The Rake Magazine

Year: 2007

  • Murder by Numbers

    Viewed through the prism of memory, some years take on a character, a distinctive tone. In 2006, crime reclaimed its place on the front pages of newspapers across the United States, including the Star Tribune. And in this year of murder, Courtney Brown and Trevor Marsh were like twin poles on a violent globe. Brown died on a Saturday night in September, while walking with friends near the intersection of Lyndale Avenue North and Dowling Avenue. He had been playing basketball. The young man who shot him wanted Brown’s basketball shoes and jersey, a replica of an old Morgan State University uniform. Brown was about to start his sophomore year at Edison High.

     

    Minneapolis had been recording homicides at a rate not seen here in a decade, but Brown’s killing, which occurred on the fringes of Minneapolis’ most troubled neighborhood, struck a chord. Spurred by media attention and aided by cooperative citizens, the police quickly arrested several suspects, including the alleged shooter. He was seventeen. Charges have since been dropped.

    Trevor Marsh’s murder occurred nine miles away, bringing a half-dozen squad cars and police barricades to a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. A student at South High, he was shot in the woods near the Mississippi River, below the intersection of Thirty-second Street and West River Parkway. It was October 26. Another South High student had been murdered just three weeks earlier.

    Police said little about the circumstances of Marsh’s killing, but rumors swirled at the school and throughout the Longfellow neighborhood, where violent crime is rare. Marsh had been in trouble. He was shot execution style. The killers had taken his shoes, a sign of gang involvement. In late December, Minneapolis police charged two alleged gang members, one of them only sixteen, with Marsh’s murder. According to the criminal complaint, Raine C. Neiss shot Marsh at close range near the left ear because he had lied about being a member of the Gangster Disciples. An eyewitness allegedly told investigators that Neiss was playing Russian roulette with a pistol that Marsh brought to the meeting.

    Along the river, a memorial grew and morphed, withered and was revived. A framed photograph in a wicker basket, flowers, balloons. Saints candles. Briefly, a blue bandanna. In December, a Christmas wreath with handwritten notes.

    These murders made for two sharply contrasting tales: One victim black, the other white. One lived north, one south. One was the epitome of innocence on the fringes of a troubled neighborhood; the other, apparently living what Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak indelicately called a “high-risk lifestyle,” albeit in a supposedly safe part of the city. And yet each death created the same anguish, confusion, and even rage.

     

    By year’s end, Minneapolis had recorded sixty homicides, thirteen more than in 2005 and the highest number since 1996, when eighty-eight people died violently in the city. Twenty-nine—nearly half—of last year’s killings occurred in a six-square-mile area of North Minneapolis, from Glenwood Avenue north to Dowling, and from the city’s western border to the Mississippi River on the east (minus the North Loop neighborhood in the southeastern corner). According to the 2000 Census, 49,405 people live here, which equates to roughly fifty-four homicides per hundred thousand residents. Were North Minneapolis a separate city, that murder rate would put it just behind such municipalities as Compton, California, and Gary, Indiana. If Longfellow neighborhood had the same homicide rate, there would have been fifteen homicides there in 2006, instead of three; in southwest Minneapolis, there would have been thirty-four instead of the single case—the shooting of graduate student Michael Zebuhr in Uptown—that caused such an uproar last March.

    Granted, last year’s total was far below the 1995 record of ninety-nine homicides, which earned the city mention as “Murderapolis” in the New York Times. And, in fact, experts routinely caution against extrapolating from homicide data for a single year, since the numbers involved are relatively small and can be influenced by many factors, including luck. But the Minneapolis-based Center for Homicide Research has used police data and other sources to locate all seven-hundred-odd homicides in Minnesota between 1996 and 2000. Zooming in on Minneapolis shows that nothing substantial has changed between those years and 2006—there are just more dots. “Homicide doesn’t occur randomly,” pointed out Dallas Drake, the center’s principal researcher. “It clusters. It clusters in space and time.”

    Minneapolis is not alone. From Orlando to Oakland, Philadelphia to Indianapolis, to Milwaukee, to Little Rock, violent crime, particularly murder, was big news in 2006. Oakland, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last October, “has hit a 10-year high for homicides.” A headline in the Houston Chronicle proclaimed that same month: “Homicide rate on track to be worst in a decade.” Wrote the Orlando Sentinel on November 3: “Death brings murder count to record 44.” In August, the Philadelphia Daily News reported that “blood is spilling at a record rate this year—not only on the streets of Philly—but in supposedly friendlier locales …”

    These figures in many cases rose for the second year in a row. “Among violent crimes,” the Washington Post reported, “the biggest rise in 2005 came in the number of homicides, which leapt 4.8 percent, to nearly 17,000. Some of the hardest-hit cities included Milwaukee (up 40 percent), Cleveland (38 percent), Houston (23 percent), and Phoenix (9 percent).” According to recently released FBI figures, violent crime rates accelerated four percent in the first half of 2006. This follows a 2.5 percent increase in 2005, which was the largest increase in a decade.

     

    No matter how it’s broken down statistically, murder is ultimately just a surrogate for the broader perceptions about security and danger that profoundly shape our lives. We focus on homicides, in part, because they can be measured with relative accuracy. Few go unreported; the demarcation between life and death is clear. In legal terms, too, it makes a huge difference: When a man was shot at a downtown Minneapolis bus stop in late November, the fact that he survived meant that the shooter could not be charged with murder. Knowing that the victim survived, however, does not make those who witnessed the shooting, or who wait at that bus stop every day, feel measurably safer.

    Among themselves, criminologists often speak of homicide as merely one type of aggravated assault, in which numerous factors—the shooter’s skill, proximity to advanced trauma care, and sheer luck—influence the fate of the victim. A half-inch difference in where a bullet hits can mean the difference between life and death. Researchers at Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts have estimated that the U.S. murder rate would be roughly three times higher without the advances in emergency-room medicine that have occurred since 1960. And so Minneapolis’ overall homicide rate is surely reduced by the proximity of two Level I trauma centers, at Hennepin County and North Memorial Medical Centers.

    But trauma surgeons saving the lives of gunshot victims masks the true dimensions of the problem, which is not so much murder as it is violence in general. A better measure of that violence might be a tally of those who are intentionally shot, or shot at, in the city; however, such figures are unfortunately only “semi-accurate,” said Minneapolis police Lieutenant Greg Reinhardt. “You don’t see a gang member saying, ‘I want to make a report that I was shot at.’ They’re going to take care of it themselves.”

    Still, even the number of reported shootings in 2006 rose twelve percent over 2005, according to police figures. Aggravated assaults, which include shootings, were up sixteen percent in the same period, and weapons-related arrests were up fourteen percent. Nearly three-quarters of Minneapolis’ homicide victims in 2006 were killed with handguns; a decade earlier, when the city had eighty-eight homicides, handguns were used in about half of them. One logical response to violent crime, then, might be to take away guns from those with a propensity for violence. Police in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, cut gun crimes nearly in half when they dramatically increased enforcement in “gun crime hot spots” of laws that prohibit the carrying of concealed weapons. They took away sixty-five percent more guns than in the previous year. Researchers have reported similar results in other cities, but the methods used to seize those guns have often proved controversial, with frequent charges that police rely on racial profiling to decide whom to search.

    At universities and think tanks across the United States, a small cottage industry of researchers has tried to understand why and how murder occurs, and by extension how to curb it. There is even a peer-reviewed journal, Homicide Studies. (From its November 2006 issue: “The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill.”) Like law-enforcement officials, those researchers routinely classify homicides in a variety of ways: by the relationship between victim and killer, say, or by looking at whether illegal drugs or gang membership were involved.

    If the goal is to reduce the number of murders, those distinctions make sense. Preventing the death of a young child at the hands of a caregiver (No. 13, three-year-old Ethan Hamilton) or of an intimate partner (No. 43, Martell Delaney) requires a different strategy from, say, stopping drive-by shootings (No. 50, South High student Gennaro Knox ), violent robberies (No. 12, Michael Zebuhr), or drug-related murders (No. 16, Garey Hannah). Likewise, this analysis helps us gauge risk and protect ourselves.

    But these distinctions have negative consequences, as well. They inherently place at least part of the blame for murder on the victim. One was buying illegal drugs, a second argued with a gang member, another chose to live with a violent partner. In this crude calculus, it is the random act of violence that haunts urban America. Thus, as the Star Tribune reported in the wake of that November bus-stop murder: “The downtown shooting wasn’t random … The boy was shot by another person who … knew the parties involved.” The subtext: You, dear reader, are safe.

    These distinctions create a sort of economy of homicide, in which some lives are more valuable than others. And in this economy, daily news coverage becomes a rough measure of value. Only a handful of the city’s murders in 2006 made front-page news, and those often had a ready-made nickname (the Block E shooting, the Uptown murder), or at least a shocking detail (killed for a basketball jersey). The killing of Michael Zebuhr merited 7,500 words. Including the trial and its aftermath, the death of Alan Reitter, near Block E, generated more than 11,000 words. Michael Eide, shot near Twenty-ninth and Morgan Avenues North, was worth 313. Erman Edmonds, shot on the 3700 block of Columbus Avenue South, warranted 105.

    At the very nadir of this process, the act of living in or even visiting a neighborhood plagued by violence tacitly becomes equated with risk. Murder, Drake says, “becomes normal. ‘That’s just a bad neighborhood.’ It becomes acceptable—expected—that homicide will occur there.”

    In recent years, researchers in the field of public health have become involved in this discussion of homicide. From their perspective, murder might be seen as a disease that disproportionately afflicts men: In Minneapolis, the murder rate for men (27.9 per hundred thousand residents) is nearly eight times higher than it is for women (3.6). Homicide disproportionately affects African Americans, especially men: Their murder rate in Minneapolis (eighty-seven per hundred thousand) is about fifteen times that of white men (5.6). Homicide rates for black male teenagers (202 per hundred thousand) and black men aged twenty to twenty-nine (244 per hundred thousand) are staggeringly high. (The rates for whites are fifteen and eleven, respectively.) As with the maps plotting out murder locations in Minneapolis, these figures remain fundamentally consistent, year after year, decade after decade, both here and in many American cities.

    Not that plenty of people aren’t trying to reduce the violence, using myriad strategies, both obvious (a police juvenile-crime apprehension unit, gun buy-back programs, increased patrols in hot spots, the new “Shotspotter” technology) and not so obvious (nonprofit organizations that rehabilitate problem properties).

    We also talk good. Last August, Mayor Rybak spoke of public safety as a “civil right.” Quoting the mayor, the Strib wrote an impassioned editorial, pointing out how angry we would be if armed thugs terrorized the streets of Edina. Governor Pawlenty called the violence in Minneapolis “a statewide concern.” We write this article.

    But lacking a coherent, systematic plan to address violence, all of the above amounts to tinkering. Some years see more cops added to the police force, or more dollars budgeted for overtime. But by leaving the problem to the cops (as though a thousand more officers might alone solve the problem), we forget that our safety depends most on voluntary adherence to law. As a city and state, we make a cost-benefit analysis, essentially deciding that a certain number of lives are expendable.

    By contrast, Boston radically reduced its youth homicide rate in the 1990s with a comprehensive, multidisciplinary effort that has been dubbed the “Boston Miracle.” According to figures published in Murder Is No Accident, by Doctors Deborah Prothrow-Stith and Howard Spivak, fourteen children aged sixteen and under were killed by handguns there in 1988. By 1996, the city had in place more than a dozen antiviolence programs that involved numerous organizations, including community groups, the police, and hospitals. Schools, for example, taught an antiviolence curriculum. Hospitals assessed victims of violence to determine whether they were at risk of additional attacks; doctors, social workers and nurses attempted to prevent them much as they might try to prevent asthma attacks. Community groups sought to give young people alternatives to joining gangs. The police department instituted community policing and worked with probation officers to hold youth offenders accountable. The result: Between 1996 and 1998, Prothrow-Stith and Spivak report, not one child sixteen and under was killed with a handgun in Boston. Over an eight-year period, the city averaged just one such killing a year, compared with an average of seven per year in the preceeding eight years.

    Many of these same programs have been implemented in cities all over the U.S., including Minneapolis. So what made Boston special? Even the authors of Murder Is No Accident, who were themselves primary architects of the Boston Violence Prevention Project, say they “don’t know exactly what happened.” While politicians and police chiefs are often quick to claim credit for reductions in crime, criminologists admit in moments of candor how little we truly know. “It’s a Crime What We Don’t Know About Crime,” the Washington Post titled one essay last July.

    In this context, Courtney Brown’s death in September was, paradoxically, both random and predictable. There was no way to know that this “innocent” and “sweet” boy (as then-Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar described him) would die a “senseless” death, any more than we can know exactly who will die from secondhand smoke, and when. But the circumstances were volatile in Courtney Brown’s neighborhood. Similar killings outraged the city in the Murderapolis years. A similar killing will likely happen this year, too.

    “When the [homicide] rates are going down, we feel relieved,” said Drake, “but there’s never a sense that we can eliminate homicide altogether. We expect a certain number. That’s a sick way of thinking. Not all countries have the homicide rate that we have.” By implication, the invocation of public health tells us something else important: Murder is preventable. So says a sign on the wall of Drake’s office.

  • Spinning "Climate Change"

    Aquatennial and Winter Carnival to merge.

    More Speedo time!

    Northwest Passage soon to be completed.

    Global Warming: Beats the hell out of an ice age.

    It’s treatable! Sort of like a meteorlogical bi-polar disorder.

    Won’t that hole in the ozone be a handy escape hatch when the planet blows up?

  • Peddling Pleasure

    Smitten Kitten, the South Minneapolis sex boutique, recently launched its own version of the in-home sex-toy party, at which such wares as lubricants and vibrators are passed around for taste-testing, manhandling, discussion, and, of course, purchase. These “Pussy Parties” are geared to have a more urban, less hetero bent than, say, “Passion Parties,” which is what the industry leader calls its gatherings. Lindsey, a roaming sex educator employed by Smitten Kitten, presided over a dozen randy partygoers a few weeks ago. The hostesses were college students, Jessie and Jacqueline, who had booked the party in honor of their soon-to-be-married friend Liz. For the occasion, they’d wallpapered their Southeast Minneapolis living room with pornographic images—cutouts of naked men taken from Slurp and other similarly tasteful 80s-era publications. Seasoned pro that she is, Lindsey didn’t bat an eye. During a lecture on male anatomy, in fact, she pointed to one of the photographs of a gentleman in full recline and said, “This guy, there’s his taint!”
    Suited up as if to assert an authoritative air, the twenty-six-year-old Lindsey wore a short red skirt, black tights, and a pair of tall, calf-hugging black boots. She’d applied a light dusting of makeup to her baby face, and her closely cropped auburn hair was wispy and spiked. Providing a hint of what was to come, she announced, “I’ve got the Cock Box,” and opened a vintage trunk to reveal a fantastic display of satin and hard plastics. Lubricants were stowed in satchels and side pouches, while vibrators were belted down by what looked to be a series of frilly garter belts. “I’d like you to know that my mom helped me make this box,” Lindsey said.
    In the next hour or so, she would educate (“Semen comes out at twenty-eight miles per hour”), boggle (“You don’t have to worry about losing things in your vagina—your butt, now that’s a different story”), and pitch with equal zeal. She waxed poetic on the virtues of such products as Rocket Balm (“sort of like a hot, sexy Bengay”) and O’My Clitoral Stimulating Gel. As guests passed around the Fukuoku Finger Vibe, Lindsey suggested this inconspicuous massager would pack well for travel. It isn’t likely to bring its owner unwanted attention from airport security agents, although such a scenario didn’t seem much of a concern for Lindsey. “When I travel I put a big dildo on top of my suitcase,” she said. “I think it’s funny and I want them to check it.”
    Among a batch of scary-looking toys, many of which bore a vague resemblance to weapons of torture, Lindsey introduced the Sea Goddess, an aquamarine, cactus-shaped contraption. This two-headed creature, she said, both pulses and “does a Ricki Lake-like neck twist.” An imposing doodad called the Echo resembled a chocolate soft-serve ice cream cone and had the all-important flared base. “You can put this in a harness or in a butt,” Lindsey said. “You can also put this in the dishwasher.”
    She was also more than candid regarding her own sexual practices. For example, as a motivational reward to herself, she said, she inserts something called Smartballs every time she does housework. “It makes you shake your butt a little more while you’re vacuuming,” she said. More shocking still was her claim of having convinced men (yes, more than one) to insert things up their backsides; because of the opportune placement of their prostates, or P-spots, they’d all thanked her for it later, she said.
    Shortly after bowling over the room with this last statement, Lindsey packed up the Cock Box and carried it upstairs, making herself available in one of the home’s private bedrooms so that partygoers could discreetly place orders and ask questions. Having spent the past sixty minutes under Lindsey’ erotic spell, no one in the living room seemed quite certain of how to proceed in her absence. One woman sighed. Another stretched her arms as she looked around. A few had their heads buried in their order forms, presumably pondering purchases of Body Wax Candles and Kama Sutra Honey Dust. Finally, a Pussy Party attendee named Alison spoke up. “I feel like I’m ordering Girl Scout Cookies,” she said.

  • Learning to Speak

    It’s a bit foggy aboard the Queen Mary 2 on our second day out of New York. The sky merges seamlessly with the ocean, obliterating the horizon in mushy blue-grayness. But deep inside this massive vessel—the newest, largest, fastest, and most luxurious ocean liner in the world—and behind the doors of the Illuminations auditorium, the stage lights are so bright that I can’t see anyone beyond the second row. What I know (and sense acutely) is that there are 150 people in the room, and that their attention, in just a moment, will be trained on me. For the first time I feel nervous, my self-assurance fading into a maritime cloudbank along with the afternoon sun. I start to worry: Have I combed my hair? Did I get my tie on straight? Am I going to stammer?

    Dr. David Vaisey, a silver-haired Oxford professor and a luminary in the world of English academia, takes the lectern to introduce me. It was never the icebergs of the North Atlantic I feared. It’s these spotlights.

    Months earlier, checking my morning email, I noticed one that stood out from the deluge of spam that usually arrives overnight. It was addressed: “From Oxford University for William Gurstelle.” Yes, that storied institution of higher learning. And they had a business proposition for me: Oxford runs the Discovery Series, a continuing-education program offered on the Cunard Line’s Queen Mary 2, and they wanted me to present a series of lectures on my particular area of expertise: catapults, Tesla coils, rockets, coil guns, flamethrowers, and other technology-with-an-edge stuff. I’ve carved out a niche in this area, authored books, and developed an overall reputation as the go-to guy for the facts on things that go whoosh, boom, and splat.

    In return for four presentations on these topics, Oxford offered a stipend, along with airfare and accommodations for me and a guest aboard the Queen Mary 2. In an attempt to avoid appearing overly eager, I waited two days before accepting. Then, promptly, I began to feel pangs of apprehension. I’ve given quite a few talks before, and typically they involve a fair amount of nervous anticipation. I’m more a writer than a speaker. Still, I figured I would know more about my strange little area of expertise than any of the ship’s other passengers, and wasn’t an all-expenses-paid trip on a legendary ocean liner worth some anxiety?

    All of that rationalizing seems a million years ago as I mount the stage and stand at the lectern. I take a gulp of water and look down at my notes. It’s my turn in the spotlight.

    Historians tell us that public speaking—the art of oratory—was crucial to the culture of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. In Rhetoric, Aristotle explained his method for effective and persuasive speaking. A public speaker must master three things, he said: ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos comes from a speaker’s credibility; pathos from his emotion; and logos from his logic. These simple ideas have influenced speaking traditions throughout Western civilizations in the 2,400 years since Rhetoric was published.

    Public speaking has been an important part of life in America since before the Revolution. Whether you wanted to win an election, supporters for your cause, or converts for your congregation, the ability to deliver crowd-pleasing speeches was necessary. Candidates for office debated. Ministers preached. And—most relevant to the task in front of me—guest speakers at the local lyceums and other organizations such as Chautauquas and Rotary Clubs provided education and entertainment for people of all classes in cities and small towns across America.

    Even with the advent of electronic information exchange—from radio and television to blogs, email, and online chats—the tradition of public speaking remains vital. Still, a great many of us are loathe to stand up and talk in front of our peers. People fear public speaking for one of two reasons. A minority of people are truly phobic, and probably no amount of practice or coaching will help them to overcome their fear. The rest of us simply realize, consciously or unconsciously, that we are unskilled public speakers. We don’t know how to use this activity to help us accomplish goals, and that makes us nervous. I do rather like to talk, publicly and privately; what I suffered from was an antipathy to the idea of exhibiting myself, in public, as mediocre. The way to avoid that was to prepare for my engagement very, very well.

    I figured that reciting my talk in front of a mirror would yield minimal results, and be quite boring, to boot. So I embarked on a different sort of training program, something I called my Audible Spring, built around the observation of speakers speaking. I resolved to see every major speaker coming to the Twin Cities that I possibly could in the four months preceding my summer voyage on the Queen Mary 2. I might or might not enjoy these people or be moved by them—but I would learn from them. Stutter, strut, sweat, or swear, it wasn’t what these orators were saying, it was how they said it that mattered.

    Once I became attuned to looking, I found the number and quality of lecturers coming to the Twin Cities nearly overwhelming. Another not-insignificant benefit of my self-improvement program was the food that is frequently offered after lectures. In fact, these free buffets were often superb: exotic pastries, aged cheeses, and, occasionally, the ne plus ultra of the hors d’oeuvres table, jumbo shrimp. One’s overall impression of even the driest, most obtuse lecture can always be improved by the ingestion of high-quality canapés and finger foods immediately afterward.

    After attending nearly three dozen lectures, I devised a framework for understanding the world of public speaking, dividing it into a series of patterns and formats. Most speaking engagements, I noticed, fall into one of three categories: inspirational, informative, or persuasive. While some speakers may fall outside this taxonomy, it usually holds up well.

    Those of the inspirational ilk are usually billed as “motivational speakers”; characters who have made it their job to tell people to reach higher, to try harder, to be more creative, or to think outside the box. For such speakers, their credibility—Aristotle’s ethos—might lie with their unparalleled ability to throw out base runners at second base (Johnny Bench) or endure astronaut training (Buzz Aldrin), but in many cases, it’s a matter of self-proclamation: The speaker is a successful motivator by dint of being a successful motivator (Tony Robbins).

    Persuaders distinguish themselves with a cause or a calling. They preach, rant, and cajole, warning against the monoculture of corn farming (Michael Pollan) or plead for higher levels of journalistic integrity (Seth Mnookin). Like the motivators, they often employ a formula: Launch with a startling story, fill the middle with facts and statistics, and bring things to a close with a stentorian call to action.

    The third group, the informers, seeks to explain things to people, not change them. Usually less dynamic than the other types of talkers, they make use of graphics-heavy presentations and are prone to reading from notes; they lecture about science, politics, and the seldom-heard stories behind well-known events. My own talks fall largely into this category. Certainly, I love my subject matter and I hope my enthusiasm for it comes through. But you can’t please everyone. I feared coming across as stodgy or pedantic, cringing visibly if my auditors were to check their watches, or worse, leave early.

    The length of a typical lecture runs fifty minutes, give or take ten minutes. But fifty minutes spent simply informing, persuading, or motivating always seems too long. The speakers I like best merge these genres. If they’re good, they spend some time in two areas, and if they’re great, they hit all three. Both Dan Pink, a journalist and Washington insider of some repute, and the Guthrie Theater’s Joe Dowling were stellar, mixing all three modalities seamlessly and effectively. When inspiration, information, and persuasion are expertly combined in one neat package, as happened with these speakers, a lecture can be as amazing for the audience as any other, perhaps more artistically oriented, cultural experience.

    Still, the personal and more intimate nature of a lecture distinguishes it from other forms of public entertainment, such as a play or a concert. As much as we would like to ask Osmo Vänskä or Joe Dowling why they interpreted Beethoven or Tennessee Williams in a particular way, the opportunity to query them personally doesn’t often happen—except in a lecture. Thanks to the virtually mandatory Q&A session afterward, audience members have a rare chance to connect directly with those people at the center of attention. It’s that personal connection between speaker and listener that can make a lecture a profound experience, one with immediate impact. Using their own words directly and passionately, speakers can transform an audience: The audience may become more informed, more enthusiastic, or more partisan. The fact is, they go away different from when they arrived. Add a buffet and it can’t be beat.

    So it was that last spring I found myself gobbling up every lecture I could find (and quite often, the food offered afterward), in many cases attending more than one a day. My improvement program began with Salman Rushdie at the Thursday noontime Westminster Town Hall Forum in downtown Minneapolis. The novelist exuded bravado and confidence, traits not unexpected from someone with a Powerball-sized fatwa on his head (and no bodyguards, either, at least not in sight).

    Still, while Rushdie was persuasive and motivating, he was also opinionated, facile, and glib. “Do not start me on The DaVinci Code,” he sneered. “A novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.” The audience nodded and snickered knowingly, though no doubt more than half of these people had read and enjoyed the book.

    Later that week, Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist, visited the State Theater in downtown Minneapolis. Uncharacteristically for a lecture, the sponsor, National Geographic Magazine, created a bit of advance hype with promotional materials that gushed about him being “a real-life Indiana Jones” and “one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People.” But while Sereno was an adequate informer, he was but a so-so persuader and no motivator at all. Sadly, there was no bullwhip and no lost ark; nor was there much excitement. And while his talk was heavy on facts and photos, basically (and ironically, for a paleontologist) it had no bones. Despite all the talk of dinosaurs, fossils, and grueling, sweating African expeditions through the desert, I left more exhausted than exhilarated.

    After these initial forays, the local lecture scene heated up. My calendar grew clogged with opportunities for intellectual enlightenment. Simon Singh, a Cambridge-educated cosmologist, best-selling science writer, and BBC television host, visited Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where he made a strong case for the importance of science education. While he is a persuader of some talent, Singh is primarily known for his ability to inform, having made his mark as perhaps the foremost explainer of the Big Bang Theory (the subject of his latest book). Singh was also quite entertaining, sprinkling in clever gimmicks and telling some pretty good jokes. In all, even if I found it hard to fathom his explanations of what happened in the first ten-billionth of a second after the universe began, he managed to make even string theory and twelve-dimensional space-time sound rather user friendly.

    A few weeks later, St. Louis Park’s own Tom Friedman visited Macalester College. The New York Times columnist was earnest and smooth, as he’d better be at a reputed thirty-five thousand dollars per lecture (a fee that might explain why there was no post-lecture buffet on this occasion). Friedman, a Macalester staffer told me, does use a formula for his speeches—one that I thought worked quite well. A fine informer and a superior persuader, Friedman began with a joke and moved adroitly through a presentation of the gist of his book, The World is Flat, via a bullet-point summary of world politics as shaped by the economic rise of India and China. He made one well-articulated point after another, finished up a scant hour later—and voilà, he was thirty-five grand richer.

    Soon after Friedman’s talk, I went to the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, expecting to listen to David Horowitz, the well-known conservative ideologue. I found to my dismay that I was there to hear David Horowitz, the Portland State University professor and not-so-well-known social scientist.

    “Let’s welcome the real David Horowitz!” enthused the scholarly colleague who introduced him. As if to make himself more real to the audience, this Horowitz spent the first half-hour reading his own biography, wherein he offered copious details of his professional relationships with various faculty members from the University of Minnesota’s history department. Beyond that, however, he actually offered interesting notions about the effect of American popular culture on literature, the performing arts, painting, and comedy. And the buffet afterward was outstanding: several mixed-fruit tarts, a properly rich tiramisu, and some unbelievably flaky mille-feuilles.

    As it turned out, Friedman was just the opener for a season of big-name speakers: My schedule soon filled up with dates to hear former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, NPR reporter Don Gonyea, explorer Anne Bancroft, and writers T. Coraghessan Boyle, Tracy Kidder, Sebastian Junger, and David Halberstam, to name a few. I learned something from just about every one of them, too. Sandra Day O’Connor, for example, was a surprising master of body language. Gesturing vigorously and to great effect, her hands amplified and emphasized her speaking points in a way that words and voice could not. In his speaking, as in his millions-selling series of books, Jack “Chicken Soup for the Soul” Canfield had a real knack for taking trivial-sounding principles and puffing them up to sound important. Plus, the snack buffet after his talk was heartier than most, a plain but filling spread of fresh fruit, miniature bagels, and various non-gourmet cheeses (Gouda or Stilton would be a bit pretentious for a guy like Canfield).

    No land-based buffet, free or otherwise, compares to the Queen Mary 2’s four-room extravaganza. On average there are five world cuisines represented, and the fish selection alone ran from sushi, to finnan haddie, to deep-fried haddock. But then everything on this liner was beyond beyond. (When big Mary was first launched in 2003, she was the longest, widest, tallest, and heaviest passenger ship ever built. She lost that last distinction to Norwegian Cruise Line’s Freedom of the Seas last year, but the QM2 is still the largest ocean liner—as opposed to cruise ship—ever built, and she remains the tallest and longest passenger vessel.) Besides the couple dozen restaurants and bars, there are five swimming pools, several art galleries, a fitness center, a spa, a library, a casino, two theaters, a ballroom, five classrooms, and a planetarium. I spent hours anticipating my trip, studying the brochures, choosing the right books to read while stretched out on a padded teak deck chair, and learning how to tie a bow tie for the formal nights.

    Once my girlfriend and I finally flew to New York and boarded the ship in Brooklyn, my first order of business was meeting with the continuing-education staff from Oxford University and the three other speakers booked for the trip. They were all Oxford professors, it turned out: David Vaisey, a venerated historian and the retired head of the Oxford Bodleian Library, probably the most important scholastic library in the world; Hans-Joachim Hahn, a renowned professor of contemporary German culture; and the delightfully named Harry Sidebottom, an Oxford don with a wry sense of humor who specializes in Greek and Roman history. I was selected for this voyage to provide a non-academic counterpoint to these distinguished scholars—and also, not insignificantly, the people at Cunard felt my subject matter would appeal to younger passengers.

    The other lecturers were invaluable as the time for my first presentation drew near. Vaisey in particular was a veteran cruise-ship lecturer. “It’s an older crowd,” he pointed out. “Most of these passengers are here because they’re interested in what you have to say. But these are really comfortable seats. As soon as the lights go down, a few will go to sleep. They can’t help it. Don’t let the snoring break your concentration.”

    The house lights GO down and the spotlight comes up—on me. For fifty minutes, I take my listeners through the history, science, and social significance of various contraptions that were the most powerful, most complex, and most expensive machines on earth for nearly two millennia. I move from Alexander the Great’s arrow-shooting ballistas to the great counterweighted hurling machines of England’s Angevin kings, to catapults, trebuchets, and mangonels—but soon I leave my notes behind. I move into what is known as “Csikszentmihalyian flow,” a state in which words come to the speaker easily and quickly. I have to remind myself to keep the pace down to a fast walk.

    While I had given dozens of lectures, doing so aboard a luxury liner, and with the Oxford imprimatur, gives me added incentive to excel. I soon find that my months of preparation were worthwhile. I bring nearly every technique, every tip that I collected to bear. People respond favorably to my sprinklings of alliterative and onomatopoeic phrases. My pauses for dramatic affect come off, well, dramatically, and not, as I had feared, like I have simply lost my place. And the visual aids—slides ranging from Telsa coils to Ottoman sultans, and video clips featuring lively demonstrations of various machines and devices—make a profound difference in getting my material across, as well as giving people something to look at besides me.

    Afterward, I was told that I could review a video of my lecture—and that, in fact, this video would be cablecast on a continuous loop via the ship’s close-circuit television system. If you think hearing your own recorded voice is strange, try watching a video of yourself speaking. It is far worse. But “you’re always your own worst critic,” Vaisey and Sidebottom said. After a few replays, I did indeed cut myself some slack. I had crossed the North Atlantic without hitting an iceberg.

  • House of Anything You Wish

    I came here to lose. But the wheel won’t let me.

    Once again I pile all of my chips on three. People gasp. What are the odds for winning eight straight-ups in a row?

    Fools! Don’t they know wheels do not hold memory? That math and luck never go together? With roulette, every spin is new. Probability is as whimsical as life. Who would believe three is not even my lucky number?

    You’d sneer at me, Mei. Superstitious, you’d say. But how can I not think that way? On March third, you walked out on me with our three-year-old son. Three years ago, you enrolled in Queens College to study English and computer science, and things began to go downhill.

    Nonsense, you’d say. It has nothing to do with school.

    But it does. How else could I explain your change of heart? I’m still the same Tiger Fan you loved seventeen years ago. Your mother threatened to disown you for going out with a guard soldier from the countryside. Your father pointed his gun at us when he caught me in your room. But nothing could stop you from loving me. You left your mansion without looking back and took the train with me all the way to the Pearl River. On the bank, we looked through the mist at Hong Kong on the other side. If we swam across, we’d be free. It would have taken only four hours. You shook your head, said you sank like a rock in water. But I knew you couldn’t bear bringing your family down further. Once you crossed over, you’d be an enemy of China. Even if your father denounced you, his military career would be over. At the border town, you slid a Swiss watch into the registrar’s sleeve and got our marriage certificate stamped. You sealed the red paper into a plastic bag and zipped it into my pocket, together with sixty U.S. dollars. How you got the money is still a mystery to me. If you make it, Tiger, you cried, hugging my neck, if we meet again, we’ll never part, dead or alive.

    Seventeen years later, you laid quietly on your side of the bed in our Chinatown home. So quiet I couldn’t hear you breathe.

    “Do you remember, Mei,” I asked in the dark, “do you remember?”

    “I was young, a foolish sixteen-year-old,” you finally mumbled.

    I don’t believe it. How can you forget? The scars are there, on your belly, chest, limbs, scars you burnt through the skin to keep me in your heart. Twelve years you waited, though no mail or phone could reach you from Hong Kong. Your family forced you to move on. Tiger Fan is long dead, your father announced. He’s married another woman and has children, your mother said. They brought you a troop of bachelors with great prospects for the future. But you faked insanity and checked yourself into a mental hospital.

    And you couldn’t possibly forget the day we met at JFK! The tears we shed without shame, the joy over our first condo on Bayard Street, our first car, my store on Broadway, your green card …

    Remember the birth of Jia?

    But your ears shut down as soon as I started telling you how I almost drowned in the Pearl River, starved on the streets of Hong Kong, my spirit shattered from working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week in restaurants and antique stores until I saved enough for New York. Useless to point out how I burnt my bridges applying for a green card as a political refugee so that you could come legally, as my wife.

    “Sorry, I no longer speak Chinese.” This is all I could get out of you after I spilled my guts.

    The wheel shudders, stops at three. The dealer clears the chips from the losers, then stacks them up next to my bets. Thirty-five to one. How much have I won? Do I even care? Such dead silence around the table—all eyes wish me dead. I wish myself dead. I came to forget, but everything in this room—its Chinese name, Chinese customers, Chinese managers, and the damn Ping’s Noodle in the corner—stirs up memories. Even the dealer looks like your twin sister. How her almond eyes glow like embers!

    Those ember eyes of yours, Mei. They used to melt me with each blink. Now they spew hate and hunger. How did that happen? What made you start speaking English at home? First with our son, then with me, even when I laughed, mocked and begged you to stop. I can humor every whim of yours, but not this, not at home. After twelve hours of twisting my tongue to please tourists in my store, I need to feel like a person again. Is it too much to ask? Aren’t we still Chinese?

    “We’re New Yorkers now,” you said. “Let’s speak like New Yorkers, our first step to success. Look around, Tiger. Do any of your friends live in this ghetto? No! I’m not saying we should live in SoHo like Master Yao and his artist friends. But even Yingying and Bunny Song live somewhere else, although they can barely afford a meal in a cheap restaurant!”

    I’m successful, too, just like everyone else, I almost shouted. I built my antique store from scratch in the heart of Chinatown. Do you know that every square inch of land here is worth more than gold, and our condo on Bayard Street is just as valuable as the loft in SoHo? Do you know Master Yao spent more time in my little store on Broadway than in his own grand studio? But the smirk on your lips stopped me cold. Since when did you pick up that white man’s look? I wish I could smack it off your face, once and for all.

    “Dump that bitch, fast,” my friends say. “She’s your ill star, bringing you nothing but misfortune since you met her. She’s not even pretty, jaw too square, cheeks too high, signs of a man-killer. You’re still young, only thirty-five. With your looks and money, you can pick the most beautiful girls from Chinatown or Flushing.”

    It’s true that women flock to my bed like moths to a light. Singles, divorcees, married women with husbands on the mainland, all beautiful and young, eager to please. They scream and writhe in my bed. They call me a true tiger and make me feel like a man. But as soon they’re out my door, I get sick to my stomach. I don’t know what they’re after, my money or my American passport. Probably both.

    Ah, here comes another spin. My tablemates move their bets around as the ball leaps and rolls over the slot. Some pinch their chips between their fingers, waiting for me to make a move. I count out thirty-five chips and place them carefully on thirty-three.

    Yesterday was your birthday. I made six dishes—three vegetarian and three seafood, your favorites—and a chocolate cake for our son Jia. I thought the little banquet might cheer you up. You often get depressed on your own birthdays. I dialed the number for your apartment in Sunset Park. It still blows me up whenever I think that you rented this tiny one-bedroom behind my back when we were still living together. Say whatever you want, but I just don’t believe that a normal person can find happiness in a rat hole. For a long time, you wouldn’t give me your phone number or address. Need to be alone for a while to clear your mind, you said. Clear my ass. Haven’t you figured out you can’t live without me? Don’t you know it isn’t that hard to find out where someone lives? Still so naïve, after all these years.

    I listened to the ring with a clear conscience. It was your birthday, for heaven’s sake. I was inviting my wife to her birthday dinner. I wanted to hear you laugh, tell you that thirty-three was an auspicious number, like cuddling lovers, the symbol of “double happiness” on the door of the newly-wed. The phone rang and rang. Finally you picked it up, but you sounded nervous, anxious to hang up. Then I heard him, reading a story to my son behind a closed door. It was deep, muffled, a voice that didn’t need to shout to claim authority, a white man’s voice.

    “Come back home, Mei. Now!” I screamed.

    You waited till I lost my steam, then said, “Tiger, I just want a normal life. I want Jia to grow up good, not a hoodlum.”

    You hung up and unplugged the phone.

    I dumped the dinner into the garbage can.

    You think I’m a tong, bitch! But how can I blame you? All the movies and TV shows you watch, the rumors behind doors, the bullets flying around the dark streets. Yes, there are tongs everywhere. But that’s only half of the truth. You never gave me a chance to tell my story.

    The day I opened my shop, they drifted into the door like ghosts. Through their sunglasses, they looked at me without a word. I knew what they wanted. But instead of giving them the envelope with cash, I shouted, “Welcome to my store. Please have some candy and peanuts.”

    They couldn’t believe their ears. You should see how their mouths dropped open like dead fish. The next day they came back and smashed a few plates and vases. They picked the biggest and shiniest ones, not knowing everything on display was imitation. The real stuff was locked in the safe. I opened the cash register.

    “Look, it’s empty. I haven’t made a penny yet. If you loiter around my store every day, how can I get any customers? If I can’t do business, how can I make money to pay you guys?”

    They looked at me as if I were nuts. I bet nobody had ever talked to them like that. Two days later, they came and placed a little black box on my counter. I opened it. It was an ear, dried and shriveled like an autumn leaf. I looked at it, looked at the two young thugs, who had no idea what tough meat tasted like.

    “O.K.,” I said. “Tell your boss to meet me tonight, nine sharp, in the back room of Seafood Palace on Center Street.”
    I took out my gun for Russian roulette. It was the first thing I’d bought after I made my pledge to Uncle Sam. It had taken me six years and forty thousand bucks to become an alien in this Yankee town. A perfect gift for the celebration. I’d played it in Beijing and Hong Kong. Not my choice at first. But it was the only way I could fend off the soldiers and thugs. The only way to show them I could play, and play hard, despite my pale skin and my girly face. I’m good, real good. Know when to stop. It’d be the first time I’d use it on American soil, and I hoped it’d be the last.

    I got there at eight-thirty, ordered an eighteen-dish banquet, poured two glasses of white grain spirit, and waited. The boss arrived, a scrawny little guy, guarded by his seven brothers. I stood up, showed him my full glass, bottomed it, then pushed his glass over. He stared in disbelief. His bodyguards lifted their shirts, showing off the knives that dangled on their belts. I laughed, pulled out my gun, put a bullet in, twirled the cylinder, and put it against my temple. I pulled the trigger.

    They all went pale.

    I placed my blue beauty next to his glass, still untouched.

    He stared at it like a zombie.

    I slid a red envelope to the scrawny shrimp. It was swollen with fifty twenty-dollar bills. “Believe it or not, you’re the first people who stepped in my store. According to the custom of my trade, you get a present from me, as a lucky omen. Tomorrow I’ll receive my regular clients. One of them is the head of the police station on Elizabeth Street, known as Hawk. I’m sure you’re well acquainted with him. But I bet you don’t know he’s a fanatic antique collector. If you have a chance to visit his home, you’ll see his collection. Perhaps you guys should drop by my store also, have a chat with him. He’s not as ferocious as he looks, if you get to know him.”

    If you had seen the way they ran, Mei, you’d know they’d never show their pimpled faces in my store again. I sat down, alone, ate the eighteen-course dinner, drank the whole bottle of liquor. It’s a shame to waste food, under any circumstance.

    I wish you would believe that I run my business clean in Chinatown.

    The wheel is slowing down. The dealer gives me a look, clears her throat. She seems to wait for me to change my mind before she calls out “No more bets.” Thirty-three is just a column. It pays only two to one, far less exciting than straight-ups or splits. But what do I care? I didn’t come here to win in the first place. Besides, once I make up my mind, I stand firm. I’m pigheaded like you. We have twin spirits.

    The first night of our reunion, you wouldn’t let me keep the light on. I thought you were just being shy. As I buried my face between your breasts, I felt the scars. I switched on the light. Your torso was covered, some perfectly round, like cigarette burns, some with perforated edges like a poppy pod.

    “Who did that to you?” I screamed in horror. “Tell me who did it. I swear I’ll get them, one by one.”

    “Shh,” you hushed, sealing my lips with your slender fingers. “I did it to myself, just to prove I was mad, a real huachi who lost her mind for love, no longer fit for marriage.”

    I bawled into your belly. How could I ever pay back such love in this life?

    “Tiger, Tiger, look at me.” You cradled my face and cooed like a pigeon at my ear. “It wasn’t painful, not at all, not compared to the pain of longing for you, for not knowing where you were, how you were doing. I knew you were alive, no matter what they told me. I knew you were alive because I was still hanging on. Tiger, my sweetheart and lover, look at me, look at my belly. What do you see? It’s your face, your profile, if you link the dots together. Here’s the forehead, the nose, the lips, and chin. Here, here, feel them.” You grabbed my finger to trace the scars that formed a constellation.

    And I remembered the first time I met you, outside your father’s mansion. You were reading on the front steps, the breeze blowing the fuzzy hair of your nape this way and that, like the waves of a golden harvest. I felt dizzy, weightless, a buoy in space. I have been floating in your universe ever since.

    But it all disappeared when you exploded without a warning. No, not true. There were signs. First the change from Mei to May, then the abandonment of Chinese, your hatred for Chinatown, and the constant nagging about me being a gangster. I shouldn’t have laughed it off. I should have paid more attention.

    I tried everything I could to clear my name. But you just yelled, despair in your eyes, “How could you survive in this town otherwise? Those damn tourists stare at me like a whore. They even have the nerve to ask why I don’t wear the sexy gown that split at my thighs.”

    “All right,” I said finally. “Give me a year to sell out. We’ll move wherever you want, SoHo, Flushing, Brooklyn, White Plains, even New Jersey.”

    I thought you’d jump with joy.

    “Doesn’t matter where you live,” you screamed. “You are Chinatown.”

    Bitch!

    But you’re right. I am Chinatown. I live there, buy and sell stuff robbed from tombs hundreds, thousands of years old. I wear my watermelon hat and silk robe, just like a Chinaman in a movie, to amuse tourists. I even smell like Chinatown—the stink of fish, garlic, and soy sauce. Is it a crime? I do whatever it takes to support my family. But are you grateful? Jia wouldn’t even say hello when he came home from school. He chatted only with you, in English. The other day, I told him to speak Chinese like a good son, like a human being. Guess what he said after making a horrific face?

    “Can you talk like a grown-up?”

    I spanked him, for the first time. He’s only five, already he acts like a little devil. What will he be like when he reaches fifteen, twenty-five? I might as well strangle him right now, to save trouble for the future.

    I guess it pushed you over the edge.

    Fine. We live in America. Spanking is not hip. I speak Chinglish. My clothes smell of rice and old graves. But do you have to get a white devil into your bed and have my son call him “father?”

    I pulled out my gun. The cold metal soothed my throbbing temple.

    The ball drops. I won again. Two to one. No big deal. But the message is clear. I’m not yet finished, not yet.

    I’m tired of being out. I want to be in the game, before it’s too late, you said.

    Translated: you’re bored as a merchant’s wife in Chinatown. You want to be pampered by some white man.

    With your China eyes and yellow skin? With your permanently accented English? Your job behind a receptionist desk in the Seagram Building and your rat-infested one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn? You forget this is America, not Beijing. General’s daughter or not, white men don’t give a shit about your past.

    I want to be in, too. Why do you think I swam through the night to cross the river? Why I cut off my ties with China and applied for citizenship as a refugee? Do you know how I felt when I stood on the harbor of Hong Kong, gazing at the mainland’s shadow poking through the mist? For sixteen years I haven’t returned home. Sixteen years. I want to see my mother one more time before she goes. She’s blind, ready to join her husband, the father I’ve never met. Her coffin is made and varnished, her name chiseled on the stone. But she can’t go without me, her only son, at her bedside, to guide her soul into heaven with my cry.

    “What are you afraid of?” Mom asks whenever I call. “You’re a foreigner now, a rich foreigner. Nobody can touch you.”

    “Yes, nothing to be afraid of.” You tell me the same thing, when you see the pinched look on my face, knowing I’m homesick. “Now that you have an American passport, the old man won’t dare harm you.”

    I laugh. What do you know about your father’s other side? He can toast to his enemies at a banquet and have them eliminated before they have a chance to burp the gas out of their stomachs. He was so furious when he found out I married his only daughter that he instantly put me on the list of top spy suspects. He won’t give a shit that I’m a “foreigner” with an American passport. As soon as my name appears on the computer screen at customs, he’ll have me dragged to his cell. My only hope is to wait till he retires or dies.

    Not a totally bad end, perhaps? At least he treats me as if I were still Chinese, not a “foreign devil.” Even my own mother calls me a “foreigner.” Being my mother, she doesn’t say the word devil, but I can hear it in the awkward silence, the way she bites her tongue to stop it from slipping out of her mouth. Foreign devil, foreign ghost. Once you cross that bridge, once you turn your back to your mother, you become a ghost, a ghost without a grave, without a country.

    “Nonsense,” you said when I tried to tell you my morbid thoughts, your voice loud and shrill as if you were trying to scare away ghosts. “America is your home now. You belong here. We all do, dead or alive.”

    I looked past your shoulder, at the antique vase on the nightstand. It captured the scene of a slender maiden chasing a butterfly in the garden and a young man peeking at her from the wall, his eyes full of lust. It’s the kind of vase that would have sold quickly, if not for the crack at the bottom. So I drilled a hole and turned it into a lamp. Tourists love Chinese antiques. Americans. Europeans. They come into my store. “I’m looking for a vase or plate with Chinese faces like you and her.” They point their fat, hairy fingers at me, at my young assistant from Shanghai. When they get what they want, they pat me on my shoulder. “Hsie hsie, China Fan.” Their thanks come out like “shit shit.”

    I gaze into their eyes: blue, hazel, brown, gray. Will they ever look at me and say: Perhaps he’s an American too, just like us?

    Do you know, Mei, that you’re a walking Chinatown yourself?

    But no matter. Nothing stops you. The stubborn dreamer.

    Somewhere far away, slot machines sing in many voices: a Christmas bell, an alarm, a combat song. They remind me of those sleepless nights in Beijing, under my cotton quilt, my ear pressed against the old plastic radio for the static sound from the Voice of America. Turn to the dealer, now. Do not weep. Must not weep. Not here.

    She returns my glare with a smile and turns the wheel.

    Let’s play then, Mei, you from your rat hole in Sunset Park, me from this Chinese casino room in Atlantic City. Ruyilou—House of Anything You Wish. See how I pile everything on the big red one? It stands tall, quivering, a pickax hacking into the belly of the game.

    Wang Ping’s latest collection of short stories, The Last Communist Virgin, will be available from Coffee House Press April 1. Her photo and video installation, “Behind the Gate: China in Flux After the Flood of the Three Gorges Dam,” is on exhibit at Macalester Art Gallery March 3–27. Born in Shanghai, she now lives in St. Paul.

  • Nice Folks and Nitwits

    People will tell me anything. I have that kind of face. I got it from years of practice. When I was a waitress, I’d listen to people all day long and smile at nice folks and nitwits alike. My livelihood depended on my genial expression. In time, it bled over into my daily life. My bland, Mona Lisa smile would win people’s confidence even if they hardly knew me. Maybe they were picking up that I’m interested in people. You know—I am you and you are me and we are all together. We’ve all got stories we’re dying to tell, even if it’s the kind of thing you pray won’t show up in your obituary.
    At the greasy spoon where I used to work, one of the regulars was an old veteran with a face like five miles of gravel road. Late one night when it was just the two of us, he looked up from his drink and blurted out, “I’m a cross-dresser.” He would have been a better Charles Bukowski impersonator, but I just refilled his cup and commiserated about finding the correct undergarments for trapeze dresses.
    After my standup comedy performances, people would often tell me stories that were funny tinged with awful, like they were looking for permission to laugh off the painful part. I remember one regular-looking guy, maybe fifty, thick-set, plaid wool jacket, and brown thinning hair. His blue eyes were dancing and he made a beeline to me and said, “I got to tell you a story.
    “I got a dog, a golden retriever name of Gracie. She’s my girl, and she’s a good one. We go everywhere together, best pals. She’s a long hair, and every summer we got to get ’er a haircut. It’s better for when she swims, my wife says, ’cause that way Gracie can’t shake water all over the kitchen floor and then it’s also better in case of ticks.”
    The guy was gearing up to tell me the next part.
    “I can’t have money.” I let my eyes run a quick scan of the man. He was holding car keys. He could pilot a car, but he could not be trusted with money. Where was this story going? I held my smile. “It just runs through my fingers, and it’s better if my wife takes care of that side of things. She keeps us out of the poorhouse.”
    He leaned in conspiratorially, looking from left to right to make sure no one else was listening in and then he continued.
    “One Saturday last summer, she gives me a twenty-dollar bill and says for me to go get Gracie her haircut. Then she takes off for the day with her girlfriends. Well, I’m thinking I’d rather have the twenty, and I could just get out my beard clipper and cut Gracie’s hair myself.”
    After he said that, I figured you could practically cue the disaster music, but the guy had to get it out. “So, I’m doing it in the kitchen, that way it’s easier clean up. The top half is no problem at all, even the tail. I’m talking to her the whole time and I’m thinking that this’ll be easy.
    “Then, we get to the underside, a little trickier, because of the longer strands. I lean over her, kind of spooning her backside to keep her comforted and still. I’m doing all right, Gracie’s doing all right, and then the doorbell rings.
    “Gracie jumps in my hands, and then … zoop! I just shaved one of her teats clear off. It’s an accident you know.
    “And everything happened real fast after that.
    “The doorbell rings again and I let go of Gracie to run and go get rid of whoever it is. It’s someone looking for a different address. Some lady, she’s going to a baby shower and she’s got a stack of presents in her hands.
    “I open the door and say wrong house, but not before the gal hears Gracie howling to beat the band and zooming all over the house, trailing blood like a Friday the Thirteenth movie. All over my wife’s beige couch, the carpet.
    “I slam the door on the lady, and I coax Gracie back into the kitchen with some raw bacon. She’s still bleeding, I’m nuts, still thinking that somehow I can get out of this. So, I get behind her and double up and hold her tight. I got a fistful of paper towels on the wound, pressing down to try to stop the bleeding.
    “Old Gracie quiets down ’cause she’s got the open bacon package in front of her, and we just sit there for a while. Every time I took the paper towels off, the bleeding would start again. I couldn’t figure out how to Band-Aid it, so we just sat there. And, that was how my wife found us.
    “You know,” he said, “Gracie forgave me a long time before my wife did.”
    “I know,” I said. “I know how it is.”

  • The Temple is Melting

    If Minnesota hockey were a religion (and many, of course, would contend it is), Steve Mars would be a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons carry an apocalyptic message: Something must be done to save the faith, because the temple is melting.

    Warm winters of late have cut the outdoor-skating season nearly in half, and as outdoor ice goes, Mars says, so goes the status of our state as a puck mecca.

    “For years our municipal parks were to hockey what Chicago’s are to inner-city basketball,” says Mars, a red-headed, boy-faced forty-nine-year-old who was a star winger on the Duluth East and Hamilton College hockey teams. “Imagine Michael Jordan without playground basketball. We’re losing our playground hockey,” Mars says. “All of those kids who just want to go out with their skates and stick now have almost no opportunity.”

    Mars recently came up on the losing side of a contentious battle with the Eden Prairie Hockey Association over the use of $3.4 million raised to build an indoor arena (the third for this southwest suburb). He proposed instead spending the money to install up to six refrigerated outdoor rinks in city parks. Among other benefits, he says, that would have opened the sport to hundreds of kids who cannot afford the $1,400 to $1,900 to join a team and purchase equipment.
    The cost of playing hockey has been rising in direct correlation with rising temperatures; as free outdoor ice disappears, teams are forced to shell out the $150 to $200 it takes to rent an hour of indoor ice. Multiply that by twenty or so—the number of practices each team once counted on conducting outdoors—and the outlays grow prohibitive.

    “Minnesota is the state of hockey and we’re telling eighty percent of the kids they aren’t allowed in the club,” Mars says.

    Like many religions, Minnesota hockey is political. According to Eden Prairie hockey parents who insisted on remaining anonymous, the clash between the indoor vs. outdoor ice advocates was often “nasty” and led to several of the children of those involved being cut from teams they deserved to make. Many individuals contacted for this article on both sides of the issue refused to comment, saying only that they wanted to put the ugliness behind them. Jerry Fagerhaug, the Eden Prairie Hockey Association president who backed the indoor arena, did not return multiple phone calls.

    The issues in Eden Prairie are by no means limited to that community. According to Paul Douglas, the WCCO Television weather guru, Minnesotans have no choice but to “adapt to this new, Chicago-like climate.” Douglas says there will still be ice in Minnesota, but it won’t be nearly as reliable as it was a few decades ago. “Skating by mid-November was the norm for much of the twentieth century, but that date is being pushed back into mid- or late December. The skating season will, on average, be shorter by as many as ten to thirty days per winter than it was during the 1970s and early 1980s.”

    That means fewer kids may experience what the late Herb Brooks called “the joy of going to the local park rink and playing pick-up games.” Brooks, who coached the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” team to Olympic gold at Lake Placid, proposed the way forward for Minnesota Hockey shortly before his death. The state doesn’t need any more “million-dollar Taj Mahals,” Brooks said in the January 2003 issue of Let’s Play Hockey. “Why do we have all these arenas around town? To give kids the chance to play, right? But they’re expensive! What if we could find a more cost-effective way to get more ice and allow more kids to play? We need to supplement the indoor arenas—artificial outdoor ice is the missing link.”

    “The people who advocate for more indoor ice tend to be people who never experienced the joy of outdoor ice,” Mars says. “They also feel that refrigerated outdoor ice is unreliable. But all they have to do is drive over to the Roseville Oval to see that’s not true.”

    The John Rose Minnesota Oval, the largest refrigerated ice surface in the world, offers four outdoor rinks. The enormous facility is open from the first week in November until the first week in March and remains operational at temperatures up to fifty degrees. Since its establishment in 1993 the skating center has rarely been forced to cancel a session because of weather.

    Steve Mars, who failed in his campaign to convince the Eden Prairie Hockey Association that outdoor refrigerated ice is the only way to preserve the sport in the era of global warming, says he’s glad the conflict has, for the moment, been resolved. But he laments the missed opportunity. “This was our chance to bring hockey back to any child who wanted to play. That’s what makes me lose sleep and lose friends over this. I mean, jeez, come on guys.”

  • Project with a Capital “P”

    Andy Sturdevant—bon vivant, raconteur, interlocutor, chairman-elect of the Medicine Lake Gentlemen’s Research Society—sat down one wintry Wednesday evening to talk about history. I had last seen him perched atop a handmade shack on the frozen shores of Medicine Lake, horn-rims steaming, cheeks aflame, hollering into the wind like Buddy Holly in a one-piece snowsuit, one whose embroidered label read “The Aristocrat.”
    Sturdevant had planned to offer a walking tour coupled with a rambling, discursive history of Medicine (née Mdewakan) Lake—part of the festivities surrounding the Art Shanty Projects, the annual undertaking whereby dozens of artists invite the public to visit their creative takes on ice fishing shanties. But the temperature of the air and the fortitude of the tour group were plunging fast. So he took pity on the crowd and shaved several hundred years off the history; as we huddled around him in a loose horseshoe, he let loose a volley of historical grapeshot: “You are standing on the site of a mid-century Methodist mission camp! ‘Mdewakan’ is Dakota for Lake of the Spirit! This lake was the childhood home of director Terry Gilliam!” [Editor’s Note: Mdewakan is literally translated as “sacred” or “mysterious” Lake.] With a flourish, Sturdevant corralled the crowd out of the wind for a “Battle Hymn of the Republic” sing-a-long. We sang hallelujah, said hallelujah, and with that, the tour was over.
    By the time we met at the Clicquot Club in south Minneapolis, Sturdevant had swapped his lambskin for a long, red-and-white striped Dr. Who-style scarf. He grasped a grilled panino imperiale with one hand and flipped through some of his historical research, a series of nineteenth-century advertisements, with the other. The ads were designed to persuade Minneapolitans of the 1890s to settle near “Medicine Lake Park,” and Sturdevant read them aloud with glee. “Do not suppose that THE PARK IS A WILDERNESS,” he intoned. “The shrewd investor will be quick to GRASP THE OPPORTUNITY and purchase now, while prices are low and terms easy.” Wiping a few crumbs from his chin, he moved on to describe his next curatorial endeavors, including a sprawling twentieth-anniversary exhibit on the history of No Name Exhibitions and the Soap Factory, the art space near St. Anthony Main that occupies a special place in Sturdevant’s heart. “It’s dank and weird,” he says. “Everything a gallery should be.” It’s also where he once exhibited a project titled Dead Flying Minnesota Liberals: images of Hubert Humphrey and Gov. Orville Freeman strung up between the gallery rafters and spotlit from below like the ghosts of politics past.
    Indeed, a deep appreciation for local history permeates Sturdevant’s work—all the more impressive as he only recently set foot on local soil. An artist by training, curiosity-seeker by nature, and gentleman historian by night, he moved to Minneapolis two years ago on a wing and a beer. He’d spent a cool quarter-century on much-loved home turf in Louisville, Kentucky, where “You pay $180 in rent,” he says. “You make $600 a month and live like a king.” But the city’s elixir of torpor and plenitude threatened to choke his chi, so he sat down one night with a Sharpie and a Sterling and made a list of possible new hometowns—Philly! San Francisco! New York! Milwaukee!(?) Chicago is where most Louisvillians go for a swig of big-city life, but Minneapolis became the frontrunner by dint of its mystery. Sturdevant arrived in February of 2005 bearing copies of a home-made book called Everything I Knew About Minneapolis Before I Moved Here, all his worldly knowledge occupying a dainty twelve pages.
    Any newcomer will tell you that the social fabric of the Upper Midwest is as impermeable as lefse left in the snow, but Sturdevant approached Minneapolis as a Project with a capital “P”: He scoured the local papers for arty happenings, scribbled notes, and attended precisely one zillion gallery openings. He said hello. And hello. And hello. He switched from Sterling to Grain Belt. Being from the South gave him a lot of social leverage, he discovered. “Ah just moved here from Kintuckee two weeks ago”: like a hot knife through butter.
    He quickly found a number of conspirators and cohorts among other Twin Cities artists, began volunteering at the Soap Factory, and exhibited Everything I Knew at Creative Electric Studios in Northeast. He made artwork for (full disclosure) this magazine and designed programs for The Electric Arc Radio Show. At the moment, Sturdevant’s gig as a secretary at the University of Minnesota Medical School pays the rent while his multifarious projects feed the head. Not to mention the vocal cords of anyone who comes within singing distance. Speaking of which, any sing-a-longs in the foreseeable future? The gentleman makes no promises—except that he’ll personally serenade any interested party with the 1961 hit single “A Little Bit of Soap” by the Jarmels. The shrewd investor will be quick to grasp the opportunity.

  • As It Was Meant to Be Played

    I sat in a lawn chair in the middle of frozen Lake Nokomis, nibbling on chicken kabobs and sipping a tequila slushy, thinking, How serious can this pond-hockey thing be?

    A minute after the puck dropped in my first game, I immediately regretted my warm-up smorgasbord. This pond-hockey thing was apparently very serious. We were playing a team named the Whiskey Bandits, an ass-kicking juggernaut of players in handsome red jerseys who were definitely in it to win. My crew, the Arden 6, was there to play and to party. While the Whiskey Bandits were a team of sculpted Adonises in their mid-twenties, the Arden 6—made up of a forklift driver, two office maxes, a stay-at-home dad, and a couple of slackers—looked like a bunch of Chris Farleys on skates.


    The Whiskey Bandits skated with crisp, robotic efficiency. We chased them like slobbering dogs, somehow managing to score a lucky goal before the onslaught began. Within moments of the opening face-off, we were losing 10-3. A Whiskey Bandit made a wicked tic-tac move on me, twisting me right, then left, then right. I almost pooped my pants. The referee called out the score. “27-5.” Slight pause. “28-5.” They scored more than a goal a minute. The final tally, 37-5, represented one of the worst defeats in the two-year history of the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships.

    The beleaguered Arden 6 headed into the massive party tent to regroup over a few beers. We were baffled by the extreme drubbing we had suffered because we thought we had a pretty good squad. All of the players on my team played high school hockey in the Twin Cities. Nick Brown, our ringer, even played at Dartmouth and has fantastic speed and silky moves. As we sat and sulked, the Whiskey Bandits strolled in without a hint of arrogance; they came over to apologize for the slaughter.

    “Sorry ’bout all that,” a fresh-faced Bandit said sheepishly. “I had to get a waiver to come play here this weekend.”
    “A waiver from what?” I asked.

    “I play pro hockey in Oklahoma,” the guy said. He took a giant chug from his plastic keg cup. “Most of my teammates played in the minors, too.”

    My posse spit up their beers.

    “You guys are pros? Big deal,” I said facetiously. “Our right-winger is a thirty-eight-year-old stay-at-home dad who calls himself The House Admiral.”

    I walked outside to the patio that overlooked the entire tournament. Bright sun filled the blueberry sky with blinding light. A horn blew across the frozen lake, signaling the start of another round of play. All at once, on twenty-four rinks, forty-eight teams accounting for 288 players started playing hockey the way it was meant to be played: wide open, four-on-four, with no offsides, no goalies, and no hitting.
    Before our next game, I made my way to a giant board containing the tournament schedule and scores from all of the games. It gave me hope to see that many of the other teams had pathetic names like A Lot Better than Last Year, Fattys, and Footlong Meatball Sub on White with Double Pepperjack Cheese!—indicating they probably wouldn’t be as awesome as the Whiskey Bandits.

    We held a team meeting over doughnuts, hotdogs, and more beers while The Admiral talked to his babysitter on a cell phone. Back on the ice, the junk food in our systems worked like magic. We spanked our opponents, the Campbell Avenue Crawlers, a team that traveled from Connecticut just to get whupped, 20-3, by our sorry asses.
    The day ended with more hockey, more beer swilling, and a funk band named the Prophets of Soul jamming tunes like “Ain’t That a Bitch!” and “Skin Tite!”

    The next morning, cold air burned my lungs like shots of vodka; an orange sunrise painted a few white clouds the color of a dreamsicle. Our game against the Flying Saucer Attack was hard fought with lots of slashing and chipping, but we eventually lost 14-8.

    That afternoon, the beer garden bristled like a busy trading session on the New York Stock Exchange. Hordes of sweaty bastards, grown men still wearing breezers and shin pads long after their games were over, waved dollar bills to pay for beer. I asked an old-school guy in a vintage helmet how his team was doing. “I ain’t playing,” he mumbled. He pointed to the helmet and said, “I just fall down a lot.”

    Later my team stood rink-side and watched the Whiskey Bandits dismantle Kari Takko (a team named after a Minnesota North Stars backup goaltender) to win the championship game 10-2.
    “Next year, I think we should use steroids,” I suggested to my teammates. They chuckled and ambled on sore legs back to the beer garden.

  • Happy Birthday to Us

    A little more than five years ago a few of us sat down around my dining room table with some legal pads, a laptop computer, and a long list of ideas. Our starting point was an executive summary of an idea for a magazine that I’d written up three years earlier. The magazine had the working title The Village Idiot.

    Among the files in the computer’s “Idiot” folder were cash flow projections, printing cost estimates, rate cards, positioning statements, bios of prospective members of the founding team, lists of feature and department ideas, and a list of possible names. That last list was several pages long, and over the next few days, we added even more pages.

    Among the prospective names were The Natural, The Local, and The Regular. We spent a good deal of time thinking of all the reasons we couldn’t call it The Regular. We wanted to make a magazine that would be as personable as your buddies at the bar, and although we were certain that concept would eventually get across to the readers, we weren’t so sure we could weather the inevitable storm of potty jokes. I had also once participated in the founding of a newspaper called Sweet Potato, and that was enough to convince me that we should spend as much time as it took to get the right name.

    I had read an article about naming companies, which mentioned how George Eastman came up with the name Kodak. There was more to the story, of course, but the basic idea was that the name had the letter K in it, and the letter K made a strong, memorable sound, especially at the end of the word. We pored over the dictionary, the thesaurus, a book called Choose the Right Word, and eventually, after several more days of rejecting words like Crack, Smack, Clock, and Crock, we ended up with Rake, which doesn’t exactly end in a K, but is close enough for English majors.

    Now all we had to do was explain our choice. There are lots of definitions and connotations. Rake as in muckraking; rake as in the slant of a theater floor which allows everyone to get a better view; the eighteenth-century Rake’s Progress engravings by Hogarth; and, our favorite meaning: a person who likes to, shall we say, have amorous encounters with other peoples’ spouses. (We don’t do that, of course. We prefer to alter the meaning to “sticking our noses into other peoples’ affairs.”)

    So we got all that preliminary stuff out of the way, and, since our spreadsheets told us that it would be easy to make a profit, we made the financial commitment to start the magazine. By early in September, we had hired our first two employees, bought some furniture and computers, and signed an agreement with a web site developer. On September 10, 2001 we signed a five year lease on office space.
    The next day, of course, changed the nation’s business climate. But since it hadn’t directly changed the numbers on the budget spreadsheets, we decided to go ahead and publish the first issue of The Rake in March 2002. It turned out that our Rake’s progress wasn’t as easily predicable as Hogarth’s, and there have been some hiccups on the way.

    For instance, we still have trouble explaining the name, and what it says about what we do—and more to the point, how we fit into the local media scene. Since we started, we’ve received semi-regular encouragement in the trade press; they’ve recognized how The Rake is a groundbreaking addition to the magazine world. We’re one of very few glossy mags that are distributed free. We’re one of the only regional magazines that doesn’t compile incessant lists of best doctors, lawyers, colleges, restaurants and babysitters. We don’t produce “special sections” that are designed exclusively to sell advertising. (Though we like to sell advertising as much as the next guy, and we wish all of you readers would visit one of our advertisers today and say, “I want to buy that thing you advertised in The Rake, and by the way, thank you for supporting my favorite magazine.” Go ahead, you can do it.)

    First and foremost, as I wrote in this space five years ago, we are story tellers. The fun for us in The Rake is to share all sorts of tales that are fascinating in the telling, and rewarding in the response. There’s a simple logic to how this works. Because you readers connect with us on an emotional level, you provide value to our advertisers. It’s gratifying to be told, again and again, that someone loved some story we published, admires our art direction, enjoys our ads, and, as one reader mentioned last week, because of our Rakish coverage, appreciates all the Twin Cities has to offer. Those are the best birthday greetings we could receive.