No Louvre Lost: THE DAVINCI CODE, by Dan Brown (Chapters 1-4)

Look, I don’t want to be a snob. I want to grant the possibility that a book that enthralls millions and millions of readers can’t be all bad, that generally people are good readers who respond favorably to accomplished storytelling, and that, even if intellectualism is the kiss of death, there is at least a place for ideas in popular fiction. 

Chapter 1 of The DaVinci Code casts into doubt all of these possibilities.

You want to know where it lost me? Page 1 of chapter 1, when Robert Langdon rolls over after midnight and reads a flyer next to his bed: “The American University of Paris proudly presents,” it reads, “an evening with Robert Langdon, Professor of Religious Symbology, Harvard University.”  Are you kidding me?  You’re delivering exposition by having the main character blearily read his own press clippings? 

On page 2 of chapter 1: “His usually sharp blue eyes looked hazy and drawn tonight. A dark stubble was shrouding his strong jaw and dimpled chin. Around his temples, the gray highlights were advancing, making their way deeper into his thicket of course black hair. Although his female colleagues insisted the gray only accentuated his bookish appeal, Langdon knew better.”

On page 3, Brown mercifully forgoes the adjectives and just skips right to it, describing Langdon as “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed,” the repetition of “Harris” almost clever but too self-conscious to be entirely so, and Brown's attempt to separate himself from the description by couching the line in an embarrassing profile in Boston Magazine not quite working.

Here’s the thing…I actually don’t think that authors need to pander to readers so brazenly. The first chapter is all of four and a half pages, and, though I appreciate Brown’s desire to get the action started, I do think most audiences will wait until later in the book to learn that Langon is a Harvard professor. The monogram on the bathrobe says “Hotel Ritz Paris,” for Pets’ sake, so the “American University of Paris” is wholly unnecessary, and the investigator knocking on his door at this ungodly hour—you know, before Letterman is over on the east coast—says “considering your knowledge in symbology,” so that info isn't exactly a mystery for long.

As a reader, I do not need everything up front. Authors, I will roll with you until you withhold so much information that I get frustrated. It is your job to figure out when that is. Chances are, it's not page 1.

Not only does Brown give us a painstaking description, but he thinks we need this as well.

*****

The bad guys are introduced in chapter 2.  This is how they talk (descriptions are cut out in favor of pure dialogue; note especially the Mr. Burns-like “excellent”):

    

“I assume you have the information?”

“All four concurred. Independently.”

“And you believed them?”

“Their agreement was too great for coincidence.”

“Excellent. I had feared the brotherhood’s reputation for secrecy might prevail.”

“The prospect of death is strong motivation.”

“So, my pupil, tell me what I must know.”

“Teacher, all four confirmed the existence of a clef de voute…the legendary keystone.”

“The keystone. Exactly as we suspected.”

“When we possess the keystone we will be only one step away.”

“We are closer than you think. The keystone is here in Paris.”
“Paris? Incredible. It is almost too easy.”

And...scene.

Typically, when books are adapted to screenplays, the screenwriters have to select only the pieces of dialogue that capture the essence of the story that the movie tries to tell. I recently read Richard Russo’s Empire Falls and then followed up the reading with a viewing of the four-hour HBO movie, and, though the movie is excellent, it can best be described as a kind of outline for the much more excellent book. “Dumb down” is harsh, but a typical movie (120 minutes) can only hope to reduce the complexity of a novel to a narrative that has its moments.

There’s book-speak and then there’s movie-speak: Books develop; movies advance.

I haven’t seen the film version of The DaVinci Code, in large part because I’m still pissed at Ron Howard for stealing either David Lynch’s or Robert Altman’s Best Director Oscar that year, back when I gave a shit about that kind of thing (look it up). I thought about watching the movie, but then I realized that Brown has wasted enough of my time, so why would I want to give him more? 

In any case, as I was reading the bad guys’ exchange above, I thought, “They’re actually going to have to make this dialogue less transparent for the screenplay.”

People don’t talk this way. Not even in movies.

Even this cartoon is richer than Brown's villains.

*****

In chapter 3, Langdon is in a car, racing to the Louvre to help solve a crime. His trip takes him past the Eiffel Tower, which Langdon looks at admiringly. The Tower reminds him of a parting kiss with a previous love.

At this moment, the agent who is along for the ride says, “Did you mount her?”

Langdon replies, “I bet your pardon?”

The agent motions to the Tower: “She is lovely, no? Have you mounted her?”

I’m not making this up.

*****

For the record, at the end of chapter 3 (page 20), I wrote, “He needs a cohort,” which can be interpreted to mean either a partner or a romantic interest. Of course, in this book, she’s going to end up being both, but there’s certainly no need to wait any longer to introduce her.

*****

We watched The Adjustment Bureau last night, which was wildly disappointing, in part because the rules they established were both necessary and arbitrary. I won’t give too much away, but I will say that the mysterious figures in this movie should suffer from the same phobia as the Wicked Witch of the West, who is also undone by a pretty silly weakness, if you ask me. (In fairness, I’ve not read either the Frank L. Baum series or the Philip K. Dick story on which The Adjustment Bureau is based, which might explain these limitations more satisfactorily than the movies do.)

The best thing I can say about The Adjustment Bureau is that it got Leu and me talking about the necessity of weaknesses in characters and the degree to which they either work or don’t. Personally, I rather like the notion of an “Achilles heel,” for example, because there’s a kind of logic that guides dipping someone in the River Styx. You have to hold him somewhere, which means that something ain’t getting dipped. (By the way, is the Green Lantern really bothered by the color yellow? Please tell me this isn’t true.)

Thinking about it now, I would say that Hitchcock handled Jimmy Stewart’s character in Vertigo about as well as you can, which is to say that his weakness, which prevented him from acting earlier, had to be overcome in order for him to behave heroically in the end.

I'm not breaking any news here. This is a guiding tenet of stories for all time: You get a second chance, and this time you'd better not fuck it up.

Brown introduces Robert Langdon’s weakness in chapter 4: He’s claustrophobic. Once he arrives at the museum, he has to take an elevator. Brown writes, “Langdon exhaled, turning a longing glance back up the open-air escalator. Nothing’s wrong at all, he lied to himself, trudging back toward the elevator. As a boy, Langdon had fallen down an abandoned well shaft and almost died treading water in the narrow space for hours before being rescued. Since then, he’d suffered a haunting phobia of enclosed spaces—elevators, subways, squash courts. The elevator is a perfectly safe machine, Langdon continually told himself, never believing it. It’s a tiny metal box hanging in an enclosed shaft! Holding his breath, he stepped into the lift, feeling the familiar tingle of adrenaline as the door slid shut.”

I mean, obviously, so much is made of this moment that the climax of the book must feature Langdon mastering this fear in order to win the girl and save the world, right?

Right?

P.S. “Squash courts” is supposed to be funny, isn’t it?

Any hero's greatest fear.

DaInterlude: More Introductions

I had so much fun sifting through introductory paragraphs for the first post on The DaVinci Code that I thought I would list some that didn't crack the top two.

I know this blog hasn't been the most interactive endeavor--that one shot at a poll died a merciful death--but I would be curious to see what kinds of opening paragraphs you, dear readers, find compelling, so do feel free to share in the comments section below and I'll post.

I'm refraining from commentary, as I think the introductions speak for themselves, but you do not need to demonstrate such restraint.

So, some more of my faves:

“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun.”

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

“Corduroy is a bear who once lived in the toy department of a big store. Day after day he waited with all the other animals and dolls for somebody to come along and take him home.”

“Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.  Millions of men and women readied themselves for work. Some made their way to the Twin Towers, the signature structures of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Others went to Arlington, Virginia, to the Pentagon. Across the Potomac River, the United States Congress was back in session. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, people began to line up for a White House tour. In Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush went for an early morning run.”

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all—I’m not saying that—but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddamn autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out and take it easy. I mean that’s all I told D.B. about, and he’s my brother and all. He’s in Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every weekend. He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He’s got a lot of dough, now. He didn’t use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was ‘The Secret Goldfish.’ It was about this little kid that wouldn’t let anybody look at his goldfish because he’d bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he’s out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.”

No Louvre Lost: THE DAVINCI CODE, by Dan Brown (Introduction and Opening Paragraph)

Quick note:  Regular readers will know that I am more longwinded than this upcoming series of shorter entries indicates.  Truth is, life is busy enough right now that if I wait to finish my essay on Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, I won't post for another month, so I'm just going to post in a series of shorter entries.  This introduction to why I'm reading and writing about this book in the first place will be the longest of the bunch.

The DaVinci Code is exactly the kind of book that I have been trained to hate: plot-driven, contemporary, and—horror of horrors!—popular. Actually, though, it’s even worse than that. The DaVinci Code is the kind of book that I have been trained to disregard completely, which means that I wasn’t even allowed to hate it myself. I had to hate it from afar, casting judgment on those who held it in their common little hands, without actually reading a single word of it myself, which, I believe, shows up in Webster’s as the first entry for the word “scoff.”

I hold multiple degrees in the various English language arts, a few of them are even of the graduate variety, which means that I have read Tristram Shandy, Clarissa, and The Waves, but not a word by John Grisham, Mitch Albom, Stephanie Meyer, Wally Lamb, or Patricia Cornwall. Until recently, I didn’t consider this much of a loss. I held the standard academic view that any text worthy of my time was a text that rewarded multiple reads, and, judging by the pace at which people flew through the titles by these authors, these were single-serving books, to borrow a phrase from Chuck Palahniuk, another bestselling author whom I’ve never read. If I’m going to devote the time it takes to read a book—even a bad book—then I want to devote it to something that is ultimately worthwhile, and there’s something to be said for the vetting process of time.  

Of course, what “reward[ing] multiple reads” really means is that they must be good fodder for research papers, but never mind about that.

My mood started to change with a piece that appeared in Playboy about a series of books that were being published by Hard Case Crime. The books were exactly what you would expect from a publishing house called “Hard Case Crime”: They were hardboiled tales about money, femme fatales, and ordinary Joes who get sucked into seedy situations. They had titles like Somebody Owes Me Money, Say It with Bullets, and The Corpse Wore Pasties, and their covers were of the throwback variety, with guns doubling as phallic symbols and breasts just, well, doubling. To intellectualize this would be to fall into the very trap I am trying to avoid, so let’s just say that the books provided something for me that I didn’t even know I was missing. I immediately ordered three, flew through them, and then ordered three more.

See what I mean.

Some of them are contemporary potboilers, but the best of them are books that have been long out of print and that are being rescued by Hard Case for a new audience. Many of these authors are the Dean Koontzes of their day. Sadly, I’ve not read Koontz either, but I’ll give him the benefit of a doubt and say that, like Koontz, these authors are good at what they do. I would be proud to have written any of the numerous titles I have read. Sure, they are plot-driven, but to say that a story with a story is somehow inferior to a story that is instead a rich, brooding character piece is to unfairly preference the skill it takes to develop character rather than spin a yarn, when the truth is that both types of books take an inordinate amount of skill, neither one being inherently “better” than the other (whatever that means).

My appreciation of the Hard Case series made me realize what a snob I’ve been. I am absolutely guilty of equating “popular” with “inferior,” which meant that The DaVinci Code’s popularity has worked against it in my mind. However, when I saw a hardback copy at a church book sale on 181^st Street, I knew that now was the time to put aside my prejudices and read the book for myself. The book costs five dollars. There is no dust jacket. It is the 15^th printing. There are no notes of any kind in the margins of the text, though there was an interesting letter included, which will be the subject of a later post.

My idea is to basically keep a journal of the experience of reading The DaVinci Code and just jot down my thoughts as they emerg from page 1 on through page 454. Believe me, whoever inherits this copy from me is going to have some notes to sift through. You think deciphering The Last Supper is a chore, wait until they see my penmanship.

A final word before I dive in: The spoiler alert is that this whole entry is a spoiler. I am coy about nothing. If you haven’t read it yet and you don’t want anything spoiled for you, stop reading now.

OK, on to the book.

There's really no need to post these anymore, but I just like them so damn much.

The first word of Dan Brown’s crowning achievement: “Fact.” As in, it is a fact that the Priory of Scion and Opus Dei actually exist and are not just products of the author’s imagination. I’ve never understood this. Who cares if a story is true or not? What matters a “based on real events” that precedes a book or a movie? I figure by the time that it makes it to its finished form, so much has been manipulated that the “factual” elements are dubious, at best. The most honest promise of “This is a true story” is the one that appears before Fargo, because the whole damn thing is made up. Well, it’s not entirely made up, but it is cobbled together from multiple sources and then reconfigured to suit the needs of the artists. Now that’s true. But OK, Dan Brown, “fact.” We can start there.

*****

I love first paragraphs. The best first paragraph establish a tone, introduce a character, or pose a question, and hopefully they pull off all three, which is really just to say that the best first paragraphs make you want to read the second. Here are a couple firsts that definitely nudged me on to seconds:

From The Big Sleep(1939), by Raymond Chandler: “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaven and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything a well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

And this, from Gilead (2004), by Marilynne Robinson: “I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! Because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsigned after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.”

Here is the first paragraph of The DaVinci Code: “Louvre Museum, Paris. 10:46 P.M. Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Sauniere collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.”

I like the bold gesture of the beginning and that it immediately establishes a character and a place, even if the description of the character settles for demographic information rather something richer. The introduction includes “staggering,” “lunging,” “grabbing,” “heaving,” and “collapsing,” which sets up an action-packed ride.

Still, if I’m browsing in a bookstore, I put this one back down. On our rather exclusive list of introduction here, I rank this one a distant third.

Oh, hell, why not?

Beach Read #1: Buttafuoco You

You don’t know Dana, but if you did you would know that Amy Fisher: My Story, by Amy Fisher and Sheila Weller, is exactly the kind of thing that he would give as a gift: pop cultural, bargain bin, and connected in some way to a shared experience. The first two points are apparent enough, but the third requires a little context: In the summer of 1992, Dana and I drove from San Diego to St. Louis to Seattle and then back to San Diego over the course of a five-week stretch, all the while following the Long Island Lolita’s story by reading the top half of the USA Today in the paper dispensers that were outside whatever Denny’s we were eating our Grand Slams at that morning. That’s how simple the story was: You could get all of the pertinent details by reading only the top half of a paper that was known more for its use of color than it was for its journalistic integrity.

We were obsessed with the story—obsessed with the thought of a 17-year-old girl ringing a doorbell and then shooting a woman in the face, obsessed with Jan Hooks’ impersonation of Mary Jo on Saturday Night Live, obsessed with the coverage that was over the top, even for tabloid journalism, but obsessed mostly with the last name of the young girl’s alleged lover and accomplice: Buttafuoco.  Buttafuoco. We couldn’t get enough of this word that was a proper noun but that sounded so common. We would use it when someone cut us off in Wyoming: “Hey, get a look at that Buttafuoco.” We would use it to casually refer to one another: “What are you having this morning, Buttafuoco?” We would resort to it as an exclamation in moments of frustration: “Buttafuoco!” Along with American Music Club’s Everclear, which got stuck in the tape deck of my dad’s borrowed car and was consequently the only thing we could listen to for thousands and thousands of miles, Buttafuoco, and by extension Amy Fisher, defined that trip.

Which is why I was hardly surprised when, four years later, as a birthday gift, I received the book in the mail. The inscription, dated 10/4/96: “Kirby, there’s a little Buttafuoco and a little Amy Fisher in all of us. But a lot of Buttafuoco in Amy Fisher. Prepare to meet your savior. Happy birthday, Dana. Yo, Joey!”

How much do you think she hated having her weight broadcast to the world?

This is the book that Leu is talking about when she points to the shelf and says, Do you really need them all?, if not by title then at least by kind: The kitschy novelty book that served its purpose as a gift or as a joke but that was never actually intended to be read all the way through and thus does not deserve to occupy the space that could be otherwise reserved for something that’s, you know, useful. Can we at least agree to keep only the books that you have either read or intend to read someday? is the implied question. Is that too much to ask? Nope. Not too much to ask at all. Only problem is that I plan to read them all. Someday. And as I recently discovered, even a memoir by Amy Fisher can teach us a lot about storytelling, passion, and Buttafuoco.

And now, without further ado, from the home office in Nassau County—aka, Long Island 90210—the Top 5 things I learned from Amy Fisher: My Story.

5. Don’t put out in the first 106 pages. For a young woman who, by her own account, has hardly mastered the art of self-restraint, Fisher the Narrator comes across as a bit of a tease. Oh, sure, she front loads the story with details that are just lurid enough to make you want more—on page 1 she reveals that “Joey himself never wore underwear” and on page 3 she lets us in on some of her extracurriculars when she claims “I never did tricks at night—just after school”—but the majority of the first third of the book withholds information in a way that entices the reader to continue with thirds two and three.

“I knew what I really wanted from Mary Jo, what would have made everything different that day and all the days after that,” she writes on page 6. “You won’t believe me if I tell you, now, what it was. But I think you’ll understand once you know a little bit more about my life. So I’ll save it for later in this book.” Translation: Don’t put me down just yet! Please! Pretty please!! Pretty, pretty please with some Sapphic undertones on top!!! What? The Sapphic undertones did the trick?! OK. You got it. How about this, from page 85: “I think I’m strong and tough, but then an attractive man comes along and I turn to Jell-O. (Sometimes it can be a girlfriend, as you’ll soon see.)” And, finally, if girl-on-girl action isn’t your thing, then maybe family drama is:  On page 105, she resorts to the tug of a good old-fashioned family feud: “This was the beginning of me choosing Joey over Mary Lynn [an influential aunt]: a dangerous choice. The forced rift would be complete in a few weeks. But I’ll explain that later.”

You have to hand it to someone at Pocket Books who might not have had a corner office then but surely does now. The only people who are going to pick up this book are the people who are already familiar with the story, and this is a tabloid- rather than a book-length tale, so you have to give the casual browsers some reason to keep reading, especially when they have heard it all before. What better way to do so than by promising that the really juicy stuff is just up ahead?

The kicker: I still don’t have any idea what Amy wanted from Mary Jo—my best guess, seriously, is a hug—and if there was any lesbian action that may or may not have included Jell-O, I must have missed it. And don’t think I didn’t double back. Repeatedly.

If I ever cut a record, this will be the cover.

4. The auto part of a celebrity autobiography writes even less than I thought, and I thought they wrote jack fucking shit. Amy Fisher: My Story claims to be “by Amy Fisher with Sheila Weller,” though a more accurate billing might be “by Sheila Weller, with Amy Fisher somewhere in the room stretching her gum and twirling her hair while Weller clacked away at the keyboard,” a credit that, admittedly, would have struggled to fit on the front cover. Fisher might have related the story to Weller, but if she actually wrote five words of it I’ll eat Joey Buttafuoco’s tracksuit.

Weller smartly gives herself a little room to maneuver by delineating between Fisher’s (allegedly) first-person account and Weller’s more objectively journalistic sections, but even the parts that belong to Fisher are owned by Weller. “The two men, Joey and my father, were doing this little dance with each other, and I was almost the conduit, the link,” writes, um, Amy. Uh-huh. Riiiight. Or: “As I walked through the cool sand next to my supportive mom—both of us hugging our chests in our big sweatshirts—it actually seemed that my messed-up life was a piece of deadwood I could toss out to see till it sank to the bottom of the ocean.” Or…. You know what? Never mind. You get the idea.

Look, it’s not that I don’t think Fisher is capable of telling her own story. After all, Weller includes an anonymous, “authoritative” source that says, “Amy Fisher is a very bright girl. If two or three things had been different in her life, she could be on her way to becoming a doctor now,” and who am I to argue with an anonymous, authoritative source? No, it’s not that I don’t think she’s capable of telling her own story. It’s just that I know she didn’t.

3. Nothing dates a story like a reference to a technology that was once cutting edge but that is now passé. Beepers are to the Amy Fisher story as cell phones were to The X Files, which is to say that neither Fisher/Buttafuoco nor Mulder/Scully could have existed without their respective enabling devices.

On the morning that Mary Jo was shot—well, technically pistolwhipped then shot—Joey “beeped” Amy three times while she was in class (hello!), and she had to excuse herself to call him back from a pay phone in the hall. How great is that? Beepers. Pay phones. Can you picture Amy asking the girl who sits in front of her for some change. “PSST! Do you have a quarter? I’m conspiring with sleazebag boyfriend to kill his wife, and he wants me to check in.” Then, 20 minutes later, five minutes after she has returned from the first call. “PSST! Sorry. This is so embarrassing, but….”

What’s even funnier than the technology itself is that Weller felt a need to justify teenagers carrying portable gadgets that would make them accessible at all times. She writes, “A teenager having a beeper was not the big deal the media made it out to be. Although the beeper’s origins as a device to help crack dealers wheel and deal gave it an outlaw cache, it and the car phone were becoming teen communication fads.” Footnote after “fads”: “Beepers were not allowed at John F. Kennedy High. Amy’s ability to use hers surreptitiously in the school relied on her habit of setting it on Vibrate [cap hers], which made its beeping noiseless—and undetectable by her teachers.” Insert Dramatic Chipmunk music here.

This tendency to over-explain bogs Weller down throughout the book. Take, for example, her need to translate guido culture’s slang. She sensitively glosses a code that is as rich as the Navajo language that baffled the Axis forces in World War II when she identifies “What’s up?” as the translation for the otherwise impenetrable “‘Sup?,” though she does think her readers savvy enough to keep the “s” contracted.

Honestly, I don't know if this is Mary Jo or Jan Hooks.

2. I’ve got a lot to learn about the sex-trade industry. First of all, I didn’t even know that Amy Fisher was a prostitute. Somehow this piece of the story slipped right by (must have been below the fold of the USA Today, though it sure feels above to me). In any case, the marketers at Pocket make sure that anyone who picks up the book doesn’t stay similarly uninformed. This, from the back of the dust jacket, under the heading “Amy, on her entry into prostitution”: “So here I was by the fall of ’91: After trying, unsuccessfully, to convince me to have sex with his friend while he watched, to have lesbian sex, to be a stripper, and to be erotically massaged at a Korean massage parlor, Joey had succeeded in getting me into prostitution.”

To hear Amy tell it, though, she wasn’t a prostitute prostitute. She would prance around the room in the lingerie that Joey bought for her while her clients took care of themselves. Basically, Amy would be in the room while someone else did all the work. Come to think of it, Amy the Prostitute wasn’t too dissimilar from Amy the Writer.

The book actually sheds a lot of light on the escort industry, including the way in which they launder their money (they pay to use the credit card machine of legitimate businesses such as florists, laundries, and car services) and the role of the driver, who is not only the driver but also the bodyguard and the collector. Joey was kind of a driver and kind of a cocaine dealer—he was known in those circles as “Joey Coco-Pops”—but in Joey’s typically classy way, he was also the poacher, as he would hang around the parking lot where the working girls would be waiting for their next call and he would pass out the card of the competing Madame for whom he worked, essentially trying to lure them into free agency. Leave it to Joey to solicit the solicitors. Times like this, I swear, I find it damn hard not to love this man.

Weller doesn’t focus exclusively on Joey’s involvement in the prostitution ring, however. One story illustrates an inventive way in which the girls make sure they get paid: “Often they [the prostitutes] just roll their johns; get them into motel rooms, even doorways, grab their wallets out of the pockets when their pants are down, and split.”

Note to self: going forward, keep your wallet in the glovebox.

1. Joey is soooooo Buttafuoco. And finally, I leave you with this image, which requires no setup or subsequent elucidation and which garnered a “Whoa!” from yours truly in the margin, and if you are underage or even the least bit squeamish just stop reading now. No, I’m serious. OK, but don’t say I didn’t try to warn you. Here it goes, brace yourself. Amy writes, “Joey was so sexual, he could go much longer than I. When I was exhausted and couldn’t do it anymore, he would jerk himself off and, like a kid with a squirt gun, spray his semen around the room.”

I think the only thing left to say after that is “You’re welcome!”

Buttafuoco.

Number 764,961 on Amazon's list of bestselling books. Prices range from one penny used to $223.18 new.  Seriously.  Maybe I shouldn't have marked it all to hell.

No Success Like Failure: UNLIMITED POWER, by Anthony Robbins (Conclusion)

“No, seriously, today’s the motherfucking day. I mean it this time.”

*****

The final piece of the puzzle that is my relationship with Tony Robbins and Unlimited Power stems from something my friend Kevin said when we met for coffee. Kevin and I sometimes go long stretches without actually seeing one another, but when we do finally reconvene it doesn’t take more than 20 minutes of idle chitchat before one of us asks the other, What are you reading? Often the question doesn’t need to be asked, as whoever arrived at the rendezvous point first is finishing up a paragraph when the other arrives. In such instances, a nod of the head and a That any good? suffices.

On this particular day, however, I had been reading Robbins rather than any of the other authors who typically dominate our conversations—authors like Virginia Woolf, Jonathan Franzen, or Richard Dawkins—and, I don’t know, maybe shame played a bigger factor than I’m willing to admit, but mostly I just didn’t feel like going into the whole reason of why I was reading Tony Robbins, so I hid the book as best as I could hide it in plain view: I turned it upside down and made sure the spine was facing out.

Kevin must have sensed that strange things were afoot at the Astor Place Starbuck’s because he immediately asked, in his way, Watcha reading?

“Oh, this….” I shook my head, as if to say “nothing, a trifle, next question.” But he was undeterred.

“Come on, what is it?”

Realizing that things had already gotten bigger than they needed to be, I turned the book over and waited for his worst.

“Oh, my.”

“I thought you might like that.”

I proceeded to explain why I was reading Robbins, the project, how it fit into the larger whole. By the time I was finished, he was warming up to the idea, though he still had his reservations.

“My problem is that I’d be embarrassed for people to see me reading that on the train,” he admitted. (This from the guy who had recently read, in public, Between a Heart and a Rock Place: A Memoir, by Pat Benatar.) “I’d need a sign that said, ‘I’m being ironic.’”

I won’t act as if I hadn’t wondered how I might be perceived on the train—I’m self-conscious enough that this was one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind—but I had settled on an outside perspective that was more comical than anything else: Hey, get a load of the clearly unemployed, full bearded man in tattered jeans and red sneakers reading Tony Robbins. Does he really think he’s a page away from turning it all around? Shut up and read your Stieg Larsson, I would reply. And, oh, and by the way, Frankie says he loves that cover.

Hopefully Frankie is getting paid enough to make a...

...video with more lasers this time.

No, I was OK with whatever image I projected as I read. What I wondered about for the first time in response to Kevin’s statement was the bigger question of irony. As unbelievable as it sounds, given some of the fun I’ve had with Robbins’ book, I honesty never thought that I was being ironic. Sure, I could certainly stand accused of approaching the text in a less-than-reverential manner, but I don’t revere anything, and, besides, what thinking person wouldn’t? That’s the point of testing ideas in the world, isn’t it? Those that withstand the scrutiny stick. I would hope that, in the spirit of shoring up the soundness of his argument, Robbins would want his readers to think critically, to ask questions, to raise their hands when somehow something didn’t sound quite right. This is called “reading responsibly,” not “reading ironically.”

Still, a questioning mind is not always a receptive mind, and Robbins doesn’t seem like the kind of a guy who enjoys fielding questions that deviate from the FAQ. As I countered his every move, I could hear his rebuttal, as carefully packaged as all the rest: “This book will not help you because you will not let this book help you. When you are ready to listen, only then will you hear.” Like so many platitudes, this sounds like it means something, but it really doesn’t. I can’t help you unless you want to help yourself, says the counselor to the addict. Not a bad gig, since all of the heavy lifting falls to the addict.

Without a doubt, the ironic reading tempts, but so too does it cheapen. The truth is that I would never have reached for Unlimited Power had I not lost my job and had every decision I had ever made not consequently been called into question. One day, this book, out of all of the hundreds of books on my shelf, called to me when for all of the thousands of days previous it had remained mute. There’s no irony there, no knowing wink. I needed this book. I, who had absolutely nothing figured out, wanted to be in the presence of someone who claimed that he knew it all.

I was certainly not the first person to do so, and, in fact, I was not even the first person to do so with this specific copy of Unlimited Power. I knew the book was used—I purchased it for 50 cents at a library book sale in Lawrence, Kansas, remember?—but much to my delight, the previous owner left behind a number of clues as to what drove him to the text. (For the sake of the scene that follows, I will refer to the imagined previous owner as “he.”) Unfortunately, the more interesting story—why he gave it up—remains in the ether, but the hints he left behind tantalize too much to ignore.

He read with a yellow highlighter, so we are kindred spirits in that regard, anyway. (I prefer pencil, but the principle is the same.) Sometimes he highlighted whole passages, but just as often he highlighted the odd line or phrase. “Today is the day.” “W.I.T. – Whatever It Takes.” “Kentucky Fried Chicken.” All of the brief quotations that separate the larger passages in this essay—those are all lifted from what the previous owner deemed important. They include no more and no less than the precise language that he highlighted.

The highlights themselves rarely deviate from their intended lines—no sudden, seismograph-like peaks or valleys—which suggests not only a steady hand but more importantly a steady surface. This guy is not reading on a train, where too often a lurch turns a page into an Etch-a-Sketch. Neither is he on a plane, which rarely goes 10 pages without at least an air pocket or two. He’s not the guy who travels. He’s the guy who wants to be the guy who travels. Some of the notes lead me to believe that he wants to be a salesman—the sections that reference sales are inevitably noted—but would he be brazen enough to read on the job? Probably not. That would risk exposure, possible ridicule. Instead, I picture him hunched over the kitchen table in his apartment that he shares with no one. It’s after hours, after the TV shows that he watches dispassionately. He doesn’t have any other books on his shelf—as he flipped through this one at a friend’s house the friend said You want that? Go ahead and take it, so he did—and this lack of experience is why he has a hard time reading more than 12 pages in a single sitting. The highlighter is supposed to keep him focused—he remembers the same technique working for the smart girls at the community college, which all of his friends who went to a four-year program referred to as “13^th grade”—but the long stretches between highlighted sections betray his lapses.

On page 14, he highlights “rejected 1,009 times.” On page 43, “no matter how terrible a situation is, you can represent it in a way that empowers you.” On page 49, “hit a golf ball perfectly.” Strangely, on page 87, some checkmarks and an asterisk with a pen. Page 89, a handwritten note in pencil, cursive, an effeminate hand: “John Chezick dealership—Gordon + Al Gottard.” John Chezick Honda is in Kansas City. On page 90, another handwritten note: “me in the picture.” The strength of the highlighter fades until, finally, on page 147 of 418 it disappears completely.

Thinking about him led me to wonder what people would think about me. Not the “me” with the book in his hands—I’ve already said that they can snicker all they want—but, rather, I wondered what people think of the “me” I left in the margins. The previous owner had offered some morsels of an existence that I had used to piece together a—let’s face it—a pretty flimsy life. I, on the other hand, had left behind a full meal. I corrected Robbins’ errors (“When you find the specific triggers [submodalities] that cause you to go into a desirable state, than you can link these triggers….”). I wrote things like “But how much room does that take up?” and “Is this true?” and “X’d an unfortunate abbreviation” and “beer.” “How do you prove this?” “How to breathe.” I referred to my previous place of employment by name. I put a “?” next to passages that confused, an “!” next to parts that excited. Few books on my shelf so clearly capture within their covers my mental state as I was reading them.

Dylan, again: “You can learn everything there is to learn about me from the songs, if you just know where to look.”  

A clue....

*****

The dirty little secret about Unlimited Power is that it’s hard to read it all the way through without getting something out of it. This pains me to say, but it’s true. That 14-year-old version of myself was wise to resist. Robbins isn’t still going strong a quarter of a century later because he’s unintentionally hilarious, even if he is. He’s still going strong because he’s good. I don’t suddenly have a desire to start a fast-food franchise, nor do I want to run for office or own a fleet of jets, but I can’t deny that Robbins has introduced me to a number of powerful tools that will help me better cope with situations of great adversity.

For example: One of the really underrated parts about being unemployed is that people heap pity upon you. They offer to babysit, they give you old Metro cards, and occasionally they take you to Knicks games. My friend Jim did just that. He’s in the medical profession, and a rep of some kind offered him two tickets to the Knicks-Hawks game, the last before the All-Start break, a game that will forever go down in Knicks lore as the Last Day of the Gallinari Era. Somehow I’ve made it this far in my life without attending a professional basketball game, and I actually count myself a fan of the Knickerbockers, so I leapt at the chance to go to the game.

This despite the fact that the game was on a Wednesday night and on Thursday morning I had (a) to get Jonah to day care and (b) a phone interview for a job that I really, really wanted.

To say that Jim is a bad influence is unfair because I know damn well what I’m signing up for when I agree to a night with him: hard drinking, passionate arguments about sports, and stories we’ve told each other a thousand times before. But mostly hard drinking. I don’t know that I’ve ever outlasted him—on more than one occasion I’ve called it a night only to see him signaling for another while I’m on the way out the door—but on good nights (bad nights?) I can keep up, which is exactly what I did for the hour at the bar before the game, the two and a half hours during the game, and the two hours back at the bar after. The play-by-play is a little blurry, but at one point during the game I remember Jim turning to me and saying, Does it look like they’re playing defense to you? Because it doesn’t look like they’re playing defense to me. Then, a quarter/drink later: Did I ever tell you about the time I scored 60 for Donora High? Did I say stories we told each other a thousand times before? Make that a thousand and one. We stayed until the last dribble, even though the game was over long before. When we returned to the same bar we started at, I expected the bartender to greet us as if we were the ones who had secured the victory. “We’re back!” I bellowed when we swung open the door. No one as much as shifted in their seats. We ordered another beer and shot and got down to the serious business of arguing about Barry Bonds.

Jim and I were there for the end of an era.

At the end of the night, the Knicks had won their last game before Carmelo hit town, we had discovered a great bar with three-dollar pints of Harps just an avenue block away from the Garden, and I had consumed far, far more alcohol than any man should on the eve of a big job interview.

The next morning, I had to pry my eyelids open like a character from anime. Everything looked sideways until I realized that I was the one who was sideways. And that was just the start. That idyllic morning with Jonah that I painted before? Hungover, that exact same morning is a hellish procession of torture. I sacrifice the quiet lap time that I had so treasured for 15 more minutes of sleep, which means that nothing is quiet, everything rushed. I know there are stripes on the banana, buddy, now will you please just take a bite please? Where’s your other shoe? We don’t need your gloves. Just pull your hands into your sleeves. On the walk, I cheat by taking advantage of the elevator at the subway. I shave off two minutes. The cold air should be invigorating, but it’s not. It’s just cold. I count it a victory just getting to Nana G’s, then remember that I have to get back. Can I just lie down for a minute? You have a cot or something for nap time, right? Just point me in the right direction. I’ll be fine. I promise Jonah who knows what when I come pick him up and begin the long trek home.

It’s nine o’clock now. My phone interview is at eleven. I can sleep for an hour and a half, mainline some coffee, and I’ll be fine. Only I can’t sleep. I’m afraid my alarm won’t wake me and I’ll miss the interview completely. A shower would feel good, but I can’t stand up long enough. Worst of all, my stomach feels heavy, like it’s full of cornmeal. Time advances at a pace that’s simply unfair for someone who counts the seconds based on the throbs in his temples. It can’t be that late already. I just laid down. It’s 10:30 now, 10:40. I hear the kids at the school next door yelling at recess. If I could just be sick, release this heaviness, I would feel better. I decide better to do so now than in the middle of the interview. Yes, sir, well that’s an excellent bluuuch. I stagger to the bathroom, drop to my knees, hug the toilet like it’s a buoy and I’m adrift at sea. It’s 10:50. Nothing. 10:55.

The cornmeal stubbornly lodged, I resign myself to my fate: I’m morally weak, and, as a result, my family and I are going to be destitute on the street. We’re standing on the sidewalk in our robes, clinging to what few possessions we can carry in our hands as they change the locks to the building. I look down at the key in my hand, let it fall to the cold concrete. Jonah clutches his favorite car to his chest. Leu is too despondent to even cry. Her stomach bulges, a communiqué from within, not even language, just from his still-developing mind to mine: What the fuck, Dad? You call this being a responsible adult?  But you don’t understand, I….  You were what?  I was…I don’t know.

And then, cutting through my worst-case, another voice. This one deeper, resonant, as thick as Andre the Giant’s. Is it…? Could it be…God?

No. But close. It’s Anthony Robbins. “You can create your own world,” he intones. “Nothing is or is not, only what you make it. Only you can prevent forest fires.”

I’m here, Tony. I’m here.

Do you want this job?

Yes.

Do you want to turn your life around?

Yes.

I can’t hear you!

I said, Yes! Yes!

Then you know what to do.

I don’t.

You do.

I can’t.

You can.

I can’t.

You can, you can.

It’s 10:58. I picture myself as I am, as viewed from an omniscient eye: huddled over the toilet, a sorry, pathetic, pitiful excuse for a man. Then, in the background, as if pulled back in the pocket of a slingshot, I picture how I want to be: upright, confident. I talk on the phone in a tone that communicates professional ease. That’s a really capital question, old boy. Let me address it first on a granular level. Just tell me if you’re looking for something more robust. At his desk in a skyscraper in Midtown, the interviewer stamps “HIRED” in big red letters across the front of my résumé. My teeth are as straight as piano keys. They gleam as brightly as something bright that gleams. I release the image. It gets brighter and more overwhelming the closer it gets. It lands right between my eyes, pinches them awake. My old self in shambles, mercury scurrying across the bathroom floor.

I’m bare-chested, wearing nothing but boxer shorts. I’m paunchy. My arms without definition. I’m an underwhelming physical specimen in every possible way. My beard is mangy. I sweat. I smell sour. The phone rings. I put my hands on the toilet and push.

I stand up like a man.

Whoosh. 

Number 8,282 on Amazon's list of best-selling books; number 16 in Business and Investing/Business Life/Motivation & Self-Improvement.

No Success Like Failure: UNLIMITED POWER, by Anthony Robbins (Part 5)

“with fears and frustrations”

*****

Of the many reasons why I live in New York, “project management” isn’t in the top 100. Hell, it isn’t even in the top 1,000; the top 10,000. On a list that includes “being able to attend theater every night” and “walking across the Brooklyn Bridge” on one end and “being stuck on the wrong side of 5^th Avenue during the Puerto Rican Day Parade” and “six-dollar pints of light beer” on the other, “project management” falls much closer to “six-dollar pints,” maybe a notch above “waiting for the 7 train on one of those outdoor platforms in Queens on a windy night in January,” but just barely.

I am here to write. To surround myself with other artists; to subject myself to other artists, yes. But mainly, importantly, to write.

In the same way that Christians periodically retreat in an effort to remind themselves of their commitment to Jesus, so too do I have to occasionally step back and take stock of where I am and what I’m doing. I don’t require a What Would Mamet Do? bracelet to remind myself of my devotion—and, even if I did, the wiser course is probably What Would Mamet Not Do?—but every so often a mental check-in is valuable, nonetheless. Such a renewal of vows, as it were, does not require the public spectacle of, say, a Promise Keepers meeting, where I realize the sheer numbers are supposed to enhance the experience, though I’ve always thought they diminished it, trading, as they do, the intimacy of individuality for the Leni Riefenstahl-like mass of up-reached hands and streaming tears.

No, any issue my priorities and I have are strictly between me and my priorities, though I could maybe be talked into an AA-like support group, if things were to ever bottom out.

“Hello, my name is Kirby.”

“Hi, Kirby!”

“It has been three months since I’ve written anything that was worth shit.”

In their current form, however, the check-ins are brief, usually nothing more than an internal “What are you doing with your life?,” and they usually occur after things that really don’t matter—things like work—begin to seem as if they actually do. A blown deadline that nags more than it should. A prolonged stretch of going in early and/or staying late. Just generally not leaving it all behind at 5:00. Nothing at work should ever affect any part of my life that doesn’t happen at work.

"Project management" is at the opposite end of a list that includes this near the top.

“Every complex system whether it’s a factory tool or a computer or a human being, has to be congruent,” writes Robbins. “Its parts have to work together; every action has to support every other action if it’s to work at peak level. If the parts of a machine try to go in two different directions at once, the machine will be out of sync and could eventually break down.”

The great curse of my life—other than the fact that I can’t play guitar—is that society fails to value the skills that I possess enough for me to parlay them into something like a living. I don’t know how to buy or sell stocks. I don’t know how to scrape out the carotid artery when it becomes too constricted by gunk or even how to read a blood-pressure pump for that matter. I can’t throw a ball fast enough or jump high enough. I can tell you generally why the Ten Commandments shouldn’t be displayed in public classrooms, but I can’t argue precedence. Speaking of God, He sure knows I can’t carry a tune. I know enough about a few things that I feel capable to teach what I know to others, but I lack the requisite certification to make that transfer of knowledge official. I can’t really build anything. If I hammer a nail, it’s going to be crooked; if I saw a board, I’m going to lose a digit. I have no big idea for a business of my own. I don’t even have any small ideas. I barely understand how my bike works, let along my computer.

You know what I’m good at? Here’s what I’m good at: I can fix your sentences (and write a few of my own), and I’m really, really good at noticing when the font that’s supposed to be Calibri is actually Cambria or when that 12-point heading is really 11 or when the period is mistakenly bold.

I have degrees in English, writing, and philosophy, which means I can read, write, and think. Plug that trifecta into a Craigslist search and tell me how many rewarding, full-time opportunities emerge.

“We can learn to produce the most effective behaviors, but if those behaviors don’t support our deepest needs and desires, if those behaviors infringe upon other things that are important to us, then we have internal conflict, and we lack the congruency that is necessary for success on a large scale.” That’s Robbins again, obviously, in a line that stings not a little but a lot, for, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I’ve been incongruent my whole life.

Tell me something I don't know.

I had occasion recently to sift through a number of old notebooks. They stretched all the way back to my freshman year of high school and then extended forward through my four undergraduate years and multiple graduate programs. As I flipped through, I was struck by how similar their contents were throughout those 15 years: The information in the first third of every spiral was the official notes for the class. Whether it was Journalism or Western Civ until 1660 or Psych or Soc or Algebra I or Biology or Performing American Culture or Contemporary Southern Women’s Fiction, I had all of the sanctioned information right up top, in enough detail that, give me two hours with any given notebook right now, and I could still ace the quiz.

In the back of the notebooks, however, that’s where I kept the important stuff. In the back, without fail, for as many years as I have proof (and probably for even longer than that), I have story ideas, song lyrics, character sketches, snippets of dialogue. I would sit in class, give a shit for as long as I could stand to give a shit, and then flip to the back where I would release that which had been at the fore all along. Thankfully the quality of the back-of-the-notebook material improved from Ms. Admire’s ELA class in my ninth-grade year to that which appeared in the back of Dr. Schultz’s 19^th Century American Novel class as I was finishing up the course work for my (never completed) doctoral dissertation. But the general idea stayed the same: What I was supposed to care about up front; what I actually cared about in the back.

The only time this didn’t hold true was when I was at Carnegie Mellon, where I studied playwriting. During those two years, everything that mattered was up front. There was no back. Those were two good years, where people thought of me as a writer and where it was my job to write.

The problem is that they were only two years, and once I entered the workforce, the old habits re-emerged: crack a notebook from my five years on the job, and you’ll find meeting notes up front and a revised outline for Act I in the back. Right now—I shit you not—right at this very minute I am hunched over a cramped cubicle on my lunch break at a temp gig, writing in longhand on the back of an agenda from a meeting we had last week (Item 1: Training Update).

It doesn’t take a world-renowned guru to see that my life might possibly maybe lack congruence. Huh, do you think?

Get congruent, baby.

“It’s easy for people to put things like this [deep-seated goals] off and get trapped into making a living rather than designing a life,” Robbins writes. And elsewhere: “A lot of very smart people spend their careers totally frustrated because they’re doing jobs that don’t make the best of their inherent capabilities.” I like “designing a life,” by the way. There’s poetry in it. The Avett Brothers express the same idea, if only a little more melodically: “Decide what to be, and go be it.”

I know people who live like this. Ask them at a party what they do and they’ll tell you that they’re a painter, when in reality the only canvas they’re in charge of is an Excel spreadsheet. I’m an actor. Oh, yeah, what restaurant do you work at? That kind of thing. I know writers who think it’s appropriate to apply for a copyeditor position by submitting a resume that lists their recent workshop productions. They aspire to nothing more than temp work, just in case they have to attend an out-of-town tryout ahead of their Broadway premiere. Ride the Greenway, and every cyclists who buzzes by—“on your left, your left!”—is wearing a yellow jersey.

I admire the hell out of these people. I love them for the ego it takes to blindly deny reality and to instead embrace their self-created fantasy. I love too that they refuse to be defined by what they do. I wait tables. That does not make me a waiter. Talk to me at a party and, firstly, I’m going to lead with my passion, not my occupation, and, secondly, fuck you for trying to pigeonhole me anyway. They would scoff at Robbins and his ilk, but really they’re not so far removed from one another. Robbins would applaud their ability to control their own minds. He might even include their story in the next version of the book: Unlimited Power 2: Electric Whoosh-a-loo.

I wish to god I were more like these people. I wish to god if, when you asked me what I do, I didn’t avert my eyes and sheepishly say, “It’s really too boring to go into right now.” I wish you didn’t have to wait for some other subject to come up before somehow I eventually allowed, “Oh, yeah, writing. I mean, I dabble.” But I’m not wired that way. I don’t believe that things are true just because I really, really want them to be true. In fact, quite the opposite. On the rare occasion that I do actually let myself envision something good happening it’s almost guaranteed not to. The surest way for me to lose something I think I’ve got a shot at is for me to picture myself getting it. If I didn’t cleave them in two after reading the words “we’re sorry but,” rejection letters would be crippling: It’s not that you didn’t give it to me; it’s that in my head I already have it, and you’re taking it away.

According to Robbins, this defeatist attitude means that I’m getting what I deserve. My life is a self-fulfilling prophecy: I refuse to envision the best; therefore, the best will never come. My Pulitzer is an elbow-patched Tweed jacket away, but I’m just too stupid to realize it. As is so often the case with this book, Robbins undoes a keen observation with a gross oversimplification. Being a writer or fulfilling any kind of professional goal is not the same as being a reality-tv star, not even if your professional goal is to be a reality-tv star. You don’t call yourself a writer and then start writing. You write. That’s it.

Even if all too often it is relegated to the back of the agenda.

For now, anyway.

My Hometown

It just doesn’t feel right to post about books on a day when my dad woke up with no roof. He and the rest of my immediate family live in Joplin, Missouri, which was devastated by a tornado on Sunday evening. At the time that the tornado twisted its way through the town, I was at Sushi Yu on 181^st Street, trying to explain to the woman behind the counter that I had only ordered one shrimp-tempura roll, not two. Jonah put his hand in the goldfish bowl. “Come on, buddy. You know better than that," I said.

At that moment, my dad was huddled in a closet as the wind scattered his belongings across the rapidly disappearing neighborhood. “It was amazing, Kirb,” he said in a spotty cell-phone conversation much later that night. “One minute it was just raining, and the next thing I know, all of my windows are shattering. It sounded like lightning. I tried to open the garage door, but the wind was holding it shut, so I got into the closet.” Five minute later, he re-emerged and found that he was now a part of the sometimes-not-so-great outdoors. “That beautiful picture of my mom and dad,” he said. A gold chain on the kitchen counter remained exactly where he had left it. The hummingbird feeder in the backyard swayed in the wind.

I had heard the news from my mom, who happened to be in West Virginia at the time and who had received a call from her brother, who lives in one of the Carolinas. “Looks like a tornado hit Joplin pretty good,” he said. “Everyone OK?”  Their mother, my grandmother, is in a nursing home there. “I don’t know,” she said.

In New York, you live your whole life hoping to avoid the cover of the Post. In the Midwest, you don’t ever want to be the lead story on the Weather Channel. They were live, cars stacked on top of one another in the background, pyramid-style, like it was a piece of modern art. They were in front of St. John’s hospital, where we used to get chased by the security guards for skateboarding in their parking garage and where a patient was rumored to have been sucked right out of a window during the storm. As was true with most of the images I scrutinized online that night, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at. Reference points had blown away. At St. John’s, the windows all looked to be broken, giving some credence to the story about the patient being vacuumed out, and there seemed to be some smoke billowing from somewhere. In general, though, the pictures just failed to capture it. From one angle, Joplin High, where I went to school, didn’t seem so bad; from another, it was rubble.

That the Weather Channel had descended spoke to the size of the story, but the real information was being disseminated on Facebook. With cell-phone reception knocked out in the immediate aftermath, Facebook was the most effective way to check on friends and family. I followed the unfolding narrative by feverishly refreshing my screen. “I’m OK but Joplin is destroyed,” read one early post from a good friend. “Just visited South Joplin,” read another. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Ex-pats like myself urged family to check in when they could. I stayed up to date through a series of exchanges with my 14-year-old niece. “Dad is OK, but not sure about PaPa,” she said before we tracked him down and learned about his house. “Attention Joplin,” announced one popular post, “Walking wounded go to Memorial Hall. Critically injured go to Freeman. Repost.” One friend admirably managed some humor from Lawrence. “Glad your cutie patootie is still, um…alrigty-rooty,” read his message to another friend. Yet another friend in nearby Carthage offered her house to people who needed a place to stay.

A kind of roll call developed where people logged on if only long enough to let others know that they were OK. I kept a mental checklist and ticked off names when they called out their virtual number. As the night wore on, I noticed that an ex-girlfriend had remained silent. I had stayed in touch with her pretty well over the years but had no idea where she lived. She had recently moved to a new house and talked a lot about her garden. I checked her profile. There were a host of messages wishing her well. Her profile picture was of her and her son. For a split second, I imagined the worst. “Please don’t be dead in a tornado,” I said to no one in particular. Minutes later, a note appeared: “We are OK.” I went to bed.

As anyone who knows me even a little bit can attest, I have a love/hate relationship with Joplin, which is to say that I love to hate it. My dad had moved us there from San Diego right before I started my freshman year of high school, so I resented it from the start and never really warmed up to it. Growing up, I had always thought of it as small, narrow-minded, and constricting, and, let’s be honest here, my feelings really haven’t changed all that much as I’ve gotten older. We all need something in our lives to push against—whether that something be a political party, a sports team, or a religion—and Joplin has served that role well for me throughout the years.

But I do know a whole lot of people who have stayed in town most of their lives and who have flourished. They are lawyers and musicians and city employees who stayed and fought to build the community rather than tearing it down from afar. For all of the times that I have wished Joplin ill—and, believe me, there have been plenty—it’s something else entirely when it actually happens. That’s where I crashed the junior prom with Tommy Walkinshaw and that’s where we met for drinks every single Friday night after work and that’s where I took my grandmother for a drive that one time. God damnit, like it or not, that’s my hometown.

When I went to bed on Sunday night, the death toll was at 34. By Monday morning, it was 89. Jonah was setting the timer so I could play with him “for just five minutes, Daddy” before going to work. He wanted me to assemble his train tracks. Leu was awake but not yet out of bed. I poked my head in. “Death count is at 89,” I said. “Jesus,” she said. “I would not want to wake up in Joplin this morning.”

I knew what she meant, yet somehow, for the first time in my adult life, Joplin was the one place that I wanted to be.