Early crazy neighbor stories from another life

This is one of those stories I can’t believe I haven’t written down yet, but I’ve told several times to friends, always to some good laughs.  I have a long history of interesting neighbors, tracing back to my first Vermont apartment in Fair Haven.

(To sum up Fair Haven - I visited Middlebury, and ran into my old advisor, the legendary environmental writer John Elder.  On learning I was working at Castleton, he waxed on about the beauty of the area, and asked where I was living.  On hearing the response of "Downtown Fair Haven", he paused, bit his lower lip, and said, "Ummm...interesting choice...")

The apartment was the back “L” of an old house on Main Street – a two bedroom I’d rented in anticipation of my girlfriend moving out to Vermont when I got settled.  She, however, elected to stay in San Francisco for another year, so I had a big drafty apartment with cranky heaters (the one in the second bedroom I never turned on – had a nasty habit of going BANGBANGBANG rather than lighting, and I didn’t trust gas that much), and not much to decorate the place with.

I had two sets of neighbors.  The downstairs neighbors, Jim and Lucy(I think – don’t really remember), were a lovely couple I knew from the college where I worked.  He worked in IT, and she was a student.  Both of them were about 6’2”, and both of them probably weighed about 300 pounds each.  Very warm-hearted, good friends with a lot of the music and theatre people I worked with, and a joy.

The upstairs neighbor was the landlord’s kid.  He was in his early 20’s like the rest of us, but hadn’t been quite right since he fell off a ladder and hit his head a few years prior.  He’d been a decent sort prior, I’d been told, but became a raging asshole as a result of the brain rattle.  He still worked occasionally as a house painter, but mostly did nothing besides drink and throw loud parties at odd weekdays.

Parties included loud country music and line-dancing.  Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart” was a wild favorite at the time, and they would blast it at 2 am while doing the “Achy Breaky” dance.  In boots.  Over and over and over, as I stared at the ceiling, willing them to stop in my mind.

Complaining to the landlord did no good.  He shook his head, lamented the issue of his poor injured son, and reminded both myself and the other neighbors we had signed year-long leases.  (I have never signed a long-term lease since.)

Occasionally the front neighbors would go up and bang on the door if it got really loud (the one time I complained it only resulted in the dancing getting louder), but mostly it was counting the months left on the lease. 

One May night, he threw an especially loud party, with the sounds of probably 30 people dancing and singing the “Achy Breaky” at the top of their lungs, or at least as best they could drunk out of their minds.  I’d drifted off briefly, the party noise being mostly background at this point I’d gotten used to, but this woke me up.  “Goddammit,” I muttered, looking at the clock.  Just after 2am.  Dammit.

Then suddenly – complete silence upstairs.  Total.  No music, no dancing, no voices.  Nothing.

Now I snapped awake, and sat up.  I could hear the refrigerator in the kitchen.  The hiss of the pilot light in the gas heater in the living room.  I had never heard this quiet before.

A slow, thumping walk down the outside stairs.  Then a pounding knock at my front door.

I stayed in my bed, and pulled the sheets up.  Nothing good can come of this, I thought.

The knock pounded again. 

I got up slowly, walked to the door, and opened it.

Standing there backlit in the moonlight, was Lucy – all 6’2”, 300 pounds of her – dressed in an open flannel bathrobe with nothing on underneath, flapping in the light breeze, holding a shotgun across her chest.

“Ummmm…..”

She smiled.  “Just wanted to let you know we won’t be hearing that crap for a while.”

My mind raced.  Shots?  No, I hadn’t heard…at least I don’t think… “Oh?”

She nodded, and showed me the shotgun, split and now clearly unloaded.  “Told them I was only bringing this up unloaded once.  And maybe they should just pipe the fuck down during Finals Week.”

 She smiled, and kissed my cheek.  “You have a good night.”  And with that, she walked down the path and back to her own apartment.

I sat at the kitchen table, trying a couple of shots of vodka first, then finally making coffee and staring at the clock until I knew the convenience store on the way to work opened.  I drove there, picked up the paper, continued on to work, and went over the classifieds for Apartments as soon as I walked into my office.

By the end of the day I’d called three apartments that seemed promising, and by the end of the week I’d signed on to an apartment on Lake St. Catherine (another two bedroom).  Oddly enough, my landlord had no issues with my breaking the lease at this point, and overpaid my security deposit by $100 without even an inspection of the place before I left.

“Thank you for all your…patience,” he said.  And with a handshake, that was it.

End of the calm

So this happened:

I went to Maine for four days over the weekend to help my grandmother celebrate her 90th birthday and visit family I hadn't seen for a while.  I brought Sam and Dante with me (Jess was possibly heading out of town and couldn't watch Dante), and we had a blast visiting family and hanging out with the cousins.

On Sunday afternoon at my brother's house doing the family Christmas, my phone rang with a Rochester number I didn't recognize.  I ignored it, as Sam was in the middle of opening presents at the time.

Checking the phone later, I realized it was Josh, the older teenager from downstairs.  He's been a lot squirrelly lately - his mom has been making noise about wanting to move out and buy a house and that Josh and his kids are the only reason she hasn't yet, maybe he should get off his lazy ass and get a goddamn JOB already since he didn't finish the GED, and no, she is NOT buying him a replacement for his car that broke down in Maryland and he sold for bus money to get back to NY.

Based on this, I could figure out whatever he wanted wasn't something I could fix in Maine.  But I texted him anyway, in case it was actually something urgent.

"I just wanted to know if I could use your firepit to burn a bunch of cardboard in the back yard."

Long-time readers of the blog will understand that the whole burning-in-the-backyard is a bit of a sore spot between us.  Or rather, a major sore spot that caused me to give the landlord notice not that long ago (go read my previous post if you want that background).  So I hesitated.

In that hesitation, I remembered my resolve to let go...remember it is a rental...yet not give explicit permission should he actually burn down the back yard.  So I gave what I felt was a good answer.

"I'm in Maine right now."

"O" was the text back.

Perfect, I thought.  He can do with that info what he will.  And I will check The Batavian for news about fire calls in the meantime.

I told my sister about the text exchange, and she raised an eyebrow at me.  "Ummmm...these are the crazy neighbors you tell stories about, right?  Do you REALLY want him to know you're out of state right now?"

I hadn't really thought about that.  "What's he going to do?"  Though I did have images in my mind of the door forced open for the rest of my time in Maine, racking my mind to see what could possibly hawked or sold, and wondering if the cat would get out if it happened.

Upon arriving home on Monday night at 10pm, I was so relieved to see the door closed and locked that I just brought in the stuff that immediately needed to be brought in, and passed out.  It was only the following morning (okay, afternoon - I felt a cold/flu coming on the whole trip back) that I looked at the door and saw the attempt.

Clearly, he hadn't gotten in.  My laptop was still on the table in plain sight, the school laptop still in the bag by the chair, and my power drill still in the hallway where I've been tripping over it for a week before I left.  (Really do need to move that...)  The screwdriver marks only go part-way up the latch, so clearly a fail.

I texted the landlord about the break-in attempt, and he called me right back.  Seems someone jiggled his side door handle Sunday night, and his girlfriend's son had been sitting on the stairs and happened to hear it. No one was there when the kid went to check.  He also wasn't going to call the police over it, but with my story as well he was now calling a friend of his on the force and most likely the friend would be over to look at my door as well.

The officer did come by and look at the door.  He was shocked someone would have come up my staircase to break in, and said that he'd look at the downstairs apartment door to see if there were any signs of a break-in attempt.  (There weren't.)  Asked if anyone knew I was gone for the weekend, and I told him the downstairs neighbor - a name not unfamiliar to the police in town.  He told me to keep an eye out for suspicious people, and that was about it.

At the suggestion of a friend, I went out this morning and bought a door guard to prevent another such attempt.  So now my door looks like this:

A great improvement, I think.  Actually even looks nice.  :)

It occurred to me later on what the connection was between my break-in attempt and the door rattle at my landlord's - that door leads to where my landlord keeps the keys to all the apartments.  So the little bastard was trying to sneak in and get the keys to my apartment, and went away when he found the door locked.  No idea if this was before or after trying to pry my door open with the screwdriver, but it really doesn't matter.

A part of me thinks I should be really worried about this - break-in attempt is pretty ballsy, and he's pretty desperate.  But I'm not that worried - this was low-hanging fruit, and I should never have told him about being out of state.  He's not going to put any actual effort into something like this, and I'm pretty sure he knows I know - I asked him if he'd seen anyone near my apartment and I got a quick denial of his having been here AT ALL this weekend...well, except when he texted me about the fire pit thing, but EVEN THEN he wasn't really here...

So I'm going to work on trying to catch up the neighbor stories here on the blog - I realize there are TONS I haven't written yet, and I have a suspicion things are going to get interesting around here again.  We'll see.

The end of the downstairs drama...for now.

I realize I haven't done a "neighbor update" in quite a while, so one is long overdue, especially since things are now quiet, and probably will be for a good long time.  So I figured I'd update how things have worked out.  Events may be moderately compressed and out of alignment, but this is pretty much how it all happened.

As I've mentioned before, I've spent a lot of time on the backyard, clearing out the brush, planting flowers and trees, and generally trying to make the place look good.  So over the July 4th weekend, I was a bit distressed when Josh (downstairs teenager) knocked on my door with a request to build a fire pit in the backyard.

"Ummm....no."  I paused, still trying to take it in.  "There's nowhere you can dig a good pit, it's against every single fire code in the village...it's a bad idea."

"Well...just come down and I'll show you where I want to build it."

Dan (downstairs father/husband) was standing at the spot, where Josh had already started digging with MY shovel.  A gas grill abandoned behind the house was now in pieces, with the grill part seated oddly in the beginnings of the hole.  Dan made the case that it was Oatka Fest, and Josh couldn't drink, and he REALLY wanted to have a fire.

I pointed out that the spot they'd picked was directly under a tree, and would spark the roots.  It was a bad idea, I said, on every level I could think of.

Dan stared at me.  "Boy wants to build a fire, though."

I sighed, knowing that logic and reason had no place in these discussions, only damage control.  I had been thinking about buying a fire pit and various other furniture, and I had just gotten my PD bonus that weekend.  "Tell you what - I'm going to go buy a fire pit.  Above ground.  I'll be back.  Don't...dig anything else."

So I drove to Batavia, going first to Home Depot, then to Target.  I got a fire pit, and an offset umbrella that was on clearance (in July - whatever, not questioning), and brought them back.  So Josh had his fire in the firepit, and I went out to the Oatka Fest with Dan (looooooong story on that one).

The following day, I bought a table set at Target I'd seen, but didn't have trunk space for the previous day.  Also picked up some tiki torches, and cleared out a nice little sitting area.

A truce of sorts was declared - Wendy didn't feel comfortable going into the back yard, so Dan and I would hang out in the backyard, playing guitar.  Josh would occasionally join us, and on one memorable occasion, Savannah (back neighbor) came down and joined us on saxophone. 

In the meantime, I was also working on clearing out some of the neighbor's back yard as well.  Barb, the next door matriarch, had a vision of creek access, and spurred on by the other neighbor clearing her yard down to the creek, there was a boom of activity.

Josh, I must add, also had his girlfriend move in, along with her THREE kids.  So he was spending a lot of time in the backyard with the fire.  And wanting to cut and split and otherwise break stuff, as is natural for an unemployed teenage boy who desperately wants an outlet.

Part of that outlet came from helping me with the bathroom renovation - another complete story unto itself.  But he helped me a lot with up and down stuff, other than what was (in hindsight) a major issue where I'd asked him to measure for a SharkBite connector and he'd instead just shoved it on there.  I cursed a lot, and Wendy was VERY upset I'd cursed in front of his children.  Knowing she'd dropped worse in front of the kids, I chose to ignore it.

After the bathroom was finished, I directed him as best I could with a good friend coming in to visit.  But he was antsy.  He wanted to chop and break stuff. 

Finally, I was heading off for a day to help with Sam's birthday party, and on my way out the door, Josh announced he was going to clear backyard stuff.

Knowing he wanted to use an ax rather than any of the useful other clearing that needed to be done, I told him to PLEASE check with Barb before doing anything, since she and I had talked and knew what needed to be done.  And with that, I went off to help set up for Sam's birthday party.

I came back from the party, and Josh announced he'd chopped up "that junk stump out back".  I raised an eyebrow, not coming up with any "junk stump" that was out back at all.  I went out back to check, and found that he was referring to the ornamental stump that Barb was specifically saving aside as a decorative centerpiece of her backyard.

Walking back up to the house, he was standing in the back yard with the axe.  "What?" he said, looking at my face.

"I asked you to do ONE thing.  ONE.  What was it?"

"You know, you can't talk to me like this.  I'm not a fucking child, man."

"I asked you to check with Barb.  And you didn't.  The one thing I asked you to do."

"YOU CANNOT TALK TO ME LIKE I'M A FUCKING CHILD!!!!!"

At this point it suddenly occurred to me I was having this conversation with a pissed-off teenager holding a double-edged ax.  Fast retreat seemed MORE than reasonable, and I abruptly retreated to my apartment.

Later that evening, the ax goes up into my apartment.  Dan agrees to take it away in his car somewhere the next morning.

A day later, I get a text from Josh.  "I'm building the fire pit.  Big-ass fire in the backyard, and you can't fucking say nothin' about it.  My backyard too."

I look out back, and see Josh dragging the grill to backyard.  I quickly text the landlord.  "Josh is building a huge fire pit in the backyard underneath the large maple tree.  I'm assuming you have an opinion about this."

Thirty seconds later Dan comes flying out of the apartment and down towards the back yard.  Lots of bad noise,and the grill is hauled back up in front of the basement door.  I had a text conversation with my friend Jenn (also known as the Voice of Reason) about all the drama going on, and asked me why I cared so much about a rental.  And that Josh had a point - his back yard as much as mine.

"But I've done so much work!" I said.

"Rental."

"But they're just pissing on what I've done."

"You want to buy the place?"

I laughed.  "Hell no."

"Then it's a rental.  And if it's pissing you off this much, walk away.  Cheap rent isn't worth the stress.  Move.  You should have done it years ago."

The following evening I'm walking Dante and I see the grill base, now painted bright red, parked in the backyard with a stack of wood next to it, and I feel a blind rage welling inside me.  I marched Dante toward the house, Dan sitting in the front yard half-crocked already.

"How's it going?"

I don't answer.  Slammed the door behind me.

Dante goes in the apartment and I march directly past Dan to head for the backyard.  "Dude, talk to me, what's going on?"

I hauled the grill up to the edge of the driveway, and dropped it by the curb.  Dan rushed up.  "Nick, he's just gonna haul it back down."

I shook my head.  "Tomorrow's trash day.  Scrappers will get it within an hour."

"Nick, come on.  You need to be reasonable about this."

And at that moment, I think back to everything that led up to this, most of what's happened in the past few years, and Jenn's words of wisdom.

"You're right.  I do.  I'm done."

Dan stepped back.  "What does that mean?"

"It means I'm done.  I've had it.  I'm finished."

I headed down the path, and pulled out my phone to send two texts.  First one to Josh.  "Go ahead.  Have your bonfire.  I don't care."

Second text to my landlord.  "I'm done.  I'll put it in writing later, but consider this 30 days notice.  I'll be out of the apartment by the end of September."

And with that, I directed myself toward the Smokin' Eagle to wait out the rest of the evening.  And a third text to Jenn filling her in on the situation.

My first Scotch arrived when I got a text from Josh.  "Don't talk to me."

I looked out the window, and saw him walking down the other sidewalk.  Did he know I was here?  Then I laughed - not like the boy can come in, right?

I texted back.  "I'm serious.  Have your bonfire.  Big and bright.  I really don't care."

Next text from Jenn.  "Not sure I approve of the Eagle, but tell me you're not texting the teen."

Damn, she's good, I thought.  "Not anymore."

"Good."

The next couple of Scotches go by with conversations with the landlord, (who I tell not to cut short his errands in Rochester to deal with the situation - I'm really just done with the situation entirely, and it's not a panic situation) and Jess (to let her know the situation and tell her to keep her ear out for cheap rent in the area).

Scotch Four arrives with the end of the conversation with Jess, and I realize this is the first text conversation I've had with her at the Eagle that hasn't involved me saying something stupid while drunk.  I consider this another victory (as Scotch Four definitely qualifies as drunk) and a sign I've made the right decision.

Another text from Josh.  "We need to talk."

I text back.  "Nothing to talk about.  I'm gone by the end of September.  Do whatever you want - I don't care."

I believe I may have had Scotch Six before going home.  It would certainly explain why the streets were tipping back and forth on my walk home.  (Note - one of the main reasons I patronize the Eagle: walking distance.)

The apartment house was remarkably quiet when I got home, with only Wendi standing outside the door smoking.  She said something to me as I staggered toward the door.  I believe it may have been "hi".  My response may have involved the words "go", "fuck", and "yourself", especially given the look on her face.

"What did I do?"

"What HAVEN'T you done?" I shouted back, staggering into my apartment and locking the door.  I turned on the stereo, called up The Heavy's "Big Bad Wolf", played it at top volume a couple of times, and headed toward the bedroom.

There was a knock on the door.  I stopped at the door, checked to make sure it was locked, and continued on to the bedroom to pass out.

The next morning (if 11:52 counts as "morning") I woke up with a ringing hangover, and found a letter from Wendi taped to my door.  It was a very sweet and touching letter about how she was frustrated with Josh's behavior, told me several things I didn't know, and also how she appreciated everything I'd done around the apartment and how she'd enjoyed having me as a neighbor.

Very sweet, I thought.  But I'm still out of here.

Tensions downstairs continued to mount.  I had a friend over for dinner, determined to enjoy the backyard oasis before I moved, and when I brought her over, Dan was hauling stuff out to his car.

I was determined not to get into a long conversation due to having a dinner guest, but he told me he needed a break from it all and was moving out for "a little while" to sort things out and see how that goes.  I nodded, wished him luck, and went upstairs.

My friend said she noticed a definite reaction to his statement of moving out for a short time, and asked me about it.  I didn't want too share my own memories of moving out "for a short time" three years ago, and wasn't sure I could put it into words.  "Ignore it," I said.

Turns out that was the case, as the day after Dan moved out for "a short time", his stuff started accumulating in the hallway as Wendi, her boyfriend (who I'd known about for years), and the kids started cleaning house.  Dan came to pick it all up a couple of days later, and we chatted on the porch of the neighbor's house.

"You got the crap end of the stick on this one," I told him.

He said he was better off out, and that he'd be back to hang out and play guitar.  That was months ago, and the only time I've seen him since was briefly as he dropped off divorce paperwork.

I told my landlord I was staying.  His quick response was "Thank God."

In the time since, Wendi and Larry (the bf) have done massive renovations to the apartment over the rest of August, but have been noticeably absent for most of the last month or so.  Neither her Jeep nor Josh's car have regularly been in the driveway for the last month, and Josh told me the last time I saw him that he was thinking of moving to West Virginia to live with his girlfriend's father.

The calm is...odd.  I'm enjoying it for the time being, and I've left out a lot.  (I realize my neighbor posts have not even TOUCHED the topic of Driveway Guy.)  I need to consolidate and truly write up the stories in the quiet.  Heaven only knows what happens next.

Why the Rolling Stone Cover is Wrong

People are furious over the cover of Rolling Stone featuring alleged mass murderer/terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.  There are protests, calls for banning, and general upsettedness about the cover.

Rolling Stone's official response is pretty weak - I will instead link to the much stronger piece by Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Matt Taibbi explaining the cover and his reaction to it.  You can read it here.  Please do so. I'll wait.

(Incidentally, if you've never read Taibbi's work before, do so.  And keep doing so.  He's one of the best reporters out there.)

This is the strongest defense of the cover I have seen thus far.  He is articulate, reasoned, and makes many great points about the investigative reporting quality regularly found in Rolling Stone, possibly the best in the country in the mass-media magazine market.

However, in his reasoning about the cover, Taibbi is one thing that he so very rarely manages to be.  He is Wrong.  The cover IS a big deal, because this is not the cover of any other mass media magazine.  It is the Cover of the Rolling Stone.

The site rockpaper.net has an archive of all the Rolling Stone covers ever done, and from this archive list I have chosen to look at the 2000's as an example.  Thirteen and a half years of covers.  For individual cover photographs of people who weren't the current President of the United States or an entertainer (meaning musicians, actors, TV personalities, or Shaun White), we have the following:

http://rollingstoneauthentic.com/files/RS0853-550x660.jpg

http://rollingstoneauthentic.com/files/RS0961-550x660.jpg

http://www.catchandreleasebooks.com/shop_image/product/4aa4e5a0669dd612924042a48d538c1c.jpg

http://hstbooks.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/7092281.jpg

http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/18/1870/8LX8D00Z/posters/stephen-danelian-howard-dean-rolling-stone-no-941-february-2004.jpg

http://cast.thirdage.com/files/originals/steve-jobs-cover.jpg

Thirteen and a half years.  SIX covers.  FIVE people.  Three Presidential candidates, one iconic writer intimately connected to Rolling Stone, and an Industry Legend who fundamentally shifted the way we consume media.  The Jobs and Thompson covers were also in honor of their passing (one Thompson cover for his death, one for reminisces two years later).

It is true that Rolling Stone sometimes does covers for their political reporting, but there is a very noticeable difference in those covers:

http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/18/1870/3VX8D00Z/posters/robert-grossman-george-w-bush-rolling-stone-no-999-may-2006.jpg

http://rollingstoneauthentic.com/files/RS1012-550x660.jpg

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictures/2010-rolling-stone-covers-20100302/rolling-stone-covers-1096-you-idiots-planets-worst-enemies-44224048

http://rollingstoneauthentic.com/files/RS1165-550x748.jpg

http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Rolling-Stone-1063-JOHN-McCAIN-Jackson-Browne-Carlos-Santana-Of-Montreal-/00/s/MTYwMFgxMjAw/z/5fEAAMXQM0FRfAzh/$(KGrHqZ,!lQFEH3hWDn)BRf!zhSPFQ~~60_35.JPG

I missed a couple for brevity.  But the point is, they are not photographs.  They are drawings, cartoons, and graphics.

A portrait cover on Rolling Stone is a cultural touchstone that has been with us for most of our lives.  It is a symbol of an entertainment figure having "made it", and truly making a dent in popular culture.  There are even songs about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ux3-a9RE1Q

(fun fact - written by Shel Silverstein)

Rolling Stone themselves are well aware of their cover's place in popular culture history, as evinced by this book available at Amazon, Rolling Stone 1,000 Covers:

http://www.amazon.com/Rolling-Stone-000-Covers-Influencial/dp/0810958651/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374336640&sr=1-3&keywords=rolling+stone+cover+to+cover

"For the past 39 years, the covers of Rolling Stone have depicted the great icons of popular culture, from John Lennon, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Madonna to Steve Martin, Uma Thurman, and Richard Nixon. Often it was an appearance on the cover that launched a performer’s legendary status in the first place."

Rolling Stone has also proffered up issues devoted entirely to their photography, the careful construction of it, and the impact on culture:

http://i.ebayimg.com/t/ROLLING-STONE-958-The-50-Photographs-Sep-30-2004-HM-/15/!B81lKL!!Wk~$(KGrHqQOKoYEz!t)jnMpBM4Fselmzg~~0_35.JPG

Carefully crafted, meticulously detailed.  Not found photographs.

And as for the nature of that found photograph, there is an issue of presentation.  Taibbi (and others) point out the photo has been used multiple times in multiple other venues.  Setting aside the argument about the Rolling Stone cover's iconic status, let's look at image presentation.  Here is the image from the Taibbi article from the New York Times:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/files/2013/07/nyttsarnaev.jpg

Note the arm position.  The extension of the right arm clearly indicates this photo as a "selfie", a photo taken by himself, most likely with his phone.  There are thousands of them taken by teens and twenty-somethings everywhere.  It is an unremarkable photo that does not stick in the memory.

Here is the Rolling Stone crop for the cover:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/tsarnaev-rollingstone-290.jpeg

Any remnant of the right arm remaining is removed by cropping and text.  It now looks posed, professional, and striking.  Which is what cropping is supposed to do.  But it is no longer the same picture that Taibbi cited.  It has been altered to be remembered.  And in so altering, it removes the excuse of 'everyone else has used it'.

Add the image alteration to the cultural expectations of what goes into the magic of  Rolling Stone cover, and it makes sense that people thought this was a professional cover shoot done by Rolling Stone.

In Rolling Stone's defense, another controversial cover has also been cited, reaching back to 1970, and the cover article of Charles Manson.

http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/0c9109c71ea0524d9fe840f91fabd67bb94a26a9/r=537&c=0-0-534-712/local/-/media/USATODAY/test/2013/07/17/1374076265000-XXX-manson-1970-rolling-stone-1307171152_3_4.jpg

Setting aside trying to stake precedence on a cover that is 43 years old, the Manson cover makes sense due to the pop culture ties of the time.  His "family" lived together in a commune similar to hundreds of other hippie communes of the time.  He named his "family members" after Beatles songs ('Lovely Rita', 'Sexy Sadie', etc.), and believed a war called "Helter Skelter" needed to be waged.  He was a musician and a songwriter, with one of his songs performed on the Guns 'n Roses 1993 album "The Spaghetti Incident" (to the shock, horror, and outrage of everyone not named W. Axl Rose.).  He was the dark side of the counter-culture of the time, and the main media outlet of that culture was...Rolling Stone.  

I called the cover a violation of trust, and my friend Jeff, a journalist himself, called me on that as a very bold statement.  As shown by the evidence, I stand by it.  Rolling Stone has spent the last 50 years defining their cover as a cultural touchstone, with a very specific set of expectations attached to it.  In an age where the print magazine is running into digital issues, Rolling Stone maintains a presence, allowing for in-depth journalism of the type Taibbi mentions as dying in other outlets.  It is protected by the sanctity of the cover, a cultural icon recognizable to most everyone in the Western World.  To defend it as "just a magazine cover" is at best disingenuous, at worst threatens the iconic status and therefore the survival of the entity itself.  

Works cited:


"Helter Skelter (Manson scenario)", Wikipedia.  Web.  Accessed 7-20-2013

"Look at Your Game, Girl", Wikipedia.  Web.  Accessed 7-20-2013

"Rolling Stone 1,000 Covers", Amazon.  Web.  Accessed 7-2--2013

"Rolling Stone Magazine Database", Rock Paper.  Web.  Accessed 7-20-2013

Dr. Hook, "Cover of the Rolling Stone".  Youtube.  Web.  Accessed 7-20-2013

Taibbi, Matt, "Explaining the Rolling Stone cover, by a Boston native", Rolling Stone. Web.  Accessed 7-20-2013

All photos cited individually.  All rights reserved by the copyright holders.

Finding "North"

About 31 pages into Roads, by Larry McMurtry, I hated the book, for reasons of a difference in preferential geography.  He is a man of the Texas plains, and a need for big sky. On page 31, he begins very simply with “I don’t generally like northern places”(31) and continues for much of the book to intermittently bash my beloved New England. 

To his credit, he does later on state that we all have our own particular geography we are attached to – his own preference for plains, or Hemingway’s attraction to northern Michigan, generally an attraction formed in our youth and stays as a certain vantage point.  I’ll give it to him.

The other difficulty I had was his intention of just looking at roads.  He specifically cited William Least Heat Moon’s books as the antithesis of what he wanted to do.  He didn’t want to meet people at all, and prided himself on saying a grand total of 14 words to three other people during an entire day trip.  His aim was to travel only interstates – end to end of the big roads that exist primarily to get people from point A to point B.  Charles Kurault once said the unfortunateness of the interstate system is the ability to drive from coast to coast and not see a damn thing.  McMurtry’s intention, at first, seems to be a book-long treatise on proving not only that Kurault was right, but that it wasn’t in fact a bad thing.

“I want to drive them…just to see what I see.”(23)

My own favorite road trips don’t involve the road itself, but involve the stops along the way, and it is the same with my favorite travel books as well.  So having this as a central premise was a bit off-putting.  However, I kept at it, and I’m glad that I did.

First, McMurtry is a rare-book dealer, and going through his narrative I came across titles I had never heard of, and would have unlikely cause to ever hear of.  Some I may never be able to put my hands on, but some of his journeys and rare sales make for some interesting combinations of thought that I never would have put together.  West Virginia and Milton, for example.  (He knows of someone who has a rare first edition of Paradise Lost with an intact title page out on one of his trips.)

He has a few choice words for Hemingway, travelling to northern Michigan to specifically view the geography of Hemingway’s early Nick Adams stories.  Travelling to Hemingway’s house in Key West, he is horrified by the furniture, notes that the Key West house was purchased after he did his best work, and wants to know which of his later wives was responsible for the furniture.  Best not to know too much about our favorite writers, so as not to have issues between personality and art.

The purpose for the travels doesn’t really come into play until the later part of the book, as he is travelling west from Washington, D.C., where he lived for 20 years as a rare-book dealer.  Following heart surgery, he suffered a profound depression that took years to return to a functional state of mind. 

“I don’t really expect my old personality to be waiting for me at a rest stop in Tennessee, or a Waffle House in Arkansas, but I am still listening for chords I haven’t heard in a while, wondering if a passage in a book or a place I once liked along the road will cause them to sound again.” (164)

He goes back to Proust over and over, “looking not for lost time, but lost feelings”.  It’s a taking stock book in a lot of ways. He spends a lot of time on growing up on the plains, looking at Highway 281, which he claims as “his river”, not having the mighty Mississippi of Twain and so many others.

The book comes to an end when McMurtry reaches the T of Route 2 and 281 in North Dakota, the northernmost point of 281.  He always wondered, as a boy, where 281 went as it went north.  (He knew the southern tip – no mystery there.)  His grandfather told him “Oklahoma”, not having been much of a traveler himself.

And it is at the top of 281 that he reaches an epiphany, and ceases his desire to wander, at least for a time.  He remembers a book by the cowboy Teddy Blue called We Pointed Them North, where a young and less-than worldly cowpoke thought that North was an actual place, a real destination or town.  And at the head of 281, McMurtry found his “North” – a mystical place along the lines of Shangri-La, Xanadu, and Home, that place one can never return to.

McMurtry laments that the problem with roads is one he realized several years ago with women – there are too many nice ones, and that means you are going to miss some.  It’s a simple fact of life.  “One of the saddening facts of life is that there is always going to be a delightful woman somewhere who, for whatever accident of timing or attraction, simply slips by and recedes, to return only in a dream.” (204)

He ends with summation of fiction primarily asking the questions of “Where does the road go?  And how is one to marry?”(206)  Possibly too simplistic, but essential questions of Life, to be sure.

I am glad McMurtry found his “North”, though it seems to be more of an internal sense rather than an actual place.  On reflection, “North” is always that – be it Shangri-La, Xanadu, or Home – an idea, a state of resting the wandering mind, drinking from Frost’s grail in “Directive”. 

“Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” (Frost, Directive)

  Drink deep, my friends.  In this summer of my 40^th year, I aim to spend a lot of time drinking to resolve my confusion.  (Metaphorically, of course – it’s been my experience that literal tends to add to the confusion rather than resolve it.)  With any luck, I’ve got a few years on this road, and I aim to make them count.  J

Town changes - originally from May 6, 2013

This is something I wrote back on May 6th, but have just now gotten around to posting.  Hope you enjoy.

Le Roy has a history of tearing down its historical landmarks.  Many cities, big and small, had a brief period of time in the 60’s where “urban renewal” caused them to tear down a great many irreplaceable buildings in the name of Progress, but Le Roy has not been limited in scope to modern urban renewal.  This is a practice that has been under way pretty much since Le Roy was incorporated.

The first accredited Women’s College, Ingham University, was located right along the banks of the Oatka Creek, starting in the 1850’s.  It had a music conservatory, art program, and an academic program as rigorous as any men’s college at the time.  Today, no buildings remain, all of them torn down around the turn of the century.  The stones from the conservatory were used to build the town library, but that was decades later.  The rest was used for fill for the bridge.  There’s a plaque, but that’s it.

A striking round building housed the Unitarian Universalist church at the corner of Main and Lake until 1854, when it was torn down and the Masons built a temple there.  It was in turn torn down in 2008 for a Walgreens.  A fantastic mansion was torn down in a row of mansions for an Acme Supermarket, now a Sav-A-Lot.  (The mansion next door is for sale, and I have to imagine the property value suffers due to the supermarket.  It is going for less than a ranch house in the swankier Rochester suburbs.)

Factories that produced patent medicine, a real Dining-car diner built in Silver Springs, various other historic dwellings, the first church – all have been razed.  The Jello Factory has been spared the wrecking ball, but I think that was only due to timing (Jello left town in 1964), and now with Jello being a point of pride of the town it will never be torn down.  It is commercial space in an odd section of town, with a small plaque.  The LeRoy House, containing the Jello Museum and Historical Society, is the last building left of the LeRoy Institute, which was also torn down and used for backfill.

The Walgreens incident was a particular sore point with the town preservationists, mostly due to the land in question being private and in a commercial corridor, so the tearing down of a 19^th century Masonic Hall and putting up a distinctly modern drug store needed no public comment whatsoever.  And it was with this backdrop that the battle over the Wiss Hotel began.

The Wiss Hotel was not a beautiful building – a squat, three story brick structure on the corner of Main and Lake, right across from the Walgreens.  It was empty and abandoned when I moved here in 2010, home only to hundreds of cats that would stare out at you if you walked down Main Street late at night.  A few of my neighbors have memories of the Wiss as a flophouse with a bar in the first floor, the flophouse duties being taken over by the old hotel by the train tracks at 66 Lake Ave.  (An address that shows up in the police report at least once a month – last time for a guy who tried to hit a friend with a bottle of vodka while an underage girl was simultaneously giving him head.) 

The town quietly took possession of the Wiss during a nationally-covered outbreak of Mass Hysteria/Tourette’s of a number of high school girls, burying a story of the owners of the Wiss and connections to the sale of land for the high school built only ten years ago instead of on land freely available by previous educational deed.  Taxes hadn’t been paid for years, and the county passed on collecting the property and let the town take it.

Noise was made about tearing down the structure and replacing it with either a Dunkin Donuts or a Taco Bell, and with that, the preservationists swung into action.  There was no specific love for the Wiss as a building, but the idea of the town gateway from the Thruway being a Walgreens and a Taco Bell was too much. 

An LLC was formed, and an architect was hired to determine the structural soundness of the Wiss Hotel.  He determined it to be salvageable, and the LLC spoke of plans to turn the Wiss into luxury apartments and storefront space.

It wasn’t a love for the Wiss itself, but the viewing of it as an anchor of the downtown row on the east run of Main Street.  The edges have been chipped away for years on the south side of the street, while the north side was a strong, old-fashioned row making a quaint downtown district.  The district ends at the creek – an abandoned restaurant on the south side, and the post office on the north side (built in 1936, after the village had torn down a storefront block rumored to have been a hiding spot for Fredrick Douglass as he fled north to freedom).  The concern was maintaining the character of downtown LeRoy.

Town meetings were contentious.  The LLC wished to purchase the building, and also put forward concerns about the asbestos content of the building and the abatement as the building came down.  The LLC was willing to pay the town 10,000 dollars, while the tearing down would cost 155K. 

The town supervisors were dead set against it.  There were serious leakage issues, they said, and there had been for years.  They disputed the cursory structural assessment of the architect, saying a full assessment was needed. 

Full frustration and anger swung into action.  Articles about the town history pointed out that the Wiss was possibly the oldest standing commercial structure in the village.  Visions of the Wiss as a cornerstone of the revitalization of LeRoy with luxury apartments (never mind the glut of rental units on the market already), and support from the owner of the McDonalds (which tore down the Dining Car on Main St) and the owner of the Creekside Inn (still vacant years later with no sign of opening anytime soon). 

My own opinion was toward preservation after I bought the book on the History of LeRoy at Walgreens (all irony intended), and looked at the range of buildings that used to stand in LeRoy.  I didn’t know how a Taco Bell could possibly exist on that corner, as part of it was listed as a DOT right-of-way if the Wiss were ever torn down.

In the end, the board voted quickly to not sell to the LLC, and to authorize the funds to tear down the building.  The LLC was bitter, vowed to continue the fight in the months that it took for the Wiss to be torn down.

Months, as it turned out, was weeks.  A company was given the contract, it was announced that the building would come down “hot” – no abatement.  All materials would be trucked out, and the lot leveled and seeded for grass.

It came down in the space of a week, and in defense of the board, it was apparent in the tear-down that the structure was in terrible shape.  The third floor had simply been put on the flat roof of the original building, causing runoff to rot the sides of the structure, which was causing the cave-in from the back that was apparent from the street.  At a bare minimum, the third floor would have needed to come down, and it was questionable if any of the structure would have been salvageable.  Years ago, possibly, (maybe when it was owned by the family of one of the board members), but now there was no saving it.

Rumors of a Dunkin Donuts or Taco Bell swirled, but the mayor announced that the lot would remain vacant for at least six months while the village decided what to do with the parcel.  “This will possibly be the first time anyone who has known me has heard me say this, but money is not the most important thing in this matter.”  One of the board members mentioned he liked the new view of the town coming in from 490/Thruway, and that would definitely be a major consideration.

The protective fences came down today, and I got the first full effect of the new view coming in to the main intersection of Routes 5 and 19.  The dominating structure now is the Presbyterian church on the corner, a classic white clap-board spired church.  “A New-England Village Feel” is what one of the selectmen said, and I have to agree with him.  It does feel like entering a small town like the ones I grew up with, and I rather like that. 

Reflecting on the changes of the town, with a few notable exceptions (would happily trade back the Sav-A-Lot for the mansion), a village is in constant flux for populations and needs.  It stands right now as a pretty strong place, with cleanup needs of multiple small towns facing declining fortunes.  And in this delicate balance, aesthetically, it works.

But if the village considers selling the parcel to Taco Bell, I will be at the meetings.  With torch and pitchfork if necessary.

How my first car was destroyed by squirrels

The first car I really owned was a 1981 VW Dasher diesel station wagon. Army green, with the front end definitely fading and headed toward rust. I paid 300 dollars cash for it in the fall of 1994, prepped to drive it out to college for my senior year. I also spray-painted it with rustproofing one afternoon to change it to a flat black of sorts (it seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time), and it went from Maine to Vermont on a single tank of gas. I only had it for three months, but it was particularly memorable primarily for its untimely demise. At the hands of squirrels.


I suffered a bit of a nervous breakdown during exam week of my fall semester, and my parents came out that evening to come get me when I temporarily withdrew from college. My mother drove the minivan packed with my stuff, and Dad and I took my car to head home.

We made it as far as Montpelier when it started making some really ugly engine sounds. Hammering, groaning, could-fly-apart-at-any-moment noises. Under the circumstances, we opted not to go any further and got a motel for the night so a mechanic could look at the car in the morning.

(My Dad reassured me that he did not see this in any way as foreshadowing where my mental state was headed. For this, I was grateful.)

The nearest dealership was in Barre, and we had it towed there. The mechanic was a short, grey-bearded, solid guy who had worked in Waterville for 20 years before coming out to Vermont. He was shocked at my car. “Haven’t seen one of these in years….” he muttered. “I’ll see what’s up.”

We waited about a half hour when he came back out, a look of shock and horror on his face. “You gotta come see this,” he said, and motioned us back into the shop.

We walked back into the shop, where Weird Al was playing on the shop radio. (I did consider this a foreshadowing of the condition of my car.) Sticking out of the middle of the engine was a long-handled torque wrench. “Pull on that,” he said.

My father and I both did – the wrench did not move. “That should swing back and forth with no effort at all. Your pistons have all frozen up.”

“How did that happen?” my dad asked.

The man reached into the opened engine block, and pulled out a handful of broken acorns. “Car’s full of ‘em. Some squirrels have been using it for nut storage, apparently.”

I nodded. “They guy I bought it from did say that he’d let it sit outside for a year.”

“Yep. Any other car wouldn’t have even started up. You’ve been driving this how long?”

“Three months. And back and forth to Maine twice.”

He shook his head. “Always wondered what it would take to kill one of these diesel engines. And now I know. A bunch of fucking squirrels.”

We sold the car to one of the other mechanics at the shop for a hundred bucks – the nearly-new studded snow tires would fit his own VW, and he’d use the car for storage out in his back yard. “All the stuff the wifey doesn’t want me keepin’ in the house,” he said with a wink.

Mom unloaded the van and drove back out to Barre to pick us up. Dad and I still laughed about it for years. He also agreed that I needed a replacement car, and we found one during that month I was home recovering – a 1986 Honda Prelude that served me well for many years (and has a few stories attached to it).

My brother Andy also insisted it was time he got his own car as well – he got a Dodge Daytona that my Dad warned him against after test-driving it (when we got done testing the Prelude, Dad said if I wasn’t buying it, he was). The Daytona was a story unto itself, going through three engines in about two years before the mechanic insisted he was NOT installing a 4th into that heap-o-crap car. (Andy also totaled my Dad’s car running into a deer going back and forth to the garage after the death of the final engine, just in case there was any question about the bad mojo attached to the Daytona.)

My current car is very boring – first really “boring” one I’ve owned, and I’m finding I rather like it that way.