The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • The Magical Mystery Cure

    The first time I smoked pot, I was in eighth grade. I smoked it. I inhaled. And I enjoyed it. The inaugural inhalation wasn’t planned or anything. My best buddy and I happened to be snooping around her older sister’s bedroom, and we happened upon her hookah. Holla! Just having that opium den artifact in our hot little hands was enough to make the to-smoke-or-not-to-smoke decision for us. It was a four-foot-tall, carved affair with tentacles jutting out all over—the stuff of Janis Joplin album covers and seventies cop movies.

    If the events of that afternoon had been a syllogistic proposition, it would have broken down something like this: Hookah is to bored eighth-grade nerd girls as rabbit hole is to Alice in Wonderland. My friend and I looked at each other and wordlessly began rummaging through the dirty clothes on the floor of her sister’s bedroom for a Bic lighter.

    Four hours after bringing that hookah to my lips for the first time, I was mapping out a plan for where I could purchase this magical substance, how much it would cost, how I was going to afford it, where I would smoke it, and, of course, how not to get caught. I soon deduced that the best time for me to do it was before my first class, back behind the convenience store in the strip mall next to the school. Conveniently, that was also where I could buy it.
    What saves this story from being a script for an after-school special is that a couple of weeks into my rigorous self-medication regimen, my grades … shot through the roof! For the first time, it wasn’t at all difficult to concentrate, and all of my previously hated subjects (and their previously hated teachers) seemed infinitely and positively fascinating.

    That year, I got my first A in math after toking up and stumbling onto the realization that all math is plaid—as in, all mathematical communications are interrelated grids of different values. Calculus is really just a specific pattern of tartan. Once you know that, you can figure out pretty much everything.

    Full disclosure: I did become a somewhat less social creature than I’d been before starting to smoke pot, and I gained ten pounds. But that’s what happens when you’re holed up in your room—cranking Hall and Oates, reading Beowulf, and laughing like a bowl full of jelly while stuffing your face with Fritos.

    It’s just been established that THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Before we all start mulching for the backyard herb garden, here’s a quote from the Scripps Research Institute (aka Team Ganja): “Our results provide a mechanism whereby the THC molecule can directly impact Alzheimer’s disease pathology,” the study authors wrote. “In addition, THC may prove valuable as a model for developing new and more effective drugs to treat the disease.” That’s a direct quote from the October 2006 issue of Molecular Pharmaceutics, which just happens to be lying around in my bathroom next to the National Enquirer.

    So, it sounds like the big plan is to do what big pharmaceutical companies do: isolate the THC molecule, put it in a pill, and give it a crazy name that alludes to its function and contents. (I did some focus grouping and came up with Doobitral.) Then, charge senior citizens twenty bucks a hit for it. For the old folks who can’t afford it, I’m suggesting that the State of Minnesota organize a monthly caravan of gaily painted VW microbuses to Vancouver.

    Of course, the company that comes up with the definitive formula for Doobitral should hire Willie Nelson as its celebrity spokesperson. Can’t you just see the commercial? Willie strolling in a waving field of cannabis, his guitar slung over his shoulder, a knowing smile crinkling in the corners of his eyes as the voiceover delivers the obligatory side-effects warning—Caution: Doobitral may cause the giggles, profound sloth, inability to sustain or even feign interest in sex or violence, a tendency to begin declarative sentences with “Dude,” and a craving for crunchy snacks.

    Finally, a warning to kids who may be reading this: If you find yourself tempted to indulge, you can always talk to a parent, teacher, or school counselor. Dude, any of them can probably hook you up with some Adderall or Ritalin.

  • Rouge Almost Noir

    If you go down to the woods south of London, you may be in for a big surprise. Not the teddy bears’ picnic—that seems to be what a good many urban folk seem to expect in the countryside these days, as though farms were all film sets and the animals, a collection of animated stuffed toys. (Was it a wish for revenge on his father that inspired Christopher Robin Milne to sell the rights for Winnie-the-Pooh to Disney? Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Christopher Robin is getting even …)

    The surprise is something quite unforeseen a generation ago. In the 1980s, English farmers, fed up with the agricultural policies of the European Union, spotted that consumers were no less fed up with the way that pork sold in supermarkets tended to taste more and more like blotting paper. Their response was to domesticate and rear wild boar, with exceedingly palatable results. Inevitably, though, some of the boar found their way out into the wild, where they ensconced themselves most successfully with their litters of little stripy piglets in woodland less than an hour from Gatwick Airport.

    Though more than a hundred of the animals were let loose last Christmas when the fencing around a farm near my family home was cut by animal-liberation fanatics, I have yet to meet a boar in the wild. But I have read the description of pig-sticking in India by the British cavalry officer Francis Yeats-Brown in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and the speed and ferocity of the aroused boar sound terrifying. Boar are almost the weight of a Harley-Davidson and even quicker off the lights. The Yeats-Brown prescription is to stand your ground, with the spear out in front of you, so that the boar impales himself thoroughly; otherwise, you will get crushed and then rootled by the same sharp tusks that do such a thorough job of carving up farmers’ fields. Naturally, the Yeats-Brown sporting ethic requires that you “honour while you strike him down, the foe that comes with fearless eyes.” No wonder Yeats-Brown was one of the earliest western devotees of yoga. And no wonder it’s illegal to introduce the European wild boar to Minnesota.

    The French, though, have always had wild boar, and nowhere more so than in the Loire Valley, southwest of Paris. Many of the grand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chateaux along the river were built as hunting boxes for the nobility of the Ancien Régime. I don’t know if they still hunt the boar with hounds through the forests there. They certainly hunt deer in a musical and stately manner, a style that makes English fox hunting seem like a mad cross-country dash. As one might expect in wooded country, hound music is highly prized, and the solemn playing of the hunting horn is taken very seriously, especially to honor dead quarry.

    The Loire Valley also produces a greater variety of wines than any other part of France. Most of them are white; the area is quite far north. But let me commend a red, the 2004 vintage from the lieu-dit Les Poyeux in the appellation Saumur-Champigny. This wine is made from the Cabernet Franc grape (an ancestor of the better-known Cabernet Sauvignon) and is available locally for around $15 in a bottle embossed with the old French Royal Arms. It is powerful stuff; drink it slowly. It improves with acquaintance and would improve even more with keeping. The color is on the red side of bituminous; the initial nose is almost nonexistent except, perhaps, for a whiff of alcohol. There is less fruitiness in the initial flavor than I found in the highly concentrated vintage from the baking hot summer of 2003. What is interesting, though, is the way that the concentrated tannins in the center of the taste open out level by level, unfolding successive, refreshing bitternesses and leaving a lingering, tingling aftertaste.

    This is wine that demands your attention; it comes with fearless eyes. Honor it with the sort of fully flavored food you might eat with a Côtes du Rhône: venison roasted with a bitter cocoa glaze, well-hung wild boar, or a juicy sirloin with lots of horseradish. Your patience should be rewarded.

  • The Unseen Perils of Getting Fit

    I’ve been going to the gym pretty early these days: Monday through Friday, 5:30 a.m, whether I want to or not. I’ve turned over a new leaf, you see. I now realize that abdominal muscles do not appear magically as a result of wishing on Starburst wrappers. I have now reached an age at which I have to do my best to protect what natural assets I have left rather than book a one-way ticket on the gravy boat cruise to an untimely frumpitude.

    I go so early because, after much trial and error, I have found that it is better to hit the gym before my brain can fully register how much exercising totally and royally sucks.

    Because I am a highly suggestible person—a vulnerable adult, if you will—I was initially afraid that I would lose myself in this candy-colored spandex universe and morph into the kind of person I have always regarded with scorn. Because I come from strong, dedicated, working-class stock, I could easily see myself swelling into a female Tony Little—tank-like and relentlessly, horridly FIT! Complete with a thin, creepy ponytail and bulbous calves. But I never should have worried. There is too much of the old me at the core. The old me who, left unchecked during a bad breakup, once polished off an entire fried chicken in one sitting. Fee, fie, foe, fum.

    So, to get to the gym on time, I have to leave my house by about 5:15. I walk down a set of four concrete steps that lead to my driveway. Every morning, at the third step, I lurch face-first through a line of sticky spider web. Because I am generally tired when this occurs, I swat blindly at the air around my face like a half-hibernating bear and growl.

    One day, I told my husband about the foolish spider in our backyard. I wondered aloud why it always builds its house in the same location when it just gets ruined every day.

    And my husband said the creepiest thing of all.

    “Maybe it’s not his house you’re ruining. Maybe it’s his trap. Maybe he’s just really ambitious. Maybe he sees you stumble out of the house every morning and thinks: ‘Hmmm … all I have to do is land that big clumsy one, and I’ll be set for life.’ ”

    So, I’m the Moby Dick of South Minneapolis, hunted by Ahab the Arachnid. I’ve got an eight-legged, net-casting maniac in my backyard. I’ve seen the spider in question, and he’s damn near big enough to take down cetacean prey. He’s tan, big as a Jordan almond, and when I put on the porch light to spy on him as he sleeps, I swear I can hear him snoring.

    I grew up in a house that had bugs. Not roaches, but millipedes in the basement, kitchen ants in the summer, and water bugs behind the washer—all sorts of extracurricular critters that weren’t paying their rent by being cute. My friends who grew up in newer, nicer houses turned out idiotically compassionate. They’re the ones who solicitously sweep up indoor spiders and gently place them outside. If I find one of those little crawly buggers near me, I flatten it with a hardbound copy of Charlotte’s Web. Why? Because I’m some pig. In fact, I would like to catch all those bug lovers in less-than-humane traps and set them free in Colorado.

    I look at a bug inside my house and I say, “I know what you’re thinking. Is that can of Raid empty, or has it still got one squirt in it? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. So you’ve got to ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

    Outside the house, the rules are different. It’s their turf. You won’t find me terrorizing them with a magnifying glass, only trying to stay out of their way. So when I’m on my way to the gym, I just hope old Ahab doesn’t immobilize me and suck out all my juices. But if he’d take about two pints off my keister, we could make a deal.

  • A Calm Panic

    Max Marti’s bus ride home from Capitol Hill Gifted and Talented Magnet School in St. Paul is typically kind of boring—especially for a kid like Max, a budding rock guitarist who loves run-and-gun computer games and ValleyFair thrill rides. On September 15, the lanky fourteen-year-old was among about forty first- through eighth-graders aboard the bus. He was sitting in the very back, one of only three eighth-graders on the route that Friday. “The reason I was on the bus is because I didn’t have soccer practice that day, otherwise I wouldn’t have been there.”

    He knew something was strange when the bus headed up Arundel Street, he said a few days after the incident. “It was a pretty steep hill, and there was, like, some dark-gray smoke coming out of the tailpipe. That was our first clue. We also heard some kind of grating or clicking noises—not really loud, but, you know, unusual noises.

    “That’s when we started rolling backwards. We [knew we] weren’t backing up, because we kept accelerating toward the bottom of the hill. I don’t know why the brakes weren’t used. [The State Patrol later determined that the bus was mechanically sound but that the engine was unable to draw enough gas from its under-filled tank while it was climbing Arundel Street. When the engine stopped, so did the power brakes.]

    “Kids started screaming at about the bottom of the hill when they realized that we couldn’t or weren’t going to stop. We hit a couple of sapling kind of trees. Flattened those. The chain-link fence that separates the curb from the [I-94] embankment, we just ran right through that. Then we started rolling down the embankment onto the freeway.

    “We went over, like, a four-foot retaining wall—right out onto the freeway. Then we hit the metal guardrail thing and blocked off the entire exit lane on the side of the highway. And finally, the guardrail caught on something on the underside of the bus and stopped us. It was over in about thirty seconds.

    “Subconsciously, you’re thinking that you might die. And that’s a pretty weird feeling. It’s a calm panic, I’d say. Your brain is panicking, but you aren’t. Once the bus stopped, the kids were just sitting there. Stunned, I guess. I was scared, but I didn’t, like, scream or panic at all.

    “At ValleyFair, just a couple of weeks before the accident, I went on all the crazy rides—Steel Venom, Power Tower, all the good ones. A good ride has speed to it, and the feeling of your stomach floating up. I didn’t get any of those sensations on the bus—it was going too slow. Pretty much it was only fear, like if a roller coaster you were riding broke. There’s a difference between a thrill and fear.

    “I tried to open up the back exit on the bus, but it was stuck. Another eighth-grader who was in the front of the bus opened up the front door, and I kind of yelled for everybody to grab their stuff to get them going.

    “Once we got onto the highway, all these cars were screeching to a halt, and lots of people were getting out of their cars to come over to us, guiding us back up the embankment.

    “It wasn’t that epic; it was kind of a short thing that happened. The next day, the kid who was in the front of the bus got interviewed on TV, and during his interview, he said he was a Boy Scout. Then the next day, everybody made fun of him.”

  • that Speaks French

    Of all the depressing novels I know, Jude the Obscure takes the prize for sustained doom and gloom. Don’t let the film mislead you; it is far too pretty. All those authentic Victorian sets (not to mention the delightfully authentic Kate Winslet) undermine the exposition of Jude’s law, that Sod and Murphy were incurable optimists, because if anything can go wrong it will, particularly when something might seem just for once to be going almost right. It is not Jude one loses patience with; it is his creator, for being so beastly to him. No wonder the nineteenth-century public hated it.

    Jude is a country lad with an ambition to study at the University of Christminster, so he starts to teach himself Latin. He swiftly discovers that there is no one-to-one correspondence between English and Latin words, that a foreign language is not simply an alternative set of vocabulary but a wholly different way of putting thoughts together (something that the users of Internet translation services have not always understood). With characteristic determination (doomed, of course), Jude sets about the systematic exploration of Latin grammar and syntax.

    I was thinking of Jude’s experience the other day while being lectured by one of those well-fed wiseacres who like to tell us there is no point learning foreign languages because soon everyone will know English. “What can he know of English who only English knows?” I muttered to myself, sotto voce. Those who do not take the trouble to study languages end up like the Monsieur Jourdan in Molière’s Le Bourgeoise Gentilhomme, who is amazed to learn that what he has been speaking all his life is prose.

    More to the point, foreigners who learn English do not ipso facto stop talking Foreign. They may know English, and so understand what we tell them. They can say in English what they would like us to hear. But heaven knows what they are muttering about us in the privacy of their own tongues. I wonder how many people in Washington speak Farsi or read Shi’ite theology (though I have it on good authority that at the time of the Tehran Embassy hostage crisis in 1979, the State Department had a computer programmed to simulate the presumed mental processes of the Ayatollah Khomeini). The trouble with my well-fed wiseacre was that the voice he most liked the sound of was his own.

    The swiftest method of learning Foreign is, they say, the Horizontal. It usually involves one-to-one tuition and is, in general, employed only in those colleges and universities that have a hearty appetite for protracted and expensive litigation. That said, I know someone who learned French in six weeks by adopting a suitably unclothed and recumbent posture, though the fact that he had come straight from twelve months learning Coptic in an Egyptian monastery may have whetted his whistle. I must say I have not tried it myself, and if I had, I would not be saying.

    Wines, too, have their characteristic syntax. Let me introduce you to a red wine that certainly speaks French. It is the 2004 Côtes du Rhône from the well-known Burgundy shipper Charles Thomas (pronounced, of course, Sharl Tomah in the manner of Peter Sellers asking for a rhoom). It is available hereabouts for not much more than ten dollars.

    This wine is constructed not in the languorous language of Proust, pursuing evanescent flavors of madeleine and fancy tea down long, convoluted corridors of memory. Rather, like Edith Piaf, it combines sweetness and husky pungency: “No, nothing of nothing. No, I not regret nothing, neither the well which one has done me, nor the bad, all this is for me well equal” (perhaps something does get lost in translation). The initial fruit leads to the tannins at the center of the taste with the inevitability of a well-made sentence. The weather has a lot to do with it; 2004 was not as spectacularly hot and dry as 2003, which produced astonishingly concentrated wines all across France. In 2004, it rained in August. The result is a wine that has both charm and a mind of its own—and plenty of alcohol. Taken with steak frites, it might even put you back on your feet (even if Hardy and his President of the Immortals knock you back down in the very next chapter). Santé!

  • Hell in a Hamburglar Glass

    I had a garage sale a couple of weeks ago. I relish regularly purging my home of crap. However, I also think it is a special kind of hell to have to arrange crap artfully on card tables in the driveway, assign a value to each item of crap, and look at the neighbors with a straight face when one of them holds up a crappy McDonaldland-character glass tumbler and tries to whittle down the marked price of ten cents. C’mon, people. It still holds water, and we’re talking about the Hamburglar here.

    So, okay. Maybe it actually isn’t hell. After all, it’s a beautiful, seventy-five-degree day spent out in your driveway. But it is purgatory. Because you can’t go anywhere else. All you can do is sit there on a lawn chair and stew in the lovingly hand-painted juices of your own tchotchkes.

    I’ll tell you this. I hate figurines. I have never purchased a figurine for myself, but I have had them thrust upon me by people who claim to know and love me. Perhaps this hatred of ornamental figures stems from years of moving from apartment to apartment during my twenties, but I never collected stuff like that when I was a kid, either. Figurines have always made me feel big and clumsy, like King Kong with Fay Wray.

    I remember a childhood pal, Shelly, who was abnormally fond of horse figurines. Fond as in boyfriend fond. Abnormal as in no one else could touch them but her! abnormal. These plastic replicas of real horses lived on her dresser in a specific formation, and woe be to anyone who dared draw so much as a pinkie finger across the glossy mane of the centrally positioned Clydesdale. If that happened, the usually sweet, retiring, Sunday-school-attending Shelly would screech, through bared, tinseled teeth, “GET OUT OF MY ROOM, YOU BUTTHOLE! THOSE ARE MINE!” And she would chase you out of her room, down the dangerously creaky, ankle-twistingly irregular staircase of her illegal attic bedroom, through the terrifying Lladro-ballerina-choked formal living room and out onto the religious-icon-ornamented front lawn. There she would grab fistfuls of your unattractive, gender-neutralizing bowl haircut and march you toward the legal property line of her yard, where she would throw you roughly to your knees on the sidewalk and explain that you and your dirty, oily, Ho Hos-icing-stained fingers were never, ever to cross that line again.

    Not that this ever happened to me, dear readers, but this is what would happen if anybody ever dared touch one of stupid Smelly Shelly’s stupid plastic horses that lived on her stupid dresser in her stupid room in her stupid house.

    Such is the dark power of collectibles, which is why I have made a concerted effort to keep my existence free from any item that requires its own display case or its own Certificate of Authenticity. I’m terrified enough by official documents.

    I’m not sure where my dog’s breeding papers are right now. For all I know, his identity credentials may have been sold out of a van idling behind the mercado on Lake Street. Also unaccounted for are my marriage license and copies of my 2002 federal and state tax returns. There are autographed baseballs out there with a better paper trail than mine.

    Do you get the feeling that the Certificate of Authenticity was dreamed up by people who feel the need for additional official documents in their lives? Are they expecting art historians to question the provenance of their Thomas Kinkade prints? Are they waiting for the moment they can whip out their certificate and say “Ha! Who dares question the validity of this painting of a lighthouse amid storm-splashed rocks?”

    But the art historians could, of course, challenge the authenticity of the Certificate of Authenticity. And then there would be a war of “nuh-uhs” and “uh-huhs.” Feelings would be hurt, and there would be much emotional eating afterwards.

    The woman haggling over the Hamburglar glass finally wore me down. I just gave it to her. Looking deeply satisfied, she greedily stuffed her treasure into her large pocketbook and sniffed, “For a single glass, it wasn’t worth much.” It would have been a totally different story if I’d had a set.

  • Fighting Over North

    If you were watching the news August 11, you probably saw Rev. Jerry McAfee hijack Mayor R.T. Rybak’s press conference on fighting crime. Rybak and Council Member Don Samuels were standing on West Broadway Avenue when, the cameras showed, McAfee got into Rybak’s face. The next images were of Rybak scurrying to his waiting car.

    This was another skirmish in the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of North Minneapolis residents between Rybak-ally Samuels and activists such as McAfee, pastor of the New Salem Baptist Church. This tension between those African-Americans “workin’ with The Man” and those down in the trenches “struggling against The Man” has deep roots, going back to the “house Negroes”-versus-“field hands” days.

    Since both McAfee and Samuels want (in McAfee’s words) to have the police “target those that need to be targeted,” why can’t they “just get along” and focus on getting things done? Because each man has a different view of how to interact with the majority culture and establish political legitimacy. McAfee, who calls Samuels “Rybak’s house Negro,” claims that Samuels has let scarce city resources, such as video-surveillance cameras, go to more affluent parts of the city. Samuels counters by saying that McAfee is a “wannabe power broker and professional hell-raiser,” who “makes a living off the suffering in North Minneapolis” while he retreats nightly to the relative safety of Brooklyn Park.

    McAfee, whose two-thousand-member church is one of the largest black congregations in the city, boasted to me about how his organization is working. “We have a crack-fighting team, a mentoring team, and a team that works with people in prison. We are on the streets daily. We respect the members of our community and we demand respect from people outside our community.”

    Were his actions that day motivated by his fears of racial profiling, along with pique at not being invited to participate in the press conference? “Absolutely not,” McAfee said. “The mayor came up here with an attitude. Me getting in the mayor’s face only happened after he repeatedly ignored my questions about why it took him so long to focus on crime in North Minneapolis. I wanted to know—why did South Minneapolis get surveillance cameras before we did, even though twenty-six of the forty-one murders so far this year have been in this community?”

    Samuels denies that Rybak disrespected McAfee. “It is Lord of the Flies time up here, and McAfee is crying about getting ‘respect.’ Well, the grown-ups are coming and we are prepared to face the thugs and guns that McAfee, who does not live in this community, apparently cannot deal with. What happened at the press conference tells these immature, morally deprived kids that it is OK to be violent and stay stupid.”

    The major difference between McAfee and Samuels revolves around their relationships with Rybak. McAfee dislikes Rybak and sees him as someone who only comes to North Minneapolis to record sound bites. Samuels makes no apologies for his relationship with Rybak. “The mayor is advocating a targeted precision strike for a limited period of time by forty cops. This is a good thing! My relationship with the mayor is an asset for this community. McAfee’s attempt to publicly humiliate and excoriate me because I can work with him is wrong.”

    The harsh political reality is that North Minneapolis desperately needs the juice that both men bring to the table. Samuels is North Minneapolis’ voice on the council. Suggesting that he is an Uncle Tom for creating a political alliance with the mayor only makes it less likely that Northsiders will get city resources. Nevertheless, Rybak and Samuels have got to forge a working relationship with people like McAfee. He has credibility with factions of the community that distrust Rybak—and by association, any politician who is at his side whenever he comes to the hood. Neither man can claim political legitimacy without maintaining an effective bond with the other. And both should realize that claims of political legitimacy do not mean much in comparison with the twenty-six people who have been blown away in less than eight months.

  • Antipodean Sweetener

    One of the unsung pleasures of a summer weekend in an English country house is the short shelf of books left in the spare bedroom for the entertainment of guests. If you are out of luck, the row of volumes on the bedside table consists of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, Regency bodice-rippers by the likes of Georgette Heyer or, worst of all, copies of the Watchtower.

    A few years ago, every spare bedroom I slept in seemed to boast a copy of Jessica Mitford’s American Way of Death. One could see why one’s kind hosts might not want this gripping volume in a room that they used regularly themselves. It is an entertaining but distinctly macabre exposé of the trade practices of undertakers in the Eisenhower era. Once one has read it, one never forgets the T-shaped layout of the ideal coffin showroom and the methods used to steer mourning relatives toward the most expensive coffins. These, one is told, should be placed in the right-hand arm of the T (because research has shown that wanderers lost in the Antarctic are likely to go round in right-handed circles, like waste water in an antipodean plughole). Some of Miss Mitford’s revelations about embalming are unlikely to induce slumber. I am sure it is all very out of date nowadays. And anyway, she was a Communist.

    But the greatest find I ever had was a thriller by John Buchan called The Courts of the Morning. John Buchan was a prolific producer of literate light literature in the decades before and after the First World War (he died as governor general of Canada in 1941). Critics have considered his heroes literary ancestors of James Bond, but actually the contrasts are more instructive. There’s precious little technology (though it is occasionally handy that Sir Archie Roylance is an early aviator).

    Unlike the sybaritic Bond, Buchan’s Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot are quietly public-spirited. Though True Love sometimes comes to the surface, there is no sign of Miss Pussy Galore and her bathykolpian avatars; Buchan is the only thriller writer I know to have been an enthusiast for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

    Perhaps Bunyan also affected Buchan’s genius for evoking landscape. The grand, green hills around Erzerum in Eastern Turkey provide spectacular scenery for the dénouement of Greenmantle, a yarn about Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot using charm and intelligence to foil an Islamic uprising in the darkest days of the First World War. What stuck in the mind from the weekend I spent with The Courts of the Morning was certainly the landscape where the tale unfolds. The core of the story is a miners’ conspiracy in the province of Gran Secco (Big Thirst).
    Quite how Sandy Arbuthnot got embroiled in it has long evaporated from memory, but the sense of him speeding up and down the west coast of South America, plunging into deep valleys in sight of snow-topped mountains to deploy his diplomatic skills lingers in the mind like a sweet smell.

    I cannot recall what he drank while he was achieving all this. After all, I had to read fast; it would have been tacky to miss meals and tackier still to let the volume find its way into my suitcase (not a temptation for a reader contemplating the grim revelations of Miss Mitford). But there was surely wine to be had. Already in 1933, Viu Manet, nowadays one of the largest wine concerns in South America, was taking advantage of the alternating sea breezes and dry air from the Andes to grow grapes in the temperate vales of Chile.

    Since I first met them in England some thirty years ago, Chilean wines have improved massively. Let me commend to you the Semillon made by Viu Manet, a sweet white wine which can be had in half-bottles hereabouts for around twelve dollars. Sweet, but not too sweet, not Bourbon or embalming fluid, lighter than the great French dessert wines of Sauternes that are made from the same sort of grape. Think of it as last-of-the-summer wine, sipped solitarily on the front porch in early evening sunshine, surrounded by the scent of cut grass (so much more pleasing than the sound of grass being cut). Take it with a plain biscuit (OK, cracker) and the kind of light reading whose heroes impart a vicarious sense of mighty deeds achieved. This Semillon might even soothe you into the unjustified conviction that your summer was not entirely wasted. In Chile it is spring.

  • Looking, but Not Seeing

    Lance Bass is gay? You’re kidding. Does this mean he’s not going to be an astronaut? Because I really, really wanted him to go to outer space. Joan Collins has a paid-in-full ticket to go on the Virgin 2010 flight, but she’s kind of old, and though I love her, I think Lance Bass is probably more suited for the rigors of space travel. Joan’s eyelashes seem as if they might ignite upon re-entry.

    I don’t care if Lance Bass is gay. It’s just that I’m always the last to know these things. As a young girl, I managed to harbor crushes on both Paul Lynde and the lead singer of Judas Priest. I’m into guys with a wild sense of humor who aren’t afraid to laugh at themselves. And who doesn’t prefer her rock stars swathed in studded black leather?

    When I was a teen, my “gaydar” antennae could only pick up the strongest of signals. In the early eighties, I thought that maybe Boy George might be gay, but I wasn’t totally sure. Wearing muumuus and eyeliner could just be his look. Maybe under that stringy weave he was simply a Hawaiian with a Maybelline fetish.

    As the eighties progressed, I was better able to discern the sexual orientation of celebrities by carefully examining the photo captions in People magazine. Any matinee idol who was a “confirmed bachelor” or starlet who had a “gal pal” could be batting for the other team, as it were. I had to keep up on these things because I didn’t want my romantic hopes to be dashed again, like they were with Paul Lynde.

    Think of it this way: You don’t nurture the crush on the married Beatle. You go for the eligible one—the one you actually have a shot at a date with—in Pretend Town. (By the way, can you imagine, if on the Beatles’ historic Ed Sullivan appearance, under John Lennon’s camera shot the caption read, “Don’t bother girls—HE’S GAY!”)

    When I was a young adult, k.d. lang’s refreshing lack of ambiguity drew these sorts of things into sharper focus. (It only took me a moment to discard the possibility that k.d. might be e.e. cummings’ soul mate.) Melissa Etheridge never tried to hide which chromosome she craved. The album titled Yes I Am, and the accompanying videos which featured luscious women as the objects of her desire, were obvious enough, even for me. But some fans missed the signals. I remember reading in an interview with Etheridge in Rolling Stone magazine that she had to keep dodging calls from country western star Billy Ray Cyrus—he of the “Achy Breaky Heart” and the magnificent man mullet. Apparently, Billy Ray just didn’t get it. He kept asking her out. She finally said that she had to tell him point-blank. The interview never got into specifics on what his reaction was. Judging from his public persona, I imagine it could have gone like this:

    (Melissa picks up the phone.) “Hello? Oh. Hi, Billy Ray. Uh, no, I really can’t go out to dinner with you. I’ve got a girlfriend and we’re going out that night. What? No, I don’t want to bring her along. I know the more the merrier, but see, uh … My girlfriend and I are going out to dinner that night. On a date. Just the two of us. No men. No, you don’t understand. It’s not so we can have a heart-to-heart girl talk. I’m gay. She’s gay. I date women. Not men. You are a man, Billy. I don’t date men. No, that is not kinky! Cut it out, will you! I AM NOT JUST SAYING THAT SO YOU’LL GET TURNED ON! DON’T CALL HERE ANYMORE!” (Hangs up.)

    Hands down, the woman with the worst gaydar in the world is, of course, Liza Minnelli. She’s the Wrongway Peachfuzz of sexual orientation. Her husband Peter Allen was a protégé of her mom and a Broadway dancer, for heaven’s sake. This may come to you as awful news—(or a relief, depending on your inclinations) but her fourth husband-for-a-minute—the eyebrow-plucking, Lalique Crystal-collecting producer David Gest—insists he’s not “that way,” as the worldwide homosexual community breathes a giant sigh of relief.

  • The Cheese Man Speaks

    When Bruce Wry was a marine stationed in Vietnam, he spent some time studying the local language. He never would have guessed that, forty years later, the Vietnamese he learned during the war would come in handy for selling cheese at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market.

    “It’s nice. When the Vietnamese come here I can talk to them,” he said. “Over the years the ethnic mix has changed. Once, you didn’t see any Russians, now, there are a lot of Russians. The Hmong, if you got it for two dollars they want it for a dollar, if you got it for a dollar they want it for fifty cents.

    “There was one Amish family that sold cheese. They came up here and they only sat in their chairs, didn’t offer samples or anything, you know. They were right across from me, they were cheaper than me. They lasted about a month. You’ve got to sample and talk to people.”

    Every weekend, he’s on his chrome bar stool at stall #248 in the long, tin-roofed arcade at East Lyndale Avenue North and Third Avenue North, sandwiched between Koa Vang produce and the Sleeping Cat Organic Farm, where the aromas of basil, cilantro, mint, and lemon grass intersect. In the multicultural hurly-burly of vendors, Wry is a standout: a towering, friendly fifty-six-year-old in an orange foam hat that resembles a thick wedge of Swiss. He sells twenty varieties of Wisconsin cheese, driving in every market day from New Richmond, Wisconsin. He’s not a farmer, but a reseller who understands merchandising and the value of brand identity.

    “‘The hat?’ I started wearing this, I don’t know, six, seven years ago. Kids call me ‘the Cheesehead.’ They get up in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go down and see the Cheesehead.’ I hear that from a lot of people. And I laugh all the way to the bank.

    “They know I’m from Wisconsin. It gets bad during football season. People ask me, ‘What the blank happened to the Packers last week?’ from a block away. My wife used to wear the horns, for the Vikings. People would say, ‘I don’t want to buy from you,’ so I’d ask if they wanted to buy from my wife. People would ask her, ‘Are you horny?’ Then she wouldn’t wear it anymore. That was that.

    “People want me to wear this so they can tell where I’m at when they walk up and down the aisle,” Wry said, but the rubber headgear proved impractical during this summer’s record heat wave. “If I fell over from the heat, there’s nobody here that’d want to give me mouth-to-mouth. They’d say, ‘Too bad, that’s the end of that story, you’re gonna die.’ ”

    Wry has had one full weekend off in twenty-seven years and maybe three days off besides that. He gets up at 3:30 in the morning for the Thursday market on Nicollet Mall. For the weekend market, he gets to sleep in until 4:00 a.m. He drives fifty miles before dawn, when there’s hardly anybody else on the road, in his battle-scarred, rust-pocked blue GMC van. It’s got half a grille missing, and the right-headlight-and-turn-signal assembly is held in place with probably half a roll’s worth of duct tape.

    On a good day, Wry sells five hundred pounds of cheese. A regular refrigerator, packed tight, holds around two hundred pounds. About eight pounds of each day’s inventory goes to tasters. Just as Wry has regular customers, he knows the moochers on sight.

    “We have people who sample every week who have never bought in seven years. And the worst is downtown. On the Nicollet Mall. You know ’em. Here he comes again. They take enough to feed a whole family. But you have to give samples because some people walk on a little ways and come back again and buy.”

    Wry counts people watching as one of the great fringe benefits of his job. “That’s why I enjoy selling here. I fall in love a hundred times a day,” he said. “Downtown it’s worse. You wonder where some of these gals are working at. They’re sure showing it off.”

    Wry’s customers aren’t looking for exotic varieties; he doesn’t offer anything fancier than Gouda. “Everyone thinks it’s from Holland. It’s from Holland, Wisconsin, about fifty miles south of Green Bay,” he said with a broad, knowing smile.

    “Provolone, Muenster, feta—they don’t move. You can’t carry everything. If they ask ‘Do you have blue cheese?’ I just tell ’em, ‘No ma’am, I just carry happy cheese.’ ‘You got any goat cheese?’ ‘No, they’re too hard to catch.’ ”

    People sometimes ask for help choosing the right cheese for a certain wine, he said, “but I don’t know a damn thing about it. I haven’t drank in so many years. I’ve had twenty-seven years of sobriety. See how it falls in line with my job? Otherwise I probably wouldn’t be doing it. I couldn’t get up that early.”

    Does Wry have a personal favorite among his wares?

    “Extra-sharp cheddar,” he said. “The older, the sharper it gets. Women, wine, and cheese get better with age. That was told to me by a woman. She was pretty old.”