Jorge Garcia (Hugo “Hurley” Reyes) was kind enough to pose for a snapshot with Vanity Fair mascot Little Graydon when I visited the Hawaiian set of “Lost” toward the end of its run.
Inner Disneyland
I didn’t want to go to Disneyland. They made me do it. Actually, they tried to get me to take them to Disney World, because it was closer, because it was newer, but I said no. I said if we were going to do anything that involved Disney, we were going to go all the way. We were going to go to the source. We were going to go home. To the bosom. To the bosom of fun. To the sweaty fat old smelly saggy gray white man bosom of Walt Disney itself. To Anaheim.
We crossed through at 11:35 p.m., according to the glowing blue digits of the rental car’s dashboard clock. I saw traffic lights hanging from braided metal wires. They were swinging in the wind. A strong wind that was not fooling around. My wife was beside me: Maria Cantal Aldea. She had married me when she was 30 years old and I was 54. Don’t laugh. Things like that happen all the time. No, we did not work together in an office. No, I was not her boss or superior. We met each other, in fact, at an outdoor party in the summertime. We stood side by side on a cushion of grass near a body of water. I have the feeling it must have been a lake. This was in 1998. In the
‘75
Every weekday morning my dad drove his pale yellow Oldsmobile Toronado out of the suburbs and into the Lincoln Tunnel. He worked at an insurance company on Sixth Avenue. He made it home, most nights, at seven o’clock.
At some point along the way he grew a mustache — only to shave it off suddenly. And… that’s right… one day… must have been in the spring of ‘75… one day he swapped the Toronado for a lime green TR7.
I loved the TR7, or at least the idea of it. Its ad-campaign slogan, “the shape of things to come,” was irresistible to a ten-year-old boy. So my dad was something of a hero to me, when he pulled into the garage behind the wheel of that small triangular British vehicle. My mother was not so thrilled.
Aside from
Suomi
I was looking through the glass doors at the beer. I took a twenty-eight-ounce bottle off the metal shelf and went to the cashier and laid a hundred-dollar bill on the counter.
“Don’t you got anything smaller?”
He was a tough-looking skinny blond guy with a chipped front tooth. There are a lot of these guys in Florida.
“No.”
“We don’t accept nothing over fifties.”
“Just take it.”
“Put it back if you don’t got anything smaller.”
“You don’t understand. It’s yours. It’s a present, from me to you.”
It was a Monday or a Tuesday or maybe a Wednesday at around six o’clock. I walked the bridge over the waterway. I crossed the narrow island, past the junk shops and surf shops, past the plastic white tables outside the pizza place. I sat down at the back edge of the beach, away from the rowdy kids, near a clump of scrubby bushes and trees. I took the beer out of the bag. It’s nice in Florida, but I was starting to get tired of it. All I’d been doing was hanging out at the beach or else playing video games at the old arcade, which was nice and cool with its smooth cement floors and ceiling fans.
I grew up in the nice part of the Bronx. In Riverdale, where the trees are big. You’re also just a couple miles from the poorest neighborhoods in the whole country. I could say you would never know it but I thought about it a lot. Sometimes it made me feel like my family and I were on the wrong side of history. But I still
Face at the window
I really didn’t mean for this Tumblr to become like some kind of ongoing memoir, so my apologies for that, but here is another story from when I was a kid.
Definitely the most frightening thing I’ve been through. Kind of sick, what happened. If I was given to using the word “signal,” I would even call it the signal event of my life. Although it took place when I was a kindergartener. Well, part of it. Half of it.
It was early in the morning. Maybe not even seven o’clock. I was already watching TV. I was lying on the couch. Under a blanket. I should tell you all this was taking place in the New Jersey suburbs. North Caldwell, to be exact.
My mother was upstairs, probably taking a shower. My dad was at work — or on his way to work in the yellow Oldsmobile. It was raining hard. I thought I saw something at the window but it was nothing.
As a kid I always woke up early. Five or six o’clock. Later on I ended up being a night owl… logged so many sleepless nights… and did my best work late, unbothered by the rest of the world. Probably my schedule changed in graduate school. Anyway, this day I’m talking about — it was a weekday, a school day, and I had already had breakfast, and I thought I saw something at the window but it was nothing. I was young, like five. This was 1967. I was wearing my green New York Jets football shirt with the number 8, in white. Eight was my lucky number, always had affection for it. Mom considered this shirt to be part of my “play clothes,” not my “school clothes,” so I was going to have to change it before getting on the school bus.
Once again I thought I saw something at the window. This time there was something. This time there was a face at the window. An old man. My first thought was hobo. A hobo begging for food. My second thought was he my grandfather. But that wasn’t right.
He was staring at me but I didn’t scream out. Maybe because his eyes seemed sad. Now that I have kids of my own, I hope they would not be so stupid in such a situation. I would want them to get up off the couch, to run, to fight, to scream, to find me or their mother. But idiot that I was, I just
Reckoner (Winters Mix). This is a mix I made using pieces of a Radiohead song. It’s legal — Radiohead gave it away. The first voice you hear is that of comedian Jonathan Winters. He’s there in the middle, too. Some obscure stuff of his. Also a phone call with Bob Dylan.
Dad’s Dietary Theories
People used to laugh at my father’s theories on dieting and nutrition. Well, with all the recent news from the scientific community, are they laughing now?
My dad believed that breakfast should consist of three eggs, a rasher of bacon, four pieces of toast with butter and jam, and three cups of coffee with cream and sugar. His secret was to cook the eggs in olive oil, rather than butter. Based on nothing more than his gut instinct, Dad posited that the healthful properties of olive oil somehow negated the possibly fattening or artery-clogging effects of the eggs, butter, and cream.
Since the body is a creature of habit, it should be fed frequently, my father believed. This is something he was asserting as long as forty years ago. Only recently have nutritionists caught up to him in recognizing the value of many meals ingested over the course of a day.
One of Dad’s favorite meals he called “second breakfast.” A smaller version of the day’s first meal, second breakfast came moments after he had washed down his eggs with the last sip of coffee.
This second breakfast typically meant two pieces of well-buttered toast, one strip (not rasher) of bacon, and a single egg, with a cup of black tea. Third breakfast was cute, almost feminine — a single Eggo waffle, with honey and melted butter pooling in the nooks, accompanied by a can of Fresca.
Before lunch every day — to keep away “the hungries,” as Dad termed them — my father ate a lot of the candy he kept in jars around the apartment. Sometimes I would find bite-size Snickers bars under the cushions. Dad said it was O.K. to eat them if
A Merry Sort of Life
I had a job in a glass building. I sat in an office and looked outside.
One morning around 10:30 I saw four or five seagulls touring the sky. They were fifty or sixty stories above the concrete. I was on the twenty-third floor, looking at them, with my rolling chair close to the glass. It made me feel terrible, seeing those birds, although the ocean was not really so far off. But, come on, there we were, the seagulls and I, in midtown Manhattan. Not such a good place for that kind of bird. Atlantic City… when I was a kid… Atlantic City is an excellent place for a seagull.
I remember hanging out of a hotel-room window. I had a plate in one hand. The hotel was made of stone. The remains of a room-service breakfast were on the plate. I was wearing flannel pajamas, and I was worn out from an asthma attack, but still feeling pretty great, as the seagulls balanced themselves on the air and snatched or plucked bits of pancake from the plate.
My dad was an insurance man. Back then, before the casinos went up
Authorball
Every fall, with the World Series approaching and the big novels coming out, my thoughts go to baseball and books. Then the two things get mixed up in my mind, and I do this thing where I create a roster made up of writers by taking the skills and talents apparent in their work and translating them to the baseball field. Tolstoy, for example, would be something like Ryan Howard, a power-hitting first baseman who bats cleanup. So here’s my latest team, with brief scouting reports included.
In the lead-off spot, centerfielder Jane Austen.
Janie gets on base and she’s real quick. She may not look like much, but, as her body of work shows, first impressions don’t always count for much.
Batting second, second baseman Guy de Maupassant.
Guy is not what you’d call a toolsy player but he’s a good contact hitter. Can slap the ball the other way.
Batting third, right fielder, Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Andy Rooney, Atheist
I made fun of Andy Rooney when I was a kid. We all did.
As far back as 1978, when he started doing the commentary that would end up serving as the “60 Minutes” coda for some 33 years, he seemed aggressively out of touch. By the time I was 30 years old, and Rooney made a big show of his lack of sympathy for Kurt Cobain just a few days after his suicide, he seemed to confirm what we had
“Is There a Beat Generation.” This is a mashup I made piecing together things from my record collection beneath a Jack Kerouac lecture.
Maybe a meteorite
One night, when I was eight or nine years old, my father came into my bedroom.
“Wake up.”
The sky had a red tinge.
“What’s going on?”
“Put some clothes on, let’s go.”
My big sister and my father were waiting for me by the time I made it to the front door.
My sister looked tired. Also frightened.
We went outside. We started walking toward the high school.
“There was an explosion,” my father said.
It was early in the summer. A breeze was coming off the woods. You could smell mud and animal life. We were walking fast. Up ahead, on the right, was the house where my grandparents lived.
“Let’s not wake them up,” my dad said. “This might scare them.”
My sister asked what was going on, exactly, and my dad said:
”Maybe a bomb. Or maybe the school’s boiler blew up. Maybe something else.”
“Let’s go back home,” my sister said.
“We should see what it was.”
“I’ll just go home by myself,” my sister said.
“No,” my father said. “This is something you need to see.”
We were walking past the house where my friend Scott lived. That meant we were close to the school. The street came to a dead end at a clump of trees. In the trees were dirt paths hardened over the years by kids taking shortcuts.
The paths faded into the grass at the beginning of the school field. Yellow lights were flashing. A shadowy figure in a gas mask was hammering wooden stakes into the ground. Then he connected them with yellow caution tape.
Smoke was rising over there. We stepped closer to the
