My path was, surprise!, more circuitous. In the immediate aftermath of Gambit’s implosion I office temped for over a year, until I was able to find a gig that took advantage of my experience in bringing products to market. That gig was Le Zink, launching an Australian Day-Glo colored sunscreen in the US. As it happened, Marvel Comics came onto the market while I was working on Le Zink and I convinced my entrepreneurial boss that we should own a comic book publisher.

There followed a whirlwind year in which I took the point coordinating the teams of accountants and lawyers and investment bankers, digging deep into Marvel’s financials and structuring the offer. We were the last man standing before Ronald Perelman bought Marvel, and I honestly believe our offer was better. We were not, however, Ronald Perelman and MacAndrews & Forbes, and I think that tipped the scales.

Meanwhile, throughout the year I was working on the leveraged buyout of Marvel, Dorothy and I were continuing to hang with two of our best friends in New York, Jenette Kahn and her husband, Mort Fink. Jenette was the President and Publisher of DC Comics, the primary rival of the company I was attempting to purchase. That whole year, all I could say when Jenette and Mort asked what I was up to was that I was working on a very interesting LBO, but that I was under NDA and couldn’t discuss it. Although, to be fair, that was the same answer I had to give everybody.

But how, I can hear you asking, did we become best buds with the President of DC Comics? That takes us back to our hosiery company, Gambit. Jenette was a well-known fashionista, and had fallen in love with Dorothy’s designs. In fact, she purchased so much product she qualified as a wholesale account.

I’m in our San Francisco production office late one evening when the phone rings. I pick it up and Jenette’s on the line, offering me the Wonder Woman license for printed hosiery and requesting a meeting to discuss particulars the next time we were in New York. That’s a pretty easy Yes.

Did we have any interest in making Wonder Woman printed hosiery? We did not. Was Jenette interested in offering the license to us? Clearly not, or someone from DC’s licensing department would have reached out. But when you’re the President of DC Comics and you want to meet someone, you have a lot of options for baiting the hook.

And that’s what Jenette wanted. She loved the work, and wanted to meet the people responsible for it, under the perfectly reasonable assumption that it took interesting people to do interesting work. For our part, why would we not want to meet the President of DC Comics? It’s good to have friends in high places.

As suggested, we met the next time we were in NYC and hit it off like we’d known each other for decades. Thenceforth, every time we were in the city we’d join them for dinner, or a Knicks game, or an excursion of some type, and that carried over when we moved there as Gambit collapsed. Dorothy was even Jenette’s Plus One at an all-girls sleepover for Gloria Steinem’s birthday, every guest snuggled under one of the hostess’s many furs. 20 Feet From Stardom.

I was released from the NDA when Marvel accepted Perelman’s offer, and was now free to talk to Jenette about what I’d learned in the last year, having been elbow deep in Marvel’s operations and financials. I suggested that my deep industry knowledge, coupled with my well-established entrepreneurial chops (I had two successful national product rollouts under my belt, Gambit and Le Zink, and I’d just ticked thirty), qualified me to do something at DC, even if I didn’t have a clue what it might be. I was crystal clear, however, that she should employ me. Somehow.

Although, as a counterfactual, it’s more than entertaining to imagine an outcome where Jenette and I headed DC and Marvel respectively. That’s certainly what I was imagining all that year. What would the industry have looked like with friendly rivals?

At the time Jenette and I sat down for our chat, Art Spiegelman’s Maus was making waves. It was still a few years away from its Pulitzer in 1992, but the first collected volume was published in 1986 and suggested an interesting path forward for the comic book business. Here was proof positive that non-comic book readers would go into a bookstore to buy a graphic novel whose content and themes spoke to them. Jenette had been wrestling with how DC could take advantage of this opportunity, which amounted to a whole new market for comics, when my startup chops walked through the door.

This quickly coalesced into a vision for a new imprint, broadly under the DC imprimatur but with distinct branding, that would focus on the emerging market of non-comic book readers willing to read the right kind of comic books.

There were two immediate, glaring problems with this plan, and both of them were me. First, I had no experience in comic books or publishing of any kind, so Jenette creating a new imprint and handing it off to a noob had the potential to create an uprising among the experienced DC editors who’d been bypassed for such a plum opportunity.

Of course, my inexperience was a feature not a bug, not that DC’s staff would see it that way. The imprint practically required someone who’d never produced comic books in order to make things that weren’t like what DC was already making. In the post on Gambit I discuss the value of Strategic Ignorance and the risks of being an expert. Experts are steeped in the common wisdom of what’s possible in their domain, while an outsider may well imagine solutions that experts cannot. I was exactly the sort of ignorant that this new imprint required, if it was to have a chance of success.

The other thing wrong with me as the potential leader of this new imprint was that I was Jenette’s friend. Although no one at DC knew me at the time, there would be no question, no matter how we kept it on the down low, that my relationship with Jenette would become common knowledge after about five minutes on the clock. Not a good look, and as problematic in its own way as my lack of industry experience.

Jenette’s solution was to stage a competition, open to all. In order to pick a leader for their new, yet-to-be-named imprint, DC solicited proposals for the launch of an imaginary new magazine. Not a comic book of any kind, but a regular newsstand magazine (how quaint), whose focus could be anything: fashion, sports, health, science, travel… You could pick anything, but you had to make the case for why it filled a need not met in the market and how you’d go about executing.

The proposal needed to make the business case for the title, describe the editorial focus, identify the market niche it filled, define the target audience demographics, and explain how it would make money. You know. A business plan. The thing no one with any comic book experience at the time knew how to create.

I know a bunch of people threw their hats in the ring, but a lot of them dropped out once they realized how hard the assignment was. I think at the end of the process there was my proposal and either two or three others from industry insiders. I pitched Manifesto, a men’s magazine with a how-to focus, basically Glamour for men.

Believe it or not, I still have the proposal, which I came across when we unpacked in Chicago and I was sorting through our archives. Ten pages of detailed market analysis, circulation estimates, demographics, competitive analysis, editorial philosophy, and graphic design considerations. Ten more pages of appendices of raw data, a twelve-month editorial calendar, and a sample issue’s full contents. Those poor fuckers never stood a chance.

Did Jenette put her thumb on the scale by creating that particular challenge, suspecting that I’d be the only candidate who could successfully execute it? Maybe. But it’s also true that the skills the assignment was meant to foreground were absolutely critical to successfully launching the imprint, and mine was the only submission that objectively demonstrated those skills. You tell me if that’s “unfair.”

Fair or not, it was now possible to identify me as possessing the unique skill set necessary to launch a new imprint. Did that keep DC’s editors from grumbling about how Jenette’s friend just happened to win? It did not. That dogged me the entire time I worked at DC.

A Rocky Start

I was a fish out of water at DC from Day One. Under the normal chain of command I would have reported to the Executive Editor, Dick Giordano, with the EVP, Paul Levitz, greenlighting projects. Instead, I reported directly to Jenette, who was the only person I had to convince to approve a book. Paul reviewed my budgets and print runs and made sure my numbers made sense. Dick was a resource available to me whenever I had creative questions.

Reflecting the fact that this was meant to be a standalone entity, I had the unwieldy official title, Group Editor and Marketing Manager. I solicited and acquired projects, brokered writer/artist teams when necessary, provided story and copy editing, set production estimates and budgets, prepared the marketing plan and managed the execution of collateral materials, set and managed the publishing calendar, prepared the artwork to be turned into film, checked the film and made corrections before it went to the printer, and even flew to Quebec to our printer, Ronalds, to color correct on press if we had a particularly challenging production. I also attended conventions, spoke on panels, and was responsible for the brand in every way imaginable.

The very first panel I sat on, at the San Diego Comic-Con, was a literal nightmare. I don’t remember who else was on the panel, but it was Art Speigelman and a bunch of other heavy hitters. Piranha had just published its first books, which somehow qualified me to sit with this group. I had never done any public speaking before, and when a question came to me, I opened my mouth, uttered a few words, and went completely blank. After an uncomfortable moment of silence, I muttered something about losing my train of thought and passed to the next contestant.

That’s the nightmare, isn’t it? Leaving the house without pants on, running into the ex and her new boy toy when you haven’t showered in a couple of days, having a mental breakdown in public… But a funny thing happened. I was fine. The worst thing that could have happened in that moment happened, and then it was over and everything was OK. I never had an issue with public speaking after that.

Anyway, all of this action was managed from a home office. I eventually wound up with an official DC office, but for the first two years they wanted me isolated from their day-to-day operations. They didn’t want me infected by the methods they used to produce traditional comic books. DC was, I think, the only employer I’ve ever had that truly understood and valued my ignorance.

A key difference between my role and the other editors was that I was financially responsible for my line, whereas DC’s traditional editors were only responsible for the creative integrity of their books. Not only did Paul Levitz review and approve my budgets, but we always had a post mortem once a book had been published to see if I’d hit my targets or not. Not a one of those other editors wanted bottom line responsibility, a point I was happy to make whenever anyone gave me the stinkeye.

However, none of this happened right away, as I hit more a brick wall than a speed bump on Day One.

The traditional comic book business is built on the work-made-for-hire model, meaning writers and artists are paid to create to the company’s spec and the company owns the creative output. Jenette had done heroic work creating and implementing a royalty structure so that creatives could share in the financial gains their work generated, but the work itself was, still and always, for hire, and owned by DC.

I had been tasked with launching a line of creator-oriented work, inspired by Maus, and it never occurred to me that DC thought that might be possible using a work-made-for-hire contract. Because that would be insane. But that’s what I discovered on Day One. Paul handed me their standard contract and told me to go out and acquire all the goodness Jenette craved.

I asked Jenette if this was real, and she said it was. A huge component of their business model involved dusting off old properties and reimagining them in a new context. Since they never knew what might be valuable in the future, they just owned everything.

I told Jenette we’d never get the properties we’d set our sights on with a work-made-for-hire contract, and she told me to go figure out what we could do instead. As long as that solution didn’t involve DC losing access to potentially valuable properties.

Fuck.

I spent literally my entire first year on staff working with Chantal d’Aulnis, their in-house counsel. We couldn’t announce the line, I couldn’t solicit work, we couldn’t do anything public facing until the contractual issue was resolved. There wasn’t really a new imprint until I figured out how to wrest a creator’s rights contract out of a company that had no interest in any such thing.

Other than work on the contract the one thing I was able to do in that year was name and brand the imprint. I’d been staring at a blank legal pad in the run-up to the meeting with Jenette, and had nothing. I had a list of names so anodyne no one involved in the process can recall them, myself included. As a joke, and without any particular thought or effort, I tossed Piranha Press onto that list, so that at least Jenette and I could enjoy a laugh together while we bemoaned my lack of imagination.

Unexpectedly, it resonated with Jenette and stuck. Henceforth, Piranha Press, Comics With Teeth.

Of course, without a creator’s rights contract to offer, the newly named Piranha Press would die in the cradle. The whole thing just seemed silly. It’s not like Art Spiegelman was raking in the bucks on Maus merch. I was tasked with signing projects that had almost by definition next to zero merchandising value, with a contract that insisted, as a habit, on the value of the merchandising rights.

If there’s a theme to extract from these career retrospectives, it’s that I’m not smart enough to stop when something appears objectively impossible. For a full year I pushed and yielded and pushed some more, probing, searching for a weak spot that I could exploit, a combination of elements no one had thought of before that would unlock the solution. It was an impossible problem I had to solve. I needed the job.

I have accomplished a few things in my career of which I am genuinely proud, things that have left the larger world slightly different because of my efforts. One was figuring out how to print on hosiery. Another was birthing the first creator’s rights contract offered by either of the major comic book publishers. I can’t take all of the credit, as I had willing partners in Jenette and Chantal, although neither, I think, truly believed there was a solution. So I’ll take full credit for the solution.

What finally cut the knot? The contract Piranha offered vested all rights to the property directly with the creator. Creators owned their own work, but licensed back to DC the rights to publish and exploit the materials in any manner and in any medium. They could make posable action figures, t-shirts, movies, games, anything and everything was included in the license. I don’t remember the split, but there was generous profit sharing of such exploitation.

So how was this different than a work-made-for-hire contract? Creative ownership was meaningless if the same rights as existed under the previous arrangement were simply licensed away instead of being forcibly wrested by droit du seigneur. The hook was that in order for DC to retain the rights to exploit a property they would have to keep it in print. If three years lapsed without publication, the contract terminated and all licensed rights reverted to the creator.

What that meant as a practical matter was that as the three year window loomed, DC would have to make a rational cost/benefit analysis about the value of the subsidiary rights. In the past they had never had to make that call, as they owned everything forever.

If a book had been out of print for three years, was it worth the investment in reprinting in order to retain the licensing rights? In most cases, the answer was obviously no, and all rights reverted. On the off chance that Piranha published a blockbuster, DC could retain the rights as long as they wanted. Otherwise, there was no business rationale for absorbing the cost of reprinting in order to retain the licensing rights. I’d left DC by the time the first three-year window came up, but all of those properties reverted to their creators, as intended.

I baked one other innovation into the contract. Since these were properties owned by the creators, DC couldn’t exercise the sort of editorial control to which they were accustomed. So what happened if a story came in and they wanted changes?

They had to ask.

They had to make their case to the creators why the changes were necessary or meaningful. Creators could then accede to the request, reject it, or offer a compromise solution. Which DC could accept or reject. For the most part, this led to exactly the kind of creative compromise and accommodation you’d like to see between publisher and creator. In the event that compromise could not be reached, DC’s only option was nuclear: decline to publish. With the creators keeping any already paid advance.

This actually came up regarding the final issue of a four-issue mini-series, The Score. Jenette requested a change that the creators weren’t comfortable with, but neither was Jenette comfortable failing to publish the final issue. In the end, the creators negotiated a one-off Batman special in exchange for acquiescing to the request. Truthfully, I don’t think the change was that big a deal for them, but I’d handed them leverage and they were happy to use it.

That creator’s rights contract was the one Karen Berger used to launch Vertigo. Trying to take any of the credit for Vertigo would be stupid, as it was Karen’s vision and execution through and through. But it’s a fact that she couldn’t have acquired the properties that made Vertigo so successful without the contract I’d pioneered for Piranha, and that absent my efforts that contract would never have existed.

So… Sandman. You’re welcome.

Congratulations! You Have A Fish!

Now what? I’d solved one problem only to be confronted with another: what was Piranha Press? All I really had was a negative mandate: don’t make traditional superhero comics. That left… a lot.

Of course, this was really two completely different questions: what should the stories be about, and how should they be told? On the first of those questions, content, I made an intentional choice for eclectic, with a side of literary. More than anything, I wanted to publish books that covered the full range of subject matter available to fiction that didn’t have pictures, putting comic books on an equal footing with literature.

The second question, regarding form, was, I thought, even more interesting. Comic books had developed a rigorous graphical language, using panels and word balloons to tell sequential stories. That was fine for the sort of action-oriented superhero fare that was the norm, but I felt like there were more ways than that to combine words and pictures to tell a story.

What I wanted out of form was for each story to combine words and pictures in the way best suited to telling that particular story. If that happened to be a traditional panel and word balloon structure, great. If the story needed something different, let’s figure that out.

That aligned with how I viewed my role as an editor. Having acquired a property, I was endorsing the creators as capable of telling their story and the work as worthy of publishing. My role was to make sure that the final product represented the best articulated version of the story they were telling. Not, “I think this is wrong,” or, “I think this would be better.” More, “I think your intention here is X, and I’m not sure that’s coming across clearly. Is there a better way to express that idea?” I felt like I was standing in for the reader rather than the publisher, saying, “Hold on, I didn’t follow that last bit.”

Also, while I wasn’t against working with talent that came from a comic book background, I had a strong bias towards new voices, people who had, because of the stories they wanted to tell, never considered the comic book industry a likely option. While there were quite a few smaller publishers out there at the time, doing interesting work, I had one thing that creators wanted that the small press didn’t have: money. I was able to pay creators way more than the independent press could offer, which popped loose material that might otherwise have never seen the light of day.

As I’m busy acquiring properties with my brand new contract and my freshly articulated editorial POV, I had to think not only about launch, but also pretty much the entire first year’s production calendar. I could backfill with new acquisitions for Year Two and beyond, but I’d need enough in the pipeline to make sure I could publish that first year without a hiccup.

Part of that process was also settling on what the books would look like. I wanted there to be consistent line branding, but I wanted the finished product to look more like a book than a comic. My benchmark was that I wanted someone on the subway to be comfortable reading a Piranha Press book, knowing that it didn’t brand them as a nerd. Remember, this was way before the nerds won and superheroes went mainstream. Comic books were still considered a cultural backwater.

DC’s Director of Design, Richard Bruning, hooked me up with graphic designer extraordinaire Dean Motter. Dean had done the excellent Piranha logo, and now it was time to tackle full-on branding. Here’s the branding applied to my business card, as well as the front and back covers of the first issue of Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children, one of my three launch titles. We tweaked the design over the life of the project, but the branding stayed recognizable from Day One. In fact, the cover design won more than one (ok, two – that’s more than one) industry design awards.

Those three launch titles were, in effect, my manifesto. They needed to represent the range I was trying to encompass with Piranha, in both the kinds of stories being told and the way they were being told. I was in no small measure outlining the perimeters of an editorial vision for the line. The shape would fill in as I published more titles, but I needed to establish the broad outline on launch.

My three launch titles were:

Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children, a series with a standalone story each month written by Dave Louapre and illustrated by Dan Sweetman. They came to me as a team, with a sheaf of single panel cartoons (which I subsequently published as The Wasteland) and a self-published story called The Rancid Baby. Dave was a writer of surpassing skill, the best writer, from a technical perspective, that I’d work with, and Dan was a master of multiple techniques, all of which he utilized for BSFUC.

BSFUC was everything I’d hoped for with Piranha: dark, funny, high-toned and lowdown. I’d publish thirty issues over the life of Piranha, plus three trade paperbacks. They were my flagship.

Structurally, BSFUC was illustrated fiction: text offset with pictures, although the exact shape of that arrangement varied story to story, as did Dan’s illustration technique. Everything was in service of the story.

Next up was ETC, a science fiction page-turner written by industry vet Tim Conrad. I connected Tim with Michael Davis, an illustrator who was new to the comics and storytelling world. This was a full-color five issue limited series, and the most traditional of my launch titles, in the sense that it was primarily a panel and word balloon presentation, although executed in high style.

The launch was rounded out by Desert Streams, by the delightful Alison Marek. Desert Streams was a quiet first person story of a teenage girl caught in the crossfire of the family drama between her mother and stepfather. Rendered in sensitive pencil, Alison beautifully captures the adolescent search for normalcy.

Structurally, Desert Streams represented yet another approach. The narrative was pictures with text, but in a more orderly, rigorous way than BSFUC. And the shape made everyone batshit insane. It was about half a trade paperback high, a format no had ever used for anything ever. But Alison had finished Desert Streams years earlier, and it was complete when she brought it to me. I didn’t have a single editorial suggestion (I think the only thing we did was typeset the text), and I certainly wasn’t going to demand that she completely redo the book from scratch so it would fit into a predetermined format.

What did this all add up to? I had an ongoing black and white anthology series of illustrated fiction. I had a full-color mini-series set in a science fiction future. And I had a half-sized trade paperback black-and-white kitchen sink drama.

I hoped that what it demonstrated was a commitment to do what was best for each story, and that the focus on story integrity would attract even more excellent work. I hoped that the range on display, of both genre and structure, would demonstrate our devotion to telling stories of any and every kind, attracting even more excellent work.

Or…

It was an incoherent editorial mess without a focus or point of view. I was trying to use three data points to illustrate a larger theme, and that’s only going to work so well. Let’s just say that I had both passionate supporters and passionate detractors, from initial launch all the way through to demise.

Many Unhappy Returns

There was now one last problem to solve in order for Piranha Press to fulfill its destiny. I needed to put the books in bookstores, not just comic book shops. I had been tasked with creating a line of books meant to be attractive to a mainstream, non-comic book readership, and I needed to be where those readers were, which was not in comic book shops.

The flip side of that equation is that by creating an editorial POV focused on attracting non-comic book readers I had, in what appeared to be an intentional act, completely alienated the vast majority of traditional comic book readers. Piranha Press had a devoted readership in comic shops, but it was burdened with both a low floor and a low ceiling. It’s tough to build a successful business on that profile.

That’s when I discovered a quirk of the comic book industry that I somehow had never learned. When bookstores order books they can be returned to the publisher. If you’re old enough to remember used book stores that sold paperbacks with their covers torn off, that’s how it used to be done. Retailers would tear the covers off unsold books and return just the covers to the publishers for credit, proof that a book had been destroyed. Or sold to the secondary market.

But when a comic book shop bought a book, it was forever. Comic books were a non-returnable business, which was an entirely different economic model than bookstores. First I had to convince DC to offer creator’s rights. Now I would have to convince them to sell books on a returnable basis, a thing they had never done before, in order to get my titles in front of the readers for whom they were intended in the first place.

Fuck.

I worked with DC’s marketing department to put together a pilot program in the main Tower Books store in the Village. We brought in an old-fashioned drug store style spinner rack, set it up in the store, and stocked it with both DC and Piranha Press titles. This was long before every bookstore had a dedicated graphic novel section.

All of the metrics from that test pointed to putting my titles into bookstores. I had higher total dollar sales than the DC books, which wasn’t surprising on the one hand, because my books were more expensive. But I also had higher unit sales and higher sell through rates. Those books performed in that setting.

I took those results back to Paul, and he still wasn’t comfortable getting into a returnable business. To be fair, it would have been a non-trivial change, as they had no logistics set up around returns. But still. I’d been hired to create an imprint that would appeal to people who would never go into a comic shop, delivered on that mandate, and proven that I’d done so. It seemed like I’d been set up to fail, and that securing the creator’s rights contract at the beginning just kicked that failure down the road.

Jenette was sympathetic, but unwilling to overrule Paul on what amounted to a core financial decision. What I was told was that the line didn’t have to go into bookstores and build an entirely new audience for DC. They were perfectly comfortable keeping it as an art house project whose benefits were more reputational than financial. They had unquestionably accrued cred for publishing such oddball stuff, and were happy continuing to do so.

I wasn’t, and maybe that was just youth and righteousness speaking. But I’d signed on to create a real business, and babysitting a vanity press didn’t feel right to me. This was my third successful national product launch in the span of about half a dozen years, and there was something about the proposed arrangement that felt like being put out to pasture. Of course, I couldn’t have known at the time that Piranha would be my last product launch.

Feelings aside, I also had the very real practical concern that the long-term commitment to a prestige product would look very different than the commitment to a money-making concern. A profitable imprint justifies its own existence, but a vanity press survives at the whim of its patrons, which I just couldn’t count on.

So I left.

Don’t Let The Domino Hit You On The Way Out

For my last couple of years at DC I’d had an editorial assistant working for me, a bright, talented young woman. When I announced my departure she, naturally, wanted to step into the lead role. She was super competent, but at the time I wasn’t convinced she had the editorial chops to make the transition. I’d given her some top-line editorial tasks, and I felt like her instincts weren’t quite there.

I have no way of knowing if DC would have given her the position if I’d gone to bat for her. But I didn’t. Instead, I made the case that I didn’t think she was quite ready. I failed to account for a number of things in this process. First, how little actual influence I had once I’d lame ducked myself. I felt like I was still collaborating with DC on how to make the line successful after my departure, and they felt that letting me offer opinions didn’t cost them anything.

The other thing I hadn’t accounted for was how much worse the alternatives to my assistant were. They handed the line to Andy Helfer, one of their existing editors. The gap in editorial sensibility between myself and my assistant was a rounding error compared to the gulf that separated Helfer and I.

Andy immediately canceled every project in my pipeline with one exception, Stuck Rubber Baby. Everything else was killed, no matter where it was in the production cycle. Everyone’s rights reverted and they got to keep the money they’d been paid, but none of those projects ever sniffed daylight.

Andy eventually changed the imprint to Paradox Press, for which I was intensely grateful, as one of the only books he published under the Piranha name was a one-off that cast Prince as a superhero.

But that’s what happens when you walk away. It’s not yours any longer.

Obviously, Paradox Press had the same structural headwinds that had caused me to leave Piranha, and sure enough, it was shuttered when it failed to make money. Being put out to pasture with Piranha might have made for a pleasant few years, but I would still have ended up at the glue factory, as I’d predicted.

Next…

About six months before I opted out, DC’s Design Director, Richard Bruning, decided to move on and return to freelancing. He was frustrated by several things. One was that in leading the design department he was spending most days supervising other designers, but never getting much opportunity city to create himself. I live with a maker, so I totally understand that. Richard was a crackerjack manager, but it’s the rare maker who actually enjoys managing, and Richard wasn’t one of them.

Richard was even more frustrated by DC’s disinterest in using digital design tools in any part of their workflow. Richard was justifiably concerned that if he stayed at DC the graphic design industry would pass him by as it pivoted to a digital design paradigm, so he and Dean Motter were starting a design studio that was built from the ground up to use digital tools, and did I want to join them?

Richard and I had become work besties over the previous few years. We respected each other’s abilities and collaborated really gracefully together on a number of efforts. If I was going to go into business with anyone it would be Richard. But at the time I was asked, I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t given up on Piranha Press at that point, as I was convinced that I could still make it a success.

When I finally did decide to leave six months later, I took Richard and Dean up on their offer and joined as a partner, responsible for client management and business operations. We were originally Bruning Motter Nevelow, but we gave up that catchy moniker when Dean left. Richard and I embarked on our adventure together as Brainstorm Unlimited.

The Titles

Who’d like a little lowdown on each of the titles I published? No? Well, feel free to stop reading. Although you’ll miss the after-credits outtakes.

The Sinners & Hardcore

Alec Stevens is a writer/artist who brought me The Sinners, an old man’s recounting of his life of sin, torment, and redemption. The story has the feeling of classic literature, while the art is an absolutely gorgeous gloss on German Expressionism, with a side of stained glass. Alec followed that up with Hardcore, the story of a violent skinhead gang, rendered in a similar style.

The Drowned Girl & Nation Of Snitches

One of my best friends in NYC was Jon Hammer, a painter whose work I love to this day. Some of it is still on my walls as we speak. After I got the Piranha gig I casually asked Jon whether he’d ever considered telling a story. He hadn’t, but he went away and came back to me with The Drowned Girl, a fever dream about Dick Shamus, a delusional fellow who thinks he’s a private eye hunting down a clutch of fifth column Nazis bent on world domination. He’s not, but his meaningless exploits are hysterical, and the fact that there’s no real story at the end of the day is audacious. The artwork is spectacular, and the ending is unexpectedly lyrical.

The Drowned Girl wasn’t particularly successful for me financially, not that many of my books were (see above about not selling in bookstores). But I thought it was a roaring success creatively and I published a second Hammer book, A Nation Of Snitches, about, if it can be said to be about anything, a satanic serial killer who murders for Christ. In a twist, both Dorothy and I appear in cameos. The artist photo in The Drowned Girl is of Dorothy dying Jon’s hair, and I have a walk-on in Nation Of Snitches in my urologist’s waiting room.

The Score

Writer Gerard Jones brought me this twisty mystery as a four-part limited series. My recollection is that I connected Gerry with artist Mark Badger, but they might have come as a team. Structurally, The Score is a fairly traditional panel-and-word-balloon presentation, which makes perfect sense for an action story. However, the painterly approach Mark used makes the book look nothing at all like a conventional comic book.

The drama in The Score wasn’t confined to the page. This wasn’t the first project I brought to Jenette that she rejected, but it was the first one I fought her over. She didn’t care for the story’s focus on prostitution, drugs, and violence. I told her she was wrong, that beneath that gritty surface there was a compelling, page-turning mystery with real depth and beautiful art. I kind of insisted. She relented, but in the chilliest manner possible. She looked me in the eye and said, “OK. But you’d better be right.” Ouch!

Spoiler alert: I was right. It turned out beautifully and never came back to bite me. But there was plenty more drama to come. For starters, Jenette scrutinized the scripts and gave notes in a way she didn’t for any of my other projects. From a subject matter perspective, The Score pushed both Jenette’s and DC’s boundaries, and she was vigilant about policing the borders.

Gerry and Mark knew that they were going to get exceptionally close scrutiny, literally down to specific words. This is how I learned that scumbag meant a used condom. I did not know that. That word was excised. In our defense, we did slip in what I’m certain was DC’s first anal sex scene, by way of an artful scene cut. I’m pretty sure Jenette missed it.

My other favorite part of The Score was the development process. The thing about mysteries is that they have to be honest. All of the pieces need to interlock like a clockwork mechanism, and all of the breadcrumbs need to lead to the conclusion. When you’re done reading, all of the clues should be logical and true, even if you didn’t pick up on them at the time.

To achieve that effect I flew Gerry and Mark to New York and put them up for a week. I commandeered a conference room in the office and we hunkered down to plot the story out inch by painstaking inch. We poked holes that needed to be patched, brainstormed solutions, restructured scenes, and tightened that fucker down until it squeaked. I think that’s the most fun I ever had as an editor.

I mentioned earlier that Jenette had demanded a change that almost got the fourth and final issue shitcanned. The cover to issue four featured one of the female characters on the ground being menaced by a man with a knife. Jenette felt that the positioning of the characters suggested a sexual assault, when in fact it was just a good, old-fashioned vanilla assault.

We’d pushed Jenette pretty hard with this project, but this is where she dug her heels in. Still, given that the work was actually owned by Gerry and Mark, her only leverage was refusal to publish. We came up with what I think is an exceptionally clever solution that satisfied all parties, and put a lot of money in Gerry’s and Mark’s pockets, as they negotiated a Batman special as compensation for relenting.

We discussed painting an entirely new cover, but instead we took the rejected cover art, wrapped it in Kraft paper and tape like we were covering up porn, and strategically ripped the wrapper to show enough of the cover underneath to tell the story. We put stamps on the actual artwork and I took the board to the Post Office to get the stamps canceled. It took some convincing before the clerk understood that I didn’t want to mail it, I just wanted the stamps canceled and the art handed back to me.

Honestly, I think it was a better cover because of the changes. But our aggrieved artists would never admit any such thing.

Epicurus The Sage

Bill Messner-Loebs was the writer/artist responsible for one of the towering achievements of the indie comics scene: Journey, The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire. It wasn’t particularly successful, but holy fuck was it good. It told the story of Michigan frontier life in the 19th century, centered on the real Fort Miami. It was a gripping, dramatic, page-turning adventure story built out of the slenderest of elements: weather, personalities, and weather.

I can’t recall now whether I solicited Bill or he solicited me, but his pitch was so oddball I had to say yes. An adventure story/satire about Greek philosophy, featuring Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and our hero, the tolerant, rational Epicurus. Also appearing was Alexander of Macedon as a child, before he was Great. If memory serves, Bill and artist Sam Kieth came to me as a package. Structurally, Epicurus is a traditional panels-and-word-balloons narrative, but Sam’s approach to panel layout experimented with form, using the entire page as a design element. To say nothing of the fact that the artwork is just beautiful.

Epicurus was well received, and I published a second volume. The first was nominated for a Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album.

Gregory

Gregory was the brainchild of writer/artist Marc Hempel, and was an oddball breakout hit for Piranha, nominated for a Harvey and two Eisner awards. It was successful enough that three subsequent volumes came out under the Piranha imprint after I left. Structurally it was panels-and-word-balloons, but with quite a bit more chaos in the page design than that description suggests.

Gregory was the heartwarming story of Gregory, a young boy (lunatic was still on the approved list back then) who lives in a straitjacket in a small cell in an asylum, can barely speak, and has as his only friend a rat named Hermin Vermin, who keeps dying and coming back to life. I’m sure it’s exactly the kind of earnest, personal story Jenette had in mind when she imagined going after the Maus readership.

Despite that description, it is unaccountably charming and utterly original. There’s no way that a few random pages can capture the glory, so I offer up the entirety of A Hello To Arms. You’re welcome.

Why I Hate Saturn

Why I Hate Saturn was a hit for Piranha, winning the Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album of Original Work. Kyle Baker was a gifted writer/artist who had just published his first graphic novel, The Cowboy Wally Show. I don’t remember who approached whom, but Cowboy Wally was hysterical, so it was easy to sign Kyle up for his next book.

Structurally, Saturn is panels and captions, not a word balloon to be found. It’s a screwball comedy with hipster Anne, Anne’s platonic BFF Ricky, and Anne’s sister Laura, who thinks she’s the Queen of the Leather AstroGirls of Saturn. It’s mostly talking heads, but the dialogue has a crisp serve-and-volley rhythm that’s seductive. It is very, very funny.

Saturn was a tricky book to produce. At first blush it looks like a black-and-white book with a gray tint, but it’s actually two-color printing: black and a PMS-match brown for the wash. The brown was a completely separate overlay that was turned into a second plate, so there was no way to see exactly what it looked like until the press was running.

This was one of those occasions where I went up to our printer in Quebec to color correct on press. Piranha’s print runs were always minuscule compared to DC’s, so they always ran afterwards. I’d park myself in their waiting room and pass out until summoned, usually somewhere around two or three in the morning.

At which point I’d have to leap into high-functioning cognition, as I had a tiny window to make corrections. “Bring up the red in the center, tone down the yellow on the right…” The presses were so fast and my runs were so short that if I dithered, the run would be over. If I wanted the books to look good, I had moments to make the corrections. Thank goodness Saturn wasn’t my first press check. That two-color thing was complicated, but I think the final product looked great.

Our rep at Ronalds told me this great story about Frank Miller and his colorist Lynn Varley doing color correction on the first issue of The Dark Knight. They tweaked and adjusted and tweaked again until they were satisfied with the color, and announced that the print run could now commence. But the press had been running the entire time, and the run was actually ending. The last couple of hundred copies that came off the press looked exactly like Frank and Lynn wanted, and the rest got sold anyway. Even with a large run, you want to make press corrections fast.

Actually completing Saturn was a challenge. Kyle always had a ton of side gigs, and was relentless in requesting extensions from me so that he could complete other work. I was generous in granting them until I wasn’t. I had to get Saturn on the production calendar at some point, which meant Kyle had to actually finish the book.

Did I say “You’re running out of friends?” I did, because he was. He was very young, and was developing a reputation for burning editors. That’s not good, and he needed to understand that the juggling he was trying to pull off had consequences. But I wasn’t expecting this, which took up a full page in the September 1991 issue of National Lampoon.

I will confess that I was hurt by it, which was, obviously, the point. I went so far as to discuss it with a lawyer, who thankfully talked me off the ledge. But I am incapable of finding it funny.

Sparrow

Desert Streams was pretty well received, so Alison brought me Sparrow. This one hadn’t been sitting in her drawer and was created from scratch. It utilizes a text-and-illustrations approach similar to Desert Streams, but with a full-sized format and a fresh start Alison had the freedom to experiment more with the relationship between words and pictures, creating a more fluid reading experience. Sparrow tells the story of Jumpy McNabb, an acknowledged bad boy at only five years old, and looks at what it takes to twist a child into that shape.

Mars On Earth

Mars On Earth is a story about a down-on-his-luck bowling hustler, written by Damon Cardwell, a down-on-his-luck bowling hustler. I was familiar with Glenn Barr’s work through, I’m pretty sure, Juxtapoz magazine, and I thought his style would be a good fit for Damon’s story. They were fireworks together. Mars is straight up illustrated fiction, no sequential storytelling at all.

This was one of my favorite books to edit, because I just loved the long calls with Damon going over the latest script. Mars is about 95% autobiographical, and it’s not the 5% you think. Every time I’d say, “OK, that part’s made up,” he’d say, “Nope, that happened.” The thing about the adrenaline shot? True story.

Possibly my single most favorite moment as an editor came near the end of the process. A climactic scene is set in a Vegas strip club Damon identified as The Crazy Horse. I said, “Damon. That strip club you describe isn’t The Crazy Horse. It’s The Crazy Horse II.” There was a pause on the other end of the line, and he finally said, “You’re right. That is The Crazy Horse II. How did you know that?” “I’m an editor, Damon. It’s my job to know shit.”

What If This Were Heaven, Wouldn’t That Be Hell & The Wasteland

I published three trade paperbacks by the BSFUC boys. What If This Were Heaven, Wouldn’t That Be Hell was three original stories: Lester, The Lonesome Druid, Even Bluebirds Go To Hell, and The Night They Missed The Donkey Show. The genesis of this book was, I think, that the stories were either too short or too long to fit the BSFUC format, so we collected them as a volume.

Donkey Show was a largely truthful recounting of the evening I shanghaied a group of my creators (names withheld for obvious reasons) from the San Diego Comic-Con to search for the mythical donkey show in Tijuana. We never found it, thank goodness, but it turned into a great story. Dave made up the part about the inflatable Elvises, but I swear everything else in the story actually happened.

The Wasteland was a collection of their single panel cartoons, which had initially so endeared them to me. And A Cotton Candy Autopsy collected the first two stories about the out of control clowns, Anybody’s Freak from issue #1, Bingo And Addy’s Escape from issue #13, and a brand-new story to close the trilogy, The Resurrection Of Joey Punchinello. I got to quote a Penn & Teller endorsement on the back cover: “As ugly children we found this book extremely beautiful.” Also, from an MTV review, when that was a thing: “Makes Heathers look like Police Academy.” That’s a great quote.

Stuck Rubber Baby

Stuck Rubber Baby is, without question, the book I’m proudest of, even though my name doesn’t appear in it anywhere. It is tender, fierce, and important. It’s the kind of book that makes a difference.

Howard Cruse was the king of independent gay comics. He couldn’t be the king of mainstream gay comics, because there wasn’t any such thing. His strips Wendel and Barefootz were grounded in the post-Stonewall gay community, and the collected editions were a testament to his creative vision.

Howard had begun thinking of a longer form project, but his art style is slow and painstaking, so he didn’t think he’d be able to earn enough from a book to cover the time it took to create it. A friend urged him to reach out to me. I was familiar with his work and more than receptive. I worked with Howard to put together a pitch that would deliver an advance against royalties adequate to cover his estimated time frame of two years for creation of this 201 page behemoth.

Sadly, Howard underestimated the time by a significant factor. It took him four years to complete his two year project. He wound up auctioning off pages of original artwork, before they were actually done, to make ends meet.

Stuck Rubber Baby is a frankly brilliant exploration of a Southern lad coming to grips with being gay during the civil rights movement. It’s the intersection of those two strands, and the way the main character comes to better understand both himself and his place, that’s so effective.

Howard grew up in Birmingham at that time, so SRB was often taken for thinly veiled autobiography, but it wasn’t. It was based on his lived experience, and has some elements in common with his personal history, but the story itself is just that. A story, enriched and deepened by its author’s life. Like “real” fiction.

I loved the editorial process for this book. Howard was telling a complicated story using a denser, more fluid panel narrative than he had in the past, so everything was new to him. Being that outside set of eyes, saying “This is working beautifully, this isn’t coming across, my eye isn’t going where you want it to…,” helping to make the final story the very best it could be, was enormously gratifying. Howard was an open-minded collaborator, always willing to listen to suggestions. And even adopt them, when he agreed. As it should be.

I left Piranha when the book was only about 25% complete, which freaked Howard out. He was not looking for a change in editorial horses midstream. He trusted me, and didn’t want to have to start over with someone who hadn’t been there from the beginning. He knew I worked for both his and the story’s best interests, so as part of my exit from DC we agreed that I’d continue to edit SRB on a freelance basis.

For reasons I don’t recall, that arrangement ended before the book was completely done, and he was handed off to one of Andy’s editors. There wasn’t a lot of risk, as he was probably 80% finished. All the hard work of plotting was completed, and Howard had a firm hand on page layout and design by that point, so the change didn’t really impact the finished product.

What surprised me, on publication, was that I was given zero credit as the editor of the book. I still don’t know what that was about. I have an idea or two, but they fall under the heading of rank speculation. But that’s just me whinging. The book itself was everything I’d hoped for, whether my name was on it or not. It swept the awards the year it was published, deservedly winning for Best Graphic Novel at the Eisners, the Harveys, and the UK Comic Art Awards.

Howard did an exceptionally detailed series of blog posts about the creation of SRB, but his site was taken down after he died in 2019. Given DC’s snub on credits, this was practically the only place where my role was properly acknowledged, although Howard did thank me in the credits of the book itself. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine, so Howard’s posts are still available.

The Elvis Mandible

The Elvis Mandible gave The Drowned Girl a run for its money as the weirdest thing I published. Writer/artist Douglas Michael uncovers the long buried truth: the jawbone of the King wields enormous power. Hopefully the CIA can keep it away from the commies. This one is more panel-and-caption than panel-and-word balloon, with a delicate gray wash that makes the line art glow. Hilariously, DC’s legal department required the cover disclaimer, so I made it look as much like a joke as I could get away with.

The Laziest Secretary In The World

Jennifer Waters brought this to me as a straight up novella, and I connected her to Gil Ashby, whose work I knew from Denys Cowan. This was pure illustrated fiction, and was, I think, Gil’s first book. The story is about the titular Latoya, who would rather scam than work. Madcap hijinks ensue when she agrees to marry a Korean businessman so he can get American citizenship.

Invaders From Home

John Blair Moore was the writer/artist behind this absurdist, mostly-based-on-a-true-story (I think he made up the talking duck) tale of a man falling apart at the prospect of having a child. Years later when we moved to St. Louis, I learned that John, and the now-grown daughter in question, were residents, and we struck up a renewed relationship. This is theoretically panels-and-word balloons, but with a loose, shambolic approach to page layout that echoes the protagonist’s mental state.

The Hiding Place

The Hiding Place is where the last member of a species facing extinction goes to live out its days. A young boy stumbles on it and discovers an eco-disaster in the making. Charlie Boatner came to me with this story, and I hooked him up with illustrator Steve Parkhouse, whose whimsical, charming style brings the story to life. Steve was an established industry vet, whose Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention The Hiding Place. This was told in a fairly straightforward panel-and-word-balloon structure.

But Wait, There’s More…

I’ll close with a few items that I couldn’t shoehorn into the above. Enjoy.

Real Life Funnies

The Village Voice ran a weekly strip called Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies from the 70s to the 90s. Its tag lines were “100% overheard” and “All dialogue guaranteed verbatim.” I really enjoyed Stan’s work, and reached out to see if he had something in mind more long-form than a weekly strip. He did not, but we hit it off and I enjoyed his company. He was an excellent conversationalist, but I was unaware at the time the extent to which he was listening. Real Life Funnies was reportage, and Stan was a reporter. Always.

He wound up doing two strips about us. One was about the dissolution of Gambit (which I sadly can’t find a copy of), and then there was this, which actually appeared in AdWeek. It doesn’t entirely live up to the “All dialogue guaranteed verbatim” claim, but I understand where creative license makes the strip better.

Phoenix Rising

It was a simpler time. Men watched women take off their clothes, and women paid their way through college. One of the projects that got killed when I left Piranha was a science fiction story whose technical consultant was a graduate physics student by day, stripper by night. We had a story conference one evening at a club where she danced, in between numbers.

So it was not abnormal for our crew to gather at a strip club for drinks and gawks. My oldest friend, Bruce, had been telling me about a gorgeous new dancer at one of the clubs whose nom de peau was Phoenix. After weeks of buildup, I was finally able to join Bruce and our other friends at her club one night.

Phoenix lived up to the hype. She was, as advertised, a goddess. I asked her to join our table after her dance, and she did. The round of introductions involved sharing what we all did for a living. When it was my turn I offered up that I published comic books.

Phoenix said she loved comic books and I asked her what her favorites were. She said that she liked really obscure stuff that I’d probably never heard of. When prompted, she told me that her favorite comic book was Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children. I told her that was one of the books I published, and her eyes got wide.

“Are you Mark Nevelow?”

I swear, I dined out on that story for years.

Weirdly, sometime after that I was at a convention, enjoying the local scene, when another stripper who called herself Phoenix confessed that BSFUC was her favorite comic, although she couldn’t name check me.

I came back to New York confident that I’d surgically identified Piranha’s target market: strippers named Phoenix. Of course, I couldn’t share that insight with corporate without exposing my expense account, so I kept it to myself.

Sir Pranksalot

I am not, temperamentally, a prankster. Too much planning, too much to potentially go south, not enough payoff. But that doesn’t mean, when circumstances demand, that I can’t rise to the occasion.

Paul Levitz had an uncanny knack for spotting the one typo or error whenever one of my books was published. He’d call me into his office to congratulate me on whatever had just come out and open it casually. Invariably to the spread with whatever error might have slipped through.

I was convinced that he got an advance copy air shipped to him from the printer, before the case got to the library*, just so he could pore through it ahead of time and locate the error. He was too consistent and too cheerful for it not to have been intentional.

One day Paul escalates this from a gentle poking to an actual prank. He had the printer bind a Flash cover on one of my books, then called me into his office when the issue hit the library. He let me go for about ten minutes thinking there’d been a bindery error, and that my entire run had shipped with the wrong cover. After watching me hyperventilate for ten minutes, he admitted it was a prank.

Revenge is unquestionably a dish best served cold, so I planned my revenge carefully and took my time putting my plot in motion. The only people who knew what I was planning were Jenette, because I’m not actually stupid, and Richard Bruning, because he was my co-conspirator.

At the time, DC’s most popular book was Legends of the Dark Knight: Gothic, by Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson. The next issue coming up was #6. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but there was a massive print run for this book.

I contacted our printer in Canada and told him to pull the black plate at the end of the run and bind 100 copies. Those were to be cased and shipped to the DC library like they were the actual books. To describe him as reluctant is a massive understatement. I had to swear on a stack of bibles that the prank had been approved by Jenette.

But I couldn’t let the library find the “mistake” and raise the alarm. The library often took multiple days to open cases and distribute them, so the book would have hit the stands by the time the library cracked the case. If there was really a massive printing error, it would have been raised days before the library found it.

I had one of my distributor friends call DC’s Marketing VP, Bruce Bristow, the morning the book hit the street. The call came from outside DC, so it seemed completely legit. Bruce got a call saying “Have you seen Legends #6? How the hell did this leave the printer?”

So Bruce runs down to the library, cracks the case, and finds what appears to be an entire run that’s been printed without the black plate. He grabs a handful and runs to Levitz’s office, and all hell breaks loose. 

It was beautiful, like someone had set a bomb off at HQ. People were running back and forth, production was called in, marketing was called in, and everyone was running around chasing their tails. After an hour, Jenette made me confess, so something useful could be accomplished that day. Who knows how long it would have gone on if I hadn’t pulled the plug?

Jenette, to her credit, denied any knowledge of the prank, claiming I’d gone rogue. Paul, to what should have been his shame, insisted that he hadn’t been fooled and was just playing along. Sore loser.

I took a copy to the next Comic-Con, and as artists stopped by the booth I encouraged them to ink a page for sport.

I still have a stack of those books. They should be valuable in a collectibles-driven market, like the Inverted Jenny upside-down airplane stamp, but no one even knows they exist.

Until now.

On the other hand, we may be new to Chicago, but it’s still fundamentally our culture. It’s less a foreign locale than a new neighborhood, so it’s not clear to me what I might have to say, other than, “Hey! Cool new neighborhood, amiright?” It just doesn’t feel like I have anything interesting to say about Chicago.

As it happened, I was having this very conversation with my sister, Nef, and my niece, Amber, as we walked to a downtown protest about Trump sending ICE and troops to Chicago. Spoiler: the demonstrators were opposed. I basically laid out the argument above, to have them push back that they thought the blog was about something else entirely. I don’t remember what, exactly, as I was confused as to whether I was supposed to be offended that someone else was defining my intentions as a writer or chagrined that I didn’t seem to be doing what I thought I was doing. Regardless, their contention was that their interpretation of the blog’s focus permitted plenty of Chicago reportage.

Then we got to the corner of Michigan Avenue and Ida B. Wells Drive, the gathering spot for the protest, and I realized that they were right. Maybe not regarding my objectives in blogging, but they were certainly correct that Chicago would offer ample blogging opportunities. Looking at the crowd gathered there, I felt as much confusion as to what the natives were doing as I did in any of the more credibly “foreign” places we’ve visited. I was pleasantly surprised to discover how comfortable I felt now that I was baffled. It’s the place I’ve been living the past couple of years, and it feels like home.

As with everywhere else we’ve been, I was struggling to understand the purpose, meaning, and intention of what I was seeing. It just wasn’t clear what we were there to do. Protest, sure, I got that part, but to what end? The desired outcome of this activity wasn’t at all obvious to me.

Which is not to shit all over protests and demonstrations. They’re all we have. But they’re inherently performative, which is why I’ve never attended one before. They’re about expressing anger and outrage, and while I’m certain that expression feels cathartic, it’s not going to directly lead to anything changing. Unless we deploy the Kathmandu method, which didn’t seem to be on the menu. Absent that, which I’m also certain was cathartic, the best a protest can do is let people know that other people are outraged. And if enough people know that enough other people are outraged, A Change Is Gonna Come, I guess. It all feels very abstract.

This particular protest also felt super chill. As this was Baby’s First Protest, Amber prepped me on the walk over, letting me know that I would be seeing more police than I had ever seen in my life.

Or not.

This was about it. There was no presence at all at the plaza, and maybe a couple of bike cops at each intersection on the march, clearly meant to manage traffic rather than keep the peace. No riot shields in phalanxes, no truncheons at the ready, no water cannons poised to gently nudge miscreants back to the path of righteousness. Just… traffic control.

It was, if I’m being honest, a little bit of a letdown.

I think maybe it was because, in an alignment unlikely to reoccur, the cops and protestors were on the same side. Nobody wanted a massive ICE presence or troop deployment. The citizens because, “How dare you?” and the cops because, “Hey! Brutalizing Chicago’s citizens is our thing! Stay in your lane.” Still, the absence of water cannons and beatings was probably a net positive. However it came about.

The result was a vibe more Lollapalooza than Watts Riots. There was marching and chanting of slogans and waving of signs. One of the chants sounded like “Trump loves donuts,” which, sadly, it was not. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t have a bullhorn, as that’s certainly the chant I’d have led. So many great reasons for me to not have a bullhorn.

The signs, however, were 100% the highlight of the experience. If you’ve been following along, you know that we always document entertaining examples of local graphic design, and this place was a hotbed, from hand scrawled to elaborately printed. Many of them were clever and funny, but quite a few seemed not fully on point. While the ostensible purpose of the gathering was to protest the Trump administration’s plans to send the military to Chicago to assist ICE deportation efforts, the signage reflected a less focused umbrage.

And there were a ton of signs that just seemed hilariously off the mark. Calls to release the Epstein files. An earnest young woman carrying a handmade sign with the reproductive rights slogan, “Keep Your Hands Off Our Bodies.” An obviously unassailable sentiment, just not particularly related to the stated purpose of the demonstration. And this:

OK.

But my favorite was this:

I apologize for truncating the sign. The full quote is, “First off, fuck your bitch and the clique you claim.” At the time I thought, well, you’re just angry, aren’t you? Not sure about what, but that’s not a happy sentiment. Then I looked it up, and it’s a lyric from a famous 2Pac dis track, Hit ‘Em Up, and that rabbit hole left me more confused than when I thought it was just random.

Hit ‘Em Up is about the West Coast/East Coast beef that eventually took 2Pac’s life, among others. He specifically called out East Coast rappers such as the Notorious B.I.G, Diddy, and Mobb Deep. For being, you know, bad people. And suggesting that the appropriate response to their badness was to fuck they bitches, to be followed by stabbing and shooting. Not of the bitches, of the bad people. Bitches are for fucking, not stabbing and shooting. Go down that path and soon enough you’ll run out of bitches to fuck. No one wants that.

Anyway. A measured, thoughtful, reasonable position. Hard to argue.

But harder to find the thread that connects the quote to the event. Is it a metaphor? Are we 2Pac, and is the Trump administration East Coast rappers? Are we supposed to fuck they bitches? Before stabbing and shooting? If that’s the intention, does the sign carrier understand that we die in the end?

This was more targeted to the rationale of the gathering, but so telegraphic I had to decode it for our group.

I can’t begin to tell you how I knew this, but the sign refers to Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which defines the requirement for soldiers to follow orders, but provides an affirmative defense for failing to do so if the order was illegal. That’s a subtle, perfectly targeted argument that, maybe, could have been made a tad more obvious.

And these are just funny.

I’m glad I went, because we brought the Trump administration to its knees, and about damn time he faced the consequences of collective action. Next up: climate change. Or vaccines. Or tariffs. Or extrajudicial killings.

No wonder those signs were stuffed.

We failed to account for two things. At least. The first was that if we were committed to “traveling until it was no longer fun,” what that really meant is that we were playing a game of chicken with our mental health. Neither of us would want to be the first to admit defeat, so one of us would wind up going way past not fun and straight into meltdown. Not good.

The second thing we’d failed to account for was that we’d be spending every waking moment together, sharing exactly the same experiences, and with no one to talk to except the occasional Zoom friend. That was an entirely more claustrophobic effect than we’d anticipated. Also not good.

That’s why we picked up an apartment in Chicago last year and spent six months in the US settling into it. We figured it would act as an escape valve, allowing us to go home when things got to be too much on the road. Our plan was for nine months of travel and three months in Chicago. What could possibly go wrong?

This lifestyle requires sacrifices but also, obviously, confers benefits. The problem Dorothy and I have had since Day One is that those sacrifices and benefits impact us asymmetrically. Dorothy values more highly what she’s had to give up than I value what I’ve lost, and I value what’s been gained more than she does. So, good for me, but that means that this whole endeavor has been built on the back of Dorothy’s goodwill. Which is almost infinite. But not quite.

The things Dorothy has had to give up, friendship, community, meaningful work, are things she’s no longer comfortable living without. I, on the other hand, deeply miss my weekly board game night. But I’m coping.

We’d said at the beginning that when the pressures of travel became too great that we’d still leave Chicago for three months over winter. We’d have to be physically unable to leave the apartment before fleeing Chicago’s winter was off the table. So that’s what we’re going to do.

Well, that’s what Dorothy’s going to do. We’ll go somewhere together each winter, but I will travel solo for another chunk of the year. I’m not sure how long or on what cadence, but that’s the plan. If I like traveling alone at all. Dorothy and I have been together 50 years, so I’ve never been alone. I may not like it, or it may be a refreshing smack in the face. It will certainly stretch my skills, as I’ve never had to feed myself before. And I probably won’t notice that something is wrong with me until a limb falls off.

I know for a fact that I’ll find solo traveling inferior to traveling with Dorothy. But I also know that I’ll find solo traveling superior to sitting in Chicago nine months of the year, so I’ll take what I can get. Honestly, I think at this point we’ll both benefit from not sharing every moment together. It’s… a lot.

One of the ways we’ve made fifty years as a couple is by being willing to throw everything in the air and start over. Circumstances change, but most people are way too slow to recognize that different circumstances require different responses. Different input, different output. That’s all that’s going on now, so it’s a thing we’re supremely comfortable doing. We’ll figure it out and get it right.

The current plan is to return to the US in September, after Indonesia. Then I’ll leave around the first of the year (two months in Thailand?), and join up with Dorothy and my sister, Nef, in Uzbekistan for a month. They’ll go back and I’ll keep going (Malaysia & Sri Lanka?) for another couple of months. That will reset the calendar for our snowbird cadence, and I’ll know by the following year what I can handle for solo travel.

Or not. Between now and whenever is then, something else may change that forces another pivot. It’s what we do.

And, yes. In this context, at least, asshole is an adjective.

So, having produced one singular slab of memoirage, and having apparently learned nothing, I shall now address a subject dramatically less interesting than my mother’s mob ties: my follies as a teenaged athlete. But don’t worry, my mother has a cameo. Even my father makes an appearance, and there won’t be much of that.

YMCA Caravans

These do not exist anymore, and there’s a pretty strong argument to be made that they never should have. It was just such a profoundly stupid idea. 20 or so preteen children stacked like cordwood in the back of a stake bed truck. One set of 20-something counselors who slept during the day and drove all night, another set who took the day shift minding us. It must have been just boys, as I recall that the protocol for peeing in the middle of the nighttime drive was to climb over the other sleeping campers to the back of the truck and let it go through the slats. Which was, objectively, hilarious.

Caravans were about a week long and traveled between national park destinations in the Southwest. I don’t recall all the destinations, but I know we went to Lake Mead. I remember because I was permitted to rent a kayak to noodle about the lake. As befit the generally loose oversight structure, no one bothered to check to see if I knew how to row a kayak.

I did not.

If I rowed on one side I spun clockwise. If I rowed on the other side I spun counterclockwise. Neither seemed particularly helpful. The rhythm required to alternate left and right to navigate in a more or less straight line never really suggested itself. So I drifted. Big lakes have currents. There I went.

Every boat I waved at for a rescue waved back.

It actually took the counselors a couple of hours to a) notice my absence, and b) spot me drifting on the horizon. A motor boat was sent out to rescue me, with a counselor rowing my kayak back. They kept a closer eye on me after that. I showed them.

My First Concussion

I don’t recall the order (I wonder why…), nor do I recall whether my Caravan Concussions were on the same or different caravans. But I had two of them. Both were softball related. Now that I think of it, I think they were on the same caravan, and that the outfield concussion came first.

I was clearly destined to follow in the footsteps of the great Jewish athletes of legend. So, picked last and parked in the outfield, where I was least likely to do harm.

Until a fly ball came my way. You’ve seen this scene so many times. The chubby-uncoordinated-friendless child goes back, back, back, and snares the fly ball to the deafening cheers of all in attendance.

I, on the other hand, ran forward while looking behind me to track the ball and ran skull first into a basketball stanchion. Concussion #1. Check.

The next time we played softball the counselors settled me safely behind the plate, which primarily involved chasing down bad pitches. Until one counselor was pitching and another counselor came to bat. Circumstances required that the pitches have a dollop of mustard applied, and one of these juiced pitches got past my small glove and modest reflexes, landing square in the kisser.

When I came to, I was cradled in the arms of one of the counselors, who took that opportunity to share that in addition to being uncoordinated I also threw like a girl. Those were the days, no? Can’t get away with that shit now.

But he wasn’t just painful diagnosis, he was also helpful prescription. He was an assistant coach in the YMCA’s gymnastics program, and he suggested that I enroll when we got back home. Assuming, as I’m sure we both did, that I made it home at all.

Gymnastics, Part One

Being a good boy, I did as was suggested and joined the Y gymnastics program. Who wants to throw like a girl? Do even girls want to throw like girls? I certainly didn’t.

I don’t have especially strong memories of the program. I do recall a man with an Eastern European accent slapping my calves to induce the pointing of toes. Those were the days, no? Can’t get away with that shit now.

I can’t honestly recall how long I stuck with it. It was more than one-and-done, but it fell short of triggering a life changing commitment. I jumped, I rolled, I stood on my hands. I don’t believe I demonstrated any particular flair for any of it.

Oddly, my strongest memory of the various YMCA programs from that period was from a swim class, where an instructor noted, for no reason that I can recall, that I had “musclebound thighs.” I’m sure now that he was moonlighting from his job at the parish. But I liked the sound of it. If I could only find a thigh-forward sport I’d be set.

I’m pretty sure that the main goal of the gymnastics program, to keep me from throwing like a girl, was a failure. Throwing is kind of a team sport activity, given that you were generally expected to throw to someone. Since team sports and I agreed to continue to disagree, there was never really any opportunity to test the no-longer-throws-like-a-girl hypothesis. But it was probably at least partially successful in rendering me slightly less uncoordinated.

Thus ended my brief flirtation with sporting activity.

Then Came High School

As high school years go, mine weren’t so bad. I know that middle school is supposed to be the worst, but grade school for me was the Stygian depths from which I clawed my way to the light. I spent a lot of my time getting beat up in grade school. Which, again, will surprise none of you who know me.

The absolute nadir was sixth grade. After a particularly noteworthy thrashing by a third grader, I announced to my mother that I wouldn’t be going to middle school. I simply refused to be the youngest and smallest, knowing full well what lay in store, surrounded by bigger, older kids. Jesus, a third grader had just taken me down.

My older brother, who walked in on this conversation, suggested I keep a roll of pennies in my pocket. I told him that he was insane if he thought a 50¢ bribe was enough to get me out of a beating, and he explained the concept of brass knuckles. Nope. A great way to get an even more thorough beating and lose 50¢.

I don’t recall how I was convinced, but I wound up going to middle school after all. Probably because I lacked any real agency. To my surprise, though, the beatings stopped. Instead, my middle school betters decided it would be more fun to stuff me upside down into a trash can. Repeatedly. I spent a lot of my time in middle school face down in trash cans. But you had to acknowledge both their creativity and their effort. They weren’t just taking the easy way out and hitting me. Props.

I finally solved the problem by befriending a very large person as my protector, in exchange for help with homework. What ensued were pitched playground battles between those who would stuff me in a garbage can and those, my new friend and his friends, who would prevent it. It leached the fun out of dumping me into a trash can when it became clear that this pleasure could only be enjoyed at great cost, so it petered out of its own accord.

After that middle school was pretty OK. I even had friends, which was a nice change from grade school. I recall the post-trash can era as mostly pleasant.

Since middle school had actually been an improvement over grade school, high school seemed promising. And it pretty much delivered. At the time, California high schools were three years, 10-12, and I entered at barely 15, just turning 17 by graduation. But despite being, once again, youngest and smallest, there were no more beatings or stuffings. In part, I think, because of exactly how I went to high school.

I was part of San Diego’s Independent Study program, their high-end gifted ghetto. There were two schools with IS programs, and students came from all over the county. At my program, at Clairemont High, we had a pair of joined bungalows on the outskirts of the campus, so we were away from the mainstream kids. We had our own library, and we each had a dedicated cubicle for study. We had two full time tutors, one for Math and Science, one for English and Humanities. We didn’t take any classes with the rest of the high school, unless there was a subject of specific interest that the tutors couldn’t handle. And foreign languages. Those were always with the normal kids.

Each school admitted about 6-8 students per grade, so at any given time there were about 20 of us, as all the grades shared the same space. It was kind of like a one room schoolhouse, but with two rooms. It made for an interesting echo chamber, a small group of super smart kids isolated from the rest of the campus.

Naturally, high jinks ensued. There was the day I couldn’t find my little Honda roller skate shaped car, because a bunch of my compadres had picked it up and moved it. Or the contest we had to do the most interesting, non-destructive thing to a particular student’s lunch. I brought a thermos of hot water, plastic bags, and jello to school, and encased the contents of his lunch within his lunch bag. I was sure I was the winner, but was disqualified when the bag with his sandwich leaked and I’d been deemed to have “harmed” his lunch. As if. That was lime jello, and clearly enhanced his sandwich. Obviously, the loss still stings.

Especially since the eventual winner involved hiding a walkie talkie in his lunch bag and having his lunch beg him not to be eaten. Funny, but weak.

My favorite was when we started comparing notes about the admission process and discovered that we’d all been told the same thing. IQ was one of the entrance criteria, and we had each been told that we were right on the cutoff threshold and had just snuck in under the wire. Obviously, that couldn’t be true for the entire group. We’d been told that to keep from getting swelled heads and totem poling one another.

Faced with that scenario, we did what anyone would have done. We broke into the locked file cabinet and located our admission packets. It’s not like we had a choice. And we discovered exactly what we thought we would: our IQ scores were all over the map, not clustered at the cutoff. But that information did not lead to the intellectual Lord of the Flies scenario they’d feared. We had fun with it for a bit, but it didn’t really matter. I don’t know, maybe it mattered to the kids who were genuinely near the cutoff, but the rest of us were fine.

Not for nothing, my two best friends, Bob and Bruce, my ride or die friends, came from the IS program. We’re still tight, fifty years on.

Gymnastics, Part Two

I suppose we all want what we don’t have. I had academic challenges galore, but excelling at them didn’t provide any sense of satisfaction. It just seemed like a parlor trick I was good at. I wanted to do something hard. So I decided to do the most unlikely thing possible. Despite my distinctly unsporting history, I decided, on entering high school, that I would be a jock. I was not going to leave high school without a varsity letter. In something.

But what?

Going through the sports offered at Clairemont was discouraging. I knew better than to try team sports. Too much picked-last scar tissue. It had to be some kind of individual sport. Wrestling involved someone else trying to hurt me. Swimming is hard. Diving is up way too high for my comfort. Tennis involved playing directly against someone. Golf…? I had never golfed, but I suppose it was possible.

But gymnastics. I’d done that before. Perhaps my musclebound thighs would be an asset. Plus, I didn’t think our team was all that strong, so three years to get a varsity letter seemed doable. I was on my way to the jockhood of my dreams, as a Floor Exercise specialist.

Of course, there were roadblocks on my journey. Like a complete and total lack of talent or ability. I would have to conquer the heights with the only tool I had available: effort.

And man, did I throw myself into it. During the competitive season I spent 4-6 hours a day in the gym, seven days a week. The rest of the year I was at the Y about 3 hours a day, 4-5 days a week. The thing about having no actual native ability is that it took an absurd amount of repetition to learn a new skill.

But it paid off. JV my first year, and then a week-long summer gymnastics camp I attended in Lake Tahoe with the rest of San Diego’s serious high school gymnasts, my off-season brethren at the Y. I was ready to explode my junior year.

The only noticeable downside to my gymnastics career was that there was only the one locker room, which the gymnastics team shared with the “real” jocks. Who seemed to think the gymnasts were a little gay. I came to that conclusion because we were constantly being called fairies and faggots. So I’m pretty confident in that assessment.

It didn’t help that the two best gymnasts on the team were completely, flamboyantly gay. But I didn’t mind belonging to that group, because I truly belonged. These were my people. Plus, I could flip over a football player’s head before he could catch me, so good luck trying to dump me head first into a trash can. I may have still been small, but I was now agile.

On the plus side, I had transformed myself into a dense mass of highly sculpted muscle. I was quite the nerdy little smoke show. It manifested in a sort of girl friend, but the fumblings were more panic inducing than fulfilling, so it never went anywhere. I suppose I didn’t like being objectified. I was more than just my washboard abs, dammit.

In fact, my parents were starting to worry about my lack of dating. And my carrying a teddy bear with me to school. Which still made me one of the least eccentric of my IS peers. My older brother was gay and out, and I believe the parents had concerns about me. My mother actually sat me down and suggested that sometimes when girls said no they meant yes, and that I should try being more aggressive. Those were the days, no? Can’t get away with that shit now.

I replied that that seemed confusing, and perhaps I’d be better off with the kind of girl who didn’t play games, who meant what she said and said what she meant. So… Horton. I was holding out for a Dr. Seuss character.

Our two best gymnasts had graduated, so the field was open for me junior year. But if I was going to score well enough to letter, I needed at least one Level F move in my routine, which was the most difficult level at the time. I had a book with all of the moves and grades, and I scoured it for a Level F move I could actually learn and perform. Something other than a double twisting back flip, for example. I’d tried twisting back flips, and found it disconcerting to rotate across two axes simultaneously. And I can assure you, I was the only one of my gymnastics peers who thought of twisting back flips that way.

I eventually found… something. Something so weird that no one else came anywhere near it. I’m sure it’s truly dead, as no serious gymnast would get within the same zip code.

It started with a standing back handspring. Not from a round-off, too much momentum. But instead of going all the way around to my feet, as my hands hit the floor I collapsed into it, so I landed on my neck, with straight legs pointing behind me and my feet behind my head. Then I kicked straight up in a kip motion into a handstand, but I used my momentum to push off the floor. I hopped up into the air in the handstand position, executed a half turn, and landed and held the handstand.

It was a completely bonkers combination of strength, fluidity, and ungainliness, and exhibited a shocking lack of give-a-fuck for a competitive sport. It was engineered in a lab to be my signature move. You could practically see judges flipping through the book. “Yeah, that’s a real thing. And it is an F move. And he did nail it, so… I guess we have to score it?”

I wasn’t good enough to medal at County that year, but all the guys who finished ahead of me were graduating, so I had a clear path to a medal as a senior. Meanwhile, goal achieved. I got my varsity letter as a junior. I wore the fuck out of my garish orange and blue official letterman jacket. It’s packed away in a memory box, for future spelunking.

By the way, Clairemont High’s claim to fame is that it’s where Cameron Crowe did his research for Fast Times At Ridgemont High in 1978. I graduated in 1974, so I was definitely not the model for Spicoli.

OK, What’s The Catch?

Senior year, my coach recommended me to a friend of his who was the head coach at Cal State Fullerton, and I went up with my father to tour the facility, meet the coach, and talk about the program and where I could fit in. I didn’t have the weight for a scholarship offer, but still.

I also decided that I’d be more valuable to the team, and as a college prospect, if I competed in all the events, not just floor exercise. So I committed to competing all-around, learning vault, high bar, parallel bars, pommel horse, and rings. It was a lot to pack in, at five to midnight.

Parallel bars was the easiest to pick up. It took advantage of my floor exercise skills in a fairly straightforward way. Pommel horse and rings both required ridiculous upper body strength, and did nothing to leverage my musclebound thighs. Super hard. But I could hold an Iron Cross on the rings, so that’s not nothing. Although I’m pretty sure I looked like my seams were about to split. Red is not my color. I’m a Winter.

Vault and high bar were just plain frightening. High bar because the only thing keeping me from flying off into outer space as I spun about in circles was my grip on the bar. Which seemed like a literally tenuous grip on survival.

Vault was terrifying for two reasons. The first is that it required running full tilt at a large, heavy, stationary object. Getting the timing right on that was tough, but the most terrifying part was when I finally did get it right. Once, and only once, I hit the board at exactly the right spot, properly in stride, with perfect timing, and took off like a rocket. My fingers barely brushed the horse as I flipped over the top. I took so much air that I quit.

In that moment, and with my experience on the high bar clearly in mind, I quit trying to compete all-around. The beauty of floor exercise was that I couldn’t get any higher off the ground than I could propel myself. That seemed like a safe, sane approach.

But I want to be clear about something that’s been left unsaid. I wasn’t a very good gymnast. There’s only so far you can go on nothing but sheer force of will, and I’d gotten about that far. You don’t get to truly excel, at anything, without some degree of talent. I suppose I did have a degree of talent. Like literally one degree. Not enough.

On top of that, I wasn’t really ideally shaped for a successful gymnastics career. I had the compact/muscular thing down, but I had a noticeable sway in my back and pretty obviously bowed legs. Maintaining proper form was pretty much impossible. The notion that I had a post-high school gymnastics career was fairly delusional.

Given all that, settling for a medal in floor exercise at County (it was a very weak year) and maybe being the worst tumbler on a college team seemed like a pretty good outcome.

Or not.

I’m sure you’d all love a tidy narrative arc, with our hero triumphing in his senior year. That’s certainly what I was expecting: the payoff for all that grueling work. But you all know better, even if I didn’t at the time.

The actual payoff for all that hard work turned out to be… arthritis. Specifically, osteoarthritis, the breakdown of joint cartilage. At 16.

Who knew that the constant pounding my knees and wrists were taking on my relentless program of self improvement would do bad things to my cartilage? Probably any competent adult trainer, but my high school coach was a wrestler who coached the gymnastic team. Not a deep subject matter expert in… much at all.

My doctor recommended against competing my senior year. He said the risk of additional permanent damage was super high, but he’d leave that to my discretion. But he pretty much forbade competing in college. I did the grownup thing and quit. If I couldn’t take it past high school, there was no point in risking crippling myself for a County medal.

No matter how hard I’d worked for it and how badly I wanted it.

I will say, though, that in a curious way this experience has helped me age. I think one of the hardest things for most people about aging is coming to grips with decline and disfunction. That whole raging against the dying of the light. But I’ve been used to my body failing since I was 16, so when a new system goes dark, I’m kind of, “Well, that doesn’t work now. Okie doke.”

Now What?

Truthfully, it wasn’t all that hard to quit, because by this point I was in an enormous amount of near constant pain, alleviated only by holding very still. I could walk about 2-3 blocks before needing a lie down. Thankfully, normal living doesn’t put a lot of strain on the wrists, so those recovered nicely. It took a couple of years before the knees came fully around, surrounded as they were by musclebound thighs and powerful, shapely calves. Strong muscles are a positive tonic for weak joints. A regimen of nuclear-grade anti-inflammatories also pulled their weight.

These days I’m pretty much asymptomatic. I’ve walked as much as seven miles in a day on our travels, and the knees are fine. I’m more likely to be bothered by the shin splints I also received as gift-with-purchase from gymnastics, since I don’t think they ever truly heal. It’s why I don’t run. I don’t lead a lifestyle that puts a lot of stress on my wrists (not even sure what that would be), but every once in a while I’ll try to unscrew the lid of a stuck jar and the wrists will scream at me. Just a friendly reminder. “Hey, remember when we broke you? Good times.”

That popped me loose as a 17 year-old freshman at UCSD. I’d applied to Berkeley and been accepted, but there was no money for me to attend sleepaway college, so I had to stay local. I didn’t really have a clue what I was interested in, since until just prior I’d been interested in being a gymnast.

What I was really interested in was figuring out how to work and put myself through school once I turned 18, since I had a deep-seated aversion to living at home. That’s because home was unstable. Literally.

Home Is Where The Dock Is

I’ve already written about the year my parents took me out of school and we traveled the US, Canada, and Mexico in a travel trailer. After we stopped in San Diego, we parked in a trailer park on Mission Bay and they put me back into school. So quite a few of my formative years were spent in a small metal can with my parents.

There was a brief interlude when I was 16 where we lived in a house in Ocean Beach like real people. I had my very own bedroom. With a door! Heaven.

Sadly, that wasn’t quite Bohemian enough for them, so when I was 17 they moved us onto a motor boat. My bedroom was the pilot’s cabin, with a custom-made Shetland sofa bed I unfurled to sleep. Along with a modest allocation of clothes, I was permitted room for a record player and a single box of records. I removed them from their jackets so more would fit in the box. The jackets, along with the records that didn’t fit and everything else I owned of value, went into storage.

A couple of stories will establish exactly how batshit insane this arrangement was. First up, the summer before my freshman year at UCSD. My mother announces that they’re leaving for a two week tour, and would I like to come with them? I exploded with something like, “Are you kidding? I have a job. I can’t just pick up for two weeks. I have responsibilities.”

My mother was very understanding. She said I could probably stay with friends for a couple of weeks, and offered me a sleeping bag so I could sleep in the back of my car if there were any gaps. And that was it. They left for a romantic tour and I couch surfed and slept in my car. That arrangement worked fine for them.

Then there was the night I came home to the dock and home wasn’t there. Remember that we’re talking about 1974. No cell phones. If they weren’t docked and tethered, there was no way to communicate. I waited on the dock until they came tooling up about an hour later.

I was sputtering, all splenetic Daffy Duck, but butter wouldn’t melt in my mother’s mouth. “Well, dear, you didn’t call to say you’d be late, and we wanted to take a little evening harbor cruise. It is a lovely night.”

I thought that they were clear that I’d be moving out on my 18th birthday no matter what, but I suppose they considered this an insurance policy, lest I become complacent. Mission accomplished. No way in hell I’d be on that boat the day after my 18th birthday.

Yer Out!

That led me to an athletic program at UCSD run by an ex-minor league umpire, who offered training in umpiring and an entrée to paid gigs officiating youth ball. I knew absolutely zero about baseball, my scant softball knowledge having been literally knocked out of my head. But I was intrigued by the part-time income opportunities, and threw myself at it like I’d committed to gymnastics.

I got to my first paid gig as a base umpire, and the plate umpire walked me around the field before the game. “This is a base. If the defensive player has the ball and is touching the base before the baserunner gets there, the baserunner is out, and you make this signal with your hands. Otherwise they’re safe, and you make this signal. I’ll take care of everything else.” I don’t think I’d ever watched a baseball game. I knew nothing.

But baseball was a year-round sport in SoCal. If I umpired a game every weekday and a doubleheader each on Saturday and Sunday, that’s nine games. At $15-$20/game, that was enough to live independently. That would get me out of the house (boat), let me take classes, and leave me enough time for homework. I was in. I’d work my way through college the old fashioned way: as an umpire.

While on this journey I also explored officiating football and basketball. I had no feel for football at all, and I also washed out as a basketball referee. I really wanted to be good at basketball, because I loved the game as a spectator. But it put more stress on my knees than was comfortable, and I found it hard in unpleasant ways.

By the book, basketball is a non-contact sport, so literally everything in basketball is a judgement call. There are no clear, bright right-from-wrong lines. It’s all just a fast moving hash. Baseball, on the other hand, is almost nothing but clear bright lines. Where is the ball, where is the batter? Where is the ball, where is the baserunner? They’re binaries, with right and wrong answers. The only thing in baseball that looks like the kind of judgement call that basketball is built on is baserunning interference. That’s one of those is-that-too-much kind of calls, and even that’s usually pretty obvious. You kind of know when a baserunner has interfered.

Which means that it’s theoretically possible to call a perfect baseball game, which was fascinating to me. I spent all four years of college umpiring, and, unlike gymnastics, I got good at it. It got to the point where I could call an entire game behind the plate and miss maybe a couple of pitches. Which were close, and which I knew I’d missed. I never called a perfect, error-free game, but I got close. It was possible.

I even spent a summer in Fairbanks umpiring youth ball. The more experienced umpires were up there for the semi-pro league, which was quite good. They play a Midnight Sun game on the summer solstice which starts at 11 PM and is played under natural light. Pretty cool.

To this day, umpiring is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it scratched the same itch for me that gymnastics did. It required pushing myself to my physical limits, of both perception and processing. A lot happens in an instant in baseball, and you have to see it, process what you’ve seen through a set of rules that seem intentionally arbitrary, and render a judgement in about a second. Take two seconds and it looks like you’re not sure. Because selling the call is the final step.

In real life, you’re never called upon to make a complex decision that quickly. Worst possible case: “Excuse me, I need to use the restroom. I’ll be back in a jiffy.” Playoffs, stolen base, cloud of dust, runner and fielder looking up at you, thousands of people watching… After that, the rest of the world feels like it’s moving in slow motion. I am very hard to rattle.

So. A difficult, athletics-adjacent pursuit with the potential for perfection? I was hooked. After my first couple of years this was more than just a way to pay the bills. This was my new career path. Of course, I was told I’d never, no matter how talented I was, succeed as an umpire because I was too small. Impossible for a creature of my stature to command the respect of the towering professional specimens of MLB.

Well, that just made my blood boil. I was more committed than ever to follow the very specific path that led to the majors. It started, as all good stories do, with Harry Wendelstedt.

Harry was an ex-major league umpire who ran a racket pair of umpiring schools, one in Florida and the other, conveniently, in San Bernardino. Pay yer tuition, go through the program, and if you graduated high enough in the class you’d be offered a minor league A contract. Then you were on the same flight path as players. Shitty pay, part-year work, put your head down and move up one layer at a time, A to AA to AAA, to the Show, if you were good enough.

What’s not to love?

My plan was to save enough money for Harry’s school and start my journey. Which required leaving San Diego, where parking cars passed for a real job. I moved to San Francisco to make the big bucks, as a low-level grunt at stock brokerages. Which actually paid well enough to fuel my dreams.

Since you already know that I’m not a retired major league umpire, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that some interesting things happened along the way. First, there was no national association of umpires. Everything was local and regional. I worked my way up to playoff ball over four years in San Diego by taking every assignment, no matter how shitty. It was how I earned my living, but I also knew that the only way to get good assignments was to do the grunt work on the way up.

None of that experience meant anything in the Bay Area. Working as an umpire there would mean starting all over at the bottom, with the worst imaginable Little League games as my entry point. Given the full-time job to save for Harry, that didn’t seem tenable. So in order to fuel my dreams of Major League success, I’d have to stop umpiring.

Then there was my final year of umpiring in San Diego, before heading north. Umpiring isn’t the safest of pursuits, and I had a couple of notable incidents that year. At the time, about one Major League umpire each year went down with facial reconstruction surgery. A hard foul ball to the face mask could shatter the mask, driving the broken steel bar into the cheek. Masks are better now, obviously, but that was the context at the time.

The other context was that umpiring was a decidedly macho pursuit. A pretty interesting place to find myself, after prancing about a floor exercise mat in cunning leather slippers. Umpires tended to be ballplayers who couldn’t cut it, so they brought a jock mentality. But it was also a fact that players would pounce on perceived weakness. “Oh, you got hit by a foul ball and you’re limping. That’s why you were out of position and blew that call, you weak fucking loser.”

An injury prone pursuit in which showing the effects of injury made your job impossible. Nice.

I have a knot on the outside of my left foot. It’s right where the steel cap on my plate shoes ended. I had an unconventional stance behind the plate, which Harry would have squashed, where I wrapped my left leg to the side of the catcher. I felt like it gave me a better view of the strike zone, but it exposed the side of my foot. Inevitably, about once per game, I’d take a foul ball right behind the steel plate on my shoe, fracturing and refracturing the fifth metatarsal, without ever giving it a chance to heal.

Tough but stupid. I had what it took for success as an umpire.

But that was an ongoing thing. There were two specific incidents my last year that gave me pause. The first was taking a foul ball directly to my left elbow, which left my entire left arm dangling useless by my side. What did I do? I switched my ball and strike counter to my right hand and finished the last four innings of the game, whereupon I collected my check, right handed, and drove myself one-armed to the ER. No permanent damage, but it makes you think.

The second was taking a foul ball to my face mask. It didn’t shatter the mask, but it left a pronounced dent. It makes you think.

Or it doesn’t. I was still committed to my plan when I hit San Francisco. Except that I was forced by circumstance to stop umpiring, and I realized that, working at a stock brokerage, my risk of any given workday ending in the hospital was vanishingly low. Then I thought about the many years of low pay and half-year work slogging through the minors, if I even got there because I was, irrefutably, very small and that was a real thing…

So I quit.

But if quitting seems like a motif, I’ll point out in my own defense that I only ever quit long after quitting made sense. Tough but stupid.

Herman de Medici, Or How I Met My Horton

There is one final act in the extravaganza that was my youthful athletic career, but this one got me married.

Of the many shameful things I have confessed, in this post and others, this may be the most shameful: Dorothy and I met at the Society for Creative Anachronism. We laughed, we cried, we LARPed.

One of my high school friends (thank you, June Moore!) told me about the SCA’s weekend activities in Balboa Park, and suggested that I might come. Sure. What else was I doing? But I would need to go in character. Can’t play without paying for your ticket. I somehow found a motley costume and appeared, fully blown, as Herman de Medici, bastard outcast of the de Medici family and court jester to the Barony of Calafia in the Kingdom of Caid.

The Barony was unaware up until that moment that they possessed a court jester, but they were happy to welcome me. Court jestering, in my mind, involved primarily scampering about at ground level in the posture above, my primary jape being looking up the dresses of the Ladies. Those were the days, no? Can’t get away with that shit now.

Still, all in good fun, nothing to see with all those petticoats, and I took the swatting in good natured stride. Besides, I wore ankle bells, so I wasn’t exactly sneaking up on anyone. Only one Lady didn’t swat me, and that was the Princess of the realm. We became fast friends, along with her beau, the Prince, who had ascended to his lofty position by being better at hitting people with rattan swords than any of the other aspirants.

My other primary jestery activity was, unaccountably, tumbling. It turned out that if I kept my weird crab walking posture I could frolic about and do low-to-the-ground back flips without torturing my knees or wrists. Lords and Ladies alike found this bizarre performance entertaining, which endeared me to the Court. My position was secure.

I started to see Princess and Prince socially, outside of officially sanctioned events, and we became good friends.

Then came a Valentine’s Day tourney that Prince was unable to attend, leaving Princess and I to our own devices. Nothing… happened. But it was the first time we’d locked eyes and had the “Oh” moment. Or at least I thought we had the “Oh” moment. I’d never had an “Oh” moment, so maybe that look meant something else. Like, “Whachoo looking at, fool?” Best to just pretend it hadn’t happened and move on.

Trying to ignore it was painful, but it made sense from my perspective. Because surely I must have hallucinated the whole thing. Dorothy was perfect. She was the Princess for a reason. She was smart, funny, stunningly beautiful… Way out of my league. Sure, I had the musclebound thighs of legend and lore, but that was about it. Otherwise, 100% schlub. So net, maybe 98% schlub, factoring in the thighs. Tossing in the abs might get you to 96%, but that’s still a lot of schlub.

I might have hallucinated the shared moment, but my “Oh” was real. Which was torture. Realistically, I had absolutely no chance. She already had a Prince. Who’d trade down for a jester?

There was no story I could tell myself where the Princess was my first girlfriend. I knew from long, excruciating experience that you claw your way up from the bottom. Step by painful step. Maybe I’d work my way up to a Princess someday, but no way was I starting at the top. Better to just forget the whole thing and stay friends. Because if I acted on what I thought had happened, and was as wrong as I thought I was, I’d destroy the friendship. Which would be heartbreaking.

So when I saw that Patti Smith was coming to town on tour with her first album, Horses, I did what any good friend would do. I asked Dorothy if I should pick up a ticket for her. Instant yes, but it wasn’t until she didn’t pay me back for her ticket that I realized we were on a date. That and the unspeakable things she did to my thumb while holding my hand. At that age, apparently, everything is an erogenous zone.

This was clearly a woman who meant what she said and said what she meant. I’d waited long enough and kept true to my heart. I’d found my Horton.

So much for ignoring it.

We still celebrate Valentine’s Day as an anniversary of sorts. Our daughter, Ruby, has dubbed it our Romanciversary. We’ve never had a name for it before, so that’s nice. We’ve always referred to it as The First Time We Realized We Wanted To Fuck. Which is a little unwieldy, and doesn’t really lend itself to a card. Romanciversary is a marked improvement.

We started dating, but sub rosa. We were careful to only go places with low probability of running into someone who’d recognize us. Nothing like the added frisson of danger. One of the things I learned during this period was that Dorothy was as desperate to leave home as I was, despite being land-based. Her entire dating life was centered on identifying the best horse to ride out of town on. So not only was there myself and the prince, there were two other beaus having their gums checked at the same time.

I felt like I had the inside track, if only because she’d confided to me about the stable, while the other horses were all in the dark. But I was boxing above my weight and somehow needed to come out on top this time, no quitting. So I did something uncharacteristic: I asked my father for advice. Specifically for romantic advice. Surprisingly, since he was a hardcore asshole, he came across.

An aside here, as if this whole thing wasn’t 100% aside, to establish his hardcore-asshole bona fides. Dorothy and I didn’t live particularly close to one another, and at one point while we were dating he and I were driving somewhere and he started giving me a ration of shit for all of the miles I was putting on the car. He wound up to the payoff, which was telling me to stop thinking with my dick. I made him stop the car and I got out. I preferred to walk the miles home than spend another moment with him.

Which story also establishes my desperation to win. That’s who I went to for advice. Unaccountably, he delivered. He told me the trick he’d used on my mother, telling me that I had to get past how corny it sounded, as it was guaranteed to work. He told me to send her 11 flowers, with a card that said, “For the 12th. You complete the dozen.”

Holy shit did that work. I wish I could buy stock in that trick. I almost forgave him.

I’m pretty sure one of her beaus was visiting at home when the flowers arrived, so a little awkward. But we became an official, out-in-public couple, and we vowed to move in together on my 18th birthday. Dorothy is a year older, so she had to wait for my emancipation. And as promised, we actually did move in together the day I turned 18.

To this day, I have never given Dorothy a dozen flowers. Even though the request confounds florists. It usually ends with me saying, “Fine. I want a dozen flowers. Please throw one out before you wrap them up.”

I’m sure there were bruised feelings amongst the other beaus, as no one expects the story to end with the Princess and the Jester making merry. But you have to break a few eggs to tell a love story. Preferably over three befuddled horses.

By the way, neither of our families was thrilled when we announced our marriage. My mother took me aside for a gentle conversation, suggesting we might have insurmountable obstacles. She said that it was hard enough to make a marriage work, and that adding in the extra difficulties of bridging our religious differences (which was already funny, as we were both confirmed heathens) might be too much to overcome. I replied that Dorothy was a girl, and that our gender differences made our (theoretical) religious differences look like a rounding error. I asked if she wanted me to marry a nice Jewish boy, so we’d have no meaningful differences to speak of, and that ended that.

My father stayed in character. He took me shopping for my wedding suit and shared that the only reason he was helping was so that I couldn’t blame him when it failed. It’s so important to have a reliable anchor in your life. That man was a rock.

But the coup de grâce was administered by Dorothy’s mother. Dorothy called her to announce our plans, and there was a pause on the other end of the phone. Finally, “Oh. We were hoping you’d get over him.” We’ve always enjoyed a warm relationship.

Many years later I asked Dorothy how she’d picked me as the winner. The flowers helped, but the real answer was that she considered herself a little timid, and the future she imagined for herself with the other three beaus looked stable and unexciting, while the future she imagined with me seemed full of adventure. She knew that I would prod her and challenge her and take her places she didn’t even know she wanted to go. She made a choice to accept being uncomfortable in order to avoid being bored. I think it takes enormous strength of character to pick the hard thing over the easy thing, for your whole life, and I loved her even more for that. If possible.

And that’s the future that came to pass. No one can say that our lives haven’t been full, and full of adventure. It’s a future we’re still living. Every day.

But how, you ask, does this any of this adorable love story relate to my athletic career? Well, it’s entirely possible that the die had been cast when I looked up her skirt, but I think it was the whole of Herman de Medici that won the Princess over. That absolutely included the scampering and weird crablike tumbling. How could you not be charmed?

Plus, get a load of those musclebound thighs. I was still ripped.

I never became a real gymnast or a professional umpire, but fifty years later I still consider myself a winner. Thanks, gymnastics.

This is our safe haven, our sanctuary, our respite from travel. Now, when we’re on the downside of a visit and discussing where to go next, Home is an option. Rather than perpetual travel until we break, which had been the previous model, we’re looking at nine months of travel broken up by three months of Home in Chicago.

At least that’s our starting offer. The entire point of this escapade is that we don’t know what we’re doing, so we’ll pivot as new facts on the ground suggest new approaches. Will nine-and-three be our final model? Who knows? Maybe we’ll settle into six-and-six, or three-and-nine. Dunno. We’re going to set out, knowing we now have a safety valve to trigger, and see what happens.

The Apartment

The apartment is in a hospital that had been converted to residential units in 2000. It’s a solid five-story elevator building with surprisingly useful amenities and reasonable monthly HOA fees. For our fees we get: hot water, cable, high-speed internet, a mail room for parcels, two fairly well appointed exercise rooms (including rowing machines, so I don’t have to find room in the apartment for my rowing machine), a covered parking space, nicely landscaped grounds, and a spacious 8’x18′ temperature controlled storage unit in the basement.

The apartment itself is a modest ~ 1,100 square feet with two bedrooms and a single bathroom. It has a slightly industrial ambiance, with concrete ceiling beams and exposed ducting. The master bedroom has a generous walk-in closet, and the main living area is open plan, with the kitchen, dining area, and living room all sharing a large space. It’s how we designed our St. Louis apartment, so it’s a style we really like.

Even though our last apartment was measurably larger, about 1,500 square feet, this apartment feels as big, or bigger. A lot of the square footage in our previous digs was taken up by the massive open plan living room/dining room/kitchen. It felt enormous because it was, but I don’t know that it had more usable space than we currently have. Everything was just further apart.

Here, that open plan area has been compressed, but we have just as much living room and dining room as before. The kitchen is noticeably smaller, but some of our changes have mitigated that. As a bonus, the compression of the common area also created enough room for a second bedroom, so Dorothy has a fully equipped workroom. We’ve just had to pretend we’re living on a boat and make every cubic inch count. As a result, it feels more spacious than it should.

But the highlight of the apartment is the North-facing view. We’re pointed right at the downtown skyline and Navy Pier, so we’re line of sight to the regular summer fireworks displays. We’re right at the tree line, so we have a leafy, green panorama, and the 5’x10′ balcony permits not just warm evenings but also offers BirbTV. We have a birb feeder, and we spend hours happily watching BirbTV.

Would you like a tour? Home would love the opportunity to show off.

Le Foyer

That’s French.

The front door opened onto a narrow path to the living area, with the small bedroom just to the right and the bathroom off to the left. Straight ahead was a small coat closet. The path from the front door to the living area felt like a tunnel.

This is what it looked like looking towards the door.

So we removed the wall, turning the closet into a niche. That widened the visual pathway to make the entrance seem less claustrophobic.

Which also left a trench in the floor. This was when we discovered that the walls in the unit had been set down to the original hospital concrete floors, but the flooring had been built up. We lost a wall but gained a hole.

Our other renovations seemed more obvious. This seemed a little weird, but the end result, with the view on entry opening up to the living area, is a shockingly substantial improvement.

The Workroom

Having an extra bedroom provided Dorothy a dedicated work space.

The only change we made to this space was to add a track for overhead lighting. Like the rest of the apartment, this room was dark.

While there’s some fabric still stored in the basement, there is a surprising amount stored under the gracious 6′ x 4′ cutting table. She has a gravity feed iron, a primary sewing station, a serger station, and a dress form in her size. There is no happier sound in our home than the sound of a sewing machine.

There’s even enough room between the cutting table and closet to unfold our full-size guest mattress. Luxe accommodations!

The Living Area

This is where the action is: living room, dining room, and kitchen, all mashed up together in a common space. This is also where we made the most changes.

Living Room

Lighting

First, the room was dramatically underlit. The entire living room/dining room area had an adorable little 3′ track section, providing a fraction of the light necessary. The apartment was dark. We extended that track across the room, so it now provides lighting for the living room, dining room, and the art walls.

We did something a little different with the lighting here than in our last St. Louis apartment. There we set up multiple smart lighting circuits, so that we could use light to define spaces in the open plan space. We want to do the same thing here, but we’re not building from scratch, like we did in St. Louis, so we had to be clever to avoid ridiculous electrician bills.

We just have three tracks in the whole space: one covering the entry and Dorothy’s workroom, one for the kitchen, and one for the living room/dining room. Instead of smart circuits we’re using smart bulbs (Wiz, if you’re interested). Now we’re not constrained by the physical circuits, we can use the smart bulbs to create as many logical circuits as we like.

For example, the track in the living area has ten lamps. Three are part of a Living Room group, three are part of a Dining Room group, and four are part of the group which lights art on the walls, which also has lamps on the kitchen track. Dorothy’s workroom has two lamps in the track and another smart bulb in a gooseneck at her sewing station, all of which can be triggered as part of the same logical circuit. You can put in magnetic wall switches that can control any group you want, you can trigger them through an app, or you can voice control them through Alexa, which is what we usually do. It’s great when you have your hands in food prep and realize that you need more light to just holler for it.

As a final bonus, you have granular control over how the lights fade on and off, their color, 100 steps of fade, and their color temperature. We’ve set the Living Room lamps to warm and the Kitchen and Dining Room to daylight, for example, but that’s all easy to modify, even by voice. “Set dining room to warm at 75%.” Yes, sir.

Fireplace

The living room featured a non-working gas fireplace that was taking up useful space and preventing a seating configuration focused on the view. It was non-working because it was unvented, and my sister, who’d owned the apartment before us, decommissioned the gas. Because who in their right mind would turn on an unvented gas fireplace? So we had to pull that out and remove the conspicuous black gas pipe that supplied it and spanned the living room ceiling.

It seemed stupid on paper, as the fireplace was a 2′ x 6′ installation, and reclaiming all of 12 square feet seemed kind of ridiculous, relative to the cost and hassle. But, like the closet wall we removed, it made a surprising difference. Also like that wall, it left a lovely hole in the floor.

Interestingly, the blue we chose for the walls is not precisely the Majorelle Blue we saw in Marrakech. But it’s mighty damned close.

The Sisyphus table, in action.

Dining Room

The dining room isn’t a separate room, just a space defined by furniture and lighting. It’s pretty full.

This is it, the OG, the very first piece of folk art we purchased, which set us on this long, winding path. We were both ridiculously hung over one day when we wandered into a little folk art shop in the East Village, long before this stuff was cool and collected. We looked at it, looked at each other, and asked, “Do you see that, too?” Since we both saw it, we bought it, brought it home, and named it Santa Tequila, the Patron Saint of Roaring Hangovers. This is an original piece by Pedro Linares, the literal inventor of the dream creatures he named alebrijes. The Victor Fabian porcupine wouldn’t exist without Pedro Linares. We are proud to be Santa Tequila’s caretaker.

By the way, he does stand up, but putting all his weight on his papier-mâché toes is a bad idea. Dude has some years on him.

The Kitchen

The industrial ambiance shows through here, with the concrete open beam ceiling and the exposed duct. The second bedroom, Dorothy’s workroom, is just behind the kitchen.

We added lighting in this area. There was a short section of track lighting, but it was on the beam that was exactly between the island and countertop, meaning that whichever direction you faced the light would be behind your head and you’d be working in shadow. So we moved that track over the island, and added the gooseneck lamps over the sink and stove. No more shadow.

There was an unvented gas range, so that needed to be replaced with an electric induction range, and the new electric line to run it. We took down the upper cabinets because they loom unattractively, they use wall space that would best be allocated to art, and we can’t reach them with our little T-Rex arms anyway. They did, however, hold things, so we had to extend the island with additional cabinets to make up for their loss.

The Bedroom

This is the room where we did the least work. We were going to add track, but decided that overhead lighting wasn’t strictly necessary in a bedroom. Other than paint, we pretty much left this room alone.

The Bathroom

This is where most of our renovation budget went. The bathtub had unusually tall sides, and while watching Dorothy, with her surgically reconstructed hips and knees, try to spider over the edge was reliable entertainment, it wasn’t a sustainable solution, so we had to pull that out and convert it into a step-in shower enclosure.

What we didn’t realize before demolishing the tiled tub enclosure was that the drain wasn’t at floor height. The drains were set above the hospital’s concrete floors, which was why the tub seemed so tall. The bottom of the bathtub had to be above the drain, and so did our shower floor.

Despite the sudden change of plans, and with many thanks to Tony, who jumped in with no prep to build the shower platform and step, we finally got our bathroom.

The Basement

A house is not a home without a garage, and ours is a generous 8’x18′ storeroom in the basement.

And yes, the racks are tagged and numbered and the bins are labeled. Shut up. You’re just jealous that your garage isn’t this well organized.

And it’s not like we have a choice. We have to do what the voices tell us.

I’ve even created a tag for those posts, so if that’s your interest you can pull them all up from the Personal History tag. There’s only a few now, but there will be more. Other than their inherent amusement value, those stories are also a way to make sure that our children, Sam and Ruby, have stories about our lives from before 2022, when we started our travel adventure and created this blog.

Death Becomes Us

A few years before we hit the road, Dorothy and I docented my mother’s surviving partner, Ben, through decline and death. That experience left lasting marks on us, both in terms of how we want to manage our own ends and how we want to manage what we leave behind.

My mother, Jackie, had died about seven years before Ben, by her own hand. She was 88, and while the physical decline had long since started she still had enough marbles to recognize that her mental acuity was diminishing, the clarity to recognize where that process was heading, and the will to choose not to go there. Her decision was the ultimate act of agency.

Ben had taken a different tack, deciding that he wanted to live as close to forever as he could manage. That path led him to a memory care unit, which was the only safe place for him given the level of minding he required at that point. Some months into that stay, Ben confessed to me that he thought perhaps my mother had had the right idea after all. But by then that decision had been taken out of his hands. He was watched 24/7 and he no longer had the ability to assert agency in the same way that my mother had. That door slammed shut when he entered the facility.

Jackie arranged her life so that she kept her agency until her last breath. Ben arranged his life so that his agency was removed before he was done with it. That’s more than a little instructive.

Our net takeaway from the end-to-end experience, covering both Jackie’s and Ben’s deaths, is that it’s better to leave a year early than a day late. That last year is unlikely to be our best year ever, and the risk of being even a day late making that decision is catastrophic. Here’s to getting the timing right.

Hit The Road, Jack

But there was a pre-death takeaway, as well. As Ben was declining mentally, Dorothy put together a memory book for him, so he’d have an anchor as he drifted further away. But Ben’s house was an unorganized mess, and even when Dorothy unearthed something that seemed meaningful he could no longer identify all the people in pictures, or what certain documents meant. Despite that, Dorothy was heroically able to assemble a significant memory book, and Ben referred to it often and found joy in it.

But the things Ben couldn’t identify amongst the detritus were just lost. They no longer had any meaning or value, which was just sad. We committed then and there that we’d never leave that sort of chaos for Sam and Ruby to clean up.

We were already downsizing to hit the road and leave as little behind as possible, but this brought some focus to that effort. Now we weren’t merely downsizing, we were also going to curate, so that what was left made sense and had context. We only kept art that had some personal relevance. We sorted all of our scanned photos into years and events and moved them to a family-accessible cloud service, which also hosted all of our scanned and foldered documents (no more paper). We reduced our belongings to only those that had meaning. We know that Sam and Ruby will thank us. Posthumously.

Which brings us back to the blog. Part of layering in some of the personal history came from that same curatorial impulse, the desire to leave behind for our children a moderately coherent story about our lives. If we took the time to do that with our photos, documents, and artifacts, we should surely do it for our stories. They know at least the outlines of most of the meaningful stories (that we’ve chosen to share – that thing with the snake is nobody’s business), but probably not all of the details and specifics.

Not every story worth sharing from our past is going to neatly fit into some corner of our travel narrative, so I’m going to offroad here, and share a story that is utterly unrelated to our travels. If you’re here for the pretty pictures of exotic locales, you can stop now. Because I’m going to tell a story about my mother’s mob ties.

Ambition!

This story starts way back when we were newlyweds freshly divorced. We had moved from San Diego, then primarily a Navy town, to the more welcoming arms of San Francisco, where several of our friends had preceded us, smoothing our entry.

December 31, 1980. New Year’s Eve with our friends, where a pact was made. We all had shitty office jobs, but we were obviously too smart and too creative as a group not to explode into success. We agreed that evening to join forces as necessary, as a collective, to help bring anyone’s brainchild to fruition. Dorothy and I were the first to move from talking to doing, and with another of our cohort, Yvonne, we started Sleaze Magnets: Painfully Trendy Accessories.

Thus ensued a manic flurry of product development, using found objects and drugs. We filled aquarium tubing with telephone wire and beads to make bracelets. We put colored plastic rods in the toaster oven and twisted them into spirals for earrings. We made skinny ties. And we applied fabric paint to store-bought pantyhose.

We didn’t know how to get the products into retail, so we took an ad out in the happening West Coast magazine of the time, Wet, for mail order fulfillment.

If you replied to the ad, we sent you a handmade two-sided color copy of our catalog.

You’ll be surprised to learn that we weren’t a roaring success. We were better at making things than marketing and promoting them, but we were also lucky to be unsuccessful, as most of the pieces required a ridiculous amount of hand labor to produce. We were literally decades ahead of Etsy’s I-have-no-idea-what-my-labor’s-worth business model.

So we had our little catalog and our pile of oh-so-hip punk products, and everyone we showed them to had the same response: “Cool. But can we get some of those pantyhose? Those are amazing.” So what Sleaze Magnets had truly done was push us to create a lot of products quickly, one of which was clearly worth pivoting to pursue on its own. Thus did Sleaze Magnets, having outlived its usefulness, die.

What would rise to take its place wasn’t immediately obvious. The Sleaze Magnets hosiery had been created with fabric paint and broken off Q-tips. Not only was that inadequate for any but the simplest of designs, it was impossible to scale. We imagined large rooms full of small women with tiny hands and an industrial supply of Q-tips (did I mention the drugs?), but that clearly wasn’t going to work. In order to make a business of it, they would need to be printed.

That turned out to be a thornier problem than anticipated. At the time, what little printed hosiery existed used dye sublimation inks, which printed one side at a time (leaving an unprinted river on each side of the leg) and basically dyed the fibers. So if you printed a square shape, that shape would distort when stretched around a leg. There was a reason they never caught on. They looked like shit. We needed to print images on a porous, flexible substrate that would hold their integrity when stretched.

I took our hosiery and our Q-tip samples to a bunch of silkscreen ink manufacturers and explained what we were trying to do. Every single one of them told me the same thing: that what we were trying to do was physically impossible, no one’s ink would do that, and if it was possible, someone would have done it already. Certainly not us children.

And here is where I learned a lesson that would follow me my entire life: the value of Strategic Ignorance. The problem with subject matter experts is that they have marinated in the agreed upon wisdom of what is and isn’t possible in their domains. They’re experts. They know.

But those experts are often blind to the way that the components of their domain can be mixmastered into new shapes, outcomes that are still possibilities if you bring enough ignorance to the table. I built what passed for my career on Strategic Ignorance, never knowing enough about any one thing that I was an expert who couldn’t imagine off-label solutions. Fairly obviously, that made my resume a tough sell.

What did we do when faced with the rejection of our very premise? We bought a screen printing head, which lived on our dining table, and every type of ink we could get our hands on. And for six solid months I printed and permutated until I cracked it: solid images that would hold their integrity when stretched in any direction. I had solved a problem no one else had solved because I had no fucking idea it was impossible. Well, not quite. I had been told it was impossible. By experts. I just chose not to believe it.

The highlight of this process, and, to be honest, one of the highlights of my life, was taking our printed samples to the ink manufacturer. He flipped through the sample ring with wide eyes. “Jesus Christ, whose ink does this?” Your ink. “Impossible. Our ink can’t do this.” Oh, it doesn’t get any sweeter.

But we weren’t out of the woods. The ink I’d found that could be coaxed into doing our trick was a thermoplastic ink, requiring heat to set. It turned out that the temperature required to set the ink was just a couple of degrees below the char temperature for the hosiery. At that point I was printing in a rented garage and curing the ink under heat lamps, so I didn’t exactly have fine-grained control over the temperature. I burned a lot of hosiery before we were able to set up a proper factory.

Once we were able to (fairly) reliably produce printed pantyhose, we faced another problem: who, exactly, the fuck were we? We were complete unknowns, with no track record and not just a new product but an entirely new product category. At that point, none of the department stores or top boutiques were carrying any printed hosiery. Because there wasn’t any.

We knew the only solution available to us was to dress the part. We’d need top-flight branding and sales material to even get the meeting with buyers. We had to get the small things right so buyers could plausibly infer that we’d get the big things right: manufacturing and fulfillment.

We engaged our network and had a logo done. We did the branding and design ourselves. We hired a sales manager with experience selling to department store accessories buyers. And we built an absolutely insane handmade swatch book out of thick plexiglass and shiny machined bolts. At the very last minute, the night before our first sales meetings, I silkscreened the logo onto the plexi cover. One shot to get it right, fuck it up and no catalog. Nailed it! And the next day we closed our first sale, to I. Magnin in San Francisco.

A new star was born: Gambit by Dorothy Jones.

Bang, Zoom, To The Moon…

And thus were a fateful series of dominos tipped.

First up: delivering to I. Magnin. If the goal was to grow the business, we needed to bring solid sell-through numbers to buyers, so we had to make I. Magnin work. Our first challenge was packaging.

At the time, I was spending a lot of time in hosiery departments in San Francisco. A lot of time. So much time I began to be escorted out. Because I was just standing still and watching. But not in a creepy way.

I was watching people shop. And what I saw was that shopping looked a lot like reading a magazine. If you watch someone reading a magazine, there’s a back-and-forth scanning motion as pages are turned, until something on a page catches attention and arrests that movement. I saw the same thing in hosiery departments.

A shopper would walk in and the head scanning would commence. Then something would catch their attention. What were they looking at when that happened? What caught their eye? Sometimes that would be it, and the scanning motion would start back up. But sometimes they’d walk towards what had caught their eye. Then they might walk off or they might pick the product up. They might put it back or they might buy it.

To make a sale you had to successfully navigate each of these chained decisions, one at a time. You had to arrest the scanning motion. You had to motivate a closer look. You had to induce handling the product. And then you had to close the sale.

Watching women negotiate that space was like a master class in product marketing. The combination of physical packaging, graphic design, and product characteristics could lead a customer successfully through that decision tree or push them away.

Stores only had two ways to display hosiery: Hanging on wall pegs or stacked in tiered bins. The hosiery stacked in bins were in flat packs with a notch at the top to display the product. The notch was adequate to display the color of the hose, because that was the product’s only visual attribute. But it wouldn’t work for our product, which had an all-over pattern. That tiny notch would never show enough of the product. We’d just look like colored tights.

On the other hand, the wall racks displayed hosiery in half-width packs, where you could see the entire package. With a generous window on the package, we could show enough of the product to close the sale. If we could get past the head scanning, induce the approach, and get women to pick the product up in the first place.

The ideal solution to stop the head scanning was some kind of branded merchandising, like a custom rack with signage and only our product. But department stores charge for that placement, on top of the cost of producing the materials. Not practical for the I. Magnin test, and certainly not a scalable business model. We’d need to solve the problem through packaging.

I’d noticed that products didn’t really stand out on the wall racks. They just kind of blended into an undistinguished wash. But there were products that consistently halted the head scan, even if they didn’t consistently induce the approach. Those were products with strong graphic elements on the packaging. But they still looked like individual products. If we could pair strong graphic design with something that pulled the multiple products into a visually cohesive unit, faking a paid merchandising solution, we’d not only stop the head scanning, we’d get the approach. Then when a customer saw how different and unique the designs were compared to everything else in the store, we’d get the pickup for a closer inspection. Then the quality of the design would close the sale. All four steps leading straight to the cash register.

Here’s our solution. The logo was done in a hot color with a drop shadow to push it forward, making it appear to float over the package. The repeating horizontal bars were the trick that faked a merchandising display. If all a sales associate did was hang our products together, and that is truly all they would do, the horizontal bars from a distance looked continuous. Rows and columns of our product had a unified look, creating a branded display out of nothing but hanging them up. The vinyl pack displayed more than enough of the product to finish the job.

It would be impossible not to see the display, arresting the head scan. It would be impossible to avoid walking closer to see wtf. Once right up on it, you’d just have to pick it up to learn more. Boom! Sale.

Just one little problem with this insanely perfect solution. I. Magnin rejected it outright when we showed it to them.

Why? Because of an immutable law of the hosiery department that we didn’t know: pantyhose were sold in flat packs, knee highs were sold in half packs. For all the close observation, I’d never noticed. If we put pantyhose in a half pack, we were told, no one would know what they were.

We didn’t believe for a moment that customers held the same rigid taxonomy as buyers, but we weren’t really given a choice.

So we cut a deal. We’d deliver in a flat pack, as commanded. But if we didn’t get good sell-through numbers, we’d take the product back and repackage it at our expense in half packs. I. Magnin agreed that they would then hang them on the wall as intended. We’ll try your way, and if that doesn’t work you’ll try our way.

This experiment required that we print up both types of packaging, but we just had to eat that cost. No risk, no reward, am I right?

This is what we delivered to I. Magnin. As promised, they racked this with the other pantyhose, with only the top showing behind the lowest tier in the bin.

We called them after the first weekend to check on sell-through, and it was a bloodbath. They had sold not a single pair. Not the sort of vindication we were seeking, but we were hardly surprised.

We picked everything up, repackaged them in the half packs and returned them to be displayed as intended. We called after the next weekend for results.

They had sold through over the weekend. 100% sell-through in two days. Unheard of. We had the package, we had the sell-through proof, we had everything we needed to tell the story and roll this product out nationally.

Well. Almost everything.

We didn’t have anything approaching the capital it would take to truly launch this product. We had a tiger by the tail, but without the tiger. Just tail.

Our sales manager hooked us up with a potential investor. Let’s call him Dr. Howard Greenspan. Dr. Howard was very impressed, and said that he would fund a sales trip to the New York department stores, and if we came back with enough orders he’d make an investment of a specified size. Whose amount escapes me now, for reasons that will become clear.

We wrote paper at 100% of the stores we saw in New York. 100 fucking percent. Dr. Howard was in. In exchange for his investment he got 51% of the business.

Now we had a new set of problems. It turns out department store orders had drop dead dates. Who knew? If we didn’t ship by a certain date, the orders would cancel automatically. We can’t recall exactly now, but we think it was just six weeks. You know what else we didn’t have when we went to New York, besides capital? Product to print on. A place to set up a factory. Equipment. A fucking clue what we’d just let ourselves in for.

We went to work. We ordered product to print on and buttloads of ink. We rented a space and had an industrial heater delivered, the kind with a precise thermostat and a speed-controlled conveyor belt. We were still using the screen head from our dining room. We were ready in… two weeks. Ah, youth.

Which was good, because we had process to invent. It took a fair amount of tinkering to perfect the temperature and belt speed of the drying unit so the ink was properly cured and the pantyhose wasn’t damaged. Scaling the process up from one-at-a-time to constantly introduced challenges that needed to be resolved. But I think the biggest challenge was… I was the only one on the team who knew how to screen print. I would have to personally print every pair we’d sold.

And it’s not like I was an experienced screen printer, or had had any training. I taught myself to screen print during the prototyping process, and it worked, so I guess I was doing it right?

In the final crunch to pack and ship I pulled two consecutive all nighters, with the occasional nap on top of the nice, warm drying unit. Unsurprisingly, our reject rate went through the roof. Only about half of what I printed turned out to be usable product. The rest got piled in a heap.

After we shipped and I slept for a few days, I went back to that reject pile and couldn’t for the life of me find the flaws that had sent them to their doom. In addition to printed hosiery, I also appear to have been producing hallucinations.

This was our hard launch, so we were, on a parallel track, preparing marketing. We did a photo shoot with a photographer whose studio was in the same building as our new factory space. We paid for ads to announce our arrival, one in Women’s Wear Daily and one in Vogue. After that we relied exclusively on editorial coverage rather than paying for advertising, but we wanted to make a splash.

We couldn’t afford to pay Vogue for front-of-the-magazine placement, so we figured we’d be stuffed in the back. They liked the ad so much we got premium placement. And a little boost of controversy.

It’s hard to make out from the above, but the roster of our kickoff clients included Henri Bendel, Neiman-Marcus, Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, Saks, Marshall Field, Macys, B. Altman… A murderer’s row of major department stores and high-end boutiques. We arrived hard.

That was July 1982. By January 1983 Vogue was giving us free ink. This photo was by Irving Penn. It made our hearts stop to be photographed by Irving Penn.

After we filled those first orders we scaled up for real. We hired production staff that I trained on our methods, we created an order management system, we set up a shipping department, we hired new sales reps, and we started cranking out marketing material.

Our very first catalog wasn’t even a catalog. When Dorothy went on some of those first sales calls she noticed that buyers would clip photos they liked and tack them up on their cubicle walls, so we decided that we’d cut out the middleman and deliver single page product shots designed specifically for that purpose. We saw those over and over on subsequent sales calls, as nearly every buyer had them up on their walls.

And here was a little more of that lovely controversy. Between the Vogue ad and the product shots we got a reputation for… spiciness. The girl-girl shots were especially good for riling up the peasants. We just thought it was good art direction.

Meanwhile, we’re lining up press interviews for Dorothy and sending her on multi-city tours for in-store promotions. We amassed a ridiculous amount of press and editorial coverage, all of it glowing, all of it free.

In addition to the core innovation, actually printing on hosiery, Dorothy introduced two other bombs to the industry: fashion colors and seasonal designs. Except for intentionally gaudy tights, hosiery had previously come in hosiery colors. Dorothy changed that, coordinating the hosiery colors with the dominant colors for the fashion season.

Buyers were delighted. They were shocked, before being delighted, when they learned that each season’s patterns would be different. We had a fresh Spring and Fall line every season, with older patterns sent out to pasture. No one retired hosiery designs. If it was on offer, it was on offer forever. We married manufactured scarcity to FOMO, for everyone’s benefit. Dorothy singlehandedly made the hosiery business into a fashion business.

Which was the long game, and the reason we’d branded the products with her name. We weren’t just building a hosiery business. We were laying the foundation for a fashion empire, leveraging Dorothy’s public name and profile to branch out into real fashion. We had, we believed, both tiger and tail. She had credibility and a built-in audience for whatever she did next.

Just for fun…

The Wheels On The Bus… Fall Off

Those of you attentive to narrative arc can see where this is headed.

Let’s not forget how very, very young we were during all of this. Dorothy’s the elder, so we were respectively 23 and 24 when we made our New Year’s pact with our friends. 24 and 25 when we built Gambit (officially Dorothy Jones & Co., in line with our plans for World Domination). 25 and 26 when we launched to the market. And 27 and 28 when it collapsed.

We had a meteoric two-year run. Made it ma, top of the world.

I said I’d explain why I couldn’t remember the amount of Dr. Howard’s investment. It’s because he never made it. After funding the initial sales trip and factory setup, he only ever took money out of the business. He never put in another cent.

He kept the two of us on such a short financial leash that we could barely buy groceries, claiming that there wasn’t enough profit to pay us a real wage. All while, we discovered later, he had himself, his wife, and his mistress on the payroll.

I built that factory. I knew our costs, I knew our sales, and I knew the fat margins I’d built into our pricing. 65¢ of every dollar of income was gross profit, and we had a lean, low overhead operation. I knew there was money there. But other than pay us, the other thing Dr. Howard failed to do was share the books, as he was contractually obliged to do.

We were still based in San Francisco, but spent a lot of time in New York on sales. We convinced Dr. Howard that it made more sense for us to be based in NYC and return to SF twice a year to do the factory work to produce a fresh line, and he doled out enough cash to get us there. But we truthfully knew that our future, whatever it might be, required us to be in New York.

So we moved, and once settled told Dr. Howard that we had the next season’s designs done, and we’d return to SF to put them into production as soon as he shared the books with us. No financials, no new season.

His response to that was to send a press release to Woman’s Wear Daily and all of Dorothy Jones and Co.’s creditors announcing that Dorothy had refused to release the next season’s designs and that the business was shutting down due to her malfeasance. He helpfully added that his share of the business was held in an asset-free shell company that was declaring bankruptcy, but that Dorothy was a general partner and thus responsible for any and all of the company’s debts. And, for good measure, here’s her phone number.

So…

Our backup plan, in the event that events transpired as they did, was that Dorothy had built herself into a bankable name, and other employment should be available. She was the Queen. As it happened, being under the cloud of dueling lawsuits, with even the availability of her name in question (yes, the rights to the Dorothy Jones name belonged to Dorothy Jones & Co., 51% of which was under the control of Dr. Howard) substantially tamped down interest in hiring her. She wound up snagging a part-time contract gig designing for Perry Ellis Hosiery.

I figured I could get a job in management at some sort of fashion accessories firm, only to be told that experience in hosiery in no way qualified me to work in the tie, or belt, or sock businesses. Seriously. Unqualified for socks. I referred to this as “Oh, you have experience marketing cigarettes, but you’ve never marketed menthol cigarettes. Totally different ball game.” So I office temped. I felt like a refugee who’d been a surgeon coming to the Land of Opportunity and driving a cab.

It was so thin that we couldn’t afford groceries but we had a Macy’s credit card and bought $13 melons in their basement gourmet shop. It was so thin (ba-dum-dum)…

What we learned in the aftermath was that Dr. Howard had done more than siphon off net positive cash flow. He’d been siphoning off income, leaving creditors unpaid. By the time everyone had lined up to try to get their cut from us, it added up to more than $500,000 dollars in unpaid bills. Befitting our status as prodigies, we were declared bankrupt, at 27 and 28, with over half a million dollars in debts and no assets.

If you thought it couldn’t get any worse, hold my beer. Please. We learned from the IRS that Dr. Howard had also declined to hand payroll tax withholdings over to the government. Not just the company’s share, mind you, but also the amounts withheld from employee’s paychecks.

You could owe a million bucks in income tax and the IRS will talk to you. They’ll negotiate a settlement. They’ll take cents on the dollar. Reluctantly, but they’ll rationally balance the cost of enforcement and the settlement offer and negotiate. But if you die owing $10 in unpaid payroll taxes they will hunt down your heirs. They will take nothing short of every fucking cent they’re owed.

How did we learn this? From our IRS agent. At 27 and 28 we not only had a freshly minted bankruptcy, we also had an actual specific IRS agent assigned to Dorothy’s case. Who we went to visit. Who explained to us that the government was about to put a lien on her wages (such as they were) in order to collect what they were owed. But he was also kind enough to recognize our circumstances and give us some advice.

That advice was for Dorothy to get pregnant, have a baby, and leave the workforce. It wouldn’t keep the government from placing the lien, but it would probably keep them from pointlessly trying to enforce it.

Sweet! A path out at last.

Obviously, we didn’t do that. We just rolled the dice and hoped we’d be OK. Which in this regard, at least, we were. We were clearly so pathetic that it wasn’t even worth the effort for the government to file the lien. Instead they focussed on Dr. Howard, who actually had enough money to pay the tax bill. It took the IRS over ten years to dig past all of the fancy shell companies and strike Dr. Howard’s actual assets, but they eventually got their money. As the prophecy foretold.

Back in real-time, we were wallowing in an existential crisis. To go with our financial crisis. But at least we were fucked in New York City, right? We spent I’d say the next six months trying to figure out how this had all happened. Sure, sometimes you’re walking down the street and you get hit by a meteor. Bad things do sometimes happen through no fault of your own. But sometimes the fucking is so enormous that you just have to bear some personal responsibility. Acknowledging that Dr. Howard was a scumbag and a thief, we were desperate to figure out what we had done that made the fucking possible. Because we never wanted to be fucked like that again.

Aside from the value of Strategic Ignorance, there was one more life lesson to be pulled from this, what I call the Brass Ring Fallacy: There is no opportunity so once-in-a-lifetime that it’s worth shucking your common sense and strolling blithely into risk. A red flag is a red flag is a red flag. Had we been bulls we’d have everted.

But we weren’t bulls. We were very stupid children and Dr. Howard sniffed us out from get-go.

We were convinced that we were a capital investment away from the kind of success most people can only dream about. We were convinced that it was worth the risk to grab the brass ring. And we were convinced that we had no other options. The first of these beliefs was basically true, and the others couldn’t have been more ridiculously wrong.

We had one more critical decision to make in the rubble of the aftermath: to sue or not sue. There was no question that we had been wronged, and in a demonstrably provable way. We had been torted up the ass. Without lube. The question was whether we wanted to go through what it would take to prevail. It would mean that for some unknown but not trivial number of years we would be consumed with the lawsuit. It would take our time, attention, and money. We could focus backwards, on making right the wrong that had been done to us, or move forward, smarter and tougher, and make sure that we were never fucked again.

As hard as it was, we decided to move forward. And you know what? We have never been fucked again. It’s been tried, but we can smell it from a distance. We have been fucked by a professional, dude, don’t even bring that weakass shit. We have somehow been able to keep ourselves open to opportunity while having a finely tuned bullshit meter to keep the bad guys away. We came out of that experience, at 27 and 28, with the kind of education that many people never get in their entire lifetimes. We were seasoned.

And here’s another thing. We both really like who we are. And who we are is, in no small part, the result of this particular experience. This was the forge in which our adult selves were fired, and we like our adult selves. That makes this experience, however painful it was at the time, a net positive for us. We are, counterintuitively, grateful for it.

Mommie Dearest

“Jesus, dude. Talk about burying the lede. You’re at almost 6,000 words and nothing about your mother’s mob ties.”

OK, OK, I hear you. Exceptionally long setup, but at long last the punchline.

Amidst all this, as the extent of the fuckery became clear, dear old Ma and I are chewing it over. She is a robust 58, and it’s just a few years after my father, Stan, had died. As we’re discussing the depth and breadth of what’s been done, she says to me, “Do you want me to have him taken care of? I know people. Nothing that could possibly be traced back to you.”

Holy fuck! On the one hand, awesome to know that someone cares enough about me to have murder committed on my behalf. On the other hand, well, murder. And who are these “people” that she knows? Jesus.

So I stutter something back about what a lovely offer that is, but that I’m not prepared to go that far.

“Fine, fine, I understand. But you know, your father had a rule. ‘Don’t fuck with what’s mine.’ You’re mine, you’ve been fucked with, and since he’s not here that’s my job now.”

Man, if you squint it’s almost sweet. But then she goes on.

“OK, the man’s a doctor, right? He works with his hands. And you know where he lives. So he walks out of his house one day and as someone passes him on the street they reach out, break his hands, and just keep walking. Good enough, right? No. We wait until he’s healed up, and we do it a second time. The bastard will never leave his house again. Or work. And an asshole like that has plenty of enemies. He’ll never have a clue.”

That’s… a lot. Especially from your mother. If I remember correctly, my response to that was “Jesus Christ, remind me to never piss you off.”

I mean, where do you start? I don’t honestly know what’s scarier. That she could conceive of such a plan, seemingly off the cuff (or even worse to contemplate, what if it wasn’t off the cuff? What if she’d done it before?), or that she had the resources to execute it. Who are these “people?”

In a million years I could never have conceived of that plan. Murdering the guy, sure. But breaking his hands? Twice? Where does that even come from? I regret very little in my life, but I definitely regret not asking her about this episode before she died. But I have a theory.

When I was a wee bairn Stan and Jackie owned a furniture manufacturing company (the entrepreneurial gene seems to be dominant), Jacklyn Manufacturing. What a softie he was. I remember playing in the giant pits of foam.

They wholesaled to furniture stores, so buyers were big ticket. Nobody was there to get a single chair, and they were coddled appropriately. One way the buyers were coddled was that the catalog for the furniture featured nude models on all the beds, sofas, and chairs. Hubba hubba. I know this because I found the box of prints. Talk about a formative experience!

The other way they were coddled, which I didn’t learn about until I was an adult, was with… companionship. Jackie had a rolodex, and she made sure that each traveling buyer was provided an appropriate friend for the evening. It was a simpler time. Still. Your mother may be a boss, but mine was a pimp.

Here’s where the conjecture comes in. I find it hard to believe that either Jackie or Stan traveled in circles where they had direct contact with a rolodex full of women of negotiable morals. Although your parents are, inherently, unknowable. I find it easier to believe that in the manufacturing business they had come across someone who did have that access, and could provide it to them for a cut.

And that somehow Jackie had maintained that relationship and was able to leverage it for a murder or maiming for hire scheme 20+ years later?

It doesn’t make any sense, but any other potential explanation seems both less plausible and more frightening. So I’m going to stick with this. The stories we tell ourselves.

Coda

How did this eventually all wrap up? As I mentioned, it took over a decade but the IRS finally got to Dr. Howard. Which validated, I think, our decision to let it go. If it took the IRS, with their vast resources, ten years, what could we have accomplished?

We survived the dark years in the immediate aftermath and went on to other exciting adventures and exploits, without ever once getting within hailing distance of a fucking. So, yay us.

The contract for Dorothy Jones and Co eventually lapsed and Dorothy got the rights to her name back, although that didn’t make much practical difference. Her Broadway career as a costumer didn’t require that she market herself by name, but it did make the decision to relocate to New York before the shit hit the fan look prescient.

Some years after all of this Dr. Howard tracks us down and calls. I pick up the phone, and he explains that he’s had a come-to-Jesus moment, or whatever a Jewish doctor has, and he’d like to meet with Dorothy, in a very public place of her choosing, so he can apologize for his foul deeds in person.

I tell him that the forgiveness he’s seeking is between him and his god, and we’ll have nothing to do with it. Above our pay grade. Instead, I suggested that he might go fuck himself. Although I’d have taken cash, had it been offered. Pointedly, it was not.

The entire episode isn’t so much a funny or sad or angry story anymore. It’s just a fact from our past, however much it’s informed our ongoing present. All I can say is that it’s nice to be past the part of our lives where the knowledge and wisdom we picked up at such cost matters. It’s good to be old.

I know we haven’t truly dug into Chicago yet, so it seems like cheating to step out, but we’ve taken our first excursion: three days in rural Wisconsin on an art tour with my sister, Nef. Specifically, DTour, a biannual rural art fair put on by the Wormfarm Institute. Site-specific art installations are scattered over a 50 mile route, interspersed with informative signage, Burma Shave inspired roadside poetry, and side trips to local artisans and locally crafted deliciousness.

The point of DTour is to bridge the gap between urban and rural, between art and industry. The artsy are exposed to the beauty of the landscape and the vibrancy of the farmlands, and the farmers are able to look at their world through a different lens, to recontextualize the utilitarian as aesthetic. Everyone wins.

One of the first things that happened as we started the driving tour was confusion over what was art. We’d pass a field and ask ourselves if what we were looking at was art or farming. After our first few actual installations it was clear, but the initial confusion was pretty entertaining, and led, I think, to exactly the conversation that Wormfarm was looking to stimulate.

Art In The Field

We took two full days to complete DTour. It could have been done in a single day, but only if you skipped the artisan’s studios that were off the main route. What’s the point of that? There were 15 site-specific installations on the tour, and we have photos of most of them. Here they are, in no particular order.

Here Be Dragons

Almost overwhelming in scale, Here Be Dragons was built on one of the irrigation rigs we initially mistook for art. So we were kind of right after all.

Preserve

An entire structure filled with jars. A few had actual objects, like flowers or herbs, but the majority had pictures on film, illuminated by the natural light passing through the open building.

Seed Art

Woven Willow Sanctuary

These were individual structures strewn about a large field with a stream. You could sit inside them, and the interiors were decorated with charms and talismans. Sitting inside and taking in the peaceful landscape absolutely felt like being in a sanctuary.

As It Is…

This piece was staged inside an abandoned church. There was a weathervane on the roof that caught the wind and rotated the sculpture inside.

There was also a surprising piece hanging on the wall made of eggshells.

Lady Corn

You could climb inside and operate the pulleys that moved the eyes and waved the little corn arms.

Which, of course, we did. Because we are, all of us, five years old.

Signs O’ The Times

The route was also littered with what seemed like permanent signage, helpfully explaining core concepts, such as Sky, Soil, and Ethics. I’m sure it’s hard to be a farmer and not accept scientific facts like erosion and conservation. But the signs, placed on people’s farms, walked a delicate path around things like climate change or anything potentially divisive, while still making the case for the need to protect and nurture our farmlands. The goal, after all, was to bridge the urban/rural divide, not exacerbate it.

Performance Art

In addition to the installations there were a number of live performances. The one we most wanted to see, the Hayrake Ballet, was only staged one day, the week before we got there. The Times just did a writeup on DTour and included a short video of the performance, and the full performance is here on YouTube. So sorry to have missed it.

We did catch another of the live performances, a site-specific dance called Damp Edges. It lasted several hours, which seemed cruel to the performers, as it was a pretty chilly day and they were, as advertised, damp. In a nice touch there were picture frames set up around the perimeter, so you could look through them to frame the performance.

As we were driving along the route we saw a guitarist sitting alone in a field. Performance or cry for help? Performance, as it turned out, by Andrew. Andrew is based in Chicago, and his full band, Orillia, is having its debut album launch party in a few weeks. Of course we’re going. We’re field fans!

Update!

The Orillia record release party was on November 19th at the Hideout in Chicago, a lovely old-timey dive bar. The opening acts were Winefred RT and Cherryburn, both of which were surprisingly good for warmup acts. Winefred RT was a charming performer and excellent writer, and Cherryburn had somehow misplaced their drummer, but played a spirited set of nicely layered, atmospheric songs regardless.

But, headliners. Here’s Orillia performing I Am A Cinematographer, a spirited cover of a deep cut from Bonny “Prince” Billy.

The Hills Are Alive…

If the whole point of DTour was to expose city folk to the beauty of the rural landscape, mission accomplished. While not as objectively spectacular as, say, the Sahara, the region has plenty of subtle beauty. It didn’t hurt that we visited mid-October, as the leaves were starting to turn.

DTour’s location is in part of the Driftless Area, also known as the Paleozoic Plateau, about 24,000 square miles across Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. The ice skipped this area during the last ice age, leaving behind a topography dramatically different than the glaciated areas surrounding it.

When glaciers retreat they leave behind drift, a mix of rubble ranging in scale from silt to boulders, which buries whatever had been there before. The Driftless Area, never manhandled by glaciers, maintained its pre-ice age topography. Water erosion has continued unabated, carving the existing landscape deeper into the plateau. The Driftless is a little time machine, a fascinating geologic snapshot of ancient America.

That landscape seems well suited to corn. Like the rest of the Midwest. I’ve driven through plenty of corn panoramas, but I’ve never noted anything particular except their visual monotony. Perhaps it was that the corn fields on DTour were part of the rolling landscape, and not flat expanses cleaved in twain by an interstate. But I suspect it was more that I just stopped and looked closely for the first time. But damn. Even the cornfields were beautiful.

Corn, we discovered, is surprisingly noisy.

Fuck me. Even the clouds seemed extra beautiful. Farm living is the life for me!

Local Artisans

No visit, no matter the destination, is complete without shopping.

The selection of local artisans on the route, or just off, was solid. There was one fail (scented candles and country kitsch, cloying in every sense), but otherwise the quality was pretty high. Nef got a carved wooden bowl at a studio that also featured stained glass, and we each picked up ceramics at two different studios.

Without question, though, the highlight was David Timberlake.

David is a charming old goat, proud to show off the disfiguring scars from his many broken bones. More importantly, he is a ridiculously creative metalworker. Honestly, most of this kind of work leaves me cold, tending as it does towards adorable little robot figures made of nuts and bolts or steampunk hoohah. But David brings a sculptor’s eye to found metal objects and creates works of surprising grace. Rather than the mechanical rigidity his components might suggest, his pieces are metallic poems of movement and rhythm. Unaccountably, because it is not at first glance our esthetic, we were drawn to the work.

His grounds are littered with sculptures in situ, and his workshop is a delight on its own.

There were also, as was to be expected, many, many cheeses and meats on offer. Far from being basic, the locally produced foods were rich and complex, probably from being made so close to the source. We ferried home an inappropriate amount of calories. Next time we’ll bring a cooler.

This entire experience was shockingly similar to the sorts of road trips we take on our international travels, and a great reminder that culture is where you find it. Plus, there’s nothing wrong with speaking the language and understanding how money works. When we’re finally done traveling the globe, it’s nice to know that adventures still await us in our backyard.

I think that’s a great question, because it forces us to step back and think about the meta in a way that I don’t usually. I tend to be firmly grounded in the experience and what that experience means, but I haven’t really slowed down to reflect on the big picture.

So, thanks, Whip. It forced Dorothy and I to talk through this topic and have a lively conversation, which is always welcome. On a side note, the last time Whip and I spoke he shared his list of five things he’s learned from world travel, and there was zero overlap in our lists, which I thought was interesting. Beyond that I don’t recall the specifics, because they weren’t about me.

#1) It’s The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine

Empires rise and fall, and so will ours.

Our accidental Cradle of Civilization Tour has provided some unexpected perspective. We’ve been wading through the ruins of successive empires, each of which was certain it would last forever. Hittites gave way to Phoenicians, who were crushed by the Romans, who also outlasted the Greeks, but were superseded by the Byzantines, who were destroyed by the Ottomans. Who eventually became foot stools. Knee bone connected to thigh bone.

Some of those civilizations lasted over 1,000 years, although the Hittites only lasted a few hundred. But they’re all gone. Some died as wizened old codgers rattling out their last breaths and some died as teenagers. Teenagers are stupid. Many get over it, but a few get behind the wheel drunk and don’t make it home.

The US is Hittite young. Are we going to make it to adulthood or are we going to hit the ditch going 100? Right now the ditch is looking like a safe bet, but you know what? None of it matters. We rose, and if we don’t fall now we’ll fall eventually. That may sound like nihilism, but it’s not. As the Buddha said, “All things must pass.” That’s meant to anchor you in a humbling impermanence, a certain graceful sanguinity. Check.

#2) R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Everyone’s culture is beautiful and amazing.

Culture. It’s more than just a Petri dish. And it’s certainly more than lines on a map. It’s food and history and dance and race and geography and clothes and ethnicity and architecture and language and religion and traditions.

I don’t think we understood how fractal culture is. Does the US have a culture? Sure, if hamburgers are a cuisine and self-righteousness is a religion (I say yes to both). Does the South have a culture distinct from US culture? Duh. Does Louisiana have a culture distinct from Georgia? Obviously.

Dorothy and I are Californians, a place that sometimes seems devoid of culture. Rather than feeling steeped in any particular cultural identity I think we grew up thinking of ourselves as generic Americans. Then we moved to New York City, home to a substantial expat community from what seemed like every country on the planet, a concatenation of micro-cultures separated by cross streets rather than a culture of its own. Unless New York’s jacked up version of American Exceptionalism counts as culture (I say it does).

But I don’t know that we appreciated the granularity of culture until we took a road trip from St. Louis down the Mississippi to Louisiana one Christmas. It turns out that reading about the Civil War from the safe confines of California doesn’t prepare you for the place itself, where it’s still a raw, painful wound.

It wasn’t the omnipresence of memorials and museums, it was the way people spoke about their history. What felt like ancient history in high school in California was so present. I toured Edinburgh Castle some years back, and the docent was pretty clear that they’re still pissed about the Reformation, so yeah. The Civil War wasn’t that long ago.

It became hilariously obvious when we toured Vicksburg and then Natchez as we made our way south. In Vicksburg the docent waxed eloquent about the Siege of Vicksburg and how they had held out until the end, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi. He then tossed in a gratuitous observation about Natchez, their neighbors to the south who had just rolled over and surrendered at the first sign of a Union ironclad. I believe he used the expression round heeled.

Then when we toured Natchez the docent spoke admiringly of the wisdom of the city’s leaders who surrendered to the inevitable, leaving Natchez almost entirely intact, allowing us to enjoy the antebellum architecture years later. He then tossed in a gratuitous observation about Vicksburg, which had foolishly held on until the bitterest of ends, leaving the entire city in ruins. I believe he used the expression idiots.

When I mentioned what our Vicksburg guide had said, our Natchez guide laughed and said it was just a little friendly rivalry. Really? That’s not what it sounded like to me. It sounded like a long-running, unresolved argument about morality during wartime. But I’m sure it was just joshin’.

It’s not just that California has a different culture than the South, or that Mississippi has a different culture than Louisiana. It’s that Vicksburg has a different culture than Natchez. And if you zoomed in further, Natchez would most certainly look like a patchwork quilt, not a monoculture.

Maybe we weren’t Southerners, but the Civil War, however poorly taught in California high schools, was still part of our shared history, still part of American culture. When confronted with new information from the local perspective, we had a framework in place that allowed us to understand what we were hearing. Obviously, that’s been missing on our travels. Unwinding culture without any previous knowledge of our setting has been both one of our biggest challenges and our biggest joys.

The challenge is in trying to decode and unravel the various strands that make up a local culture, and the joy is in having any success in the attempt at all. Oaxaca represents one of the best examples of this. At first it seemed to be a monoculture. A distinct, specifically Oaxacan culture, but consistent in its expression. But digging a little deeper, we discovered that 16 different indigenous populations had contributed to the mélange that looked at first like a unitary “Oaxacan” culture. Some parts contributed by Zapotec, some by Mixtec, some by Mazateco…

There’s the cultural fractal again. We saw it at an even more zoomed in level in Tunisia, when I got my Berber tattoo. When we were talking about the meaning of the Berber symbols, my tattoo artist/ethnographer explained that there was no single, agreed upon codex. As she traveled the Sahara documenting tattoos, she found that the same symbol took different meanings in different tribal groups, sometimes only a few miles apart.

And that’s where the rest of the joy comes from, aside from cracking the code itself. There’s an enormous amount of joy in discovering the particulars of a given culture, the meaning and the beauty underlying specific cultural components. Why that pattern is used on ceramics. What that woven rug motif means. What that dance represents…

Here’s what matters: As important as dispassionate observation is to understanding what you’re seeing, you should never forget to let yourself get swept up in the moment. The purpose of beauty is transcendence. Which is everywhere, if you’re looking for it.

#3) Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough

How long you stay somewhere is fundamental to your experience of that place.

We’re clearly not on a tourist cadence on our travels, staying about three months on most of our stops. There are distinct benefits to that cadence, one of which is the perception that we have effectively infinite time. Every day doesn’t have to be packed with adventure. We can have an inside day, house cleaning and reading, and not feel like we’re cheating ourselves of experience. We can get a cold without it feeling like an existential threat to our FUN. It allows us to relax and just live wherever we happen to be.

“Just living” in that way also brings us closer to the normal daily rhythms of local life wherever we are. We’re never going to truly experience a place the way locals do, but we get dramatically closer in three months than we would on a ten day tourist junket. Marinating in local life, and not just slamming the tourist hot spots, is part of what makes this such a lovely, profound experience.

But I think the most salient benefit of the time we spend in each location is related to the previous point about decoding culture. That process requires moving slowly, listening, researching, processing… It takes time to figure out how the puzzle pieces fit together. We were in Mexico for over four months before I could plausibly explain the differences in shopping patterns between Mexico and the US.

Three months isn’t enough to make us hardcore experts on local culture, prepared to write a book on the subject. Unless a blog is just a very slow book. But it’s enough to tease out some interesting connections and get a deeper understanding of a place than is possible on a tourist cadence.

#4) War! What’s It Good For? Lining Colonialist’s Pockets. Uh!

Colonialism has a longer history than I thought.

I like to think that one of the privileges of being an American is the right to a blinkered, narrow view of history. We’re only 200 or so years old and we’re awesome, so nothing that happened before us could possibly matter. Right?

When I think of colonialism, which is often, I think of the ravages of the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. I knew that Western European colonialism stretched back earlier, but my familiarity was with its 18th century heyday. What I like to think of as the Golden Age of Colonialism.

Imagine my surprise, as we traveled the world and partook of different cultures, to learn that colonialism has its own rich history going back to the earliest city-states. A lack of respect for borders may be one of our innate capabilities as humans. Maybe prostitution is only the world’s second oldest profession. After fuckery.

Phoenicians colonized the North African coast in 900 BC. Greece colonized not only other city-states in modern day Greece, but also in Italy and North Africa as far back as 800 BC. By 200 BC Rome had colonized the rest of Italy, and over the next 200 years added Greece, Spain, France, Britain, a chunk of the Middle East, and whatever was left over in North Africa after they beat the shit out of the Phoenicians.

And it just keeps going. The Arabs were big time colonizers, peaking between the 8th to 12th centuries. By the 1400s the Ottomans had turned colonization into administrative performance art, allowing the Western Europeans to offer a philosophical rebuttal anchored in brutality.

And while it’s obvious, it’s worth stating that every colonist at every point throughout history engaged in slavery. I certainly thought of slavery primarily in the context of the 18th century slave trade, and not as an historical constant, but you can blame my California high school for that.

I’m not sure if it’s comforting to know that colonialism has been with us all along and isn’t just something the French made up because they’re French. But it’s certainly eye opening to confront the scars that exist, at one level or another, just about everywhere. It’s one thing to be in Morocco, where there are still people alive today who lived under French colonial rule, and another to be in Tunisia and hear Berbers refer to the predations of Arab colonizers, who conquered the region in 647.

It’s been with us forever, and it never really goes away.

#5) Land of 1000 Dances

There are different models for being successful, as both individuals and nations.

Every place we’ve been we’ve seen some component of culture or behavior or civic life that was a) different than how we do things in the US of A; b) admirable, and c) generally tied up with other things that weren’t so swell. A way of life can be something we wouldn’t want to live under (single party political rule, theocracy…) and still have positive elements.

We have seen countless examples. Here are just a few…

Same Sex Friendship

As we traveled through Muslim countries, we were shocked by the extent to which same sex friendship was expressed physically. Men hugged one another, walked hand in hand or arms around shoulders, came in close for conversation, and generally behaved in ways that would be interpreted as gay in the US. Same for women. Friends reveled in one another’s company without having to worry about policing their perimeters.

We thought hard about how states that were so hostile to homosexuality could have fostered an environment in which same sex friends felt they had license to express their feelings for one another physically. “Homosexual activity” is illegal in Morocco and Tunisia, and while there are no laws against it in Turkey, LGBTQ citizens enjoy no legal protections from discrimination.

Sadly, the only explanation we could come up with is that same-gender attraction is so taboo in those countries that no real gay couples would ever risk public displays of affection. Thus, any such displays must, by definition, be platonic.

It would be a pure delight if same sex friends in the US felt comfortable expressing their affection physically, instead of trimming their sails to avoid the appearance of homosexuality. I think it would dramatically relax our culture. But I’d hate to think that the only route to that outcome went through violent suppression of LQBTQ+ rights.

Embedding Faith In Daily Life

One of the things I hate most about the US is the centrality of religion in our culture, and how that manifests as a particularly curdled piousness and hypocrisy. We love to proudly proclaim our religious bona fides while giving the thinnest of lip service to the values upon which those religions are built. We’ll fight to the death to make sure the town square has Christmas decorations, but god help you if you expect us to exhibit actual charity, compassion, or humility.

Over 99% of the populations of Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia are Muslim. While Turkey is a secular state, Islam is the official state religion of both Morocco and Tunisia. None of these countries is run by priests, the technical definition of a theocracy, but civic life is absolutely driven by religious concerns and requirements.

And yet…

Where public expressions of faith in the US seem largely performative, the equivalent expressions in Muslim countries seem heartfelt and genuine. We found the same thing when we visited India, which also weaves deeply religious practices into daily life. These are people who are living their faith as an integral part of their lives, not sinning six days a week and begging for forgiveness on the seventh. There’s something truly beautiful and graceful about that.

I don’t want to live in a theocracy. Certainly not the one that wackjob American Christians would like to impose on me. But still, there’s something to be said for a culture that lives its values, even if those values are religious. Not a point of view I ever thought I’d understand.

There Are Valid Reasons For One-Party Rule

Cuba held many surprises, not least of which was the argument it made for the value of single-party rule. I go off at length on this subject here, but the gist is that I had thought that multiparty rule was a bedrock value, a principal of good governance. If Cuba ever converted to a multiparty system, as the US government demands that it do in order to lift the bloqueo, its grand socialist experiment would collapse. Which is, of course, exactly why we’re demanding it.

While that outcome might not seem obvious, the explanation is super simple: The moment there are multiple political parties the US would rush in to financially support the one most prone to do our bidding, turning Cuba into the US colony we have long desired. We would, through illegal means, buy the election and the government. If that sounds paranoid, you’ve never read any Cuban history, and you should. And if that sounds avoidable, I have nothing for you. That level of naiveté is unfixable.

But here’s the thing about Cuba’s single-party rule, which exists entirely to blunt the predations of the US government: it has delivered for its citizens, and, absent the bloqueo, would be thriving. Crime is low, the streets are safe, education is free through university, health care is a right, there’s low infant mortality, and there’s universal literacy. I’m not excusing the crushing of political dissent, just pointing out that Cuba isn’t the Communist hellhole we’re told it is. And to the extent that it’s an economic hellhole, that’s a thing we did to them, not a thing they did to themselves.

Would I like to live under single-party rule? Not at all, but I wouldn’t mind free education through university and universal health care. Besides, we kind of are living under single-party rule. That party is Late-Stage Capitalism, and it brooks very little dissent. But I’ve now seen a plausible argument for actual single-party rule, and I’d have thought that impossible.

Every problem we have in the US has been solved somewhere, although maybe not with methods we’d consider American. We should be able to acknowledge the benefits we see in other societies and at least make an attempt to figure out a way to import the upside while dulling the downside. Obviously, that’s hard to do while everyone’s knees are busy jerking.

At a minimum, though, we should be able to look at other places and admit that while their values might be different than ours, those values often lead to outcomes that seem out of our reach. And wonder, at least for a moment, why that is. Maybe demonizing the other doesn’t get us anywhere but a false sense of moral superiority.

Which beats all hollow actually solving any of our problems.

#6) More, More, More

Bigger Isn’t Always Better (with apologies to Dirk Diggler)

Bonus time! This is the sixth of the five things we’ve learned on our travels.

At one point I dug deep into the differences in shopping patterns between Mexico and the US. While Mexico has big box stores (Ikea, Walmart, Home Depot), they haven’t obliterated everything in their path, as they’ve done in the US. Mexico has somehow managed peaceful coexistence between large and small retail models, as opposed to the winner-take-all, late-stage capitalism death match we enjoy in the US. This has been largely true of our other destinations, as well. Carrefour’s hypermarkets haven’t obliterated local produce stores or neighborhood markets in North Africa and Turkey.

In the US, the Market insists that the opposite of Growth is Decline: if you’re not getting bigger you’re dying. But that’s kind of obviously bullshit. Success doesn’t have to be reduced down to a Manichaean binary. Success can mean Enough, instead of always manically demanding More.

Oaxaca had more eyeglass stores per square foot than I’ve seen anywhere else on the planet. How can they all be successful? By defining success differently than we do. If my store sells six pairs of eyeglasses/day and pays my rent and delivers enough profit to be comfortable, why would I have to purchase my competitors and super-size my business? Where is it written that I must get bigger?

Refusing to buy into the Market’s definition of success does more than just create a retail landscape that’s balanced between large and small businesses in a way that we can’t muster. I honestly believe it makes for a healthier citizenry. Sure, there’s a lot of hustling in those economies, but it’s not like our version of capitalism has granted us a hustle-free existence. But there’s a healthy acknowledgement, I think, that sometimes enough truly is enough. We’re certainly trying to live that way, and have been enjoying the hell out of our distinctly un-American downsizing.

Thanks, Whip!

Dorothy and I really enjoyed the conversation that led to this post, and I hope it’s been an entertaining read. If you liked it, the good parts are Dorothy’s. If not, please blame Whip. I am but a vessel.

One of the things we’d been looking forward to about being back in the US is being in an environment we can navigate like natives. So here’s the funny thing about Chicago. We’ve never lived there. We’ve never lived in our new condo. Or any kind of condo. We don’t know where food comes from. We don’t know where trash goes. We largely understand the speech, which is not an unalloyed benefit, but we have no clue whether the condo association is OK with hemming the curtains. We’re struggling with the local currency (“That can’t be how much burritos cost”). Once again, we’re in a brand new environment figuring it out as we go along.

Obviously, it’s not quite the same. Once we do figure it out we’ll be able to leverage that knowledge in the future. Sussing out Marrakech didn’t really give us a leg up in Istanbul. And while navigating what the condo association will permit is challenging, it’s also a one-off. We’re going to do some renovation at the front end of this process and then ride the apartment out until death. It’s not like we’re going to Winchester Mystery House our condo.

Moving In

Our transition to the new apartment was super greased. We bought a unit in the same building that my sister, Nef, lives in, and she and her daughter Amber set the apartment up so it was gracious when we arrived. Rather than a completely empty apartment, there was a little sofa and a couple of barstools. There was a bed with linens and towels in the bathroom. There was butter and eggs and cheese and cereal, dishes and flatware. There was bourbon and beer. We arrived with our suitcases and didn’t have to immediately find a grocery store for provisions and a Target for necessary housewares. It was a lovely greeting and a welcoming, civilized start to our stay.

And especially helpful because our first official act as newly minted Chicago residents was to come down with Covid. I thought it was a brutal case of jet lag, so it took a couple of days to recognize, and then, of course, Dorothy caught it. Because we share everything. It definitely slowed our entry.

Which was fine, because a slow entry actually worked out. We’d sold or given away almost all of our lifetime accumulation of WTF prior to launching and what was left, the choice bits, fit in a 10’x15’ storage facility we rented in Chicago. So instead of hiring movers and swimming, Scrooge McDuck-like, through all of our belongings, we borrowed a car from family and moved over a carload a day. One day’s stuff could be absorbed into the apartment the day it came over, and we dealt with trash and recycling in real time, so we were never living in that move-in morass of boxes and garbage.

We got about halfway through the storage facility on our own before hitting the furniture too big to fit in the car and the boxes too heavy for old people. While Dorothy was visiting family in San Diego, I had movers bring over the last of it and largely got things organized and put away before she got back. One of the lovely perks of our 1,100 square foot apartment is a dedicated 8’x18’ store room in the basement, so there’s enough garage to hold what we don’t need every day in a rational, accessible fashion. You know: labeled, inventoried, taxonomized bins stored on matching steel shelves. All the comforts of our OCD home.

Our apartment is on the fifth floor of a hospital that was refurbed into housing, but the wing we’re in doesn’t have trash chutes on the fifth floor. I knew that before we bought the apartment, and it was a definite negative. But when we got here and moved in, we were all, “OMG, the trash is only one floor away!” We didn’t have to walk it to the corner two blocks away and just leave it on the sidewalk (Carthage). Or walk it three blocks to the parking lot and ask for Cuco (Guanajuato). Or walk it four blocks to the closest dumpster (Marrakech).

We are committed to retaining our childlike wonder at the world’s marvels. Like a trash chute that’s only a floor away. We’ll see if we can avoid becoming jaded, entitled burghers. Stay tuned.

The Apartment

The apartment is lovely. It has 10 1/2 foot ceilings, so it feels nice and spacious. It also has exposed ducting and concrete beams, so it’s a little industrial from the neck up, but the rooms are graciously proportioned. There’s a master bedroom with a walk-in closet and a smaller second bedroom, which will be Dorothy’s workroom. The main living area is open plan, which we love, with the kitchen an integral part of the living room/dining room space. The bathroom is split with a sink and toilet in one room and the tub in the other. So guests don’t have to be confronted with the army of unguents and potions that occupy the modern bathroom.

We’ll be doing some renovation. There’s a gas fireplace in the living room that we’re taking out. An unvented gas fireplace is an epically awful idea, and the enclosure eats into the living space. Removing it will reclaim a fair amount of usable square feet. We’re removing the upper cabinets in the kitchen, because we can’t reach them with our little T-Rex arms. We’re adding a ton of track lighting, because the previous owners appear to have been blind. I have never been in a darker apartment in my life. And we’re swapping out the tub for a more age appropriate barrier-free shower enclosure.

But the best feature of the apartment is probably the north-facing view. Just about the entire north side of the apartment is glass, pointed straight at the downtown skyline. We’re up at the tree line, so the view is leafy and green (at least at this time of year), and there’s a nice 5’x10′ balcony. And, best of all, BirdTV. I could watch BirdTV for hours. And have.

One final curiosity. The very first property we ever purchased, in 1992, was a condo in the Renaissance East in Spanish Harlem. The very last property we’ll ever purchase is a condo in the Renaissance Place in Hyde Park. Nothing like a little unaccountable symmetry to wrap things up in a neat bow.

Money, Money, Money

One of the things I’ve been most interested to discover is whether it’s truly more expensive to live in the US than the other parts of the world we’ve visited. I keep a detailed budget, so I can compare month to month costs and make sure we’re not ridiculously overspending. In order to compare apples to other apples I factored out our move-in costs, which are all one-time, one-off. Mattress, vacuum cleaner, table and chairs, movers… They’re functionally capital expenses to set our home up, not operating expenses.

Turns out, July, our first month in Chicago, was not our most expensive month so far. We spent more in Tunisia in April, because of the life-changing, expensive, week-long Sahara tour, and we spent more in Istanbul in June, because of multiple road trips and one very costly rug. But those two months were well above average for us, and our Chicago month is also near the top. I’ve updated the post on our spending with a broader range of locations, and included our Chicago month, so you can see where the money goes. July picked up the tag end of our Turkey trip, so if August looks more representative I’ll swap those numbers out.

Chicago Its Own Self

Getting here, getting Covid, going to our summer camp, physically moving in… We definitely haven’t been able to enjoy Chicago yet. At least we know where the trash goes in our building.

Chicago certainly seems to possess all of the benefits we imagined when we picked it as our Final Resting Place. As we learn yet another foreign city I’ll post about our adventures here. To date, though, moving in has been our primary adventure.

That’s certainly how we felt about this adventure. And most of our lives. And it’s absolutely true in the broadest sense. But in the approach we’ve taken in executing this particular escapade, I think we’ve come up short.

Despite the obviously meticulous planning that made what we’re doing even possible, our entire process has been to play it by ear. Where are we going next? We’ll decide when we need to. How will we get along with limited native language skills? We’ll find out. How will we feel? TBD.

What we did know is that we’d each be giving up a lot to do this. What we didn’t know, and couldn’t, is what those losses would feel like and where the dial would land between gain and loss. We’ve both tended to be loosely tethered to place, happy to pack up and move if it seemed convenient or interesting, so we weren’t expecting the absence of home to carry so much weight. In hindsight, there’s a glaring difference between not being attached to a particular home, and not needing a home at all.

Something’s Lost But Something’s Gained…

There’s been an underlying asymmetry to this plan from the very beginning, in the sense that Dorothy and I valued very differently the things we’ve had to give up. We both gave up friends, which I think landed about evenly, probably a little harder on Dorothy, who’s less noticeably sociopathic than I am. Zoom mitigates that a little, but not entirely. Lockdown taught us that Zoom could suffice when there were no other options. And there are definitely no other options while we travel. Three months is a long time to stay somewhere as a tourist, but it’s hardly long enough to make friends.

The real downside here is less about access to our friends than that we are 100% our only companions. We’re experiencing everything together, and it’s a little claustrophobic. One of our ironclad relationship rules is that each of us should have a hobby that doesn’t involve the other. I had board game nights with my friends that Dorothy didn’t join. Dorothy had nights out with her friends that I didn’t attend. But we’re this hermetically sealed unit on our travels, and that’s not healthy. I’ve taken to going on walks by myself one day a week, but all that does for Dorothy is absent me; it doesn’t offer her anything positive in return. Not that the value of my absence should be underestimated.

We both gave up work, which hit with completely disparate impacts. Dorothy gave up satisfying other people’s demands for money, which she’d have to be a psycho to crave. But she misses work in the sense that her entire adult life has been devoted to making things with her hands, and that is largely absent. We travel with a sewing kit, and she has hemmed the curtains in our Airbnb and bought clothes for the fabric and completely recut them and reassembled them by hand. It’s what there is for her to do, and it scratches the itch at least a little. Personally, I find the faint whiff of desperation intoxicating.

I, on the other hand, haven’t enjoyed my work for the past twenty years or so, ever since I started being paid like an adult and stopped being creative. We wouldn’t have the flexibility and freedom to do what we’re doing without the financial base those twenty years built, but I can appreciate the benefits without having to gaslight myself about how much fun it was.

So I’ve happily given up a work life I’d only ever tolerated, while Dorothy is sporting a severe phantom limb where making things is concerned.

And we both gave up Home. More on that in a minute.

What have we each gained to offset our losses? Most obviously, adventure. We’re going places and doing things that are absolutely amazing. However, there’s even a little asymmetry here, as my risk calculations tend to be looser than Dorothy’s. I’m happy to just set off (my motto: What could possibly go wrong?), while Dorothy requires a little gritting of teeth (her motto: It will be fine…). I know not to push too hard and Dorothy knows to let things happen, so while this isn’t a major problem it’s definitely a source of underlying tension.

Dorothy has gained the challenge of settling us in a new place every three months. She has to figure out how to close any gaps in what the Airbnb offers, suss out the local produce and figure out how to feed us, and make sure that our home is as gracious as we can pull off under the circumstances.

The other thing we’ve probably gained is staving off dementia. One of the reasons we chose to gallivant off in the first place was because we knew it would be hard in ways that promote neuroplasticity. We can practically feel that on a daily basis. Our retirement fears were all about becoming smaller and having our lives close in on us. Disaster averted! For now.

The primary thing I’ve gained is this blog. I’ve always written a lot for work, but I’ve seldom been able to write as a pure expression of myself. I not only take pleasure in the act of writing, but the writing forces me to be thoughtful about the places we visit and the things we do, even the pictures I take. I am definitely a more engaged consumer of our experiences because of it. Of course, I could just write a pure travelogue: “We went here and saw this and then we went there and saw that.” But how profoundly uninteresting, for both me and you.

Instead, I want to write about what the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen mean. I want to understand their context, to write about things that aren’t just on the surface. That requires that I’m thinking both while we’re adventuring and while I’m writing. I’m not crafting learned dissertations, but I feel a responsibility to accurately represent what we’re seeing. That’s what made Cuba so painful. The truth underneath the surface was fucked up.

So, on balance. I gave up work I didn’t like in exchange for adventure and the blog. Dorothy gave up friends and making things and home for… adventure and housekeeping?

When we set out, the commitment we made to one another is that we’d stop when it was no longer fun. What we didn’t understand is that, at a practical level, that meant that we’d go until one of us broke. Neither of us want to pull the lever if the other is still having fun, so that means we’d each hold on until the last possible moment before cracking.

That’s an unhealthy dynamic.

We needed to figure out a safety valve, so we could reduce the pressure when necessary without having to completely throw the towel in.

Homeward Bound

As it happens, my sister, Nef, owns two apartments in her Hyde Park Chicago building. Don’t ask. There is no straightforward narrative that ends in “spare apartment.”

We’d already made arrangements to purchase the apartment from her. The idea was that we’d pick up our Final Resting Place for when we were done traveling, lock it in at today’s prices, and rent it out for a little extra income until we careened to a stop.

Since this adventure is all about being responsive and adaptive to whatever’s going on around us, we’re executing a pivot. We’re returning to the US after Tunisia, but we’re returning to truly move into the apartment. We’ll get our things out of storage, do a little renovation, and have a real home.

Our assumption had been that we couldn’t afford to maintain a home and travel, but that’s what spreadsheets are for. We’re paying for our travels out of our Social Security income, and we actually run a surplus every month, even with all of the rugs, pottery, and clothing. You can see our budget here.

We paid cash for the Chicago apartment from the proceeds of selling our St. Louis building, so it only has insurance, taxes, and HOA fees while unoccupied. That load isn’t 100% covered by our travel surplus, but it’s defrayed to the extent that the additional expense isn’t an existential threat. And once set up and furnished, we could rent it out on one of the sabbatical services and bank some profit if we wanted.

What this means is that when we’re having the conversation about where to go next, “home” is now an option. We could travel for six months of the year, nine months, or a full year at a time, as we see fit, knowing that we can tap out and recharge at any time. That will substantially extend how long we can do this. Left as we currently operate, I think we’d have an increasingly shrill year of this left, maximum. With a safety valve installed, we can do this until we’re physically unable, which had been the original plan. It never occurred to me that we’d crack mentally before we broke down physically.

Our son, Sam, is graduating with his MBA in December of this year, so we’re going to stick around for the ceremony before hitting the road again. That gives us more than six months in Chicago to settle in, learn the city, and make a home. A home we’ll be happy to come back to whenever we feel the need.

I’ll write about the move-in and renovation, and I’ll write about Chicago. But then we’ll be back in the saddle and on to more exotic destinations and more interesting blog posts.

Let your home be your mast and not your anchor. — Kahlil Gibran