“My wife is having surgery Thursday,” said DR as I passed him in the hallway at work. “Outpatient. She’s having a growth removed from her nose. It’s not cancer. I’ve been calling her ‘Snout’ ever since she discovered it.”
DR is an odd fellow, prone to odd conversations and indiscretion. He is also terribly nice. When I meet him like this, it often causes me to wince for his sake. He doesn’t notice me wincing. Which is good, because he’s also really entertaining. “I bet she doesn’t appreciate being called that,” I replied.
“There’s a reason for it,” he said. “When I was growing up in Virginia, we had a two-headed goat. We called her Snout because she had two noses.”
I failed to see how this was a good reason to call his wife by that name. DR continued: “It’s rare to have a goat with two well-developed heads. It had two tongues and everything. We had her for a few weeks then sold her to the circus.”
“The circus?”
“It was before the Internet when you could see pictures of two-headed goats all the time. [Oh, look! He was right. -gb] They were really happy to have her.”
He never did say whether his wife liked Snout as a nickname.
I don’t remember what it was turned me on to Charles Bowden. (It might have been Hearing Voices, maybe even this episode. Or this one. That podcast has introduced me to several writers I should have been reading long ago.) However it was I heard his name, I went and dug up what I could find of his online, mining the Harper’s archive especially. And I was astonished at what I found. Is there a better essayist writing in America today?
What is Bowden’s work like? There are several ways in which Bowden and David Simon are similar, aside from their subject matter (both have written at length about the drug war and its consequences on their regions). Though Bowden remains a long-form journalist while Simon left that world behind to become a television producer in the 1990s, both writers put reporting at the heart of what they do. Bowden and Simon also write in the space between sociopolitical forces (Bowden: narcotrafficking, immigration, civic corruption, globalization, immigration/emigration; Simon: narcotics, cities, lingering effects of racial oppression, entrenched power of bureaucracy) and human attempts (not to say successes) to survive in the face of those forces. Both writers take darkness as a given, assuming that attempts to do good are successes in spite of ourselves and worth some amount of quiet admiration, if not congratulations. And it is particularly those who have highest to rise who warrant the most scrutiny, such as the junkie who turns his life around or the sicario (hit-man) who finds God and the strength to escape from his cartel.
Bowden’s work is underpinned by a knowledge that writing has real and sometimes terrible consequences. In “Torch Song,” a memoir of his time working as a reporter on the city desk at the Tucson Citizen, Bowden reveals the articles he wrote about rape and molestation resulted in civic rage and personal sexual conquest; in “Teachings of Don Fernando,” a eulogy for a drug informant—scratch that, the best eulogy for a drug informant ever written—he claims that an article he wrote for GQ hastened the death of Amado Carillo Fuentes, head of the Juarez drug cartel in the 1990s. A lesser writer would avoid admitting so much. But what brings Bowden to make them? Is it braggadoccio? Inflated self-regard? I can see how one might say either: he has Western roots and he writes about drug traffickers and murderers whom he both despises and admires (or neither despises nor admires, which amounts to the same thing), a stance that can be maddening; he has a gravely, poetically masculine voice that comes across in print. His essays are gripped by a clear notion of causality: actions—even inadvertent actions, such as staring too long at a parade of killers in Juarez—have real consequences. This clarity makes him an astute reader of the current scene, such as in his March 2008 essay “Ike and Lyndon,” ostensibly a meditation on Lyndon Johnson and an artist in a Texas mental hospital, which also uncovers the zeitgeist that made George W. Bush inevitable. Just his work in Harper’s is a remarkable collection. I’m looking forward to reading his books soon.
I bought a car yesterday, with all the low drama that negotiating for big-ticket item can bring. (The research for it has been occupying much more of my spare time than I care to remember.) A few observations:
- Bargaining could be more honest if negotiations for a trade-in and the car purchased were done separately. Dealers, being better at negotiating that most everyone anyway, would still make out like bandits, but they wouldn’t have to do it through obfuscations.
- As it is, there are at most only two numbers that matter: (1) the amount you sell your car for and (2) the amount you buy theirs for. The higher (1) is and the lower (2) is, the better off things are going. The smaller (2) is, the better off things are. But when you are up on the one hand and down on the other, it can be difficult to understand whether you are doing well or ill. Odds are, because the dealership has the greatest assets in the negotiation and is better equipped to marshal those assets in its own favor, you are doing ill.
- Neither the down payment (if you’re not paying cash for all of it) nor the taxes and fees are part of the negotiation. It is wise to know them both ahead of time.
- I have known the general manager at the dealership for nearly ten years, and I count him a friend. I even attended his wedding. That said, the word friend sounds predatory and aggressive when said at the wrong time.
- I would totally hire a professional advocate—if not a lawyer, then a legal assistant perhaps, or B.A. in sales—for bargaining. After all, spending $500 to save $1,500 is a net benefit. (Entrepreneurs: Get on it!) Of course, that’s not counting the fact that the dealerships probably would buy off all the advocates under the table and/or played them off each other. (Entrepreneurs: You’re all sellouts!)
- I wish we could get by with having no car at all, but if we must have one, then I’m pretty happy with the one we got.
Tell Gannon I really will get this triforce put together someday.
- Out of the collapse of a civilization, new growth: It’s a classic Romantic (and American) story that Rebecca Solnit, writing about the history and present-day transformation of Detroit tells, so much so that I wonder whether sustainable is not sometimes just a new word for pastoral. Solnit knows this story, of course—it’s why she quotes “Ozymandias“—and I am certain she is trying to do more than revive Romantic images of the deaths of empires. But I’m not altogether sure she succeeds.
- If current practice is any predictor of the future, the morass that Lawrence Lessig says copyright law is heading to is frightening. It is in such contexts that I appreciate the fact my employer asserts rights of fair use for many of the texts we use, but our interpretation of fair use is tightening, much like a noose. How soon before that noose strangles us? How soon before copyright strangles us all?
- We’ve just passed the one-year anniversary of the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision upholding the rights of gay citizens to marry. In honor of that, David Cole’s essay explaining why the future of marriage is inclusive is worth reviving.
- The first part of William Langewiesche’s American Ground is a description of the subterranean levels of the World Trade Center after it collapsed. Reading it was the first time I realized that New York City, like London and Paris and all the great cities, has nearly as much history beneath the streets as above. (Ghostbusters 2 notwithstanding.) This essay about Steve Duncan, “guerrilla historian of infrastructure,” makes the point even better.
- Marlowe channels Whitman.
When I was a kid, well before Caller ID, there was a phone number you could call at any hour of the day or night, and a man would answer it. I don’t remember how I got the number, but before long I had it committed to memory. So, too, did my cousin, who didn’t even live in town. We would huddle on my grandmother’s basement stairs where there was a phone and dial the number together. When the man answered, one of us would raise his voice an octave—or, more likely, a half-octave—and say, “Hi there! I’m a cheerleader! Let’s have some fun!”
Of course the man knew the game we were playing. I won’t try to invent what was said—my memory isn’t that detailed—but to his discredit, he sometimes played along, and he was filthy when he did it. Other times, he groused and swore at us that he’d tell our parents what we were doing. That hardly mattered, however, because we didn’t know what we were doing. Calling him was wrong, and it was anonymous, and because it was both of those things it was titillating, and that’s why we did it.
How it all ended I don’t exactly remember, though I seem to recall we were caught on the phone one day and warned never to call the man again. We probably disobeyed that order, but we had been found out. The game was no longer just between us and the man, so it soon ended.
