Avenue of Champions

The new issue of RVA Magazine is out, and once again they have put something I wrote in it. Go out and buy a copy.

Avenue of Champions

One night a couple of years ago I played pool with some friends at a place on West Broad Street. I left late and alone, and approaching car with key in hand saw in my peripherals a figure approaching from the left. Instinct took hold. I jammed the key in the door, jumped inside, and cranked the engine-- and then shame caught up to instinct. I took my hand off the gearshift and took a good look at my potential attacker. She was a heavy-set black woman in her thirties, dressed in jeans and a sweater, not particularly dirty or homeless looking. Just an ordinary person in the city at night and most likely in distress. Had I taken this innocent woman for a threat because she was black? Despicable.
I rolled my window down and asked what was the matter.
“I need a ride,” said the woman.
I had expected her to ask to use my phone. I offered her that.
“Nobody to call, I need a ride.”
White guilt makes you do strange things. Here was a stranger without manners refusing to be helped on my terms, and instead of telling her sorry and driving away I felt that I needed to prove to her that I was not afraid. That I was aware that I had the sociological upperhand, that I was keenly aware my great-great grandfather had most likely whipped hers for rattling his chains too much, and moreover, that I owed her for it.
So I cleaned my CDs off the passenger seat and asked her where I was driving.
“Oh, just drive and I’ll tell you where,” she said, “my name’s Denise. What’s your name?”
“Andrew.”
“Andrew, where do you live?”
“Southside,” I said, glad for once to live thirty minutes away.
“Oh. Well cross Broad and go straight for a minute.”
As we started over the bridge towards the Diamond she asked me if I had a girlfriend, and I started thinking about the episode of Six Feet Under where a hitchhiker douses Michael C. Hall in gasoline and puts a gun in his mouth.
“Yes I do,” I lied.
“Well do you ever, y’know, mess around on her?”
“No,” I said. My voice cracked.
“Why not?” she asked, “Not like she would know.”
“I love my girlfriend,” my beautiful imaginary girlfriend, I started thinking of a name for her in case I was pressed and settled on Michelle, “I’d never do that to her.”
Near the Diamond Denise asked me to make a right down a pitch-black street that seemed to go nowhere. At the time it was too dark to read the street name, but now I know it’s called “the Avenue of Champions.”
This is where a better story would take off. I’d park to let her out, and her pimp would come from the shadows to stab me and take my wallet. Or she’d ask me to do some meth with her, and a cop would pull up just as she did and when my family came to bail me out I’d get to explain why I was in a parked car with a stranger and some crystal methamphetamine at 2 am. Maybe if I were James Frey that’s how this would end. But it isn’t what happened, and I’m too boring to pretend otherwise.
Stopped there at the Avenue of Champions I heard, in my mind’s ear, the voices of two shitty DJ’s joking about this ridiculous white guy who allowed himself to be robbed and murdered by a black hitchhiker because he felt it would be racist to do otherwise. It would blow up into a national news story, a little throw away in the last five minutes of the network broadcast that Brian Williams thought somehow provided trenchant insight into race relations in America. I didn’t stop to wonder how the media figured out the motives of a corpse; I kicked Denise out of the car.
“Man, I’m not going to fuck you up,” she said to me.
“No,” I said, “I’m scared and you need to get out of the car. Sorry.”
And, amazingly, she did. Grumbling, she shuffled down the road towards I know not what, and I drove away half expecting to be chased by an El Camino back to Chesterfield County. Later, safe in the bosom of 23113, the guilt would return, and Denise would become once more an unfortunate woman in poor circumstances who was further victimized by the fear and latent racism of a would-be good Samaritan. But for a few minutes, driving fifty miles an hour through the museum district, fear outpaced guilt, and for a brief shining moment outside the Diamond I had ceased to be a total fucking moron.

I'm only sort of kidding.

Recently my job satisfies me less. Children are harder to manage right before summer vacation, and some who take medication stop taking it, and my patience, always thin, has grown thinner. Money problems that I have until now rationalized as “the trade-off for doing something I enjoy” are becoming harder to manage, just as the enjoyment dwindles.

Last week I renewed my cell phone plan, and as a reward for being a loyal Sprint customer received a $150 credit towards the purchase of a new phone. After a few calls and an hour and a half standing in line at my local Sprint store, I received a brand new phone at no cost.
As I punched my phone numbers into my digital phone book, I found myself feeling content for the first time in what felt like, but probably wasn’t really, months. Finally re-connected with the joy of owning something new and expensive, I realized how much I had missed it. I began to think that the key to happiness is not the love of small children, but consumption: of electronics, of compact discs, DVDs, furniture, expensive food, etc. Money, it turns out, is more important than people. I guess I already knew that, but sometimes it takes life experience for a concept to really register. This one finally has.
So my next job, and I’m looking for one, is going to reflect this new set of priorities. If nobody will give me a job that fulfills me, I might as well get paid well and fulfill myself by buying a lot of shit. Is that soulless and evil? Maybe. Will I be happier? No doubt about it. So will GMAC and Sallie Mae.
Peace out children. Talk to me when you can afford it.

Harmless Books That I Cannot Take to Work

Naked by David Sedaris
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
The Virgin's Lover by Phillipa Gregory
Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man by Tim Allen
Why I am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

I Always Liked this One- June 16, 2004

Alyssa Teaches Me Feminism

My friend Alyssa is a feminist; not in the sense that you and I and all other decent people are feminists (that is to say, we support equal rights for everyone), but in the sense that she will be a graduate student in women's studies at Rutgers this fall and doesn't shave her armpits.
When you know someone like this, whose views lie outside of the mainstream, the temptation is to make their differences the topic of conversation, if only because it's the first topic that comes to mind during an awkward pause. So whenever I see Alyssa, I eventually start asking her questions about women's rights, and that's where the conversation stays.

Allow me, for the sake of explaining further, to set up this hypothetical comparison-
Say you had a friend who was schizophrenic. You would almost certainly find yourself full of questions about how he regards the world. "What," you might ask yourself, "does Mervin feel about nuclear armament? About cabbage? about professional basketball?" Were you to ask him you would not be surprised to find his perspective different from your own: nuclear weapons remain a menace, but for him a pressing one, lurking in the garages and bridgework of everyone around him; cabbage for him is not an unappetizing vegetable but a good friend, loyal and pleasant to talk to; basketball might have no meaning at all. These may not be your own feelings, but it does you good to hear about them- your horizons are broadened.

It's precisely that way with Alyssa. I am always asking her ridiculous questions about what is important to her, because I am genuinely curious about how she sees things, and she is patient and willing to discuss whatever nonsense it is that I am bothering her with-
"I like calling people 'douchebags,' Alyssa. Is that okay? As a feminist are you offended by that?"
"Actually Andrew, I am offended by the very act of douching. Is there something wrong with a woman's body that she needs to cleanse it that way?"
"Wow, I'd never thought of it like that. But I guess that makes 'douchebag,' okay then?"
"Well, not really."
Alyssa seems to approach this kind of question and answer session as working to raise awareness of feminist issues, and if that is her goal she has achieved it. Among other things, I have learned from her that it is fun to call pro-life people "anti-choice." "Because," as Alyssa put it, "Why should we let them define the terms of debate? I'm not going to let them imply that I am anti-life."
She also invited me to a women's rights rally in D.C. where it is doubtless I would have learned countless other things about feminism, but I begged off because I am lazy. After the rally, she told me that Karen Hughes, a close advisor to the President, had created controversy when she likened the protestors to terrorists. I got a good laugh out of that. "Ha!" I said to myself, "what a jackass!" But for Alyssa, this was an attack, one which she will fend off with rusty chains and broken bottles. I admire her for it.

Alyssa really liked it when I first wrote this, and sometimes still brings it up when she is town. She just got her Master's degree (what, you my master now?) from Rutgers, and has landed a vagina-related position in our nation's capital, which means I will get to see her more often, thank goodness. The amount of radical feminism I am exposed to dropped precipitously in her absence, and I have found no one to fill the void.

The Reason I Took Down "The Porn Thing"

A number of people have asked why I took down the recent repost of "The Hot National Security Advisor," a brief bit of not-quiet-soft-core porn that I plagarised from a Zane book and altered slightly so that it was about a sexual encounter between the Secretary of State and myself.
There are really a few reasons I did this, but the main one is that a number of people found my site by googling things like “big nipples” and “nine-inches in the butt.” It might sound silly, but that’s what it took for me to see that I had crossed the line between edgy and jaw-droppingly poor taste.
There’s something appealing about being uncompromising, and as a result people who fail to compromise are celebrated in every aspect of our culture: Admiral Farragutt’s damning the torpedos, Dirty Harry’s 37 different recognizable speeches (delivered inevitably to a criminal he has the drop on) that are repeated by people ranging from the American Film Institute to shitty cellists in my high school orchestra who now work as mattress salesmen, most of John Wayne’s career but perhaps most memorably when he spanked his wife with a shovel in McLintock thereby causing Pauline Kael to go into a series of twitching fits that would later be misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s disease, George W.’s entire benighted political career from his willingness to claim that Anne Richards was a lesbian to his current willingness to tap the public’s phones and call it national security, the Cuban Missile Crisis, pissy self-absorbed white people sending back their steaks at Outback, ad infinitum. It’s easy to see why people discuss this as being somehow quintessentially “American,” (by people I really mean Shelby Foote) but I think it seems pretty global and it’s not hard to understand why—nobody, not the French or the Iranians or the Irish, likes to compromise; we all do it every day of our lives and we hate it.
Anyway, I thought that by reposting pornography with Condoleeza Rice’s name in it on my blog that I was being uncompromising, but really I was just being disgusting, so I took it down.
My bad.