Darling, Your Fish Are Done (Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa)

In the 2nd floor apartment that I share with my wife, there is a triangular counter space above the kitchen sink.  There are two windows above that space that let the blazing Arizona sun in from the east and south in the morning.  We always keep the blinds on those windows drawn at night, so that we may wake up in a gradual manner, drinking our tea and coffee.  Lately, it's been so hot that we just take the chilled version out of the refrigerator.


I'm not sure what the triangular space was really for. Perhaps a flowering plant.  But Diana is a great artist, and her vision was of an aquarium.  One day I came home, and there was a 36 gallon tank with a variety of fish swimming in it, some tropical and some not.  But the stars of the scene were two goldfish, whom we named Little Princess and Groucho Marx (because of his seeming black moustache).  It wasn't long before Little Princess was the Queen of the tank:  she had mushroomed to four inches in length.  The Queen's Consort had also grown, but not nearly as much. His moustache had disappeared, but we still called him Groucho anyway. 


About a year has passed since we first set up the aquarium.  The Phoenix area has two seasons:  Summer and Hell.  Summer for most of the country is Hell here, and the other three seasons are Summer here. It was 81F on New Year's Day, 2012.


But in the Summer of 2011, my wife hadn't rented her studio space in downtown Phoenix yet.  She stayed here, with the air-conditioning on.


We had a scorching June, and our electricity bill was $281.  That's for a 1,400 square foot apartment.  May's bill had only been $130.   After seeing the increase, I decided to tough it out.  Diana had been painting in her studio for a couple of days in a row, so I turned the AC off. After coming home from work, the place was about 92F, but with not much humidity, I  felt comfortable enough just using the ceiling fans.


I was very diligent about feeding the fish and our two newly acquired African frogs two times a day.  But I didn't check the tank thermometer:  There was a large basil plant obscuring the view (Diana loves fresh basil in her food).


But early on the morning of Saturday, July 14th (Bastille Day, no less),  I noticed that the tank had gone rather murky, and some time later, a tapas-size catfish was stiffly up-ended, staring at the surface of the water. 


Oh well, a dead fish.  "They do die, after all"  I snarled, in a Lord-Of-The-Manor accent. I scooped him out with a large slotted spoon and he went out with the rubbish.


I went out of the apartment for a while.  When I came back, Little Princess was floating on the top.  I phoned my wife in a near panic.  She said that because the catfish had died overnight, the ammonia in the tank had spiked.  But not to worry, she said. Put three capfuls of  conditioning liquid in the tank.  I did so, but the situation didn't improve.  The bodies piled up. I almost lost Little Princess down the garbage disposal -- finally I managed to get her out, wrap her in a paper towel, and put her in the freezer next to a box of organic popsicles from Whole Foods Market.   I phoned Diana again, and asked her to come back to Scottsdale.  I simply didn't know what to do.


After she arrived, we discussed the tragedy.  I simply couldn't figure out what I had done wrong.  After all, from all of the training I had received in my Roman Catholic upbringing, I knew I must have done something wrong.


Sometimes wives can be good detectives, and during my "interview," I let it spill that I had turned the AC off for three days.


"You can't do that!  You boiled the fish, in between turning off the air-conditioner, between those two windows with the hot Arizona sun pouring in! If you weren't so handsome, you'd be in  trouble! " she nearly yelled.


And then there was another comment about dumb Irish / monkey brains or something.


 I hadn't even opened the blinds the entire time the AC was off, but still I had made Not-So-Happy-Family Seafood Soup.


The aquarium and the surviving fish -- among them, Groucho Marx -- are now downstairs with a husband and wife and their two young children, and they are enthralled by our gift.   The triangular counter space is vacant.


If you're in Arizona, stay out of the sun !

Poor Forgotten Brezhnev

I have bushy black eyebrows.  I don't know what the evolutionary advantage may have been, but I've seen lots of Slavic people with the same trait.  My mother's family was from Slovakia, and my great grandmother, Antonia Kubinek, was born there in the 19th century. To our knowledge, there are no pictures of the Kubineks available.  But somehow I feel that she had the same bushy black eyebrows.  They must have come from somewhere, and I think it's the Carpathian Mountains.

However, my hairstylist, Mr. "J", a rather debonair, accomplished young man, does not like bushy eyebrows.  He thinks they are simply disgusting. Over the last six months or so, we have had a friendly oral slappy-party  over whether they should be trimmed.  I like them, and he doesn't.  When I came in in May, I told him I didn't want them trimmed.  But he insisted !  After all, his place of business  is a Paul Mitchell Salon in Scottsdale. So I relented.  But then I hatched a plot.  A plot !

When I saw Mr. "J." for my June appointment, I was carrying on my person a picture of a person with the most prominent black eyebrows in the world, the late Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev.  I secreted it in my pocket, and when my hairstylist was about ready to seize my eyebrows, I whipped Comrade Brezhnev's picture out of a fold between a Kardashians photo essay in People magazine, and said "This is a real eyebrow problem.  Do you know who he is?"

Mr. "J" retorted "I don't know, and I don't want to know !"

"Well, he was  Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, until his death in 1982."

"So what?"  Mr. "J" snapped.

Didn't my hairstylist know anything about the "Evil Empire,"  the Stalinist purges and forced agrarian collectivization that lead to tens of millions of deaths?  Or even the Russian Revolution of 1917 that deposed and literally disposed of the Romanovs for good?

I guess not.  He trimmed my eyebrows anyway, almost in a panic, and instructed me:  "You're taking this picture home with you !"

"Yes, dear."

So when Mr. "J" had done his fine job, and I was at the reception desk, ready to pay my bill, I showed Brezhnev's picture to the young (20s) staff, and asked them,"Who is this man?"

Every one of them said "I don't know" and looked at me with a perplexed gaze.

But then a more mature lady with a great new 3-figure 'do approached the desk.  Rudely, I said to her "Madam, you appear old enough to know this man. What's his name?"  She snapped back:  "He's just some Mexican!"

Ouch.  "Just some Mexican."

Poor, poor, forgotten Brezhnev.

Parrots And Me

For most of my life, I've loved parrots.

My life was spent on Long Island until almost the age of eleven.  During those years, for me parrots lived in the realm of black and white "B" criminal movies shown in the wee hours on WPIX-11.  They existed  in the cigarette smoke swirled by ceiling fans, and cawed when Carmen Miranda jiggled her fruits, head-worn and otherwise. Potted palms and servants in starched white uniforms were the backdrop.

Then, in the early 70s,  my father landed a job as a maritime engineer for the U.S. Navy on their base at Subic Bay, Philippines.  I was suddenly transported to a country were real parrots lived.  But not many of them.  As it turned out, almost all of them had been stolen by kooky filthy rich people and their favorite restaurants. I did see parrots, but they were never in the wild, even though I had hiked miles through the steaming jungle as a boy scout. 

In 1982, I graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a major in Music.  During that last semester, I had seen a movie entitled Eating Raoul, which to me was one of the best social satires on Los Angeles ever brought to film.  Later that year, when I was visiting my parents on the East Coast, I took my mother to see it.  Mom was from Manhattan, and shared Woody Allen's intense disdain for L.A.  I hoped she would like it.  In a strange way, she did -- because she found the film as disgusting as her idea of Los Angeles was -- indeed,  I remember her "Judge Judy" OMG face.  Some time later, when I finally decided to move to the San Francisco Bay Area -- with a permanence that lasted 24 years -- she gave me a cheaply feathered false parrot that one could attach to a ceiling hook.  It was pink and yellow and green and had an obnoxous beak:   "Here" --she said-- "Is  your pet parrot Raoul!"

Well, I wasn't going to let this gift be wasted.

I have always been an early riser. One morning, a fleeting girlfriend couldn't find one of her underthings.  She had some idea that she had to go to work...after fifteen minutes of searching she found it hanging from Raoul.  I was enjoying a rather nice bath when she confronted me:   Men are Idiots! 

Dear Reader, as I have stated, it was a fleeting relationship.

I now believe in the Law of Attraction, because a real parrot appeared in my life.  In 2008, after I had long since thrown the cannabis-tarred and feathered faux-parrot Raoul into an Oakland dumpster (in 1996 , at my wife Diana's request),  she informed me that I was getting a Valentine present.  When I came home, there was a Golden Conure - a parrot from Brazil -- whom our friends had said couldn't quite get along with their dog. I immediately named the bird Raúl using the traditional Spanish spelling.

We took Raúl to a bird veterinarian, and found out from the leg band that she had been born in São Paulo, Brazil.   So, with a knee-reflex, we changed her name to Raúla.

Raúla didn't much like the trip from the SF Bay Area to Scottsdale AZ.  It took place  in August 2010, and at the Grapevine Weigh Station,  a California Highway Patrol (CHP) Officer detained us, convinced that any persons transporting a parrot must be drug dealers.  After the officer had queried every criminal database in the world for 20 minutes, he let us go, banging his fist on the table, throwing our California Driver Licenses across the desk, and instructing us:  Get out of here !

So we did.

Here is Raúla, the paradise bird of Scottsdale.  She likes toast and blackberries for breakfast. 

Amen.

Mormonnequin For Your Money

More.

More Money.

More Money Now.

Mormonnequin 2012.

Indestructible

"When I was a young man, only my mind was degenerate." -- Philip Hellsten (1952-2009)

At 0500 on the 4th of July, I decided to soothe my injured hip in the jacuzzi.  So I hobbled over there and was surprised to find two 20ish lads lounging poolside.  They were smoking cigarettes and drinking a concoction of orange juice and most probably vodka.

After I turned the jets on and sat down in the swirling water, one of them said to me "Do you usually get up this early?"

I replied that it was an old habit from years of commuting long distances in the SF Bay Area.  Getting up very early was the only way to avoid traffic jams.

Somewhat apologetically,  my new acquaintance said "I'm usually in bed by 10 o' clock -- I never do this."

Yes, indeed.  But there was no reason to regret it, I thought.  Looking at myself, having finally broken my body from years of long-distance running, I reminisced about the age when I could party all night and not feel too bad afterwards. In a flashing memory -- I believe the kind that people who are falling to their death experience -- I recalled myself stay up sixty-five straight hours in 1981.  It had to do with partying all night with my girlfriend on a Friday, and then performing with a band at a party on The Queen Mary the next evening.  I was 21 at the time.  At the end of it all, I did feel tremendously tired, but I was able to do it --  I don't think I could now.

I didn't bother telling the lads that they would eventually lose their endurance -- that would be "No Fun," as Iggy Pop once sang.

As they were leaving, the other asked me "Is it beer-thirty yet?"
"Yes," I retorted -- "Definitely time for another one!"

The Story

St. Patrick’s Day arrives next Thursday, March 17th.  It’s a day overloaded with memories for me, as my father is a professional  Irish-American of sorts.  He once had a beautiful  tenor voice,  loved a political harangue, and lost many of his teeth in both planned and impromptu boxing matches.   Alas, he’s 84 now,  suffers from dementia,  and thus isn’t quite sure who I am anymore. 

Among my fondest memories of Saint Pat's are dad’s green satin suit, the drink and the blather:

"It's not the truth, it's the story."

Well he knew his pint, and of the Irishmen (and wannabes) who make arses of themselves on the important day. What was a somewhat solemn occasion in Ireland has become National Alcoholic Achievement Day in America.  Dad had explained it this way: "In Ireland, a bottle of whiskey cost a month's wages.  In America, a day's wages."  

Here’s a song I wrote in tribute to his legacy. It’s a 1-4-5 type of song, but you can throw in the relative minor to make it more ballad-like if you prefer.

 

Caveman

An I.Q. that’s good for golfing

is a very happy lad

You should see him on a pub crawl

half sodden and half mad

You can fiddlefuck and argue

if it’s human or it’s beast

But even all the nitwits say

he’s quite a touchy piece

He’ll thrash the sweet bejesus

out of those who cross his will

Take you out with the rubbish

or eat you as a meal

There’s no sense making chatter

with a caveman of this sort

You’d best make fancy footwork

for the nearest door

No girl would fancy marriage

because he drools while making sweet

And with such a large appendage

he can barely take a seat

Jesus, Mary, Joseph and

the panoply of saints

I confess to you that I’ve

never seen a harder case

Testosterone’s a good thing,

it gives us girls and boys

But too much of a good thing

is Satan’s grandest ploy

La la la la
La la la la
Tra la la la
Caveman

© 2008 Tom Hamill

 

Fleshibitionists

As we approach Mardi Gras (which falls on March 8 this year), I recall my only direct experience of the definitive New Orleans celebration.  The year was 1976, and I was 16 years old.  My parents and I (I'm an only child) had just returned from over 5 years living in The Philippines, where my father worked as a maritime engineer. I was attending St. Stanislaus Academy in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, which was about an hour's drive from The Crescent City.  St. Stanislaus, which had been built on waterfront property, had been wiped out by Hurricane Camille (1969) and subsequently rebuilt. (After Hurricane Katrina demolished it once again in 2005, the Roman Catholic Church surrendered to nature).   My father received an invitation from a NASA rocket scientist (literally) to attend a party at a hotel room in The French Quarter.

So we drove the family LTD (for those of your remember the Ford model, it was a cheap answer to the Cadillac monsters of the day , and contained a V8 engine that delivered 15 mpg at 55 mph on a perfectly flat freeway) to New Orleans, where we found an almost non-navigable path to the hotel garage.  On the way, we witnessed the traditional and customary "monkey shines" of Mardi Gras.  But the most precious moment came when a young man, thoroughly intoxicated, stripped right in front of our car, and started to give my parents a nudie show. My mother, who had maintained shrines to The Blessed Virgin at all the homes we had lived in, emitted an expression of shock and closed her eyes.  My father said something "wise" in his Queens English (note the lack of an apostrophe).  It was a seminal moment for me, one that would inspire me later in life.

We now advance to 1988 in San Francisco, where I was a member of a dadapunk opera band called The Outpatients.  The occasion was one of the National Poetry Week performance nights at the Fort Mason complex.  We were set to accompany the Frank Moore Dance Troupe.  Frank himself did not dance; indeed, he did not walk.  He had been confined to a wheelchair for most of his life by Cerebral Palsy.  In the room adjoining the performance space there was an on-going cocktail party.  Every member of the troupe (save Mr. Moore) was completely naked, and exchanged niceties with the clothed, while indulging in white wine and crudité.  Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian-American literary luminary, seemed ponderous, and smoked a number of cigarettes.  When it was our turn to perform, we accompanied the performers with our best neo-juju music.  Some of the dancers wrapped others in large rolls of cellophane while Frank’s wife, Linda Mac, recited poetry.  Frank himself was treated to a nude young lady with a shaved head “rocking” on his lap.  Indeed, the piece was called Rocking and Wrapping.

In 2009, in a wooded valley in California, there was a dilapidated building dedicated to art.  The ground floor was occupied by a gallery, and on the 2nd floor there were 4 studios shared by about a dozen artists.  I found myself in one of them.  Ms. L. papered over the windows while Mr. J, who was the gallery minister of beverages, distributed the chardonnay.  4 students were at their easels ready to start the class. The astrologer next door attempted entry but was told by Ms. L that he would have to pay the model’s fee, and so he declined attending.  5 minutes after the students started drawing, The Gallery Director burst into the studio and snapped “What are you perverts doing in here?”  He soon turned scarlet in the face when he saw me in my natural Spanish model pose: classical guitar on my lap,  tripartite configuration hanging beneath the instrument.  33 years after that Mardi Gras, I was now I the fleshibitionist.