Jack and Norman

   Tom Wolfe was not impressed by the “radical chic” phenomena of the 60’s, and he made it clear in his book. Whether it was Leonard Bernstein raising funds for the Black Panthers; or Jane Fonda stumping for the communists; or some rich Hollywood celebrity inviting activists to their party; Tom saw it as grandstanding, others saw it as slumming. Regardless, Norman Mailer took radical chic to new extremes with the cause of Jack Henry Abbott. The man of Mailer’s fascination was not a political prisoner or freedom fighter, but a 34-year old convict who’d done robbery, assault, and murder. Born to an Irish-American sailor and a half-Chinese woman who turned tricks, he was rejected by both his parents’ families for being mixed-race. He grew up in boy’s homes, juvenile prisons, then adult prisons, and by age 34 had a record of violent extremes. Not the kind of guy you want to have around. Mailer helped free him, death and disaster followed. This book tries to explain how and why.

    Jerome Loving, the author, is a professor at Texas A&M, so I’ll assume he’s dealt with his fair share of radicals in academia. His book has major surprises in store, even for people who are familiar with the Mailer-Abbott story. Most readers are familiar with the basic plot; Mailer was writing a crime book, Abbott the convict heard about it, he offered his knowledge about prison, and they exchanged letters. Mailer, along with Jerzy Kozinski, was so impressed with Abbott’s writing that he persuaded the parole board to let him go. Now here’s where the surprises come in; there was a huge amount of fraud involved, and Jack Henry Abbott was a seriously bad guy.

    Professor Loving makes a convincing claim that Abbott was embellishing a lot of his story. According to Abbott, he’d spent years in the hole, yet he was surprisingly well-read. Prisoners in solitary have no access to the prison library, and where he was incarcerated, you’d be lucky to get anything other than the Bible and the Book of Moron. So how did he read all the books on philosophy that he knew of? Books on Communism were definitely not on the high-security reading list, nor anything by radical authors, so how did he get them? It’s likely that he was lying about how much time he’d really been in solitary.

    From the get-go, the author stresses that Abbott was incredibly self-indulgent and blame all his bad habits on prison. Not one single mistake did he ever take responsibility for. As for the connection with Mailer, it was his book about Gary Gilmore, who like Abbott had been in Utah, that put them in contact. Abbott wrote that he was admirer of Marx and Lenin, which fascinated Mailer. However, Loving thinks that after Mailer did seventeen days in the loony-bin for stabbing his wife, he developed guilt for being too privileged. Was this Mailer’s way of atoning for his crime? Ironically, Gary Gilmore asked to be executed by firing squad to fulfill the Mormon law of “blood atonement.”

    I applaud the author for his unbiased writing on a highly debated topic. Some say that it was Mailer and Kozinski that got Abbott paroled, while others point out that it was in exchange for ratting out other convicts. There’s also the fact that the prison warden wanted him out, so that he wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore. Then there’s the misery that Abbott put his family through; when his sister and brother-in-law visited, they couldn’t touch each other, because he was sexually attracted to her and seeing a man touch her would set him off. At least his sister led a happy life without him. As for Abbott’s short stint at freedom, it soon ended when he stabbed a waiter to death for not letting him use the bathroom. Abbott didn’t want to go to New York in the first place; he wanted to go to Cuba or the USSR because they were Communist. Maybe that’s what should’ve happened? It would be a great way to get rid of American undesirables, shipping them off to Cuba and Moscow, places where nobody else seems to want to live. They sent us all of their criminals, so why shouldn’t we send them ours? Despite Abbott’s love of left-wing ideology, the Black Panthers had no use for him. They publicly criticized his behavior.

   Liberals have often had a sense of “feeling sorry” for men in prisons. I remember a Richard Pryor skit where he said he visited a prison and thought the Black men in there would all be political criminals. He was going to march in there and show solidarity with his “brothers.” When he came out, all he could say was “Thank God for prisons!”

Paris I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down

    Not a year goes by, it seems, without a memoir of an American in Paris; about the hostility of the people, the mysteries of the food, the shock of the conversational habits, the weather, the health, the streets, the other foreigners. Into this swamp of great misadventures and failed sojourns steps Rosencrantz Baldwin, a writer and self-described Francophile, on his first trip to Paris. I’ll spoil the plot for you, he ends up disappointed.

    One of the most prominent themes throughout the book is the perception of French speech as rudeness. At the advertising agency where Baldwin gets hired, he finds himself the butt of lewd comments from every colleague. Every single time he talks to a coworker, they make some stupid remark about his private parts. So, what does he do? He looks at a coworker who just spilled water on himself and makes a joke about that. The coworker is seriously riled. Let this be the first lesson for the American in Paris; they’re French, you’re not, and the two of you are not equal.

    On the subject of love and sex (what book about France could be complete without it), Baldwin finds that the French dislike the recently-elected Sarkozy for that reason. He publicly declares his love for his paramour, and in the eyes of the French, that’s a sign of weakness. There’s nothing as un-French as letting the woman you love get in your way, so when the diminutive President announces she’s the love his eyes, the people at the office roll their eyes. As for the treatment of immigrants, the author probably gets a better deal because he’s White and American. On the flip side, the Africans are not well treated, which he sees firsthand at a mandated seminar for foreigners. Almost all the students are African Muslims, and the tension is obvious; all of them have jobs, all of them work without a safety net, and all of them have no extended family in the country to fall back on. They’re the people that have it the hardest, and they’re the people that you don’t see. Yet here they are, having a pampered twenty-something tell them how to behave, talking down to them. The “teacher” implies that these grown men and women aren’t behaving well enough, and the “students” probably want to say “who do you think cooks your meal when you eat out?” The immigrants have become the new lower class. It’s the part of French life that the American in Paris wouldn’t normally see.

    Rosencrantz Baldwin does a great job of writing without bias, but in the end, it’s a depressing story. He starts out fascinated by the French, and ends up depressed, fed up, and resentful. What begins as the adventure of a lifetime ends up as a “Dear John” letter to Paris. Perhaps the problem is that he expected far too much? Or maybe he would’ve been happier in another part of the country, like Marseilles or the Breton Coast? I’m told that outside of Paris the French aren’t fond of the Parisians; they view them as overly bourgeoisie and snobby, and nobody likes the high cost of living there.

   Baldwin isn’t the first American (or Englishman) to not enjoy Paris. George Orwell lived there on a loaf of bread a day, and Adam Gopnik (in his memoir Paris to the Moon) found it tiresome. Going to live in Paris can be one of two things; either you love the experience, or it goes with a bang into the grave of idealism.

An Empty Spoon by Sunny Decker

    The good old days are debatable. Some people are nostalgic, some are glad they’re over. There’s a scene in the Book of Exodus where the Israelites long for the “good old days,” in their case it’s their life in Egypt. Sweating it out in the desert, they moan “let’s go back to Egypt, at least we had food and water.” They don’t seem to remember all the persecution, just the scraps of food they occasionally got. At the time I was learning this, my Bible teacher warned us against nostalgia. He said “we never had to lock the door at night, because nobody would break in, and that’s because there was nothing to steal!”

    An Empty Spoon reminds me why there were no “good old days.”  It’s a bleak memoir, with a few funny scenes in between, by Sunny Decker, a teacher in 1960’s Philadelphia. She taught at a bad high school, with all of the problems that we see 50 years later – drugs, broken homes, teen pregnancy – and there’s nowhere to turn. The parents were no help, and the building was a mess.

    There are some positive things that happen in this book. Decker gives a troubled teenage girl a copy of Anne Frank’s Diary, and the girl reads it with diligence. Then one morning the girl comes into class crying, throws the book at the teacher, and screams “you lied to me, she dies in the end!” I consider this positive; the teacher got the girl to read, and got her to think. Perhaps this girl was used to seeing friends or family get killed, and thought that Anne Frank’s two years of hiding in an attack would end with her escaping? Another funny story is where she takes the kids to see Streetcar Named Desire, and they think it’s a comedy. They see the big stupid guy in the bowling shirt, his spineless wife, his alcoholic bimbo sister-in-law, and they think it’s meant to be funny. The kids laugh so loud that the actors can’t concentrate.

   An Empty Spoon could’ve taken place right now, because almost every problem I see in this book is the same as what I see now. There’s a scene where a student, probably older than the others, shows up with his two children. Most would be horrified at the idea of paying child support at that age (no money left to tease the girls) but for this boy, it’s his way of promoting his virility. The girl he had them with is an Italian-American. I’m surprised her parents didn’t have her killed for getting pregnant by a Black boy.

    When we look back at the 60’s, we tend to think that it was an age of rights and progress, but like the Israelites in Exodus, we ignore the bad things. There were riots in almost every city, and crime and drug use increased. We have the Civil Rights movement to remember well, but after that was over, what did we have? There was poverty, crumbling schools, and family violence. Bill Cosby once said “when we won the battle, we started partying a little too soon.” I agree, but I have something to add; after the party, the whole country woke up with a 40 year hangover. Even Woodstock, that great festival of peace, love, and music, ended badly. Some of those musicians would soon die of drug overdoses, and let’s not forget, the “peace and love” didn’t go well at Altamont

   I’m going to give kudos to Sunny Decker for staying positive in a horrible time. She put up with all sorts of stuff from her kids, and even from Dick Gregory, who came to the school and told the kids to burn the place down (I’m not joking.) She was dealing with 20 year olds who couldn’t read, kids who showed up once a week, and 17 year old boys who were making babies with multiple girls. President Obama seemed to have a fondness for the 60’s, but I don’t. I wasn’t alive then, and I wouldn’t want to go back there. Even if I could warn the people of the future, I doubt they would’ve listened.

The 1960’s were probably our worst decade. Good riddance. 

Cooked

    It’s clear to me now what convict-turned chef Jeff Henderson’s problem was, and it had nothing to do with drugs: his problem was that his father was a lousy role model and his hard-working mother got no credit. The boy’s mother was a welder, and if you think that’s a cool job (if not a man’s job) then you’re right. Only problem was that his mother’s coworkers treated her like shit, and even if they didn’t, the people in his neighborhood hated the people that worked. As for his father and grandfather, they taught the boy that it was okay to steal. Young Jeff learned that hard work was for suckers and real men helped themselves to whatever they wanted.

Cooked is not so much a book about a chef as it is about proving yourself in work. The guy goes to jail right out of his teens, never had a real job, and learns to cook in a prison kitchen. Fresh out of jail, he finds that his father has pilfered the money he’d given him for safekeeping, and the “tough black guy” attitude won’t work in a kitchen. The restaurants in California are heavily staffed by Mexicans, and tough or not, he’s all alone while on their turf. But the Mexican cooks are only in it as a job to make money. Jeff Henderson intends to turn it into a career, so as you guessed, he quickly moves up the ladder and on to other restaurants.

I guess you could say that a big theme in this book is career change. You go from a place where you’re the top dog to being on the bottom and starting again. Henderson, in his role as the lowest ranking cook, finds that his coworkers are nasty and they don’t want a Black man there. He makes the mistake of telling off an inept female colleague, and the retaliation is swift. The light at the end of the tunnel is that the boss can see that he’s doing all the work, and after learning all that he can, on he goes. You can’t steal their money, or their tools, and probably can’t steal their clients. But you can steal their skills.

Henderson doesn’t say much about his personal life, except for one important anecdote. Soon after his marriage, his brothers-in-law move into their apartment and proceed to sponge off them. He has to give his wife an ultimatum that either they leave or he leaves; she agrees, and orders them out. I found this to be important to the story, because as a child he sees his father do stupid things and his mother get treated badly. He says to his wife “I’m on parole and I can’t have marijuana in the house.” He’s finally grown up enough to put his foot down.

Cooking in restaurants is probably a great job for kids who can’t sit still. Unfortunately the training has to be paid for and few public schools have a really good culinary program. Henderson got his for free, but unfortunately he had to be in jail first. Marcus Samuelson got his free of charge, because in Sweden there are great trade schools. Here in the USA, the trade high school got killed by political correctness. Tell a kid he should forego college to become a chef, and his parents will scream bloody murder.

Something tells me that if Jeff Henderson had pursued a career in cooking while still in high school, he would never have gotten into drug dealing.

Paris to the Moon

    In the 1920’s, George Orwell lived among refugees in Paris, washing dishes in restaurants, and teaching English for a pittance. In the 1950’s, James Baldwin wrote about how living in Paris allowed him to be “just another American.” Orwell shocked readers by exposing the filth of the restaurant kitchens, and Baldwin marveled about how the Gendarmes never bothered him. Now we have Adam Gopnick, an American writer, being bored and peeved in Paris. Like most Americans, he expects Paris to be fun, fun, more fun, and really, really interesting. Sadly, he’s disappointed by the end. He doesn’t experience the vibrant lives of the poor, as Orwell did in Down and Out in Paris and London.  Nor does he find shock and surprise at the lack of anti-Black racism, as Baldwin did in Notes of a Native Son. What Gopnick finds is boredom, boredom, and more boredom. Accustomed to the “customer is always right” idea of doing business, he finds the coldness of the French to be too much.

    The most vivid memory I have of this book is the part here he tries to join a gym. In France, sports and fitness are not as important as they are for Americans, maybe because they walk a lot more. Parisian men and women aren’t into racquetball, biking, tennis, and other athletics. Few adults belong to gyms, and if you want to work out, you go for a walk. With the Parisian custom of tiny meals and lots of walking, people aren’t as paranoid about their health. When Gopnick finally locates a gym, he finds the staff are unprepared, lazy, and just not on task. It’s as though the employees take their duties lightly and feel no accountability to the customers.

    All over Paris he finds people either striking or complaining that they have to work. The scariest things for a Frenchman appear to be competition and the freedom of choice; they want mandatory vacations, mandatory short work hours, and massive job protections. I wish Gopnick would have looked closer to see who cleans the offices. What do the African immigrant laborers have to say?

    Christmas is a funny issue in the book, for several reasons. Firstly, the Christmas of Santa Claus, Christmas trees, and lots of presents, is more of a British-American holiday than a French one. The French aren’t going “Christmas crazy” like the Americans; no fir tree mess in the living room, no fat guy in a Santa suit, and no going broke on the presents and the decoration. A few of the big stores have a Santa Claus, but you’re not going to see lots of kids line up to sit on the guy’s knee and tell him what they want. That would be very un-French, for a child to sit in a stranger’s lap and say “I want.” To irritate the author even more, he finds that his US Christmas tree lights don’t work because the French house current will melt the bulbs. Buying them there is worse, because the French light bulbs cost three times as much. He didn’t ask the locals, but I bet they’d have said “why would I spend all that money on light bulbs that I’m only going to use once a year?”

    Paris to the Moon is good, but it lacks the bite of A Year in the Merde. I found it repetitive in that Gopnick mentions the same things over and over again, like transit strikes and apartment hunting. Since he’s an American who doesn’t speak French, he obviously has little interaction with the locals. But in contrast to earlier “foreigner in Paris” memoirs, he arrives at a time when the country has huge government welfare programs, so the living cost is higher. If he’d arrived around the time that James Baldwin was writing Notes of a Native Son, then the cost of food and lodging would’ve been cheaper.  And I bet the people in the stores would’ve been a little more eager to please.

Box Office Poison

Back in the 1990’s, before the tech boom started, it wasn’t unusual for a recent college grad to work in a bookstore (or wait tables) while deciding what to do next. Years earlier it was unheard of, but in the Clinton era it was the norm. It all changed after 1997 with all the internet companies sprouting up, and 20 years later, it’s the norm again.

I read Box Office Poison way back in 1995 when it was a photocopied mini comic in the $1-box at Jim Hanley’s. From the minute I opened it I knew it was going to be a classic; the story was great, the artwork was perfect, and the author didn’t take himself seriously. I could relate to Sherman, the cranky protagonist who works in a bookstore, shares a Brooklyn apartment (with a very 1990’s couple), and likes weird girls. I loved the way the characters were all imperfect; the girls are short and lanky haired, and the guys are fat and shlumpy. It was quite a contrast to Spider-Man, where every character looks gorgeous (even some of the villains look hot.) You won’t see any bulging muscles, perfect 38DD boobs, or $100 hairstyles. This isn’t a Todd McFarland Spiderman comic, and you won’t see Spiderman’s steroid-freak muscles, nor Mary Jane Parker’s supermodel fashion. The protagonist is lanky and sexless, and his girl is 5’5, short-haired, and wears dark clothing.

The story begins with Sherman and his friend Ed moving his stuff into his new room. The two of them make for a funny pair; Sherman is tall, slim, and neatly groomed, while Ed is short, fat, goateed, and shaves his head (reminds you a little of Laurel & Hardy or Mutt & Jeff.) Then comes the new girlfriend, Dorothy Lestrade (yes, it is a reference to Sherlock Holmes) a woman with a shady past, who (to the reader and unfortunately not to Sherman) is obviously mentally unbalanced. The new apartment is in Carol Gardens, and keep in mind that this was before the “hipster” era, so you didn’t have all the great restaurants, theatres, stores, and whatnot. Whenever the characters go to a restaurant, it’s usually a diner or a basic Italian eatery. All the good restaurants were in Manhattan, and even as late as 2004, I remember Carol Gardens being sort of dull. I’m definitely going to assign this book if I’m teaching a class on New York history!

Alex Robinson crafted the perfect story of being young in the 1990’s, at a time when young people were “finding” Brooklyn, opting to cohabitate instead of getting married, and most important for this book, starting to appreciate comics that did not involve men in tights! As for the artwork, it’s all black and white line drawings, with a great use of shadows. After a childhood of comics with muscle-freaks leaping around in pantyhose, I was glad to find comics set in the real world. The only non-superhero comic we had at the time was Archie, and he was NEVER a realistic depiction of being a teen (nobody in that comic was short, overweight, sloppy, pimpled, gay, lesbian, alcoholic, addicted to drugs, homeless, etc.) We had Maus (thank heavens) and Tintin (even that falls short) but when Box Office Poison came out, I couldn’t get enough.

    Unlike Archie, Sherman Davies has to pay his own bills, and unlike Veronica, his girlfriend has issues, and they can be scary! If Archie and Jughead were out of the house and living in shared apartments on a shoestring budget, this is probably how it would end up. As for the mini-comic I picked up almost 20 years ago, I still have it, and I’m not giving it up!

Bringing Up Bebe

Pam Druckerman boldly goes to Paris and joins the ranks of George Orwell, Julia Child, and countless others writers who bring back a funny, shocking, or depressing memoir. Unlike other “American in Paris” memoirs, she’s not interested in romance, food, or rudeness; she explores how the French raise their kids. With the inquisitive curiosity of Margaret Mead, she asks one major question; why are French children so well behaved?

    The story starts out simply enough, she and her husband get assigned to work in France, and they go with apprehension over language and adjustment. After having their first child, Pam and her husband find something strange about French children; babies sleep through the night, kids never interrupt their parents, and there are no picky eaters. In the French preschools, chicken nuggets are never served. Instead, the kids are served of salad with sun-dried tomatoes, followed by fish, cooked vegetables, a cheese course, and fruit, prepared by a chef whose credentials are ruthlessly screened. All over Paris, children sit quietly in restaurants, never ask for seconds, never make noise, and never complain. Whenever Druckerman sees noisy children, they’re usually American or British. So what’s the secret to the kids being so well-behaved? Her quest begins!

   The first thing she discovers is a concept called “the pause.” It means that the parent must never respond right away to a crying baby; instead of running to pick the baby up, you wait five minutes for her to stop crying, then go to her. If the baby cries at night, you ignore it, because after five minutes she’ll get tired and go back to sleep. No night feeding either, because French babies eat at breakfast, lunch, snack time, and dinner, just like the big kids. Without the night feedings, there’s no need to get up to change the baby. They end up sleeping through the night by three months.

   On the American side, we might see the French parenting as insensitive and unloving. But look at the drawbacks to Dr. Spock’s methods, especially with regards to how it effects marriage. Nighttime feedings leave mothers worn out and tired, and having to tiptoe around the house, so as not to wake the baby, can be a hardship to the other children. Extended breastfeeding can lead to a clingy child, and make the child less inclined to try new foods. As for the parents who let the child sleep in their bed, how do they have sex? American parents treat their child as a plaything and a pet, but when the child becomes a clingy four-year-old, they’re desperate for a break. Meanwhile, the French four-year-old is going on a three-day school trip somewhere, and the parents are perfectly confident that the children will be safe.

   Until recently, few of the “American in Paris” books were about the children, except for one; Paris Was Ours has a story about the French style of parenting and the plot is similar. The author sees that French mothers are “mean, mean, mean,” but the French kids behave perfectly. Take this for example; a three year old spends a week in a hospital, and the minute he gets out, the family goes to a seaside holiday, no cancelling the vacation. The mother wants to go to the beach, and the child, who’s never seen the babysitter before, won’t take food from her. So what does she do? She puts him to bed for his nap, hungry and crying, and when he wakes, he eats ravenously. The mother’s response? She says “that’ll teach him!”

    I met a French school chef in New York once, and asked him what he thought of our typical public school lunch. The menu in question consisted of mashed potatoes, nachos with (processed) cheddar cheese and bacon, chicken nuggets, fish sticks, pizza, spaghetti (served preheated) and mystery meat. He looked at me warily and said “if I served this to the students, I would lose my job, and people would laugh at me, and I don’t know which is worse.”

    Need I say more?