(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

  That show was just one of many, part of something larger, what I would now refer to, ingloriously, as a lifestyle.

  Not that I got myself all snagged up in the trappings—the clothing and the albums and the lighters—because I was, after all, a good suburban kid from a progressive California city, with a couple of parents who had dabbled in hippiedom and raised me up on a steady diet of Beatles and Stones, a kid who had thrown his lot in with the Police and the Smiths and the Fixx, who dabbled in prog rock (Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto! ) but remained officially an acolyte of New Wave, which seems somehow more embarrassing to admit than anything else I’ve told you.

  Well.

  The point being that I thought of myself as slumming. Observing El Paso’s metalheads as they thrashed and banged against their own bleak prospects, as they closed their eyes and hoped for a way out through the music—all this was a matter of professional duty.

  But I was more like those kids than I would ever have admitted to myself, as insecure about my manhood, as desperate for affirmation, as hungry for touch. Didn’t matter that I wore skinny thrift-store ties and wingtips, or carried around business cards with my name printed on them. Didn’t even matter that I had a girlfriend who read Nietzsche. What mattered was my insides, which were in a state of continuous, riotous want.

  Did I mention Tesla?

  They were my favorite metal band, probably because they weren’t even really metal, just five burnouts from Sacramento who knew enough to play loud. The lead singer, Jeff Keith, grew up eating government-issue cheese in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. Before he joined the band, he drove a septic truck. His job was to transport rich people’s shit around. He was a shit transporter. You don’t think this guy knew his way around a wish fantasy?

  The rest of the guys, they were all shit transporters of one sort or another. They lacked pretense, because they lacked access to the world of ideas, which is the laboratory of pretense. What they knew was that life sucked most of the time, but that music (along with sex) was the only sure path to joy.

  I got to see Tesla only once, opening for White Snake. Went to see the show with my pal Hank, a lawyer at one of the big downtown firms. We got us a bottle of MD 20/20—pink grapefruit, as I recall—and drank the whole thing sitting on a curb outside the arena, Hank still in his dark suit. We also smoked a big, fat blunt. Shit yeah. At one point, a Latin woman walked past in jeans so tight that we could see everything and Hank said, “Jesus, man, that’s one of our paralegals.” He couldn’t believe that she was dressed like that, right out in public.

  Sometimes you had to explain this kind of stuff to people like Hank, because they wanted to believe that El Paso was pretty much what they saw, a dried-out suburb with chain restaurants and a friendly brown underclass. This was easier than facing the city as it actually existed—a head-on collision between the First and Third Worlds, the sort of place where the day maids had to sneak across a toxic river every morning at six. Where, if you got up early enough, you could watch the whole sad drama, the Border Patrol agents cruising around in puke-green vans, deciding whom to deport back to the insatiable hunger of Juarez. Though actually El Paso was what all cities are (only more so): a factory of lurid dreams.

  All I could think of as this woman walked past us was how much I wanted to strip those jeans off—I knew it would take some doing—and hump her on the fine leather chair in Hank’s office. Squeak-squeak-squeak.

  This night I’m talking about was, if memory serves, a Friday in early spring of 1989, and Hank and I were juiced up on sugary wine and downtown brown, and we streamed into the arena just in time to catch Tesla wailing through “Heaven’s Trail (No Way Out).” No one was listening that carefully. They were just the opening band, relegated to the front third of the stage, looking a little naked, almost earnest up there without the fancy costumes and fireworks. But it was a beautiful thing to hear the sweet clamor of all that art.

  And I did manage to have sex with that paralegal.

  Or no, maybe it wasn’t her exactly, but the teller from the bank with the same dyed ringlets of hair. What I remember is the lovely curve of her in the moonlight, and the desperate mashing of our wine-soaked bodies.

  Now, as a grownup, well into my reasonable thirties, it would make sense enough to disown the excess of metal, the dopey hairstyles and costumes and tragically stupid lyrics. I don’t listen to the stuff anymore, aside from Tesla. Never did listen to it much. But what I can’t rid myself of is the yearning, the dumb yearning of the body and the heart’s frenzy, that sense of what might happen at any moment, the sex that might happen at any moment, the skin and the wet parts, the utter absence of shame.

  Metal was always about this—shameless hope—and this seems in keeping with the best spirit of rock and roll. I find it hard to get turned on listening to the minor-key bombast of alt-rock (which sells us self-indulgent misery) or hip-hop (which sells us black self-immolation in a thin, shiny wrapper of self-celebration). But I still stiffen up at the sound of a good, overblown power chord. I still look around and try to spot any stray tits in the room, and later, in the privacy of my own quarters, whether alone or with company, I quite happily conduct my business.

  CASH COWED

  A lot of people have accused the Bush administration of failing to seek compromise with Democrats. They base this accusation on stuff like Bush planning the war in Iraq without “consulting” Congress, or allowing the nation’s energy policy to be written by “industry lobbyists.”

  Well, I can assure all you lefty naysayers out there that the midterm elections (aka the Great Thumpin’) have in fact heralded a much more inclusive Republican approach to governance.

  I base this assertion on a wonderful phone call I received last week, which began with a recorded message from a young woman urging me to hold on for a second recorded message, this one from Representative Tom Reynolds (R-NY), the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and a close personal friend—or rather, sorry, check that, enemy—of former congressperv Mark Foley.

  Mr. Reynolds, it turns out, had a terrific offer. He wanted to recognize me as one of the small-business leaders in my state and to invite me to become an honorary chairman of something called the Business Advisory Council. I would be awarded a ceremonial gavel and allowed (potentially) to attend an economic summit/dinner with the President himself. I was then connected to an actual person, a young man named David Lucas, who explained that, for a mere $500 contribution, my name would join those of dozens of other business leaders in an ad scheduled to run in The Wall Street Journal.

  I realize there are cynics out there who might be upset at such a phone call. They might accuse the Republicans of running a boiler room operation, of trying to scam money from gullible small-businessmen to feed their insatiable graft machine.

  But I was heartened. No, more than heartened; I was moved. Here they were, these supposedly “evil” Republicans, reaching across the aisle to embrace little old me, an impoverished pinko writer who has publicly referred to George W. Bush as “an evangelical nutbag.” If that’s not inclusion, I don’t know what is.

  So, obviously, I wanted to help out. But five hundred bucks is a lot of money, particularly for an impoverished pinko writer, so I needed to ask my new Republican pal David a few questions first.

  “What can you tell me about the gavel?” I said.

  “The gavel?” David said. “We don’t have too much on the gavel, sir. I know it does have a golden band, just like the one on the House floor.”

  I imagined Vice President Dick Cheney calling a joint session to order with just such a gavel and, as often happens when I think of Dick Cheney, I got a hard-on.

  “What about the ad in The Wall Street Journal?” I said.

  “It’s a limited-time offer,” David said. “This is something you’d need to do within the next day or two. We’d need you to pay.”

  “Right,” I said. “What will it say, exactly?”

  “Your name will be in the
ad, listed as an honorary state chair of the Business Advisory Council.”

  “What is the Business Advisory Council?”

  “It’s a group that seeks to bring common business sense to Washington. It functions independently, with reporting lines to Tom Reynolds and party leaders. There are meetings, economic summits, and so forth.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What would the ad say?”

  “Just that you have shown a willingness to provide strong leadership in the business community.”

  “But how do you know that I’ve shown a willingness to provide strong leadership in the business community?”

  “Because that’s what the ad will say. That you’re standing up for your state and ready to go to work in Washington in an economical way.”

  It certainly sounded legit to me.

  “But tell me, David. The congressman mentioned a dinner with the President. Is that included in the five-hundred-dollar fee?”

  “Well, there is a black-tie dinner in spring, but we don’t have the date or time yet. And we’re still recruiting business leaders for that. Of course, there’s an additional cost associated.”

  “It sure would be great to have dinner with the President,” I said.

  “Yes, that is a great honor, sir.”

  “What sort of additional cost would that involve?” I was imagining ribs and slaw in Crawford, cold brewskis, cracking a few faggot jokes over horseshoes.

  “I don’t know for sure,” David said. “I think last time it was twenty-five hundred for a seat. But that includes meetings before the official dinner.”

  I whistled. “That’s something I’d have to think about.”

  “It’s just five hundred for the ad,” David said. “But we’d need to process your payment in the next day or two. This is a limited-time offer.”

  “Still,” I said. “That’s a lot of money for me. I’d have to check with my board of directors on this.”

  “That’s the thing,” David said. “Because of campaign reform, it’s illegal to solicit corporate contributions, so this would have to be on a personal level.”

  I told him I understood, but needed more time to think about it.

  David lowered his voice. “If cash flow is an issue, we could probably get your name in the ad for two or three hundred dollars.”

  “I thought it was five hundred,” I said.

  “Yeah, it is five hundred. But there is a minimum contribution of a hundred dollars.”

  This was almost too much generosity.

  “If you have a credit card, we could take care of this right now.”

  I didn’t want to have to break it to David, because I knew he regarded me as a pretty hard-core business leader at this point, but I wasn’t sure my credit card was in good standing. “Let me call you back later,” I said.

  He was pretty disappointed.

  I, on the other hand, felt buoyant. It was high time I stopped regarding the GOP as a bunch of greedy crooks devoted to enriching themselves at the expense of our national character. I needed to realize that they cared about the little guy. The party was filled with folks like Tom Reynolds and David Lucas, men who spent their days endeavoring to make sure that tiny voices like mine were heard in the great halls of power. I couldn’t wait to tell my bitter pinko brethren about this brush with bipartisan phone solicitation. Don’t you guys get it? I’d say. This is how democracy is supposed to work.

  WHERE’D YOU HIDE THE BODY?

  Because I don’t own a TV, I’m often struck by the appearance of entire TV genres that have risen up in my absence. The other day I found myself in front of a TV (a wide-screen sucker at that), and in the space of two hours saw ads for the following series: CSI, Without a Trace, Cold Case, and CSI: NY.

  The basic premise of all of these shows, from what I could discern, is pretty similar: There’s a dead body and the investigators have to figure out how it got dead. So, in other words, we’re talking about Quincy, ME, only with cooler gadgets and hotter actors. In most cases—and I think this is crucial—the bodies have been forgotten, overlooked, or otherwise misplaced. The best example I can cite is the promo for CSI: NY, which I had the pleasure of viewing seventeen times. It shows a woman on a bus nudging a fellow passenger, apparently a black youth dressed in baggy clothing, who is dozing. His baseball hat falls off and we discover that the kid is actually …a skeleton.

  Now, I want to make clear that I have never seen any of these shows. I’m sure they’re gripping and ingeniously written and expertly acted. But that’s not why I find them interesting. I find them interesting because they (and their massive popularity) strike me as a deep expression of the current national neurosis.

  By which I mean that we, as a nation, are suffering from an odd form of survivor guilt. We are being told, almost constantly, that we are at war. We are aware that killing is being done in the name of our protection. Like the President, we see the casualty reports on TV. But we are not seeing any of the bodies.

  This is the single most conspicuous aspect of our so-called war coverage. No bloody footage allowed, nothing that would make the consequences of our military operations too apparent. The media isn’t even allowed to photograph the caskets of the fallen. It’s as if the bodies of the Americans (not to mention the foreign combatants, not to mention the foreign civilians) have disappeared …without a trace.

  Not only are the bodies gone, they have been stripped of any concrete narrative. Why? Because if we saw all those bodies, and learned something about the life that animated each of them, their deaths would become too real. We might start to ask the appropriate moral questions that ought to accompany preemptive military action. Namely: Why did this person die? For what cause? Was that cause worth his death, and the anguish felt by his survivors?

  In this sense, we can see the deluge of necro-investigative shows as a displaced psychic response, a kind of compensatory pantomime. While the military are engaged in an elaborate cover-up of all those bodies (with a friendly assist from our free press), our popular culture crafts shows in which intrepid techno-equipped heroes start with a body and uncover the truth about its death. These programs are not concerned with morality, though. They are intended to deliver the viewer a sense of closure, of a job well done. They inoculate us against the senselessness of death by rendering death as a mystery to be solved.

  I’m not sure I can convey the strangeness of all this.

  But just imagine if a person from an indigenous culture with no access to media tried to take stock of our current historical circumstance. She would find a culture completely insulated from the abundant byproducts of actual killing and yet curiously obsessed with precise, artificial renderings of death.

  Americans have always had a tremendous knack for self-delusion, of course. We were founded by self-deluders, and we have been happily sustained by the habit. But I do think the terrorist attacks of 9/11 raised our capacities to a new high. All we heard about in the days afterward was the scope of the tragedy. Initial estimates, if you’ll recall, were up to forty thousand dead at the World Trade Center alone. And yet, oddly, we were shown very few images of human carnage. Instead, we saw an endless tape loop—the collision, the collapse, the rubble. The bodies simply disappeared.

  A psychic vacuum was created, one we’re still trying to fill. I don’t mean to suggest that America’s death fetish is premeditated, or even recognized. On the contrary, it’s a powerful subconscious effort to explicate (and thereby tame) the horror of death.

  One might locate the same paradoxical impulse in a Reality TV game show that subjects Americans to temporary states of starvation and disease when in fact these hardships define human existence in much of the world. Or a hit series such as Dexter, which stars a serial killer with a heart of gold whose elaborate torture methods are justified by the greater evil of his victims. (Don’t get me started on the sado-fetishism of 24.) Can it be any coincidence that Americans are offered such stylized visions of torture at the very moment our administra
tion is arguing for its necessity against actual terrorist suspects?

  Or consider the rash of recent films, such as Turistas Go Home, in which innocent Americans abroad—generally dressed in bikinis—are abducted by murderous foreigners. These movies arrive in the midst of a sustained campaign by this country’s leaders to cast our citizens as victims facing a villainous immigrant mob ravenous to pour over our borders and steal our jobs. (And the really plum ones, too, such as cleaning toilets.)

  I’m not suggesting that the Bush administration has a secret pipeline to Tinseltown. Notwithstanding the Disney/Cheney collaboration The Path to 9/11, they don’t need one. These fables arise spontaneously, as a way of reinventing the world in a manner that absolves us of the violence carried out in our names. They are generated by the growing burden of our imperial guilt. America is talking to itself through these dramas, issuing frantic alibis that play more like twisted confessions.

  It all comes down to dead bodies—the real ones, the fake ones, our profound national confusion over which is which. Do we even know anymore?

  The figure that comes to mind when I consider this paradox is Lady Macbeth. As you’ll recall, she isn’t the one who does the killing. She sends her husband to do the dirty work. And yet she goes mad anyhow, rubbing and rubbing at a spot of blood that isn’t there, but was, and will be.

  DEMAGOGUE DAYS

  OR, HOW THE RIGHT-WING HATEOCRACY CHEWED ME UP AND SPAT ME OUT

  A Shameless Multimedia Extravaganza Featuring Sean Hannity, Dante Alighieri, Ann Coulter, and a special cameo by that super-classy Secretary of State who never met a war she didn’t like…Condoleezza Rice!