Solid Gold Question Mark Twenty Feet Tall Monday, September 01, 2003

Generally a glorious day. I decided I was going to call the new priest Father Pineapple, which made me feel very pleased with myself; now all I need is a nickname for the creepy aquiline deacon, who looks something like a hairdo model in a bad barber shop. Deacon Leer? Deacon Beard? Or something that reflects the supremely irritating affect he uses when he reads the Gospel, or God help us, a sermon: Instead of reading naturally, he puts long pauses between words to emphasize them, then rushes out whole verses in one breath. And he says "Jesus" as if it had six esses on the end and his hernia snapped after the first syllable. Any week now, I expect him to start scatting.

So I daydreamed through most of the service, as I do more and more often lately. As we all know, intent counts in church, just like on "Law & Order"; but for all the time I spend thinking about guys in spacesuits kicking down doors or enumerating the songs I want to scan into my iPod or rehearsing grievances from the past week, something happens to me when it comes time for the Creed and Communion. The fantasias are my imperfect faith and my fault; the few moments that I'm free from those imagings are, I think, my reward for the neutron of faith I do have bouncing around my heart.

I continued my Sunday school with Dr. Percy and "The Moviegoer." I needed a snuggle with American prose after getting tied down and bronskied by Evelyn Waugh; and the doctor does not disappoint. His style isn't within an ocean of Evelyn's, but he's a writer of ideas, and they never, never, never fail him. Every page has a paragraph worth quoting. If you want to know what I go on and on about, signposts and whatever, pick up this one. Some samples:

Everything is upside-down for me. What are generally to be the best time are for me the worst times, and that worst of times [in the war] was one of the best. My shoulder didn't hurt but it was pressed hard against the ground as if somebody sat on me. Six inches from my nose a dung beetle was scratching around under the leaves. As I watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity. I was onto something. I vowed that if I ever got out of this fix, I would pursue the search. Naturally, as soon as I recovered and got home, I forgot about it. But this morning, when I got up, I dressed as usual and began as usual to put my belongings into my pockets: wallet, notebook (for writing down occasional thoughts), pencil, keys, handkerchief, pocket slide rule (for calculating percentage returns on principal). They looked both unfamiliar and at the same time full of clues. I stood in the center of the room and gazed at the little pile, sighting through a hole made by thumb and forefinger. What was unfamiliar about them was that I could see them. They might have belonged to someone else. A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand. Once I saw it, however, the search became possible. I bathed, shaved, dressed carefully, and sat at my desk and poked through the little pile in search of a clue just as the detective on television pokes through the dead man's possessions, using his pencil as a poker.

And later:

What is the nature of the search? you ask. ... The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as though I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick. ... What do you seek--God? you ask with a smile. .... I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say: Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?

Bang bang bang, he does not stop, page after page after page. He is not a poet; he is not Waugh. He wrote a handful of novels and a couple books of philosophy. But the paragraphs above, from his first novel, are the beginning of probably the most monumental literary undertaking of the past century. He diagnoses a disease that we all suffer from but are too sick to see. What's the cure? The search. And what's waiting at the end. But I won't spoil it for you.

An excellent smoothie, a sufficient sandwich, and a movie with good buddies. The Film Forum again, this time for "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three." From the opening theme, I knew we were in excellent hands; funky, percussive, Lalo Schifrinesque; every time you hear it a Noo Yawk cop gets his wings. And what a city we get to see! Streets full of V-8s, everyone's got a moustache and a ratty hairdo, the mayor's a John Lindsay feeb, the cops are louts, the TA is a shabby mess run by loudmouths...and, yes, the Twin Towers put in an appearance, looming behind the FDR Drive. A pair of Walter Matthau buildings, big and unlovely and indispensable. God rest ye.

That was my father's city: run by older guys with white shirts, brown sweaters and red tempers; guys who would blow their stack and say impolitic things and damn the consequences. Indeed, their lines got belly laughs like you wouldn't believe, from a mixed crowd: We've arrived at a point where we get as much of a vicarious thrill out of hearing somebody say "fruitcake" without fear as we do watching a gunfight or car chase.

To be sure, it's wrong to romanticize those guys as the last generation of straight shooters before political correctness defanged us all. Many of them just didn't earn their bluster. They run the city in "Pelham"; but they're not doing a hell of a lot with it. The offices are shabby, everybody's got his feet up on the desk and looks hung over. A city of clock-watchers and seat-warmers.

My father, I am quick to note, was one of the good ones. He is a gentleman, a quiet, polite guy who I have seen lose his temper maybe twice in his life. Moreover, he is good at what he does. One of the most enlightening, and humbling, moments in my life was going to his retirement party and seeing the esteem and love his co-workers had for him.

And for clarity's sake: I am not one of those guys who thinks New York has become Disneyfied, and that we need to restore the city's integrity by bringing back graffiti and peep shows and stocking the Port Authority with a new generation of Jodie Fosters. Anybody who thinks this city needs more problems is out of his mind.

I was just about to run, and now I see Charles Bronson is dead. Another tough guy from a lost city. I hope Heaven is full of punks for him to waste.

@ 12:10:00 AM,

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