Cooking with Jazz

(First Published in November, 2009, in The Dead Mule, a literary journal. The photograph was taken by Marissa Steinberg.)

“I’m a survivor,” the man in the crumpled leather jacket said. The skin stretching down his aquiline nose, along his cheeks, was a tan sandy beach creased with diesel black. He sat leeched to the wall in the corner of The Spotted Cat Bar on Frenchmen Street, a road angling off the boxy French Quarter like the handle of the Big Dipper. “Been through Katrina and ‘bout four other canes,” he announced, stretching his long legs. He pressed his head against the wall. “Ain’t no thing like a hurricane.” He giggled. His nostalgic mien married an odd, chilling smirk. “Ain’t no thing.”

The couple from Kansas that sat next to the man—a thin redhead with a mass of clef notes for hair and her husband, who wore a starchy white collared shirt—smiled at him uncomfortably. He continued to snicker, the couple glanced at one another, their faces looked as though they had inhaled the air at Jefferson Parish days after the floodwaters drained. The man’s laughing fit continued and he did not notice as the Midwesterners scurried to the far corner of the bar. When he finished his chuckle, he pinched one end of his oily moustache and tilted his dark felt cowboy hat off his brow.

“Where’d they go?”

A pile of patrons rushed for the abandoned, shoddy rattan bench. “Are these seats taken?” a pig-tailed blonde with a bass-drum-behind asked the self-proclaimed survivor.

“They’re all yours,” he gestured. She squeezed in along with her boyfriend and smiled at the man. “But I ain’t talkin’ no mo’ ‘bout hurricanes. Cause I been through four.”

“That’s fine,” the girl said. A wide, frightened smile spread and marked her face with insincere dimples.

“And when they came and tried to git me from Katrina, which I was in, I said to ‘em bin here two weeks ready,” indicating this with the thumb, pointer, and middle finger of his left hand “and gotsa ‘nuff wine and beans and batteries to be right.”

He glanced up at the band on stage. They waited for the drummer to assemble his kit. The couple glanced at each other, gulped at the man, and nodded.

He sucked his teeth and shook his head. “Too many of them still,” he said, pointing at two young black horn players.

The trumpeter buzzed his lips, ejecting little droplets of spittle. The saxophonist licked the smooth wooden reed until it was as moist as the bottom of a Café Du Monde bag, drenched with the oils of fried beignets.

“I play here on Tuesday nights,” the survivor lied, and then began mumbling something beneath the whimper of the saxophone.

The drummer tapped the snare and the keyboarder typed a few notes that merged with the clinking beer bottles that the bartender (the one with the pale legs that were just visible between the hem of her floral dress and black Converse) dragged out through the front door. The smokers crowding the doorway extinguished their cigarettes and flooded in like water forming to the shape of the room. The bass leaned against the wall.

In walked a hairy financier in a pink and white checkered shirt, his nose bright like a fire truck; a long pasty drunk woman with short blonde hair and wearing a cropped leather coat that reached no further than her lowest rib; an elderly black man sporting a doo-rag and one snaggletooth in a gummy mouth; his girlfriend, a teapot-shaped woman with a silver wig; and a man with his own fully corked bottle of Korbel.

Suddenly the music erupted and the new arrivals swirled and hot-stepped to the five-piece band. The sax and trumpet engaged in a heated dialogue. The trumpet—a stunning golden moon eclipsed by the dark cavity that sunk into the lunar metal like a black hole—shrieked like a goose clenched at the throat. The saxophone politely moaned. If the horns were the andouille sausage and crawfish of this jazzy jambalaya, then the keyboard was the spice tickling the nodules of the tongue. The cymbals crashed and clinked like the pots and pans in a Cajun kitchen, while the snare drum rattled like the streetcar palpitating its way down St. Charles Avenue. Like the Grimm Reaper, the bass player hovered over the others, tearing at the heavy strings as though he were chipping away at the brick and mortar of the crypts to unite the newest intern with their ancestral remains.

The painting on the wall, above the sickle arm of the bass, hung like an eerie harbinger of jazz music—a trio in an old wooden saloon playing their bones out, literally, for only transparent suits draped over their skinless, jazz-worked skeletons. The painting made it seem as though jazz was endangered like Ninth Ward residents. Though that fallacy was extinguished once the music began.

The tall woman in the crop-top leather coat spun with her fourth partner of the night, knocking the metal tip bucket off its perch with her bony uncoordinated hips. Ex-Presidents exploded from the pail like confetti, invigorated by the etouffee of syncopation they had never heard.

The one-toothed man and his silver-haired lady smothered against one another. He was the rice on her gumbo.

In the background the bottle of Korbel exploded, the champagne slid down the green bottle like meat juice running through the bread of a slathered po’ boy.

The rest of the crowd percolated along the wall, except the one man in the crumpled leather coat; he just kept mumbling about all the bad times. The jazz cried out about the hard times too, but sprinkled the crowd with something sweet like the powdered sugar coating mucky Decatur Street.

Healthcare Gone Wild

Fixing healthcare as a system, forget that debate. Let’s talk about those on the frontlines of healthcare.

 

For the past two months I’ve been in this sick-cycle. I must take it back to the beginning: my first trip to the pulmonologist.

 

I was running late.

 

“Traffic,” I explained, calling a half hour before my appointment. A courtesy call.

 

“No problem,” the receptionist told me.

 

“I’m here,” I announced, which I followed with my seal-bark cough. I was five minutes late.

 

“Sorry,” the receptionist retorted coldly. “The doctor can’t see you anymore. You’re late.”

 

I had just battled my way through traffic with whooping cough, and I was a whopping five minutes late. I even called and this is the thanks I get.

 

“Can you check with him?” I asked.

 

She glared at me heartlessly, but finally pushed away from her gatekeeper position to ask the pulmonologist. He happens to be a good guy and told the embittered receptionist he would see me. (By the way, he was taking patients even after I left).

 

But he didn’t cure me. Two weeks later I went back. A different doctor, though.

 

I displayed for the new pulmonologist my month-long coughing spasm, described the medicines prescribed to me by his partner, and detailed my enormous tea-intake. This doctor stood straddling the floor between the doorjamb: one foot in the room, the other out. He was reading my file without looking at the pages and glanced down the hallway where his other “patients” waited.

 

Then, for the first time, he walked fully into the room. He pressed the stethoscope against my back and very nasally said: “Breathe.” With each mouthful of air, I coughed. I felt like an auditioning actor pouring out his heart for a sleeping director.

 

“Here.” He handed me a prescription with the worst chicken-scratch that even a pharmacist would scoff at it, and like some superhero, one who had saved the day, he flew off into the night. Except he was really more of a villain who had just robbed me blind and he was prancing down the fluorescent-flooded hallway to overcharge more fools like me waiting for miracles. My co-payment for that two-minute visit was $15. That’s $450 an hour, not to mention the thousands per hour he’s billing my penniless insurance company.

 

I want doctors to make me feel like they earned that money. Shove a few tongue depressors in my mouth; take some blood without reason. For Chris sakes, test for a hernia to rationalize the bill. This was no doctor’s office; it was a healthcare assembly line. I was that poorly inspected car being rushed out to the market.

 

A few weeks later, I crashed. Convinced it was swine flu, I called my girlfriend’s doctor. They had Sunday office hours.

 

“I think I may have the flu,” I told the receptionist. “Can the doctor see me today?”

 

“The doctor’s very busy,” she snarled. “The earliest I can do is one month from now. Does that work?”

Writing on Codeine

I’ve always read that the brilliant artists were on drugs. Absinthe made Van Gogh hallucinate helping paint those halos imbued in his work, Kerouac found his spontaneous prose with marijuana, and LSD invented the ‘60s. Now, I’m not much for any of that stuff—smoke makes me cough, dust makes me sneeze, and I’m on enough pills for asthma as it is, so who needs it? I always thought I’d be a writer influenced only by the soundness of mind.

 

But right now, because of the aforementioned asthma, my doctor prescribed me Hycodan syrup for this persistent cough. Hycodan is laced with codeine. Today is the first time I will publish some words under the influence of mind-altering manna. My one teaspoon every eight hours will determine for me if drugs truly can elevate the poetic and philosophical and “in the zone” thinking that has left a powerful stain in the arts. I’m going to try and become Woodstock. (Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any of the content in this post and if you happen to find me driving an automobile, do stay away from me).

 

Poetic: (Please click on the link “Poetry,” which you will find on the right. I’m not in the mood right now to be poetic. I did, however, just smash my guitar and burned in effigy a picture of the captain who crashed the Titanic).

 

Philosophical: The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug. (This is actually Mark Twain’s quote, but I figure the difference between thinking and taking is the difference between caring and the Internet).

 

In the zone: I’ll let you know when I find it. Maybe I’ll tweet it out. But if it’s more than 140 characters, then forget it.

News for the DOT

I spend a lot of time driving to work and I started taking notes so I could offer the Department of Transportation a few recommendations.

 

First of all, those red-light cameras that nab you at an intersection have got to go. They’re terrible for safety. I pass about six of those booby traps on my way to work and if somebody happens to walk out onto the road, they could kiss their ass goodbye. Nobody’s looking straight ahead. Everybody has their eyes glued to that yellow column of lights as if it were some UFO slowly hovering through the sky. It used to be that when a light turned yellow, drivers would accelerate to get safely through the intersection. But not anymore. With red-light cameras all over the roads as if it were Orwell’s 1984, each yellow light generates a car chorus of banshee shrieks as cars slam on brakes, causing near pile-ups. And even after I drive safely through the intersection, I’m staring in my rearview mirror looking for someone else to trigger that flashing light.

 

Another thing that needs fixing are those black message boards overhanging highways. This summer the sign’s yellow lights read: “Quality Air Action Day.” It recommended that drivers use public transport or form carpools to decrease the noxious levels of Carbon Monoxide entering our environment because of the day’s heat. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great cause; however, it’s a little too late to do anything about it when drivers are already sitting in their cars, in traffic, on the Southern State Parkway. Here’s my proposal (it’s a bit more complicated, probably another hundred bulbs or so for the sign). Have the sign say, “Tomorrow will be Quality Air Action Day.”

 

Lastly, cops should not allow do-overs. I saw this woman completely blow through a stop sign, screech to the halt ten feet past the sign because she noticed a cop, and then backed up to re-stop at the stop sign. Then the cop let her go.

Tea Bagger Wisdom

In the past month I’ve been drinking a ton of tea for this cough that I can’t seem to kick. But I have a grievance against tea: Teabag tags. Somebody had the bright idea of posting Confucianism at the end of my teabag strings. Why we need fortune cookie messages attached to all of our grocery items is beyond me. I don’t want enlightenment from tea; I want to stop coughing.

 

Anyway, the other day was the epitome of all teabag tag wonders. I opened an individual packet and read the trite maxim printed on the tag. “Grace brings trust, appreciation, love, and prosperity,” the tag said.

 

I actually liked that one, I thought. I’ll be graceful today. Then, with poise, I tore open a second tea packet for my thermos. It was a teabag phenomenon: my next tea tag message said, “Grace brings contentment.”

 

I was amazed and sunken with melancholy all at once. On the one hand, I knew I had to be graceful. But on the other hand, my teabag proverb basically downgraded my opportunities. First grace was bringing me appreciation and love and prosperity, then teabag two amended teabag one, erasing the potentiality for having charm. I felt like a gold medal winner standing on the Olympic podium, being told mid-celebration “There’s been a mistake. You’ve actually won the silver.” Oh well, I thought, and gracefully left my home.

 

When my thermos ran dry at school, I boiled some more water and opened up a third packet. This time the tag foretold something I could respect: “Happiness comes from contentment.”

 

Instead of giving me a teabag axiom that would later be repealed, this new idea of providing me with a thesaurus example finally provided me with some solid truth. I would not be let down, (a word that comes from disappointed).

Opening The Holocaust Vault

(This short story was awarded and first published at the Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival. It is adapted from Chapter 1 of my book, My Grandparents’ Holocaust).

As a child, all I knew about my grandparents’ Holocaust was that Poppy was the only person to survive from his family and Grandma and her cousin were the only two to survive from theirs.

On weekends, at Grandma and Poppy’s Brighton Beach apartment, I was constantly investigating, hoping to uncover Holocaust secrets. 

“Tell me about the war.”

“Not now tatehla,” Poppy said.  “Deal,” he instructed, quelling my curiosity with cards.

“Not now sheine keit,” Grandma said.  “Eat.”

If I ever managed to unearth a story, what I received was Grandma’s PG-version of the camps.

“This girl did a pee in my eating bowl.”  She went into the kitchen and placed a large grey lump of gefilte fish on my plate. “Here tateh sheine.  Eat.” 

“Grandma, tell me…”

“Eat, tatehla.  Eat.”  

But I only hungered for the stories behind those haphazard vein-colored digits tattooed forever on their arms.  

When my questions remained unanswered, I went into my grandparents’ bedroom and gazed at Grandma’s family portrait, which hung above the light switch like a page torn from an obituary.  

“What do you want I should say?  That’s a cousin, an uncle, mine brother.  Dead, dead, dead.  All thirty.  Dead.”

The stories remained sealed in memory.  

Then, at the end of the millennium, Poppy died.  I shoveled dirt onto his grave and felt as though I was burying the Holocaust.  

To reclaim it, I went to Poland—the beginning of their tragedy.  When I returned with some context, Grandma opened the Holocaust vault.

Fish Bowl Conspiracies

I’ve grown skeptical of those drop-your-business-cards-in-the-bucket-to-win contests as well as those in-store raffles.

Just the other day my friend, a lawyer, admitted that while intoxicated he stealthily reached into the fishbowl lottery at Qdoba and hijacked a crumpled handful of business cards. I’m guessing there are a number of people on a daily basis pulling the same stunt, callously discarding hundreds of six cent investments (that’s how much those little cards cost), just to better their chances at claiming the twenty-five-burrito luncheon.

I’m also doubting Trader Joe’s. I’ve brought my post-consumer, poly-whatever, recycled bags into TJ’s enough times that I should have won their raffle by now. But I haven’t.

Yet the incident that made me most dubious of these contests was when a neighborhood Italian restaurant invited me to leave my business card with the bill in order to be entered for a Dinner-for-two raffle.

My girlfriend, Marissa, the only one with business cards at the time, slipped her credentials in with the credit card. However, a few minutes later, the waiter returned, twiddling her qualifications in his hand.

“Wow, thanks a lot,” he said with confusion. “I guess…I guess…I’ll pass this on to my girlfriend.” He pocketed the card and turned to walk away.

“Wait, wait, wait. Huh?” I asked.

“I’m gonna give it to my girlfriend,” he repeated slowly. “That’s why you gave it to me, because she’s in fashion, too, right?”

“It’s for the contest,” I said. How would we know your girlfriend was in fashion? How would we even know you, our food-serving stranger, had a girlfriend to begin with?

“What contest?” the waiter said, more befuddled than before.

What contest indeed.

Following the Law Hands-Free

Law-abiding citizens and police officers are still confused about hands-free driving. I’m not advocating for educating cops on how to spot hand-restricted culprits since I do pass cop cars on my way to work with breakfast in my right hand. I do think, however, if we are going to be a society of laws we should at least understand them.

One of my friends is very fastidious about keeping his hands free of the cell phone while behind the wheel. On long trips I’m forced to text for him. Yet, on one such trip, texting would not suffice. He needed to talk.
“Can you hold the phone to my ear?” he asked.

“Use speaker phone.”

“It’s private.”

This is ridiculous, I thought, but obliged to the demand. As the conversation began, he apparently did not like the positioning of my arm or the force I used to press the phone against the small opening to his ear canal. He grabbed my wrist and craned his neck to achieve the desired placement and pressure. Now, with his body bent and his head in the middle of the car centered just above the dashboard, he was supposedly hands-free.

“I think this defeats the purpose,” I said as he continued to drive with my wrist in his hand.

“Shhh,” he said, unable to hear the person on the other end. A horn blared and he swerved just in time, managing to save our lives while following his interpretation of the law.

Another friend had a banking snafu and through Blue Tooth technology was speaking with Citibank’s outsourced Indian staff about the mishap. Whether it was accents or volume or technological quality she couldn’t hear the foreign staffer on the line. So in order to hear better, with her left hand on the wheel and her right hand pressing the Blue Tooth against her ear, she continued to drive responsibly. Hands-free.

Present-Angst

I just read a NYT opinion piece where something called “eco-angst” is addressed. It’s the moment when knowing some unpleasant information about a product you use puts you in a bad mood. For example, “I can’t believe my deodorant is giving me Alzheimer’s.”

I think I discovered an angst even more detrimental to society, more groundless than “eco-angst.” I call it “present-angst.”

These days, there’s a faction of people that respond to “How are you?” with “It’s Monday” or “It’s raining.” They blame the Earth’s rotation and the water nourishing the planet for their own confounding emotional state. I’ve heard that Mondays and rain were sometimes less enjoyable moments in a person’s life, but when did they become appropriate answers to another person’s uninterested salutation.

I could imagine members of this “present-angst” cohort awaking from month long comas. “What day is it?” they would ask. Or, “Can you peel back those curtains?” And when you showed them a calendar and pointed to the first workday of the week or if a dark cloud rolled past their hospital window, they would beg for a return to their unconscious condition.

There’s one guy I know who always told me the day of the week when I used to say “How are you?” Then I switched to “Yo,” but he still responded with “Monday.” Finally I just acknowledged him with a head nod, yet he managed to return the nonverbal gesture with his trite, baseless response.

Now that it’s Yom Kippur and many of you have this Monday off, it’s a great day to overcome your “present-angst.” If someone says “How are you?” You say “good” or “atoning.” When the rain comes, we’ll work on that.

Check out the eco-angst article. It’s worth a read: http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/the-age-of-eco-angst/?th&emc=th

Hate Group Loves Shirt

Typically, hate websites are full of bigoted rants and angry sermons posted by shadowy online personas. But as I was scouring one of the more popular white supremacist and Neo Nazi pages that I am forced to read for my column, I found an anomaly in the world of hate. It was an odd string of dialogue that made these haters sound like fashionistas. They were complimenting the creators of a new anti-Israel t-shirt. If I had forgotten that I was reading a hate page, I would have thought I was viewing the feedback of clothing connoisseurs getting a sneak-peek at next year’s collection.

I just love those shirts, was more or less the typical tone of the posts. But the creatives at the hate site chose from a more juvenile vocabulary, using words like “cool” and “great” and “wow” as they admired the shirt that cursed Israel.

Everyone, however, was complaining about the price tag. “If I had the money, I would get one for sure,” one of the posts read.

Did that anonymous Neo-Nazi just say for sure?