Book reviews, Scumbag studies, Social comment

Scumbag studies: my quest for SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Helmut Naujocks

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Some people are fascinated by serial killers. Some seek out evidence of conspiracies. I’m fascinated by enigmatic scumbags. SS-Sturmbannführer (SS Major) Alfred Naujocks was one such.

In Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer described Naujocks (pronounced ‘NAW-yokes’) as an ‘intellectual SS ruffian.’ I wouldn’t say that the ‘intellectual’ part is well supported by the record. Not that he was an idiot, but Naujocks wasn’t much of an idea guy. He did excel at carrying out dirty deeds when so tasked, and thought very well under pressure. He was daring, clever and ruthless. And of all the old Nazis who needed to answer for crimes, he is one of those who eluded justice. In fact, I still haven’t been able to learn that much about him.

The body of work on Naujocks begins with Shirer’s mentions of some of his deeds. It then proceeds to an affidavit he gave while in U.S. captivity in late 1945, presented at the Nuremberg trials. Naujocks himself escaped custody before he could face the tribunal. His trail went cold until 1960, at which time a journalist named Gunter Peis penned an autobiography called The Man Who Started the War. Here are the tantalizing lines from end of Chapter One, which tells of his surrender to U.S. troops:

He pulled his chair up to the table, sat down and began to think. Soon he was typing slowly, carefully. The story he wrote at length was fascinating, incredible and very detailed. It was also quite untrue.

What follows is the story that in 1945 would have hanged Alfred Naujocks.

Peis knew his storytelling work; that’s a lead that makes one want to believe, and to read on in any case. Here’s the problem: there’s no more reason to take this book at face value than there is to believe his entire Nuremberg affidavit. That’s not to say it’s all lies, just that it’s from a source with plenty of motive to lie. By 1960, as I understand it, Naujocks wasn’t in the best of health (he was born in 1911, so that would make him only 49), hadn’t been much of a success in business, and probably needed money. A lurid tale would sell better, one would think, and not many people were likely to come forward with authoritative knowledge to refute his account. Most of those who could have, one supposes, would have preferred to remain inconspicuous. The book may have been his last special operation, and surely his most self-serving.

In any case, we now know that he died in 1966 in Hamburg, where he had apparently lived unmolested. For years many had assumed he must have escaped to Spain or South America, as did many Nazi fugitives from justice, and there is now reasonable evidence now that he did not. He probably managed to lose himself in the postwar chaos and ocean of damaged or destroyed records that resulted from the bombing, invasion and final collapse of the Third Reich.

There are two other books on Naujocks. One is in German, and a very kind native speaker is reading and digesting it for me. I have an e-copy which I could feed with great effort to an online translator, but I hope that my Austrian friend will be able to point me toward the parts that answer questions. The other is not a book yet, but a manuscript by an English author, for which the agent has evidently not yet found a publisher. I wish he would self-publish it, or at least accept my offer of free and confidential proofreading, but neither seems forthcoming. Not knowing what it says, I have no way to evaluate its research or historiography.

What I have pieced together so far, and feel reasonably certain is true except where I label doubt, is this much:

Born in 1911 in Kiel, perhaps with some Baltic forebears (‘Naujocks’ originates from the Lithuanian surname ‘Naujokitis’), he joined the Nazi party in 1931 after being attacked by a left-wing gang. At that point, Hitler had not yet taken over full power in Germany. It didn’t take Naujocks long to make a name for himself as a thug. In 1934 he joined the SS-SD, the SS and Nazi party intelligence organization. He was involved in special operations in Czechoslovakia prior to its partition and absorption. He claims, unconvincingly, to have propagated the disinformation that triggered Stalin’s purges of his officer corps.

His autobiography’s title refers to the Gleiwitz (Polish: Gliwice) incident, a faked Polish attack on a border radio station just prior to (and meant as a pretext for) Hitler’s declaration of war on Poland in 1939. It is the event most notoriously associated with Naujocks, thus the one you would be most likely to see mishandled on a History Channel special (if they ever get tired of dippy reality shows about pawn shops and storage lockers). Later that year, he carried out the abduction of two British intelligence agents on Dutch soil, spiriting them back to Germany. Peis tells tales of Naujocks counterfeiting British currency and operating an espionage brothel in Berlin, which might be true. Naujocks worked for one of the most powerful and feared Nazis alive, SS-Obergruppenführer (SS General) Reinhard Heydrich, and stories differ as to how he managed to incur Heydrich’s personal wrath. Naujocks’ amusing story is that he made the mistake of listening in when Heydrich himself was using the brothel.

In any case, Heydrich was one of the worst possible people any German could piss off, which meant Naujocks was lucky not to be shot in the neck. Heydrich instead saw Naujocks kicked out of the SS-SD and sent to the Eastern Front with the 1st SS Panzer Division (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler), one of the Waffen SS’ elite divisions. Wounded in action, he was sent back to Germany. In the meantime, a couple of daring Czechs had managed–at the cost of their lives and many others–to assassinate Heydrich, thus removing the practical obstacle to Naujocks’ re-employment with the SS-SD. He is implicated in murder/reprisals against the Belgian and Danish resistances in 1943-1944. With the writing on the wall for Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, Naujocks surrendered or deserted to the Americans, gave the aforementioned affidavit, escaped, did whatever he did for twenty years besides sell his story to Peis, and died in 1966.

And I may soon know more. Or have reason to believe more. Because whatever the truth of Peis’ tale, there is little doubt that it would take minimal amendment to make his lead accurate: if the Allies had learned the full truth in 1945, they would have hanged Alfred Naujocks.

Editing/writing life

Why it costs what it costs

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My line of work involves a lot of sticker shock. I’m sometimes the recipient, as in: I look into a situation, discover that it would require me to work for about $1.75 per hour, and realize that there are people desperate enough to accept that and people ready to exploit that desperation. Other times, I’m the shocker rather than the shockee.

I don’t make public my pricing methodology, but it’s based on the amount of time and effort required to do the job right. That, in turn, is affected most by the size of the job and the depth of attention necessary. Length is always the biggest factor: if someone wants a critical read with suggestions, and the ms is 400 pages long, well, that’s a lot of work. It’s a lot more involved than a 120-page short novel, and will require much more mental juggling to keep track of everything. (That critical read would also be included in an editing job, if that were wanted, as part and parcel. But one must do as one was engaged to do.)

Proofreading is least expensive, because my brain really is not on the storyline, but on catching errors. The author failed to deliver adequate character development? Not my purview. Author made a grammatical error? Fix it and move on. Story is insipid? Not what I was hired to address. Big ton of loose spaces? Fix them. I go over the entire thing at least twice, but that’s simply because I am better at this than other people.

Editing is more expensive, and more variable, because it depends upon what shape the writing is in. Good writing costs less because it may have sentences that can stand without my intervention. Bad writing costs more because I have to make it into good writing. Editing also depends upon length, of course, and on intricacy and complexity. No two are alike, and different mss require different treatments. A one-method-fits-all approach would not help to transform the ms into the best book it can be.

This can mean that I send a ms back to the author with strong suggestions and observations, and suggest some reworking before we get into editing. What I am really saying there is: “This has some flaws I consider lethal. If I fix them for you, in the first place, it will be very expensive. In the second, it will be me supplying the creativity, because a rewrite has no boundaries. I think it’s better if the creativity and flow of ideas are yours; it’s your book. Consult me any time as you go, but I hope you’ll rework this.” If the author can’t or won’t do that, and still wants me to edit it, that’s a problem because I’m not comfortable sending out a fatally flawed book. That means…

…rewriting. I undertake this with great reluctance, but if someone insists and accepts the greatly inflated cost, I may decide to take it. Rewriting happens when either the writing or the story have such severe flaws that plain editing won’t suffice. It’s also rare, because in my experience the worse the writing, the more certain is the author of that writing’s perfection and brilliance. Distilled to the result, the combination of sticker shock and the notion of complete change of even the basic style (which can have no other meaning but “this isn’t good at all”) usually end up sparing me rewriting jobs. And that’s fine, because they are arduous. I would so much rather offer feedback and guidance so that I can simply edit a much-improved ms.

Composition or ghostwriting is the next level up. This happens when I don’t have a ms to work with, just notes or guidelines. Creating that ms is my task. I have done a great deal of it as a contributing author, and I like it well enough, but it’s even more work to do well, and costs even more. It can entail travel, interviewing, purchasing of books, library trips, transcription, and every other manner of research available to me.

Thus, if you’re hoping to keep the price within reason, keep the length within reason. Big book = big project.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

New release: _Rock ‘n Roll Heaven_, by Shawn Inmon

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Rock ‘n Roll Heaven has been released. This is a medium-length novel focused on the life and times of a fictitious small-time rocker, and in a broader sense the evolution of rock and roll. I was substantive editor.

Its genesis goes back two decades in Shawn’s life, a story he tells in the Author’s Notes. If memory serves, my involvement began about the time he was considering the sequel to his very successful Feels Like The First Time. The opening conversation was inauspicious. Paraphrased:

S: “I want to write a novel about a musician who ends up interacting with all his idols in the afterlife.”

J: “Are you kidding? That’s the loopiest idea I’ve ever heard. It has zero commercial potential. You’re out of your mind.” (I’ve left out the bad words.)

S: “Maybe, but I want to write it anyway. If I do it, will you edit it?”

J: “Of course. If I can’t talk you out of it, I’ll gladly help you make it the best it can be.”

We talked about it for a while, with me not warming to the idea at all. Shawn planned to write about what he loves second only to his wife and children: rock and roll and its history. To me, the whole notion seemed masturbatory, and I told him so. Then what should I do to make it work? Shawn has a gift for asking the right questions. I said that it had better include a story, and a good one.

Shawn is sort of a Veeckian character, a puckish soul with laughing eyes who knows how to let an experience unfold. He’s a great pleasure to work with, because he can take the highest caliber of frankness for which my literary fieldpiece is chambered.

Think about what I did. This is a paying client. I told him the idea was loopy. Then I told him, in cruder terms, that it was self-indulgent, and had no chance to make any money. That’s not what you say when you want the work. At that point, most authors are looking for an editor who believes in the book concept, which means that an editor who doesn’t is Not On Board.

That’s why some authors fail: they focus mainly on people who tell them what they want to hear. They are brilliant, this is the Next Big Thing, etc. They are looking for reassurance and strokes, independent validation of the gushing they got from their spouses and Aunt Sandy. They aren’t looking for someone to tell them they need to improve. Any editor can–and many do–make a living telling novice authors they are brilliant, because it’s what they crave.

Aspiring editors can milk this. Many aspiring writers consider their prose a perfected work of art. Anyone who Fails To Adore simply has no taste, doesn’t get their genius. The less that you say needs to change about their writing, the more credible you are in their eyes. The easy route to good money is to do less work and more sucking up. I’ll even supply the Magic Bullshit (since I’m not using it anyway): “Honestly, I think this is very well written. I can suggest some minor changes, and check for errors, but I love the story.” Just say that. It will mark you as a Believer, and you’ll be hired. Over and over.

Since you won’t do much actual work, you will have quick turnarounds and an airtight explanation: “There wasn’t that much that needed fixing.” Excited would-be authors will preen in delight, seeing that a Real Editor recognizes their genius. The product will be garbage, because the client sought and received sycophancy rather than critique and valuable ideas, but you got paid and your client loved ‘working with’ you. Right?

True confession: I wasn’t completely candid with Shawn. I left out one thing: I was fascinated to see what in hell he would come up with. The man has a Churchillian zigzag lightning streak through his mind, and only a fool would underestimate him. (I no longer do, and am relieved to be less a fool.) Along came the ms, and while I was blunter than usual about some of its issues, it also threw me some invigorating surprises. His research and portrayals of rock legends rang thorough, creative and difficult to predict. Not only did he wrap it around a creditable story, making that story the focal point rather than the rock-and-roll musings, but he redid the opening and hit it off the scoreboard. My work was to keep the strings from showing; let’s hope that readers feel I succeeded at it.

I did one thing differently this time. I normally work in silence broken only by the periodic comments of Alex, my white-eyed conure (a little parrot, bright green). Since the book centered on rock and roll, I felt it irresponsible to edit without background music. It was odd how sometimes the song that played seemed pertinent to my current focus in the narrative.

The creepiest aspect was the author’s notes at the end. I haven’t been asked to edit those before, thank the gods. In this case, for the first time since I’ve worked with Shawn, I found myself perusing his laudatory comments about my work and what it means to his creative process. You tell me: how the hell do you edit someone else’s nice words about yourself? What if you were getting a medal, and were asked to edit the citation that would be read at the ceremony? I prefer ‘as minimally as possible and let’s get the hell out of here,’ and that’s what I did. Or didn’t, one might say. But in spite of my intense embarrassment from the process, Shawn, thanks. Awful kind of you.

R&RH will surprise the reader on several levels. One of Shawn’s last serious questions was the proper Amazon category. Contemporary fantasy? Metaphysical fiction? The truth is a mixture of the two. It contains strong texture and depth on the subject of music and how it is made, but also tells a profound self-discovery story. If you are sick of cloned books, and want something original, I doubt you’ve ever read anything quite like it.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

How (and how not) to solicit book reviews

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The book industry has changed, in case you weren’t paying attention, and the downfall of the New York model has gone hand in hand with the changes in the game’s admission rules. The bar has dropped from ‘has to make the publisher money’ to ‘author has to be willing to shell out a little money or become a DIY publisher him/herself.’ If you don’t hire any editing, proofreading, typesetting, cover art or printing, there’s no noteworthy cost. It’s guaranteed to be lousy on some level, because just about no one who writes well does all the rest of that well, but congrats: you’re published.

In short, the ticket price has dropped to a sliding scale, but there is no parking or mass transit, and traffic is horrible.

If you self-publish, of course, you’re also the marketing department. (Even under other forms of publishing, you are still the marketing department, though it’s more comforting to pretend that you are not.) That means trying to get some book reviews up on Amazon, which probably has 90% of the market share, or on blogs or other bookselling sites. Most people will read at least a few book reviews before buying a book. A book with no reviews appears to be a book that has generated zero interest, and inspires like in the shopper.

Where this leads: if you’re written any Amazon reviews of any note at all, there are a lot more people seeking reviews than there once were. Naughty secret: for whatever it was worth, under the old Amazon review system where someone named Harriet Klausner ranked as #1 for years by writing about three book reports a day, my highest ranking (out of about 150,000 reviewers) was #73. In 2000, that got me about 1-2 review requests per month.

Today, under the new ranking system (in which my body of work is unremarkable) and having written about ten reviews in the last ten years, I get 1-2 review requests per week. It has nothing to do with me, but everything to do with the exponential increase in self-marketers. Self-publishers, even those who hire professional assistance and produce quality work, are of necessity self-marketers. The self-publisher who is not also a self-marketer is either disinterested in making money, or disinterested in facing reality.

Some of those seeking reviews are doing it right, and some are doing it wrong. Here is how to do it right.

  • The approach must be personal and by name. ‘Dear Reviewer’ is of minimal worth; that tells me it’s spam, and should be deleted.
  • The approach must indicate why I was selected. A generalist approach (“as you have reviewed many books on Amazon…”) is a failure, because that tells me it’s spam.
  • The why must be credible and sensible. At the least, it should refer to a genre of material I have read, and better that it include specific titles. I’m not saying that someone needs to butter me up, just that it needs not to look like spam.
  • The offer must include a print copy of the book. Of course, this is not true for many reviewers, and is not possible for many books. To me, an author serious enough about wanting a review is serious enough to mail me a copy. Therefore, this one’s optional, as I have specific conditions that don’t apply to everyone else.
  • The offer must not involve a pre-publication version, a.k.a. a galley. Galleys may be rarer today, but I remember a number of approaches where someone wanted me to review a .pdf of the galley. I don’t think too many reviewers are interested in pre-publication galleys–they want to review the book after it’s gone gold.
  • The offer must include contact information beyond an e-mail address. This is business. We are real people. If you are an author, you’re a public figure on some level. Providing your contact information highlights your authenticity and encourages me to take you seriously. If you write under a pen name, you should provide your real name, or if not, explain candidly to me why you can’t (your ex-husband is a complete psycho, you are living under an assumed name in Ecuador, etc.).
  • The offer must not put me on a mailing list of people to spam later. I will generally remember who has written to me before, so if you send out a second round hoping for better results, you won’t get those results from me. I realize that this sounds implausible; who would do such a stupid thing? Please believe me when I say that some people are so desperate for publicity, they will do exactly this. When I see it again, I get very grouchy. I had to report one author to her ISP.
  • The offer must be phrased in your best writing. Because if you can’t write well when you step into my spotlight (and presumably are presenting yourself at your very best), that tells me that your book may be badly written. If I suspect that it is, I won’t proceed further.

Why?

Because my time is finite, and I don’t want to accept a commitment to read a book that will be torture to my brain. Especially when good practice demands that I drop whatever else I am reading and fulfill my commitment to read it.

Because I will then be expected to review it (and professional ethics demand that I do so in a timely manner), and I have zero fundamental desire to impale a book in public. The idea of harming an aspiring author’s prospects is completely counter to my line of work, my thought process and level of enthusiasm–it feels like a police officer ordered to slap around a nice elderly lady. Most would refuse.

Three, because I get nothing from this. I don’t have tremendous motivation to write book reviews, as anyone who looks at my body of work at Amazon (seven serious book reviews in the last four years) can tell. When I write a book review, I am donating my time almost for free, and to make it worse, Amazon is going to whore my review out to anyone it wishes (a major reason not to donate them free content).

Even if you do everything right, I may not end up accepting a review copy, and the reasons may have nothing to do with anything you said or did. I could just be too busy to do it right and on time. But if you do everything right, someone else will.

Editing/writing life

When you’re buried in work…

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…you may not make much time for blogging.

You really can’t. If you have time to write blog posts, which all your clients can see, how will you explain to them why their stuff isn’t getting done sooner? That’s why there’s been less new material recently here at The ‘Lancer. For example:

I recently finished a major rewrite job on a crime thriller. It was extremely difficult going, because when you rewrite, think about it: you’re responsible for everything. This character was not introduced sooner? That’s what you’re paid to correct. Wait, what did we say about how that situation went forty pages ago? Have to go back and look. Rewriting is expensive, and in some cases, needs to be (and is about to become) more expensive.

Shortly thereafter, an editing job reached my desk that I don’t even know how to categorize (except as fiction), but it’s about death and rock and roll. Much easier work, but also more commercial potential and higher expectations as a result. At times like this, it’s handy to have another gear that I am not sure others in my line of work can access. Of course, when I deploy it, I’m wiped the whole next day. Two naps. Zero social function.

That one had to be done that quickly, because I could not keep the next project waiting: an intriguing comic political fiction tale about Latin America. For one thing, it’s four hundred pages, reckoning at 300 w/pp. For another, it was scanned via OCR, leaving a goodly number of small scanning flubs. I like the ms and believe that it’ll do well, but it’s going to take me weeks to do correctly.

I may or may not finish that one by the time it’s time to dig into a Native American historical fiction novel that’s a little longer than the previous ms I mentioned. It all depends how quickly the author is able to devote the time to addressing the matters we discussed beforehand. You see, sometimes a ms needs a significant amount of work before it’s to the stage where I can do what is called editing, not rewriting. If there are major issues to address, I would prefer that the creative remedial actions come from the author; it is his or her book. This need usually reveals itself on the evaluation read, which I don’t undertake unless I’m pretty sure I’d like to be the editor. Anyway, depending on life events, that ms could arrive any time, and I’d at least have to start evaluating where it had gotten to while still working on the previously mentioned project.

And out there beyond those are shades of more, early discussions, early contacts.

Anyway, that’s what’s keeping me off the blog lately, and away from the tough ‘hoods and fleshpots of Boise. We actually have a lot of those, no joke. I’ve seen all sorts of places that look to me like strip joints. Not of interest to me personally, but considering how desperately poor so many Idahoans are–the outcome of a chillingly effective philosophy that believes, at its heart, that the best way to keep Boise from becoming Denver is to give the poor absolutely zero incentive to come or stay here–it surprises me not one bit that there are enough young women desperate for money in Boise that it can support half a dozen strip-o-terias.

As for me, even if I were the type, I have too much on my plate. But I promise I’m not forgetting you fine souls who stay in touch with The ‘Lancer. I just have to pick days when I can set aside some time, ideally days when my brain activity exceeds that of muesli.

Editing/writing life, Epinions (reclaimed), Technology

The death of Epinions

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Word has come of the final demise of Epinions.com, one of my early writing sandboxes. I can’t say that I’m sad, but like an old apartment where one lived for a time, one may look back at it and say: there is a piece of my life’s days.

To explain why it matters, I must tell what it was and why it became popular. Epinions was born as what we might call the people’s product review platform. Anyone could create an account and write reviews of books, diaper pails, cars, wines, cell phones, travel destinations, games, what have you. And therein lay its greatest flaw: you could only review what was in the Epinions database, which meant a significant delay between purchase and waiting for the item to be added. By the time the leads put it out there, the product might be discontinued, though people tried hard to keep the database as current as possible. That wasn’t a factor at Amazon, where if you could buy it, you already had an account and could review it. It’s not hard to see why Epinions reviews failed to become a go-to product research resource, in spite of significant talent and effort.

Epinions also meant exposing one’s work to public critique, because anyone could comment on and rate a review. Enough negative reviews, and your review wouldn’t show up as readily. If people didn’t like something about your review, they’d say so–although one learned to be careful taking on the site’s evident intellectual heavyweights. It developed its own culture: product detail fanatics, wiseacres who wrote reviews not meant to be taken too seriously (hi, there; my name is jkkelley), lazy two-line reviewers, moms trying to out-mom all other moms, honest hard workers, prats, and idiots.

Oh, and one got paid. At first, quite a lot, enough that unscrupulous people created click circles to scam the site out of wads of venture capital. As I arrived, pay became a trickle. I probably made $500 for over a hundred reviews spread over the course of ten years, heavily concentrated in the first three. I’d guess that I made less than $1/hour. When I started to get paid real money to write, I became less interested in donating my creativity to a site that avowedly shopped my writing to other sites with no extra compensation for me. While that wasn’t the only reason I stopped writing, I’d be false if I presented it in idealistic terms. When I learned that my work was worth more than Epinions would ever pay me, the incentive was gone–unless I had an ax to grind, as I sometimes did.

I came to know a good number of great people at Epinions. A couple are now acclaimed authors. I met perhaps a dozen or more in person. I stay in touch with quite a few. It had a few freaks, most easily avoided. Some I became close to in real-world terms that I knew would long survive the site. Some I have seen through major life changes, been drunk with, mourned. Some I’m pretty sure would take me in if I were homeless, and a few would more likely give me the coup de grace.

Epinions was a good place to learn how to write, thanks to the open-ended platform and potential for critique. Not all of it was constructive, but even the mean-spirited and bitchy critiques taught me things. I wouldn’t call it a finishing school for writing, but it was a useful boot camp. If people were heckling one’s reviews, well, there might have been a reason for that. One learned to organize one’s work (or not). One learned to be sure of one’s facts (or not). One learned how to handle critique with grace (or not). For many, Epinions was the first place where they turned to face the blast furnace of public reaction to writing.

My own specialty at Epinions was the art of the parody review. It was designed so that it could not deserve bad ratings, because it still contained helpful consumer information. It was experiential without taking the concept seriously. I reviewed Hustler as a women’s magazine. I reviewed a sippy cup for utility in drinking alcohol while operating power tools or behind the wheel. I reviewed Grand Theft Auto III as a homeschooling tool. I reviewed a CD called The Power of Pussy by Bongwater. I reviewed a game called Team Barbie Detective, playing it with my own inclinations and seeing how it went. Amused yet annoyed by a freakout review by a religious fanatic of a children’s animated DVD, which alleged that it was demonic, I bought the same DVD and evaluated it as a practical guide to demon summoning. (Hey, kids need to know this stuff.) Epinions had some review topics that just pleaded for mockery, such as ‘How To Use Action Figures And Sets.’

At times, I got serious. I reviewed Everclear, telling the story of the time it came near to ending my life in its second decade. When I decided to hammer a stake through the heart of the University of Phoenix, I was all malice and business. It wasn’t all comedy.

The defining moment, I suppose, was the breast pump review. They told me it was the funniest, craziest thing I’d ever done at Epinions. I’m not sure I’d agree, but I enjoyed the reception it got, especially from quite a few women who had actually deployed a breast pump in anger at some point. There’s a story behind it. Mark Arnold, of St. Louis, was one of the funnier writers at the site. Those of us who felt there was room for mirth commingled with the consumer helpfulness were something of a fraternity at Epinions, and Mark was in good standing. He was also dying, rather swiftly, of kidney cancer. We could do precious little for him, but we could bring our A-games to make him laugh while he was suffering, and thus convey to him our affection. I am reliably informed that we made a real difference for Mark, and I’m proud of my own small donation to the cause.

And that it may be preserved for those who enjoyed it, and survive the fall of Epinions’ flaming timbers, I present it here in modestly edited form. We remember you, Mark. You were a good guy and a funny writer.
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Venturing among the forlorn, giving a whole new meaning to “self-expression”

Evenflo Breast Pump Kit Press and Pump Battery/Electric, reviewed by jkkelley on 2001-09-05

Pros: can be returned to Wal-Mart, sex toy potential

Cons: didn’t make me lactate, painful, noisy, sold at Wal-Mart

Summary: not recommended for milking your breast, though you might get someone aroused with it

After posting my fiftieth review at Epinions, I hit upon an idea for #100 that I nursed, so to speak, for four months. At Epinions we hear a lot about stay-at-home moms this, the Mommy Brigade that, and so on. It’s mostly silliness, but there’s an element of truth in it.  My own mom was a stay-at-home mom, and she worked hard.

So, in regard for moms everywhere, I want to write for Kids & Family. Who says you have to have kids to write in this area, anyway? Bah. A fresh perspective is needed: one from someone who has no children, has not even been to Chuck E Cheese’s, and therefore has no biases. For, as we all know, it is true that just once in a great while, the occasional Kids & Family junkie gets just a little militant.

Did you realize that men too can lactate? It’s not a simple matter; our normal acquaintance, at least in the case of straight men, involves a radically different approach to the breast. Milking our own is usually not on the agenda. But we can; just ask any doctor. And we should. Who says that only women can nurse babies? I call upon males of all persuasions to break these chains of oppression and show that we, too, can be nurturing and life-giving.

With that, I resolved to milk myself, if I could, and in so doing, review a breast pump. I figured that a new viewpoint would add a lot of consumer value, result in Informed Buying Decisions, and help me gain valuable Kids & Family-related insight so that I could better relate to the plight of nursing women.

Now, granted, unless I attempted to do the dairy routine in the shopping mall food court–and since I wasn’t going to have to clean up any baby barf–I admit that I knew in advance I wasn’t getting the Total Lactatory Experience. That part I couldn’t help. But I tried valiantly anyway, good reader, and if you’d like to hear the story, read on.

It was a typical Tri-Cities August afternoon (about 95° F) one fine Tuesday when I did something which normally for me would be anathema. Something so bizarre I had to really psych myself up to get through it. I would venture to a circle of Hell to walk unto the tormented and the damned, with faith in nonconformity as my fortress.

I went to Wal-Mart.

First priority:  avoid being ‘greeted’.  I chose my entry timing with care.  Evading the underemployed senior in blue, I moved with a purpose toward the pharmaceutical section. I was in the Wal-world, as they say, but not of it. I stepped over dropped pork rinds (that is not a joke). I disdained a cart. I dodged corpulent, aimless cartpushers lacking in depth perception. I met the vacant stares of staff and patrons alike without flinching; just as in a burn ward, it is important to people not to deny their humanity even when in a state of degradation.  Exile from humanity is far worse torture.

How unfortunate for me, then, that I couldn’t find the damned breast pump section with both hands and an annotated map. I wandered around for a good twenty minutes (the place was about the size of a big league ballpark) before at last bungling across the breast pumps. Naturally, some Queen Bee had her cart parked right in front of them. Naturally, it took several minutes for it to occur to Her Majesty that I might want one, and that I might greatly appreciate it if she would kindly back her rig up. This is normal in the Tri-Cities. They mean no harm; it just doesn’t occur to anyone that they could ever possibly be obstructing anyone, so they just stand there doing nothing, letting the mental solenoids work.

My main decision was whether to get the manual or the electric one. Since I knew I would be returning it anyway (no other reason to set foot in Walton Memorial Arena), I splurged on the electric one.  Perhaps I could milk myself while reading, or preparing possum stew, or playing solitaire Pictionary.

The waiting is the hardest part, and never more so than when being in line to check out takes you out of the Brownian motion of shopping and forces you to register what you see.  Two of the three customers ahead of me had some problem or issue (probably a twenty-cent discount that they failed to receive).  It took about fifteen minutes before I finally got to plunk down the card. During that time, the Mother of the Year behind me threatened to cut her son’s finger off if he touched a pack of gum. (I shot the boy a look of solidarity. If I’d had a sow like that for a mom, I would have wanted a few looks of solidarity.)

The checker, a thirtyfiveish woman with a sad expression and a fading shiner that spoke volumes, couldn’t determine whether the credit card slip she printed was for a credit or debit card.  This is normally a fairly elementary question, I believe, but the elementary is complicated at Wal-Mart. After seeing the black eye, I gave her incompetence a pass.  My façade fading, I just signed the slip and bugged out of there.

To my great joy, I also evaded being ‘greeted’ on the way out. Exultation of the kind I felt when I was leaving Hell High School for college. Ha, you gravy-suckers. You got to borrow my money for a week, but you didn’t get my soul. You didn’t even provoke in me any reaction but pity. I get to leave, and you will remain here, slaving away for the world’s worst employer outside of a few shoe factories in Shenzhen. I had a sense of triumph and achievement as I headed for the White Lightning, my truck, which I’d deliberately parked in the lot’s farthest corner. At the 27th and US 395 Wal-Mart in Kennewick, Washington, that effectively meant parking it in Idaho.

After my appointment that afternoon (I wonder how the nice elderly lady having trouble getting her Verizon dial-up going would have reacted if she knew; I felt slutty), I headed for the barn, pump safely stowed atop my briefcase full of computer and business paraphernalia.

I showed my beautiful bride my purchase.

“NO! You aren’t really going to milk yourself, are you?”
“Why, certainly, dear. Why should women get all the glory?”
“You are such a freak.”
“By the way, dear, I need you to help me.”
(groaning) “Oh, god. With what?”
“The before and after pictures, obviously!”

She looked at me in shocked disdain. She is so culturally conservative sometimes.

That evening I tried to assemble it. Deb’s efforts to help made the task more challenging; I had to shoo her off, on the grounds that I couldn’t evaluate the assembly directions fairly if she did it for me.

Instructions: lousy. In English, Spanish and French, interspersed together, but in a way that’s difficult to follow. The drawings are not to scale, so the parts they’re showing as being big are actually small and vice versa. I’m reasonably mechanically inclined, but I found them badly formatted and confusing–the fact that I understand Spanish and French notwithstanding. I can only imagine how much fun this might be during postpartum depression.  Hell, even during partum depression.

In the back, also in three languages, are some questions and answers about breastfeeding. Engorgement (full hooter syndrome, basically), storage, refrigeration, scheduling, milking oneself and massage techniques are all covered. None of them helped me personally, though some of them look promising as foreplay.

Assembly: poorly thought out. For example: to get the bottle in place like the manual says, you have to shove with all your might, bending the plastic. I was sincerely scared that I would break it, which would give me postpartum depression (because then I couldn’t take it back to Wallyworld). I tried every direction and method. If you follow the instructions, you will ultimately damage the pumper. My recommendation is to lightly grease these parts with Vaseline or something so you don’t have to honk on it so hard.

What it looks like: imagine a white one-demitasse coffee maker, if such a thing exists. Then imagine a milk bottle about the size of a champagne split, topped by a clear plastic trumpet bell coming out at an angle. You position the little valve on top of the bottle on the drip part of the coffee maker, at an angle, then cram and force the bottle vertical.

Attachments: it also comes with a little blue bag, so that you can cart it around in public without horny guys forming a pack behind you waiting for you to uncover an inch of breast flesh.  There are also some nursing pads (probably to mop up in case you’re doing the Old Faithful thing), a little ‘silicone nipple adapter’ (a euphemistic term for ‘miniature mammary adapter’), and a rubber hose called the ‘flushing tube’ (for if you get truly infuriated with the thing and find yourself about to flush it down the can). In some ways it was sort of like a little Kirby vacuum cleaner.

Getting going: one problem most women don’t have to face is chest hair. Like Esau, I am ‘an hairy man,’ so I shaved off a circle of chest hair centered on my nipple. The trumpet bell thing, which we should just call the sucker, is about the diameter of a baseball; I shaved an area about like a saucer. Having not shaven anything in four years, I actually had to go digging for a shaving razor. Finally found one in an old travel kit. It was that or steal from the wife.

Firing that sucker up: the instructions said to stimulate my “let-down reflex” by relaxing, thinking about my baby, and massaging my breasts. Since I don’t have a baby, or much in the way of breasts, I substituted thinking about experiences I’ve had in the past that sucked, such as Micron’s warranty service, talking to Dell Computer on the phone, and dining at Casa Chapala. Day by day I recorded my experiences:

Day 1: had some difficulty getting a firm seal (some of these aquatic mammals really need to take up Tae Bo), and when I did, yeouch! I immediately turned down the suction.  It felt like I was nursing a remora. No middle ground; either there wasn’t enough suction and it fell off, or there was enough to hurt like all hell. Five minutes of this left my whole nipple area swollen, and if I’d kept it on full, I’m sure I’d have blown a blood vessel.

Day 2: the problem with this thing is that the suction level doesn’t stay put, meaning it keeps sliding up until it could suck-start a Harley. Nipple very swollen and tender. This isn’t for wimps, let me tell you. Feels like a baby, all right:  a baby badger.

Day 3: hurts even worse, though I’m getting the hang of keeping my thumb in the right place so it can’t do the Electrolux thing to me. Feels like a needle in my nipple. It is absolutely impossible to do anything else during this–can’t chat online, can’t write, can’t even read a magazine.

Day 4: I’m building up my endurance a little here, though the thing is still painful. I’m beginning to despair that I’ll actually get any milk this week. (It was at this point that I actually, for the first time, asked myself what in the world I would do with it if I did in fact begin to do the dairy thing. Sell it on eBay, I think.)

Day 5: left the suction up higher this time and sucked it up, so to speak, when it came to the pain. I paid the price–I think a blood vessel is about to go. Tomorrow I’m going to have to shave again. In the mirror, with my shirt off, I look pretty odd.  I would have a lot of explaining to do at the beach.

Day 6: weird effect; my areola (the skin around the nipple) is getting all wrinkly, like women’s do when their nipples get erect. We may be getting somewhere here, even though with the pump attached it still feels like my nipple is in a pair of vise-grips. This has real potential as a S&M sex toy. It would give a manageable amount of mildly erotic pain.

Day 7: oh, great, I’ve finally developed a tolerance for the ‘high’ setting now that the experiment is over. It hurt acutely at first (and my nipple is always tender) but after about five minutes it didn’t bother me. The hell with it; I’m taking this back. I’m also saying the hell with the before and after pictures, on the grounds that I have to admit that it didn’t do me any visible damage.

Results: very poor. This device failed to express even a drop of colostrum from my nipple. I therefore cannot recommend this pump; I must join the ranks of the many dissatisfied customers. I see now why it has the unflattering nickname: “The Nipple Ripper.”

I don’t know of any women I’d wish it on. Couple guys, maybe.

Book reviews, Epinions (reclaimed), Social comment

Recent re-read: George Orwell’s 1984

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He loved Big Brother.

Those are the final four words of 1984. When I first absorbed them, they hit me rather hard. It’s been thirty years, but it may as well have been yesterday.

I first read it in a very superficial manner in high school. It didn’t really hit me until the actual year 1984. In fact, on the first date referenced specifically by the main character (April 4, 1984), I may well have been reading it. It was a text for my modern European history survey in college, so a superficial reading would not do–especially for a course in my major.

This time, I was engrossed in Winston Smith’s long, lonely, forlorn struggle against a world of contradictory statements designed to systematically break down the faintest trace of humanity and individuality. Winston, a faceless bureaucrat, declares war against a society whose raison d’être is to possess his mind. The system intrudes constantly; it functions the same whether Winston consents, just passively lies there, or fights back. He twists viciously, flings off the grunting weight of indifferent, impersonal oppression, and decides that he has not really lived until he began to fight.

I’ve been there. In fact, that describes my upbringing.

Winston discovers allies, but hope as one might to the contrary, he confronts a system that handles rebels with an inexorable spirit-grinding mechanism. It is not enough that he die. It is not enough that he submit under duress. It is not enough that he confess to various low crimes. Nothing will suffice but utter submission of the essential self.

Been there too. That describes how the world feels to me in adulthood.

The pressure of conformity insinuates from every direction… not just against me, but against all. My fourth rereading of 1984 left me with the belief that its message grows more relevant every day. I wonder how it can be that our school systems do not ban it, as it is a threat to the conformity that society employs schools to inculcate.

  • “You have no privacy. Get over it.”
  • “It’s just a business decision; don’t take it personally.”
  • “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.”
  • “Wear a Tommy Humdinger shirt. Be individual. Be unique.”
  • “Surely you don’t believe those fairy tales about a god and a cross.”
  • “Don’t be rude to telemarketers; they are just doing their jobs.”

“My self-confidence has soared since I got my breast implants.”
“If you want to get hired, you’ll wear a real suit.”
“You don’t understand; this drug replaces a chemical your brain doesn’t produce.”
“A computer on every desktop, running Microsoft software.”
“The nail that sticks up is hammered down.”
“Only ‘liberals’ truly understand the human condition.”

  • “It’s too wordy. If you can’t get the message across in ten words, forget it.”
  • “What do you mean, she’s black (/white/Jewish/Thai)? How could you do this to me?”
  • “Just ignore the bully. Names can never hurt you. Never throw the first punch.”
  • “I still need to lose ten more pounds.”
  • “You don’t want to have children? You’re sick!”
  • “Oh, sure, you’re bisexual. We all were too, before we really confronted our sexuality.”

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
“It’s dirty down there.”
“If you don’t like this country, why don’t you just leave?”
“If you value your Temple Recommend, you’ll do as Elder Sanctimoni and I tell you.”
“You know what the neighbors would say.”
“Nice girls don’t use those words.”

  • “So, John…your mother tells me you haven’t taken communion for two years.”
  • “Ever have those days when you just don’t feel ‘fresh and feminine’?”
  • “Drive the sporty new Acura Spatula LX!”
  • “All my friends listen to Rage Against the Machine, so I will too.”
  • “If you don’t stand up during the national anthem, you’re a Commie.”
  • “Everyone has a car. You have to have a car.”

“How could anyone possibly survive without cable TV?”
“So just throw the junk mail away if you don’t like it.”
“Everyone else is cooperating with us.”
“You, young lady, look like some kind of whore.”
“I watched the Super Bowl just for the commercials.”
“The two-party system may be flawed but it’s still the best ever designed.”

This sort of conformist rhetoric pummels us daily, and it is what comes to my mind when I read the propaganda presented by the authorities of Winston’s IngSoc overlords. I do not believe that a page of the book goes by without a statement that will come as a body blow to anyone who believes in freedom of writing, speech and thought. It does not matter what form those freedoms take for you. Orwell depicts a world in which they are gone.

When Winston loves Big Brother, the light of liberty and determination in him fades to darkness. In the contradictory spirit of 1984, this is portrayed as a moment of dawning light and joy. Ironic. I have read that some women, to their magnified mortification, find that they become aroused and even orgasm during rape, and that this renders it still more traumatic; like having not merely one’s body taken but one’s soul. Maybe that’s what happens to Winston in the end–though in his case, the ecstasy is the closing act, his last thought and feeling. He does not get to grieve.

Contradictions are the mechanism by which the Ingsoc (English Socialism) of Winston’s Airstrip One (formerly England) of Oceania (formerly the English-speaking countries plus Central and South America) breaks down the independence of the psyche. Freedom is Slavery. War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength. When constantly bombarded with contradictory statements, in time they may pound one’s unique grip on perceived objective reality down into a numb receptiveness, the mind a blank canvas on which the propagandist can paint today’s version of history–or edit yesterday’s version when its message becomes inconvenient.

It is as though the mind were a collection of odd-shaped stones and Ingsoc the rock crusher; when it is done, the gravel all looks the same. You can use it in cement, or pave a road, or crush it further to make sand, or do as you otherwise wish.

What makes 1984 an important work of literature is the fact that a single page of it can supply the thinking reader with enough questions to last a week. I offer a sampling from page 66 of my copy, said page chosen by confidently closing my eyes and opening the book:

“Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were appearing in the Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing.” (What does this say about the basic value of creativity? Of art? What do we lose when a Bill Watterson quits writing Calvin & Hobbes because he’s simply not willing to conform?)

“And then a voice from the telescreen was singing: ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree; I sold you and you sold me. There lie they, and here lie we; Under the spreading chestnut tree.’ The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford’s ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears.” (How many times has each of us looked into the face of living human ruin? Have we fled from it? Can we confront it? Am I a living ruin?)

“A little later all three were rearrested. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes over again, with a whole string of new ones.” (Why is there so much pressure to make public confession? Do we believe in any sort of rehabilitation? If so, is our ‘rehabilitation’ simply a means of promoting conformity? For whose benefit is it… that of the rehabilitated individual, or so that we may congratulate ourselves on our humanity?)

1984 is not about the repression of individuality, but its systematic destruction. All that makes us unique individuals: love, family ties, our own perceptions of history, an enterprising spirit, egotism, modesty, courage, trust, greed, lust. At one point Winston observes that, contrary to his historic perception, the proletarian masses are still human, and the Party members largely no longer are.

The designation of the Party’s main enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, as stereotypically Jewish would be easy enough to interpret only at a shallow level. Orwell wrote in 1949, and it is tempting to consider his writing merely a polemic against totalitarianism, as best understood by the world in 1949–either recently-shattered Nazism or triumphant Stalinism, neither of which meant world Jewry any goodwill. That’s only part of what I take away.

Orwell’s message is timeless: any authority that rules by strength of power is shaken by the notion of someone it cannot bribe, intimidate, ingratiate or hoodwink. Short of just stomping with the jackboot, those are authority’s primary tools. Anyone whose values will not be compromised disturbs those who just went along, and those who pressured them to do so.

So it isn’t enough for IngSoc to obliterate Winston, the man. They must steal his newly-discovered soul, and those of all who oppose them. Winston’s thoughtcrime is the disease, to be attacked with antibodies until driven out. What’s left of him can then go ahead and die.

The final line of 1984 affected the path of my life. I would, over the course of life, face many pressures to conform. I learned, with effort, to put on the necessary fronts that may get one by. I did not take that so far as to validate what I despised, and concede that it was really okay. No matter how many people do a stupid thing, or a wrong thing, it will still be stupid or wrong. It reached a point where I learned to begin with distrusting the wisdom or value of an act or attitude in proportion to the number of people doing, touting and flaunting it. This was alienating, but the more things I learned that many people believed were in fact ridiculous, the better that felt. It came to a point where I had to remind myself that now and then, the masses get it right. I still keep reminding myself that mindless nonconformity isn’t much better than mindless conformity, and can easily be worse. Difference for the sake of principle, yes. For its own sake, nah.

When I read the final line of 1984, and grasped its import, something broke inside my own brain. I saw my future in terms of choices, either to go along and say it’s all okay, or to stick to my guns and have a harder life. It meant that a lot of people would make fun of me, ridiculing my choices as irrational–especially when I failed to let law, government and corporations force me to rationalize their actions as acceptable.  There was nothing noble in my decision to hate Big Brother; it was the simple survival choice. It was a choice of humanity. It might shorten my life, but at least  for a time I would be truly alive. My soul might be damaged, but it would be mine. I would look about me and see mostly persons whose souls had been sold–not because they cooperated with oppression, but because they had been unable to combine cooperating with hating, so they redefined oppression as not-oppression, then proceeded to make fun of those of us who hadn’t sold out. Our refusal remained an irritant, a reminder of sordid collaboration, and it must be demeaned by the collaborators at every turn.

The Vichy régime of France during World War II, representative of a France that chose to abandon its liberty and principles rather than fight and defend its beautiful capital to that capital’s destruction, treated its own French countrypeople more cruelly than the Nazi occupiers in many ways. I scorn and despise AT&T, for example–but not half as much as I scorn and despise the mentality that can look at the way they do business, and rationalize blessing that way while cursing the consumer who speaks out against it. The collaborator, who chose the evil side, is more to be despised than the evil side itself, which lacked ability to be good in the first place.

Here’s to Emmanuel Goldstein.

===

This review was originally published in different form on Epinions, a site now deceased. I have reclaimed my work.

Book reviews, Epinions (reclaimed), Social comment, Sports

Book review: The David Kopay Story

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(This review was originally submitted to Epinions. I am reclaiming my work in edited and updated form.)

So Michael Sam, a linebacker from Missouri with legitimate hopes of being taken in the NFL draft, has come out as gay. He did so knowing that this might impact his opportunity to play at the sport’s highest level. Evidently he had already come out to his college teammates, who respected his confidence and continued to treat him as a teammate.

This takes guts. You know how, when a windshield cracks, it can be repaired provided the crack doesn’t reach the edge? This may be the blow that cracks the glass barrier of discrimination to its edge. While those of us who advocate an end to homophobic discrimination are cheering on Michael Sam, I’d like to remind the world of the man who first struck at the barrier. I have more in common with him than some might realize.

David Kopay was a tough college running back who made it to the professional football ranks through sheer determination and obstinacy, staying there for a decade as a backup and special teams hand. A craggily handsome fellow who ‘came out’ in the mid-1970s while writing The David Kopay Story with Perry Deane Young. And a University of Washington Husky.

David and I, therefore, have walked the same collegiate paths. I’m proud of my alma mater; while no university is perfect, UW (we usually say ‘U-Dub,’ often without the definite article) combines a square mile of carefully landscaped lakeside campus with some of the finest educational tools that exist. As far as I know, it is still the very finest nursing school in the land, and maybe the world. For those with the self-discipline to till them, UW can offer impressively fertile grounds for learning in a rich variety of studies.

We also have good sports teams. But when I think of famous fellow Dawgs who inspire me, the first one that comes to mind is not Football Hall of Famer Hugh McIlhenny. Nor is it legendary quarterback Warren Moon. It is not statesman Warren Magnuson, flying ace and Medal of Honor winner ‘Pappy’ Boyington, activist and decorated veteran Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer, former Speaker of the House Tom Foley, newsman Chet Huntley, actors Richard Karn, Dawn Wells, Joel McHale or Patrick Duffy, or civil rights activist Gordon Hirabayashi–though I’d be honored to meet any of them.

No, when I think of fellow alumni whose hands I would like to shake, David Kopay is the first-stringer.

We must remember that this book was first published in 1977. Jimmy Carter was President. The nation was mired in a post-Vietnam funk. The economy was a hot mess. We had begun to make meaningful the civil rights gains of the 1960s. The Cold War was a reality. We were expecting the next war in Europe, possibly soon, and our military was the next thing to a broken force.

The ex-hippies were just starting to be promoted to lower management, but going home and listening to the Beatles and the Stones on vinyl at home, and clinging to their VW microbuses as tokens of a bygone time when ‘all you needed was love.’ We had partied the hearty party of post-WWII prosperity, we were about done throwing up the morning after, and we were mopping up the puke with a throbbing headache and drinking cranberry juice. And telling everyone to turn that damn music down.

The popular perception of male homosexuality in the 1970s was that it was a personal choice, like becoming a Jehovah’s Witness or a disk jockey. Many also saw it as a dangerous perversion, felonious in many states. Family and friends tended to treat it as a major disgrace. Society treated male homosexuality as a rare, contagious, emasculating disease.

In this timeframe, at the finish of a ten-year NFL career, David Kopay let it be public knowledge that he was homosexual. No one else had done this, especially not someone who had spent nearly a generation in men’s locker rooms where he might–omigawd–see other men naked. It sounds stupid now, but remember the times, and you’ll be able to imagine the reaction.

With Young’s able assistance, Kopay tells us the story of his path to ultimately living as an out gay man. The conflicting desires. The intoxicated sexual incidents with friends and fraternity brothers. How hard he tried to be heterosexual, and the ways in which that hurt women who truly cared for him. The cracks and comments from teammates who had no idea how correct they were, and the way Kopay enjoyed hitting them extra hard in practice. The format alternates between Kopay’s narrative and Young’s commenary, and flows well, with no sense of reading a tennis match. (Not that it’s really germane, but the two were never lovers. Of course, if you co-author a book with someone, you might as well be.)

Kopay’s book impacted popular perceptions of athletes similarly to Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. For many years, the public had practiced voluntary ignorance concerning professional athletes’ humanity. Bouton, another of my great heroes (although it should not be glossed over that Ball Four contains some crude homophobic references that I suspect Bouton regrets today), had made athletes look more human. By coming out, Kopay humanized them in yet another. If part of the population is gay, part of the athlete population will be gay. Kopay’s work destroyed that comfy ability to pretend that wasn’t so.

I find Kopay’s description of his upbringing to ring with truth, which is why I’d recommend it for anyone who wishes to better understand the experience of being gay. Of course he found his early desires and thoughts confusing; he was raised in a very religious home, and there was no manual available in any case to explain that some people happened to prefer same-sex partners. His only clue was that he knew, deep down, that he was more interested in males than females, try as he might to live otherwise. The candor of this self-discovery story, and his coming to terms with it, makes Kopay’s book relevant nearly two generations after its first publication.

By modern standards, his family’s reaction to his coming out would be considered very disappointing. For the 1970s, their reaction was commonplace and mainstream. Kopay lets us see the pain that caused him, the ‘we cannot truly accept you as you are’ hurt that continues to bleed long after. His African American teammates who knew or suspected he was gay were also the most understanding. While the book is explicit, it’s not pornographic. it is more about football than sex, and again, Kopay is straightforward. He was not a big star. He hung on in the pros by sheer force of will. He just wanted to play the game.

That explains another part of the kinship I feel with David Kopay. Armed with moderate athletic talent, he lowered his helmet and charged, pounding his way to a respectable ten-year professional football career. Unlike Kopay, I lacked athletic talent, yet I battled my way to two high school varsity baseball letters, a varsity football letter, and the slightly fear-tinged regard earned by someone lacking a commonsensical regard for his own safety. The only thing that got me any respect was the reckless use of the hardshell helmet against joints, soft parts, and so on. (I once hit a kid hard enough to break one of the steel bolts holding my face mask in place.)

After college, I took up amateur hockey and played it for six years, leaving memories of myself with many; I also played ten years of amateur baseball, making solid contributions to competitive teams (and, I daresay, leaving a few physical calling cards along the basepaths). I refused to accept lack of talent as a disqualifier. I wanted to win, and to do well, and I wanted it bad enough to give all of what little ability I did have. I’ve learned that it’s about 80% what you do with what you have and about 20% what you have to work with. The same ratio held true in college academics, as I learned by underachieving my way through my first two years of school, while others of comparable natural talent made me look rather dumb by comparison.

Kopay set forth to be a collegiate and professional athlete, not an activist. His career was not spectacular, but certainly successful (he was particularly tough on special teams). After that career ended, a challenge far greater than the Rose Bowl came his way. Kopay faced and met that challenge. His account doesn’t dwell on the courage that took; nor should it, because it speaks for itself. Sure, he was afraid; I also would have been. He felt the fear, and did it anyway.

I wish I’d had David Kopay on any or all of my teams. Skills, talents, sexual preference; all secondary considerations. Give me someone who’s honest; give me a comrade; give me someone who wants to win with all his or her heart; give me guts under fire; give me someone who never quits; give me someone who’ll angrily tell me I’m full of it; give me someone who will lead me if I falter, follow me if I lead, and avenge me if I fall.

Let me draft a team loaded with that mentality, and we will make a way.

In the first round of that draft, my team selects David Kopay.

Michael Sam’s step is of similar magnitude. I am glad that today, unlike Kopay’s day, he may look behind him and see not merely a few confidential well-wishers, but a great multitude in which straight allies outnumber those who are gay. This is one of those rare crowds where I feel comfortable. Good luck, Michael.

Sports

Bill Veeck: major league baseball’s last entrepreneur

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Were he still with us, February 9, 2014 would be the hundredth birthday of William Louis Veeck, Jr. Today’s sterile, quillion-dollar corporate baseball industry misses him terribly. There will never be a better day to explain why.

Let’s start with one bold assertion: if Bill Veeck owned your hometown baseball team, you’d buy season tickets.

You would. I love the game, but I’m not much at all for actual stadium attendance (don’t like crowds, too many jackasses). I would want season tickets.

Even when Veeck’s teams were lousy, they entertained. And since he understood women’s buying power, and their sometimes differing expectations from the ballpark experience, Veeck’s teams appealed to women perhaps even more than men. In those days, most owners viewed female fans as afterthoughts. Veeck considered women valuable customers of the most loyal sort. An unprejudiced man in an era of African American segregation and aristocratic anti-Semitic restrictions, Veeck’s operations attracted and welcomed anyone willing to buy a ticket. Thus, Veeck set attendance records, and all his teams created buzz.

They also sometimes became winners, and on a low budget. Veeck was an entrepreneurial baseball owner; when he owned a team, it was his primary business. He was no George Steinbrenner, flush with wealth earned in other ways. Rarely could he afford a team’s purchase price, so he followed the principle of ‘other people’s money.’ He would line up investors, put up some of his own money, and operate the team. He was a salesman, a hustler of the best kind, and a very shrewd judge of administrative and sports management talent. If you had wanted a drink-from-the-firehose sports and promotional education, and you’d had any guts at all, you’d have gone to Veeck’s office and offered to take a job doing anything, for whatever he wanted to pay you. The rest would come through osmosis.

There’s a trend today in sports, news and talk shows: sports entertainment, news entertainment, talk entertainment. Pro wrestling, CNN and Jerry Springer are examples of the trend. Problem: no one today manages the second noun without losing the first. Pro wrestling is not sport, CNN is not news, and Jerry Springer isn’t discussion. They’re circuses, nothing more, deserving no more serious consideration than a stage magician who seems to believe his act involves actual magic.

Bill Veeck combined entertainment with sport without diminishing either. That is genius. And while Bill Veeck spent much of his life laughing his head off, few things gratified him more than when the game’s stuffy dignitaries would accuse him of making a travesty of baseball. But why would they say such a thing?

  • He once sent a little person (formerly called a ‘midget’) up to bat.
  • He gave outrageous door prizes, like a dozen live chickens or a pallet of beer.
  • His stunts sometimes bombed, notably Disco Demolition Night.
  • He sometimes used clowns in the coaching boxes.
  • He brought up 42-year-old Satchel Paige, late of the Negro Leagues, and touted him for Rookie of the Year.
  • He was the first to sign an African American (Larry Doby) to play in the American League.
  • He held a funeral for a pennant.
  • He held a Grandstand Managers’ Day in which fans chose the lineup and strategy. His fans won.
  • His groundskeepers’ skullduggery was a legend. If Veeck’s team was full of turtles, the groundskeepers transformed the basepaths into swamps. If they couldn’t run, no one got to run.
  • If he had a crosstown rival, he considered it his duty to try and run them out of town, annoying them in every way he could think of.
  • Hardly a game went by without some sort of stunt. Car racing. Little people landing by helicopter. Door prizes. The exploding scoreboard (a Veeck invention). Fireworks…

…and much more. But he did all of it while doing his level best to build winning teams on a shoestring budget. Bill Veeck wanted to win as well as entertain. The ‘travesty’ was that he and his fans had fun.

My assessment is that the other owners hated him out of stuffy envy. Veeck was always having fun, and they often were not, and his promotional competence pointed up their many promotional scleroses; of course they were bound to hate him. The staid and dull almost always hate the fun and interesting, do they not? Most owners took their lordly positions very seriously. Veeck’s first act, upon buying a team, was to remove his office door. He would then reorganize the concession stands, renovate the women’s restrooms, speak at any event that wanted him, tease his detractors, excoriate his nearest rivals, and go out drinking with his friends. A caring man who meant much to many, Bill Veeck had a great many friends to drink with. Some were the bleacher guys, because Veeck did not watch games from an effete  luxury box. He preferred to sit shirtless in the cheap seats, drinking beer and talking baseball with his steady customers. He loved the stadium, the stunts, the fans and the game.

For most of this time, he had a leg to stand on…and only one. He lost the right in Marine training during World War II, and every so often they had to trim it back a little more. He had to soak the stump in hot water for several hours each day. Veeck being Veeck, he cut a hole in the prosthetic leg and used it as an ashtray. For fun, he would stab it with an icepick and watch the reactions. He was inventive and brave, pioneering a number of innovations we take for granted today.

Bill Veeck made baseball fun, even for people who otherwise paid it minimal attention. He is enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He is something of a patron saint to the Baseball Reliquary, the organization which gave me generous permission to use Tony Salin’s work as the basis of my baseball name pronunciation project.

And if he owned your hometown team, you’d go to the games.

There is plenty of good reading out there about Bill Veeck. Here’s your Veeckography:

Veeck as in Wreck, Bill Veeck with Ed Linn

The Hustler’s Handbook, Bill Veeck with Ed Linn

Thirty Tons a Day, Bill Veeck with Ed Linn

Bill Veeck: A Baseball Legend, Gerald Eskenazi

Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, Paul Dickson

Note: for my money, anything written with Ed Linn is worth reading. One of the most gifted co-authors whose work I’ve had the pleasure to experience. They rarely get due credit for that.

Adventures, Religion

Locked out half naked on I-5

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This story explains one reason why I remain open to metaphysical ideas, which is not to say I buy into them all without question.

Back in summer 1990, I bought my first real vehicle at the age of 27. We don’t count the Corvair with the failing transmission and rotting tires, which was stolen with the connivance of the dealer and the assent of our precious legal system, nor do we count the Skyhawk that also had a failing trannie, which I shoved up the seller’s rear end. It was the White Lightning, my 1990 Toyota pickup. I paid $10,200 for it. A two-wheel-drive vanilla-colored and vanilla-looking vehicle, it is, and some of the better money I have ever spent in my life. I’m still driving it.

It might surprise you, then, that one evening early in my ownership, I tried to kick the back window out–but I’m getting ahead of myself. At the time, I was engaged to K., an accountant about my age. She lived near Lynnwood, north of Seattle, and I lived in what would later become Shoreline. I was working over in Bellevue as a computer salesman in the trenches of the IBM/Microsoft wars. My work required that I wear a dress shirt, slacks, tie and dress shoes.

I was still wearing most of them late that summer evening, because I’d gone straight from arrival back at my apartment up to see K. I don’t remember why, but she was distraught about something–probably about her racist S.O.B. parents, with whom she still lived, or her abominable uncle, or her arrogant brother and cousin, or her idiot sister. If you are beginning to suspect that I didn’t have a joyous relationship with K.’s family, and that perhaps the relationship eventually disintegrated, you are a perceptive reader. Her distress wasn’t due to anything I’d done, at least.

The evening ended up with K. and I parked out in Alderwood Manor somewhere, with her bawling and sniffling, and me trying to be supportive. At one point, she had needed a mucous control method. Being the type, I had taken off my white dress shirt and encouraged her to load it up with snot and tears. That didn’t concern me. While I decided against putting the shirt back on, I figured it didn’t matter if I drove home topless. It was night. The only people who would see were my fellow tenants at the slum called The Villager, and I simply didn’t give a damn what any of my fellow Villager people thought about anything. About 10:00, I dropped K. off and headed for I-5. I’d be home in twenty minutes, maybe less. Couple beers and bed.

One decision I had made after buying the truck was a quiet protest against the apathetic climate toward stranded motorists, combined with the culture of fear. Everyone was afraid to stop and help someone, a mentality I still decry. This was before the prevalence of cell phones, so being stuck was a bigger problem than it is today, and being helped was mighty nice. I had decided to be the sort of person who would stop and help people if he could. Ah, those idealistic days. As I rolled down I-5 southbound near the 220th St. SE exit for Mountlake Terrace (mine was the next after that), I saw a vehicle stopped on the shoulder with a young man leaning against it. This Was My Time.

I didn’t stop and think about my appearance, of course. I flipped on my turn signal, braked back and pulled in behind the guy. It made sense to leave my engine running and the lights on, or so I thought. I got out, bare-chested but otherwise dressed for office work, and asked: “What’s wrong?”

The kid told me that his car had died. “Sucks,” I replied. “Where do you live?”

“Mountlake Terrace.”

“Okay. I’ll give you a ride to your place if you like.”

“Sounds good.” I moved to get into the driver’s side. It was locked. My long habits of locking doors behind me had caused me to screw myself but good. Now I was the shirtless guy who had locked himself out of his new truck along I-5 around 10:15 PM, and wasn’t much use to the kid anymore. I had a bit of a panic, and figured that I needed to break a window and get in, so I climbed into the bed. I sat on the right wheelwell, brought back my foot and booted the back window with all my might. Thump. Tried again. Thump. After a third futile kick, and a perverse gratification with the obvious fruits of Toyota’s PPG auto glass standards, I got out and tried to think what to do next.

I’ll bet it was a good thing I couldn’t see the poor kid’s expression. Then I had an idea, one of a series of naive ideas I had that night, each arguably naiver than the last. There’s naive, and then there’s twentysomething J.K. naive.

“Tell you what. I have to call a tow truck to let me back into this thing before it runs out of gas. There’s a gas station off the exit. I’ll just trot down there, call a tow truck, get him to slim jim me into my truck, and if you want, he can tow yours and take you home. Wait here, okay?”

And if you can believe this, I imagined that he would. So off I went, the jogger out for his nightly conditioning run in his dress clothes, manly chest bared for the world not to see (what with it being dark). I wasn’t in bad shape back then, playing hockey and softball, and it didn’t take me that long to reach the exit and then the convenience store. I used a pay phone–kids, that’s what we used to have to do back in the day–to call a tow truck, then set off at a return trot. This was not how I’d planned to spend that evening’s end, but stupid happens.

Can you believe that the kid had bugged out on me? What was the matter with that ungrateful little bastard? In any case, I had no other business but to await the tow truck. It was getting on around 10:45 now, and a vehicle pulled up behind me, headlights like little suns. I couldn’t tell who it was, but it didn’t take long to find out.

Out stepped a Washington State Patrolman, flashlight over the shoulder and directly in my eyes. I understand why they do that, even if it wasn’t any fun. One suspected that perhaps the officer would like to know what was going on, and might justly be prepared for risk, so I did the natural thing. Keeping my hands open, wide and visible, I gave him a cheerful: “Howdy, trooper!”

“Would you like to tell me what’s going on here?”

In fact, I would rather not have, but it was a reasonable question. And if the tow truck didn’t show up, he’d be able to summon any necessary assistance. Fair’s fair; he’d stopped to help someone, so I appreciated that on a couple of levels. I told him the story to this point, omitting nothing. “Now I’m waiting for the tow truck,” I finished.

“Looks like you’ve got yourself in a jam,” advised Trooper Obvious. Couldn’t blame him, though. He was trying his best not to laugh.

A second set of lights appeared behind his patrol car. “Trooper, I think your backup just showed up.”

He looked. “No, that’s a Snohomish County Deputy. Why don’t you stay here with your vehicle and wait for the tow truck, and I’ll go explain this to him.”

While the stater was furnishing his colleague with the Nightly Civilian Comedy Report, another set of lights pulled in behind the deputy’s car. That was the tow truck, and the officers directed the driver toward me. The driver didn’t start laughing, maybe because he had seen weirder things. He took his slim jim and got to work while I watched in nervous mode. He wasn’t succeeding, it was after 11:00 PM, my engine was still running, there were five vehicles present, and I’m not a big fan of being the center of attention at the best of times. The tow truck guy still wasn’t getting anywhere with the slim jim. He explained that on newer models, Toyota had redesigned the lock mechanism. Oh, joy.

I saw a sixth car pull up, just ahead of the kid’s stalled car. Oh, crap. More cops. Not that I didn’t appreciate that the cops had stopped to begin with, but I wasn’t looking forward to another addition to the merry throng. Then I saw the license plate.

Washington, WCA 105. It’s been nearly twenty-four years, and I still remember it purely for this reason. K.’s tags.

A little cautiously, K. got out of her maroon Mustang. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, other than locking myself out of my truck.”

“What did you do, stop and help someone, then lock yourself out?”

She knew me that well, at least. I nodded.

This is where trust pays off. When I’d bought the truck, my first act was to give K. a spare key. You never know. She pulled out her key ring, walked over and unlocked my door. Situation resolved. Then I started thinking. “What brought you out here? I’d have thought you were in bed. That’s why I didn’t call you, I figured you’d have a hard time getting to sleep as it was. Did you call my place?” I rarely ask anyone for anything, and hate to inconvenience people, especially when it will require me to explain how dumb I can be.

“No. I just knew you were in trouble, so I got in my car and headed back the way I knew you would go home.” I thanked her, hugged and kissed her, and almost hugged and kissed the tow truck driver when he declined to charge me for coming out. While he hadn’t actually achieved anything, those things aren’t free to operate. I guess he figured I’d had suffered enough for one night. Nice guy. After advising the police officers of the solution, everyone saddled up and went our various ways.

And then I began to think. She had sensed I was in trouble, taken the correct route, happened to spot my truck despite the presence of a varied little fleet of vehicles making it less than easy to pick out, and shown up with the solution in her purse. How does such a thing occur? Most of my mental answers were in language unsuitable for the blog, which maintains rather tolerant standards in that area. The kinds of things one says when one is both creeped out and relieved.

While I’m not trying to cite this as proof of the existence of psychic phenomena, it’s enough to make you think. Anyone remember the old Charlie Daniels Band tune The Legend of Wooley Swamp? It’s one of my country favorites, as they are one of my favorite country bands. And as it keeps repeating:

“Some thangs in this world ya just can’t explain.”

And to this day, I will neither get into nor out of my truck without a spare key on my person.

It has since bailed me out a couple more times.

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.