Fitness—Saved!

DESPITE THE MYSTERIOUS FIRE-DEPARTMENT situation of yesterday that shunted all morning-workout freaks to later or next-day exercise sessions, I did managed to slide in after work, giving a lift to another blah day with some king-hell progress.

Good thing, too. The last time I'd worked my shoulders and legs (I do both on the same day) was last Friday, and I was beginning to feel aches in both. This let me know that muscle was being broken down, or so I believed. In practice, I fulfilled one of my goals for the week by lifting more than I'd anticipated in a couple of exercises.

I felt tired and fatigued by the time I got home from work, and I figured, at minimum, I would get 30 minutes on whichever aerobic machine was available. I assumed the upstairs weight areas were going to be swamped. I typically get home between 5:15 and 5:20, and take about 10 minutes to get dressed and over to the gym in the morning, when there's less traffic through the heart of town. So I took a couple of coins for the town parking meters in case the gym lot was full. But a spot near the entrance welcomed me, which I took as a good sign.

The weight floor was busy, but mostly filled with silent men who weren't using any of the leg or shoulder machines I planned to attack. Just in case, I switched my usual order of battle and hit the shoulder press machine first. Because it's a plate-loaded unit, not a Nautilus- or Cybex-style stack-raiser, it's tough for folks to "work in," or alternate use on the gadget—while one party exercises, the other rests, then they switch, the seat and weight are adjusted, lather, rinse, etc. With plate-loading machines, you'd have to drag off many of the barbell plates to reset the thing for the next person. If you're doing several sets, like I was, and combining it with a second, related exercise (in my case, shrugs with dumbbells), it's best to have the machine to yourself for the full bunch of sets.

Which I did. In fact, I felt strong enough to add a little more weight to later sets, which surprised me. I'd honestly thought that missing Monday, plus the dodgy protein intake over the weekend, were responsible for lost muscle tissue. But the top set on both the shoulder press machine (45 lb. each side, 5 reps) and the shrugs (60 lb., 5 reps) were both confident and controlled.

With the shoulders out of the way, the three sets of leg exercises, as well as some crunches and dumbbell bicep curls I finished with, were a dream. I stretched, rode home through grim humidity, and enjoyed a chocolate–mixed berry protein smoothie. So if nothing else, I am at least feeding myself enough protein to keep muscle during those accidental outtages that inevitably will crop up.

And Now, a Musical Digression

I did manage to follow this up today with a half hour on the elliptical trainer. Instead of absorbing CNBC's panicked pre-market jabberings, I went with my iPod. I listened to a techno/dance compilation Trance: A State of Altered Consciousness, which in disc form rarely left my car during long solo casino rides. Certain dance music from the late Nineties found a nice place in my ear, despite my fairly diverse, untethered allegiance to any one favorite musical style.

I'd first heard this record at the long-gone Tower Records in Paramus. The first cut, Sasha's "Xpander," came on the store stereo system while I was digging through the magazines. I'd heard this track before, during an ad campaign for some videogame, and I found the whole track riveting. I read idly through several magazines and books at the store while listening to the rest of the record, then bought it. In the intervening years, it was always part of my driving music on the way to Foxwoods or Atlantic City. I couldn't make the final approach along Route 2A or the AC Expressway without the gaudy pulse of System F's "Out of the Blue" conjuring images of the Japanese techno-future we all thought was coming back in the mid-Eighties, with candy-sheened megatowers clawing their way into the violet Tokyo skies.

I gave copies of this disc to two women I knew, one a close friend and former lover, the other a friend I hoped would become a future lover (sadly not to be), both of whom dug dance music. My own copy disappeared when I stupidly left a case full of CDs untended at a gym in Las Vegas in summer of 2003. When I bought my first iPod later that year, it took some time to locate a new copy of the record, but find it I did, and I added it to the playlist and stashed the disc someplace safe.

I hadn't listened to it for a while until today. The new iPod does a much better job of running the tracks together without that split-second gap the '03 model dropped between the cuts. Although I didn't have time to let the whole album play, as my ride neared its end, I did blip forward to "Out of the Blue," and imagined myself, with the TV in front of the elliptical trainer showing only my sweaty reflection, gliding among those pastel-and-steel Tokyo towers again, a Blade Runner metropolis done up by Ecstasy-addled confectioner/architects.

Some love may never catch fire, and friends may drift away, but at least I shared that music with them, bidding them the chance to fly through their own dream-cities wherever they might lie.

Overdue Returns

FOR THE PAST TWO MONTHS or so, I've been culling my library. It's now obvious that books are missing from the shelves. If you were wise enough to have taken a picture of my living room during one of my Xmas parties here, holding that photo up with my current shelves in the background would display notable gaps.

This has not been easy. I was raised with a reverence for bound words. I've long had full shelves, plus a couple of boxes of additional books — roleplaying tomes, mostly — in the closet. Parting with them seemed heretical.

I've since understood the emotional attachment that old possessions can conceal, the ties to a safer past they can represent for some. Taken to an extreme of which I would accuse nobody I know, it results in hoarding. In my case, it belies a sad nostalgia. And I have come to hate that prison of a word.

Merciless winnowing was in order.

The first couple of loads went easily. I've brought three grocery bags to the library so far. I actually believe some of the books came to me from their monthly fundraising sales. I think I bought them — I'm thinking of four or so S. J. Perelman collections — out of a sense that I was rescuing the wit inside from final disappearance. I now know it is not my duty to rescue them at the cost of convenience, storage space, or sentimental ties to a New York society now long gone. I'm done with them; let someone else enjoy them. Their past is not my past. I've got enough trouble with that past already.

Poker books from earlier in my studies were also added to the mix. If I've internalized the wisdom, I don't need the shells from whence it sprung. Not that I've become some sort of hold'em demigod, but if I am playing better in any way as a result of having read them, they're sort of alive through my improved play. Which sounds like the justification those soccer-team plane-crash cannibals made for wolfing their dead chums in Alive. At no-limit hold'em, there's little distinction. Eat or be eaten.

But I digress. I made a rule earlier this year that if I were to buy new books, old books would have to go on a one-for-one exchange. I recently took the opportunity to upgrade my Las Vegas Fodor's Guide. My copy of James Ellroy's towering and ugly masterpiece American Tabloid seems to be out on permanent loan, and I fetishize that book; thus I also ordered that. Those were straight replacements (my 2006 Vegas Fodor's is now in the care of a recent convert to the Neon Havens). Were anything else to come in the door, however, something else would need to exit.

Inspired by a post on Get Rich Slowly about the acid-drip that renting a storage space can represent to one's savings, I felt energized to resume my book winnowing. This morning, my local library will become the lucky recipients of the following volumes:

Red Storm Rising and The Hunt for Red October, Tom Clancy: Millions of these two titles are in print, and shall be for years. No need to duplicate the work of the public library system by retaining two of them here. I do have fond memories of Red Storm though. During my boring college summer job, I used to sneak the paving-stone-sized Red Storm paperback into the john for 20-minute reading breaks. Not as brazen as my mother's habit of taking naps in the ladies' room on days following benders with officemates, but damn close.

The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction: This one, a college textbook, has survived several purges. It was the sole text used in an American fiction class I took as part of the English major program. A second course I took that same semester — for which I had to read and comprehend a Great Novel like The Sound and the Fury or A Farewell to Arms each week — had the same professor. And he was terrifying. Think about one click less scary than Elaine Benes's dad as portrayed by Lawrence Tierney in Seinfeld. He wasn't hostile or lacking in academic rigor, just terse and uncompromising, and he detested lack of class participation. (As someone who is terrified of public speaking, but even more upset by having nobody else in a class or meeting answering an instructor's question, I thus had four phobia-laden classes per week.) People eventually forced themselves to answer his questions, but almost always with an unconscious inquisitive lilt at the end, as though asking the prof if they had finally satisfied his burning quest for an answer that demonstrated that the class was actually thinking deeply about the literature. In retrospect, it was effective. In person, it was enervating.

For the class in which we used the Norton, we had the choice for a final project of analyzing one of the short stories we hadn't covered in class, or writing a new one. I chose the latter, and submitted what I, with my current set of eyes, now recognize as a terrible pastiche of cyberpunk clichés. I also now realize they were only really clichés to someone who, as I had been in 1990, hadn't been steeping themselves in William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Walter Jon Williams, and Richard Kadrey at every chance. I anticipated a withering last-page summation of its crappiness from this strict arbiter of great American literature. I was instead stunned to receive an A–. Two years later, I entered the story into a contest run by the college literary magazine. It took third, won me a C-note, and was published in the magazine. Not bad for a story whose best line was, "His scream abruptly cut off as my fingers met in his forebrain."

Writer's Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing: I took the opportunity a month ago to read through this, to determine whether it held anything of continuing worth. It does not; in fact, it's shockingly dated, and was so in the late 80s, when I received it as a gift. You wouldn't think writing tips could go out of date, but the book is tied closely to the markets contemporary to the publication of its individual articles. (Likewise with a guide to writing science fiction short stories that went in an earlier purge.) There is no advice in here that I cannot also find from working writers' blogs, more current writers' guides or marketplace reports, or — frankly — by taking the advice of an oaf I know who told me, about 12 years ago, that I ought to spend 3 hours a day writing. It was his one non-oafish piece of wisdom, and shames me in my failure to follow it.

(Yes, I owned this book before I wrote that horrible cyberpunk story in college. No, I didn't call upon its advice. Writer's Digest is blameless for that horrid line you read a couple of grafs up.)

White Jazz, James Ellroy: This will surprise some folks I know. But it's simply not as good as its predecessor, L.A. Confidential (which is an order of magnitude more complex than the also-excellent movie it inspired), or Ellroy's next novel, the aforementioned American Tabloid. (Jazz does introduce a prototype of Pete Bondurant, one of Tabloid's three stars, which gives me one of those shared-universe kicks, like seeing the skull of an Alien warrior-bug among the Predator's trophies in Predator 2.) For me, the tighter, more telegraphic prose style he adopted after L.A. doesn't function as well in the first-person narrative he uses in Jazz. Third-person limited seems to work best with that style, as does his use of three rotating protagonists, each of whom illuminates traits of the other two through his observations and interactions. With only one narrator, White Jazz feels more like a transcript; with three, Ellroy's books become brutal, seductively shadowed sculptures.

Shock Value, John Waters: The year was 1999. I'd just quit my first real job, and I was attending a horror convention with one of my now-former coworkers, on whom I had a wicked, unspoken crush. We shared a love for the science fiction show Babylon 5, and several of its stars were set to appear at the con. Also on the guest list, along with the usual assortment of nostalgia-pimps and fraying fright-flick and geek-TV retreads, was sleazemeister John Waters. I spent most of the con waffling over how to tell my coworker — who was, if it can be believed, even more naïve about romance than I was — that I dug her as more than just a friend. As I'd driven her to the con, however, I didn't want to spook her and make her even more skittish. So instead I followed her through the exhibition halls, spending way too much money on signed photos of various B5 stars. We bought copies of Waters's book and queued up for his signature. I told the surprisingly normal-looking but stylish Waters my name, shook his hand after he signed the book, and told him I loved his work in The Simpsons, for which he graciously thanked me. If I could've mustered the balls to have been as honest and direct with my coworker about how I liked her as Waters was about his life, aesthetics, and films in this book, I could've spared myself a summer's worth of nervous frustration and second-guessing . . . and the eventual humiliation of being flatly told, when I finally spilled my guts to her, that (and I quote) "you know, I don't date," only to watch her begin dating a longtime friend of mine, her eventual husband, that fall.

Al Leong, aka the False Yaphet Kotto

IN THE DAYS BEFORE the Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia, when "Internet" was somewhere that Ted Kennedy whacked tennis balls while drunk, it took more legwork for a movie fan to trace the career of his or her favorite actors. This was especially true for character actors. True, you might remember a person's face from one film or TV show to the next, but picking his or her name out of the credits, especially when that character merely appeared as "Guard" or "Henchman," was difficult without some fast taping and freeze-framing. (Did I mention we also lacked TiVo? Oh, the indignity.)

My friends and I reached adolescence in the 1980s, the Golden Age of the Action Film. We spent our nights playing Dungeons & Dragons or a host of other roleplaying games, and our audiovisual backdrop for this mayhem was a festival of endlessly rerun bullet operas on HBO, TNT, and the USA Network. By this method did we memorize such epics as Aliens, Lethal Weapon, and Big Trouble in Little China, as well as dozens of B-grade offerings at the unlikely hands (and sometimes feet) of the era's gun-wielding, roundhouse-kicking steroid abusers.

Casting agents for these films invariably turned to a regular cadre of action-film utility players for stuntwork and bit parts that usually ended in on-screen death. Working both ends of this equation was Al Leong. If your movie-watching history matches mine, you know of whom I speak. Asian gent, bald crown, long fringe of hair, bushy handlebar mustache. His characters were dynamic and generally doomed. You saw him electrocute Mel Gibson, watched him lead a gang of Tongs into battle, and laughed as he snarfed a candy bar amid the burglary in Die Hard.

My friends and I naturally picked up on the fact that Leong was typecast. We never actually got his name, though. For a while, he was "that guy from [insert film here]." Somehow, one of us — possibly me — got it into his head that this actor's name was Yaphet Kotto.

Now, we had seen Yaphet Kotto in a few things as well. He was an ill-fated crewmember of the Nostromo in Alien. He challenged Britain's greatest secret agent in Live and Let Die. And he was the FBI nemesis of bounty hunter Robert DeNiro in Midnight Run. Somehow, like a virus jumping species, Al Leong became, in name, Yaphet Kotto. It sounded exotic, had great "mouthfeel," and gave our geeky teenage minds a feeling of smug insider knowledge.

To be clear: This is Al Leong.


And this is Yaphet Kotto.


Why yes, my friends and I function quite well for Mongoloids.

It wasn't until the release of the aforementioned Midnight Run in 1988 that we learned our mistake. Whoever that nimble Asian mook who died in every film was, he wasn't named Yaphet Kotto.

With no swift or convenient way to find out his true name, said actor was dubbed "the false Yaphet Kotto."

People, we called him this for the better part of the next decade. Even after we saw him in more films, even when we could have stayed during the credits to settle, finally, the mystery of who this diehard from Die Hard really was, whenever we saw him, my friends and I would squeal with delight and say, "It's the false Yaphet Kotto!"

It wasn't until the Internet had wormed its way into every home that the resources finally sank to our level of laziness, and one of us learned that this guy was actually named Al Leong. I'd like to think that, on the other side of the country, Al felt a shiver of relief go through him, temporarily displacing the aches and pains from a hundred hyperkinetic stunts and a thousand explosive squibs detonating across his career and anatomy.

Then Steven Seagal probably broke his neck.

Poker Dealer for a Day

WHEN TEXAS HOLD'EM SURGED into popularity through 2003 and especially into 2004, with back-to-back World Series wins by everyman players Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer, people founded home games and held amateur tournaments in droves, as I have mentioned previously. In most of these cases, the players ran and dealt the games themselves. Some planners, however, turned to professionals to set up and staff hold'em tourneys at corporate gatherings, private parties, or charity casino nights. Here's the story of how I spent a day and made a little money teaching folks to play at a birthday hold'em party.

I built my home poker game from an ad on the Internet. Others did the same, either on homepokergames.com or Craigslist. I had seen folks post ads offering their services as dealers for private games, either at someone's home or office or at an underground poker club. One day in July 2004, I noticed an ad for someone seeking dealers for a birthday party. The job was to teach folks the basics of playing hold'em and then deal the game, for which the dealer would be paid. Continuing my streak of somewhat foolhardy acceptance of Internet-based poker ads at face value, I dropped the person an email with my qualifications.

She responded enthusiastically and said I sounded more than qualified to do this job. In a subsequent phone conversation, she said she was recruiting a total of three dealers to help host a surprise poker party for her husband at their home in Rutherford, NJ. As described, we would simply give a lesson, deal, and help folks have fun. No real money would be involved. It didn't seem to pose the same danger as, say, dealing to Silvio Dante or Paulie Walnuts at the Executive Game. For this effort, I could graze on the party food and drink, and I would be paid a C-note.

I accepted. The hostess was thrilled, and had only one minor request: Could I dress up in a white shirt and black pants like a casino poker dealer? I happily agreed. I've flirted with going for Halloween as a casino dealer, so it wasn't that outrageous an idea. She did note that I could bring clothing more appropriate to the season — dead summer heat — because their place was the top floor of a multifamily house, and once the gig got rolling, the place would probably heat up. Once I had made my initial impression, I could change if the joint began roasting.

With her address plotted on Mapquest, I found myself the next Saturday heading down a sun-drenched Route 17 to the intersection with Route 3, hard by Rutherford town. It's a charming suburban burg, and their house was on a broad, tree-bowered avenue that could have appeared in a commercial. As I pulled up, incongruously in my black Dockers and white dress shirt. I noticed a second person, similarly attired, considerably more obese, heading up the driveway of the three-story house. Intros were exchanged, and he turned out to be much like myself, a player in home and casino poker who spotted the ad while looking for a new game. We entered the house from the rear, squeezing up a twisting stairway that emitted ominous creaks as my companion preceded me up to the top floor, where the hostess, a woman in her late twenties, happily welcomed us in.

This floor probably began life as the house's attic when it was a single-family domicile. Once the building had been subdivided, the owners retrofitted interior walls around the perimeter to partition a kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, but they left the bulk of the attic open as a common area. This space was heavily decorated with both birthday and gambling party trappings. Somehow, they had stolen or otherwise acquired a large World Poker Tour banner, which hung over the food table. Three long tables, each covered in felt and ringed with folding chairs, awaited the players. It was behind one of these tables that we met our third dealer, a New York City policeman from Staten Island. I recognized him as a frequent advertiser on Craigslist offering his poker-dealing services. The three of us discussed what we would teach the newbies and how to run the game — the hostess hadn't really specified what we were to play — to ensure that folks had a fair shot at the prizes. The hostess had explained that she had three Texas hold'em chip sets, one for the winner on each table. We decided to let folks play regular ring hold'em until the alarm went off, at which point the chip leader on each table would win their poker set. Fairly simple.

Even with only about five party guests in addition to the hostess and the dealers, the attic was already quite warm. I had brought a T-shirt and shorts up with me in a gym bag, as had the guy who arrived at the same time as I did. Noticing this, the hostess apologized for the heat and stressed again that we could change when we got too hot. I suspected this would come sooner rather than later. For the moment, I grabbed a soda and got my table in order, stacking chips for the players, spreading the deck face up to show the full spread, and waiting for the rest of the guests to arrive.

As guests filtered in, they marveled at the whole setup, and did double-takes at the fact that she had recruited dealers. I greeted anyone who strolled by my table, hoping the fact that I was sweating more with each new source of heat that walked up the stairs with a gift or bottle. The air conditioners were on, but were not equal to the task of chilling this top-of-the-building hot box. I opened a second Diet Coke and got a water bottle in reserve ready for any dizzy spells.

Presently, the birthday boy arrived, completely surprised and stunned at the whole setup. The hostess then divided the crowd among the three tables, and gave us some time to introduce our players to the game. I'm a fairly effective trainer, and no small ham, so having a captive and slightly tipsy audience was right up my alley. I've also sat in at a couple of casino poker lessons. Plus, I find the whole procedure of being a dealer fascinating. I was very much "on" as I explained what the blinds were, how the board cards would combine with their hole cards to make hands, and how the betting would progress. I dealt a few practice hands face up for them, and I gave a rudimentary lesson on the importance of position. Nothing too deep or math heavy. By the time the hostess started the clock, they had the basics roughly down, and enough alcohol to make any mistakes humorous.

I truly enjoy dealing poker, so the mechanical aspect of it, aside from the liters of sweat rolling down my back, was a blast. The players were gloriously green — showing one another their cards, betting with anything, saying "All in!' when they shoved in their last chips — and had a ball. The time passed very swiftly, another marker of how much fun it was, and soon we were awarding the hold'em sets to the lucky degenerates at each table with the biggest piles of chips.

At this point, I changed out of my sopping dealer duds and into the amazing comfort of my dry, baggy T-shirt and shorts combo. I lingered and shot the shit with folks for a while, finally feeling a little out of place. Most of these folks were about 10 years younger than me, and somewhat to my right politically. No matter. When the hostess handed us each an envelope, I saw five portraits of that upstanding Democrat-Republican Andrew Jackson, and was quite happy to cast my ballot for that worthy, if unbalanced, dead president.

I stayed for no longer than another half hour. I was ravenously hungry, but I was wary of the food that had been provided, which, though tasty earlier in the day, by then had been marinating in the heat for hours and was no doubt host to some fascinating microorganisms. So I thanked the hostess for the gig, accepted in turn her profuse thanks, congratulated her husband on his birthday and on having such an excellent spouse, and then threaded my way down the narrow stairs into the comparatively cool July afternoon. Not even in Vegas had an open car window and a highway breeze felt so refreshing on my face.

Sometimes I look back and wonder at the boldness I exhibited in accepting players and a job like this from faceless ads on the Internet. I can't claim this success had anything to do with the legendary gambler's honor of which old-timers like Doyle Brunson wax rhapsodic. All I know is that the home game I assembled from scratch on the Internet is still going, in a different venue, and has engendered friendships that might never have coalesced. And aside from dropping about 10 pounds of water weight, I suffered no ill consequences from my day as a dealer. I hope to recapture some of that willingness to venture forth from my shell in the job hunt. If nothing else, this incident gives me an answer to an employer's question of what my most unusual job might have been.

July 8, 1994: When the Waters Rose

I WAS NOT KEEPING a blog on the 10th anniversary of the above date, so I couldn't commemorate it here. With one eye on the screen and the other on the blue skies over my town, far bluer than those on 7/8/04, I recount the day the waters of a northern border town of New Jersey swept away my coworkers' cars and trust in the weather.

At the time, I worked at a publisher of psychological and human-factors books and journals. The expansion of the production department and our need for warehouse space led the boss, in April 1994, to move both parts of the business to Northvale, a town on the New York–New Jersey border, far from the highways and malls that stereotype this state. The new workplace comprised two warehouses, each with vestigial office space. Into one of these spaces our production department was crammed. The office itself was at the blind end of a desolate, winding road, dotted with similar industrial spaces and partly paralleled by a water-filled ditch that terminated in a pond. Our nearest neighbor was a manufacturer of cologne, and the factory lent the air a sickly-sweet redolence.

In the months since our move, I and my coworkers noticed that the groundwater in the area, which also saturated the woods between our parking lot and the cologne factory, rose easily when heavy rain fell. The ditch and pond are part of the Sparkill Creek, which flowed across the border from New York. Bureaucratic turf conflicts had prevented some responsible party — either the town, the county, or the Army Corps of Engineers — from performing much-needed dredging of the creek, which would have alleviated the swift rise of water downstream after rain or snowmelt. It also would have prevented what followed.

I don't recall either the weather prediction or the exact conditions on the morning of Friday, July 8, 1994. As the afternoon neared, however, the skies blackened, and rain began to fall. Not merely swift-moving summer rain. This was Hollywood-backlot rain of the 40-days-and-40-nights variety. Water fell in punishing drops from the storm clouds, which came to a halt over Northvale, it seemed, and quickly saturated the ground.

Rain was falling on the northern side of the border as well, and the Sparkill Creek failed to contain the waters. Those of us in the outer offices noticed that the water had breached the streams that ran through the nearby woods, which were now more akin to flooded mangrove forests. Bullet-like precipitation now began to splash into a rising sheet of water in our parking lot. We had seen ponding before in the lot, but nothing like this, never so quickly.

The rain refused to stop. Despite the presence of the company's chief financial officer, we didn't get the go-ahead to leave. I tried to sneak out, carrying a Federal Express box, but my department head spotted me, and when she asked where I was going, I stammered some excuse about dropping the box in my car to deliver it on the way out. When I looked out the front door, I saw that the water had reached the top of the first of four or five steps up to the entrance.

Finally someone made it plain to the mongoloids in the comparatively dry confines of the main office that multiple cars, at minimum, were at risk of being flooded, and we got the nod to leave. The rain was still falling at a blinding rate, and from my window I could see the water had reached the bottom of my car door. Folks clustered in the entryway but stopped, in disbelief at the still-pouring precipitation and the depth of the water in the lot. I pushed through them and ran, sloshing through the flood, to my car. Opening the door admitted a little of the water, but I did manage to get the engine to turn over, back the car up slowly (to avoid getting too much moisture in my tailpipe), and roll out of the lot.

My view was poor from the water spattering against it, but I knew the drive in and out, and could make out bodies of water. What posed a greater threat was the depth of these bodies. The road out was uneven in level in addition to being curvy, so any of the floods emanating from the overwhelmed sewer gratings could have swamped my engine and left me stranded. I decided to avoid as many as I could, including a possible escape onto a higher side street through a fence chained shut with what I hoped was a flimsy lock.

Down the first straightaway, however, there was little to distingush the road from the drainage ditch that had once lay placidly beside it. I drove slowly through a few massive, unavoidable puddles, which were deep enough for water to splash onto my car hood. At the first major bend, however, my potential escape was blocked by a vast road lake, which could conceivably have been deeper than any of the other bodies I had boated through. With the rain finally slackening, I could see licks of steam emanating from beneath my hood — evaporation of water on hot components, I ardently hoped. I dared not risk the lake.

Instead, I made a hard left, not along the road, but onto the grass next to it. The warehouse to my left had a significant lawn, and although it seemed waterlogged, there was no deep ponding or mire in which I thought I might be trapped. So I drove across this company's lawn, evading the massive puddle and eschewing the Dukes of Hazzard–like crashout through the fence.

I took the last couple of bends, and the ponds that made them treacherous, slowly, and finally made it onto the main street. From here, only one more body of floodwater stood between me and escape: on the other side of the railroad tracks, which, by coincidence, ran next to the professional building where I had had my first part-time postcollegiate job. I confess that the tension of having dodged so many deep water hazards and the excitement at the proximity of my escape led to my first and last mistake at this juncture. I accelerated over the raised tracks, splashed into the final pond, forged through about half of it . . . and then the engine died.

I frantically tried to restart it, but I couldn't get it to turn over. Feeling massively stupid, I popped it into neutral, hopped out, and pushed it to dry ground with the assistance of some kind onlookers. Once we had it on the side of the road, I ran into my old company to call AAA for a trip to the dealer's, boat shoes squishing with each step. After the tow, my father picked me up from the car lot and listened to my amazing tale, which I punctuated with considerable doubt over whether my car would ever run again. This fear was dispelled the next morning: We went back to the dealer, started the car successfully, let it run as it spit water from the tailpipe for 10 minutes, then backed out and left in our respective vehicles. That car lasted another 11 years, even if I never managed to get all of the flood mud from the inside of the hood.

I was lucky. Although all of my coworkers escaped without physical harm, their cars didn't.

In the wake of my escape, my coworkers found a number of ways out. When the rain threatened to invade the building, most of them entered our neighboring company's warehouse, loaded into the back of an 18-wheeler (along with a fairly frightening dog, I am told), and were driven free of the flood from that dry perch. A couple of them were removed via rowboat after sticking it out and attempting to walk through the receding waters, only to be stopped by the police for fear of being swept down through an open manhole into the fast-moving sewers. Both groups made it into the media, the former on the TV news later that night, the latter in a photo the next day in the county newspaper.

My coworkers returned the next morning along a street free of water but strewn with mud and debris to find their vehicles entirely inundated, in some cases still full of water. My friend Anne wept as water gushed from her Honda as it was hoisted up by a tow truck. My boss and mentor, Chris, was one of the few whose car — a silver Chevelle — still functioned more or less ably after the flood, and he redubbed it SWAMP THING, which he later painted across the rear in bold, Famous Monsters of Filmland–style letters. In one rare burst of humor, the finance officer's car was found to have a number of wrapped condoms floating around inside. But most of the cars were totaled.

In learning this, I felt guilty for having gotten out first and not having taken some of my workmates along. I eventually realized that going solo was probably the only thing that saved me. I was driving through water that crested my headlights in some cases. Any more weight, and the level of the engine (in particular the spark plugs) might have dipped beneath the waves. Then I would have endangered up to another three lives, with no guarantee of choice as to where the car might have crapped out. The truck that eventually rescued most of the others might have passed to see four soaked production editors clustered together on the straining roof of a submerged Corolla.

I visited the scene of the flood that Sunday. Mud still clung to the vegetation lining the road and drainage ditch, which had subsided to its regular banks in the past 48 hours. The building bore a watermark where the flood had peaked. I parked my car where I had parked that Friday, just to see how deep it would have been in the flood. The next time you see a Corolla, stand next to the door handles. Based on the mud line on the trees, had I left the vehicle along with the others, the water would have reached midway between the door latch and the window line. A muffler full of water and a wet distributor cap would have been the least of my worries.

The company covered part of the replacement costs of the cars totaled in the flood. It instituted a new policy: When it rained in the future, two people would have to go out with one of our rulers to measure the depth, and beyond some point, we would be allowed to leave. Even after we had a firsthand witness from the top of the corporate pyramid, we still couldn't be trusted to nick out at the slightest sight of moisture. It typifies the mentality at that company to this day. Anne and I made this errand one day, when a late-winter rain following an icy snowfall caused the water to rise over impenetrable permafrost. I believe the measure was deep enough, but by that time, she and I knew each other well enough to craft a saving mistruth if it meant she didn't have to suffer the loss of another car.

The closest I have been to such threatening flooding since then came with Tropical Storm Floyd in September 1999. I and my car escaped harm. By that point, I was commuting into the city via bus, but the roads had been closed by the remnant of that once-powerful hurricane and the torrential rain it brought. Apartments and condos less than a half mile from where I sit went under water. The Elks Lodge to which my dad belongs took on several feet. Scant miles from where I had lived a month earlier, in Lodi, low-lying homes and businesses disappeared under flooding, and an aerial photo of the region resembled some of the scenes from Katrina. Still, then, as now, had the waters lapped at my tires and the clouds shown no signs of yielding to the sun, I would have gotten into my car, which in 1994 was dipped like Achilles in trying waters, and escaped as best as I could. I spent 9 months underwater prior to my birth. No pull of heroism or hubris, nor any threat of unemployment, can tempt me to leave the world in a similar fashion by remaining behind.

How I Boosted My SAT(Swearword Acquisition Total)

NOBODY IS BORN WITH their vocabulary, just the potential for one. We begin learning it at birth. Whether through listening to one's elders, reading, taking in audio or visual media, or eventually, in school, word by word our storehouse of text fills. I have not gotten so old and feebleminded that I can't remember exactly where I picked up certain words. I have been batting around a post on that topic, which would also give you some insight into what sort of stimuli influenced me early on. The story behind one word, however, is funny . . . and a bit perilous.

I believe in freedom of expression, but I also have a sense of tact. Merely because one can use a given word or phrase, it doesn't mean one should. This applies most strongly to profanity. Expletives are a seasoning, not the main dish, and one has to prepare the menu with the diners in mind. Fan I may be of such curse-laden fare as Scarface or The Sopranos, it doesn't mean that I am going to quote these works in every context. People look at you a little strange if you get your Deadwood on and, say, greet the father of the bride with a hearty, "Congratulations, cocksucker!"

Among grownups of reason, with whom the ground has been prepared carefully, I nevertheless believe one can broach any topic and discuss it rationally. It is in this spirit, then, that we proceed.

I am going to tell you how I first heard, and learned the meaning of, the word cunt.

Ah, the C-bomb. I do not use this word. I barely even use the word tits, not even in the expressions "tits up" or "ripped to the tits." I can think of no more demeaning objectification of women than to use cunt, even if it does, like fuck or shit, originate centuries ago when the mincemeat pie that is English was still cooling on the great green windowsill of Britain. Believe me, I'll use the shit out of fuck a million times before I enter the launch code on the C-bomb. On those very few occasions when I have become infuriated enough to utter it — even among men — I have regretted it. Even in my private journal it does not appear. I have never heard it at my poker game, which is a sausage-fest and does get its share of earthy guy talk. As wide as my reading has been lo these many years, when I ran across it several times in the first 20 pages of Tropic of Cancer, I had to force myself to continue. It is never used in the South Park movie, which otherwise rode its R-rating straight through the Seven Dirty Words.

But I had to learn it somewhere.

This is how.

The year was 1981. I was in sixth grade. As a way of allowing students to decide what language they would take, my junior high school had kids take a sampler quarter each of French and Spanish. The second semester was devoted to Communicative Arts, which we had in addition to Art class, and which could best be described as applied art, versus the general art teaching we got in Art class (e.g., two weeks in clay sculpture, two weeks making a giant version of some common item with cardboard, two weeks of stamping inked potatoes on oak tag, etc.).

One day in this class, two of my classmates began snickering among themselves. By this time, I was known as a "good" kid, someone who wouldn't get into trouble, who was not only smart but fairly geeky (this was right after the summer of The Empire Strikes Back, and I still hadn't calmed down). So the more rowdy kids liked to try and tempt me into trouble. I therefore recognized this sort of snicker when it emanated my way.

This time, they tried to gauge how many swears I knew. The class was poorly supervised, so you could talk at leisure and whisper "bad words" without being caught. I did know fuck (which, as a young child, I thought I had coined) and shit (which, around the same time, I employed on an even younger kid one day at the park, which got me a stern talking-to and what today we would call a "time out"). I also knew a range of euphimisms and double entendres, a phrase that, unlike most of my classmates, I could actually spell even before the sampler of French earlier that year.

I had much to learn, however. "James," asked one of them with a leer, "do you know what a cunt is?"

I had no idea, but from the way the kid asked, and the reaction from the kid next to him, I knew it wasn't clean.

"No, what is it?"

"Maybe you should ask Miss [whatever the teacher's name was]," the second one said. I knew that was a bad idea.

"I don't think so. What is it?"

"It's a unit of electricity," said the first kid, joining the second one in a fit of snickers.

Now, as foul as this word is, that is a pretty funny line for a sixth grader, I have to give him that. Replace the underscored terms in the following sentences with our mot du jour:

"The sockets in Europe are all screwed up. All my plugs are for 110 volts, and they need 220 volts to work."

"The new hydroelectric plant is expected to bring 6 megawatts of power to over 120,000 homes in the Valley."

"Remember, it's not the volts that kill you, it's the amps!"

No way was I asking Teach the definition of this word. So what was my brilliant idea for researching this lexicographic dilemma, in the days before Merriam-Webster online and Wikipedia?

Simple. I asked my mother.

I never had a sit-down with my parents to get the scoop on "the birds and the bees," but neither had I made any mention to that point that I knew the basics. (A surprisingly frank book on the topic was on the anatomy shelf in the children's stacks of my town library, which described the entire process.) However, they had not raised me with any extreme prudery, aside from sending me to bed before the more adult fare came on WHT. I was even allowed to listen to the soundtrack of Hair, which if you recall, is by no means all as radio friendly as "Age of Aquarius" or "Good Morning Starshine." In fact, when the term fellatio was used in the song "Sodomy," I asked my mom what both of those words meant, and she said it was something that happened during the act of love. (The latter one might say a bit much about my parents.) So I had had blue language defined for me in the past. Just . . . nothing this explosive.

So I walked into the kitchen that afternoon after school and asked, "Mom, what is a cunt?"

She paused in her preparation of dinner, and to her credit didn't instantly feed me a hunk of Ivory Soap or drive me to church for penance, as some of my friends' parents would have. "Where did you hear that?" she asked evenly.

"Some kids at school asked me if I knew what it was, and that I should ask the teacher."

"It's a term for a woman's sex organs. If anyone else at school asks you if you know any other words like this, ask me first and I'll tell you, okay?"

"Okay."

Now, see what she did here. She didn't threaten me with dire consequences if she ever heard me say it again. She didn't ask me to squeal on whoever said it at school, or for the name of the teacher in whose class I heard it, so she could call the principal and demand some sort of redress. She defined it calmly, and in asking me to direct future inquiries along these lines to her, expressed her desire not to hear that I've been using this language myself.

After this initial exposure, I'm fairly certain that I didn't hear the word again until high school, when I saw one of George Carlin's cable specials. I guarantee you that I laughed, as did my parents, who watched along with me.

How might my approach to the word have been different had I been punished on the spot? Would I have reacted against this by placing it in heavier rotation? Would I have objectified women with other terms, in my actions, in my relationships with them? It's tough to say if that might have been a turning point in my development. All I can say is, even as other curse words slowly made it into my rotation as needed among friends and even with my parents, this one has stayed pretty firmly locked up.

At least until Ann Coulter becomes secretary of state.

Dodging Raindrops Like Bullets

I DISEMBARKED FROM THE train just in time, it seems. From the station, I could see massive black thunderheads gathering at nearly every corner of the sky. One wan strip of light sky was all that remained of a Thursday afternoon cut short by an impending storm. Ozone hung heavy in the air around the station, where the ground bore slick evidence of a previous soaking.

I made a quick stop in Trader Joe's across the street from my apartment, figuring I wouldn't have long before the heavens opened or the gusting winds knocked out the power and placed any dairy I purchased in jeopardy. On my final jog from the store to my front door, I felt fat drops spatter on my forehead, and lightning caught me with its flash, like a prisoner slinking along a jailhouse wall during a breakout. Now I am ensconced before my computer, unplugged from the wall and the Net for safety, with 1010 WINS in the background, the broadcast so wracked with static it sounds like an ethereal giant is somehow chewing on the signal itself.

Don't get me wrong — I love a good storm. With today bringing the official start of hurricane season, I'm sure we'll get our share of violent weather, which with any fortune will be more of a spectacle than a hazard. As a child, lying in bed on the top story of my parents' house, I enjoyed being lulled to sleep by the unstructured music of rain pattering on the roof, distant rumbles of thunder punctuating the symphony. My parents and I were trapped once in a South Jersey shopping center, when a huge storm swept over us, illuminating the sky and pouring dangerously opaque sheets of rain over the flat landscape. With no real sense of scale and few landmarks of any height down the shore, it seemed to my 10-year-old self like the ground-to-air lightning was a thousand miles tall.

Later, during a college summer, my foolhardy friends and I watched a massive high-atmosphere lightning storm from the deck of a friend's house. We drew our chairs under shelter and watched in awe as lightning burned inside dark, swiftly passing clouds, like thoughts illuminating the neurons of a feverish brain. For what seemed like hours we watched this light show, until the air could support the moisture no longer and drenching rain began to sheet down . . . whereupon we got the hell back into the house.

This rain now engulfing the area is welcome, the weather having switched decisively to heat and humidity after the holiday weekend. Optimally, it will last all day tomorrow and trail off, as light rain, into Saturday, thus keeping potential beachgoers off of the Garden State Parkway. I have a plan to drive two friends, Steve and Dave (aka Felix), to Atlantic City. Dave's had a couple of recent and profitable gambling excursions, and some weeks ago threw this date at the wall to see who might want to come along for a rematch. We had a fourth, the mighty Bill, but his Palpatine-like progress into the Hoboken power structure called him into service for Saturday and he had to back out.

This is a bit of a Costanza-like worlds-are-colliding moment for me. My trips to the local (and distant) gambling emporia, both as a blackjack and craps novice and, later, as a poker padawan, have been solo affairs. I've floated group outings in the past, but time and events conspired against me. This changes Saturday. Neither Steve nor Felix are in my poker circle, so we're looking at the two aforementioned games as our degeneracy of choice (unless we wander into one of the racing books). I haven't played blackjack, formerly my game of choice, since my June 2003 trip to Las Vegas, when Dame Poker ran her green finger across my brow and then laid the tempting bait of a royal flush before my bedazzled eyes. Craps I remember how to play, but I have been reviewing blackjack basic strategy for the past couple of days so I am not staring at two Aces in front of me and saying, "I'm all in" instead of splitting them. (Apropos of my coming date with table gaming, last week at the poker game I kept getting hands — 7 4, 9 2, 8 3 — which would have warranted doubling down at a blackjack table, but which in hold'em were absolute trash.)

So what we're looking for this weekend is a bit of rain to ease the influx of shore-goers, a sudden reawakening of my basic-strategy skills, a benign neglect on the part of the gods of statistical variance, a hot hand when the dice are rattling around in it, and, of course, a boatload of fun. Once all these goals are achieved, and we've slipped back under the wire to the dreary, casino-starved precincts of Bergen County, then — then — the skies can unleash whatever torrents of weather they so desire.

Orange Heroin, or The Smack Chip

DORITOS. LIVES THERE ANOTHER snack chip so addictive, so dangerous, so foul to the breath and waistline and yet so easy to engulf in great, faux-cheese-dusted handfuls?

Doritos were my downfall last night, at a poker gathering with my usual players. I had eaten properly all day, and had allowed myself the luxury of two slices of pizza out of the pie ordered for the festivities. Within the context of my activity level and food intake, this was no problem.

Then the host's wife came home, bearing snack chips. Among them, the foul saffron-hued deceivers themselves.

A bowl was placed at my end of the table, along with a heap of Fritos, glistening there like Howard Hughes's canola-fried toenails. The familiar waft of chemically processed cheese analogue sweet-talked its way into my nostrils. My Doritos life flashed before my eyes:

I am in third grade. I am sitting in the living room of my parents' house, chubby ass ensconced on mid-70s-era mustard shag. I am reading a book on chess (Chess the Easy Way, by Reuben Fine), a childhood interest of mine. I have taken this book out of the Montvale library numerous times. It pleases my young mind somehow — not necessarily the content, but the red cover, the print, the renderings of the pieces on the board. On the coffee table next to the book is a Corelle bowl, white with a stripe of small green flowers around the outside, from a line of crockery that tens of thousands of postgrads would inherit from their parents upon finding their first new apartment. The bowl is filled with Doritos, heavily spiced and fried, crunchy, yet sadly not infinite. Each handful brings me closer to the point when I will have to wheedle my way into a refill. . . .

I am in freshman year of college, fall semester. I am reclining on my dorm room bed, my small, static-laced TV propped up on a dresser and the focus of my attention this evening. I am waiting for the premiere episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first new Trek show in decades. After spending part of the previous summer watching the original show to make fun of it, I have unwittingly fallen into being a fan. As the final commercial finishes, I rip open a huge bag of Doritos and await the opening narration. . . .

October 3, 1995. Lunch hour. I am joining an entire nation in hanging on every word of Judge Lance Ito, who is speaking to the foreman of the jury appointed to weigh the guilt or innocence of O.J. Simpson. Unlike millions who are riveted to this spectacle their TVs, I am sitting in my black Corolla in the Mahwah parking lot of my employer and listening to the proceedings on the radio. Eschewing a nutritious lunch for convenience and comfort, I am grazing from an open bag of Doritos that sits on the passenger seat. I punctuate Ito's instructions with echoing crunches and frequent sips from the 20-oz. bottle of Diet Coke at the ready in the cupholder. Months of tension and speculation on the part of armchair attorneys and talking heads will climax in moments. I stop feeding my face only when I hear the words, "We the jury. . . ."

Saturday night? Sunday morning? It's not the next day until you sleep. So it's still some random Saturday in 2000. I have just gotten home from my pal Tony's, where he and Felix and I have been enacting mayhem on Tony's PlayStation. This is way too much stimulation even for my adult brain, so on the way home I have snagged a bottle of Diet Sprite and a bag of Doritos. Some folks like sleeping pills, some prefer warm milk, others a stiff shot of Nyquil. I have chosen to wind back down with a book, Ramie's Lane Closure Ambrosia show of drum & bass on WFMU, and a hand-to-mouth conveyance of "cheese" and calories until I drop off or run out of chips. . . .

Yes, I finished the bowl. No, I don't regret it.