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I seem to recall loving, and even liking, women a lot more than I do today.The square wheels started turning for me, again, when I read about Zuckerman writing a pithy, scathing retort to answer his ex-wife's pithier, even more scathing reply to their divorce settlement – several years before. "C'mon, Nate," I thought, "you're where you are because you are good at showing your ass in public. So she wants to point out the boils, the scabs and the folliculitis, so what? F*k her. Move on. What's for dinner?"
And then my "significant another" left me. Again.
She'd done this before in the middle of me losing my career in education to the Iraq War, the aftermath of trauma therapy and the thaw of a frozen avalanche of self- pity. Granted I had been narcissistic, self-absorbed, depressed and ungrateful for all the many wonderful things that the threat of abject poverty affords a person, but did she really have to invite her dysfunctional young adult children, their crack-whore spouses, and all their toddlers and infants to share in our collective joy? No, methinks. So when her ex-husband began calling at intervals of his choosing to check up on his, "grandchildren," and to smell the progression of the "infection," I just lost it. Not all at once because "she" made me promise, at the age of four, to never treat a woman as she had been treated. So I summoned up the strength of ten uber-mensches and soldiered on. And so did the gremlins of my wife's unconscious desire to make me responsible for all her many travails.
They won. Again. Just like they did with "her." No one gets mentally well because of the fondest wishes of loved ones, nor the dogged persistence of a jilted lover who has not learned the meaning of the term, "letting go." Holding on had become a compulsion that had had me in its teeth for some time by then. It seems that when you earnestly believe you can compensate for your lack of professional skill and license with perseverance and determination, then there is no end to what you cannot do.
So maybe Zuckerman was right. Lie in wait for years afterward, quietly bumbling along with the annoying buzz of her temporary literary success as background noise, and then lower the boom on the bitch when she least expects it. Yeah. That should punctuate the dreariness for at least fifteen glorious minutes of sunlight and victory.
Fifteen minutes can seem like an eternity when your every thought until that golden moment has been consumed with layers of guilt, shame and confusion she had had the unmitigated gall to point out to you just before she hit the door for good. Abandonment and betrayal make for such a scintillating double-header of grief and agony. Sure she was pissed because I had spent too much time writing and digging, whining and complaining – but she got me back ten times over. She got ten years of my attention, except that she was nowhere around to appreciate my misery. And she knew that long before she ever chose the path she eventually took.
Abandonment should be classified as interpersonal arson – betrayal, emotional rape.
Just then a high-fly foul ball crash-landed into the beer of the couple in front of me, sending a cold, hops-laden baptism into my face, chest and lap. I looked up just in time to see my consecration displayed on the jumbotron over centerfield. The crowd roared with delight. As much as I'd like to have stayed to finish watching the eighth inning of a mutual shut-out, I felt a strong urge to tell the world to kiss my ass, go home and then take a shower. F*king Rangers.
I'm not a fan, as my friends have tried to tell me. I make the effort, sometimes with the wind at my back, only to discover that running from your sadness is a lot like sliding into first base: you can do it, but the odds of pleasing the crowd and yourself are just not there. The whole trauma therapy thing felt like I'd picked up and moved a mountain; however, I'd only succeeded in heaving it six inches to the left. I was very proud of my accomplishment, which only accentuated the anger of all the tourists whose view I had just compromised. No one appreciates the accomplishments of people in the wild; it reminds them too much of television and they came into the wild to get the hell away from TV.
The road back from Arlington is a long one, with plenty of time to think about the eternities that lay between the white flashes of reflected light in the road. The smell of beer is enticing enough, I don't need to start thinking about resentments and regrets again. But the road is long, the sky is dark and Zuckerman's Dilemma adds to the chill of my car's air conditioning.
So she left me again, and this time it was all about her problems and my inability, or unwillingness, to be swept up by them. They were her feelings, after all, and while I'd have loved to continue feeling them for her, I had plenty of my own that required sorting. She had lost a grandchild after our last reunion, and while I barely knew the infant, I could not bare to look at his pictures for a good three month's afterward. He looked so happy and content floating in his bathwater, smiling up at the camera. All I had ever seen of him was a tiny heap of yellow flesh lying quietly on an emergency room table. Dark little marbles gleaming beneath the slits of his tiny eyes were just reflected light; the cries were the cries of a father, his dubiously sober wife, a brother and their mother, eyes alight with the twin fires of agonizing grief and paralyzing shame. "Welcome back," I thought. "Welcome home."
Within thirteen months one of those brothers would also be dead driving this very road in a groggy rage, only to meet up with a tourist traveling the wrong way down the interstate. She wouldn't leave me then, nor I her. We went on about our business with an almost eery complacency. After all, she reasoned, she had expected to get a call about one of her two boys eventually – too many drugs, too many trips to the county lockup and too little guidance from their father. The whole side of her family was so much like my mother's that I had long since become paralyzed with both anxiety and the smell of death, apriori. I never once considered being a stepfather to any of these people, which was just fine with them. I was the interloper and the destroyer in their way of thinking and they were at least as ominous a spectacle to behold to me. We shared their mother and I would do my best to not act like a jealous child, and that's about the best I could manage.
It's not like she is bad woman. Not like my mother at all. Not that my mother was bad, just that somewhere between all the experimental drugs and experimental shock treatments, she could only point vaguely in the direction of "all men" as being the source of her madness, of her grief. Rumors circulated around the family regarding her molestation at the hands of her father, a fate the good people of the San Joaquin were more than willing to embrace as being uniquely, "Okie." It's not that that famous John with whom I share a birthplace, if not a street, overstated the grief of the Depression, as he was so often accused. Not at all. The cabron blithely understated the misery of the migrant farmworkers, particularly the ones forced out of Oklahoma with my mother, for the sake of a few cheap tears to blend in with the frozen gin and lime. I can forgive John since he wasn't the only pair of eyes overlooking the Nobel-winning manuscript; it's hard trying to tell fact from fiction when the source of the information has a habit of driving drunk through the Los Gatos hills and pissing off the locals.
So, yeah, men have a tendency to understate the suffering of women. So do women. And men suffer under this same compact of mutually-assured alienation. In fact, hiding the unbelievable from the disbelieving has never been a gender-specific issue, much to Oprah's consternation, nor has it ever been especially difficult. It has always been much easier to wipe out the mind and personality of the knower of the secret than to risk having those secrets see the cold light of day. The harder the knower tries to be heard, the crazier they sound until, finally, madness sets in for good. I was told by my older siblings that this time had long since come and gone before I was born. I never even had a chance to fulfill my heart's fondest desire. It would have been nice to know that sad fact twenty years before I came to the conclusion on my own...but all the adults at the time felt that it was best to leave me to my fantasies, rather than to risk telling the truth to a confused, depressed, ashamed and guilt-laden child who just wanted his mother to come home. Which she never really did. It's one thing to know you're a confused, depressed, shame-shocked and guilt-laden individual and it is quite another to be in that condition and never come to realize it and what that might mean to you.
My mother never really knew what was happening because there was never a time when she wasn't running from her sadness, even after the shock treatments. I saw her when I was four or five – after being gone for three full months – and she was like a zombie from one of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episodes. I was terrified at what I was seeing, but I didn't have the words, or the nervous system, to express what I was feeling, much less pose a simple question. It was my father's fault, my mother would later exclaim, and with that proclamation my fate would be sealed: I, too, would become the scapegoat for the mental illnesses of a series of unconsciously-selected sex partners who would come to abandon and betray me, without really meaning to, just as my mother and older siblings had. That's why the trauma therapy felt so important and meaningful to me. Like that Rest Area up ahead. I need a soda. My mouth feels extremely dry and I need some air. I'm starting to smell like a day-old beer.
The air always feels like a too-cold sauna when you first open the door into the Texas air to leave your refrigerated reality, even at night. This is nothing like the life I knew back home where the humidity was always low and every day was a blistering sixty five degrees. This is nothing like the life I would have freely chosen. Left to my own devices, I would have freely chosen to wrap myself around a tree on a lonely country road at very high speed, smelling of day old beer.
I hear the grumbling and rustling of Texans who have just caught the scent of someone having an unauthorized good time. Parents grab their children and hold them close, teenagers giggle and gawk and everyone seems to notice in this part of the Texas Hill Country when someone's hair is out of place. Generally I ignore this bullsh* because it's codependent nonsense and certainly not the best of what I have come to know about Texas, but they do have me, dead to rights. I smell like a drunk, and I really don't want to explain, not that I don't have the time. If I were as drunk as I smell, I'd be falling all over myself, and yet – behold – an articulate atheist who doesn't just think you're stupid, he knows it. Geez, I hope I don't have to ask anyone for change to buy a soda.
A college student passes me by as I fumble for some soda machine change on his way to the men's room. It's not the UT teeshirt that clues me in but the potent incense of sensimilla that wafts through the air as he walks by. He smiles at me, knowingly, and I smile back. I used to smell like he does – a lot – and he probably thinks the same of me. But I really just want to get a soda and return to my own uniquely refrigerated and neurotic narrative for I am still enjoying the "the world can kiss my ass" mood I was in two hours ago when I got baptized and sanctified at the house that Bushes' graft and corruption built. F*k the Rangers. F*k the Bushes', there is a change machine waiting to accept my five dollar bill and render me the privilege of spending one dollar and twenty five cents for a seventy-five cent soda – that used to be thirty five cents when I was a kid. He's not only old, ladies and gentlemen, but he is bitter, too. Probably has stinky feet. What would Jesus do with such a wretch?
The answer, as if ordained from heaven, resounds with the cacophony of a soda dropping to the bottom of the machine. Of course. Jesus would buy him a drink. I think Jesus preferred hanging out with the atheists, all other things being equal.
What gives me the right to remember, and to recall with sufficient force, the memory of the pain and the humiliation of only a single lifetime before? I think it was because I was waterboarded by the Catholic Church at six months of age. No, the memory is not clear as day – I don't believe that that is possible – but the blotches of pretty colors and vestments, the soothing and routine sounds of someone being prayful, followed immediately by a feeling of falling backward and having water up my nose and in my mouth were unmistakable recollections for me. I have no other memories from that time and only vague memories of loud noises and panic at the age of two and a half, but I know in my gut that what happened, happened. Two later incidents of near-drowning in my childhood and a terrifying anxiety of being left alone in a pool of water that I had had until I was taught to swim at the age of twelve give me some bonafides in this regard. Baptism has always been about waking up, for me, and if Christopher Hitchens can take seventeen seconds of the ceremony as an adult, I should be able to survive a couple of ladles-full of holy water and the hum of disembodied Latin.
Unfortunately, most sports fans do not understand that what passes for a harmless tradition to adults can literally shatter the mind of an infant; what we recall as childhood horseplay, now, were acts of severe violence and abuse to the mind of a toddler. So while I enjoy watching other people being humiliated and shamed as much as the next person, the constant repetition of an authority figure subjecting especially small children – or anyone, really – to the set-ups, the gotcha's and the coup de grace's of living in a police state enrages me to the point where the perfect hypocrisy of vengeance mixed with frozen gin and lime seems like a perfectly reasonable response to me. I probably should roll down the window a bit. I think the smell of beer and the feeling of alcohol on my body is stirring up recollections of, "Unforgiven." An academy award winning act of vengeance and drama has never been very far from a host of suicidal ideations lurking just inside the shadows of my daily experience. A small price to pay for the privilege of still stealing oxygen from the more worthy criminals who continue to walk the planet as free men and women.
Sometimes a Rest Area and a soda can stop a waking nightmare, and sometimes it can just aggravate it. I can tell that this time – and under the circumstances of Zuckerman's Dilemma – that this little catharsis has all the pleasures that accrue lancing a boil.
It's not so much that she left, cut off the phone, changed the locks and waited on the other side of a locked door daring me to break in. That was bad enough. It's that she wanted to make the entire experience of another pair of deaths in her family all about my temper and my inability – even after trauma therapy – to tolerate mental instability in the people I keep close to my skin. I'm sorry, I apologize, but I have enough of my own craziness and lunacy to deal with, I don't need to be apologizing or atoning for anyone else's.
And that's really it for me.
I watched my father atoning and paying through the teeth for my mother's past and the unkindnesses directed by one human being against another, and it left an impression on me that boiled underneath a thick layer of ice. Atop the ice was the sunshine of a story I wanted to tell about a remarkable, saintly woman whom I had given my word – hell, I have given my life – that I would never treat a woman as she had been treated. It was a no-brainer at four years of age to tell a woman whose blood was on the wall that I would never allow her to feel this way again, that I would protect and defend her from the slings and arrows the world seemed determined to send her way.
But I failed in that regard within a week. I sailed backwards in my dinner chair as I confronted the perpetrator of the offense, and earned a fat lip in the process. At four one really doesn't have a concept of size and strength when you're still struggling with matters of right and wrong. As far as I was concerned, that sonofabitch was going to pay, and pay mightily, just as soon as I could quit crying. Then I could see to punch him in the nuts.
My mother, saint that she was, encouraged me to keep my own counsel for the time being. I could help by allowing her to hide her swollen, broken face from public view and walk several blocks through a rough neighborhood with a note for our local grocer. "Bread, milk, cigarettes and...Ripple." I was too young, at four, five, six, seven, eight or nine for a grocer to ever distrust me with the contents in my shopping bag.
It was a fair trade: I could avoid a gigantic ass-whipping taking revenge on my father and all I had to do was ride my sister's bicycle – time had passed and so had my father's desire to be seen every day by the same people who wanted to see him dead – down to the local grocer with my little note and a five dollar bill. "Bread, milk, cigarettes and...Ripple." Whether it was watching a young boy ride a girl's bicycle that had a basket with plastic flowers on it – through a rough neighborhood – week after week, or just the common decency of one human being caring for another, the grocers stopped accepting my mother's hand-written notes. So my mother and I went up the street to the liquor store. She would show them. Making her son cry like that was a crime punishable by...estrangement.
So the notes were down to just cigarettes and Ripple, and the ride back was a lot easier since I didn't have to ride up the hill that first quarter of a mile to get to Ord Grove Avenue. Of course that also meant that I wouldn't be getting that last quarter of a mile of exhilarating speed going downhill, either. It was a fair trade since I didn't like those mean old grocers, either. If my mother hated them, I would hate them, too.
A few months later those same grocers shot a black man with their behind-the-counter shotgun who had just succeeded in thinking he had robbed them. Shot him in the alleyway behind the store that I used to ride down at blazing speed, even for a girl's bike. I went down that alleyway afterward looking for blood, but couldn't see any. They must have hosed off the sidewalk down into the corner drain.
A schism between my father and I opened up in our move to the new neighborhood. The Scotch-Irish kid down the street took great pride in showing me where he'd thrown a bowling ball at his father's head – so his mother said – because his father had hit his mother. It was a mighty hole and his mother was so very proud of him. As deeply ingrained as this whole "mighty courage" thing had been burrowed into my gut, it was fairly clear that I didn't have what it took to smash my father's skull with a bowling ball. And my new friend, Skeeter, wasn't offering to help me out much, either. The whole anger thing was becoming far too real for me to accept. Couldn't we all just get along like we used to after I was waterboarded?
When Skeeter's dad got robbed driving his cab in beautiful, downtown Seaside, I fully expected him to be howling with approval. He wasn't. He felt shame for his father. Clearly this was a family that could forgive and forget things like bowling balls thrown at skulls and such. I guess I needed to lie in wait a little longer before I could have my revenge.
Then something really strange happened living in that neighborhood. Well, a lot of strange things happened living in that neighborhood that I won't go into right now, but I think this one was key. A new and less volatile friend of mine decided to shoot our new BB guns in the neighhorhood. Sure we'd been cautioned against it, but, hell, if the BB's fly straight and we didn't aim at anybody, what harm could it cause?
Daisy BB's, apparently, are dropped in manufacture while they're still soft from a conveyor onto a hard surface of some kind. This gave nearly every Daisy BB a flat edge to it, which isn't significant over the four and five foot distances most normal children shoot their BB guns from. But my friend Bobby and I were hunting hedgerows and the little birds that sought shelter in them. At a distance of fifty yards, a Daisy BB will curve substantially, a matter of physics that no one had bothered to explain to my eight year old brain, nor to the brain of my friend Bobby. When we heard the characteristic "clink" of brass to glass, we ran behind my house as fast as we could. Alas, we had been spotted and very soon two little criminals were hauled before the window of the Dickson residence to show the tiny BB hole we had made in their teenager's bedroom window. My mother phoned Bobby's mother and then informed the neighbors of the usual perfunctory promise of reparations. "Beat their asses," the teenager demanded.
Bobby told me the following day of his experience with a hand on his bare ass that he said he'd never forget. He forgot. I went to college for a couple of years with Bobby when we were older. If ever we wanted to be found passed-out drunk around a bunch of drunken women, Bobby's dorm room was the place to start. Broken glass, naked women and missing clothing were a part of Bobby's repetoire.
I, however, could not forget my ass-whipping for it was life-changing.
By now my parent's fights had become the stuff of neighborhood legend. She would pull us out of elementary school on a Wednesday or Thursday, rush my younger sister and I off to grandma's house in the San Joaquin Valley over the weekend while she told me during the two hour drive, through a thick fog of cigarette smoke and rage, that we weren't going home ever again. Adults miss that sort of detail when they recall my mother's flights from reality. For me, each time we left, it was a final commitment; a dressed rehearsal for the day when we would finally kill my father and run away to live with the circus that was my grandmother's house. I hung by my mother's every word no matter how many times she denied she had ever said it. Her poor memory, or my misunderstanding of the terms of our imbalanced level of commitment, were a function of my father's rage and the impact it had on us all.
So we slunk back to the house on Metz Avenue on Sundays, usually, our tails between our legs and the two of them mortally obsessed with one another until their next exchange of physical or verbal violence.
But once this surrender was particularly grave for as my mother crossed the threshold of the front door, we could hear the slap of hand to flesh, broken glass and my mother's false teeth flying out of her mouth and onto the floor. My older sisters ran to my sister and I to protect us from what we'd already heard and would certainly have to see, and we lapsed into convulsions of crying and terror. Would he kill her this time, was she already dead? My sister and I did not know. My older siblings would stay to calm us, but, soon, they would leave to return to their lives safely outside of ground zero. Within the hour, in fact.
My sister and I had to comfort each other any way we could because it would be us who would have to leave the front door and walk by the broken milk glasses that had been destroyed by the force with which our mother's false teeth had left her mouth. The fact that she had had false teeth in the first place was the likely consequence of earlier beatings, with and without the numbing effects of alcohol to quiet the mind and still the pain.
Against this backdrop my mother contemplated telling my father of my criminal negligence with my new BB gun, the one with the wooden stock. She didn't have to consider this fact for very long because she had no idea how to make enough money to pay for a new window AND purchase her now daily supply of cheap wine and liquor. So of course how could she tell the man who hated coming home to her after sixteen hours of kissing the ass of every customer in the greater Monterey Bay Area, and tolerating the idiocy of anyone dumb enough to work for him, that his son was a common juvenile delinquent? She would be direct so as to limit her pain, of course.
What happened after her telling of the tale of my irresponsible, eight year old behavior was sudden, explosive and terrifying. Perhaps if the screams of my mother and sister had not been so shrill, if I had been permitted to simply hang at once from a lonely gallows in the middle of nowhere, I could have weathered my punishment more forthrightly. But it was not to be for I was jerked up off the ground by one arm as my father lurched for my rifle. Several times he struck my back, arms and buttocks with the wooden end of the weapon, yelling at the top of his lungs that I would never again be permitted to shoot my rifle off, and hadn't I been told to never point that gun at others and how stupid could I be shooting out a neighbor's window? What sort of juvenile delinquent was I to be? Would I be like my older brother, Woody, who stole money from his parents? Who did I think I was?
Then I was tossed like a ragdoll into my bed and told not to come out for dinner.
My mother brought me my dinner that night, in between her angry shrieks at my father for his unrestrained, explosive display of temperament at a mere child. My mother was right, you know, and one day I would have my revenge. One day. One day I would kick his abusive ass to kingdom come. He just didn't know whom he was fooling with.
The road between Waco and Austin is the loneliest for me. It's not as bad as the stretch from Ozona to El Paso, not by a long shot, but there's something about the Texas prairie at night that makes me want to just press down on the accelerator pedal. During the daylight things seem normal enough, but at night things appear to be hiding behind other things, for nothing is quite what it seems to be during the daytime. And I know it's not this car, because I've ridden this stretch of road on my motorcycle, and the feeling was all the more palpable. I just don't get what Texans are so proud of about their state. Pride just trips off their tongues when they speak about where they were born and raised, but when they start talking – and not talking – about their childhood experiences in a land populated by a lot of old Germans, I want to pull my hair out by the roots. Child abuse is embedded in the language of old Germany and Prussia. "Who gives a sh* that you had your jaw busted by your father when you were ten, you probably deserved it! Can you play football? Can you put on the uniform, look through a cage at other uniformed half-humans, and can you hit them so hard they see stars? We don't give a damn about your whiney-assed obsession with your past...what can you do for us today? How can you prove yourself worthy of our attention today?"
What's for dinner?
Why am I here, then? I mean, the nice thing about Texas is that it has roads that come into the state and just as many that leave...don't let the door hit cha' where the good lord split cha'? Cha-chah.
This is weird because, now, I love my parents. Really, I do. You can't experience the world through the eyes they gave you and the first pair of shoes they put on your feet and not look back on all the chaos and insanity and be completely void of appreciation for the fact that they lasted a lot longer than you would have, given what they went through. In fact, just a cursory glance at the historical record proves that it has actually become, gradually, less and less violent since those pesky French finally bled all over themselves in one last, turgid convulsion of violence, coming back with something like real wisdom to share with the rest of us. And that's really what matters about our lives...are we doing right by our kids as compared to what we grew up with and through? In my case the answer is, "yes," and because I know that to be true I have nothing to prove to anyone. Not even to Texas.
But my father received his Army Air Corps training here at Lackland Air Force Base. He has the pictures to prove it. I walk and work on a daily basis in many of the same places he walked and worked at. This was not something I ever planned to do. I have invited him to come out, just for a visit, and he demurs. A look of panic sweeps over his face as if I had just offered Zuckerman the chance to visit Bergen-Belsen. He fears Texas perhaps because had he delivered the beatings to my mother that he got away with in California, those two cops who offered to club the sh* out of him for my mother would have done far worse to him in this proud state. In California they offer to do the right thing, but then they look at the kids and think better of it. Not in Texas, not even in this day and age. If you are dumb enough to piss of someone with a badge and a gun, you just might get treated to the privilege, on the way to your first stint working for Wackenhut, to escaping out of the open back door of a sheriff deputy's cruiser. And if you are truly dumb, you will take these rather large and feisty men up on their largesse. For in your bolting across an open field and to your freedom, you will likely receive the entire contents of a .40 caliber Glock magazine into your back, legs and arms – in that order. The story will be that they shot you in your legs, but you continued to run, so they had no choice since you had assaulted a lone officer and were a violent fugitive fleeing from justice. Uncuff him, give me back my bracelets, and stuff that piece of sh* into a zip-lock bag. That's one the taxpayers of this state will not have to feed and clothe.
So, no. My father would have been beaten to death if he had crushed my mother's face while living in this state. And that would have meant that I wouldn't be here, now, to tell the tale of what can happen, and what did happen, when a sensitive, intelligent human being got exposed to the kind of carnival of violence human beings used to live with on a daily basis for thousands of years. That story needs to be told, and retold, in places like Germany, Serbia and Texas. These places need to be here to remind us of where we come from and just how angry and nasty human existence can be.
As for my crazy wife, I don't know. She had no good excuse for her rapid abandonment of me other than the unstated fact that she had always been somebody's mother or wife since she was fifteen. Even before her grandfather's death, she had started spending his money like a drunken sailor. When I started objecting to her behavior, we started butting heads. I reckon we have some further head-butting to do, but this time I'm not dumb enough to try to do it without a lot of outside help. While I never want to be the one who keeps a person from achieving their greatest happiness or their greatest good, I really do not believe that it is wrong to lose your composure when someone keeps pushing your buttons long after you've said, "ouch." They are demonstrating that they actually want you to lose your temper on their watch so that they then have a relatively guilt-free reason to run from a confrontation with their sadness that only you know can be addressed and accommodated.
On the other hand, I am a f*king control freak. Not of the neat-nick variety, but when someone starts offending people for no good reason, my antennae go up. If they demonstrate contempt in spite of repeated attempts to calm them down, I go into a hypervigilant restraint mode that I am powerless to control. It's not that I don't want them to be free, I just don't want anyone to be hurt. After all those years of living at home with an untreated bipolar-disordered mother, I have all the curb appeal of a psychiatric nurse. So if she absolutely must leave, I absolutely will let her go. I have better things to do with my life than to live in fear that the one person I am trusting with my back is only waiting for me to die, or become disabled, so that they can spend money they didn't earn buying things they don't like to impress people they cannot stand.
And with that, Nathan Zuckerman, you can count yourself among the fortunate few who loved, lost but still managed to maintain a smattering of dignity.
Spend it wisely.
