We buried my father’s mother not long ago, next to grandfather, by the hickory tree in the Quaker cemetery, in South Carolina. Camden was not yet in its spring glory, when the dogwood and azalea explode in white and pink. I remember it was always around then that I would come down from the north, sometimes calling her from on the road to announce my impending arrival with a carload of disreputable-looking college friends. “Oh, darling,” Mimi would always say, however inwardly alarmed at the prospect of our invasion, “how long can you stay?” Soon the car would turn up the white gravel driveway that slopes up over the terraced hill, tires crunching past pines and magnolia toward the house, its balcony purple and drowsy with great boughs of wisteria. The day of the funeral we drove there for one last look. The new owner had kindly called to give his permission, but we drove through furtively, like trespassers.
My grandfather had bought the house in the thirties after a turbulent career in revolutionary Mexico. It was forlorn then, sitting atop a blasted hill bitterly fought over during the wars of independence and secession. The house, Kamschatka, meaning “far off and lonely place,” had been named after the Russian province. When it was built in the 1850s, the house stood a full two miles from town, a long way by carriage. Legend has it that the slaves buried the silver to keep the Yankee soldiers from getting it, and that it is still there somewhere. Mary Chesnut, author of the famous Civil War diary, lived there. Her husband, James, had built the house for her so that she could entertain on a grander scale, and though we don’t know exactly what it looked like at the time of its building, even in its pristine state it could not have been as beautiful as my grandfather would make it almost a century later. What imagination he had. Even Tara, post-Sherman, looked grander than Kamschatka when he and Mimi first saw it.
How odd to find such vision in a man who had grown up the son of a Texas sheriff in the 1880s. He brought in over a half-dozen Italian landscapers and transformed the parched barren hill into a paradise of flowers and greenery, and added brick walls, patios, walkways and arbors, Palladian cottages and stables.
He loved water and built fountains—not nearly as grandiose as Brideshead’s, but more southern and languorous. You could hear the one out front from the bedrooms; its splash gave a sense of the most profound tranquillity. One night my cousin Billy caught an enormous catfish down at the pond and brought it back in a bucket and put it in the fountain with the goldfish. The trauma of it all must have given the poor thing an appetite. The next morning there were no flashes of orange in the weedy murk, only a fat, digesting, bewhiskered catfish.
There was a ghost. (I know, I know, but hear me out.) Several times he woke up people who until then quite definitely did not believe in ghosts. He was said to be a cavalry officer who had promised to return from the war. Unable to keep his promise in life, here he was, keeping it in death. One night one of the guests was awakened by the sound of boots and spurs clumping up and down the hall. He came out of the bedroom and stared into the darkness. Then he looked up and suddenly there was the ghost, standing at the head of the stairs, his uniformed figure silhouetted in the moonlight. It never occurred to anyone that they should be afraid of him.
I remember the big, candlelit dinners when I was very young and allowed to stay up: Ella and Jeff bringing in great silver salvers of freshly shot roast squab and quail, the room perfumed with magnolia blossoms, forsythia, hibiscus and oleander.
On the wall in the dining room was the one valuable painting in the house, a dark oil of Andrew Jackson. If you looked closely, you could see the scar on his chin from when he was a boy and a British soldier had struck him for refusing to polish his boots. You had to really look for it, since Old Hickory had a lined face. But my grandmother liked that scar—it appealed to her innate American pride. So we’d keep on looking, poring over the great South Carolinian’s face until she found it—there! “I think that’s just a wrinkle, Mimi.” “Oh. You know, darling, I think you’re right.”
I hope the condominium units will never come to Kamschatka. I could handle it if they made a movie there, even one with nude frolics in the fountain with Billy’s catfish; but condos would probably drive even the ghost away. Meantime, I hear the new owner has filled it with children and noise, which is how it should be for great houses that live on after their builders have gone.
—Architectural Digest, 1985
Sergeant Pepcid’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band
I sensed there was something wrong right after the opening of Sunday night’s The Beatles Anthology: Part One when the announcer’s voice boomed that the evening was being brought to us by something called Pepcid AC. The AC stands for Acid Controller. You take Pepcid in anticipation of getting indigestion. The other two main sponsors of our collective walk down Penny Lane were a credit card designed by Ringo, and Ford Taurus wagon.
The next two hours contained forty-seven-odd commercials, not counting promos for the local TV news team that’s On Our Side. One ad for every two-and-a-half minutes of Beatles nostalgia, a hard day’s night indeed, considering that the only thing we learned that we didn’t already know was that Ringo was miserably hung-over when they shot his solo scene in the movie of that name, walking along the canal kicking bits of debris and muttering to himself angstfully. Ringo’s commentary made it clear that he was describing one of the immortal moments in modern cinema. (Ten bucks to any aging boomer who actually makes it all the way through A Hard Day’s Night.) On Wednesday in Part Two, George reveals that he had turista during the beach scene in Help!
Grateful as I was for Ringo’s now-it-can-be-told revelations—I already knew that the Beatles started in Liverpool, did gigs in Hamburg, and came to America in 1964 and went on the Ed Sullivan Show—the fact is his new credit card is much more interesting.
About halfway through I found I had stopped paying attention to the Anthology, despite the breathless alerts that an original Beatles song, “Free as a Bird,” was upcoming: “Stay tuned for the world premiere of the new Beatles song.” Instead I was fixating on the commercials. It was the ads that fascinated, for they showed us what boomers truly care about most—ourselves.
Twenty-five years ago, when the Beatles broke up, the only acid my generation cared about came in windowpane, blotter, or Orange Sunshine. Now we have this yuppie Prufrock leaning over his wife’s shoulder as she prepares lasagna with spicy sausages, fretting that this will bring on esophageal Hiroshima. But he can rest easy—she has bought him acid controller. He can eat all the spicy sausages he wants! Now on to the day Paul and John first met…
What more is there to be said of Ringo’s credit card? For the past twenty-five years one has followed dear Ringo’s career, uttering, “Ringo, Pingo, Ringo,” then, “Say it ain’t so,” and finally, “Duude.” And yet you still can’t bring yourself to dislike him. He is what he always was—Ringo. Even the name was never quite on the level. He has become the Kato Kaelin of the Beatles. Where will he turn up next? In the Hawaiian sunshine, on a real estate infomercial? On the 900-number Psychic Hotline? I felt this vibration in me head and I knew we were gonna be really big. Stay tuned.
“We’re in our fifties now,” said the woman in the Ikea ad to her couch potato husband. “That hurts,” he replied, following up with a snappy rejoinder about the sound of one hand clapping. Zen and the art of Some Assembly Required?
Then there was Fran Dresher, nasal sex kitten of the ’90s, jimmying her thighs into Hanes’s Smooth Illusions. “It’s like liposuction without the sur-ge-ry.” Followed immediately by low-fat Tostitos Chips. Bet you can’t eat just the whole bag. Doubtless the next Beatles Anthology will be entirely brought to us by Olestra, the new fat substitute recently okayed by the FDA.
For aching boomers there was Tylenol Flu. What? They’re giving your hospitalized father Advil? But don’t you know it’s got ibuprofen! Get him out of there, man, now! Message (as Bush’s speech texts used to say): You have a cold and your parents are croaking. I was surprised not to see any
Jacoby and Meyers law offices ads: Are you quite sure that Dad has made out his will?
Kodak was a major presence. The Grim Reaper is upon us! The memories must be preserved! And this time we’ve figured out how to keep them from turning green after a few decades. Notice how all those pictures of you when you were a Cub Scout now make you look like something from The X Files?
Cars had barely been equipped with seat belts when the Beatles were playing Shea Stadium. Now we must have not only dual air bags in our Volvos, but also side-impact air bags. Yes, I agree, I must have them too, even if this means karmically aligning myself with crash-test dummies. If James Dean’s silver Porsche had been equipped with air bags, he’d now be alive and endorsing nicotine patches.
“Tonight,” said the announcer between news of Ringo’s appearance tomorrow on Good Morning America and Ford Taurus “Making the Dream Come True”—what are we talking about here? a station wagon—in tones denoting The Second Coming, “you’re just minutes away from when the Beatles reunite.” Best of all, the Anthology is “coming to stores December 1. You haven’t heard everything yet!”
There was more? Mercedes, Xerox, Pizza Hut, “Home of the Stuffed Crust,” Arizona Jeans, “More attitude than latitude” (whatever that means), Motorola Pagers “You jumped fast enough to make Pavlov proud!”
Finally the great moment had arrived, after—literally—a countdown. 0:59 … 0:58 … 0:57 … Then there they were, sitting around a table, George, Ringo, Paul. Paul said, “We didn’t see how to do a reunion without John, but then we figured out a way.” He winked, and “Free as a Bird”—available December 1!—began. It was good to hear John’s voice again, but as the music played, you wondered how it all was playing with the man who wrote, “The way things are going, they’re going to crucify me.” Was he turning revolutions number nine? Had he reached, in anticipation, for the Pepcid AC?
—The Washington Post, 1995
Bugging Out
A quarter-century or so ago, I saw a rather earnest movie done in the form of a documentary and narrated by a fictional scientist who has been drummed out of the scientific community for tiresomely asserting that insects are taking over the world. It wasn’t just that the little buggers would outlast anything humans threw at them and dance on our graves. No, no, this entomological Cassandra begged us to understand, in the sort of language we now get courtesy of Mark from Michigan—it is all part of the plan.
It sounded perfectly plausible to me, but then I was eighteen and stoned. Successive assaults by the multitudinous cockroaches in my college dorm only heightened my sense of impending doom. Still, in time I ceased gibbering about the coming Armageddon and got a life.
But now, each summer, after a few days in our decomposing mossy rental on the Maine coast whose plumbing was last repaired during Roosevelt’s second term, I find myself, like that chimp contemplating the human skull, considering my position in the chain of being. I find myself, too, on about the fifth trip into town to the hardware store, cozying up to the proprietor. “Rufus,” I say, “they’ve been guzzling that stuff you sold me like it was strawberry milkshake. I’m a regular customer. Surely you have something special under that counter? DDT? Napalm? Sarin? Just between us. No need for the EPA to know anything. Heh heh.”
I know it’s tricky, revealing one’s insecticide wet dreams in the magazine that published Silent Spring—and, what’s more, on a typewriter just up the road from E. B. White’s old barn, home to the most famous spider in history. But there it is.
Each summer in our cabin, where—true fact—some years ago a woman died of complications from a spider bite, my wife, my children, my dog (in his capacity as larval troop carrier), and I are intimately reacquainted with the insect kingdom: flies, mosquitoes, midges, gnats, moths, earwigs, beetles, weevils, wasps, plant hoppers, assassin bugs (that is an actual type), back swimmers, thrips, lice, stone flies, crickets, termites, damselflies, dragonflies, horseflies, ticks, mites, millipedes, and centipedes.
This summer brought us friendship with yet another glory of creation: carpenter ants. My first clue that the spring had not been a silent one came when I walked into the room that serves as our living, eating, and sleeping quarters to find a significant pile of extremely unpleasant matter heaped on the floor. Naturally, this drew my eye to the ceiling beam above. Where, exactly, I mused, did this revolting, excreting winged horde fit in the ultimate scheme of things? Did He who made the Lamb make them? The British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, asked what a lifetime of study had taught him about the nature of God, replied, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” You could call this point of view bugnosticism.
Yet now I see—writing this, enfolded in citronella, my face sticky with Repel—that they also serve who only creep and crawl. These unlovely arthropods show us our true selves. There is the Zen monk who removes his sandals lest he step on an ant. And there is me, shaken by my wife out of a rum-deep sleep at 2:00 A.M., handed a flyswatter, and told to kill—kill!—the mosquito that is freaking out the kids. In summer, I see my place in the ultimate scheme of things: groggy in a bathrobe, snarling and swearing, ridiculous, fencing with the vanguard of Apocalypse.
—The New Yorker, 1995
“Washington
Writer”
Writing brought me to Washington. I was sitting at my desk at Esquire magazine in New York, eating my New York bagel, musing New York thoughts—rent control, the newest twenty hot restaurants that had opened that day, and whether I could get a reservation—when the phone rang. It was a desperate vice presidential press secretary calling from—cool!—Air Force Two. He needed a speechwriter, needed one fast, needed one cheap.
What the hey, I said to myself philosophically. Could be an interesting gig. I’ve always thought of writing as a journeyman’s trade; perhaps the way a studio musician might think of his own craft. Here was a chance to work on a new album with George Bush. (Voodoo Economics Lounge?) Do it for a year, go back to the Apple with neat Secret Service stories.
That was fifteen years ago. Here I still am, with every intention of staying, despite having spent the last forty-eight hours in inane Sisyphean battle with minor functionaries of the D.C. government over—oh never mind. I like it here.
I wrote my first novel. It had the words “White House” in the title, and that somehow fixed me, if not pigeonholed me, as a “Washington novelist.” At first I was quite delighted with this appelation. Me, a “Washington novelist.” I don’t think we’re in New York anymore, Toto.
I wrote a second novel that didn’t have “White House” or “Washington” or “Potomac” or “Power and Principle” or any other denotative code words in the title. There was a disappointed sound from the gallery when it came out (despite good reviews). It’s very nice and all, but frankly we were rather expecting another Washington book.…
I wrote a third novel. It didn’t have D.C. buzzwords in the title, but it was certainly a “Washington novel.” (Main character: a K Street tobacco spokesman. Washington enough for you?) The gallery expressed satisfaction: Now that’s more like it. Once again I was, in the reviews, a “Washington novelist,” or just “Washington writer.” “Washington satirist” followed. I guess whatever my feelings about the Department of Public Works, this effectively rules out fleeing to the burbs. “Bethesda novelist,” “Chevy Chase satirist” just doesn’t have the same oomph. There’s this, too: if you live somewhere where renewing your car registration is automatic and painless, you won’t be inspired to write satire. Efficient government—local and federal—would only wreck my career.
Washington was my writer’s capital, as Melville put it in a more aqueous context, my Harvard, my Yale. I was quite innocent when I arrived here with my houseplants, Hermes typewriter and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. I’d seen a bit of the world; rather a lot of it, actually. But oh what a brave new world was Washington, that had such people in’t! A few weeks after I arrived that suffocating July, 1981, I soon found myself in the White House mess, that
is, the Navy-run dining room in the basement, listening to two (grown) speechwriters arguing furiously over who had had more “face time”—face time! oh brave neologisms!—in the “Oval” with “POTUS.” (The first term is synecdoche, of course; the second an acronym for President of the United States.) All this I watched in fascination and in wonder. Here was a ritual that had been acted and reenacted since the first royal court was established thousands of years ago in the palmly deserts of the Fertile Crescent, when the first Rosencrantz and Guildenstern squabbled over who had spent more time sucking up to Assurbanipal.
I don’t think my two messmates were familiar with Alexander Pope’s “Epitaph for one who would not be buried in Westminster Abbey”:
Heroes and kings! your distance keep,
In peace let me poor poet sleep,
Who never flattered folks like you:
Let Horace blush, and Vergil too.
The little episode was my first inkling that I had found my proper place in the universe. There’s a Spanish word my father taught me early on: querencia. Literally “favored spot.” It’s used in bullfighting. When the bull enters the ring, the matador watches very intently as the bull seeks out the spot where it feels safe. Once he finds it, he will continue as the anger and pain increase, to return to it. The matador must therefore take care not to put himself between the bull and his querencia, for once he has set his charge for this—to put in a Washington way—safe house, he will keep going, no matter what stands in his path. He will not be tempted by a proffered cape. Woe to the matador who has misjudged the invisible spot in the sand. At any rate, I had found my querencia. Or, as these things happen, it had found me.
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