Climbing Out the Window

The phone rang while the class was in session but the students were busy with their workbooks.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Mr. Chavoor?”
“Yes.”
“This is Carol Hendsch.”
“Oh, hi.”

It was the department chair.
“I’m calling because I remembered something you said.”
“What was that?”

The bell rang to end the period. I waved at them to let them go to lunch.
“Didn’t you say that you didn’t want to remain in ESL?”
“Yes I did say that.”
“That your career goal was to have regular English classes?”
“Yes, that’s correct. The second language kids are great but I prefer kids who are on grade level.”

I heard her laugh.
“I can’t guarantee you that, but I do have an English II opening for you”
“What? They’re opening five new sections?”
“No.” She chuckled at the notion. “Mr. Bassert though is transferring. He’ll be doing one-on-one tutoring for adult school.”
“That’s great. I mean, that’s what he wants to do, right?”
“Well that’s hard to know.” Again, she chuckled. “I’m not sure Mr. Bassert knows what he wants to do. The poor man is very confused. It looks like Alzheimer’s to me. He was quite a brilliant man; now it’s very sad.”
“Oh.”

I couldn’t remember seeing him at any of the department meetings.
“Very sad. So now, when would you want me to start? What about my classes?”
“We have someone for the ESL classes; we need you to straighten up Mr. Bassert’s classes.”
“Straighten up?”
“Well, a man who can barely make it out of the parking lot, let alone to his classroom, can’t realistically be expected to control 35 10th graders.”
“If it’s that bad shouldn’t he retire?”
“He needs one more semester to get a full retirement. We carried him during the years when he became just eccentric, but we just can’t do it anymore. It’s getting very strange and tragic.”
“Like what?”
“He forgets what he had done the day before. Sometimes he does the same lesson plan every day for a week.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yes, and sometimes he gives a test before he has taught the unit. Then the week following the test he begins the unit, and he has shown the same movie over and over, forgetting that he had shown it the day before”
“I can’t believe it. What else?”
“He takes off his shoes and socks in class.”
“Oh, no.”
“But that’s not even the worst of it; he then proceeds to clean his toenails with a buck knife.”
“How are the kids handling this?”
“The kids are climbing out the window.”
“What?”
“They have been climbing out the window until no one is left in the room.”

“What for?

“Just for the entertainment of it, I suppose.”

“What does he do then?”
“According to one teacher next door, he continues the lesson, which is usually a lecture anyway.”
“Don’t the kids get caught?”
“Yes they do. So they have taken to climbing out the window one at a time, then climbing back in the window, all before the end of the period.”
“Why hasn’t someone stopped this earlier?”
“They were trying to get him to a full retirement.”
“But one year. Couldn’t they just give him the one year?”
“Apparently not.”
“So you want me to take over his classes?”
“I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t think you could do it. Would you like to think about it for a few days?”
“No, I don’t need to think about it. I’ll go in there tomorrow if you want.”
“I’m thinking it might be better if you start after Christmas vacation. They’ll be away from a bad situation for a good stretch and it will be like starting new.”
“But the semester ends two weeks after that. Might as well wait until the end of the semester.”
“The kids though are on their third sub. They are so out of control they run off subs easily, even good ones.”
“Oh.”
“Are you sure you want this assignment?”
“Yes. I’ll do it. I can do it.”

I had doubts but I was in my fifth year and hadn’t yet got the assignment I wanted: high school English teacher. This was my chance.
“One more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Mr. Bassert’s marks in his gradebook are a bit cryptic, when they are there at all.”
“You mean he doesn’t have any grades entered?”
“Well he has some interesting squiggles but nothing you could call a letter or a number.”

She laughed softly.
“How am I supposed to finish the semester? What am I supposed to do for grades?”
“You’ll think of something.”

Then that chortle again, this time ringing out, easing the shock a bit.
“Let’s see now, this kid’s nice, give him a B; that kid’s too quiet, give her a C.”
“Either that or base the semester grade on the third quarter.”
“That sounds good. Are they in the grade book?”
“No, but you can look them up in the office. They still wouldn’t be a fair representation of the students’ abilities.”
“But at least they won’t be surprised.”

I wasn’t about to go hunt down their grades in the office.
“Have any parents complained?”
“Those who do get their kids moved into a classroom with an effective teacher.”
“Those who don’t?”
“Those who don’t have been helping Mr. Bassert to retire.”
“Huh.”
“So you will be ready after Christmas break, right?”
“Yes.”
“If you would like, I can give you some 10th grade activities and go through the anthology with you. They haven’t read anything in 16 weeks.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“All right, Mr. Chavoor. I am looking forward to seeing you over here in East Hall. His room is downstairs but at least you will be closer to the rest of us than being out there in West Hall. Now you had better go eat lunch; not much time left.”

She chuckled once again; it was her trademark in all our conversations that followed over the next 23 years.
“Thanks very much, Mrs. Hendsch.”
A month later I stood before my first high school English class. I knew I had to have a successful first day or it would be a 20 week battle. I had taken some vocabulary words from the short story I was going to have them read but we had some things to talk about first. I decided to forego the “My name is Mr. Chavoor, and this is English II” introduction.
“Tell me what’s been going on here.”

They began tentatively, not sure whether I was going to scold them or just listen. When they saw it was the latter, the stories poured out, including some that Mrs. Hendsch didn’t even know about. When they were done I waited a while, then I spoke.
“I know why you’ve been misbehaving.”
“Why?” one of them asked.
“Because someone’s been stealing from you.”
“What are you talking about?” another one shouted.
“You haven’t been learning or doing anything in this class. Your education was being stolen. So you expressed your anger and frustration by doing things you otherwise wouldn’t, like climbing out the window.”

It got quiet but it was that good quiet where they had absorbed a truth and their minds became engaged to digest that truth.

“So we’re going to make up for your loss, starting right now. Take out a piece of paper and put your name, date and period on it.”

“Haven’t done this in a long time,” a student remarked with some delight.
And so we began. It wasn’t all as easy as that first ten minutes, but there was some learning going on in that second semester, and I was convinced that the kids preferred it to the anarchy they were allowed to create. I always felt bad that the beginning of my career was the sad end of Mr. Bassert’s. I occasionally wondered if my own career would be jinxed because of it.

One of his students though left two words in a patch of fresh cement that covered a large crack in front of East Hall: REMEMBER BASSERT. The tribute remained there for nearly a dozen years until the entire section was repaved. After that there was no trace of Mr. Bassert except in the minds of those who remember him.

Christmas is Secular

December 2014

Christmas is secular. And there isn’t anything wrong with that. December 25—and the weeks that build up to it—is, around the world, the most celebrated day of the year. It’s an event. It’s a state of mind.
We have a dead tree in our house. Or some of you used to until you decided to have a fake dead tree in your house. We do it because our parents did it and most of our grandparents did it. And it gives us that warm, fuzzy feeling. When we decorate the tree, it isn’t a burdensome household task, it is a family event, a ritual if you will. We proceed the way we did the year before and the decade before and the generation before. Sometimes we add new traditions but we like the feeling of custom and ritual. The older the ornaments, the better. Some of them are about the birth of Jesus, and others aren’t. But there is nothing wrong with the non-Jesus ones. They are all iconic in one way or another. We have Santa on a surf board because we went to Hawaii (or a friend went there) and we have a little taxi cab with a Christmas tree hanging out of the trunk because we went to New York. We have bulbs—green, red, blue, gold—that don’t have a history. But others do. We have a cermanic one with a lion and a lamb hand painted on it that we bought at a craft fair in Centerville one year. I had one from 50 years ago when I was in the Cub Scouts and wrote my name on it with Elmer’s glue and put silver glitter on it. I dropped it one year about 15 years ago and it shattered. It was a sad day.
On or around Christmas family members gather and eat large amounts of food. There is a warm feeling. There is much labor before and after this kind of gathering but it is a labor of love. There is music and the tone is lighter, louder and well, merrier than on other, non-Christmas occasions. There is a veritable smorgasbord of hors d’oeuvres and then desserts that bracket the gigantic meal. Christmas is the time when we reward our gastronomic austerity with gastronomic indulgence. And then there’s the alcohol: people who don’t generally drink will have a drink, and those who do drink will drink a little more and more often than usual.
I have been playing the Kingston Trio album in December for over 50 years. The album has songs about the birth of Jesus (“Follow now o shepherds, rise up from your sleeping”) and songs about trying to score free drinks by singing door to door (“Wassail, Wassail all over the town, the cup it is white and the ale it is brown”). They are both part of Christmas.
“Christmas is for children,” we say to each other. We buy presents. There’s the giving of and the receiving of gifts, too. The children don’t have to prepare for anything. We, on the other hand, make ourselves crazy with lists and shopping and mail ordering. The TV news reports out whether we are spending more or we are spending less than the Christmas before. The explanation is that the Wise men brought gifts to Jesus so we bring gifts to each other. This is ok because most of us generally don’t buy gifts for loved ones on a regular day.
Christmas livens up a tough season. Winter is grey and cold. It is generally agreed that the actual birthdate of Jesus is not known. There were shepherds tending their flocks out in the fields at night, which would be, I’m guessing, spring or summer. But in any case whoever picked December 25 or January 6 had a good idea. It’s good to push our spirits up as winter begins. But you see, it was arbitrary. The Bible records the birth of Jesus but there is no celebration of His birthday after that. It is stuff we made up and stuff we do. It’s a cultural meme. No harm, no foul.
I wrote this because last night we went to our granddaughter’s Winter Pagent at her school. Songs about snow, mostly. The elephant in the room was huge, seated, shaking his head and tapping the ashes off his cigarette. I do believe in separation of church and state but I think we can approach this issue in a better and still egalitarian manner. Let’s have the kids sing songs about Christmas, Hanukah, Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa and any other winter celebration there is. Let’s respect each other’s choices.
About 20 years ago I attended a party at the house of the pastor, at that time, of our church. I was talking to him and I said, “People forget about the real meaning of Christmas.” But he rebuked me in a gentle way, saying that all of it—the parties and the gifts and the craziness and the too much food and the lights and Santa Claus—and all of it is a good thing.
Christmas is secular. No matter what we say about the metaphoric value of trees, presents, dinner gatherings, music, or lights, it’s still secular. Everybody can participate in it in one form or another. But don’t get me wrong; I believe that the birth of Jesus was the most important event in the history of the world, that His birth, life, death and resurrection was a visit from God. The rest of it is stuff we do. And there isn’t anything wrong with that.

Santa and the 7th Veil

As far as I can tell we officially never stopped playing Santa Claus. We realized how much it meant to Mom and didn’t want to disillusion her, so at Christmas time we dropped his name as often as we could, and every so often one of us would ask, “Is Santa Claus broke this year?” It was a reference to Christmas, 1966, the most famous Christmas in Chavoor Christmas history.
Mom hid the presents in the entryway closet where we kept the flag rolled up and jammed in the corner waiting for Memorial and then Independence Day. The presents were wrapped and had stickers that bore the names of the recipients as well as the deliverer, Santa, all in Mom’s primitive but distinctive handwriting. Then, while she was grocery shopping or helping Dad at the office, my sister and I would make like bank robbers with only a few minutes to accomplish our goal. We’d open the door, take out the presents with much haste and commence to lift, shake and hold them up to the light. We could tell an item of clothing from something more promising. We knew that a heavy present was better than a light one. After examining each gift we put them back, not quite just as we found them but close enough.
Eventually though, we got careless and Mom figured out what we were doing. I’m not sure why it mattered; we knew who Santa was and we would never reveal her true identity. We never opened any of the gifts and we never fully figured out what was in them. But Mom wanted not just for us to play Santa with her, she wanted to keep up the pretense that she had to keep the secret that the presents didn’t come from the North Pole. So she found a new hiding place—the trunk of the ’55 Ford Fairlane.
The history of the Fairlane has been previously documented and it has been my goal to not repeat myself so the short version is that of all the cars that Dad owned—a ’62 Ford Galaxie 500, a ’67 Studebaker Station Wagon and the car that pre-dates my existence, known only as “the black Ford” among them—the Fairlane was the most beloved car in the family by a wide margin. There was something relaxed about it, something unpretentious. It was solid and utilitarian. It looked like it was ready to go to work and that it would do its job without complaining. At the same time though it was like those old slippers that fit right and you never want to be without them no matter what shape they were in. It wasn’t a pristine car, but it was a car that just fit right. Mom put all the Christmas presents of the Christmas of 1966 in the trunk and the Ford Fairlane said, “No problem.”
Dad had a client who wanted to take Mom and Dad to a Middle Eastern night club in Hollywood. Dad liked Middle Eastern music and belly dancers but night clubs and Hollywood weren’t his deal. It was a client though, a customer as Dad called them, and he wasn’t going to say no. So a few nights before Christmas Dad’s client and wife, and Dad and Mom were at a place called the 7th Veil in Hollywood, being entertained by belly dancers. Now, the 7th Veil that exists today is nothing more than a strip club, and I know that because I googled it. But I’m going to assume it had more, uh, semblance of legitimacy or well, I don’t know but let’s just say it was something better than a strip club, that the men who went there wore suits and ties and the women wore gloves and hats, and there is a difference between strippers and belly dancers. There is though the myth of the dance of the 7 veils.
In one version it was the dance that King Herod’s niece did that caused him to offer her whatever she wanted, which turned out to be the head of John the Baptist. In another, Ishtar, the Assyrian goddess of fertility, visits her sister in the underworld but is made to remove an article of clothing at each of the seven gates she passes through. The process infuriated her and she attacked her host. It was all downhill from there.
According to Dad they were having a nice time. One of the belly dancers apparently took an interest in my American born Assyrian Pop. She began dancing as though he were the only man in the room. This part of the story was confirmed by the frequent eye-rolling from Mom while Dad told the story. The woman began throwing veils at Dad; it was never determined whether she threw seven of them, but it was more than two or three.
Much later that same night, well past midnight, Dad and Mom and the client and his wife emerged from the 7th Veil to discover the Ford Fairlane was missing. Dad never liked valet parking and I imagine there was much yelling, accusing and cussing that went on until the police were called, a report was filed and a taxi was hailed, and when Dad jumped to conclusions the Grand Canyon was a mere mud puddle. Dad had unwittingly become a victim of the dance of the seven veils. He believed that the belly dancer had—by tossing the veils at or on him— signaled to the co-conspirators that they should steal his car, and the co-conspirators included the valet parking kid, the maitre d, the waiter, the manager, the owner and generally, the entire city of Hollywood. Even at the age 12 this seemed a little preposterous but sitting there in the breakfast booth in the kitchen the morning after the Ford Fairlane was stolen, I realized he believed his own story and the that there was something wonderful and crazy about the fact that he did.
“Santa Claus is poor this year,” Mom announced when Dad was done.
“Poor?” my sister said.
“Yes,” Mom replied, grimacing while she peeled a tangerine.
“That’s funny,” I said. “Santa. Poor. Ha-ha.”
Eventually we figured out that the trunk of the Ford was the new hiding place. The Chavoors love irony, and this was the funniest, sweetest, craziest irony of them all. Santa was poor. Presents were in the car. The car got stolen from a parking lot of a belly dancing nightclub. Dad had veils on his head. It was the signal.
It turned up in Mexico. The trunk was empty and there were empty beer cans and cigarette butts all over the front and back seat. The beer cans and cigarettes bothered dad more than the car getting stolen. It was never the same after that. The Ford Fairlane had become the prodigal son except that Dad was not willing to forgive. He sold the car two years later. I didn’t grieve; the car didn’t fit anymore. The late 60’s arrived and the car looked and felt obsolete.
Seven years later while I was reading On the Road I thought of the Ford Fairlane on its own journey of sorrow and loss….

Actually, I just thought of that now. But the story is about Mom wanting to never put the Santa Claus game to rest and about Dad’s paranoiac, whimsical, charming imaginings after his experience at the 7th Veil and about the greatest Christmas story in Chavoor family lore, and there’s certainly neither sorrow nor loss in any of that.

Confronting Rocky

December 1999

The dog-jumping-the-fence dream came from a memory in my life before my official memory begins. Wait, that’s not true either. I have always claimed that I remember my crib and a press board train that fit on the rail of the crib. This was later. This was pre-kindergarten and Mom had taken me on the bus to somewhere and we were walking together. Mom was dressed up and was wearing a hat. I was so happy and proud and excited to be with her. We had been on the bus and had lunch and we were headed back. We were on a residential street. There was shade and morning sun coming through the shade and it was peacefully quiet. I had a joy and contentedness that was just, I don’t know, hasn’t been matched since. I was looking at the houses as we walked down the tree-lined street. I saw the dog– it was a big black dog, maybe a short hair lab– and got a little skittish but I saw that he was behind a chain link gate. The dog started to bark and Mom took my hand and said, “It’s ok,” using her dismissive, sing-song voice. The dog was jumping straight up and barking hysterically. I was trying to get to the next house. I didn’t want to see the dog but I was already turning my head to watch him.
That’s the part that I believe is real. I say I believe because I dreamed the whole thing over and over for a long time after the incident. In the dream the dog clears the fence and charges us. All of it done in complete silence. Then Mom moves away. She doesn’t walk or run and she doesn’t speak but it’s like she is suddenly repositioned and suddenly, inexplicably across the street and half way up the block. I would wake up just as the dog leaped at me.The dream went away after awhile but the memory of the dream never did. It made sense then that I grew up afraid of any dog that barked, jumped, ran and was larger than a loaf of bread.

At first I wouldn’t tell anyone, not even when Jeff Ward down the street got a Weimaraner and the back yard smelled of dead grass, sun baked cinder blocks,dog piss and dog shit and the dog, I think his name was George, would jump up and put his paws on my shoulders. I wouldn’t tell Jeff how scared I was, how my heart would try to break out of my chest. But by the time I got to high school I made it in to a running gag. That way it could serve dual purposes: it was humorously ironic that a “big” and “tough” football player was afraid of dogs, and I generally liked playing against the stereotypical jock anyway; and it could notify owners to keep their dog at bay.

I was 19 or so. I was trying to find a house where there was a Halloween party going on. I can’t remember if it was an officially sanctioned church party or a party given by friends from church. I think the hosts were the Albarians, but I could be wrong.In either case it was a house I had never been to and neither had Robert, my good friend. We were somewhere west of Van Nuys Boulevard, maybe it was Canoga Park, and we were on the right street but we didn’t have the address. There were a lot of cars–some of them were familiar looking– and we had narrowed it down to two houses. They were both dark but we figured maybe that was for effect. There was music but it was hard to determine where it was coming from; it was muted and sounded as though it was hovering over our heads. The house directly in front of where we stood had a chain link fence around it; the house to our right had none.
“Would an Armenian put an ugly cyclone chain link fence around his front yard?” I asked incredulously.
“I think this is it though,” Robert said.
“You sure?”
“No, but I got a 50-50 chance.”
That’s when the dog came blasting out of nowhere, a stupid looking, mangy tan and white little dog with the comically short legs. He was barking manically, savagely like we were resident puppy killers. I jerked and jolted as if the devil himself has crept up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and singed my skin with the touch of his white hot sulfurous hand.
“Whoa! Easy there, Jack.”
“I don’t like dogs.”
“No kidding.”
“I used to have bad dreams when I was little about a big dog hopping a fence.”
“This dog’s no threat. No chance he’s getting over the fence.”
“Yeah? You don’t know.”
“Look, you want the dog to shut up you have be the alpha dog.”
“The what?”
“Hey, dog! Quiet! Down boy!”
“Way to go, Robes. He’s ten times crazier.”
“Wait a minute now, if this is the Albarians, then the dog speaks Armenian.”
” Ha-ha. Yeah, maybe.”
“Seriously. Watch this. Shoon! Soos!”
“It’s not working. Maybe you have to know his name.”
“Everybody calls their dog shoon.”
“We name our dogs Dog?”
“Of course! We’re a very practical people.”
But the dog was more hysterical than ever. He was trying to push his face through the bottom of the fence, all the while snarling, barking and making other guttural sounds.
“Come on Robes, let’s get out of here. I don’t like dogs. I told you, man.”
“A tough guy like you?”
“Right now I’m all flight and no fight. I’m very practical.”
“This is the place. Come on, tell that dog to shut up in Armenian. Confront your fears and prove that we’re at the right place.”
“Soos shoon, soos!”
We were barking out our commands in Armenian when the owner of the dog came out, asking us in a manner rather rude if there was someway he could help us. Turns out, the man wasn’t Armenian. He was highly annoyed though.
“Oh yeah,” Robert said nonchalantly, “we’re looking for the Albarian residence.”
The man pointed to his left, then told his dog, Topper, to shut up and go inside, which the dog did immediately. I don’t remember much about the party except that I was still rattled by Topper for a long time.
That’s how it was. I hated people who said of their barking dog, “Just ignore him,” or “He hasn’t bitten anyone. Not yet, anyway!” When my oldest child, Kathleen, was five and began begging and bartering for a dog, I eventually gave in. I got the wrong dog though and he grew to be the size of Marmaduke. When he ran away for the fifth time, Grace and I said to each other, “Run Sherlock, run.” But owning a dog was different than encountering one. We did better with a smaller dog and ended up with three over the years, including Eddie, who is 14 and barks at everything and anything and with one exception does not bite. Nevertheless, I still am nervous and jumpy around big, barking dogs behind fences. There is a huge German Shepherd around the corner from us and you know how that goes: their dog goes psycho and Eddie wants to play with him. We haven’t walked our dogs for years.
Sometimes though one has to, as Robert said so many years ago, confront the object of fear, be the master of it. I was perfectly content at being better safe than sorry until the day I had to face down my worst fear.
Kelsey, my youngest, who was 10 at the time, and Grace and I were delivering Christmas presents to kids whose mom or dad was in prison. The present was addressed from the imprisoned parent and was purchased by benefactors from churches that participated in the program. The parents described the gift so there would be no guess work or some vague, generalized, one size fits all gift.It was really a great idea and despite what happened, it still is. I thought that the delivery of the gifts would be a great activity for the youth group of the church; the ideal lesson having to do with the verse where Jesus says, “Whatever you do for the least of these, you have done it for me.” It seems that if there is no outreach program the church is only a social outlet. But our church had several good things going on: we gave food out in November;we gave heavy jackets away;we participated in Cropwalk, which raised money for local foodbanks; we offered tutoring for the neighborhood elementary school kids.
Angel Tree, the program which found us delivering gifts to folks in a tough spot, had been mostly planned and executed by the adults in the church; the kids typically played broom hockey and ate pizza. And so this time the kids were invited to participate. Grace and I had five or six presents to deliver. I was happy Kelsey was with us.
We loaded up the Dodge Caravan and rolled through some pretty rough neighborhoods. For the most part we were treated graciously. On a couple of occasions the participants were the parents or grandparents of some of my students. The look on the faces of the young children when we announced that their father was thinking of them at Christmas was the richest kind of blessing I have ever experienced, and I knew that Kelsey was having one of those life lessons that would have a positive impact on her life.
We were on our last or second to last stop, somewhere around Belmont and Maple. It was a small house on a block of small houses in varying degrees of disrepair. There was a cyclone chain link fence around the front and broken toys and car parts strewn about. The house had a front porch and the front door was ajar.
“Well, this must be the place,” I said to Grace, “looks like they left the door open for us.” I put my hand on the latch but Grace stopped me.
“Wait, there’s a dog.”
“Where?”
“Right over there.”
The dog began growling as if on cue. It was a white pitbull, quite muscular, replete with studded collar.
“He’s on the side yard isn’t he?”
“Hello?” Grace called out, “We’re here to deliver the presents? I called this morning?”
“Yes,” an unseen man’s voice replied from inside the house, “come on in.”
“Could you please secure your dog?”
“He’s on the side yard. He can’t get to the front and the back door is closed.”
So I opened the gate. We were about halfway to the front porch when the dog just materialized. and stood before us, ok, not exactly before us but a little to my left. We all slowed our pace but as I found out later, Kelsey never saw the dog. I immediately began thinking of strategies. I remembered from elementary school it was widely held that kicking a dog directly on his lower jaw would knock him out. But by way of twisted selected breeding a pitbull’s face is mashed in and there wasn’t much of a jaw to kick, and odds were I wouldn’t hit the target even if it were the size of a hatbox and this wasn’t the time to revert to or rely on schoolyard mythology. The dog was quicker, stronger and far more ferral than I could ever hope to be. There was only one strategy that I could think of: I would have to make sure the dog attacked me so at least my wife and child could escape. I had to assume that the owner had a shovel or a crowbar or a pistol to eventually separate me from the dog, but by God, I was going to protect my family.
I locked eyes with the dog. I couldn’t remember if it was something you were supposed to do or never do, like the moment of a car accident do you turn into it, out of it, brake, pump the brakes? Who knows? Anyway, I decided to stare the damn dog down. Let him know it was between me and him. All the old fears did not manifest themselves. This was my family and I was not going to allow any harm to come to them.
The dog watched me all the way to the front porch, slowly leaning his head forward. The dog was bracing himself when the owner, a shoeless man in sweatpants, a Raiders shirt, a goatee and Ray-bans,came to the door and called out, “Rocky, no,” and Rocky suddenly relaxed and trotted off to the backyard.
We delivered the presents, more than a little annoyed that the man’s inattentiveness created our brush with catastrophe. He insisted the side gate was closed but offered no explanation as to how Rocky might have made it to the front yard. I’m thinking that in dream like fashion, Rocky silently hopped it. You never know.
After that year, our church would not send us out to deliver; instead we invited the recipients to come to our social hall and have dinner and a Christmas party. We are, after all, a very practical people.

Strange Days, Indeed

It started early in their career: George was the quiet one; Paul was the cute one; Ringo was the clown; John was the witty, acerbic one. Later on George was the mystic; Paul’s cuteness could not mask his consuming musical perfectionism; Ringo’s clowning could not mask his alcoholism; and John had channeled acerbic wittiness into sounding the charge for social revolution. Everyone had his favorite Beatle. John and Paul were always the front-runners, while Ringo never rose above dead last and George was for those who championed a dark horse.
John Lennon was my favorite Beatle. It was John who had the best line in “Hard Day’s Night.” When a British reporter asks him, “And John, how did you find America?” John replies, “Turned left at Greenland.” Paul’s bits were usually with his fictional uncle. Paul wrote, “Yesterday” and a batch of other wonderful songs, but John was the guy who wanted to jump into something, anything, with both feet and figure the rest out later. Paul’s songs were inventions, third person stories, but John’s songs were more personal, more daring, and just riskier. “Penny Lane” was from Paul’s past, but it sounds like something from a children’s storybook. “Strawberry Fields,” from John’s past was surreal but from the start he invited the listener to come along, advising him that his experiences from the past no longer felt real. The sound and instrumentation of the song is like nothing anyone had heard before. And at the end of the song, when there is nothing left of it but pounding drums, John says, “Cranberry sauce,” just for the fun of it, maybe just so the listener wouldn’t take this “heavy” song too seriously.
Lennon even caught the attention of my dad who thought Bing Crosby was a fine example of contemporary music. Dad hated rock and roll, and called it jungle music, but one day he walked into the living room while I was playing “Rain” which John wrote. He sat down and tipped his head in the direction of the stereo. “If the rain comes they run and hide their heads, they might as well be dead.” Dad noted that he was right, that people are scared of getting wet, when they ought enjoy it. The next line, about people slipping into the shade when the sun shines delighted Dad even more; there were Dad said people who were afraid to sweat, afraid of the sun, as if being with nature would hurt them. We had a long conversation that day involving rain, sun, nature and people’s attitudes. I ended up playing the song three times for him.
John married a Japanese woman whose idea of art was the word YES taped to the ceiling of the art museum. There was a ladder to climb to see the word. I thought it was just the greatest thing at the time. A ladder, and the word YES in an art museum.
When the Beatles broke up, it was the Rolling Stone interview that made it possible for John to reveal his human side. All the pain, rage, resentment, paranoia all poured out of him. I didn’t like or agree with everything he said but I knew that he was trying to become real by telling the truth. And it was the same with that first studio solo album. I didn’t agree with the idea that “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” and the idea that Lennon could be a “Working Class Hero” is laughable, but that album is one of the best, most soul- baring album I have ever heard. When he cries out “Mama don’t go! Daddy come home!” and when he makes the observation, “I don’t expect you to understand, after you’ve caused so much pain. But then again, you’re not to blame; you’re just a human, a victim of the insane!” it is genuine. It is not fun, but it is one guy trying to get everything on the inside out.
His biggest ideas were often the most simple. “All you need is Love” was originally broadcast live around the world. He knew he had the attention of millions in the western world, and he wanted to make something good of it. He and his wife went to bed, called it a “Bed-In” and announced that it was better to go to bed than to go to war. One of his better slogans was “War is over if you want it.” And of course the slogan he made into a song, “Give peace a chance,” and the refrain from “Instant Karma,” “We all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun.” We were a collective, powerful source, and all we had to do was believe it and act on it. He believed in “Power to the People” but the people had to claim it.
By 1980 though that kind of thinking had gone away. The feeling that came with it– that things could change– was gone, too. It all seemed like some old, dated, black and white movie that not too many people remembered anymore. I was married, had a haircut, and was listening to jazz, classical and bluegrass music. I was convinced that rock had lost its life-transforming power– a power that Pete Townsend said could save souls– and that there were no bands like the old bands, that there just couldn’t be, and that maybe it was just time to go on to something else.
On Monday, December 8, Grace and I were at the house of our friends, Kenny and Robyn for dinner. It was a fine time, a cheerful time. Robyn is the person who introduced me to Grace, although it might have been the other way around since both Grace and I had known Robyn for a long time. Sometimes pairs of couples don’t match up; the men are cool but the women don’t mix, or vice versa, or there might be little friendship across gender lines. But in the Chavoor-Esraelian grouping, everyone likes everyone else. We are always happy to see each other and sad to see each other go.
So we were having such a good time I wasn’t too worried about it being Monday night late in the season with an interesting game on TV. The AFC East is always competitive no matter what decade it is, and that night was no exception; The Dolphins were in a close game with the Patriots. When dinner was over and we moved into the living room and when Kenny offered to put the game on, well, I didn’t say no.
We had been watching the game but not intently when something odd happened: Howard Cosell was quoting Jackson Browne. I think it was “For a Dancer” from the Late for the Sky album. I was confused, and when I heard Kenny say, “Oh no,” I thought that Jackson Browne had died but I couldn’t imagine why Howard Cosell would know or care. He was from the Frank Sinatra generation. I was about to say that I couldn’t hear and would someone please turn up the volume, when, as if Cosell had heard me, spoke emphatically, “John Lennon, dead at 40.”
I gasped audibly and the others looked at me. I wasn’t sure how they felt about it, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but what I believed was that he was more than a celebrity, or a former Beatle, or a political activist. I felt as though I had grown up with him, that I met him when I was ten and he was on the Ed Sullivan Show and that I had experienced some of his own changes with him or at least felt a strong empathy. But my logical side would not accept this. I never spoke to him or met him, so how could I be upset? I was sad but not rattled when Jimi Hendrix died, but he was a victim of his own environment, he killed himself. No one hated him so much that he would take a gun and shoot him down in the street. And besides, Lennon was different.
If I was going to get visibly emotional about the murder and loss of John Lennon, I decided I wanted to be alone, as my wife or my friends may not understand. So I exited to the bathroom. In the bathroom I couldn’t decide whether to let it out or compose myself. I decided on the latter. I ran the water for a while. A sob came out but I gathered myself. I shut the water off. I was going back and would be appropriately sad. I didn’t know him, he had never been to my house, I never called him on the phone, and we never had a beer together. That funny, crazy, reckless time had been retreating steadily in the rearview mirror and now with Lennon’s death, it was really over, done with and no longer in sight. With my new resolve I returned to the living room.
We talked about it a little bit. We couldn’t imagine who would want to kill John Lennon. After that Grace and Robyn talked while Kenny and I watched the rest of the game even though Cosell had commented that a football game meant nothing compared to the enormity of what had happened in New York. My attention to the game came and went. I did though exult abruptly over a good play in a close game. Immediately afterwards I felt guilty and silly as though I had been secretly following a game during a funeral.
We got home and while we were getting ready for bed, the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and a strained voice spoke.
“Hey man.”
“Hey.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Me neither, man.”
“John’s gone, man.”
“That you, Tom?”
“Yeah. I can’t believe it.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you call anybody? I called John Tokorian. He was bummed.”
A half hour later John called. The conversation was pretty much the same except that we reviewed Lennon’s career, the highs and the lows and the huge impact he had made on our generation and how they where the only band members people called by their first name and how he had kicked heroin and had become a family man who appreciated the home life and how all that was showing in his latest lp and how it might have been the start of a rebirth of his talent which might have led to a revival of resistance to the Reagan presidency, and now all of it was gone with a single bullet.
That night I dreamed that the old, dated black and white movie was back. There were all my friends from those long ago days, relaxed and cheerful. We were outside somewhere. More people were arriving and were greeted with enthusiasm and love. We wore the old clothes, spoke the old, lost language, using the idioms and expressions of that time. We knew something good was about to happen, something was about to change for the better; it was the way it felt back in those days. Then Sanford, one of the old friends, summed things up by saying, “It was a time that had to come, and a time that had to go.” I awoke, feeling cold and thirsty.
A month later I coughed up a little more than I would otherwise pay for a record, and special ordered a Japanese import of “Live Peace in Toronto,” his concert album with Eric Clapton, Klaus Voorman, and Alan White. It was not available at any local record stores. When it arrived I tore the package open and put the record on right away. There was John in concert, telling the audience, “We’re gonna play numbers that we know because we’ve never played together before,” and then lurching into “Blue Suede Shoes,” sloppy and messy but familiar and comforting.
After that Yoko tried living off his ghost and Nike used “Revolution” for a TV ad, tribute Beatles bands popped up all over the place, but we all knew where the real John Lennon was, he’s right there on the last track of side one, telling the audience in Toronto, “This is what we came for, really,” just before they do “Give Peace a Chance.”
All we were saying was give peace a chance.

Short,Tough Life in Chemical City

December 1992

It was the coldest winter I had ever experienced in my first 13 years in Fresno. It was raw cold, cut-right- through- your- jacket cold, wish- I- had- thermal underwear- cold, wish- it- would- snow- and- warm- things- up cold. Citrus farmers across the valley were praying for any temperature above 32 and firing up their smudge pots and wind machines. But backyard citrus enthusiasts were in a bind; all they could do is pray, unless they were clever enough to augment it with Plan B.

“Badveli, won’t God protect the oranges?” Henry asked.

“Maybe,” Badveli replied, coughing softly.

“And maybe not,” Henry said, tapping the bedrails.

“You can find the blankets,” Badveli whispered from the hospital bed.

“Sure, Badveli, no problem,” Henry said, swinging his keys on his key ring.

“They are in the workshop.”

“Ok.”

“Not the canvass though, they are too heavy and might hurt the branches.”

“Yes.”

“Just the blankets and the sheets.” “Sheedagess.”

“What’s he talking about?” I asked, having missed the first half of the conversation, which was in Armenian.

“Jack,” Henry replied smiling, “your father-in-law is funny.”

“Why’s that?”

“Here he is recovering from surgery and what is the number one thing on his mind?”

“Missing Tic-Tac-Dough?”

“No, that’s not it.” He waved his hand as if swatting a fly.

“Writing his next sermon?”

“No way!”

“Pilaf?”

“He’s worried about his orange trees!”

“Orange trees?”

“The frost will ruin the oranges.”

“Ha! Uh, I mean oh, no!”

Badveli had his eyes closed and was nodding his head slowly.

“Prostate cancer is nothing. We have to go take care of the oranges.”

“We?”

“Yes. It’s a two man job.”

“Yeah, but…” and I stopped, realizing I couldn’t beg off a request from my father-in-law, not under the circumstances anyway.

“Don’t worry,” Grace said, “I’ll go to the party and Henry can drop you off after you’re done.”

“Oh ho! Now I see,” Henry exclaimed, “you have other things to do.”

“No, no. It’s ok.”

“Jack, life is tough.”

“It’s all right. What do we have to do anyway?”

“We have to get his two big ladders, and cover the orange trees with blankets.”

“What?” I laughed, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. Are you saying we’re going to keep the oranges warm?”

“Yes!” Henry answered, smiling again.

“Let’s go save the oranges!” I said, delighted with the lunacy of tossing blankets on orange trees on the coldest night ever.

“Don’t worry, Badveli,” Henry said, “we’ll take care of it.”

“Shinora galem,” he murmured. “He said thanks,” Henry said as we made for the door.

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

We sped across town in Henry’s Buick Regal, the radio faintly spilling out fuzzy Christmas songs.

“So, we have to cover the whole tree?” I asked as we crossed the railroad tracks on First near Lamona.

“No, just the top.”

“Henry, you think they’ll ever move?”

“If you ask your father-in-law this is the best neighborhood in town.”

“He’s your father-in-law, too.”

“He likes you the best.”

“Come on, you do everything with him. You tie vines with him. You take him to Home Depot. You speak Armenian. You play that board game with him.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“What?”

“You go to church, teach Sunday school, sing in the choir. That makes you number one,” Henry said, smiling.

“Aw, come on,” I said as we pulled into the driveway and right on to the backyard of Badveli’s house.

The old saying goes that you will always know when you are in an Armenian’s backyard because there will be far more fruit trees than shade trees, if there are any shade trees at all, and there is no Armenian man who made more use of his backyard than Jamil Chamichian. If it was in season, there was no need to buy fruit at the store. There were plenty of oranges, tangerines, peaches, apricots, plums, peaches, cherries, and grapes, and the flavor was not just passable; the flavor was unmatchably superb. Whenever I ate my father-in-law’s fruit, the words of my dad always came to me, “Fruit is God’s candy.” All in a space of about half a basketball court, after subtracting the space for his vegetable garden. We weren’t just doing our father-in-law a favor, we were rescuing a veritable garden of Eden.

“Jack, we have to find the blankets and the ladders. The blankets are in a box by the workshop.”

“Ok. Where are the ladders?”

“Between the shop and the fence.”

“It’s dark as a coal mine. How we gonna get it?”

“Hold my arm and we’ll walk real slow.”

We found everything and we set up two 12 foot ladders on either side of the first of two orange trees. My ears, nose and cheeks were stinging from the cold. I imagined my eyelashes breaking off if I squinted my eyes.

“Ok, what do we do?”

“I’ll climb up my ladder with a blanket on my shoulder. You climb up on your ladder, then I toss the blanket to you and we cover the top of the tree with it.”

“I can’t even see you standing next to me, so how am I gonna see you up there at the other side of the tree?”

“All right. The car’s right by the tree. I’ll just turn the lights on.”

“Sounds good.”

So he positioned the car to face the tree, put the lights on and we scrambled up our respective ladders. It took us five shivering minutes to get one blanket in a relatively effective position. But we had one more for a spot that was left bare.

“Jack, just a minute. I thought of something.”

“What?” I asked as he scrambled down the ladder.

“If we leave the lights on, the battery will go dead.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, we can try it in the dark again.”

“No, there’s a better way,” he said as he started the engine.

“Perfect,” I said. “Now we don’t have to worry about it.”

“Right.”

It was cold enough to wonder whether my mustache would break off. I was shivering and my teeth were clattering. We worked intently another five minutes when Henry started laughing.

“What is it?”

“Jack, do you notice anything?”

“No.”

“What’s different right now? Think about it.”

“This blanket didn’t go on as good as the other one?”

“It’s dark, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. Hey did your headlights go off?” “No,” Henry laughed, “we don’t have any headlights!”

“What?” I cried and when I looked down I saw there was no Buick Regal.

Henry had the house keys and we went inside the house and called the police. While we waited we laughed and laughed.

“Henry, why are you laughing? You lost your car!”

“Jack, life is short. You have a car, then it gets stolen and you don’t have a car.”

“You amaze me, Henry.”

“Besides, we were dumb!” he said, and we laughed some more.

The squad car pulled up and the two officers came to the front door. Their presence—uniformed and larger than life—filled the house. We told them our story.

“You left the engine running? While you were at the top of the ladders?”

“Yes,” Henry said, smiling and slapping his knee.

The officers looked at each other.

“We weren’t gonna let the battery go dead!” I laughed.

They weren’t sure what to make of us.

“Did you see anyone?”

“No.” Henry said. “Hear anything?” “Nope!” I said.

“You didn’t hear the car as it took off?” “No,” Henry said, “we were busy covering the trees! We didn’t notice until it was already gone and it got dark.”

We started laughing again. “Well, this part of town has quite a reputation.”

“What do you mean?” Henry asked.

“Don’t you know the nickname they have for this area?”

“No.” “Chemical City.”

“You mean drugs?”

“Your in-laws could very well be the only folks in the neighborhood not dealing drugs.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It’s not something we kid about.” “Wow.”

“Have they noticed a lot of late night guests at their neighbors houses who only stay a minute or two?”

“They have complained about that, yes, especially right directly across the street.”

“Those are drug transactions.”

“What should they do?”

“They should move.”

They finished writing up their report and left. Henry and I were not as jovial but were still amused at the outcome of the evening’s events. We sat in the kitchen and shared an orange, then cleaned up and called Grace. Henry’s car was found undamaged two days later on a residential street in Clovis.

“They only borrowed it,” Henry said.

“Joy riding, ha!” I said.

It was just as Henry had said, he had a car, then he didn’t and then, well, he did again. Life was tough, life was short and life kept rolling, even in Chemical City four days before Christmas.

Professor Matriarch

December 1977

“You understand, don’t you, that a fireplace is absolutely useless as far as warming the house. Completely inefficient.”
We were silent. We didn’t know where he was or where he was headed but it wouldn’t take long to find out.
“Heats the width of the fireplace plus three feet out. So why? What’s the real purpose? It is simply this: being warm has nothing to with it; the fact of the matter is man has an irresistible urge to urinate on the fire. It’s primal. Goes all the way back. And it’s about power. Control.”
The front row took notes. The middle section of the room sat motionless. Those of us in the back row glanced furtively at each other—too chicken to roll our eyes or raise an eyebrow. As a proud member of the back row I chewed my bubble gum and scribbled down Dylan lyrics as they came to me. “The back of the fish truck unloads while my conscience explodes.”
“Remember now, on a cold winter night like last night, when the fireplace is burning, what do men do? They STARE at the fire.”
“Women stare at fires,” a front row girl suggested.
“Of course they do. They are trying to retrieve what they lost. See? We must shake off the ridiculous notion that this has always been a patriarchal society. If you go back to the beginning, it was matriarchal.”
I looked like a note taker as I scribbled down, “He built a fire on Main Street and shot it full of holes! Ah, Mama, can this really be the end?”

I felt any Dylan lyric had more value than deciding whether I had an urge to piss on fires.

The class was Greek and Roman Tragedy. The first silly notion he hoped to free us from was the idea that the Romans had any original plays. This seemed very important to him because he mentioned it every time the class met. The Romans merely changed Greek names of the characters into Roman ones; the stories were otherwise the same. Then there was the business of linking Greek Tragedy to psychology, mostly Freudian. I can’t remember if peeing on fires was Freudian or not, though. All the notes I took were Dylan lyrics, and one from Hendrix, “I have only one itching’ desire, let me stand next to your fire.”

The other silly thing he wanted us to dismiss included saying Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas. He advised us well in advance not to wish him a Merry Christmas or say the phrase in his presence, and he further warned us not to say Happy Holidays either, which was a mere euphemism from his perspective. His greater concern though seemed to be that the world had been matriarchal to start and then the men conspired and killed off the women leaders and took over, from which point they vowed to stay in power by inventing religious and cultural norms to make sure women never wrested the power back. I don’t remember actually reading or discussing a play, only selections that he believed underscored his notions.
I sat in class one afternoon chewing a stick of Carefree Sugarless Bubblegum while he was rambling on about men forming a circle around a woman leader and stabbing her to death.
“They all had to participate in the act, don’t you see?”
He stopped abruptly and seemed to be staring at the backrow nonbelievers. He adjusted and readjusted his glasses and then looked directly at me.
“Would you please stop snapping that gum?”
“Yeah, sure. Sorry.”
I thought he was certainly within his rights to be angry, and I was grateful that he didn’t appear to be. I even sat up a little as a sign of my remorse. Then he suddenly switched to the story of Job in the Bible.
“Religion is a trick, a manipulation. Look at Job. God made fun of his devotion. Tortured him in every way imaginable. Job’s piety went right out the window. Until God gave him everything back; then he was God’s pimp again.”
It was both inaccurate and unfair. I decided that I would go visit the man. It was not the role I liked to play as a college student. I liked to think that I slipped in unawares, got my education and slipped out before anyone noticed. But now I was the gum chewing guy and I could no longer be anonymous. A few days later, I went to see him during his office hours.
“Hi. I uh, came to apologize for snapping the gum.”
“Oh well, that’s all right. I don’t mind if you chew gum; it’s just the snapping. Very distracting,” he said, almost apologetically.
“Yeah, it was dumb.”
His office seemed smaller than others but he made very effective use of every space, a very organized man, apparently.
“Well, I had a question. Will Job be in the final?”
“Well, that’s up to you. If you feel you can connect a religious story to tragedy and psychology, then by all means.”
“I, well, I felt that the idea of Job being a pimp was well, I’m a …”
“It doesn’t matter what your personal religious fantasies are. What I said is my opinion. I’ve no need for a Sunday school lesson.”
“I just don’t think it was a fair characterization. I’m not an expert or…”
“I see your point.”
He folded his arms across his chest.
“I’ve been thinking about the patriarchal conspiracy against the matriarchy.”
I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t capable of grasping ideas that were unorthodox.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been wondering if football isn’t a symbolic recreation of that moment.”
“How’s that?”
“The defense is the patriarchy; the offense is the matriarchy. The defense surrounds the offense; they conspire to kill the quarterback.”
It made as much sense as anything else; it just wasn’t in a book.
“Uh-huh.”
“And the quarterback holds a breast like object. See?”
“That wouldn’t be it. Not at all.”
“Well, I was just thinking that…”
He jumped up.
“Thank you for coming in.”
I was glad I brought it up; I was going to toss it into my final. I was not averse to putting crazy stuff into finals, not after mentioning Mick Jagger’s member as a pop icon in a class called Popular 20th Century Icons on a five dollar dare. I decided to throw out plan b, which was to reference a lyric in a Flo and Eddie song, which concerned itself with a donkey and a burrito. In this class though, now that knew how the professor felt about football, I would pass on the idea.
He distributed the final without comment. He didn’t appear to be different than any other day. We wrote with a certain silent intensity. Halfway through the allotted time he picked up his briefcase and turned to go out the door. Several of us looked up. He looked a little like of Phil Silvers except that whatever his plans were, the were not quite as elaborate as what I remembered on the Phil Silvers Show. He got out the door and turned left to go out of the building and we all heard him say, “Merry Christmas” in a staged mumble. The class gasped and called for him to come back; he didn’t.
Six weeks later the second semester began. I was standing on the balcony of the Oviatt Library, deciding whether to go to class or go to the Chinese place on Plummer where they served a huge plate of broccoli beef for $2.50. I had my car keys out when a student from the Greek Tragedy class approached me.
“Hey, man. How you doin?”
“All right.”
He was a back row associate but I didn’t know him well. All semester long he didn’t speak to anyone except his girlfriend, and even they didn’t talk much; most of the time she would slip off her shoe and he would hold her foot.
“Did you hear about it?”
“About what?”
“Professor Martiarch.”
“What about him?”
“He killed himself.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Up on Mulholland.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He took his VW up there and put a hose in the exhaust pipe and ran it to the window.”
“When?”
“Day before Christmas Eve.”
“Damn. He didn’t seem depressed.”
“No shit. But hey, good way to go though. I mean nice view and all. If that’s what you wanna do.”
“I guess.”
“And it doesn’t hurt, and you just go to sleep. Must smell bad though.”
“I wonder why he did it.”
“Who knows? Couldn’t get any, maybe.”
He spit over the balcony, and walked away. I was glad I didn’t get to know the guy; I felt I had discovered all I ever wanted to know about him.
I stood looking out over the campus, trying to know the why of it, but I could not. My thoughts ricocheted from one thing to another, finally landing on something my friend Robert once said about a Simon and Garfunkel album. “I’ll tell you what’s most peculiar about it: it’s got two songs about suicide. Ha!” Then I glommed on to the lyrics of the song he was referring to, having no other reference point for how to respond to this kind of calamity. I drove home and went to my room and put on the record. I lay on my back and stared at the Who poster on the ceiling while the words poured out.

He died last Saturday
He turned on the gas and he went to sleep
With the windows closed so he’d never wake up
To his silent world and his tiny room
And Mrs. Reardon says he has a brother somewhere
Who should be notified soon
And all the people said “What a shame that he’s dead
But
wasn’t he a most peculiar man?”

I didn’t know him to know why he did it. I didn’t feel right imagining I was mourning his death. I felt something but I didn’t know what it was. I searched for something that could help me understand him, but all I could remember was a joke he once told; he said it was his favorite joke because it “explained everything.”

There was a man who lost everything in one week. He lost his job, his wife ran away with the mailman, his son stole his credit cards and ran up a huge bill, his car was repossessed. He lost all hope. He went to Suicide Bridge in Pasadena. Just as he was ready to jump though, he heard a voice.
“What’s wrong there, young man?”
When he turned around he saw a homeless woman. He told her everything that had gone wrong.
“I can help you,” she said.
“How could you help me?” he asked.
“I’m a witch. I have magical powers. I can restore everything to you in 24 hours.”
“Yeah sure, go ahead.”
“But there is one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You have to sleep with me.”
The woman was hideous and foul smelling. She had not changed clothes in years. Her teeth were either rotting or missing. Her face was filled with puss-filled welts. She could not have been younger than 70.
“I can’t.” The very thought was repugnant.
“Then you won’t get anything restored to you.”
He thought about it some more and he decided he had nothing to lose.
He found a one star hotel and spent his last fifty dollars. He held his
breath and closed his eyes and did what was required.
“Well” he said, “that wasn’t easy, but tomorrow I’ll have a brand new start.”
“How old are you, young man?” The woman asked as they were getting dressed.
“I’m 40 years old.”
“Forty years old and you STILL BELIEVE IN MAGIC?”

I remembered that he told the joke more than once, and I remembered how he laughed heartily at his own joke. I thought about the joke for a week, trying to wring some kind of understanding from it, but his life, his beliefs and his death remained enigmatic. I knew there was more to him than we figured out, and that there was more to him than he was willing to disclose, but now hindsight was all blah, blah, blah, and it was all passed now and too late.