Author: David Sterry Page 17 of 19
David Henry Sterry is the author of 16 books, a performer, muckraker, educator, book editor, activist, and book doctor. His first memoir, Chicken, was an international bestseller, and has been translated into 10 languages. “As laconic as Dashiell Hammett, as viscerally hallucinogenic as Hunter S Thompson. Sex, violence, drugs, love, hate, and great writing, what more could you ask for?” – The Irish Times.
STEROIDS
Everybody’s screaming about steroids. Steroids are bad! Steroids are horrible. Steroids are a curse. We spend all this time and money debating and policying and testing. I say we’ve got it all wrong. We should embrace steroids. Steroids are the future. It’s evolution. Its survival of the fittest, not the most drug-free. You think when the cave men were running from the saber-toothed tiger they had time to get drug tested. Hell no! Do you know why? Cuz they’d be dead that’s why. Look science is what separates us from the beast. That and porn on the internet. And weapons of mass destruction. You don’t see NASCAR doin’ cart and buggy races. Nobody wants a basketball game where short white guys shoot two handed set shots. Nobody wants to see skinny little dudes hit fly balls to the warning track. We don’t want slower 100 yard dashes. When I see a linebacker hunting down a flanker comin’ over the middle, I wanna see him take the guy’s head off, snap him in two, leave him a twisted wreck while he roars over the fallen warrior like a gladiator screaming triumphantly over a dead Christian.
I say we have two games. One for steroided athletes. The other for Naturals, we’ll call them. Let the roideds get as big as they want. Breed them so every generation gets bigger faster and stronger. Maybe if Marion Jones and Barry Bonds mated when they were chock full of human growth hormones they could produce and evolutionary marvel, a new missing link that takes us as a species to the next level. I mean come on. How cool would it be to see a baseball hit a thousand feet, a 100 meter dash in five seconds a golfer drive a drive on a 550 yard par five, the Tour de France winner racing the whole course without ever once stopping.
New ideas are scary. The all laughed at Christopher Columbus said the world was round. They laughed at Al Gore when he invented the internet. But who’s laughing now.
You can’t fight evolution. If you don’t believe me, go ask a dinosaur.
I say, instead of moaning and groaning about steroids, let’s make them our friend. If you wanna be a Natural, be a Natural, but if you don’t mean your reproductive organs shrivel and breaking out in acne and decreasing your life expectancy I say that’s your right. I for one relish the chance to see a 650lb shortstop hitting a 200 mph fastball outta the Grand Canyon.
I saw the new Coen brothers movie. No country for old fuckers. It’s a beautiful movie. I love the way they inhabit different parts of America. Fargo. Depression era deep South. Arizona. And in this one, they really capture the desert, the colors and the heat and the language and the moral code, the fabric of life in this corner of the world. And at this point, Tommy Lee Jones face is like a piece of incredible scenery. It’s like the craggy rocks with all their creases and crevices in the sunbaked tableau of the West. He just seems so authentic to that part of the world. And javier bardim is unfuckingbelievable. For my money, not that I’m putting any on the line here, but if I were, that is the performance of the year thus far. And his chosen weapon of destruction is so unique and beautiful and poetically violent. Air. Josh Brolin, the guy who finds the money, was also quite great. As was his girlfriend/wife, Kelly McDonald, from Trainspotting and gosford Park. As usual the brothers Coen got superb performances out of every one. It was gorgeous to look at, it was suspenseful, the soundtrack was excellent, a fantastic meditation on good and evil, chance and fate, wisdom and bravery, it was such fun to be securely in the hands of masters. That being said, I felt let down by the end of the film. Actually, let down is a gross understatement. One of my pet peeves is the unsatisfying ending. I hate it. It leaves such a toxic taste in my mouth. When I say satisfying ending, let me be clear, I don’t mean it has to be happy, that everything has to work out peachy and keen. But that can be just as unsatisfying, when its false. In Thelma and Louise for example, they fly off the cliff to their deaths together. But it’s so satisfying. It all makes such beautiful sense. And it’s so lovely and yes, I’m going to use the word again, poetic. But the freres coen, imho, left out a couple of crucial scenes. After following this guy who finds the money through the whole movie, I am rooting for him to escape evil. They have proven to me that he is a worthy hero to follow. A hero full of flaws, which you want your heroes to be, but a scrappy resourceful hero. The whole reason he got into trouble in the first place was that he tried to bring water to the shot-to-shit dying man. An act of kindness and charity. What Jesus would have done. So I have followed him throughout the whole story, but when it gets to the ultimate moment, the climax, the payoff, that scene is missing from this movie. I hated that. Same thing when Tommy Lee Jones walks into the room and nothing happens. It rankled me. I think it’s bad storytelling. I hate it when people try to tell people how to make their books or movies or art. But I also hate it when a storyteller leaves out the climax of their stories. I want to see the movie again, to determine whether I will feel as angry and unsatisfied, so like a lover who is brought to the brink of climax and then shut down cold, rode hard and put up wet, left with artistic blue balls. But having seen it once, that’s my opinion from the clear blue sky and the deep blue sea, that’s my two cents worth. And with inflation, I owe you one.
Olive has really discovered how to smile, and apparently she enjoys doing it very much.
She had her first Thanksgiving at her grandfather’s birthday party. Everyone was very nice to her. She had a very good time.
At one point on the trip back in the car, she woke up and went absolutely berserk, a death rattle of the scream that shrieks from the depths of her up her lungs shoots through her throat rattles off the top of her skull and careens out horrifically.
In a small enclosed spaces like a car it makes you feel like plucking your eyes out.
Arielle wanted to stop the car and comfort her.
I said, just let her scream for a minute and see what happens. It’s okay to be furious at the world. It’s a very natural reaction to the human condition. Let’s see if she can figure out how to calm herself down.
Sure enough about three minutes later she was asleep, and slept the whole rest of the trip.
Being responsible for another human being’s existence makes for a series of seemingly life altering decisions every day.
It’s not dull.
And when she smiles in my face it’s like the universe is a rose opening just for me.
I Hate My Boss
I’m losing my mind. I haven’t quite lost all of it yet, but I’m close. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I’ve lost interest in sex. I’m always exhausted. I’ve lost so much weight. I look in the mirror and I see a ragged skeleton starring back at me. And my mind races down these tracks: This is not who I want to be! This is not the life I want! Why am I letting this man destroy me? Everyone else in the office just seems to go about their business. They talk about their wives, the latest sporting events and fashions. And he seems to have no effect on them. He’s just their weird obsessive abusive pain-in-the-ass boss. But every time I see him my bile boils and my colon twitches and my jaw clenches and I get damp under my arms and I feel this almost uncontrollable violence springing up in me, wrapping blackness all around me, these sick twisted images appear in my mind like a horror film director has hijacked it, I see myself jamming that PDA right down his throat until he chokes on it; bashing his fat smug mug in with his precious laptop; cutting the break cable on his gas guzzling bourgeois breeder SUV. I have planned his death so many times. And yet I am too much of a coward to pull the trigger and that makes me loathe myself all the more. I try to go about my business like everybody else, to be normal. But every little thing he does crawls beneath my skin like an insect and pumps me full of venom, releasing into my bloodstream and infecting my fevered brain. When he starts talking about his fake liberal politics, always complaining about Bush and the war and the environment, I have to resist the urge to puke all over his suit. And he’s always going on and on about how he hates the Man, when the rich and brutal irony is that he IS the Man. And I happen to know he didn’t even VOTE in the last election, because he made everybody work all day that day so that nobody could vote. And that terrible toxic temper. Mean for the sake of mean. Nasty for the sake of nasty. Cruel for the sake of cruel. Last week I accidentally spilled tea on his desk and he went mental, I could see it in his eyes, this evil insanity, he went totally berserk, screaming and yelling and calling me an idiot and a moron and implying that I was inferior in every way to him, as well as being a pedophile and a homosexual. O what a rat bastard that paunchy two-faced cheapskate tightwad bitch is. In front of other people, he’s always telling me what a great job I’m doing and how I’m gonna get a raise, I’m gonna get more vacation time, a better health plan, but it’s all complete bullshit, and as soon as we’re behind closed doors he berates me and tells me what a loser I am, how without him I would be nowhere, that I am a complete waste of space. And after awhile, of course, you start to believe it. And he’s always making me work nights and weekends, ridiculous stupid hours, all nighters, so I’m walking around sleep deprived and hallucinating, while he stands behind me cracking his whip across my back, until I feel flayed and bloody. And he thinks he’s so funny, always making those stupid lame jokes, always expecting me to laugh my ass off at’em. Seriously, if I don’t laugh he’ll actually say, “Didn’t you think that was funny?” What am I gonna say? “No, it wasn’t funny, you’re about as funny as a nun on crutches carrying a crippled orphan.” I should quit. I’ve rehearsed my speech so many times, this marvelous rant in front of everyone, in which I expose him once and for all to be the incarnation of arrogant hypocritical incompetence that he is. But do I? No. Why? I have pondered this question over and over because if I don’t do something this is going to kill me. Or I’m going to kill him. And here’s the sad ridiculous and truly pathetic thing: I’m self-employed.
Well, we did it.We put all of our stuff into boxes, hired burly man to put them in a giant truck, stuffed our most valuable (mismatched socks, my mother’s ashes) stuff into our Rav 4 and waved goodbye to our life in San Rafael California, where the sun shines all the time, and the deer are so friendly that we frequently found them rummaging through our refrigerator when they had the munchies.Packing, for me, after several months of doing it, was a source of almost unspeakable horror.the more I packed, and more than was to pack, one pile would disappear and 2 more would rear their heads.It was like a dream you have where you’re running as hard as you can, but you’re not getting any closer to the house where those men are molesting your girlfriend, or whatever particular thing you run towards in your dreams.
Several times I just broke down completely, weeping like a hurricane as I tried to decide whether to throw away some postcard my mother sent me 35 years ago, or some fab picture of some babe I boffed in 1979.All the fevered letters, the sweet notes, passionate poems, the broken hearts on both sides of the Highway of Love.It just plumb wore me out sifting through all the shit of my life and figure out the difference between junk and my stuff, what was trash and what was treasure.And of course I turned 50 on June 2.Half a century.If I live to be a hundred it’s already half over.And of course we were writing two books under a ridiculously preposterous deadline.And of course my lovely and talented wife was pregnant.All evidence points toward the fact that it is my child dancing in her womb, only time will tell.So there’s that.
But the results of all these churning tributaries of life feeding into one giant waterfall was that I lost part of my mind, and I’m just now getting it back.My hands have been aching.Ever since the move.While they were sore before that, but they really started aching during the move.A combination of deep sharp pain, slow strangulating pain.Throbbing burning pain, and the psychological pain that constant pain inflicts.The slightest difficulty became a source of intense irritation which flamed into rage so quickly it gave me the bends.Tracking down and talking to computer technicians, phone company lackeys, insurance brokers, tax record officials, it was all just beyond me.
Luckily, I had a lot of help, mostly from my lovely and talented wife, who as I said was pregnant, and continues to be so.Also, Judy, my moms widow, she packed about 17,000 boxes, all by herself.She’s from Minnesota, so she has that good Midwestern work ethic, and she was one box-packing fool.She was like a cartoon character, you stand there and all watching her arms and hands whirring all-around, and suddenly another box was packed and she was taping it shut, easy peasy, Bob’s your uncle.And mind you, I started collecting boxes and packing several months before the move.So it’s not like I was unprepared.
But the more I packed, the more my mental health deteriorated, until finally I was blinded by the light, and suddenly a migraine had somehow slithered like a computer virus into the mainframe of my brain.Apparently when you have a migraine it’s basically just everything tightening up and compressing.It feels like my head is in a giant vise being tightened by a circus strongman with an anger management problem.Then I start to see these lights in the corner of my eyes, only when you look right at them, they go away, so you’re not really sure if you’re actually seeing the lights, or if it’s just some floater that you see in the corner of your eye sometimes.But then I get this kind of disorientated, off kilter, askew feeling.It’s not so overpowering that you can’t carry on a conversation or brush your teeth or pack a box, but there’s definitely something wrong.Then I really really really see the lights in the corners of my eyes, and that’s when I know I’ve arrived in Migraine City, where excruciating agony awaits everyone who steps off that train.It used to be at this point in the migraine, I would get a knee buckling, chest heaving, jaw tightening pain started in the middle of my brain and worked its way out seismically.
However, since I started working with Dr. Marty Rossman, and his amazing creative visualization techniques, I am able to get through the whole thing now with basically no pain at all.Here’s what I’d do.I get myself in a cool very dark place, somewhere soft I can lay down and be very peaceful.I imagine a very happy moment from my past: a beach in Hawaii where wild horses cavorted on a hill 200 yards away, and the warm warm ocean broke in gentle waves.In.Out.In.Out.And I time the waves with my breath.In.Out.In.Out.Then starting at the soles of my feet, I breathe cool blue soothing light into my body, moving up little by little, toes, feet, ankles, calves, knees, and usually by the time I get to my poor wracked brain, I am asleep, and usually I sleep for a couple of hours.When I wake up and I’m groggy and it’s hard for me to put words together, and I’m logey, there’s tapioca pudding where sharp thoughts should be.So that’s what packing reduced me to: a useless, incoherent, blithering idiot.But somehow I got by with a little help from my friends.Then all I had to do was drive across the United States of America.With my lovely and talented wife getting more pregnant by the day, furiously trying to finish writing these books, and wrap our minds around the fact that very very very very soon we were going to be new homeowners, new parents, and new New Jersey-ites.
America is huge.And tilted.All the nuts and flakes eventually roll to California.And what you realize as soon as you leave California, is that you were one of the nuts and flakes.When you get into Nevada, and Wyoming, it’s almost incomprehensible how much land there is no one living there.Land as far as the eye can see.And then some.We drove and we drove and we drove.Then we drove and we drove and we drove.It was actually really fun to just get to talk with each other, without the phone always ringing, and some emergency or other to have to face down.And it was an excellent way to write a book.I would drive, and my lovely and talented wife would type with the laptop in, of all places, her lap. I think our child is either going to be madly in love with books, or will hate them with a fiery passion.
Cheyenne, Wyoming is not nearly as exciting as you think it would be.Basically it seems like a rundown, time-worn western town where everyone seems a little too anxious to talk to someone who’s not from there.We went into a pawn shop and the guy behind the counter with more nose hairs than teeth roped us into a conversation that was literally about the weather.And he would not let us go.We tried to extricate ourselves over and over again, to no avail.He did everything but physically restrain us from leaving his store.It took some classic misdirection involving the unborn within my lovely and talented wife’s belly to get us the hell out of there.But you can get a really good steak in Cheyenne, Wyoming.Omaha is also a very good town for getting a steak.We were going to get married on the trip across the country.Mostly for insurance purposes.Seriously.That’s what we’ve come to as a culture.Got to get married so you can get health insurance.Plus we thought it would be fun to get married while my lovely and talented wife looked so gosh darn pregnant.So we asked about getting married in Salt Lake City.We figured, it must be very easy to get married there, since men historically had so many wives in Salt Lake City.No, turns out it’s actually quite difficult to get married in Salt Lake City.Our waiter said he thought it was because they were trying to discourage polygamy.We had a very nice gay Mormon waiter in Salt Lake City.And I wondered what it must be like to be a gay Mormon in Salt Lake City.And I thought about Matthew Shepard and how those homophobes crucified him.
The open spaces of the planes and prairies are very peaceful and restful.The people we saw there seemed very well fed and friendlier, more interested in other people than folks on either coast.Everyone wanted to know when the baby was due, if it was a boy or girl, what name we picked out.Miles and miles and miles of rows and rows and rows of corn and beans and wheat.There’s so much food and so much space, and you wonder, How is anyone hungry?How is it that people don’t have a place to live?
Chicago is a very cool town.There’s all this amazing stuff going on, blues festivals and world-class theater and food that makes you happy to be alive.We treated ourselves in Chicago, took a day off, and did some chillin.We decided to go to the Ritz, and have their brunch.We had done that in Atlanta when we were on our book tour, and it was so decadent and disgusting and fun.In Atlanta there were three rooms with stations of food in them: meats of every kind and breads of every kind and salads of every kind and the even had a chocolate fountain.A chocolate fountain!Nothing says fun to me like a chocolate fountain.So we walked in about two o’clock to the Chicago Ritz, pregnant and roadburned.They did have a lot of stuff and the stuff was good, don’t get me wrong.But they only had a few kinds of bread, a few kinds of meat, maybe a quarter of the stuff that was in the Atlanta Ritz: certainly no chocolate fountain. We were sitting next to two Uber Alpha males.They were in their late 40s even on a Sunday they were in their killer suits, and tasselly shoes. I always feel like scruffy lad next one of these Alpha Males. Like they are Men.And I am a boy.So the one guy turns to the other and says, “I don’t want to hear about how your kids are sick, or your wife has cancer, or your car needs new tires, I don’t give a shit.You either put up the numbers or you don’t.If you have the numbers, everything else works itself out.If you don’t have the numbers, I don’t want to hear any of your bullshit.”
Either I forgot how disgusting, despicable, and deplorable New York City is, or I’ve completely changed since I moved in away from here in 1993.Or New York City has changed since then.Because it really sucks now.It’s abusively loud, it’s ridiculously expensive, would it is becoming one huge super Mall, where they’re trying to drive out all artists, and the artisans, and regular people who aren’t billionaires.Plus, it smells like sour kiss and old man’s balls.Don’t ask how I know what old man balls smell like, trust me you don’t want to know.Here are some of the highlights from my first week in New York City.
·I got two moving violations for ridiculous shift I didn’t even do
·I got three parking tickets
·the window of my car was smashed in, and all the license and registration material was stolen, clearly an attempt to steal my identity
·my wallet with my drivers license is, the keys to my motorcycle, and hundreds of dollars was stolen
·a cab driver tried to run me over while I was rollerskating on 6th Ave
And it was so hot and humid and muggy and some stinky.I really began to think that it was all a big mistake, I was yearning for California so bad to hurt.We moved from apartment to apartment, staying with our kind friends, trying not to wear out are welcome.We were urban Bedouins.Which is not easy when, as a couple, you are getting more pregnant every day.We did finally finish our books though.Except for a few dribs and drabs, Be Artists In the Me, and The Writer In Me are done and dusted, put to bed.Plus we had a really fun party, where people gave us a lot of stuff for the new baby.Much of which I could not readily identify.It was really great to see people I hadn’t seen in so long.And we went to see a show called Spring A weakening.It’s really a great piece of work.It’s all about repressed sexuality and adolescents.Something which I have been studying, formally and informally for many years, and in fact the subject of my next book, which will be a ghost story about a Shaker baby skeleton aerie in a wall at a boarding school.John Gallagher Jr., who won a Tony for his work in the show, was unfucking believable, just electric.And we saw a fantastic movie called Once, and evolution in the musical, Irish, incredibly real, simple and moving.And I got to play a lot of soccer, with people from all over the world.So that was cool.
We took control of our house on August 1.The people we bought it from had lived here for 50 years.And they have done basically nothing to improve the house for 49 of those years.The electricity was installed by Thomas Alva Edison.The entire basement was constructed from asbestos.So on August 2, asbestosis removers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, architects, interior designers and decorators, colorists, general contractors, carpenters, and tradesmen of every ilk swarmed through our new home, painting, plumbing, electricing, madly removing asbestos.And then it was a crazy — toward the finish line: getting everything done before our stuff arrived in and/or the baby did.There was much sanding of many floors, paint was ordered and applied to walls, sinks were bought and installed, electrical boxes mounted on the walls, telephone and cable hard wired into this beautiful old house.It really looked for a moment what our stuff is going to arrive before the stain on the floors was dry.I kept having this image in my head of the movers tromping in with our stuff, and traipsing staying throughout every square inch of our house.But somehow, miraculously, almost everything was done by the time our stuff was due to arrive on Monday morning at 8:30 a.m..By about noon on Monday, we looked at each other and had the same thought.Where are the movers with our stuff?Because they certainly weren’t here at our house.So we called up the moving company.Turns out the driver was in Maryland, or Memphis, or Minneapolis.I can’t remember, someplace that started with an M. but they certainly weren’t in Montclair were our house was.And is.It was definitely a case of movus interruptus.So we had to do it all over again the next day.But this time, our stuff came.It was amazing how much of it just seemed like junk to me.I would open a box and think, Oh my God!Did I actually pay to have this moved?What is this?Is this mine?Oh my God!Two large movers, and one short Hispanic man bugged all of our stuff from the truck into the house.After about an hour, but the short Hispanic man started grumbling in Spanish, disgruntled and dismayed.As he walked up the narrow, steep stairs with another heavy boxes, he kept moaning No Mas.This became his nickname around our house: No Mas.It took them eight hours to haul all of our shit into our house, but finally it was done.We were in.Hallelujah!
Many said we were insane to try and move across country while Arielle was pregnant.Into a house that was basically in shambles.But we did it.And we are both very very happy in our new home.And the baby is due today.
After having been through this ordeal, I do have one piece of advice.If anyone out there is thinking of moving:
JUST SAY NO!!!
