I Wish I Believed in Doggie Heaven

When I say that I wish I believed in doggie heaven, I am not being sarcastic. I am not being ironic.

For the moment, I am not being my usual smartass. I promise to re-assume that role momentarily.

But I really do wish I did. Believe in doggie-heaven, that is. I envy people who believe that all dogs go to heaven. When they lose their beloved little canine pals, they believe that those little pals get to spend eternity romping joyfully in some sun-drenched meadow in Elysium. 

That's so consoling. And I do so envy them. Because that consolation is so needed. There is no heartbreak like the loss of a beloved pet. It's just like the loss of a child, and there's no getting around it.

I don't know to what extent my ex-wife believes in doggie heaven. Probably she doesn't. But she has always been a huge dog-lover, and when we lost our "little girl," our miniature schnauzer Alexandra, in 2008, and I was crying "like a fire in the sun" as Bob Dylan put it, Valerie consoled with me with the very image I just mentioned, that Alexandra was at that moment romping in some sun-drenched meadow. Healthy again, strong again, able to see and run and bark again, as she had not been shortly before her death at age 16. In fact toward the end of her life Alexandra couldn't even handle steps: when we put the pups outside, she had to be carried.

Belief is such a balm. I envy people who have it.

I'm thinking about such things right now because I know one thing is true: if there were such a thing as doggie heaven, no one would deserve to be there right now more than my friend Callie, who died last month.

I never did take a picture of Callie,
but this little character could have been
her twin. She looked just like this.

Callie was a light-brown chihuahua. She was tiny. So tiny I could pick her up with one hand. Like Alexandra, she was old. Maybe 16 when she passed away. But her death still came as a shock to me because of its timing. I departed on July 30 of this year for Tbilisi, Georgia, where I am currently serving as an English teacher. I couldn't take Callie with me, so I left her with my sister. I knew she would be well taken care of at my sister's, cuddled, loved, given treats and made to feel like family, just as I had tried to make her feel in the one year that she and I got to spend together.

I arrived in Tbilisi on Aug. 2nd. One week later my sister informed me in an e-mail that Callie had died peacefully in her sleep.

Okay, she was 16. In dog-years that's 112, or so I've always been told. But to die so soon after I'd left the country? Did she die because she was pining for me? Did she die because I had stuffed her full of cookies and cupcakes while she was alive, unaware that she may have been diabetic? These questions tortured me. And yes, I cried.

Carla consoled me. "She had run her course," she said. "She never had much TLC until you came along. You did fine by your little doggie friend."

I tried. But somehow when your little doggie friend dies six days after you leave the country, and after you've tried your best to set her up with a good home, you feel responsible.

For the year that we got to spend together, Callie was my best friend in the world. In fact I was often made to feel that she was my only friend in the world.

I hope Callie didn't die because she missed me. I knew that my sister, and my niece Alicia, would make her feel part of a family. That's why I left her there. Carla had four other little dogs and two cats, so I figured Callie would have good nap-taking company. And in fact perhaps a day or two before Callie died, Carla did send me a photo of Callie curled up in nap-mode with Golden Boy, the big, friendly orange cat. He was twice her size.

Callie deserved to have a family. Before I came along, she didn't have much in that direction. Not that John and Mayra Hansgen, my landlord and landlady for the year I lived in California, were mean to her or anything. No, they treated her fine. It's just that they both had jobs and were most of the time not home, and Callie's only companion on their patio most of the time was Negra, another aged chihuahua, who was as mean and nasty as Callie was sweet.

Callie had been a stray. John and Mayra's daughter had picked her up and brought her home. That's really all I knew. The daughter gave Callie TLC when she was around, but she was only around about once a week. The rest of the time Callie was alone with Negra, something I wouldn't wish on anybody.

Then, in the summer of 2010, I came along. I had just come back out to California from the east coast, and was renting a room from John and Mayra. I paid little attention to any of the dogs at first. John and Mayra had four of them: Brandy and Koko were big dogs; they stayed mostly along one side of the house. Callie and Negra were the little ones; they stayed on the patio.

I was unaware of the doggie-politics of the household until one day when I happened to come out the back door and saw Callie lying on her back on the pavement, one paw scrunched up to her face, Negra standing over her. My first thought was that Negra was bullying Callie and that Callie had assumed the "submissive posture." I intervened. "Negra! You leave Callie alone, you little bastard!" I chased Negra away and scooped Callie up. Callie was terrified. I tucked her underneath my T-shirt and took her into my room. With her little head poking out of my collar, I sat in my computer chair and rocked her quietly until she calmed down.

As it turned out, Negra had not been bullying Callie after all. Callie was epileptic, and she had been having a little seizure.

But the experience bonded us, Callie and me. After that Callie decided that I was her very best friend. Whenever I would come back from driving my taxicab, early or late, if Callie were awake or should happen to awaken, as soon as I came through the patio gate she would climb out of her doggie-bed and here would come this tiny figure, trotting across the patio after me. Callie followed me wherever I went.

Animals are so great. They love you without guile, without agenda and without expectation. They expect nothing in return. They just love you because they love you. So unlike people. Callie decided that the thing she wanted most in this world was just to be with me. If I were there, she was there. How many times did I accidentally kick her because she was tiny and, when I came into the room, I didn't see that she was getting right under my feet? How many times did I accidentally whack her with the patio gate when I opened it upon returning from my taxi, not realizing that, having heard my approach, she was standing right there at the gate waiting for me to come in?

These mishaps broke my heart every time they happened.. And I would always pick Callie up, stroke her little head and apologize over and over. And she always forgave me immediately.

As I said, so unlike people.

Mayra didn't want Callie in the house because she knew that Callie, and Negra too, would piddle on the carpets if they were let inside. I defied Mayra, to hell with her. The carpet in my room had been ruined with pet stains before I even moved in. What the hell? I would let Callie in, but keep my door closed so she wouldn't venture out into the hallway. But every now and then I might go down the hall into the kitchen for something and forget to close my door. Sure enough, a moment later I would turn around and there would be Callie, standing in the kitchen door just looking at me with those big brown eyes, as if to say, "Are you still here, Daddy? Did you leave me?"

"No, I'm right here, Sugar Plum," I would assure her, then scoop her up and take her back into my room. I'd put her on the bed (she was too little to hop down) where she would make a little nest for herself among the pillows and curl up for a nap.

Sometimes Callie was very insistent about wanting to be picked up. I'd be sitting at my computer doing something, and I would feel her tiny front paws on my leg. I'd look down and she'd be looking up at me, again with those big brown eyes to which I could not possibly say no. "Pick me up!" Those eyes demanded. "I want to sit in your lap!"

I always did. And she would stretch out on my lap and go to sleep. But those naps were always short because I was forever having to stand up for something. This inconvenienced Callie, but again, she was very forgiving. She always came back.

But Callie's very favorite place was next to me in bed. And I don't mean on top of the quilt. She liked to burrow down under the covers and curl up right next to my skin. I usually did not let her do this; I was afraid she would burrow down there and, in her sleep, piddle on the sheets, forcing me to strip the bed and wash everything the next morning. It happened a few times. No, usually when she began to "burrow," I would scrunch the covers up tight so she couldn't get under them. After a few moments she would get the message and go make herself a nest among the pillows.  If she couldn't be right next to me, being a foot or two away was the next best thing.

But sometimes I would let her burrow, and she was never happier than when she was curled up in a little ball, right against my back, happily and peacefully asleep next to her best pal, me.

Callie often didn't get enough to eat because Negra was such a bully. Negra would hog all the food, and if Callie tried to come up and get some, Negra would snap at her and chase her off. I noticed this, as did John and Mayra. Callie was often fed separately from Negra. We would put her up on the patio table where Negra couldn't get at her and let her have her share of the food. John often gave the doggies chicken as a treat, and made sure Callie got her share. I would also give her treats, a diced-up frankfurter perhaps, or a cookie or a cupcake. I often stopped at Albertson's while driving my cab in order to make sure that when I came home I would have something in the way of a treat that I could crumble up for Callie in a little bowl.

When I was preparing to leave for this overseas teaching job, I agonized about what might happen to Callie. In a perfect world, I would have taken her with me, but pets weren't allowed. I did not want to leave her at the Hansgen's. It wasn't that John and Mayra were mean to her, of course not. But Negra was mean to her, and John and Mayra were, for much of the day, not home. I wanted Callie to be some place where she might get at least some of the love and affection I had tried to lavish on her during the year she and I got to spend together. I spoke to John, and he readily agreed that, if I could find a place where Callie might get more TLC (and less Negra) than she was getting at his house, well, that was okay with him. So I took Callie, and John, who had bonded thoroughly with my cat Humboldt, whom I had brought along when I moved in, well, he got to keep Humboldt. We did a swap, Callie for Humboldt. And I think Callie and Humboldt both did well.

I would like to think that Callie was happy during the one week of life that remained to her after I left the United States. My guess was that she would maybe pine for me for a day or two, then get used to being at Carla's and settle in with her new family. There wasn't much time for that, as it turned out. But I do hope that when she breathed her last on that Saturday night after I flew away, she was having a sweet dream about ... oh, maybe romping in a sun-drenched meadow somewhere, healthy, strong, able to bark again.

For the time being, Callie rests in my sister's backyard alongside Honey, my nephew Joey's dog who died three years ago. They both sleep beneath a beautiful, blooming yellow forsythia, a cutting from a tree which belonged to my late father, and which he gave my sister about a year before he died. So one corner of the yard is a memorial both to my father and to beloved doggie-friends. My father loved dogs. Peace be upon them, all three, and also upon those people I envy so, who believe that all dogs go to heaven.

Down and Out in Tbilisi

I am in Tbilisi, the capital of what used to be the Soviet Republic of Georgia, and is now just Georgia. But I want that understood right off the bat. I am not in Ted Turner's Georgia, I am in Josef Stalin's Georgia.

What am I doing here? At the moment, not much. I came here ostensibly to teach English. The Georgian Ministry of Education is going full-court press on teaching Georgian children (and cops) to speak English, and at the moment is importing English teachers by the truckload. I was among a truckload of about 20 or so who arrived here about two weeks ago. By the way, and without any false modesty, I'm a hell of a teacher.

I was supposed to be teaching in the tiny mountain hamlet of Stepantzminda. It's about 100 miles north of here, not far from the Russian border. I went there, and lasted about 36 hours. I was supposed to be living with a "host family." Well, my host family and I had what the Americans these days call "issues" with each other.  I think they thought I was crazy. I have a habit of muttering under my breath when sitting in front of a computer. I think from that alone they concluded that I was some sort of sociopath. For my part, I didn't like the way they treated me as if I were invisible. I had been told all sorts of things about Georgian hospitality. These people treated me like I wasn't there. The first night I arrived they didn't even offer me any supper. When I got hungry I had to go down the road and buy bread and cheese at a store.

Then there was their toilet. It didn't work. It just ran and ran and ran, and no one seemed the slightest bit interested in fixing it. Hey, I ain't taking a shit in a toilet that won't flush. At three a.m. on the first of my two nights there when I felt "the urge," I had to go out int the backyard where they kept their dog, chickens and horse and take a shit in the garden. I kicked dirt over it with my shoe. What is this, Tobacco Road? Get me outta here.

So. They didn't want me and I didn't want them. I hardly had time to learn the horse's name (It was Malchik, the Russian word for "little boy.") In less than 48 hours I was sent back to Tbilisi. That was okay with me. The countryside around Stepantzminda was jaw-dropping in its beauty -- towering mountains, some capped with snow. But the town itself wasn't much: 135 people and about 400 cows. I'm glad I was spared spending a Sunday there. The temptation to open my veins for something to do might have been overpowering, and I have not yet been to Italy. If I'm going to die, I want to see Naples first.

In truth, bad karma has been dogging me since I got here. I lost my wallet (although it did turn up). I also lost my passport. It did not turn up, and I had to go to the American embassy and get it replaced. Now, I spent a dozen years working in Amerian embassies and consulates, and they are just about my least favorite places on earth. Then, just six days after I got on the plane in Los Angeles, the news came that Callie, my beloved little chihuahua doggie pal, had died in her sleep. Just one bad thing after another.

When I became upset about losing my wallet, then became equally upset about losing my passport, "Giga," the bureaucrat who locally manages the program that brought us here, decided he was going to send me back to the United States. How dare you get upset about your wallet disappearing, he implied? There must be something wrong with you.

We got into a spirited argument about that, but finally struck a compromise: I can stay in-country and teach, but I cannot live with a "host family." I have to have my own place.

This will be more expensive, but it actually suits me just fine. I had been living in a rented room in California for a year when I picked up this gig, and was beyond sick and tired of having other people underfoot all the time, telling me to tiptoe, not to dunk my zwieback in my Bosco and sticking signs all over the house saying you can't rock in the rocking chair after 11 p.m. Besides, I like doing my own cooking and have not been able to for some time. The couple I lived with in California included a Guatemalan wife who was so damned persnickety about everything that I didn't dare use the kitchen for making anything except coffee and toast. Georgia, I've been told, has very traditional notions about gender roles, and men simply do NOT cook in this country. That's women's work. Well, to hell with that. I don't want any woman cooking for me. Bring on my own place. And my own stove.

But as of this writing, I'm essentially Saul Bellow's Dangling Man. Today is Wednesday and I have not heard a word from TLG (Teach and Learn with Georgia) since Saturday. I'm staying in a hostel on the outskirts of Tbilisi, waiting for them to find me an apartment and a school. It's very hot here at this time of year. I walk around town sweating a lot. I read. I drink beer. I smoke. I watch Dudley Do-Right cartoons on my laptop (when it will connect to the wi-fi network.) I try to get used to the local toilet paper, which could be used to sand furniture.

Georgia is a very old country.  There have been people in this part of the world since this part of the world belonged to the Romans. Or did this part of the world ever belong to the Romans? I should know the answer to that. I was a history major in college. But I don't. I do remember that the Black Sea was considered outside the pale of the Roman Empire (the poet Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea when Augustus Caesar, the Roman emperor on whose watch Christ was killed and by the way one of history's great prudes, decided that Ovid was a pornographer), and Georgia is east of the Black Sea, so probably it never was part of the Roman Empire.

The Russians have been hanging around this part of the world for 200 years or so. They got into a war with the Turks or maybe it was the Persians (or maybe it was both of them) back in the 18th century, and decided they wanted a buffer zone between themselves and the Turks (or the Persians.) They've been trying to subdue the Caucasus ever since. It's the same stunt Stalin pulled when he annexed eastern Europe in 1945: invaded by the French in 1812 and then by the Germans in 1941, the Russians wanted a buffer zone between themselves and western Europe, and they maintained it until they ran out of money. But geography will tell: while it was easy for the Russians to bully eastern Europe with tanks, the Caucausus is mountainous country; mountainous country is notoriously difficult to invade and easy to defend, so the Russians never really established hegemony over Georgia, or Chechnya, or Abkhazia or Ingushetia or Dagestan, although they fought a war with the Georgians as recently as 2008 and the region of Georgia known as South Ossetia is still occupied by the Russians and is technically considered a war zone. We've been told not to go there.

If there is an upside to all of this, it is that everyone in this part of the world understands Russian, and having studied Russian in college, then spent a year in Moscow during my State Department days, I speak and understand a little Russian. Not enough to engage in an abstruse discussion of the prose style of Lev Tolstoy versus that of Fyodor Dostoevski, but certainly enough to give directions to a cab driver, sit down in a cafe and order a cup of coffee or walk into into a store and ask for some bread and cheese. 

This has saved my butt, because nobody could possibly learn Georgian, at least not in the five days which was all the Georgian language training they could give us. Even if I wanted to learn Georgian, which has more in common with Arabic than it has with Russian, I'm only going to be here for nine or ten months, which isn't long enough to pick up any local language.

Besides, the way I figure it, why should I go to the effort of learning a language which is spoken by only four million people in the entire world, all of whom are here, in a country about the size of South Carolina?

Once out of Georgia I would never use Georgian again. Russian, on the other hand, is spoken by close to 300 million people all over the globe. I might have use for Russian somewhere else. So, rather than kick myself all over the place trying to learn Georgian, I think I will work on improving my Russian while I'm here trying to improve other people's English.

I'm waiting for the weather to cool down, which in turn, hopefully, will discourage the mosquitoes here. And I'm waiting for my assignment. Meanwhile the taxicabs here are relatively cheap, there is a Metro, and they have a local cheesy-bread here that is to die for. Stand by for updates from a wannabe ex-pat.

I'm serious. I don't intend to stay in Georgia beyond my assignment here, but ex-pat is one of my life goals. If I have my druthers, the United States will see me no more.

Meanwhile, I think Tbilisi is seeing more of me than it cares to. Serves it right.

A Page from a Cabdriver's Diary

It had to happen sooner or later. Every taxicab operator in the world probably has this experience at least once. I had it last night.

No, I wasn't robbed. I have been assaulted while driving a cab, but so far I have yet to feel the cold blue steel of a 9mm Glock stuck in my ear, followed by a growl of "Gimme your money."

Maybe that's next. Bring it on. I mean, if the guy doesn't blow my brains out, it'll be a good story. And if he does, I won't have to pay the rent next month. A real win-win.

But last night, shortly after midnight, I got a dispatch call to a north side bar here in Chula Vista called On The Rocks. It's a hip-hop spot in which, at 12:30 a.m. of a Sunday morning, you can drink beer while enjoying the mellifluous tones of Eminem or L.L. Cool J shouting that he's gonna fuck yo' bitch and take yo' ride. A real classy joint. I pick up customers there all the time, but wouldn't be caught dead (no pun intended) going there for anything else.

Anyway, when I got out of my cab and went into On The Rocks looking for my customer, I walked right into the middle of a bar fight. As the rap music blasted away, some guys were swinging and shoving and shouting at each other in front of the door. The bouncer, a burly guy with a beard, was trying to break it up. Burly or not, he was having only limited success.

I walked past the melee and went over to the bar. I had to shout and wave my arms to get the bartender's attention; she was enjoying the fight. "Red Cab?" I yelled over the music. "Somebody call Red Cab?"

"I don't know nothin' about no fuckin' cab," she yelled back. Like I said, a classy joint.

Squeezing my way back through the combatants, I returned to my cab and got on the radio. "I'm at On The Rocks," I said. "But there's a bar fight going on and I can't find my customer," I said. "The bartender said she didn't know anything about anyone calling a cab. She was kind of rude."

"Well, she had something else on her mind," the dispatcher said. "I'll bell you back on stand four."

"Check," I replied. ("We always have to say "check," like we're doing Sam Spade. It's company policy.)

Unwilling to leave without at least trying to pick up a fare, (after all this is money we're talking about), I lingered for a few moments in front of the bar. The bouncer had finally managed to eject the two Snoop Dog wannabes who had apparently started the fight. They were shouting back at him. It wasn't fair, they protested, that the other side in the fight wasn't being ejected as well.

"I'm kickin' 'em out now, bro, I'm kickin' 'em out now," he commisserated, making hand gestures to indicate that all was under control.

"You want me to call the cops?" I asked him.

"No thanks," he said.

I drove away. I decided to go on back to my room and call it a night.

On my way back down Broadway I chanced upon some cops in the middle of hassling somebody. The cops were out in force last night, running DUI checkpoints, pulling people over, breaking up fights. Just another quiet Saturday night here in the old South Bay. At Broadway and Davidson, the location of Wild Wooley's, a bar frequently even more un-mellow than On The Rocks, (there was a stabbing there in March) two units, lights flashing, were doing something to somebody. I pulled over just as a motorcycle cop pulled up to join in the fun.

I walked over to the motorcycle cop. "They just had a bar fight at On The Rocks," I told him. "It may be over now, but there was still some chirping going on when I drove away. You might want to go by and make sure it is over."

"Okay, I'll tell dispatch," the cop said.

I got back in my cab and continued south on Broadway, heading for the barn, as it were. But then my radio crackled to life again. "145, your customer came out of On The Rocks. He's standing out front." (145 is my cab number.)

"Okay, I'll go back." I popped a u-turn in the middle of Broadway and went back to On The Rocks. (12:45 a.m. is just about the only time you can get away with making a u-turn on Broadway. In daylight it's one of Chula Vista's busiest streets.)

Back at On The Rocks, two police units had arrived and the usual "he said she said" was underway. No business of mine. My business was "Brian," my own personal drunk, whom I had picked up there before. Surprise: Brian wasn't alone. He had two buddies with him. All three of them were as plowed as a cornfield, and, although they were happy-drunk, not mean-drunk, their adrenaline was pumping like a gusher in view of what had just happened inside the bar.

They climbed into my cab, all three of them shouting, laughing, cursing, insulting each other. Insulting me. I went along with it. Drunken boys will be drunken boys.

"Where do you guys want to go?" I asked.

"The Silver Dollar," Brian said. "You know where that is?"

"Buddy, I grew up around the corner from the Silver Dollar," I replied, swinging out of the parking lot. I wasn't lying. I grew up on Madrona Street, literally right around the corner from the 300 block of Third Avenue, where the Silver Dollar is. (And also Dock's, but that bar deserves its own blog posting -- I got drunk there with my oldest friend on the night before my wedding in 2005.)

It turned out that we had the makings of a lively debate there in the cab even if these guys hadn't been drunk. The four of us had attended three different Chula Vista area high schools. Brian went to Hilltop; the second guy, whose name I didn't catch, went to Bonita Vista. The guy sitting right behind me shouted that he was "Chula Vista High, Class of '73!"

"Really?" I shouted over the shouting. "I'M Chula Vista High, Class of '73! What the hell's your name?" I had to yell my question three times before he heard me over his buddies' yelling.

"Jeff McKissack," he shouted back.

"Jeff McKissack! I remember you!"

I did, too. In fact I remembered three other things about Jeff besides the fact that we had walked across the same lawn in matching blue caps and gowns to collect our diplomas on the same June afternoon in 1973. Unless I'm misremembering, (and my memory is pretty good), Jeff and I were in the same gym class during our senior year.

The other two things I remembered about him were, first, that he had one of coolest cars on campus: a beautiful, yellow 1957 Chevy Bel Air. I mean a car right out of American Graffiti.

The second thing was that Jeff McKissack, at age 18, was the first person I ever heard use the expression, "Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one."

We got to the Silver Dollar, everyone still shouting away. "Hilltop!" Brian yelled. "We used to kick your asses all the time!"

"Hilltop, feh," I replied. "Your whole football team was nothing but a bunch of friggin' ballerinas."

"You tell him, Kelley!" Jeff yelled, offering me his fist for that knuckle-on-knuckle buddy-tap.

They were all out of the cab now, but I had a hard time getting them to shut the damn doors and go into the bar so I could go home. They invited me to "Take a 20-minute break and come have a drink with us," but I declined. I really did want to go home.

But I handed Jeff my business card. "Call me when you're sober," I said. "And don't LOSE that!" I really would like to have a cup of coffee with this guy. I haven't seen him in 37 years.

I headed once again for home, but a guy flagged me down on Third Avenue. He wanted a ride home. I picked him up. What the heck, another quick six or seven bucks before the final bell.

On the way to his house up off of I Street (where my mother lived as a little girl, by the way) I told him what had just happened.

"Isn't it incredible?" he said. "What a small world."

"Well, I don't know," I said. "It seems like a lot of people I went to school with are still hanging around here. I've come and gone, myself. And come and gone. I was in the foreign service for 13 years. I've lived all over the place. But there are people I went to high school with who never drifted very far from this town."

"Different strokes for different folks," he said as I dropped him off and he paid me. "You have a good night."

"Well, mine's over," I said. "But you have a good night too."

I finally got back to my room. But I was too pumped up to sleep. Liquor might have helped, but for one thing I'm on the water wagon these days and for another, even if I wanted a stiff one, it was now getting close to two a.m. and here in California there's a state law that the stores can't sell liquor between 2 and 6 in the morning. I went back out and drove to Walgreen's instead for some over-the-counter sleeping pills.

Back home again, while I waited for the pills to take hold, I called a former girlfriend of mine who lives in Moscow. Her name is Nadya. I had no hesitation about calling her because there's an 11-hour difference between San Diego and Moscow. When it's three a.m. here, it's two O'clock tomorrow afternoon there. I had a phone card in my wallet which made calling Moscow very cheap; Nadya and I talked for an hour and I think it cost about three dollars off the card.

I told her what had happened. "Incredible," she said. Nadya is an English teacher in Moscow. "Incredible," with the "r" slightly rolling off her Russian tongue, is one of her favorite words.

Lights out finally came at four a.m.

Now, I'm sure that Jeff no longer has that '57 Chevy. But I sure would like to see what he's driving now. And get caught up on 37 years' worth of all that life, love, catastrophe, joy and sorrow that pile up to where, when you see someone you haven't spoken to in that long, you find yourself uncovering an entire hidden life about which you knew nothing. When last I saw Jeff, he was a boy with sleek shoulder-length hair, the way so many boys wore their hair in the early seventies. Now he's a middle-aged guy with a crew cut.

Yes, I would like to have a cup of coffee with Jeff. I hope he doesn't lose that card, because as drunked-up as he was last night, I have little doubt but that, come this morning, he probably remembered nothing of On The Rocks, a bar fight, old high school rivalries revisited at the top of our lungs, or me. Hell, he probably didn't even remember having been in a cab.

People tell me I should write a book about my experiences as a cab driver, both here and on the east coast. I may do it, because I have a title that I know will make it a hit. Given the number of drunks I ferry around on Friday and Saturday nights, I'm thinking of calling the book Lord of The Barflies.

And now I think I'll saddle up and go see if the Sunday hangover crowd needs any rides home from church.

Dear Miss Cyberhearts...

I returned to the west coast last year from the east coast, for a number of reasons. On the list, but quite low on it, was the fact that I was desperately lonely.

Oh, I had a girlfriend. I was crazy about her, as who wouldn't be? She was wonderful: smart, beautiful, sexy, tender, caring...the problem was that I seldom saw her. Her career came first, her children second, her parents third, and so on. I think I ranked about ninth. I was lucky if I saw her once a week. The rest of the time it was just me and my shadow, driving the PT Cruiser down the avenue.

Well, it's been ten months (to the day, actually) since I pulled back into southern California.

And I am still desperately lonely. My best friend at the moment is a tiny, aged chihuahua dog named Callie. She's good company, but you can't really discuss the films of Ingmar Bergman with her. She prefers a lemon cookie. I try to have one handy whenever she comes to the back door. She's too old to bark anymore; she just makes this sort of chirping sound and I know it's she.

Coin toss: which was it that sent me back to dating's version of a Black Hole, Match.com? Was it loneliness or boredom?

Both, I guess.

I do NOT believe in cyberdating. It doesn't work. Only once in my life has a meet-your-mate web site ever gotten me as far as a dating relationship. Her name was Tanya. We had a summer romance of sorts, then, right after 9/11, she dumped me like an overripe casaba melon. I never really knew why. Several years later we had dinner together and all she would tell me was that it wasn't because of another guy. I guess that was supposed to make me feel better.

I think part of my problem with Tanya was the same problem that Allan Felix had. He's the character Woody Allen played in Play It Again, Sam. If you remember that flick, Allan was a movie critic. And a movie fanatic. He lived vicariously through the movies. His wife Linda didn't like that. She wanted more excitement. So she left him. "She said I didn't make her laugh. Insufficient laughter, that's grounds for divorce now," he complains. "And she wants to go skiing. She wants to ski down the side of a mountain, laughing like an idiot."

Tanya was about 10 years my junior, and I think she wanted more of a wild-n'-crazy guy than me. I'm not against doing things on impulse, but I am kind of a creature of habit. Left to my own devices, I'll go to bed at 10 p.m. Tanya wanted more, I guess, than just a good cook who could be relied upon to show up on time, and was able to talk about Tolstoy, Scriabin and Billy Wilder.

Okay, let's get the obvious downside to cyberdating out of the way first. Everyone knows this. People LIE on dating websites. They trim years off their ages, pounds off their bodies and inflate their resumes. Fortysomethings tend to post pictures of themselves that were taken shortly after high school. If the average cyberdating profile is to be believed, an awful lot of skydiving candidates for Congress were late for picking up their Oscars because their Lamborghinis were being repaired.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. But not by much.

One of my other problems with cyberdating is its total lack of parity. Women on these web sites get so much more e-mail than men do that they can easily pick and choose during the sorteo. Men are at a disadvantage; we don't get anywhere near as many "winks" as women do, so we can't be so choosy.

We're also much more readily disposed of, because the women know that if they give one of us a thump and don't like the sound, there are 256 more potential losers waiting out in the hallway, adjusting their pinkie rings and sucking in their stomachs.

But I have a new problem with cyberdating, one I just recognized after many vigils in front of the flickering screen. This one really depresses me, and I don't know why I never noticed it before.

Is there some professional profile-writing service out there, creating Match.com profiles for women at $25 a pop? Because I keep seeing the same things over and over. It's like somebody's using a template. "I'm new at this." "Gee, I've never done this before!" "I'm looking for THE ONE." "I'm not into games." (who is?) "I love sunsets, blues, white wine and clubs with live music." "I have a great sense of humor, LOL." (Gag me.) "Looking for my soulmate." (If you find him, let me know.) And so on and so on.

And while we're on that subject, would someone explain to me just what the heck "Spiritual, but not religious" means? It's like saying, "I'll have a Cafe au lait, only leave out the milk." Whatever it means, it sure seems to describe a lot of women, because an awful lot of them pick that instead of "Protestant," "Catholic," "Jewish," "Muslim" or whatever. Why not just check "No Choice" and skip the New Age gobbledygook?

Now, I have done this thing on both coasts, and I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but logging on to a meet-your-mate website here in my native California, I'm dismayed at finding that just about every girl out there is a California Girl.

Ironic? Not really. The media created the "Angry White Male" and the "Soccer Mom," and the media also created the California Girl. As Billy Joel sang years ago, "Los Angelenos all come from somewhere." 

Most people who make a fetish of  living in southern California actually come from Michigan, Maryland or Ohio. I suspect that these "immigrants" helped create the stereotype, but there is definitely a perceived "California mindset." And as I peruse the profiles on Match.com within 50 miles of San Diego, I'm seeing altogether too much of this kind of stuff: "I'm into yoga, rock-climbing, raw vegetables, holistic wheat germ and my own personal style of spirituality." Bully for you, Ms. Dalai Lama. Get outta here. 

Maybe my bar is set too high. I'm looking for a woman who can write Basic English. That lets about 90 percent of the population off. "I'm looking for a man that can make me laugh." That's, "a man WHO can me make me laugh," dear. Believe it or not, men, like women, are "who's," not "that's."

 And I don't want to read about how you love "car's," "dog's" and being sent "flower's." Go text yourself.

The only place I have ever met women that seems to be worthwhile is at work. That was fine when I was working for the government, or for a technology company on the east coast. But these days I'm driving a cab. People who take cabs fall into three basic categories, none of which bodes well for romance: (1) Those too old to drive themselves anymore. (2) Those who have had their licenses suspended for various felonies and misdemeanors, and (3) Drunks. Drunks are good tippers, as a rule, but dating one isn't on my bucket list.

So for now I'll probably keep poking, with a sinking heart and even lower expectations, on my keyboard, reading about all of those "optimistic, see-the-glass-as-half-full" types who love "champagne, sunsets, bath-with-candles and Dave Matthews," who are not seeking "a man to complete me," but rather looking for someone who is "sensitive, a good listener and likes the Denver Broncos." What the heck, it kills time.  And who knows? Maybe some of them are drunks who have had their licenses suspended, and might need a cab. If it isn't too much wear and tear on my heart, it might be good for business.

Famous for Thirty Seconds

Did you ever play that "Kevin Bacon" game, where players try to trace a connection between anyone they can think of...and Kevin Bacon?

I could play that game. Kevin Bacon walked right past my taxicab one afternoon. I was parked at a taxi stand in front of the Hotel Monaco in Alexandria, Virginia. Bacon came out of the hotel, walked right past my nose and went into a boutique on the other side of King Street. For the record, he looked awful. Dirty, greasy clothes, greasy hair, sunglasses. No doubt he was hoping not to be recognized. If that was the intent, it almost worked. I looked at him as he went by and thought, "Hey, that guy looks like Kevin Bacon." Later that night I learned that he and his brothers, who had a pop music combo, were performing at the hotel.

But it's not Kevin Bacon I'm thinking about right this moment. A lot of us can trace a six-degrees-of-separation line between ourselves and some famous person, or persons. Not long ago I played the name-dropping game on the way to dinner with my childhood pal Jim Provenza, who was in town on business.

I told him that not once, but twice, I'd had Senator John Warner of Virginia as a passenger in my cab. On one of those two occasions I actually picked him up at his house in Alexandria and drove him up to Capitol Hill.

Jim, an attorney who works in Sacramento, told me that he knows Leon Panetta, currently the director of the CIA.

I countered that play with an admittedly-less impressive connection: Thomas A. Shannon, as of this writing U.S. ambassador to Brazil, is an old crony of mine from my own days with the State Department. Tom and I served in Brazil together way back when he was just a junior officer. Since then he has risen as high as Assistant Secretary of State. More than once, just to keep him humble (not necessary, by the way: Tom is the soul of easygoing, self-effacing irony) I would sometimes remind him of his relatively-humble origins. Tom does not fit the stereotype of the career diplomat as a spoiled, prep-school scion of northeastern Old Money. Like me, Tom is a San Diego County boy (albeit one who holds a PhD from Oxford.)

 "Don't get the big head, Mr. Chief-of-Mission material," I'd say to him. "You're just a surfer from Clairemont Mesa."

He'd laugh. Tom can't bullshit me; I'm from Chula Vista, just a few miles south of him.

But I had to admit that Jim won that particular hand: countering a CIA chief with an ambassador is like holding a pair of jacks against three of a kind.

I took the next pot, though. Once, standing at the second-floor bar of the famous off-Broadway restaurant Sardi's in New York, my friend Charlie Berigan and I got to meet James Coburn, who sidled up to the bar with his wife Pat for a drink and, there being no other spots available, stood right next to me.

Senators, spookmasters, ambassadors, movie actors. All good plays. But how many can claim a six-degrees-of-separation line connecting them not with one, but two convicted killers? And one of them definitely on the "A" list, a household name in the world of crime.

I can. And it was from this experience that I can lay claim to my share of Andy Warhol's famous dictum about how in the future everybody's going to be famous for fifteen minutes.

I once got to be famous for longer than fifteen minutes. Try a whole weekend.

By now I'm sure you're all a-dither, wondering who my two killers were. I'll get the more famous name out of the way first. Chuck Manson, who would probably have a fit if anyone called him Chuck. But he's 76 and in prison; I'm not afraid. Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. Nyeh. But that's right. I am speaking of Charlie "Charles" Manson, head of the Manson "family" and power behind the infamous Tate-LoBianco murders of 1969.

My late father, by the way, (since we're playing this game) was a personal acquaintance of Vincent Bugliosi, the district attorney who prosecuted Manson.

But no, I have never actually met Charles Manson. He was almost a neighbor for a while. But that's only because I lived and worked in Vacaville, California in the early-to-mid 1980s, and Manson was an inmate at California Medical Facility Vacaville for some years.

Don't let the name of the place fool you; CMF Vacaville is not a hospital. It is a prison. It got the name "Medical Facility" back in the days when psychopathic killers could still be called "criminally insane." I don't know what they call such people now, probably something like "upbringing-challenged," since sociopaths usually turn out to have had bad childhoods, and in our current culture somebody else, usually your parents, is always responsible for whatever stupid or evil thing you might do.  CMF Vacaville was a prison specifically for the "upbringing-challenged" crowd. I've been inside it, but only as part of a media tour of its remodeled facilities in 1984. Among my fellow tourists that day was then-California Governor George Deukmejian. Deukmejian made a speech. I just looked around and thought about the dreadful claustrophobia I would get in one of those eight-by-four cells.

As a writer for the Vacaville Reporter newspaper in 1981, I got to listen to a tape of one of Manson's parole hearings at CMF. Manson, as I remember, was channeling Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny, playing with a couple of rubber balls during the hearing and asking pertinent questions like "Why are we here? What's all this about?" He was trying to freak everybody out by acting crazier than usual.

The "other" killer in this tale is much lesser-known than Manson, but every bit as vicious. I mean, this guy tried to kill Manson. He must be bad.

His name was Jan Holmstrom. Not as famous as Manson, no, but a pretty bad dude. In 1974, in Pasadena, Holmstrom killed his father with four blasts from a shotgun, then handed the gun to a Cub Scout who was standing nearby, and walked away.

Believe it or not, Holmstrom was a Hare Krishna. That's right, one of those people you see prancing around at airports, barefoot and baldheaded, shaking jingle bells and passing out religious literature.

I don't think the Hare Krishnas would want to make Jan Holmstrom their poster boy.

On the morning of September 25, 1984, inside the grounds of CMF Vacaville, Manson and Holmstrom got into a "religious argument." Holmstrom complained, specifically, that Manson had objected to his Hare Krishna chanting, and threatened him. Not to be outdone, Jan poured some paint thinner on Chuck and set him on fire.

That's where I come into the picture. You see, at the moment that all of this was happening, I was doing my laundry.

Well, yeah, I was. Doing my laundry. I was a radio news broadcaster at KUIC, 95.3 FM, upper Solano County's only FM radio station in those days. Yes, you can stream my alma mater on the Internet now, if you care to: http://www.kuic.com/. The last time I checked, one of the deejays who worked there way back when I did, Rick Batiste, was still on the air at "Quick-95." Not much ambition, I guess.

As I remember, I was temporarily without a car. My 1975 Ford Maverick had been totaled in an accident on the Oakland Bay Bridge not too long before, when my roommate, Doug Parker, on his way to pick up two friends of ours at San Francisco International Airport who were flying in from Philadelphia, got rear-ended pretty badly in heavy traffic. The maypole-dance with the insurance companies was still in progress, and for the moment I had no car. I was going to and from the studio on a bicycle.

As I was sorting my socks and underwear, I got a phone call from my boss at the station, news director Paul Hosley. Something had happened at CMF, but he was in the middle of his morning news block and didn't have time to look into it himself. He asked me to call the prison and talk to the public affairs officer.

I don't remember the guy's name. But I got him on the phone. "I hear you have a news item for us," I said.

"Yeah, and you're going to want to run tape," he said.

"Well, I'm not at the studio, I'm at home. I can't run tape from here. Whaddaya got?"

"I'm telling you, Kelley, you're gonna want to run tape," he insisted.

"Why don't you tell me what it is first? I don't have a car, and I'd have to ride my bike down to the studio to run tape."

"Okay," he said. Then he started reading the release. "At eight-eighteen this morning, inmate Charles Manson was attacked and set on fire by inmate Jan Holmstrom..."

"Hold it," I said. "I want to run tape."

"I knew you would."

"Let me call you back in fifteen minutes." Socks and underwear forgotten, I jumped on the old Huffy and got myself down to the studio as fast as I could pedal.

As subscribers to the Associated Press, we at KUIC radio could also be contributors. Once in a great while the AP might be interested in something we had to offer them, usually something involving a death. We'd get a credit line, and five bucks, for a wire story. For example when our good friend Toby Johnson, one of our disc jockeys who had been fired months earlier, got killed in a head-on collision between his car and an RV early one morning on Highway 29 over near St. Helena in the Napa Valley, AP picked that up from us. I phoned it to them, and a few minutes later, here it came over the wire, slugged "FROM KELLEY DUPUIS, K-U-I-C VACAVILLE." We were all in shock over Toby's death, but traffic fatalities were traffic fatalities, and the AP liked them.

A story on the wire would get you five bucks. But a voicer, that is to say, a 30-second audiotape segment, would get you $25 if the AP wanted it.

Needless to say, they wanted the Charlie-and-Jan barbeque story from CMF. And they wanted a voicer.

I'd taken the call, cut the tape and written the copy, so if anyone was going to do a voicer, it was going to be me. The guy from AP in Sacramento was explicit, though: 30 seconds. No more.

He and I must have spent half an hour on this. My voicer kept coming in at 36 seconds, or 34. It took several tries to get it whittled down to an exact 30.

I was allowed no "intro." Local stations, if they used the item, would provide that themselves. The voicer was just me, reeling off the facts of the incident in 30 seconds. My "outro" as we called the tag line at the end, was simply, "Kelley Dupuis, Vacaville." AP was one big family. One big cheap family. Local stations that might use the clip would do their own intro, something along the lines of , " Convicted killer Charles Manson, serving a life sentence at Vacaville state prison, was attacked and set on fire this morning in what was apparently a religious disagreement. Kelley Dupuis of KUIC Vacaville has details." Then they'd roll the tape of me.

Given the fact that we were all living on starvation wages in those days, I smacked my lips over the 25 bucks I was going to get for this. Other than that, I didn't give it much more of another thought. Who, outside of our area, was going to be interested in such a thing?

Silly question. Lurid sells. Radio stations all over California picked this item up. In fact, as far as I know, AP stations in other states may have run it as well. After all, this was Charles Manson we were talking about, the Mariah Carey of killers.

I got a surprise the following Sunday. Okay, it was a pleasant surprise, although I can see where a lot of folks would hesitate to use the term "pleasant surprise" in connection with a story like that. What can I tell you? Reporters have big egos. Why else would we be willing to work like galley slaves for the kind of pay that forced most of us to share quarters with other reporters?

The surprise came during a telephone conversation the following Sunday with my mom. Mom had a monthly appointment to have her hair done, always on Saturday. Since it was a regular appointment, she usually saw at least one person at the hairdressers' whom she knew. Now I was living in Vacaville, which is about 35 miles west of the state capital, Sacramento. My folks lived way down in Chula Vista, where I grew up, about 600-some miles to the south. Mom was not, by any stretch of the imagination, in our broadcast area.

She said, "I saw Mrs. So-and-So at the hairdressers' yesterday. She asked me, 'What's the name of that boy of yours again, the one who's a journalist?'"

"Oh," my mom replied, "You mean Kelley."

"Yeah, Kelley!" her friend replied. "I heard him on KSDO this morning, talking about Charles Manson."

KSDO, one of the oldest AM radio stations in San Diego. They'd picked up my voicer!

Damn, I'd hit the big time! San Diego!

It was the only time I ever did. My voice never got anywhere near a big radio market again, that I know of. I had to take my 25 bucks, plus the knowledge that my own voice had been broadcast over Greater San Diego for 30 whole seconds, giving everybody the hottest news item of the week. (Get it? The hottest news item? Rim shot.)

The following year I gave up radio and joined the State Department, giving up humiliating pay in exchange for a humiliating job. But I did get a dozen or so years of world travel out of that deal.

Manson, as far as I know, has traveled no further than the trip from Vacaville to his new home in San Quentin, to which he was later transferred, in all the years since he and I made a showbiz team together.

And he's been famous for most of his life.

Some People Have All The Luck

I just finished reading, back-to-back, two books by David Sedaris.

I've already decided that I don't like him especially.

I had a similar experience years ago with Anais Nin. But I had to read three volumes of her diaries before I got sick of her. The honeymoon ended quickly, but it did last three volumes.

I went through all the usual stages of an affair with La Nin by reading her diaries, which I only learned later had been heavily-edited, hence some of the mendacity and what used to be called "glaring omissions" of which I ultimately suspected her. It was this mendacity of hers which ended our romantic relationship. That, and how wildly self-absorbed she was. How, I wondered, could a married woman write page after page in her diaries, describing pregnancy and childbirth, without once mentioning her husband? (Subsequent reading revealed the dark reason: Anais aborted that baby, whose real father was Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer.)

But poor old Hugh Guiler, Anais' long-suffering banker husband, probably wouldn't have gotten a mention even if the baby had been his. He was "edited out" of Anais' diaries generally, in much the same way Stalin had photographs in Soviet history books edited to erase the people he'd killed.

But I went through all the stages with Anais: awareness, infatuation, fantasies (she was, after all, dead by the time I read her diaries) and then finally disillusionment and the desire for a breakup, in this case the return of her books to the public library. But the relationship ran an ordinary and not-entirely unexpected course. I understood, after sending her back to the shelves, both how Henry Miller could have become so infatuated with her himself, and also why Gore Vidal, who had a much more jaundiced eye than Miller, dissed her so thoroughly in his own memoirs. Vidal described himself and Nin as two "chicken hawks," and I don't think anyone could have said it better.

On the other hand, I didn't need three volumes, but only a couple of hundred pages to become acquainted with Sedaris and his jokes, especially the ones he keeps repeating, like "my childhood was awkward and unpleasant because I grew up gay." Yeah? Well, my childhood was awkward and unpleasant because I had a weird first name, and between the ages of 13 and 18, bad acne. I don't browbeat the world with it. In any case, by the end of the second book of his that I read, I was already sick of listening to him.

Still,  I can hear the screeching already. 

"You...you...you...HOMOPHOBE!!!"

Admit to not caring for any member of any federally-protected grievance group, for whatever reason, and you're going to be immediately labeled a "Fill-In-The-The-Blank-O-Phobe" by its PR wing. Meaning, of course, a "phobe" of whatever grievance group your victim belongs to. In this case, the grievance group just happens to be gays, and if there's any doubt in your mind, just read anything Sedaris has ever written. This guy has been dining out on "gay" for years. Someone should tell him that it really isn't avant-garde anymore to whine about how no one understood you when you were a child because you preferred baking banana-nut muffins to playing football. (Hey, as a teen I preferred muffin-baking, or for that matter almost any other activity, to football, and I'm straight. I just don't like football. Never did, particularly.)

Unfortunately for all of the "homophobe" screechers out there, Sedaris' sexual orientation has nothing to do with my dislike of him. It's his narcissism that rubs me the wrong way. That, and the fact that I find him as funny as hell maybe 15 percent of the time, but as funny as a root canal the other 85 percent. Especially when he's talking about dying animals and floating turds. Yuk-yuk-yuk.

By the way, is there a correlation between gayness and narcissism? Ask W.H. Auden. He was gay, and he thought there was. But don't ask me. Ask him. He's dead, but ask him anyway. (I tend to think Auden was a little too enamoured ((note spelling)) of Freud, but that was common among intellectuals of his generation.)

Sorry, friends of my ex-wife:* hurling the epithet "homophobe" at anyone who fails to approve of one of your group for any reason whatever sounds just a LITTLE bit too much to me like my late father's old, tried-and-true method of winning arguments. Any time someone began to get the best of him in an exchange of opinions, or merely to question the reasonableness of his latest ill-informed rant, (usually punctuated with an index finger stabbing into the air or into his interlocutor's chest) my dad would begin jumping up and down screaming "You hate me! You hate me! You've AWAYS hated me!"

I called this technique of my father's, and still call it this even though my father, like Auden, is dead, the "Beaver Cleaver Bluff." In one episode of Leave It To Beaver, Beaver ran from the room shouting "Everyone in this house is against me!" Boy, did that sound like my father! Anyone who dared to disagree with my father about anything was immediately branded his personal enemy. Oh, I tell you, it was great having a nine year-old for a father.

My father, by the way, was a homophobe, and such a screechy one himself that we often found ourselves repeating Hamlet's old saw about the lady who doth protest too much. He also hated Jews, blacks, women, the French, (clear self-loathing, that last; my father, who hated "the Frogs," actually spoke Canadian French very well) the pope, (ditto; he came from a Catholic family) men who wore their hair long, Mexicans, (although he spoke Spanish as well as he did French) Jane Fonda and cilantro. I think my father considered it an unconscionable outrage that anyone should feel sorry for anybody in the world except him.

But at least my father didn't write books. I'll give him credit for that. David Sedaris does, and I just finished reading two of them: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Me Talk Pretty One Day. Read two of a guy's books, particularly if they're written in the first person and are basically all about him, and I think you can be excused for deciding you don't like him even if you've never actually met the guy face-to-face.

For, in these two books anyway, himself is just about all Sedaris writes about. Himself, his family and his boyfriends.

Okay, jealousy is in the mix. This guy gets buckets of money, literary awards and God-knows what all else for telling tawdry, insipid anecdotes about himself and his family. Hey, I've been doing that on my blog for years, and nobody has showered me with money, awards and appearances on National Public Radio. What's so special about David Sedaris? He's funny sometimes. So what? My younger sister was funny. She didn't get to be famous and lionized for it.

And another okay:  I hear Sedaris is also a playwright, and I admit that I have not seen any of his plays. Maybe he's another Noel Coward. I don't know. But these two books I read are basically blogs-between-covers, and I don't see why he should get showered with ticker-tape and fame for doing something thousands upon thousands of us have been doing since technology caught up with our rampant egos and allowed us a forum in which to pop off about ourselves and our own not so much differently than he does.

So how come he gets all the attention? Maybe he is funnier and cleverer than I am. Plenty of people are, but most of them haven't been richly rewarded for it. In fact most of the clever, funny people I know are as obscure and unknown as I am. This guy must have a good agent. I don't suppose he, she or it would be interested in talking to me.

But if they see this and surprise me, I'll let you know.

* My ex-wife Valerie, a Washington, D.C. real-estate hawker the last time I spoke with her, is the only Gay Rights advocate I have ever met who is, technically, not gay. Valerie generally prefers men, although she does tend to prefer them in a "Sugar Mama" sort of scenario (she being the sugar mama.) Like Lawrence Welk, whose genius it was to find a  previously-untapped "niche audience" among the Geritol crowd, Valerie has made the LGBT community her own niche market. And since the gay community is mostly where she makes her money, Valerie tends to sound off on gay rights like the aging Christopher Isherwood (although, generally speaking, more as a cheerleader, who knows on which side her pom-poms are glued, than as a player.)

Of Round Numbers, DNA and other Spooky Stuff

                        

Top left: my mother circa 1940, about age 19.

Lower photo: 1954. The baby on my mom's lap is my older sister Carla. I wouldn't come along until the following year. Carla was the apple of her mother's eye. I wasn't the apple of anyone's.



"There is nothing more sad or more glorious than generations changing hands." -- John Mellenkamp, from the liner notes to his album Scarecrow, 1985

I was out driving my cab tonight when the Mexican national anthem began to play on XLNC-1, the classical music radio station here in San Diego which serves San Diego and northern Baja California, announcing classical pieces in Spanish and then, when they're over, back-announcing them in English.

That's how I know it's midnight: XLNC-1 always plays the Mexican national anthem, Hymno Nacional Mexicano at midnight.

And these days (or I should say, nights) I am usually still driving around at midnight when the music plays, picking up and dropping off for Red Cab of San Diego.

My anecdotal life: the cherry on the sundae of my evening tonight was ferrying two drunks back to the La Quinta Inn after midnight. The police turned them over to me after a fracas outside the Star Gazer, a noisy bar on Broadway. A third member of their party, their buddy, had apparently been severely kicked, pounded and stomped in some difference of opinion which may have been racial (the Star-Gazer's regular Saturday-night clientele mixes drunken black guys with drunken white guys: you do the math) and was at UCSD Medical Center. No doubt they had been involved in the fracas as well. They were both as plowed as beanfields, and I handled them with extreme care. It was okay, though; when I dropped them at the La Quinta, they tipped me.

Anyway, when I heard Hymno Nacional Mexicano tonight, I knew not only that it was midnight, but also that it was now, officially, April 3rd.

April 3rd is the birthday of two members of my family. It's the anniversary of the birth of my mother, Sheila Marjorie Winrow Dupuis, born April 3rd, 1921. I say "anniversary of the birth" because my mother isn't with us anymore. She died on October 1, 2000 at age 79.

It is also the birthday of my cousin Melissa Gray Billon Thirloway, born April 3rd, 1951, who hasn't spoken to me in 30 years.

That is correct. My mother and my cousin Melissa were born 30 years apart, to the day. Of the implications of this, more in a moment, as Nabokov said in Transparent Things. (He, too, for reasons that will soon become obvious, fits into this little narrative.)

It is only Melissa's birthday, by the way, not (and I hope not until I'm "anniversaried" myself) an "anniversary." Melissa is still with us, and as far as I know, so are my other Billon cousins, her older sister Shari and her younger brother John. Melissa and I, while we do not share a birthday, do have that one thing in common: both of us were the middle child in a set of three.

I've always been partial to the Billons, but I'll get to that some other time. (I will, too. My uncle Pete Billon, Shari, John and Melissa's father, was a real character. I loved him, but he was a character. We had that in common, Uncle Pete and I. Two characters, we. We came to blows once, Uncle Pete and I. That happens when two "characters" split a bottle of Scotch. I don't care; I loved him anyway.)

Of his wife, Jessie Winrow Billon, I could, and hopefully will, say a great deal more some other time. I adored my Aunt Jessie.

It took some digging, but I found two older photos of my mother. My cousin Melissa appears to the right. She looks more like her father than she does like her mother. (And by the way, has more of her father's personality than her mother's. Believe me, I know. I knew both her and her father very well. She's the female version of him. No wonder I could never get along with her. )

I also decided to throw in a picture of a butterfly. Hey, it's my blog. I can stick butterflies on it anywhere I want.

My mother was quite beautiful. So were her younger sisters, my aunts Jessie and Bernice. Grandma Winrow had a framed photo on her piano of my Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, taken on their wedding day in 1944. It looked like a shot from some hokey home-front movie that Hollywood might have churned out during the war. My Uncle Pete, (whom I always thought looked a little like James Arness, TV's Marshal Dillon) was dapper in his flyer's uniform, and I swear my Aunt Jessie looked like June Allyson.

Atop the old upright were also a tinted photo of my mother, aged about 18, and a little, framed red-white-and-blue sampler that said "America, Love It or Leave It."

I'm not making any of this up.

The "baby" of the family, my Uncle Bert Winrow, (1927-2008) got the richest dollop of all this DNA. He was movie-star handsome, which you can see in a photo of him taken during World War II when he was in the Navy.

There he is, in his sailor suit, looking like a member of the cast of Leonard Bernstein's On The Town. It'd be positively queasy-making if he weren't my beloved uncle.  But he was.

I've seen the photos from my parents' wedding in 1950. Uncle Bert, aged 23, was one of my dad's groomsmen. He looks like the smiling punk he was. (I can get away with saying that; my cousin Steve Winrow, one of my favorite people in the world, has also seen those wedding photos and he agrees with me that his dad did indeed look like a punk that day.)

How I came out looking like I did is anybody's guess. I'm not beautiful, or anything remotely approaching it. I don't think I look like either of my parents. Neither did my late sister Lynn, and she was beautiful when she was young, before depression, booze, painkillers and junk food swelled her up and killed her off at age 47.

The only one of us Dupuis kids who even remotely resembles one of our parents is my sister Carla. She has Dad's nose. (All I got was his personality, which no doubt has much to do with the fact that I've been divorced twice and currently live alone. I don't look like my father, but my mother told me often enough that I sure as hell sound like him. )

Great. I seem to have inherited the personality of the man with whom I had the most problems. (See Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball and Me, by me, Outskirts Press, 2008.)

But this isn't about me. It's about my mom and Melissa, the two birthday girls. Yes, my mom was beautiful when she was young, and Melissa was a stunner at 22 or so. Now it can be told, as they used to say: when I was 18 and Melissa was 22, I had a perfectly horrific crush on her. (Actually, I made this confession to Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete 25 years ago. Uncle Pete's only comment: "Call her.")

Melissa and her husband Jeff have two (I think) fully grown children: daughter Briana and son Tyler. I think the Thirloway "children" would both be in their thirties now, but I haven't seen a photo of either of them since they were babies, and I've never met either of them. Not long after they were married in 1977, Melissa and Jeff took up residence in Seattle. I've spent my share of time in the state of Washington, but believe it or not, I have never been to Seattle. To me, Washington always meant Spokane.

But I'm sure that Briana and Tyler Thirloway must be favored of the gods. Their mother was gorgeous, and their dad was a very handsome fellow who, I think, might even still have hair. (Lucky Jeff; I got my dad's hair, which is to say I don't have any, and haven't since I was about 30. I first had noticeable hair loss at 20. My father, taking me out for dinner on my 20th birthday in 1975, poo-poohed my worries: "You don't have my hair, you have your mother's hair," he said. Well, if I do, I hope someone can find it.)

Now. When James Watson and Francis Crick broke the genetic code back in the early nineteen-fifties, all they did was scratch the surface of what are far, far deeper mysteries.

I'm going to tell you an anecdote. It was a flash-and-gone moment in my life, but one that I have never forgotten, because it would have made me think of Vladimir Nabokov if I had known his work at the time this moment occurred. But I was going-on 18 that day and had not yet discovered Pale Fire, Lolita, or one of my all-time favorite books, Speak, Memory.

I didn't start reading Nabokov until a few years later. But his curiously intense visual sense led him to be unusual among writers. Nabokov was the most "visual" of writers, and he had a way of treating narratives as though they were chess problems. (He loved chess and composed many chess problems, by the way.) Nabokov noticed things, things that most of us usually miss. A quarter of a century ago we would have called him "right-brained." He liked to stick little puzzles in his narratives and challenge his readers to notice them.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote novels the way he
played chess. Nobody else has ever done this,
that I know of, anyway.

And...here comes coincidence number two (coincidence number one will come shortly): there was a popular book in the mid-1980s called Drawing On The Right Side Of the Brain. It put forth the idea that the right sides of our brains handle things like spatial relationships, while the left sides handle the conceptual stuff, language, grammar and all that. It was a "how-to" book; it showed  you how you could become good at drawing by trying to "shut off" the left side of your brain, the part that handled ideas and concepts, and liberate the right side, the part that processed visual images and spatial relationships.

An interesting concept, discredited now I think. But I was trying to draw in those days...and so was my Aunt Jessie, who lent me her copy of the book. I tried its exercises.

"Pay attention," as Nabokov might have said (if he'd thought to say it.)  "Pay attention" was Nabokov's "message," the only message his writings would ever send. Small wonder that he was derided for so many years as a writer who supposedly had "nothing to say." He had plenty to say: "Pay attention" is one hell of a message.

So pay attention: my Aunt Jessie lent me this book.

(About now, if you know Schubert, the early bars of the piano part of his Erlkonig should be sounding in your head: "doodley-doodley-do, do-do," etc. )

I would expect that Melissa would "get" this, by the way. When we were young, I wanted to be a poet and Melissa wanted to sing opera. She knew Schubert's music. I was discovering it. She had just graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles when we started talking about music. She had thought that she wanted to major in choral conducting. Then she decided she wanted to sing. We started writing letters to each other.  (No e-mail in 1973.) Pretty soon we got into an argument. Then we kissed and made up. Then we got into another argument. Melissa and I simply do not get along. And I adore her as much as I adored her mother. But in the hard-to-get-along-with sweepstakes, Melissa would blow her mother away in the first round. So would I.

"Opposites attract" may be a truism, but it doesn't apply in this tale. Melissa and I are too much alike, that's our problem. Or it was until we both got too old to care.

Dateline: Pasadena, California. Time: late summer, 1973. Melissa had just graduated from "Oxy" as it's called; I had graduated from high school in June and was about to start college myself.

On an impulse (I had access to the family Chevrolet) I hauled myself up to Altadena (near Pasadena) where Melissa was sharing an apartment that summer with her equally-beautiful friend Peggy. I sometimes wonder whatever became of Peggy. The last time I saw her was at my cousin John's first wedding in 1976.

My unannounced arrival left both of them a little nonplussed. I suppose that was the idea. It was a Saturday night. I don't remember many details, but Melissa and I talked rather late into the night, then I bunked on the living-room couch. I think we managed to avoid quarreling; don't ask me how. I do remember that Melissa was wearing a flowing dress of some mauve-gray color when I barged in, and was barefoot. I still had hair, was parting it in the middle as fashion dictated in those blow-dried days, and was also sporting an ugly gash on my nose. My boss at the Union 76 station where I was pumping gas that summer had a black labrador, who bit me on the very day I quit. I still have the scar on my nose.

I think I was wearing a light-blue turtleneck sweater, jeans and Hush Puppies. Well, maybe my memory is better than I thought. Take note, shade of Nabokov (who, by the way, named the dead poet of his novel Pale Fire "John Shade." Clever.)

I arrived on Saturday night. By Sunday afternoon Melissa clearly didn't know what to do with me. I was getting ready to leave, though probably not as quickly as she and Peggy would have liked. Anyway, she suggested we go out and have lunch.

There was a popular delicatessen in Pasadena in those days, whose name escapes me now. It was a mouthful, no pun intended: "Rumpelmayer's," or something like that. Melissa and Peggy agreed that this would be the best place for us two cousins to go and get a bite to eat.

We went there, Melissa driving the ponderous white Ford Thunderbird she drove that summer (Uncle Pete picked it out -- don't ask.)

As teenagers will be, (especially if they're in the incubation period of painful crushes), I was extremely self-conscious. We stood at the counter in this deli, Melissa and I, looking at the menu. All of the sandwiches they served were named after celebrities. This was where my self-consciousness kicked in: I just couldn't make myself order a "Mickey Rooney" or a "Robert Redford." It was too embarrassing.

Melissa noticed my discomfort and suggested we might go somewhere else. We did. She drove us to a coffee shop which was called...oh, hell. The Pepper Mill? The Salt Shaker? Something like that.

We sat opposite each other in a booth and ordered lunch. And it was while we were waiting for our food that Nabokov's butterfly flew through the room. (Oh, yes. For the uninitiated, Nabokov was a lepidopterist as well as a writer; butterflies are a regular presence in his work, and now I suddenly understand why I chose to stick a butterfly at the top of this posting.)

So we're sitting there. We're chatting. Melissa is gorgeous. I'm shy. There's a long, embarrassed pause in the conversation. She winks at me.

That was when that butterfly (here it is, folks: coincidence number one) landed on my shoulder. I've never forgotten it.

Melissa's wink was a long, slow one accompanied by an affectionate grin, a sort of tightening around the mouth. The kind of grin you give someone with whom you share a secret.

My mother's grin. My mother's wink. I swear to God, for one fleeting nanosecond there I had the unmistakable impression that I was sitting in that booth with my mother. The way Melissa looked at me, grinned and winked, was exactly, right down to the twitch, the way my mother would grin and wink at me. It was eerie. And it only lasted a fraction of a second. But somehow, in that Augenblick, the Billon genes and the Winrow genes and the Gray genes and all the rest came together and struck The Lost Chord. For a second, Melissa became Sheila. Melissa became my mom.

Oh, sneaky, sneaky DNA. So on-target in its knittings and weavings, so on-the-mark in its splashes of watercolor. It would have done Nabokov proud, that moment. But I was a few weeks shy of 18 and hadn't read him yet. In the years since, having read his stuff over and over, I know that I participated in a truly nabokovian moment that afternoon. And I'm deeply, profoundly grateful.

Here's to you, maestro. Happy Birthday to the shade of my mom, who I'd like to think is sharing a snicker with you as I write this. And Happy Birthday, dear Melissa.

And here's to DNA, and life's most precious, sometimes-fathomable mysteries. (If you pay attention!)

I love you all very much.

Kelley