The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Truth-Mongering

    The other day, we were surprised to see a certain advertisement in Newsweek and the New Yorker. It was a bold yellow page that made a startling claim: Everything you’ve heard about mercury poisoning in fish is false. According to the ad, published by a mysterious organization identified only as FishScam.com, all the claims about the presence of mercury in fish are based on a single, flawed study, five decades old, of an island race that ate massive amounts of whale blubber.

    As it turns out, the ad was bought by the Center for Consumer Freedom. A notorious Washington, D.C., lobbying group run by Rick Berman, the CCF represents the restaurant, alcohol, and hospitality industries. FishScam.com’s website is a net bulging with counter-information to fight environmentalist “fearmongering.” But it essentially comes down to an argument not about whether mercury is in fish—it is, after all—but what might constitute levels dangerous to humans. Berman and his cohorts would impeach the FDA and the EPA’s own standards on base doses of toxins in food. It is a matter of deep concern to them that scientists establish the minimum amount it takes to produce pathology in humans, and then divide that number by ten to account for differences in weight, metabolism, genetics, and so on. In other words, erring on the safe side.

    With their self-interest on such unflattering display, FishScam.com’s funders remain mostly anonymous. Like proponents of, say, intelligent design or “natural” global warming theory, Berman’s experts engage in much criticism of existing science, without offering peer-reviewed science of their own. This is because what they are really arguing about are non-empirical first principles.

    Incredibly, the Center for Consumer Freedom suggests that the Sierra Club, the Oceana institute, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the Ad Council, and about twenty other organizations—including, by extension, the FDA and the EPA—are hiding their true agenda, which is to attack the coal industry for mercury emissions. If that is true, it is hardly a secret, given the overwhelming evidence that mercury—and most other heavy metals—are demonstrably toxic to the human body. This is universally acknowledged. That mercury concentrates in fish, especially fatty predatorial fish like mackerel, swordfish, and some types of tuna is also settled truth. (As any holder of a Minnesota fishing license can tell you, non-commercial fish caught in our local lakes and rivers are poisonous enough that one should not eat them except ritually, at most once a week.)

    Of course, what the CCF really wishes to do is sell more fish, and there they have an uphill battle. The good news is that American fish consumption has not changed much in the past ten years, since the rise of awareness about risks associated with red meat. Fish is recommended primarily for its omega-3 fatty acids, good for the brain and the heart. This is also conveniently available from organic dairy products, for example. The bad news is that Americans still eat less than half of the recommended quantities of seafood—half a pound per week of less-risky species such as salmon, pollack, shrimp, and catfish. Almost a third of the fish we do eat is in the form of canned tuna. Unfortunately, a recent study by the Mercury Policy Project suggested that one can out of twenty actually exceeds the “reference dose” for mercury.

    Rick Berman and his employers believe that there is too much black-and-white thinking in the world—at least when it comes to their bottom line—and with that sentiment we can partly agree. But there is a time and a place for subtle thinking, and with the health of women and children at risk, this is not it. “Play Russian Roulette with your unborn child” would be an ad campaign with long odds of succeeding. And the idea that there may be an acceptable level of mercury to put in the mouths of infants and children must have been conceived by a person who does not have kids, and is not capable of empathizing with those who do.

    We’ve grown used to this sort of anti-activism and counter-spin; the manipulation of facts in an effort to explode some sort of widespread science-based conspiracy. The proposition that our notions regarding safe levels of mercury in fish comes from one flawed, fifty-year-old study is, on the face of it, bunk. It ought to be an embarrassment to those who would take money to publish it.

  • Guns in the City

    The sound of the well-made gun is precise. If you pull the slide back smoothly, the sound of the hammer locking back echoes with a sharp “clock” through the hollow grip. Slap a magazine into the grip, pull the slide back a little more and let it go. The sharp “smack” tells you a bullet has seated in the chamber. The tiny pin sticks out in front of the hammer to confirm the bullet is in place. If you pull the trigger, the next sound you hear will be considerably louder. While the boom reverberates on the range, you will hear the next clock-smack. The gun will fire again.

    It’s not just a fine machine. It’s actually quite elegant in its function. The plastic grip is perfectly shaped to the hand. A tail protrudes from above the grip to protect the webbing of your thumb from being hit by the slide. The safety lever and slide catch are within easy reach of your thumb. The trigger, when the gun is cocked, takes a very light pull with the pad of your index finger. The barrel tapers smoothly out of the heavy slide down to its front sight, which is the shape of a shark’s dorsal fin. It is slightly beveled forward, though, so it won’t catch at all as you draw it from the leather holster.

    The holster is also thoughtfully designed. It is heavy leather, with a flap that covers the gun to keep out the muck of war. But the strap that holds the flap down is simply impaled on a round steel knob and comes up easily. A second rear flap on the holster breaks away to allow the grip to come back, instead of just up, and permits the muzzle to bear on the target immediately.

    The magazine holds eight 9 mm Parabellum rounds. The name comes from the old Roman adage, si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

    The gun has the usual markings and serial number. But nowhere is the name of its designer—Walther. There is clearly stamped on the left side of the slide “P.38,” the model, and “byf44,” which indicates it was built in 1944 at the Mauser factory in Oberndorf. On both sides of the slide, on the frame, and on the barrel are marks made after test firing the gun at the factory: “WaA135.” Between the two inspector’s marks on the right side is a tiny eagle perched on a swastika.

    The Germans manufactured a fine gun sixty-two years ago. It still fires a very tight group. I shot 232 out of 250 with it three months ago on my proficiency exam to get my state permit to carry a pistol. Of course I wasn’t under the same pressure as the German officer who gave it up to my father six decades ago. Dad was able to take it, he once told me, because the officer “didn’t need it any more.”

  • Taking Control of My Finances

    Collector: This is in regards to your MBNA account, sir.

    Debtor: OK.

    c: And on the MBNA account, I have a due balance of $8,841 and change. They will settle for eighty percent of the balance or a payment plan.

    d: Oh, OK.

    c: So how did you want to proceed in that?

    d: Um, I think I’m gonna go with the option I’ve been taking so far.

    c: Which is …

    d: Um, well. The plan is to pay the balance back, but not according to a schedule.

    c: … OK Let me just refresh here what we have for the last payment I have here was

    for January 4, 2004, for $120. So we haven’t had a payment in about a year and a half.

    c: Right.

    c: OK. What happened, generally speaking, that you couldn’t make the payment, sir?

    d: Um, well, my bank account went below

    an amount that I could make a payment.

    c: Oh. Kay. So you are currently working, right?

    d: Um, yes.

    c: OK. Let me just advise you what the

    settlement offer is. The settlement offer is $7,160. That is a reduction of about $1,800. However if you want to take advantage,

    no fees will be counted and you can take up to six months to pay it back. Do you want to do that?

    d: Ah. Sure.

    c: Did you want to do that in six months?

    But you have to have at least one minimum payment every month.

    d: Oh. Um. No.

    c: So tell me what you want to do.

    d: I’m gonna do the same thing I’ve

    been doing, which is I’m gonna pay you back, but not according to a schedule.

    c: OK, so how much are you willing to pay today, sir?

    d: Well, today is not on my schedule.

    c: I’m not hearing a dollar amount or a specified payment or a sense of a type of committed date that you’re going to make that payment, which is what they’re asking for, sir.

    d: Right, you’re correct.

    c: OK. So tell me when and how much.

    d: No, you’re correct in that you’re not

    hearing a dollar amount or a specific date.

    c: Is it a refusal to pay, then, or no?

    d: Oh, no it’s not a refusal to pay. I’m just unable to pay according to a schedule.

    c: I understand that, sir. We’re kind of at a standstill here. We’re kind of going around.

    —Lee M. Cardholder

  • Ham Is In The Air

    I have a vision of a place in northern Italy, a landscape of rolling, golden hills dotted with oak trees. As my mind’s eye zooms in on this scene, it becomes clear that something is hanging from the branches of the oaks. A sea breeze brushes past, and I realize that the boughs are laden with ham—not deli slices draped over branches, mind you, but beautiful, trussed-up, whole legs of ham. They are swinging in the salty air, curing, actually, into what will eventually be prosciutto, one of the most delicious of all meats.

    In this age of refrigeration, Cryovac preservation, and aseptic packaging, not to mention the chemically extended lives of most any food you’d pick off the shelf, it seems a little ridiculous to imagine ham in the wind. Some might even blow past “ridiculous” and say, “Dangerous! Unsanitary!” And then I see my picturesque grove of prosciutto-bearing trees overrun by men with lab coats and clipboards, throwing up yellow “caution” tape as far as the eye can see. Foreign meats come under strict investigation by the FDA if they are to be sold in the U.S., which means a lot of the old traditions don’t pass muster. Sadly, it’s been largely forgotten that the curing of meats is a cornerstone of our collective food history; we humans would not have survived without it. Along with other types of preservation (smoking, pickling, drying), curing was once a means of survival—a way to extend the stock of the larder during colder months and harder times. Now these once-essential techniques themselves only survive as boutique industries or hobbies.

    A wide range of meat and fish can be cured (gravlax is cured salmon, bresaola is cured beef), but I’m most riveted by the tastes and traditions of salt-cured ham, the making of which is regarded by many as an art form. Maybe that’s because my early ham experiences were limited to pre-packaged slices and the annual Easter feast, during which I was compelled to make someone cut the “bark” off my ham. Once I discovered prosciutto, as well as Spain’s jamon Serrano and Iberico, deli slices become virtually extinct in my diet. The beautiful terra-cotta colors and rich, dusky flavors of cured ham make more mundane meats seem like cardboard.

    As old as the salt that drives it, the curing process is thought to have been perfected by the ancient Egyptians. And while the techniques have been perfected through the generations, the basic elements have remained unchanged. Wet curing, also known as immersion curing, involves covering the meat in a seasoned brine that must be changed every seven days for weeks or months, depending on the size of the ham and the depth of cure. Dry curing, the method used to make prosciutto, involves rubbing the meat with salt and letting it age in dry, cool air.

    In Italy, the northern province of

    Parma is the land of prosciutto as much as it is the land of cheese. In fact, the making of Parmigiano-Reggiano helps fuel the ham industry by providing whey to feed the pigs. Only the cured ham from this region, which must abide by strict rules and regulations set by the local prosciutto consortium, can be called “Prosciutto di Parma.” Centered in the small village of Langhirano just south of Parma, the Pio Tosini Prosciuttifici (production house) uses age-old techniques. The hind legs of pigs are trimmed, cleaned, and then coated with sea salt and rubbed by hand. The salt applications are repeated once a week for one to two months, during which time moisture is drawn out of the meat. The hams are then washed several times, scrubbed, and hung to dry.

    With its winds from both the sea and the mountains, Parma has an ideal climate for air-drying and aging—a crucial part of the process, and one that creates Prosciutto di Parma’s distinctively delicate taste. Prosciutto from San Daniele, in the Friuli region, has a different, salty-sweet flavor and smoother texture than Prosciutto di Parma, because of the higher altitude and drier air. Similarly, Spain’s Serrano (“from the mountains”) hams are cured in drying sheds located in relatively high-altitude, cool climates. During different stages of the drying period, which can last up to two years, the hams rotate to different rooms within the shed. Italian prosciutto is tested for readiness by an inspector who inserts a horse-bone needle and judges the issuing aroma.

    If you can’t get to Italy to see the swaying hams, certainly you can make it to Iowa, where Herb and Kathy Eckhouse have brought the secrets of great prosciutto. After living in Parma for three years, Herb believed he could re-create great cured ham right in his own home, in the small town of Norwalk. The couple’s young company, La Quercia (meaning “the oak,” www.laquercia.us), recently released “Prosciutto Americano,” its first domestically cured ham, made with organic U.S. pork. Because he’s not obligated to follow the constraints imposed by Italian consortiums, Eckhouse has been free to experiment with trim size, handling techniques, and the curing process overall. The resulting product is garnering national attention for its creamy texture and depth of flavor.

    Prosciutto can be found in most grocery stores, and more and more places carry Spanish jamon. La Tienda, a family-owned gourmet Spanish food importer and Internet retailer (www

    .tienda.com), has begun taking advance orders for the elite jamon Iberico, which is aged between two and four years and won’t be available in the U.S. until next year. In the meantime, La Quercia’s Prosciutto Americano can be ordered at Surdyk’s by the slice, but if you’re willing to spend the cash, it really is a treat to purchase a whole leg online. That way, you can discover the varying richness in different sections of the leg, the area around the bone being the most flavorful. For those who opt for a few ounces here and there, try one of my favorite distractions: Slather a spear of cucumber with goat cheese and wrap it with prosciutto. Find a sunny patio and dream of ham in the wind.

  • Chalk & Cheese

    When you buy a farm, said the Roman agricultural writer Palladius, you need to look at the people who live in the area. If they seem a sturdy lot, you can invest with confidence, but if they are podgy and pasty faced (that is a free translation of the Latin), then keep away. The local people, no less than the cheese and wine they produce, are autochthonous, sprung from the local soil.

    Until last week, I thought that the origin of the expression “as different as chalk and cheese” also lay in the soil—that the distinction was not between the substances themselves but between the chalk uplands of southern England, traditionally good for grazing sheep, and the region’s lush, damp valleys, where cows produce milk creamy enough to make Stilton and Cheshire. Now I find, from a quick blink at John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, that there were people as far back as the fourteenth century dim enough to confuse actual pieces of cheese with lumps of calcareous limestone. But I still prefer my own theory. The school I went to in my teens was surrounded by chalk downs, no longer sheep-runs but acres of open arable, thickly coated in nitrate of potash. Not only did that land look quite different from the little meadows in the vale a few miles to the south, but the folk who farmed it were different as well. Terroir tells.

    The crumbliest, most chalk-like of English cheeses actually come not from the vales of the south but from granite country in Wales and the north, where the last Ice Age scraped the easy surface off the landscape and left what passes in Britain for mountains. Caerphilly, a sharp white cheese from Wales, hails from hills where they quarry granite that people polish and turn into kitchen counters—the sort guaranteed to shatter any wine glass dropped on it. Similarly, Wensleydale cheese is made among the northern Pennines (James Herriot territory). Not long ago, a faceless quango—“quasi-autonomous national governmental organization”—tried to close the creamery and move production to an industrial suburb of Liverpool. A management buyout prevented it and Wensleydale is still made by the strong, silent men of the Yorkshire Dales, as it has been since the twelfth century, when the Cistercian monks first came to tame this wet and gritty land.

    The wine that goes best with such sharp, crumbly cheese, however, comes from the sun-dappled valley of the river Loire in western France, distinctly chalk-and-limestone country. Splendid Sauvignon Blanc like Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre has often lain in cool, dry, limestone caves. Thus cheese and chalk may in a sense bury the hatchet. Crumble some Wensleydale into a green salad, add fresh thyme from the garden, sip one of these dry white wines, and somehow the sharpnesses coalesce.

    However, it is not the famous Sauvignon wines from the Loire that we celebrate this month, but rather one whose grapes grow in a land whose spectacular and complex geology defies summary description—though we saw plenty of it masquerading as Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings films. The House of Nobilo’s 2005 Sauvignon Blanc (available locally for about thirteen dollars) comes from the Marlborough region at the north end of the South Island of New Zealand. This is about as far south as Minnesota or the Rhone valley is north, that is, say, about forty-two degrees of latitude, but the Pacific Ocean makes the climate a good deal milder than ours.

    The white Sauvignon grape has been grown here for a century, but it has only become big business in the last thirty years, particularly since England joined the Common Market and New Zealand had to find new markets (and sometimes new products) to replace agricultural exports, like lamb, that had previously gone to Britain. These days the price of land is rising in the Marlborough area as erstwhile pastures are turned over to grapes.

    The results of all this industry are fresh, delightful, and now famous. The 2005 Nobilo has a good bright color and a good bright taste, crisp with a hint of a fizz on first acquaintance. It is not as dry as, say, Sancerre (but then the Loire is a good deal farther from the Equator); there is a roundness more reminiscent perhaps of kiwi fruit than of anything citrus. Drink it at lunchtime with a summer salad (don’t forget the cheese) and it will put a spring into your afternoon.

  • For White People

    You probably didn’t notice, but due to a bureaucratic mix-up, there was no Shortlist Music Prize awarded this year. The “Shorty” was a newish but well-respected award that tried to recognize serious pop and rock bands for doing important new work, regardless of popularity. The main symptom of doing important work was selling less than 500,000 copies of any particular album—a prerequisite for the prize.

    The first Shortlist winner, in 2001, was the Icelandic art-rock band Sigur Rós and they were emblematic of everything the judges were looking to reward with their new trophy. Here was a band deeply engrossed in unique aesthetic issues, rabidly exercising its “creative control” by producing odd and beautiful sonic art in a faraway place. Yet simultaneously, they became deeply influential in the mainstream recording industry. Like Radiohead before them, they became a shibboleth for all self-respecting musicheads. Their epic seventy-minute albums of exquisitely slow ambient rock are shamelessly anti-commercial; their CDs are often unmolested by song titles, liner notes, or credits. The band sings in a mixture of Icelandic and nonsense; they play their guitars with horsehair bows. (Sigur Rós play the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis on May 8).

    One could speculate on the prospects of a shoe-gazing art band like Sigur Rós by looking at, for example, the slow starvation of Spin magazine and the College Music Journal, the corporate consolidation of alternative weeklies, and how fast what’s cool and credible becomes mainstream and bland. Still, new undergrounds are constantly found deeper down, and there are new markets opening up to them. Free of the expectation of commercial radio celebrity, a band like Sigur Rós can succeed by capturing the attention of chic producers of TV shows, films, and advertisements. Sigur Rós licensed a song to the Wes Anderson movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and another to the Cameron Crowe-Tom Cruise flick Vanilla Sky. They’ve written with composer Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson and played with the London Sinfonietta orchestra. They’ve even collaborated with the godheads of art-rock, Radiohead. In short, cool still counts for something.

    Sigur Rós formed in Reykjavík in 1994, and once their otherworldy, ethereal, minimalist sound got off the isle of Iceland, the band was quickly tagged as the next big thing out of that country since Björk. Critics loved the massive doses of reverb, organ, and strings, and the tempos that sounded like they were in hibernation. Riding on top of that nearly stationary wave was the thinnest falsetto voice, backtracked, multitracked, and degraded. Singing in a language he called “Hopelandic,” Jonsi Birgisson sounded like a trembling ingénue coming through an unreliable connection. While he sawed at his guitar, keyboardist Kjarri Sveinsson played one or two notes at a time, drummer Ágúst Gunnarson did more noisemaking than beat-keeping, and bassist Goggi Holm seemed not very busy at all. With the first flush of success, the group built their own recording studio in an empty swimming pool out on the Icelandic tundra. No one was surprised.

    With his spare and beautiful 1978 recording, Music for Airports, Brian Eno coined the term “ambient music,” a genre that could serve as audio wallpaper, but was supposed to reward scrutiny the way Muzak couldn’t. Sigur Rós may be the first group since Eno to fulfill the promise of his invention—music as uncorrupted art for your ears.

    But Sigur Rós’s is an inescapably Nordic interpretation. There is a deeply melancholic vibe in all of its music, a hyperborean sense of isolation and anomie. The first record released overseas, Ágætis Byrjn (1999), was spare and exposed. On their second record, (2002), the flight took on a new drummer (Orri Dyrason) and hit some turbulence and aural bombast. Their latest, Takk, revisits this density but with heavier orchestration—more strings, brass, glockenspiel, flutes, 3/3 time, vocal harmonizations—along with multiple layers of guitar distortion. It’s as if Nordic reserve has turned inside out, and passionately embraced itself. “Takk” means “thanks”—at once a light form of gratitude and a casual parting note, with overtones of finality. It may be the only word the band has ever used that your average English-speaking critic can understand.

    On Takk, the sound structures are beginning to resemble commercial anthems and soundtrack epics; there is a lot of bona fide up-tempo rock ’n’ roll drumming. As it has matured, Sigur Rós has gradually abandoned minimalism and clarity for structure and complexity. The end result is that Takk sounds more urgent and impatient than its predecessors, as if the band were trying to make you understand its language by speaking louder and faster.

    Listening to Sigur Rós’s albums, one is unmoored from lyrics and their meaning. The lyrics become part of the artifact, rather than a framework to establish its meaning—words as tones, not syntax. The voice is played like a wind instrument, not a percussion instrument. In this way, Sigur Rós is the antipode of hip-hop, the dominant form today. While it is true that a rap has lilt and flow according to the style of the rapper, the genre is inescapably about the words; it is still, at its roots, a form of performance poetry. Yet there’s no alternative but to consider Sigur Rós purely as sound; understanding the lyrics would, on some fundamental level, subvert the experience of their music.

    Let’s be frank and admit that this is pure, blindingly white music. If Sigur Rós weren’t so opaque, and if anyone parsed anything malevolent in their music, the band might be accused of representing racial purity, the way troublemakers accused Joy Division in the eighties of being Nazi sympathizers. That’s unfair to both bands, because the “evidence” was circumstantial at best. (The swastika, for example, was a popular artifact with many pre-PC punks.) Still, it’s an interesting comparison. Superficially, Sigur Rós’s funereal packaging and imaging owes much to Factory, Joy Division’s famously artsy record label. At a more profound level, Joy Division appropriated the symbols and signs of World War II, most obviously with its name, which was what Nazis supposedly called the coteries of Jewish women they kept as sex slaves. “Sigur Rós” means “victory rose,” and although the band was named after Jonsi’s younger sister, it is a name that, at least in English translation, is also evocative of a World War II lexicon. On a tour of Dachau once, I was told that SS officers kept Jewish children caged outside in the winter; the cruel effects of exposure led the Nazis to call them their “victory rose garden.”

    That’s an irresponsible association to make, but an irresistible one for a self-loathing white critic. Given hip-hop’s ascendance, not just in mainstream music but mainstream culture, it is hard to believe a band can exist that does not exhibit any sign of its influence. And yet here it is: a modern band that is so radically isolated and self-sufficient and uncorrupted that it becomes something of an anthropological curiosity. Maybe this sound is the natural outcome of Iceland’s homogeneous, insular society. Of course, insularity never stopped the English from tampering with the blues, skiffle, reggae, and the like—but then Iceland has never been the colonizer that Britain has. It is no crime to be white, and no misdemeanor to make music for yourself. And it is not entirely surprising that Sigur Rós is most popular among mostly white alt-rock critics and mostly white composers of modern classical music, while they do not register at all with commercial radio programmers and sneaker manufacturers.

    Another way to pose this old riddle—whether a band can develop an uninfluenced, sui generis sound—is to consider why Sigur Rós are considered art-rock or alt-rock rather than world music. If these musicians are as strongly defined by their geography as people say they are, they should bear stronger marks of folk influence. Much has been made of their sound being a sort of audible analog for Iceland. No one doubts that place has a huge influence on sound, but musicians tend to study other musicians more than they study landscape. (Indeed, although in interviews Sigur Rós frequently dismiss “geographic determinism,” they have toured with and championed Steindor Andersen, a traditional Icelandic rimur chanter of their acquaintance.) Often by “world music” we mean non-American folk music with some sort of modern corruption, like Sweden’s Väsen, or England’s June Tabor, or the Afro Celt Sound System. Sigur Rós are probably the inverse of that—modern corruption inflected by elements of local folk. It is possible that they represent art-rock as a sort of trailing edge of identity politics, quite literally the last stand of the pale-faced artiste.

  • Move Along

    If you really want to get Minneapolitans edgy about crime, kill some white people. Since the random murders of two middle-class whites in Uptown and downtown, near Block E, both places where affluent people live, work, and spend big entertainment dollars, Minneapolis has dramatically raised its police profile at those locations. Block E, with its proximity to the city’s most populous African-American neighborhoods, has drawn large numbers of black teens and twentysomethings since the $170 million entertainment complex opened in 2002. Even before the March 30 murder of thirty-one-year-old Alan Reitter, black kids frequenting Block E, who often wear hip-hop clothes and enthusiastically embrace the swagger that goes along with it, were sometimes perceived as a menace by white patrons.

    On a Friday night in mid-April, I decided to catch a movie at Block E with my sixteen-year-old son Alexander. I wanted to see for myself whether young, African-American males were targeted by security more frequently than other patrons, and, if they were, whether their behavior warranted the extra scrutiny. Beyond that, I wanted to get the African-American males’ perception of how they were regularly treated.

    I found that groups of African-American males were scrutinized more closely than groups of white young people by security guards and also were more frequently asked to move along. Admittedly, this was just one evening’s worth of observations, but that was all it took to witness the disparity. Shortly after Alexander and I arrived, we saw a guard order a group of African-American males, who were chatting amiably, to leave the building. Within about twenty feet of them were groups of white teenagers that the guard left alone.

    When I asked the guard why he had rousted the black kids, he curtly replied that I was “interfering with his duties.” When I told him that I intended to continue watching his interactions with Block E patrons, he ordered me to leave the building. When I protested, he called the Minneapolis police and asked them to toss me out. After the police arrived, I explained who I was and what I was doing. They told me that I was free to observe whatever I wanted so long as I did not speak to the security guards. A few minutes later, I saw the guard who had tried to expel me engaged in a friendly chat with some white patrons.

    I then spoke with the rousted African-American kids, who were dressed in what they called their “hangin’ out with their boys clothes.” One told me that he was tired of security people and cops “mean mugging” him. “The brothas always get singled out down here,” he said. “The cops think we’re up to something and these young white wannabes hit on us for weed.” When I pointed out that some African-American males do hassle white passersby, as attested to by some of my white friends, nineteen-year-old Derrick R., who did not offer his last name, conceded the point. “Yeah, some of the brothas are acting like fools sometimes,” he said, “But hey, we all gotta hang out someplace.” Twenty-year-old Isaiah Thomas added that black guys have to dress more conservatively than whites to get respect. “If a nigga has got a good fit [i.e. nice clothes], and acts like he’s about something, then he ain’t as likely to get hassled.” His friends nodded in agreement, with one adding, “Yeah, that’s true brother, but it ain’t right.”

    The following Monday, I spoke with a senior official with Securitas, the company that employs the overly zealous security guard. The official predictably said that Securitas did not train its security guards to profile African-Americans or to hassle anyone engaged in lawful conduct. You know what? I believe him. Securitas is not the problem—it is much deeper and more systemic than that. Ever since the earliest days of slavery, the mere presence of a group of black males has been interpreted as threatening by many whites. That is, unless they are wearing a business suit or a uniform of some kind—say, for a sports team—which signals that they are properly domesticated and under control. One black man can be easily cowed if he gets out of line. A group of black men is more likely to fight back. At some deep subconscious level, white America knows that black men have plenty of valid reasons for wanting to avenge centuries of abuse. And, as we all know, payback is a bitch.

    I will candidly admit that some groups of African-Americans males do, to borrow Derrick R.’s phrase, “act a fool sometimes” and exploit this historic white fear. However, as a society we have got to come to grips with the legacy of this fear if we are to peacefully co-exist, as individuals and groups, at places like Block E.

  • In Broad Daylight

    It doesn’t take long to call the police. Sally is disappointed. She had hoped to be on hold for a while, listening to instrumental versions of Broadway tunes. She is poised to wait with her elbows and belly pressed against the counter, the phone pressed between her ear and shoulder, an earring scratching against the plastic. This wasn’t such a big crime anyway. Didn’t they have murderers and wife beaters to attend to? She watches the clock on the wall—it is old and sticky with greasy dust, its ornate black hands and tarnished brass pendulums swinging stiffly below. It takes less than two minutes to tell the dispatcher the address and the crime. She shrugs and adjusts her apron, with “Ruben’s Delicatessen” emblazoned on the front in red letters. At only ten o’clock, it is already splattered and smeared with the juice and fat of corned beef, pastrami and roast turkey. She wipes her hands on it one more time, and listens for the first faint call of a police siren. Afraid they’d come more quickly than she hoped, she runs to the screen door and looks down the block. She half expects to see Roland standing there in black jeans, with a grin stretching beneath his eye patch.

    “Roland!” Sally yells. There is silence, but she knows he hasn’t gotten far. Even when he was a kid, he was never very fast. He is still in earshot, and Sally knows it. “Listen, moron, I’ve called the police, just so you know. I don’t want you to get arrested—mostly—so just get the hell away. I’m gonna get fired for sure.” Her boss’s wife is a sharp-faced woman with watery eyes, who manages to find an excuse to fire any woman who happens to catch her husband’s attention. This is not hard to do. After four pinches on her rear and twice catching him smelling her hair, Sally has known that her days at the deli are numbered.

    Still, she needs to pay the rent. Roland knows this as well, of course. “Stupid, one-eyed bastard,” she mutters, but her breath catches and she stares anxiously out of the window before forcing herself to turn away.

    With the hot morning sun slanting into the empty, dusty deli, Sally opens the door of the refrigerated case and gently leans her body onto the rows of Dr. Brown’s sodas, curving her neck and lifting her heavy, red hair in an attempt to get as much of the cold metal onto her hot, damp throat. She does this often when no one is looking. Secretly, she thinks that it boosts sales. She still isn’t used to the summer heat, and often sneers bitterly at the broken air conditioner her boss is too cheap or too lazy to fix, which sits behind the counter. The dial is still pointing toward “coldest,” obscured now by dust. Sally quickly snaps the front of her bra, releasing the small pool of sweat that has collected between her breasts, and pulls the damp shirt away from the small of her back. Usually, the customers standing in line are red faced and cranky even before Sally greets them with a sunny smile that she perfected in front of the mirror. After the morning rush of dark-suited men and women getting their kosher meats and hot bread for the day, the place is empty until lunch. Sally doesn’t mind. The dry shelves filled with condiments and crackers imported from Russia, Poland, and Israel make her think of the small, tight, airless stores back home, before the Wal-Mart moved in, and half the town moved out.

    Sally was one of them, one of the first wave of refugees fleeing town in old beaters, watching the legions of Ford Explorers and Jags filled with platinum-headed families heading up to the lake. She sold the leaky, grease-smelling trailer that was once her mother’s, and before that, belonged to some man named Hank who disappeared when he found out that he could go to jail for tax evasion. She liked that trailer. Every square inch of wall space was covered with photographs of her aunts, long dead, or her mother, buried out back, or Jorge, who was never coming back and she knew it. Or that’s what she told people, anyway.

    The two windows facing the lake she always kept as clear as water. She could sit there for hours looking out. She used to sit at those windows with Jorge, taking turns resting their heads on each other’s hands, blowing smoke rings toward the lake and sky. When he disappeared, she missed him most when she sat at that table, staring at the bills piling up, nobody’s hands to hold her aching head.

    The man and woman who bought the trailer were both glossy-haired and taut-bodied people from the city. Sally never saw them again, but heard that they made short work of the trailer and spent nearly a million dollars building a weekend lake home. Sally really didn’t have much of a choice. With the Wal-Mart there, no one bothered to go to her hardware store anymore, especially the exploding numbers of wealthy boat-owners who distrusted anything local. When Jorge was around, she at least had an extra paycheck coming in. Together they were able to cover the taxes—barely—that doubled every year. Jorge brought home food from the bar where he was a short order cook. Fried chicken usually. Sometimes fish sticks and jo-jo potatoes. Sally kept the cars working.

    Roland was around a lot back then. He’d show up late at night with three High Life’s and a pack of Lucky Strikes and the three of them would laugh at the inept and painfully self-involved people from the city who invaded their town every summer. When Roland lost his daddy’s farm, they stopped laughing. Jorge and Sally gave him nearly all they had in savings to help him set up shop in St. Paul.

    When Jorge disappeared, she sat in front of the window with her ledger and calculated exactly how much she would need to keep her doors open. Assuming that her calculator was broken, she tried it again. She started picking at the scab above her left eyebrow. A drop of blood began to languidly inch down the curve of her cheek. She did not notice it. In one last, desperate move, she retrieved every box with every order, receipt, tax return, inventory, and even wish lists. At last, with a sigh, she arranged every piece of paper into neat stacks, paper clipped each one, and walked to the fridge for a beer. There was only one left. Walking back to the table, she turned off the light and sat down in the 3:00 a.m. darkness. She didn’t want her mother’s eyes looking at her. Not anymore.

    Five others from her old town now live in her same neighborhood in St. Paul. They congregate without making plans. All of a sudden five people arrive at Sally’s apartment and they sit on the bare floor drinking Miller High Life, silently rolling their damp eyes to the ceiling. Or, in Roland’s case, only one eye. Roland had lived in the city before, working in one of the meat packing plants in West St. Paul. He lost his eye and nearly lost his left hand. There is a purple scar that starts at his middle knuckle and swoops around to the front of his wrist. He eventually went back to help his daddy on the old farm right outside of Emily. Corn, mostly. Some potatoes. For the most part, though, they’d spend five months a year pulling stones out of the earth and hauling them into a pile at the center of the field. Roland got the first foreclosure warning a week after his daddy died. He found this comforting. He did manage to sell the farm before it was repossessed, and while Roland was glad to have money in the bank at last, he found out later that the man who bought the land sold the stones from the pile for nearly the price he’d paid for the land.

    “If my daddy ever heard that,” Roland would say, “It would kill him again. Forty years he broke his back on those stones. And now those people are buying them for their damn fireplaces. You just never know, do you? If alls they wanted was a rock pile, hell, we could’ve given ’em that.”

    Everyone’s story was like that. Margaret’s gas station couldn’t compete with the Holiday. Frank’s farm was repossessed and turned into an ATV course. A petition organized by new residents shut down Irene’s bar, determining it to be an eyesore. Every summer more and more stares told them that they no longer belonged, that their town now belonged to someone else. Now they would watch one another’s faces, noting the dark circles under the eyes, and imagine they were home.

    “Remember that time,” Roland had said one evening as they sat listening to the radio. He flexed his toes and shifted his weight on his sore hipbones, “Irene swiped that box of liquor from the sales rep and it turned out to be champagne? First time that old battle-axe didn’t water down the drinks.”

    “She even let Jorge go a little crazy in the kitchen,” Margaret said, kindly taking Sally’s hand and stroking it. “First time she let him cook up anything that wasn’t frozen and deep fried. That was some eating that night, wasn’t it? Lord, that man could cook.”

    Sally couldn’t look up. Her grief was like that, whacking her over the head when she least expected it. Jorge had gone to visit some cousins who were working in the sugar beet fields over at the Dakota border. The farm workers’ residence caught fire on the Fourth of July while people were inside, drinking and dancing. No one survived. Some of the bodies were charred beyond recognition, but most were crushed by the collapsing building, leaving bone shards and ashes under a pile of brick and concrete. There was nothing for Sally to bury.

    “He would have wanted you to move on, Sal,” she thought she heard Roland say as she rested her eyes on her knees. Had she looked up, she would have seen him staring at her, biting his lip, his one eye bright with tears.

    Sally closes the door to the case and walks to the window. She half hopes to see Roland standing out there, demanding answers, his coal black eye patch flapping in the wind. She looks back at the counter. There is a perfect square of dust marking where the cash register had stood only twenty minutes before. She reaches out her hand and is about to press it to the middle of the square, but thinks better of it. This is, after all, a crime scene. Instead she uses her knuckles to draw a squiggly line through the entire dusty box.

    The second Sally had seen Roland walking down the sidewalk toward the deli, she knew she was in trouble. This has been brewing for a while. Two days earlier, in Sally’s apartment, Roland had neglected to leave with the others, but stayed on the pretense of helping Sally clean up.

    “Lord knows you need some help around here, Sal. You’re working too much,” he had said as he sat on her counter, slowly smoking a Chesterfield, watching Sally do the dishes. Her back ached as she leaned toward the too-low sink that was jammed into the corner of the sloped wall of her converted-attic apartment. She was already sleepy, and the smell of soap and the remains of fried chicken were making it difficult to keep her eyes open, like the faint strains of a lullaby, half forgotten.

    It was true that she was working too much. Thirty hours a week as a deli clerk, thirty hours as a telemarketer, as well as house cleaning when she had time. She often made time.

    “My mother said there was no such thing as working too much,” Sally told Roland. “Hell, a girl’s gotta eat. Besides, I worked more at the … um, I’ve worked harder, Roland. You should know that.” Sally squeezed warm, soapy water through her fists a few times and tilted her head back as far as it would go. Headache, she thought; I knew it. Sally rarely spoke of her hardware store.

    “It just seems like you’d be a lot happier if you had someone helping you out a bit, you know, sharing expenses.”

    “Roland, I’ve been on my own for quite some time now and haven’t starved yet. Are you trying to tell me that I can’t take care of myself?”

    “No, Sal, it’s just that I—” He ran his hand through his hair, which needed a wash. “I just thought you … Jesus.” He took another drag. “Why should you be alone, Sal? Why shouldn’t you have someone to take care of you? I … ” He faltered again.

    Sally wiped her hands off on the seat of her jeans. She couldn’t look at him. He coughed and laid his hand gently on her shoulder. She let it stay there for a moment heating through her blouse, until she heard him sigh, and felt the hand start to slide. Then she jerked away. Her bare feet seemed to echo in the empty apartment as she walked to the door. She turned and looked at him, examined his face, his eyebrows arched in anticipation. “Roland,” she began, but stopped. “Just go. I gotta get some sleep.” After he slumped away, she stood by the door for a long time, her breath coming in fierce gulps, feeling the imprint of his hand warm its way from her shoulder into her bones.

    The morning of the crime, he had stood before her, hardly able to speak, his breath coming quickly and his good eye crying freely.

    “I loved him too, Sal. We all did. But you know it would break his heart if he knew you were wasting your life like this.”

    “I’m not wasting anything, Roland. I’m happy.” What a load of shit, she thought to herself. I don’t even believe that.

    “You hate your jobs. You hate your apartment. Sal, we’ve known each other since the third grade, you think I can’t tell you’re miserable? Jorge was my best friend.” Roland took her hands. His left hand couldn’t grip as well as the right, but she didn’t bother to pull away. She stared at their hands, her nails bitten to the quick, his purple scar. This is the longest that we’ve ever touched, she thought to herself. She could not bring herself to look at his face.

    “He’s not the issue, Roland. What, you think he would want me crying all day, just sitting at my old house and watching them tear it down? I moved on and I kept moving.” Her voice was catching in her sore throat.

    “I love you, Sal. I’ve loved you for years.”

    Sally knew she should say something, feel something. But her body was frozen and numb.

    Roland dropped her hands. He took a step backward. “I need an answer,” he said. Sally still couldn’t speak. She couldn’t look at him, or anything else for that matter. Her chest and shoulders were heavy, and her vision was swimming. She put her hands on the counter to steady herself. She stared mutely at her swollen knuckles, her ragged nails. “Well, if you’re not going to answer me, maybe I’m just going to have to push the issue.” He grabbed the ancient cash register, hoisted it to his chest and headed for the door. “You want this back, you have to at least talk to me.” And then he was gone.

    Sally’s skin starts to tingle when she hears the police siren sounding faintly through the hot streets. Panicking, she hurries over to the window to make sure Roland is gone. Pulled by a hope that he is far away and safe, and by a sudden and piercing desire to see him again, Sally has half a mind to give herself a swift kick in the shins. As the sirens grow nearer and pull to a halt in front of the deli, Sally hears the door open in the back and her boss and her boss’s wife walking in through the kitchen. Two police officers, a short, lively-looking blonde woman and a heavy man with olive skin, walk in the front door just as the boss’s wife lets out a shrill scream.

    “Sally! What happened to the cash register? Did you—” But before she could finish, the lady cop spoke.

    “I believe you were the one who called in the report.” She looked at Sally, who wondered briefly if she had perhaps once worked at the delicatessen herself. “The register was there, I assume.” She pointed to the dusty square on the counter. “Was it electric?”

    “No,” said Sally, finally getting her voice back, “it’s really old.” She could hear her boss’s wife whispering frantically to her balding husband who looked at Sally with a combination of desire and pity. Sally was able to pick up words like “completely untrustworthy” and “tart.”

    “Can you describe the person who took it?” the officer asked, shaking her head at the wife hissing into her slumping husband’s ear.

    Sally met her boss’s eye and gave him half a smile. He licked his lips and stared at her with a combination of lust and despair. Sally nearly laughed out loud. Poor bastard, she thought, and for a moment, like a spark moving along a copper wire, she could feel his aching loneliness coursing from her shoes to her red hair. She looked around at the deli. Roland was right. She really hated her job. And in a split second, she felt herself open up, expand, as though her body had been nothing more than a concrete cast, waiting to fall away. She looked toward the window, her body newly made of light, and color and wings.

    “Lady, can you describe the guy or not?”

    “No,” Sally said, her eyes leaving the sad old man who dreamt of her body, and looking straight at her boss’s wife. “I never saw him. I was out back smoking a cigarette at the time.” The sharp-faced woman flashed a look at Sally, who smiled. Roland’s never going to believe this, she thought, and she calculated the seconds it would take her to run home.

     

  • Rake Appeal { Road

    When it comes to campers, there is the pack-only-what-you-need, leave-no-trace, love-your-mother variety, and there is the load-up-the-Explorer, don’t-forget-the-cappuccino-machine, outdoorsy-but-not-too-outdoorsy sort. There is also a third category, which fits between the two—motorcycle campers. More Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid than Lewis and Clarke, motorcycle campers pack light because they have to, but they ride because they want to.

    Arriving at camp, even if it’s just an RV parking lot, is sweeter to the motorcycle camper because his arrival is never guaranteed. Riders face perils on the road that seldom bother drivers: shunting crosswinds, clouds of bugs, and deer at dusk. Every rider has a tale to tell about the buddy who lost control when his front wheel slipped on squirrel guts in the curve of a shady country two-lane. (No wonder there are so many “Bikers for Christ.”) Despite all this, motorcyclists live for riding season. At camp, they place a crushed can under their sidestands so that, under morning dew or hot tar, they’ll find their bikes upright when they awake, and they’ll be ready to hit the road again.

    Now, I don’t know if cowboys (prior to Brokeback Mountain) ever got giddy about their horses. But back in 1999, when I got my 1979 BMW R65 and my pal Joe got his 1982 BMW R65, we were all motorcycles all the time. Old friends separated by ten years and a hundred miles were drawn back together by a love for boxer engines. It was a first-kiss type of excitement, and we were dating Twins.

    During our first year as motorcyclists, Joe and I met more and more, often for increasingly adventurous rides. It started with easy, meetcha-halfways between Minneapolis and Winona, where beautiful Highway 61 hugs the Mississippi River skirting dramatic bluffs with dreamy sweepers. We rode whenever we could—day trips at first, then overnighters as we explored the joys (and limitations) of pairing camping with motorcycling. The riding season stretched deep into autumn.

    That first winter was interminable. With our bikes frigid under dusty sheets in our garages, we talked about riding and exchanged jpegs of old Beemers nearly every day. We both read the Duluth-based Aerostitch’s adventure-riding catalog cover to cover, twice. Finally, after a week of tantalizingly sunny days in mid-March, we planned a rendezvous. The temperature was thirty-three degrees that Saturday morning. The cold battery resisted but the sleepy engine eventually turned over by the sheer power of my will to ride. It was 7:00 a.m., the roads were clear, and the sun was bright. Wearing long johns and several layers did little for my hands, which were frozen and aching before I had even crossed into St. Paul. By Hastings, I had to stop for a cup of coffee just so the cup could warm my hands, and I bought a second pair of gloves at a hardware store. I was determined to meet Joe at the rest area that overlooks Lake Pepin, just north of Lake City. We would ride along the river together, reveling in horsepower and torque on the highways, and slowing down in the small towns to admire ourselves, mirror images of tandem cafe racers, in storefront windows.

    Motorcycling creates a strange bond. I feel no affinity for other people who drive crappy old Subarus, for example. Yet I have an immediate connection with other motorcyclists. Harley-owners groups are the classic example of bike bonding buoyed by branding. And it’s the same for Brit bike riders as it is for scooter lovers and so on. Why on earth do motorcycles draw people together when riding—helmeted and speeding along on noisy machines—is essentially a solo activity?

    Ernesto “Che” Guevara, crossing South America in 1951 on a 500cc Norton with his friend Alberto Granado, described their adventure in his famous book-turned-film, The Motorcycle Diaries, as “two lives running parallel for a while … What we had in common—our restlessness, our impassioned spirits, and a love for the open road.” Those currents run deep, and none is more infectious than the lure of the open road. Whitman was inspired by it. So were Hopper and Fonda.

    That bond, however, doesn’t mean riders engage in an intimate exchange of thoughts and feelings. (Here’s the narrator of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance trying to talk to his son, riding pinion: “I whack Chris’s knee and point to [a blackbird], ‘What!’ he hollers. ‘Blackbird!’ He says something I don’t hear. ‘What?’ I holler back.”) But when riders go through something—bad weather, beautiful scenery, or close calls—they go through it together. After years of weekend riding, Joe and I felt ready to go through (or make that around) something bigger: Lake Superior.

    We spent a year planning the “Supe Loop.” With our first major debate (clockwise or counterclockwise?) resolved, we focused on being properly equipped for the six-day adventure. I drew a logo; Joe ordered it embroidered on ball caps. We agreed that my rank, thirty-year-old Timberline tent would suffice in lieu of buying something smaller, lighter, and fresher. We decided that if Joe could find a way to carry it, a spare gallon of gas was a good idea. I determined that Joe’s travel-size espresso maker was awesome but extraneous. Joe concluded that my tool kit was also extraneous unless I planned also to pack the six-hundred-page repair manual and a prayer card for St. Clymer, patron saint of lost causes.

    It bears mention here that the 500cc Norton that Che and Alberto rode fell apart not even halfway through their journey. In the end, the Supe Loop was not a loop at all. I’d had my bike tuned up and prepared in every way imaginable. I had even packed a spare clutch cable should that part fail, as it had so many times in the past. But at dusk on the first day, fifteen miles from the Canadian border, it was a throttle cable that had frayed inside its casing that caused my motorcycle to accelerate out of control. I freaked out while Joe, calm as the placid lake below us, managed to disassemble, monkey with, and re-install the cable. He didn’t trust his tinkering to take us all the way around the lake, but it was a patch-job that could get us back home without a hitch. As we turned around and headed south, Lake Superior spread out before us. My eyes, however, bounced between the road and my tachometer, with nervous glances down at Dr. Frankenstein’s cruise control.

    We enjoyed two nights of camping on that trip. Sips of Jack Daniels from Dad’s old camp-stove fuel bottle soothed our heartaches at the campfire that last night, as it primed our spirits for tomorrow’s ride back home. —Adam Demers

  • Sized Up

    This was the first interview I’d ever conducted with my shirt off. Standing before me in the mirrored pink closet was my subject: Lonnie Eiden, a nattily clad woman of supreme confidence, a professional bra fitter for forty years. “I think I’m a 34C,” I offered, playing right into her hands.

    “Let’s see what you’ve got,” she said. She looked me over with the keen eye of a physician. And then came the assessment: “Oh, sweetheart.”

    “Am I wrong?”

    “We’re going to start with a D, a 34D. Boy, I’m going to see a D on you.”

    I grew up believing that C is the ideal cup size, having heard it once on television or something. Undoubtedly, it was a meaningless distinction, sort of like the old claim that a long middle toe connotes royalty. Still, I believed that a woman’s breast should perfectly fill a martini glass. It shouldn’t clog a margarita tumbler. This notion, apparently, had led me to make a very common mistake, which is choosing bras that are too small. “Part of it is that there is a mental illusion about cup size,” said Eiden. “The minute you get to D or double D, people think huge and that’s not true. Cup size really doesn’t mean anything because we can make a person look much smaller in the right cup size.”

    A too-small bra causes chest flesh to bunch up and shoulders to roll forward, warned Eiden, a stickler on matters of posture. “There isn’t room for the breast tissue in the cup, and then you start this process of bending over and you look heavier. Your breasts hang down and you lose that waist.” To compensate for undersized cups, she said, women often purchase bras with bands that are too large. These enormous bands ride too high in back, which leads to the snowman effect, something otherwise known as “back fat.”

    The best a bra can do, according to Eiden, who was trained at an actual bra-fitting school in Minneapolis, is provide a woman with “breasts of stone.” Such stationary breasts, she said, can be had only after a professional fitting. “I just dread it when I see an article about how to measure because I know that in the next two months we’re going to be flooded with people who say, ‘I know what I am and don’t tell me that I’m not.’”

    With Eiden’s estimable guidance, I strapped myself into the D-cup model. I fastened it with the snaps at my back, rather than connecting it in front and spinning it around. I leaned forward before snapping, so that my breasts fell into the cups. “Now what is the step three you forgot?” Eiden asked. Dutifully, I bent at the waist and shook, sending every smidge of chest flesh forward. Then I stood upright and looked in the mirror, newly sculpted, with cleavage like a smile. —Jennifer Vogel