The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • Mellow Pinot

    The late summer evenings take my mind back thirty years to a leafy lane on the Devon-Dorset border, the western edge of the countryside familiar to readers of Thomas Hardy’s novels. We had spent the day otter-hunting, the finest of all forms of venery, requiring intimate understanding of the habits of the otter, but offering little threat to the animal’s life. The sport, alas, was on its last legs. A combination of the pesticide DDT (causing sterility all the way up the food chain) and the escape of American mink from fur farms (causing loss of habitat) had reduced English otter numbers to a condition from which they have taken a whole generation to recover. Nevertheless, we had enjoyed a grand day not merely looking at nature but being part of it.

    Now we stood in a grassy, gritty lane as the last of the sunlight filtered sideways through the elms (there were still elms then), waiting for the rickety old red van, filled with straw, which would take the hounds home. The pure-bred otterhounds, large, lop-eared friendly beasts with Afro-curly coats, nuzzled our thighs, hoping we still had some of our lunchtime sandwiches left. The Master of the Hounds, a genial man with an outdoor face and the finest note on a hunting horn I have ever heard, had fallen into conversation with an older man who had come upon us in the lane.

    It was the older man who caught and held my eye. He was tall and dignified, dressed in the English country manner: cloth cap, good tweed coat, corduroy or cavalry twill trousers (I can’t remember which). They talked of the usual country things—the harvest, the weather, the local fox hounds—though not, I noticed, of their families. A cloud of reserve seemed to hang over their kindly courtesies, as each spoke with studied care. Eventually the older man resumed his walk and the Master turned to us. “That was Colonel Dugdale,” he said softly. “He did everything for those girls.”

    Everything promptly fell into place. The newspapers had been full of one Bridget Rose Dugdale, who in the course of getting a degree from Oxford and a doctorate from London University, had got the idea that her life should be spent supporting the cause of the Irish Republican Army. At the time the IRA was short of cash; no doubt the Irish bars in certain American cities were not taking enough in and Colonel Qadhafi of Libya was feeling parsimonious. Anyway, Dr. Dugdale burgled her father’s country house and stole the family treasures. Later she was one of a gang that broke into a big house near Dublin and made off with some really good pictures, including a Vermeer. The thing about Vermeers is that there are not very many of them—perhaps thirty-six. The old Dutchman painted them to give mankind joy, not to provide collateral for the purchase of armaments.

    I am not clever enough to debate the ins and outs of the Irish Question. What lingers in the mind is the immense sadness which surrounded the father. No wonder he was reticent, even by English standards. More than anything it was his hopes, it seemed to me, that had been stolen from him.

    To have your hope taken away is not natural. It is not an everyday tragedy, the sort of sadness that Hardy, more than most poets, perceived beneath the decencies of country life. Losing hope is like losing the companionship of your shadow. This seemed to me a tragedy caused by an idea. The Turks have a saying, balik bashdan koka— “the fish begins stinking from the head.” There’s nothing harmless about ideas.

    Good then to commend to you a wine that goes straight to the heart. It is a Pinot Noir from California, but drunk blind you would think you were in the presence of a burgundy as elegant as Proust’s Madame de Guermantes. The pellucid red, pale around the edges, is the color of good burgundy; it makes the polish on your glass shine brighter, not like the oily integument of port, still less the limpid trout-stream blue of gin. There is a whiff of oak, a slight and pleasing sweetness, and a lingering wininess which rises right through the sinuses as though you were Caruso or Gigli projecting a top “D” from between your eyebrows (any tenor will tell you what I mean). This nectar is the 1998 vintage from Seven Peaks (no, not Twin Peaks), a winery in the Central Coast region of California. It would go well with any mellow cheese, say Stilton, Gorgonzola, or Brie. May you mellow well with it into autumn.

  • Rites of Passage

    There’s an arbor in my neighborhood that I drive past every day. Sturdy pre-fab construction, what looks to be bare, untreated wood. It catches my eye not because it’s beautiful, but because it is goofy. It’s the placement of the thing that gets me. It’s plopped a third of the way into the front yard of the house.

    It is not arching gracefully over a walkway or path. Nor does it draw the eye through to focus on a lush planting. Furthermore, it’s not an accidental placement of the thing. It’s been sitting on that front-yard grass, bare as a bone for its second summer now, and it looks as though it’s going to stay there. It looks as though someone had a Jack Daniels break on chore day, went to Bachman’s, dumped two hundred dollars on a three-sided pine box, hauled it home, stood it up in the yard, passed out, and then woke up the next day and decided to leave it where it stands as a physical reminder to remain sober while landscaping.

    I’m not saying that as a judgment, merely as an observation.

    I live a couple of blocks away from the house that boasts this oddity, and I don’t know the people who live there. The rest of the house seems well-kept and ordered, at least from the outside, which only makes the Doorway to Nowhere that much more puzzling.

    So, I’m out having coffee with my groovy artist pal, an old friend I haven’t seen in a while. He travels around a lot, and because I pretty much stay in the same place, I know we’ll always catch up sooner or later. He knows where to find me. It’s been more than a year since we’ve spoken, and when he asks me how I’ve been lately, the floodgates release. “My dad is sick! My kids are growing up fast! We have no kitchen countertops! The family dog had to be put to sleep!” Life is hardly falling in around my feet, but suffice it to say, there’s been a fair amount of nuttiness in the last twelve months. The next thing I know, I’ve been talking his ear off for thirty minutes straight and for the last ten I’ve been ranting about the arbitrary arbor. Of all things.

    My old pal, he laughed in all the right places and didn’t question my hopscotching brain patterns. I finally ran out of gas, and he took a pull off his hand-rolled cigarette, and a slurpy sip from his sugary coffee treat. And when he spoke, it wasn’t, “Aw, hell, baby, I’m so sorry about your dad.” Or even “The dog too, huh? Well that’s the pits, man.” Nope. It was “Colleen, how do you know that the archway doesn’t lead anywhere?”

    I stifled a wild urge to sink my teeth into his gentle hippie windpipe. Instead, I calmly said, “Well, that’s because I can see through it. That, and the last time I checked, I wasn’t living inside a Doctor Who episode. Just in case you’re wondering, I’m certain it’s not haunted either. No unexplained deaths in the neighborhood, no smell of sulfur.”

    “Sure seems to be haunting you.” He laughed.

    “Say that again but next time, cue the sitar music.”

    “Seriously, think about all the things in life that you feel you know are real, but you can’t see. Your idea of God and the hereafter. Divine reprisal for unrepentant souls. Maybe you don’t see anything on the other side of that arbor, and what bugs you is that you feel you’re supposed to. By all the rules of gardening, an archway is supposed to lead somewhere. To your eye, this one doesn’t, and that sticks in your craw so much that you’ve become obsessed by it.”

    “Obsessed is a pretty strong word.”

    “Is it? I don’t see you for a year and a half, all this stuff is going on in your life, and you ramble on about a stupid garden feature that’s not even in your own yard?”

    My morning commute takes me past the arbor and every day I still look up at it. I’ve become accustomed to the weird, bare wood arch standing stark on a plain green patch of grass. Now I’ve begun thinking of it as a pass-through that leads to everywhere, instead of a doorway that connects to only one room. A conceptual thoroughfare leading past illness, strife, and financial crunches, with wayside rests for joy and contentment and ridiculous old friends who smoke fragrant curls of tobacco and untangle thought snarls.

    It’s like a little South Minneapolis Stonehenge. A primitive calendar that reminds me each day that passes is an occasion to believe.

  • Doing More With Less

    This past May, my mother told me that my father, Clinton Collins, Sr., was probably going to be posthumously inducted into his high school hall of fame. Right about that same time, actor Bill Cosby began catching hell from certain so-called African-American leaders and their liberal apologists because he said publicly what most black people have said privately—the teen pregnancies, the underachievement, and the gangbanging—ain’t all Mr. Charlie’s fault. Cosby recently went one step further and told those who fault him for airing “dirty laundry”: “Your dirty laundry gets out of school every day about 2:30….It’s cursing and calling each other ‘nigger’ as they’re walking up and down the street. They think they are hip. They can’t read; they can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling and going nowhere.”

    Initially, I did not link one event—a well-deserved recognition for a Mississippi Civil Rights pioneer—with the controversy surrounding Cosby’s observations. However, during my trip last month with my mother and sisters to accept my father’s award, I came to understand why Cosby is so angry that many younger African-Americans have squandered what my father’s generation bought through sacrifice, courage, and just plain guts.

    My father graduated in 1946 from Oak Park High School, Laurel, Mississippi’s black high school. Before the school opened in 1929, Laurel did not provide any formal education for its black citizens beyond the eighth grade. Whites saw the high school primarily as a place where, in the parlance of the times, the “local Nigras” could learn a trade. However, the black people of Laurel and the black teachers at Oak Park saw something far greater: a place where students could acquire the education to escape the feudal confines of a racist and dirt-poor Mississippi.

    My father’s life growing up in small-town Mississippi in the thirties and early forties was hard. He knew first-hand the stomach pangs from going to bed hungry. White folks called him “nigger” so much that he was surprised when they did not. He used an outhouse until he was seventeen years old.

    The other students at Oak Park also came from what by today’s standards would be Third World-level poverty, but the school’s all-black faculty did not permit that as an excuse for mediocre work. To keep the white folks happy, they made sure every student learned a “trade.” They also taught them how to write well, made sure they read great works of literature, and ensured that everyone learned “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” an anthem of black pride and old-fashioned patriotism.

    In other words, they were taught that they could achieve. They learned to shun mediocrity and to be proud of their African-American heritage.

    At the Oak Park hall-of-fame induction ceremony, I saw a group of proud, happy people whose collective credentials would be impressive in any setting. Oak Park graduates include opera star Leontyne Price, Olympic gold medalist Ralph Boston, university professors, medical doctors, lawyers, real estate moguls. Sitting there in Laurel, I thought about my North Minneapolis neighborhood and all the dysfunctions that exist there—teen pregnancies, trash-dumping, drug-dealing—and the collective accomplishments of the Oak Park crowd become even more impressive.

    How did generations of Oak Park students achieve more in the face of overwhelming adversity than many of today’s African-American kids, who have barely swallowed crumbs of the crap my dad was forced to eat every day?

    Then it came to me. Pain—induced by hard-core racism and the segregation it spawned—motivated the Oak Park crowd to take affirmative steps to improve their lives. What’s more, their families, most of which had a father at the helm, supported the teachers. And for the teachers, education was not just a paycheck—it was a calling.

    Each speaker in his own way said largely the same thing. Retired Army General David Price, who graduated with my dad in the Class of 1946, told of being rousted out of a theater by the assistant principal while cutting chemistry class. “Hopefully appreciation of your education will come later,” he was admonished. “But you are sure as hell going to class right now.”

    If Oak Park could do so much with so little, then young African-Americans have few excuses losing ground with the far greater resources available to them now.

  • Olympic Spirit

    You can find the best-looking man in Minnesota, my female colleagues tell me, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He is well over six feet tall, poses naked, and has a relaxed, arrogant look about him—there’s that jutty chin that women find irresistible. I am led to believe (by the same authorities) that the view from the rear is particularly gratifying—this baby got back, as my daughter’s favorite rapster once said.

    And perfect proportions. In fact, mathematically exact proportions; every one of his measurements is a planned and precise multiple of one of his knuckles (or digital phalanges, as they call them in the trade). Man is the measure of all things, as Protagoras said. Nothing illustrates more elegantly than this muscular specimen the ancient Greek conviction that the basis of beauty, indeed of all reality, is actually mathematical.

    Before you ask, we will never know how many digital phalanges were allotted to the part of him which was most masculine; it must have broken off some time in the last couple of thousand years. The plow-gash on his left thigh looks pretty painful as well.

    This is not one of your modern males, with an intense and sensitive inner life. It is impossible to discern what he is thinking, beyond perhaps that he feels relaxed and confident. A knee and an elbow are bent, the latter to hold a no-longer-extant spear (hence his name, the Doryphoros or Spear-Bearer). Despite the severed tree stump behind him, he does not seem as dim as Paul Bunyan. One imagines him as frozen poetry in motion, like an Olympic athlete: elegant in action but inarticulate when faced with a gabbling journalist.

    Beauty here is only skin deep. But what a skin—smooth white Pentelic marble (a Greek marble, though he is a Roman copy of a long-lost Greek original). You may think marble is merely parboiled limestone, of no more interest than potatoes. For Greeks and Romans it was a pleasure to be savored like wine. They looked at the green marble of Thessaly and saw in its white and yellow flecks the flowers and pasture on the spring hillsides from which it was cut. The more decadent emperors enjoyed building baths faced with the creamy stone quarried from the island of Skyros, with its distinctive gold and maroon veins, the colors of the Golden Gophers. (Could that be why Skyrian marble was used for the staircases in the Minnesota State Capitol?)

    A plainer creamy marble came from the island of Paros. Its noble simplicity and calm grandeur belies the wild life enjoyed by its ancient inhabitants. Lesbos might be famous for luxury and the poetess Sappho, but for the real strong stuff one turns to Archilochus, the poet of Paros. Too bad his works survive only in fragments. But you will get the idea from the title of a lecture about one of his recently rediscovered poems: “Last Tango on Paros.”

    Nowadays Paros is also home to wine marketed by Boutari, the best-known of all Greek wine makers. (Mr. Boutari is known also as a campaigner against dancing bears, but that is another story.) Unusually, this wine is red and robust, not white or resinated (retsina is surely one of those pleasures that are best enjoyed in the land of their origin); it is made from the distinctive Greek grape Xinómavro (“acid black”), with a strong, consistent flavor and a slightly brandified twang at the end.

    Its taste, indeed, is monochromatic enough to allow one to mix it with water in the ancient manner, in a krater or mixing bowl. (Just as “crater,” as in volcano, comes from krater because they are the same shape, so “acetabulum”—for the hip-socket —comes from the ancient name for little bowls that Greeks and Romans put vinegar in). Only barbarians drank their wine neat. Do you think the drinkers and thinkers at Plato’s Symposium could have been half so witty if they were in a condition that would have rendered them incapable of operating a motor chariot?

    So sit back, add a little water if you wish, and watch the marbly patterns swirl around your glass (or red-figured skyphos). You can do this while you watch the Olympics if you like. For myself, I would rather be among the cypress trees on a Hellenic hillside, balancing the aromas of pine and sunshine, of crushed thyme underfoot, and a whole lamb spitted and roasting succulently to celebrate the Greek festival of the Dormition of the Mother of God.

  • Cannibal Hamsters of the Living Dead

    I like to drive through the neighborhoods I used to live in and check in with my history. Most recently, Uptown. The corner of 25th and Bryant, a stately duplex on a tree-lined block.

    The Uptown house rarely calls me. But something was in my head this day, something small, furry and insistent. Chewing through the toilet-paper tube of my consciousness, suckling at the suspended drip-bottle of recollection, running endlessly on the exercise wheel of my mind.

    Rewind fourteen years. I was living in Stevens Court. Money was tight. My little Amanda was two years old and just beginning to realize the concept of “things.”

    “Can I have that?” she’d say, pointing at the bike a child was riding through the park. “No,” I’d say. “But you can ride on my shoulders!”

    “You don’t have anything I can pedal.” Amanda was nobody’s dummy. It went on that way for a time. At the dollar store, “No.” At the grocery store, “No.” It was a world of “No.” She and I were sick of it.

    There was a pet store nearby. Browsing there was Amanda’s favorite treat. One day after a million no’s, in the pet store, she held up the funniest little animal I ever saw. A Siberian hamster. It looked just like a Siberian husky dog, only it was four inches long. They were expensive. Fifty bucks apiece. Amanda held a squirming fuzzball to her lips. It kissed her. She laughed delightedly, and was powerless to resist.

    “Can I have this little guy?” God help me. I had my rent money in cash in my pocket. Her eyes held such wild hope.
    “Yes.” The look on her face. The sun itself has never shone brighter.

    When I screw up, I like to screw up big. I dropped two hundred dollars on two hamsters and the James J. Hill House of hamster tanks. I’d figure out what to tell the landlord later.

    Fast-forward six months. Our fortunes improved. We were moving to our stately duplex in Uptown. I had a handsome live-in boyfriend named Ken, comedy work, and a sense that maybe things would work out.

    On moving day, as boxes and furniture were hauled in a steady stream into the house, a friend lugged in the hamster tank. “Where should I put these guys?” I wanted them out of my daughter’s reach until we got settled. The duplex boasted a formal dining room with a very wide plate rail ringing the room near the ceiling. I pointed to a corner of the plate rail. “Put them up there.” I didn’t think they would fall. In fact, once they were up there, I didn’t think about them at all.

    Fast forward two weeks. Ken, Amanda, and I were enjoying breakfast in the dining room. Amanda asked, “Mommy? Where are my hamsters?” Ken and I choked, goggled at each other over our coffee mugs, but said nothing. She asked again, and I did the only thing I could think to do. I lied.

    “Honey, remember when we moved in here? Your hamsters told me that they didn’t want to move to a new place. They said they wanted to go back to the store to live with their aunts and uncles and cousins. So I took them back.”
    It took awhile for her to speak. When she did, she looked me in the eye and her voice quavered. “I guess I wish you would have told me.”

    “I’m sorry, honey. I should have.”

    She let out a hot gasp and looked away. But not before I saw another look I’ll never forget. She knew I was lying. My lie painted a Disney world of talking hamsters and watchful mothers that she was already too wise to believe in. Like I said, she’s nobody’s dummy. I hustled her to the neighbors’ and paced the floor with my boyfriend.

    “You do it,” I said, “I can’t look.” He dragged a chair over to the plate rail. His eyes widened in horror. He jumped down, covering his mouth in a gag. They weren’t both dead.

    I shrieked, “Kill it!” I was in a state; I mean what was I going to do? Allow my baby to harbor a cannibal hamster? Ken’s eyes rolled in revulsion. “Kill it? The thing is mad as hell. I don’t want to touch it!” My mind was racing. “Put the oven mitt on, grab it, and throw it against the wall!”

    Ken looked at me, thunderstruck. Our relationship lasted for years after that moment. To this day, I’m not sure why. At that moment, he knew the black depths of my heart.

    Shielding our hands with oven mitts, we took the tank off the rail. The rodent was indeed furious, charging the walls in a palsied hamster slam dance. We carried the tank to the alley, tipped it over, and sprang back as fast as we could. It shot out down the alley, ravenous for flesh.

    Free, in Uptown.

  • Ghetto Is As Ghetto Does

    Until a month ago, I did not think that I lived in “the ghetto.” North Minneapolis, the inner city, and even, on occasion, the ’hood—but not the ghetto. However, that was before a string of troubling incidents occurred in my neighborhood—and before I got some surprising reactions to them from some of my South Minneapolis friends. I’ve seen first-hand what happens when urban geography, race, and our notions of individual self-worth get mixed together.

    “Ghetto” derives from the name of an island near Venice where Jews were forced to live in the 1500s. Now, according to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, a ghetto is a “thickly populated slum area, inhabited predominantly by members of an ethnic or other minority group, often as a result of social or economic restrictions, pressures or hardships.”

    Things started to get strange a few weeks ago when I asked some of the young men in my neighborhood about the dramatic increase in cars parked near my home at odd hours and often with suspicious-looking passengers. I made it clear to these men that I would report any drug dealing or other criminal activity to the police.

    A few days later, a young African-American man approached me as I was headed to work. “I heard you were asking about drug dealing around here,” he said. “Nobody is dealing drugs. But you gotta understand—you live in the ghetto.”

    I was just a little perplexed. “I live in the ghetto? What does that mean? Am I supposed to accept trash in my yard, open drug dealing, and general mayhem because of my ZIP code? People in Linden Hills or Kenwood don’t have to put up with this.”

    “Brother, you don’t live in Linden Hills or Kenwood.”

    “Fair enough,” I replied, “but my parents placed their lives on the line in Mississippi during the Civil Rights movement so that black people could live in decent neighborhoods. I am not going to disrespect our struggle as a people by accepting that kind of defeatist thinking.”

    Then our eyes locked for a moment, each looking at the other with mutual bemusement. He clearly did not understand me, and I surely did not understand him. Did I challenge his expectations of what he and other Northsiders were entitled to from their surroundings? He probably thought I was setting the bar too high with my Kenwood comparisons, and I thought his ghetto comments provided an excuse for condoning subpar living conditions and bad behavior.

    Less than thirty-six hours later, a ten-pound rock crashed through my living-room window at three o’clock in the morning. Was there a connection? Was I being punished for being too bourgeois and not accepting the consequences of my geographic place?

    When I told two of my best friends, both Southsiders, I thought that they would surely empathize. Instead, I got lectured about “ghetto life” and strongly encouraged to “git while the gettin’ was good” to the relative safety of South Minneapolis. “I warned you about messing around with those Northside Negroes,” one told me. “They don’t look at the world the same way you and I do. You are dealing with men who don’t value their own lives, let alone yours.”

    My other ABC (“ace boon coon,” Southern lingo for close personal friend) largely agreed. “You’ve got a choice to make,” he began. “If you don’t do anything else, they probably won’t either. Don’t start a neighborhood block group, don’t write about this in your column, and for God’s sake, do not challenge them again. Next time, you might just really piss them off. Inside your own home, say whatever you want, but do not ruffle their feathers by trying to impose your view of appropriate behavior on them. Accept that you live in a ghetto, populated with bad people who, if pushed, will do bad things to you.”

    However, I am not going to ignore trash in my yard and criminal activity on my street because of my address. I strongly encourage my fellow “Northside Negroes”—and Northside Hmong, Latino, and all the other hyphenated Americans—to have zero tolerance for bad behavior. We’ve got to let the bad boys and girls know that the heat is on. We all deserve what people in Kenwood and Linden Hills take for granted—clean, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.

  • Wine, wine, wine! Wine from the Hills

    Why do people admire Napoleon? I don’t mean the French—they have reasons of their own for boosting Bonaparte, such as a dearth of more recent political heroes. But what inspires so many ordinary Anglophones in their cloying fascination for the great dictator? It’s not just the sticky puff-pastries and the Napoleon brandy (but what has that to do with Napoleon?), nor the English eccentrics who put In Memoriam notices for him on appropriate anniversaries in what these days passes for the Personal Column of the London Times.

    Something more sinister runs through the websites devoted to Napoleon—dozens of them when last I looked at Google—adulation of a species of power rooted in populism, fed by violence, and dressed in glamour. It would not be fair to condemn Napoleon for his most effusive modern admirer, Bokassa I, former ruler of the Central African Empire. It is said that after he was finally ousted from power, his freezer was found filled with human flesh.

    Napoleon was not that bad. But the dapper little French tyrant forms quite a contrast with his most persistent opponent, that amiable old duffer George III. Maybe “Farmer George” should have noticed sooner than he did that his North American subjects were falling out among themselves—though surely it was equally unreasonable of John Hancock to expect His Majesty to read his signature, however big it was written, from the far side of the Atlantic.

    Of course there were contemporaries who saw through Napoleon. Beethoven withdrew the dedication of his Third Symphony, the Eroica, when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Dr. Stephen Maturin’s passion for rescuing his native Catalonia from the Corsican corporal inspired him to serve as a surgeon in the Royal Navy and to star in Master and Commander (wonderful film, all those chaps getting really wet). The Duke of Wellington admitted that Napoleon’s hat on the battlefield was worth forty thousand men, but also said (with his customary damning pithiness—Earl Stanhope’s Conversations with Wellington is one of the finest collections of one-liners in the language) that Napoleon was no gentleman.

    It was Wellington’s army’s long campaigns on the Iberian Peninsula (aided by indigenous guerrillas—which is how the word entered English) that slowly wore down Napoleon’s power. The battle that broke the French grip on Spain took place in July 1812 outside the city of Salamanca, halfway between Madrid and Oporto on the coast of Portugal. Skillful use of “dead ground” in the hilly terrain contributed much to Wellington’s victory, but all the same the loss of life was terrible. Seven thousand French and five thousand allies killed and wounded—ten percent of the force.

    The hills near Salamanca have recently begun to produce a very pleasing red wine, which can be had around here for about $10. The makers are called Bodegas Valdeaguila and have been in business only since 2000; their wine is called (appropriately enough) Viña Salamanca. Given a little air it is ripe and fruity, with a pleasantly leafy flavor in the aftertaste. At the center there are tannins which tingle somewhat; they would battle effectively with spicy sausage or a paella laced with pepper. These effects are produced by equal quantities of two grape varieties, the Tempranillo, the grape of Ribera del Duero (north of here) and Rioja, and, less familiar, the Rufete, an endemic variety suited to the long sunny days, cool evenings and low rainfall of the hill country (the rain in Spain, you will recall, falls mainly in the plain).

    Wine, olives, grain, the perennial staples of Mediterranean life—this will go onward the same, though dynasties pass, as Thomas Hardy said. No bad thing, maybe, that a winemaker’s alliance with nature can furnish distraction from man’s misuse of power.

  • Stand and Deliver

    So, I’m sitting at this casino bar outside of Carlton, Minnesota, last month, and this rather handsome gent rolls up alongside me and says, “Nice mustache-ride joke. Can I buy you a drink?” I’d just closed out the bill at the Black Bear Casino’s “Free Comedy Night Thursdays.” Now, I don’t mean to brag, but that’s headlining, baby. Top o’ the hog pile.

    When I say the guy rolled up, I mean that literally. My beer benefactor was in a wheelchair. Marine Corps, Vietnam, but that came out after the second round of beers. He told me he lost the leg in a poker game.

    As it turns out, the guy wanted to talk shop. He’s just started making the rounds with his own stand-up act at open mikes in Minneapolis. That’s a long drive for someone who lives in Hinckley, but when you love performing, a couple of hours’ drive time can weirdly sweeten the deal. Whets the appetite for a crowd.

    I took the Lady Slipper Lounge gig for the money. No mistaking that. But also for love. I’m called a comic, but I’m more of a B.S. artist. Anybody who has the audacity to take a microphone in hand and stand on a stage alone in front of strangers in a strange place with the intent to bring them together in a symphony of delight is both an artist, and full of it. I mean, talk about the impossible.

    In truth, it had been years since I headlined a room of any size as a stand-up. You can leave the stage, but you never get over the laughs. I wanted to see if my old love would have me back.

    The stage was a set of steps that led into the bar and a mike on a stand. No lighting, pre-show music cued in from a Discman. The crowd numbered fifty. The house emcee wore matching “Ziamond” pinky rings on each of his hands and did a pretty convincing Burgess Meredith impersonation. Kind of a mid-eighties vintage if you ask me, but the crowd lapped it up. Every grunt was underscored by the ringing slots.

    In the middle of the first comic’s act, a drunken heckler roared to life. She was the prototypical Birthday Girl. Slumped in her seat, melon breasts spilling out of a shiny party blouse. Toy tiara from Wal-Mart perched on her head, queen for her day. She emitted giant eruptions of slurred sass, angrily ensuring that all eyes remained on her. Because they were tanked, she and her friends could only understand so much of what was being said to them from the stage.

    The opening comic handled her like a brilliant neurosurgeon that is suddenly forced mid-operation to work with butter knives. He had a pattern. Mollify, compliment, insult. Apology, flattery, personal attack. Dig, dig, push. Tamp down the dirt. Bye-bye birthday girl. Twenty minutes later, she and her friends were stunned into shamed silence, the rest of the audience laughing at them. The comic killed her. He killed them. He killed.

    I followed, and my set went fine. What I like to call “wildly OK.” My beer buddy was right; the best joke of my set was the mustache joke. It was a toss-off, part of a crowd riff. A fella in the front row sported a humongous Tom Selleck tickler, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it so I said: “Hey Tiger, how much are they charging for a mustache ride these days? Used to be twenty-five cents, and you’d see those T-shirts everywhere. What happened? Do you think there might have been a big mustache-ride accident? What do you think it was—whiplash? Or a dislocated jaw? That’s a damn shame. Bunch of litigation-happy people gotta screw it up for the rest of us!”

    It was hilarious—really, it was, but I guess you had to be there.

  • Ties That Bind

    Assigning guilt by association is as American as motherhood, apple pie, and Chevrolet. The thinking goes something like this—if X is a bad person, and you are somehow tied to X, then you must be a bad person, too. This becomes especially true if those ties are familial, and person X is accused of a crime considered so heinous that the governor wants to bring back the death penalty because of it. In fact, in the eyes of some, you must be even worse than the accused if you are part of the family that spawned such a monster.

    Just ask Angela Dellatorre, sister of Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr., the accused murderer of Dru Sjodin. Dellatorre, who asked that I not use her real name, lives near New York City and called me after she heard about a previous column about the level of publicity generated by the search for Dru Sjodin, compared to cases involving missing women of color.

    “I had to thank you,” she began, “for not writing something that trashed my family the way the press has in the Grand Forks area.” I replied that I did not necessarily write a piece supporting Alfonso Rodriguez. I simply wanted to point out that the blond, blue-eyed Sjodin’s disappearance garnered far more media coverage than the disappearance of a black or Mexican woman ever has in Minnesota.

    “I understand that. Still, by pointing out that race makes a difference in how people have viewed this, you were supportive. You cannot imagine how hard this has been on my family, especially my mother, who is seventy-two years old.” Angela said there is a gag order that prevents her family in Crookston from talking to the media. However, she added, “the gag order has not stopped the people in Crookston and Grand Forks from writing the most hateful things you can imagine about our family to the local newspaper. Hearing all this stuff just reminds me how tough it was growing up poor and Mexican in Crookston. Our family was never really accepted in that town.”

    How did the Rodriguezes end up in such an inhospitable part of the country? Angela’s parents were migrant workers who came north every spring from Laredo, Texas, to pick vegetables. “Eventually, they got tired of the back-and-forth and decided to put down roots in northern Minnesota,” she said. “We were one of the first Mexican families in town. I am not making excuses for Alfonso or anything like that, but it was hell. I cannot count how many times we were called ‘dirty Mexicans.’ We were a different color and lowly migrant workers. We got harassed in school constantly. I remember a teacher telling me, ‘I am sure that someday I will see you barefoot and pregnant with a bunch of babies.’ Within a year of graduating from Crookston Central High School I was on my way to the East Coast, vowing to never come back to live. And I have kept my vow.”

    Angela continued: “We have a good family. My mother was a wonderful mother—quiet, gentle, and hard-working. She and my dad raised five kids—three girls and two boys. My brother who lives on the West Coast has a good job and so do the three girls. Two of my sisters have college degrees.”

    Angela’s summary of her family’s accomplishments had one painfully obvious omission—Alfonso. As much as I wanted to, I carefully avoided directly asking about the Dru Sjodin accusations. And Angela, at some intuitive level, sensed my curiosity. Whenever the conversation drifted too close to the events of the past six months, she wearily said, “I do not know if I should be talking to you.” At one point, Angela whispered, “They are putting my family though hell up there. My poor mother… she has beat cancer twice, but this is killing her. She says now that she does not want to live anymore. My sister who lives in Crookston tells me that her three kids get tormented at school every day. What are we going to do, Mr. Collins?”

    Unfortunately, the destruction of the family and close associates of a notorious accused person is simply considered “collateral damage,” especially if the victim is a member of a socially privileged group and the accused is not. I cannot offer any advice to Angela Dellatorre and her family. I can’t even assure them that things will get better for them. Because in the months to come, now that the feds are prosecuting Rodriguez and will most certainly ask for the death penalty, they’re bound to get worse.

  • Wine, wine, wine! Attitude Adjustment

    The other day a student asked me to name my favorite building. I had no hesitation. “Exeter Cathedral,” I said. There is plenty of magnificence: creamy, glowing stone, the longest medieval Gothic vault in England (possibly in the world), a forest of columns branching upward. But this place also has an unintimidating intimacy; while it lacks the astonishing height of French medieval cathedrals, it has a measured, welcoming breadth. If you don’t believe me, try the pictures at www.exeter-cathedral.org.uk.

    Don’t miss the details. The carving underneath a seat of a fourteenth-century elephant with cow-like cloven hooves; the corbel carvings of the master mason Roger and his dog. And the owls. My mother, who grew up in the shadow of this great fane, would spend wet afternoons with her sisters in a tiny chantry counting owls. A bishop called Oldham (friend of Erasmus) lies buried there and his coat of arms bears three owls (Oldham/Owldom, geddit?). The sculptor who decorated the walls had taken the pun to an extreme, and the girls were able to find at least forty-three owls—small, wide-eyed, often well concealed in corners. In 1942 someone told my mother that the cathedral had been razed by aerial bombardment. She walked round all day in a daze.

    Her informant, thank God, was wrong; only a single chapel had been destroyed. But a mere eighteen months earlier, at Coventry, an entire medieval cathedral had been burnt by incendiary bombs. While the stench of dank charred timber still hung in the air, one of the clergy picked up three medieval nails and put them together to form a cross.

    Not long after the end of the war, a group from Coventry went over to Dresden in East Germany, which had been devastated by Allied bombing. They helped rebuild a hospital. This group, the Community of the Cross of Nails, has spread beyond Coventry and is still active in the ghastliest parts of the world, mediating in Iraq, in Gaza, trying to get people to see things whole. When one thinks how thick and deep horror and hatred are spread across the earth, it seems hardly decent to write about the pleasures of wine.

    Fear and rancor have never been in short supply, of course. People produced plenty in the Middle Ages as well. For most of the fourteenth century, a dispute as vicious as it is difficult to understand kept half a dozen successive popes in exile at Avignon in the south of France. The palace they erected overlooks the bridge across the river Rhone. The summer residence they built in the hills was slighted in the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion (more horror), and its ruins still loom large above the village.

    However, the vines planted at Châteauneuf-du-Pape (new castle of the pope) had their successors, and in the nineteenth century, wine named after the castle became widely available. The reds are better known than the whites, so it was a pleasure recently to meet a bottle of good white Châteauneuf, from the 2002 vintage. Vieux Mas des Papes is a pleasant pale yellow and has a good heart. After an initial impression of the green sweetness of fresh grapes, the wine takes a grip on the palate and promotes substantial salivation and a lingering finish. One imagines there might be incense which tastes like this. It is certainly a wine that would go well with summer greens—endives, asparagus, chives—and like all Châteauneuf-du-Pape, it is not lacking in alcohol (never less than twelve-and-a-half percent).

    All this for only $19.68, including tax. The figure sticks in the mind because 1968 was one of the worst years in living memory for many French wines. Oddly enough, 2002 was also a poor year in the Rhone valley—it rained. But this wine is made from the young vines of a well-known Châteauneuf domaine, that of Vieux Télegraphe, and the skill of the winemaker has triumphed over adversity. Perhaps it is true that wine does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to Man. Justifying Man’s ways to God, or even to himself, is quite another matter.