An inside joke’s an interesting sort of communication. In grade school me and Pete Kriengsiri had a joke he’d come up with. It was based on a news report he’d seen about barbers in China who danced while they cut people’s hair. The joke was a pantomime of one of these barbers accidentally murdering his customer. I know it doesn’t really read that funny, but you had to see Pete do it.

A better example is probably me and Mike Morrison’s joke from 7th grade. It was made out of two jokes, one was a Heehaw-style sorta skit where one redneck asks another if he’s ever seen a cow eat a dog, then indicates an uneaten dog in front of them, and finally explains that the dog is from Coweta, a county in rural Georgia. The other joke was an old standard, that the only good thing that’s ever come out of Alabama was I-20, the highway. Obviously you’ve gotta set it up the right way. Anyways, how we compacted them into a single joke, our joke, was we took the first line from the first joke “Ya ever seen a cow eat a dog?” and then simply affixed the punchline from the second, “I-20.” So the whole thing went

[me or Mike]: Y’ever seen a cow eat a dog?

[the other of us]: I-20.

Might be important to mention that both the parts of the querent and respondent were to be delivered with a hammy North Georgia accent, and if you were the one saying “I-20,” usually you’d want to drag out the first syllable “i” a good bit and also make a little back-and-forth hinge kinda motion with your arm bent at the elbow. Nevertheless it was unbelievably funny. Often just the punchline would suffice. Mike would poke his head and elbow in the door and say “ahhh-20” and I’d hinge my elbow back at him and say “ahhh-20.” And that’d do it.

On the subject, there was a cartoon my sister and I used to watch called The Gift of Winter—one of those straight-to-video numbers they’d sell at independent toy shops, like the kind of place where they’d stock Playmobile figures but no Barbies or GIs Joe. The whole gist of the movie kinda escapes me—something about the invention of snow—but my sister and I’s favorite line, the one we’d always repeat, was one of the cartoon’s children characters saying to one of the cartoon’s adult characters, named Kablooie, “Kablooie, I need to go to the baathroom.”

Children are preternaturally attuned to how funny it is that we go to the bathroom. And that we do so through our genitals, the funniest parts of our body. A penis is inherently funny. A vagina less so (more mysterious) but the word itself is funny. Ditto vulva. The butt may actually be the ancestral source of all comedy, created in situ the very first time man stood erect. Imagine that, if you’re able. A fellow ape out on the savannah, waddling about on his fours like the rest of you, then, abruptly and with no warning to you or the other apes, thrusts him or herself (apeself) upright. A magnificent transformation of stature. An entirely new being there before you. And there as well, where their legs once curved seamlessly down from their back, right at your eyeline, two creased orbs of protuberant excess muscle. The world’s first butt.

Maybe laughter had already developed before this point, but there’s no way it came after. Just witnessing another of what you are lurch up into a different species would have done a number on your proprioceptive self-image, but then the butt? What could be a more fitting punchline to the ascent of man. It’s even possible I’ve got it backwards, that the first man stood erect not to elevate his perspective and gaze to the horizon, but for the express point of making the butt. I kind of like that for us. Shit, I just thought of something. If he—or she, I guess—if ape first stood upright and then farted, that would have brought down the house. And what could be a more fitting soundtrack to the ascent of man.

It’s a pleasing chiasmus, if nothing else. E erectionis clunum. The butt is anatomy’s great leveler. If you ever find yourself carving grotesques in a medieval church and want to show the stuck-up Bishop what for, just peek a little butt out of his cassock. There’s actually a statue at the Cloisters in Manhattan that I’m thinking of, a priest or friar riding a horse away from the viewer, butt fully out, cheeks a’blazin’. The placard next to it pulls the classic archaeologist’s bluff of claiming this dude’s bare ass may hold some “unknown religious or political significance.” But, come on. We all know what the deal is. It’s funny.

Geoffrey Chaucer knew the score. That’s why he ended the Miller’s Tale with a moon and a toot and a poker up the chute. There’s another great joke in The Canterbury Tales that I think I might have discovered? I’ve never seen it written about; it would be crazy if I’m the only person alive who’s gotten it in half a millennium. Like I’ve got an inside joke with Geoffrey Chaucer. Or I’m the Keeper of the Joke. I could take it to my grave! That’d show ‘em.

No, I’ll tell it, but it’s kinda involved so I’m gonna save it for lower. You sorta gotta know some Middle English too.

It’s wild enough that a joke can even work at 600 years remove. That’s typically the first thing in literature to fall flat. If a joke at its most fundamental does something to upturn expectation, and thereby stoke delight, it’s frankly miraculous that any joke or drawing can be funny more than once. I’ve only got one joke that still makes me properly laugh whenever I say or think about it (I just started chuckling right now), and I kind of wonder if it’s truly that funny to me or if I just managed to do some sort of Pavlovian, operative-conditioning mental job on myself. Well, I guess it’d be rude not to share it at this point. Not even a joke really, kinda more of a bon mot. But anyways, a friend was hungover and leaving the bathroom, and when asked how it went, he said “Oh, you know. The meatball then the waterfall.”

It’s not that a joke has to continuously overturn expectation to survive the ages. I mean, nothing’s going to have the staying power of the meatball then the waterfall. Really it only has to work the one time. What’s usually fatal is that the context gets lost, that the expectation the joke subverts is no longer generally expected. Not the joke’s fault. And not always permanently fatal—explaining a punchline is a great way to ruin a joke, but you can sometimes revive the whole thing by using the punchline to work out the setup. Like when Homer [Simpson] finds the can of Billy Beer in his old concert jacket and says “We elected the wrong Carter.”

There’s a presumed moment in Chaucer’s life where he’s reading Dante’s Inferno and suddenly cottons to what’s up. That Dante has constructed an allegorical model of Christian Hell in order to put his real-life political rivals in 13th-century Florence into a giant puddle of shit. The 100-year-old Italian references click and Geoffrey communes with the dead poet through laughter. Even without establishing that Alessio Interminei of Lucca was a White Guelph whose interminable flattery Dante figured as a mortal case of verbal diarrhea, you’ve still got that giant puddle of shit he’s in. That’s a universal context. Shit, butts, shitting butts, pissing cocks and vulvas. These are the fundamentals of comedy. And comedy is the wedding procession of human life.

There’s a counterintuitive advantage to burying a joke for posterity, especially those that partake in posteriority. Like a little old lady who breaks out the “PS: your cunt’s in the sink” bit over the dinner table, their age becomes a context in itself. I didn’t read Aristophanes until my 30s, or at least not The Clouds, but there’s a great line right at the beginning where he’s got one of Socrates’ students at the Academy recounting how a lizard disrupted Socrates’ meditations on the sublime. Socrates had been gazing at the night sky, rapt and agape in wonder, when, per my translation, “a lizard shitted in his mouth.” That one’s a two-fer. You got a funny line there, plain and simple, a funny scenario really, and then you’ve got the unanticipated joy of reading an obsolete past tense of the word shit in a 4,000-year-old Ancient Greek play.

Likewise, when I was first told about François Rabelais the 16th-century Rennaissance writer and his masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel, I was taught that it was a satire of the French nobility in the reign of Francis I and that its tone was “a little bawdy.” None of this prepared me for the entire chapter where Gargantua just lists every object he’s tried to wipe his ass with.

I think this is why kids learning Hamlet in high school are usually so flummoxed by the “country matters” line. Here is The Tragedie of Hamlet, the great, august Elizabethan play, pinnacle of our literature, so important it’s in Looney Tunes, and bam, pussy joke. How do you reconstruct your image of important-ass William Shakespeare from that slap on the ass? Many don’t—they either call bullshit on their teacher’s explanation that Prince Hamlet, our culture’s very figuration of depressive gravitas, the guy with the dang skull, has taken the opportunity of executing his grand plan to avenge his father’s death to put his face in a girl’s lap and drop the c-word, or they mentally write down The Bard to this-guy-thinks-he’s-a-comedian. They think they’ve gotta pick one of the masks on the drama teacher’s door, never make the leap that they’re the same face. Arthur Koestler said somewhere that “the step from the sublime to the ridiculous is reversible” and I like it enough to have written it down, but I take issue with the idea that those two virtues are necessarily opposed.

Speaking of Hamlet, though, have you read that thing lately? How about that first scene on the battlements with Horatio and old King Hamlet’s Ghost? Horatio, skeptical of all these ghost sightings, joins the night watchmen to put this ghost malarkey to rest. Except there is a ghost, so what does Horatio do? First he asks it if it has unfinished business on Earth or warnings from the grave, fair, then he asks the ghost if it can lead them to buried treasure. Then he tells a guard to spear it. Then he says we probably shouldn’t have tried to spear it. The scene description should’ve been “Horatio, a genius, talks to a ghost.” I couldn’t tell you if this was on purpose, but if you’ve got an itching sense of deja vu this is more or less the first five minutes of Ghostbusters.

Back to kids for a second, I had a friend who taught preschool who came home from work one day and said one of the kids in the bathroom had suddenly adopted the eureeka posture and declared, finger raised and pointing like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, “You’ve got butt cheeks!” This stoked a cascading, rest-of-the-day-long cycle of pandemonium in which every kid in the class remembered then marveled anew at the fact that each of them, all of us, have butt cheeks. Those kids got it. If the Everybody Poops guy was ever thinking of writing a sequel, he could really do worse than to make it Here’s Everyone’s Butt Cheeks. Another entry in the memento merda canon.

—

Alright, I’ll explain the Chaucer thing. The plot of the The Canterbury Tales is that a bunch of different 14th-century Englishmen and -women are riding to Canterbury together and telling each other stories to win a free dinner. Sorry if this is doye stuff—I don’t know, maybe they didn’t teach it at your school. So the first tale teller is a knight, The Knight, and he tells an extremely long and staid story about courtly love between a knight and some lady. Famously long. The Miller, who’s basically described like WC Fields, goes next and his tale borrows many of the themes and tropes from the Knight’s Tale but ends with a college student fucking a carpenter’s wife and getting a branding iron shoved up his ass. This pisses off The Reeve, who thinks the Miller’s story was secretly making fun of him because he used to be a carpenter, who then tells a tale where a miller‘s wife and daughter get fucked by two college students. You can see the progression. Finally, The Cook, drunkest of them all, who falls off his horse offscreen some twenty tales later, gets up and says that he’s gonna outdo them all. He proceeds to start a tale about a guy named basically Johnny Partyguy, who lives in London with his wife, a woman “who swives for her sustenance.”

And that’s the fucking tale. Seriously, that’s where it ends, that line. The scholarly consensus, at least back when I’d try to keep up with such things, was that Chaucer got stuck there and put a pin in it to finish later. That The Tales were unfinished, and that you could tell because they cut off at points and the order seems screwy and the fragments have gaps between them that don’t quite make sense, that feel like there’s something missing, something unwritten. But oh, ain’t that life? At least in England, or among us English, as the Amish say. Maybe the Italians make it all the way to the end of their journey, through hell to paradise, or complete the 100 nights of stories they planned to, but we’re frankly lucky to make it to the tavern at the end of the day with enough wit left on us to complete the punchline.

Anyways, you get it, right? The joke I mean, me and Chaucer’s. The swive line.

They shepherd’s crooked that fucker.

Bwompf, right on his keister.

This was an article I was writing for the Mountain Gazette, but it didn’t make the cut. It was written in the Yucatan in late 2020, so bear that in mind when I mention, like, the election. It’s that election, not the other one.

I’ve been considering walking lately. Not so much the quotidian physical act, the kind of ambulation that gets you into the kitchen from the other room without need of advance planning or focused awareness. Nor the more discrete types of walk you’d say you “go on” or “take a,” with the tidy implicit assurance that you’ll wind up back at wherever you set out from, probably before needing to sleep, maybe having gotten some sort of snack.

The walking I keep thinking about is the long, open-ended, one-way kind of walking—one of those grand, life-tossing moseys that earlier ones of us might have called a peregrination. “Walking somewhere,” where the “somewhere” is not just a placeholder for the actual, specific destination you intend to come up with at some point, but is in fact the full set of directions. Intransitive walking. Just hit the road and start hoofing. A road, even. Some road. Just, hit road.

There’s a reason for this fantasized vagrancy. Actually a couple. For one, I’m in Mexico—and there’s reasons for that. Among them is why I’ve given such mental real estate to walking in recent days. And that is I’ve got no driver’s license. Not just I’ve got a suspended driver’s license, or I lost my physical albeit-unsuspended driver’s license, but both. An ignominious combination.

I’ll spare you the saga that led to this crapulent state of affairs in my mobility. Or maybe I won’t—OK, whatever, short version: traffic ticket from a small upstate town that I can’t seem to take care of, even two emasculating years and two reasonably-expensive lawyers down the road. And I should clarify that this situation isn’t exactly what led me to Mexico—that was a girl—however, having found myself in Mexico, settled in a little, given things the old college hmmm, the idea of returning to a place looking to extract even more time and money from me before removing my tag number from the pull-over-absolutely-any-time-you-pass-a-cop-car database helped set my thoughts to wander.

But that’s too logical for what I’m getting at. It makes it seem like there was a linear decision-making process that went something like “can’t drive?” => “walk.” It also doesn’t account for why I’m conflating an involuntary stint as a pedestrian with relocating to a foreign country as a single indivisible notion, in case you didn’t notice (or were just decent enough not to mention). And, need I remind you, or myself for that matter, this isn’t simply about lower-case-w walking, the ancient carless form of transportation, but the great existential act of Walking, of turning your heel against what’s sedentary and stable in your world and pushing the very globe behind you, like a lumberjack rolling a log in the water, or an irate bull rearing to charge, or a teenage boy cleaning up a spill with his foot so he doesn’t have to kneel or set down the phone then ejecting the soggy paper towel backward for someone else to retrieve from the floor.

This isn’t an urge that arises from some mere bureaucratic slip-up, not even the sort of ongoing, interest-accruing, somehow-unfixable-but-try-calling-again-tomorrow-Kafkaesque slip-ups the goobers employed by our kleptomaniacal punishment-state have become so adept at levying these days. It’s the stark emotional response to the culmination of half a lifetime’s such indignities, the collapse of routine possibility—the Sisyphusean breaking-point of watching that damn rock roll all the way back down to the base of the hill just one more goddamn time, and finally going, “You know what? To hell with that rock. Hill too, while I’m at it.”

William Least Heat Moon nailed it pretty good at the outset of his seminal American peace-out, Blue Highways: “On the morning of my departure, I had seen 38 Blood Moons, an age that carries its own madness and futility. With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and time and men and deeds connected.” Of course, he had a car at his disposal, and presumably the requisite insurance. Valid license too, I’m guessing.

All the same, the feeling holds: Comes a time when a man tires of packing it up and moving along, and his dreams turn to doing the latter without bothering about the former. And that time is apparently 38 years old. Which I just turned.

--

If you’ve ever been forced to deal with sudden engine trouble, a late ride, an early bus, or festival parking, you may have thought or even uttered the phrase “Fuck it, I’ll walk.” Tis a fine sentiment, less the declaration of a simple choice than an instant and unfettered upwelling of primal human spirit, an affirmation of the indomitable stubbornness of the bipedal soul of man beset by the vicissitudes of this cruel, godless earth. That may sound a little purple for the distances involved in the average city bus route or auxiliary parking lot, but even though these petite modern instances of “Fuck it, I’ll walk” do not have a particularly epic cast, they’re vestigial remnants of an ancient heroic impulse—diminished echoes of the grand and strident “Fuck it, I’ll walk”s of our ancestral past.

So many of our great cultural myths start in the aftermath of someone saying “Fuck it, I’ll walk”—Aeneas porting his dad out through the burning gates of Troy, Abraham from the Bible bailing on Ur, Mad Max a’crest the sprawling sea of sands beyond Thunderdome. Really if you look back to some of the earliest periods of recorded history, humans are just walking all over the place, big old tribes of them crossing the horizon from somewhere to somewhere else. This is what you did when shit happened.

Crops failed? Take a walk. King’s killing babies? Take a walk. Place you just walked to enslaved you? Keep on walking.

I’ve seen the act of migrating to a new area described as “voting with your feet,” although given the actual order of historical developments I think it’d be more fitting to call voting “walking somewhere with your hand and those of the other people in your community who agree with you, all while standing still.” Either way, the ability to just up and split when a situation’s not to your liking is some fundamental human agency. The one power left at your disposal when all the others go away: YOU go away.

Aside from it not being what the real-life William Wallace said when he died, and him also not being the real-life Braveheart, it always rang a little hollow to me when Mel Gibson as William Wallace as Braveheart said, “They can take our lives but they can never take our freedom.” I mean clearly they took his both. But you know one thing they can’t take from you? Your legs. Wait, what am I saying? They can take your legs right off—that’s what drawing and quartering is all about. Jesus, and I’m saying this in reference to a scene where a guy is having his legs ripped off? Strike this whole paragraph. Sorry.

Oh I know what I was thinking. They can’t take your legs, or your life OR your freedom, if you already got out of there while the getting was good. There’s my point. I got myself out of America when the getting seemed goodest, election day. As prudent a time for foot-voting as any, I figure.

--

In the middle of the Great Depression, my great uncle Scott walked down from Texas through Mexico and into Central America, sending home short newspaper dispatches about what he saw along the way. And so the obvious question for me is: Am I such an asshole as to recreate this journey? Probably not. Have you ever actually walked anywhere? Like outside of a city, obviously. Or a mall. Anywhere more than say, two miles away? It’s the fucking pits. Throw an incline in there and you can just plain forget it.

One time my car broke down about five miles away from my home in upstate New York. Eh, I thought, this’ll probably take an hour or two. Wrong. Four shit-awful hours later one of my neighbors saw me treading the half-foot or so of shoulder the road provided, drenched in sweat, eyes completely unfocused, and gave me a ride. I was maybe halfway from where I’d started.

Werner Herzog once walked from Munich to Paris in the middle of winter to see a friend of his who was dying of something, I forget what, I wanna say cancer? Let’s just call it cancer. He thought walking the whole way would keep her from dying, like a spell. Which it did. Or whatever, we can argue about it some other time, she was still alive when he got there.

Herzog kept a journal during the month or so it took him and published it as a book called Of Walking In Ice a few years later at somebody’s insistence (supposedly). It’s charming, if you haven’t read it, and inspiring in that horrible way where you read it sitting somewhere comfortable and indoors where you have a lease that you’re paid up on and start thinking “I could just do this someday.” Then that thought nestles itself into the recesses of your mind, as snugly as you in your nice paid-for chair, and waits for things to totally go to pot before it pokes out its little poorly-considered head and goes, “Hey, remember that thing you read about Herzog doing? You should do that. You should do that now.”

Actually, western literature abounds with bad examples of this kind, dating all the way back to Geoffrey Chaucer’s casual assertion that springtime’s a good excuse for “folk to goon on pilgrimages” and Danté’s mid-life-crisis decision to just go wander off into the fucking woods. Worked out fine for all them, right? The tale-telling pilgrims made it to Canterbury. Danté wound up in heaven with his dead girlfriend. What’s-her-face didn’t die.

What none of these beloved works of walkaganda ever seem to account for is the walking. Storytime at dinner in the pub? Hey, that’s fun. Rare Italian leopard chased you to the door of literal Hell? Whoa, pretty crazy, man. But you know what these are? These are highlights. Even Werner, with his cancer-fixing walkomancy, invariably leaves out the countless left-right steps that took him from the barn he slept in the night before to seeing someone’s goat out in a field the following afternoon. That’s, what, at least 10 good hours of dead space between noteworthy events? And then one of those events is there was a goat? You see my issue here, I hope.

If you’re going to walk off somewhere, like that’s your big plan for the life of yours that’s fallen apart or your psychic treatment for your friend’s maybe-cancer, the majority of what you’re gonna be doing is walking. Hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of just walking—all day, then all day again, then all day again, then all day again. Trying to push this option on kids and other impressionable home-dwellers on the basis of what happened on either side of the actual walking is as dubious as recommending someone go into education because there’s free coffee in the teacher’s lounge.

And these are European walkalogues. Europe is the walker’s continent. You try this crap anywhere in America and you’ll be lucky to see a goat the following week. When I was in middle school in the Atlanta suburbs I missed the bus one morning after my mom had already left for work and had to walk the hour and a half the school bus would typically cover in 15 minutes. You wanna know what I saw along the way? The same-ass identical trees I’d see out the window of the bus every morning. Just way more slowly.

Now there are some fine lengths of American road you could find yourself walking along: winding downhill curves carving through fern-shaded primeval woods, gentle downhill breaks looking out on endless towering mountains, the last straight downhill slope as you leave the East Texas hill country for the western prairie, the Austin city lights spangled below you like an inverse night sky. I should know, I’ve driven past a bunch of them! You sail on by, soaking up their grandeur for half a minute and think, “Man, imagine that on foot. Sure wish I could ditch this car and really take that in, instead of just blazing through and barely mumbling the word vista to the people in the back seat.” But I’ve also driven the way-more miles of monotonous, unshaded, waist-high-grass-shouldered, gradually-inclining, barely-ever-curving-but-never-quite-straight road that lead to these scenic walk spots, and know what I think of them? “Hope I’ve got enough gas.”

Mexico’s not much better on this front. You know this country’s like 90% hill, right? And only about half of that’s facing down.

--

Knowing how lousy walking is, however, does little to defer the dream of saying “Fuck it, I’ll walk.” Remember, this is a primal force. If anything, the knowledge of how taxing and fruitless the real-life experience of walking can be, of how unlikely you are to actually undertake this grand romantic foot-quest from your old life to your new, just makes the urge to do it even worse.

Worse in the sense of stronger, sure. Like an obstinate child who wails even louder when you shush it. But also worse in the sense that you realize you probably aren’t actually going to do it, despite the fact that you could do it, despite the fact that all these people you look up to went out and did it and wrote books about it (or founded civilizations), that for all its intensity at the present moment, it’ll just loiter in your heart as a nagging unspoken pipedream and curdle over time into a little grumpy raisin of regret. Worse, as you picture yourself old in a chair, like that guy in the WWII propaganda poster whose daughter is asking him “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” and he’s eyeing the middle-distance like, ugh, cause now he’s gotta tell her he didn’t do shit in the war, except there might not even be a daughter in your case, just that chair and that stare and the lingering sense of guilt and futility over that time you didn’t just walk out on everything in your life like a lunatic.

But hey, maybe not!

--

Many assert that there’s a transformative quality to walking—I mean, beside transforming the landscape back into the impassable enormous slog it was before we came up with better forms of travel. That the physical act of walking—per the gym coach’s healing injunction to “walk it off” and the rage-swollen brain’s inclination to “take a walk and cool off”—can fix the soul’s fissures and shape us back into better men.

Penitents on the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain believe the hundreds of miles they plod will put them right with God for whatever it is they may have done. Ernesto Guevara became Che by treading the earth of South America until he’d seen enough of our miserable society to decide that it all needed to come down. And of course there’s old Herzog whose perambulatory spellcraft saved his friend’s life and got him a book deal. Actually, I know I said I wasn’t going to argue about it, but if that’s not a spell, come on, what is?

But here’s the deal too: It sure as shit ought to be a spell for all the work going into it. If magic or whatever you want to call it is supposed to be some sort of mystic or alchemical shortcut to a more arduous piece of labor you either can’t or don’t want to do, walking somewhere is about the worst shortcut I can think of. It’s the literal longcut to anywhere you can possibly go.

I used to use walking as a little baby spell of my own, as a means of clearing my head whenever I got stuck on something while I was writing. I’d get up from my desk, put on or take off whatever knitwear made sense for the weather, then head to the door, resolved to stay in forward motion until the words came back into focus.

You know how far I usually had to go to jog my brain back onto track? Like a foot from the door. The second my body realized what’s up, what I was about to set it to do, it just folded and gave me exactly what I wanted. Words, phrases, complete sentences, full-on mental clarity—anything to avoid a walk, and its dreaded byproduct, the walk back.

God knows what this old corpse would do to me if I tried to make it follow in Great Uncle Scott’s footsteps. Maybe it’d give me all the words I could ever hope to write. A book worth burning down the remnants of my old life. Or maybe just an embolism.

--

The Great Uncle Scott legend looms pretty large over my mom’s side of the family. Of the great uncles, he’s the one who did something interesting and potentially duplicable with his life—besides Great Uncle Gurnt, who lost his arm, or Great Uncle Lutrow, who shot the sheriff’s dog—and who more aspirationally kept a record of his misadventures and also got paid for them. Even though he was married into the family and not a great uncle by blood, we still attribute any sense of wanderlust to his example, as there being “a little Uncle Scott in us”—as if we each possess a wayward gene that the right conditions will express and send us ambling south of the border.

Most of my cousins have had Scott-ish phases of itinerancy in their lives, but I have one who pulled a full gainer. His great depression came in the wake of a bad breakup—one of those sudden, devastating hard-reboot sorta breakups. With an actual copy of Great Uncle Scott’s reporting for his reading material, he bailed on the States, his job, all of it, and bounced his way down through Central and South America as a gringo tour operator in various spots. This was his deal for years, or maybe just year, and he’d write long, letterly emails to my parents and presumably his own from whatever locale he was holed up in, painting the scene for them.

When I caught up with him, I was on my own Great Uncle Scott trip—or so my mom would describe it to the aunts and uncles, which irked me—flying to different parts of the world to make weird little documentaries for Vice. My cousin had somehow ended up in Cuzco for a minute, the ancient Incan capital in the Peruvian Andes, and I’d chosen to ditch Christmas with my wife and family for the first time in my life and follow a crew down to those very same mountains to participate in a traditional fist-fighting ceremony that takes place on December 25th every year.

We were flying into Cuzco to get to the town with the fight, so I met him for a drink before the van ride up into the hills. He looked rough. The years, or just year, had turned him from the kind of clean-cut, All-American kid you’d see in a Jeep ad into Jim Morrison picking out a burial plot at Père Lachaise. His hair was a lifetime longer than I’d ever seen it, frizzing out in a wavy ponytail down his back, and he drank with that posture and countenance you see at the end of the bar a little too early in the afternoon.

It saddened me. It saddened me and shamed me for not having anything to offer to fix it, and made me wonder if there but for the grace of my father’s genes go I someday. We made plans to hang out again when I came back down the mountain after the fight, but I already knew I’d try to ditch them. That felt shitty too, of course, but the thought of the hole his life seemed to be in, the end of the road he’d made it further down than Great Uncle Scott ever did yet with no apparent redemption, it hung on me and haunted me and made my own circumstances feel like some perverse, unjust cosmic gimme. I didn’t want to see him like that. I didn’t want to know you could be stuck like that.

Go figure, the second we pulled back into town my cousin was walking right by where the van stopped. There was no ditching a night out now, so I swallowed back my guilt and went off with him to hit the town. It was a grim evening. Bar to bar to bar and less words and longer silence at each new stop as the night dragged on. Finally it was like 3, wherever we were was closing up, and we walked back through the darkened arcades toward my hotel for a last drink I was screaming to find a way out of.

We turned a corner and a place was open, some sort of second-floor nightclub from the sound of it, where the staircase goes straight down to a doorway on the street and a couple bouncers and a handful of smokers hang out around it. Before we had a chance to debate it as an option, a short kid in his teens or 20s flew out from the staircase and skidded face-first over the lip of the sidewalk. The bouncers now were four or five and stomping the kid with the full weight of their body into the sidewalk. My gut got ready to watch him die.

I don’t know if my cousin grabbed me or if I was just pulled in his wake, but already he was at the curb, threading the top half of his body into the space between the boots and their target. “Hey, whoa, sorry man. This is our friend. This guy’s our friend. Hey, sorry, we’re getting him out of here—just came back to find him, we know how he gets. Sorry. Sorry, we’re taking him home.” I was close enough to catch the other arm as my cousin hoisted the kid up under one of his shoulders, and we scooted him limp and feet dragging down the other end of the block. A cab stopped and my cousin gave him enough money to get the kid home or wherever he could.

We might have laughed with the plunge of adrenaline, but we didn’t. Just walked on pretty quietly, and said good-bye at the hotel.

I never got a sense for what effect saving that kid’s life had on my cousin, whether it managed to reawaken something from his earlier self or just felt like one close call too many on a long enough trek. It’s like what artist David Wojnarowicz said on his hitchhike across America: “I guess everybody comes close to death at least once if they make that distance.” Whatever the case, a pretty short time later he lopped off his ponytail, came back to the States, and started rebuilding his life.

—

I don’t have an ending for this yet. This is just where I’m at. My feet are looking up at me right now with a dainty and supple sense of pleading, like dogs who don’t want to go out in the rain. Then again, they could be pining for the walk they need, to bark on up the crooked road—you can never be certain with dogs.

Maybe I’ll just get a car. You know if you tie a bunch of shit to the roof, the cops down here don’t really fuck with you.

When my friend Giancarlo Ditrapano died in 2021, nearly all the writers he published wrote an endless-feeling series of obituaries. I wrote two and contented myself to have them tucked down on a ridiculously long page beneath the likes of Sam Lipsyte and Annie Dewitt. A year later Chiara Barzini published an interview with Gian that she’d conducted a few years before his death in which for no apparent reason he referred to me as “a genius”, which is Gian-talk, I know, but still gave me a mournful post-mortem shiver of pride even coming from such a legendary dick-suck as himself. (Both lit. and fig.) Gian died on April 1st, and for the past five years I’ve seen him in my dreams within a week of every anniversary. Here’s how I described the last one (skip if boring):

Dying on April Fools Day was a very Gian thing to do. He loved April Fools. He was the only person I’ve ever met who did it right. He once convinced me for 6 hours that he’d tested positive for HIV. My favorite April Fools of his was when he texted his entire family in West Virginia that his husband Giuseppe had had a heart attack and was in critical condition in a hospital in Italy. He kept it up all day, named the hospital and everything, doctors reports, described the ICU. The best part was, due to the time difference, it wasn’t even April Fools in America yet. I still believe that if he’s been faking his death this whole time, that if one April he suddenly reappears like Christ at Pentecost and bellows “Aaaapril Fooools!” it will in fact be funny. And he will have got us so good. The champion.

Last year Gian’s family, Catherine Foulkrod, and my old colleague from Vice, the innocuously named Jonathan Smith, assembled a book out of all, or think all, of his writing for Vice magazine over the years. Jonathan asked me to write an introduction to the book to go with his own introduction. I did it mostly in the kitchen on my phone and, having not seen Jonathan’s ahead of time, I was amazed by how well they complemented each other. I told him we should title them “Gian at Vice” and “Gian in the World.” He didn’t go for it.

The book they put together came out gloriously. Catherine and Gian’s sister Lia organized a book-release party/reading at one of those awful new hotels from the last 15 years in Williamsburg, and the night was a fitting tribute to Gian’s spirit. Do you know how hard it is to stage a two-hour literary reading without shit getting boring? It’s very hard. But they did it. At the end of the night, Catherine asked me to read the introduction I’d written as the final piece and, having possibly been forewarned, I read the following elongated draft of said introduction with the Sanskrit spelled out phonetically for me, at least according to Google.

A previous edited version of this ran in the Paris Review last February, and obviously the original version is in Gian’s book which you should buy or find some other way to read. I told Catherine that night, flushed with the two quick beers I’d downed to fortify my nerve before the mic, that, in retrospect, I think meeting Gian and asking him to write for me was the only truly good thing I did in my 20 years in New York. Anyways, blah blah blah, here’s the intro:

“Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.” -Wallace Stevens, frontispiece from NY Tyrant vol 1

विद्याविनयसम्पन्ने ब्राह्मणे गवि हस्तिनि |

शुनि चैव श्वपाके च पण्डिता: समदर्शिन: - Bhagavadgita 5:18

Giancarlo Ditrapano was a friend, so take all this with a gram of salt. Gian had two arts at which he was preternaturally talented, what we’d’ve called his genius before that word just meant smart guy. One was, I guess you’d say books. Sounds dumb, but that’s what he did and was good at. He found people who wrote, not always writers, and coaxed them into writing books that were wildly better than what the rest of the book world was crapping out in any given year. I know this probably sounds more like management than art, it’s hard to consider editing an art if you haven’t seen it being done, and publishing is full-well up the stairs at the sausage factory.

The books Gian put out weren’t sausages. The writing he knew how to find and to encourage was great from sentence to sentence, that was obviously the big part of it, but the books weren’t just a casing for the writing. The books themselves were fucking Things. They were objects of care and craft—the design, the cover, the typeface, the size of the paper, the blurbs(!), everything was hand-wrought to fit perfectly together with the writing and the writer as one discrete deal, the way a Pink Floyd album in its proper sleeve is. This was at a time when smaller independent imprints would sometimes have a uniform house style that looked alright, and the major publishing houses routinely put out books that looked like slapped-together dogshit. He’d do one or two of these guys in a year, obsessing over them through the whole process, talking endlessly about them the whole way through from manuscript to galley. No one makes two sausages a year without taking a major bath on the enterprise.

Anyways if you have a hard time picturing publishing as an art, you’re really not gonna like his other talent, which was friendship. Yes I know that also sounds dumb. You had to see it.

In perhaps the most bejaded of times, in the most jading city in America, Gian practiced an insane and earnest form of near-perfect fraternal love. The quintessential example is when Michael Bible from the LA Review of Books, whom he’d never met, came over to interview him, he greeted him at the door with a silver platter of cocaine and ended the night by safeguarding the reporter’s blacked-out body into a cab with a fresh pack of cigarettes in his pocket for the morning. And again, to emphasize, this was a stranger.

To those he knew and worked with, Gian texted like a teen, called unbidden from downstairs on your block, gossiped vertiginously while managing to keep secrets, lent money he didn’t really have, gave out spare keys to his apartment to party in when he was out of town. When many of us collected in New York to reconcile his death, we all shared the embarrassment of realizing that each of us had considered ourself his best friend, and that in fact we hadn’t been wrong. He was just a slut that way. (Also in the conventional way.) This may all sound incidental to his work as a publisher—nice things to say about your dead friend, as warned up top—but it is exactly how he conducted his publishing, which was, in terms of time spent, pretty much completely inseparable from whatever you’d call the rest of his life. He treated his writers like he was trying to fuck them. Not “out of something,” wiseass, like he was smitten with lust and couldn’t keep himself from calling around the clock or showing up at their work with treats.

Gian ran his operation from a desk under a bunk bed in a baroque, sunless, one-room apartment and anytime you went over, there’d be someone who’d been “just leaving” for an hour, or a couple someones you were now going to spend most of a night with, and they would invariably be not just a good hang but responsible for some crucial piece of art or literature or culture in the following year. He was like if Gertrude Stein did hard drugs. Or Jesus.

—

Gian used to talk in passing about The Work—not always in title case but implied—about continuing The Work, furthering The Work. It’s a testament to either friendship or laziness that at no point did either of us try to explicate or press the other on what the hell he was referring to as The Work. It was just a given, like the Great Celestial Wheel to Boethius or whoever that was, or the magnum opus of the hermetical alchemists.

You knew it when you were doing it.

I missed Gian in the first half of the 2000s, when he was running around New York City fresh from college in New Orleans, being a writer. By the time I met him, he’d put on his new hat, was a publisher, so much so that when I asked him if he ever wrote himself he said he’d “take a swing at it,” like it was something he hadn’t considered.

The story as I know it is that Gian applied for an internship at a fairly major publishing house, I’m gonna say FSG. He went in for the interview and his interviewer was the evocatively-named literary wildcat Peter Wolfgang. After Peter explained the duties of the FSG intern and Gian determined they weren’t for him, he (Gian) invited him (Peter) to ditch work for a mid-day drink, over which they concocted a literary journal to be called The New York Tyrant, which Peter promptly quit his job and borrowed money to co-found. These were the kind of things you were supposed to do in New York back then, not that too many did.

You’ll remember what New York was like after 9/11. On the evening after 2,000 fellow people were crushed to death out our windows, the photographer Ryan McGinley and some other downtown art kids rode their bikes through the charnel grounds wearing their t-shirts as masks to catch the human ash we all had to breathe. That set the tone for the next five-odd years. A sense of bouyant detachment set in, at least for those of us who weren’t cheering on the chance to kill Arabs or perfunctorily/worthlessly protesting the same. Irony’s much-ballyhooed death on the American century’s day of days passed over the 20 and 30-somethings of lower Manhattan and Williamsburg, cocaine made a blazing comeback, along with dance music and also guitar music that wasn’t impossible to dance to. No one short of Boccaccio could capture the frantic sort of obliviating fun that reigned in the city those quick years, Boccaccio or Bosch, maybe Brueghel. By 2005ish, however, maybe 6ish, the death’s head grin was cracking at the jaw line and it seemed like American life was going to keep on continuing another decade and we all maybe better start buckling down for it. It was time to be serious or something. Supposedly.

Every decade flips gears around the five-year mark.The spunky new-wave early 80s becomes the booming, shoulder-padded late 80s. The anti-commercial grunge 90s becomes the gelled and frosted dot.com Disney-teen 90s. So forth and so on.

In whatever-you-want-to-call-it, hipsterdom, alternative media, it felt like the mood was moving to LA or at least the west coast. Arguably it did. These were the Devendra Banhart times, Arthur magazine times. Now’s when everybody grew those beards, got back into weed.

In book publishing, I shouldn’t even pretend I can tell you what was going on there. What Gian was doing, though, was taking up the bishop’s crook and devising a way to shepherd the writers he knew and loved and partied with into the back half of the 00s. His initial device was the Tyrant, an irregularly published sorta thing that was either a lower-rent literary review or a slightly-too-nice zine. 200-odd pages maybe once a year of short fiction, prose poetry, a little bit of actual poetry, a cartoon here and there.

I found a copy of the second issue out zine-shopping which I did not so much because I liked zines—I liked them fine, but I wasn’t a zine head or anything. In 2006 or 7 I was put in charge of Vice magazine’s website. I had no clue what I was doing and I already hated what the internet was. So, in lieu of keeping up with shit on the internet, “the discourse,” I’d go zine-shopping.

Most of these I made it a few pages into, or page, singular, then flipped through the rest for decent illustrators or photographers I could poach. This one didn’t have any pictures. I’d never heard of a single one of the writers on the back and their contributors’ photos were all blown out. The cover art was good, it was a painting of James Spader from that scene in the parking lot in Pretty In Pink when he’s letting the cigarette hang off his lip. I believe he’s telling Molly Ringwald “You’re a bitch”—I thought “Shit, cute”—and the book itself was a nice size and weight, felt like a book. That was enough for a $10 gamble, which I was gonna expense anyways, and I cracked it open on the subway ride back as much because I’d forgot to bring an actual book I wanted to read as from any expectation of this thing being worthwhile.

When I got home, I stayed up the night finishing it, cover to cover. This would be 2007, in Brooklyn, and yet here was something that engaged in neither the faux-proletarian dirtbag argot of all the skateboard-magazines-grown-up or the cloying cutesy-poo whimsy of the Park Slope McSweeneys set. This was proper writing, pretentious even. Style pervaded right down to the sentence, as if every piece was assembled from the best sentences its writer had or would ever come up with.

All the stories shared something you couldn’t quite peg down—they weren’t similar to each other, they were on the same wavelength. The whole thing felt sinister and subterranean. It was unwinking. I kept thinking the word “sublime,” like I was some Edward Gorey or Mervyn Peake character in a wingback chair or something.

It was also properly dark, a relief. No beards here, just the sweaty close shave of the three-day dry drunk. People often seize on the tyrant part of New York Tyrant, but the New York’s really the essential component. Not that all the writers were New York people. Hell, Gian was technically a West Virginian—and an exemplary one—of Breece DJ Pancake’s lineage. Nevertheless, these stories he put together all read like the scrambled thoughts of a 5am walk home through deserted Chinatown. These stories made you smell piss.

The next issue of the Tyrant came out a couple months later, had a damn Smiths album on the cover this time, and then I knew this hadn’t been a lucky fluke or one-off, microscene sorta thing. Whole new set of writers, same feeling, somehow, somehow the same style. This was the work of a guy who properly knew what he was doing. A lot of people who shift from writers to publishers do so because they basically washed out of the former and the latter’s close enough to not feel like failure. Like when a musician starts managing bands. Gian’s the rare exception to this—there’s maybe a couple a decade—who didn’t resign himself from writing to publishing, but graduated into it.

I asked him if he’d bring his writers, and himself, over to Vice magazine where I worked, which maybe he thought was a good move in terms of publicity if not necessarily the right vibe. But what I really wanted to do was decamp into his scene, this scene he’d summoned into being from the grease traps of 21st-century New York.

He had the weirdest people in his stable. They were all either 30-year-old weirdos you’d never heard of or evil old men from the 80s. He’d met famous 80s editor Gordon Lish’s son, Atticus, and was publishing a book of his drawings, which were sort of like David Shrigley but miserable. He interviewed 300-year-old queer AIDS survivor Edmund White from the New Yorker and then gave him a blowjob (he called me that night and described it as like having a loaded gun in his mouth), and then bumped into his friend the comedian/guitarist Dave Hill on the way home and crashed his set at UCB, fingers reeking of Edmund’s HIV+ cum and shit. He asked me if I knew Tao Lin since Vice had published one of his first stories, which I didn’t, then the next time I saw him he and Tao were rolling on ecstasy together in the back of that bar next to 7A.

None of it made sense on paper. His taste conformed to nothing like an accepted school or aesthetic or scene, it was clear to anyone he just liked what he liked. But what he liked was great, often “somehow great.” He saw The Great in shit you’d never even think to paw through.

One of the first full books he put out was Firework by Eugene Marten. He gave me a galley the night he sent the final edit off to the printer, and beamed at how much I was gonna like. And holy shit did I not care for that book. When I picked it up a month ago I had an old cab receipt marking my place from 2008 when I gave it up for something else. It was on page 26. And, like clockwork, like the irritating meshing of tiny annoying gears, I took up my place on page 26 and read it clean through to morning. He’d been right. Motherfucker.

The New York Tyrant continued on for another four full volumes over the next five years, bulging bigger every issue, before begetting Tyrant Books. That’s what Gian spent the 2010s doing. By this point the vibe he had cultivated in the Tyrant had suffused out into the culture. He had fans, young writers who were drawn to him by the works he published and the tone they sustained. (It’s one thing do this with a bunch of short stories gathered over a couple months, entirely different to hold the same high note book for book over years.) He brought them to New York, or wherever he was, and they became part of The Work. He made a New York of them all.

There’s a spiritual New York and it’s made from people like West Virginians and midwestern misfits as much as real-estate aristocrats and native-born freaks. Like Blake’s Jerusalem it must always be built, and rebuilt unendingly, by a chain of willing sacrificial nuts. For 15 years Gian took up this charge, and for 15 years we all got to live in the city he discharged. Let The Work proceed. Long live the Tyrant.

Hey guys,

I have to leave the country for a week to tell the French about what’s been going on over here recently. In order to stave off reader attrition and rumors of my own Bartlebyesque case of the lazies, I’ve posted three older pieces of writing—classics, if you will—for to a’read. Sorry, for you to read.

They’re all from the first Trump administration, so I guess that could be a thematic link of sorts, and they’ve all got that sort of bemused air of subdued suspicion that was so then-courant. Oh, and two of them mention Ron Rosenbaum! That’s honestly just a coincidence, but I’ll take what I can get in order to get these up and make my flight.

Click the linky words to read the whole thing:

—

In a weird presaging of all the Epstein crap this year, Trump spent his first six months in office back in 2017 claiming he was gonna blow the lid off the JFK assassination, then just dumped a bunch of crap in a pdf folder. It wasn’t even the complete files. Anyways, I combed through that tranche for a couple nights and managed to solve the case—so YOU’RE WELCOME.

—

OK, so then—and this is funny—so Trump’s just taken office, like it’s been five months since he was sworn in, and his last casino in Atlantic City, which he took his name off of when it went bankrupt, is having a liquidation sale. So you can drive out to New Jersey and buy old furniture from the sitting-president’s failed casino. Tell me that’s not funny. Anyways, I went, bought a couple patio chairs, and wrote this whole spiel about the day and the Trump 90s in AC.

—

Four years later—so kind of a bookend on the whole era—I wrote this remembrance of my trip to New York’s Potters Field, the city’s prison-run charnel grounds for plague victims, homeless, and other human unmentionables.

That’s it—see you in a week or… I’ll try to make it just two. Two.

Continued from part 1…

As I developed a mental callus for the letters to the editor and began practicing the discipline of recognizing when to stop reading something before it could fully enrage me, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution changed the stakes. Like a late-70s coke dealer introducing his best customers to freebase, the AJC worked out a new delivery system for the bad juju of the letters section, concentrating its worst effects in a way that could bypass even the heartiest tolerance. They called this The Vent.

The Vent was a column on the outer edge of page 2 of the local news section, where you’d usually expect to see an events calendar or On This Date In History-type material. The idea was that readers could call a number to complain about something into an answering machine and the paper would transcribe their complaint and print it with a bunch of others. Its logo was a furious cartoon telephone screaming profanities into its own receiver.

The Vent was concocted and run by the AJC‘s traffic columnist, The Lane Ranger, which is obviously a classic example of job-that-once-was, writing print advice for the following day’s commute. I suspect, but can’t be bothered to confirm, that it began life as a sort of traffic-tips hotline which devolved into characteristic Atlanta bitching, but by the time it caught on its purview had been widened to anything you want to gripe—or “vent”—about.

Traffic remained a mainstay (Atlanta), but people in The Vent groused about a wide variety of subjects: local government, sports, their boss, restaurant behavior, shit on television, interpersonal drama with unnamed neighbors or coworkers, the weather, pager etiquette, their employees, The Wife. There was effectively a character limit to “vents,” although I think they measured it by either word count or length-of-answering-machine-message. Basically a sentence or two, no attribution. So what you got every day was a four-inch stream of anonymous invective, just bitch after bitch after bitch after bitch down the whole length of the page.

A style congealed. Broad, epigrammatic declarations of universal wrath in application to extremely specific petty grievances. Rhetorical questions wailed unto heaven from the I-75/85 Downtown Connector. Completely hypothetical scenarios that were just a seedbed for some new pun—puns so obtuse they had to be offset with hyphens or quote marks. Hyperbolic rage and flat, back-of-the-throat sarcasm were the trademark modes of the early Vent, whether in tandem or welded awkwardly together. Pithiness, when it occurred, which wasn’t very often, was of the sort you’d accept on a contemporaneous t-shirt or bumper sticker.

You would not believe the kind of shit that passed for humor in The Vent. Here, I have an example:

And that’s at least an honest attempt at a joke—once a week you’d see a straight-up rip from that week’s episode of Seinfeld or an old Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey. Imagine doing that, calling your fucking newspaper and regurgitating lines from a TV show as if you’d come up with them. These were, again to reiterate, unattributed.

What we generally refer to these days as “Reddit humor” has a lineage which traces back through fark.com in the late 90s to what we-before-the-internet would call “office jokes.” “You want it when?!” with the cartoon guy rolling on the floor in screaming laughter; variants of the xeroxed sign “You don’t have to be crazy to work here...” where they’ll either train you or just note that “it helps”; facetious vocational prayers and pseudo-eponymous “laws.” These totems marked out the workspace of an office figure every bit as archetypal to the 90s as the classic senior manager with his framed Successories poster and executive-gift-laden desk—the office cut-up.

Like many a traditional clown or jester, the office joker usually gave off the impression of being a deeply and intrinsically miserable person who was loitering on either side of a full-scale emotional crack up. Engineers and other technical professions seemed especially susceptible to this role—that’s the whole deal with Dilbert, another 90s rosetta stone—to the point where I still have a hard time reading a cliché reddit post without picturing the requisite cell-phone holster and thinning pate furrowed down over narrow rectanguloid glasses. These guys took to The Vent like the tone-deaf to an open mic.

Because of their length, though, or lack thereof, it was practically impossible to get a real, visceral sense of each writer, or venter, and the result of this was a sort of schizophrenic feeling of getting yelled at by a chorus of essentially the same guy over and over for completely different things in the same smarmy, know-better voice. You’d get women in The Vent sometimes, but they were damn-near indistinguishable from the men without context clues like mentioning high heels or their husband.

There was also a lot more Bubba in The Vent than in the letters to the editor, which could’ve been because of the comparative ease of leaving an answering machine message but also might’ve just been due to the nascent popularity of Jeff Foxworthy. This would be around 1993, the year his You Might Be A Redneck If... convinced millions of middle-class, white-collar suburban dads that they’d actually been brought up in rural poverty and were as such members of a protected class of natural geniuses. Such to say that sometimes a couple of the barking voices would have a legible Southern accent, or proffer rustic folk wisdom on the finer points of truck repair or the University of Georgia Athletics program. That at least mixed things up, I guess.

Anyways, it was a hit. For months after its debut every damn adult you’d be forced to meet would ask “Have you ever read this thing The Vent?” and then if you said something crotchety or mildly clever they’d say “You should send that in to The Vent!” The paper published multiple books of collected vents in that little index-card-looking gift-book format with the spine on the short side so the pages are all wider than they are tall, like for Christmas stockings. People would fucking clip it in the morning and take the goddamn column with them to work to show their coworkers ones they thought were good. Coworkers or their fucking students.

It was unavoidable. Even when you weren’t being subject to a completely nonconsensual recitation of what some munch thinks police oughta do to unruly teens at Perimeter Mall, it was just there. You couldn’t not read it. I mentioned the skill up top of being able to stop reading something when you realize it’s going to piss you off for no demonstrable gain. (A hard-won skill, requiring lifelong vigilance and practice.) There was no chance of that with The Vent. They’re too short. If you start reading one then you’ve read the thing. It’s through the callus. And there’s the next one right below it, ready to slip through the puncture. And there’s your day gone—torpoedo’d by yesterday’s ire, courtesy of Who Knows. Courtesy of Some Guy On A Phone.

I’m old enough to remember how mystified the general public was by Twitter when it launched. (And equally old enough to remember that Facebook’s first marketing push was a word-of-mouth campaign that it was “like Myspace without black people” (because, you see, they initially required a college email to register—cool guys, right?)) Part of this was that the idea of Twitter, or not even the idea, just the fact that there was a thing called Twitter, outpaced anyone’s actual use of the site. My ex-wife was emailing back and forth with an older coworker in the office around this time, and they were responding to each other really quickly and the older coworker leaned around her monitor and breathlessly asked “Is this it? Are we twittering?”

Twitter’s early users made grandiose and legitimately insufferable claims about the website, how it was supposed to be some revolutionary new framework of expression, its own new medium. I’m serious, people talked about it, in earnest—Twitter—like they’d just watched Horse In Motion at Eadward Muybridge’s house. “I think we’re seeing the birth of a brand new artistic medium,” I’m paraphrasing but I swear some tool wrote basically that on Metafilter or boingboing.net, royal we and everything. Another couple of schmucks made a bunch of accounts to reenact the early days of Nazi Germany through tweets in order to demonstrate that Twitter would’ve stopped the Holocaust. That experiment (they called it “an experiment”) has only grown funnier in the last decade.

My own first impression of Twitter was “Oh, so it’s The Vent, but it just keeps going.” The length of the posts was the same, I guess you could see people’s names but back then everyone was like @blonky or @sasparillllllla so it might as well’ve been anonymous. The general tone was a little different, but not much. Similar pomposity, everybody always declaiming something as though from on high. (I remember, back when I ran the Vice Twitter account, I got in an argument with some dude over like a band or something, and his next post was “30-degrees in Raleigh tonight, I feel for all the poor souls without homes.” Just, great job there, buddy.) Less overt anger maybe. At first. Although once people figured out you could get free shit from airlines, that style of bitching was identical. And usually directed open-letter-style at “you,” the reader, presumed to at some point include whoever it was they were actually mad at. As if you yourself were American Air.

This is where it really paralleled its analog antecedent, in its effect, the sensation of being spoken to, and sometimes yelled at, by about five people at the same time. The insistent, needling din of randos’ careless thoughts. Some ogre’s bad mood fired whole hog straight into your corneas. The Vent, at least, was a single page. At its worst, it was the functional equivalent stopping in a Waffle House during off-peak hours and letting everyone present insult you. Twitter’s like when Japanese wrestling legend Antonio Inoki slapped everyone in the stadium, but in reverse, and forever.

None of this is to suggest that I think Twitter’s worthless, or beneath me or anything. I still have fond memories of that account pretending to be Soon-Yi Previn, with the one-two punch of “Help! Dad-husband is missing in Fairway!” and, five minutes later, “It’s ok, he was in vitamin aisle.” But let’s call it what it was: an RSS feed you could blog on.

Or, to cue up what I’m actually on about here, a comment section detached from its content.

Part 3 eventually…

I started reading the newspaper at the breakfast table with my parents when I was 8 or 9, probably in an unconscious bid to playact adulthood or seem “mature.” My starting point most mornings, and frequently my ending point, was the letters to the editor. They were short, to the point (a function of being short), and generally strange.

“Hey [Mom or Dad—depending who was at the table versus getting more coffee], this guy thinks the editorial board of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution should issue a public apology to Saddam Hussein.”

“This guy thinks Zell Miller should be hanged for authorizing the bond issuance to extend State Route 400 to I-285.”

“This woman thinks they should teach Eminem lyrics in high school English.”

My mom’s usual reply was “Crazy crazy,” sort of mumbled half into her mug while she stared into the middle distance and waited for the caffeine to hit. My dad, an earlier riser, used my befuddlement as an opportunity to teach his son a lesson about the greater world.

“Son, [he never addressed me as Son, but it helps establish the tone in which he was speaking] this person is what we refer to as, ‘a crank.’”

He invited me to consider what I’d observed him, as a representative adult, do when he read an article in the paper he disagreed with or was otherwise put off by.

“You say, ‘Get this, Lu’ then read the crazy part of the article out loud and Mom says ‘Crazy crazy.’”

“Exactly.”

He asked if I’d ever seen him storm off from the kitchen to the computer room, turn on the computer, boot up DosShell, run WordPerfect, type a letter, print it out, pull off those spindle tabs from the line-jet printer paper, fold it into an envelope, return to the kitchen to find the address to write on the envelope, head back to the computer room to find a stamp then out down the driveway to the mailbox, and when I said, “No, you’ve got a job to go to,” he snapped his finger at me and said Bingo.

“And a family.”

Once I’d been cottoned to the fact that people who write letters to the editor were a distinct sort of folk, drawn from the wider pool of the idle and unpleasant, reading the letters took on a new form of enjoyment. Whereas before I’d been perturbed and titillated by what I took as earnest plans for the state—like requiring bicycle licenses or reinstating the draft—now I could sit back and enjoy the freak show. A typology began to emerge. There were essentially four basic kinds of letter writer, with the occasional hybrid or one-off respondent to an article they were personally involved with. They were:

-The crabby old man itching for violence.

-The pedantic tracker of pointless errata, often fixated on a specific beat or specific reporter.

-The Volvo-driving single mother, for whom the Coexist bumper sticker would eventually provide a softer and more true-to-self statement of purpose than its predecessor, the Darwin fish.

-The hyper-rationalist, self-taught policy wonk whose proposals were genuinely indistinguishable from satire. (One guy figured out the parks department could solve a payroll crisis by converting old cemeteries into playgrounds, with the added benefit that it would “lift the spirits of the grieving and acclimate children to the finality of death.”)

I grew to love this menagerie of lonely screwups. They formed a stable set of complementing human archetypes—like the cast of Herman’s Head—and I learned to identify them and their grouping, first by subject matter, then by diction, and eventually through syntax. I could picture them and their living spaces. I could tell you which ones wrote at the kitchen table and which ones had a dedicated “home office,” and which ones called their home office “the study.” Which ones were widowed versus divorced, which ones confirmed bachelors, and which ones simply had an unloved spouse who kept out of the way. One time I was halfway through a letter about homeless shelters and I said, “This guy’s gotta be from Milledgeville,” and he was.

One of the undersung benefits of an American public school education is early exposure to grown ups from a wide variety of intelligence levels and temperament. I had a lucky handful of good teachers in high school, but I probably learned more that I use in my daily life from all the awful ones along the way. My 2nd grade teacher Mrs Seadle, for instance, taught me not to argue with dolts. My 4th grade teacher Ms Mayworth about casual racism, and the Vietnam vet who taught our 6th grade Health class and whose name escapes me (Coach Something-or-Other) taught us all about the psychic limits of patience and probably also PTSD.

The letters to the editor held similar educational value. They familiarized me with the people in my neighborhood that “These are the people in your neighborhood”-type primers typically leave out. From the full blazing shut-ins with their terrifying lawns to the merely unhappy, those sane-seeming nondescripts where you can sometimes see the cracks in their passing complexion in the slow lane at the grocery store or driving past a picket line. An entire spectrum of cautionary examples, united in their pathological compulsion to say what they gotta say.

This was especially helpful to me, because I 100% have the disease. If I read a mistake in a story or article, or more usually if I read or hear something I think I know better than, my brain will pull the emergency brake and divert full power to my response. I will not merely start thinking it, my thoughts will start writing it. If I don’t nip the bud quickly enough, I will actually start picturing reading it—it having already been written, mailed off, and accepted for publication—and from there receiving the adulation of others who’ve read it. This can go on, to the exclusion of other productive mental work, for hours. It’s sick. Two years before his death from AIDS, the artist David Wojnarowicz described the innate, volcanic urge he’d felt since puberty, to “place his naked body on the naked body of another boy,” as “a sensation equivalent to the separation of the earth from its axis.” This feels like that.

One morning, after coaxing a few too many “crazy crazy”s out of her, my mom, I’m guessing pretty fucking sick of having her coffee disturbed by what the dregs of Atlanta’s literate had seen fit to write, made the obvious suggestion.

“Why don’t you write your own letter in?”

The thought made me queasy, like being invited to openly consider taking part in a murder. The idea that I’d degrade myself over a keyboard for half an hour (and the unthinkable certainty that it would take four to five times longer) to join the ranks of these unsolicited boobs, tapping out little analogies and rhetorical questions with my smug little fingers. Opening the paper straight to the editorial page the next however-many days, scanning for my name. And of course the worst possibility of all, that I wouldn’t make the cut. That I would fail in aspiring to human vermin.

“Never,” I declared, before God and my pop tart.

To date I’ve kept this pledge. I had a close call a few months back when a writer for Harper’s called Pink Floyd’s The Wall the “wildly-successful stoner opera Another Brick in the Wall,” but I managed to hold my peace long enough for the next issue to come out. Contributing to the trough of worthless writing, however, is considerably easier to avoid than consuming it. Even having solved the puzzle, I still sat down every morning and made the first act of my day subjecting my brain to the opinions of mental invalids.

Scab-peelers, zit-pickers, and cold-sore-tonguers all know the irresistible siren song of their foul urges, and as a member of all three fraternities, I can begrudge no man or woman for compulsively damaging their body for the simple satisfaction of so doing. Still, no good’s come of it. Kingsley Amis once wrote “If you can’t annoy someone, there’s little point in writing,” and if that’s the functional baseline of the craft then the letters to the editor were at least getting the job done.

[Of the thousands and thousands of sentences I’ve read boxed in next to the proper editorials only one has ever stuck with me, and then only because it provided a fitting punchline to one of the great local political scandals of my youth.

The backstory is such: Georgia’d had some guy redesign its state flag in 2001, mostly as a way to deal with the Confederate battle flag they’d stuck on there after Brown v Board of Education in the 50s. This was as tendentious as you’d imagine—many people loved that anti-desegregation flag, said it evoked “heritage” (typically without a specifier like “Southern” or “Our”—just “Heritage,” heritage as an end to itself). The new one was a blue flag with the state seal in the middle and an orange ribbon beneath it with five more little flags in a row and the words “Georgia’s History.” Two of them were just the Stars and Stripes for some reason, then the three previous state flags of Georgia, out of order, and of course including the one with the Confederate battle flag on it.

No one was happy. The North American Vexillogical Association said that it violated every principle of basic flag design and some Sons of the Confederacy guy who I think it turned out had Klan ties back in the 80s called it “the Denny’s placemat of flags,” which you’ve gotta admit is a good quip, source notwithstanding. Ah hell, look at the thing.

I’d forgotten about the fonts. Psychotic.

So anyways, the state flag board or whatever rushed together another replacement to quell the furor. What they ended up with is was what they should’ve gone with in the first place, just the seal and some stripes, suitably arranged and without any overt nods to the Confederacy. Boring but serviceable—the kind of design that registers as a state flag on first glance.

Fuck it, might as well post it too.

Problem solved then, right? Everybody happy now? Ahhhh—everybody but one. The bad flag’s creator, an extremely old architect or something, did not appreciate all the derision being heaped on his design. This flag was going to be his legacy, his parting gift to the State of Georgia and its people to close out a lifetime of design-oriented service. Now here it was being damn-near universally reviled. He took to the letters to kick back at the pricks, managing to compress into 100 words all the unwarranted hurt and sour self-pity he’d been subject to for his effort. An effort that, by the way, was made not for money or professional acclaim, but in profoundest expression of his unflagging state pride, and on deadline.

Oh, not only that, he’d done exactly what he’d been asked to! He’d threaded the needle, figured out a way to make both sides satisfied—nay, bring both sides together. And for that we mock him?? His epistle closed with a sentence that evokes all the bitter, unshaven grandeur of Richard Nixon’s greatest quotations:

“They may say my flag is the dog’s breakfast, but I think it’s the cat’s meow.”]

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Part 2—The Vent… coming at some point…

“He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil” - Orwell

Any time a new term takes root in army jargon, you can kinda see where things are heading with it. For instance, when Robert McNamara and the brain trust running the Vietnam War came up with the phrase “collateral damage” as a euphemism for “we killed civilians,” it told you a number of things about the war. One, they were killing so many civilians they needed an abbreviable official term for it. Two, since they weren’t planning to stop killing civilians, the term should sound as anodyne and incidental as possible—collateral damage is great in this respect because it isn’t something you do or commit, it’s something that happens. “There was some collateral damage” is a natural-sounding sentence in a way that “there was some murder” isn’t. Also way easier on a soldier whose unit just torched a village, kinda sounds like a bank error. You can say it with a shrug.

The fact that the Defense Department was borrowing their terminology from the financial sector dovetails neatly with how they were managing the whole war, the bean-counter approach derided by soldiers and protesters alike that elevated the metric of “body count” over appreciable political gains or controlled territory as their primary index of success. The classic soldier’s gripe in WWII was that the whole thing was over “property”—the army owned their ass “from here to eternity” and they were an interchangeable piece of government-issued equipment fighting over whose country owned what—by Vietnam they’d been downgraded to marks on a ledger and if the war was about anything at all, you could say it was a form of geopolitical bookkeeping. And in an accounting war, where the sum of the conflict is reduced to a running tally of “ours” versus “theirs,” dead women and children are just numbers that don’t go in either column. They could have just as easily called it human spillage.

Although, at the time, the coinage and official adoption of “collateral damage” rightly freaked out a good deal of Americans, the term stuck and became permanently lodged in the milspeak lexicon. We all got used to it. It was characteristic of the army’s PR shift in the 60s and 70s from a red-blooded, bellicose and patriotic fighting force into a reserved, emotionless cadre of professional technicians whose primary function just happens to be killing people. And it was useful, especially in keeping up that appearance. You can stand at a lectern and claim that you’re “making efforts to reduce collateral damage” and most people will just hear that and think, “Ok, nerd.” Try saying “we’re making efforts not to kill too many women and children” in the same unfeeling robot tone and see what the reporters’ faces do.

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Likewise, there was a pendulumesque shift sometime during the Iraq War where the army started trotting out the weird, German-sounding phrase “warfighter.” This was ostensibly to provide an umbrella term for everyone in the armed forces and settle an ongoing pair of debates about proper nomenclature. You see, you can’t just call everyone “soldiers” because the Army calls its soldiers “soldiers,” and that would make the “sailors” of the Navy and the “Marines” of the Marines upset. That’s nothing recent, by the way, and it was solved in the early 20th century by referring to everybody as “servicemen.” This supposedly ran aground against feminism in the 70s and 80s and became “servicemen and servicewomen” and then SUPPOSEDLY ran aground again against political correctness in the 90s and became “service members.”

So actually, honestly, now that I type it out, the debate wasn’t ongoing at all. It was settled. But some guys in the military didn’t like “service members.” Wasn’t tough, made it sound like a job. Not even that, made them sound like employees.

Now, be mindful what’s happening around this time. 9/11 for one thing, and a rush of angry jocks into the armed forces. Prior to what David O. Russell called “the big Tuesday thing,” the American military was not held in anywhere near the esteem it was suddenly given Wednesday morning. If you had approached a stranger in an army uniform at the airport on September 10th, 2001, and told them “thank you for your service,” you would’ve been roundly and correctly deemed a nutcase by any onlookers, including the guy being thanked. It was certainly not a respectable career choice. They wouldn’t have had to make the kind of ads they were running at the time—guy at the radar bank of a battleship is suddenly at a computer in an office, using those skills—if it was. Frankly, the army was for poor kids who wanted to go to college and dorks who wanted to fly fighter jets. Oh yeah, and the sliver of genuine teenage psychopaths who held off shooting up their school simply so that they could get into the Marine Corps.

So the army’s suddenly a noble calling. Unilateral military action has gone from “that thing Hitler did” to accepted neoliberal statecraft or “the return of history” or some such shit. Meanwhile, the American army has plowed into Afghanistan and promptly let both Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri shuffle off to Pakistan. Then, with an occupying army on the ground in the historically most adverse nationstate on Earth, the United States pulls half its military out to invade Iraq. This goes great (in army terms) for approximately three months before quickly going the opposite of great. For a professional army of expert technicians, the consensus on the ground is nobody has any idea what they’re doing.

The Rumsfeld Defense Department is treating the soldiers worse than employees. They’ve given them a deadline of something like six months to break Iraq apart then put it back together again so they can leave. And they’re cheaping out even there. Ebay’s doing brisk business shipping body armor to Camp Fallujah. “America isn’t at war—America’s at the mall” becomes the cynical soldier’s maxim of the era.

And so somebody, somewhere, but guessing DC, revisits the term “service members.” In a crowning moment of early-2000s thinking, it is decided, in some office somewhere with bald lighting and old carpets, we need to rebrand the soldiers.

It’s glorious. It’s exactly what a shitty business whose employees hate it does when it needs to turn things around without spending any money. Just give everyone a new title! One that doesn’t require a raise or promotion—one that’s not legally a thing. Maybe something overblown and unintentionally embarrassing, like “sales associate” or “sandwich artist.”

What’s particularly beautiful about the word “warfighter” is you can clearly see the debate it emerged from as it undoubtedly happened. Some anachronistic crew-cut psycho prepares an egregiously long powerpoint presentation to change the phrase “service member” in all official government communication to the word “warrior.” Before he makes it off of slide one, one of the suits in the room says that’s too directly aggressive and out of keeping with the military’s current values. This leads to a room-wide shouting match between suits and uniforms where weirdly most of the suits (this is the Bush admin) like the “warrior” idea—sounds tough—and the uniforms are trying to talk them off the cliff by referencing Japan in World War II and other “warrior states,” and expounding in unparseable depth about the definitions of words like “service” and “duty.” Some suit manages to cut the Gordian Knot—”What’s something that’s like warrior, but just a different word?” Now the argument’s purely semantic. A brainstorm develops. Words are called out.

“Troopers!” “Commandos!” “Dragoons!”

The guy with the crew cut abandons his slides and finds a dry-erase marker to write with.

“Combatants—no, combatmen!” “Peacekeepers—wait, peacemakers!”

Even the career military officers who preferred “service member”—who believed in the term and what it said about the army—are lobbing out replacements.

“Men-at-arms!” “Arms-bearers!” “War... fighters?”

Perhaps the second word’s supplied by another man in the room. Or maybe it’s connected by a squeaking faint red line on the dry-erase board between two columns of options. Whatever the case, it’s won. Once it’s said aloud it’s the obvious choice. It IS the word. You can’t unthink it back into two. And you can’t argue it doesn’t fit. Army men fight war. That’s what they do. It apparently occurs to no one present that the direct German translation of their new official title is pretty much Wehrmacht. Or if it does, it gets laughs.

Now most active-duty service members in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t a bunch of dunderheads; they recognized the warfighter rollout for the snowjob it was. Military bloggers gave it the full salvo of bloggers’ derision. It smacked of the kind of rear-echelon, back-office bravado that actual combat soldiers tend to despise—what Marines would call “moto”—and to an army in the unwarriorly position of policing a hostile population they’d been sent to liberate, a conflict whose defining features for the American serviceman were being blown up while driving somewhere and kicking in the door to some screaming family’s apartment, being condescendingly graduated into “warfighters” could only have been seen as a booby prize for the particularly obtuse.

But remember the jocks I mentioned earlier, the ones who ran out to enlist “when they saw those towers fall”? Many of those guys, not all but definitely more than some, were a bunch of dunderheads. And they not only lapped that shit up, they brought it back home with them.

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There’s a perennial bitch I’ve heard from vets of multiple generations that standards are slipping in whichever branch of service they were in. Actually, it’d be more accurate to say that the bitch isn’t “standards slipping” but rather that standards are being intentionally lowered to meet recruiting goals. This reputedly happened on the sly in the last years of WWII—a friend’s father was made a squad leader right off the bat because he was the only man in his unit who was literate enough to read orders—and in Korea. It definitely happened—on paper and with a name—during Vietnam. To fill out the US ranks in the growing war, McNamara’s team concocted Project 100,000, which lowered the mental aptitude test score required to be drafted. This was framed as an experiment—let’s just throw these legal idiots into boot camp with the rest of the men and see how they do. See if they rise to the occasion.

Generally speaking, they didn’t. They died in disproportionate numbers and those who didn’t became the archetypal homeless Nam vets who roamed the decaying American cities of my childhood. There’s an irony that in trying to pump up their enlistment figures the war-managers were simultaneously queering their own body count, but it’s hard to savor. Like “collateral damage,” which makes the sayer complicit in the callous indifference of its formulators (to talk about “killing civilians” in so many words, even if done smiling and shamelessly, at least verbally acknowledges it as an awful thing), openly designating American teenagers as experimental test subjects in a war of your own devising raises managerial sangfroid to the level of obscenity.

These guys were like readymade collateral damage, rushed and brutalized through a training regimen they often didn’t understand and which oftener left them in no fitter shape for the carnage they were about to be flown into. They were human padding in the ledger, fed uncomprehending to the war like milk-fattened Meriahs.

It’s hard to figure whether McNamara and his crew legitimately believed that putting literal army rejects into battle would prove the army’s own standards wrong, but that’s the thing with experiments, they can’t really fail, you just learn the opposite of what you’d wanted. The fact that the wikipedia page for Project 100,000 redirects from the phrase “McNamara’s Morons” should give you an idea of how the regular soldiery viewed this whole gruesome plot. If you watch movies (sorry, I just thought it’d be funny to phrase that in the conditional—like it’s the 90s or something) this is what the Private Pyle storyline in Full Metal Jacket is about, and arguably Forrest Gump.

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So back to the warfighter era, the Iraq/Afghanistan variant of the lowered standards complaint that I heard wasn’t that they’d dropped the test scores again—that they’d presumably learned from—it was that they’d relaxed the dual provisions preventing guys with tons of tattoos and/or open gang affiliations from enlisting. I know, this immediately sounds like a racial thing—that was the first thing I thought when I heard it. Hoo boy, tell me about these “gangsters” and their tattoos (ears pricked up for the next word in sequence, “IQ”). But this wasn’t where they went with it. Their beef wasn’t black and latino gang members, it was the tweakers. Guys with too many Alice in Chains CDRs in their visor.

The tattoos that alarmed them were more creepy than explicit—Nordic-looking shit, maybe a demonic clown or demonic clown motif here or there—and the gang affiliations they suspected would sometimes be better termed political affiliations, or political beliefs, or just straight-up beliefs. Basically, they felt like the gang and tattoo regulations had acted as a sort of backstop psych evaluation. That the army was now letting in dudes who might be lunatics. Dudes who gave them the willies. And these dudes, these willie-giving lunatic dudes, these dudes LOVED the warfighter schtick.

An enlisted unit in the military is one of the last true melting pots in American society. A place, like public school, where you’re thrown together and forced to deal with folks from completely different walks of life and social strata to your own. Folks you would have never mixed with—or sometimes wanted to mix with—on your own. Part of the tragedy of Columbine is that it was the school itself that brought together Harris and Klebold, who might have each just wound up going into the Marines or college if their paths hadn’t crossed. That’s not to draw another comparison between school shooters and army guys, by the way, just the quickest example of this sort of institutional destiny I can come up with.

So all the post-9/11 jocks whose newfound patriotism had arrived fully-formed and unexamined while they were watching an event on tv, and which was functionally inseparable from anger, were now being introduced to the tattoo guys with questionable backgrounds and mental health, and they were all buddying up. The jocks offered the tweakers a chance for acceptance by what high-school taxonomy had deemed their social betters; the tweakers offered the jocks a receptive audience for their aggression and off-color jokes. It was a productive mating. They both started growing beards.

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This new crop of cross-pollinated jocks and tweaks had grown up on the previous generation of recruiting ads where a Marine fights a lava monster, and a VHS diet of movies like Navy Seals and Black Hawk Down, that specific strain of 90s/00s war flicks that had arisen—typically with the direct blessings and involvement of the US military in their production—as a reaction to the cinematic beating the armed forces had taken in the aftermath of Vietnam. Movies that eschewed the traditional point of depicting the horrors of war as an end to itself, and instead used the horrors of war to illustrate how tough and cool the guys who took part in them were. What good soldiers they were—what warriors.

I think it’s in Jarhead where they describe how even the most ardent anti-war movie can be used to pump soldiers up for battle as long as it depicts combat intensely enough. These films don’t even bother with the pretense—they’re solely war porn. Violence simulators for at-home adrenal wanking, films whose message can be boiled down to “This is what it’s like when this thing happens, or happened.” The type of movies classified online by how accurately they get the sound of different munitions.

They also forego the classic “squad movie” convention of plopping you in with a bunch of average grunts to focus on the new “elite units” of late-20th-century warfare. The Special Operators—SEALs and Delta Force and the brave men, pause, of the Green Beret. Part of this is a practical consideration for the era; you’re not going to get much action out of an infantry private doing base duty at the Korean DMZ in 1994. But there’s also a palpable sense of why settle for less than the best? This is Pax Americana, baby. Who cares about underdogs when your country is the undisputed overdog of the global order? Can’t we enjoy it a little? Let’s see that judo champ who’s also a computer expert shoot a bunch of, I don’t know, make them Iranians. Why wrestle with the morality of war when you can just revel in its mastery for a couple hours.

It’s easy to forget how novel and cutting-edge special forces were to the public in the early 90s (JSOC was only established in 1980) and hard to overstate how large the special forces loomed in the imagination of preteen boys. Right at the age when you’d normally have to learn that, actually, the army wasn’t all fun stuff and guns and gun battles in rooms full of barrels, actually, it’s more like a job, and generally kind of a crummy job—here were these dudes being more or less pitched as GI Joe but for real. Career military men who didn’t have to do a bunch of desk work and grow a paunch, who got to break into compounds, kill people at will.

That could be you! There didn’t even need to be a war. While the “special” in special forces began life as a reference to specialized units of specialists in one thing or another (the Green Berets and guerrilla warfare; Army Rangers and climbing stuff; the proto-Navy-SEAL Underwater Demolition Team and blowing stuff up underwater), by Nam it had grown into a floating signifier for any sort of off-the-books military activity—special operations. This is another euphemism we’ve been inured to through overuse, from the same team who brought us “collateral damage.”

Originally just the general name for what special units do, special operations comes to refer almost exclusively to covert activities behind enemy lines at the same time that special ops go from a wartime exigency to a political option for any ol’ time and place. JFK’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor cooks up an entire doctrine of “special warfare” in ‘61 (which he also calls “sub-limited war,” just to show you how nuts they were already getting with the euphemizing) whereby America can fight other countries purely by sending special operators in to specially operate. No Congress needed, no official declaration of war, no official nothin’—just secret army men on secret army missions. This is, quoth he, “not envisioned by our Constitution,” but what the hey, right? Beats “unlimited war,” which is what you call it when everyone nukes each other.

As gnarly as “collateral damage” is, at least it’s theoretically on accident. In a peacetime context, special warfare is essentially just crime. Assassinating a person in a country you’re not at war with is murder. Kidnapping a person is kidnapping. Infiltrating a foreign country and conducting military operations in disguise or dressed as a civilian is either espionage or perfidy, depending on what you’re doing while you’re in there, if not both. Shit, that last one’s still a crime even in war. All of them are technically acts of war without the direct participation of the country being raided. Obviously you can get away with it, but come on, that’s just true of everything. That’s not a doctrine.

This all used to be a Bit of a Thing in our “nation of laws,” and even the existence of the various and similarly named special operations groups were kept mum from the public, at least on an official basis. Then Delta Force crashed a helicopter flying into Iran and within five years they were a movie franchise. Reagan renamed all covert operations “special activities” and any debate over “should we be doing this shit?” was supplanted by kids arguing about which of the special forces was the hardest to get into. The fact that “special” just up and became an open synonym for “illegal” was met with the blankest national stare you can imagine. Breaking international law for the government became a major 10-year-old career plan.

The whole deal with special forces is that the rules don’t apply to them. Not the rules of warfare, not international law, not even the rules of the service. They’re so good at being in the military they don’t have to act like they’re in the military. They can grow beards, put their hands in their pockets, cut in line in the lunchroom (they actually put this in Black Hawk Down to demonstrate what cool guys Delta Force are—like a 4th-grade boy’s power fantasy), they’re the big dawgs on campus. They aren’t undisciplined, they’ve transcended discipline. And everything else that sucks about army life, grooming standards, KP.

[This gets so out of hand by the 2010s you’ve got Michael Bay making a movie about Benghazi where Jim from The Office is part of a squad of contract special-ops bodyguards, all bearded, who know better about everything than their dork employers in the CIA and who behave like over-it frat boys with senioritis, but are actually lionhearted warrior-geniuses. There’s seriously a scene where one of them is quoting Joseph Campbell aloud while the other guy is pretending a flashlight is his dick. [Oh my god, and there’s another scene where Jim is facetiming his wife and daughters—because, you see, he’s also a model father and husband who’s been torn away from his family by this job he took for money—and his wife’s in the car with the kids and a bunch of their friends in the drive-thru at a McDonald’s and she’s so flustered [oh yeah—and she’s pregnant!] that she yells at the guy on the drive-thru mic to “Just give me six of anything”—like, don’t take it out on that guy, he didn’t make you take your kids’ friends to Disneyland. Just insane behavior. “Give me six of anything.”]]

For a teenage midwit drowning in suburban boredom, this must’ve looked like the high life. And here’s another sweetener: Soldiers in the army—regular soldiers—fight other soldiers from other armies. This could make them evil Nazis like in World War II, or it could make them driftless teens just like themselves, such as in every other war since or prior. Special Forces don’t go in for that moral grey zone malarkey, not in 90s cinema they don’t. Their enemies are terrorists, or drug cartels, or warlords, or rogue Soviet generals who made off with a nuke, or terrorists-for-hire, people whose summary execution by an extralegal assassination squad wouldn’t raise a Quaker’s eyebrow. Never faceless fellow members of a nation’s armed forces carrying out orders for even facelesser old bureaucrats, but individually wicked individuals, who individually chose to enact whatever their particular wickedness, all by themselves. What cops and toddlers would call “bad guys.” Go figure the generation raised on this crap would be mustered to fight a literal war on terror.

America’s embrace of special warfare didn’t just jank up the psychology of action movies. The US Army has had plenteous real-life issues with soldiers who bought into the idea that they’d surpassed the law and were intrinsically good guys no matter what they did. Seth Harp just released a great book reporting on the myriad crimes conducted by the special ops community over the last 20 years. Actually, that’s not even just an American thing—three years ago the German government busted a bunch of special operators getting ready to carry out a right-wing coup with a grey-haired old monarchist à la a Frederik Forsyth novel. And I don’t know if you remember Los Zetas, that nightmare mini-cartel in Mexico who’d carve their initials into people’s chests on youtube, but of course they started out as a special forces narco squad trained in the good old US o’ A.

Anyways, this is what the warfighter aesthetic grew out of, from the fertile imaginings of couch-bound teens. Bin Laden made it real and gave it a blazing sense of moral rectitude. Afghanistan gave it a beard. The Ranger Athlete Warrior fitness program developed in 2005 for the Army Rangers (or RAW—undoubtedly backronym’d from the professional wrestling series Raw Is War) gave it its characteristic roid-monkey physique. And the US Armed Forces finally gave it a name and official designation.

--

To kids who grew up with this image of their life in the service, how could the real thing be anything other than a letdown. Christ, and then imagine Iraq, working a supply desk somewhere or arguing with some old guy through a translator about when his water would be turned back on. At a previous time, you could presumably convince yourself that at least you were doing your part to right some great or minor historical wrong wrought by some dastardly foreign military, but this one was fully our wrong. We were the dastards. How do you square that with teenage visions of trapezian hulks lettin’ freedom ring?

Normally you don’t, or you wouldn’t. You’d realize teenage-you was a bit of a dipshit, and he’d let himself get snookered into your present circumstances. Lesson learned. But what if you’ve got too much riding on this thing? What if your New York Times-subscribing, sandal-wearing stepdad tried to talk you out of joining the service and you can picture the look on his smug, told-you-so face while you break down your experience for him back home by the chiminea? What if instead of being wrong, you could twist the very fabric of reality to its obverse end and make it so you were right the whole time and everyone and -thing around you was what’s wrong?

What if—work with me on this one—instead of the war having a point, the war was the point? There’s your service, then. Regardless of who’s running Afghanistan these days and how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were buried in pieces under US occupation, you went. There was war, and you went to it. Teen dream fulfilled. You escaped the bonds of soft, civilian life and are now entitled to consider yourself a man apart from all that, a veteran, with all attendant benefits thereof. You’ve earned those trapeziii. Discount breakfasts, too.

As to why, the great why of it all, well first off, yours is not to question that—that’s Tennyson. But if you were to question why, as is natural (as Kurt Vonnegut would say, is the entire, actual point of war—to recognize its very futility), what does that leave you with, “I did it to do it”? Sure, but you gotta dress it up a little so it doesn’t sound so circular. Something more like, I did it to prove I could do it.

Or you could just say it like actual veterans do, you did it for your brothers. On its face this is just as maddeningly circular. Why did you and a bunch of other schnooks each individually sign up to go be shot at? To keep each other from being shot at. But the point isn’t to actually answer why, it’s to say “brothers.” To proclaim your fraternity with those fellow schnooks the army saw fit to assign to your unit.

Camaraderie and the brotherhood of fighting men have been used to sell the army since, I don’t know, since people. American soldiers in World War II loved to make fun of the recruiting slogan “I found a home in the army,” but somewhere between the tangible pointlessness of Vietnam and the drastic expansion of VA services under Reagan, this sense of extrafamilial kinship took root in earnest with American vets. “Old army buddies” became “my brothers.”

Military men in the draft age relished the thought of returning to civilian life, getting their army stint over with and in the rearview. In Nam, “the Nam” itself was considered a kind of transitory space akin to purgatory—or bardo, in keeping with their then-Buddhist majority—that you had to traverse in order to to go back to “the real world” (which just meant the US). There’s obviously a difference between being plucked up by the draft board in the flowering of your youth and shipped off somewhere to kill and/or die and offering up your own early 20s for the same treatment. Like, it’s one thing for war to be something that happened to you versus something you chose for yourself—if the bright side of things is you made it home intact, how does that pass through your lips without sounding like “I guess I fucked up”?

So you make the war your calling, yourself a warrior. You weren’t just there for the war, the war was there for you. You in fact found a home in the army, and your brother veterans will be the only hearts who truly beat in step with your own. Besides, what’s your stepdad know about war, what’s Ronald know about warrioring? He wasn’t there, man. He’s not a veteran.

Veteran’s got a certain ring to it, though. Sounds kinda old and hobbled. Kinda guy you’d see at the diner in a garrison cap with a bunch of pins on it, early-bird’in it with his paper all laid out on the counter. Vet’s a little better, but not by much. Also what you call a doctor for dogs. And so the army, whether sensing this or simply riding the same channel of the gestalt, did the working man a solid and elevated them all to warfighters.

--

There’s a way to look at this where the failure of the patriotic draftee army in Korea and Nam begets the professional, specialized army of the 80s and 90s which, as it fails its own missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, gives way to a sort of individualized cult of “the warrior ethos.” The army goes from something you volunteer or are volunteered for to serve your country and its interests, to a vehicle for improving yourself and gaining work skills (be all that you can be), to an institution whose very point is itself—you join the army to be and to have been in the army. To have the army experience so you can be part of an initiatory caste of “warfighting” veterans.

Never mind what you actually do when you’re in there; never mind what the army itself does—whether it wins or loses, whether it’s legal or illegal, whether it’s good or bad or makes any sense; never mind what good you’ll be for society, or yourself for that matter, when you come home from war.

It’s not about any of that, it’s all about you. As the web ads say, “if you served, you’re a veteran.” Ipso facto. This is incidentally a more or less complete inversion of the very idea of military service as “service”—rather than subsuming your identity in the collective will of the army, and through it the nation at large, the army serves to furnish you and other directionless young men your identity, along with a permanent buttrest of laurels.

We don’t have to wonder if our new Secretary of Defense falls into this camp, he’s said as much openly and repeatedly. He’s got the post-reg tattoos to prove it. One of his first diktats was for the armed forces to stop making and running pussy ads. You know, ads targeting girls and homos. Meaning ads depicting girls and homos. Meaning guys who could be homos—presumptive homos. We all know what I’m talking about here—sissies in glasses. Bring back the tough-guy dragon ads so that tough-guy kids will start enlisting again. Bring back the lava monster.

There’s a bizarre idea buried in this—that kids who wanted to join the army saw a commercial in which the army wasn’t badass enough for their liking, and so they decided not to join the army. “Oh, there’s girls? Not my life’s calling, I guess.” Regardless of whether or not this ever actually happened, and that’s one monumental IF, the real puzzler is why a professional military would want such a hypothetical recruit. “Long as it’s not gay and stuff.”

But enlistment’s up, or at least they claim it is, so what do I know. Our warfighter cup runneth over.

—

Sorry, I know I started this off with “new slang,” like the Burger King song, and all I’ve done so far is burned countless bits on two 20- and 60-year-old pieces of army slang. Not even slang, really, jargon. But here’s what I was trying to get at.

Earlier this month—shit, wait—earlier this year (!) I was watching Dr Phil using his vaunted self-help credentials to tag along on a handful of ICE raids in Chicago. In a prior time that alone would be a sufficient bummer, but we aren’t living in prior times. After one of the busts, the camera returned to the makeshift “command center” they were operating out of, where Dr Phil was sitting off the counter of a kitchenette sink. The raid hadn’t found the guy they were after, but they did pick up two other guys they could deport. This is how they said it, though: “We missed our main target, but did catch two collaterals.” Collaterals.

I’m old enough to remember the 90s iteration of the American Immigration Crisis (which, just to be clear, was identical to the ginned up immigration crisis of the last ten years), back when the debate centered on legal vs illegal aliens. Alien was, of course, and is, still is, the legal status of a person who isn’t a citizen of this country—it’s the legal term. That’s where alien meaning a space alien comes from; they’re like foreigners, but for Earth. It’s a metaphor.

People made such bank off this wordplay that by the 80s, the word alien by itself in idiomatic American English referred exclusively to the space kind, and if you were talking about a resident alien or someone like that then you had to specify it. People made additional bank off this conflation; there was a whole show on Fox called Alien Nation where the aliens (space) are also aliens (immigrants) and it became de rigueur for any hack comedian or political cartoonist doing an immigration bit to throw in an “ET phone home” or drawing of Alf. This actually in fact ran aground against for-real political correctness in the 90s, whose proponents raised the—let’s be fair, reasonable—point that intentionally mistaking poor Latin American workers for science fiction monsters was poisoning the well against them.

A sort of linguistic rochambeau followed, where the soft-hearted insisted on changing “illegal aliens” to “illegal immigrants” so they wouldn’t sound like Predator or something, while their rightward counterparts doubled down on being assholes and shaved the whole term down to “illegals.” Like the very nature of the people they were talking about was Crime, like they were just walking crime. It was fitting cop slang, if a little broad, and it stuck around while the left kept chipping away at “illegal immigrant” until it became “undocumented migrant” or whatever you’re supposed to say now.

Now they’ve taken the same razor to collateral damage. Scrub the damage part, that’s just taken for granted—the damage is implied. Damage is their purview after all, why would they even be talking about it if it didn’t involve damage? When all you are is a hammer, the world’s either nails or things you didn’t mean to hit. Nails and not-nails, targets and collaterals. Fucking collaterals. All the evil piled up in that word from half a century of casual murder.

Anyways, that’s what we are now, funds put up for these creeps’ mounting debts. Human obligations to be redeemed when their whole dogshit operation comes tumbling down. Or what’s the opposite of redeemed? Amortized.

They’re burying the COVID deaths on Hart Island. The last time I saw Hart Island was from a plane taking off out of Laguardia. I used to insist on flying out of there because I could get to it from my house in under 30 minutes and every time we took off I’d look out the window while the plane banked west and find Hart Island off the side of the Bronx. Usually I’d snap a picture too, provided my phone was charged. There’s probably more photos of that strange brown squiggle of land on my phone than any single other place or person.

Do you know about Hart Island? There was a five-year period of my life where I’m fully certain that this was the question I asked the most people. Well fine, after “How’s it going?” But it was the question I asked the most people in earnest.

The way it’d come up is people would ask me what I was working on. Sometimes I was working on something fairly interesting, or had just finished with something, and I’d tell them about that. Sometimes I wasn’t really working on anything, or I was but I didn’t feel like describing whatever it was, so I’d ask them if they knew about Hart Island. Most didn’t. I guess that’s probably changed now.

Here’s the history of Hart Island. For whatever reason I always run through it backwards. That’s just the way it works in my mind; it’s like doing an archeological dig, you can’t start from the bottom. So Hart Island is our potter’s field in New York. It’s where the homeless, the family-less, the John and Jane Does who die in the city get buried. It’s also where the stillborn babies of Catholic parents are sometimes buried, along with the severed limbs of members of some religious faith or another — although I’ve always been a little dubious of that last part.

The bodies arrive at Hart Island in plain wooden caskets and are stacked three deep in trenches dug by prisoners from Rikers. Technically, Hart Island is part of Rikers — it’s administered by the state Department of Corrections. To be selected for the burial detail you have to be in the final six months of your sentence so you’re a low flight risk. Not sure how necessary that precaution is or if they’ve ever had a prisoner try to escape from off of Hart Island — that’d be one bitch of a swim.

In the 80s and early 90s, during New York’s last plague days, many of the victims of AIDS were buried on Hart Island. The last authorized photos of Hart Island — or I think they were authorized, could just be the last widely released photos — were from this period, taken by a female photographer whose name escapes me who was somehow able to join a burial crew with a camera. I wish I could better remember the story, or that I had working wifi right now, but the images are good and lodged in my head. Black & white shots of black and white prisoners, mostly on the older side, shoveling in the sun next to unmarked crates of unnamed people. The caskets aren’t casket-shaped, the way they’d draw them in a cartoon, just straight rectangular pine or plywood boxes, like what you’d use to ship a whole bunch of curtain rods or oblong parts for a truck. Looking at them all neatly stacked, I had a difficult time convincing myself they contained actual human bodies. I had to really force myself to picture it properly, I think partially because of the shape but also because you really never see coffins on top of one another. Like cargo.

Before this period, back in the 60s, Hart Island was where New York’s Nike nuclear-defense missiles were housed. A friend of mine’s dad was in the Air Force during this time and actually in charge of the operation. The idea, as he described it to me, was that after the Distant Early Warning system and all the other radar networks we used to have picked up incoming missiles from the USSR, his team would try to shoot them down at more-or-less the last minute before they made it to the city. Well I guess you wouldn’t shoot them down, more like shoot them… away. I should see if I can ask him more about it, if he’s still around.

Prior to the missile battery, Hart had a wayward boys school, a psychiatric hospital, and a tubercularium whose chronology I forget, then before that Typhoid Mary’s house was on it, and then before that it was a prison camp in the Civil War. Oh and I left out the drug rehab that was there in the 1970s. You’re seeing the pattern here, right? It’s things we don’t know where to put and don’t like thinking about. Hart Island is like the underside of the city’s guestroom bed, or that weird crawl space on the side of the attic. If you look at it from above right next to City Island, it almost looks like a strange duplicate land mass, but withered and bereft of features, like a quickly fading afterimage or an artifact from a sloppy xerox, or a stillborn twin.

There are very few things in New York that could reasonably be called secrets. That’s just the nature of the beast. I was tryna take a girl out garbage-picking recently down in Dead Horse Bay on a sort of “Look what cool shit I know about” gambit, and she shot back links to two major articles and a 20-minute youtube doc all from the last three years. It’s like there’s a tacit 7- to 8-year cycle where writers will pick something from atlasobscura like Dead Horse Bay or King Zog’s mansion or one of the abandoned subway stations and profile it for the Times or the New Yorker then let it dwindle back down into mild obscurity before the next round of discoverers. Hart, however,’s not on this cycle.

Ever since it’s been run by the Department of Corrections, the official policy for Hart Island has been “no reporters.” It was originally just straight up “no visitors,” endy story, but a couple decades worth of activism forced them to loosen up a little, albeit just a little. The policy’s funny — not funny-ha-ha obviously, more like funny-not-well-thought-through. From what I can tell, it wasn’t put in place because they were doing something shady or awful. It’s because the whole idea is simply unpleasant. Burial practices are already something the average person doesn’t like thinking about — then you throw prison labor into the mix, strip away the frills and formality that make funerals respectable, add in the fact that most of the buried are from the city’s homeless population — it’s just not a feel-good story any way you slice it.

I’m pretty sure this is the way the DOC looked at it, that it didn’t make them look good even in the absolute best-case scenario, and since they could just say blanket “Nope,” that’s what they did. Naturally, however, instead of keeping Hart Island out of sight and mind, the full prohibition stoked the imagination of those who ran up against it and gave rise to rumors of horror-film conditions, bodies flung naked and coffinless into mass graves by swarthy, uncaring convicts; skeletal hands protruding from the poorly packed earth. The sheer notion that it was being kept hidden meant there had to be something to hide, and — in the classic counterintuitive model of urban legends — the more implausibly heinous the carnage described, the more plausible it somehow sounded.

Of the handful of people I asked “Do you know about Hart Island?” who answered yes, almost every one of them had a friend of their brother’s or some other apocryphal third-hand source who’d stumbled onto the island off a boat to take a drunken piss and then run screaming when a skeleton grabbed their ankle. And because there was no actual coverage to weigh it against, this Scooby Doo nonsense was taken and passed on as gospel. Even by me, though I talk all like I’m above it.

While Hart Island’s off-limits status made it a journalistic white whale for me and good fodder for small talk with the kind of grim, desensitized oddballs I like to hang out with, there were people legitimately angry about it. These were the family members and friends of those buried on the island. It’s a good reminder that everybody has at least somebody else in their life no matter how down and out you get. But there’s also a variety of ways you can end up unidentified at death — none too pleasant — or you can be unlucky enough to die from a new disease before it’s properly understood. The reason they took the early AIDS victims out to Hart was because they hadn’t yet eliminated the possibility that their bodies could be contagious. Same deal with COVID I imagine — they don’t know and they’re frightened.

No matter what put them in the Potter’s Field, all these people were people, had families, had friends. It’s a weird burden on the living to be denied access to their dead. Bad enough already to have lost a loved one in such lonely conditions without the added guilt of being unable to attend to their remains. This probably hits close to home with a lot of us right now. I remember when the first few people I knew died of COVID one of my first thoughts was, “I wonder how they’ll stack up all the memorials when we’re free to congregate again.” I kept a little mental tally, that I had at least X-number funerals to go to at some point in the future.

But I’m digressing, the point was that restricting the bereaved from visiting their loved ones’ graves is a particularly thoughtless and frankly cruel side effect of trying to avoid bad publicity. So — and again, no wifi here, so I’m working from memory — a coalition of I believe direct family members of the buried, homeless advocates, the photographer I mentioned above and maybe her husband?, and Catholic priests pressed the DOC to let them on the island. The priests’ interest was slightly divergent from the other three — they wanted to perform last rites on the trenches in case they contained any Catholics who’d died outside a state of grace. Strangely enough — or maybe not so strangely enough given the 1st Amendment and general government squeamishness over things involving religion — the last rites is what won them over. Once the priests were allowed on Hart Island, they served as a beachhead for the other groups.

So this is how I went to Hart Island: A friend forwarded me a link to a homeless advocacy website that had a listing for a monthly prayer meeting they’d arranged with the DOC. There were 10 to 15 slots per month, and you had to submit an application for the visitation unit or whatever it’s called at Rikers to run a background check on you to see if you could go. They were pretty clear about the fact that members of the media weren’t allowed. I’d been working at Vice for at least 5 years by this point, so I assumed they’d reject my application, but I gave it a shot. Can’t blame a boy for trying, right?

Somehow I was given a go. I’m still not sure how I managed to slip through the cracks; I’ve since met a number of writers and photographers who tried to go via this route and were summarily denied. Maybe they didn’t think Vice Magazine was a real thing. Maybe I just didn’t google well back then.

However it happened, I was emailed instructions to meet at a pier on City Island Harbor for the boat over to Hart Island. There were about 8 of us all told when the day came — a man heading up the group from the advocacy group, who I think may have been homeless in his past; a handful of seeming regulars, your run-of-the-mill nondescript church-going folk; myself; and a young lady in her late teens who confided in me that she’d signed up so she could write a story about it for her college newspaper. So that was the prayer-group side of things — 4 pray-ers and 2 surreptitious reporters. Solid ratio.

The DOC was represented by two men, both older, one in a genuinely sharp-looking suit and black wool overcoat, the other in a prison guard uniform about as rumpled as I’ve ever seen. The one in the suit was clearly in charge, he did a headcount with the homeless advocate then recited the rules for the trip. We would surrender our phones and cameras (this is back when they were still sometimes separate) before we were allowed on the boat, we were allowed to take personal notes but he could look at them and confiscate them if he didn’t like them, we had 45 minutes on the island, we had to stay with the group at all times on the island and the group had to stay in a purpose-built gazebo at all times on the island. He then collected our electronics in a pillow case and we boarded the ferry.

I had a small black moleskine I’d thought to jot a couple bible verses in in case someone wanted to look at it (I know, I am very clever). The young lady from college was writing in a spiral-bound notebook that immediately drew the besuited man’s attention. From the second she opened it on the several-minute boat ride over he clocked her with squinty eyes and peered very deliberately over her shoulder every time he moseyed past. I was beginning to put together that he was the guy who’d processed all our applications.

The other guy from the DOC couldn’t have given less of a crap about us or about anything. He was so relaxed it almost seemed like he was stoned or something. I started talking with him on the ferry — kinda to try and keep fancyman out of my grill — and found out that he was the Corrections officer in charge of the burial details from Rikers. Evidently, much like how the details themselves are made up of short-timers, the job of overseeing the crews is given to one of the most senior guards as a sort of sinecure since it’s an infrequent and undemanding gig. So that’s why he came across so dopey; he was practically retired.

We got off the ferry at a shabby-looking dock midway down the island’s west side. It’s hard to find a good vantage point of Hart Island from land. There’s a few blocks on City Island where you can get a composite glimpse, but unless you break into someone’s waterfront yard or one of the several marinas, you can’t really see the whole island until you get on the water. But once you do, whoa mama does it live up to its reputation.

First of all the whole thing’s completely flat; it’s kind of surprising just to look at it that the island doesn’t fully submerge at high tide every day. Then there’s about maybe ten trees total on it, and of course when I was heading over it was early March and a cold one at that, so they were bare and crooked looking. But the eeriest aspect of all is its skyline, if you’re allowed to call five buildings a skyline.

It looked like some weird time traveller’s island, or a really depressing version of Epcot Center. There were five distinctly identifiable time periods each represented by a solitary building. I sketched out a shitty little schematic of them in my notebook so I could remember their order. On the south end was a long, branchingly corridored institutional building — either the psychiatric hospital or the sanatorium or the school for wayward boys I think, if not all three — to its immediate north was a single-story standalone house, Typhoid Mary’s, I presume; then there was a blocky brutalist number from the 60s that I suspect is where the Air Force did their thing; then an old stone gothic-revival chapel from the turn of the century; and right where we were disembarking, an unpainted concrete box that the island’s head guard told me housed the island’s power dynamo, which he also told me was not working. All the buildings were visibly missing pieces.

The gazebo we’d been told we couldn’t leave was a very direct half-minute’s walk past the dynamo house into the middle of the skinny island. It looked out on a small memorial placard ringed by a horseshoe of flower bushes — guessing they were flower bushes since it hadn’t gotten warm enough for them to blossom. Next to the bushes there was a front-end loader being operated by a small crew in orange vests over Carharts — the top guard caught our sidelong glances at it and nipped the obvious suspicion in the bud.

“Don’t worry, they’re just working on the water line, we don’t bury people like that.” I saw the well-dressed guy wince as we all chuckled nervously.

After we all spaced ourselves out along the railing of the gazebo, the homeless advocate, who had a sort of Cornel West vibe going, or at least a sort of Cornel West beard, paired with a warm-looking houndstooth blazer and a braided prayer cap, began the service.

“Blessed are the poor.” Solid opener. “We stand here among the unknown. The almighty has his own purpose; he must have loved them…”

The speech was nice. I felt bad taking notes through it, so that’s all I wrote down. He spoke for maybe 4 or 5 minutes, though, then asked us to bow our heads in silent prayer. I bowed my head but kept my eyes open, like a bratty teen at his family’s church. I glanced at the college student who was just cruising away in her notebook, then at the DOC press guy in the suit, who was mad-dogging her from right outside the gazebo. Suddenly he trained his gaze at me and I clamped my eyes shut like I’d been caught.

When the advocate concluded the prayer, we had about 15 minutes to kill until the ferry came back for us. I heard the college girl not even trying to hide it, just lobbing interview questions at the press guy. He responded to one, “There are no mass graves on Hart Island. There are communal burial plots.” and I had to fake a cough to hide my laughter.

I used the rest of my 15 to talk more with Captain Relaxin’ (who was in fact a Captain). He really couldn’t have been more at odds with the constipated press guy, right down to their styles — it was cartoonish. I don’t know if he cottoned to the fact that I was media, but he gave me a classic tour guide’s rundown of interesting tidbits about the island, the history of all the buildings, the peak of burials at the end of the 80s when the city was facing both the Crack and AIDS epidemics and burying some 17,000 people a year on Hart Island.

I asked him if anybody on his details had ever tried to escape. “Man someone wants to get off here alive they better find some wood to knock on.” There wasn’t much wood around.

He walked me through an average week for him; it was mostly maintenance stuff, the burials only happened every so often. I forget if it was like once a week or more like once a month. Most of the time, though, his job sounded like being the super of a really busted tenement house.

“Man last week they called me for a fire and I had to drive all the way up from Staten Island, 3 in the morning.” I told him I had no clue what he was referring to.

“I live on Staten Island. So last week someone called in a fire on the island — “ I had to ask who would’ve seen the fire and who would’ve set it, “ — some guy on City Island; probably some teens or college kids who took a boat over and set off some firecrackers or something, maybe started a campfire. ANYWAYS — “ this was the point of the story “ — they get me out of bed at 3 in the morning, and like I said, I’m down on Staten Island. So I get out of bed, get dressed, get in my car, get on the BQE. By the time I get here it’s quarter to 4 and there’s no fire, no one around, so I just have to head on back home.”

I clucked in sympathy for his frustration and made a note of the fact that Hart Island was completely unguarded at night. That evening, when I got home, I immediately started calling around to see if I knew anyone who had access to a boat.

This is when I really started chatting it up about Hart Island. I’d get the ball rolling with some gal in a bar, see if she knew anything about it, then casually drop the fact that I was (possibly) the first reporter to openly visit Hart Island in 50 years. I usually left out the possibly.

It’s stupid to be proud of things like this. I know the mainstream media prides itself on taking pride for such things, but I’ve always prided myself for doing exactly the opposite, aside from the handful of cases like this where I don’t. As said, stupid.

I’d also tell them about my new goal with the island, to sneak a camera crew onto it in the middle of the night and conduct a seance. I lined it up three different times with three different boat owners. Each time something canceled it. The first owner got arrested. The second one I think was just humoring me and backed out when he realized I was serious. The third one something happened to his boat. I began feeling superstitious about the island. It was haunting me. I made a concerted effort not to talk about it just to try and get laid.

One night I was flying back into Laguardia after a long shoot. I’d been feeling gloomy the whole flight; probably a break-up brewing. The bell dinged for the seatbelt sign and Hart Island slid under the left wing as we banked into the final approach. I left the fuselage, sailed down fast, scared for the impact. The island grew and caught me. I stood upright. Bones enclosed my feet, they grabbed me and they pulled me down. I heard something severe and awful, like silence if it could be louder.

A flight attendant touched my shoulder to tell me to take my head off the tray table and to lock it up for landing. I woke with a start, and probably made an embarrassing noise of some kind. The bell dinged and to my left Hart Island slid under the wing as we banked into our final approach.

I can’t believe it’s really here. JFK day. Like many a glasses-wearer born between 19s 60 and 90, I’ve been awaiting this day’s document dump with an Xmas-eve level of antsiness. And so, naturally, like the rest of the internet, reading through the actual declassified files is one of the greatest letdowns of my brief life.

Where’s the secret treaty inviting the USSR to collaborate with NASA on the Apollo program? Where’s the shelved announcement ordering the complete withdrawal of all US military forces from South Vietnam? Where’s Marilyn Monroe’s secret daughter, of trash novel fame? This is just a bunch of expense reports and illegible field memos. Even the redacted parts seem like they’re probably boring.

The JFK assassination is the literal mother of all conspiracy theories, as in it gave birth to the phrase if not the entire phenomenon. As Hunter Thompson once said about who shot JFK, before confessing to the crime himself then getting in a shouting match in a crowded restaurant after his son threatened to turn him in for it, “a whole generation of American journalists is still embarrassed by their failure to answer that question.” No revelation — at least no revelation without aliens — could possibly have lived up to 50 years of bladder-popping anticipation. And of course, the fact that the CIA was allowed to stroke out a handful of names as well as hold back an entire raft of documents at the last minute means that not only is one of the key players still improbably alive (and playing grabass from his wheelchair, hinthinthinthint) but that the Great American Mystery of the 20th century will continue through the 21st as exactly that.

The Tao of Pooh reader in me always took this as the ultimate lesson of Kennedy’s death. Having honed my pattern recognition on its Christmas-tree-lights tangle of characters, factions, and motives over hundreds of hours in books and on BBSs, I eventually hit the same wall every JFK conspiracizer does: There’s no answer. Simple as that. From there you either drive yourself crazy going back over all the clues to find sub-clues and meta-clues, or you accept the fact that you will never ever ever know the complete story. Which is HARD. Remember how people reacted to the end of Lost? And this is real life. Something DID happen. And we will never, never never never, NEVAR know what it was. Maddening.

The saving grace for the can’t-accepters was the existence of these files and the fact that one day within most of their lives, they’d all be released. It held the same preservative spell on the faithful as Christ’s Second Coming or the revelation of the Hidden Mahdi or that Kalki thing Current 93 was really into. And now, like all the predicted doomsdays we’ve lived through since 2000, it’s been postponed. Possibly indefinitely. That’s religion for you.

My excitement over the JFK file release was re-stoked by World’s Greatest Reporter Ron Rosenbaum a couple weeks ago when he reported on a reporter who’d gone down to Mexico and done some genuine fresh reporting on an old side character in the saga. To bring the uninitiated up to speed: Two months before the assassination, Lee Harvey went to Mexico City for a few days and basically made himself a nuisance at the Cuban and Soviet embassies there, presumably in order to get a visa to Havana and/or Moscow. While there, according to Octavio Paz’s wife Elena Garro, Oswald was invited to a “twist party” at one of the Cuban embassarios’ house. What happened at that party, besides slightly outdated dancing, has long been a speculator’s wet dream. The new reporting which caught Ron Rosenbaum’s eye was an interview with an attendee of the twist party which ultimately yielded the suggestion that the Cuban embassy folks may have told Oswald about all of the CIA’s assassination attempts on Fidel Castro and, whether they explicitly proposed it or he just took up the hint on his own accord, that put the beans in the baby’s ear that presicide was fair game.

So fiddle-dee-me when I’m scrolling through the archive last night and chance click on a file that for some reason is dated 00/00/0000. The pdf is an FBI memorandum on Señora Elena Garro de Paz, progenitress of the twist party story, and her worthiness as a source. The memo is pretty ho-hum up ’til the last page, item 10 on the author’s bullet list. Give it a peep.

The fact that an incident written off by the FBI as immaterial to their investigation is nevertheless “disturbing” to the CIA — so much so that they apparently insisted on not pursuing it — is a juicy little Lucy to start with. But the reasons given are pure paranoiac paydirt. Let’s enumerate them Count-style.

1. ha ha ha, The CIA recognizes that jurisdiction in this case belongs to the FBI. Yeah, this is an agency really known for its adherence to procedural boundaries.
2. ha ha ha, It’s tough to conduct an investigation in a foreign country. It’s also tough to operate a clandestine airline in a foreign hemisphere but somehow they managed that one.
3. ha ha — fine, I agree this is getting old — 3. the Mexico City station chief was pals with the Interior Minister. OK, that’s a little bit intriguing; why would their relationship preclude asking questions about a dance party at a diplomat’s apartment — a diplomat for a third (read: exterior) country — at which a soon-to-be presidential assassin was twisting, either again or the night away? Which brings us to
4. “the Garro scenario may have involved agents of the CIA.” In order of likelihood, this explanation roundly tops the other three and its implications are… well… implicational.

If there were spooks at the party where LHO got the idea to pop the president, that’s one of several black eyes for the agency. At best (for them) somebody should have flagged this would-be communist defector who’s being regaled with stories of how his government has tried to murder the leader of the country he’s been publicly advocating “fair play” for for over a year. At worst, and let’s be generous most likely, they’re the ones who told him. Whoops is very right.

Since, as explained above, I am of the Zen camp when it comes to this assassination, either case works for me. Whether the CIA let it or made it happen, or didn’t stop it is a matter for the diehard conspiracy junkies looking to cover the spread. In simple betting man’s terms, however, I’m calling it for the Company. There’s your Kennedy assassination plot, as the Scots say: It was the CIA, in the book depository, with the Oswald.

See y’all at the Hinkley record declassifying!

Atlantic City often gets pegged as the East Coast Las Vegas, which is unfair to both of them seeing as how AC predates the westerly Sin City by half a century, and for all its indefensible crimes against culture, Las Vegas has yet to cede property to the tyrant king of tastelessness, somehow-president Donald Trump. For the better part of the 80s and 90s Atlantic City was Trump Town, a municipal monument to conspicuous consumption of the lowest, most brain-damaged variety.

If Vegas is the Great American Mirage, a manifestation of pure wealth sprouting from the sterile Nevada desert, then AC is the Great American Veneer, where the very idea of money is stretched to its tackiest, least plausible breaking point. Nowhere on earth is as cheap looking — and my personal reference points include Soviet-built housing blocs in the Kazakh sticks as well as a DIY floating school in Nigeria’s largest slum. The casinos look like brutalist 70s government buildings wearing dollar-store casino costumes across their facades, and they tower over the most bombed-out residential strips this side of Gary, Indiana. Detroit looks like a Lecorbusier by comparison.

Growing up in Atlanta, I learned that running sky-bridges between buildings has less to do with projecting a futuristic aesthetic than with preventing members of the indoor class from having to observe or interact with the street-dwelling set, and Atlantic City’s resort blocs boast the most skywalks per capita of any city I’ve seen in America. Steve Wynn even convinced the city to build a direct off-ramp from the Atlantic City Expressway Connector to his would-be casino so that his out-of-town patrons wouldn’t have to pass through the city’s surface streets on their way to gamble. (Donald sued the city over this “private driveway” to Wynn’s property but withdrew the suit once he got his own exit; justice.)

All the safeguards aren’t keeping AC’s local low-rollers insulated from much. Even by casino standards, the resorts of Atlantic City’s boardwalk paint a dismal picture. It’s depressing enough to see the same dozen or so retail chains and restaurant franchises in cities across the country, but the absence of any chains is a very distinct sort of sad. It’s practically un-American. Apart from a Dunkin Donuts and a Howard Johnson that looked to be pushing 50, the strip along which the Tropicana, the Showboat, and the Taj Mahal all sit is as devoid of corporate signage as East Berlin in the 80s. The only residue of branding I saw was a billboard for Guy Fieri’s Chophouse-Steakhouse (evidently its proper name) sandwiched between stock images of suspiciously happy gamblers outside the very empty Bally’s Atlantic City. Even Guy’s frosted tips appeared weathered.

—

When Trump first set his eyes on the jewel of the Jersey Shore, legal gambling in Atlantic City was just six years old. Not even old enough to gamble itself! In what would become classic Trump fashion, the Donald masked his salivating bucklust with an air of arrogant pseudo-/not-quite-philanthropy. His first great You’re Welcome to the city came with Trump Plaza (né Harrah’s at Trump Plaza), built in partnership with gambling titan Harrah’s and quickly stripped of their name to distance the operation from their low-stakes reputation. Sorry, I mean to distance Trump’s operation from Harrah’s low-stakes reputation — I agree that could’ve gone either way. As reported in the New York Times, Harrah’s acquiesced to the rechristening “reluctantly” and “only in response to [Trump’s] frequent and impassioned requests.” After a year of shitty performance, Trump sued his partners for mismanaging the Plaza, telling the court “I gave them a Lambourghini and they didn’t know how to turn on the key.” Chalk it up to my middle-class upbringing that I didn’t know Lambos have keys that themselves need to be started.

Trump’s two major casinos, the Plaza and the Castle (site of syndicated game shows Yahtzee and Trump Card, hosted by Larry Hovis from Hogan’s Heroes and third-round NFL draft pick Jimmy Cefalo, respectively), stumbled along to moderate success through the end of the 80s before Trump pulled the trigger on his biggest eyesore yet, the Trump Taj Mahal. Pior to Trump’s involvement, the Taj’s original contracteur was James Crosby, whose first company, Unexcelled Chemicals, was fined for using child labor in the 1950s, and whose second, the Mary Carter Paint Company, was fined by the FTC for falsely advertising a “buy 1 get 1 free” offer on paint cans which were only sold as two-packs. That plucky little paint company became Resorts International when their business model shifted to casinos in the 1960s. It may also have been a CIA front involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion and included Meyer Lansky and the Rothschild family among its investors, depending how tinfoil-hat you want to get, but suffice it to say, not the squeakiestly clean of real estate concerns when Trump outbid Merv Griffin to buy it following James Crosby’s death.

While its namesake was built in memory of 17th-century Indian emperor Shah Jahan’s beloved wife, the Trump Taj Mahal was built in living memory of its new namesake. The word Trump was emblazoned not just on the casino’s exterior wherever space allowed, but upon every available surface therein. Chairbacks, matchbooks, phone directories, emergency escape-route maps all insistently reminded their user to whom they should direct their thanks. It wouldn’t surprise me if the bible in each room had an additional stamp on its flyleaf so that it read “Provided — TRUMP — by the Gideons International.”

The Trump Taj Mahal also cost roughly $300 million more to complete than its Indian predecessor (adjusting for over 300 years of inflation), although it did beat the Taj Mahal Agra to its grand opening in a third of the construction time. And how grand an opening it was! As Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous graciously publicized in 1990, the red-carpet inauguration of the Trump Taj Mahal was attended by then-unsullied Michael Jackson along with other turn-of-the-decade notables in a saturnalia of garish black-marble opulence and the kind of cretins who are drawn to it. A veritable bukkake of bad taste.

Twenty-seven years later to the day (give or take a few months) a much differently-attired mob crowded the Taj Mahal’s voluminous entryway. Well, honestly not that different. The line of untucked shirts and ill-fitting jeans snaked its way around the Taj’s port caleche and down the driveway, undeterred by the grey summer drizzle or the fact that it was a workday. A pair of Atlantic City cops directed incoming traffic to the sidestreets, past the closed and empty parking lot beneath the casino’s famous round sign, the ribbon above “Taj Mahal” bare white where bold red text once proclaimed its owner’s name. At some point before it closed last October, the word Trump had been methodically scrubbed from every place it had previously festooned. So methodically that there wasn’t even a palimpsest on any of the walls, chairs, tables, or placards that for decades had barked that commanding syllable at every passing eye.

Despite the newfound Trumplessness of the former Trump Taj Mahal, the pickers who queued patiently for the liquidation sale starting that morning had come not so much for the cut-rate deals on poker chairs and extremely well-used bed linens (the flatscreens may have been another matter), but for the opportunity to plunder the halls of our somehow-fucking president’s grand monument to winning, and to take home a memento mori of its ultimate loss. That or a pool umbrella.

The liquidation sale was being run, in remarkably hands-on fashion, by Don Hayes, whose company North Carolina LiquidatorS (NCLS) has been selling off the detritus of Trump’s failures for going on four decades. Perched on a stool in front of a display stage piled with sample goods — including a king- and queen-sized bed, several light fixtures, and three copies of the same framed print of a palm tree — Don explained the mechanics of the sale to each fresh wave of shoppers through the lobby in a five-minute spiel that sounded like it had been repeated somewhere in the thousands of times. Every item up for purchase had a tag with its price and item number (the sample goods bore oversize mockups for the near-sighted and easily confused); for big items or ones affixed to the wall you were supposed to write down the number on a little white form and bring that to the cashier — otherwise whatever you could carry to the elevator was yours. Don closed with a joke about dragging a bed into the lobby that he’d clearly ceased expecting laughter for sometime in the last decade. Then he wished everyone an awkward “happy shoppings” and gave himself a 30-second breather before starting again.

The NCLS staff was about as mixed as lots come; a haphazard assortment of college-age kids, folks just north of retirement age, and a middle ground that I could only describe as obvious job-seekers. Questions and more often than not the questioners too were directed to Don, who responded off-microphone and mid-spiel with the kind of patience that seems purchased at the eventual cost of sanity. His contempt for the type of customer this type of business entices to drive upward of three hours on a Thursday morning — a contempt he did a superhuman job of hiding through most of his interactions and in his general mien — nevertheless showed through his eyes during these impromptu Q&As, and with perfectly just cause.

My own questions abounded as I entered the lobby, though of a markedly different ilk than the ones taxing Don on his stool:

Who would buy all this crap? Or more pressingly, who would buy any of it?

Vases and planters a hand taller than me were arranged in rows three deep next to the old concierge’s desk. Each of the lobby’s three chandeliers bore a price tag in the low four figures. Surrounding the escalators stood a phalanx of waist-high clay garbage cans like the terra cotta warriors of Xi’an if they were garbage cans. I had my answer on this last item almost immediately: A mom and her teenage son were lugging a can to the somehow already 20-person-long checkout line.

“Do you guys run a hotel too?” I asked. “No,” said the teen, with a mysterious sense of excitement, “We’re going to put it in our backyard!”

After selecting two pool loungers (25 bucks!) from a cordoned-off area of the old casino floor filled with outdoor furniture, I convinced an eager 20-something NCLS employee to watch my chairs and made my way to the elevator bank. The liquidation sale was being done floor by floor, with the top four open first and the next ones down to be unlocked as each preceding story was exhausted. Well, not quite the top — floors 46 through 50 had been readied to be rifled through — the 51st floor was the penthouse and off-limits to us liquidatees.

“I don’t even have the key to that floor,” confessed the elevator operator, another NCLSer. He let our car out on the highest floor he could access and everybody hustled down the un-air-conditioned hall to claim some crap. It was only half an hour into the sale but all the rooms looked picked clean. Actually, ransacked is a better word. There was nothing clean about it. Pillows and couch cushions strew the floors, mattresses lay half off the beds as if someone had hoped to find a wallet hidden beneath them or a cache of pornography, wallpaper was torn in wide strips halfway down from the ceiling. I unconsciously expected to see a murdered body every time I entered a bathroom. But no, just another heavily stained toilet.

The 49th and 50th floors’ suites were a little more promising. Brown leather sofas sat tagged in front of electric fireplaces, and a couple of VCRs and leopard print “fainting couches” were still up for grabs. The separate bedrooms had jacuzzis on a carpeted plinth surrounded by mirrors, naturally including the ceiling. On the control panel for the water jets of the first hot tub I saw, I noticed a square patch of glue where somebody had removed the instruction placard. And then again on the second one. It was only down the hall in a suite that hadn’t been fully stripped that I found one still attached and realized why these little metal signs were worth prying off: engraved at the top in drop-shadowed capslock were the words “TRUMP TAJ MAHAL.” They were the last overlooked indicators of the place’s once-proud owner.

—

At the end of the Trump Taj Mahal’s first year, the casino was poised to default on its investors. This wasn’t because it was doing bad business. Unlike the Plaza and the Castle, the latter of which famously raked in a whopping $250,000 in its first six months (undoubtedly Harrah’s fault, or their name’s, or somebody’s — not Donald’s though!), the Taj was something of a cash cow. So much so that it drove its competing sister properties into bankruptcy. The rub was that Trump, the credited author of the The Art of the Deal, had financed his endeavor with bonds tied to a 14% interest rate. To avoid having to declare bankruptcy right off the bat, Donald’s dad, Fred, stopped by the Taj and bought $3.35 million worth of chips, which is either a hell of a nice Christmas present or a severely illegal loan depending on whether or not you’re the New Jersey Commission on Casino Control.

Incidentally, the guy next to me in line the morning of the sale, a former card dealer at the Taj named Art, told me he hoped to buy a bunch of old chips and doctor them up to cash in at a solvent casino, though he eventually claimed to be joking. Whether or not he was (his accent made it tricky to tell), none of the casino’s old chips or cards was for sale. Maybe one of the other Trumps had attempted another last-ditch bailout.

In addition to all the tagged fineries, the Trump Taj Mahal left behind some 3,000 employees when it turned off its slots — about twice the number of jobless card dealers and bootblacks the Plaza left in its wake two years earlier.

Walkering down the hallway of the 50th floor was an older gent in a Trump Plaza windbreaker. His nurse was carrying a vase a few steps behind him. A few very slow steps behind him. When I asked what he did at the Plaza (my initial question, if he had in fact worked at the Plaza, was met with a Don Hayesian eyeroll) he said he “wandered the halls and answered questions.” He then muttered, “Yep, it’s the end of an era.” When I asked him if it was the end of a good or a bad era he just kept moseying away and began to hum something I’m about 80% sure was “Que Sera Sera.”

At one end of the 50th floor was a club room with a kitchen and baby grand piano priced at a couple thousand bucks. As I clanked out the theme from Top Gun with my free hand and readjusted my grip on a $25 combination VCR/DVD player in the other, a boisterous young frat type came in carrying an armchair, tailed by his permissive girlfriend.

“Dude! You just missed me taking a shower!” he proudly announced. “No I didn’t,” I thought as I waited for the two to clear the room before trying my hand at the theme song from Life Goes On.

On the stairwell to the 49th floor I bumped into a local news crew, one of at least four covering the sale as evidenced by the number of microwave vans in the driveway, and immediately thought of the proud showerer and his poor, poor girlfriend. Sure enough, if you google-news Trump Taj Mahal, there are multiple stories of a young man taking a shower (in his boxers (lame)) during the liquidation sale, with his girlfriend standing there, holding the chair, going, “I can’t believe you’re doing it, Chet.” Multiple stories. On days like these, I can see why Trump hates the fucking press.

—

Although the original decor didn’t meet most people’s (present company excluded) definition of classy, I was disappointed to learn that at some point following Lifestyle’s 1990 exposé, the Trump Taj Mahal had undergone a full refurnishing. The black marble countertops in the suites and maroon bidets still bore the stamp of Donald’s aesthetic imprimatur, but otherwise the color palette was the muted mousey browns and cremes that Crate & Barrel was hawking in the mid-00s.

No one expects a New Jersey casino owned by Donald Trump to be tastefully accoutered. No one, apparently, but Donald Trump.

This is to me the man’s cardinal sin — above the bullying, the smug bravado, the aggro business practices, the illiteracy (both social and regular), the open lying, the bad diet — as well as potentially the root cause of all the above: The guy has no sense of self-awareness. None whatsoever. A self-aware Donald Trump (just attempt the paradox with me) would embrace his tackiness. He would take a poker den named for one of the greatest architectural marvels in human history and just garish the ever-loving shit out of the place. Neon lights, leopard print everything, infinity mirrors on all the walls, not just his name but his FACE staring at you from chips and matchbooks and the backs of chairs. Instead, you have this pathetic suburban mom attempt at class: decorative wicker balls, brass pineapple finials on the bedposts — burnished brass, not shiny — faux archaeological stoneworks mounted on the walls and labeled “pop art” (this one could be NCLS’s fault).

These are the signifiers of a person who earnestly believes himself to be the paragon of wealthy refinement; the housewares equivalents of his scotch-taped neckties and million-dollar weave. As Esquire reporter and all-around master journalist Ron Rosenbaum discovered when he interviewed Trump in the mid-80s about his desire to negotiate nuclear arms talks with the Soviets and France, there isn’t an iota of irony in Donald’s worldview or self-appraisal. He believes everything he says and assumes the rest of us do too. Hence his insistence on declaring criticism of him categorically “false.” This is even spookier in light of his outings in supposed self-parody. When he takes the ring in Wrestlemania Whichever to piledrive whoeveritwas, he isn’t joking. Look at his face: This is a man who believes he’s the type of natural “tough” who can take a ripped 20-year-old athlete to the floor.

—

Back in the lobby the checkout line had grown longer than the entry line, which itself was — against all logic — still growing as the rain kept coming down. Someone from NCLS had found a stable of luggage carts for shoppers to haul their loot in. I requested one to make my pile more portable, but the waiting list was 12 names deep. By this point I had accumulated an electric fireplace, a poker chair, two large framed prints (one of the original Taj Mahal, a comparison I wouldn’t have been eager to draw were I in the interior decorator’s shoes), an orange patio umbrella without a base, the lounge chairs, and a folding luggage rack, oh yeah! and my DVD/VCR, all being dutifully minded by my young NCLS staffer, who informed me he’d had to chase away numerous scavengers while I was upstairs — probably humping for a tip. I left the goods in his care once more to see what everyone else had scrounged.

Two young ladies had stacked a dining room’s worth of chairs on their carts in the teetering manner of a classic acrobatic routine. “Saves me from having to go to Ikea!” one of them cheerfully chirped by way of explanation.

Two middle-age men behind her seemed to have secured every lamp shaped like a camel from the open floors, some 15 total. “We’re going to keep these in a closet to give out as gifts,” they reasoned, as much to me it sounded like as to themselves or each other. Nestled amid the lampshades was their real score, an ice bucket with “TRUMP Hotels & Casino Resorts” printed on one side. This was the original name of Trump Entertainment Resorts, Inc., the company Trump founded in the mid-90s and to whom he sold the Taj for $890 million as a way of shuffling around the mountainous debts he’d accrued in its construction and first year of operation. Without snitching on my lamp buddies, I checked in with Don Hayes on the status of such rare Trump-branded merch.

“Those should have all been cleared out,” he told me, “We can get sued for selling anything with his name on it. He’s done it before. If anybody finds anything with Trump on it, it’ll be taken and thrown in the garbage.”

I nervously felt my pockets for the shape of the jacuzzi placard, as well as two travel-size bottles of Trump-brand mouthwash and moisturizer I’d discovered rifling through the drawer of the lobby shoeshine station. Don had fielded enough questions, I decided, as I returned to my pile and set to figuring out how to lug it into line for checkout.

—

The failure of the Taj Mahal isn’t much of a shocker for today’s Atlantic City. Two years before its closure, four of the other big boardwalk casinos bit the dust, including Trump Plaza. It’s a hard racket. And Donald pulled out all the stops to try and make it work. He opened a franchise of loathsome NYC strip club Scores in the main building. He tried to use eminent domain to evict octogenarian homeowner Vera Coker from her octogenarian home so he could annex the property. He even filed a lawsuit to prevent Stockton University from using the neighboring Showboat casino as a campus instead of a gambling warren (college kids are notorious low-rollers).

It’s possible that his accumulation of terrible karma is what finally 86’d him from AC, but as Trump supporters love to point out, every successful businessman has a few failures under their belt. Of course, if Trump truly bought into this defense you’d think he wouldn’t mind having his name on old casino flotsam being sold to the kind of chuckleheads who’d dedicate a Thursday morning to standing in line for the honor of buying them. It feels like “You win some, you lose some” — like most books in his house — is a saying Trump’s never read past the first comma.

In Percy Shelley’s meditation on vanitas “Ozymandias,” helpfully digested for Trump-style movie-learners by the villainous robot in Aliens: Covenant, the titular pharoah has ironically foretold the crumbling of his glorious empire by engraving on the plinth of his leggy statue the injunction: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

In Trump’s version, the epitaph would have been sandblasted clean years before the traveller from an antique land surveyed the colossal wreck and he’d be prevented by court order from mentioning the decay round which the lone and level sands stretch far away. And in the meantime, of course, dude is still cranking out plenty of works to look on and despair.