It’s amazing how quick you can go from thinking you got life by the tail to that helpless child lost at the fair feeling. Sure, some stuff happened, but maybe it’s just the natural course of things; the internal weather going from sun to clouds.

One thing is I lost some writing (what was to be this week’s Substack). I write in email so it saves the draft, because I can’t figure out auto-save in Word and my power surges sometimes and the computer shuts off and I lose what I’ve written. I had a few emails open at once and maybe some button got hit and I lost 80% of what I had. Of course, that heavy grief came over me. As many of you know, losing writing is a particular agony, like the death of a child, but with a slight hope for reincarnation if you can just remember all the wonderful details about them. Only it’s not just the details, it’s their life force and energy and how they moved through the world. That wonderful soul you brought into being has met a tragic fate. It’s downright sickening, but you’re going to get your shot to play Orpheus and go down into the underworld and bring Eurydice back. That is if you’re not so despondent you swear off words forever.

Fucking writing. You can do it on the daily for years, but every time you go in it’s a high wire act without a net. I can’t believe I’m a writer. It’s so startling to me, I have to go back and read whatever I’ve just written over and over, partially to keep the rhythm and story logic but mostly because I’m so stunned I can actually write. That I can make a me on the page I can live with. That everything alive and musical doesn’t turn to stone when I try to get it down. That the colorful bird I saw streaking across the sky still looks good when I get him in the cage. It wasn’t even that what I lost was so great, but my carelessness with it, and therefore with me, is what lingers. Maybe it’s good for some of us to be a little reckless and wild with ourselves, but when you’ve spent the meat of your life sworn to the flag of whatever feels good you must take care and be precise and intentional. You got to parent those words like they’re your little babies, be they pretty or ugly. Clever or dumb as a box of rocks.

I could blame my achy insides on the fact that I have been displaced from my cocina, but that don’t fly because I now have an outdoor kitchen which consists of a black universal sink (159 bucks at Lowe’s and hooked up to the garden spigot) and a barbecue which had been sitting neglected for years out back. This is all in the front yard in full view of my neighbors and I’m like one of those dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, only I move. (The placard reads, “Early 21^st century sexagenarian, and self-imagined iconoclast, swings to Duke Ellington while grilling zucchini.) I’ve gone full homesteader and am ready to cross the Donner Pass. Last night I sliced some steaks off a collar roast from my pork geniuses and got that char-joy I had long forgotten. That and the zukes and I even did some fingerling potatoes in a foil packet that I let sweat to a starchy-creamy bliss. (I can’t put a potato directly in a fire without thinking of my dad tossing spuds in a trash can blaze to make the “Mickies” of his Flatbush youth.) It was a lovely trio, but I didn’t stop there, throwing three ears of corn on at the end and making my version of “elote” the great Mexican street food that’s sold all over my neighborhood. The char dulled the sweetness and made the maize a proper side dish and not dessert. I love it so much out there I might just get a loin cloth and go full nature boy, leaving my kitchen gutted and boarded up for good.

This kitchen project is five years in the making. I have known my architect since I’m eight-years-old, though he was my brother’s friend not mine. They met at the recently deceased Hampshire college in 1971, Dave (my architect pal) not even enrolled, just bussing up from NYC to visit. When I moved in, I emailed him, “I need you to renovate my kitchen and back house. I’m the closest thing you’ll ever have to a little brother, so you can’t say no.” And he didn’t.

Dave was a top-of-the–line contractor for decades, but he’s also a fine artist with great taste. He even worked a little for Trudy Rosen, a brilliant interior designer and family friend who did all my mother’s places, which were simple and elegant, so there’s history there as well. We’ve taken our time with the whole thing and his trips to the west coast have been as big a part of it as the blueprints. He’s a great cook and as fanatical about food as me, only I work with superior produce, and he weeps in envy over my tomatoes. In the last five years he’s been out ten times or more. We feast like kings, listen to the music we love and genuflect before Bobby D while wondering why he’s such a bitter asshole. He teases me about only listening to music from the 1940s and so I’ll put on some Coleman Hawkins from the 60s to prove him wrong. We’re both kind of shocked that my life took the turn it did--That I’ve got the dough for this after all those years when it looked like I’d be the one pushing up daisies early. He cackles with absurdity when I read him the dialogue of my talking cats, then we discuss the merits of a hundred and fifty year old French butcher table and whether it might feel too much like a stage set. He is official architect, chops buster, and lunch companion, but most of all he is my witness, and connects all the lives I have lived to this one.

We don’t talk about Ezra (my brother) that often, yet in some way, the whole project is about E. Not like we are doing it for him, but that he is the bridge between us-- That when we eat and talk and keep the last fifty-five years humming in the air, we honor and love him and keep him alive. We don’t cry, we laugh. When I read Dave a paragraph of an article in the New Yorker about Jurgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School, we both say where is E to tell us what it means and to frame it in his unique historical context. When I swim in the simple lap pool that Dave designed, I think, where is E and wouldn’t he be surprised to see me swimming; me who could barely float and him, head lifeguard at our community pool. When I time the lamb chops just right and they take on that juicy-savory, that’s the best thing I ever put in my mouth magic, I wonder where is E, how could he not be here to enjoy this? Yet somehow when Dave is around, so is E, and we when we finish the kitchen and the big new window lets all that Northern light in, we will think of Ez and my mom and even Trudy, and we’ll cook and laugh and be awed by the arc of life.

I wake up having conversations in my head with five different people and in all of them I am coherent, compelling, justified and most of all right! The teller of hard truths, that’s me. It’s like the scene at the end of the Godfather and I am settling all family business, though I’m not sure which one of them is Moe Greene and gets shot in the eye. When I get this full of righteous brilliance, I know to be wary, but I also know there is a kernel of truth in my grievance and sometimes the whole damn ear. The only problem with the rant in your head is that it tends to blot out the dignity, vulnerability and point of view of the other person, and according to the great Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the encounter with the “other” is the most sacred thing of all. (Levinas says that not even murder cannot destroy the otherness of another person. That the act of killing tries to suppress the other person completely. Yet, this attempt fails because the very act of murder reveals a silent, radical resistance in the victim that the killer can never touch or own.) I will either have to keep my powder dry or have actual conversations with these people, and they will go oh so differently than what I imagined in my noggin. My semi-famous ex-shrink, Barry Michaels told me, “Sometimes you got to be a real asshole to be an adult” and I think what he meant was you can’t let other people’s feelings run your life. You got to sit there in that awful, angsty, bizarro world of, telling people (sometimes people you are very close to) what they don’t want to hear and often, and even worse, being served big portions of what you don’t want to hear. All praise be to they who can sit in conflict and neither cave nor bully.

I am back from Paris and not only am I suffering from flan withdrawal (I thought kicking dope was tough ‘til I went cold turkey off eclairs) I have walked straight into a construction site. I’m expanding my kitchen and right now am sitting in my second-floor office (an enclosed sleeping porch) as they do shoring beneath me. Hopefully they know what they’re doing, and I don’t go plunging to my death mid-paragraph. Also, it was my birthday yesterday. I’m 64 (and was sent the McCartney song by at least five people). Perhaps the birthday has to do with the “settle all family business” energy, as birthdays are great markers for change, and even better for the fantasy of change.

There’s a woman who writes a substack that I read to remember how fraught my relationship with my mother was. She’s a feminist, a Jew and a very smart pain in the ass, though she has horrendous taste in TV and movies (or maybe common taste is a better way to put it), and like many of us, she is very self-aware in certain areas and utterly clueless in others. Also she uses the word sexy a lot and in this incredibly unsexy way, but I read every column or at least start it. Her stack is a toothache I can’t keep my tongue off of. The other day I got truly tired of it and not even my dislike was entertaining me. I told a friend, “I’m so tired of reading X, I’m tired of reading myself.” At the end of every post, she shills for money and tells you how many people recommend her “stack” (throngs and throngs) and offers seminars where the novice can learn to write a sentence that makes you want to read more. I respect her dedication to her hustle, but I always get a moustache twirling thrill that I chose screenwriting over journalism and have no need to ask you dear reader for anything but your brief attention.

I actually had an interesting birthday, at least in how utterly un-different it was from my normal day. I spent most of it working on the first act of the movie I’m writing, a new installment of an animated family film franchise. I had been working on it while I was in Paris and upon my return had received a very clear plan of action from the general which staff sergeant Swerdlow was happy to carry out. What can I say, sometimes warfare is a blast!

I wish you all (at least you scribes) could have some experience writing family films because at its best it teaches you a lot about playfulness, pace and clarity, which over time has a very interesting effect on your prose writing. That being said, I don’t think Philip Roth ever worked for Pixar and he seemed to do just fine. But somehow that’s the game I ended up in and the way I put food on the table (speaking of food I am not going to have a kitchen for possibly five months and anyone who has read this regularly understands the crippling severity of this amputation...more on that later....or not).

When I write these family films, I’m a hound on the hunt and so far on this one the scent has come and gone with the wind, but yesterday I got a strong whiff and was hot on the trail. Story, character, rhythm, humor, action, relevance and surprise. Scene writing. It’s a real thing. Starting one place, ending another and having a gas in between while making sure to pay the story forward; then cutting to other characters and another part of the story in a way that feels like the two are dancing, and then maybe even a third group who have their own needs and objectives but are part of the whole. At its best it feels like flying, but with impact, slowing down for key pieces of information or to shine some light on character, then revving it back up with a joke or a gust of story wind to blow it forward. You must know when to hit the gas and when to brake or even better, downshift, so you don’t have touch the brakes at all.

With all writing, but especially screenplays, it’s about coalescing energy and momentum and then dispersing it. This is the process, over and over. It is not easy to make a story swing, to get the thing moving and living and climbing the mountain with force. Like life, most of storytelling is climbing the mountain, so you must be judicious and careful about when you decide to come down. Or to put it another way it’s not easy to put together a big wad of dough and though blowing it on a spree is a huge joy (and one the audience needs and expects), you will then have to do the work to put together another wad. Knowing when to save and when to spend is a major part of the gig. And you must keep all that grown up shit in mind in as you write with your child heart, child sincerity, child joy and goofiness. (One last thing about screenwriting that I still must constantly remind myself of is; you gotta look up at the screen, not down at the page. It’s happening on the screen! The audience is going to see it with their eyes and hear it with their ears. It is not happening in their head i.e. on the page. Look up. Look up. Look up. Look Up. Look up!)

For me it all comes down to Bugs Bunny. Bugs, the Little Rascals, Abbott and Costello, The Honeymooners, the Odd Couple (TV show), The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, I love Lucy, Chaplin, The Marx Brothers. This is the stuff I was raised on. Most of the people who do what I do are twenty-five years younger and the TV and comedy they grew up on was less physical and archetypal. Art Carney is a comic genius. His body and timing set to the great cosmic-ha ha clock of eternity. Jackie Gleason is a force of nature. All you need to tell him is “You’re jealous in this scene” and amazing things happen. David Schwimmer on the other hand is a line sayer. His comedy is attitude and if there is an archetype it’s not one Jung or Mel Brooks would be interested in. I feel lucky to have been raised by the saints and have that comic standard to at least shoot for if not achieve. On my 64th birthday I was thrilled to write a funny riff for a talking rabbit with Redd Foxx’s soul in my heart and Kevin Hart’s voice in my ear.

But today when I woke, it wasn’t talking animals that were on my mind, it was just Swerdy, ready to set them all straight. I might get paid to write down the voices in my head but luckily, almost six and half decades in, I have learned not to act on them.

If you have three minutes it’s worth it, even on your phone.

The phone is down to 4%. I've got the "Lime" app open because I'm on the bike, the "Maps" app open cause I'm up in the Marais, I'm riding the wrong way on a wrist-thin, cobblestone street clogged with leisurely piétons and the 8PM sun is blinding me like the giant yolk of an oeuf from hell, and on top of that I've got to pee so bad I may poop my pants. I have never been happier!

I turn off the cobblestone and hit a main drag, trusting my instincts over GPS and almost always being right. I may not be intimate with all the side streets of the 4th, but three weeks in, I somehow know my Parisian elbow from my ass. Last year it was about food. I spent my time browsing boulangeries and butcher shops and wandering the open markets. I chose the fromagerie over the Musee d'Orsay and though I did see an exhibit of Matisse paintings of his daughter I was more intrigued with Tomme de Savoie than I was with Henri M. But this time la bouffe is in the background and the city itself is what fills my mouth.

I headed to the Marais around 6PM, my destination, a hat store and restaurant to follow. The Chapeau shop is disappointing. I tell the young woman who works there how much I loved Le Cerise (my favorite Parisian hat store) and how sad I am that it closed. She says she worked there for six years and that she’s even sadder than me and we bond over how much better that store was than this one. I browse the summer fedoras, mostly Panamas, but the brims are too wide and make me look more like Bella Abzug than a Cuban dandy. There's one with a slightly stingier brim that might just do, but it turns out it's a sample that can't be bought, though I can order one and get it in October. I look over the at the caps and see a beautiful light cotton newsboy in olive green. I haven't worn a cap since high school (when I sported a blue Chairman Mao adorned with a red Ho Chi Minh pin my mother had brought back from Hanoi). It gives me a certain old Italian man, bocce ball playing charm, but my beard has grown wild and rabbinical and the cap doesn't frame it like the fedora does. I consider a major trim of my barbe or maybe even going clean shaven and start to see it not as a grooming choice, but as a late second act story point--Summoned to Paris for work, our lead character visits a hat shop looking for a fedora and stumbles upon a magic cap that makes him shave his beard of thirty years and start a whole new chapter of both life and face. I buy the cap, but decide not to race to a barber seeing as I'm in the Jewish quarter and shaving the beard here might seem like spitting in the face of Hashem. I walk over to the restaurant. It's been open five minutes and there's not even a seat at the bar. It's a tiny place with a great reputation and my free range chicken with chanterelles in natural juices after an appetizer of rillettes de cochon will have to wait. I figure I'll just cross the Seine and head back to my part of town and that's how I get myself running out of phone juice and needing to pee.

When you hop off these rent-a-bikes you have to "end" the ride on the app and take a picture that you're parked in an appropriate spot and sometimes it takes a minute, which of course it does now. I shift from foot to foot doing the pee dance, but see a phone store right in front of me and decide that I can hold it. I duck in and ask the young, good looking Indian kid if I can get a quick charge (He's rail thin with long curly dark hair and a John Waters mustache that he somehow pulls off). He tells me, no, they're closing, but I can buy one of those charging batteries, which I just enviously saw some guy using at a coffee place an hour ago. I say “I’ll take one," and he says "great” and knocks it down from 55 Euros to 40 since I'm the last sale of the day. "Can I charge for a minute?" "No problem." I look over and see a guy in a Boston Red Sox hat who turns out to be the owner. "You like the Red Sox?" "Yes," he says in his French accent, "I love them." I playfully curse his soul and tell him I'm a Yankee fan. He says he used to be, but switched sides. We dive into an American sports conversation and now I can stay as long as I like. We talk Aaron Judge and Ohtani, and he tells me he bought two faux satin Yankees bomber jackets and his wife almost divorced him. "For buying them?" "For wearing them!” (She’s a fashion snob, not a Red Sox fan.) He's considering moving to the west coast, has a pal in San Fran who turned one bakery into ten and might need him to run one. "San Fran's great" I say, and then we get into the Knicks and how he was pulling for New York over Wemby. In the middle of all this a guy on a scooter drops off two cake boxes from the bakery he works at, a thank you for fixing his phone. I leave with a half-charged phone, a new battery and one of the cake boxes, which contains a large flan and is one of the best pastries I've tasted since I've been here. And I'm going to go back to Los Angeles? For what?!

Hold on, there's more.

Since dinner in the Marais ain't happening, I come back to the hotel, take a shower, blow dry my balls (I don't really, but there is a blow dryer) and head back out on the bike to a place I have already eaten at twice that makes some damn fine food. I had delicious sweetbreads my second visit, but I'm going back to my first meal, which was a first course of seared rabbit livers (foie de lapin sounds a lot more appetizing) and a nice piece of fish after. My favorite waiter isn't there tonight and the food isn't quite as good, but it's still more than acceptable. When asked about dessert I pass because I have been here almost three weeks and I have not had profiteroles, and whenever I see a waiter pouring hot melted chocolate from a kettle over ice cream filled pastry it makes me happy.

I go online and look for good profiterole reviews nearby and settle on Brasserie Lipp in Saint-Germain which is a five minute ride away. I walk into the Lipp and I get some lip. Actually, what I get is the cold shoulder as they won't let me just order dessert. I give the guy my best "come on garcon, you can bend the rules for this sweet boy" delivery, but he's not buying my act. People have been so nice to me here it takes me a minute to register that someone is actually saying no to me. Luckily there are four other joints within spitting distance. I end up across the street at Cafe de Flore of Picasso and Simone de Beauvoir fame. I order my profiteroles and wait. It's a bustling Friday night in Saint-Germain: elegant Arab women in headscarves, elegant French women without headscarves, flaneurs and fancy Philippes, an endless stream of bike riders and waiters weaving in and out. The roar of the crowd is everywhere, as if the boulevard is a boxing match and the sidewalk bistros ringside seats.

I look over at the next table (which is a foot away) and there's a good looking African cat about fifty with a plastic baggie of five cigars already cut and ready to go. I smile and say, “You're serious about your cigars" and in two minutes we are deep into it. Isaac lives in Hell's Kitchen on 37th between 9th and 10th and works for Citibank. I tell him I have all my money with Citibank and he assures me nothing can go wrong as long as I'm patient. "Oh, I am Isaac, I am." My profiteroles arrive. Already swimming in a river of chocolate sauce they're a major let down, but Isaac is a gas. Born in Ivory Coast he has an incredible speaking voice: deep, musical, wise, playful, the cadence and confidence of a great salesman. The French he speaks to the waiter is as good as listening to Yves Montand.
"Is Cameroon near Ivory Coast?"
"No, Cameroon is more in the middle."
"I used to play with a musician from Cameroon."
"A bass player?"
”Yeah, how'd you know?"
"Cameroon is famous for bass players."
"His name was Andre Manga."
"I know Andre Manga... He played with Michael Jackson.”
"WHAT?!”

In the mid 90s I had a band. I was the singer/talker/poet and I had some really great musicians with me. My backup singer was Lisa Simone, Nina's daughter and my bass player was a sweet cat and bad ass musician, but I never kept up with his career and now I find out he played with Michael! Michael and (from Wikipedia) "Angélique Kidjo, Boyz II Men, Janet Jackson, Paul Simon, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Dr. Dre, and many others." I had to come to Paris to find out my bass player went from Swerdlow to Stevie to the king of pop.

I'm still marveling over the Manga news when an older cat dressed like the Good Humor man comes to the table selling newspapers. Isaac seems to know him and they chop it up in French. The guy tells me he has been selling papers on the street since 1972, and Isaac tells me he's famous, which I take with a grain of salt, but then the paper seller tells me to google "The last newspaper hawker in Paris” and I’ll see an article in the New York Times. It's true, there's an article on him in the Times. "He got the medal of honor from Macron" Isaac says with pride, and the guy breaks out his phone to show me a video of Emmanuel M pinning a red ribbon to his chest. I am both impressed and amazed, and though I don't want to steal the guy's thunder, I can't resist saying "My boss just got one of those" and break out a picture of my boss and old friend Chris Meledandri recently getting a red ribbon pinned on him by Macron as well. It's three nudniks and two medals of honor on the sidewalk in Saint-Germain. And that's what Paris has been like. A web of new connections that lead to old stories. I feel like I've grown up and grown young here. That these three weeks have crystallized something in me; hurled me into a life and city that has use for all I've learned and survived. That a new chapter has started and that I had to get out of the house and onto the streets to set it free. Had to trade the car for the bike and Pico Boulevard for Rue de Lafayette. I feel alive. Like I have something unique to offer the world and even more, a blessing to still receive from it.

Jackie, my boss’s assistant (my boss is my good friend of thirty-five years, but he’s also my boss and I get a kick out of calling him that) told me she likes Le Cinq Codet, and so I say, “I’ll take one of those” and don’t give it a second thought until the car drops me off in the 7th, the glorious golden dome of Hotel National des Invalides (where Napoleon is buried) looming overhead. Okay, now we’re talking.

I walk up to the front desk and it’s a whole new world; the lobby larger, the concierge blonder, the vibe more upscale. I get my key and go up to the room, but it’s even smaller than the rooms at the Marquis, a lot of beige, cream and light wood squeezed into tight quarters. Then I go down to the breakfast room, which is bigger, fancier and less quirky, and suddenly I’m homesick for the lo-fi funk of Le Marquis.

I go back up to the room and email Jackie. “Sorry to be a diva, but is there any way I can check out of here and switch to Le Marquis, guess I’m a creature of habit.” Ten minutes later she writes back, “All good. Stay at Le Cordet tonight and you’re booked at Le Marquis starting tomorrow.” I have a decent night’s sleep, grab a morning coffee from a guy who barely looks up from his phone, and head out about noon, rolling my suitcase on cobblestone past the Ecole Militaire. I walk into the Marquis, see the small Filipina woman who runs the breakfast room and say, “I remember you.” She looks at me a beat and says “I remember you too” and I immediately feel better. Moments later I bump into Katie (French pronunciation), the woman who runs the place. About forty-five and tall with an unkempt bob, Katie wears jumpers with dark tights and flat shoes. Her mouth is all gums and overbite, a veritable museum of teeth. She also says “I remember you,” and I say, “Must be the hat,” referencing the worn, straw fedora I wear. “No,” she says. “I remember you.” This touches me far more than it should or maybe it touches me exactly as much as it should.

Thirty-five years of writing family films has worked its way into my DNA and when called upon I can usually rise to the occasion. The boss and I have a shorthand we developed decades ago, and though there are periods where my services seem expendable, there always comes a time when my particular skill set is needed. The work must be going well cause they ask me to stay another week. I tell the young woman at the front desk I need to extend my stay and she tells me it is not possible, that the hotel is fully booked. This does not make me happy, but as opposed to getting sulky I decide to see it as an opportunity. Ever since I started riding the rent-a-bikes Paris has become my city. I decide to look up some hotels in the 7th and take a bike tour, surveying each until I find the ideal spot.

My first stop is the Comtesse, on Avenue de Tourville. It’s a beautiful tree-lined thoroughfare, lots of “Lime” bikes always parked along it to speed off on. The concierge at the Comtesse looks me over and asks me if I know the price and I tell him, “Don’t worry, I just look like a bum.” He takes me up to see a room. It’s tiny, expensive and no fucking way. I leave slightly disillusioned and head for the next place on my list, but on the way I see a joint called Hotel Le Tourville, which is run by the same company as Le Marquis. I walk in and there’s a young blonde with dark roots behind the desk. A Russian transplant, she speaks great French and pretty damn good English, and though her style is a tad robotic (like she’s following the training manual), I give her the benefit of the doubt. She shows me a perfectly fine room on the first floor that has a nice little patio. Overcome with a surge of boldness, I say, “I’ll take it,” the patio, with its little sitting area tipping the scales. I should also mention that there’s a 100 year old Underwood typewriter in a case by the front desk and two more elsewhere in the lobby. The hotel was a famous haunt of writers back in the day (Victor Hugo specifically) and even has a “Poet’s weekend special!” I don’t look for signs from the universe but when they smack me in the mouth I take the hint. I tell Vlada (the Russian’s name) the company I work for will pay. I send Jackie an email and she takes care of it or at least gives them a card to keep on file. I can check in tomorrow at two.

Gema, the Filipina, and Phay, a wonderful young Kenyan school teacher who doubles as breakfast room deputy, serve me my coffee and we say our goodbyes. In a week, we’ve bonded over movies and colonialism but all good things must come to an end. On the way out Katie asks me where I’m going, and I tell her that the concierge (who is seated right next to her) said there were no rooms so I checked into another hotel. Katie does not like this one bit and quickly hits the computer. The concierge was wrong, there is a room if I want it. But I’ve got that patio in mind and that beautiful tree lined Avenue. It’s around the corner from the Rue Cler where I do all my shopping, and I cannot halt my Parisian evolution even for wonderful women like Gema, Phay and Katie.

I get to the Hotel le Tourville at 1:30 hoping the room is ready. There’s a young African cat behind the desk who tells me not yet. I take a seat at a little table in the lobby by the coffee machine. Two girls about twenty with bare midriffs and jeans slung low on their hips plop down in chairs and break out their phones, and I realize the culture is over and the world is going to hell in handbasket. Okay, maybe that’s over the top, but they radiate a bored dissatisfaction that in combination with their nubile flesh antics spells some kind of soulless doom. I’m not loving the vibe here, but decide to take a walk and get a hold of myself. I come back at two and Vlada is now behind the desk. She tells me she needs my credit card to guarantee my stay, and I say but you have the company credit card, but she says that’s just an authorization and starts to get a little Soviet Politburo with me. When I ask if I can cancel my reservation after a few days if I don’t dig the room she tells me, “No.” I’m not liking that one bit and so she gets the manager on the phone for a tense conversation in French, but when she gets off, it’s still “no.” “I have to stay the whole week even if I don’t like the room?” “Yes.” But then she says I can cancel the entire reservation if I want, but have to do it now and pay for one night as a penalty. This is all too much for me. I am trying to write about talking cats, sociopathic raccoons and adorable mini pigs, I can’t handle do or die decisions about accommodations. “Alright, let me just see the room again and I’ll tell you what I want to do.”

She lets me into the room and I hate it, the patio smaller and uglier than I remember. We go back out to the front desk and I ask her if she can get Le Marquis on the phone. Katie picks up. “I’m over at the Tourville and I’m not happy.” “Good,” she says. “Come back home.” I feel more maternal love in that one moment than I got in my entire childhood career.

I Uber the few blocks and roll my bag back into the Marquis. It’s been ninety minutes and I feel like a soldier returning from war. Katie welcomes me back and says she’s taken care of everything, I won’t have to pay the one night penalty at the Tourville. In minutes I’m back at my spot on the umbrella’d patio happily writing away. Katie comes out to check on me and asks if they can bring me a coffee. I say yes, and she smiles and says, “We like having you here,” and I realize that for me this is true luxury, far beyond any four-poster suite at the Ritz Carlton. To be known. To remember and be remembered. To have taken the time to connect with people, especially those who are serving me, and make sure they know that we are on even footing. That I am full of appreciation, not expectation. In fact, I can think of nothing more opulent than holding the elevator door for an older African housekeeper and seeing her royal face light up when she smiles and says “Merci.”

The young cat at the boulangerie is soccer player handsome and if he had been patrolling the midfield for Les Blues in their loss to England you wouldn’t have batted an eye. “Dude, I need a half baguette for this creamy, sheep cheese I just scored.” I don’t actually say that but the half baguette part is true. He tells me I need cash for it and I say “I got two bits American, how’s that?” He gives me a firm shake of his beautiful head. Then it comes clear that the half baguette is 60 cents and the minimum to use your card is 1 Euro. I say no problem, as he grabs two feet of pain and puts a blade to it, tossing in a cookie to make up for the 40 cents. “Oh, you’re being nice, huh?” He smiles and gives me a “oui.” I’m in Paris if that wasn’t clear.

Armed with bread and cheese I walk past the fruit man/kid and give his nectarines a squeeze. They’re gorgeous but too hard for my liking as I want to eat them not get fucked by them (anyone who reads this regularly knows “ripe” is one of my top five all time words). Turns out he’s he’s got a soft peach and we shake on it. I even buy a couple of apricots, which have some give, but are too beautiful to be truly great. He rings me up and I notice he’s wearing a French national team sweatshirt and I offer my condolences about the tough loss to Spain, but at least they did better than the Argentines.

My friend Paul lives here. He moved from LA with his wife and kids a couple of years back; just up and left and made a life in France. He sends me the name of the restaurant we’re meeting at and I hit the street, walking past golden domes and iron statues of men who made their mark. I feel that, I was in one world and now I’m in another miracle of air travel glow. I slip past a cafe, the smell of French fries and perfume getting me tipsy (beautiful Arab women in burkas eat steak frites, their eyebrows lush as the paintings of Rosseau). I go past the Musee Militaire, its line up of oxidized cannons harking back to some once proud 18th century might. Then I look up and see the woman I was behind in the customs line. (At the airport) I was immediately struck by her strong features, great posture and choice of stylish but sensible shoes. I figured her for Armenian or something of the sort (her last name wasn’t Johnson that’s for sure, even though she was holding an American passport) and now here she is walking right at me on Avenue De Grenelle in the 7th arrondissement. I have a brief kismet delusion that I will now find out what that strange discoloration I noticed just above her top lip is all about, but she blows right by me and I must accept that she does not need a secular and extremely poetic old rabbi to make her stay in Paris worthwhile.

I keep walking, my phone playing Hermes and leading the way (I know I recently wrote a whole anti GPS rant, but I will lean on Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself” line as defense). I pass a bustling cafe vibrating differently than the others. I know the food is good from the way people are eating (they are there to chew, not talk). I have perfect pitch when it comes to grub and envision myself in a swirl of Francais, eating duck confit, understanding everything and nothing. My eye catches an old “Tabac” sign and I flash on Frank O Hara buying a pack of Gauloises from the tobacconist at the Ziegfeld theatre in that great poem about the day Billie Holliday died. A few minutes early, I sit down on a sidewalk step and feel Paris under my ass. A woman waits on the corner, maybe sixty. She wears a green dress with a big slit up the side, her tanned leg revealing and hiding itself with metronome consistency.

Dinner’s fine, pizza out on the street, my pal relaying some recent work successes and me truly happy for him. We’re a couple bearded Jewish screenwriters (he works more in TV) born two months apart, both getting nursed on the show biz tit and lapping it up in Paris. What absurd luck to be born white in America and to folks with some cash and culture; how the world opens its doors to you or at least doesn’t close them. I guess one can overcome anything, and we all have to dig out of the ditch of ourselves, but Long Island ain’t Darfur, and though I’m not always grateful, I’m at least mindful.

After dinner we get on these “Lime” rent-a-bikes in the just starting to fade 9pm Parisian light. I’ve never been on one before and when the electric surge kicks in I get a giddy, black and white French new wave thrill. With my fedora in my front basket and the wind in my non-existent hair I cruise through this beautiful historic city. Walking is a creek, but riding is a river and I get swept away by the autonomy of motion, the two wheel world taking fifty years off my age.

I’ve traveled very little in my six decades and though the guide book of my inner life is rich in detail my Marco Polo soul has never gotten a fair shake. When I do find myself abroad I get a glimpse of a huge unlived expat existence and an even huger body of unwritten expat literature. And yet I always feel a pull to return home and limit the loneliness of wandering. To be part of while apart from, this is my natural state. Traveling is the perfect instrument for that concerto, and writing even better. I don’t have the courage Paul does and could never up and move abroad, but maybe I can change my return flight and stay a few more days or even rent a car and head to Burgundy. It’s amazing how much I like and don’t like being alone.

The Alanon meeting is fine, though I forget how long the preamble is and how much group business needs to be taken care of. I’m looking over at my pal to see how appalled he is and how badly he wants to leave, but he’s hanging in there. Not nodding his head in identification but hanging in there. Near the end of the meeting, I decide to share, because what the fuck, I’ve been sitting there an hour listening, why not bare my soul a bit as well. I talk about a resentment with an old friend, how I want a blessing from him that’s not coming, and that my favorite Alanon expression is “Stop going to the hardware store for milk,” which to me means, stop hoping people will change and finally give you what you want from them.

The meeting ends. My pal has not been transformed and to be honest he’s probably not going to come back. We go downstairs where a big AA meeting is wrapping up and I run into some folks I know, one of whom is an old harmonica player who has been very ill and when I see his dyed black rock and roll hair, lip beard and eyes still twinkling through his illness I feel a surge in my heart that is way bigger than our connection warrants. “Jimmy!” I say. “It’s good to see you man,” and I really fucking mean it. We talk for a bit, both of us just happy to be clean and alive and needing nothing more. And now I know I didn’t just bring my pal to the meeting to be of service, I bought him so I could run into the great Jimmy Wills and have my heart opened.

I say goodbye to Jimmy, then to my pal and I have that good 12-step feeling as I walk down Wilshire on an early summer night. Not that I want to go back to meetings, but that I am known and cared for (and know and care for others) and that I came through a dark twenty-year chasm of self-harm and made it here. To be honest I’m a little high on recovery and decide to call my AA sponsor Bob, who is really just my friend now. He picks up the phone and says “Tommy, what the fuck, I was just thinking about you” and I say, “Bobby, I just saw Jimmy W and it was so nice” and then we do a little two-step about what a great cat Jimmy is and how he’s been fighting cancer and that he’s just noble and nutty as hell. Then Bobby says he was just thinking about me because he wanted me to come to speak at the Thursday night meeting he secretaries, but then it occurred to him that I don’t go to meetings, so he can’t have me speak, but then he realized I’m sober and have a message of sobriety, so of course he can. “So, what do you say Tommy, will you come speak in two weeks? “Yeah, Bobby, I’ll come speak.” And that’s my night. My pal needs some support, which leads to Jimmy W, which leads to Bobby, which leads to me speaking at an AA meeting even though I never go.

It’s an open meeting for men and women, but it’s all dudes and feels like a men’s stag. It’s a pretty ragged looking bunch, but once they open their mouths, the tenderness leaks and the confessions spill and there may even be some wisdom lurking amidst the nonsense. As far as my lead share, I keep it brief and say I do not go to meetings, but I am a sober member of this program and almost everyone I know is sober and that AA changed my life, which it did. I share how much I love Bobby who is sitting next to me and how he was there for me in my darkest hour and that calling him every day at two o’clock for three years helped save my life, even though it seemed ridiculous at the time. The group feels me and when they thank me for telling the truth about not attending meetings, I say some things are even bigger than sobriety, and for me authenticity is one of them.

Late in the meeting a guy near me shares. He’s older and weathered and grief streaked about the cheeks and eyes. He shares that his adult son recently OD’d and that he’s an addict who has struggled—Tells how he went back to engineering school at 68 and was amazed that his young Indian classmates loved to hang out with him and hear his stories. There’s something about his share that’s familiar, how even when he describes good things the pain is greater than the hope and I can hear the heavy blows life has delivered him; that he’s in the war right now though he doesn’t share the details.

After the meeting I step outside, and he comes up to me. I tell him I liked his share and I’m so sorry about his son and then it all comes spilling out. He’s 75 and on 24 milligrams of Suboxone (doctor prescribed methadone given to opiate addicts) which is a huge dose. HUGE! As he talks, I can hear the buzzing of his frayed wires. I know this place, not the madness, but the heartbreak and how it feels to come to meetings high as fuck, which I did for years, and so I decide to tell him what I know no one else in this room would dare ever say, which is: “You are not getting clean. It’s not happening. Maybe you get down to 6 milligrams or 4, but what it would it take for you at this age to make it through a full detox you no longer have the strength or will or surrender for. This is it. You are going to be on this stuff for the rest of your life. You don’t need to get off Suboxone, you need to find some self-love and self-forgiveness. If being around sober people feels good, that’s great, but you don’t have to come and be the guy in the meeting who can’t get it. You don’t have to shame-bathe and self-hate and play the hopeless case. That battle is over and there’s no need to keep losing it. Just try and love yourself, as hard as it is. The twelve steps are wonderful and being clean is a gift, but it is not all there is. We all get the dignity of our own experience, so please, please find the dignity in yours.”

The crack is back! And by crack, I mean the Persian Mulberries, which grace us for two weeks and cannot be glanced at without fingers getting stained. Drunk on their own juices they are the Hafez of berries (sorry Rumi), tang and centuries-old sweetness perfectly entwined. I swear they get you high; dark, wet, black-blooded bits of the eternal. Deeply feminine in texture, flavor, wisdom, this is sex food and I don’t mean to be eaten with it I mean to be eaten as it. Oh, what the Persians know and don’t know. The other night, Iran scored late against Egypt in the World Cup and it was not just a goal but a transcendence. This conflicted, royal land; lorded over from within by theocracy, ruptured from abroad by barbarity, finding hope on the soccer field! The goal scorer tore his jersey off, as if nakedness were the only answer to his ecstasy. His teammates engulfed him, the Iranian fans gone full rapture, not like he had scored a goal but like he had performed a miracle. His brothers kissed his head and face; those ecstatic kisses between men which are the opposite of war— And now onto the knockout round they would go, this moment of victory happening on the world stage for all to see…And then five minutes later, the kisses still wet, the goal was nullified! Disallowed, when the video replay revealed the player “offside” by inches. Technology, which had taken the form of bombers from above, morphing into pinpoint surveillance, the modern world once again coming down on the Persian empire. It was not just a sports cruelty, but a historical one. The players were devastated, but soon their disbelief had turned to wry acceptance, as if continued suffering and the ability to endure it was the only victory one could count on.

And from this enduring soil grow the trees that gift the sweetest morsels. The Rumi berries (sorry Hafez), so delicate they must be picked by brown-eyed angels with felt hands. How magnificent fruit is. Born of the earth and free of slaughter it is the snack of Eden. Fuck protein with its obvious objectives and heavy-handed ways, give me the grace of tree and vine. Fruit is aspirational, goodness reached for, not dug up. You don’t stumble upon a cabbage on a country stroll, but you may come across wild berries, though you won’t come across Persian Mulberries unless you make your pilgrimage to Mecca (whatever Mecca is to you).

My fingers bloodied, my mouth in awe, I think of Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian film director and how he understands both the sweetness of life and the stain it leaves behind. I adore his masterpiece, “Close-Up,” but my favorite is his 1987 film “Where is the Friend’s House?” a meditation on human decency and how even a small action taken in the name of empathy can become an epic quest.

The film begins with a rural teacher harshly scolding an eight-year-old boy in his class. The boy starts to cry in a way that is so real and helpless you swear you’ve never seen anyone cry in a movie before. Defenseless against the requirements of school/society he is singled out as the lamb to be sacrificed, but he is not the star of the film. The star is his friend Ahmed, an ancient soul in an eight-year-old’s body. Ahmed disobeys his domineering, preoccupied, yet somehow still loving mother and sets out by foot to find his friend’s house (in a neighboring town) so he can return his school workbook, which has accidentally gotten into Ahmed’s satchel and which his friend needs to not be expelled. Ahmed crosses the threshold, navigating modern Iran and ancient Persia (which are one in the same here) with only the goodness of his intentions to guide him.

Half documentary, half fable, “Where is the Friend’s House?” is the work of a maestro, but it’s not just filmmaking Kiarostami is a master of, he is a master of heart and place. Religiously unsentimental and always tender, he gets to the essence of Persian poetry and storytelling and though I am uneducated on both subjects, I know what I’m saying is true.

What is it about those berries that doesn’t just please my mouth but opens my heart? Why am I so moved by those Persian athletes kissing their hero, unafraid of wild displays of love and joy? What is so profound about Kiarostami smiting indifference with a small boy’s need to save his friend from exile? Oh, what the Persians know and don’t know.

Sometimes life just stops like a train and you can hear the steam brakes and feel the lurch. I’m not talking about pulling into the station I mean the middle of nowhere. Unsure how you got there or where you’re going you disembark with your fellow passengers, all of you wading into an empty field. It’s like the end of a Bergman movie or Buñuel, and you realize everyone’s lost, but at least we’re all lost together.

I was saying a few weeks or months or years ago that something is coming to an end, but now I see it’s coming to a beginning. It’s the time between the “coming to” and actually starting that can get sketchy. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to give up reimagining the story of my life. Allen Ginsberg asked, “When will I be able to go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?” My question is, when I’ll be able to go into the supermarket and buy what I need with exactly what happened.

You know what makes me happy? Really good peaches sliced up with cottage cheese (Have you tried this 6% milkfat “Good” brand cultured cottage cheese. If not, please do). I get my peaches and nectarines from Tenerelli Farms and it is stone fruit heaven. The color, flavor, mouth feel. Sweet, wet, cool, the sugar giving over to tang and tang to sugar. Prufrock would have eaten these without asking. I only do yellow flesh, the lily-white world of no interest to me, save for red headed women. When I was twenty-three I was blown away by the Babcock, a variety of white peach so delicate they no longer grow them due to bruising (you looked at them wrong and they bruised). I loved saying the name Babcock, and though the initial hit was sweet and mild, their aftertaste contained a smoky surprise, like a great white jazz musician who plays beyond their appearance. This was 1985, back before I went to farmers markets, instead buying by the box at the huge central market in downtown LA, a hub for the entire country’s larder. The place was lousy with truckers and their 18 wheelers. We’re not talking prissy farm to table twee, this was nation feeding, the bounty that California soil brought forth almost incomprehensible, boxes of broccoli and cauliflower stacked refrigerator high and hand-trucked around like Formula One. And in the middle of this supermarket supplying glut there were higher end stalls with higher end fruit, and that’s where I would buy the Babcocks, fecund and fuzzy in their wood-slatted boxes. I was vegan then (before that word had entered the lexicon) and having twenty-four Vermeer worthy peaches was not indulgence but necessity.

LA was different then. Its hamburger-donut soul not yet foodiefied. There was a restaurant-bakery called Vickman’s that catered to the truckers and manufacturers downtown, its hours 3:00 A.M to. 3:00 P.M. They served ham steak and eggs, bacon and eggs, sausage and eggs, loneliness and eggs. Big plate gut busters washed down with smokestack coffee and a slice of pie for dessert. The glass cases were filled with cream cakes, Danish, manhole cover size cookies. Their famous strawberry cream pie was plasma red and crowned with fist sized berries, shellacked in sugar and shiny as a Harlem pimp’s fingernails. The whipped cream was cloud high and just as white and big belt buckle truckers would grab one “to go” after sopping up runny yolks with toast. Vickman’s closed in 1993 after seventy-four years of breakfast; the truckers left to the stand up joys of the food truck burrito, their cafeteria table heyday now in the rearview.

Los Angeles is an unusual burg. Its story not in its people but in the reasons they came here. Folks go to New York because it’s New York. People come to LA because they’re ambitious, desperate or both. The city was made for the hardboiled prose of Raymond Chandler: The cars. The isolation. The mocking sunlight. The castle of Hollywood high on a hill and everyone trying to storm it. The best writing in LA is done in neon and Chandler knew that. He wasn’t style over substance he was style as substance. Didion’s a killer, but she’s a smart woman; LA is a dumb guy.

The first week I got here I drove to the top of Fairfax Avenue (right in the middle of town). It was 1983, back when there was still a walking trail through the scrub. This was not Central Park and when I saw a hawk swoop down into the brush, then head skyward with a rabbit in its talons I knew I was in a savage, untamed place and that I would never leave. I’ve written two novels about Los Angeles and made a pair of movies, rebranding myself as the de Tocqueville of LA, yet my hometown still haunts me; my unlived New York life like a wound in my thigh. I couldn’t even root for the Knicks, the team of my childhood, my disappointment in my non-New York story causing me to make an enemy of the great Jalen Brunson. But when the final horn sounded and the Knicks were champs I couldn’t stop smiling, my true colors finally bleeding through. When will I be able to go into the supermarket and buy what I need with exactly what happened? I hope it’s soon.

These thoughts came to me as I was driving home from the farmer’s market, the screen in my car telling me I would be home in 8 minutes, which made me think about information and the glut of it we have now, which got me thinking about the joys of both knowing and not knowing, which led me to that childhood question, and the difference between a kid hearing “Soon” or “Not for a while” or “We’ll get there when we get there” (Taoist wisdom repurposed as parental annoyance) and hearing something concrete like time down to the minute. Is this “synchronize all watches” specificity a good thing? Do we like GPS, i.e “human progress”? Is the goal to take as much uncertainty out of life as we can?

Well, I got bad news for the arc of history, because uncertainty is here to stay, and the earlier you get good with it, the better. (Uncertainty/living in the unknown is the apple cider vinegar of modalities. We know it’s good for us, we just don’t like actually drinking it). Also, it’s important for kids to see that their parents don’t always have the answer. That adults are pretty much as clueless as they are, just bigger. That boredom comes and goes and if you know how to look out the window with curiosity or play “I’m Going on a Picnic” (a travel game from my childhood) you can get so immersed in the moment that arriving spoils the fun as opposed to being it. Then again, if you’re in a strange town on vacation and your daughter gets stung by a bee and goes into anaphylactic shock and you need to rush to the emergency room, GPS is the single greatest thing that ever happened to mankind. (Why do I need to always push back on my own thinking? I don’t know, except I come from a family of left-leaning historians and am a natural Hegelian by blood.)

I think my real question is, what is all this knowing and information doing to us psychically and emotionally? It feels like part of the digital/AI mandate is to make uncertainty obsolete, and it not hard to see these phones not as communication devices or small computers, but as certainty machines. Let’s just examine the difference between buying heroin (one of the great anxious making endeavors) in 1996 and 2006. 1n ‘96 you sat waiting for the dealer at a gas station or a Burger King like a character in a Greek tragedy (or comedy, depending on how sick you were). You were in the hands of fate, watching traffic like a fortune teller reading tea leaves, searching for the car that would cure what ailed you. If the dealer was late, you started cooking up awful scenarios; the not knowing where they were or if they would show making you even sicker than your junk lack. In 2006, you’d just call or text them, “How much longer”? Your jitters calmed when they told you there was an accident on the 10 and they’d be there in twenty. Do we like this lack of mystery? This ability to assure ourselves and calm our nerves. Do we really need to know that our Uber driver just turned left on Pico and is “.4 miles” away and watch it like a video game? What is this doing to us in terms of expectations, and how much more of a gap is it creating between the digital certainty of our outer lives and analog uncertainty of our inner ones?

I often talk to friends my age or slightly younger and we try to imagine being a teenager with your parents having the kind of access to you and your whereabouts that these phones allow. From a Jungian perspective it is it not hard to see the smart phone as an anti-individuation device; a digital umbilical cord that needs to be snipped. I may be an extreme case, but a huge part of who I am and what I have to offer is a product of what I learned roaming the parentless wilderness that was late 1970s New York. Sure, we may have been too un-herded for our own good, but at least we got to find out where the line was without our parents checking in every hour to see if we were stepping over it. A parent asking a sixteen-year-old to give them their PIN so they can track their whereabouts is not just a boundary infraction, it is a literary violation. A desecration of not just the young storyteller, but their story. I get that it’s for safety, but which safety are we talking about? The kid’s physical well-being or a parent’s emotional one? The biggest threat is not where teenagers are physically going but how this information/social media free for all distorts their thinking and sense of self. Consider a dad who always knows where their fifteen-year-old is, but it totally unaware that they have suicidal ideation.

GPS is a powerful weapon (not to mention its dark, surveillance-oriented cousins) especially in terms of destroying a “The first step of the journey is to lose to the way” mindset. Being told by an automated voice what turn to take is a strange mix of reassuring and numbing. It’s like having your math teacher stand over your shoulder as you work, saying, “That’s right, very good, now do this, be careful of that.” Sure, it’s comforting, but it also slowly erodes self-reliance and the intrepid spirit within. No one should be denied the opportunity to get lost. Being lost is holy. It teaches you to think on your feet and improvise. When to trust and distrust your intuition. It is also proof that the state of lostness is temporary, which is a very good thing to know, because being lost (at least internally) can feel intensely permanent. What great story, myth or fable does not have a hero who at some point loses their way?

I know it’s tough to remember, but there was life before GPS. The world was not pure chaos (any more than it is now). People got where they were going, the mail was delivered, packages arrived, the freeways were not littered with pileups as bewildered drivers checked unwieldy maps. Folks stopped and asked for directions, engaging in the ego humbling act of saying, “I don’t know. Do you?” How can anything that keeps us from asking for help be good for this ongoing collective project, which human society, for better or worse, seems to be. Don’t get me wrong, I love clarity and strive for it in my work, but sometimes a little opacity is nice. I spent almost twenty years of my life high on dope, I don’t want to spend the rest of it narcotized by information. Call me old fashioned, but I’m not ready for “Are we there yet?” to be erased from the lexicon.

The final phase of my four-year methadone detox was a sleepless month of descent and rebirth. Thawing out after a twenty year freeze I wandered the 5AM streets, wrote simple rhyming poetry and listened to Blood On the Tracks on repeat, my heart pierced then healed by lines like, “If she’s passing by this way I’m not that hard to find/Tell her she can look me up if she’s got the time.” It wasn’t the words that saved me, it was the delivery and it had always been. At the age of twelve Bob Dylan showed me who I wanted to be and I learned how to write listening to him sing (that open hearted snarl). An orphan, but with authority, there was no doubt in my mind that he had come to tell the tale. But as much as I love (was raised by) Bob, and know I’ll be listening to him on my deathbed, I hold Cab Calloway in the same regard, and dare I say, consider him an even more culturally influential figure. That’s right, Cabell Calloway the Third!

How’d you like to blow your top
Dig yourself some fine re-bop
Hi-de-hi, he-de-he
Oh, the hi-de-ho man that’s me

If you think that’s four lines of nonsense, you’re wrong, it’s modernist poetry. You can slouch toward Bethlehem all you want, I’m gonna jitterbug down 125^th street and not look back. The verse above is from The Hi De Ho Man and it comes after a triptych of opening wails that sound like a cross between a Muslim call to prayer and a Jewish cantor on peyote channeling Louis Armstrong. Three biblical cries that resolve in hipster jive, but not “hipster” the way it is used now; a watered down 21st century word that has more judgment than reverence. No, hipster as in “Are you hep to the jive?” Meaning, do you understand the power of the powerless? That we have hack’d your mother tongue and made it swing; Taken back the language you stole from us and smuggled it into yours through the service entrance! Jive isn’t just personal, it’s political. It says, “America, you want to diminish and de-joy me? Well, I say Palomar, Shalomar, Swanee shore, let me dig that jive once more!” That’s a riff from Cab’s classic, “Jumpin’ Jive” and a few lines later he offers this sage advice.

Now don’t you be that ickeroo
Get hep, come on and follow through
Then you get your steady foo
You make the joint jump like the gators do.

Now be honest, how many of you could use some steady foo right now?

Born in Rochester, New York to two college educated parents, Cabell Calloway blew in Christmas day 1907, the wise men in Zoot suits and singing three-part harmony. The family moved to Baltimore when he was twelve and young Cab would blow off school to head out to Pimlico racetrack where he “cooled down” horses and developed a lifelong love for the ponies (the word “cool” involved from the jump). Caught shootin’ dice on the church steps, his teacher/church organist mother sent him to a Pennsylvania reform school, but when he got back home he returned to his hustlin’ ways, only this time he started taking vocal lessons, and was performing in nightclubs at the age of fifteen.

His senior year of high school he joined the basketball team and was soon hoopin’ pro with the Baltimore Athenians of the Negro Professional Basketball league (This was back when baseball was king, which means he saw the black future, not just musically, but athletically as well). His sister Blanche had become a successful band leader in Chicago so it was off to Chi-town where he met L. Armstrong (that minor figure) who taught him how to scat. By 1929 he was onto New York and with the hot breeze of the Harlem Renaissance at his back, he bent one ear toward Langston Hughes and one toward the street.

Urban and urbane Cab Calloway is the Dada Harlem truth. Preacher/hustler/hipster/hoofer/crooner he embodied five definitive archetypes of Harlem life. But that list doesn’t include the one that fifty years later would evolve into a cultural juggernaut and world dominating art form, and that of course is MC/rapper; which is basically a preacher and a hustler slugging it out in rhyme. But Cab didn’t just take the tales and tongue of the streets and turn them into content, he understood how to make them accessible to a wide (meaning white) audience, while still keeping it real as fuck (a magic trick he pulled off seventy years before Jay Z hijacked Hard Knock Life). He is the first to celebrate the abundance and creativity of black urban life, mythologizing musicians, dandies, addicts, hustlers, and down on their lucksters; portraying them not as stock types but as literary characters (literary characters whose stories have to be told in three minutes or sometimes one verse or line). He’s a black Damon Runyon, but he does it in poetry, not prose, his patter and slang to Runyon what the Nicolas Brothers are to Fred Astaire.

And like Jay Z, Kanye, Pharrell and the boys Cab has his eyes on the Benjamins, and at the tender age of twenty-three becomes the first African American with a syndicated radio show, making $50,000 a year and in the middle of the great depression. His song, Minnie the Moocher, was the first black single to sell a million copies. The cat struck gold with a tune about a woman whose dude (a coke addict named “Smokey”) takes her down to Chinatown and gets her hooked on heroin, or in slang parlance, “Shows her how to kick the gong around.” He tells sordid ghetto tales in a coded, rhythmic style and gets rich doing it. Is that not page one of the hip-hop play book? And he’s doing all this in 1931!

But Cab isn’t just a rapper/singer/song-writer/bandleader/dancer extraordinaire, he is also a satirist (the Johnathan Swift of the jive). Satire from the ruling class is hard enough to pull off, but satire from the underclasses is miracle work, and it takes a lot of confidence and chutzpah to pull it off. But confidence and specifically “chutzpah” is something Cab has by the boatload. Living in Harlem when it was still full of Jews, Calloway had big ears for Yiddish words and inflection. He’s got a song called “Abi Gezunt” (Abi Gezunt is a Yiddish expression that translates to “As long as you’re healthy”) that contains this Jew/jive jewel.

I’m Neil the spiel, a gas, a killer
A very close friend of Mrs. Miller
Miller, schmiller, Abi Gezunt
I’m a cat that’s in the know

The dude hears and uses everything! Part sponge, part synthesizer, he puts urban culture in the jive grinder and makes it into jazz sausage. But of all the things he does it is the extravagant use of his band as back-up singers that gets me the craziest. “Call and response” is the conversation between preacher and congregation. Raised to an art form in the black church, Cab weaponizes it to the secular good. He takes “hallelujah!” and makes it “Hi de ho!” No one has ever had as hip a Greek chorus or used them as freely or to as great an effect. His boys/band will follow him anywhere, mimicking his funky absurdity with joy and conviction, the sanctuary and bandstand becoming one.

A few fun facts about Cab Calloway:

He turned down a chance to play with the Harlem Globetrotters, but years later performed during halftime at their games.

In 1938, he released Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue: A Hepster’s Dictionary, the first dictionary published by an African American. It became the official jive language reference book of the New York Public Library.

In 1941, Calloway fired Dizzy Gillespie from his orchestra after an onstage fracas erupted when Calloway was hit with spitballs. He wrongly accused Gillespie, who stabbed Calloway in the leg with a small knife.

There is a stakes race run at Saratoga racetrack called the Calloway in his pony playing honor.

As I said earlier, he’s one the great originators and influencers of the 20^th century, his impact felt everywhere and not just with folks like James Brown, Prince or Andre 3000. You know Doctor Seuss was listening to CC. That The Cat in the Hat and Minnie the Moocher are kissing cousins. Dig this section of the good Doctor’s Fox in Socks-

Ben’s band. Bim’s band.
Big bands. Pig bands.
Bim and Ben lead
Bands with brooms.
Ben’s band bangs
And Bim’s band booms
(And Basie’s swings
And Duke’s band zooms)

And how about Danny Kaye? Think he didn’t steal (or at least heavily borrow) his frantic, floppy-haired white boy bop from CC? He even did a version of Minnie the Moocher, and why not, you hear Cab or see him and you want to get in on it. Have a little of that gold rub off on you and make you shine.

I think in the end what I love and respect about him most is the uniqueness and totality of his vision; how hard he swings and how many different elements are in play. How jazz and language are exalted simultaneously. But it’s his exuberance and humor that the world could not resist. He was a word spreader. The pied piper of jive. An alchemist, he transcended the racism and ignorance of 1930s America and created something joyous and undeniable, and he did in a way that was so original he came off as other-worldly as opposed to uncle Tomish. As he says in his song the Honeydripper-

And he jumps
And he sways
And he rips
And he rides
And he ships
And jumps
He’s high
Oh my
Boy, joy joy hoy boy hoy joy!

I ordered these ultra-thin pads for post-urination dribbling yesterday. That wild teenage boy who ran the streets now doddering around with wet undies. When I think about all the ways I’ve been compromised it’s a wonder I still have the strength to brush my teeth. I am both the criminal and the scene of the crime. The judge, jury and hangman. Thank God I’m also the governor granting a last second reprieve. Leadbelly had his execution stayed because he sang and played so good, or maybe Huddie Ledbetter is simply too good a name to kill. I’d like to think I was spared so I could tell my piece of the tale, but maybe I’m just a strong motherfucker.

My father in-law’s sixteen-year-old life was saved because of his soccer prowess. In 1941 he volunteered for a work camp, so he could show the Nazis he was a good boy and ready to do his part. The work camp was called Sered and from there, men, women and children were transported to Auschwitz. There was a Jew in charge of the transport list and when Martin’s name was chosen, the camp commander looked at it and said, “He’s my left winger, you can’t take him.” The list maker answered, “There’s no one else to go,” to which the camp commander replied, “Then you go.” The list maker said “I’ll find someone else.” Martin told a story about everyone being rounded up and loaded into the train to Auschwitz, and in the desperate chaos he saw the most learned rabbi in the region, wandering the platform, crying out, “There is no God! There is no God! There is no God!”

I haven’t heard about my heart yet*, if you’re wondering. The link to the results I mentioned were just for a kidney test to make sure they could shoot me full of dye, but I am suffering with gout in my left foot that comes and goes and comes again, and I’m not even slurpin’ down oysters like Diamond Jim Brady. What’s astounding isn’t that we grow old but that we stay young and us sweet little children must deal with old people problems. Now I take bathroom breaks during recess, the foot I used for kickball glory, gone gouty.

Martin escaped the work camp when he was out collecting silkworms to make parachutes, and a long and improbable survival odyssey began. There was illness and kindness. He was hidden at a monastery by monks who turned out to be saints. By 1943 he had joined the Russian partisans, who would have shot him if they had found out he was a Jew. By then he knew that his parents were dead, gassed along with four of his siblings. His great moment for revenge came when a Nazi soldier was captured and tied to a tree for execution. These heinous, slaughtering beasts who had unleashed this awful madness and ground his family up like beef, and now one of them helpless, his chest and throat exposed. Martin took aim with the others but was unable to pull the trigger. I had a strange, vacant, barely verbal relationship with him, but I always respected him for that.

My son has a nose for great art and like a bloodhound on a manhunt can track down the fugitive. He invited me to a flick he had scoped out called Come and See, a 1985 Russian film that is considered a masterpiece but had somehow stayed off my radar. I couldn’t make it to the theater, so he went with his mom, but I watched the following night on the Criterion channel. It’s about the Russian partisans and it is one of the most startling movies I’ve ever seen. Personal and epic. Human and horrific. Magic realism, not “magic realism,” it has a dark fairy tale energy that makes it not just a record of history but a stunning work of art. The fucking Russians! They got a chip on their shoulder the size of the Ritz and boy do they know what to do with it. There’s heartache and there’s Russian peasant heartache and the two are not to be confused. For us, World War II was the crowning achievement of the “great generation” and 407,000 heroic service members were lost to the cause. For the Russians it was the annihilation of a generation, 10,000,000 soldiers gone and another 16,000,000 million civilians sacrificed to Hitler’s vision. Somehow, Come and See makes you feel that.

The lead of the film is a teenage boy from a small Belarusian village and as I watched, I couldn’t help but think of Martin out there in the woods, just orphaned and fighting for his life. The context of his adolescence the great moral battle of the 20^th century. I was so moved I had to pause to call my ex and say, “I can’t believe you were even able to watch this.”

I’m not sure what to do about this heart of mine and I don’t mean my aorta I mean that big red yearning thing. To be honest, I don’t always trust what it wants. It’s not just my pecker that dribbles, my heart does too and other people get stained, not just my boxer shorts. You think by now I would have learned to trust my gut, only I have a few guts and you never know which one the jukebox is going to play. When you’re as “poetic” as I am, time is your only ally. If the crazy shit in my head is still there after seventy-two hours, then I figure maybe it ain’t so crazy. We must learn to wait ourselves out or we’re truly fucked. At least I am.

It took a lot of guts to order those dribble pads and confess to myself that I’m late second act for sure and probably early third. There are some things about aging that are quite shameful, but for some reason telling all of you I’m a leaky old fool has been a joy.

*Just got news on my heart a moment ago. All clear. No adjustments needed.

I’ve got this ground lamb dish I make a lot but this last time I cut the leaks longer and it changed the whole deal. Texture. Mouth feel. So much of my life in service to the way things feel in my mouth. Food, words, and yes, of course, that too. To find someone you love to kiss is to remember everything. Cut the leeks long, two to three inches, and use the green part almost to the top. Cook them down, salting to taste. Just leeks, just green, just that. Use a lot, more than you think is right but don’t go crazy.

I have grown defenseless against sleep. A lifetime of avoiding pain seeps through the unconscious and I wake up with the ghosts of what I tried to get out of. I would love to blame it on addiction or my childhood, and they both are in there, but it’s confusing suffering and soothing that has cost me most. If you learn nothing else in this life, may you learn to suffer to the good.

Let your cooked leeks rest in the pan and increase their flavor. Most things get better as they sit though probably not tempura. Get some olive oil and garlic going in another pan and a little fresh thyme if you have it. Leave the cloves whole but broken. You do this by pushing down on them with the flat edge of a durable knife (Don’t break your carbon steel Japanese beauty then come crying to me). Cover the pan and cook the garlic soft over a very low flame and let the room fill with that smell. You can lose your job, get dumped by your partner, then receive a text that your sibling needs to borrow ten grand, and the smell of garlic cooking will still make you happy. Once the garlic is softened, flatten it in the pan with the back of a wooden spoon, turn up the heat and add the ground lamb (a pound or the whole package, what have you). Hit the lamb with some good salt and get it all mixed up with the garlic and thyme and cook it ‘til there’s still the tiniest bit of pink. Did I forget to tell you to add dried cherries and cranberries to the leeks halfway through, so they soften up a little and get their tang and sweet on. Well, make sure you do that. Now, add the ground lamb to the leeks and dried cherries and cranberries and mix in a little pre-cooked rice. Not too much. It’s a lamb dish, not a lamb and rice dish but the rice evens it and of course the mouth feel.

I had a CT scan on my heart yesterday. They want to see if my aorta is enlarged and if it is they need to do open-heart surgery to fix it. I had open heart surgery once before and the procedure and complications that came after took me to the edge of the abyss, as those of you who have read this for a while know. I’m twenty years older now, which isn’t good, but I’m in a lot better shape and I don’t have a raging valve infection or an eighteen-year heroin habit compromising me. Since the initial surgery, I have had four stents added to my heart and the cryogenic valve they used the first time has been replaced with a plastic one. All these procedures were done through a vein in my wrist or groin, and I went home the same day. It was a walk in the park, less trouble than having a tooth pulled, but open-heart surgery is a whole other beast and when I heard it was an option I was overcome with sorrow, “No,” I thought, “I can’t. I can’t be sawed in half again. I can’t wake up with that big tube jammed down my throat. Please, no more consequences, I’ve paid enough!”

Leeks, ground lamb, the dried fruit and a little rice. That’s what’s in the pan. Now you chop a huge mound of fresh herbs: parsley, cilantro and mint and throw it on top, mixing it all together off the flame. Serve it with some good yogurt or even better wrap it in some crisp lettuce leaves and feel the coolness of the greens against the savory warmth of the lamb, the yogurt’s creamy tang bringing it all together.

Two minutes after I began writing, I got a text from Cedars Sinai with a link to the test results. I haven’t checked them yet, and it’s been kind of thrilling to work on this, knowing the outcome is waiting for me. Whatever it says, I’ll deal with it. I’m not scared anymore. I have turned it into “story” and now it’s part of my purpose. If everything’s cool, I will tell you all next week, and if not, I’m sure I will get a few compelling posts out of it. You see, I’ve rigged the game by writing about my life.

I want Charlotte Rampling to break my heart
A cold splash of burning water
Helpless as a baby in a six foot ditch

I want Charlotte Rampling to break my heart
Something so absolute
It makes my valve replacement feel like a shiatsu
I want to be outmanned and outwomanned
Outflanked, outfucked and shit out of luck
I want to look into those grey eyes and frostbite
Fatal paper cut by cheekbone
I want to be a blathering wreck
Because for once I can’t only not have what I want
I won’t ever want anything again

Ruin me Charlotte Rampling
You are the great devil bird suspendered
The only one
Where nothing that happened between us
Could elicit the response
It all goes back to my mother
You make the most beautiful brown-eyed Jewess
An egg-carrying Polish hen

Damage me Charlotte Rampling
Decimate me with your narrow-hipped science
Your table of elements has only three boxes
One for hydrogen
One for apathy
And one for disgust
Harm me with your secrets
Tell me my best isn’t good enough
Brain not big enough
Cock not smart enough
And so-so at best on charisma
I know you’re crazy
But I don’t care
Why be in love with a human being
When I can be in love with you

Rain on me Charlotte Rampling
So the song of my pain is so pure
Plato cries iron tears
So I can kneel on a bar stool next to Orpheus
And relate one alcoholic to another
You feral cat
You can’t even be trusted to crawl
The last time I held you in my arms
I bled more than you
It struck me so clear:
This is like buying a ten-cent oven mitt
From a park bench retard
And reaching directly for the sun

Destroy me Charlotte Rampling
String me up from the ego’s fascistic meat hook
Finally
A woman so dangerous
I can’t tell whether this poem
Is about you
Or me

I like to feed people. To make a yummy thing or buy a yummy thing or know about a yummy thing, and then say, “Here, taste this yummy thing.” I like to watch flavor spread through them. To alter their senses with my sensibility. It’s a great way to give love and get love at the same time. To say, “Look at you” while saying, “Look at me.” I’m not like those Italian grandmas who cook out of care and duty; tapping into the maternal archetype, their bolognese a red re-imagining of the tit. No, I’m more of a food rabbi with a small basement shtiebel. You guys know what a shtiebel is? AI says - A shtiebel (Yiddish for “little room,” pl. shtieblech) is a small, informal space used for Jewish communal prayer. Unlike formal synagogues, shtieblech are typically intimate, converted houses or storefronts where the atmosphere is highly casual, and the community is tightly knit.

My kitchen is a shtiebel
A place of humble prayer
Not arrogant nor feeble
More Bert Lahr than Fred Astaire

My kitchen is a shtiebel
For angels and for fiends
I serve both good and evil
And with a side of beans

I wonder if Italians have shtiebels. Little basement haunts where they intimately Catholicize. A small prayer hall/salumeria, where you eat a slice of soppressata between two wafers. Speaking of Italians, let me tell you about a recent guanciale episode I had. No, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to brag about spending 134 bucks on a three-pound slab of pig face from Siena. That it went down like a drug deal; me and Julietta, the blonde Italian vendor at the Larchmont farmer’s market. Julietta, who calls me “Thomas” (Toemus) in a way that intrigues me but (luckily) doesn’t slay me. We had been doing small deals, nickel and dime shit, six ounces here and there. It was twenty clams a package and I was happy about it, because it was the real deal and had that simple Italian funk (what I imagine Sophia Loren’s feet must have smelled like after a long car trip). I always made “gricia” out of it or “gray” pasta, which is just guanciale, black pepper (the gray), pasta water and pecorino cheese. You may be all a-twitter about Carbonara, but I am content with the pure animal ooze of rendered pork jowl and don’t need an egg to thicken and richen. Don’t get me wrong, put a good Carbonara before me and I am ready to get yolky, but Swerdy is a purist, my credo: “As much flavor with as few steps and ingredients as possible.”

So, I’m getting my guancholl six ounces at time and damn happy about it, but then the slices start to get thin and it’s feeling more like mortadella than guanciale. I let Julietta know this is unsustainable and that I’m ready to go full Escobar and procure in bulk. This excites her, which excites me. She says will talk to Mr Big and if he approves, the hand off will be next Wednesday, but just know the slabs are usually three to four pounds and quaranta dollares a libbra. She takes my number and says if there’s a problem, she will send a text to alert (or a man named Rocco will hang a dead pigeon on my door), but once it’s on, it’s on and there’s no turning back.

I show up the following Wednesday wearing a hat and shades (I always do, but still). Julietta clocks me as she’s wrapping up a pesto exchange. She sends a “grazie mille” toward the customer, but she’s headed for me. We lock eyes. “I have it.” She goes to the cooler and hands me a football sized hunk of flesh. The pig skin, literally pigskin. I hand her my credit card and think to myself, “Why are you buying a $130 hunk of face bacon you lunatic?” But the truth is I know why. Because I’m no dilettante! Because the old ways (and the old country) are sacred. Because in a world that confronts me with endless falseness I need as much as real as I can get. Things made or grown by nameless masters, for it is the nameless masters that make life matter most!

Okay, I will step down off my pork box but let me just say that to lay a big slab of guanciale on the cutting board is a divine and slightly grotesque thrill. The way the knife struggles with the skin, then glides through that creamy jowl fat, as different from belly fat as silk is from cotton. I can get almost as big a thrill from the gai lan (Chinese broccoli) that I get from Jason, my Thai wizard, but there’s something about the Italian oeuvre that just speaks to me. Half the women I’ve been involved with have been Italian but that’s a different Substack (though not that different).

My kitchen is a shtiebel
We eat but we don’t binge
My apron is a tallis
There’s grease stains in the fringe

My kitchen is a shtiebel
My thyme and time in sprigs
Even the pork is Kosher
My rabbi raised the pigs

I’m in a playful mood. We gotta play. Even when the balls are heavy you got to juggle ‘em while riding a unicycle. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you end up having to listen to advice. But let’s get serious-- Here’s a major food tip. Of all the things I have posted on Substack: the sacred nonsense and confessional symphonics. The fried potato reveries and anchovy testimonials. The James Dean/Fellini hagiography and odes to mom and dad, this is the most important thing I have ever shared.

If you want to keep the crunch on your chips, crackers and cookies after you have opened the package, put them in the refrigerator. Yes, an open bag of kettle chips will last two weeks in the fridge. Refrigeration works by removing moisture. So, throw your chip clips OUT the window and put your breadsticks IN the ice box. I came to this late in the game, but it’s made a huge difference (not quite as much as realizing that my feelings are fluid and change quickly so, maybe I should wait twenty-four hours before I say something that will blow up my life, but close).

https://oliveoillovers.com/products/entelia-5l-bag-in-box

Here’s another food improvement. This is a link is to a very solid Greek extra virgin olive oil. 77 smackaroobies for 5ls. This is considerably cheaper (and better) than that California olive oil they sell at Whole Foods, Sprouts and supermarkets. Now you may say, “What I am going to do with five liters of olive oil?” and my answer to that is, “Do I have to teach you everything?”

My kitchen is a shtiebel
Let’s gather and commune
The nectarines are dripping
And it isn’t even June

My kitchen is a shtiebel
The floor is painted blue
The flavor Gods are dancing
Hallelujah, halleluj!

A few months back I wrote about an independent film I was making. Well I fucked a bunch of it up, most notably the third act, which lay there like a meaningless lump. What we thought was deep, was dull. A character that mattered to us on the page (my co-writer TJ and I) meant nothing to us on the screen. It wasn’t just that the scenes didn’t play, but that our thesis hadn’t come off. We knew it would be fascinating to watch us try to save an addict in the middle of our relapse. To see us pleading with him not to use drugs with drugs in our pocket. Now, that’s a cool and unique angle on a recovery movie and only we can do it because we lived it! Oh, were we wrong.

I sat there and watched the first cut, the hole in my heart getting wider with every frame. Reading a bad draft of a short story you have written is a drag, but at least it’s just happening in your head. Watching your story not work on screen happens everywhere. You don’t just read the falseness, you see it, hear it, live it. It’s the difference between witnessing a car accident and being in one. You write a bad draft of a novel or screw up a painting, you mop up the tears, get back in there and see what you can do. You fuck your movie up, you either live with it, or you find more dough so you can round up the troops and go back into battle. Dates, schedules, crew. Calls with producers, camera and lenses, insurance for the camera and lenses and I haven’t even mentioned the re-writing and having a story solution for what ails you.

The details of the re-shoots are not important, and though I have seen the dailies, which are good, I haven’t seen them assembled into the film, so we still don’t know. But what makes me happy is that we acknowledged our problems and came up with a plan, changing what could be changed and working with what couldn’t. It was like that show “Chopped” where you are given a box of ingredients you have to cook with-- You have two ex-addicts who are close friends relapsing after fifteen years clean. They have heroin in their pocket, a small stray dog that has fallen into their lap and the city of Los Angeles; now make a frittata out of it.

In situations like these, it helps to have almost forty years of experience writing screenplays professionally, and the reason professionally is important is not because you get paid, which is nice, but because you are forced to deal with notes. Whether it’s the producers, the studio or the director, you are endlessly being asked to solve problems and let go of what you thought was good and have gotten attached to. Luckily, I have always been more interested in finding new solutions than in defending what was there. This is not always a great creative quality. Stubbornness and fierce (if not maniacal) belief in what you’ve done can be huge assets in the arts, they are just not ones I was blessed with; but what I do have is an ability to think on the fly and work within limits. To tinker, mend and repurpose. I don’t care if it’s fixing cars or saxophones or being a surgeon or plumber; to understand why something isn’t working and know how to fix it is a joy. The setting of a broken bone as big a boon as growing a new one.

There is nothing more startling than the difference between the art we imagine in our head (the fantasy of what it can and will be) and the harsh reality of what it becomes the moment we are brave enough to attempt it, yet we need that initial gush of belief, similar to the faith and madness it takes to fall in love. Sometimes that love is deep, easy and lasting, but sometimes you’re in couples therapy after a month. You can break up with your partner, but you can’t break up with your movie, so you two better learn to get along. I’ve written a couple of novels and started three others and gotten a chunk of the way through before jumping ship. I don’t consider these breakups permanent and hope that one day we will get back together. But for me, movies are different. Movies aren’t boyfriends or girlfriends, they’re spouses you’ve been married to for twenty years and have three kids with and there is going to be a lot of wreckage if you don’t see it through. The first film I made, A Thousand Junkies, took four years to complete and when I showed TJ the first assembly he prayed that no one else would ever see the horrors he had just witnessed (he co-wrote and co-starred in that one as well). But I worked on it like crazy. We shot new scenes and scads of B roll, hoping it would be edited into A+ art. Figuring out what that movie needed and seeing it through changed my life, and we will see this one through too. I only hope we are half as pleased with it as we are with “Junkies” though I have made peace with any outcome (Not really).

But this isn’t just about making things right, it’s about the relief of fucking up. Fucking up as opportunity; as remedy; as balm. When my self-worth is on the line, I am an anxious creator, but as soon as my car gets a few dents in it, I relax and drive my jalopy right. Remembering that I can make mistakes and still be loved is a lesson I will be learning my entire life. That flaw and fuck-up are not a curse, but a blessing. A kind and nurturing voice whispering in my ear, “You blew it kid. Now, let’s get to work.”

My parents met at a May Day parade in 1948, my mother a red diaper prodigy raised in a communist cooperative, my father a middle-class Brooklyn boy with working class sympathies. He was impressed with her smarts and politics and she his soulful eyes and Sid Caesar charm. She loved to tell how she got a run in her stocking on their first date and later that evening ten new pairs delivered by messenger. He knew what he was doing. She might have been raised speaking the language of revolution, but her soft spot was right down bourgeois alley. She said he made her laugh so hard she didn’t know if she would live and that they were so hot for each other they would duck out of MoMA exhibits, grab a hotel room and make their own splatter paintings. He must have thought he hit the jackpot; a brainy, horny force like her, already married once and ready for action. He didn’t know how overmatched he was and she didn’t know how badly he wanted to be overmatched, but not many know what they need at that age and most people never.

The Coops (the communist co-ops) was in the Bronx and billed itself as the first Utopian Community. My mom’s parents were bohemians; 1920’s hippies, they ate health food and sneered at the idiocy of the “Americana dope.” Amy (my mom) would wake up for school to find five party members sleeping on the living room floor, Indian print tablecloths tossed over ‘em as blankets. It might as well have been Haight Ashbury, only they were on the way to unionize miners in Kentucky, not see the “Dead” at the Fillmore West.

There was a documentary about the Coops and Amy was in it. Looking elegant and interviewed in front of a piano she spoke with a historian’s expertise and insight, playing the socialist grande dame. All the other Coopsters had a proletariat charm and talked about their lives and childhood memories, but Amy kept it historical, her upbringing part of a sweeping narrative. I wish she had told the story about being four and waking up in the middle of the night to a huge wailing roar coming from the street below. She ran to the window convinced the animals had escaped the Bronx Zoo, but it wasn’t lions it was lefties, howling their anguish over the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti! Can you imagine? An entire borough collectively grieving the death of two Italian anarchists. Would have been a perfect tale for the movie, but she never knew where the gold was. That the personal is political and that vulnerability the most flattering light of all.

My dad’s parents were far less idealistic, his Russian immigrant father chasing after dollars his second-generation Hungarian mother could spend. She thought her husband was beneath her and did that superior and disparaging thing that comes so naturally to Magyars. He lapped it up and with an old country accent to boot. What can you say? Some guys just like to suffer, the tail between their legs stimulating their genitals. Pauline (my father’s mother) would go out at night, leaving her husband’s dinner cold on the table, and my dad, eight-years old and already having eaten, would sit with his father so he didn’t have to eat alone.

Stanley (my dad) was smart as hell and passed the New York law bar for kicks, never practicing law a day in his life. As a young man he liked to expound on art and politics before “sparking” with the hot-mouthed Italian girls he met working at the textile mill. But he met his match in Amy. She was from the source, the place where art and left-wing politics met; heavyweight Jewish intellectuals and creatives laying it down, drunk on unions, equality and the vulnerability of capitalism. The smartest Jews in New York and they were wrong about everything! Back in those New York days art and left-wing politics were dance partners, not to the extent they are in South America, where literature and the left are almost inseparable, but the actors you saw on Broadway were the party members you saw at meetings and the writers and painters the same. My parents came of age in that mid-century lefty boil and whenever May Day rolls around I think of them. Their hearts smooth and free of the trenches they would dig in each other, though the ground for those trenches had been softened long ago.

(What are we doing when we write about our parents? Forgiving them? Accusing them? Reinforcing who they were to us or revaluing it? It’s such a pleasure to lay them out on the undertaker’s table. To be the author of their lives like they were the author of ours. I think of Brando in Last Tango, talking to his suicided wife, and wonder how different my words would be to each of them. Would I sob over my nemesis mother and scream at my ally dad?)

Amy ruined politics for me and I cannot separate the two. Yet when confronted with right leaning energy I immediately bristle. I’m not even sure I have political opinions as much as politics is where I play out my family loyalties, defending or betraying my mother depending on my mood. My father was an artist who was too scared to art, and so he produced, facilitated and corresponded with the greats. I am at peace with the ways he is in me and when I read his writing I know I am just continuing what he started, but with a little more force. I am not at peace with the ways my mother is in me, yet when I want a stranger to know who I am and where I come from, I do not tell them my father produced Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris or the first Leroi Jones plays or that he corresponded with Ionesco by mail. I tell them that I grew up with medical supplies for the Vietcong in the downstairs closet, that my mother chained herself to the White house fence and that at her memorial there was a faded newspaper clipping of her and a cool young black man, the caption reading “Amy Swerdlow and H Rap Brown discuss shutting down the Pentagon.” (I even use her all-access feminist credentials to try and get in good with the ladies.)

I have come to believe that America should be run from the middle. That no policy is as good as polarization is bad. I am appalled by the right and embarrassed by the left, and between the phone, the new fascism and the not new consumerism (the true ruling party in America) I have no hopes for the political future. But I am so happy that my parents met on May Day, and that I come from that passionate, humanist soup: commies, socialists, Trotskyites, anarchists, “wobblies!” Those who questioned the status quo and burned for something better and more equal. Those are my people. The ones marching in the black and white parade.

I was in a Coffee Bean on Sunset and Argyle when I heard the news. I never met him or worked with him (though we both acted in a short movie called The Fifteen Minute Hamlet), but I felt a certain kinship and deep admiration for the cat, and admiration is something I can be stingy with. It wasn’t just that he died, but how he died, and that somehow, I hadn’t died that way, and if it was all in the rearview for me how could it not be for him? It caught me off guard. Not just the news, but how hard it hit me. That he had gone back to that dark, lonely soothe and in two years gone, found with the needle still in his arm. That’s a rough way to go out whether you’re Philip Seymour Hoffman or just some junkie on the street. The next day an actor tweeted “Sad isn’t the word I’d use to describe a 46-year-old man throwing his life away to drugs. Senseless is more like it. Stupid.” Clearly, this was not written by an addict for stupidity had nothing to do with it or him. It’s not senseless either. In fact, I can see it making a great deal of sense, or maybe senselessness was what he was after (or maybe the wolves he had managed to keep at bay howled so loud they could not be ignored).

In the following days there were all kinds of reports. I read one about him showing up at a film festival looking sketchy and not being recognized as he tried to get into a screening. The guy at the door, said “Who are you?” and he answered, “I’m just some junkie.” That’s quite a thing to say when you’re the most respected actor of your generation, and it can be taken a lot of ways. I guess shame and self-loathing are at the top of the list, but that’s not what I hear. What I hear is loneliness, exile, and oddly enough, freedom. The insider returning to his rightful home as outsider. This may be projection or me applying my show biz experience to his (mine a drop in the bucket when compared) but what I heard was, “It’s not real. Not Hollywood, not fame, not my Oscar, not any of it. This whole identity and the glowing reviews and ass kissing and my big ego and everyone’s else’s big ego, and the privilege and the press junkets, even the artistic respect I have worked so hard for, the high bar I have set and continue to uphold, none of it is real and what is real is the spoon. I’m not that thing called Philip Seymour Hoffman, and if I am, then Philip Seymour Hoffman shoots dope.”

Now, of course, he may have thought none of that and it was as simple as a few drinks and a couple of Vicodin blooming into a full-blown habit, but something was happening in that huge psyche of his. You don’t just make that choice at 44 with a kid and that career and so much to lose. Maybe he thought he could dabble. That he could dip his toe back in without getting drenched, but when you step back in the ring with the champ there’s always a chance you’ll get knocked out. The fiercer your spirit, the fiercer your habit. The qualities that make a great artist make a great addict as well.

He got sober in his early twenties and stayed clean for two decades, building not just an acting career, but a body of work that elevated and exalted the outsider-oddball. It’s not the brilliant mannerisms and affect that make his Truman Capote so compelling, but the way he uses his intellect and talent (Capote’s and his own) to dazzle the world. Yet underneath you always feel his sadness and sense of non-belonging; of cultivating eccentricity as way to both gather love and keep it away. Life not as something lived but performed. His work as “Scotty,” the pen chewing boom man in Boogie Nights, is so aching, so confused, conflicted and helpless it can almost be hard to watch. The scene where he drunkenly kisses Mark Wahlberg, then apologizes, then sits in his new car, repeatedly calling himself an idiot, is the “Stella, Stella, Stella!” of self-loathing. It’s as if he took all the pain and unmediated hunger that would have gone into his addiction and harnessed it for creative good--But then it harnessed him and all bets off. (Go ahead right now and see him up on the screen. Can you imagine that cat doing anything half-assed?)

Heroin addiction is a love affair. It may be a misguided one, but there’s a sickening intimacy to shooting dope. It’s a blood ceremony. Death and resurrection. It whispers in your ear, and you do as it says. You submit and swear an oath. You know better. Know that it doesn’t have your best interests at heart, but you keep going, not because it feels so good but because you’ve forgotten how to live any other way. Intravenous drug use is just different. You want to get fucked up you can just go into a bodega and buy a six pack, but to go cop or have dope delivered to you, then mix it with water, cook it up and pull it through a cotton into a syringe you have somehow gotten your hands on, then wrap a belt or rubber strap around your arm or leg to make a vein pop out, and then phlebotomize yourself and inject a substance that you know can kill you directly into your bloodstream, that is not a tepid act. It’s radical! It may become commonplace after you do it a few hundred times, but as a stand-alone piece of behavior it is way fucking extreme.

I got clean at the age he relapsed and I can just feel him, all alone, fixing in his West Village apartment. The shame and excitement. The thrilling juxtaposition of his high status and low behavior. Maybe it sounds like I’m defending him or saying there is some kind of subversive nobility in dope addiction, but I’m not. When I think about the time, resources and misguided love I gave to my habit I am overcome with sadness and confusion (I wanted to say I don’t know who that person is, but it’s not true. I do). I think I just want to sympathize with him and say I understand the impulse and pull of it. That when it has you, it has you and there is nothing anyone can say or do. That the drive to self-immolate is lurking in all of us and that those most connected to heaven are often the most vulnerable to hell. That as tragic as it is to lose an illuminator of that brightness in mid-life, it is also a miracle that he got clean at all and gave us (and himself) twenty years of brilliance, meaning and poetry. I’m not sure why this is on my mind now twelve years after the fact, except that maybe it’s always on my mind, and that every time I drive by that corner I think of him.

I got this thing I do when I get around a bunch of high falutin literary types, especially if we’re all gathered for an author event in some lovely industrial space that doubles as both a bookstore and the headquarters for a classy independent press (a hometown LA press who doesn’t know who I am). What I do is immediately separate myself and say, “No, you are not my people.” I do this as a shield against both their rejection and acceptance, each of which would agitate me, though in different ways.

A subcategory of “You are not my people” is you’re a bunch of privileged white folks who have no connection to the deep ethnic thrum of the real Los Angeles, and that’s why there is not a black, Latino or even Asian face here, and I, who grew up in Great Neck Long Island and has had access to the best of white, Jewish intellectual art, culture and education am the great knower of the disenfranchised and honorary “other.” These are some of the absurd judgements and identity gymnastics I dabble in when I find myself in situations like these.

Luckily, at the age of sixty-three, these thoughts are only a backbeat, and I’m able to enjoy the paragraph the author begins with, an insightful bit of confession about believing her agent’s praise, even though she can never get her on the phone. It doesn’t hurt that she’s Italian from Italy and radiates a self-aware intelligent charm. There’s a semi-famous writer two rows in front of me known for noir Raymond Chandlery books and a brief TV series he had on HBO. He’s got a rep and a vibe and my first thought on seeing him is, your noir shit ain’t as good as mine, buster, but the next morning I’m full of regret that I didn’t go up and introduce myself, say we have a mutual author friend, and give him a copy of my detective book, which our mutual author friend is a huge fan of and which I had in the car for just such an occasion. This “I don’t want anything to do with any of you, but please read my book and see how great I am,” combo platter is one of my favorite meals and as it’s happening, I can only sigh and try to have compassion for the little misfit inside.

The interview is neither thrilling nor long. The author (a friend of the friend I’m there with) is quickly swarmed after and a large receiving line formed. We’re happy to wait five minutes to praise and chuckle but thirty seems extreme, so we split, passing on our chance for a literary shmooze (We are more Spanky and Alfalfa than F Scott and Zelda).

I drive back to my part of town thinking about a roasted cone cabbage I left in the oven and whether I should cook a 9 P.M. pork chop to go with. I decide to pass on the piggy and give in to my darker angels, which in this case are thick cut French fries, cooked in fat vats of cheap boiling oil on the corner of Western and Venice right in front of the U-Haul sign. These frites are the opposite of the thin, French crunch sticks you find in Paris cafes. They are also unlike diner fries or burger stand crinkle-cuts. I guess you could call them steak fries but on steroids, the massive, peeled potatoes cut into planks six inches long and an inch and half wide, then cooked for twenty minutes in a pot so huge it could deep fry a five-year-old.

I park on the sidewalk because it’s my hood and I know I can get away with it (It was the driveway of the U-haul joint, it’s not like I jumped the curb). I saunter up to the stand which consists of two giant frying vats set up on the street and a large foil-lined, glass case where the taters and fried chicken live once they’re done (It’s a pollo frito and papas stand). I want to get home and watch the second half of the Laker game but much to my chagrin, the case is empty, though a fresh batch is browning in the lethal, bubbling swill.

The kid working the friers is about twenty. He usually has a partner but tonight he’s working alone. He’s got a shaved head, perfect skin and the distant brown eyes of those who know all or nothing. There’s a curly haired Latino cat waiting as well. We trade hungry smiles and knowing nods. I ask the kid “Cuantos minutos?” pointing to the fries. “Siete,” he answers. “Estoy esperando papas.” I say to the other guy waiting, thrilled to have used two verbs in one sentence.

I wander to the vats and watch the chicken fry. There’s something about huge pots of boiling oil right on the sidewalk that feels downright murderous, but this is the LA I love most. Back at the reading it was all about the death of Hollywood and how stolen water built the illusion machine. They were praying at the altar of Robert Towne, saying Los Angeles is as much an idea as a city; an empty desert that white men willed into bloom. I get it and know that’s true, but to me LA is as much kimchi as it is Kim Novak. I see the movie business not as a fallen empire but as an ATM machine that has allowed me to learn and love a city, which for me, has little to do with celluloid.

The fries are taking more like quince minutos than siete but the game’s at halftime and all is right with the world, though I am getting a touch hungry, and to be honest both the fries and the chicken look done. Finally, our saint of the distant stare takes a huge paddle sieve and pulls the fries from the grease, forming a shiny golden mound in the bright, bulb light case. I thought he might hook me up with a quick box full since I’ve been waiting so patiently, but instead he goes and does the same with the chicken. Alright, patience Swerdlow. The other guy was before you anyway. All will get their fried yummies and joy shall reign. But instead of putting together the other guy’s order, he starts slicing new potatoes for another batch. And not one or two but seven or eight. Finally, he finishes and drops the spuds in the grease. Good, the papas in the case need a little time to cool anyway and will be perfect when I get them home and watch LeBron, but instead of giving us our food he starts preparing chicken, dredging piece after piece in a bucket of flour. I look to the other cat to see if he’s concerned about these delays, but he’s taking it all in stride.

Ten pieces of chicken dredged and now frying, our hero is finally ready to give us our food. It’s been at least twenty minutes and I’m a tad hangry, but this is the real world, and we must adapt to the pace of the place we find ourselves. Another guy has now shown up who I have seen working the stand and who might even own it, but he is not doing any work, so I’m not sure. The kid turns to him, and they trade a burst in Spanish. Then the new guy turns to me and says, indicating the other customer, “He has a very big order and there may not be anything left.” I must be honest and confess that I did not take this news well. “Why didn’t he tell me?” I ask. The guy has no answer. “He told me to wait seven minutes. If he knew he wasn’t going to have enough, why didn’t he just tell me then.” “He didn’t know.” “But he knows now?” “He has five orders,” he says referring to the other customer. “I understand that, but he should have told me that so I could have decided whether I wanted to wait or not.” I look to the kid, hoping he’s following along, but he’s all business putting together the other guy’s order. “He doesn’t speak English.” “He could have told me in Spanish,” I say. “Why did he tell me to wait seven minutes if he knew he didn’t have enough!” And just like that I’ve gone full gringo. I’m the flustered and impatient white boy who’s not getting what he wants. The stranger who doesn’t understand the ways and customs of the world he’s entered. I’m treating them like it’s Five Guys, but it’s not Five Guys it’s one Guatemalan kid.

I’m still talking with the guy as the kid boxes up chicken and fries. I get a slight hold of myself and say “Look it’s not the end of the world, but he could have told me.” The kid gets to box four and I realize there are going to be enough fries for me too and feel even stupider. He scoops up my fries and I tell him to throw in a piece of chicken. I smile, trying to make up for my gringo display, but there’s no need to apologize because he wasn’t offended. He was just doing his job. If I wanted my fries I could wait for the next batch, my time no more valuable than his.

He fills my carton, hits the fries hard with a spray bottle of ketchup and when he hands me my change I tip him five bucks as penance. He nods and absolves me with his all or nothing eyes, and I realize I’ve still got a lot to learn; about LA and everything else.

I wrote this the day after Anthony Bourdain hung himself and the and thoughts came fast and freely, but what I didn’t mention was what a fine writer he was. Here’s some proof.

Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times—superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own.

Was thinking about Anthony Bourdain. About him and Hemingway. Both suicides at sixty-one. Both icons of male adventure. Two gifted bad boys, searing the culture with their red-hot poker of maleness. Both macho, though perhaps in different ways, but each with a well cultivated image: The explorer, the traveler, the bad ass. But what the myths show us is that it is not only about adventuring outward into the material world, but inward across the threshold of the psyche. An opening of the self to the self. I’m thinking how these epic travelers who are always moving forward are usually running from something as much as to something and maybe more.

Bourdain, even with his great openness, profound humanity, generous spirit and respect for all, even with his big egalitarian heart in the right place, was unwilling (or unable) to do the heavy inner-unpacking that is needed to be sane. He was scared of no dark Asian alley or goat embryo stew at the end of it, but he was scared to wander down into the basement of himself. But hey, that’s who he was. The tattooed bad boy organ-meat eating booze swilling punk rock Marco Polo, slurping dirty noodles in the streets of Bangkok and botulism be damned! And damn if we all didn’t get a lot out of it. He wasn’t killing his steers in the bull ring like Hemingway, or blasting big game with shotguns, but he was eating pig head with the same manly glee. They were both under the same illusion. The illusion that they could just be so heroically themselves that they could get around the teachings, but the teachings will not be ignored, and there will be no going around, only through.

There is a violence to running the streets and saying “bring me the fattiest cuts and the highest proof rum.” There is a violence to excess, and that violence will eventually be turned toward the self in either the material world, the spiritual or both; and even the most generous humanist leanings will not protect you from that. Not even authentically being yourself can protect you from yourself, and when the cameras are always rolling who knows what authentic can morph into. Not even talent will protect you from yourself and it is usually the opposite. And ambition won’t do it either. So, heartbreaking to see someone that beautifully himself lose himself so completely. It never ceases to amaze, the vast gulf between the image we project to the world and what is really going on inside us.

But there is another side to all this (another of many), which is that Bourdain was on a public hero’s journey, and I’m not sure either party (him or us) really understood the terms. Time and time again he went across the threshold with nothing but his wits, perceptions and appetite(s) and we watched happily, asking him to hold all our wanderlust projections (which he did, and clearly not so gladly). That was part of the gig and part of his genius. He was a willing, though maybe unwitting projection holder. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me “I think Anthony Bourdain has the best life ever.” So, imagine how many people said that to him. Imagine holding that big a projection (the best life ever) for that many people. What a nightmare. If you have the greatest life ever, then you should be happy every second. Combine that with a natural addictive personality and penchant for the dark side and you got a nice recipe for misery, and since you are so fucking lucky to live the life you do then you better keep that misery a secret. I mean what the fuck is Anthony Bourdain complaining about. He flies all over, eats great food, women love him, and he has (seems to have) friends from Uruguay to Hokkaido. He’s got loot, the coolest food show ever and a sexy Italian actress girlfriend, this cat done figured the shit out! Then, one night he doesn’t show up for dinner and hangs himself with the belt from a bathrobe. It’s hard to comprehend. He must have felt he had no right to complain, so he just kept shoving foie gras down his throat, being force fed his own good fortune like the geese whose livers he was eating.

And by protecting his public image, he missed his chance to do an even deeper and more heroic service. To give voice to the disconnect between his inner and outer life (and ours as well). As harsh as this may sound Bourdain ultimately crapped out on the hero’s journey. He did the easy half, running up a big beautiful tab at the smorgasbord of glory, but he wasn’t able to do the tough half -- The brutal and (seemingly) unbearable half, where you are forced to confront your own weakness and fragility, and in turn are given the opportunity for grace.

I’m driving somewhere or cooking something or wondering why important people aren’t pleading with me to write novels or just spend a week in Istanbul and record my impressions when suddenly I flash on Marley, an old comrade I mixed it up with, the intensity of our initial collision giving way to an every so often check-in friendliness. Where’s Marley been, I wonder for no reason other than she’s popped into my head after six months of silence? Twenty minutes later I get an email from Marley.

Right as the email comes in my dear pal, co-writer, co-star, and co-ex junkie TJ calls me. I say, “TJ, I was just thinking about someone I haven’t thought of in months, and twenty minutes later I get an email from her; tell me energy isn’t real.” “Energy isn’t real,” he says as if I am not just wrong, but a “flat earther” level moron. “You don’t think it’s amazing that I think of someone for the first time in half a year and they email me within minutes?” “What about all the time you think of people, and they don’t email you within minutes,” he replies in the same dismissive tone.

I find this very interesting. Not the question of whether we are all telepathically connected, but what he gets out of thinking we aren’t, whether he’s right or wrong. (He’s reading this, thinking, “What do you mean ‘whether’ I’m right or wrong?”) As I get older (and hopefully wiser) I realize I’m more interested in what people get out of what they believe than I am in what they believe. Like take my old friend, Steve G (who I have known since I’m eight and loves Sam Harris) who told me a while back that there is no such thing as magic. He said it as if the whole notion of magic was not just absurd, but deeply offensive and that anything other than a hard factual approach to existence was woo-woo, Ouija board bullshit. What is my pal Steve getting out of this? What is the comfort in thinking magic is nonsense, that everything is explainable and if it isn’t, there’s a perfectly good explanation for that? Why are some people comforted by magic/mystery while others are shaken by it or just shake their head at it? The “fuck magic” camp is science first and prays at the altar of the rational. They are soothed and affirmed by the factual and this gets them through. What are beliefs anyway, but the ways we make reality bearable (or unbearable) to us?

Now, the magic believers are interesting as well, and also get a lot out of their doctrine. I think some of this magic/no magic thing may come down to gender. Women, who can grow life inside them and whose sex is on the inside, are naturally more in touch with what can’t be seen. They’re tied to the moon and cycles and organic mysticism or at least have access to that realm. Men, on the other hand, tend to be black and white thinkers. Where women have doors, men have walls. (This gives men a chance to crumble, which can be very bad or very, very good.) There are men who are open to mystery and magic, but they tend to be in touch with the feminine at least archetypally.

Sometimes, I’ll have Sunday night dinner over at my place and it’ll be me and my ex and a couple of our female friends and they will go deep into the occult realm. Whether it’s past lives, present hauntings or future premonitions, they are reassured by divination it all its forms, a psychic knowing the name of their grandfather starts with J one more affirming brick in magic’s mysterious wall. I’m somewhat in agreement. Not so much about psychics (who seem more like artists than clairvoyants), but that there are layers to reality or things I can’t see but sense are happening. Like people in my life who I just like to be around physically. I don’t mean sexually (And I don’t mean not sexually) I just mean that our cells are having an electrical conversation that can’t be seen. Maybe this is science and mystery meeting. Humans getting in touch with their honeybee wisdoms.

But now I’m heading down another road. This is about what we get out of our beliefs. Like I can’t believe anyone would think Keith Richards is cooler than Charlie Parker (two musical junkie icons). I know in my soul (TJ doesn’t believe people have souls, by the way) that Bird is in a different stratosphere of talent, meaning and sainthood than Keith Richards, and I need this to be true, or my entire cool meta structure will come undone. How can an imitator be greater than an originator? How can that sad, soulful, horn-pawning son of Kansas City not be greater than an English multimillionaire who dips his quill in the black ink of the blues without being stained? I need the authentic but less popular to win because (for myriad reasons, I’m sure many delusional) I see myself as authentic and less popular and know in my heart that the outsider always has the inside scoop on jazz, jive and whatever swings hardest.

About ten years back, I was talking with a couple I had just met, and the man in the couple (about 35) told me that they (the couple) didn’t believe the moon was real. Not that the moon landing wasn’t real, but that the actual moon itself was bogus! I don’t remember the exact explanation, though I think aliens had hung it there. He wasn’t vibrating with nuttiness nor was he particularly radical in his other views, but when it came to the moon, he was a true outlier. I remember looking at him and wondering, what do you get out of this? What does it do for you to hold an opinion that fringe. I can sort of understand being so angry, disenfranchised and antisemitic that you believe the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (I can’t really) but to take a stand against the realness of the moon seems next level conspiracy. I can still see the look in his eye as he laid it all out. A kind of defiant, “that’s right, that’s what I’m saying, deal with me” gleam. He was thrilled with his hypothesis, his contrariety getting him high like a drug. I don’t even think he really believed it, but he believed vehemently in his right to believe it!

As for energy and telepathy, I’m not sure, but I lean toward connectivity. I want to say I prefer people who are open to the possibility, but I just referenced two of my favorite people in the world, who aren’t, so who knows. I do like it when I think of something and whoever I’m with says the very thing I’m thinking. I don’t need it to be a coincidence, nor do I need it to be proof that we are all potential mind readers, but what I do notice about those moments is that they always come as a surprise and without effort. That in a state of relaxation a channel seems to open. That looking for magic is the worst way to find it.