There are certain things you wouldn't mind hearing when you go to a doctor: "Your AIDS test was negative," "No, you're not pregnant," or "Just head on home. Today's Patient Appreciation Day, and your new heart is on us." Conversely, there are things you don't want to hear: "You need to head down to the county hospital's emergency room. Now."
Just my luck, on Sept. 13 I was told just that - along with, "We're calling you a cab to take you to the emergency room. Either take it for free now or pay for your own ambulance a few hours later."
Worry, cry, scream - I apparently didn't even have time for that. I had come in because my calves were swollen and discolored and had a wound that hadn't quite healed despite being visible for a month. I was utterly terrified, and I was caught between the cracks since my insurance eligibility at PW wasn’t until Nov. 1st. As the cab's horn honked outside, I leaped up, grabbed my backpack and bolted out of the office like I was starring in "The Fugitive."
Now I was living a movie cliché: I was literally racing against time to save my life, for the doctor had also told me if I had waited five more days to see her on my scheduled appointment, .I would have wound up in the Intensive Care Unit or dead.
Even more terrifying, at that moment, was the fact that I was hurtling towards LA County/USC General Hospital – the iconic building that served as the image and inspiration for ABC’s perennial daytime soap opera, and therefore the most famous hospital in America. Anytime someone mentions they're "going to County", people assume they're either headed to prison or to a medical experience that would make them wish they were behind bars instead.
“Oh my God! Why are you there?!” was the number one reaction I received even after clarifying I was headed to be healed rather than arrested.
Well, there’s any number of reasons a person can wind up there: a) they’re uninsured, b) they’re broke, or c) they’re batshit crazy. In my case I was neither broke nor crazy, but had slipped through the cracks as my new employer was about to rant me insurance in just two more weeks. My body always has the worst timing.
I’ve never been too scared of hospitals. I grew up living at one, since my dad was a VA doctor who was a rehab specialist, picking and prescribing which prosthetic arms and legs our veteran patient needed after they’d had their limbs blown off in battle.
We lived for our first two years of his job in a rented mansion-style house on a street of homes set aside for doctors new to the area. We kids adapted easily, only wondering on occasion why we had to cover our eyes in the morning as a mental patient peed on our lawn, or wondering why none of our friends’ parents let THEM come visit us, instead insisting we come play in their bland suburban neighborhoods.
Sure, you could say it was strange to ride my bike to my dad’s office after school and hang out with old soldiers missing parts of their mind or body. But I was friends with them, especially because of the hospital chapel’s Sunday Mass, which is what my dad dragged us to because he was too lazy to drive down the mountain from the hospital into town. I was glad we were at the hospital’s Mass, because where else could I meet a man like James Keever, who was in charge of the Scripture readings but would forget to wear a belt and his pants would fall to the floor in the middle of reading Jesus parables. He’d freeze as if wondering whether the throng before him noticed – of course we had! – and then kept reading, finished, hiked his pants back up from his ankles and sat down as if nothing had happened. Or Russell Houda, a polite little man in a suit who constantly drove my dad nuts by insisting he had to let me watch “The Beverly Hillbillies,” which my dad had declared off limits to me due to Elly Mae’s ample charms.
But my adult visit to LA County Hospital was a whole other world.
During my 14-hour wait to enter the County ER, I encountered a tattooed, mohawked Nine Inch Nails fan who was awaiting emergency dental surgery to remove a stray incisor which had somehow grown in upside down, rendered the left side of his face immobile by pinching the nerves within, and was now about a half-inch away from affecting the blood vessels leading to his eyeball. At least he was nonchalant about it, noting, "I'm used to pain."
Among the dozens of oddball examples of humanity I experienced there was an ancient Asian man who looked like he was about to drop dead in his plastic chair before anyone noticed him. And an angry African-American man who said he'd been waiting 10 hours just to pick up a refill on his blood pressure medication and now felt his heart beating so hard he thought it would burst right out of his chest.
Worst of all was the young Hispanic guy in a wheelchair, who had what appeared to be a gaping split in his skin along the top of his foot. When I asked him what happened, he replied, "Lawnmower accident." As I nearly retched, he further explained that he had originally cut the foot clean off, but the doctors at LAC/USC had miraculously reattached it and tried to make it work over six months of inpatient therapy. He went home, and even without having stood on it, had managed to reopen one of the major fault lines in his flesh.
The cost of his bill was $1 million and growing by the day. But all he could do was laugh in frustrated amazement: "Hey, at least I don't have to pay for it! Thank God for ATP!"
I didn't know it yet, but ATP stands for "Ability To Pay," and it is the program that makes care for all possible, yet puts the county health system's financial stability at risk.
The idea is that, after returning home, patients are asked to set an appointment with a billing department worker in which they are to bring in proof of income and bank statement for the month in which they were hospitalized. The ultimate bill is rendered as a percentage of the funds they had available in that particular month.
For instance, my official bill for a five-day, four-night stay was an "all-inclusive" $20,828. After looking at my less than Trump-worthy financial information, my ATP payment was declared around $1600.
And if my description of my stay as a "five-day, four-night, all-inclusive" experience makes LAC/USC sound suspiciously like a resort, consider the following. While I had a severe leg infection, it did not give me pain and wasn't contagious, so I was free to walk around the hospital at will anytime I wasn't strapped to an IV or sleeping. The food was actually pretty good, and the smart guys in my wing quickly caught on to the fact they could stash extra sandwiches, snacks and sodas to use anytime they wanted.
The hospital really was like a combination of resort and "Hogan's Heroes"-style prison - lights out at 11, TV off from 1030 p.m. to 6 a.m. If you're gone from the wing more than four hours, you start over in the hell of the ER waiting room. The patio for smoking was like a prison yard for a downtown max penitentiary, on a high floor and all fenced in, but the shower was described by Paul, the guy in the next bed over, as a "monsoon" and its warm mist was indeed the best I'd ever experienced. And I don't know whether I was just easily impressed after expecting less than nothing, but the ice water was pretty damn good too.
For the four of us men who shared a big room in the orthopedics ward, it indeed seemed a shelter from the storm. Paul was a Caucasian, 50-year-old gay personal chef who had months of therapy awaiting him, since the hospital had to replace a shattered shoulder with one made of plastic. He spoke like the wizened veteran of the place, able to define another patient within seconds.
"I can always tell the ones who just did time," he'd chuckle. "It's an ultra-masculine thing going on in their air."
The other two guys were Latinos, one who had simply broken his leg in a normal fashion, the other one recovering from the agonizing removal of a leg brace that had been held in place via a seemingly endless series of screws that left his leg looking like pummeled ground beef while gasping, seemingly 24 hours a day: “Oh, Dios mio! Aye Maria!”
And then there was me: the guy with a mysterious infection the doctors never quite defined, but who was able to wander with aplomb except for the four times a day IV drips sent medicine to save my legs.
TO BE CONTINUED
Sunday, May 10, 2009
BEHIND THE BOOKS AT BARNES & NOBLE (Yes, we hate you all. All of you customers asking where the Da Vinci Code is - or the bathroom...argh)
I started reading books way beyond my age level when I was 4 years old, so I’ve had a nearly lifelong love-hate relationship with them. My mom says I started reading sixth-grade science books because I watched “Sesame Street” three times a day and picked up all the phonics in them.
Other kids thought I was weird, I wound up getting glasses at an insanely early age because I strained them from sneaking books under my covers with a flashlight, and I eventually got more hooked on writing my own stories than reading those of others. So that’s why it was kind of ironic that when I was desperate five years ago and really needed a job, I got hired by a giant Barnes & Noble store.
You might think that if you’re gonna work retail, a bookstore would be a pretty cool dignified place to do it. After all, you’re not constantly having to tell people they’re not fat in clothing stores, or insisting they Supersize their fries. Instead, you’re opening their eyes and minds to great literature – or so you’d think.
Probably because I’m 6 foot 3 and 300 pounds and hard to miss in a lineup, my managers forced me to work as the Information Guy for the store. At my branch, the manager took it way too literally and had me really wear signs around my neck saying shit like “Information,” or “How Can I Help You?” What I really should have worn was a sign saying “Down the aisle and to the left,” because that’s where the bathrooms were and because we were the only place in Old Pasadena’s shopping district dumb enough to have public bathrooms, I had to repeat that phrase about 500 times a day. I got so used to doing it that the moment someone made that “uncomfortable” or “embarrassed” face people always use when seeking a bathroom, I’d just save them the hot air from their mouths, point and say “Down and to the left.”
What was more annoying is when these same people returned from the bathroom with a horrified look on their faces, asking if there was going to be any “janitorial services rendered” on the premises anytime soon. Look, you want 5000 people to be able to use the bathroom, you’re gonna get a mess – and my job title ain’t janitor. I fantasized about losing it and spewing those very same words to someone, but never got the chance. And though I led an employee-wide push to seal off the toilets from the public, the bosses refused – until they put up the Berlin Wall of Bathrooms two weeks after I left.
Instead, I came to hate people so much through that job that I played other tricks on them. Like if I knew I was about to leave for the night or had a break coming up, and there was no way anyone could have a chance to complain about me, I’d tell them the bathrooms were in the back part of the store and up the staircase. We had a single-story store, but that didn’t stop about 18 people a day from looking for the spiral steps to Bathroomland.
I also liked to wear other employee’s name tags for an hour or two per shift and give the surliest customer service imaginable, so that they’d get yelled at or have a report written up and not even know what hit them.
My favorite questions came from people who clearly didn’t know what they were looking for: people looking for “The Adventures of Don Quixote” came up as a frequent request from people who just couldn’t’ find it – because they were looking in the biography section. Yeah, for a story about an old man who fights windmills while riding a horse around the country – find his true-life autobiography. Parents who didn’t know they just bought the sluttiest teen fiction imaginable for their daughters were also fun to serve. But my favorite was an old lady in her 80s who came in on multiple occasions seeking my advice on which book about S&M or bondage was the best one to buy. Come on! I thought grandmas are supposed to spank you, not GET spanked!! My co-workers would just stand and laugh, saying that I was the only info guy – unless a hot girl walked in with a question, of course.
In fact, it was the fact that I wanted to kill customers – fantasizing about the funniest ways to perform a massacre – that drove me to quit the store. But before I got to that point, I encountered the truly crazy people in the store – whom we called “The Regulars” yet were anything BUT regular people. It was as if our store had been taken over by Skid Row as an additional day shelter for the homeless. Some of the grossest people in LA – make that ANYwhere – thought nothing of blocking our customers by lying in the aisles and conducting their personal hygiene rituals – which were time-consuming yet, judging by the results, extremely limited at BEST – in our bathrooms. One guy had the gracious timing to have a heroin overdose on the toilet during a Christmas season rush hour, yelling out as he was pushed out on a stretcher that he had hepatitis, causing everyone in sight to run for the doors.
You might ask, Where was security in this store? Well, we didn’t have even hidden security cameras like EVRY OTHER STORE ON THE PLANET because our managers said customer surveys showed they made people “uncomfortable.” Meanwhile, we lost 8 percent of our inventory each year – 1000s of books! – to theft and then were asked why it was happening.
My final straw with the world of retail books came when one of the regulars talked me into letting him stay on my couch because he was between homes. He seemed decent and cleancut, just a regular guy with some hard luck. He didn’t fully explain that he was between HALFWAY homes for his coke addiction, and waited until the fourth night on my couch he decided to tell me the story of how he did some time in prison for the time he accidentally killed a man. I realized this was his my way of telling me I’d better not EVER ask him to leave. But thankfully, I convinced someone to MOVE IN three days later and Mr. Regular was on his way out of my apartment.
On then rare occasions I set foot in that Barnes & Noble again, my former co-workers ask why I don’t drop by and visit more often. To which I say, do you think to o many Guantanamo Bay prisoners are gonna visit again for the sun and the ocean view? It’s against human nature to go anywhere NEAR where you’ve been traumatized.
Other kids thought I was weird, I wound up getting glasses at an insanely early age because I strained them from sneaking books under my covers with a flashlight, and I eventually got more hooked on writing my own stories than reading those of others. So that’s why it was kind of ironic that when I was desperate five years ago and really needed a job, I got hired by a giant Barnes & Noble store.
You might think that if you’re gonna work retail, a bookstore would be a pretty cool dignified place to do it. After all, you’re not constantly having to tell people they’re not fat in clothing stores, or insisting they Supersize their fries. Instead, you’re opening their eyes and minds to great literature – or so you’d think.
Probably because I’m 6 foot 3 and 300 pounds and hard to miss in a lineup, my managers forced me to work as the Information Guy for the store. At my branch, the manager took it way too literally and had me really wear signs around my neck saying shit like “Information,” or “How Can I Help You?” What I really should have worn was a sign saying “Down the aisle and to the left,” because that’s where the bathrooms were and because we were the only place in Old Pasadena’s shopping district dumb enough to have public bathrooms, I had to repeat that phrase about 500 times a day. I got so used to doing it that the moment someone made that “uncomfortable” or “embarrassed” face people always use when seeking a bathroom, I’d just save them the hot air from their mouths, point and say “Down and to the left.”
What was more annoying is when these same people returned from the bathroom with a horrified look on their faces, asking if there was going to be any “janitorial services rendered” on the premises anytime soon. Look, you want 5000 people to be able to use the bathroom, you’re gonna get a mess – and my job title ain’t janitor. I fantasized about losing it and spewing those very same words to someone, but never got the chance. And though I led an employee-wide push to seal off the toilets from the public, the bosses refused – until they put up the Berlin Wall of Bathrooms two weeks after I left.
Instead, I came to hate people so much through that job that I played other tricks on them. Like if I knew I was about to leave for the night or had a break coming up, and there was no way anyone could have a chance to complain about me, I’d tell them the bathrooms were in the back part of the store and up the staircase. We had a single-story store, but that didn’t stop about 18 people a day from looking for the spiral steps to Bathroomland.
I also liked to wear other employee’s name tags for an hour or two per shift and give the surliest customer service imaginable, so that they’d get yelled at or have a report written up and not even know what hit them.
My favorite questions came from people who clearly didn’t know what they were looking for: people looking for “The Adventures of Don Quixote” came up as a frequent request from people who just couldn’t’ find it – because they were looking in the biography section. Yeah, for a story about an old man who fights windmills while riding a horse around the country – find his true-life autobiography. Parents who didn’t know they just bought the sluttiest teen fiction imaginable for their daughters were also fun to serve. But my favorite was an old lady in her 80s who came in on multiple occasions seeking my advice on which book about S&M or bondage was the best one to buy. Come on! I thought grandmas are supposed to spank you, not GET spanked!! My co-workers would just stand and laugh, saying that I was the only info guy – unless a hot girl walked in with a question, of course.
In fact, it was the fact that I wanted to kill customers – fantasizing about the funniest ways to perform a massacre – that drove me to quit the store. But before I got to that point, I encountered the truly crazy people in the store – whom we called “The Regulars” yet were anything BUT regular people. It was as if our store had been taken over by Skid Row as an additional day shelter for the homeless. Some of the grossest people in LA – make that ANYwhere – thought nothing of blocking our customers by lying in the aisles and conducting their personal hygiene rituals – which were time-consuming yet, judging by the results, extremely limited at BEST – in our bathrooms. One guy had the gracious timing to have a heroin overdose on the toilet during a Christmas season rush hour, yelling out as he was pushed out on a stretcher that he had hepatitis, causing everyone in sight to run for the doors.
You might ask, Where was security in this store? Well, we didn’t have even hidden security cameras like EVRY OTHER STORE ON THE PLANET because our managers said customer surveys showed they made people “uncomfortable.” Meanwhile, we lost 8 percent of our inventory each year – 1000s of books! – to theft and then were asked why it was happening.
My final straw with the world of retail books came when one of the regulars talked me into letting him stay on my couch because he was between homes. He seemed decent and cleancut, just a regular guy with some hard luck. He didn’t fully explain that he was between HALFWAY homes for his coke addiction, and waited until the fourth night on my couch he decided to tell me the story of how he did some time in prison for the time he accidentally killed a man. I realized this was his my way of telling me I’d better not EVER ask him to leave. But thankfully, I convinced someone to MOVE IN three days later and Mr. Regular was on his way out of my apartment.
On then rare occasions I set foot in that Barnes & Noble again, my former co-workers ask why I don’t drop by and visit more often. To which I say, do you think to o many Guantanamo Bay prisoners are gonna visit again for the sun and the ocean view? It’s against human nature to go anywhere NEAR where you’ve been traumatized.
IN THE BLOOD - the story a reformed Blood gangbanger caught between the cops and the streets
There are some stories you do because you have to, not because of an assignment but a burning need to help someone get their story out to the world. This was one of those stories. I'm likely going to be doing more about and with Shaka in the near future. Stay tuned. And see the great movie "Crips & Bloods: Made in America," when it's out on DVD (soon).
In the blood
Staying straight in a crooked world
Shaka walks up to the security guard’s table at Fremont High School in South Los Angeles and signs in as a visitor. He then flows smoothly through the halls of his alma mater and enters a small room that serves as a campus police center, complete with three LAPD officers — one white, one Latino, one African-American — who spend each day trying to ensure that the school’s tinderbox mix of races and ethnicities doesn’t erupt into gang violence.
On the wall behind the Latino officer is a crisply hung poster of the 1993 cult classic Western, “Tombstone,” with several badass actors sporting shotguns and pistols under the tagline “Justice Is Coming.” And with the arrival of Shaka, a tall and trim 29-year-old African American who’s also a reformed member of the Family Swans Bloods, an affiliate group of the notorious Bloods gang, that statement has just been bolstered. He comes in daily to help the cops reach the kids who are seemingly unreachable, and to talk them into one last shot at avoiding the court system and prison by doing the right thing in a world where they’re surrounded by wrong.
Shaka is the man’s street name — he prefers not to divulge his legal name, due partly to the street cred he’s established with his adopted moniker, and partly out of concern that harm could come if people know too much about his “real” self. Elaborately decorated Ed Hardy jeans and a navy-blue camouflage-style dress shirt mask an array of tattoos not quite faded into his complexion, the contrast revealing the dual worlds he’s trapped between — his gangbanging past, which earned him three trips to the pen for slinging dope before he went straight five years ago, and his present as a voluntary gang interventionist seeking to atone for his past evils as a violent drug hustler.
In his old life, the money flowed fast and easy; in his new one, he is unpaid by the LAPD or the schools, despite the fact they can’t operate nearly as well without the dozens like him throughout LA County who have seen the light and are trying to light a path for others to follow.
With the recent release of the incisive new documentary “Crips & Bloods: Made in America,” which recently played for a week at the Laemmele Playhouse 7 and will soon be released on DVD, Shaka has found validation as one of the primary interview subjects in the film, taking pride in showing that there’s a better way to live than thugging while also inspiring his own dreams of publishing a memoir of life on the streets, creating hip-hop CDs and designing his own clothing line.
Some might scoff at those ambitions as shallow and stereotypical of young people whose lives in the ’hoods of LA and other cities expose them to few examples of growing up to be doctors or engineers. But whether displaying his surprisingly striking shirt designs or pouring his soul out while gently reading the opening passage of his eloquently written memoir, Shaka shows he’s a man of surprises who just needs a chance to succeed — and he says there are countless more young African Americans just like him. For now, he’s blessed with the funds to survive and pursue his interests by also working with his childhood friend, Los Angeles Clippers star Baron Davis, who initiated the funding for “Crips & Bloods.”
“It feels like we’re not even American citizens, we’re just ‘blacks’ to most of America,” he says, while pointing out that the very same white cop who just consulted with him inside the school was now detaining a group of black male students after school for the apparent offense of talking in numbers. “People don’t think of us in the same way, that we have the same rights. Yes, having the police around does make us safer sometimes, but how are you supposed to stay positive when you’re afraid to walk anywhere alone because someone may attack you, yet you get questioned or detained when you walk anywhere with a group? That’s the whole cycle of gangs — you join for safety, to make friends and have some male companionship when most fathers are out of the picture. The officers don’t really know us, they don’t rest their heads in our neighborhoods at night or know what our dreams and concerns and families are like.” Side by sideThe words spill out from Shaka in a torrent, his eyes riveted on his listener, but, as he himself notes, he is just one man attempting to fight an epidemic of violence that has plagued Los Angeles for the past 60 years and seems to grow worse each decade. According to Father Greg Boyle, a Catholic priest who founded Homeboy Industries, a series of businesses that train ex-gang members to develop skills that will pay their bills legitimately, there are more than 86,000 ’bangers in more than 1,100 gangs in Los Angeles County alone.
“We’re the largest gang intervention program in the USA, with members of nearly 600 gangs walking through our doors here,” says Boyle, who started his ministry in 1988. “We locate jobs for them, and we have five businesses where enemies work side by side with each other: a bakery, restaurants, a silk-screening plant, maintenance and landscaping. It just sort of evolved over the years, with first a school and then a jobs program, opened a bakery, and now we also offer tattoo removal with two machines and ten rotating doctors.”
Boyle started Homeboy while stationed as a pastor at Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights from 1986 to 1992. His parish, one of the poorest the city, had eight gangs and LA’s highest level of gang activity.
“You could either keep your head in the sand or do something about it. There were mostly Latinos and only one African-American gang in the area,” says Boyle. “It’s still primarily Latinos that come here, merely because I hand out my card at masses and only Catholics come to the masses.”
Boyle recalls that his parishioners were skeptical and unhappy in the beginning of his gang efforts, when ex-members started attending church and receiving other services there. But, he notes, “The gang members were never the problem. They never are. It’s more the people demonizing them from the outside.”
Operating on a $3.5 million annual budget, raised not from church funds but from foundations, fundraising and the profits of the Homeboy businesses themselves, Boyle has been able to help thousands of ex-bangers over the years. Far from depending on charity from the diocese, Boyle and his young staffers are proud that parishes are now frequent customers, comprising a large portion of their 1,900-strong customer base.
“There’s no defined period of time that folks stay here, but it helps them when they get out of prison or when they immediately decide to redirect their lives,” says Boyle. “I don’t know many people that do all the stuff we do. It’s a rehab center for people who wanna redirect themselves.” Don’t disappearShaka decided to redirect himself while undergoing a harrowing crisis of conscience that nearly drove him mad five years ago. While he grew up in a stable home with both parents in which he said he acted perfect inside the house but “turned into an animal on the streets, changing every day like a chameleon,” Shaka went deep into the dealing lifestyle once he finished high school.
“There was so much violence I got caught up in, and it never seemed to go away, whether I was doing it or being around it and seeing it everywhere,” he says, his wide eyes welling with pain from the memories. “I finally started going crazy because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and for like five days I was having my life flash before me without physically being in danger of dying.”
He finally emerged from the darkness, due to turning to God and his girlfriend Chrystal, a vibrant presence who has been with Shaka for six years and shares with him two young sons — Jaiden, 4, and Jaison, five months — and a small but well-kept pink stucco house.
“Jaiden was a result of that madness, because my girl kept calming me down by telling me she loved me and making love,” he recalls. “We’ve been together a long time. I want to set a good example to younger guys in the neighborhood that you stick with your kids and be there for them. When I came out of that madness, I started going to church, when I’d never been religious before.”
As he works tirelessly to quell tensions and set standards for the younger black men coming up through Fremont and other area schools, Shaka has to be fluid in his interactions. As a Latino student sits forlornly in the school police room after being busted for actually rolling marijuana in class, the LAPD officers are threatening the juvenile joint-maker with a trip through the courts, probation and community service — or, if he’s lucky, settling the incident with just a hefty dose of community service without marks on his criminal record.
The student plays nonchalant, but worry is clearly etched in his eyes. Shaka steps in, describing the terms of the deal with a little more slang and the forceful concern of an older brother.
“I know what I’d do if I was you,” he says, as the kid looks at him inquisitively. “I’d take the community service, no strings attached.”
The kid complies; negotiations have ended, problem solved. Stepping outside afterward, Shaka says he makes that kind of quick impact on youths because they know he’s been down the long road to prison over and over. Before he leaves for the day, the LAPD officers ask him to negotiate a meeting between them and a particularly troubled young man and his mother because the school had just pulled his file for a last-chance expulsion warning.
When he sees Michael, the student in jeopardy, smoking with friends outside after school, Shaka pulls Michael out of the pack and warns him how close he has come to expulsion and the courts, saying “It doesn’t have to be something specific. It’s a ton of little things adding up, and they don’t want you there anymore unless you shape up.”
Michael agrees to a meeting with his mom and the officials, and Shaka’s back rolling in his cousin’s car. It’s a stark drive through the neighborhood. He points out a house where a young man on a college basketball scholarship just got shot in the legs nine times by a gang simply for sitting outside in his car. These are the things that never seem to get better.
And yet the only way they can get better is if the residents of neighborhoods like this can be treated like everyone else, and seen as everyday people. Shaka pulls up on another block to introduce a reporter to “other hard-working honest people, and the moms that look out for the kids of the neighborhood.” One man is hooking up an elaborate stereo system for a client’s car, two moms come by and shake hands with a visitor, surprised and glad to see a white face taking the time to listen and meet folks in the area. “Don’t forget about us” is a refrain heard repeatedly as people say their goodbyes.
That unexpected warmth and friendliness flies in the face of the violent and dangerous image South LA neighborhoods are often saddled with. “Crips & Bloods” director Stacy Peralta, who first achieved notoriety as a pro skateboarder and director of the skateboarding documentary “Dogtown & Z-Boys,” says he was shaken by the same positive feelings.“It’s not what I had expected. I never had anybody give me a bad time and always had people being forthright and say thanks for making the film,” recalls Peralta. “Then they’d say ‘Don’t just disappear, come back to our community, be a part of it.’ They’re hungry for connection, hungry to be a part of the world, because in a sense they’re not.” An everyday thingEven more striking for Peralta was the effect he had on interviewees when he took them from their neighborhoods to a calm studio for in-depth questioning.
“People who struck me strongly, I’d bring them to another location where they could really sit down in a secure location and have a long talk without having to look over their shoulder,” Peralta explains. “They commented on being somewhere safe, saying ‘it’s nice to be somewhere I don’t have to think about something happening or someone giving me a hard time for being in the wrong place.’
“It’s really a tragedy that’s going on in this country and that, in a sense, it’s going on in secret. People always say after seeing the movie ‘I didn’t know this was still going on’ or ‘that it’s going on so close to us,’ and so it just goes on and on every day.”
Surprisingly, even the election of America’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, hasn’t created a groundswell of hope in the very place where it’s needed most.
“Some people were happy and I was excited on election day and then at the inauguration,” says Shaka, his face lighting up. “But I saw lots of other people just say ‘what the fuck’s this going to change for us? The same shit is still everywhere.’”
Pasadena’s got plenty of gang problems of its own, a fact that local gang interventionist Tim Rhambo has seen for more than 20 years — first as a member of the Pasadena Denver Lane Bloods and later as an activist with the local youth organization Day One. Like Shaka, he tries to spend as much time as possible mixing it up with gang members and those likely to join them, all in the hope of convincing them to break or remain free of the groups’ insidious influences.
Rhambo himself turned from gang life when he was 18, realizing that if he kept his wicked ways up he’d be heading to the harsh world of the state penitentiary rather than the simpler lockdowns of juvenile halls. The 40-year-old credits police officers and other community members for keeping on him to stay on a productive path, and is dedicating himself to give others the same influence — although the current economic crisis has forced Day One to cut him loose and he now struggles while working part-time with kids at the Asian Youth Center and as a boxing instructor at the Villa Parke Community Center in Pasadena.
“I do a lot of volunteer work down at Villa Parke, as a boxing instructor. And at my job now at the Asian Youth Center, I go out into the streets even after I’m off the clock,” says Rhambo. “This is real to me, and I think every generation it gets worse. When I was out gangbanging, the generation before me said you guys are doing stupid stuff, and said ‘we only was fighting, sometimes stabbings, but not with gunplay.’ Now there’s no respect for the old guys who been through it, and they don’t want to talk to [the young ones] because they’re afraid they’ll get shot.
“You gotta be out there on them every day for bangers to get it. I can’t see them two days, or one day and expect them to do what I expect. It’s hard. It’s a constant battle.”
In the blood
Staying straight in a crooked world
Shaka walks up to the security guard’s table at Fremont High School in South Los Angeles and signs in as a visitor. He then flows smoothly through the halls of his alma mater and enters a small room that serves as a campus police center, complete with three LAPD officers — one white, one Latino, one African-American — who spend each day trying to ensure that the school’s tinderbox mix of races and ethnicities doesn’t erupt into gang violence.
On the wall behind the Latino officer is a crisply hung poster of the 1993 cult classic Western, “Tombstone,” with several badass actors sporting shotguns and pistols under the tagline “Justice Is Coming.” And with the arrival of Shaka, a tall and trim 29-year-old African American who’s also a reformed member of the Family Swans Bloods, an affiliate group of the notorious Bloods gang, that statement has just been bolstered. He comes in daily to help the cops reach the kids who are seemingly unreachable, and to talk them into one last shot at avoiding the court system and prison by doing the right thing in a world where they’re surrounded by wrong.
Shaka is the man’s street name — he prefers not to divulge his legal name, due partly to the street cred he’s established with his adopted moniker, and partly out of concern that harm could come if people know too much about his “real” self. Elaborately decorated Ed Hardy jeans and a navy-blue camouflage-style dress shirt mask an array of tattoos not quite faded into his complexion, the contrast revealing the dual worlds he’s trapped between — his gangbanging past, which earned him three trips to the pen for slinging dope before he went straight five years ago, and his present as a voluntary gang interventionist seeking to atone for his past evils as a violent drug hustler.
In his old life, the money flowed fast and easy; in his new one, he is unpaid by the LAPD or the schools, despite the fact they can’t operate nearly as well without the dozens like him throughout LA County who have seen the light and are trying to light a path for others to follow.
With the recent release of the incisive new documentary “Crips & Bloods: Made in America,” which recently played for a week at the Laemmele Playhouse 7 and will soon be released on DVD, Shaka has found validation as one of the primary interview subjects in the film, taking pride in showing that there’s a better way to live than thugging while also inspiring his own dreams of publishing a memoir of life on the streets, creating hip-hop CDs and designing his own clothing line.
Some might scoff at those ambitions as shallow and stereotypical of young people whose lives in the ’hoods of LA and other cities expose them to few examples of growing up to be doctors or engineers. But whether displaying his surprisingly striking shirt designs or pouring his soul out while gently reading the opening passage of his eloquently written memoir, Shaka shows he’s a man of surprises who just needs a chance to succeed — and he says there are countless more young African Americans just like him. For now, he’s blessed with the funds to survive and pursue his interests by also working with his childhood friend, Los Angeles Clippers star Baron Davis, who initiated the funding for “Crips & Bloods.”
“It feels like we’re not even American citizens, we’re just ‘blacks’ to most of America,” he says, while pointing out that the very same white cop who just consulted with him inside the school was now detaining a group of black male students after school for the apparent offense of talking in numbers. “People don’t think of us in the same way, that we have the same rights. Yes, having the police around does make us safer sometimes, but how are you supposed to stay positive when you’re afraid to walk anywhere alone because someone may attack you, yet you get questioned or detained when you walk anywhere with a group? That’s the whole cycle of gangs — you join for safety, to make friends and have some male companionship when most fathers are out of the picture. The officers don’t really know us, they don’t rest their heads in our neighborhoods at night or know what our dreams and concerns and families are like.” Side by sideThe words spill out from Shaka in a torrent, his eyes riveted on his listener, but, as he himself notes, he is just one man attempting to fight an epidemic of violence that has plagued Los Angeles for the past 60 years and seems to grow worse each decade. According to Father Greg Boyle, a Catholic priest who founded Homeboy Industries, a series of businesses that train ex-gang members to develop skills that will pay their bills legitimately, there are more than 86,000 ’bangers in more than 1,100 gangs in Los Angeles County alone.
“We’re the largest gang intervention program in the USA, with members of nearly 600 gangs walking through our doors here,” says Boyle, who started his ministry in 1988. “We locate jobs for them, and we have five businesses where enemies work side by side with each other: a bakery, restaurants, a silk-screening plant, maintenance and landscaping. It just sort of evolved over the years, with first a school and then a jobs program, opened a bakery, and now we also offer tattoo removal with two machines and ten rotating doctors.”
Boyle started Homeboy while stationed as a pastor at Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights from 1986 to 1992. His parish, one of the poorest the city, had eight gangs and LA’s highest level of gang activity.
“You could either keep your head in the sand or do something about it. There were mostly Latinos and only one African-American gang in the area,” says Boyle. “It’s still primarily Latinos that come here, merely because I hand out my card at masses and only Catholics come to the masses.”
Boyle recalls that his parishioners were skeptical and unhappy in the beginning of his gang efforts, when ex-members started attending church and receiving other services there. But, he notes, “The gang members were never the problem. They never are. It’s more the people demonizing them from the outside.”
Operating on a $3.5 million annual budget, raised not from church funds but from foundations, fundraising and the profits of the Homeboy businesses themselves, Boyle has been able to help thousands of ex-bangers over the years. Far from depending on charity from the diocese, Boyle and his young staffers are proud that parishes are now frequent customers, comprising a large portion of their 1,900-strong customer base.
“There’s no defined period of time that folks stay here, but it helps them when they get out of prison or when they immediately decide to redirect their lives,” says Boyle. “I don’t know many people that do all the stuff we do. It’s a rehab center for people who wanna redirect themselves.” Don’t disappearShaka decided to redirect himself while undergoing a harrowing crisis of conscience that nearly drove him mad five years ago. While he grew up in a stable home with both parents in which he said he acted perfect inside the house but “turned into an animal on the streets, changing every day like a chameleon,” Shaka went deep into the dealing lifestyle once he finished high school.
“There was so much violence I got caught up in, and it never seemed to go away, whether I was doing it or being around it and seeing it everywhere,” he says, his wide eyes welling with pain from the memories. “I finally started going crazy because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and for like five days I was having my life flash before me without physically being in danger of dying.”
He finally emerged from the darkness, due to turning to God and his girlfriend Chrystal, a vibrant presence who has been with Shaka for six years and shares with him two young sons — Jaiden, 4, and Jaison, five months — and a small but well-kept pink stucco house.
“Jaiden was a result of that madness, because my girl kept calming me down by telling me she loved me and making love,” he recalls. “We’ve been together a long time. I want to set a good example to younger guys in the neighborhood that you stick with your kids and be there for them. When I came out of that madness, I started going to church, when I’d never been religious before.”
As he works tirelessly to quell tensions and set standards for the younger black men coming up through Fremont and other area schools, Shaka has to be fluid in his interactions. As a Latino student sits forlornly in the school police room after being busted for actually rolling marijuana in class, the LAPD officers are threatening the juvenile joint-maker with a trip through the courts, probation and community service — or, if he’s lucky, settling the incident with just a hefty dose of community service without marks on his criminal record.
The student plays nonchalant, but worry is clearly etched in his eyes. Shaka steps in, describing the terms of the deal with a little more slang and the forceful concern of an older brother.
“I know what I’d do if I was you,” he says, as the kid looks at him inquisitively. “I’d take the community service, no strings attached.”
The kid complies; negotiations have ended, problem solved. Stepping outside afterward, Shaka says he makes that kind of quick impact on youths because they know he’s been down the long road to prison over and over. Before he leaves for the day, the LAPD officers ask him to negotiate a meeting between them and a particularly troubled young man and his mother because the school had just pulled his file for a last-chance expulsion warning.
When he sees Michael, the student in jeopardy, smoking with friends outside after school, Shaka pulls Michael out of the pack and warns him how close he has come to expulsion and the courts, saying “It doesn’t have to be something specific. It’s a ton of little things adding up, and they don’t want you there anymore unless you shape up.”
Michael agrees to a meeting with his mom and the officials, and Shaka’s back rolling in his cousin’s car. It’s a stark drive through the neighborhood. He points out a house where a young man on a college basketball scholarship just got shot in the legs nine times by a gang simply for sitting outside in his car. These are the things that never seem to get better.
And yet the only way they can get better is if the residents of neighborhoods like this can be treated like everyone else, and seen as everyday people. Shaka pulls up on another block to introduce a reporter to “other hard-working honest people, and the moms that look out for the kids of the neighborhood.” One man is hooking up an elaborate stereo system for a client’s car, two moms come by and shake hands with a visitor, surprised and glad to see a white face taking the time to listen and meet folks in the area. “Don’t forget about us” is a refrain heard repeatedly as people say their goodbyes.
That unexpected warmth and friendliness flies in the face of the violent and dangerous image South LA neighborhoods are often saddled with. “Crips & Bloods” director Stacy Peralta, who first achieved notoriety as a pro skateboarder and director of the skateboarding documentary “Dogtown & Z-Boys,” says he was shaken by the same positive feelings.“It’s not what I had expected. I never had anybody give me a bad time and always had people being forthright and say thanks for making the film,” recalls Peralta. “Then they’d say ‘Don’t just disappear, come back to our community, be a part of it.’ They’re hungry for connection, hungry to be a part of the world, because in a sense they’re not.” An everyday thingEven more striking for Peralta was the effect he had on interviewees when he took them from their neighborhoods to a calm studio for in-depth questioning.
“People who struck me strongly, I’d bring them to another location where they could really sit down in a secure location and have a long talk without having to look over their shoulder,” Peralta explains. “They commented on being somewhere safe, saying ‘it’s nice to be somewhere I don’t have to think about something happening or someone giving me a hard time for being in the wrong place.’
“It’s really a tragedy that’s going on in this country and that, in a sense, it’s going on in secret. People always say after seeing the movie ‘I didn’t know this was still going on’ or ‘that it’s going on so close to us,’ and so it just goes on and on every day.”
Surprisingly, even the election of America’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, hasn’t created a groundswell of hope in the very place where it’s needed most.
“Some people were happy and I was excited on election day and then at the inauguration,” says Shaka, his face lighting up. “But I saw lots of other people just say ‘what the fuck’s this going to change for us? The same shit is still everywhere.’”
Pasadena’s got plenty of gang problems of its own, a fact that local gang interventionist Tim Rhambo has seen for more than 20 years — first as a member of the Pasadena Denver Lane Bloods and later as an activist with the local youth organization Day One. Like Shaka, he tries to spend as much time as possible mixing it up with gang members and those likely to join them, all in the hope of convincing them to break or remain free of the groups’ insidious influences.
Rhambo himself turned from gang life when he was 18, realizing that if he kept his wicked ways up he’d be heading to the harsh world of the state penitentiary rather than the simpler lockdowns of juvenile halls. The 40-year-old credits police officers and other community members for keeping on him to stay on a productive path, and is dedicating himself to give others the same influence — although the current economic crisis has forced Day One to cut him loose and he now struggles while working part-time with kids at the Asian Youth Center and as a boxing instructor at the Villa Parke Community Center in Pasadena.
“I do a lot of volunteer work down at Villa Parke, as a boxing instructor. And at my job now at the Asian Youth Center, I go out into the streets even after I’m off the clock,” says Rhambo. “This is real to me, and I think every generation it gets worse. When I was out gangbanging, the generation before me said you guys are doing stupid stuff, and said ‘we only was fighting, sometimes stabbings, but not with gunplay.’ Now there’s no respect for the old guys who been through it, and they don’t want to talk to [the young ones] because they’re afraid they’ll get shot.
“You gotta be out there on them every day for bangers to get it. I can’t see them two days, or one day and expect them to do what I expect. It’s hard. It’s a constant battle.”
Thursday, March 12, 2009
I"LL NEVER FORGET THE MOMENT MY BOSS THREW A FOLDER AT MY HEAD
Growing up Catholic, I was taught two major things in life: Guilt and forgiveness. They’re two sides of the same coin, actually.
The whole feeling guilty about getting into so-called “Trouble” never really registered with me. But on the other hand, I’m often way too forgiving for my own good. And it was because of that, that I’ve had some of the meanest, shittiest bosses one could ever imagine, and put up with them for way too long a time.
The first crappy boss I had was named Glenn. I should have known not to work with him, for I sold my soul the moment I walked in the door to interview to be his assistant. See, Glenn was the head of the Engine Manufacturers Association, the lobbying organization that tried to convince people that SUVs and Hummers were environmentally friendly and fuel-efficient.
Glenn flew all over the world spreading the organization’s questionable science and spreading lies that no doubt resulted in pollution you could choke on in half the cities on the planet. I handled his travel schedule, faxing and copying. And then one day, he got the bright idea to have me – a guy who might be verbally skilled but has tested as “functionally retarded” in science and math – to have me redesign the association’s entire filing system.
We’re talking 40 years, four FULL DECADES, of files covering every engine and environmental regulation known to man. And he explained to me over a lengthy lunch the scientifically complex way he wanted them rearranged. The problem was a) I’m functionally retarded at science and math, and b) I’m 300 pounds and way more interested in the steak on my plate than I was in his formulas.
So I rearranged the files, alright – in a strict alphabetical system. It took forever, nearly his entire two-week business trip, but I got done in time to present to him my…well, my colossal fuckup.
When he came back, chipper and happy from two weeks of destroying the planet while nestled at a conference in the Alps of Sweden, it appeared nothing could destroy his good mood.
Then he checked out the filing system.
“So did you finish redoing the filing, Carl?”
“Yes, sir!” I beamed with glowing pride.
But then I suddenly noticed he was gradually less happy. In fact, he looked gradually more and more concerned, and then pissed off.
“Where’s the TC70 report, Carl?”
“In the T section,” I replied, not aware that there was never supposed to BE a T Section. I had taken the work of men with PhD’s in engineering and combined them in the same fashion that the writers of “Sesame Street” would. It seemed simple, but in reality, my boss was due to face Congress in Washington the next day and the TC70 report was now a needle in a haystack of 20,000 folders to him.
And then it happened, in front of God, myself and thankfully about 50 witnesses since we were part of a giant corporation where the hundreds of Dilbert-style employees were assembled in grids of cubicles: Glenn lost it. I mean, really lost it.
His eyes squinted shut, and his face turned so red I thought he was gonna have a stroke. And then, as I cowered for my life, he picked up a giant red folder filled with a pile of documents the size of the Chicago phone book and THREW IT AT MY HEAD!!!!
I’ll never forget the next two seconds: the way the folder spun through the air, spinning like a helicopter blade as it shot out papers pell-mell in every direction, the shrieks of the female employees around me and the yell of another boss screaming at Glenn, “What are you doing?!” And then I ducked fast, leaving the folder and its remaining contents to smash into the glass of the window behind me before dropping to the floor. That moment gave me an even greater appreciation than most for President Bush’s shoe-dodging skills.
Then, as all hell was breaking loose in reaction to Glenn’s throw, he panicked, ran into his office and locked the door. He refused to come out for the next two hours.They had to bring in HR, then building security and finally the Chicago police in before Glenn came out. But I had the ULTIMATE revenge satisfaction, because he was forced to go on a two-week "Vacation" at an anger-management clinic in the Arizona desert, and when he came back I got a raise and he had to kiss my ass for the next 3 years.
The ridiculous point is, I stayed. And I forgave him. In fact, we became friends and he took me to dinner last summer when I visited Chicago, and I didn’t even have to duck once to avoid having silverware, dishes or a glass thrown at me.But even Glenn wasn't the worst boss I had. That was a woman named Ruth Ratny- you know she's evil just by hearing her name. RATny. She was actually featured on "Oprah" as one of the 4 meanest bosses in America. I will love Oprah FOREVER - and would even vote for her as President - because everyone on staff was able to tape that episode and send copies to their friends and families as ultimate proof that we really were working for a megabitch.But she got her just rewards a month or two later – ironically, after she drove me to a mental breakdown and wouldn’t even give me the day off to recover. So I had quit that job and went on the road performing standup with my best friend Tim for two weeks. And it was when I was checking my messages from Eau Claire, WI that I heard the shocking news from about 50 friends on my answering machine:
Ruth had actually fallen down an elevator shaft and LIVED. She fell two stories onto the roof of the car, which she used to get around the building she owned, and then it careened another five floors SMACK into the basement. She actually SURVIVED. That's when I KNEW she truly had a pact with the devil. Eventually I was desperate enough to come back to work for her and she talked me into a pay cut in exchange for my not having to see the hematoma on her leg. The lowest I've ever sunk though was the time I applied for work at Easter season. The interview consisted of two questions I never thought I'd be answering after getting a college degree: "Are you looking for full, or part-time, work as a bunny?" And, "What shopping mall do you see yourself at in 5 years?"I also applied for a job cutting trees in the Christmas tree lot at Target. They warned me I'd be covered in sap at the end of the night, and I told them I've had worse things happen to me at college parties. But they didn't give me the job, so that means either I failed a drug test without taking drugs, or my credit's so bad they wouldn't trust me with a chainsaw.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
GET THEE TO THE MOVIE THEATER! (a rare serious post)
BY CARL KOZLOWSKI
It’s not often that Hollywood deals with any Christian themes in an intelligent or respectful way. In fact, it seems that often the only times that the mainstream movie industry deals with Christianity at all is to portray its believers as either hypocrites, simpletons or buffoons. On the rare occasions that they actually show a character in a church, it’s usually for a wedding or a funeral – despite the fact that even the most limited estimates have shown that at least half of America’s 300 million citizens attend church services fairly regularly.
As a Catholic, I’ve found that my church is portrayed both better and worse than other Christian faiths. Yes, we are spared the pain of seeing our spiritual leaders portrayed as sweaty, quaking, self-righteous, pulpit-pounding televangelists, but on the other hand the last few years have shown that Hollywood has no problem seizing the headlines and showing priests as either pedophiles or at least questionable. Either that, or priests are forever in question of their vows of celibacy and are standing on the brink of having a torrid affair with a woman.
So, imagine my surprise to find that this holiday movie season has offered up not one, but two Oscar-worthy, thoughtful films that deal with matters of faith in an intelligent and exciting way: “Gran Torino” and “Doubt.” While these films tackle their issues from different angles, the results are grandly entertaining and provide plenty to talk about after viewing them. So get thee to their theaters!
“Gran Torino” has been seen by many critics as a response by its star and director, Clint Eastwood, to his own lengthy career of playing hyper-violent urban vigilantes like Dirty Harry Callahan. In five “Dirty Harry” films, he chased, beat and shot up seemingly dozens if not hundreds of the worst criminal perps in San Francisco, but in “Gran Torino,” Eastwood is a 78-year-old Korean War vet named Walt who has watched his working-class Detroit neighborhood change to the point where he’s virtually a lone Caucasian surrounded by Asians.
And Walt hates them all, as well as any other ethnic group that isn’t his own – Polish. It’s here that the film walks a fine and fascinating line, addressing racial tensions in a way that few manage to pull off. The 2005 Best Picture winner “Crash” managed to show race relations in a similarly brutal, bracing and ultimately redemptive fashion, but “Gran Torino” reminded me more of Jack Nicholson’s iconic and Oscar-winning performance as Melvin in 1997’s classic “As Good As It Gets.” Both Nicholson and Eastwood get away with saying thing that would get most of us either beaten or arrested, but manage to have audiences laughing because we expect them to be grizzled, uncensored and outrageous – and because they are poking serious fun at their characters along the way as well.
In “Torino,” the Catholic element comes into play right from the beginning, as Walt is seen at his wife’s funeral. He quickly makes it clear that he doesn’t respect his parish priest, whom he derides face-to-face as “a 27-year-old virgin” who doesn’t know anything about the real world’s problems and suffering. But that priest, played by Christopher Carley, refuses to back down because he promised Walt’s wife on her deathbed that he would persuade Walt to make a confession for the first time in decades.
As the story crystallizes around Walt’s determination to change by protecting his next-door neighbors’ kids from a street gang of their Asian peers, the priest keeps popping up, gradually winning Walt’s respect and forcing him to consider the moral implications of his urge to be a vigilante and perhaps go too far for his own legal and moral good. By the time the film is resolved through a series of clever, unforeseen twists, it is clear that Walt has been transformed by the wisdom of this man whom he once saw as naïve. And Walt’s response is an affecting parallel to the audience’s own initially derisive perception of the priest, taking us along on his faith journey as well.
Meanwhile, “Doubt” – as its title might indicate – heads in the opposite direction while still giving viewers plenty to consider about matters of faith and trust. Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, shortly after the massive changes ushered in by the modernizing Vatican II conference in Rome, the story quickly sets up a conflict between the old-school nun who serves as principal and runs the school like a prison (played by Meryl Streep) and the young, new priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who wants to shake things up by treating the students as fully rounded young people who deserve doses of freedom and respect as well.
Streep and Hoffman wind up in battle over a much more thorny subject, however: she comes to believe, through the tips of a naïve young nun played by Amy Adams, that Hoffman is engaged in an inappropriate relationship with the school’s first admitted black male student. While she has no direct evidence to support her belief, she rigidly sets out to destroy the priest anyway because she refuses to harbor doubt, considering it a weakness. Hanging in the balance are each of their reputations, as well as the well-being of the young boy, whom Hoffman claims he’s merely paying extra attention to in order to help him overcome the ill behavior shown him by his racist classmates.
“Doubt” cannily sets its dramatic fireworks – it’s written and directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (“Moonstruck”) as an adaptation of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play – up in the early ‘60s, removing the film’s questions of inappropriate priestly behavior from the context of this decade’s earlier pedophilic scandals so that its larger questions of faith, morality, and yes, doubt can be dealt with without the distractions of wondering how close a fact-based film was hewing to reality.
A priest friend of mine dismissed “Doubt” without having seen it, saying that he felt the filmmakers caused damage to the public’s perception of the church merely by portraying the film’s three leads in their clerical outfits next to the title word. But I believe that as much as we’d like to think all of life’s questions can be answered with black and white statements by our pastors or solely through interpreting the Scriptures, a stronger faith can be achieved through occasionally questioning things for ourselves.
And films like “Gran Torino” and “Doubt” give us a great place to start.
It’s not often that Hollywood deals with any Christian themes in an intelligent or respectful way. In fact, it seems that often the only times that the mainstream movie industry deals with Christianity at all is to portray its believers as either hypocrites, simpletons or buffoons. On the rare occasions that they actually show a character in a church, it’s usually for a wedding or a funeral – despite the fact that even the most limited estimates have shown that at least half of America’s 300 million citizens attend church services fairly regularly.
As a Catholic, I’ve found that my church is portrayed both better and worse than other Christian faiths. Yes, we are spared the pain of seeing our spiritual leaders portrayed as sweaty, quaking, self-righteous, pulpit-pounding televangelists, but on the other hand the last few years have shown that Hollywood has no problem seizing the headlines and showing priests as either pedophiles or at least questionable. Either that, or priests are forever in question of their vows of celibacy and are standing on the brink of having a torrid affair with a woman.
So, imagine my surprise to find that this holiday movie season has offered up not one, but two Oscar-worthy, thoughtful films that deal with matters of faith in an intelligent and exciting way: “Gran Torino” and “Doubt.” While these films tackle their issues from different angles, the results are grandly entertaining and provide plenty to talk about after viewing them. So get thee to their theaters!
“Gran Torino” has been seen by many critics as a response by its star and director, Clint Eastwood, to his own lengthy career of playing hyper-violent urban vigilantes like Dirty Harry Callahan. In five “Dirty Harry” films, he chased, beat and shot up seemingly dozens if not hundreds of the worst criminal perps in San Francisco, but in “Gran Torino,” Eastwood is a 78-year-old Korean War vet named Walt who has watched his working-class Detroit neighborhood change to the point where he’s virtually a lone Caucasian surrounded by Asians.
And Walt hates them all, as well as any other ethnic group that isn’t his own – Polish. It’s here that the film walks a fine and fascinating line, addressing racial tensions in a way that few manage to pull off. The 2005 Best Picture winner “Crash” managed to show race relations in a similarly brutal, bracing and ultimately redemptive fashion, but “Gran Torino” reminded me more of Jack Nicholson’s iconic and Oscar-winning performance as Melvin in 1997’s classic “As Good As It Gets.” Both Nicholson and Eastwood get away with saying thing that would get most of us either beaten or arrested, but manage to have audiences laughing because we expect them to be grizzled, uncensored and outrageous – and because they are poking serious fun at their characters along the way as well.
In “Torino,” the Catholic element comes into play right from the beginning, as Walt is seen at his wife’s funeral. He quickly makes it clear that he doesn’t respect his parish priest, whom he derides face-to-face as “a 27-year-old virgin” who doesn’t know anything about the real world’s problems and suffering. But that priest, played by Christopher Carley, refuses to back down because he promised Walt’s wife on her deathbed that he would persuade Walt to make a confession for the first time in decades.
As the story crystallizes around Walt’s determination to change by protecting his next-door neighbors’ kids from a street gang of their Asian peers, the priest keeps popping up, gradually winning Walt’s respect and forcing him to consider the moral implications of his urge to be a vigilante and perhaps go too far for his own legal and moral good. By the time the film is resolved through a series of clever, unforeseen twists, it is clear that Walt has been transformed by the wisdom of this man whom he once saw as naïve. And Walt’s response is an affecting parallel to the audience’s own initially derisive perception of the priest, taking us along on his faith journey as well.
Meanwhile, “Doubt” – as its title might indicate – heads in the opposite direction while still giving viewers plenty to consider about matters of faith and trust. Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, shortly after the massive changes ushered in by the modernizing Vatican II conference in Rome, the story quickly sets up a conflict between the old-school nun who serves as principal and runs the school like a prison (played by Meryl Streep) and the young, new priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who wants to shake things up by treating the students as fully rounded young people who deserve doses of freedom and respect as well.
Streep and Hoffman wind up in battle over a much more thorny subject, however: she comes to believe, through the tips of a naïve young nun played by Amy Adams, that Hoffman is engaged in an inappropriate relationship with the school’s first admitted black male student. While she has no direct evidence to support her belief, she rigidly sets out to destroy the priest anyway because she refuses to harbor doubt, considering it a weakness. Hanging in the balance are each of their reputations, as well as the well-being of the young boy, whom Hoffman claims he’s merely paying extra attention to in order to help him overcome the ill behavior shown him by his racist classmates.
“Doubt” cannily sets its dramatic fireworks – it’s written and directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (“Moonstruck”) as an adaptation of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play – up in the early ‘60s, removing the film’s questions of inappropriate priestly behavior from the context of this decade’s earlier pedophilic scandals so that its larger questions of faith, morality, and yes, doubt can be dealt with without the distractions of wondering how close a fact-based film was hewing to reality.
A priest friend of mine dismissed “Doubt” without having seen it, saying that he felt the filmmakers caused damage to the public’s perception of the church merely by portraying the film’s three leads in their clerical outfits next to the title word. But I believe that as much as we’d like to think all of life’s questions can be answered with black and white statements by our pastors or solely through interpreting the Scriptures, a stronger faith can be achieved through occasionally questioning things for ourselves.
And films like “Gran Torino” and “Doubt” give us a great place to start.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
MY BATTLE WITH A GIANT CRAB (minds out of the gutter, we're talking seafood! )
So I was in San Francisco, which you can read more about in the post after this, and was looking for the best damn meals i could find in the city. I had already had clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl at Boudin's (Yummmm) and the best Chinese in the city at House of Nanking (where there's always a line, but SO worth it! When i figure out the photo thing, you'll see pictures of the weird stuff they gave me to eat!)
But I was determined to have a hearty plateful of seafood, and the tour guide on Mr. Toad's Wild Tour said that Crab Ciappino was the way to go. I found a joint on Fisherman's Wharf and settled in at a table and ordered away.
What i wound up with (I had no idea what i was getting into) was a giant bowl of tomato broth (delicious, by the way) but it was filled with giant crab pieces , all in their shells. I've only tried to eat this kind of thing one other time in my life and it wasn't pretty. Add in the red soup aspect and i was destined to look more blood-spattered than Sweeney Todd.
And like Todd, you have to brutalize your quarry when eating a crab. Who ever came up with the idea of catching this giant monstrosity that looks like it starred in "Alien," and decided that it was worth the effort of cracking it open repeatedly and fishing out the meat with a dainty fork? On the one hand, it's a decidedly macho process; on the other, decidedly effete.
And I'm sorry, but I'm with the folks of PETA on this one. They think foie gras is bad, but how about this?! At least we're ripping it to pieces once it's already dead. But as I contort my fingers to wrest slivers of crabmeat, I realize my hands keep going numb from the no-doubt-permanent nerve damage I subjected them to on the GoCar, from numbing cold and attempting to navigate the world's craziest streets with only handbrakes to save me.
This is too much work, i quickly decide - I don't want to fight my dinner, i just want to eat it! I shouldn't need the technical skills of a surgeon to complete my meal. But then, maybe this level of frustration is why the Old Testament book of Leviticus frowned on eating shellfish in the first place.
But as I finally get the hang of it, a rush of adrenaline kicks in and I start ripping and tearing it, limb from limb, eventually staring into its gaping maw. I feel like I'm wrestling this beast more than the old guy in "The Old Man and the Sea."
Best of all, they rward you with a hot towel at the end. I also have a photo of the heaping mess that resulted, but that will have to be posted when i learn the technological wonders of uploading photos!
But I was determined to have a hearty plateful of seafood, and the tour guide on Mr. Toad's Wild Tour said that Crab Ciappino was the way to go. I found a joint on Fisherman's Wharf and settled in at a table and ordered away.
What i wound up with (I had no idea what i was getting into) was a giant bowl of tomato broth (delicious, by the way) but it was filled with giant crab pieces , all in their shells. I've only tried to eat this kind of thing one other time in my life and it wasn't pretty. Add in the red soup aspect and i was destined to look more blood-spattered than Sweeney Todd.
And like Todd, you have to brutalize your quarry when eating a crab. Who ever came up with the idea of catching this giant monstrosity that looks like it starred in "Alien," and decided that it was worth the effort of cracking it open repeatedly and fishing out the meat with a dainty fork? On the one hand, it's a decidedly macho process; on the other, decidedly effete.
And I'm sorry, but I'm with the folks of PETA on this one. They think foie gras is bad, but how about this?! At least we're ripping it to pieces once it's already dead. But as I contort my fingers to wrest slivers of crabmeat, I realize my hands keep going numb from the no-doubt-permanent nerve damage I subjected them to on the GoCar, from numbing cold and attempting to navigate the world's craziest streets with only handbrakes to save me.
This is too much work, i quickly decide - I don't want to fight my dinner, i just want to eat it! I shouldn't need the technical skills of a surgeon to complete my meal. But then, maybe this level of frustration is why the Old Testament book of Leviticus frowned on eating shellfish in the first place.
But as I finally get the hang of it, a rush of adrenaline kicks in and I start ripping and tearing it, limb from limb, eventually staring into its gaping maw. I feel like I'm wrestling this beast more than the old guy in "The Old Man and the Sea."
Best of all, they rward you with a hot towel at the end. I also have a photo of the heaping mess that resulted, but that will have to be posted when i learn the technological wonders of uploading photos!
WHAT I DID ON MY CHRISTMAS VACATION (A very bizarre report by me!)
WHAT I DID ON MY CHRISTMAS VACATION (a very bizarre report by me!)
San Francisco: It's long been known as the city of Rice A Roni, cable cars and really really gay people. But because it also is the world's cheapest plane ticket from LA and never gets covered in snow, I decided to make it my Christmas mini-vacation destination.
For four days, from Dec. 26-30, I jetted up to the city to see just what a "San Francisco treat" really entails. Thanks to the wonderful folks at http://www.cheaptickets.com/ (yes, this is a shameless plug hoping for even better future deals!) I wound up getting a round-trip ticket, three nights in the historic-status Hotel Whitcomb, and round trip Super Shuttle from the San Fran airport, all for just $401. I decided to make it a Christmas gift to me (awwwww.)
Well, my Christmas Eve really sucked. I spent it alone because my family is in another state, except for the aunt in Sherman Oaks who had begged me to stick around and spend it with her. Then she decided to have me come over Christmas Day, not Eve, and Christmas Eve is like the one night a year when you absolutely, positively can't call people to ask to come over. They're already miserable enough with their own families without the extra grief of allowing you to come over. So i did some pre-trip research and went to see "Milk."
Contrary to what you might think, it's not a documentary about cows or the dairy industry. Rather, it's the biopic of a guy named Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay man ever to be elected to office in America, before getting shot down in cold blood by a Christian fellow councilman who got off for the killing without a sentence because he claimed he had eaten too many Twinkies and went insane on a sugar high. (If that isn't reason to watch what you let your kids eat, I don't know what is! Moms, hide your Ho Hos!) I always thought that "the Twinkie defense" meant that that guy had testified he killed Milk after yelling out "Take that, you Twinkie!" So the movie was pretty educational. Sean Penn was terrific in it, except the whole time his voice sounded like an even more effeminate Mr. Rogers of "Mr. Rogers Neighborhood" (if that's even possible). No matter how angry he got, or seductive, or whatever, Penn sounded like he was offering chocolate chip cookies to 2nd graders. He also kissed guys a lot, so if that bugs you, watch out. I still say Mickey Rourke deserves the Oscar for "The Wrestler," though.
At any rate, my hotel was indeed classic in style, with huge chandeliers in the lobby and a fancy doorman and bellman in full uniform, but the room was a little small and the bathroom was riDONKulous! Sitting on the toilet required yoga positioning that nearly exceeded my physical capabilities, and there was no tub - just a shower so tiny I had to fold into even further pretzel positions to scrub down.
On the plus side - for me, anyway - was that while the hotel was on the major thoroughfare of Market Street, which includes all the most glamorous stores in the city, the Hotel Whitcomb is about four long blocks AWAY from those glamorous stores. In fact, it's precariously close to the most skanky and questionable part of the city, called The Tenderloin, not due to its great steaks but due to the fact that young hookers of both sexes offer up their tender vittles to customers near there. THAT'S not the fun part; the fun part for me, since I'm a magnet for daily-life danger, was that one night when i woke up starving at 3 a.m., the front desk told me no one would deliver food that late but that i could "make a run for Carl's Jr. a block or so away." Sounded innocent enough. But i quickly came to realize when the guy said "Make a run for it," he meant it! The two-block journey to hamburger-land involved what i like to call a Human Video Game: having to run, jump, dodge, bob and weave my way around sleeping bums and incredibly aggressive panhandlers like I was playing a real-life game of "Frogger."
When I finally made it to Carl's Jr., I was treated to what apparently was the first night ever on the register for the male Filipino running it, as he kept swiping the debit card of the guy in front of me so many times that the guy finally said, "Dammit, if this burger combo winds up costing me $350 instead of $7.50, it's gonna be on YOUR ass!" I tried hard not to laugh, but that was quality comedy for 3 a.m. on a Friday. Meanwhile, some other badass came in, looking like Huggy Bear from "Starsky and Hutch" in a beanie cap, black leather jacket and pimp-daddy shoes from 1973. He apparently thought he WAS Carl's Jr. because he acted like he owned the place, belligerently asking other bums who were there long before him what they were doing and when they ignored him or gave unsatisfactory answers, he'd yell "Suck my d***!"
He kept ranting angrily about how much of that activity was going on, apparently "everyone" is doing it to him because he's so badass. I just put on my hoodie and prayed he wouldn't start talking to me. It was a lot of stress to go through just to eat a Guacamole Burger, is all I'm saying.
On a more pleasant note, the rest of my stay in San Fran was absolutely fantastic, amazing, and yes, even FABULOUS!!! I got to my hotel at about 11 a.m. on Friday and hit the streets in search of a good tour a couple hours later. Now, you might think i'd take a bay tour on a boat, or hop a bus tour, but instead of a city bus tour i decided on literally spur of the moment (15 minutes before departure) to plunk down 50 bucks to be taken to the Muir Woods an hour out of town. Why there? Because they're one of the prime homes of the redwoods, trees so mindbogglingly tall, beautiful and old that they literally should serve as a case-closed argument for a Divine Creator of Earth and the Universe. It was cold, foggy and half the bus was composed of a tour group of Mexican fourth graders (literally from Mexico) but it was still one of the most amazing sights of my life. (I'm trying to upload my pix, but don't know how here. Anyone who can help advise, please write me at Carlk@pasadenaweekly.com. )
The next day, I engaged in the highlight of my trip: renting a GoCar. Now, i haven't driven in 5 1/2 years, and San Francisco is pretty much a suicidal place to start trying. It's home to 47 hills, and we're talking HILLS. Lance Armstrong probably couldn't bike these babies! Not to mention twists, turns and fast-paced traffic. So this could have been scary. Yet surprisingly, it wasn't.
The GoCar is a new technology only available in San Diego, San Fran and Miami so far - in which the three-wheeled vehicle (two in front, one in back) operates like a motorcycle, with hand brakes and acceleration and no use of feet - which was just as well because the thing is smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle and my legs kept going numb from being jammed inside. It goes up to 35 mph and has a GPS system in which a hot-sounding chick not only tells you where to go, but also narrates explanations of everything.
The downsides - which are quickly forgotten due to the amazing upsides of the thing, which looks like a modernized version of the motorcycle sidecars that Nazis used to drive in WWII movies - are that I felt I dislocated my left hip getting in and out and was almost certain a tore a ligament in my right knee (thankfully, neither actually happened). My hands were practically frostbitten from the fact I had no gloves on amid cold December air and no roof - the lack of roof also meaning i had to wear a ridiculous helmet the whole time that made me look like a very portly Speed Racer. (Again, there are photos, but i need someone to help me figure out how!) But it was exciting and liberating to drive, especially on Lombard Street - the world's windiest with eight immediate sharp turns in one block.
Sure, I'll admit I was shrieking the whole way down, but people were laughing and it helped distract me from the fact that my arms felt they were about to be ripped clean out of their sockets from holding the brakes so hard. Despite all that (or maybe because of the sheer thrill of it) I recommend it wholeheartedly!!
That night, I packed my night with two more "Yes Man"-style decisions. I'd learned that the incomparable '60s soul singer Darlene Love (who worked with Phil Spector on many songs, including the ultimate pop Christmas song, "Baby Please Come Home". I've grown up watching her on the Letterman show nearly every year since she started singing that song on his show the night before Christmas Eve each year since 1986, and there she has a gospel choir, a small orchestra, the house band and Paul Shaffer impeccably performing the song's vital piano riffs. I remembered Letterman saying "if you're in San Francisco, see her through Jan. 7 at the Rrazz Room," so bam - he told me to go and i went.
Darlene was performing without a choir and orchestra, but had '70s/'80s soul singer Melba Moore (I know, who??) open for her and Melba was surprisingly good - plus they both shared a TIGHT five piece band with drums, two horns, a guitarist and bassist that blasted right through countless covers from the era when women could really truly sing their guts out in a song. I was easily the youngest person in the room, as i was surrounded by middle-aged and older married couples and countless ecstatic gay guys (who run like Pavlov's dogs to any show featuring a diva like Love).
The show kicked off with a Love-Moore duet on "Heat Wave," which reminded me of the late great Sweeney Sisters lounge-act sketches on "SNL" in the '80s because these ladies came ready to WORK it! Love then left Moore to her own devices for awhile, which was mostly mediocre stuff, except Moore did a brassy interpretation of "The Long and Winding Road" in which she held the final note, Whitney-style, for at least 20 seconds at the end, leading to thunderous applause and yet another standing ovation from the gays in the crowd.
But that was nothing compared to the rapturous response Love got when she took the stage again. As she burst through a succession of '60s songs, I felt like I was in the super-cheesy audience of one of those PBS pledge-drive specials where a bunch of '60s acts are shown singing their ancient one or two-hit wonders. She tore through "He's a Rebel," "Da Doo Ron Ron," and "Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry" before finally doing Tina Turner's "River Deep Mountain High" with such earth-shaking intensity I didn't even realize she didn't sing any Christmas songs the entire time. How heartbreaking. But still a masterful display of vocal power!
I then hopped a cab for yet another destination: Cobb's Comedy Club, a huge and respected venue where my current favorite comic on earth, Patton Oswalt, was headlining. The line literally wrapped around the block, which was perfect for the sharpest comic mind in the country - who went on to deconstruct both the Christmas holidays and religion itself in such a funny fashion that I couldn't help laughing, even though I'm Catholic and Oswalt's an atheist. That's a strong show!
Sunday, I hopped into an old '20s jalopy to take Mr. Toad's Wild Tour, which had a very funny tour guide named Patrick taking us around the city in a classic car that had had its engine converted to biodiesel. The driver let me be his sidekick, which basically covered for the fact i was the only solo traveler, but that was still preferable to the multitude of restaurants and other tours whose initial response to my "party of one" requests was "WHAT?! Really?!" Ah, nothing like being made to feel comfortable on vacation, eh?
So among the things I learned from the Mr. Toad tour are:
The city's Washington Square is actually a triangle of land, and features a statue of Ben Franklin rather than George Washington. But then again, this city's so gay, why should they bother to even get their FACTS straight, right?
Many houses with garages were built in the '20s, with the garages added in the '50s.
Steve McQueen's "Bullitt" character lived in an apartment at Clay and Taylor, directly across from the VJ Market.
Grace Cathedral has a labyrinth inside for no reason that our driver could figure out. You can take a free tour of it, though, and I suppose ask the guide yourself.
To be a member of the city's lavish Pacific Union Club, you must be male and Republican. And I bet, in denial. (Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, baby!)
Chinatown is home to 180,000 Chinese. They have no front yards there. So kids play in parks in other neighborhoods.
The Fairmont Hotel was where Kim Novak's residence was in my all-time choice for greatest movie ever: "Vertigo."
The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory (I have a photo, which will be posted soon!) is the one place that makes ALL the fortune cookies for the many Chinese restaurants in Chinatown. It's a tiny space that looks like a sweatshop, with 4 old women constantly stuffing fortunes into cookies coming off an assembly line apparatus as an old Chinese guy yells at them. I took a picture of that too, will be up soon i hope!
The third weekend in May, the Beta Breakers race is a 7 mile race through town which people can choose to run nude. (Look out Frisco, here i come! Don't worry i'm personal training first.)
Panhandle Park is an actual city park that had such a staggering concentration of bums, that that's where the word "panhandler" came from. The worldwide word for bums - amazing! (Don't you feel mentally enriched now?!)
SF city law says a house can't be painted more than 5 colors on the outside. (That actually USED to be a problem!)
The Grateful Dead used to live at 810 Ashbury.
Golden Gate Park is 3 1/2 miles long, which makes it bigger than NYC's Central Park even though SF is a mile smaller (7 miles rather than 8 miles).
The Presidio - former military base - rents its houses nowadays for $8,000 a month. But hey - you get 5 BR, 2 1/2 BA and an actual yard - a great rarity in SF! You're also paying for actual easy parking, and for having trees around.
SF only has 3 cemeteries inside it, at least one of which is ancient and defunct and another one which is for pets. But a small town called Coma (pop. 1,400) 10 miles south of SF has mor than 1.5 million people buried there so far from the city, prompting its city slogan "It's good to be alive in Coma."
The Golden Gate Bridge takes 4 years to paint. It's painted International Orange, not Gold. It got its name by being named "the gateway to gold" during the Gold Rush.
There are great white sharks swimming off Baker Beach, which is clothing optional. I guess people go nude there if they want to make dinner a little easier for the sharks. ************************************************************************************Enough Enough about the city, though...Well, actually, one last thing before i detail my epic battle with a bowlful of crab cioppino. Despite taking 4 or 5 different tours there (I also went to Alcatraz at NIGHT - scary!), I realized at 4 p.m. my last day there - 4 hours before my ride to the SF airport! - that no tour had shown even a sliver of the gay part of town. How can you go to SF and not see the gay part? Unless it's ALL the gay part and you just don't know it?!
So i asked a tour driver why and he said everyone's still scared of freaking out midwestern tourists who might freak out if their kid sees two guys holding hands or kissing. But as a grown man who had already survived a screening of "Milk" just the other day, I was prepared for it! I decided to hop a cab and simply ask the driver "Take me to the gayest part of town!" Which i did, and the driver said "you mean the Castro, right?" I didn't know if that was a code word so i said "Just the gayest part. I only have four hours."
Which made it sound like i was looking for one last miracle lovefest, even though i'm straight. So the driver took me down the world's most convoluted collection of backstreets and wound up dropping me off right across the street from the Castro Theater! And guess what they were showing that night? No, not "Brokeback Mountain" or a porno, but "The Sing Along Sound of Music." Complete with a costume contest!!! If THAT wasn't the gayest thing to do on a Monday night in SF, i don't know what was! And applying my "yes man" principle, i slapped down $15 to go watch it! I've never seen so many guys dressed as nuns or Maria Von Trapp in one place in my life! And others dressed in lederhosen! More than 1400 people singing as if it was their one shot on the "American Idol" auditions - LOUD being the operative word here- to some of the catchiest songs in movie history. With events like that, it's no wonder I would love to move there.
San Francisco: It's long been known as the city of Rice A Roni, cable cars and really really gay people. But because it also is the world's cheapest plane ticket from LA and never gets covered in snow, I decided to make it my Christmas mini-vacation destination.
For four days, from Dec. 26-30, I jetted up to the city to see just what a "San Francisco treat" really entails. Thanks to the wonderful folks at http://www.cheaptickets.com/ (yes, this is a shameless plug hoping for even better future deals!) I wound up getting a round-trip ticket, three nights in the historic-status Hotel Whitcomb, and round trip Super Shuttle from the San Fran airport, all for just $401. I decided to make it a Christmas gift to me (awwwww.)
Well, my Christmas Eve really sucked. I spent it alone because my family is in another state, except for the aunt in Sherman Oaks who had begged me to stick around and spend it with her. Then she decided to have me come over Christmas Day, not Eve, and Christmas Eve is like the one night a year when you absolutely, positively can't call people to ask to come over. They're already miserable enough with their own families without the extra grief of allowing you to come over. So i did some pre-trip research and went to see "Milk."
Contrary to what you might think, it's not a documentary about cows or the dairy industry. Rather, it's the biopic of a guy named Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay man ever to be elected to office in America, before getting shot down in cold blood by a Christian fellow councilman who got off for the killing without a sentence because he claimed he had eaten too many Twinkies and went insane on a sugar high. (If that isn't reason to watch what you let your kids eat, I don't know what is! Moms, hide your Ho Hos!) I always thought that "the Twinkie defense" meant that that guy had testified he killed Milk after yelling out "Take that, you Twinkie!" So the movie was pretty educational. Sean Penn was terrific in it, except the whole time his voice sounded like an even more effeminate Mr. Rogers of "Mr. Rogers Neighborhood" (if that's even possible). No matter how angry he got, or seductive, or whatever, Penn sounded like he was offering chocolate chip cookies to 2nd graders. He also kissed guys a lot, so if that bugs you, watch out. I still say Mickey Rourke deserves the Oscar for "The Wrestler," though.
At any rate, my hotel was indeed classic in style, with huge chandeliers in the lobby and a fancy doorman and bellman in full uniform, but the room was a little small and the bathroom was riDONKulous! Sitting on the toilet required yoga positioning that nearly exceeded my physical capabilities, and there was no tub - just a shower so tiny I had to fold into even further pretzel positions to scrub down.
On the plus side - for me, anyway - was that while the hotel was on the major thoroughfare of Market Street, which includes all the most glamorous stores in the city, the Hotel Whitcomb is about four long blocks AWAY from those glamorous stores. In fact, it's precariously close to the most skanky and questionable part of the city, called The Tenderloin, not due to its great steaks but due to the fact that young hookers of both sexes offer up their tender vittles to customers near there. THAT'S not the fun part; the fun part for me, since I'm a magnet for daily-life danger, was that one night when i woke up starving at 3 a.m., the front desk told me no one would deliver food that late but that i could "make a run for Carl's Jr. a block or so away." Sounded innocent enough. But i quickly came to realize when the guy said "Make a run for it," he meant it! The two-block journey to hamburger-land involved what i like to call a Human Video Game: having to run, jump, dodge, bob and weave my way around sleeping bums and incredibly aggressive panhandlers like I was playing a real-life game of "Frogger."
When I finally made it to Carl's Jr., I was treated to what apparently was the first night ever on the register for the male Filipino running it, as he kept swiping the debit card of the guy in front of me so many times that the guy finally said, "Dammit, if this burger combo winds up costing me $350 instead of $7.50, it's gonna be on YOUR ass!" I tried hard not to laugh, but that was quality comedy for 3 a.m. on a Friday. Meanwhile, some other badass came in, looking like Huggy Bear from "Starsky and Hutch" in a beanie cap, black leather jacket and pimp-daddy shoes from 1973. He apparently thought he WAS Carl's Jr. because he acted like he owned the place, belligerently asking other bums who were there long before him what they were doing and when they ignored him or gave unsatisfactory answers, he'd yell "Suck my d***!"
He kept ranting angrily about how much of that activity was going on, apparently "everyone" is doing it to him because he's so badass. I just put on my hoodie and prayed he wouldn't start talking to me. It was a lot of stress to go through just to eat a Guacamole Burger, is all I'm saying.
On a more pleasant note, the rest of my stay in San Fran was absolutely fantastic, amazing, and yes, even FABULOUS!!! I got to my hotel at about 11 a.m. on Friday and hit the streets in search of a good tour a couple hours later. Now, you might think i'd take a bay tour on a boat, or hop a bus tour, but instead of a city bus tour i decided on literally spur of the moment (15 minutes before departure) to plunk down 50 bucks to be taken to the Muir Woods an hour out of town. Why there? Because they're one of the prime homes of the redwoods, trees so mindbogglingly tall, beautiful and old that they literally should serve as a case-closed argument for a Divine Creator of Earth and the Universe. It was cold, foggy and half the bus was composed of a tour group of Mexican fourth graders (literally from Mexico) but it was still one of the most amazing sights of my life. (I'm trying to upload my pix, but don't know how here. Anyone who can help advise, please write me at Carlk@pasadenaweekly.com. )
The next day, I engaged in the highlight of my trip: renting a GoCar. Now, i haven't driven in 5 1/2 years, and San Francisco is pretty much a suicidal place to start trying. It's home to 47 hills, and we're talking HILLS. Lance Armstrong probably couldn't bike these babies! Not to mention twists, turns and fast-paced traffic. So this could have been scary. Yet surprisingly, it wasn't.
The GoCar is a new technology only available in San Diego, San Fran and Miami so far - in which the three-wheeled vehicle (two in front, one in back) operates like a motorcycle, with hand brakes and acceleration and no use of feet - which was just as well because the thing is smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle and my legs kept going numb from being jammed inside. It goes up to 35 mph and has a GPS system in which a hot-sounding chick not only tells you where to go, but also narrates explanations of everything.
The downsides - which are quickly forgotten due to the amazing upsides of the thing, which looks like a modernized version of the motorcycle sidecars that Nazis used to drive in WWII movies - are that I felt I dislocated my left hip getting in and out and was almost certain a tore a ligament in my right knee (thankfully, neither actually happened). My hands were practically frostbitten from the fact I had no gloves on amid cold December air and no roof - the lack of roof also meaning i had to wear a ridiculous helmet the whole time that made me look like a very portly Speed Racer. (Again, there are photos, but i need someone to help me figure out how!) But it was exciting and liberating to drive, especially on Lombard Street - the world's windiest with eight immediate sharp turns in one block.
Sure, I'll admit I was shrieking the whole way down, but people were laughing and it helped distract me from the fact that my arms felt they were about to be ripped clean out of their sockets from holding the brakes so hard. Despite all that (or maybe because of the sheer thrill of it) I recommend it wholeheartedly!!
That night, I packed my night with two more "Yes Man"-style decisions. I'd learned that the incomparable '60s soul singer Darlene Love (who worked with Phil Spector on many songs, including the ultimate pop Christmas song, "Baby Please Come Home". I've grown up watching her on the Letterman show nearly every year since she started singing that song on his show the night before Christmas Eve each year since 1986, and there she has a gospel choir, a small orchestra, the house band and Paul Shaffer impeccably performing the song's vital piano riffs. I remembered Letterman saying "if you're in San Francisco, see her through Jan. 7 at the Rrazz Room," so bam - he told me to go and i went.
Darlene was performing without a choir and orchestra, but had '70s/'80s soul singer Melba Moore (I know, who??) open for her and Melba was surprisingly good - plus they both shared a TIGHT five piece band with drums, two horns, a guitarist and bassist that blasted right through countless covers from the era when women could really truly sing their guts out in a song. I was easily the youngest person in the room, as i was surrounded by middle-aged and older married couples and countless ecstatic gay guys (who run like Pavlov's dogs to any show featuring a diva like Love).
The show kicked off with a Love-Moore duet on "Heat Wave," which reminded me of the late great Sweeney Sisters lounge-act sketches on "SNL" in the '80s because these ladies came ready to WORK it! Love then left Moore to her own devices for awhile, which was mostly mediocre stuff, except Moore did a brassy interpretation of "The Long and Winding Road" in which she held the final note, Whitney-style, for at least 20 seconds at the end, leading to thunderous applause and yet another standing ovation from the gays in the crowd.
But that was nothing compared to the rapturous response Love got when she took the stage again. As she burst through a succession of '60s songs, I felt like I was in the super-cheesy audience of one of those PBS pledge-drive specials where a bunch of '60s acts are shown singing their ancient one or two-hit wonders. She tore through "He's a Rebel," "Da Doo Ron Ron," and "Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry" before finally doing Tina Turner's "River Deep Mountain High" with such earth-shaking intensity I didn't even realize she didn't sing any Christmas songs the entire time. How heartbreaking. But still a masterful display of vocal power!
I then hopped a cab for yet another destination: Cobb's Comedy Club, a huge and respected venue where my current favorite comic on earth, Patton Oswalt, was headlining. The line literally wrapped around the block, which was perfect for the sharpest comic mind in the country - who went on to deconstruct both the Christmas holidays and religion itself in such a funny fashion that I couldn't help laughing, even though I'm Catholic and Oswalt's an atheist. That's a strong show!
Sunday, I hopped into an old '20s jalopy to take Mr. Toad's Wild Tour, which had a very funny tour guide named Patrick taking us around the city in a classic car that had had its engine converted to biodiesel. The driver let me be his sidekick, which basically covered for the fact i was the only solo traveler, but that was still preferable to the multitude of restaurants and other tours whose initial response to my "party of one" requests was "WHAT?! Really?!" Ah, nothing like being made to feel comfortable on vacation, eh?
So among the things I learned from the Mr. Toad tour are:
The city's Washington Square is actually a triangle of land, and features a statue of Ben Franklin rather than George Washington. But then again, this city's so gay, why should they bother to even get their FACTS straight, right?
Many houses with garages were built in the '20s, with the garages added in the '50s.
Steve McQueen's "Bullitt" character lived in an apartment at Clay and Taylor, directly across from the VJ Market.
Grace Cathedral has a labyrinth inside for no reason that our driver could figure out. You can take a free tour of it, though, and I suppose ask the guide yourself.
To be a member of the city's lavish Pacific Union Club, you must be male and Republican. And I bet, in denial. (Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, baby!)
Chinatown is home to 180,000 Chinese. They have no front yards there. So kids play in parks in other neighborhoods.
The Fairmont Hotel was where Kim Novak's residence was in my all-time choice for greatest movie ever: "Vertigo."
The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory (I have a photo, which will be posted soon!) is the one place that makes ALL the fortune cookies for the many Chinese restaurants in Chinatown. It's a tiny space that looks like a sweatshop, with 4 old women constantly stuffing fortunes into cookies coming off an assembly line apparatus as an old Chinese guy yells at them. I took a picture of that too, will be up soon i hope!
The third weekend in May, the Beta Breakers race is a 7 mile race through town which people can choose to run nude. (Look out Frisco, here i come! Don't worry i'm personal training first.)
Panhandle Park is an actual city park that had such a staggering concentration of bums, that that's where the word "panhandler" came from. The worldwide word for bums - amazing! (Don't you feel mentally enriched now?!)
SF city law says a house can't be painted more than 5 colors on the outside. (That actually USED to be a problem!)
The Grateful Dead used to live at 810 Ashbury.
Golden Gate Park is 3 1/2 miles long, which makes it bigger than NYC's Central Park even though SF is a mile smaller (7 miles rather than 8 miles).
The Presidio - former military base - rents its houses nowadays for $8,000 a month. But hey - you get 5 BR, 2 1/2 BA and an actual yard - a great rarity in SF! You're also paying for actual easy parking, and for having trees around.
SF only has 3 cemeteries inside it, at least one of which is ancient and defunct and another one which is for pets. But a small town called Coma (pop. 1,400) 10 miles south of SF has mor than 1.5 million people buried there so far from the city, prompting its city slogan "It's good to be alive in Coma."
The Golden Gate Bridge takes 4 years to paint. It's painted International Orange, not Gold. It got its name by being named "the gateway to gold" during the Gold Rush.
There are great white sharks swimming off Baker Beach, which is clothing optional. I guess people go nude there if they want to make dinner a little easier for the sharks. ************************************************************************************Enough Enough about the city, though...Well, actually, one last thing before i detail my epic battle with a bowlful of crab cioppino. Despite taking 4 or 5 different tours there (I also went to Alcatraz at NIGHT - scary!), I realized at 4 p.m. my last day there - 4 hours before my ride to the SF airport! - that no tour had shown even a sliver of the gay part of town. How can you go to SF and not see the gay part? Unless it's ALL the gay part and you just don't know it?!
So i asked a tour driver why and he said everyone's still scared of freaking out midwestern tourists who might freak out if their kid sees two guys holding hands or kissing. But as a grown man who had already survived a screening of "Milk" just the other day, I was prepared for it! I decided to hop a cab and simply ask the driver "Take me to the gayest part of town!" Which i did, and the driver said "you mean the Castro, right?" I didn't know if that was a code word so i said "Just the gayest part. I only have four hours."
Which made it sound like i was looking for one last miracle lovefest, even though i'm straight. So the driver took me down the world's most convoluted collection of backstreets and wound up dropping me off right across the street from the Castro Theater! And guess what they were showing that night? No, not "Brokeback Mountain" or a porno, but "The Sing Along Sound of Music." Complete with a costume contest!!! If THAT wasn't the gayest thing to do on a Monday night in SF, i don't know what was! And applying my "yes man" principle, i slapped down $15 to go watch it! I've never seen so many guys dressed as nuns or Maria Von Trapp in one place in my life! And others dressed in lederhosen! More than 1400 people singing as if it was their one shot on the "American Idol" auditions - LOUD being the operative word here- to some of the catchiest songs in movie history. With events like that, it's no wonder I would love to move there.
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