#113: Big Deal on Madonna Street

(originally published July 15, 2013)

Big Deal on Wheeling Street

The scene:

July 1985. Morris Heights. The field at the end of the street is overgrown with beige scrub, with a small copse of trees at its center. The copse hides an abandoned mattress, an object of mystery and excitement to bored adolescents. Around it, bike paths have been carved out of the dry ground with teeth-chipping hills and gullies for intrepid bikers. Midsummer flattens everything, a heat that stretches across the neighborhood like mohair. The sun opens the mischief in our pores, and it’s too far to walk to Circle-K to shoplift candy.

The soundtrack:

Instead of Piero Umiliani: cicadas. Cars speeding up and down Baranmore Parkway. Duran Duran, Phil Collins, Paul Young and Whitney Houston on the radio. My father snoring on the couch as we wait to have dinner with my cousins.

The crew:

Me, as the semi-innocent Mario; my best friend Danny from across the street as Peppe, the instigator; Floyd, the Native-American, the sad-sack Capannelle; Brent, whose glasses always seemed smeared, as can’t-catch-a-break Cosimo; and Rae, the chubby-faced moll, who lived two doors down from me.

The plan:

Three blocks away, I-225 connects the major interstates I-70 and I-25, cutting through our neighborhood like a pocketknife. The highway is the terminus of our world: anything past Xanadu St. seems as distant as the moon, and the kids there, aliens. Although there’s an underpass right along 30th, the 31st St. gang decides on a shortcut: a kid-sized opening in the chain-link fence walling off the highway. There must be a similar gap on the other side.

The job:

The cars don’t seem to be going that fast, even though they’re barreling along at 65 miles an hour, minimum. We wait until we spy a gap in traffic, then, one at a time, hop over the guardrail and run across the pavement to the grassy median. That’s just northbound; we still have southbound to contend with, though it’s pretty much the same. Floyd, with his short, spindly legs, can’t sprint as fast, and the rest of us watch as cars slow and swerve to avoid him. We also discover that there’s no gap on the other side of the highway.

The fallout:

After lying low for a bit and consulting, we decide to haul ass back across the highway, but not before we see police lights coming down to road. Most of the gang scampers across and down the hill, but Danny, who’s been ushering Floyd, gets nabbed. We know as soon as we see this that he’ll sell us down the river, and we scatter home to await the knock on our doors. But as it turns out, Dad has woken from his nap, and it’s time for dinner. As we drive up Baranmore Parkway, away from the crime scene, I see a cop car coming from the opposite direction, and as we pass, there’s Danny’s red hair in the back. For one of us, at least, a successful getaway.

#112: Playtime

(originally published Apr. 21, 2013)

In one of the visual gags in Playtime, Tati puts the viewer in a voyeuristic role, framing the scene from the outside of an apartment building. Inside, two families face each other, ostensibly watching a boxing match on the in-set televisions mounted on their respective side of the shared wall. But from the outside, the families seemingly react as if they are observing each other. For instance, as the father on one side begins to disrobe, the father on the other side shoos his daughter away, as if he does not want her to look upon the other man’s nakedness.

I visited Bác Thu Dang’s apartment once, with my parents. We were on our way someplace else, I think, because I can’t think of any reason why I should have been there. I was eight or nine at the time. His apartment was a one-bedroom, and the whole place was cluttered, as if there was no way a whole life could have fit into that space. We sat around a kitchen table, and, on the chair next to me, was a stack of newspapers that was almost as tall as I was. The appliances were lumbering, 70s avocado-green beasts, covered in a thin, opaque film of grease. My parents and Bác Thu Dang spoke in animated tones, but I couldn’t understand what they said. Bored to distraction, I began looking through the stack: newspapers in English, newspapers in Vietnamese, unopened mail.

But then, near the bottom, there it was. A porno mag. It wasn’t the first I’d ever seen, of course; I knew the location of every dirty magazine at home. I had also become adept at sniffing them out at the houses of other relatives too: underneath mattresses, at the back of closets, in child-accessible storage spaces. It was as if, by discovering where others had hidden their sexual secrets, I could learn how to hide my own better.

But this magazine was different. Up to then, everything I’d seen, despite promises of SHOCKING and UNCENSORED, was pretty much softcore. What the couple (white man, Asian woman) did in this magazine, the others had only suggested. I was enthralled, even as I tried to appear nonchalant. The thrill of the forbidden, of discovery—but when I reached its end, I was confused. All that white foamy stuff? That’s a lot of spit, I thought, and it wasn’t until years later that I realized that I had seen my first cumshot.

I thought differently about Bác Thu Dang after that. Afterwards, whenever I encountered him, I thought I could detect, underneath his unflagging joviality, sadness, loneliness. As he moved, I thought I could see him carrying squalor and poverty and pornography around like a phantom limb. I didn’t suspect that these would one day be as much a part of my life as they were of his. The voyeur never considers his own position.  He presses his nose up against the glass of another person’s life. He pretends to know what’s going on inside. He pretends that what he sees is a joke. He never considers that he is also being watched.

#111: Mon Oncle

(originally published Feb. 16, 2013)

Bác Thu Dang was not a blood relative as far as I know. Vietnamese family trees are notoriously convoluted, with the farther branches of second uncles and cousins twisted and labyrinthine. But I suspect that his bác was an honorific, the way that some Vietnamese refer to Ho Chi Minh as Bác Hồ—Uncle Ho. (My parents refuse to speak Ho Chi Minh’s name in any incarnations—their version of the 614th mitzvah.)

I knew nothing of Bác Thu Dang’s life. My father told me, at one point, that he worked as a janitor. He spoke very little English, but in Vietnamese, he had a knack for puns: slight tonal shifts, switched consonants. When he came over for visits—once a week, it seemed—he and my parents played cắt tê for nickels and took sips of Remy Martin V.S.O.P. until they were red-faced from laughter and alcohol. My mother let me taste her drink (Remy and 7-Up) and sporadically explained what was so funny. I suspect that most of Bác Thu Dang’s jokes were dirty.

One Christmas, Bác Thu Dang gave me a bag of Hershey’s Kisses, and I ate them all, except for three—one of each color: green, red, silver. I had a habit of hording candy—in a Sucrets tin, one of each flavor out from a bag of Jelly Bellys; in a lidded jar, the accumulated cherry pieces from a Halloween’s-worth of SweeTarts. A few years ago, when I was cleaning out my childhood desk, I found those three Kisses, still in their bag, crammed in the back of a drawer. They’d dissolved into dust by then, eaten by something larval, their foil pocked with holes. This was my last physical reminder with Bác Thu Dang, but still, I threw the bag away.

I’m struck by how M. Hulot reminds me of Bác Thu Dang: the tall frame, the long face, the air of calm bufuddlement. I don’t recall ever seeing Bác Thu Dang without a hat, most often a droopy fishing hat that sat low on his head, much like the one M. Hulot wears on his holiday. The similarities end there: Bác Thu Dang also wore large glasses, and his front two incisors were nicotine-stained and slightly twisted, giving him the appearance of an overbite. But he was a familiar sight in our house, a constant presence in our lives.

Until he wasn’t. At some point, the visits stopped, I’m not sure why. There hadn’t been a quarrel that I was aware of, and when my parents encountered him, they were still convivial. But the level of closeness wasn’t there anymore. Maybe the friendship had simply run its course. The young boy in Mon Oncle never questions why his uncle is suddenly no longer a part of his life; he instead forms a stronger bond with his father.

For me, I know there’s must be another secret stash of chocolate somewhere.

#110: Monsieur Hulot's Holiday

(originally published Jan. 3, 2013)

For a number of years, Matthew and I had a New Year’s Eve tradition: we would go to bed early—well before midnight—and when the new year came, we’d rouse to the noisemakers and the fireworks, and turn to each other, and mumble ‘happy new year,’ and kiss, and then go back to sleep.

*

This year, we went to a friend’s house for an evening of board games. Foil hats, hors d’oeuvres, plastic leis. Ball drop, champagne toast, kiss, Auld Lang Syne. Then it was time to go.

The highways were empty. No tractor trailers, only a few other cars. Everyone, I suppose, was enjoying their night off, except for those bartenders, policemen, taxi drivers, and hospital workers who kept the world in working order for us to return to the next day. On the drive, Matthew said that he could see fireworks from between the buildings of Wilmington, but by the time I looked, they had dissipated.

Matthew went to bed soon after we got home. I watched M. Hulot’s Holiday. On New Year’s Day, Southerners eat black-eyed peas and collard greens to represent prosperity. The Irish eat ham and cabbage. Maybe watching M. Hulot’s Holiday signifies gentle humility. Or having gimlet humor towards the world. Or maybe I, myself, need a vacation on the Brittany coast. As I watched, the movie was punctuated, from outside, with occasional bursts. Fireworks—or perhaps gunfire, both wholly American traditions.

*

Towards the end of the film, M. Hulot accidentally sets off a shed full of fireworks. Some of them hit the pension where he’s staying in what director Terry Jones describes as an “artillery barrage.”

“It’s almost as if,” Jones says, “Tati was mounting a military assault against the stuffy old world of the past.”

The racket wakes the other vacationers, the lights in their rooms turning on one by one. And as they leave their rooms and gather downstairs, where raucous jazz plays, they begin—begrudgingly—to have fun.

*

New Year’s Eve, 1999. We weren’t afraid of the Y2K bug—not really. But, just in case, two hours before the catastrophe hit, Matthew drove me in his green Jetta (named Clio, for the muse of history) north from Denver. We had planned it so that when midnight struck, we’d be over the Wyoming border, but still far enough away from Cheyenne to miss the cataclysm. At midnight, we pulled into a scenic overlook on the side of the highway. We got out of the car—after all, it, too, had an internal computer and may have been susceptible to spontaneous combustion. It was cold, I remember, though there was no snow, and we huddled beneath the light overhanging the highway, the orange glow almost nuclear in its brightness. At midnight, to the north we could see fireworks, and to the south, another set of fireworks. The wind, with sharp teeth, brought the sound of distant explosions. And we stood there, holding each other, until we were sure that the world hadn’t ended after all, and then drove home.

#109: The Scarlet Empress

(originally published Dec. 27, 2012)

When I got a Mohawk over the summer, my parents reacted with horror: you look like a punk, my father said. A no-goodnik. A Mexican. I had once joked, as a teenager, about getting a Mohawk, and my parents said that if I did, they’d hold me down and shave my head all the way. My mother pleaded with Matthew to convince me to revert to my old haircut. “I can understand him wanting to cut his hair that was if he were young,” my mother told him. “But he’s almost forty.”

I thought, There’s no way they would have let me have one while I was growing up. I waged my follicular rebellions in secret. One evening, when they had gone to dinner with friends, my sister and I mixed up a bowl of sticky blue dye, a color that could only been seen directly under light. We smeared a protective layer of conditioner along our hairlines—Direct contact with skin may result in a burning sensation, the package read— and tried not to touch anything with our heads for two hours. When we rinsed, we were disappointed to see the color: most of it streaked the bottom of the bathtub, and none of it had stayed in our hair. Our rebellion washed down the drain.

So, at the start of the summer, as Tomacina took the clippers to the side of my head, the revolutionary spirit rekindled. The grey hairs fell away, a clearcutting of old-growth lumber. My head felt lighter. And when she had finished, the black nylon haircut cape was speckled with years of my life, shaved off.

Early in The Scarlet Countess, there’s a scene of Marlene Dietrich on a swing, playing the young Catherine the Great. When the camera focuses on her face, it’s unmistakably her, though something seems off. Let’s face it: Marlene Dietrich is one of the screen’s greatest sexual icons, but she can’t pull off a teenager too well. Her hair, a mass of blonde ringlets, can’t disguise the sensuousness of her eyes, and despite her attempts to play the ingénue, her sexual persona shines through.

Over the summer, I paid careful attention to other Mohawk-bearers. We were a secret brotherhood, I thought, until I realized that my brothers were, on the whole, much younger than I was. The Mohawk was a bit of play-acting on my part, something I could pull off for a short time, but not convincingly. Maybe it’s better to let Marlene be Marlene and for Viet to be Viet.

My hair grows quickly, so it only too about a month for it to reach sufficient shagginess. The new school semester was about to start. I returned to Tomacina, and she asked what I wanted. I repeated what I’ve said to her at least a hundred times now: one-and-a-half on the sides, longer on top, kill the sideburns. She ran her fingers through my hair. “You’re a mess,” she said.

#108: The Rock

(originally published Nov. 28, 2012)

For a while, I only trusted gay men with my hair. As a child, my mother cut my hair: every two months or so, I sat on a chair set upon spread-out newspaper on the basement storeroom, and my mother worked my head with a trimmer set that nicked my ears and spewed hot ozone. In middle-school, she started taking me to haircut franchises: Great Clips, the Hair Cuttery—but after one too many fucked-up cuts, we settled on a Vietnamese woman who had shop in the Far East Shopping Plaza. While I got my hair cut, she shopped for groceries.

Patrick, though, was my first stylist. He worked first out of Cherry Creek, but when he opened his own salon in Englewood, I followed. We hung out for coffee and occasionally hit the bars together. He introduced me to having my hair slightly askew and tousled, as if I’d just woken up. (How can anyone tell the difference? asks Matthew.)

When I returned to Denver after grad school, Patrick had closed his salon and had moved to San Diego. I tried other gay men, but results were spotty, depending mostly on the mood of the stylist that day. But Matthew introduced me to Meechie, who worked at the Supercuts not far from our apartment, and from that day on, only sassy black women have cut my hair.

I have great respect for hair stylists. When I told Tomacina, my current stylist, that I’d like a Mohawk for the summer, she didn’t bat an eye, but worked the clippers until all the white hairs at my temples were on the floor. “Not too bad,” she said.

In The Rock, the gay barber (“stylist,” he insists) is played for laughs. He’s a hideous stereotype: prancing, mincing, and prone to the vapors. His complaint that he’s not allowed to use scissors is played off as evidence of frivolity. What’s a pair of thinning shears when compared to the fate of San Francisco, a city under threat of being poison gassed? He’s on-hand to give Sean Connery, a wrongfully-imprisoned British intelligence officer, a haircut. They sit, guarded by FBI officers, on a high hotel balcony, with the San Francisco hills roll behind them.

Michael Bay admits that Connery essentially reprises his most famous role: “a rusty James Bond,” he describes the character. A friend recently explained why she doesn’t like James Bond movies. “Whenever I see Bond driving through a crowded marketplace, overturning the stalls and sending everything flying, I don’t care that Bond is trying to save the world,” she said. “All I can think about are all the poor merchants who’ve just had their lives upended.”

“I guess I’m not the right audience,” she concluded.

Connery uses the haircut as a pretext to escape, of course, flinging his captor off the balcony. The stylist flees into the elevator, where he cowers from Mason. But he knows that his work is no less important than Mason’s work to save the world. “All I care about is,” he says, “Are you happy with your haircut?”

#107: Mona Lisa

(originally published Nov. 21, 2012)

Bob Hoskins walks into the Ritz wearing a Naugahyde jacket the color and texture of an orange fruit roll-up, and beneath that, a Hawaiian shirt which even retired Floridians would decry as too loud. Later, he shows off a gold medallion. At the bar, smoking a cigarette and drinking a Bloody Mary, he thinks nothing of his clothes: they’re new, after all. He’s comfortable in them, proud of them, until the call girl he’s been driving around she sees him and sums up her feelings in a word: Christ.

The camera shows the dining room: white arches, chairs with red velvet cushions, and crystal chandeliers. Rose marble columns, potted palms, Oriental rugs. Everything is gilded—the statues in the recesses, the harp on which the harpist plays—and when the light reflects on your skin, you yourself become golden.

Matthew and I were there on Christmas Day. My cousin, who lived in London at the time, made the reservations, her treat. Tea at the Ritz!: the only hotel to have its name adjectivized. On the long escalator rides in the Tube, adverts framed on the walls spoke of the tradition of spending the holidays at the Ritz, only £50 a person.

But once we arrived, I felt under-dressed. Some men wore tailored tuxedoes. I wore a suit I had owned since college, when it fit a slightly skinner version of myself. It pinched, and the material seemed scratchy. When I reached for my teacup, too much of my cuff showed. Even the waiters’ uniforms seemed custom-fit. For the next hour and a half—before we had to make way for the next seating—I tried to convince myself that I belonged there.

But my clothes gave me away, I thought. The call girl who paid for Bob Hoskins clothes tells him: Being cheap is one thing. Looking cheap is another. That really takes talent.

Afterwards, sated with cucumber sandwiches and lapsang souchang, as we gathered our coats, an older woman emerged from the downstairs casino. She was tall and elegant, Parisian, I imagined. But: she wore the most astonishing hat. It teetered upon her head, a swirl of purple, as if Gaudi had built a beehive out of felt. I couldn’t help but gawp as she passed by. I turned to Matthew in order to confirm that what I had seen was real, but instead, I caught the eye of an older British woman. With a wry smile, she said, “I see you looking,” in a tone of voice that humored as much as it chastened.

Chances are that hat cost more than my suit. But she seemed so at ease in it that it didn’t matter that I found it slightly ridiculous, much in the same way that I found myself slightly ridiculous. She wanted to call attention to herself, so if she was there, then Bob Hoskins could be there, and so could I. I put on my overcoat (second-hand, bought at a Washington D.C. garage sale) and headed out into the London winter.

#106: Coup de Torchon

(originally published Oct. 31, 2012)

Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon has no moral center. The main character, the lone police officer of a small, colonial Senegalese town, is craven, prone to childish pranks, from salting someone’s tea to weakening the floorboards of an outhouse so that the unlucky occupant falls through. He endures humiliations with a wan smile, and when he’s finally had his fill, he metes out capricious punishment, killing the guilty and innocent alike. He draws others into his depravity, making his superior officer a patsy and inducing a schoolteacher to tell her class that his chalk-written confession on the blackboard is Le Marseillaise. Characters twice proclaim—once during an eclipse and again during a sandstorm—the arrival of Judgment Day, but no such judgment comes. Instead, life continues unabated in the town, the painted walls of houses both sun-baked and blinding. Tavernier’s camerawork itself resists implying a moral center. He avoids, as he describes, “the principle of symmetry, with the hero in the center.” Instead, he creates, with his Steadicam shots, “an image that [has] no center, that [keeps] shifting… It’s the physical equivalent of earth that isn’t solid.”

This is the creation of colonialism, Tavernier suggests—this lawless land. “The atmosphere of violence, horror, hypocrisy doesn’t leave you anything to hold on to,” he says. “But it’s not exactly a desperate vision of the world. Nor is it the opposite. You simply don’t know.”

*

I was raised Vietnamese Buddhist, which carries syncretic traces of Confucian ancestor worship. My parents themselves were light Buddhists, which meant that I went to temple only on major holidays: New Year’s, smoky with sulfurous firecrackers and jangled with Dragon Dances; the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, with paper lanterns and me trading my salty yolked slice of mooncake to my father for his yolk-free one; and the Veneration of the Ancestors, for which one pinned a red rose to his lapel if his parents were alive and a white one if the parents had passed on. At temple, black-and-white portraits of the deceased were lined up on either side of the altar; each time I attended, I looked for my grandparents there. At the center of the altar was a large gilt Buddha, seated in the heroic position, hands in the ‘calling earth to witness’ mudra. The Buddha had radiant, neon halo. Buddhism doesn’t have strict tenets, such as the Ten Commandments, but instead suggests the Eightfold Path. I would have learned these paths, but the service was conducted in Vietnamese, which I understood only fleetingly, and I mouthed my way through sutras transliterated from Sanskrit into monosyllabic Vietnamese and read to the rhythm of a tapped woodblock. At the gong, I knew to bow, though I never figured out which gongs meant bow once and which meant three times.

Thus, my moral education consisted primarily of ‘Goofus and Gallant’ cartoons in Highlights for Children, read once every six months while waiting in the dentist’s office. I like to think I didn’t turn out too badly.

#105: Spartacus

(originally published Sept. 19, 2012)

I first saw Laurence Olivier’s ‘oysters and snails’ speech to Tony Curtis, not in Spartacus itself, but rather in The Celluloid Closet. In that scene, Olivier argues to his slave that sexuality is a matter of taste, rather than of appetite, and being a matter of taste, is not a moral consideration. “It could be argued so, Master” says Curtis. The Celluloid Closet was part of a queer studies class I took as a junior in college, at which time my own preferences had already ossified. ‘Skinny Jewish intellectuals’ was my taste, rather than a moral judgment on chubby Gentile fools.

***

Years later, I was in New Orleans with my skinny Jewish intellectual, for a conference. He had never eaten raw oysters before, his father having instilled in him the fear of Vibrio vulnificus, rather than Leviticus. We sat at open-air bar at Felix’s, and, around us, was the sultry autumn air, the sound of granular ice, and quick-fingered men with shucking knives and chain mail gloves. “OK,” he said, “I’ll try one,” and several dozens later, the area was around us a denuded shoal, a mother-of-pearl graveyard. “Oh, I’ve missed out on so much,” he bemoaned. “I lived in Boston and never had any oysters.”

***

Censors suggested replacing ‘oysters’ and ‘snails’ with ‘artichokes’ and ‘truffles,’ but even after Kubrick reshot the scene, they cut it, leaving audiences, presumably, to wonder why Curtis’ slave has a sudden attack of drapetomania. And while could be argued that the scene dealt with sexuality in a progressive way, for 1960, it might be that the screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, conceived of the scene much differently. According to Howard Fast, the author of the novel, the more abstract decadences of starvation or slavery were inconceivable to Hollywood types. But sexuality—this was a decadence that Hollywood could understand. Most people in Hollywood either knew someone who indulged in it, Fast says, or indulged in it themselves.

***

Matthew and I know oysters. We know the different types: the briny ones from Maine, the mineral tang of those from Prince Edward Island, the creamy flesh of Puget Sound breeds. We don’t slather them in cocktail sauce, but opt instead for a shallot-champagne mignonette or, if that’s not available, a squeeze of lemon and a dab of horseradish. Escargot is fussy: handling the little forks, and maneuvering the shells out of that specialized divot pan. No, when we feel decadent, it’s much easier to slide an oyster whole into your mouth, liquid and all, even if ‘decadence’ is relative, and, of course, a matter of taste.

***

I learned recently that the ‘oysters and snails’ scene is a reconstruction—the audio long since lost. Tony Curtis, almost 30 years later, re-recorded his lines, and Anthony Hopkins was brought in to dub Olivier’s. Kubrick supervised via his fax machine from England. But even in its cobbled-together state, it still has a delicious charge to it: filmed from behind a gauzy curtain, the two men half-naked and oiling each other up. “It is all a matter of taste, isn’t it?” Olivier says, before concluding: “My taste includes both snails and oysters.”

#104: Double Suicide

(originally published Sept. 9, 2012)

Suicide 1: Neal was two classes above me in seventh grade, while his brother, Eric was one class behind, in fourth. Neal’s curly hair was cut in a proto-mullet, with wavy lines shaved into the sides, and he maintained a light wisp of a mustache, so blonde and light that it looked like a trick of the sun. He wore neon-colored clamdiggers and short-sleeved shirts as though he were a California native trapped in land-locked Colorado. Whenever I visited his brother, who lived two blocks away, he regarded us with an indifferent air, the way a queen ant ignores the workers scurrying around her.

There was conflicting news of his death: some people said that it was an accident, that he had shot himself while playing with a gun; others said that it was deliberate. Eric missed two weeks of school, and when he came back, I treated him gingerly, with no mention of Neal, even though Neal’s presence hung over Eric like a bubble.

I was afraid of grief—not Eric’s grief, which made him walk as though the floors of Parklane Elementary were pools of wet clay. That grief was evident, palpable. No, I was more afraid of Neal’s grief, a huge, unknowable thing that could swallow a person up in an instant, in an irreversible contraction of the index finger.

Suicide 2: My cousin Huong was a police officer in the Los Angeles, and my family drove to California for her funeral: my parents, sister, aunt and uncle all crammed into a van. There was no stopping in Las Vegas for a run at the casinos, no pauses except at gas stations, where I was allowed to look at the candy but not buy any. Huong, too, had shot herself. I remember her round face, her feathered, neck-length hair, and how, once, on a previous visit, I had slept in the same bed with her, and she advised me: if you fart in the middle of the night, the least you can do is lift up the comforter to let it out.

By then, though, I had been thoroughly brain-washed by suicide-prevention filmstrips; back then, suicide was considered the highest act of selfishness. The closest I ever came to suicide was holding a kitchen knife to my wrist and thinking, I could do it, I could, in teenaged high Romantic mode. But the practical truth of it, I knew, was more unbearable: a closed-casket ceremony, her fellow police officers sitting stiff-backed in folding chairs, her boyfriend gripping the brass sides of the casket so hard that it shifted on its base.

The question I wanted to ask Eric, the question I wasn’t able to ask Huong, was Why? But I suspect that even if they could have answered, it still wouldn’t have made sense. There is no why. There’s only the act. The doomed lovers in Double Suicide proceed to their fates with mechanical certainty, and the black-shrouded Bunraku puppeteers look on, anguished, as Huong’s mother clutches a framed photograph of her, repeating, No one’s as beautiful as my Huong. No one.

#103: The Lady Eve

(originally published Aug. 21, 2012)

In The Lady Eve, right before Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) realizes that her beloved thinks she’s a gold digger, she tells him, regarding women: “The best ones aren’t as good as you probably think they are, and the bad ones aren’t as bad. Not nearly as bad.” Her voice is jaunty as she speaks because she doesn’t know what’s coming next, and as he reveals what he knows, Stanwyck becomes crest-fallen. Her self-confidence is rattled, and her eyes water as she pleads with him to see past what he believes. To see past what the world believes of her.

Those tears may seem like easy sentimentality in this most sentimental of film genres (the romantic comedy or, more specific, the screwball comedy), but behind those tears, Stanwyck maintains a strong will. She spends the remainder of the film proving her assertion about women, and from then on, looks at Peter Fonda as if he’s more trouble than he’s worth, but worth the pursuit anyhow.

At that moment, I finally understood why my mother loves Barbara Stanwyck. We once watched an entire season of The Colbys because Stanwyck starred as the matriarch of the family, Constance Colby. I was only eleven and had endured 10 hours of Richard Chamberlain in The Thorn Birds for two hours of Stanwyck, but at least for The Colbys, I was already a fan of Dynasty. But when Constance was killed off after the first season (a plane crash in Asia), my mother and I stopped watching, because the show was actually pretty lame. The series finale involved an alien abduction, if I’m not mistaken.

Stanwyck had never struck me as someone who was glamorous—after all, I’d only ever seen her play fiercely protective mothers—but I could say the same about my mother. She had me when she was almost forty, so I never knew her as a young woman. A black-and-white photograph of my mother hangs on the wall outside the kitchen. In it, my mother appears softer than I’ve ever seen her, looking slightly over her shoulder, hair cupping her face, luminous. My father joked: “That was taken when Mom was a radio pop star.”

I can’t tell how old my mother is in that photograph, but apparently, my paternal grandmother once called her a ‘gold digger.’ My father was, at the time, an officer in the ARVN, educated in America, slender and handsome with a cop stashe. In other words: quite a catch. And my mother? She was older than my father by three years. Quite the scandal.

According to Henry Cavill, screwball comedies aren’t comedies of marriage, but of how a couple separates and reunites. Of remarriage. How long did it take my mother to convince my grandmother that good girls weren’t as good as she think they were, and bad ones weren’t as bad? Because nowadays, as I watch my mother in the kitchen, peeling vegetables, making rice, stir-frying shrimp and braising fish, I can’t help but think that my father got the better end of the deal.

#102: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

(originally published July 8, 2012)

On the last day of our 2010 Belgian trip, my friend Rudi, whose last name can either mean “fisherman” or “sin,” depending on how you mispronounce it, took us in his Fiat for a tour of the Belgian countryside. I had told him that we wanted to see places lesser-traveled by tourists, and he suggested the medieval cities of Huy, Dinant, and Namur. Great, I said. We can find some lunch along the way.

After Huy, along the Chaussée de Dinant, we stopped at a farmhouse restaurant beside a brook. As we enjoyed the sunshine, sipping tea, nibbling Speculoos, and watching the chickens wandered the grounds, the waitress informed us that we had arrived at their nether-time: too late for breakfast, too early for lunch. We could wait around for another hour if we wanted, but we decided to push on. Rudi said he knew a place in Dinant.

We reached Dinant in the full force of the afternoon. The sun glinting off the River Meuse competed with the Casino de Dinant for the title of Brightest, Gaudiest, the Most Neonic. The restaurant Rudi had chosen was in a prime location: our backs to the cliffs, tower of Notre-Dame to our left, the river before us. And, in keeping with Walloonian Catholic tradition, it was closed on Sundays. Matthew bought a couque de Dinant in the shape of a pig, but Rudi advised against biting into it. “Not unless you want to break your teeth,” he said.

In Namur, Rudi drove us to the Citadel, at the top of a hill. Other tourists, mostly Belgians, had lined their chairs alongside the edge of the stone wall for a view over the city. On the tables next to them, plates of food. It was just after five, and the river cut through Namur like a sickle. Rudi flagged down our waiter came and had an animated conversation with him. The waiter turned to us, apologetic, and shrugged.

“If you learn any French today,” Rudi said, ruefully, “it will be the phrase, Desolée, la cuisine est fermée.”

The waiter brought a condolence plate of cheese and celery salt. And a few packets of Speculoos.

Taking the E411 back towards our hotel, the countryside browning in the fading sunlight, we could have been the titular bourgeoisie from Buñuel’s film, hungry, following an endless highway towards an unknown destination.

We stopped in Wavre, a suburb southeast of Brussels. Outside a take-out shop, people congregated in line and around the picnic benches to the right of the shop. “OK,” Rudi said, “this place must be open.” The other customers seemed bemused by our presence: What are they doing here? people asked Rudi, as if their suburban lives were far removed from the tourist trade. In a way, this was exactly what I had asked Rudi for. Almost everyone ordered frîtes; most of the menu board was devoted by the various frîtes sauces. I chose one that seemed most unfamiliar—merguez—and as we settled into the warm evening with our paper boats of fries, we finally did something new and heretofore unexplored: we began to eat.

#101: Cries and Whispers

(originally published June 21, 2012)

My across-the-street neighbor, Sharon came home yesterday, and everyone along the block knows: she has come home to die. She was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer last December, and although she was responding to treatment, a week ago, her condition deteriorated, and, since then, her house stood empty. Her husband’s cars were nowhere to be seen, except, probably, at Christiana Hospital. Then, yesterday, a van pulled up to her house, and a triangular sign warning visitors about in-use oxygen appeared on her front door.

Weeks, I understand. A few months at most: her platelet count is down to 40,000; 100,000 is the minimum necessary to continue chemo. The other day, her grown daughter swept out the living room, preparing to convert it into a bedroom; Sharon’s mother was also there. They are the start of it, the parade of friends and family paying their respects, as if their presence can make her more comfortable.

Death, in Cries and Whispers, is both frightening and horrific. Agnes, suffering from an unspecified cancer, has long fits where she can’t breathe. Her torso contorts as she gasps. She clutches her skin from the pain. Her sisters, emotionally distant and self-absorbed, are unable to cope and refuse to comfort her. The visuals themselves are uncomfortable: the scenes are drenched in a hyper-sanguinated red, a color which, to Bergman, represents “the interior of the soul.” The walls: red. The window treatments: red. The carpet: red. The screen fades to red. When death comes, Bergman seems to say, everyone’s soul is laid bare. Isn’t that what you’ve come to see?

The drapes covering the living room window where Sharon  sleeps were once red, but, after years of constant battle with the sun, are now vermillion. Paper cut-outs of numbers and letters are taped to the glass, reminders that Sharon once ran a daycare out of her house. Those, too, have faded; no one can remember what color they once were.

“I’m at peace,” Sharon said. “A lot of children have been in and out of my house. I’ve touched a lot of lives.” She still had hair when she said this. When I last saw her, her head was wrapped in a bandana, and she was bloated. She didn’t seem to be in pain, but this was what I saw on the outside.

Cries and Whispers ends on a note of grace: Agnes, in her diary, describes walking with her sisters and coming upon a swing, the three of them together again, and happy, for a moment. So I end with this moment with Sharon: a summer night, when she had just finished a ride with her ladies’ motorcycle club. The smell of exhaust dangled in the humidity. Sharon sat on her stoop with her then-neighbor and motorcycle buddy, and when the two of them saw Matthew and me returning home, they called us over. They had an iced pitcher of margaritas at the ready. And despite the insects swarming around our exposed skin, despite the obnoxious cruisers zooming down the street at unsafe speeds, we were, for a moment, happy.

#100: Beastie Boys Video Anthology

(originally published June 20, 2012)

Pollywog Stew (1982)

I never knew the Beastie Boys did straight-up punk.

Licensed to Ill (1986)

“(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” was impossible to avoid. The video was on heavy MTV rotation, and I disliked the Beastie Boys for many reasons: shouty lyrics, frat-boy antics, low-level homophobia. Of all the things to fight for, I thought, why is partying first? But the biggest reason was that hip-hop wasn’t on my radar; I was twelve, and only making the transition from Top 40 to Euro synth-pop.

Paul’s Boutique (1989)

At Barnes & Noble, I spread all the alternative music magazines I could find in front of me on the table so that everyone could see how alternative I was. Even though Paul’s Boutique got plenty of positive press, my antipathy towards the Beastie Boys had evolved into indifference. They were mainstream, I thought, and to hell with the mainstream! I was too busy with the review of the latest Peter Murphy album and the up-and-coming Nine Inch Nails, who I suspected might get big.

Check Your Head (1992)

R___ had a poetry class with me. He wore baseball caps backwards and was in a fraternity: in other words, the type I associated with the Beastie Boys. And, sure enough, when I delivered a copy of my workshop poem to his dorm, there, on the floor, was Check Your Head. Mark Strand took a liking to R___’s work, much to my dismay. Strand held up phrases of his for us to examine: a crumb of soap. Grandmother slurping soup. I wondered, How was this possible? Strand gave me a C, and I retreated to the Baltimore raves, which frat boys hadn’t yet infiltrated.

Ill Communication (1994)

In X-Force #43, Rictor (a mutant with the ability to create seismic waves) takes his teammate Shatterstar (a warrior from another dimension) to the Limelight to teach him about human feelings. When Shatterstar hears “Sabotage,” he notes the atavism of the song, how the bass rattles his bones. When a young girl tries to dance with him, he runs away, wondering what it would take to make him feel human. Years later, he and Rictor become lovers.

Hello Nasty (1998)

Ad-Rock apologized for his past homophobia in a letter to Time Out New York. “There are no excuses, but time has healed our stupidity,” he wrote. “We have learned and sincerely changed since the 80s.” He takes it a step further in “Alive” when he raps “Homophobics ain’t OK,” while wearing a fuzzy powder-blue jumpsuit.

Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 (2011)

Adam Yauch passed away from cancer about a month ago. A friend in Brooklyn told me about passing a beauty salon that had a hand-written sign reading ‘R.I.P. MCA.’ I didn’t know what it meant, my friend said. Neither did I. Adam Yauch, to me, was not MCA but the founder of Oscilloscope Laboratories and vegan Buddhist. But, rewatching the videos, I realized how Adam Yauch is inseparable from MCA, the way I’m inseparable from my 80s self for which I have yet to apologize. There he is dressed like a scruffy 80s motorcycle rocker; then again with short-cropped gray hair. There he is his delivering a gruff rap about beer; then again criticizing disrespect towards women. There he is, still fighting.

#99: Gimme Shelter

(originally published June 4, 2012)

The camera doesn’t record memories as much as it creates them. These moments can now not be forgotten: the naked and drug-addled being escorted to the medical tent; a man wearing a sparkly Star-Spangled outfit, puffing from a furry bong the size of a hockey stick; the woman on-stage who says, petulantly, “But I wanna see Mick Jagger, goddammit.” Throughout Gimme Shelter, the Rolling Stones watch the footage, as if it holds clues to their own memories of their 1969 North American tour, which ended at the infamous Altamont Speedway concert: what did they see? What could they have done? They listen to a radio call-in show recapping the Altamont concert, with Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger, one of the Hell’s Angels, giving his side of the story, and afterwards, Charlie Watts says, sardonically, “Well done, Sonny.” When the film reaches the moment when Meredith Hunter gets stabbed in the back. Jagger asks to see it again. The Moviola freezes on a knife blade flashing in the air. Then Maysles winds it backwards, and Hunter pulls a gun, its shape visible against a girl’s crotchet dress.

*

Memorializing one’s life has become ubiquitous. Video clips, photographs—with these artifacts, we can rifle through our memories, parsing their significance. What did this moment mean? Nowadays, you can’t go to a concert without someone holding up his phone for the entirety of the performance. What will he remember of it? How does he re-live the experience? Does he sing along? Are his eyes dazzled by the strobe lights, the smoke machines, the trembling of his own hand?

*

I saw Skinny Puppy on their Too Dark Park tour. The stage featured rubberized trees that, in the light, looked wet with slime. Faces were twisted into the bark. Behind the band, a back projection showed a loop of atrocities: war crimes, Lucio Fulci clips, animal experiments, Microsoft Windows 3.0 graphics. At one point, the lead singer, Ogre, was tied into a chair with medical tubing and and ‘injected’ with neon fluids. His bandmates strapped metal stilts to his arms and legs, and for the duration of the concert, he loped around the stage, a Goth giraffe.

*

I still have the t-shirt from the concert, a stippled close-up from the album’s cover art: a demonic, tentacled face. It’s the only physical reminder I have of the concert, and I’ve stopped wearing it. The image has started to crack and flake away, and the black of the shirt itself has faded to a dingy gray. And to be honest: I can hardly remember much of the concert itself. Much of what I ‘remember’ was provided by other sources. But I’m sure it happened that way, anyway.

*

In 1991, Skinny Puppy released their Tormentor single, which featured the track “Harsh Stone White,” recorded live in Denver. I imagine I can hear myself cheering, clapping, begging for “Worlock,” and I can see myself, the only skinny Asian 16-year old at the concert, skirting the mosh pit, inching my way up to the stage, and my 37-year old self, now sporting a mohawk for the summer, crosses his arms and says, Well done, sonny.

#98: L'Avventura

(originally published Feb. 24, 2012)

In 1960, L’Avventura was awarded the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for its “remarkable contribution to the search for a new cinematic language.” That language, according to Seymour Chatman, is a metonymic cinema, in which the landscapes are physical externalizations of a character’s inner emotions. Objects in the landscape, Chatman states, “serve as metonymic signs of [the character’s] inner life.” Thus, the barren, volcanic island which serves as the stage for the first part of the film represents the characters’ own inner barrenness.

Antonioni frames his characters such that they’re not looking at each other, or even in the same direction. They are, in the words of numerous critics, alienated. Even when they speak, they turn away from each other, or one character has her back to the other. They speak to empty space, to jagged, black rock formations, to sea sprays.

When Matthew and I are angry with each other, I direct my words towards the spot just to his left or to the thinning spot on the carpet where the cats have ripped out the piling. We look past each other, as if the weight of actually looking—seeing—each other would drag us both down to the floor. We avoid touching, and turn our bodies going up and the down the stairs, lest our contact set off a spark the burns the whole house down. The air, it seems, is colder. But is the landscape a metonymic extension of myself or is it simply February, and we’ve set the thermostat to 64° because our last heating bill was nearly three hundred dollars?

He stands off to the side while I’m typing and looks at me, as if daring me to look back. I don’t.

Have you eaten dinner?

No.

He leaves the room.

András Kovács argues that characterizing Antonioni’s mise-en-scène as metonymic is reductive. “If Antonioni’s landscapes are ‘empty,’” he writes, “it is not because they express by their physical aspect the characters’ mental state. It is because the characters cannot find their lives in there however beautiful they may appear…. They wander around in it not because they want to find something that is out there, but because they have lost their human contact with that world.”

In the final scene, Claudia approaches her lover Sandro, sitting on a bench, from behind. Sandro has just betrayed her, and he weeps into his hands. Her hand hesitates before she places it, tremulously, on his head. Antonioni himself offers conflicting interpretations of her gesture: “She will stay with him and forgive him,” and “What they finally arrive at is a mutual sense of pity.” To Sandro’s right, a solid brick wall, grey and stubborn, featureless, crumbling. To Claudia’s left, Mount Etna in deep focus, streaked with what looks like snow. But they don’t look at each other.

Matthew and I will reconcile. Our lives will resume their normal course. But before that, we have to look: Look at my face. Look at this piece of me that represents the whole.

#97: Do the Right Thing

(originally published Feb. 10, 2012)

The last time I saw Do the Right Thing, I was in Brooklyn for a sleep-over. W-M, my best friend, had invited me to meet Y___, who lived within throwing distance of Sunset Park. Y___ was Nigerian; his wife K___ was South Asian; and, as the other guests arrived, the party resembled, more and more, a U.N. General Assembly Meeting. I was the only delegate who had not brought his own pillow.

The gathering wound late into the night, and those of us spending the night staked out floor positions. But even at 2 a.m., no one was tired. We debated books and art and politics, and nibbled on leftover chaat. We were, all of us, overeducated, despite (in spite of?) our various international upbringings, and K___’s naan tasted just as good cold as it did warm.

Y___ had set up a projector to beam pictures from his laptop onto his wall. Someone stopped the slideshow and pulled up Do the Right Thing on YouTube. We watched, pausing every ten minutes or so as the invisible hand guiding the cursor searched for the next section. During those interstices, I thought about how far this slice of Brooklyn was from that one: 20 years and two bus transfers away.

***

Lee Klein, as he was supervising the transfer of the film to DVD, recalls cinematographer Ernest Dickerson saying, Redder, redder, redder. “The instinct was,” Klein says, “not to go that red because it seemed too far, but that’s how he shot it and that was the intention, and it’s easy to back off the red to be safe.”

***

I was in Y___’s brownstone again two years later. W-M had moved into the apartment below Y___, and she was throwing a house-warming party. Many of the invitees I had met two years before. I brought W___ a glazed Portuguese tile with a portrait of Fernando Pessoa. She had already settled in quite comfortably: a vertical bookshelf made it look as if books were climbing up her wall. She had filled her disused dining room fireplace with books. An arch of books, a parabola of paper. Our lives are fire hazards.

The party moved into Sunset Park. It was a pleasant fall late-afternoon, and the blanket kept the cold from seeping into us. The park was a patchwork of picnics. As we gathered around the homemade red velvet cake, a Hispanic toddler waddled up to us. His nose and mouth were a transparent slick of mucus. Someone offered him a slice, and he looked at it hesitantly and wandered off without taking it. Around us, lingual cacophony:  the park of Babel.

Then: sunset, something that would have been apocalyptic if it weren’t so beautiful. The air turned to blood. Loud Chinese music came over some loudspeakers as a group of dancers prepared their evening practice session. The red grew increasingly intense, as though someone were infusing oxygen into the blood. As other housewarmers returned to W-M’s apartment, I watched the sky: redder, redder, redder.

#96: Written on the Wind

(originally published Jan. 5, 2012)

Opening shot of Written on the Wind: a sports car races across a barren Texan landscape. Oil derricks rise out of the ground like metallic spines, upright. The sky is a blue that exists only in the movies—a day-for-night shot—bright as electricity, deep as evening, and the starkness of the sky makes you think that Texas is always like this: empty, endless, illuminated.

When I was young, my father brought home magazines from his visits to our local HMO. National Geographic for him; Reader’s Digest for my mother; Ranger Rick for me. I asked him to buy me a subscription, but he said no, that these copies with the address label ripped off were good enough. One issue I recall featured pictures of the decorated pumpjacks in Luling, Texas. They struck me as odd and beautiful, how they simultaneously mimicked nature and denuded it. One was a smiling Monarch butterfly, its wings attached to the pump arm. Another was made up as killer whale; the third, a zebra. My brother had just started his degree in petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. He would, I thought, soon be working with these strange creatures.

Douglas Sirk describes the oil well as “a rather frightening symbol of American society,” a symbol of emptiness, of loss. Rainer Fassbinder points out how the golden miniature oil rig that the scion of the family holds in his portrait “looks like a penis substitute.” The presence of oil is ubiquitous: after Lauren Bacall discovers she’s pregnant, she leaves via the back alley behind the doctor’s office, and, in the upper-left corner of the frame, a grasshopper-green oil pump drains the parking lot.

After graduation, my brother got a job with Atlantic Richfield Company in Midland, Texas, and, for a while, my parents only bought gas from Arco stations on the assumption that they were somehow supporting him. One summer, the family piled into the van to pay him a visit. I remember the long stretches of flat, empty road, where land just seemed to fall off the horizon. From afar, the oil derricks looked like spindly saguaros, and it wasn’t until we got close that I could see their exoskeletons. If it weren’t for them holding the state down, it seemed, Texas might have just blown away.

The final scene of Written on the Wind, as described by Fassbinder: “Dorothy Malone, as the last remnant of the family, has this penis in her hand…. The oil empire that Dorothy now heads is her substitute for Rock Hudson.” Oil, the film suggests, is no substitute for life.

Of the three siblings in my family, my brother is the ‘successful’ one. He works for BP and flies to Aberdeen, Scotland, to plan where to plant off-shore oil drills off the Vietnam coast. He owns a large house just outside of Houston (just being about an hour’s drive), where he lives with his wife and daughter. His wife, who also went to the Colorado School of Mines, also works in petroleum. My parents constantly (still) worry about my sister and I, but him—his life is set.

#95: All That Heaven Allows

(originally published Dec. 13, 2011)

Matthew and I were visiting the father of one of his friends who owned a condo near Vail. Neither he nor I skied, given our combined income at the time. Vail Village can make you feel very poor very quickly. Women in high heels navigate the cobblestones with effortless ease and whisk into shops with names that sound like aspirations: Fantasia Furs, Jewels of the West, Worth Home.

At the Wedgwood storefront, I said, “Okay, let’s each pick a pattern,” because it’s a sure harbinger of doom when two gay men can’t agree on a china set. But we concurred: Persia. We went into the store, were ignored by the shopkeepers, and walked back out.

*

The Wedgwood teapot (Jasperware, white-on-pale blue) that the Cary finds in All That Heaven Allows is a sure symbol of her materialism. She’s drawn to it even though it’s in broken, and her love interest, the rugged Ron, takes it out of her hands and tells her that it was there for a reason: it’s in pieces. She looks at him, slightly embarrassed. It’s only a god damn teapot, after all.

That teapot, nowadays, with its body restored, could probably fetch anywhere from $250-500 at auction.

*

Every year, Matthew’s relations in upstate New York ask him what he wants for Christmas. They take the holiday and gift-giving very seriously, and his protests that he don’t need anything fall on deaf ears. One year, I offered to help clear the table and stack the plates (Lenox, Eternal Gold-Banded) after dinner and was told, in no uncertain terms:  “We do not stack the plates.”

So we asked for our own china set, and not soon after, received place settings for eight (Wedgwood, India).

“One of these days,” Matthew says, “we’re actually going to use them.”

*

Ron repairs the teapot and surprises Cary with it. It’s his invitation: come live with me here, in this restored barn, in the forest. But she can’t; she’ll miss her comforts, her standing in the community, her solid upper middle-class reputation. As she gathers her coat to leave, the edge catches the teapot and it falls, breaking again—this time, irreparable. Ron gathers the fragments and tosses them into the fireplace.

*

Yesterday, Matthew and I were in TJ Maxx, the sub-bourgeois discount store, stopping in just to stop in. While I was deciding whether or not I needed a new tea strainer, he came up to me:  “Look what I found.”

A Wedgwood teapot (Notting Hill). For $35.

“It can’t be real,” I said.

He turned it over. It was, indeed, stamped Wedgwood. He traced his finger along the platinum band ringing the teapot. “Oh,” he said, “that’s why it’s here.” The porcelain had a flaw, a dimpled acne scar on its side. After Wedgwood emerged from bankruptcy proceedings in 2009, the company closed its plants in the UK and moved almost all of its production to Indonesia, where labor is approximately 85% cheaper. At that time, as well, unemployment in Britain jumped almost 2.5% from a year earlier.

*

so much depends
upon

a blue Wedgwood
teapot

glazed with English
Breakfast

by the wood-burning
fireplace

#94: I Know Where I'm Going!

(originally published Dec. 5, 2011)

When I told Matthew about I Know Where I’m Going!, he said, “I already know what you’re going to write about.”

I asked, “What?”

He said, “You know.” He meant the time I drove from Houston to Denver and nearly ended up in Oklahoma. Or the times he’s sat quietly as the highway exit we needed to take passed by. Or the time I drove around a mall parking lot for what seemed like hours, unable to navigate its labyrinthine entrance-exit system. I am, as Matthew puts it, ‘directionally-challenged.’

While in Scotland this summer, however, I knew exactly where I was going. I knew which bus to take (Lothian Buses #49, The Mary Queen of Scots) to get to Edinburgh from where I stayed in Lasswade. I knew that Craigmillar Park, Mayfield Gardens, Minto Street, Newington Road, Clerk Street, Nicolson Street, South Bridge, and North Bridge were all the same road, and as I traveled along it (them?), I noted the bed-and-breakfasts dotting the route: Thrums, Airlie, Heatherlea. In the city, I navigated between music stores: Hog’s Head, Avalanche, Underground Solush’n, Fopp. I conquered the bend where Victoria Street becomes West Bow, and where a roast pig sits in the window of Oink!, its skin crackled and scored into diamond-shapes, awaiting my delectation.

But, to be honest, I lost my way once—just once!—my first full day in Lasswade. I was walking from Hawthornden Castle to Bonnyrigg (which we residents had dubbed ‘the Brig’) for Internet access. The map I had been given was a speckled and faded seventh-generation photocopy. Streets faded at the edges. Nonetheless, I made my journey, confident that I would find my way. And I did.

On the return trip, however, I got turned about. A landmark church somehow ended up on the other side of town. I counted intersections until I was supposed to reach the correct one, but they didn’t add up. Still, I forged ahead. This was, after all, suburban Edinburgh; I didn’t fear football hooligans or the Corryvrecken. The sun didn’t set until well-near 10.

But it was getting late nonetheless. I had nearly walked to Loanhead, almost 2 miles off course, and acres of grasslands opened around me, dotted by occasional patches of poppies, a red tide, when I turned back towards Bonnyrigg. Still couldn’t find my way out. Flustered, I stopped into a pub, The Laird and Dog, where the locals regarded me with pity, curiosity.

“I’m trying to get to Hawthornden Castle,” I said. The name didn’t register with the bartender or wait staff. I repeated myself, slower, as if this would translate English into Scottish Gaelic. A red-nosed bar patron said, “Ah!” and explained to the others. The bartender looked at me—Why didn’t you just say so?—and explained the way. Or so I think—his brogue was opaque, nearly impenetrable. But I followed his hand gestures: cross the creek?—no, bridge; turn left; keep going past the Polton Inn. Can’t miss it.

I returned, just in time for dinner. As it turns out, the Hawthornden Castle administrator had driven past me as I was striding towards Loanhead. He had considered stopping and giving me a lift, but, he said, “You seemed like you knew where you were going.”