It’s nearing midnight in Hollywood, and the Urban Man has joined his fellow Angelenos on a sacred pilgrimmage. I’ve come with a rowdy club of twenty-somethings to stand outside the Sunset Five, in a long and happy line to see “The Citizen Kane of Bad Movies.”

I mean, of course, The Room, that delicious cult epic of bad writing, bad acting, and bad direction; the film produced by, written by, directed by, and starring the staggeringly untalented Tommy Wiseau.

This is the work sent by God to assure mankind that “failure is an option”–and really, could there be anything more important to communicate to His ever-suffering children?

The night is cold, but the mall is lit with the clean fluorescence of successful commerce—the Starbucks and Trader Joes that dominate our lives.  The crowd would prefer to be more rowdy: more stoned or more drunk or more foolish.  But our own failures are insufficient: we need Tommy to clown before us.

At last, five minutes before the screening, a roar goes up: Tommy is sighted. Then he disappears. Then he reappears. Then he disappears. Then, at last, he begins walking dangerously along a parapet 30 feet above the ground, swaggering in his sunglasses and low-slung pants and long, black-dyed hair. He is a joy to behold: another strange phenomenon of the media age; a man who has parlayed his very lack of art or good sense into fame and fortune; a man who has learned, like so many here, to celebrate his degradation as a kind of greatness.

Soon, we will see Tommy’s misshapen butt waggling in many bad sex scenes and his mysterious accent butchering many awkward lines. But for now, he’s reveling down the line of fans, slapping hands as he does every month during screenings of The Room, not just in Hollywood, but around the world: Boston, Toronto, London, you name it. This has gone on since 2003, when film was first released to universal pans.

Apparently it’s not just Angelenos who require the sweet balm of failure, but urban men and women everywhere.

Before the film starts, Tommy condescends to do a short Q & A. The questions often mock him: “Tommy, are you following the same fitness regime as when you made the film?” But it is impossible to know whether he actually feels mocked, or whether he is pretending to misunderstand the question: “Yes, yes,” he says dismissively. Is that vaguely Eastern European accent faked?  Does it matter? Here, as everywhere these days, the line between fiction and truth has become unimportant. We have let go of that line as we have let go of so much that once defined us.

The only thing that’s certain is that this $6 million independent production was at first intended to be entirely serious—even if Tommy later, and lamely, labeled the work “a black comedy.” Without that firm truth, none of it would matter.

At last the overwrought music kicks in, and we see those idiotic establishing shots of San Francisco. The camera pans endlessly along the Golden Gate as the audience encourages it: “Go, Go, Go.” Tommy, in the heroic role of Johnny, arrives to shag his plump, but disloyal girlfriend, to whom he will later cry out, with superb melodrama, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”—a line once repeated on The Simpsons, and now appearing on T-Shirts. We ready our fistfuls of plastic spoons, to throw when the mysterious spoon pictures appear onscreen. During one interminable sex scene, as Lisa cheats with Johnny’s best friend, half the audience runs out to the bathroom.

“Intermission!” they cry.

A friend of mine, a brilliant professor of religion at a major university, once asked her class what they were most grateful for in their lives. She was startled when a woman stood up and said, “Every day I am grateful that I am not so bright as the rest of you. I give thanks to God that he made me mediocre, so I can be happy. I do not have to compete with you, and be miserable like you when I fail to accomplish anything wonderful.” My friend the brilliant professor says she recalls this moment often. Watching The Room, I recall it too. I think, “I would kiss that woman if I met her.” Trust me, the Urban Man would not kiss Tommy, but I say to all who might listen: “Wiseau, too, has performed a sacred sacrifice.”

Twenty minutes in, the screen is littered with stilted dialogue and half-formed plotlines, just as the floor is littered with thousands of plastic spoons. As we laugh, we are what? Freed. Freed momentarily from the great accomplishments, clever writing, exquisite visions, heroic meanings, talented beauties, and magnificent sex that torture us every day. We drink deeply of failure, and briefly we are free, free, free.

(An Urban Man classic post. First appeared on KCRW.com)

Like most people, the Urban Man often says, “if only life were more like media.” If only the women were reliably beautiful or wise, the men muscled or avuncular. If only we offered one another heartfelt looks at the tail ends of dramatic days, and never had to tie our shoes after moments of true love.

Today, as I sit working on a laptop at a favorite hotel bar here in L.A., I look up from time to time to watch yet another production crew shooting out by the pool.

They’re staging some kind of fake wedding, but even though they’re just five feet away through the plate glass windows, I can’t hear a word of dialog. Instead, I appreciate the exquisite swagger of the handheld cameraman and the frenzied calm of the director in his Hawaiian shirt.

I won’t tell you what they’re shooting, as I would be then forced to supply gossip or candid asides, but it’s a popular a sitcom: They’ve put up an arch of flowers for the pretend nuptuals, and grips are standing in the pool to choreograph some cheerful and chaotic moment. Overhead, a hardy crew manipulates enormous reflector screens — and I do the math on what it must cost to have 40-odd people here to create four or
five short minutes of nonsense.

As usual I envy not the money, the beauty or the fame—but the attention to detail. I mean, if I could get a crew of 40 to go back and work on certain moments in my own life, nonsense or otherwise, I certainly would. These shows cost upwards of a million an episode. Surely, there are moments from my own past it would have been worth a million dollars to perfect…

Take that long night at a snooty little vegetarian restaurant in Westwood, when I said those stupid things to my wife. Or that awful lunch with Danny, when I actually forced him to pick up the check. That visit from my mother. That advice to my son. That last conversation with Don.

If I could, I would have perched men in trees to hold sunscreens.

I would have hired set dressers to provide a trellis with plastic trumpet vines. The other people in my life might never have noticed, and who knows, I might have gotten those moments just right. I mean, the scene might still have been filled with nonsense, but at least it would have been perfect nonsense.

At last, the shoot begins. The sound boom and camera crowd in to record the arrival of a snappy young woman. Probably it’s funny how she’s so underdressed for the wedding. She enters with a giggling leap, and she’s immediately accosted by a middle-aged woman with a brittle smile. Beside her stands the ideal balding fool in a tuxedo. Everyone speaks what must be very clever words, and within a few seconds, the brittle smile fades, the balding man frowns.

Charming chaos ensues.

But at this point, the director stops the scene and makes them do it all over again: Giggling leap. Fading smile. Charming chaos. I watch 3 takes, 12 takes: Leap, giggle, smile. Leap, giggle, smile. Eventually I turn back to my laptop. Hours pass, and the director still seems unsatisfied. Next time I look up, it’s still leap, giggle, smile. Everyone maintains their professional cheer, but the crew does seem to realize they will never get these lousy four minutes of screen time entirely right. I mean – even with a script and a few hundred grand a day, even with all that handsome talent
and scurrying grips, these folks can’t seem to achieve nonsense that’s entirely perfect.

When I pack up to leave, they’re still at it. And it occurs to me that really, the Urban Man saved a lot of money over the years.

Copyright © 2011. Marc Porter Zasada. All rights reserved.

Produced by Terra Abroms, Directed by Rupert Green, Edited by Ed Abroms, Crew: Nye Green, Sofi Porter Zasada, Pacie Porter Zasada, Leo Porter Zasada. (c) 2010 Marc Porter Zasada and Upper Story Arts.

Like most Americans, I like to believe that capitalism operates with a kind of heavenly logic: that it ultimately makes sense for the whole society, and that the people at the top are not robber barons, but the guarantors of social order. I want to feel that their relentless efforts create not just prosperity, but a logical mansion in which we can all dwell at peace.

Americans may pretend to be democrats, small “d,” or republicans, small “r,” but most of us don’t trust the masses.  Even the tea-partiers, for all their noise about democracy, ultimately trust only the rich to organize society…I mean, probably only the rich are organized enough.

Like everyone, of course, my confidence was shaken last year. For a short cheerless season, it seemed that maybe our captains of finance were not the authors of order, but chaos. That their great financial structures, along with their large mansions, were just elaborate illusions.

Fortunately, that season seems to be passing, and our captains of finance are re-asserting control of government and industry.

Tonight, the Urban Man finds himself in North Beverly Hills, enjoying dinner at the actual mansion of a big-time financier. All evening, I look for evidence that the world is making sense again.

Sure enough, over Ahi steaks, the conversation turns to good news at Goldman Sachs. I do not comprehend this news, but the sound of it is soothing as I let my eyes pass across thick velvet drapes and oversized wall sconces.

As always, in these houses, it’s not the luxury I enjoy, not the original art or oriental carpets—it’s the hush and the organization. I love to witness direct evidence that mere mortal beings, dust to dust, are capable of maintaining large estates where everything is well-made, well-kept, lawns well-clipped, gaudy Chinese vases well-dusted. 

It doesn’t matter if, like so much in Beverly Hills, the whole thing has been built in hideous taste. That there are, for-heaven’s-sake, porcelain shepherds on the mantel and a fake Greek statue at the end of the room. I don’t really care if my hosts have failed to make the transition from old-world extravagance to postmodern chic. Personally, I prefer old-world extravagance among financiers—it’s way more comforting.

Over coffee, I excuse myself to go looking for a pink marble bathroom. I’m sure a pink marble bathroom exists somewhere here, and I’m eager to encounter a little pile of neatly folded hand towels.

At the top of the stair, I pause to hear my host’s baritone, rising up from the dining room, where he seems to be giving advice on leveraged assets, and I feel as giddy as the impoverished visitor in one of those feel-good depression-era films.

On the landing I find the necessary antique lacquer cabinet from Japan and the necessary huge 19^th century oil of chubby cherubs. The door of the master bedroom has been left ajar, and I pause to appreciate not just the size of the bed, but the way it has been layered with embroidered shams.

And I think yes, this should be the true goal of wealth: that the eye should never fall upon uncertainty, and that certainty should trickle down to the rest of us through industries and institutions.

 After a quick glance over my shoulder, I stroll right into the master bedroom: I’m sorry, but on behalf of my fellow citizens, I have to find out if maybe it really is all just an illusion.

 Maybe, I think, like Wall Street, this mansion hides a secret chaos. I look under the bed, but I find no stray socks. I open the door to the huge walk-in closet, and I thrill to see the shoes of my host and hostess laid neatly in rows, 10 pairs to a shelf, three shelves high. Tears come to the eyes of the Urban Man, and I think: Surely, the system still works. Surely, these folks still have it together.

Surely.

Copyright © 2010 Marc Porter Zasada. All Rights Reserved. Circumstances have been altered to protect the author.

Like many in the present age, I now do much of my work from a bedroom at the back of my home. Often, it’s just me and my small electric window on the world, staring at one another long into the dwindling afternoon.

You might think this a peaceable scene, but of course it’s not. Not only am I engaged, IM-to-IM and flame-to-flame, with colleagues and clients on four continents, but I am by digital extension part of every conflict and tragedy that passes, wavelike, around the globe:  Not just wars and riots, but strange killings, stranger escapes, bitter posts in reply to angry posts, and the countless celebrity missteps which appear in scrolling lists and bright pop up boxes on my screen.

Always there are more of these little boxes, but I do not complain. Like privacy, I know that peace is no longer available to humankind. Nonstop terror and distraction have become just regular life, like the weather or old age. In the Middle Ages, only fools complained about the pervasiveness of the Catholic Church. Today, only fools complain about the inescapability of Twitter or Facebook or RSS feeds.

Still, one would occasionally like to push aside the foam and froth, and find the peaceable ocean hidden beneath the waves.  Or if not actually to find that peace or see that depth or know any kind of fuller truth—such experiences having become impossible—then at least, to hear again the rumor of their existence.

This afternoon, as five o’clock rolls into six and I light my bedroom lamp, my middle son begins practicing piano. He’s far off in the living room, but the opening of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata radiates through the house again and again, again and again, again and again.

At first I groan about the added chaos. At first I say to myself, “Surely this is the one too many distractions.” To focus my attention, I put on my big, isolating headphones—and soon the voices of far-off colleagues begin booming like spurious gods, directly in the center of my head.

Says Hera to Zeus: “What the hell’s happening with that project in Japan?”

Zeus, gleefully sharing his screen, replies, “Hear my thunder and see my lighting.”

And yes, the Urban Man replies to the gods with dramatic words. And why not?  Like the comment-posters on unnumbered websites, I know that dramatic words carry better across the Internet. It doesn’t matter if those words make peace and understanding less possible, because we have all agreed that peace and understanding are impossible.

“The whole thing is f—ed up,” say I into my little microphone.

“You bet it’s f—ed up,” shouts Hera into my brain.

Still, beneath it all—I mean even as yet more colleagues open chat windows across the bottom of  my screen; even as some irrelevant new disaster overtakes a country in an upper right hand corner widget; even as I hear of riots passing across a city in a lefthand crawl; even as a pop star gets arrested on a Twitter pop-up and a congressman resigns live on MSNBC—the opening of the Moonlight Sonata just keeps on coming on: that famously dark and pervasive three-note motion supported by the enormous bass chords—a motion suddenly interrupted by Beethoven’s firm right hand as if he suddenly recognized the  melody that underpins everything: “Ah yes,” he seems to say, “that was the tune all along.”

And briefly I think, “What if Beethoven was right? What if life is actually not just terror and distraction, but even in the present time, and even if we were to open a thousand windows on our computer screens, including five hundred Facebook pages, two hundred Twitter feeds, one hundred blogs, six dozen YouTube channels, eleven angry strings of talkback commentary, and unnumbered simultaneous VOIP channels—what if some enormous and coherent melody will someday prove to underlie it all?”

What if we, ourselves, could pick out the tune?

 Off in the living room, my son returns to the beginning of the Moonlight Sonata, trying one more time to get it right. In the center of my head, the voices of spurious gods continue to shout, but I no longer focus on their words.

Copyright © 2011 Marc Porter Zasada. All Rights Reserved.

People complain that we in the media expect too much of actors. That we ask them deep philosophical questions and want them to reveal great truths when they’re masters of nothing but illusion. Why should we care what they think about life and the universe? Shouldn’t we be interviewing, like, actual wise people? 

This question came up the other day when I was having lunch with a genuine philosopher. He’s a friend with a PhD, a ponytail, and a scraggly beard who teaches, like, rabbis. In short, he’s dedicated his life to truth.

Naturally, we booked a table at an organic place called “Real Food Daily” here in L.A.—but lo, as they brought out the tofu spring rolls, my friend had the gall to complain about how poorly he’s paid.

 “How is it that I spent 10 years in college and read about 20,000 books,” he says, “but some 22-year-old actor who’s barely read a book and only knows how to mug a camera, gets interviewed every day and makes a hundred times my salary? How is that possible?”

 Fortunately, I’m ready with a detailed epistemological response.

“My friend,” I say, “you philosophers are out of touch. Most people around the world now grasp that truth is a lesser thing than art, fact a lesser thing than film, and argument a lesser thing than song. Let me put it this way: when folks in L.A. talk about ‘the naked truth’ we don’t mean it as a compliment, we mean it’s a fact not properly dressed for a night on the town.”

He begins to laugh, but I raise a chopstick in warning.

 “Seriously, truth is no longer among the average person’s top three concerns, and the globally-desirable ratio of fantasy to reality has moved past the critical 50% mark. Most of our values now derive from screenplays and nuanced post-production. That makes L.A. no longer just the entertainment capitol of the world, but its philosophical capitol as well.”

Now I’m really on a roll.  “Spinoza might say we’ve reduced the dignity of man. Kant might say we’ve escaped our existential responsibility. But surely, illusion is far more enduring than truth. Truth is slippery and subject to change, while a DVD will last forever. Surely, then, you should learn from the people on DVDs.”

 “Don’t pull my leg,” says my friend, chasing a bit of cilantro around his plate. “I’ve listened to those interviews. Who cares about an actor’s favorite colors, favorite dogs and latest romances? Who really cares about the thoughts of such shallow people?”

“Stop right there,” I reply. “Doesn’t their very shallowness demonstrate their greatness? Surely we need to comprehend their weakness as “normal” human beings, so we can learn from their disciplined ability to overcome the normal and appear iconically noble, passionate, or funny on screen. You have to admit that an actor’s ability to fake astounding courage and wisdom has more of an impact on the world than any actual courage or wisdom. Without the efforts of Hollywood, we would quickly realize that love is brief, friendship uncertain, disease rampant, and aging inevitable. Illusion is not just more necessary than understanding, it has a longer pedigree. It’s older than the oldest profession, as ancient as cave paintings and songs of victory.

“That 22-year-old actor you complain about, who demonstrates, for example, a really effective go-to-hell attitude, is worth more than ten Platos. He deserves not just a lengthy interview, but yes, a thousand times your salary…or mine. After all,” reflects The Urban Man, gazing down along the relentless ugly scatter of La Cienega Boulevard, “Anyone can survive this town without truth, but no one can survive without attitude.”.

 “Okay, okay,” cries my educated friend, throwing up his hands: “I give up!” Then we both grow quiet as we sip our fair trade coffee and listen to the industry buzz roll into the restaurant like a loud afternoon fog.

From a commentary I delivered on KCRW-FM. Copyright © 2011 Marc Porter Zasada. All Rights Reserved. The original audio podcast of this post can be heard at www.kcrw.com/theurbanman

(An Urban Man Classic Post)

Here in L.A., we are all experts at avoiding people.  In fact, a lot of folks move here because they don’t really like people, and they can easily hole up in a small tract house with their big TV and cocoon-like car. If you telecommute, you don’t even have to see people in the office. Go to a midnight club, and you can get all sweaty without actually touching a single sweaty other.

The height of L.A. success comes when you achieve an extremely large number of both friends and enemies, but avoid them all. You move into a gated Bel Air estate and employ staff whose whole job is to keep people at bay.

Okay, most Angelenos don’t have staff or gated estates. They just carry sunglasses.

Tonight I find myself at a large event with many round tables. Our hostess, with ignorant enthusiasm, has seated everyone with someone she thinks they know. And lo, when I locate my seat, I see it’s wedged between a friend on the right and an enemy on the left, each of whom I normally avoid.

I think, “Surely, this violates some city zoning ordinance.”  

To buy time, I turn first to my enemy. Ten years ago I got a promotion he probably deserved. Yes, he was a hundred times more qualified, but I was not palpably evil. 

Now I offer him a big smile. “Hi Clarence, how’s the kids?”

“Excellent,” he says, and turns away. Now we begin avoiding each other with style. I pick through my arugula. He simply looks cool.

Most Angelenos avoid each other by looking cool. In fact, when you think about it, the whole point of cool fashions and cool attitudes is to imply that you have a set of strict, but indecipherable rules for avoiding other people. That’s why cool fashions have to change constantly. I mean, once people get used to one kind of cool, it ceases to be intimidating.

For a moment, I consider explaining all this to Clarence, along with a friendly warning that his wardrobe is on the verge of becoming unintimidating…but I don’t get the chance, because now I accidentally make eye contact with my friend on the right, whose name is not Jimmy.

“I’ve been having a rough time,” begins Jimmy without preamble, “regarding my longterm goals. Remember I was making a move in Hospitality? Well, then I got sidetracked in this lawsuit with my old girlfriend.”

Sometimes, at social events, it’s fun to get people talking and then just listen, ‘cause if you let people talk, they often tell stories you’ve never heard, even on ‘This American Life.’

Still, everyone has his limits. Probably Ira Glass has his limits. For me, that limit is Jimmy. It’s something about the mix of pathetic themes and unnecessary detail. Something about the way he won’t let me get a grunt in edgewise. Because we know a lot of the same people and often show up in the same rooms, I could write a whole book about how to avoid Jimmy…you know, pretending that my cell phone is vibrating, making a sudden turn toward the hors d’ouevres.

Just now Jimmy talks fast, trying to get it all in before I make my escape, but I cannot tell you any of his updated goals and desires, because I do not actually listen.

Instead, like any good Angeleno, I put him on mute as I review my own goals and desires. In fact, I think, “How very skilled we have become, all three of us. How perfectly we each, in his own special way, practice The Art of the Endless Avoid.”

At last the music kicks in to obliterate all conversation, and as The Urban Man stands up to dance with no one in particular, I offer Jimmy a little shrug that says, “Gee, I guess I won’t get to hear the end of your story.”

Copyright © 2010 Marc Porter Zasada. All Rights Reserved.

ONCE OUT INTO BIG CITIES and finding himself alone, the irrepressible Thomas Putnam took to writing letters home to his sister. From Chicago, high in a hotel room with the window open and the armies of the wounded moving below, he felt himself full of his youth and wrote: “Already it is summer here. On the streets, their cheeks puff out with wind, their eyes fill with light. Our nights are ten miles high and Arabian. The lamps are moons. One is surprisingly aware of trees, how deep they are, the way they hold themselves aloof.” And he sealed up the letter and dropped it in a mailbox the next day; from there it was delivered to Concord, Missouri. The year was 1957.

His sister Ramona had dark eyes, of which the more said the better: “dark as olives, and the secret pleasure of knowledge within those eyes. I have often asked her what she was thinking,” Thomas had written to Avery, the boy next door who loved Ramona. Now she opened the letter written high in the hotel room and took it out on the back porch where she could hear the dogs and the screen doors. Ramona was only fifteen and so could not be expected to understand more than that Thomas was happy and alive and apparently not yet out of money, though he had been to three cities and not found work. “Perhaps you could try fixing bicycles,” wrote Ramona back in her ignorance, “you were always so good at that,” and she posted the letter to the address he had included, though knowing it might not find her brother at all.

Avery was due that afternoon, and she sat placidly waiting for him, not yet to that age when one prepares for the arrival of others.

Avery, all of seventeen, arrived in his jeans and felt shirt and that satisfied smile on his tight, blond face that Ramona found so complete. He stood above her silently as she finished her letter to Thomas.

“Tranquillity has two L’s,” he said after a time, and she crossed it off and changed the word without even acknowledging Avery’s presence, that’s how familiar they were already. The tall boy sat beside her on the step and watched the sunlight settling among the willows and fences as day opened into eleven o’clock. “I am happy,” he might have said aloud, for there was nothing of yearning adolescence about Avery, none of that nervous “walking with the girl next door” that plagues youths of every nation and age. He was confident and free and easy. “She loves me,” he had written to Thomas only last week, and that was all he needed to say.

“Avery plans to be an engineer,” wrote Ramona to her brother later. “He told me this afternoon that he wants to build bridges. I said fine, if that’s what he wants to do. I don’t understand men at all.” She posted this letter dutifully to the address of the hotel where Thomas had been heard from last, but it had been some months since Thomas had replied specifically to one of her letters. It didn’t seem to matter though, really. The things she wrote about she often forgot a week later, the issues so hotly discussed already seeming obscured in the distance of youth.

In the same mail was a letter from Thomas himself: “I look into people’s faces—they don’t seem to mind. In the city, everyone is for everyone else’s entertainment. We turn down our collars and let the air into our shirts. Our necks therefore are dirty. And oh yes, I’m working as a carpenter for a man with fat breasts and yellow eyes. He listens to country music, remarkably, and divines my innermost thoughts.”

“It sounds dreadful,” said Ramona next day as she sat with Avery in a hamburger shop and ate french fries. “Imagine, a man like that; I suppose Thomas has to work day and night.”

“That’s because he hasn’t an education,” said Avery piously, and ordered a milkshake. “That’s why I’m going to get an education and be an engineer. So I won’t have to work hard.”

“All right, I’ll marry you,” said Ramona, with a laugh, and threw her fifteen-year-old arms around his neck. And Avery smiled too, even though she got ketchup all over his felt shirt and he would have to go home and change.

“Where are you, Thomas?” wrote Ramona only a little time later. “Some nights I wake up and say to myself, `where is my brother?’ I can’t get it out of my head, and the next morning mother must comfort me or some such nonsense. I know perfectly well you’re safe and somewhere in New York working on the docks, but still I worry. I figure you’re nearly twenty now and you really should start thinking of settling down. Avery says he wants to marry when he’s twenty, which will make me eighteen and a woman.”

But Thomas apparently hadn’t received that letter, for just two weeks later, he was writing to Avery: “When I see great ships I feel them in my chest like a weight. My legs are driven into the earth and I am struck dumb. They are a terror and a joy. On the shore, the men and women are corrupt, stupid, far from God. But on ships! What a pure life must be led! Nothing but the salt and the ringing metal. Perhaps I should go to sea. Perhaps you should go to sea, Avery. Or build ships. There are those who build ships and those who sail them, I suppose.”

Avery said to Ramona that day, “Your brother wants to go to sea.”

“No! Then how could we ever write!”

“I don’t know, they have radios and perhaps helicopters bring them mail.”

“Perhaps.” They were going to see a horror movie to relieve the boredom of a Saturday afternoon.

Months passed. Avery was accepted into college. At college he wore khaki shorts and polyester shirts. He learned about large sheets of tracing paper. He owned a red sports car and drove over weekends to visit Ramona. She was taking a class to be a secretary because, “after all, everyone should have a profession.” He would drive up before the high cement walls of the secretarial school where she would be sitting outside among the landscaped juniper bushes and writing in a little notebook. And she would look up with her dark eyes as the sun caught the windshield of the car. And all the world would stop on that dime and wait for their eyes to meet through the sultry air. There was nothing more to be said of this time but gossip and mere romance.

From Marseilles, where he sat among the potted palms of a cafe and tossed on the waves of foreign conversations, Thomas began another letter to his beloved sister, she who no doubt still fished in the creek or played among the deep willows. He wrote:

“Surely, America is the great barbarian, come to sweep aside civilizations of the old and the weak. It makes me sad and full of tragic energy. What is an American but a housecat left to feast on the dinner scraps? We are the children on holiday and the builders of empires. We don’t know where we come from or where we’re headed, don’t have the least idea of war or peace, hunger or plenty. Meanwhile, the world learns from us. You can see it here, where American pinball machines are moved into the rotting cafes of the seaport, where the prostitutes take American clothes and American smiles. And yet I am intoxicated by the cigarette smoke here, the sound of taxicabs. The air stinks of fish and tar and diesel; it is an incense and the great ships are still cathedrals.”

The letter never reached Ramona until a month later, for she and Avery had taken off to Arizona for their honeymoon. They bought rugs and maps. One night, alone in the open and thinking of lost pagan religions, Ramona was breathless with the scent of dirt and distant pine. She wrote to her brother: “I remembered tonight that God is large. Otherwise, things are fine. Avery is sunburned and drinks beer, which I didn’t know before. We make love with the lights on but the window closed, so it is hot. The car is packed full with rugs and maps. I may collect pottery. I wake up before my husband and go down to the coffee shop and drink coffee. I’ve begun drinking coffee. Men stop there with trucks and look tired and also there are men who are up early to go hunting or whatever, for they are full of laughter. I am often the only woman there in the mornings, and I enjoy the rough conversation, the projects in their voices. Avery has no rough conversation; do you think that a lack? When we’re married (well, we are married, but not, you know, yet in an apartment with a television and a child), perhaps I won’t work. I want to be beautiful.”

Avery grew a mustache. He developed a taste for certain movies on Thursday nights. He wore after-shave. He liked a good wristwatch and kept his car running well, even gave it a name which he had etched onto a small brass plate and screwed into the dashboard. At some point he left school and went to work building bridges. Ramona tried being beautiful for a while, but discovered it only made her husband and his friends treat her as a fool. Then she tried being a secretary, but found it a bore and anyway, Avery made plenty of money for the two of them until they might have a child. They had a child. Ramona named it David, thinking of the Jewish king, but then was disappointed to find that David was the most popular male name being given that year.

“You know, I wanted to please God with that name,” wrote Ramona to Thomas. “Does that sound stupid? Everything sounds stupid these days. Everything I say seems to echo off a tinny plate and sounds foolish. I’ve been reading Dostoevsky. Incidentally, my address has been changed this last year. If you’re getting these letters, you should stop writing to me at home.”

She got a letter from Thomas some weeks later, forwarded from their home address, which read: “They pray here five times a day; they have a man who sings to them in that rhyming language from a tower to call them to prayers. They keep themselves clean and walk these corrupt streets like so many millions of forgotten saints. I question them (for they speak English) and they treat me like a child. I am not a child any longer though, but a man with a thin neck and sun-washed blue eyes. I read their books, the books they have memorized, and I can make nothing out of them but a kind of rhythm, like the tide. At the same time I dream of home, of the sun on the back porch. Tell me, Ramona, I figure you at twenty-one now, are you a woman? And do you live at home? Write me at the Hotel Karachi.”

Ramona began taking night classes, learned how to cook Chinese, taught her child to sing. “David, David, sing me the one about the lamb.” The boy had her dark eyes and looked nothing like his father. Avery, meanwhile, took up fishing, television, Sunday softball, alcohol, mystery novels, laughing in restaurants, sex manuals; he spoke of a trip to the coast of Mexico.

“I don’t want to go to Mexico,” said Ramona, in her far-off way. She had become far off, or so Avery said to her, and he wondered if perhaps they had married too young.

“But why don’t you want to go to Mexico?” he persisted, drawing forth the inevitable travel brochures. They glared in the late afternoon light through the apartment window.

“I don’t like Mexican music,” she said in a puzzled way, and walked off to the boy’s room, where David, now five, was busy with small trucks.

Ramona began to think about crime and war, the dirt in the streets, the heavy air of their neighborhood, the way cars droned, the triviality of religion, the nakedness of her emotions. She felt weak and did not want to feel weak. She went back to work when David entered school and she took up the flute. One day she grew up, and discovered the adroit patience of adulthood. Now she. began to scorn Avery, who worked all day and indulged in nonsense all night, and so had never grown up at all. She wrote to Thomas:

“I am trapped, but unafraid.”

Thomas wrote back: “So you have married Avery! What news! I just got one of your letters on returning to Strasbourg. I am pleased. Avery is strong and determined. He has no giddiness about him, and no male vanity. He is handsome and knows the ways of the world. You were always so dreamy, perhaps he will take you out into the world. How I miss America! The freedom! The honest ambitious male of the species. The female without illusions! The bustling innocence of the cities! I would like to take in a hamburger and a movie and fall in love with a nice girl. The old world is just that, old. And I, even at thirty, am an American, and so I am young.”

Ramona took up diaries, exercise, popular music, driving her child around in the afternoons. She used lipstick now, and drew circles around her dark eyes to emphasize them. At ten, David began to romanticize his world-traveling uncle. He wrote a letter, which Ramona dutifully mailed to an address in Jakarta: “Dear Uncle. My name is David. Mom tells me You’ve been to Germany. Did you see any old tanks or bombers? I hope someday you’ll visit us here in Ohio and tell me all about those things.”

One night not long after, in late summer when the air was dank and full of thunder, Avery came home from work and found a letter from Thomas addressed to himself. He loosened his tie and went into the kitchen to drink milk from a carton and sat down at the table in a pool of light to read.

“… and now I dream about children and envy you. I image he has model planes hanging from the ceiling and reads those boys’ adventure books. I imagine you bringing him up to love running in the forests, to love the study of old books. For myself, I feel like a cloud in the mountains, rising up out of the green valley, gathering up moisture and floating away. How I envy you. Already, it is too late for me to come home. You have taken the right road, and may grow old with dignity. I would have to go to a monastery in the Himalayas for dignity, would have to commune with scripture. Too late for me now. I imagine you there, loving a woman and a child.”

The next morning, news of a war came. Avery abandoned his job and signed up. He died within four months. Ramona found she liked being a widow. She took David out of the public schools and put him with the Catholics. She learned to play tennis, joined the museum league, moved to San Francisco. She took David up Mount Tamalpais and showed him the sweep of the bay. She wrote to Thomas:

“It is not enough, as it has never been enough, but it is much more than it was. I can think, at least. Incidentally, America is dying.”

She took on the trappings of the age because what else was there to do? She put up Escher prints in her apartment, cultivated houseplants. David was a dreamy boy throughout Catholic school life, reading magical books written for children. He thought his mother was wonderful and only vaguely missed his father. He indulged moderately in pornography and alcohol because he didn’t care to associate with large groups.

At college, though, David’s eyes opened. His mother seemed eccentric, foolish. He loathed her makeup, read her letters hurriedly, scoffing at her spiritualism. On a backpacking trip with some friends, however, he discovered the size of things and matured a bit. He fell in love, but after living with the young woman for a time, could not keep his attention sufficiently focused to stay in love. He floundered in school, losing interest in his studies. He began to drink coffee and alcohol.

When his mother died, David was on a playing field, throwing a football. A man he’d never seen before jogged up with a telegram. David went to sit in the shade and tore it open. The grass at his feet suddenly appeared in all its individual greenness. The sounds of the field crowded in upon him. He began to cry.

David drove all the way to San Francisco in one night, woke up the apartment manager at 6 a.m. to open the door. Evidently, someone had been in to clean up. Books were neatly on shelves, the weaving loom leaned against the wall and the yarn was in balls. Apparently his mother had friends. He began taking things apart, examining the titles of books, reading her correspondence. He felt suddenly awkward and young. It was a terror and a joy. She had obviously been confused, unhappy. That did not surprise him. Those serious looks she had given him since he was very young had not been ignored. He wondered If she had committed suicide. At last he went out on the little balcony that overlooked the city and read the letters from his Uncle Thomas as the sun rose. He grew five years in five minutes. Light filled up the streets as he read, and the sounds of the city were in his ears. On a sheet of paper, he wrote: “Dear Uncle Thomas: They taught me to ask all the wrong questions,” and hurried it into an envelope. At ten o’clock the postman came and David met him at the door. He did not hesitate to open a letter from Thomas, forwarded from Ohio:

“Australia is young and blustery and very self-conscious about it. I think of America in pioneer days, and wonder in fact how much American Western films have influenced their outlook. I find myself forty-eight years old and examine the mirror with surprise. They say, the old grow closer to God as little children are close to God. The circle closes. That I am lost is no matter, all our countrymen are lost. I only ask for new beginnings; what else can an American demand? Always to be starting over, that is the secret. Australia is full of new beginnings. So you are unhappy, Ramona. Does that surprise you? There are so many other things besides happiness. To name them would be trite. I walk by the sea and watch the small sailboats, of which there are numbers beyond counting.”

David put the letter down and walked to the door where he caught a taxi for the airport. He had to wait only six hours for a plane to Australia.

Copyright © Marc Porter Zasada. All rights reserved.

I don’t know about you, but I have never actually won a political argument. No one has ever said to me, “You know what? Now that you put it so clearly, I see I was wrong.” Not once. Not ever. Not when I marshal facts, not when I quote Jefferson, not by Socratic inquiry or blunt force of will.

Even though, you know, I am often right.

It’s because politics aren’t about logic, they’re about things like emotion and trust. I know, because every time I fire an arrow of inescapable logic, the other guy changes the subject. I’m ready to nail him on deficits and he switches to Freddie Mac. I’m closing in on Iraq and he slips to Iran. In the end, he says, “Well, that’s just the way I feel.”

Still, like most people, I keep trying. I hope that months later, my arrow of logic will still be lodged in my opponent’s world view. I imagine that someday at 3 a.m., he’ll wake up and think, “Hey, maybe that guy had a point.”

This morning, for example, I tried to change Ted’s mind on the healthcare issue. Ted sits on the right-leaning side of my local Starbucks. He’s 72, retired, and often wears a t-shirt with a big smiley face that reads: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT LIBERALS.

Again today, he’s holding forth with some angry white males. The words “Pelosi,” “ACORN,” and “Statism” cut through the buzz of a pleasantly caffeinated a.m. But this time, when the subject shifts to “Obamacare,” I put my laptop in neutral and stroll over in my trilby hat. “We’ve never met,” I say, “but I feel I know you well.”

Naturally, he’s shocked to learn that even though I broadcast on an NPR station, I consider myself a liberal.

In fact, right off, he tries to throw me by saying that he used to be liberal. That he voted for Johnson and Carter…until something snapped. Even more cunningly, he smiles exactly like my late father, who after working his whole life in government, switched to the right during the Reagan years. Immediately I think, “Let me change this man’s heart with a fusillade of pure logic.”

I say, “Can you explain to me why conservatives trust insurance companies more than they trust government? Don’t we at least have some control over government?”

“I don’t trust insurance companies either,” he says pleasantly. “I think they’re the lesser of two evils. And no, I don’t feel like I have any control over government. They’re under the thumb of special interests and big money.” And then he tries to divert the subject with yes, Freddie Mac and Tim Geitner. “Look at the SEC. They sat down with Bernie Madoff and gave him a clean bill of health. Why should I trust them?”

But I fire again: “So you admit that many of our problems stem from a failure of government to regulate!”

“That’s because they’re incompetent.”

“Don’t you see the inconsistency?” I cry in frustration. “You can’t get mad at them for not using their power, but then not give them power!”

Ted chews on this, and I think: “Surely that one hit the mark. Maybe this is the first political argument I will ever actually win. Surely Ted will say, “Now that you put it so clearly, I see I was wrong.”

In fact, he says: “You’re right. It’s illogical. But at least with industry, I have a choice. I can buy their product or not. That makes me feel like I have some power. I probably don’t, but I feel I do. It’s emotional, not intellectual. It’s how I feel”

He smiles and we seem to reach some curious agreement; some understanding that arrows of logic will henceforth clatter uselessly to the ground.

And then, as I was never able to do with my father, this man and I amiably spend the next 40 minutes tossing softballs of history and emotion, trust and distrust, Reagan and Carter, Clinton and Bush, Hillary and Barack, until at last we shake hands and the Urban Man returns to his side of the coffee house, strangely content.

Copyright © 2009 Marc Porter Zasada. All rights reserved.