The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Stop the Clock

    Perhaps no place on Minnesota’s Iron Range personifies its mythical, often misunderstood boom-calamity-boom nature better than tiny Kinney (its population flutters around two hundred), located in the middle of the Mesabi Range on Highway 169. In 1977, faced with an outdated water system and difficulty securing state or federal assistance, Kinney attempted to secede from the Union. In a letter to then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, town leaders announced that they were even prepared to declare war and surrender immediately, in an effort to expedite the delivery of foreign aid necessary to replace its water system. No official response was forthcoming, but the Republic of Kinney was born, and last July the town celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its independence.

    To an outsider, the vast territory of the Range, with its gaggle of working-class towns and the unique landscapes created by its mines, does in fact have the feel of an old-world republic. The region technically encompasses the entire northeast corner of the state, including Two Harbors and Duluth, whose Lake Superior ports send Iron Range ore out into the world. But the Superior shore, and the area north and south from Ely, the Arrowhead region, has always had a distinct identity. With the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and a large swath of the Superior National Forest, this territory attracts scads of tourists and wilderness adventurers.

    The heart of the Iron Range, however, has never been high on the list of Minnesota tourist destinations. It’s not hard to find native Minnesotans who’ve never even driven through the region proper, despite its fabled place in state history and the fact that so many of the town names are ingrained in Minnesota lore: Hibbing, Virginia, Chisholm, Eveleth, Mountain Iron, Biwabik.

    Aside from a Bronx accent still evident after thirty-five years in Minnesota, photographer Mike Melman could easily pass as a native Iron Ranger at any Twin Cities social function. He’s got the laconic demeanor; the ruddy, slightly rumpled look of a man who’s just stepped in out of a cold wind; and the gift for being simultaneously deadpan and passionate. Not that Melman attends many social functions. He’s a rambler with a camera, “looking for places they haven’t messed up yet, but will,” and is generally out trolling for pictures in the dead of night.

    Melman took a circuitous route to Minneapolis, where he has lived since 1972. Born and raised in the Bronx, he attended New York’s Cooper Union and then Berkeley to complete his architecture degree. After college he served a six-year stint in the Naval Air Reserve, stationed at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The Navy stuck a camera in his hands and sent him up in the plastic nose of a P2V prop plane to take surveillance photos over the Atlantic.

    Later, Melman went to England for several years, where he worked for architects and started taking photos in earnest. He and his wife then made the somewhat arbitrary decision to relocate to Minnesota (“a couple friends from Cooper Union ended up here, and said good things”).

    Melman worked steadily in architecture and promptly retired when he turned 65. “It wasn’t exactly a successful career,” he said. “I made a conscious choice not to do my own thing, so I was always working for firms. And the problem with that is that a lot of the time you end up working on stuff you don’t believe in.”

    Even as he was toiling at architecture, he was discovering that photography was the perfect medium for capturing the environment he found in the Midwest. “The move was a strange adjustment, initially. Growing up I was closed in all the time. I rarely left the Bronx. I’d look across the airshaft and see my neighbors at their table, and the elevated train passed right outside my bedroom window. I’d look out and see the passengers and they’d be looking right back at me. They didn’t look very happy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I craved space.”

    Even so, Minnesota was an acquired taste, Melman acknowledges. “It didn’t take me long, though, to become quite addicted to all the space, the sky and clouds, the light and all the different kinds of weather you get here. Not to mention the sort of desertion you can encounter in the winter and the middle of the night.”

    All of those things—light, sky, space, and, particularly, desertion—have become trademarks of Melman’s photography. If anything, in fact, he has become somewhat notorious for the austerity and desolation of his pictures. He works very hard to exclude people, cars, and even trees in his shots. “People sometimes get appalled when I explain this,” Melman said. “And I like trees just fine; I just don’t want them in my pictures. I like the pure geometry of land, buildings, and sky, and the trees just confuse everything.”

    From the late ’80s through the ’90s, Melman (who does not own a car, and often travels by Greyhound bus) took photos all over the state. Most were nocturnes, or images captured at first light, for a project that eventually became his book The Quiet Hours, published in 2003. Then, at the suggestion of his editor at the University of Minnesota Press, Melman started poking around on the Iron Range. In 2006, he received a State Arts Board Initiative grant for a project there, and made twelve trips north that year.

    The culture of the Iron Range turned out to be a perfect fit for a guy who is fond of saying that he’d like to turn back the clock to the 1950s. “I see so much stuff—the strip malls, the condos, the crap along the freeways—and I’m always wondering, ‘Is this the future?’ ” he said recently. “Because if it is, I’m leaving. I don’t know what people are thinking. You have to wade through more and more trash to get to the good stuff.”

    Melman’s version of “the good stuff” is in ample evidence in his photographs from the Range. “They’ve got a different light up there,” he said. “It’s super clear. The legendary vastness of this country is all right there, and the scale of the mining operations is just stunning. The whole culture, there’s so much beauty. Towns come and go; they live and die by the mines, but the people try like hell to stay up there. You ask these old miners what they’re going to do when they retire and they want to stay right there, maybe get a cabin, and hunt and fish. They’ve had these incredible hard times, but there’s still this preserved way of doing things. I guess I’m always surprised when anything from the old days is still intact. It’s like a miracle to me.”

    Be sure to view the slideshow in the left column. 

  • “Open-Source Christianity”

    The place was mostly filled up by five o’clock, with solemn-eyed hipsters, middle-schoolers, and graying seniors seated on a motley assortment of older sofas arranged in rings. Wine bottles and plump bread loaves sat on scattered coffee tables, which, along with antique rugs and lamps, contributed to the overall feel of a living room (albeit a sizable one). A man with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair half-shouted greetings to a gangly youngster. Chatting the boy up, he intoned, “What can I conquer next, now that I have this human interaction thing down?” The boy held out his fist as if gallantly challenging his master to a duel. “Rock, paper, scissors.”

    As stragglers trickled in, the band started. The salt-and-pepper man gave a bold vocal accompaniment to the guitarist’s heady vibrato: “The thinnest spots of you … gradually wear through. The circumstance of something true … touches both the old and new.” Others watched the words projected on screens or watched each other hesitantly following along. Afterward, one of the band members chuckled, “That’s what a new song feels like around here: a little like a train wreck.”

    The whole setup might seem awkward as church services go, but that is precisely what the congregation of Solomon’s Porch intends. Booklets handed out to newcomers affirm that the seating in-the-round is meant “to help us engage with one another during the music, prayer, and discussion … give it a chance for a while and see how it grows on you.”

    Some few hundred people are doing just that, attending this self-described “holistic, missional Christian community” and attempting to “live the dreams and love of God in the way of Jesus.”

    Standing well over six feet, Doug Pagitt is the hulking, winsome frontman of Solomon’s Porch, whose stately stone edifice and vaulted sanctuary once served Methodists, before it went up for rent on Craigslist. “We want to participate in what God’s doing in the world. We don’t have everything figured out,” Pagitt didn’t hesistate to admit, with a surprisingly elfin grin. Pagitt became a Christian at sixteen, but had no religious background before that. “I’d never been to church. I didn’t know anything—it was all new,” he said later. Pagitt and some of his teenage pals developed an experimental approach, living out a relational kind of “open-source Christianity,” as he calls it. Sixteen years later, in 1999, he and a group of friends and acquaintances fashioned a church model patterned after his experiences. “We believe in ‘life agreement,’ ” he said during an interview. “We really don’t do ‘doctrinal agreement.’”

    Pagitt uses humor, friendly ribbing, and probably even his blue jeans to fuel the casual-authentic environment of Solomon’s Porch. He believes spiritual life flourishes in community; even sermons are shaped by several volunteers every Tuesday. During a recent service, Pagitt explained the process with sweeping gestures. “We collectively create the sermon,” he told worshippers. “It’s not a one-man or one-woman operation. It’s a holistic gathering of thoughts.” On this particular Sunday, Pagitt was serving as the “chief collaborator.” He sat down on the lone stool encircled by all the sofas and asked one family to introduce their baby. The new congregant first had to be located, turning up in a friend’s arms across the room. “Wait, Amy’s not the mother!” Pagitt laughed, his voice booming easily without the use of a microphone. “And by the way, I’m not the father.”

    As he initiated the Bible discussion portion of the service, Pagitt began swiveling on his stool—slowly at first, but then quickly, as though paddling in a pitching canoe. “We always think of the word Jesus with the word Christ,” he pointed out as he crossed his legs, swiveled, and shifted in one seamless motion. “Jesus and Christ go together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s a good ‘last name’ … the quintessential swear word.” Cross, swivel, shift. A young couple in the inner ring smiled, scratching notes to each other on their booklets. “The Jews had the story of Jesus make sense to the Gentiles,” Pagitt quipped at one point. His talk was sprinkled with pop culture references: Journeyman, ZEN MP3 players, Back to the Future, LOST. (Jesus’s parables could have seemed dull in comparison.) Pagitt eventually paused and his stool came to rest. “Questions? Thoughts? Better interpretations?” The baby started crying. “There is no singular right way of thinking,” he reiterated.

    After an appropriately contemplative silence, one guy piped up. “It’s fascinating what’s different between the Jews and Gentiles, and what’s the same.” Pagitt ran with the comment like an eager college professor as a few kids scampered around the room. Later, a young man introduced Communion, proclaiming it “a political act that liberates us.” Congregants began mingling, breaking bread, and pouring wine for each other. Eventually Pagitt’s booming voice returned, asking everybody to gather for one last communal response. As people grabbed hands and circled up once more to chant verses from Jude, it seemed as though the joyous Whos of Who-ville had relocated to South Minneapolis. The only thing missing was the giant Christmas tree—and any traditionalist-minded Grinches to pooh-pooh the scene.

  • A Taste of Springs to Come

    During a recent visit to the research and development laboratory at Dairy Queen’s international headquarters, a row of soft-serve ice cream machines stood disconcertingly silent. The waffle irons and the commercial-grade mixers were unplugged, and no syrups or candies were being tested in the refractometer, the colorometer, or the texturometer. A lone bottle of coffee flavoring—and the red DQ logos embroidered on the lab coats of the men and women who moved through the premises— provided the only hints that the pristine stainless steel counters had seen the birth of such concoctions as the Brownie Earthquake Sundae and the Yule Flip Peppermint Chip Blizzard.

    While the Dairy Queens on Lake Street and Snelling Avenue may shutter their windows for the winter months, International Dairy Queen does not sleep. These days, most Dairy Queen locations operate year-round, and the company’s South Minneapolis base is home to an R&D operation that, looking well beyond the coming summer, is currently developing menu items slated for rollout in 2010.

    International Dairy Queen’s world headquarters are tucked away in a nondescript beige edifice off Highway 100. Upon my arrival, I was treated to a Dilly Bar before being escorted to the office of R&D director Bill Barrier. Amid bookshelves where The Six Sigma Way and The Leader’s Voice shared space with Modern Food Microbiology and The Handbook of Fruits and Fruit Processing, Barrier and his colleagues, Mary Joyce, director of product innovation, explained DQ’s perpetual quest for new menu items.

    A search for the new might seem a misplaced priority for a company that for decades built its brand on such traditional fare as ice cream cones and hot dogs, but Barrier and his staff emphasized the need to be mindful of consumers’ shifting tastes. “We’ll always have the basic cone on our menu,” marketing specialist Aric Nissen told me later, “but tastes change. Preferences change. We want to give our customers what they want, sometimes before they know they want it.” Barrier described a process in which market research reveals broad areas of customer interest that in turn dictate the general priorities of the R&D team. How general? Talking with Barrier, Joyce, and Nissen, I heard several references to consumer interest in the area of “health and wellness”—though Nissen was quick to clarify that “we’re not claiming to sell healthy products.” Indications that consumers might be interested in sweet snacks with vaguely healthy associations inspired, for example, the development of a pomegranate-and-berries smoothie (antioxidants!) for the DQ-owned Orange Julius chain—as well as experiments with granola-crunch Blizzards (the lab developed a delicious product, said Nissen, but franchisees have been “a little skittish” about cereal-based menu items since a misadventure with Rice Krispies). In its darker varieties, even chocolate can be considered healthy: more antioxidants! (Chocolate was featured in another Blizzard invention that didn’t fly with franchisees, since it also involved significant quantities of cayenne pepper.)

    With a chain that has spread across multiple continents, there are local tastes to consider as well: At least one product available in DQ’s several hundred East Asian locations is not yet for sale in the United States. With respect to green-tea Blizzards, said Barrier, American consumers are just “not there yet.”

    Even in cases where consumer demand is crystal-clear, DQ R&D faces formidable technical challenges. “Inclusions” (items mixed with DQ’s signature soft-serve ice cream) must last at least four months without losing color or flavor, and also must be able to survive the violent Blizzardization process without losing their identity. Barrier and Joyce have been stymied by a certain cookie whose brand name they could not reveal but which for years has been the elusive holy grail of Blizzard development. “People always say they would love to see this cookie made into a Blizzard, but it’s too delicate,” said Joyce, shaking her head. “When you break it up, it just turns into crumbs.”
    As a trusted name in frozen treats, DQ can take risks with its cold confections—Joyce offered the example of the avant-garde Treatzza Pizza, a rousing success in the 1990s (“we took our ice cream cake and turned it inside-out”)—but it needs to tread more cautiously with its entrée offerings. “We’re still establishing our food credentials” outside of ice cream, said Joyce, although she noted that DQ is currently “pushing the salad envelope.”

    Barrier, Joyce, and Nissen were mum about future developments, but they pointed me to the nearby Normandale Boulevard location for a cutting-edge DQ experience—for example, it’s one of the first to serve new panini-like grilled sandwiches. The restaurant is also used for franchisee training, and my waffle-bowl sundae was delivered by a wildly enthusiastic man. “That looks delicious!” he boomed as he set it down. It was.

  • Suffer the Children

    The holiday spirit had barely dissipated last month when close to one-hundred-fifty people took to the streets to protest budget cuts for early childhood education. One protester was apparently so distressed by the lack of resources that she wailed and threw herself on her knees. Others tried to help her up, but she let her body go limp like an obstinate child. She was, in fact, four years old.

    All told, about two-thirds of the marchers had yet to see the inside of a kindergarten classroom. Clad in orange and sporting “Early Start” and “Strong Finish” signs on their chests and backs, respectively, the preschoolers, along with numerous chaperones, paraded down Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis, the youngest riding in carts pulled by teachers, parents, and volunteers from the YWCA Children’s Center at 12th and Nicollet.

    Despite the goal that adults professed for the protest, the children seemed more concerned with peace. Many of them wore white satin headbands with that word spelled out in glitter and (except for the aforementioned activist) chanted, “We want peace. We want peace” as they skipped and jumped.

    “It’s really more about promoting civic engagement,” admitted Ellen Cleary, a YWCA development specialist, by way of explaining the confusion. When a reporter tried to get a straight answer from various marchers, they responded with the usual indignation, suspicion, and evasiveness, as if they had spied an infiltrator in their midst. One girl impudently thrust out her sign and contorted her sweet little face into a derisive “What—are you stupid?” expression. Another coyly smiled and looked down at her frosty feet, as if to suggest that she was marching for the right to winter boots. A three-year-old boy let out a shriek, buried his face in a nearby shoulder, and refused to answer. After the march, when questioned, four-year-old Nora ran and hid under a table.

    Protected by her gray laminate canopy, she was a little more forthcoming about what she was marching for. “Peace,” she said. And what is peace? Nora giggled and ran for cover again, this time into the arms of a YWCA volunteer. “Do you want to tell?” asked the volunteer. “No!” Nora insisted, and wriggled free of one more interrogator.

    The action on Nicollet Mall, organized by the YWCA of Minneapolis in honor of Early Childhood Education Awareness Month, was one of four protests (each near one of the nonprofit’s locations) to publicize five years’ worth of budget cuts for state childcare subsidies. According to the YWCA, with fewer low-income families qualifying for subsidies and facing higher co-payments, many low-income children are now deprived of early childhood education and some childcare centers have had to close.

    Becky Roloff, CEO of the YWCA of Minneapolis, attempted to kick off the downtown event with a brief statement. With several news cameras trained on her, she fought to be heard over the roar of restless children. “We are marching to tell everybody how important it is that all of you go to school and get an education like I got an education,” Roloff explained to her young audience. “We are doing this so that we can give you a good start, so that you can do well in school, and for the rest of your lives.”

    Without a microphone, however, Roloff’s message was no match for the din of a hundred youngsters ready to take it to the streets. The cameramen asked her to do another take—but not before Sarah Warren, an eager protest organizer with a drum, took a wrong cue. She began rallying the children to shout, “Early start, strong finish!”

    Though Roloff attempted to give the media what they wanted, revved-up children have a way of getting their way. There was nothing to do but lead the kiddie caravan out of the YWCA and into the cold.

    “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” Thus began the mixed-message march as the group set off on its three-block trek down the Mall.

    Two blocks along, one mother, clearly accustomed to more aggressive demonstrations, spotted an approaching police car; she froze on the spot, as if bracing herself for the tear gas. The nearby nippers continued, oblivious to the threat.

    “We want peace. Hands are not for hitting,” they sang. Girls twirled. Boys jumped. Energy soared. And one lonely tear welled up in a reporter’s eye, while other passersby, in classic Minnesota fashion, seemed entirely oblivious to the spectacle.

  • Xbox and Body Bags

    I opened the door to hear, “Stop! Don’t come in! I’m jacking off!” My roommate was leaving to go back to the States in thirty minutes, but apparently he felt the need to do it one last time before he left. And there he was, wearing nothing but a University of South Carolina Gamecocks hat, rolled onto his stomach in pure terror that I had caught him.

    “You’ve got five minutes!” I said.

    I shut the door and returned to the command post, where the business of war was conducted. Our priorities for running combat operations in the Middle East were as follows:

    1. “Madden 2007” on Xbox. (We had a fantasy league going.)

    2. Eating/sleeping. Basic stuff in order to survive.

    3. Combat patrols.

    My roommate came in ten minutes later with a grin on his face.

    “You’re going to be in the States with your girlfriend in twelve hours. You couldn’t wait?”

    “It doesn’t matter, I couldn’t finish.”

    “What do you mean you couldn’t finish?”

    “You ruined the aura, sir.”

    “What aura? You were watching porn and jerking off. I don’t think there was anything spiritual in your hands at that moment. By the way, I hope you don’t mind, I told everyone.” I put down the Xbox controller and headed for the door.

    “Sergeant Thomas?” said one of the soldiers. “Why were you only wearing a South Carolina hat?”

    Two months into our deployment, the days were already running together. I had yet to experience the “war” that everyone kept telling me about. I was bored. That was about to change.

    Later that day, the troops were preparing their trucks, and their platoon leader, a friend of mine, approached the commander.

    “Is there a task and purpose for tonight?”

    “You could go check to see if they opened the road again.”

    “Can I leave a team behind to hit them if they try?”

    “As long as the rest of your guys are nearby to help them if they need it.”

    “Done.”

    There was a road out there, a road that we’d tried to close many times before, but the barricades could always be moved with enough determination and the right equipment. The Iraqis had both.

    With that, the plan was set and the men loaded their trucks.
    The rest of us sat down to watch The Grudge. I like horror films (and Sarah Michelle Gellar), and was looking forward to having the shit scared out of me.

    But before the movie got going, the radio blared: “… I can’t … we got hit … I can’t get to the truck … it’s on fire, rounds are cooking off at us and I think there are two guys still inside!”

    The moments immediately after that are hard to recall. I don’t remember putting on my equipment. I don’t remember whose truck the commander and I commandeered to get us there. But I do remember hearing the words “anti-tank mine” and “pressure wire.” I remember screaming down a dirt road, wondering if we were going to be next. I remember seeing the truck in the distance, on fire, helpless. I remember the faces of some of the Iraqi police who helped me move pieces of the truck in which my friends were trapped. I remember working all night. I put two young men into body bags.

    Three earlier trucks had missed the mine by five inches. Five inches was the distance between life and death. (I’ve since learned you can shave it even closer.) That night, and that arithmetic, would forever change the way I look at what I do. No matter what I do.

  • Discounting the Value of Work

    Every month or two a Costco coupon book arrives in the mail. Unlike the usual crap in most direct mail envelopes, the Costco book contains at least twenty coupons for stuff we actually use at our house: shampoo, Kleenex, garbage bags, dishwashing liquid. I usually look forward to my semi-monthly Costco runs, and do so even more when I’ve spent the night before tearing out a fist full of coupons.

    I like to go on Sunday, especially when the Vikings are playing on TV. The lines are shorter and the navigation through the aisles is easier. I often combine the Costco trip with one to Home Depot next door. But it seems the lines are never long at Home Depot these days. The trickle-down effect of the real estate bust is my guess why.

    As I was checking out at Costco, stocking up on over $100 worth of stuff, the checker mentioned that I sure was using a lot of coupons. The young woman who was reloading my cart as the items came off the scanner said that I was buying a lot of stuff that she needed, too, but she couldn’t afford to use the coupons this week because she was “short.”

    The checker offered: “They’re good through next weekend, too.”

    “Next week, I’ve got to pay rent,” she replied.

    The guy in line behind me was buying a new vacuum cleaner. The cheerful checker kept up the banter: “This must be cleaning supply day,” she said to him as I was signing my credit card slip. “Yeah,” the guy said, “my cleaning lady told me I needed a new vacuum.”

    “That’s good,” said the checker. “I’m a cleaning lady too, and I hate it when the vacuum’s no good. My husband and I do it one day a week. He does the downstairs and I do the upstairs.”

    Pushing my cart toward the parking lot, I thought of the first George Bush and his amazement at the electronic bar-code scanners when he went through a grocery line during a campaign stop. Of course, at the time this Bush had been either vice president or president for nearly twelve years and probably neither he nor Barbara had been doing their own shopping for at least that long. (And honestly, do you really want the President of the United States standing in line at the grocery store?) Nevertheless, the story was used to great effect by his rivals to show how “out of touch” Bush was with quotidian America.

    Similar charges could more honestly be leveled at Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who recently said she was proud to be from Minnesota, “where we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.” Of course, she’s probably not as proud as George Bush fils, who two years ago told a single mother of three, “You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.”

    Never the wordsmith, Bush of course has no idea that “fantastic” doesn’t really mean “great.” It means “beyond rational belief.” What is fantastic is that Bachmann is proud that someone needs a second job in order to have the money to buy discounted shampoo by the gallon. Not as fantastic perhaps as that Bachmann expressed her pride as she was endorsing the Republican-proposed “Middle Class Job Protection Act,” which has a corporate tax cut as its central strategy to protect Americans’ rights to work two or more jobs.

    It should be pretty clear by now that Americans’ ability to keep working in order to keep shopping in order to keep the terrorists at bay is stretched as thin as our military. As the New York Times noted last week, foreign companies and governments have been behind more than half of all the announced deals to purchase American companies so far this year. Our enemies don’t need to fly planes into buildings any more. They can just buy the buildings with their strong currencies. And we can start getting used to the idea that we may all be working two jobs soon, and that the new boss will likely be Asian, European, or Middle Eastern.

    I’m working on a coupon book of my own now, which I’m planning on direct-mailing to politicians who think the issues worth worrying about include who is more religious and whether gays can marry. I’m hoping just one of them will use it to walk through a checkout line and buy a clue.

  • Bitter

    After the radiation treatments, my mother wanted only green bananas. Bananas that weren’t even fruit yet, not a drop of sweetness throughout.

    “These I can taste,” she said. “My tongue has all but died.”

    She hadn’t died. Yet. Although she was past bargaining with God, she still wanted to barter with me. She would try to quit smoking, she said, but only if I promised not to drink and drive.

    “Ah … you must be thinking of one of your children from a previous life. Mom, it’s me, Charlene, remember—the nerd? I barely drink, and I don’t even own a car.”

    Tears appeared as spontaneously as an accident. The past clung to her eyelash like an unripe fruit. I caught a glimpse of my younger, glamorous mother, dazzled and bewildered, plucked from circumstances and asked to dance.

    “One has regrets.” She stared. “And requests.”

    “OK; it’s a deal,” I said.


    Soon, the materiality of the bananas     grew indigestible. The disease or the treatment had turned her stomach, so she switched to chocolate, the darker the better. Less solid, still strong. She could taste it along the back of her life, she said.

    She got the idea from To Kill a Mockingbird. She wouldn’t smoke while I read aloud, two whole hours. Instead, she ate one square of 85 percent cocoa, bit by oily crumb. Like scary Mrs. Dubose, she’d drool, curse, and shake until the timer sounded. Unlike Jem, I hadn’t been made to read to her as apology for my temper. Still, guilt tapped my shoulder like an addict.

    I lied to keep my bargain. After readings, my mother’s back was straight as a dancer’s as she bragged of her twitchy muscles, dry mind, wavy mouth. She’d had two fewer cigarettes than the day before. I said I was trying, but that the cravings were too strong; I couldn’t resist always having one more beer. Worse, I’d crashed into the garage door, mangled it and the fender too.

    “An accident means you didn’t mean it.” She spat from the back of her tongue. “Bastard. I didn’t mean it.”

    By the time I was bringing her Turkish coffee for her meals, my mother’s words were turning to steam. Still, she put her hand on mine when I relayed my troubles.

    “Mom, I’m so sorry. Last night, Mom, I hit a cat. I killed it; horrible, Mom. I promise I’ll stop now; I really will.”

    “Relapse … cat … ” she whispered. “Reprieve … ”


    As always, books were closed    , stories told and not told. I wanted to sit on the aqua couch at the coffee shop and stare at the mural of Audrey Hepburn; I wanted to hear Jem’s father in the book say, “She was the bravest person I ever knew.” Shifting in the café line from foot to foot, I’m not sure what I forgave my mother for.

    Maybe the smell of the roasting beans would be enough to open the cliffhanger back of my throat. Myself, I’d never had a cup of joe; I was thinking of trying one, that universal morning bitter. In front of me, the black liquid poured.


    Cindra Halm is the author of     Inflectional Weather, a poetry chapbook published by Press of the Taverner. She teaches at The Loft Literary Center and contributes to Rain Taxi Review of Books. “Bitter” is part of a forthcoming anthology, Blink Again: Sudden Fiction from the Upper Midwest (Spout Press).

     

  • Do You Really Believe?

    One morning last summer, leaving my apartment on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, I noticed there weren’t many people outside. It was a fine June day, but there wasn’t the usual line of cars in front of Starbucks. No commuters schlepping insulated mochas, no dog walkers, no window washers at Cafe Latté, and no one else waiting for the 7:23 bus to downtown Minneapolis.

    On the bus there were about a third as many riders as usual, and the kindly woman with the thick black braid was not in her usual seat. I tried to read, but panic was setting in. By the time I reached the skyway, my stomach was a prickly ball. I passed the jewelry store near the U.S. Trust Building and checked my watch. At least two clerks should have been in the display windows, draping necklaces and stabbing rings onto their holders. But the shop was dark and empty.

    I knew it had happened: Jesus had fulfilled his prophecy, returned to Earth, and taken the believers. Now the Apocalypse was beginning. My hands were clammy as I dialed my mom’s number; I was certain she would not answer, now or ever again. When she picked up and chirped “Why … good morning!” my shoulders eased, but my heart was still pounding from the adrenaline. “Hi, Mom,” I said weakly.

    It’s strange being the kind of person who sees a half-empty bus and thinks “Apocalypse!” In part it’s the result of watching Armageddon-inspired movies like Left Behind, but mainly it comes from being raised in an ultra-conservative church. When I was growing up, our congregation in the hamlet of Phillipsburg, Missouri, interpreted the Bible with the kind of literal fervor with which a non-believer might read IKEA assembly instructions—midway through a construction effort. On the outside, we looked like any other Christians: we dressed up, we sang, we went to Sunday school, we read the Dr. Dobson inserts in the church bulletins. But we also followed rules against women preaching, praying aloud during church, or serving communion; as well as the tenet that the only way to heaven is to make a public testimony and be fully immersed in water. Most of all, we believed that we had the one true way to heaven. In other words, we actually took the Bible at its word—unlike the Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Seventh-day Adventists who were, sad to say, bound for hell.

    Given this background, and my family’s continued devotion, I was rather smug during the 2004 election campaign, when national magazines were breathlessly reporting on the huge swaths of the voting public who considered themselves “born-again Christians.” “No shit,” I thought. (I had already left the flock.) After Bush’s win, I read how Karl Rove and the president’s other operatives had used a database of some 5,000 churches, as well as church directories gleaned from across the country, to home in on and court evangelical voters. Some 350,000 “pro-family” conservatives volunteered for the Bush campaign and nearly six million evangelicals—including three and a half million who hadn’t voted in the 2000 election—cast votes for Dubya. As Bush moved into his second term, the power of the religious right seemed palpable. Pundits talked in awe about Dr. James C. Dobson—the one who we read in church bulletins, the so-called Protestant Pope who built Focus on the Family, a $130 million, 1,300-employee media ministry in Colorado Springs, and the venerable National Association of Evangelicals, with thirty million members. It seemed like Rove had indeed established a “permanent majority” of conservative Republicans.

    But behind the scenes, in the conservative Protestant capital of Colorado Springs, there was some serious soul-searching over a study released by George Barna, a well-respected evangelical pollster in southern California who had developed a reputation for delivering scientifically sound data on U.S. religious trends. In December 2003, he conducted a telephone poll of 2,033 randomly selected Americans from numerous cross-sections of the population, who were asked a series of questions:

    1. Would you call yourself a Christian?
    2. Have you made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in your life today?
    3. Do you believe that you will go to heaven when you die because you have confessed your sins and accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?
    4. Do you believe that you have a personal responsibility to share your religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians?
    5. Do you believe that Satan exists?
    6. Do you believe that eternal salvation is possible through grace, not works?
    7. Do you believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on Earth?
    8. Do you believe that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches?
    9. Do you believe that God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity?
    10. Do you believe that God created the universe and still rules it today?

    Barna discovered that a solid thirty-eight percent of the U.S. population could be classified as “born-again” Christians, meaning they answered yes to the first three questions. The part that knocked strict Bible literalists on their heels was how few of those born-again Christians have a “Biblical world view”: only nine percent of them qualified by answering yes to all ten questions.

    Worse still, Barna found that the ideological move from being “born again” to having a “Biblical world view” is crucial to developing evangelically “correct” views on divorce, gay sex, pornography, gambling, abortion, and other social issues near and dear to Bible literalists. As it happens, born-agains are not all that statistically different from their heathen counterparts in terms of how they act, or what they believe. For instance, the divorce rate for born-agains is exactly the same as for those who haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as their savior: thirty-five percent. But overall compare those with a Biblical world view to born-agains and there are marked differences down the line. True evangelicals (those who take the Bible literally) are thirty-one times less likely to accept cohabitation, eighteen times less likely to condone drunkenness, fifteen times less likely to condone gay sex, and on and on and on.

    “There was a growing sense even before the Barna study that things were bad, that a large number of Christians were not living the Christian life,” says Marc Fey, an evangelical life coach and consultant in Colorado Springs, and director of something called “Christian Worldview” at Focus on the Family. “But what the Barna study really did was galvanize us in our belief that something had to be done.”
    The question they faced: How do you convince ninety-one percent of born-again Christians that showing up at church, voting Republican, and putting a Jesus fish on the SUV isn’t enough?

  • Planet Pickett

    A gauntlet of black-and-white portraits of jazz luminaries lines the walls of the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant on the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. Nearly all of these musicians have appeared at the Dakota in one of its two incarnations. The trick with this sort of self-promotion-as-interior-decoration is in the execution. To do it right, a place needs to have attracted top-notch talent and established a unique rapport with artists over many years, to the point that the portraits themselves seem to address the wistful adage "If these walls could talk."

    Veering left from the Dakota’s entry, the first portrait you see is of Joe Williams, the Count Basie Orchestra vocalist. Back in ’96, the then-seventy-eight-year-old Williams frolicked with unvarnished joy across the Dakota stage, delivering an unbelievably potent performance. Recalling that night in Richard Grudens’ book The Music Men, Williams said, "I don’t remember feeling that good. I think every pore in my body was open…. " The singer inscribed his Dakota portrait to the man most responsible for the club’s legacy-founder, co-owner, and frontman Lowell Pickett: "Lowell, Best. Love, Joe Williams."

    Next in line is a similarly signed shot of Stanley Turrentine, a man of massive physique and a tenor saxophone tone to match. Many years ago, Wynton Marsalis and his band finished their concert at the Guthrie and hurried over to catch Turrentine’s final set at the Dakota, only to discover they’d arrived too late. No matter. Lowell (as he is known to most everyone) invited them in, convinced a cook to stick around and feed them, and the two bands ate and jammed in the empty club until two in the morning. Beside Turrentine on the wall is a picture of trumpeter Roy Hargrove. Lowell first met Hargrove at the 1989 Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy; he was the road manager for Moore By Four and Hargrove was still a teenager yet to release his first record. Since then, the Downbeat poll winner has performed at the Dakota on numerous occasions. "To Lowell, The most comfortable jazz club in the world for musicians and patrons. Peace + Love."

    The tributes go on and on: nationally renowned jazz cat, pungent memory, heartfelt inscription. Finally, there’s McCoy Tyner, the pianist in John Coltrane’s legendary quartet who went on to become an influential dynamo in his own right. Tyner and Pickett were friends for more than a decade before Tyner became the Dakota’s first national jazz act in the fall of ’88.

    Then the legacy jumps from the wall of portraits to the bandstand. It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and for the eighth year in a row, that means hip, ironic trio The Bad Plus are playing the Dakota. Lowell introduces the group, wryly noting that the crowd is larger now than it was for the band’s first show at the club in 2000; also that the trio is fresh from a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall and an effusive write-up in The New Yorker. What he doesn’t say is that back in high school, before they even knew each other, two of the three Bad Plus musicians, pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Reid Anderson, were at the Dakota for that first McCoy Tyner gig.

    Three weeks before The Bad Plus took the stage, the Detroit blues singer Bettye LaVette played her now-regular winter engagement at the Dakota. After decades of barely scraping by, LaVette’s career was finally showing a pulse when she got a call from Lowell. Four years later, LaVette sits in her dressing room after wowing the capacity crowd she now typically draws to the Dakota. She talks about "the night Lowell and I sat right here and talked until almost daylight. Oh, you should have heard us going back and forth from the ladies rest room that night! I’m threatening to burn down the bathroom because my picture isn’t in there. And he’s saying, ‘Well, let me get to know you better.’" LaVette lets out a big laugh, then suddenly gives me a no-bullshit look from behind her tinted glasses. "Lowell is just somebody I want to hang with. I do a million gigs a year and I don’t know any other club owner or any other promoter who I’d want to hang with."
     

    Judging from his childhood and public mien, Lowell Pickett is one of the last people you’d expect to be earning hanging privileges and trading bathroom bon mots with a sassy, streetwise black woman from Detroit. He was born and raised in Austin, Minnesota, the Hormel company town where his father ran the local J.C. Penney and his mother was a music teacher and ardent cellist. Lowell was their third child and second son, reared in a quiet neighborhood, tucked away from the countercultural changes of the ’60s. Lowell’s folks were molded by the Depression, which meant that the family never ate out and pinched pennies to invest in education.

    "My father grew up dirt-poor in the middle of North Dakota; at sixteen he had to find a place for his family to live. He couldn’t afford school, and used to read college catalogues the way other people read travel brochures," Lowell says, explaining how his dad gently coaxed him into attending Shattuck Academy, at the time an Episcopalian military school in Faribault (now most famous for such alumni as Marlon Brando and Nick Nolte), first for the summer and then for a year. When he graduated from Austin High in ’67-right in sync with the Summer of Love-he had already been accepted to St. Olaf College in Northfield. He planned to earn a law degree, and was considering a double major in business administration.

    That careful, cultivated side of Lowell, now fifty-nine, can be seen as he introduces acts from the stage or roams the club troubleshooting. He’s almost always attired in a gray suit and matching tie, and his longish hair and short, graying beard are immaculately groomed. He’s a bit hangdog around the cheekbones and shoulder blades, but his voice has the dulcet, reassuring tone of an FM radio host. He can also display the unerring formality of a funky but ace maître d’.

    But that’s the master disguise, the veneer of decorum acquired (and required) when you grow up in the sticks. A less obvious but more important side of Lowell is the dreamer and adventurer-the one who’s always ready to receive, or concoct, what the flamboyant reedman Rahsaan Roland Kirk once referred to as "Bright Moments." The moments when Joe Williams turns back the clock and breathes through every pore; when Turrentine and Marsalis are sharing a blues and some blackened fish in the wee hours; when McCoy Tyner passes a baton to The Bad Plus before the group even existed in the minds of its members.

    This side of Lowell was kindled at St. Olaf, where he landed a roommate from Philadelphia. Lowell’s mother had made sure her children took piano lessons and w
    ere steeped in the classics. Show tunes were also played around the Pickett household, and Lowell had ventured further, from the New Christy Minstrels into songwriting-oriented folkies such as Donovan, Tim Hardin, and his first musical hero, Bob Dylan. But this dude from Philly had been a drummer in a rock band back home and had an entirely different crate of sounds. "Cream and Moby Grape and the Grateful Dead and the Mothers of Invention," Lowell says, reverently rolling out the names. "I had never heard that stuff before. I just loved it."

  • Childhood … for Grownups

    Chuck & Buck, a somewhat underrated 2000 film that was one of the first major releases shot on digital video, revolves around Buck, a 27-year-old man (Mike White) who, for all intents and purposes, is an 11-year-old boy. He perpetually sucks on Blow Pops, fills his room with toys, wears ill-fitting windbreakers, and speaks to other adults in a simplistic, gee-whiz monotone. The story begins with the death of Buck’s mother, a tragedy that sends him in pursuit of a childhood friend, an LA music producer named Chuck (Chris Weitz), with a stalker’s determination. Buck is clearly not developmentally challenged; he simply seems to be stuck in a time warp set to the years he and Chuck played make believe. A ridiculous tale? Perhaps. Yet, while Buck may seem an implausible character, there are, in fact, adults in real life — fully functioning members of society who are well educated and can live independently — who pursue the articles, activities, and attitudes of childhood with more dedication than most actual tykes.

    One case study of this, a prominent Minnesotan who, sadly, died last August, would rightly be called the ultimate pursuer of this strange approach to life. For starters, his name was Joybubbles. He loved stories and had imaginary friends. And he was an avid fan of Mister Rogers and similar shows, as well as an incessant collector of toys, dolls, and other playthings, listing his age as "five" until the day he died, at 58. All this despite the fact that he was once a graduate student in philosophy with an IQ of 172, who could imitate the analog dial tone that used to be a fixture of the phone system. It was this last talent that briefly brought him international fame as the grandfather of a short-lived movement known as phone phreaking.

    Blind since birth, Joybubbles entered this world as Josef Engressia in 1949, in Richmond, Virginia. In 1991, he legally changed his name to Joybubbles, which he happened upon several years earlier at a motivational seminar in Minneapolis. The leader of the conference asked attendees to describe themselves in one word. The first thing that came out of Engrassia’s head was "Joybubbles!" This confabulation gave the participant so much reason for living, he applied it to all unofficial and official documents, including his social security card.

    The reason behind this alias, and Joybubbles’ fixation on collecting Raggedy Ann dolls, Curious George books, and Sesame Street episodes, was borne out of a desire to recapture the childhood he felt he never had, and to escape the adult world he no longer wished to be a part of. "Childhood is a protected status," says Ross MacDonald, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, "No one really expects anything of you. It’s a time of fun and frivolity, at least in theory. Someone uninterested in the pressures and responsibilities of adult life, and there is no natural reason to want them, would likely find childhood a fairly palatable state."

    A quite unpalatable past drove Joybubbles’ infatuation: the sexual abuse he suffered when he was actually a child. According to longtime friend and executor of his estate, Steven Gibb, young Josef’s mother refused to believe her son’s reports about the molestation he experienced at the hands of a nun, who was also one of his grade school teachers. Consequently, as the years went by, mother and son would become so estranged that they ceased direct communication, using his father and later, following his death, his equally blind sister as go-betweens for messages.

    Another source of the friction between child and parent, and a driving force in Joybubbles’ need to make up for lost kid time, was the isolation that he felt from other children, thanks to his ability to read at an advanced level and enjoy cultural pursuits far above his age group. The latter, above all, included phone phreaking, which involved duplicating the tones that connected long-distance numbers, thus allowing the phreak (a hybrid of the words "phone" and "freak") to make long-distance calls without the phone company making a record and charging the caller.

    This bizarre hobby was made possible when human switchboard operators were replaced by automated systems that relied on tones. From the late ‘40s through the mid-‘70s, the telephone network relied upon a 2600 Hertz, or Hz, tone to indicate when a long-distance trunk line was idle, and used pulses of 2600 Hz to send dialing information. Most phone phreaks needed mechanical whistles to duplicate this sound (this included one acclaimed individual called Captain Crunch, so named after the cereal, whose whistle prize he used to imitate the tone), but Joybubbles, who was born with perfect pitch, could do so simply with his mouth.

    It’s not hard to see the members of this niche movement as antecedents of today’s computer hackers. In fact, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple, started out as participants in this game. Phil Lapsley, an Oakland, California author who is currently working on a book about phone phreaks, claims: "Phone phreaking and hacking started to intertwine in the 1970s as computers became more widespread. Many of the skills that made one a good phone phreak also made one a good hacker. If you can understand how the telephone system works, you can probably understand how computers work, too."

    As it happens, Joybubbles was one phreak who did not join the computer revolution, in no small part because he was blind. Even when Jaws and other audio systems enabled the visually impaired to use the technology in as sophisticated a manner as sighted people, and e-mail accounts could be had via telephone, Joybubbles, following a brief dalliance with the internet in the late ‘90s, never developed an interest in it. But, in the era of phreaking, he amassed an impressive "rap sheet" — ever since the day in 1957 when the eight-year-old Josef Engressia discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C would stop a dialed phone recording. This went on until the end of the ‘60s, when, as a graduate student in Tennessee, he was given a suspended sentence for malicious mischief after making long-distance calls for friends at a dollar a minute.

    Engressia became such a celebrated member of this cult that an NBC Nightly News report featured him on November 27, 1968 — a clip of which can be found on YouTube and which is likely the only visual documentation of his life available to the public. He was also the inspiration for the blind character of Whistler, played by David Strathairn in the 1992 movie Sneakers.