Notes on writing

“But in order to exist in any form, art must be giving pleasure.” – W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

"Being a professional means doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them." -- Julius Erving

I have been writing for money since 1981. How am I doing? You tell me.

My writing career took off in fits and starts, with plenty of detours, dead ends, and nonsensical tangents, personal and professional. At this point, I’ve written three books, published two of them (busy selling Number Three as we speak), and composed thousands of essays, articles, and stories. I’m a non-fiction writer, although I have recently been tempted to make something up, a challenge about which I am exceedingly nervous.

Over the course of 45 years, I have learned a few things. These are some of the things that get me through the day – and I take it day to day.

1.     Building a chair

You can’t think of it as “art”. That’s too intimidating. Usually your work is considered art only after you’re dead, and sometimes not even then. Instead, think of yourself as a craftsperson. When you write something, you are building the equivalent of a chair. (The metaphor’s not mine, I stole it from Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) The first thing you have to make sure of – is it functional? Does it do what it is meant to do? Does it hold up or does it fold up? Can it sustain your weight? Is it durable? Is it comfortable? That is the baseline of acceptability. Beyond that, you can speculate. You can make it anything. Are you building a throne? A milking stool? It’s up to you.

2.     Find your style by telling the truth

When I was just starting out, I was obsessed with the idea of my style. What was it? How could I find it? I began by imitating writers I admired. First, I copied Raymond Chandler, reveling in his terseness, his absurd, over-the-top similes, his hard-bitten outlook. The result was awful. I moved on to other influences – John Steinbeck, most prominently. Again, I found myself butting my head against a wall. I did not know what I was doing.

Then I starting working as a journalist. This was an invaluable experience for me because it taught me discipline. (I believe Hemingway said everyone should be a journalist, but only for five years!) For in journalism, there is always a deadline, usually one about four hours away. It forced me to talk to multiple people, gather information, think of how to present it, execute it, and send it out for the world to read in that abbreviated time frame. If it sucked, it sucked. I made many, many, many mistakes – fortunately, I wasn’t working for the New York Times, so my failures were small ones and nobody got hurt.

I got through the job by focusing on simple clarity. Tell the story as simply and honestly as you can. Make it understandable. This does not mean writing down to people. Respect the reader, but do so by being clear and straight with him or her. It helps to keep an “ideal reader” on your mind. Write for that person.

What do I really feel, think, taste, touch, smell, see, hear? How do I process that? This is difficult. This is what cannot be faked. That is where your truth is, and your true voice.

When I moved on to bigger projects, I found that there was a way I had of writing that sounded distinctly like me – informal, kinda jokey, friendly. That was my style. Through sheer repetition, I removed all the parts of my writing that got in the way between me and the reader. In simply communicating effectively, I have established a mode of expression that is uniquely mine.

Now, am I happy with my style? I read other writers, and am jealous of their eloquence and perception, their seemingly effortless ease. But this is the voice I was born with, the limitations I have to deal with, and now when I reread myself, I say, “That’s OK. That sounds like me.” I just do my best.

3.     Repetition

There is no such thing as inspiration. Malcom Gladwell’s “10,000 hour” rule, which states that that much practice is required to endow someone with mastery of a subject, is right on point. The only way to get better as a writer is to write. Not take classes, not look for magic formulae. When I was in college, I attended an interview with the playwright Edward Albee. “Who here wants to be a writer?” he asked. Hands shot up. “Why aren’t you writing, then? Get out of here,” he said.

I work at it every day, six days a week. On average, I can produce about 1,000 usable words a day. Everyone has a different production capacity; as you go along, you will find out what yours is. On good days, my output creeps up to 1,500 to 2,000 per shift. On lousy days, I still manage to crank out a few hundred words. Keeping at it is essential. The comedian George Carlin had a time clock at his desk at home, and he punched in and out every day, just like a factory worker. He sat there and ground it out. You have to, too. If you can’t do that, don’t try. You’ll just make yourself crazy.

Being a writer is much like being an old-time prospector. You head off into the wilderness, looking for a likely spot. You dig and dig, and sift and sift. You live on bacon and beans, and wear worn-out, patched-up clothes. Sometimes you strike gold. Most of the time, you get enough of a return to show a little profit that grubstakes you for your next attempt.

Someone smart whose name I can't remember said writing a book is like filling a swimming pool using a teacup. It requires patience. Do you like being alone with your thoughts for long periods of time, every day? Are you undaunted by the prospect of sitting there patiently, pulling words out of yourself like teeth? Congratulations, you may be a writer.

 4.     Rewrite

The first draft is always terrible. I hate first drafts. The blank page still makes me sweat. What gets me through, what allows me to write ANYTHING down, is the knowledge that I can fix it later. The first draft is just a mess of words that fight toward your goal of being understood. The first draft is filled with wrong directions, mistakes, and vile stupidities. Get over it. I LOVE rewriting. Once I have something down, I can shape it into something usable. When you are starting out, it seems impossible to wrestle something into an acceptable form. Once again, keep at it. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. The more you do it, the better you will get at it.

5.     Read

Throw away your video games. Life is too short. Read, read, read! Keep reading. I read fiction and non-fiction, poetry, plays, the back of the cereal box. I read deathless prose and complete shit. I love it all. There is no way you will get to read one-tenth of what you want to read in this life – but you can die trying. Don’t try to cheat by reading only what tops the best-seller lists. You will not discover the magic trick that will make you a great writer. In fact, most people who are good writers were stimulated by reading something so bad that they declared to themselves, “I can write something better than this crap!”

6.     Do what you can do

You have to live somehow. You have to take that day job. You have a life, people you love, obligations, hindrances. You have to write in the cracks of your working day, early in the morning, late at night. The conditions are never ideal (again, writing in the middle of a loud, busy, newsroom filled with constant interruptions on four things at a time is excellent practice). You have to forgive yourself for not getting as far in a day as you wanted. I have few readily marketable skills. I didn’t get a degree. I have raised three children, been married twice (the second one worked!), held every kind of menial job there is. I waited tables for seven years. And I kept writing.

I continue to scrape along. It’s in my blood now, I can’t help myself. When I don’t get to write, I moo like a distressed cow with overfilled udders. I do OK.

The writer typically swings between complete self-loathing and delusions of grandeur. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Don’t aspire to “be a writer”; aspire to write. It’s fun!

Recalled to life: or, where did my last six months go?

On August 26 of 2017, I was just sitting down to appetizers with my wife at a local restaurant when I passed out. Six months and two hospital stays later I am not only recovered but have what in essence is a second opportunity to live fully. Was it a stroke? A nervous breakdown? Adrenal insufficiency? A road-to-Damascus moment? What happened?

I had just returned from a long trip, driving home alone for 1,200 miles after dropping our son off at college for his sophomore year. I was sleeping rough in the car, eating catch as catch can . . . overdoing it. I was tired, more profoundly sleep-deprived than I could imagine.

Still, it was quite a surprise to pass out for the very first time in my life, especially in a public place. Though I was only out for 30 seconds or so, my thoughtful wife summoned an ambulance immediately. I found myself being loaded onto a gurney, cannulated, and shipped off to the nearest hospital. (Here's how awesome the restaurant was -- they boxed up our dinner to go!)

I was floundering. I shook with tremors, and numbness and tingling plagued my hands and feet. I was dizzy, but not in the classic sense of the room turning about me. Instead, I felt as though I were tumbling forward, end over end, uncontrollably. I was flushed and sweating, alternating with bouts of chills. My heart raced and my breath caught in my throat. My ears rang, and my throat was swollen and painful. I couldn’t bear light or noise. I was curled in on myself like a fetus.

I was drifting in and out of consciousness, and unconsciousness would have been my first choice. Above all, I was in an absolute and helpless panic. It felt like the floor had opened beneath me and I was plunging hopelessly into a never-ending nothing. You know how you miss a step in the darkness and suddenly stumble, grasping helplessly for something to steady you? This was my state, lying stock-still and wired up to all the diagnostic machines.

After two days and no diagnosis, they sent me home. I hung on for a month, hoping the problem would cure itself. Finally, in early October, I was seized with another spell so severe that I packed myself off to a second institution. Once again, they examined me — nothing. Fortunately, my wife had made an appointment at the adjacent cardiologist’s office. He took one listen to my thuddering chest and ordered a coronary angiogram (this is when they slip a tube up your vein and take a gander at your ticker with the help of x-rays and dye).

That test proved negative — as did many others. In fact, they tested every part of me over six days, through MRIs, CT scans, bloodwork, you name it. The doctors examined everything but my taint (look it up). No abnormalities were found. They were very apologetic. (One thing I did note is that many medical specialists simply cannot think, can’t extrapolate outside the bowling-lane boundaries of their unique disciplines. This clinical modesty results in the reduction of errors — and liability — but it doesn’t go far in solving a complex problem.)

An inevitable round of visits to specialists turned up nothing. Meanwhile, I was still living a very provisional existence. I was trapped at home, still victimized by the same symptoms, unable to sit up for very long periods, much less travel, and exercise, do the chores and run the errands. I couldn’t go to shul or to school functions. Initially, I was largely unable to talk for a couple of weeks, and the ability to write a coherent sentence took about a month. I was sleeping 12 to 14 hours a day, with naps of 2 to 4 hours in between. I was vanishing.

Finally, somewhere between the endocrinologist and the neurotologist, I got help. The diagnostic prize goes to ENT-otolaryngologist Carol Foster at the University of Colorado Hospital. “It’s SLEEP APNEA,” she pronounced with confident finality.

????

It still astonishes me that such a prosaic problem should be life-threatening. However, with me the problem was far worse than imagined. I went to a sleep clinic and had a study done — the kind where they wire you up and monitor you all night. (Again, my prescient wife noticed a problem years before, and I had been tested no fewer than three times by three different clinics, with inconclusive results.) It turns out I was experiencing an AHI (Apnea-hypopnea index) of 52 — meaning I was coming out of a sleep state nearly once a minute, all night long.

Not only had this produced the symptoms outlined above, but I learned that perhaps for as long as a decade, I had been sleep-deprived like this. My neural and cardiac functions, my cognitive skills, my focus, my immune system, even my glandular output and the amount of gray matter in my head, had atrophied to the point that my life was in danger.

By this point, I was sweating through three T-shirts a night, and beginning to feel uncontrollable hallucinations creeping in at the corners of my consciousness. I hunkered down and hung on. Thanks to the efficacy of my health insurance, I waited FOUR MONTHS for the CPAP machine that saved my life.

Finally, I started healing. I craved and drank cup after cup of green tea. It felt as though within me, stark against a field of deep red, was a small system of black branches, growing outward, with painful slowness. It was my nerves regenerating, my senses widening.

Now, I know that for many sleep apnea is the flavor of the month and that hordes are clamoring for the little bedside “breathing machines” that regulate one’s airflow during sleep. However, mine is a link back to health and sanity. After five months flat on my back, vegetating, I finally felt alive again. Gradually, I could do more — drive to the store, the library, my daughter’s school. Hit the gym. Take out the trash.

I started to read again. Trapped at home, I finally finished Don Quixote, Nicholas Nickleby, Tristram Shandy, The Odyssey. I read over a book I had finished writing — and discovered that it wasn’t finished. My mental deterioration was obvious over the latter half of the manuscript’s pages. I set to making the book over again.

And to making my life over again. I could now tell that the incremental damages to my body had severely circumscribed my ability to deal with people, stress, and various professional and personal challenges. I was noted for not being able to go out at night, to attend social functions, to even pass the time of day with someone without falling into an irrevocable panic. Now I find myself capable of all these things, social again, able and eager to travel, not consumed with anxiety. I am becoming a new and different person, hopefully a better and more authentic version of myself.

This carries anxieties as well. My wife is getting used to someone who is now much more capable, centered, and present than the old curmudgeonly me. Is this a good thing? To me it seems equivalent to getting used to a spouse who’s been overseas, or in a coma, or both, for years. My alert exuberance can be quite irritating. And what about the return of a vanished libido? We are working on it.

Of course, all this illness led me, as the least thing usually does, to bouts of pretentious and self-pitying thinking. Not knowing if you are going to have a life is sobering enough. Now I thought: well, here I am now. What am I doing here? What am I good for?

The short answer is, just what I was before. These mental belches come and go. However, I did stubbornly pull a few precepts out of the experience. 

1. The body has primacy. I’ve never had a comfortable existence inside of mine, being the kind of person who lives for and within the confines of his head by and large. However, I am manifested in my body, must greet the world with it, and now I must nurse it along. It told me in no uncertain terms that I can do, say, think nothing without its consent. I am finally listening to my body. The payoff is, in taking it seriously, I now find myself at the gym every day, eating better, and losing weight. It’s a miracle to regain years of dimmed vitality, especially when I am still capable of using them.
2. I don’t have time, or rather it’s all I have. My children are almost all grown, I’ve had two or three careers, a couple of marriages. Due to age, my demographic value is now nil. Biologically speaking, I’ve done my part and am no longer needed. Whatever else is true, I have no time to waste. I get to live my life, love my loved ones, and have a few more laughs. So if you were about to ask me to get involved with something stupid, I can’t. I have to hurry.
3. I need to be here now. My recovery means that I have not only better health and function, but that I have a broader bandwidth — emotionally, and dare I say spiritually (ssh don’t tell). My senses grow sharper and more comprehensive, my boundaries widen, and it can all be a little overwhelming as I am used to being shut up in the closet of my limitations, walled off even from perceptions, new sensory input. But I hang in there. We owe the world the gift of our attention.
4. As usual, I am not in charge. My AA experiences continue to teach me humility. I keep Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning next to my religious texts and consult it often. “Everything can be taken from a man,” he writes, “but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” At my worst, the absolute nadir of despair, the deity was still there and the architecture of the cosmos hung together. I almost lost it all, and came through with a second chance at a better, fuller life. None of it is my doing. I am grateful.

For me there is just today, and the older I get the more I am at peace with that approach. One of my favorite prayers states that “We have come into being to praise, to labor, and to love.” That is precisely what I intend to do.

Rockies game review: or, why I’m not a sportswriter

Seattle Mariners @ Colorado Rockies

May 29, 2017

1:10 p.m.

  

If you’da told me the Rockies were going to be in first place in the National League on Memorial Day this season, I’d have kicked you right near in the viaduct. The Rox have a long tradition of flaming out right after April, and considering the ludicrous amount of injuries we opened the year with, it seemed like now less than ever they deserved another shot from this enthusiastic but gun-shy fan. Our prospects, literally and figuratively, didn’t look good.

I waited ‘til yesterday to go – surprisingly, it was not hard to get tickets. (The previous day’s game was a sellout.) The Bolder Boulder and other holiday activities sucked away some potential crowd members, although a few people with insane stamina, still in their racing bibs, showed up to the game.

It was slightly disheartening, but familiar, to watch the Rockies lose. However (a Rockies fan must always seek qualifiers) there was definitely a different kind of losing going on in this game. This was close. Traditionally, the hit-happy bunch are let down by a series of exploding starting pitchers, who are then replaced by a dreary litany of failed relievers down the years –nay, decades, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory time and again.

Yesterday, our pitchers as a group (we used five, they used seven) suffered from a kind of dreaminess. They seemed to hurl the ball in a state of Borgesian lassitude, as though they were not quite sure any of this was real or not. This caused them to run the count up to 3-0, again and again. Despite the then heroic shakes of their respective heads, pulling them back to consensual reality, and a few strikes thrown, often as not our pitchers were getting pulled with only one or two outs and the bases loaded. You can’t keep this kind of foolishness up for long without getting punished for it.

 Otherwise, it was a good, clean game, full of swats (17 total hits, 11 runs) and no errors. Time crept by as the pitchers kept changing; the good old Rockies employee who runs gear out from the bullpen when pitchers change and then dashes back, to wild acclamation from the crowd, got worked. It would be easy to cite Parra for his ill-advised steal attempt that killed the 4th as well as some momentum, but it's a standard move. If he'd made it I'd be saying the opposite,so what do I know? In the end the Mariners just did, as Grandpa used to say, more gittin’.

In the stands, we kept our scorecards and cracked wise, one ear on the radio. The usual scoreboard shenanigans kept everyone amused, and there was plenty of hat-doffing and singing and moments of silence for Memorial Day. (What has happened to the interactive magic of the hapless fan out there trying to catch a fly ball, or replacing a base, for prizes, between innings? Is there some kind of liability issue? Has the nnany sstate taken even this away from us?) And, as I predicted, the giant anthropomorphic tooth won the mid-inning race around foul ground, maintaining a lead from the beginning over the anthropomorphic toothbrush and anthropomorphic toothpaste. Not bad.

And, oh yes, when did I predict it would rain? 2 p.m. When did it start raining? Exactly. And who was happy I brought two ponchos? Yes, that is right. Father is right.

Oh, yes. They beat us, 6 to 5.

When the whirring stops: the death of the VCR

The ancient top-loader. Pure steampunk.

The Funai Electric Company of Japan makes its last Video Cassette Recorder, and the last one for the foreseeable future, in August. It’s over.

The first videocassette recording of a film was released in 1967. Starting in 1977, the Video Home System consumer-level analog recording tape was the film-industry standard. In 1997, the DVD began encroaching on the VHS tape’s territory. The last major-market film (and future trivia answer), “Eragon,” was released on VHS in 2007, and a year later, tape manufacture ceased entirely.

 Now whatever is left out there on magnetic video tape that is playable will be stuck in a world that’s rejected its playback technology. Like the V-disc, the 8-track tape, the player piano roll, the filmstrip, and the LaserDisc, it has dead-ended, become a sport in the genetic sense of the word. It’s a now-pointless mutation.

VHS tapes were essential to a very particular kind of understanding of film. Not since the advent of art houses and repertory cinemas on the American coasts in the late 1950s had such a stretch on unseen films been found, easily accessible in the open market.

We viewers were previously subject to the imperatives of the market. In childhood, there were a few enthusiasts who wrangled 16-millimeter films, but these were few and far between, and well-off. We could find some of the output of the famous Blackhawk Films on 8-millimeter and Super 8 (Super 8!) at the local libraries, and we owned an old 8-millimeter job that played our family home movies, and Blackhawks of Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, and Tarzan.

Otherwise, first-run films came and went, and if they were good but not popular, you might never see them again. Broadcast television, the first great secondary market, was a yawning abyss of hours to be filled, and old movies filled them. “The Wizard of Oz” played every Easter, Christmas movies at Christmas, etc. We used to go through the pre-cable TV guides every Sunday and underline and/or circle (no highlighters yet) upcoming obscure gems, making late-night appointments to stare bloody-eyed at the boob tube, getting through a rare Douglas Sirk or Roy William Neill film, or “Alligator People,” or even some freakish stretches of quality such as Bondarchuk’s “War and Peace,” through the incessant interruptions of commercial blocks.

The bulky boxes of tapespool littered our weekend floors for decades, as we chucked them into the maw of the machine, which ground and gnawed at the boxes, straining to turn its gears and play that precious tape. (We had, and still have, a TOP-LOADER! Good times!) The revolution was us.

The VCR released us from time and space, and gave us ownership. We eagerly caught up with films we WANTED to see, WHEN we wanted to see them. We could now set timers and tape TV shows too, free our viewing schedule from the intentions and ends of the programmers. The power of the movie theaters faced its second serious challenge at this time, after the introduction of broadcast television and anti-monopoly action brought down the big studios after World War II.

All the films we’d read about that we’d never seen rained into our lives. It was now possible for the average person to self-educate about the length and breadth of cinema.

The primary downsides of the VCR were the laughably difficult programming problems the recording system always seemed to have, the clanky, cranky laboring of the devices, and the grainy, stretched, and stuttering quality of the image itself. (Anyone on the production side from the period will tell you about the hellish nightmare that was editing videotape.)

 As a legacy medium, the VHS tape still has cachet. Yale picked up 2,700 of them last year, mostly horror films. Stephanie Rogers’ story for the Yale News points out that the VHS and VCR spurred the rise of low-budget cinema, particularly in the cost-effective horror genre, and direct-to-rental market helps to undermine cinema-going. (Pornography was, as always, on the cutting edge of whatever technological development came along, and thrived as well.)

The DVD murdered the VHS tape. Its infinitely better image, searchability, and capacity made it the winner over the tape. DVDs gave every film freak far more than even they could digest in one sitting. The advent of multiple data channels on each disc gave birth to the commentary track, scads of now-expected “extras,” alternative edits, contextualizing content, gag and blooper reels, and films within films. (The damn things do scratch easily.)

Now what’s next? A few years ago, Oliver Stone held up a DVD and said, “You may be the last generation to own a movie.” The video (now DVD) rental stores are almost extinct themselves. Even the Redbox movie-dispensing kiosk service, which killed the Blockbuster video-rental chain, finds itself becoming a less profitable anachronism. Its DVD rentals were down a whopping 17 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Now that we are streaming film, we are purchasing temporary access to a product that’s not material. Pay for play. Downloads are possible, but we’ve come to find that digital files are just as prone to disruption, damage, overwriting, and loss as all those playlists you made on GrooveShark.

And that’s disturbing. I have about 2,000 films on DVD, very consciously chosen to provide me with an index of great films (OK, and “The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” and “Pootie Tang”) for reference and repeated viewings. I am hoping the kids get into them and are accidentally infected with the rewards of quality viewing. How long until I have to jury-rig some kind of playback system for this collection I have no desire to rebuild again, from scratch? We all seem to end up living primarily in the last medium we are comfortable with, the one we commit to financially and emotionally.

That being said, I am still hoarding the following, as hope springs eternal – 78 rpm records, 45s, and standard vinyl; first-generation audiotape, cassettes, V-discs, CDs, DVDs, and . . . somewhere on this dusty shelf I’m probing . . . my last VHS tapes.

There are 15 tapes here I deemed indispensable a decade ago. I wonder what’s on them? Can I see the content on them some other way?

Here’s a head cleaner. “A Rugrats Chanukah,” “A Rugrats Passover,” both available via Hulu. My friends Kathy and Robin Beck’s hilarious documentary, “Grandpa’s Still in the TUFF Shed.” Keeper. Three vintage Daffy Duck cartoon compilations, one of Bugs Bunny, one merely labeled “classic.” (You can see where my priorities lie.) Keep.

Of course, I have to hang on to the Mary Martin “Peter Pan” TV production. Priceless!

Homemade mixes: here’s a John Ford triple feature, “The Lost Patrol,” “The Informer,” and “Wagon Master.” All easily found via streaming.

Here are two I can’t find anywhere else: Jack Gold’s brilliant and underrated retelling of “Robin Crusoe,” 1975’s “Man Friday,” with Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree. And the PBS mini-series version of Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo” from 1996. “Nostromo” was the last, great, unrealized project of David Lean’s, and this production lacks something vital but points the way toward a truly definitive adaptation of the novel.

The first and last “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episodes. Of course. Keep.

Another compilation: the documentary on Russell Scott, Denver’s TV clown Blinky (can stream it); “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (likewise) and “The Maltese Falcon” (I have the DVD). Goodbye!

A documentary on my hero, Steinbeck; a miscellany of Laurel and Hardy shorts, some vintage Dana Gould (a criminally under-regarded standup comedian and writer), and some of those delectable vintage Fleischer Brothers Superman cartoons. Keeper.

And the family home videos. Our father’s side of the family was ravenously to new technology, and the earliest home-movie footage we have dates back to the mid-1930s. Our dauntless cousin Elaine picked up dozens of these Super 8 and 8mm home-movie shorts and had them transferred to videotape. (A dissection of moving family images from before my father’s birth to my youngest sister’s babyhood deserves another essay, and some therapy.) There are hours there to be pored over by curious descendants, discussed, laughed at, explained, and used as a springboard of associations. “That’s Aunt Emma,” I say, and her clean, damp, kitchen-y smell, her scrollwork piano, a laundry chute, the cuckoo clock, the steeply raked back yard, all manifest themselves, instantly.

The VHS tape in this last case will serve as a link to a new technology, duped to DVD and then undoubtedly to whatever new forms of recording and transmission evolve. But it’s a fact of physics that there is loss of signal, a weakening of the resolution of the image, each time a duplication to another medium is made. Will these irreplaceable ghosts of me, my parents, grandparents, sisters, cousins, and friends fade away down the years like pen strokes on a palimpsest, until finally forgotten and lost? When a medium dies, that erosion, that slippage occurs, and I worry. 

Blowing up Grandma; or, the best Fourth ever

It looked something like this.

It wasn’t on purpose. We did not intend to blow her up. We loved Grandma, even though she wasn’t Nice Grandma. (Nice Grandma gave us candy and ice cream and Mountain Dew, the last of which she didn’t know was chock-full of caffeine. She couldn’t understand what was getting us ‘all whipped up.’)

Mean Grandma chain-smoked Pall Malls and pulled recalcitrant snakes that she found in her flower gardens in half with her bare hands. My sister woke up late one morning, and Mean Grandma made her eat pork chops for breakfast, a trauma that took her years from which to recover. Nobody messed with Mean Grandma.

We bloodthirsty devil-children loved fireworks. As soon as the seasonal entertainment-munitions tents were pitched by the roadside, we begged to be hauled to them. There our parents would fume as we ran crazily around the enclosure, evaluating the various Zebras, Black Cats, sparklers, snakes, smoke bombs, ground spinners, and Strobing Comet Candles, both on a per-piece basis and as weighed against the huge combo packages we could go in on together and divvy up later.

The hierarchy of fireworks was proportional to the danger they posed. Sparklers, snakes, and smoke bombs were for babies. Fountains and spinners were more our speed. We longed to dash back and forth from the middle of the street in front of our ranch house, wielding a smoldering punk just like the dads wielded their glowing cigarette butts in the night, lighting fuses and backpedaling, over and over again. Zippers were the best; they lit, spun, and then leaped into the air, increasing the odds of becoming lodged into our foreheads, and consequently more beloved.

The arsenal of choice consisted of masses of crisp, crackly packagings of pop-bottle rockets, so-called as they were cylinders of gunpowder stuck to long, thin sticks that were placed in soda-pop bottles and ignited. These could be launched for weeks before and after July 4; they were used for cross-yard wars, or shot at innocent younger siblings and other helpless animals.

We yearned to be driven north from Denver to nearby Wyoming, where explosives laws were lax and the “good stuff” could be gotten, beckoning just beyond that arbitrary, windswept border. There were the fabled M-80s. When we could get these high-powered explosives, we would use them to shoot coffee and pop cans into the sky, out in the fields and fields of unfinished suburban developments that surrounded us. We muttered darkly of one day blowing the lock on the local A & W and guzzling all the root beer we could.

The ultimate goal was, of course, to get the biggest, most beautiful, longest-lived fountain. We worked out way up to a grand finale, then hiked over the hill to see the city shoot off the big show. The year this happened, I believe I finally had a driver’s license, and had been saving my money from working at Taco Time. One afternoon, we ran up to wicked Cheyenne.

Now, I don’t remember seeing the words “mortar,” “aerial shell,” or “artillery” on the suspiciously large piece de resistance we splurged on. We set it out in line with the other pyrotechnical treats, all curated and choreographed to a nonce.

Grandma was none too sprightly by then. She was going on 80, and her reptile-dismembering day were behind her. Still, we exercised a respect tinged with fear. She insisted on being seating in a lawn chair at the end of the driveway, nearest the street, to not miss a second of the festivities.

The show progressed to the Big Finish. We set the monster out on the asphalt, and I lit the fuse. We stepped back briskly and lightly.

Then the most amazing bass CHUFF came out of the device, like it had just shat out a locomotive at top speed; like it was the Kaiser’s Paris Gun, flinging a quarter-ton into the air.

“RUN!” I yelled, and we turned as one, bolting up the driveway. Halfway to the front door, a deafening explosion rattled the area, a fantastic electric-blue burst that froze everything forever for that one second, us, the trees, the cars, our shadows that burst into life in front of us. Haloed in cobalt.

Only 50 feet above, like an enormous azure time-lapse dandelion, the obviously commercial-grade pineapple bloomed. The sparks lashed down at the surrounding roofs and ricocheted back into the sky.

The neighborhood was very quiet, save for the hysterical dogs. We peered nervously through the front door’s tiny diamond-shaped window. Then --

“Where’s Grandma?”

It would be great to pretend that she was sitting there, face comically smudged and smoke ascending from her hair. No. She was still sitting precisely as as she when we had abandoned her. She was just pissed.

She didn’t go with us to see the big fireworks display that year, either. She said she was tired.

OLDFANGLED: Raised on Radiation

“Each person and family must be prepared to meet immediate survival requirements for two weeks following an attack without dependence on outside assistance.”
What You Should Know About the National Plan for Civil Defense and Defense Mobilization, 1960

In 1982, a pal and I were watching the film “The Atomic Café” at the now-long-gone Vogue Theater in Denver.
The early compilation-style documentary is composed of stock footage, excerpts from Cold War atomic-propaganda films. About halfway through the screening, a flickering black-and-white image filled the screen. It was a typical suburban ranch house – brand new, sitting on a bare-dirt corner lot – and the newsreel announcer hailed it as the first model home in history with a built-in fallout shelter.
I leaped to my feet in the darkened theater. “That’s MY house!” I yelled, pointing up at the screen.
“No way!” a voice called back in the gloom.
“Yeah, it is!” my friend exclaimed. “I grew up next door!”
I was transfixed. Until then, I hadn’t realized how cozy we all used to be with the idea of mass annihilation. That’s when I began to dig deeper into the history of my unassuming childhood home.

In 1958, an enterprising builder named Jack Hoerner began the construction of Allendale Heights, a housing subdivision in the Denver suburb of Arvada, located 12 miles southeast of the Rocky Flats Plant. Rocky Flats was one of the nearly two dozen U.S. government nuclear weapon production facilities dotted across the nation’s belly that fed the arms race during the Cold War – an open secret, then a controversial source of the income that fed most of my neighbors.
The 15 “Titan” home sites (named for the newly developed intercontinental ballistic missile), each with its own built-in A-bomb haven, still stand. Back then, the bomb was on everyone’s mind, and Hoerner wrung full sales potential out of it. At the opening of the subdivision on Aug. 23, 1959, Colorado Governor Steve McNichols, Denver Mayor Dick Atterton, Arvada Mayor Gail Gilbert and 2,000 or so of the curious toured our future home.
A soon-to-be retired Army major – who, according to the Aug. 17, 1959 issue of Time magazine, “once studied radiation effects” – snapped up the house immediately. All the homes sold quickly, but Hoerner’s dream of providing nuclear families with security from nuclear threat did not. Other contractors quickly surrounded Hoerner’s dream development with similar cookie-cutter neighborhoods. None of them featured bomb shelters.
My nuclear family migrated to Denver from a small Midwestern town in 9167, arriving well before the age of John Denver and successful sports franchises. The retired major sold the house to us that summer. We lived in the golden age of suburban life, a sweet dream of material fulfillment realized. All the postwar promises seemed to be coming true for my parents’ generation; we were surrounded by, and steeped in, abundance, convenience and safety.
There were “Welcome Wagon” ladies back then – hostesses who greeted new citizens with a gift basket full of free samples, coupons and advertising from local businesses. There wasn’t any mention of a plutonium trigger factory nearby. We were four of millions within 50 miles of the site, and among the 300,000 that lived in its watershed.

Dow Chemical built Rocky Flats at the U.S. military’s direction and began operations there in 1952. Three years later, the public was informed of the plant’s existence but not its purpose. It produced plutonium “pits,” small, spherical explosives that triggered an atomic bomb’s devastating chain reaction.
In addition, the facility recycled the fissionable material from outmoded bombs. Our neighborhood was populated primarily by conservative, militant Flats workers and their families. (One of the guys received, as a gag gift one year, a photo of liberal Colorado Democratic Congresswoman and House Armed Services committee member Patricia Schroeder’s face -- pasted into a toilet bowl.)
When we did find out about the bomb factory and its proximity, our neighbors assured us that there was nothing to worry about. In fact, they were proud of its existence and their “mission.” The workers who drove to and from the plant each shift, jamming our two-lane county roads (no car-pooling back then!) were serving their country, and the pay was great to boot.
Plus there was the attraction of the shroud of mystery they were forced to assume cast over their jobs. None of the Flats dads would answer our eager questions about their secret tasks. It was a perfect blend of patriotism and profit. Everyone was just fine – the lawns were immaculate, there was a grill in every back yard, and a cheesy Polynesian-style wet bar in the rumpus room of every basement.

Of course, I was indoctrinated in Cold War culture. My uncle told me how the atom bomb saved his life in summer of 1945, as he waited in the Philippines with thousands of other soldiers to invade mainland Japan. Public buildings wore the black-and-yellow fallout shelters signs like boutonnieres.
Barbie and G.I. Joe first roamed the Earth back then. Girls were expected to prepare for marriage and reproduction; boys planned to become astronauts or spies like Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” We snacked on Tang and Space Food Sticks. Our elementary-school teachers enchanted us with the “Disneyland” TV show episode “Our Friend the Atom” and terrified us with footage of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Occasionally, we’d hear the unholy wail of a test-alert siren reverberating across town. Sometimes a radio broadcast would be interrupted by the familiar, annoying buzz of the Emergency Broadcast System. Movie and television screens were crowded with nuclear monsters such as the giant ants of “Them!”, and Godzilla, whose millennial slumber was shattered by an atomic blast. Reruns of “Panic in the Year Zero,” starring Ray Milland and Frankie Avalon, taught us that the greatest danger of the post-apocalyptic world would be gangs of surly, menacing teenagers hopped up on jazz lingo (“Somebody dropped the Bomb, dad . . . crazy kick.”)
Very little of the tumultuous ‘60s reached us. We would turn away from the screen and see that we were still ensconced safely in suburbia, where its womb-like strength, combined with our natural naïveté, kept out unpleasant realities. Most children of the middle class were safe from Vietnam, tucked away in college, and there was no racial violence because there were simply no other races present – it was American apartheid personified. Our shelter wasn’t disquieting; it was a surreal comfort and sign of prestige.

The “bomb room,” as we came to call it, was located directly underneath our attached one-car garage and was accessible through a basement door. When we moved in, we kids were disappointed to find none of the paraphernalia commonly associated with atomic survival – bunks, rations, Geiger counters, chemical toilets, jars of iodine. The room was empty – a box of poured concrete about 10 feet by 12 feet, with walls 8 inches thick, and a foot-thick ceiling. It was somewhat larger than a prison cell; the bare, depressing dimensions of survival.
A circulating cold-water tank dripped into a musty old drain. There were two sharp right angles at the room’s entrance; the idea being that radioactive particles couldn’t’ turn corners. The shelter was closed off with a flimsy wooden door, with the push-button lock – oddly enough – on the outside. Of course, we found hours of delight in locking each other in or pounding in mock hysteria on the door as the others chanted, giggling, "Not enough room! Go away!”

The only thing left from the shelter’s original accoutrements was a thick, dusty envelope of civil-defense pamphlets such as “Facts About Fallout Protection,” which at one point exclaims, ‘RADIOACTIVITY IS NOTHING NEW – THE WHOLE WORLD IS RADIOACTIVE.” We read them voraciously, tickled by our own terror.
These documents paint a picture of the Cold War society’s grim, obsessive fears. Or our country’s struggle against communism, “Personal Preparedness in the Nuclear Age” told us that “On the outcome of this conflict depends the future course of history and the final result of man’s struggle to maintain freedom and liberty for himself.”
For the first time, any civilian could be catapulted into the role of front-line soldier (or smoldering statistic) in a matter of minutes. “Civil defense officials strongly urge each individual . . . to encourage his family to act as its own survival unit in the event of an enemy attack,” the instructions read. “No one can be sure how far the enemy will go.”
At the same time, the literature soft-pedaled the danger, making Armageddon seem like merely an exciting and challenging adventure for the whole family. Ray Crowley of Scripps-Howard Newspapers wrote, “Scientists are beginning to talk optimistically about mankind’s chances of surviving full-scale atomic war . . . In some places, you would be able to save your life if you dug a hole in the ground, drove your car over it, and jumped in the hole . . . “ “Fallout Protection” helpfully suggests, “If your house has Venetian blinds, lower and shut them to bar flying glass and screen out some of the blast’s fierce heat.”
Closing the blinds to ward off the effects of a nuclear blast now seems as pathetically hopeful as brandishing a crucifix at an onrushing tsunami. The cover of “Family Food Stockpile for Survival” features an illustration of a housewife, in full June Cleaver drag complete with apron and pearls, confidently shelving canned goods. “store in your shelter a two-week supply of food and water, first-aid kit, battery radio, flashlight, blankets and warm clothing.”
While all the pamphlets warned that a nuclear holocaust would be no walk in the park, they reassured us that we could all crawl out into the sunshine from our cozy shelters after a few weeks and be OK. There was a line drawing of the aftermath – firemen blithely sweeping the fallout off the streets with brooms and a hose. Contaminated earth was to be scraped up and placed a "safe” 100 feet from occupied areas.
The cover of Life magazine from Sept. 15, 1961 featured an article on “How You Can Survive Fallout.” Inside was a letter to the public from President Kennedy exhorting us to “read and consider seriously the contents . . . The ability to survive coupled with the will to do so . . . are essential to our country.”
Following the article, the reader finds a disturbingly hilarious layout of illustrations of homemade shelters. Sissy is curling her hair in a long, buried metal tube lined with cots and canned goods. Dad’s puffing a cigarette contentedly, and families are safe within the steel embryos of liberty.
Taken as a whole, this cheerful load of propaganda stands as a monument to the human capacity for slippery thinking. We were all ready to pack it in at any time.

The evacuation map prepared by the Denver Civil Defense office displays a simple but eloquent plan. The map shows the main streets marked with big arrows leading out of the city in every possible direction. Ironically, the closest major road out of Arvada led directly past the prime Soviet target – Rocky Flats.
Cold War secrecy kept us from the knowledge that mishaps and mismanagement were blighting Rocky Flats’ safety record, until the massive plutonium fire of May 11, 1969. Soon, controversy mounted and activists began to gather.
In our neighborhood, those people and their information were either ignored or scorned. Radioactive waste was migrating downwind and downstream straight for us, as Jefferson County Health Department director Dr. Carl Johnson discovered in the late 1970s. Yet even these findings, the protesters, and films such as the 1983 documentary “Dark Circle” failed to provoke our thoughts or stir us to action. We joined no marches, signed no petitions.
Over the years, the bomb rooms on our street filled up with the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life – empty cardboard boxes, Christmas decorations, knickknacks, toys, slabs of old 78-rpm records. Kids had sleepovers in the shelters, built castles and rockets out of boxes, laid awake listening to the wind howling in at the mouth of the room’s ventilation pipes. We later smuggled forbidden cigarettes in there, too, but I could never cajole a girlfriend inside for an angst-ridden teen make-out session. It was just too cold and creepy in there.
In 1989, an FBI investigation led to a halt in weapons production at Rocky Flats. A long grand-jury investigation into criminal activity and misconduct at the plant culminated in the sealing of the jury’s findings by the presiding judge, who mandated an $18.5 million settlement with Rockwell International, the plant’s operator at the time.
Today, those contaminated areas of land around and inside the former grounds of the plant have been (supposedly) scraped, scrubbed and plumbed. Traces of plutonium, carbon tetrachloride, beryllium, and tritium may remain. The Environmental Protection Agency certified the site’s cleanup on June 13, 2007. The plans are still in effect for the area to be converted into a wildlife refuge.
If we had known how dire out peril once was, as some did, would inertia and a love of the land we found ourselves on still have prevented us from moving away or raising a fuss? At the time, we were preoccupied, riding out the honey-tinged, swollen, lethargic ‘70s.
The economy declined, and it seemed that no one could maintain that suburban dream life any more. The nuclear threat fell away in our minds as the nuclear families around us exploded and split. We kids went through our teen tragedies, Mom and Dad got divorced, everyone moved on.
For a while, we were the chosen few, those who would be saved. But the shelters couldn’t save the American family from the contamination of change.

APROPOS OF NOTHING: COMEDY @ 7800 FEET

Winter in Colorado's San Juan Mountains is a magical time. The jagged snow-clad peaks look down upon picturesque villages clad in white and evergreen.
From Memorial Day through Labor Day, the town is choked with tourists. The couple-hundred families that call it home own and/or manage the hotels and motels, jeep rental outfits, gift shops, candy kitchens and restaurants. It’s like a Brigadoon that takes American Express.
When the tourists leave, the storms come and shut down the roads . . .and insanity starts to leak out of the locals.
I thought about this one December night as I dashed down Ouray’s Main Street, pursued by a bar-full of angry, drunken patrons intent on killing me.
I had moved to that hamlet for the express purpose of getting on the ground floor of a career in radio. I was already a fledgling comic, but I figured I could make the trek back to Denver when I needed to, for gigs (this led to many harrowing 300-mile commutes in the dead of winter).
Seven months after I started, the station went under. Abruptly. So abruptly that I was stopped halfway up the steep staircase I ascended to start my shift and sent home.
Thanks to friends, I was soon waiting tables and tending bar at places that all seem to have hosted John Wayne while he was filming “True Grit.”
Meanwhile, the comedy boom of the ‘80s was rolling along so forcefully that even the lamest local shithole was staging a ha-ha night. The owner would wire a 100-watt bulb inside a punched-out coffee can, point it at a stack of pallets in the corner, buy a Mr. Microphone and watch the proceeds rrrrrrrroll in!
So some of my friends from the comedy circuit started coming through town, to better and worse effect (hint: smut worked well). All along, my townie friends would encourage me to join them.
I held back. Scared? Hell, yes. Scared that I would bomb so utterly that I would have to move. A small town is as devoid of cover as the Kansas prairie.
At last, one winter I was so broke that I consented to inaugurate another comedy night at a new bar we’ll call the Purple Weasel. The unscrupulous owner promised me $50 cash to emcee and open the night for another, vastly more renowned comic whose name I’d never heard of. We’ll call him Jeff.
Try as I might to find out more about the headliner, I couldn’t. I called all the clubs in Denver; no one had heard of him. I shrugged and went back to combing through my pile of tried-and-true dick jokes to come up with the best 20 minutes of material I could muster.
The night was at hand. I paced nervously in the back of the room as everyone I knew, and all the tourists in town, crowded into the joint. Even though I was used to sucking down Camels at altitude, I was having trouble breathing. Then the owner introduced me to the headliner.
Jeff was a sawed-off, beer-bellied, rat-tailed plumber from Nucla (later home of the infamous Top Dog World Championship Prairie Dog Shoot). Jeff had done a couple of new-talent nights here and there. Jeff was drunk. Jeff was high. Jeff had brought two dozen of his closest friends, and they had all chosen to sit together down front.
I gamely started off, moving slowly but surely into a position of command with the crowd. By the time I wound up my set, I had the audience with me.
Beyond the light, silhouetted against the backlit glow of bottles behind the bar, I could Jeff’s profile as he continued to down shots. Coke, I thought, he’s gotta be doing coke – it’s the only way he’s still standing.
I introduced him, and Jeff lurched unsteadily to the mic stand.
Now, most folks don’t mind some dirty jokes in a comedy routine – the genre is supposed to be transgressive. However, what followed was the longest string of incoherent schoolyard-level sex jokes ever told.
The women left first, after about five minutes. Then Jeff segued into his race-oriented material.
Now, don’t get me wrong – the mountain town is a haven of racism, misogyny, and all-around intolerance. Still, there are limits, and Jeff plowed through them like Kowalski in “Vanishing Point.”
Unfortunately, that night, for one of the few times in my experience, a black person was in town. And there he sat. Listening to this spew. I saw him blanch, stiffen as Jeff went on and on. Finally, one of Jeff’s friends leaned forward and whispered to him.
“What?” he gurgled, and swung around to his right. “There’s a nigger here? Oop. I’m sorry,” he concluded, and nimbly segued back into the little-boy-goes-to-a-whorehouse tales.
The black man left. With him went the rest of the locals, even the most hardened ranch hands. Jeff had been on for 20 minutes; he had 40 to go. The owner sidled up to me.
“What do you know about getting a guy off stage?” he whispered.
I thought for a second.
“Give me my money now,” I demanded.
“Can’t I write you a check tomorrow?” he whined.
“NOW,” I said, asserting myself as I so rarely did.
He knocked open the till and peeled the bills out of the drawer, handed them over to me. I marched to the stage.
I hit Jeff in the chest with the palm of my hand, pulling the mic out of his hand as he went down.
“Am I done?” he sang out as he hit the floor. I turned to the crowd.
“Thanks, Jeff! Jeff, ladies and gentlemen!” I crowed.
Then I made my final mistake of the night. I decided to woo the crowd back with some more humor. My addled attempt to be professional overlooked one vital fact: the only people left in the bar were friends of Jeff’s.
The mumbled threats began. “We’re gonna kill you, faggot!” a voice cried. The rest of the gang rumbled their approval.
“Ha-ha-ha!” I ad-libbed/stuttered.
“Yeah, we’re gonna fuck you up, motherfucker!” another voice sang out. “You’re dead!”
I wrapped it up, dropped the mic to the floor, and strode up the improvised aisle among them, through them, past them, then past the bar, the toilets, out the back door and into the frigid night.
I started jogging up the alley so I could cut over and make it to the bar where my friends were waiting . . . to congratulate me. Just as I emerged under the harsh street light, I glanced downhill half a block.
There were Jeff’s friends, milling up toward their cars and straight at me.
“THERE HE IS! GET HIM!”
It helped that I was acclimatized and familiar with the territory. I cut through yards, doubled back, happy only to feel the 50 bucks in my left front pants pocket. Dammit, if they dismembered me, at least I got paid.
For dramatic purposes, I would like to report that they killed me. However, the truth is that, after a few blocks, I shook them, and then hid out in the courthouse stairwell for a half-hour or so until I was sure they were gone. then I tiptoed gingerly to safety.
Still, I keep that memory as a badge of courage. Not only have audiences heckled me – once, one damn near killed me.