The doors are closing

There has been so much going on lately. The mayor of Portland either decided or had it decided for him that he will not seek a second term next year. One of our congressmen, true to the spirit of Oregon, resigned after it was alleged that he’d done it with a very young daughter of one of his supporters. And the country came very close, from what I understand, to going into default. So I watched the news.

Believe it or not, the lead story the night I watched was about a woman who had gotten separated from her young son while they were riding the light rail train – or trying to – in downtown Portland. She was appalled by the lack of urgency shown by the local transit authority, called Tri Met. And the clowns who have taken over the newsroom egged her on, capturing the indignation on her face and in her voice and then putting this non-story, as they so often do, at the top of the broadcast. Because, according to the graphics, this tale constituted “breaking news.”

What happened, according to the story, is this: The woman’s son ran ahead of the woman and her other children and boarded a train before the mother, for reasons that were not made clear, was able to board with him. So, after the two (if not three) pre-recorded announcements that say, and this is a direct quote, “The doors are closing” well, the doors did in fact close. And the train pulled away and headed up the street to its next stop, three blocks away.

The mother was appalled for two main reasons. First, even though she caught the attention of the train operator, he didn’t stop the train. And second, when the boy was released from the train three blocks up the street, the Tri Met person who escorted him off the car (the train operator? – I don’t know) did not verify or prove that the man to whom he presented the child was in fact the boy’s uncle. There should have been a team of people from Tri Met there to handle the situation, the mother said. Though not at all unusual, the self-centeredness, the arrogance, the entitlement of this woman’s face and voice and tone offended me to the point of speechlessness.

But it passed. Since I still have the right to communicate both complaints and compliments, rather than e-mailing the station, which I believe is pointless, I sent an e-mail to the public affairs group at Tri Met to share a couple of thoughts. The first was that I think it’s ridiculous that our local news stations seem to jump at any and all opportunities to portray public transportation as a dangerous, seedy enterprise. And second, I thanked the officials of Tri Met for having a policy that forbids light rail operators from stopping trains once they’ve pulled away from the platform. Because I’ve watched people attempting to get on and off of trains and buses, fully abled (physically) people, and I’m here to tell you that once trains start stopping for people who are too stupid or too arrogant (or both) to follow the simplest of procedures, we will get nowhere.

But even in e-mail I censored myself. I think I’ve moved beyond this ‘it takes a village’ mentality, but for some reason I hesitate to just come right out and say what I think about it, which is that if you are not capable of caring for and managing your children you should not have them. Many people in the village, including me, are happy to help out but it seems to have become an expectation that we’re all on board with this mostly unspoken rule that people with young children exist in a weird zone of exemption when it comes to public conduct. It is not the transit authority’s responsibility to provide basic management services to people who apparently are not capable of managing themselves or their offspring, and it’s not mine either.

Efficiency

For many reasons, I was thinking about all the talk about the general inefficiency of government. There are a couple of examples that stand out in my mind. One is the legend about the amount of money the Pentagon pays for light bulbs. That one seems to date back to the 1970s. The second one is a comment a friend of mine made recently after having to wait in line at the post office longer than she thought was necessary because there was only one window open. And there was only one window open, she said, because the other clerks must have been taking their union-mandated coffee break. This particular friend of mine often plays online games during the work day with her husband, who is employed by a nearby municipal government, the same municipal government, I believe, that provides the family insurance package that I’d imagine has come in quite handy lately with the new baby and all. I’m not singling out my friend to criticize her; I am singling her out to illustrate that it is a common assumption that the public sector thrives on inefficiencies carried forth by lazy employees.

For more than a month and a half I worked on a project with a woman I’ve come to think of as Kitty – she’s the one who made the tom cats nervous – and just the other day, for some reason, it occurred to me that if you want a shining example of inefficiencies that are so deeply embedded in the processes and procedures that you can very accurately predict what will happen by identifying the way something should happen and then assuming that the exact opposite will prevail, man, this is it.

Kitty blew thru at least $500,000 – some of which is now in my checking account – so that a few documents could be posted on a corporate web drive and never looked at again. Never looked at again because they are of zero value. They don’t explain anything whatsoever, and what they allege to explain is in no way significant for anyone except a couple of handsomely compensated private sector employees, one of whom thought that writing “Theoretically, I guess you could include this data …” constitutes expert feedback.

The documents were written in a way that intentionally avoids anything definite. Since the reason for the lack of anything definitive was never stated directly, here’s my best guess: Nobody wanted to get busted for not knowing much. There were designers and industry experts and writers and brand strategists and “creatives” and so on and so forth. When Kitty was able to pull herself together enough to schedule a conference call, we all had them on our computers – live meeting, it’s called – so that we could look at documents together – the wrong version of documents more often than not. Then, a torrent of e-mail that sought to confirm that we had all correctly understood what we’d been directed to do during the conference call. Kitty usually ignored those e-mails, but when she did answer them her answers – if they can be called that – ignored or muddied the very simple questions she’d been asked and necessitated more questions. Which was a phenomenal waste of time and money.

And then there was Kitty herself, sitting on top of it all, spending hours reformatting documents in ways that not only didn’t make sense but were actually great examples of the exact opposite of sense. Then she’d go through whatever it was she’d assembled, defending the necessity of having a separate box within the table she created not for each slide but for each line within a slide “so that we can really drill down” and then talking through each of the graphic images she imported into the Word document – which required hours and made the file so huge it bogged down everyone’s e-mail – and how, when it was pointed out to her that the images didn’t match the text, would say, “you know – it’s just a thought.” The meetings held to explain things that should have never, ever been created in the first place were endless.

And this is efficiency in the private sector. Kitty is but one person. There are thousands, many thousands, at her company alone, a company that loves, interestingly enough, to point out how it’s bringing efficiency to many industries, including the public sector. And yet the myth persists. We must get government spending under control, I hear frequently. We must really be aggressive about waste in the public sector. I suppose the anthropologists would call these beliefs of ours something like a cultural truth, or maybe a societal assumption, but as Kitty and the millions like her sit in conference rooms across the land, bogging down everything they get their hands on with a level of inefficiency that’s worthy of a case study while, at the same time, make one crack after another about “the government,” a non-anthropologist like me has a simpler, less sophisticated way of describing it: Lying.

Those days are over

I am astounded, generally, by what people think and believe. The recent “budget crisis” was, of course, a bonanza of bafflement. One day the speaker of the house and president of the country staged a very carefully rehearsed blowup – or meltdown – that called for the speaker to “storm” out of a meeting with the president. The speaker was followed down a number of corridors by dozens, which created the impression, for me at least, of a fighter having just left the ring after a particularly grueling match.

And next thing you know, there’s the speaker on television, following his script and talking – yet again – about the fiscally reckless ways of Washington and how he knows – as a former small business owner or manager or whatever it was that he was – that this sort of irresponsibility would never play in the world of roll-up-your-sleeves businesses out there in the “real America,” where a dollar is worth exactly a dollar and the vast and rolling plains are populated by decent, hard-working folks who don’t rely on fancy accounting gimmicks. Then, the speaker declared with all the authenticity of a talking statue, that funny money business? That spending of cash we don’t have? In Washington, he said, those days are over.

And I thought, and I think I may have even said out loud to nobody but my television: Bullshit. The fact that John Boehner – and Barack Obama, for that matter – are on national television is all the proof I need that “those days” are anything but over. They’re part of the system, and part of the problem, and if they weren’t they wouldn’t be in office and would not, therefore, be on the television telling what’s over and when and how one “new day” or another officially begins.

My question is this. For whom are those kinds of statements intended? It reminds me of every presidential candidate I’ve ever followed declaring, with a sentimental little quiver in his voice, “America’s best days are ahead of her.” Who, who exactly, believes this? Who hears those words and thinks, that’s our man! He’s going to fix some shit! He gets it!

I find my answers – and then some – on Facebook. I think Facebook is more than a bit evil, but man, what a view it offers – which is critical, since the news is useless in that arena.

And just in case you have neither the time nor the interest in delving into the nation’s prevailing mindset by simply typing a password, I’m here to tell you, the messaging works. We balance our checkbooks at home, cried the chorus, why can’t they? Thanks to the people who control the news, this is what the entire “crisis” came down to. I pay my mortgage every month without bouncing a check, one of my “friends” wrote, and then added that she “expects the same of Washington.”

I don’t. Out here in “the real America” we elect year after year after year the same squeaky clean, sentimental candidates who will lie directly into the camera about the virtues of fiscal responsibility. They call it “speaking to our values.” And at the same time they accept donations from those individuals – and corporations – with enough money to influence how these candidates vote once they’re elected. Who do we suppose pays for those slick, hallucinogenic commercials upon which we base our voting decisions and the “strategic counsel” provided by the PR team – the kind of “consulting” without which nobody in Washington could prevail? It’s easier, I suppose, to sit back and, as long as all our needs are met, bitch and complain on Facebook about “Washington” and a term I’m pretty sure nobody, myself included, is capable of defining accurately: “A balanced budget.” Anyone who defined it correctly and actually talked about it wouldn’t make it past the most preliminary stages of a campaign. Besides being the kind of thing elitists talk about, it’s too boring to captivate our attention the same way as a congresswoman whose head was nearly blown off appearing on the floor for the first time “since Tucson” to cast her vote in support of ensuring the people with lots of money will continue to pay taxes at a lower rate than everyone I know. Now that, like all effective PR campaigns (in spite of my criticisms, they do know what they’re doing) made quite an impact.

Singing ourselves

One of the things I find most satisfying about reading history is the realization that regardless of how low we may feel we’ve fallen, human behavior and inclinations are no worse today than they were centuries ago. Conduct that is coarse and crass is backed up by history – and a lot of it. No matter how many times this simple fact leaps out at me from printed pages, it never fails to amaze.

Walt Whitman, of course, is no exception. After putting my John Irving novel where it belonged – on the donation pile – I took a book I’ve owned for more than a decade down from the shelf and immersed myself for a couple of weeks in the life and times of our country’s most infamous dirty old man. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography by David S. Reynolds is my kind of history. It paints pictures not only of what the poet was doing and thinking and writing but it also frames those pictures with lore about other overlapping happenings. Before reading I thought the term ‘cultural biography’ was a bit grandiose, but I now believe it’s perfect.

Here, just for fun, are a few familiar themes, straight out of the mid- to late-1800s.

The country rallied around war back then, so the story goes, as we do today (allegedly). Walt Whitman considered the Civil War the heart and soul of not only his career but his entire life. And in a way that’s frightfully familiar to me, he considered Abraham Lincoln not only the president but the redeemer. The war, in Walt Whitman’s day, put all the family troubles into perspective and gave order and purpose to the general slovenliness that had taken hold in places like Manhattan and Brooklyn. Reading about it made me wonder if our current adventures in other lands were, in some sense, an answer to the cultural malaise that had set in after nearly a decade of ‘liberal’ presidential politics. We needed to clear our heads, it seems to me, of all that sleaze, all those blowjobs. I wonder at the perfect timing of certain incidents in terms of directing the country down a path of restored national glory. Most of all, I wondered about our not-new tendency to make heroes of the soldiers. Here’s a good one from one of the war hospitals: “While at Falmouth, he saw some of the war dead, including a soldier who prompted this line in draft: ‘Young man: I think this face of yours is the face of my dead Christ.’” [pg. 411] Holy shit, Uncle Walt.

Gay marriage was not a problem for the Christians back then. In fact, gay sex wasn’t a problem because it wasn’t considered. Besides, they were focused on something far more immediate: Masturbation. Known as ‘the solitary vice,’ masturbation “ … was a major concern of purity reformers … [with] 60 to 70 percent of twelve- and thirteen-year old boys [masturbating] with some going to what Graham called ‘the still more loathsome and criminal extent of an unnatural commerce with each other!’ (probably a reference to mutual masturbation).” [pg. 199] As they are today, the piously inclined were stuck – as if bounded there by steel and concrete – in other people’s underwear. I have never noticed before, but Walt Whitman’s poetry alludes – quite often – to jacking off, which was, of course, a big problem because it was killing young people “ … by the thousands.” [pg. 199]

Remember in 2008 when it was slowly coming to the surface that the nation’s bank account had been robbed by people who continued to receive bonuses that exceeded – by a long shot – the average annual household income? Remember how the word ‘populist’ was used to dismiss and ridicule anyone and everyone who asked: Who stole the goddamn money? Oh well, said the television experts, that’s just populist rhetoric. For three decades prior to 1865 political speeches – which featured poetry readings, the warm-up bands of yesteryear, if you will – were well attended and debated and discussed at length. “The driving forces behind oratory in the antebellum years were populist politics …” [pg. 167]. And, this: “Voter turnout in the presidential election of 1840 was a remarkable 83.4 percent, and the elections from 1848 to 1872 averaged a very high 75.1 percent, in contrast to the 1932-92 period, when it averaged only 56.3 percent.” [pg 167] Is it any wonder that the banking people who own the television people will not tolerate anything ‘populist’? People might start voting, I suppose.

One of the crudest spectacles of our time, for me, is the practice of throwing litter onto stadium fields after or during a game. Well, “Whitman would long remember the primitive early theaters, with their dark entrances and the stark rows of plain wooden benches where the audience sat … Food was brought along and freely eaten during performances. Working-class viewers in the upper tier regularly tossed bones and other dinner remains onto those seated below.” [pg. 157] I don’t go to plays much, but I have to admit that that particular tradition sounds like fun.

Finally, the business about whether or not Walt Whitman was gay – and, if so, how so and how much and how often – is something I found tiresome. The discussion of it is endless, with one theory and school of thought after another trotted out and beaten practically to death. It is fruitless, in my opinion, to try to hang on the erect penis any sort of academic theory. So I’ll get straight to it: Walt Whitman’s sexuality, in his own words, reminded me of many of the ads I see on the men-seeking-men section of craigslist. Here’s one, from a letter to a farmhand – he liked them a little rough around the edges – called Edward Catell, with whom he’d had a “brief but intense” relationship of some sort. He wrote: “There is nothing in it that I think I do wrong, or am ashamed of, but I wish it kept entirely between you & me - & - I shall feel very much hurt & displeased if you don’t keep the whole thing & the present letter entirely to yourself.” [pg. 526] Like many more recent homos I know – including myself – Edward Catell didn’t take kindly to the as-you-go rules of secrecy, so in spite of Walt Whitman’s directive, he didn’t keep the letter or its implications to himself, entirely or otherwise.

Adding a stitch

Fall is in the air here in Oregon, as it has been since April. In just a few weeks we’ll find ourselves in September, which is, with one glaring exception, one of my favorite months. This September, I fear, will be considerably worse than the nine that came previously. I am preparing myself for spectacles that truly redefine tasteless. So, without further ado, let’s get it started.

First, a very good friend of mine had an experience at an airport recently that I think warrants some consideration. She was waiting to board a flight when the invitation was issued via the P.A. system that various groups were welcome to get on the plane, including “active military.” I had no idea that such a practice was in effect. Since leaving the ever-toiling, put-upon private sector, I’ve only flown on Southwest. It’s odd, though, that if this particular manifestation of our country’s vulnerability to uniforms is now standard operating procedure that Southwest – a Texas company, after all – would not partake.

Anyhow, my friend told me that when the “active duty” call was made, a uniformed government employee went to board the plane and a woman shouted out “Thank you for serving!” The response of the other passengers, my friend said, was tentative at best, as if most people weren’t really sure if automatically applauding the nation’s killing agenda was still part of the script or not.

That’s a great sign, I think.

But the following morning – a Sunday – I was brought back to the reality. I got on a bus to go do some grocery shopping on the other side of the river. Scattered about on the floor toward the rear of the bus were several sections of The Oregonian. I picked up the “Community News” section. As an aside, I assume that it was the Sunday paper, but I cannot say for sure, because evidently the dates are no longer printed on each page. Instead, at the top of each page appeared the following (and to me meaningless) words: “Volume 711, Issue 4 E.” A lame attempt at timelessness, perhaps? I have no idea, but I do think it’s strange, not to mention sloppy and irritating.

Anyhow, one below-the-fold headline caught my eye: National 9/11 Flag stops in Portland, by Anne Saker The Oregonian. Here’s the first paragraph:

On its way back to New York City for the coming 10th commemoration of one terrible September day, a large American flag lay in the lobby of the U.S. Bancorp building so that Portlanders could add a stitch to help bind up the wounds.

That’s where I stopped because I’d read all I needed – or wanted – to know. We were wounded one terrible day in September, I learned, just in case I’d forgotten, and now we’re stitching shit up to “bind” those wounds … at a bank. Man, that may be the most honest paragraph I’ve read about that terrible day since it happened.

The white lighter

Although it would not even register on the scales used to define and measure dicey in places like New Orleans, Memphis or Saint Louis, my neighborhood is sketchy. The prostitutes who peddle their wares out on 82nd Avenue use this area as a staging ground. I wouldn’t object to that so much if they’d stop flinging used condoms into the street. The drug business, which was dormant for many years, is making a comeback. The deals go like this: Two cars arrive from different directions within seconds of each other, goods and money are hastily exchanged and then both cars depart abruptly, in different directions.

The apartment building across the street is a big problem. One of the residents – a woman who shot her boyfriend two days before Thanksgiving, which prompted at least 15 Portland police cars to arrive, along with the local Fox affiliate – runs a mini-mart of sorts. I don’t spend a lot of time peaking out the window to keep tabs, but when the traffic reaches a certain volume it’s hard to not notice. People come and go constantly, walking timidly down the sidewalk, looking back over their shoulders and then bolting for her door, from which they emerge a minute and a half later. She and various other drivers squeal in and out on a very regular basis as well, on errands that are either completed or aborted within four or five minutes at most, at which point the car returns. It is entirely possible that she is feeding the destitute or handing out and delivering batteries for cell phones out of the goodness of her heart. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, harbored no such doubts when, as he lay in the courtyard bleeding beneath a limestone-colored November skyscape, announced to the law enforcement brigade and the entire neighborhood “Every mother fucker she sell to is on that mother fucking computer!” All that, and so much more, without a microphone.

In addition to the entrepreneurial, pistol-toting grandmother – she is a grandmother, this much I know – there is another problem over there. Two or three young men moved into the apartment at the end of the building most directly across the street from my living room. They’re loud. Their friends are loud. They keep odd hours and they drink. And one of them – the black one, unfortunately – is dealing. Every morning at a few minutes after 8, he charges out of there and walks quickly past my house on his way to the market down on Glisan Street, the one that’s owned by the Lebanese family and that has a payphone in front. My neighbor walks with his head down, texting the entire way.

There is something abrupt and unfriendly about him. He shuffles along, head down, scowling. On cold mornings he wore a navy blue wool pea coat and a wool cap pulled down almost to his eyebrows. He’s scowly. As it got warmer, though, he started wandering around in tank tops and shorts that flowed in such a way that they could have easily been mistaken for skirts. (Basketball shorts, I believe.) And instead of hustling down to the corner to do his business, he’d chuck his skateboard out the front door and then – in what must require multiple motions but appears to be just one – jump onto the damn thing while closing the door behind him. It made me think, that’s the same dexterity you’d need to jump off a bridge and land on a moving train without killing yourself.

One morning I was sitting on my front porch having my coffee and smoking a cigarette when he skated past. Seconds later I heard the sound of a lighter that’s either dead or close to it. It sounds like a little corner of sandpaper rapidly rubbing a small block of wood. I have a big outburst of ornamental grass beside my front stairs so that I can sit there without being completely on display, but the grass is not soundproof: I heard the wheels on asphalt, coming my way. Great, I thought. He appeared in front of the gate, facing me.

Mercy.

“Can I get a light from you?” he asked. I’d describe his voice if it weren’t for the fact that all of my attention was focused on his face. I said sure and got up and went to the kitchen to get my lighter. And when I came out with it he looked at me with an expression of dread. “I … I cannot use that lighter,” he said. I must have looked puzzled, because then he said, “White lighters are bad luck. They’re cursed. Every time I use a white lighter it’s just before something bad happens.” I held my cigarette out and he leaned forward and inhaled my fire to create his own. I said, somewhat clumsily I think, that I guessed I could have just offered him my ciggie in the first place rather than going after the lighter. He asked me if I had anything I thought brought bad luck. Other than charming and sexy young men, I wanted to say, no, nothing much. Instead I told him, while silently hoping I was not jinxing myself, that since I was born on the 13th, I have always felt immune to superstitions for the most part.

There are two things about his face that are compelling. The first is that he is clearly not black. This may be a minor point but calling this guy black is like referring to the family two doors down as Chinese. They aren’t Chinese at all: they’re Korean. My superstitious neighbor obviously has some black blood in him, but there is something else – from what country or continent I do not know – but it’s clear when you look at him directly. The races mix and match around here in a way that reminds me of riding the subway in London or going to the farmers market in Los Angeles. With the exception of me and very few others, the racial demographics are unclear. Perhaps I am overemphasizing this point, but my patience for sloppily shouted matters of fact without a single thought (apparently) is all but gone.

And then there’s the duality issue. Looking directly at him, for me, is like looking not only at a composite of the races but a quiet collision, if you will, of the genders. It’s as if two negatives were used to generate one print. His face is a map of stern and sharp and unforgiving angles one second, and the next an almost musical grace that is utterly, unapologetically and magnificently female. When his face switches from one gender to the other it takes a little bit of what it left behind with it, so sometimes he looks mostly male with a remnant of female and at other times he’s almost all woman with just a trace, a hint, of scattered maleness. It is mesmerizing to watch, the back and forth of it.

It wasn’t until a number of weeks after he asked me for a light that it occurred to me that perhaps he was hoping I’d just walk to the gate and, with my cigarette in my mouth, lean into his face and connect mine with his. Then we could stare into one another’s eyes and agonize for moments that would be recalled and recounted, over the years to follow, as entire hours before we each …

He is polite but not in a way that is gushy or particularly encouraging. One of the things I’ve noticed about him is his size. There is something grand about his face and his voice but when I look at him from a bit of a distance it’s shocking to me how compact he is. He isn’t more than five feet and eight or nine inches and, although the pounds are distributed and arranged in a way that seems damn-near perfect to me, he is slight. And his walk is ungracious, almost clumsy – as if the ground beneath him is not quite reliable.

There’s another thing I noticed about him recently. One morning a few weeks ago I was getting ready to go downtown to meet a friend of mine who I had not seen in a while. As long as I was downtown, I decided to take care of a bit of banking, pick up a few birthday cards and run some other errands. As I was washing the coffee grinds down the drain my neighbor hustled by, head down, scowling, as usual.

A couple of hours later I saw him again, not in our neighborhood, but downtown, where he – as usual – had his head down and was wearing a frown on his beautiful, beautiful face as he squinted down at a page of a book, standing beside the shelf where they display the new arrivals at the Multnomah County Library. I looked at him, then looked again – I had to remind myself that even though we were downtown, it was still him, and it was still me – and then looked quickly away, and as I was doing that I think he may have looked up, or started to, but my mind was too busy processing, in a few short seconds, where I know him from, where he was, why he was there, why it was strange that he was there, why it was strange that it was strange that he was there. The simple explanation for the strangeness is that, according to the very loud and utterly certain narration in this neighborhood, my neighbor should not even know where the library is. Me thinking his presence there was strange was jarring: I pride myself on rejecting – with great fanfare sometimes – every single utterance of neighbors whose areas of knowledgeable authority are without borders or boundaries. I reject it, and yet the confusion knocks at the door of my awareness, softly at first, then not. At any rate, I am unable to speak when the logical sequencing part of my brain is at work, so rather than stop and smile and say hello, I kept walking.

Quitting while you're ahead

“You should just quit while you’re ahead,” my mother used to say. I’m sure she said it to me a time or two but I do not recall the circumstances because it was not sufficiently traumatic. Recently, though, I quit a couple of things and it is the most perplexing thing to me. I quit watching a movie before it was over and I quit reading a book a little beyond the halfway point. I felt defeated, and guilty and more than a bit sloppy.

The Grapes of Wrath is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It was my pick for the book group I do with my sisters. While one of them said she would have preferred a more conclusive ending, I thought the ending, though horrifying in so many ways, was perfect. Right after we finished it I put it on my Netflix queue and when the movie arrived I sat through about an hour or so and then turned it off, thinking I would finish it in the morning. Only when morning came I wasn’t really interested so I tucked the disc into the envelope, sealed it and sent it on its way. I felt like I was cheating. I read the book, I know the ending, and yet. It wasn’t a bad movie, by the way.

Steinbeck’s masterpiece is perched at one end of my spectrum, and unfortunately, at the other, is a novel called Until I Find You, by John Irving. I made it to page 480 – which is just barely past the halfway point – before I pulled my bookmark out and put the book back on the shelf, where it will sit until it’s thrust back into circulation via a donation.

It is horrid.

I really like John Irving. I thought Cider House Rules and Hotel New Hampshire were outstanding (although I was much younger when I read them). This book, on the other hand. It’s the story of Jack Burns, who grows up to be an actor, and his friend Emma, who grows up to be a novelist. Really, though, from the very beginning (when Jack is four years old) the book is a story about his penis. Although I read little more than half of it, I believe the narrative – if it can be called that – is structured around Jack’s relationship with his mother, Alice, a tattoo artist, and their search, together at times, for his father, who abandoned Alice before Jack was born. Emma and Jack meet in grade school in Toronto, where she becomes the master, if you will, of his penis, which is referred to over and over and over again as “the little guy.” Every time Emma says something to Jack her quote ends with “honey pie.” Hundreds and hundreds of times, Emma calls Jack “honey pie.” And many, many sentences in this novel end with an exclamation mark, which drives me nuts.

I didn’t quit reading the book for those three reasons alone (although they helped). I quit reading because it struck me as a stupid story populated by really, really unimaginatively created characters engaged in one cliché-laden situation after another. To me, it was a amateur comic book without any illustration. Jack’s mother Alice, for example, pairs up with Emma’s mother, whose name I cannot even recall, and they become lovers. Lesbians! Where that one fell down is that for me it didn’t seem to have much of an impact on any of the situations or characters. That, I fear, is because “the little guy” kept getting in the way.

The last I read, Emma died as a result of her vagina being too small to accommodate someone she’d brought home from a bar (I am not kidding) and it is revealed that Jack’s mother had breast cancer many years while he was away at boarding school (he’d wondered why his mother hadn’t come to visit but again, the little guy … ). The last scene I read there was an envelope on the kitchen table that Emma’s mother was suggesting Jack open.

What really prompted me to abandon the book, though, was this: Until I Find You is, according to one reviewer, “a mass of lazy, unrefined writing.” I normally avoid reviews until I’ve experienced whatever it is that’s being reviewed, but I made an exception in this case because I needed, desperately, to confirm one of two things: Either it really is a bad book, or I was missing something, really missing something.

It’s the former that I found. I didn’t read a single review that really praised Until I Find You. The review that most aligned with my impressions appeared in the Washington Post and was written by Marianne Wiggins. The paper ultimately apologized for the review – which was scathing – an event that was explained in a competing newspaper like this: “Wiggins wasn’t the only reviewer to dislike Irving’s book, but she was likely the only one once married to author Salman Rushdie, a longtime friend of Irving’s.”

While I detest the critics club – their fascination with one another negates their reviews as far as I’m concerned – regardless of her marital history, I did not quit reading Marianne Wiggin’s review until I reached the end. Here are a couple of the better lines: “The story reads as if Irving woke from a recurring nightmare and started dictating compulsively.” And, even better, “I hope I’m wrong to read this as a cry for help that it appears to be. It does go on and on, and someone, somewhere in the production line at Garp Entertprises, Ltd., should have advised John Irving not to rush to print until he’d crafted pain into art, as he’s done so masterfully before.” On my list of things I think the Washington Post should apologize for, those lines are pretty close to the bottom of my list.