It's April, it's the Red Sox, and I couldn't care less. Oh happy day.

I don’t care. Schilling may be OK in a month or so; defying gravity, age, and karma (stumping for Bush), or he may finally succumb to the aforementioned assailants; his Thomas Nast cartoon-like physique finally giving way to the weighty forces that helped bloody his infamous ankle. I don’t care.
Bronson Arroyo may turn into a solid 2-3 guy, or he may continue to resemble an extra in an after-school special about suburban gang-violence (in the credits he would be follower #2 or #3.) I don’t care.
David Wells? The man whose name comes up first as a point of retort any time I am called on to attempt to dispel the myth that ballplayers are fat and lazy and that baseball is the least athletically challenging of the major sports? I don’t care. Really, I don’t.
I don’t care because of what happened last October.
I am 34 years old. I became a Red Sox fan some 27 springs ago, when my family moved to Massachusetts from Pennsylvania. Luckily, I was at just the right age where I was only beginning to appreciate the necessity of regionalistic pride, so I really didn’t have any Pirates or Phillies to leave behind.
I love the Red Sox like I love my asshole uncle who can play the shit out of the piano and who is the closest thing to god I hope to ever know; this assessment based solely on a smile that can make a heart want to live a thousand years.
I love the Sox because they have an awful history of race relations; a flaw only endearing in light of it’s stature (huge) and that it adds to the great irony of the state’s strange duality of being far and away the country’s foremost area of higher education, as well as it’s most notoriously underhanded and backwards civil rights foot-dragger, and I want to be around as this ongoing tragedy is righted. I love the Sox for jerks like Ted Williams being eventually loved, and jerk-offs like Dan Shaughnessey and Bob Ryan being simultaneously hated and revered. I love the Sox for Fenway, where my 134 pound frame is squeezed tightly into my lousy, $72 seat. I love the Sox because they always, always try. I love them because they epitomize baseball and really all of organized sport.
Sport asks that no one individual be considered greater than the sport itself. Like selflessness in life requires that the self never be considered as important as the life it is living, baseball, above all other sports, will always loom larger than any one player, because of its history, its soul, and its very nature as a delicately perfect combination of violence, grace and strategy. Teddy was big, but never bigger than the Sox. Clemens was big, but never bigger than the Sox (even when he got super-fat). Yaz was a prince for a few years there, but the Sox were always the king. And as great as the Sox are, they were never, and are never, considered to be bigger than baseball.
With their seemingly perpetually grossly-imbalanced-but-working combinations of offense, speed, defense and pitching, the Red Sox epitomize baseball’s balance in a beautifully unpretty way. They are like a Zen fable about a drunk monk with a house on his head who is teetering on the head of a pin. He always falls hard, but he stays on that head for way longer than he should, by any reasonable explanation, be able to. Plus, he always comes back for more.
Each year I wade into the season with great denial. I forget about what happened last year, whether it was a 3rd place finish in the division that was actually 4th until the last week of the season only because the other, more reasonable teams rested their starters while the Sox used the ‘pen and the DH like it was the ALCS, or whether it was the champagne uncorked as a not-so-wild pitch got away from Gedman and Buckner somehow got blamed for the commencing tragicomedy. I forget it happened and act as if the Sox are an expansion franchise that just happens to have gotten the marketing just right to give them that glow of a 100 year old franchise.
Of course, I have trepidation. I’ve seen too many GM’s let go of too many good players and get Matt Youngs or even less (if that’s possible) in return. I’ve seen too many decent Aprils turn into pretty bad Mays and absolutely over-the-fucking-top horrific Junes.
Hate the Yankees? That’s victim bullshit. I love baseball too much to hate the Yankees. Sure I hate individual Yankees, their owner most notably (I would hate Miles Davis if he ever wore a white turtleneck with a blazer.) I have hated Jeter since the day I saw him, the fact that he dated Mariah Carey only compounded this. I have hated A-rod for some time as well, and his sissy-swipe at Arroyo only helped to magnify my feelings (though again, A-rod’s Hollywood appeal and Arroyo’s cornrows only made for even juicier after-school special plotlines.)
And the ‘Yankees Suck’ chants? Well just like Schilling must exhibit a flaw (but must it be so glaring?) in supporting Bush and a truly wacko Christian agenda, it is somehow appropriate that an otherwise loyal, intelligent fanbase collectively and repeatedly opines upon viewing the history of a franchise that has won has won more championships than the Celtics, the Bruins, the Patriots, and the Red Sox combined, that said franchise quite plainly ‘sucks.’ Such flaws make for great writing and boy do they sell a story (just ask Shaughnessey. Do you think he would be sitting on such a sizeable pile of Sox-spawned earnings were he to be a scribe in, say, Montreal?)
But here we are, it is April (nearly) and the Sox enter the season as kings. I don’t care now, I won’t care next year, in fact I can’t imagine anything short of yet another republican presidency will be able to wipe this stupid smile off my face.
I get to watch this season of my favorite sport not as a Sox fan, but as a baseball fan; one in love with the game with a heart forever unbroken.

And so now, as the most conflicted, tortured organization that this big, weird sport has ever seen heads into the next 162 as champions, I don’t care. Not a lick.

Blog to check out

Like I even know what I'm talking about. Anyway, the fellow who got me into this mess (and what a fun mess it is) can be found here, where the contents of his rich, fertile brainpan continue to amaze, astound and enrich all those around (and I'm not saying that just because I'm easily amazed, astounded and enriched, with Thiamine no less.)
htttp://seaweeder.blogspot.com
Rock on.

Pud

Here is a story of a 3-legged dog, a technically illegitemate little girl, and the man-slut, beloved grandfather responsible for me and many stateside ancestors before (and after?) me greeting the day with an understated "howya'doin? instead of a formal "ola."

The Family Pud
By Joe Navas

When my father was a boy, he had a three-legged dog named “Pud.”
Pud was missing his left, front limb, having lost the appendage in what the old man vaguely - and I always felt somehow inappropriately - referred to as “a pretty funny badminton accident.”
My father had only recently arrived in the United States and having a pet like this afforded him even more notoriety in the small, rural Pennsylvania town he and his Spanish family had chosen as a new home.
As if Pud’s mere presence wasn’t enough to arouse the curiosity of the locals, he made sure he was definitely noticed by siring not one, but two litters of pups within a matter of months. The country bitches had no idea what hit them.
My father, who told this story often, seemed quite proud of Pud’s sense of immediacy and focus. It was as if Pud was not only somehow representative of my father’s family’s strong Spanish pride, but was in fact related to them; like some long lost three-limbed cousin who was so full of testosterone, as evidenced by his outrageously thick coat of body hair, that he totally lacked any sense of self control and, as he was Spanish, was considered all the more sexy for it.
My grandfather, who I never met, lived a - according to my father - strange, illustrious and complicated life filled with sex and debauchery, not unlike Pud.
He died quite young, at 44 in fact. The family had always uniformly agreed that he was felled by lung cancer. However, presented with even a brief summary of the man’s life one would easily conclude that it was entirely more likely that the true cause of his early departure was the bug that conquered the Roman Empire rather than the illness which would strike down the Marlboro Man.
Regardless, before leaving this planet for the Great Orgy in the Sky, he had the foresight to bring the whole brood to the U.S., having had a very influential friend pull a few strings in order to make sure the entire Navas brood was able to come over as one unit.
Through World War I and into the 1920’s, my grandfather was the linguist to the King
of Spain. He had mastered the major European languages at an early age and then went on to learn a number of Arabic and Turkish dialects. These tools made him a very valuable asset to a kingdom that dealt with equal frequency with the rest of Europe as with the nations of Northern Africa and the Middle East.
According to family legend, at each stop on his educational trail he planted a seed, but not necessarily in the tradition of Johnny Appleseed, really more like Pud.
Unfortunately, due to politics, politics, politics, as my grandfather’s haughty reputation began to grow as swiftly and unstoppably as a lesion on the fatty cerebellum of a gigolo linguist, his value to the kingdom as a connective commodity decreased in kind.
His removal from the governmental hierarchy seemed imminent, and so he began to consider a proposition he had received from one Thomas Alva Edison, a well-established American inventor who, some years earlier, had contacted him with a plan to produce the very first instructional language recording.
My grandfather decided to take Edison up on the offer, as he knew that getting the whole family of three boys, three girls, a wife, and an amputee dog with unstoppable sperm across the Atlantic in one fell swoop was going to take a little finagling, since even back then in the nation’s formative years, U.S. Immigration was already beginning to establish and hone it’s policy of avoiding extending too open an invitation to any person burdened with the misfortune of being brown.
To make matters worse, one of my Dad’s sisters was in fact his half-sister, and in an abstract but genealogically sound way, also his aunt.
My grandfather had somehow managed to impregnate his wife and his wife’s mother within a six month period. You can imagine how complicated birthday parties were.
Until they learned the basics of human reproduction, the two half-sisters thought they were just strangely spaced twins. This could have remained little more than a deeply scarring family secret were it not for the fact that this genealogical blip could end up posing a serious threat to the smoothness of the tribe’s move.
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization policy required proof of legitimacy regarding all children coming in., so a lie of some sort would have to be concocted in order to get everyone through Ellis Island together.
The scheme ended up being that the younger of the two girls, Olivia, the one whose
Mother her sisters and brothers called “Grandma,” would become a cousin, orphaned by the tragic death of both of her parents in, not quite a badminton accident, but by an incident that indeed had a story, the telling of which some 75 years later would become considerably more ridiculous and unbelievable: the sinking of the Titanic.
What made this fabrication stranger yet was the simple fact that the ocean liner in question had gone down some 11 years prior, and since my father’s sister was only eight years old (and small even for that) at the time of this great migration, she would, in addition to pretending she was really only a peripheral character in the family order, have to assume the posture and disposition of a child with a terrible, genetic, (i.e. non-contagious), disease that caused her to not mature properly.
So, now this poor girl, who only days before the trip had been a healthy, happy eight-year old, living like royalty just down the street from one of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, would have to quickly and convincingly transform into a deformed, parentless, disheveled rag of a thing, just waiting to die on the shores of a new land, with hope in her heart, invisible water on her brain, and blind faith in her insane family.

Maybe it was because each of them occupied such a particularly odd station in an already particularly odd family that Pud and Olivia had a bond. They enjoyed a relationship that the rest of the family was simply, rather unintentionally, excluded from.
Both were essentially novelties to the family; Pud as sideshow stud, Olivia as a sort of faux Tiny Tim, though since her maladies were fictitious, she received none of the sympathy afforded the Dickens character.
My father’s family perceived reality as something that needed to be nourished and cultivated, like a soup that, left to its own devices, would remain little more than a pot of water with some meat and vegetables floating in it were it not for the steady hand of a devoted chef guiding it towards perfection.
They held no illusion that the story of life might cease to unfold if they were not there to put their collective or individual touches to it, rather that it would be about as exciting as a bullfight with no matador if someone, someone from the Navas family specifically, was not present to ritualistically slay the mighty beast, draping it in fine silks that dangled and flowed from long, bouncing, bloody darts and swords.
That’s how my father’s father was, that’s how my father’s mother was, and that’s how everyone except Olivia and Pud were.
Everyone but Olivia and Pud had come into this world with a sense of privilege, entitlement and destiny. Each of them possessed a stare that could freeze the sun and make the ocean run for cover. Each of them chose his or her words, cutting words, very carefully, yet spoke them with such quick, lucid ease that the venom the words contained had already silently slipped into the target’s heart long after there was any chance at an antidote being prescribed, much less effectively administered.
Olivia, on the other hand, was prone to telling her siblings (all five of them) and parents (all three of them) that she loved them, often. This was unsettling, especially to my grandfather.
“Love,” my father’s father would say, was a word whose utterance “I would hope only to hear in the presence of a priest giving last rites, preferably to me.”
The word gave him a queasy feeling, and if asked why, he would likely have said something to the effect that its use offended his sense of integrity. He would say that he felt it had lost any real value, having been thrown about by so many hackneyed pretenders just looking for a good time; by so many clods on the clumsy prowl for easy action; by so many lotharios to so many Arabic, Egyptian, Italian, Moroccan, Dutch, Finnish, English, German, Greek, Russian, Indian, and Swedish women who had been too weak and so desperately in need of the emotional sustenance that the word represented that they left their brains in the bedroom hallway as they, time and time again, failed to reject the clumsy advances of such tired, clichéd, amateurs.
“I love you, Papa,” Olivia would say, and Papa would wrinkle his nose and cross his legs. He was brought up in a strict Roman Catholic tradition, and he had felt guilt in every
part of his body, but never quite so strong as he did in a particularly delicate area every time Olivia said those words, which she said nearly every day, if not to him, to another member of her consistently unnerved family
Many people, she would learn the hard way as life went on, say the words simply because they hope to hear them immediately repeated in their direction. “They may as well be saying it to a mirror,” Olivia would say to herself when she was 23 years old, her soon-to-be-revealed-as-gay boyfriend having the evening before said the phrase to her some twenty-one times, she estimated, during his bombardment of repeated drunken, requests for her to permit him to bring a man to bed with them. His begging had been fruitless, his persistent declarations of affection gone unreturned.
“I love you,” she told her stepmother. She always smiled while saying this, because the whole reason for saying it could be broken down into three simple parts: 1) It made Olivia smile, 2) It made other people smile, eventually, she hoped, and 3) She meant it.
“I love you,” she would say to Pud, and Pud would wag his tail so violently that, given his lack of proper ballast, he would invariably fall over in a matter of seconds. Pud liked being loved, and Olivia liked that she was getting the desired response. Happiness.

Pud had a lot of love to give, even after leaving so much of it all over the neighborhood, and each day he found new ways to distribute the love, albeit by more figurative, less paternity-concerned methods.
Pud often began his mornings with a quick jog out to the nearby golf course. The course was owned by a prestigious, private club, and the Navas house bordered the 16th fairway, protected, barely, by a sparse collection of dogwoods and young spruce trees.
The house had become a favorite target of duffers with terrible slices, and once the word had gotten out that the people in the house were immigrants, the scenes of projectile-driven carnage that regularly took place there could almost be perceived as some strange preview of Pearl Harbor. Nonetheless, each morning, Pud would trot out confidently amid the hail of missiles and make his rounds.
What Pud could not have known was that his appearance as a three-legged dog, however
much a source of strength it had become to the struggling, demented family, was startling to the town’s residents, especially those who happened to playing golf at 7 a.m., and especially those 7 a.m. golfers who were still drunk from the night before, which were nearly all of them, as golf, rich society folk and heavy, heavy drinking went together like, well, like it always has. The golfers, if they began at sunrise, would usually be on the 16th fairway, or the front porch, by 7 or so.
As Pud was the pet of a linguist, it would not be far-fetched to surmise that he might actually be able to understand any number of English slang terms. This theory would be supported by his jumping high in the air and doing a full somersault each time a surprised, rich, drunk, golfer would yell something like, “Jesus Christ! What in the hell is that?” at the sight of him. Such proof was offered often.
“Holy shit, Phil! Did you see what I saw?”
< somersault; lots of wagging>
“Godammed thing looks like it should be dead!”
< another somersault; more wagging>
“Christ on a crucifix, Reggie! That’s the ugliest looking dog I have ever in my life
seen!”
< somersault >.
“Hey Reg, that thing looks kind of like the puppies your Wolfhound just had...”
< a contented, satisfied look and just one, quick wag of the tail >
“Shut the hell up, Phil.”

Pud’s days weren’t always this enjoyable, but more often than not, his morning stroll was generously peppered with the sweet sounds of weirded-out white guys.
Following his initial parade, he would stroll over to the pond between the 4th and 5th hole, where, after a few slurps of water that could cause birth defects in children and a couple of choice bites of goose droppings, he would flop down for a nice long nap.
He was seldom disturbed, either because of the hour, or the particular spot, or because of his being potentially mistaken for a dead, possibly as the result of voodoo, dog.
However there were a couple of instances where his rest was interrupted.
He had been poked with a stick on one occasion.
A group of young boys had happened upon the resting, flaccid Pud and were daring each other to “touch the dead dog.” Of course, it wasn’t long before one of them was dared to the limit. And of course, it was only a matter of seconds after this that Pud revealed that he was indeed still quite of this earth by moving his remaining front leg in a quick, jerky fashion, a reaction that could very well have come as much from the stick as from a dream Pud may have been having (perhaps one in which he had four legs and there were miles of golf courses populated by nothing but incontinent geese.)
Regardless, the children fled, shrieking like monkeys on fire as they ran fast across the manicured landscape. Pud opened one eye to assess the commotion and with what some might consider a grin, fell back asleep.
Another time he found himself waking up in a trashcan, bumping along in the back of a slow-moving old truck driven by the assistant groundskeeper. Again his powers as a terrifying force came to the fore as he jumped out of the barrel and ran ahead of the unsuspecting driver. The driver, so startled by the sight of what he deduced must be the ghost of the ugliest dog he’d ever seen, turned the wheel so abruptly and violently that the meandering truck did a gentle turn and roll onto its side, its occupant actually sort of walking off the tipping machine as it went. Shaken, the assistant groundskeeper rubbed his eyes and took another hard look at the animal-spirit now trotting across the 7th green. “Sweet mother of Moses” he whispered, loud enough for only a dog to hear.
< somersault > .




-end-

Downhill Learning

One of 3 stories published in "Gamey: Lurid Accounts of Incidents That May Have Occurred." This book is published by your's truly and is available for the low, low price of $8 (I'll even sport shipping,) by sending said amount of cash to Joe Navas, p.o. box 1016, North Eastham MA 02651. Be sure to include a favorite recipe and a tip on how to reach without knowing yoga.



Downhill Learning
By Joe Navas


In the first half of 1982, I was the central figure in a cultural bloom of sorts that was so strange, flawed, artistically expansive and, ultimately, joyous that it made the Prague Spring look like the cocktail party before a figure skating competition.
My parents had been getting the dailies from the upcoming movie that my school’s guidance counselor was making about my impending psychological doom, and apparently it was a real old-school Exorcist-style shocker, because when the folks finally decided upon a course of action, the ensuing events were as unnerving as they were quick to unfold.
I was always a child who had a lot of time on his hands and not many people to spend it with. This is not to say that there were not other such loners locally, as many girls and boys (but mostly boys) that I knew were in the same boat. However, even they had little time for me as they were busy already honing the skills that would become invaluable later in their lives, such as when or when not to refer to someone as “my bitch,” or what color bandana goes best with a bright orange jumpsuit.
While these youngsters were torturing small animals, carving misspelled words into their arms, and lighting their siblings on fire, I could instead be found recording fake fart sounds on a tape recorder and gluing my fingers to the hood of the car.
It had been simple enough for my parents to accept my idiosyncrasies up until this point, especially since the I.Q. tests I’d recently undergone had finally laid to rest the nagging fear that I might be retarded. But as the B’s and C’s on my report cards magically transformed, and without much effort it seemed, into D’s and F’s, it was beginning to look as if my personally designed Waldorf-style approach to education was not working as well as we’d all hoped.
My mother, who comes from a long line of intensely mentally disturbed people from Pennsylvania (though that may be redundant), took the sudden emergence of these academic failings to mean that certain recent hormonal changes within me were not agreeing with my constitution. I could have told her that months before my grades dropped, as my ass had turned into a pair of jiggling, misshapen Casaba melons and my voice made me sound as if I were gunning for third place at a goose-calling contest.
My father, though in disagreement with my mother as to the reasons for my decline, agreed that something was definitely amiss and that action had to be taken soon, since he himself had only recently escaped the porkfat covered clutches of his in-laws and would be damned if he was going to allow a little puberty to turn me into one of them.
My parents arranged for me to begin seeing a child psychologist, which I took to mean that they could only afford to take me to some guy who couldn’t cut it as a psychiatrist and got sent to the minors.
I went along with it because I realized that my only other option was to start getting better grades, and we all agreed with a hearty laugh that wasn’t likely to happen.
My first experiences of any kind with analysts had been of the aforementioned school guidance counselor variety. I felt then, as I do now, that most of these people were found to be either too psychotic or too daft (or both) to make it as probation officers or bailiffs, so they decided to take the wealth of knowledge many of them had accumulated as occasional attendees at AA meetings, and apply it to the job of steering wayward youths toward the promised land, or military academies.
In our meetings, the counselor would sit at least ten feet away from me and ask me nicely and slowly to put the round peg in it’s proper hole, to which I would often make a joke involving his or her orifice(s) which I thought was simply hilarious and he or she might have as well had he or she not considered my suggestion so threatening.
The counselor would then throw in a couple of exercises that had something to do with cognitive skills and usually some test involving a picture of cow, which I still believe to have been some weird farm porn mistakenly included in the packet (which, coincidentally was manufactured in Oklahoma). Finally, with their hands thrown up in the air as they realized that the last time our intellects were actually comparable was when I was 14 hours old, blind, and unable to hold my head up by myself, and they were taking their psych final at UMass, they would give up.
Now, one would hope that a person who had ascended to at least this quasi-professional level in the public educational structure would be mature enough to, if not admit defeat, at least admit gross underqualification, but such professionalism is not necessarily as certain a find as one might expect in the ethical makeup of someone who’s job mostly involves keeping college brochures plentiful and sexually harassing the cafeteria staff.
It was with a sneer and a pathetic abuse of power that I was immediately and involuntarily enrolled in the class down by the boiler room.
This was the class that hope forgot. This was a raft named Shame, cast off into the Sea of Stupid. If the honors program was a well-lit mansion in the Hamptons, ours was a doorless outhouse in Manitoba.
At first, I honestly felt nothing either way about the demotion. I was really just glad that the tests seemed to be over, regardless of what they did or did not reveal. My parents’ decision to support this switch surprised me greatly on one hand, and on the other did not. It surprised me because I thought of both of them as exceedingly intelligent people, a belief I would cling to desperately during those times that I’d once again flushed money down the toilet,(literally; big bills sometimes too) as they assured me time and again that no, I was not adopted.
I didn’t think that exceedingly intelligent people would allow their son to be put into a class that counted among it’s members 12 year old girls with full-back tattoos of Molly Hatchet and guys who smoked two packs of Winstons before lunch.
However, I also knew that they were banking on the theory that whatever had gotten into me, it likely was in there for the long haul and that this was just the first of many steps toward, hopefully, an academic rebirth. I was reassured by this, and it laid to rest any fears that the next phase of “Operation Bell Curve” was going to see me wearing a helmet on my rides to school as I enjoyed the luxury and charm (not to mention the notoriety) of the short bus.
After three weeks of this immersion in remedial academics, I was taken back to the guidance counselor’s office and told of a change in strategy. It appeared that the most recent of my intelligence tests had come back and that its results, combined with the fact that I had not given a single incorrect answer in the entire three weeks that I spent in juvie hall (a feat a chimpanzee named Reggie had accomplished years earlier) had garnered me a spot in an advanced class; a Class for the Gifted. And so I went, trying my best to look intelligent.
It was after only a few days in this class that my teacher, a Volvo driving, tea-drinking fellow himself, deduced that either I was beyond his comprehension (which was unlikely) or that my test results had been read upside down (likely). He decided that the best way for me to spend the school day was to sit in a windowless room and write very basic computer programs on the Radio Shack TRS-80 that was, as I would soon find out, not to be my only companion.
I would be accompanied by an incredibly bitter and tense eleven year old boy named Jim, who constantly had one nostril completely clogged with a booger that was exactly the color that most bathrooms had been decorated with in the early ‘70s. This detail would have been intolerable were it not for the perfect symmetry and the clean line this snot carved on the inner part of the rim of Jim’s left nostril.
Over the few weeks that Jim and I spent holed up in that room making the computer play pong with itself, I began to feel a certain sympathy, if not an empathy for him and his booger. He rarely spoke beyond the subject of computers, and even at that he was extraordinarily dispassionate, but on those few occasions that he did, he gave touching and desperate insights into a mind that had grown harder and more resolute with thoughts of revenge and redemption with each passing day.
Whereas my defense to the bullies had always been fast feet and a penchant for instantly demoralizing insults, Jim never fought back, nor did he cry. He was certainly not without emotion, as Jim could infuse even a conversation about puppies and bunnies with enough underlying, seething tension that in this age, he would definitely be one of the kids on the “Watch List” kept by the guys with the flak jackets.
His manner made me wonder if his father, a well known construction worker with a deep, however, as often was the case, mostly unsubstantiated history of domestic violence, had demanded he be tough, or if Jim had just grown tired of crying. I never broached the subject, as to do so at this age would definitely have gotten me punched in the head, and one memory I was fairly sure that I could do without was one of a little boy with a big booger having clocked me senseless in front of a TRS-80.
Needless to say, when the time had come for another evaluation, and the result, of course, was my removal from the smart class, I bid farewell to Jim with a great deal more sadness than I’d ever felt for the future (and some ex-) convicts in the basement.
I was quickly deposited back into the great, murky wading pool that was the regular student population, where I quickly and happily assimilated by getting D’s and F’s as fast as the teachers could hand out the exams.
The guidance counselors once again called my parents to the school, and once again my parents came with the blind hope that somehow at least some sort of answer to the questions surrounding my sliding performance could be given. This meeting however, I was told later, was the shortest one yet. Instead of the guidance counselor going on and on with every theory from too much pulling on my noggin during birth to my biorhythms to my eyesight, he laid it out quite succinctly and finally, I would say, correctly. He told my parents I was lazy.
I cannot even begin to properly describe here the joy and relief that my mother and father felt upon learning that there seemed to be nothing outrightly wrong with me.
I could just picture them high-fiving like idiots in an end zone, claiming victory over the silent killer called Dumbness that had claimed so many Americans already, as was evidenced by the election of Reagan and the skyrocketing sales of albums by Styx. I pictured them hugging the bejeezus out of the wannabe cop and all of them sobbing uncontrollably in a heap on the test-strewn floor.
Any elation though, however close or far away from this scenario it actually was, departed as quickly as it had arrived, and all I can say is that I am extremely grateful that neither of my parents are inclined to violence, though I’m sure that they played with the idea for a while. Thankfully, my folks, as most intellectuals with neither the time nor the energy to explain the bruises and cuts might, decided to forgo the beatings and take me to a shrink.
While they felt relief, I was now terrified. My impression of psychologists was that they would make every effort they could in trying to find the cure for what ails the mind of their patient, short of prescribing a lobotomy. And if all else failed, well, there was always the lobotomy.
I had failed at an incredible number of things in my life, given my age, and under this kind of pressure, I felt the odds were 6 to 1 that I’d soon be spending my days drawing with crayons on circular paper and trying not spill the contents of my drooltray into my Tang. The first psychologist I encountered did little to allay these fears.
She was a 58-year-old former nun who, like many former nuns, had a queasy, preserved, formaldehyde smell about her. Whereas I thought anyone who’d just been sprung from convent life after 30 years would be showering on an hourly basis and buying new clothes of all sorts to try and shake the old feeling of the nunnery, she apparently was not quite ready to let go of all of its trappings, as along with the corpselike stench she had brought, appropriately, a 2 foot long cross with a bleeding Christ on it. I’m sure that as far as she was concerned, nothing could inspire a child to find the root of their being quite like the fragrant scent a of a stale, old, sexless woman and the looming specter of damnation, but I wasn’t quite sold on the idea. My parents, bless them, weren’t too keen on these details either and were just about to remove me from her care, when, oops.... she died.
Well that took care of that, and pretty soon we had found a wonderful young man with a Ph.D. from Brown, a warm smile, a beautiful, large office, and ... a grossly misshapen hairlip.
I wanted to ask my parents if this were some sort of revenge that they were engaging in toward me and if it was, I wasn’t ready to give in, but instead was very curious as to just what they might have in store that could possibly top the dying, smelly nun and the genius with the radical facial deformity. What was next? An obese Teamster with a 10-inch hard-on? Perhaps a clown who twisted balloons into the shape of Frances Farmer? I thought it best not to ask however, as I was hardly ready to accept that these ideas might pale in comparison to what actually lay ahead.
My new psychologist’s name was Geoff, and he spoke very clearly despite his lip problem, which quickly became less of a problem for me as got to know him and began to see this man in a much more heroic light.
Our first few visits were primarily clinical, but not cold, in nature. Geoff would ask me questions regarding my school life up until then. He would ask about my friends, who I had always been reluctant to talk about with anyone for fear that a simple investigation would reveal that many of them didn’t exist. I came to trust and admire him, and as a result of this, I wanted to impress him. He struck me as very adult, which, I would imagine, was the impression he was going for, what with the doctorate from the Ivy League school and the wingtips. So when the subject turned to drug use, I saw this as a golden opportunity to flex the muscles of my B.P.U. (Bullshit Production Unit) that I’d recently had installed by former members of the Nixon White House.
Geoff asked me if I smoked marijuana, which I actually had. “Yes,” I replied. He asked me how often I smoked marijuana, which was once, and I said “Twice a day, every day. For years.”
Now had I stopped there, it could have signaled the beginning a glorious life of rehabs and support groups, but I had to push it.
He asked me if I snorted cocaine. I replied “Oh yeah, four or five times a day.” He inquired as to just how many Quaaludes I required to get through the day, “About ten or so, if it’s not a Monday,” I replied. “Jesus... Mondays, y’know?” Heroin? “Two or three a day, depending on how I’m doing at the track. You know how it is with the ponies.”
As my answers painted a clearer and clearer portrait that bore an uncanny resemblance to Keith Moon, Geoff was seeing a pattern develop. I remember his unsuccessful attempt at suppressing a grin after the Quaalude answer, as that must have been when he fully realized that I was yanking his ivy covered chain. I ,of course, thought that I was laying it on so perfectly that he was viewing me as a contemporary. One of my friend’s sisters had attended Brown in the ‘70s and relative to her accounts of the lurid goings-on there, the tales I was weaving regarding my imaginary drug use were not likely to stun a man who had just graduated from a school that handed out acid and speed as part of their “Welcome Weekend Tote Bag,” which also included a generous allotment of lubricant that you might want if you wished to participate in the Roman orgy continuously occurring in the Hall of Science.
And then, strangely, just as quickly as my drug use had reached such Stones-esque proportions, it subsided. As our sessions went on, Geoff assured me that I wouldn’t be needing all those substances anymore. I agreed thoroughly and told him that with his help, I knew I could stop. Often the cliché “easier said than done” is used in these situations. However in this instance, “even easier done than said,” was entirely more applicable.
“I’m cured,” I stated rather matter-of-factly only a month later, making what I couldn’t possibly realize was a complete mockery of the hell I would endure some 18 years later. But from then on, our time together was spent walking down to the nearby pier, playing poker, and doing all sorts of other things that began to make my parents think that, while it was nice for me to have this kind of companionship, they could probably find someone from the local YMCA to pal around with me for a lot less than $100 per hour, and that’s even including the price of the necessary inoculations.
So ended the chapter of my life devoted to analysts, at least in the professional sense. My parents at least had apparently gleaned some knowledge of what made me tick from this experience, as the following months and years saw them taking me to films, concerts, sporting events, museums, and everything else short of strip shows and public executions, both of which I hope to take my children to someday. The very interesting thing about this ensuing cultural revival however, was that they assumed very separate roles in it. Sure, we still ate together, we still watched television together, and we traveled as a family to my tennis matches. But it was in the experiential expeditions that my parents felt each had something very singular to offer.
My mother is a woman who has always been so individualistic and of such superior intelligence that she was as much a natural to take the lead on affairs concerning my artistic enrichment as she was a shoe-in to be voted “Most Likely to Get the Hell Out of Pennsylvania” by her senior class, which voted by stomping on the floor once for “yes”, twice for “no”, and three times for “I still don’t understand. Could you pass the sauerkraut?”
Once a week or so, she would take me to, usually, R-rated movies. I don’t mean to give the impression that she was taking me to the stripped down version of “Caligula” or “Porky’s 3”, but rather that we would go see films like “The Breakfast Club”, which had no nudity, and “Silkwood”, which featured a briefly naked but kind of disturbing and painfully scrubbed Meryl Streep, and “Witness” which, fortunately, showed the gorgeous Kelly McGillis nude but, unfortunately, did so in the context of her being Amish.
I was a twelve year old boy who thought naked women looked pretty cool, to say the least. Yes, I was there for the art, but chief among my concerns was whether the art in question was involving the showing of skin to an extent that I found agreeable. Of course, I was witnessing all of this, nudity or not, while sitting next to my mother, which made any enjoyment of the flesh displayed on the screen, at best, impossible and, at worst , deeply scarring.
In addition to going to the movies, we would also take trips to museums, where I would be simultaneously moved by the art I saw, and angered that my own creations weren’t gracing the walls.
I’d offered my “Conan” drawings to numerous galleries and art clubs over the years, but they all politely refused, preferring the tried and true “Marsh Landscape” and “Cape Cod Sunset” themes to that of “Buccaneer Bloodshed” and “Dragons with Swords Sticking Out of Their Eye Sockets (And Shit).” I could see their point from a strictly commercial perspective, but Christ , when did it become all about the money?
On the days that I was not being shuttled to this movie house and that or to this museum and that, I was cruising around with dad.
My father was a brilliant, handsome man who, despite his age of 69 years, commanded respect and attention and still turned the heads of women half his age, though sometimes this was simply because they were wondering if that smell was coming from him. Still, when we went places it was always as The Very Cool Old Guy and His Son Who Hopefully Won’t Become Another Frank Sinatra Jr.
We went to baseball games, where I was first introduced to the sport that would become, in conjunction with bebop jazz and an instinctive hatred of anything recorded by one James Buffet, the closest thing I have to religion.
I remember that this chapter in my existence was where I learned the importance of the strange duality of life as understood through the eyes of a Red Sox fan: The harder you wish to win, the less likely you are to do so, and the less likely it appears that you will win, the harder you must try; words to live by, which is precisely why I often find myself rooting for other teams.
By far my favorite event that I would attend with my Pops was the annual tennis tournament held at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. My father had spent a great deal of time in Rhode Island in the 1930’s and he offered a unique and cherished perspective of the area. He had been enrolled at the aforementioned Brown University from 1933 to 1937, where orgies had been ruled illegal as one of the provisions of Prohibition, though cocaine was still passed around freely. Wherever we went, he had a rich and detailed story for it.
The Newport Casino, where the Hall of Fame Tournament was held, was home to some of the last, and by the far the finest, remaining grass tennis courts in the country. They were meticulously maintained entirely by, of course (in keeping with tradition), people of color earning just enough to starve; a fact that I was fortunate enough to be made well aware of by a father who had once been one of these people cutting the grass.
Still, there were many rare gems held by this tournament, chief among them was that it was fairly small and cozy in terms of the facilities and the number of spectators, yet it still offered enough prize money to attract some of the world’s best players. Since it was such an informal setting, the players would often hang around the grounds between matches and chat up the spectators. I talked about pool with Tim Mayotte, spoke about something with Mats Wilander, though I still don’t know what it was due to his having known only a little English at the time and the only Swedish I knew was, yep, you guessed it, a northern tribal dialect rooted mostly in the Old Germanic form.
I had lunch with Vijay Amitraj and I got sneered at by Ilie Nastase, who was too old to play at the tournament, and I had no problem reminding him of that.
This became an annual ritual for my father and I (not the sneering at Nastase part. “Nasty” and I actually made up the following year). We did stop going after four years however, as my father’s Alzheimer’s had begun to make the drive somewhat treacherous and ultimately misdirected.
I think it was after the third time that we’d tried to get cheeseburgers at a funeral home that we decided it might be best to just go home.
At around the same time, I had begun to dye my hair and sport what would later be known as “The Sigue Sigue Sputnik Evening Wear Collection”, so though I was entirely up for shocking the traditionalists at the Hall, I couldn’t do so at the expense of my father’s dignity, especially since by this point he thought it was 1947, and trying to explain why my hair was pink would have taken too much energy that could better be spent just loving him.
But that was years later anyway.
I suspect that as my life goes on I will, as I do now, credit nearly every ridiculous and unexplainable creative thing that I do to that period of my life and the analysts who helped make it so strange and eventful, dead and alive, smelly and non. Those who were so remarkably stupid that I would not be surprised to find they’d died of suffocation, having forgotten how to breathe, and those who were not guidance counselors.
Most of all, I thank my parents, without whose initial careless disregard of consequence after a 3-day gin and valium bender I would not have been placed on this planet to begin with.
And I’d probably be taller.

the first of many pointless rants that are extraordinarily pointless (but not as redundant as one might expect!)

“El Ranto Grande”
by Joe Navas
(first published the Cape Cod Community College newspaper, the MainSheet)
Those of you who read my writing in this paper on a regular basis and eagerly await each successive serving, I commend your lack of outside activities and “simple” tastes.
If you’re still reading now, I thank you again and ask that you get off the pills, spit out the beef jerky and get rid of that “Mike’s Hard Lemonade”- soaked futon you vowed you’d keep forever since it was on it that you banged the sister of the guy who won the last “Survivor.” There, see? You’re better than that. Damn straight.
Now, as you know, regular reader, I have been on a bit of rampage of seriousness lately, covering such topics as gay marriage, reality TV, the war in Iraq and other issues that one might consider somewhat important.
Now, I don’t mean to distance myself from any of these issues that I will forever stand for, (except for the reality TV bit; I was watching the “Make Me Look Like Brad Pitt” thing the other night and I confess, I laughed, I cried, I wrote bad checks, they got me) However, the level of pretentiousness that has been building exponentially in me as a result of my sober opining on this string of hard topics has begun to worry me a little bit.
I’m afraid to look in the mirror because I’m afraid I might see Joe Lieberman looking back at me, and behind him Tipper Gore (as my secret, conservative inner woman.)
My sense of humor, once a staggering force revered by fearful relatives and extremely close, sympathetic friends, has taken a back seat to a furrowed brow and (yeesh) thoughts of working for the Kerry campaign. So, my remedy? My cure-all for what ails my increasingly snicker-less soul? Dumb lists of who is and who is not cool. Come with me as we elevate and skewer, together, just like we said we would.
Cool:
Polly Jean Harvey. The British rocker who makes Liz Phair look like one of the Spice Girls. Sure, Liz told us that women want all sorts of things done to them that no one was willing to attest to in such a way before she got so bold, but PJ chimed in that she wanted all those same things as well, done more often, and she still won’t be even close to satisfied. Oh yeah, and if you do a real piss-poor job, she’ll kick your ass and then write a song about it.
All of this would be moot and Ms. Harvey would be just another 100 lb. chick with the guts to be an effective bouncer were it not for the fact that her first two albums “Dry” and Rid of Me” still stand as two of the finest, rawest, most aggressive guitar/bass/drums records of the last 30 years. Period.
To top it all off, she gave the coolest compliment to another musician ever when she concluded that the band Morphine was the sexiest band she’d ever encountered. How did she arrive at this assessment? By sitting on top of Morphine bassist/singer Mark Sandman’s bass cabinet during a show while wearing really tight leather pants. Rock on. Rock on hard.
Benicio Del Toro. The second coming of Brando is one of those guys who could show up at a poetry slam in New York, read the tag off a mattress and walk out with not only first place, but the deed to the club. Sure he’s had some pretty parts, (hey, when you look like that, it’s OK to let the camera be nice to you once in a while) but he’s also played a mildly retarded, alcoholic Native American (The Pledge) and a pot-bellied, vomiting lawyer (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and walked away with both films. He’s the rare blend of almost incomprehensible talent, weird beauty and verve that comes along rarely. The man is bad-ass to the bone.
Uma Thurman. If you don’t already hate Ethan Hawke for his unbelievably bad writing, cheesy facial hair and making an entire demographic look bad in “Reality Bites,” hate him just for cheating on Uma. What a putz.
Uma’s got the looks that kill. She doesn’t even have to be as gorgeous as she is. She could look more like Ethel Merman than Uma Thurman, she could look more like Thurman Munson, she could have even had something to do with “Monsoon Wedding” and she’d still have that special something going on that transcends it all (yes, even “Monsoon Wedding,” the film that Americans everywhere who also enjoy Hugh Grant movies, “World Music” and frozen Indian dinners thought was “just so…different.” Right. Different in the sense that this time, the same recycled, predictable Hollywood story has people with darker skin, there’s more peach everywhere, and lots and lots of yogurt. Yes, I realize this has nothing to do with Uma, but I still feel it’s deserves mentioning.
Honorable Mentions: David Bowie (beyond cool), Patti Smith, Donald Rumsfeld (sure the man’s as evil as 10 Hitlers, but boy can he riff), Ani DiFranco, Elvis Costello, Brett Favre (toughness is cool), Lance Armstrong (his kind of toughness is extremely cool), Alanis Morrisette, Lili Taylor, the Coen Brothers, Everyone in Jane’s Addiction and all of their friends, likewise for The Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Beastie Boys, and all sorts of dead people from Dizzy Gillespie to Joseph Campbell to Anais Nin.
Not cool:
George Bush. (Bet you didn’t see that one coming.) Note that I have intentionally left the distinguishing middle initial out because I can’t really decide which is the lamer. George I is more intelligent (then again, so is his refrigerator with the new-fangled ice maker) than George II, but even George II isn’t as stiff as his pop. I mean, who would you rather drink with? In the end I suspect each of them would try to kiss you if you’re a boy, as I’ve long theorized that the bizarre, almost psychotic aggressive behavior displayed by each of them is simply the byproduct of bottled up homoerotic impulses. And you know Rummy’s battling that demon every damn day.
Howard Stern. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know. I don’t want him pulled either. Hell, I’d fight to the death to make sure the KKK has the right to say whatever the hell they want. The radio, like the TV, has an off switch. My problem with Howard isn’t that I think he’s vulgar (you will never know how many prospective loves I have foiled by inadvertently revealing my propensity towards truly juvenile, lewd, disgusting humor. I mean stuff that would make Stern himself start passing out bibles in front of Wal-Mart.) No, with Howard it’s that I really don’t dig his ego and his intellectual laziness. He could be just as base as he is now, but he’s also got the brains and the chops (not to mention the resources) to really stick it to the powers that be. Listening to him is like watching a pro athlete that you know has loads of talent and no desire to train and learn how to maximize it. Howard Stern is Derrick Coleman.
If I want to watch (or listen) to some awkward guy with bad hair, mentally (or otherwise) get off while his underlings (carefully chosen to not be nearly as intelligent as him) laugh at all of his jokes in even, measured guffaws, well, then I could just watch a White House press conference. Hey, I go to the humor media to get away from politics, man.
If Howard goes, I hope it’s only because the ratings went naturally bad. If the FCC wants to take him out, (which does in fact seem to be the case) I’m in the fight against it all the way.
For example, as much as I want to see Pat Robertson off the air, I only want it to be because hundreds of thousands of people realized in close succession that there is no big invisible eye in the sky ready to burn them to death if they aren’t good little Santa’s Helpers coughing up dough for absolution.
Honorable Mention: Hootie and every single one of the Blowfish and anyone who even so much as worked as a roadie for them, Don Henley and Jimmy Buffet (may they both be burned to a crisp by a Tequila Sunrise), John Ashcroft, Reggie White, Jeremy Shockey, Nick and Jessica, Dave Mathews and his terrible violinist, and all sorts of dead people from Pol Pot to John Wayne to Mama Cass.
So there you have it. Again, my gratitude for your continued enthusiasm and attention. I feel much better now, my relatives are laughing again as they clutch their gin & tonics and edge towards the door. My friends are gently patting me on the back like the characters in a futuristic Spielberg film might symbolically console the hologram of a chum who’d been lobotomized years ago. “Ahh, yes, that’s better. If only his Jell-O dish was real.”
Now, on to more serious matters. Where are my leather pants?