Life and passion were either getting away from me, or I was finding new ways to define them, leaning dangerously close to career advancement over harnessing my lifelong passions. Still, doubt nagged me. I wondered if I was taking full advantage of my New York opportunities. I wondered if my writing career would advance faster if I’d interned at Condé Nast rather than here. Wasn’t it possible that I needed the Columbia Publishing Course too, or grad school at Columbia, or that my calling wasn’t publicity or editing, but at a literary agency? Watching Meredith those months, it seemed fifty-hour weeks would inhibit rather than assist my artistic pursuits, unlike a life out West, where time was abundant, nature bold and rent cheap. Deep down, I knew this. My gut told me. And yet part of me worried that if I raced home that summer to write, rather than snagging a New York job, I had failed.
That last day at Katz, I had more pressing concerns. “I don’t know how to make drinks,” I told Blake. “Other than whiskey straight.”
“Just fake it,” he said. “Pour a little soda, then a little hooch. No one will know. They’ll be drunk.”
I imagined Graydon Carter—whom I’d mistake for just another guy in a suit—chastising me for pouring too little gin into too much tonic. Was “I’m a writer, not a bartender” a sufficient defense?
I told Blake, “I’ll figure it out.”
Journalist Simon Hoggart once said that living in New York is “like being at some terrible late-night party. You’re tired, you’ve had a headache since you arrived, but you can’t leave because you’d miss the party.”
My last day at work, the entire staff moved furniture. Like a good family, people from the art department, rights, and editorial helped Blake position the tables that held the cheeses and meats. Poinsettias stood in various corners. A giant wreath hung by the door. As was tradition, Albright bought expensive caviar, served in a shiny silver dish, and at 5:00 p.m., gathered the staff for what Meg called the “Yeah, we made it another year” toast.
“This is publishing the old fashioned way,” Albright said, raising his champagne flute. “When Europeans come in here, they say, ‘Oh, now this feels like a publishing house.’” He complimented everyone on a winning year: five bestsellers, two Man Booker Prize nominees, and three runners up for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now a new book, a spiritual cooking memoir, promised to be next season’s big success. Free copies lay piled on tables by the entrance, intended for the agents, editors, and reps that attended each year. Everyone raised their glasses. Blake rolled his eyes. Before too long, the staff started stuffing bottles of wine into their bags to take home.
As folks sipped bubbly, I filled a canoe-shaped bin with beer and ice. Evan and I crafted an attractive display of beverage options at a separate table, and we were soon joined by Nick, a hilarious, flamboyant, rail-thin actor in black skintight jeans. He’d once interned there, too, and returned for intermittent temp work between acting and other gigs. He’d brought some weed that he promised to share with Evan later that night.
“So, what do you do?” Nick asked me.
“Oh, like everyone else in this city, I’m a writer,” I said. “And you?”
Twisting an outstretched hand like a flame into the air, he said, “I am an artiste.” It was indomitable, pained, self-aware, and beautiful. I am artist, his display intoned, watch me temp.
Nick painted and wrote, but was primarily an actor. He had a show soon opening off Broadway, and he lived in one of those highly coveted rent-controlled apartments allotted to Theater District actors. The established and the striving competed fiercely for these units, making lists long, waits longer, and chances slim. And here he was working for a hundred twenty cash. He snuck a sip of liquor and told Evan, “We’ll smoke later, honey, relax.”
For the next several hours, we poured drinks. And more drinks. Albright fetched numerous glasses with a warm “More red wine, please,” but he didn’t have a clue I’d been interning the last three months. I wasn’t surprised.
On a break from the bar, I was surprised to spot Shane, the man who’d assisted with the interviews at that literary nonprofit. He’d failed to email me his final decision yesterday as he’d promised, and the course of the next six months, possibly my life, was riding on that undelivered message.
I weaved through the crowd to reach him. “So,” I said, shaking his dry, nicotine-scented hand. “I never received word. Any news on the job front?”
He poked his straw into his drink. “Well,” he said. “It was between you and this other person, and—” He tilted his head. “It was very close. Very, very close. I’ll keep you posted about anything promising that comes across my desk. I have your email, so.”
I returned to the bar thinking, Please. All these people will have jobs come Monday. After the holiday break they’ll return to their desks, and I’ll remember how it felt to have peered into publishing from the freight elevator.
The subway mariachis might have signaled the end. Decked in leather vests, singing a huapango, they’d boarded the 5 train one December day. Their exotic vitality moved indifferent commuters to actually look up from their papers, and that deep guitarrón seemed to point me home. Living far from my folks for the past seven years, far from my aging grandmother and the desert of my youth, I felt like I’d been missing the real party for ages. So after Abby and I split up, I moved back to Phoenix, moved in with my parents, rent free, no hassles, no judgment, no rush. With free snacks, free laundry, and boundless free time, the arrangement put me close to my parents for what would likely be the last time, and it allowed me to write as much as I could.
According to Pulitzer-winner Lucinda Franks, a writer in New York is “a little bit like a tree falling in the forest. You’re never sure if somebody’s going to hear you.” Few hear me on my parent’s back porch here in the desert, either.
Our cat Red brought home a cactus mouse tonight—still alive, scared stiff when he dropped it on the welcome mat. Two nights ago, during a chorus of particularly yappy coyotes (they enjoy howling by the neighboring horse corral), a shooting star asserted its brief, burning presence across the sky: bright light, blue as mercury, followed by yellow fizzle. Other than that, it’s pretty quiet around here.
I spend a lot of time on this back porch. Overlooking a desert wash filled with palo verde and saguaros, I nestle into a cushioned chair with my legs up, write for hours and read anthologies and story collections like the remarkable ones coming from Katz & Strayhorn. The commute is short. Lines aren’t long. Aside from June, July, and August, the weather’s always nice. The yard’s always quiet. Books surround me. The cat, though, is a killer.
With indiscriminate lust, he kills rodents, lizards, jackrabbits and snakes, consuming their meaty tops before dumping their hindquarters on the patio to rot.
Once I confirmed that tonight’s mouse was not only alive, but uninjured, I locked Red inside to set the little guy free. But I never saw him go. I just turned around and he was gone.
'ra-di-kl
Hearing teenagers in purple flannels call their soy mochas “rad” perfectly illustrates the mechanisms behind the regurgitating cow stomach that is American pop culture. Not that that’s a bad thing—“nothing new under the sun” and all yields innovative hybrids—but the feedback loop of fashion really strikes a nerve when what was new in your youth becomes another generation’s vintage clothing. One of the dominant aesthetics of the last few years has been the 1980s: Ray-Bans, short shorts, fanny packs, wrist warmers. Forget the old “friends don’t let friends wear neon” maxim. The image of Pretty in Pink James Spader and his antagonistically feathered hair seems the most fitting mascot for our time, a time where we find eighties slang unwittingly coloring our conversations: dude; awesome; bummed; stoked; shred; balls out; this rules. And of course, the crown jewel, rad.
On the suggestion of a childhood friend who is also struggling with the difficult fact of our combined seventy years, I rented Thrashin’. It’s a sports-sploitation flick that came o
ut in 1986 when we were nine years old, and it features all the stomach-churning, Pepto-tinted vibrancy of the era, as well as a Circle Jerks song.
In the mid to late eighties, Hollywood spent much time and money trying to capitalize on then-underground sports and their associated subcultures: surfing (North Shore), breakdancing (Breakin’), BMX-biking (Rad), and skateboarding (Thrashin’ and Gleaming the Cube). Along with the synthesizer soundtracks and presence of non-ironic moustaches, what unites most of these films is their reliance on the same dramatic formulation: small town kid and/or outsider competes in a high-stakes competition against nationally known surfers/skaters/BMXers in the hopes of not only winning the prize money, but also the respect—and heart—of a girl. As Powell-Peralta-era skaters ourselves, Thrashin’ repelled my friends and me. A skate gang called The Daggers who wear dangly dagger earrings and paint their faces when they “joust” with their enemies in a drainage ditch? In the parlance of our childhood: it was redonculous. Listening to lines such as, “Well, what do you thrash?” “What’d’ya got?” felt as embarrassing as having your mom stand outside a skateshop dressing room, checking to see how your pants fit. In a narrative sense, the movie was bad. Not good bad, like retro seventies pimp-in-leather, gimme-some-skin bad, but awful. Worse yet, while rendering an innovative, subversive subculture as clownish stereotypes decked in sleeveless jean jackets and plaid shorts, Hollywood even failed to capture skateboarding’s most obvious linguistic feature: the word rad. Not one character says it in the entire movie! At all!
During the entire hour and thirty-two minutes, the characters utter a litany of dated, often pungently cheddary terms that, unlike rad, have never come back into fashion: gnarly; studly; stylin’; tasty skate betties; acid rock; you’re dead meat; I’m gonna cream that mother! But no rad. This registers as a particularly epic oversight. Not because the characters in that competing skateboard movie, Gleaming the Cube, say rad in the first five minutes. (“That was so rad,” a kid tells Tony Hawk while skating an empty pool.) And not because the characters in that maudlin 1986 BMX movie Rad say rad (and dude, and awesome) constantly. It’s tragic because skaters in the Venice Beach/Santa Monica area—the very area in which Thrashin’ is set—seem to have coined the term.
Although I can’t say for sure fer shur, the famous Z-Boys of Dogtown appear to have invented rad in the second half of the seventies. This was back in the days of sidewalk surfing, when shoeless shredders with bowl cuts balanced on the pointed tips of their skateboards to hang ten, a time when disco still shook the bubble booties of many a slick-haired New Yorker. The Z-Boys were surfer kids. Out of habit, they injected their aggressive surfing moves into the then softcore, ballerina sport of skating and, in the process, birthed modern vert skating and the sport as we know it today. They were inventive. To them, style was everything. Clothes and language and tricks mattered. No surprise, then, that it was they who sawed the tail end off the word radical, as if it were some constrictively low roof on an old Econoline van, and fashioned something new.
Only an old dude with parental leanings would have to tell you that rad is slang for cool. An adjective derived from the word “radical,” rad also means good, great, awesome, okay! It’s an expression of extreme enthusiasm which captures the joy you feel about something completely, overwhelmingly magnificent: a sunny day; a woman in a skirt; finding a twenty dollar bill on the ground. Rad is a smile you can say. It’s also the highest form of flattery, a stronger qualifier than cool, more super in its superlativeness than awesome. There are no gradations of rad, no radder or raddest. Yes, people say “raddest,” but the term is redundant, used more to fit a sentence’s tense or texture than to imply a qualitative hierarchy. As with pregnancy, rad is an absolute: something is either rad or it is not. You are either pregnant or not. There is no kind of pregnant.
All of which should elicit a resounding: duh?
Okay, but how about this: according to Merriam-Webster, radical (’ra-di-kl) is Middle English, derived from the Latin radicalis, meaning “of roots,” and radix, meaning “root.” As an adjective, it first appeared in the 14th century, after which it came to mean different, drastic, extreme, counter to tradition, a break from the ordinary. (A radical change in company policy.)
In early skateboarding vernacular, radical usually referenced tricks or someone’s bravura (killer) performance—“a radical air,” “a radical session”—or meant crazy, wild, edgy, unplanned, a precursor to modern skateboarding’s “sick.” In retrospect, the connotation might be extended to those pioneering skaters’ lifestyles in general: not having long hair, which most anyone can grow, but the Z-Boys’ fundamental shift away from accepted skateboarding tradition. As a noun, a radical is someone who stands in extreme opposition to accepted norms and customs, a person of revolutionary ideas or one who calls for drastic social, political, or economic reforms. (This was before Mountain Dew commercials made the term extreme as unpalatable as a frat party.) So Z-Boys like Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta weren’t only radical sportsmen, they were revolutionaries, because they essentially said, “No more hanging ten, fools, it’s time to tear up some pools,” and their new style turned a stick with wheels into a distinctive breed of clothing and speech that swept through global culture and changed human history. They did the same to words.
Viewed through an anthropological lens, it’s no surprise that rad would have originated in southern California, the land of free-thinking and invention that gave the world tons of great things (rad shit) like Vans, surf instrumental music, Korean tacos, and The Minutemen. I mean, could rad have originated in the Midwest, that flat kingdom of soybeans and corn? All northern California seemed able to deliver was the term “hella,” a contraction of “hell of” used in place of “very” (That VW is hella fine) which arose in San Francisco’s Hunters Point neighborhood in the late 1970s, spread through Berkley and the Deadhead ranks like fleas, and still lingers in crunchy places like Eugene, Oregon and Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s a term I still begrudge northern California for. But if rad is a kind of lyric chopper bicycle, one can’t help but try to picture the exact moment the welder hit the frame. I picture kids being lazy. Summer in LA. It’s hot. Everything gets sluggish when you’re stoned and full of burritos or just fried from skating for miles through that toxic bus exhaust heat. You look for shortcuts: cutting through alleys to bypass a block; cutting across lawns to bypass forty-five degree angle sidewalks; jaywalking to get a Slurpee. Shortening words seems an obvious extension. Laconic lips inadvertently turn radical into rad, the same way they truncated “totally” into “totes.” Consider the convenient, Smart Car portability of totes versus the many-sectioned centipede of totally. Or abbreviating “whatever” as “whatevs.” Such sonic ingenuity is proof that stiffs like Mr. Hand in Fast Times at Ridgemont High are wrong for thinking that stoned bums like Spicoli never contribute anything to society. (Um, how about the phrase “tasty waves,” Mr. Hand?) It’s also nothing new. You can hear whatevs’ earlier incarnation in the 1987 movie North Shore. When the bad boy native surf gang spots clueless mainlanders in their lineup, one of them tells Vince, their leader: “Plenty’a haole surfers, but we’ll blow them away, bra.” Vince growls: “Whatevahs.”
So convenience and style, the twin mothers of invention. But also, whether the Z-Boys knew it or not, abbreviating radical was a way of claiming a bit of the dominant culture as their own. Like spray-painting drunken geometries on the sides of the station wagon your mom gave you when you turned sixteen, removing the “–ical” removed the whole word from the standard lexicon—a radical move, in the literal sense—tearing away its Latin roots so they could refurbish this bit of fourteenth century Middle English into a full-on American original, as wholly ours as jazz and Blues and hamburgers. As with all popular inventions, though, the words got away from them.
When the 1970s turned into the ’80s, rad entered what would be its golden age. Everyone said it, every teased-hair mall rat from Reseda to North Carolina, thanks to the ve
hicle of its popularity: Valley Girl talk, aka Valspeak. Valspeak emerged in the late 1970s in California’s San Fernando Valley. Built from bits of surf and skater slang from nearby beaches and fused together with some sort of pink chewing gum, this bubbly pastiche was characterized by its rising terminal intonation—which, like so many Canadians I know, made declarative sentences sound like questions—and its overuse of terms like like, totally, you know, sooo, whatever, radical, duh, as if! Frank Zappa wrote a song about Valspeak, after which the nearby Hollywood media machine pushed the local Valley phenom into national visibility. There was the 1983 movie Valley Girl, the TV show Square Pegs (1982-1983), then later Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Clueless, recently The Hills and whatever, whatever, whatever—the familiar feedback loop of culture. (Soooo over it, btw.) Despite its initial underground origins and the subsequent Valspeak craze, it was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon that gave radical its final push through the blood/brain barrier of popular consciousness and into wider use. “Radical!” screamed Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael in seemingly every episode during the late 1980s and early ’90s. Suddenly, the kids in your high school marching band were saying radical. Your little cousin with the big-rimmed glasses was saying it. The boy down the street who always had snot caking his nostrils was saying it—people who’d never touched a skateboard, let alone heard the Repo Man soundtrack. Which is probably part of the reason nobody wanted to touch the word for so many years. It was tainted. But America has a short memory. Time makes old leprosies appear fresh again.
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