper, has purchased a $25 million starter castle in a hypersecure Aspen subdivision. He figures, no doubt accurately, he’ll be safe behind the security booth from the impecunious widows and mendacious foreign creditors he ripped off, but I digress.

I’m looking downhill for brake lights. I can probably slow down, but there’s no chance of coming to a quick stop. If I slam on the brakes I’ll either crash through the vehicle in front of me or go over the side. I want to smoke a cigarette, but I’m so wound up I could never light it, so I bite off what’s left of my fingernails. I’m fifty-eight years old, and I’ve been doing this off and on since the late 1970s. I’ve seen too many trucks mashed on the side of the road, too many accidents, and too many spaced out-drivers. On Interstate 80 in Wyoming I watched a truck in front of me get blown over onto its side in a windstorm. He must have been empty. On I-10 in Arizona I saw a state trooper open the driver door of a car and witnessed a river of blood pour out onto the road.

The blood soaking into the pavement could be mine at any moment. All it takes is an instant of bad luck, inattention, a poor decision, equipment failure—or, most likely, someone else’s mistake.

If any of those things happen, I’m a dead man. Read more…

It’s A Very Muppets Controversy!

President-elect Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton with Kermit the Frog at the Kennedy Center in 1993. Steve Whitmire, the actor who played Kermit for nearly 30 years, was fired by Disney in October 2016. (J. David Ake/AFP/Getty Images)

A kerfuffle over Kermit is causing a Muppets media maelstrom.

In October, parent company Disney fired Steve Whitmire, the man who has voiced and handled Kermit the Frog since creator Jim Henson’s death in 19990. While Henson was alive, he was the sole voice of the famous frog. When he died in 1990, his son Brian took over his company and tapped Whitmire, who had been part of the Muppet family since 1978, to keep Kermit alive.

Last week, Whitmre wrote about his sudden firing in a blogpost.

For me the Muppets are not just a job, or a career, or even a passion. They are a calling, an urgent, undeniable, impossible to resist way of life. This is my life’s work since I was 19 years old. I feel that I am at the top of my game, and I want all of you who love the Muppets to know that I would never consider abandoning Kermit or any of the others because to do so would be to forsake the assignment entrusted to me by Jim Henson, my friend and mentor, but even more, my hero.

Whitmire’s complaints are typical of someone pushed out of a career after decades. Why didn’t you give me a warning? Why are you taking away everything I’ve ever cared about?

Read more…