Dear Paul,

When Monique and I showed up one fine afternoon at the Durham County Court’s Small Claims Division for our case against the landlord, my first thought was we must be in the wrong place. We went to the third floor, exactly as we were told. We read the signs on the offices, some as old as the building, some hand-written in magic marker, and when we found the only door that seemed to have anything remotely to do with us, we walked inside.

The waiting room was deserted. I had expected bustling litigation. Instead we had our pick of twenty-plus plastic chairs, all pushed against the walls and facing in, any one of which was powerful enough to evoke unwanted memories of high school. On the other side of the waiting room were two more doors, about three feet apart, each with a narrow arrowslit of a window. The choice between the identical doors felt like a test, something in support of a behavioral scientist’s experiment on litigants, stress, and bureaucracy. Not wanting to select unwisely, we put our faces to the glass and looked inside. Apparently these were the courtrooms. Both were empty. No judges, no plaintiffs, no defendants. We had arrived early expressly to catch our magistrate in action, hoping to glean valuable tips on how best to conduct our part in the matter of Monique Dufour and Paul Maliszewski v. Robert L. Schmitz Properties.

In the County Clerk’s office, where we went to check our appointment and double-check the location of the courtroom, several knots of people were preparing the two forms required to set a case in motion. The forms are fairly straightforward, the legal language kept to a comfortable minimum. You print your name, address, and phone number, you provide the same information about the person you’re suing, you explain, briefly, why you’re coming to court and how much money you’re seeking, and you pay fifty dollars to the state. A minimum of four people huddled around each set of forms. Some stood in a circle, the better to surround the forms from every possible angle. Some knelt around a table, as if praying to the forms. A clerk was trying to explain, slowly and carefully, to the woman in line in front of us that if she went ahead and submitted the forms the way she had them filled out she’d be suing herself on behalf of the person she in fact wanted to sue.

The woman nodded uncertainly and walked away, taking the forms back to her dream team for revision. The clerk turned to us, and we smiled and asked our question. The clerk referred to an appointment book, dragging her index finger down the dates and times until she found ours, and told us, yes, we had been in the right place.

Back inside the waiting room, I immediately slumped down in the chair nearest the door and started fiddling with a bunch of paper. Monique said, “Do you want to sit there, or do you want to sit where we won’t have to look at everyone who walks in?”

“Good idea,” I said, standing up.

We sat in the far corner of the room, directly in front of the door to the second courtroom, and started waiting. Though there was nobody else in the room, we whispered. At the sound of any approaching footsteps, we fell silent and listened.

In the past week we had worked hard to prepare our case. We dropped our disposable camera off at the pharmacy. A couple of days later we chose the most damning pictures. We talked about how best we might say, look, this landlord neglected his responsibilities as specified in his own lease, turned the apartment over to us not cleaned and not ready for occupancy, and misrepresented his property. We developed a strategy, which mostly involved agreeing that Monique was best suited to handle the big picture, leaving me to supply details and quotations.

Then one evening we watched the Orson Welles film of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” The movie is incredible, starring Anthony Perkins at his jittery best. He’s two sharp elbows, a couple of pointed shoulders, and lots of flabbergasted, slightly high-pitched protests for someone, anyone at all, to listen to him. He meets people who know more about his case than he does. Yet they only speak elliptically. In so many words, they offer no help. He encounters a man who has spent countless years on an appeal, who somehow remains blissfully confident of a favorable resolution. He wades into large rooms flooded with paper, up to his knees in writs, briefs, and law books. He pleads for order where there will never be any.

The movie was ideal for novice litigants such as ourselves. No, we were not, like Joseph K., arrested one fine morning. We were two people who invested in the law a great deal of our most abstract hopes about the eventual and satisfying triumph of right, reason, justice, and fairness over wrong, illogic, injustice, and iniquity. We were two people who wanted our security deposit back.

The day before our trial I put together a presentation of our argument, nearly fifty typed pages, including nineteen of the photographs and document exhibits A through L. This brief (if that’s the word for it) featured a full-page table of contents, copies of receipts, and our collection of Dear Landlord letters. I’m aware that some may consider the effort a bit overblown, given that the word “small” modifies our claim, the stakes, and the court itself, but I am one of those people who needs to write something down in order to figure out what I even begin to think. Without writing, I babble, I stammer or just don’t speak. I’m less than useless without notes, good lines, a soundly reasoned and previously constructed argument. So, like a dutiful student, I highlighted in yellow those passages of the lease that the landlord violated and entered them into the argument. I dug up some contemporaneous notes I wrote while witnessing the landlord’s hasty, after-the-fact effort to have the apartment repaired, cleaned, and painted. I assembled the case out of paper. It was a dreary hobby as they go, and I can’t recommend it, but I had the sense and satisfaction of making something, a castle out of words maybe.

Late in the afternoon I ditched an ill-considered initial draft of the argument in which I got tangled up in mimicking very unconvincingly what little I grasp of legal language. I sensed I was in trouble when I found myself referring to Monique as “plaintiff Dufour” and beginning sentences, “We plaintiffs therefore request here that the court hereby order the defendant….” It read like a Monty Python skit. All that mumbo-jumbo and mystification was gone, deleted; now I opened with a brisk single-paragraph summary of the complaint, moved onto an itemization of the money we were seeking, detailed the charges, and drew the conclusions. Simple. My prose was as clean as our point was clear. On paper it made perfect sense, and that made sense to me. Besides, it was quite a beautiful brief to handle, to inspect, to read. In triplicate – copies enough for us, the judge, and Schmitz – it inspired awe.

Schmitz walked into the waiting room a few minutes before our trial was set to begin. We assumed it was Schmitz. Until that moment, which I captured only out of the corner of my left eye, as I pretended to flip through my papers, we had never seen the man we were suing. We hadn’t even spoken with him. We’d dealt exclusively with his beleaguered second-in-command, rental agent Christina Coffey. He had dragged Coffey to the trial with him, and the two of them sat down at the opposite end of the room and commenced whispering. A minute later they stood and hurried out of the room.

I turned to Monique and said, “Is that him? Is that Schmitz?”

“I think so,” Monique said. “But I don’t know. Was that Coffey?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It sort of looked like her, but it sort of didn’t. If that’s her she looks like she’s aged several years.”

Monique nodded. They came back into the room. Monique confirmed their identities. She sounded disappointed. When I got a better look at Coffey, I started to lose my enthusiasm for going through with the trial. If in the last month Coffey had been elected President of the United States and served two consecutive terms, battled against partisans in Congress, and made several tough decisions to send troops overseas to fight, that almost would have explained how she had changed. Almost. If I say Schmitz was stooped and dumpy, with poor to no posture and pasty skin and those adult freckles that are always threatening to merge together into one big freckle mass; if I describe him as wearing the sort of cotton Dockers and sports shirt ensemble that department-store ads swear all fathers want to receive each and every Father’s Day, you may assume that I’m allowing our legal dispute to bias my physical description of him, but you would be wrong.

We sat in the silence. The air conditioner turned on. The fluorescent lights buzzed.

A small man with a neatly trimmed beard entered the room. He seemed vaguely judge-ish in a way that, say, the four of us didn’t. Schmitz said hello to him, by name. The man returned the greeting and scooted into the courtroom on the left. From his chair he called out the first case, someone versus the something credit union. No one moved. The judge announced the name of the case again. He was shouting from his chair, at the front of the courtroom, across the empty courtroom, through the closed door in front of us, and into the waiting room.

The judge paused a minute and riffled through some papers. When he shouted our names, we filed through the door past a jumbled collection of mismatched chairs (the gallery?), through a swinging gate that barely reached my kneecaps, and took our places around one low table in front of the judge’s desk. The judge sat elevated above the table a total of, I’ll estimate, six inches. With Monique and I sharing a Bible roughly the size of a game-show buzzer between us, the judge swore us to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help us god. After I distributed copies of our brief, we were off and running.

Monique told our story. I directed the judge to our photographs. Schmitz noisily flipped through the pages to the photographs and then laughed derisively, the way people do when they can’t control themselves, except he was making such a loud production out of snorting that it was clear he was pretending to appear as if he couldn’t control himself. Monique told the judge she didn’t come here to be laughed at by the defendant of all people and expected more from these proceedings. It was going to be that kind of afternoon, the sort where the judge doesn’t wear a robe, possesses no visible gavel, has no bailiff or court secretary, sits behind stacks of paperwork from cases past, and metes out justice from a makeshift office in a building that smells like old air. Everything that should have been substantial and impressive – that gate dividing the gallery from the courtroom, the Bible, the courtroom itself – was small and toy-like, a burlesque of what I pictured.

As we had worked to ready our brief, we had also prepared to be found wrong. In between moments of feeling thoroughly convinced we would prevail, we imagined ourselves first as Schmitz might describe us and then as the judge could see us. We enacted and reenacted all the permutations the trial might take and ran through all the possible ways we could win or lose. It was one of those times when I really wished I wasn’t so self-conscious and so willing to try out the other guy’s point-of-view.

Everything was going exactly how Monique and I had imagined it would, when we had permitted ourselves to imagine the worst-case of our case. Coffey denied she ever told Monique, “Unlike a lot basements in the south, this one stays dry.” She denied she ever said the road outside the apartment is only noisy from traffic at eight in the morning and five in the evening. Trying another angle, I asked the judge to consider that the landlord undertook a whole menu of repairs after we moved out, arguing, as I’d written in the brief the night before, that the apartment was either ready when we moved in or it needed repairs. It couldn’t both be ready and need so many repairs. I was very pleased with this point. The judge asked Schmitz about those repairs. Finally, progress.

Schmitz acknowledged he had a little work done, something about not being able to match precisely the type and quality of the tile on the roof of the awning and needing to research and order it special. His fixing up the apartment was sounding more like the fine art of restoring Renaissance frescoes. The landlord was actually sitting there dreamily confessing how he’s “always liked older buildings and architecture.” I said I saw someone in the apartment painting, for two days straight, this after Coffey had told Monique the apartment didn’t need painting and wouldn’t get any. Schmitz turned to me – we were shoulder to shoulder at the table – and demanded, “Let me see a picture that shows someone in that apartment painting. Do you have a picture of someone in the apartment painting? Do you?” The judge asked Schmitz if he had the apartment painted, and Schmitz replied, “Your honor, I cannot recall.”

Almost two hours passed like this. It felt like two hours exactly. At the height of the trial’s futility, Monique explained that we did not move out of the apartment because there were yellow streaks running down the walls; that was only one minor reason of several dozen. Schmitz said, “Do you have pictures of yellow streaks on the walls? Do you? Do you?” He was like a machine, a very simple machine. Look, I said, it’s difficult to take photographs of a white wall with a simple flash. Monique said, again, please understand we are not talking only about yellow streaks. At just this moment, when I wanted to float out the window behind the judge and be far away from the courtroom, back at our apartment with Monique, where we could finish unpacking and make our home, we heard clapping in the courtroom next door. A crowd of people started applauding. There were cheers. Someone started playing the wedding march over a boombox. That’s nice, I thought. Monique told me later she thought, at least something good happened.

The judge turned to Schmitz and reprimanded him for “really falling down on the job” and “dropping the ball” and “not going the extra mile” to see that we moved in okay. This is it, I thought, the decision’s going our way. I whispered as much to Monique. In the end, however, it didn’t go our way: we lost. The judge turned to us and said from what he could see the apartment didn’t rise to the level of uninhabitable. Whatever that meant. “I have to rule for the defendant,” he said. The judge informed us of our right to appeal. We had only ten days to act, he explained. Schmitz hurriedly packed up his papers and left with Coffey. They were gone before the judge was done speaking.

So that was it. I know Monique and I both thought we were right, and moreover wanted the judge to agree we were right. We had believed, most of the time, that we could and would prevail. Failing all that, we hoped maybe for a partial judgment, an acceptable Solomonic split of our vast differences. At the very least.

Instead, zero. The afternoon was gone and we had nothing to show for it. We were tired, hungry, and disappointed, but not, I think, defeated. Despite the fact that the judge had ruled for Schmitz, landlord and friend to old buildings of Durham, neither of us felt all that wrong. It’s not as if upon hearing the judge’s decision we suddenly agreed with him. We didn’t undergo a miraculous conversion. It’s not as if we turned to Schmitz and Coffey and said, “How about that, you were right all along!” We never agreed with the judge, nor will we ever, I suspect. Instead it was as if the world of the law cleaved away from our own world right then, and we realized that where we had traveled to the law to seek a decision that would hopefully right the wrong that had happened over in our world and, you know, order our security deposit returned to us, to jingle around in our pockets a bit, what we received, in fact, was a decision limited strictly to the narrow world of the law. What hopes we’d placed in the law, we still at least were able to withdraw from the law. They were, after all, our hopes to take away. We could keep the hopes somewhere else, in the care of some other institution perhaps, though that’s doubtful, for all the obvious reasons, or we could associate them with some abstract idea of our own fashioning. Right, reason, justice, fairness – we could find these elsewhere. Or as a character at the beginning of William Gaddis’s novel, “A Frolic of His Own,” says, “You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” So what do we have faith in? That seemed like a good question, and this seemed like a good time to ask it, however dicey it always is to answer. I personally think we have a few decent options: good writing, Kafka, and the comfort of friends. Though don’t get me wrong, it would have been nice to have our money back.

Outside the courthouse, the sidewalks and most of the streets were empty already. It was Friday and nearly five. Everyone who was able had cut out of work early. We took our time walking back to the car. Monique said, “I think that judge really liked your brief. Did you see how he read it? He seemed reluctant to return it.”

I said, “I thought you did a great job telling our story.”

Truly,

Paul

Dear Sirs,

I would be interested in how to do pull out pattern books in woodwork shop on wood bending, wood turning and woodcraft on different things such as flowers patterns, leaves patterns, wooden bowl patters, wooden plate patterns, toys and toy parts, different animals all sizes.

And different birds all sizes even how to make a casket, some people calls them coffins, what ever toy and parts can be made out of wood, send your price list, if theres any books to be free, mark free on them, on the book.

Books on how to make axe handles, hammer handles, broom handles, and other different makes of handles, pick handles, mop handles, handles of all sizes, fork handles, and shovel handles, even farm plough handles, wagon poles, wagon shaves, wagon wheels, wagon wheel spokes.

These kind of books with pull out patterns is my favorite, books on how to make coffins, some people calls them caskets, and wood bending and turning is my best book that i want, would you know where i can get these books, an address would help nicely.

Sincerely,

ELDON C.
NEW BRUNSWICK
CANADA

Dear Paul,

My brother-in-law, Dennis, has a heads-up, skeptical nature – some might call it paranoia – that I’ve come to tolerate and even respect. But I wasn’t prepared for what he said to me when I visited him and my sister, Carol, last August:

“I think the beavers are trying to do me in.”

Every single summer for the past nineteen years, the basement of Dennis and Carol’s home in the Alberta countryside has flooded. Always the water laps up to within about a thumbswidth of the top of the furnace-pad, threatening to cause an electrical short, leaving them without power, or worse.

And every year Dennis develops a more sharply focussed rage at the source of the problem. I should tell you that he is a psychologist in private practice. Rage is not in his nature. Rage isn’t rational, and it isn’t constructive – unless you happen to be fighting a war.

Dennis and Carol moved to their acre and a half to escape the frustrations and horrible mall culture of the city. To raise their kids in peace, in nature. And at first it looked like peace is what they’d found. I can remember how thrilled Dennis was to discover, on his first walk around the property, a lake – still and blue and big enough to canoe on. He actually said, “It doesn’t get much more Canadian than this.”

He was wrong. It did get more Canadian. The lake was home to beavers.

I should say at this point that the saga of my brother-in-law and the beavers has reached mythic status in our family. But until my last visit, most of us had only heard bits and pieces of it. For some reason, on this particular night, Dennis was burning to tell the whole thing. My job was to listen.

The first beaver Dennis spotted was – ominously – dead. But soon he began to see the extended family, arrowing in across the water, “just as the day was coming to twilight.”

The scene put Dennis in mind of Grey Owl, the professional Indian (who was really an Englishman), bonding with the animals in the prairie wilderness. In full Grey Owl mode, Dennis started sitting by the lake, perfectly still, giving off good vibes, until the beavers got used to him, or forgot about him, and came near. He watched their reflections in the lake. He looked at their dark eyes and stained yellow teeth from “as close as you are to me now.” He felt a little bit of awe. No thoughtful Canadian can contemplate a beaver without thinking about its place in the chain of our colonial history: this country was literally built on the beaver’s back.

“I was out there admiring them day after day,” Dennis said. “Then the water started coming into my basement.

“I began connecting the dots.” He hitched out a thumb. “Our house was in the middle of a flat field, yet there was a lake on it.” Index finger. “The lake appeared to be getting bigger, yet it hadn’t rained.” Middle finger. “The beaver population seemed to be growing.”

Sorry: I need to tell you a few things about beavers.

- A beaver can take down a poplar as thick as an ax-handle in one bite.

- Beavers are workaholics: You can destroy their dam in the evening and a new one will be there to greet you in the morning.

- Beavers are smart.

- Beavers are territorial.

- Beavers have a vestigial memory that they were here first.

Because he is a sensitive man, and because his daughter, Kerri, had made it clear no beavers were to be harmed in the making of this particular movie, Dennis decided he had to develop a way to deal with the problem that everybody could live with.

He’d read somewhere that beavers were repelled by mothballs, so he bought a big bag of them and he went to the creek. After he’d broken down the beavers’ dam, he scattered the mothballs liberally on the bank. The beavers were undeterred. They showed up for work as usual and built their dam back up. There were actually footprints on the mothballs where the beavers had trudged over them.

“So I bought a length of plastic tubing. This is something a friend who’s an animal-rights person had suggested. It’s humane and it’s supposed to be effective. You punch a hole in the dam and shove the tube in, the way a surgeon puts a drain in a wound. The water runs right through the dam. Or that’s the theory.”

“Didn’t work?” I said.

He shook his head. “The beavers built a little peninsula of mud around the pipe. They plugged it.”

Dennis called up the county for advice. It turned out the county had a beaver patrol department, and they sent a guy out with a trap.

A beaver trap is a sort of spring-loaded metal jaw that sits, cocked and open, in the predicted path of the beaver, and snaps shut as the animal swims through. The first trap the guy laid actually did catch a beaver. But it quickly became clear that the county’s approach to beaver control was laid-back at best. “They treat beavers as a sustainable resource,” Dennis said. “They never want to kill them all, because that would put them out of work. So they take a beaver here and a beaver there and then pat themselves on the back.” In truth, it’s doubtful the beaver-patrol guy could have caught many more beavers if he’d tried, because the beavers very quickly learned the ropes.

Less than twenty-four hours after the beaver-patrol guy laid his second trap, Dennis went down to the creek. The trap was gone. In its place was a fresh new dam. Dennis waded into the water and started breaking it up, “and then my shovel hit something metal.” There was the trap, gleaming between the poplar branches. The beavers had simply incorporated it into their project. Dennis dug the trap out and flung it toward the creek bank. Just as it left his fingers – “bang!” – it snapped shut. A trap designed to snap the neck of a beaver could certainly break the arm of a man; this one almost had. The implications sank in. Not only had they built the dam around the trap, they hadn’t even sprung it. “That,” said Dennis, “is when I began to get scared.”

In his counselling work, Dennis often uses stories he hears as therapeutic aids, and the tale of man against beaver – internecine, interspecies stubbornness in the Canadian North (involving the national symbol, no less) – ought to be ripe with usable metaphors. But Dennis refuses to see the symbolism. This thing is too personal.

Dennis owns a gun – a .22 rifle. Perhaps it was appropriate, even necessary, to have a gun on the farm where he grew up, but it seemed stupid and un-Canadian to own one in the city. He hadn’t used it in ages. As he walked to the creek, it felt foreign in his hands.

He tried to psych himself up for the job. “You can do this,” he said to himself. “Be the man. Be the hunter.” From a distance, he could see a beaver dutifully working on a new dam. As he walked closer, levelling the gun at the beaver, “I thought of that story of the soldier in Nazi Germany, who said, ‘The hardest to kill was the first one. After that, the hardest to kill were the next 10. After that, the hardest to kill were the next 100.’”

I asked Dennis how Kerri had responded when she learned her father had put a bullet in a beaver. “She was in tears,” he said. “She thought I was Attila the Hun,” They named the creek Kerri Creek, after their daughter’s Dian-Fossey-like defense of the animals.

Dennis stepped up his patrols after that. Rain or shine he’d be out there in his green down vest and duckboots and rifle, mosquitoes eating him alive. The only thing missing from the picture was the Elmer Fudd cap. Over time, he wore a visible path through the woods to the creek.

People who study beavers find it remarkable that they almost always manage to cut down trees within falling distance of water, since they have such poor eyesight. “They’re looking up from ground level – it’s amazing they’re that accurate,” Dennis said. “If the whole tree doesn’t fall in, at least part of it does. They never cut down trees anywhere else. Okay? Remember that when I tell you that I’m on my way to the creek, and there in the middle of the trail – nowhere near the water – three fallen trees have come down over the path.” Not onto the path, but snarled in the branches and hanging precariously, like traps set by the Viet Cong.

At this point you may be feeling a surge of sympathy for the beavers. I confess that as Dennis reached this point in the story, I was. But I also know I’d feel differently if it were my home that were threatened.

Every year, the do-no-harm position adopted by Carol and Kerri and her sister Kathleen softens. Carrying soggy boxes out of the basement and wrestling with a pump compressor will do that to you. “With Kerri, it used to be, ‘Dad, do you have no heart?’” Dennis said. “Now it’s, ‘Dad, did you kill the damn beaver yet?’ Over time, they all got converted, every one of them.”

To his credit, Dennis has himself come full-circle on the issue of non-violence. His current system of beaver management is one of early intervention. Twice a day, he walks the creek. “A beaver will float a stick down the river and then come back later and see if it’s got stuck anywhere. If it has, that’s a good place to start building. So any twig that looks like it’s been sitting there more than an hour, I scoop up.

“The whole key is to move fast. If you knock a beaver dam out within twenty-four hours, they’ll fight for that spot for a day or two, and then they’ll move away, downriver. But if you let them get a beachhead, they’ll fight you for months.”

I think it was good therapy for Dennis to talk about this. I know it was good therapy to hear it. But I must admit that, since arriving back home in Vancouver, I’ve been a little worried for the guy. As long as he and my sister live on that acreage, they will have no rest. I keep half-waiting for Dennis to tell me the beavers have been tapping his phone.

All the best,

Bruce.

Sarah:

I was in New York last week. Getting my shit, to use the vernacular. You didn’t know I was there. Naturally, I didn’t tell anyone I would be in town. I rolled in with Melinda in her suburban insult vehicle, we loaded it up with a lot of garbage bags filled with my old clothes, walked to a place in Little Italy to get contraband salami and cheeses, plus my favorite boullion cubes – oh and passed by Bliss and dropped a wad on skin cream – and then we rolled out. We were back in Pittsfield by 10 p.m.

When I unpacked, or rather, when I peeled my balled-up stinking junkie clothes out of the garbage bags, I was surprised and appalled to see so much evidence, in full color, of the condition of my endocrine system when I was out there in the land of nod. One shirt had – well, you know how underarm sweat stains are often described as “half moons”? Well, these sweat stains were planets. Planets of ochre and grey and brown, ugly and reeking as Io herself.

Some of my clothes still smelled of vodka and dope sweat. One nice frock had creamy puke crusted right down the front. I threw most everything out. Actually I brought it to the Christian Center, where the others can have at it. If I see a God-fearing matron, poor as dirt, squeezed into my “She’s With Me Cause She Appreciates Perfection” shirt, galactic sweat stains and all, I’ll look away. I won’t tell.

It’s different now. I’m getting cocky and starting to toy with the notion that I might live. I am prettier, too, since I ditched the three squares and lost some of that halfway-house fat. I might be the prettiest I’ve ever been. And all I can think about is getting laid.

My old roommate in New York said that most of the men she comes in contact with simply don’t register as men. I think I know what she means – many cosmopolitan men don’t seem like Man, in the Adam sense. They have tan ankles. One guy she knows is so rich that when he gets out of his car to go into a store he doesn’t bother to close his car door. He just pulls over and walks away. He goes sockless inside his Belgian loafers. I mean really. I know you know these men.

Going to a livestock fair with Mum last week gave me the idea that I have forgotten to breed. Here, where the men are Man and go to bed wearing their work boots, I have started to regard them in the manner that I appraised the bulls and swine at the fair: hmm. Nice coat. Healthy girth. Bright eyes. Good bloodline. This kind of thinking is not unusual for people who have recently made it out of death. I know the men in my little low-bottom sober community are looking at me the same way. Because they also liked to party till they lost their pulse. They also have died and come back. Grief has made us want to breed.

At the end of the summer I went out with Perez, and we sat in his pickup in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot for about five hours. We listened to REM. We fought for the airspace to talk about ourselves. He usually won. Perez is physically perfect and completely self-centered. He reminded me of the models I used to have to deal with at work. Ceaselessly yammering on about his own little hell. I got a few kisses out of him and he let me put my head in his lap and he stroked my face and hair. That was what I had been waiting for.

He hasn’t called me for months, but to have my head petted by a calloused hand was enough. It was my first kiss since Mink in the cruiser, no lie. You should have seen me fall into his mouth. I practically went in tongue first. Now he is just a myth, for his name is so wonderful to say, to think about: Johnny Perez. Proud to be a Sox fan, a Bostonian, a minority. He sang to me and held my gaze. For a little while.

That was this summer though, and now Johnny don’t look so proud. He has been drinking, he has a stalker – he is still beautiful but there is an empty, spooked look in his eyes. When I think about him my heart knocks in my chest. I saw him at a Halloween sober dance and we slow-danced – I know! I know! – to “Purple Rain,” which was so perfect. He let me lecture him, for once, but I didn’t have the piss and/or vinegar to do it. He stroked my back. I was very dressed up, over-glamorous with my hair up in rhinestones and my ranch mink. Can you believe I didn’t sell it when I was out there getting loaded and going broke?

I don’t know where John Perez is now. He can’t go home and his brother kicked him out. It pains me to see a prideful man get a taste of reality. I told Johnny that his body is hot, he could be brutally handsome, but it’s his joy that is most attractive. And when an alkie drinks after a few years of going without, joy is the first thing to evaporate as soon as the juice hits the palate.

Another dark guy entered the picture, this one just as interested in family crafting as I seem to be. He wants to find a female with athletic genes to guarantee a good throwing arm and full scholarships. This dark guy, well, he just cleaned up about 50 days ago. A very sick junkie. We kissed behind the Dumpster (!) the other night and he told me “easy, easy” because, again, I was trying to climb into his mouth. This man hasn’t had a girlfriend (besides heroin) for years, and was in jail for a long time because of this criminal junk hunger, and he’s telling me easy easy. I love it.

We kissed at the Halloween dance too, in the handicapped bathroom. With the lights out. This time he nearly took my head off with his mouth. Then I started to get a little manic and considered faking a seizure on the dance floor, or roaming around pie-eyed in my fur, asking men randomly to make out with me. But that didn’t happen. Now, don’t go thinking I’m desperate because I’m cruising new guys at the halfway house. I am so keeping the focus on getting well. Ha ha.

I’ve moved across the street into graduate housing. I live with Debbie A., and it’s okay – we both get up for work around the same time and sit silently in the living room, awash in a pale lake of cigarette smoke, coughing our two-note coughs. Then she goes to work and I light incense, put it out, drink a glass of milk, take my meds, and go to my new telemarketing job, where I (and fifty other women) sit like brood sows in stalls, hunched over our phones. And we make money for the man, baby.

Okay, Sarah. Don’t tell me I’m slumming. Don’t tell me I’m being cool again. Tell me I’m on the right track. I know I am. I’m so relieved not to be there.

Jessica

Dear Mary,

Here is all that need be said about my experience gambling in Atlantic City. At the Trump Taj Mahal I played $1-$3 seven-card stud for four hours, sipping free whiskey and making jokes with strangers, and I lost all of seven dollars. Then I played slots and lost seven times that in a quick, mean, and lonely forty minutes.

As they say: easy come, easy go. Gambling makes for good aphorisms and invites one to meditate on risk, determinism, addiction, and faith. It’s tempting to use gambling as a metaphor when writing about the Jersey Shore. But I would rather discuss the metaphoric power of the Slingshot, which stands at 8th and Boardwalk, a handful of miles south of the Taj Mahal, in Ocean City, New Jersey.

Like all good metaphors, the Slingshot is versatile and may be seen from many different angles. Walking along the boardwalk, a smiling line of taffy, water-ice, fried dough (or, more specifically, “funnel cake”), and mini-golf establishments on the right, the dark ocean on the left, the Slingshot is seen first and from afar as two enormous towers lit with neon, 100 feet high. As one grows closer, one sees that between them is suspended a spherical cage that rotates freely around its horizontal axis, where cables stretch from either side to the tips of the two towers. There are two seats inside the sphere which, after an hydraulic mechanism tightens the cables, carry two occupants 200 feet into the air at 100 miles per hour, while spinning. It is the sort of thing that its creators bill as a “ride.” It is the sort of thing that, when seen from the ground at the very base of the towers, inspires one fourteen-year-old girl with very large teeth to somberly explain to her shorter, uglier girlfriend: “I’m not saying that you’re going to die. I’m just saying if you do die, it was meant to be.”

* * *

The summer before last, we were fearless. In 1999, Katherine and I came to Ocean City for an engagement party that my mother and her five sisters threw for us on the deck of my Aunt Susan’s summer home on Ocean City’s Gold Coast. The Gold Coast is the southerly end of the town, the new money mansions as opposed to the thirties-era salt-boxes up north. We opened presents until dusk fell. Then Katherine and I hiked down to the main drag of the boardwalk and took on everything the amusement parks had to offer: the Giant Ferris Wheel, The Inverter, The City Jet, The Spanish Galleon (Katherine’s favorite). We were thrown and twisted and twirled, and Katherine almost got sick but didn’t. My grandmother was alive then, and so was my mother.

Several weeks after we left, this happened: a new roller coaster at Wonderland Pier, the Wild Wonder, apparently malfunctioned. Apparently the car nearly reached the apex of its first major ascent when some mechanism failed. It began to roll backwards, gathering speed. When it slammed into the car behind it, which was being loaded with passengers, another mechanical failure apparently occurred, allowing two occupants, a young woman from New York and her very young child, to be thrown from their restraints. They flew out of the car, through the air, and into a steel support beam. They died instantly, apparently.

As well, as you may recall from my last letter, my grandmother died the following Christmas, and my mother died the following June, six days after my birthday, both quickly, both with little warning. And then in August we returned to Ocean City again. People asked: will it be hard going back to Ocean City without your mother? And I had no answer, the same non-answer I had and have to any question about how hard it is or will be now that all these things have happened: Jesus, I don’t know. Where’s the funnel cake?

So that is what we sought as we mounted the boardwalk our first evening in Ocean City this summer, and we found it. There is always funnel cake, and there are always lovely Irish or Czech teenagers imported for the summer ready to serve it up. Katherine and I went to Atlantic Books with their great piles of publisher’s remainders. We visited the mall that used to host individual booths of antique dealers. Ten years earlier I had gone there to find a vintage postcard to send to Katherine, who did not know then that I loved her. Now it mainly sells rock t-shirts, cheap jewelry, surf gear, electric flashing navel studs. Katherine and I watched an eleven-year-old girl as a forty-year-old man applied a temporary rhinestone tattoo of a butterfly to her very tan belly.

Then we reached the rides. At Wonderland Pier, no one seemed to feel the chill haunt of the Wild Wonder incident but us. I watched the children in the little cars fly into the air, the teenagers necking on the giant ferris with its rust spots and strange creakings. There was a time when the prospect of taking on a new ride would fill my gut with nervous excitement. Now at Playland there is the Double Dip, which raises and drops its happy riders along a seventy-five-foot pole. Just watching it made my neck hurt.

But it was the Slingshot that sent us packing. The Slingshot is not affiliated with either Wonderland or Playland. The Slingshot stands alone. Couple after couple are sent screaming into the black summer night, becoming a tiny star-like spark against the sky, cables heaving, towers wobbling, sphere becoming invisible. It was the Slingshot that made us feel too old, too scared, and suddenly vulnerable. Katherine says that when she was a child she loved all rides because she knew that they were made by grown-ups, which meant to her endless safety, boundless security. Naturally we have outgrown that delusion.

As we trudged back from the boardwalk in defeat, we saw the moon over the beach. Or at least we believed it to be the moon: it was a giant, ragged crescent, larger than the sun at dawn. It hovered just above the inky horizon, blood red, engorged, too bloated to hoist itself any further in the sky, and more likely about to fall. A small crowd had actually gathered by the boardwalk’s rail to gawk at it, as though it were a plane descending in flames, a fleet of invading spaceships. Katherine and I joined them. “Either that’s the moon,” someone said, “or something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.”

* * *

The next night, Katherine and I return to the Slingshot. The large-toothed girl behind us in line says her piece about death and destiny, and we clutch our non-refundable tickets with panic and regret. We watch that spherical cage ascend and descend for nearly forty-five minutes. We watch children no older than ten be happily loaded into what we come to call the ascending sphere of death, their fathers giving a thumbs-up before they fly into the air: “Have fun,” says dad, chuckling. Katherine and I discuss doubtfully the merits of this style of parenting. As we do, another pair is sacrificed to the sky, and we are next.

It is difficult to explain what has drawn us here, after our cowardly and probably wise retreat last night. We have every excuse not to be here, from the metaphysical to the financial (it costs twenty bucks a head to fly; forty if you want a T-shirt and a video taken of your screaming self in the cage as you rocket upwards). This last part alone should chase off a cheapskate like me. But we are here at Katherine’s impulsive suggestion, and my impulsive agreement, and neither one of us wants to back down. We are here to face our fear and transcend it, to remind ourselves that we are still alive and young and capable of risk. We want to be able to say that we will not be cowed by death.

But we also see very clearly the weak links in the Slingshot chain, the points where the cable may break, the tower may buckle. The whole rig is set back from the boardwalk, in the semi-dark of 8th Street. Though enormous, it has the look of something that really shouldn’t be there, of something that can be broken down and carted away very quickly should the sheriff show up wanting to know: “What’s all this about a Slingshot, then?” There is a palpable air of unease around us, as though all of us in line can perhaps too easily envision something snapping this time, the ball flying up and disappearing into the night, only to crash miles away, in the ocean perhaps, or a parking lot. And if not this time, the next time. I do not tell Katherine this, and really haven’t considered it until now, but we are there too, I think, not just to defy death, but to welcome it. It has been a hard year. It has been an unfair year in which we have been taught to think of the unthinkable, that we are not exempt from tragedy, but in fact can be its strange attractors. It’s not quite a suicide pact, but I think we share an agreement, unspoken even to ourselves, that if this thing kills us, we could live with that. So to speak.

When our turn comes, there is a strange ritual to it. We empty our pockets into a plastic bin: wallets, change, keys, saltwater taffy, K’s flip-flops. I take my glasses off and give them to the man who will prepare us for the ride (I swear he has a handlebar moustache). He tells us we can take nothing with us. We sit in the cage. The mustachioed man arranges the nylon straps and restraining bars that hold us in place. One of them goes directly across my groin, but I am not embarrassed to have him help me there. I am beyond such modesties. “Tighter,” I say.

He closes the cage and gives it a friendly tap. “It will be over before you know it,” he says.

The cage tilts back and is locked into a release switch below. We are facing directly upwards now. There are no stars: they are blotted out by the lights of the boardwalk. The towers hum as the cables tighten. I take Katherine’s hand. “Pretend we are going into space,” I say.

“That is not a comfort,” she says.

The hum grows very loud. The cables grow very tight. Katherine takes her hand back: she wants to hold the restraint. A switch somewhere is thrown, and we go up.

* * *

As metaphors for life and death on the boardwalk go, gambling in Atlantic City is pretty promising. But the Slingshot is better, for two reasons. One: though it is unlikely, it may actually kill you. Two, it reminds you that when you are close to death and intimate with it, when you are spinning fast and high in the dark night with nothing around you, it is difficult to tell what is happening. It is difficult to be afraid. Far less difficult than it is on the ground.

John Hodgman

PS: We did buy the video of Katherine and me flying upward in the slingshot. We watched it once before hiding it away, never to be seen again.

Dear me,

Why can’t you keep a secret?

You have promised yourself again and again that this – at last – will be the secret you will keep. This will be the precious little secret that will be yours alone to savour and deplete in its own time. Impossible, has never happened, and still you delude yourself. Three times in the last week – big secrets these!

1. That you are smoking a pipe again. You said, as I recall, “I will only do this in my room, alone. I don’t want anybody to know that I am smoking a pipe.” Then you draw it out in front of that girl from class, on the way home. Then you stand outside the building smoking it with those three girls from your Torah group. Even before you go outside the building to smoke, you pull it out. “Look what I got today – a new pipe.” Then you smoked it in front of Felix when he came over tonight, and then Shields when he came over later, and then Tracy yesterday afternoon. This in two days.

2. The novel. Oh no! You weren’t going to tell anyone you were working on a novel. Then having read the whole first goddamn chapter in front of forty people – a terrible way of keeping a first chapter a secret, don’t you think? – you scrapped it (feeling too exposed) and started anew, pledging that this time – this time! – no one would know what you were working on. You would have deceived them all, everybody certain that you were working on that one draft, when secretly, in secret, you were working on another. Leaked. Twice. Today alone. Plus that one time to your agent who of all people you were not going to let know.

And then, 3. that sweet ex-boyfriend who you hadn’t seen in two years. That night you spent together, last weekend when he was in from out of the country, and he told you – as intimate a moment as a person can experience – in the darkness, in bed, while you were at it? just after? “I love you still,” and that – that – that you were not going to share; it was an intimate moment that one, oh yes, and it was going to be sweet, and all yours alone. Was going to be all yours alone.

Shields tells you, “You have no heart. You have heart, lots of heart, but no actual heart. You are a swallow. You flit,” he says. Then tonight you ask, “What do you mean, no heart?” when you have smoked the pipe in front of him, and told him about that intimate moment with the sweet ex-boyfriend that you weren’t going to tell anyone, least of all Shields.

“You don’t let anyone in,” he says.

“But I let everyone in! I reveal everything!”

“Ah yes,” he nods quietly, as though he were the one smoking the pipe, not you, “but it’s like that old thing, where the boy goes out and tries heroin for the first time and then his father says to him, `What did you do tonight?’ `Tried heroin.’ `Sure sure, go to bed.’”

You haven’t heard that one, go on.

“You conceal by revealing.”

You think about it, like it.

“Like Trudeau!” he puts in, to impress you, win you over. “Like me! You, me and Trudeau. None of us has a heart. A single heart.”

You ushered him out. Then thought about it. Could he be right? or was it more of his usual bullshit? Lying in bed you considered it some more. How is it you could separate yourself from someone, close someone off, never open up the littlest room inside you – by revealing everything?

Then after awhile, it hit you! Or no, it didn’t actually hit you. It took several steps, yes, but it soon became apparent that, yes, it does make sense. Because by exposing everything about yourself, by having no secrets, no experience which is yours and yours alone, no thoughts which can be articulated but aren’t, nothing held back and all the worst spilled on the floor, then the difference between you and the other person, between you and any other person, can only be, like an obelisk dropped from the sky, that fundamental block of otherness.

Right, right! That essential otherness that can’t be expressed! That ineluctable core which could never be put into words because it’s not a thought, not a feeling, not an experience, not a secret, just that basic human otherness. And by making that the distance between you and everybody else, and not knowledge about you they don’t have, and not facts about you they don’t know, then the gulf between you and those around you is a thousand-mile-wide gorgon-filled moat. Or maybe their lips are pressed up close and soft, right up against the ineffable. Yes, they’re flat up against that which they could never penetrate, and which you could never, not with the greatest compulsion, reveal!

Relief, understanding.

Then you go out with Carl a week later and he tells you in response to your exquisite sentence or two of certainty, “No, that’s not you. You don’t reveal to conceal. That’s my roommate. Within thirty minutes of meeting her she’s told you all these details about her sex life. You’re not like that at all.”

You start smoking his cigarettes.

I remain your humble servant,

Sheila

Dear David:

The only other time I tried to read Paradise Lost – John Milton’s late-Renaissance rendering of the Fall of Man, the greatest epic poem in the English language, the anvil of words upon which every subsequent poem has been forged, the only contender to Shakespeare’s greatness, quite possibly the most profound meditation on good and evil ever written – I managed exactly 125 lines, or less than 1 per cent of the endlessly acclaimed masterpiece, in six months. I kept falling asleep at

So spake th’apostate angel, though in pain….

But this summer, while everyone else was out having a good time and the world seemed to be an oversold, venal, thoughtless, cramped and unwashed place, I decided to try something difficult, for a change, and read one of the all-time monster brain-crackers of Serious Literature, from start to finish.

I borrowed a shack in the Pocono Mountains of northern Pennsylvania and packed one copy of Paradise Lost and two T-shirts. No telephone, no TV, no one.

Strange coincidences sprang up almost immediately. In the notebook I grabbed as I rushed from my house, I found the words to “Ripple,” by the Grateful Dead, copied out in my wife’s neat and efficient hand:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music
Would you hold it near, as it were your own?
It’s a hand-me-down; the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they’re better left unsung.

Somehow that sentiment didn’t seem foreign to the theme of Paradise Lost. Nor did the eight-hundred-mile blight of endless Big Boys, Price Choppers, and McDonald’s restaurants that line the road from Toronto to Pennsylvania. Everywhere I looked I saw former paradises. Finally in Scranton I saw a sign that said “A Good Place to Start Feeling Better,” so I checked into a hotel. It was a Day’s Inn, and was itself next to a Price Chopper and a McDonald’s. A trucker and his wife were having a private barbecue in the parking lot. That was nice, and so was the hickory smoke coming up off his portable hibachi. “Tired?” the guy at the check in said. “Get some rest.” The door of my room wore a sign:

Always lock your door. Use all locks.

I lay on the bed and listened to the trucks vibrating by on the highway, vibrating on to everywhere but where I was. I turned on the radio, and a voice said, “Who says you can’t eat the food you want and still lose weight? Just use Fat Whacker! And be careful not to lose too much weight!” I turned off the radio and turned on the TV. A blond weatherperson on a local newscast smiled out of the set at me as she bantered with her fellow newscasters. “Mother’s Day is a week away,” she said, “so if you haven’t bought a present to show your mother your respect, there’s still time to do so. Storms to come.”

I turned off the TV, and cracked open Paradise Lost.

All Miltonists – and there are many of them; they tend to be detail weenies, to be terrifyingly well-read, to love marathon readings of the text, and to be able to cite lines from memory by book and line number – end up debating one question: Whose side is Milton on? Grumpy God’s (as C. S. Lewis believed), the side of subjugation of the self and salvation? Or silky Satan’s (as William Blake famously insisted), the casino world where you can be you, but entirely on your own?

God seems to have the upper hand, at least as the poem opens, with Satan dazed and face-up in a lake of fire, after Mr. Big Stuff hurls him from Heaven for being uppity. It’s a promising start, very sci-fi. But God quickly becomes a wooden bore and a martinet.

Satan, on the other hand, is for most of us in the twenty-first century a (frighteningly) pleasant ball of charm. For all his lack of empathy and his tireless schemes to overthrow Heaven, Satan shows some class. He never apologizes, never makes excuses for himself. “To bow and sue for grace/With suppliant knee…That were an ignominy and shame beneath this downfall.” Satan turns out to be a combination of Bill Clinton and Wile E. Coyote, insisting he’s never done anything anybody with a little ambition wouldn’t do.

Life in Eden, by contrast, resembles a Soviet propaganda film from the 1950s extolling the virtues of happy blond life on the collective. Not only do Adam and Eve have to obey God; God, the Ultimate Bossy Boots, constantly reminds them they have to be obedient.

Is it any wonder Eve ate the apple?

One night, deep into Book Nine (the only chapter of twelve that actually happens in anything like what screenwriters call “real time”), I went for dinner to a local bar. The Pines Tavern was a typical Pennsylvania highway joint, festooned with yellow flags hailing Coors beer and blue flags touting the Philadelphia Eagles. I later learned my late father-in-law drank himself to death there. Three couples in their sixties were sitting at an oak bar, drinking and flirting and laughing while choking to death (“We’re hell-raising! Heh heh heh heh heh heeuuuaaallllllggghhh”) – the usual rituals of the post-industrial American Dream. It was the perfect setting to read one of the classics of Western literature.

The waitress recommended the broasted chicken. “It’s actually a lot better than roasted,” she said. I thought that meant broiled and roasted, hence healthier. In fact the bird had been breaded, then roasted, and looked like lumps of slag from a recently cooled planet. I stabbed a piece and turned back to Paradise Lost.

As I say, it was the crux of the action. Satan had turned himself into a serpent, and now “the wily adder, blythe and glad” was trying to convince Eve to eat an apple from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge.

“Some good homework?” the waitress said, writing out my cheque.

“Just a project.” I flipped the book to show her the cover. A mistake, I realized instantly.

“Ooo-kay,” she said. “You’re thinking way too much.”

“Actually,” I said, “I’m probably not thinking enough.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I was about to get up when a loud new talk show appeared on the TV screen above the bar. The show consisted of young men talking about the times they’d thrown up. Then they called out to some busty girls in Dutch peasant costumes who were serving steins of beer to the studio audience. “Juggies!!” the men called. That was the name of the costumed girls. “Dance us out to commercial!”

That was when I left. Reading Paradise Lost can make you feel that way, especially at first – ashamed somehow, as if you belong nowhere in the modern world.

The first person to read Paradise Lost, Milton’s Quaker friend Thomas Elwood, thought it was brilliant. Few have disagreed since, thanks largely to the poem’s 10,565-line title bout between an inhuman God and an all-too-human Satan. But if Paradise Lost is so brilliant, why does it feel so heavy? Why have so many of the literary lasting – Johnson, Coleridge, Pope, Borges, dozens of others – felt obligated to defend it?

More to the point, why did it make me fall asleep? One day, in two-and-a-half hours, between Miltonic naps, I read sixty-five lines. That’s eight words every two minutes. Twenty-five lines were like a draught of chloral hydrate. Anything could distract me from its grandeur. One day early in my unsuccessful efforts to read the poem, during a stretch back in town, I kept a list:

Milton (four lines)
Ultimate Cribbage
Milton (fifteen lines)
Nap
Free Cell/Ultimate Cribbage
Oral-sex pictures on the Internet
Nap
Milton (ten lines)
Oral-sex pictures
Nap

It isn’t bad writing (as Samuel Johnson claimed) that makes Paradise Lost exhausting; it’s the poem’s very brilliance, the same quality that made it riveting hundreds of lines at a time when I finally managed to swim through the narcoleptic sea that surrounded the poem on all sides. In Paradise Lost, Good and Evil stand face to face with Judgment between them, and the clarity is seductive. In our own borderless, morally relative world anything goes; the more forcefully you can rationalize your behaviour, the more successful you tend to be. What drove me to escape into sleep, and what kept me reading, was the poem’s strict and vivid insistence that there is right and wrong; that we can’t help but fail; and that we have to admit it.

What happens in Paradise Lost is that Adam and Eve become human. The poem is the history of the self, the story of how the human conscience came to be. I found it a surprisingly traumatic read. And even more surprising, a comfort. Maybe that’s why I took so long to read it: when I was in the world of Paradise Lost I felt clear and clean.

Before Milton wrote Paradise Lost, he stopped writing poetry altogether, and spent about seventeen years as Oliver Cromwell’s public relations man. (This fact cheers up many aging writers.) He was anti-monarchist, anti-church, anti-censorship, but in favor of divorce and the beheading of Charles I. By the time Milton turned fifty, however, his situation was dire. Cromwell was dead; Charles II was on the English throne; a retro number called the Restoration was underway. Imprisoned and released, Milton was on the outs and frequently afraid for his life; his fame fading, his fortune expropriated, his pamphlets burned. He was also twice-widowed, blind, and the father of three children.

So what does Milton do? He marries a girl twenty-five years his junior and begins to dictate Paradise Lost, the masterwork he has been planning in his head for twenty years. He prefers to do so leaning back in a chair with a leg thrown over one arm. He manages an average of forty lines a day “as it were in a breath,” and then cuts half of them. His misfortune as a man turns out to be his salvation as a poet. (Like Beethoven, whose deafness let him create a world entirely on his own terms, without interference from the outside world; and unlike Mozart and Shakespeare, who seem not to have had to will their art into being, but merely let it out of themselves.)

Seven years later Milton finishes Paradise Lost. It’s an instant hit. Shakespeare’s plays enjoy more of a life outside English departments these days, especially in Hollywood. But between 1700 and 1800, Paradise Lost was republished more than 100 times, twice as often as anything by the Bard.

What’s most impressive about Milton is his grasp of the big picture. He knows he’s writing in the big leagues, and his aim and concentration never stray from universal concerns. He’s confident. He has what Virginia Woolf later spotted as the thing that lasts in literature: certainty of judgment. It makes me think that it is impossible to write anything that will last even the writer’s lifetime unless the writer believes in a moral universe – in God, for starters. Because without such a belief, without a strong faith in a moral universe, how can you know, with enough certainty to tell it in an authoritative way, what will happen when an unhappily married woman has an affair with a cad? Or when poor boy meets rich girl? You have to believe in something, anyway, to tell an effective story.

Milton thought of talent in the same way the Biblical parable does, as a fist-sized sack of gold from God. It was not to be squandered. The exercise of that talent required discipline, which as a paid-up Puritan he considered spiritually hygienic to boot. Getting up every day at four a.m. and reading the Hebrew Bible for a couple of hours before dictating forty lines of Paradise Lost wasn’t just a mental lubricant; it was colonic irrigation for his soul. “He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things,” Milton once wrote, “ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things.” Live well, he says, and you will write well. But how easy is that?

Suddenly, one day in August, as if a door blew open, I was finished. One of the few things the novelists Martin Amis and his late father Kingsley agreed on (though they weren’t alone) was that the last 150 lines of Paradise Lost stand as some of the best poetry ever written. The Son of God sacrifices himself for Adam’s sins, which turns out to be some consolation for our own inevitably approaching deaths. But Milton buries the lede:

…For then the earth
Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this Eden, and far happier days….
then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far.

Earth will be a happier Paradise than Eden ever could; the unhappy Fall of man will be his unexpected redemption. It turns out that a difficult time in history or in life can be cured by difficulty, by strictness, even by reading a difficult poem – by adhering to some unchanging standard. We could even read Paradise Lost and relearn how one becomes human, not through triumph but by failing.

I put the poem down, and stepped outside.

Next door to the cabin was the Caesar’s Palace Cove Haven Honeymoon Resort, the self-described “Land of Love” and “Honeymoon Capital of the World.” I decided to take a tour. Contented couples strolled hand in hand across the Haven’s greensward. Every room had a king-sized round bed and a heart-shaped tub, and some of them had seven-foot-high whirlpool baths in the form of champagne glasses (Cove Haven had been the brain wave of a plumber).

But what caught my eye were the Garden of Eden Apples. The Apples were pie-shaped windowless rooms in a series of round concrete bunkers. “You’ll notice there’re no windows,” Cheryl, my guide, pointed out. “So no one can see in. It’s like you’re in your own world.”

“Why do they call them Apples?” I asked.

“You know, the whole scenario with Adam and Eve and temptation and desire and fulfillment. The whole Biblical thing?”

“But,” I said, “I thought they weren’t supposed to eat the apple.”

“Well,” Cheryl said matter-of-factly, “here they can do whatever they want.”

I was back in my own time. I could tell, because I was once again ashamed of myself.

Even more respectfully,

Ian

Dear Stephen,

Over the past nine months, gradually, incrementally, I’ve been putting all of my possessions into storage. I began, in December, with a three-story house in Toronto filled with ceramic soap dishes, ancestral wedding photos, Robert Stone novels, bank statements, and sweaters; after several trips in moving trucks to storage lockers and attics, my possessions are now: a large knapsack and a laptop bag, plus whatever I can fit inside.

There’s a physical heft to putting things into storage – there’s plenty of lifting and grunting; lots of packing tape, styrofoam peanuts, and garbage bags to fill up and throw around – but the process really comes down to an exercise in sorting: what to keep, what to store, and what to throw away. It’s a deeply existential chore, even, I’d imagine, for someone less existential than I am: Are there any books I just can’t live without? Am I the kind of guy who might need a tie now and then? How important are sunglasses, really?

But now I’ve noticed something weird: I’ve started sorting jokes.

The first time I realized that I was joke-sorting was in March, a month that I spent sitting around Toronto in a deep, often narcotized, funk, waiting to finish quitting my job so that I could leave town, and watching a lot of TV. Deirdre and I were trying to resolve, as we always are, our debate over which of Jim Carrey’s movies is the greatest. She, incredibly, says Dumb and Dumber, while I maintain that it’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, in a walk. To shore up my position, I made us watch them both again, back to back, in a single night.

The next day, walking along Queen Street, I found myself replaying in my head the moment in AV:PD where Ace comes out of the bathroom at a fancy party, holding his nose and fanning frantically, and shouts, “Do NOT go in there!” Now, if you haven’t seen the movie (or even, perhaps, if you have), this is probably going to sound a little unlikely, but what I found myself thinking that afternoon was: “That might just be the best joke ever.”

And then a few days later, Deirdre and I were having dinner, and we started talking about this moment a couple of years ago, at a big celebration for her sister. There was a thirteen-year-old boy there, someone’s son, and he was quite a skilled piano player. At the end of the evening, he and Deirdre and I were hanging out by an electric piano that the band had brought, and he was playing various easy-listening tunes for us. After finishing a John Tesh medley with a flourish, he turned to me and said, utterly devoid of irony, “Now, Paul, do you follow professional basketball? You do? Well, here’s a tune you might recognize,” and he launched into his own tinkly rendition of the “NBA on NBC” theme, which in fact I did recognize, though I’d never before heard it played as a cocktail-piano tune. And we laughed about it at dinner, Deirdre and I, and then I said, “You know, I think that was the funniest moment ever.”

And so I was officially on a quest for the perfect joke. I knew it didn’t make a lot of sense – humour is, thankfully, subjective; what is funny is constantly shifting, for all of us – but I kept doing it, despite myself. I started to divide the quest into categories: one night not long ago I spent a couple of hours reading through the archives at www.mcsweeneys.net, looking for the funniest thing ever published there (conclusion: “3 Little Things I Regret Having Said,” by Dan Kennedy [itself, possibly not coincidentally, a list]). I’ve had long, giddy conversations about the funniest scene in a Woody Allen movie (conclusion: the first date in Play it Again, Sam), the funniest top-ten list (the Top Ten Forgotten Norman Rockwell Paintings), and the funniest SCTV sketch (still under debate).

Joke-sorting might sound like fun, but there is, I’m afraid, a certain joylessness to the process. It’s just like packing up a house and putting it in storage: you’re not sorting to find things you cherish – you’re looking for stuff you can live without: You’re not thinking, Do I love it? You’re thinking, Can I stand to throw it away? That’s what I was doing: getting rid of all those pesky Simpsons lines that are always banging around in a person’s head, and boiling them all down to Bart facing off against Lisa in a rock-paper-scissors contest and saying, “Good old rock. Nothing beats rock.” It was like trying to save possessions from a fire: not really a moment to stop and admire the picture frames.

More recently, the joke-nostalgia cycle has sped up, so that I can be sorting a joke even as I’m making it. When we were in L.A., Deirdre and I were staying for a while at the home of her friend Heather, who’s into new-age spirituality and various unorthodox health cures. We spent a lot of time lying in bed with the air conditioning on, staring at the books on her bookshelf, which had titles like “The Salt Diet” and “Unlocking Your Brain.” My favourite was one, I think about ginger, entitled “Common Spice or Wonder Drug?” The joke was to picture Heather reading the whole thing intently, cover to cover, and then getting to the last page, closing it, putting it down on her lap and saying, “Turns out it’s just a common spice.” Not a bad joke, especially if you tell it ten times in a row, as Deirdre and I did – but hardly worthy of the thought I had that night, falling asleep: “Wait, what if that’s the funniest joke ever?”

Did I need that one in the lifeboat, in other words, or could I throw it over the side?

My friends and I spent a good portion of the 1990s telling jokes and retelling jokes and writing jokes and refining jokes and laughing at jokes. Now, apparently, what I’m doing is whittling down. It’s like I’m preparing for a long trip, one on which I can take only a few select items: my one decent shirt, say, the second Harry Potter book, and Jim Carrey, still fanning frantically.

Yours truly,

Paul

Julie –

You know my friend Ray who taught me stick-shift and used to play flute in the Guitar Mass I was willingly brainwashed to sing in after those make-em-cry retreats in eighth grade? Well I don’t remember if I told you this or not, but now he’s becoming a priest. The summer before my mom got sick I got in the car with her and a former-nun friend of hers and drove to Grand Coteau to watch him take his vows of Poverty and Chastity.

On the drive over, I tried to tune Mom and the ex-nun in to the realities of the Church by telling them that Ray was the first person ever to offer me pot and that I for one was never going to take Communion from someone whose favorite band was Rush. Mom pointed out that I didn’t take Communion any more anyway. The ex-nun just shrugged. I guess she saw it all in the convent, before she quit. They just kept laughing and chatting it up all the way past Lafayette into the secret Jesuit woods as Mom confided her stupid personal theory that I drove Ray into the priesthood by not dating him.

There were about ten guys getting sworn in that Saturday and the candidates single-filed into the old chapel all nervous and sweaty. A Hispanic guy with a crewcut sang in a sweet high voice like a Mormon Tabernacle kid or a castrato. I pointed out the Goth faghag friend of one of the gay pledges to Mom and said, “See?” Afterwards we drank non-alcoholic Sangria out of a big metal bowl in the cafeteria and the rectory’s lunch ladies served gumbo.

I almost laughed when I first saw Ray in his stiff black-and-white collar. What in the world brought this on? I kept thinking. I even walked through this wedding-like reception line to shake his hand and congratulate him and everything. But now it turns out I drove three hours through the swamps in flowery pink drag to see Ray get Holy Water shaken on him and he’s not even a full priest!

He’s just a Novitiate. Or was. Something like that. Now he’s a Philosopher. He has six or so levels to go before he’s all priest. Like Dungeons and Dragons or something. No wonder they can’t get enough priests.

Ray got assigned to teach religion at a high school near my house here. We went to dinner a couple of months ago – a mother of an obnoxious student of his had given him a two-for-one gift certificate as a thanks-for-putting-up-with-the-kid. And Ray – I would hope this would be enough to rile even YOUR inner dead Catholic, Julie – Ray wouldn’t even wear his collar.

“Aw, come on. Put it on,” I begged. “You’re not even going to wear it? You just got it and you’re already sick of it? They let you out like that?”

“I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable,” he said. “People act differently when they see a priest.”

I thought that meant people would give us stuff free, so I kept after him for a while. I even offered him a couple of dollars but no go. Turns out he just meant people would keep coming over to our table drunk to apologize for swearing if he wore it. Catholics today are cheap and over it and don’t buy you rounds of drinks and desserts like in the good old days. (Later Ray admitted this did make him feel a little gypped. Do you know how much his allowance is a month, Julie? He made me guess and I started low, but I never got low enough – SEVEN DOLLARS! Or twenty-seven dollars. Something terrible like that. He even has to ask permission and justify it if he wants a new pair of shoes!)

So during dinner I quizzed Ray about Confession and Purgatory and Limbo and generally made him stand trial for everything I learned growing up at Holy Ghost Catholic School. He kept laughing and calling my ideas “Pre-Vatican II” and “possibly Crusadish” all because I like the idea of Purgatory!

I think people should get punished awhile for being mean on Earth. But old Philosopher kept wanting to be all Zen about it and kept calling Purgatory “more like a time for personal spiritual reflection before you meet your Creator.” That’s as bad as some Baptist Bundy accepting Jesus as his Savior on his deathbed, like that zeroes out the mayhem and makes everything okay. You can’t have your Purgatory and eat it too.

I told him how in my Purgatory if you were ever mean to a retarded person, then you become a retarded person and people are mean to you for years and you don’t understand why. And how in my Purgatory if you’re greedy and rich and go around saying all your workers are lazy because they’d be rich like you if they weren’t, you’d have to work in a coal mine or a steno pool or a computer cubicle with no oxygen or Dilbert or bathroom or smoke breaks. And if you called yourself a Feminist and wore fishnets and acted stupider than you were and got your hair cut like a 1960s pin-up girl: one thousand automatic years of hard-time laundry on “The 1900 House.” Also if you harassed women, you’d have to spend a few eternities with like Sam Walton or Patrick Swayze’s head up your skirt.

Let us call this Exhibit A in my case to be your expected earthling’s godmother. I know neither of us are Catholic any more really, but then if even a priest isn’t, who is? That’s why the Pope calls Americans “cafeteria Catholics.” John Paul II says you can’t take what you want and leave the rest behind. Religion isn’t Ryan’s or Pancho’s, he says. Oh but it is – that’s why you can pick me to be the godmother, even though you’re not having any baptism or church or religion or anything. Please. I don’t want to be one of those weird fake “aunts” that this kid is going to have to go around trying to explain. Whereas everyone knows what a godmother is – someone who tells you about all the daiquiris your Mom drank in college and how she picked your dad up on a motorcycle and slept with him on their first date!!!

Also we’ve known each other for over ten years and I still like you. I will take you in without question after any and every divorce. I will start clipping Cathy cartoons and mailing them to you every day if you don’t give in. Plus, finally, you’re pregnant and I’m not, so I could kick your ass.

So keep thinking it over. But don’t say I can be an “aunt” ever again under penalty of your own special “This is your Aunt Julie” Purgatory. Don’t let all those I’m-about-to-breastfeed-the-world hormones make your nutty decisions for you. You still have a few months to do penance.

Talk to you soon,

Cheryl

Dear Paul,

Richard-the-shrink came with me to Lucky Chances last night, but he wouldn’t gamble. He just sat behind me at the table and whispered that the air in the place was so filled with despair that he couldn’t imagine why I would come.

Why would I come? I looked around at the room full of poker tables, hundreds of serious men sitting behind stacks of gray, red, blue and black chips. Why would I leave?

You played enough when you were up here in the spring to know part of the reason I play poker. You’ve felt the injection of adrenaline when you’re sitting on a sledgehammer hand (let’s say kings over queens full) with $250 in the pot, and you’re trying to look bored while your muscles twitch and the guy down the table, who clearly made his flush on the river card, considers whether to bet into you. That is poker’s most obvious thrill – it’s the coke high of the game. I can’t imagine anyone not liking that.

But given that you were able to walk away from the table after an hour, down only a hundred, it’s clear that you aren’t as devoted as I am. (Richard has used another, more clinical term – but to hell with him.)

Maybe there are things I see in the place that others don’t. I like the food (especially that Filipino Chicken Adobo) and being able to eat dinner while I play cards. I like the flat, no-shadow lighting. I like the affectless faces of the dealers and the fact that you can sit down at a table of eight men and go a whole night without saying a word. I like the little mirrored bubbles on the ceiling that hide the cameras, and the notion that a team of sharp-eyed men – men who have seen it all – are watching over me. I even like the physical location of the casino, surrounded by cemeteries on all sides, out on the edge of the city. If you stood in the parking lot of Lucky Chances and spun a ace of spades out into the darkness in any direction, it might land on a gravestone (with a little luck). How cool is that?

Last night, with Richard-the-shrink moping behind me, I found myself at a great table. There were two excellent players, who I thought I could learn from. A couple guys were at my intermediate level. There was an middle-aged man with such bad vision he couldn’t make out the cards laid out on the table two feet in front of him. He kept calling his hands wrong. To my right, there was a guy who was so tired from gambling twenty or thirty hours straight that he had to be poked in the arm each time it was his turn to bet. (I kid you not; I did the poking.) There was also an elderly man clearly suffering from a debilitating Alzheimer-like disorder. At the end of each hand he would roll his cards over and wait expectantly for the dealer to tell him whether there was any pattern.

Richard asked me how much time I’d spent at Lucky Chances, total, but given that I have no sensation of time passing when I’m playing, it’s hard to tell. I know I’ve played enough hands to have hit two royal flushes, one in diamonds and one – my favorite – in hearts. The odds of turning a single royal flush are 60,000 to 1. So estimating three minutes a hand, that means I’ve spent 3,000 hours playing poker – or, put another way, a year’s worth of working days. I honestly don’t think it’s been that much time – I think I’m just lucky – but I don’t know for sure. Some people will never hold a royal flush. I feel like I could turn another one tomorrow.

Why do I go? Here’s a notion: I think a man should know how to gamble. And I don’t mean know the rules or even the strategies to win. To truly know how to gamble is to know how to lose more money than you intended to and not flinch. Poker is to your finances what boxing is to your flesh. You have to learn not to let the other guy know that you are hurt, which, in our day, is an under-appreciated and seldom-taught skill.

Or maybe it’s because the trance I enter playing cards blocks out every other thought in my head – and those thoughts have not been so welcome recently. Richard-the-shrink thinks it’s no coincidence that I started playing regularly two years ago, right after my father got sick. Although you know that I am loath to accept such psychodynamic explanations for behavior, he’s probably right. The trance I enter, like a narcotic haze, cheats even the anxiety of loss and death. This is why they can build the place literally surrounded by monuments to grief. Can you imagine doing that with a restaurant, or even a bar?

Also, with my father gone I am freer now to do ill-advised things with my life. Not because my father would have disapproved – I could never do anything to disappoint that man – but because he would have worried for me, and now he can’t.

I’ve just thought of another reason, one that suggests the opposite possibility: My father never gambled, never took substantial chances with his life, but this was as much out of timidness as adherence to any moral code. He was thrilled that I was less frightened by the world than he was, and so maybe I gamble because on some level I know that he would have gotten a kick out of it.

Of course, like a drug, playing poker blocks out not only the bad thoughts but the good ones as well. Like a man treading water at the edge of a monster whirlpool, I can see the rest of the ride down. You gamble to block anxiety, but the gambling also keeps you from accomplishing other things in your life, like keeping your career and relationships intact – things that might naturally bring you back to even. At the narrow bottom of the whirlpool, you keep playing because you need to avoid the anxiety that you are gambling too much. Then you go under, into a darker, colder world.

Last night Richard and I were supposed to meet friends for drinks, but it was such a good table that I kept angling for one more round. I swear they were giving money away and I was hitting flushes and straights like the deck had never known a shuffle. By the time we got back to the city, our friends were nowhere to be found and Richard was clearly unhappy with me. I gave up trying to explain to him why I love the game. You’d think with all his therapy training he would understand that gambling is the essence of hope and hope is the essence of man. What could be more compelling than the turn of a card? If he had ever seen, as I have, a ten of hearts turn over to anchor a royal flush, and felt his brain as it stumbles to process the shapes and colors of the card (red, 10! hearts!), he would understand that this random world can yield beauty and perfection. How much time and money do people waste in therapy and walk out never knowing that?

Your friend and partner in crime,

Ethan