Hollywood's Guilt Trip

I realize he has made a few good, Oscar-worthy, Oscar-winning films, but, really, someone needs to tell Clint Eastwood to give it a rest. I was appalled at Grand Theft Auto and its cheap-feeling message and its lame backdrop of the Hmong immigrants’ struggles with gang infiltration in their Detroit neighborhood. 

Million Dollar Baby was a great film. I don’t mean to say that Eastwood can’t direct a film. I just mean that he should either stick to one side of the camera or the other, or pick and choose better projects.

I’m way behind in my movie viewing, so it was only this week that I was able to get to Blood Work, an Eastwood-starring and directed, 2002 screen adaptation of the 1998 Michael Connelly novel by the same title.

Blood Work, which directly preceded Eastwood's 2004 star/director turn in Million Dollar Baby, tells the tale of Terrell McCaleb, an aging FBI superstar investigator followed by a fan who murders people solely for the enjoyment he gets from having McCaleb investigate his crimes. McCaleb suffers a heart attack while chasing the murderer, and his career ends. Two years later McCaleb is recovering from a heart transplant and is confronted by a young woman who wants McCaleb to investigate the murder of her sister whose heart McCaleb received for his transplant.

Enter gravel-voiced Eastwood and witness as he stiffens up every scene he’s in. I realize his style worked for the Rawhide TV show that launched his career, but some time after 1973 it stopped convincing me.

I’m sorry, but — as with Roger Moore’s 1980s James Bond before him (Moore was 58 when he last played Bond) — the septuagenarian Eastwood does not make a convincing action hero. Kudos to him in this go-round, as he played convincingly someone who would most likely have a heart attack after chasing down a suspect (and further kudos to Eastwood who clearly did some pretty hard charging on camera for this scene in the film), but all his tough-guy lines and tough-guy machismo fall short on the feeble, gravel-voiced delivery. I have even less desire to see 72-year-old (at the time) Eastwood in a love scene with a 30-something woman!

I don’t know if it was for comic relief (from the non-existent suspense?) or for a real sense of the fear of repercussion, but the choice of actor-comedian Paul Rodriguez as a hot-headed, McCaleb-hating, LAPD homicide detective was the wrong one. I don’t know when Rodriguez stopped being funny, but I suspect it was sometime just before he began filming for this role, in which he was neither funny nor menacing.

As suspense films go (I can’t speak for the novel, as I haven’t read it...though its treatment here doesn’t promise better), it couldn’t be more obvious if they placed a neon sign in every scene pointing to the head of the serial killer who lures McCaleb out from retirement. I guessed it about ⅓ of the way through the film.

I watched Eastwood’s first Oscar-winning directorial effort, Unforgiven (1992), twice — once when it first came out and again about 20 years later — and, each time, I failed to see its supposed greatness. As a film with a purported meta-message about the awfulness of violence in film, it was an awfully violent film. I don’t understand how it won an Academy Award other than for the suspicion that the Academy got together and said, “Gee, this guy has made a lot of movies and never won a thing! This one looks pretty and kinda makes sense. Let’s give it to him!”

Million Dollar Baby is — in my humble opinion — Eastwood’s magnum opus. It grabs you, gives you someone to root for, and then rips your heart out with a twist so unexpected you’ll spend a week in a cervical collar...and then it’s followed by yet another, equally unexpected twist.

Perhaps as his preparation for Million Dollar Baby Eastwood studied the completed Blood Work as everything not to do in a film.



Blood Work. A Numb Butt-Cheeks® rating* of 5.0. Miss it if you can. You’ll probably get a better rush from reading the book one page a day.




*The Numb Butt-Cheeks® scale of zero to ten: a Numb Butt-Cheeks rating of zero indicates such a disregard for the film that one could get up to go to the bathroom at any point without worry of missing anything exciting or important (or a desire to return!); a Numb Butt-Cheeks rating of ten indicates there is no way one would get up and leave, save for a distinct tearing of bladder tissue.





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On 90 Wasted Minutes

Have motion pictures improved over our lifetime, or do our tastes in films mature?

A discussion on Facebook with a friend sparked a challenge and rekindled an idea I had years ago for a blog entry that I never posted.

But first, a little background: my friend Sarah was house-sitting for a friend of hers and mentioned one evening about her friend's awful taste in movies, evidenced by the selection of films from Netflix that were present in the home. Sarah mentioned specifically a film released in 1987 titled Real Men, starring James Belushi and the late John Ritter. She told me that the first time she tried to watch, it was so bad she turned it off after a few minutes. She thought later that maybe it deserved a second chance, so she tried again, but fell asleep in the first half-hour. I said that it couldn't be that bad.

Sarah challenged me to watch it, and she encouraged me to blog about it.

But first, a little more background: around 2000 or 2001 — not long after I had moved in with the now-ex Mrs. Farrago — she revealed to me that she had never seen the 1986 film Highlander, starring Christopher Lambert. I was dumbstruck. "You never saw it? Not even on TV?!" She hadn't.

It then became my mission to familiarize her, indoctrinate her, and win her over to a film I felt was one of the most amazing, ground-breaking, awe-inspiring films that had ever been made. I went to Blockbuster, found the director's cut(!) on VHS, rushed it home, made popcorn, propped up the pillows on the bed, and prepared to watch her face as she watched the incredible spectacle I told her she had been missing out on for the past 15 years, and see the wonder fill her eyes as the film's awesomeness washed over her.

I pressed "PLAY" on the remote. The film started.

And it sucked.

What the hell?! Nothing was different; the "director's cut" consisted of a bonus feature in which the director talked about — and showed — a couple of segments that had been cut from the script and never filmed for the release, but which he and a couple of the crew had filmed anyway — at his personal expense — in the event that he ever had the chance to re-cut the film.

No, the film was the same. The dialog seemed clunky and immature. Suddenly, Scotsman Sean Connery's cameo appearance as a Spaniard seemed absolutely absurd. Star Christopher Lambert's performance suddenly seemed slightly less riveting than watching a two-by-four propped against a wall.

Had I changed?! Well, obviously I had; 15 years had passed since I had last seen the film, but had I changed that much?!

So I was faced with questions: Had Highlander always been this bad? Was I just too testosterone-soaked a young man in my 20s when I first experienced this fantasy-action-adventure to be able to see past the broad strokes to notice that the finer details were actually missing?

Or was it that Highlander was a superb action film in its time, but filmmaking advances in the intervening 15 years had spoiled me for older, less technologically sophisticated films?

The answer lies in there somewhere, as Highlander was only the first of several iconic — or so I thought — 1980s films whose dazzle had seemed to pale in the years between my first viewing and introducing them to my wife in the new millennium.

I suppose there's a third possibility: sensing that my wife was unimpressed could have caused me uneasiness and insecurity. "If she thinks this movie blows, what, then, must she think of me?" and so every movie I revered then seemed horrendously flawed. Could that be it?

Real Lame
And so it was with this sense that I slipped Real Men into the DVD player. Having never seen the film, and having only the Netflix description — as well as Sarah's — to go by, I had low expectations.

The premise: James Belushi stars as suave, super cool Nick Pirandello, a top US spy, and John Ritter as Bob Wilson, a timid insurance man who just happens to look exactly like another US spy who was assassinated while practicing for a rendezvous with space aliens to make an exchange for "the good package," which would save Earth from toxic chemicals that had been dumped into the ocean. Since the aliens will deal with no one except the special agent — now deceased — whom Wilson resembles, Pirandello "recruits" the unwilling Wilson to complete the mission as planned. At every turn, Wilson tries to escape, thinking Pirandello is an insane kidnapper, but Pirandello is always two steps ahead of him, and brings him back to heel. Through Pirandello's encouragement — and a few white lies — timid Wilson becomes convinced that the constant exposure to danger has made him into a formidable warrior, and his attitude and demeanor change with the new-found confidence. When all is over, Wilson returns home a new man, and he sets a few things to rights with neighborhood bullies and a would-be Lothario with designs on Wilson's wife.

I probably don't have to continue, but I promised Sarah I would blog about it.

If I didn't know better — and hadn't watched the whole thing — I would have guessed, based on the slapstick, that this film had been made for children. It is definitely intended to be a screwball comedy, but with one scene which includes a glimpse of a woman's bare breasts, and another, actually creepy-funny scene in which an attractive, but definitely much older woman sets her sights — as well as her hands and lips — on Wilson, but turns out to be Pirandello's father who has just returned home from his sex-change operation in Sweden, the film clearly is not intended for kids.

The film fairly flies through some ridiculous shoot-em-up scenes, in which Russian spies who apparently have impossibly good detection and tracking skills, but absolutely no weapons skills couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with their fully automatic weapons blazing, and Pirandello can't miss them with his sidearm while shooting from the hip with his eyes closed.

Wilson's migration from mild-mannered, cowardly insurance guy to dashing, fearless special agent is hardly seamless; all it takes is one tall tale from Pirandello that Wilson single-handedly took out an entire crew of rogue American agents (all of them dressed in clown garb, no less), thus saving Pirandello's life — when it was Pirandello himself who knocked them all out — to turn Wilson from lamb to lion.

Maybe it's just me; maybe I feel spy characters are supposed to appear to take things more seriously. Maybe Jim Belushi just doesn't come across in any construct of my imagination as a top-shelf secret agent, even in a screwball comedy. John Ritter doesn't convince as either the mealy-mouthed insurance man or the fearless convert.

Come to think of it, for a buddy-film duo, Belushi and Ritter never seem to click at all. I never got a sense of chemistry between them. They're a mismatched pair.

The only certain thing about this film is that it is trying to be a comedy. It misses as an action-adventure comedy. It misses as a spy-movie spoof. Just like its hapless Russian gunmen, it just plain misses.

But who am I to say anything about comedy? Not having seen this when it came out in 1987 — back when I was 24 and still in the grip of daily testosterone overdoses — I can't be sure if Real Men suffers in my possibly matured movie-going sensibility, a matured movie-making industry, or if it's just a really bad film.

But in 2013 I'm going to go with "bad film."

Real Men (1987) Numb Butt Cheeks® rating of 2*. Very forgettable.



*The Numb Butt-Cheeks® scale of zero to ten: a Numb Butt-Cheeks rating of zero indicates such a disregard for the film that one could get up to go to the bathroom at any point without worry of missing anything exciting or important; a Numb Butt-Cheeks rating of ten indicates there is no way one would get up and leave, save for a distinct tearing of bladder tissue.



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Instant Mobile Writing Den

Ingredients:


1 iPad



1 Bluetooth Keyboard



1 Automobile Cockpit


Instructions:


Turn automobile steering wheel 180-degrees from "straight."


Tilt steering wheel to desired angle (if so equipped)

Nestle iPad against center of wheel, resting on the inner circumference of wheel.

Place Bluetooth Keyboard on lap or clipboard.



Commence writing.



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Vibes

We often refer to animals and their instinctual drives. How does a dog know to steer her newborn pups to her teats? How does a bear know when it's time to hibernate?

These are rhetorical questions. Please don't send in your answers...

But we less often refer to our own instincts as human beings. Our world has been so dismantled in regard to how things work and why; the basic necessities of our lives have been so institutionalized, so simplified, that we have no clue how we would ever survive if all the niceties disappeared tomorrow.

But — somehow — we probably would.

We have so modernized and simplified our world and our lives that we rarely rely on our instincts. But they still crop up at times, even when our power of reason in the civilized world would rather they didn't.

Most of us deal every day with a wide assortment of people. I drive a taxi, so I probably spend time with more than my fair share. What is it with certain people — or us — that at mere sight or sound of them, we react the way we do? Positive or negative, we sometimes have a strong feeling about someone. Intuition. A "vibe." Something triggers it, but what? There are the more obvious signs. If someone is just bat-shit crazy, we tend to get out of their way...and out of their sight. But others...

The night before this writing I picked up a passenger near the local commuter train station. Within seconds of getting in the car, she was on a rant about the police a couple towns down the tracks who wouldn't give her a ride to a particular spot because she's "not from around here," and was lost. I wanted to tell her that the police aren't in the habit of giving people rides unless it's to the police station, but something told me I was better off grunting in a way that sounded like I sympathized with her, if not in total agreement. Not quite bat-shit, but still on the crazy end of the spectrum. A few more minutes into the ride and I learned that her destination was a homeless shelter at a church, and suddenly I was worried that I might not get paid for the ride. A 50/50 vibe: I was half-right. She was a bit off her rocker, but she had enough money to pay for the ride.

This afternoon another woman called for a taxi from the hotel where I often sit and wait for dispatched fares. I pulled up to the door and out came a hardy looking woman in a camouflage military field jacket and carrying a stuffed backpack. She said, merely, "I saw you comin' from across the way," and I instantly disliked her. Why? A vibe. Something in the delivery, something in the timbre of her voice... something. And then she went off on a rant about the taxi driver who brought her to the hotel who had tried to run up the fare on her. Maybe she had a vibe about taxi drivers in general, and her suspicion spoke to me on some subconscious level?

I'm no expert on the subject ...or on any subject... but I think I wouldn't be far off the mark to surmise that the vibes we get from other people harken back to the days when our species used rocks and sticks to kill for their food, and roamed about the planet in search of a better place to live. When the people of one clan encountered the people of another, their instincts told them whether or not to trust the other. I think today modern humans still feel those instincts — sometimes in true fight or flight moments of danger — but more often in those instantaneous thoughts of "This guy's a loser," or "This woman is bat-shit crazy!" I suppose it's the same for those "love at first sight" moments, too. Just as you may know someone is an example of Darwinian bottom-rung advancement, some of us also know when we see the right person for us...we just sometimes never get the opportunity to express that...Jennifer Aniston, I'm referring to you!

"I'm Somebody, Now!"

Several months back, during the heat of the summer, I responded to a dispatch of a fare in Arlington Heights, the town in which I spend most of my time at work. It was a little old lady whom I had picked up before, and she usually goes only a few blocks, so I knew it was going to be a small fare.

My job is pretty boring; not in the "I want to kill myself I'm so bored" way — I mean, I do get to meet some interesting people — but there's not a great deal of excitement in my typical day.

However, on this particular day, as I was heading to pick up the boring fare, a peculiar sight crossed my view. It happened too quickly for me to take a photo, and my sense of duty to some boring old lady waiting for her boring taxi ride in the heat of the boring day wouldn't allow me to follow it so I could take a photo, as this was certainly something worth blogging or Facebooking about. And after I dropped off the fare I tried to find it again, tried to guess what route it might have taken, but I failed. I never saw the Google Maps StreetView car again.

But then a thought occurred to me. I may not have gotten a photo of the Google Maps StreetView car (it was clearly marked as such!), but he may have gotten a photo of me!

Then I meant to at least mention it on Facebook, but a day got past me, and then another. And another. And soon I had forgotten all about it.

But tonight, as I was chatting online with a friend who lives in Italy, I took to Google Maps to check out her town...and I remembered the incident from last summer! I feverishly checked StreetView in Arlington Heights...

(Edit 12/13/15: As Google Maps updates its Street View annually, the original link I had posted here no longer shows my taxi in the image — if it loads at all. In its place is this screen grab I made at the time it was current. ATG)

THAT'S ME!! I'm Google Famous! Sorta. They blurred out my license plate and cab numbers. However, if you click on the "+" at the upper left corner of the image above, and then click and hold on the image to move it around, you can see two things: you can just barely make out my cab number — 573 — on the green oval on the driver's side rear passenger door; and you can just barely see the shocked and excited look on my face as I saw the Google Maps StreetView car driving past! You can find this image on your own if you Google Maps Arlington Heights, Illinois, zoom to the corner of Sigwalt and Evergreen streets, drag the StreetView guy to the south point of the intersection and rotate the view to see my taxi.

I'll bask in this sudden fame for, oh... about a minute or so. I have other blog posts to get to....



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The Birth of Stuff

SCHAUMBURG, IL - It started with an awkward-seeming proposition 33 years ago in Chicago Heights, Illinois. A tentative friendship had begun in an English class at Bloom High School between sophomores Sam Lapin and Tony Gasbarro, until Lapin leaned across the aisle and asked Gasbarro, "You want to make a movie with me this weekend?"

Uncertain if the engaging, quirky-humored Lapin didn't have an ulterior motive, Gasbarro shrugged off the nagging suspicion Lapin might be a serial killer and accepted the offer, and waited to see what was in store.

That weekend the boys together finished what Lapin had started, a short, stop-action animated film, "Battle on Planet 9," shot, and later edited by Lapin, on the venerable Super8 film format. It was the first of many films involving the two.

"It was all Sam's equipment," recalls Gasbarro today. "The camera, the lights, the markers, the paper, the Legos!" The popular building toy — of which Lapin was then and is still today a devotee — made up many of the miniature sets and even some characters of "Planet 9" and later films the pair were part of.

"The Legos were mine," says Lapin, "but the camera was an old Bell & Howell from the sixties or early seventies handed down from my brothers. It was great because it had a shutter release capability for taking one frame at a time" which made stop-motion animation possible. Adds Lapin, "I had a movieola-type viewer for editing I think I got at a flea market. It worked great until Tony broke it."

Gasbarro changes the subject and adds that even Lapin's family cats were frequently employed as stars, extras and props. "Cookie, Bunny and Little Bit," recalls Lapin. "They were great cats...but temperamental film stars."

For their first collaboration, Gasbarro and Lapin felt their partnership needed a name, and after deliberating for several long seconds, they came up with Cheap Productions, Inc., and an equally hastily designed logo of a grimacing sun with one of its corona flopped over. Or was it a flower with a wilted petal? Gasbarro says he does not remember.

"Tony designed and drew it," says Lapin. "He was the artist." Lapin's comment draws a self-effacing guffaw from Gasbarro, who then shakes his head. "Well," Lapin adds, "he was absolutely useless with the Legos. I certainly wasn't going to let him build the sets or the space ships!"

Lapin and Gasbarro soon got their other friends, the bulk of Bloom High School's theatre department, involved in the filmmaking effort, which continued as a film consisting of random, mostly original, silent, sight-gag sketches, inspired largely by the British "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "Benny Hill" television comedy programs in local syndication at the time.

The film was made up of "just plotless, improvised scenes," says Gasbarro. "It was just stuff, hence the title. 'Stuff.'"

Consisting mainly of gags created with in-camera edits and general teenage boy silliness, the film was a hit with their audience - which was mainly the group of filmmakers themselves. Encouraged by the film's success and the fun they had making it, the group endeavored to make another, and a genre was born: the Stuff Film.

While Lapin and Gasbarro continued to work on more plot-oriented film ideas, which were usually conceived by Lapin before collaboration shaped them into stories, the Stuff films seemed - in their minds - to take on a life of their own, and they saw a need to separate them from the Cheap Productions label. A few more moments of deep thought bore the conception of Stuff Enterprises, a subsidiary of Cheap Productions, Inc.

"Stuff 2" quickly followed the first Stuff film, and then both companies, recently separated and each run by... well, everyone ...then collaborated for their first mixed live-action/animation - not to mention title-melding - film, "Stuff 3: The Stuff From Outter [sic] Space," in which some kind of stuff from - you guessed it - outer space lands on earth and commences to eating everyone and everything in rapid, blob-like fashion, growing with each thing it consumes until it climbs a tall building and fends off several flying machines which appear to merely be flying at it for the sole purpose of drama and of being swatted out of the sky or eaten. The blob is finally defeated by a super laser which reduces the blob to the size of a gum ball, at which point it rolls off the edge of the building and falls into the hands of a young man, played by Lucio Martinez, who mistakes it for - what else - a gum ball and pops it into his mouth. Sequel, anyone?

"Stuff 3" was soon followed by "Stuff 4: Close Encounters of the Lowest Budget Kind," in which a space alien arrives to earth in a vehicle incredibly similar to the one that delivered the stuff from outter [sic] space and then turns all the young men and one lone woman - in what appears to be some sort of communal flop house - into fresh produce.

A laughing Gasbarro recalls, "Alice [Petrongelli, who portrayed the woman] neutralizes the alien with a food processor and then tearfully collects all of us who had been turned into vegetables. Even though her boyfriend [now husband, Rich Wolff] was cast as the stalk of celery, she lovingly kisses me, portrayed by an eggplant, before placing us all into the crisper in the refrigerator! And then she places only half of Kevin [Uliassi], who was turned into two grapefruit, into the drawer!" Gasbarro's laughter trails off, and then he sighs, his face withdrawing back to an expressionless gaze, and he says, "I guess you had to be there."

The fifth - and what turned out to be the final - Stuff film was titled, "Stuff 5: Slash Gorgon in the 23rd Century," an obvious take off of the earlier, major motion picture, "Flash Gordon in the 25th Century." "To give the impression," Gasbarro chuckles, "that ours was first."

But the sun soon set on Cheap Productions, Inc., and Stuff Enterprises as the older members of the company completed their senior year at Bloom and matriculated, and then Lapin, Gasbarro and Martinez followed the next year.

The Cheap Productions/Stuff Enterprises film library still exists in a box stored in Gasbarro's leased storage space in Schaumburg, and he and Lapin have continued to dream of once again making films together.

After Lapin finished his graduate studies, his path led him into education. Gasbarro followed the path into broadcasting and video production, in his own right continuing as a filmmaker, albeit for advertisers and corporate entities.

But a run of hard luck in the economic crash of the first decade of this century and the eventual lay-off from his job as a videographer led Gasbarro into an unlikely secondary career as a taxi driver.

"It certainly wasn't what I ever wanted to do with my life, but I had to pay bills," says Gasbarro. "I always liked to drive. I saw it as a thing to do until I got back on my feet."

Three years later Gasbarro is still behind the wheel of his taxi, which he now owns. Says Gasbarro, "It is incredibly liberating to be your own boss, and this allows me to be very flexible" as he still chases freelance video production work.

Though he doesn't own the taxi dispatch company, he does own the company that operates the taxi. And its name? "I thought a lot about the hopes and dreams I had to put on a shelf as my career led me more and more into TV and video production, and of how Sam and I have often mentioned collaborating again," Gasbarro muses. "So I thought, what better way to keep that dream alive than to pay homage to what we created as goofy, stupid teenagers?"

He named his company Stuff Enterprises, LLC, with Lapin's blessing.

"Even though it was originally the other way around," says Gasbarro, "I thought 'Enterprises' lent itself better to the prospect of launching other companies under its umbrella, so anything else would be subsidiary."

Is Cheap Productions one of those companies under that umbrella? Well, no. At least not yet. But Gasbarro has some ideas.

"Right now I operate the taxi as Stuff Enterprises," Gasbarro says, "but I hope to eventually operate it as another name under Stuff. And I still get the occasional video gig, and hope to get more. So I eventually hope to possibly name the video company Cheap Productions as a Stuff Enterprises enterprise," he chuckles at his own nerdy humor, and then he adds, "with Sam's permission, of course!"

But Gasbarro's nascent business sense surfaces at the idea. "That wouldn't be such a great name for a serious video production company, though, would it?"



°

A Boat Missed

I wish I knew how to write music. So much of it I hear on the radio these days speaks to me, and I wish I could express myself in the medium. To convey a thought with such an economy of words, constrained to rhythm and meter, and in a string of notes and note blends that appeal to the ear is a talent that eludes my grasp. I have played with a musical keyboard and dabbled with a few notes, and found an appealing blend, but only in a very few instances, and never in a complete song structure. Never have I been able to put words to the music I've made.

When I was a kid, my family couldn't afford lessons for even one kid, let alone seven. My oldest brother, Jim, back when he had only two or three siblings (all sisters at that point), had accordion lessons, which he ...yes, accordion lessons. He recalls hating the lessons. Not long after that my parents were no longer able to continue paying for the lessons, and Jim reached the point of independence where he decided he didn't want to continue with them, either. Today he states that he wishes he had continued with the lessons, not for any latent passion for the accordion, but for the understanding of music that he has lost since quitting.

It seems to be a theme with many people I have known: "tedious" instrument and music lessons in childhood, to the point of a demonstrated lack of interest, or an out and out refusal to continue, and a consequent regret later in life of letting go of the lessons.

But I have my parents to thank for their acquisition of accordion lessons for my big brother because long after Jim had ventured off into his life, his accordion remained in our home. Brother #2, Dan, occasionally hauled out the accordion and played a few notes, pecking out the melody of a song here and there. His exploration of music piqued my interest, but I was still too small to heave the thing up onto my chest, and the straps over my shoulders to play with it. Fortunately, though, my parents had also one Christmas bought a cheapo Magnus chord organ, a plastic encased chamber with a feeble plastic fan inside that blew air across plastic reeds, resulting in a plastic tone. The organ allowed for unlimited polyphonics from the black and white keys as well as ten-button bank of preset chords in major and minor, but the more keys you pressed at one time, the less volume you got from the organ, as the pathetic fan couldn't blow enough air across all the open reeds, resulting in a sound not much unlike that from an emphysemic harmonica player.

The organ had come with a complement of music books that, despite bars of treble clef with the appropriate notes present, led this music novice through the songs via numbered notes corresponding to numbered keys, along with chord tabs in the pertinent places. Brother #2 inspired me here also, as he would tinker on it as well as with the accordion, which challenged me to imitate and reproduce the sounds he made. And as I had easy access to it, with none of the heavy lifting that the accordion required, I could at a pretty early age indulge my curiosity freely.

My parents — for reasons of their sanity, I think — made a permanent place for the organ in our basement, where anyone's tinkering with it wouldn't disturb anyone else in the house trying to do homework, watch TV or sleep. Yes, the organ at its loudest was so feeble that its sound carried not much further than the next room.

Eventually my frame grew big and strong enough that I could handle the weight and girth of the accordion. But since I couldn't read music, the accordion required me to use my imagination. I was never quite able to figure out the maze of the left-hand side chord pad, but the melodies I recalled from the Magnus Chord Organ books kept me occupied trying to find those damn chords, and, losing interest there, I experimented with chords and melodies with my right hand.

Thus began my love for keyboards. From that time forward no piano or electronic keyboard left unattended escaped my attention. If I could get away with tinkering on it, I would. That still lasts to this day as when I run across a keyboard in a department store electronics department, or I find myself in the home of someone who owns a piano, I quite seriously itch to play with it.

As an adult I find myself wishing my parents had "subjected" me to music lessons. I wonder how differently the few brief musical expressions I have created in my tinkering would have come out, how much more I may have been able to develop them had I some real depth to my musical knowledge.

The Comeback Tour

I rarely make New Year's resolutions. However, in 2012 I began to feel a slave to Facebook. It's certainly a fun pastime, but when I found myself passing all of my time just trying to catch up with everything my friends had been up to in the prior 24 hours, 16 hours, 12 hours, four hours, 15 minutes — however frequently I could get back to check — when I spent irretrievable hours, often past midnight, composing rebuttals to the posts of friends whose political opinions run counter to mine, I knew I had to change something.

I look back at this blog and see the span of time since I last posted something here, at the increasing intervals between posts up to that point.

Facebook did that.

Granted, in my blogging I had pretty much indulged just about every last random thought I had in my head — well... there are some I would do well to keep wrapped in the moist folds of my brain — but I have also fallen out of the practice of harnessing the energy of contemplation, of snatching a thought from the murky depths of my rambling mind and pinning it down for further rumination, of expressing myself in written form. I claim to be a writer, for crap's sake, and I had relegated myself to conjuring puns — clever puns, if I may say so myself — that nevertheless garnered groans and tepid applause from my stable of loyal — if not entirely supportive — friends.

So, to the best of my ability, I resolve to set Facebook on a higher shelf to make myself less likely to take it down to play with, yet keep it within reach, and to return Farrago to the easy-reach spot it occupied once long ago.

Wish me luck.

Fantasy Fare, or How I Made a Thousand Dollars in One Night Without Having To Sleep With Anybody

The night of Monday, June 18, was the steamy cap to the sizzler the day had been. In an effort to avoid the heat, I had decided in the morning to avoid the middle of the day and work overnight instead. My efforts at sleep proved futile, and the three-hour afternoon nap I had looked forward to had resulted in maybe twenty minutes, if I count the several times my snoring woke me up from the blissful drift.

So, I sat in the parking lot of the Wellington Restaurant on the south end of Arlington Heights, staring at the dispatch computer, which had, after two hours, extended my fare toll to four for the entire day. I was not looking forward to struggling through the night to find comfort enough to sleep, or to stay awake while chauffeuring any passengers I would be lucky enough to get. I was tired. I was ready to just call the day a wash and go home.

Off to my left I noticed an older white guy, at the edge of elderly, scruffy face, thick, dirty glasses, salt-and-pepper hair wildly asserting its independence from the edges of his tweedy, long-billed cap which he wore backwards – I presumed he was of Scandinavian heritage – lugging an oversized gym bag and a briefcase across the six lanes of the desolate Arlington Heights Road. He looked right at me as he walked, so I thought, "Headed to the local commuter train station. Eight dollars. More if he tips."

He approached, asked if I was available, and then asked if I could take him to the Super 8 motel in Elk Grove Village. "That's a little better," I thought to myself, figuring it to be around 12 dollars.

He got in the car and immediately began ragging on Chicago. "I can't believe how difficult it is to get a taxi here! I thought Chicago was a big city!"

"You're not IN Chicago," I chuckled, amused by his statement and apparent lack of regard that he had walked across the street and into a taxi."You're in the suburbs. It's a little different."

Unsatisfied, he continued to say mildly disparaging things about my city, so I was mildly irked from the start of the ten-minute ride to the Elk Grove Super 8. During the drive I got a sense that he was either trying to bait me into an argument, or that he was missing a couple of marbles from his jar. As he chatted – pretty much non-stop, as I would eventually learn – he alluded to having in the past been punished for a "serious crime" – threatening someone's life through the mail – and since then being followed constantly by some elements of "the government," who harass him wherever he goes. My irk slid toward uncomfortable creep....

As we rolled up in front of the Super 8, he said, "Yeah, I'm tired of this city. I think I'm gonna go to Indianapolis."

I nodded dumbly, looking at the meter and hoping the guy was going to actually have the $12.40 to pay his fare.

"So..." he said, "will you drive me there?"

I turned and looked at him. I wish I could have seen the expression on my face. "You want to go NOW!"

"Yeah. Is that all right?"

I silently regretted the sleep I didn't get at nap time, as well as the thousand-plus miles the taxi was overdue for an oil change.

"That's a LOONG drive..." I said. I made the decision that he was indeed a few bricks shy of a load, and there was no way I was going to take him to Indianapolis!

"I'll pay you a thousand dollars if you drive straight through. You can stop first to gas up, get whatever you want to eat or drink for the trip, and then we go. Straight through."

I had judged this book by its cover. He was scruffy, not handsomely dressed, despite that he smelled of clean clothes and recent use of soap. I didn't want to blurt right out that I didn't believe he had a grand on him, so I hesitated to say anything. Then he said, "I'll pay you six-hundred up front, then four-hundred when we get there."

He certainly seemed confident, so I figured I should be as well. "Fine, but do you have a thousand bucks on you?!"

He began to fumble through the pockets of his cargo pants. Within a few seconds he pulled a thick stack of papers – hotel pamphlets, guide books, note scraps – and from within the stack he revealed a neatly folded wad of fresh $100 bills. He peeled off ten bills, held them up for me to see, and said, "Yeah, I got a thousand." He had at least twenty more bills in the wad.

"Okay," I said. "Let's go to Indianapolis!"

While he fumbled around putting everything away, and while I was still concerned about how alert I would be in a couple hours, and if the car would make it (I'm a little neurotic about it sometimes), I said to him, "While I certainly don't want to turn down your money, are you sure you don't want me to just take you downtown to the bus station where you can get a ticket to Indy for maybe fifty bucks?"

He said, "Well, if I took a bus, I'd have to lug all my stuff through the station, and onto the bus... No, I'd rather you just drive me."

It wasn't until he left me to go get his stuff, and I used the opportunity to try to contact my niece who just recently moved to Indianapolis to start her nursing career. I figured if this guy didn't stick a knife in my throat when we got there, I could at least sleep off the drowse at her place. But, alas, she was already in bed and didn't hear her phone ring.
It wasn't until the guy (I never asked his name; I figure he was too paranoid to tell me) came back that I realized taking the bus would have been a daunting task, though we're it I, it would have been worth it to save nine-hundred dollars! He had one large suitcase, two smaller carry-on sized bags, a large duffel, a gym-bag type of thing, and a backpack. The trunk of my taxi was full!

All loaded up, we sat at the door of the Super 8 motel while he flipped through the pages of a La Quinta hotels guide. He was keen on being in downtown Indianapolis because he could be "more anonymous" there. He found a La Quinta in the downtown area, read off the address – which I entered into my GPS, and we were ready to go. He handed me a $100 bill and said, "We can go gas up, and you can get whatever you want to eat and drink for the ride, and then I'll give you the other five hundred. And of course the four hundred at the end." He was nothing if not methodical!

I drove to the Northwest Tollway and to the Oasis that is a quarter mile from where I entered. I topped off the tank, and then went inside to get a cup of coffee, a pint of chocolate milk (for the sugar), and a bottle of water. When I got back in the car I turned toward him and waited expectantly, at which point he said, "Oh! Of course! We made a deal, didn't we?" He dug into his pocket and produced five more $100 bills. When he gave them to me, I rather made a show of putting them into my left front pants pocket, but I actually stuck them in the map slot on the driver's door, just in case. In case of what, I wasn't sure. And we were on our way.

The ride was approximately three and a half hours, and the guy was quiet for maybe a half-hour of it. We covered a wide range of topics, from our families, to growing up, to the economy, to the civil rights movement, to the Black Panthers, but he did most of the talking. I had a lively spurt of monologue in around the civil rights/Black Panthers area, but was generally quiet the rest of the time. Interspersed throughout his blathering, the guy would mention the unnamed who followed him wherever he went, even surmising that we were being followed. Somehow.

Aside from there being what seemed an obscene amount of truck traffic for midnight, the only notable thing outside the car during the ride was that, at some point along I-65 between Chicago and Indianapolis, there lies a massive wind farm. The windmills spread for what seems like miles in all directions, and the interstate slices right through it. Atop each windmill is a red, flashing FAA warning beacon. At night, since there is no illumination other than the warning beacons, the windmills are invisible. And the warning beacons all flash in unison, about once every three or four seconds, glowing on, then off again. For miles. It gives the eerie illusion of an unseen deck hundreds of feet in the air that's there, and then gone. I wasn't even certain it was a wind farm until, on the return trip, I looked up at one of the flashing beacons and saw the spinning blades at the hub in the red glow.

The La Quinta hotel on East Washington Street is literally about two blocks from the exit off of I-65, so I was spared the ordeal of hunting for it. We pulled underneath the overhang above the lobby entrance. With my back still to him, he said, "Here you go..." I turned to face him and he held the final four $100 bills in his hand. I put those in my left front pocket. He stepped out of the car and into the lobby, but not thirty seconds later he was out again. "They're sold out." He doubted the truth of it, but I silently guessed that the desk clerk probably assumed he was a homeless loon like I had.

He pulled out the stack of guidebooks again and began to look for another hotel when a local taxi cab rolled under the canopy. He decided that the local driver would be better suited to helping him find a place, so we unloaded him from my car, and he started loading himself into the Indy cab.

Wile I waited, I met eyes with the other taxi driver. He smiled and, in his east African accent, asked, "How's the business?"

I reflected on the four crisp bills in my pocket, and the six identical bills hidden in the car, and said, "Tonight is good!"

I don't think he recognized that my cab was from a place 200 miles away. "It's GOOD?!" he marveled. "It is slow for me!"

I gestured with my eyes toward my recent fare and said, "Well, maybe things'll pick up."

I got in my car, pointed the GPS toward "home," and went immediately back to I-65. About 20 miles in I finally stopped to go to the bathroom. About a hundred miles later I stopped for gas and a Snickers bar, and when I got to the Indiana suburbs of Chicago, I stopped to get a sack of White Castles. My biggest fear throughout the whole trip was being drowsy, but I was energized all the way to the southern reaches of Chicagoland, and that magic hour before sunrise when the body suddenly tries to crash. But, thanks to a lucky string of favorites on Chicago classic rock radio, I was able to belt my way through the fog.

As I rolled into the parking lot of my apartment complex, I thought about that Indianapolis taxi driver and wondered if he found himself in Louisville or Cincinnati that morning!

It's more than two days later as I write this, and still, whenever I think of the absurd, surreal ride, I shake my head. And I smile.

Jalopy

A thought occurred to me this week and, lo! And behold! It was a blog-worthy thought.

I harken back to the days of my adolescence when I would see an old “classic” car driving down the road, either in sad shape as it had rolled on and on with nary a thought to its upkeep, or one of the lucky ones that had been rescued from the cancer of rust and decay, and restored to or beyond its original luster. People of a certain age know to what I refer. The classics. The ’55 Chevrolet Classic or ’57 Chevy Bel Air, the Ford Fairlane...just about any car from the 1950s that teenagers and gear-heads of the post-Vietnam War era would transform in their garages from old cars to road glitz.

A restored '57 Chevy (1957 Chevrolet Bel Air).

I was 21 years old in 1985. I never drove one of those classic old cars, never got more than a gaping glimpse at the interior of one of them, feeling fortunate that I was able on a few occasions to stick my head through an open window to look at the ancient dashboard styling or the impossibly sprawling, skinny steering wheel; at the strange knobs and levers. To my eye, these cars were primitive compared to the cars belonging to family members that I was allowed to ride in or drive at the time. 


(A brief aside… when I was a small child — perhaps in the early 1970s — I would play in Uncle Frank’s big old Buick, which may have been from the 1950s, but I had no clue then of the significance of the car’s age.

Uncle Frank's Buick looked a lot like this one.)

When I looked these cars over, I was overcome with a kind of awe. What must it have been like to drive these things back in the day? They were so huge! Were they difficult to handle? Tough to steer? The sense of a bygone era, a time before my time, would fill me with the yearning to go back 30 years in time, from the 1980s to the 1950s, just to see what it was like then.

This week I was waiting to turn onto a busy highway when I saw a “boat” from the 1980s drive past me. Maybe it was from the 1970s, as it looked much like the 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass pictured here.

I’ll place the car in the 1980s, as that’s when I would have been most aware of such a car.

As it zoomed past me — in seemingly much better condition than the vehicle pictured — that blog-worthy thought occurred to me: that car is [at least] 30 years old.

It may not seem such a blog-worthy thought, but when set beside the thought of the 30-year-old cars of my youth, a disconnect occurs. As the 1980-ish Olds drove past me, I saw just an old, gas-guzzling tank, whereas 30 years ago I was filled with awe at the sight of a 30-year-old car.

The difference? Well, of course, just about every car from the 1950s is viewed as a classic, even the marketing bombs (Edsel, anyone?). I swear, if even the smallest handful of the most obscure automotive failure were manufactured, there is someone today who is an absolute fanatic about it, and owns three of them. Or thirty. Very few examples from the 1970s and ‘80s are viewed so warmly. "Planned obsolescence” — the manufactured flaws and weaknesses that were designed to kill a car by the time it reached 75,000 miles in an effort to generate repeat sales (remember 5-digit-only odometers?) — was an endearing, if unknown at the time, feature of our beloved cars of the ‘50s, but by the 1970s and ‘80s, it was killing our nation’s auto industry because the manufacturers of our imported Japanese and German cars weren’t interested in seeing their product rattle into heaps of rolling junk inside of 10 years, and neither were American auto consumers any more.

But more viscerally, I think the lack of awe at seeing a 30-year-old rolling throwback cruise by me was due, simply, to familiarity. In that Olds (or whatever it was) I saw an old beast that I had probably ridden in, either with a family member or with high school friends on a Friday night after pizza at Aurelio’s. There was nostalgia. It was “my” era. With a car of the 1950s, for me, there is no nostalgia, just a mystique, a wonder about what it was like to ride in such a car back then. With the ’77 Olds, I know what it was like. I knew what the various knobs were for. I knew how it handled. And I was never impressed.

After it passed by, though — and after I had the fleeting thought that became this post — I was rather impressed that the heap was still rolling after all these years. Like its classic predecessors, there probably aren’t too many left on the road...due not to the fact that few have survived the currents of time, but more probably due to apathy.

Impressed, yes, and hopeful that whoever was driving it was bringing it to his garage somewhere, and was that evening going to begin his labor, and soon that heap would once again be road glitz.



°

Guilt Trip(s)

Friday night there was another train versus pedestrian fatality in Arlington Heights. According to the earliest reports in the suburbs' Daily Herald newspaper, the victim was male. Given very little information by the police, the article is mercifully brief and devoid of speculation and drama.

With probably more than a thousand miles of commuter railroad track spread out in a spider web from the hub of Chicago, the Metra Rail system sees a lot of incidents involving cars, trucks and pedestrians. Friday night's was at least the second pedestrian incident at the Arlington Heights station in about a year.

While I certainly feel sorrow and pity for the victims of these incidents, I feel just as strongly for those who have witnessed them. As a perhaps overly-sensitive human being, I can barely stomach the thought of seeing another human being (or just about any being) die; to see one's life snuffed out amid the carnage wrought under the wheels of a train is the stuff that nightmares and a lifetime of psychiatric therapy are made of, and I'm only imagining it.

I was having a fairly slow day. By 5:00pm I had just barely made my goal for the day, when I was dispatched to pick up a fare in Mt. Prospect, the next town along the Metra Northwest line to the southeast of Arlington Heights. When I arrived I saw literally hundreds of people standing around on the train platforms, in the parking lot, and along the street adjacent to the station, which usually means the line has been stopped, and people are free to find other means of transportation, until the problem is fixed. My fare got in, and I said, "Train problems?"

He said, "No. A pedestrian was hit in Arlington Heights." It took no more than that to turn the entire conversation to all of the past incidents of memory.

He asked me to take him to the Rosemont CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) station, about 10 miles away toward the city. I forgot to make a turn that would have brought him to his destination a bit sooner, due to traffic, and so we wound up staying on Northwest Highway, running parallel to the Metra Northwest line's tracks most of the way. When we drove through Des Plaines, there was easily double the number of stranded people than I had seen at Mt. Prospect. "I know which way I'm heading back," I said to my customer.

Rosemont is about 10 minutes — with rush hour traffic — south of Des Plaines. I dropped off my customer in Rosemont, and the fare came to $20 exactly, and he gave me a four dollar tip. I headed back to Des Plaines. A block past the Des Plaines Metra station, I picked up two men who wanted to go to Arlington Park, the station that sits across a parking lot from the Arlington Park horse racing track, and which is the next station beyond Arlington Heights, where the incident had occurred - $25.60 plus a three dollar tip.

At Arlington Park I was hailed by a gentleman who asked me to take him to the Barrington station, which is two or three stops northwest of Arlington Heights - $22.00 plus a four dollar tip. The trains had begun moving again, after nearly three hours of delay.

From Barrington, I drove empty all the way back to Arlington Heights, where I was flagged down by an attractive young Polish woman who had apparently been blown off by a cab she had called for. Arlington Heights was her stop, and she just needed a ride home to Rolling Meadows - nine dollars, plus a 4 dollar tip.

By the time I ended my Friday, I had exceeded my goal by nearly fifty percent. A man had died, but in the relative chaos his death had caused, I saw opportunity standing in rows along the street.

Something about this makes me feel dirty.

"Shrink Rap"

The first one is up and running!



Rennratt, if you could contact your viral buddies and have them work their magic, it would be awresome!

The Dawn of a Great Friendship

Back when I was a wee lad, a mere sophomore in high school, I thought I was pretty damn funny. Strange how little things change. But anyhoo, I found myself sitting in Sophomore English class, smack in the middle of the classroom. I was too shy to sit up front — especially since I had a huge crush on the teacher, Ms. Lloyd, and I was ever fearful of what might “pop up,” you know, being a teenage boy and all.

But I digress.

And I was too much a goody-two-shoes to sit in the back of the classroom with all the kids who were too cool to sit anywhere but in the back of the classroom.

Sophomore English was a school year divided by study tracks. One track was composition, another was Greek mythology, another was Speech, I think. There may have been others, but I don’t remember. I moved into Ms. Lloyd’s classroom mid-year as I started the composition track. I found this education style uncomfortable because, after a school quarter or so in one class, I had grown comfortable with a certain routine, certain friends, a certain class pecking order, as it were, and then we were all uprooted, shaken up and placed in a new situation to sort through all over again. Welcome in the part of my life that I’m in now, but as a painfully self-conscious teen it was very stressful.

On the first day in Ms. Lloyd’s class, during the roll-call, among the names she called out was Sam Lapin. The kid next to me raised his hand. “Here.”

My best friend, Lu, had told me about this kid, Sam Lapin, told me how funny this kid was, how clever he was. This was my best friend, telling me — pretty damn funny me — since junior high — how funny this Sam Lapin kid was. Until that day I had never met Sam Lapin, though I had seen a kid on the playground and in the halls who I thought was Sam Lapin, and I despised the very sight of the kid, not to mention the very mention of his name. And here he was, sitting right next to me in English class. Only the kid sitting next to me answering to the name Sam Lapin wasn’t Sam Lapin, or at least the kid who I had thought was Sam Lapin up to that point!

Okay, so I had to get used to a new face to associate with the name of the kid I hated for no other reason than my best friend’s accolades.

As time went on in the class, Ms. Lloyd proved to be a very good sport — if not an easy target — for my brand of humor (hence my eventual crush...plus she was nice to look at), which is very word-nerd oriented. My brand of humor relies heavily on plays on words and taking words from someone else’s mouth in their alternate contexts.

But the thing I noticed was that, at every moment I found to blurt out some wise-crack based on Ms. Lloyd’s words, Sam Lapin from right next to me, blurted out a wise-crack, too. Not only that, but he often said the same thing I did. I mean the same thing, word for word, which caused both of us to look at each other and laugh with, I’m certain, the same look of bewildermazement on our faces! And whenever we didn’t blurt out at the same time, he proved to be as pretty damn funny as my best friend, Lu, had told me he was! In turn, Sam Lapin found my solo quips to be worthy of a good laugh.

In short time I no longer bore any animosity toward this Sam Lapin, but we shared the spotlight in cracking up each other and our fellow classmates and — yes — Ms. Lloyd! One day Sam made the first effort to forge a friendship — detailed in another blog post to come — and to this day we remain good friends, despite our infrequent correspondence and even less frequent face time, as we now live in places about 600 miles apart.

But our shining moment as the comedy duo Sam & Tony came late in the school year. I’d like to think Ms. Lloyd had something to do with Sam and me winding up in her classroom for the entire rest of the school year as the English tracks changed, but it may have just been lucky coincidence.

Sam’s trademark wise-crack move was to respond whenever a teacher — after explaining a concept or procedure — would pose the open-ended question to the class, “Are there any questions?”

Every time — and I mean every time — Sam would raise his hand. And the teacher would point to him. “Sam?”

And every time Sam would ask the question, “What’s the capital of North Dakota?” It mattered not what the topic of discussion was; that was Sam’s question.

As I said, Ms. Lloyd was a loving, trusting easy target for guys like Sam and me, and every time she asked the question and Sam raised his hand, she fell for it. Every. Time. But one.

Late in the school year she finished a discussion of a topic or a set of instructions, I remember not which, and she asked the inevitable, “Are there any questions?”

Sam raised his hand.

Ms. Lloyd got this expression on her face, a sort of bemused smile-smirk, as she looked at Sam and said, “Not you, Sam--” She was on to him and she finally hadn’t taken the bait! Instinct took over, and I raised my hand as she finished telling Sam with a chuckle in her voice, “--I’m not falling for it this time!” And then she shifted her gaze to me. “Tony?”

Fighting a laugh at my own clever self and barely managing the words, I said, “What’s the capital of North Dakota?”

The whole class erupted in laughter — or at least I like to remember that they did, but they might have been so tired of our shit by that point that they didn’t bother to hear us — and Ms. Lloyd hung her head in defeat. I’m certain Sam knew what was going to come out of my mouth the moment Ms. Lloyd called on me, and his laugh was the loudest in the class.

For many years after we graduated Sam and I maintained a friendship with — and I my crush on — Ms. Lloyd, sending or bringing her a Snickers bar every year on her birthday, an inside joke the origin of which I no longer remember.

I lost contact with Ms. Lloyd only about 10 years ago, a good 20 years after my graduation from high school. A Facebook search seems to be in order.

And to the person who was that kid I thought was Sam Lapin from 7th grade into the first semester of sophomore year, whoever you are… I’m sorry for all the dirty looks and mean thoughts I sent your way.



°

Poison in a Pretty Package

Prejudice is alive and well in Chicago. I was dispatched to the Mt. Prospect train station to pick up two passengers under the name Prasalli at 9:00pm. Usually, when it's a time order at a train station, the passenger is coming in on a train.

I arrived at the station around 8:55. The night after Christmas was cool, damp and rainy, with a light drizzle falling as I waited. At 9:00 nearly on the dot two young women approached from the station house and got into my cab. Since no train had pulled in yet, I verified that they were my customers.

"Hi. Did you call for a taxi?"

They were both young, probably college age, both very attractive. They both responded at once. The brunette said, "Yes."

The blond replied, "Who are you?"

"You did call for a taxi?"

Blond said, "We called one of our friends. What's your name?"

I told her my name. "I'm waiting for a customer who ordered this taxi. What's the name you gave when you called?"

Blond said, "Erin."

"Well that's not the name I have on my order."

Blond asked, "What's the name you have?"

Brunette said, "Doesn't matter. He can't take us."

"Prasalli," I replied.

The confused conversation continued, and they told me that they had a couple of taxi drivers they use regularly.

"We find the good guys we like, and we call them when we need rides so we don't get any ...weirdos. You know what I mean?"

I was pretty sure I knew what she meant.

They chatted on and told me that one of their best friends had just died, and that one of their taxi driver friends was apparently coming to get them in an unmarked green van, which Blond was uncertain about getting into. I told them that, as it was now after the scheduled time for my customers' pickup, there was a good chance they wouldn't show, and I could take the ladies to Palatine after all. Resigned to the likelihood that I wasn't available to take them to Palatine, two towns up to the northwest along the rail line, they got out.

The railroad crossing gates came down, signaling the approach of a train from Chicago. The two young women approached me again.
,
They both were under the delusion that my incoming customers were a woman, named Priscilla. Blond seemed to be in charge, or at least the stronger personality. "Where is this Priscilla going?"

"Wheeling," I replied, about a ten-minute drive north from the train station.

"Do you think maybe we could ride in your cab with them to wherever they're going, and then you could take us to Palatine?" she asked.

"That's up to my customers," I replied. "If they're cool with sharing, then I have no problem with it, but you'll have to ask them."

Moments later, train in the station, there was a knock on my driver's window. A dark-skinned man with straight hair combed and parted on one side, and sporting a mustache asked me, "Wheeling?"

"Did you call for a taxi?"

"Yes," he replied, his crisp Indian accent evident even in one brief word.

"What name did you leave on the order?"

"Prasani."

It was close enough to "Prasalli" to call it a match, so I told him and the woman who accompanied him that they could get in my car. I mentioned to them that the two young women standing now about 20 yards away from the taxi were interested in sharing a ride, though I'm not sure Mr. Prasani understood what I was saying.

I rolled down the window and called to the women. "Do you still want to share the ride?"

"No, we're good."

I find it amusing that they were willing to do just about anything to get a ride right up until they saw that their car mates were Indian, no doubt the kind of "weirdos" they were so concerned about having as their taxi driver in the random taxi lottery into which calling for a taxi enters you.

So I drove Mr. Prasani and his companion to their destination in Wheeling, all the while contemplating a return to the Mt. Prospect train station on the slim chance that those two young women would still be there. I mean, they were attractive, I am a horny middle aged man and I did want to be a hero. But the more I thought about it, the more disgusted with them I became that they had a change of heart when they saw who they thought was "Priscilla" actually was. So I said screw 'em! I am bound by the laws of this state to serve all customers, regardless of race, ethnicity or gender. If those women had gotten into my otherwise available car spewing racial hatred, I would have had to take them wherever they wanted to go. However, the circumstances as they were, I was not bound in any way to head back to get them, to save them from the rain.

No, as a matter of fact that thought quite pleased me!

Magic Memory

I wish I was a pure atheist, one who never knew what it's like to have felt a duty to a god or a church and their corresponding patterns of behavior. Because those things have left a mark on me, on my cerebral cortex, my instinctive brain. I often call religious indoctrination "brainwashing," and this is why; the trained instinct of belief. It's brainwashing because - despite the rational, reasoned thought that tells me there's no magical, invisible entity holding the universe in the palm of his hand, who knows my every thought and that of every other thinking being in the universe - in unguarded moments I still catch myself thinking of my mother "in heaven," or my father "looking down on me" and approving or disapproving. It's brainwashing because - despite years - decades, now - of consciously brushing off those ideas into the dust-pile of fairly tale - I still can't unthink the thoughts that swim up from the depths of my childhood indoctrination.

Yes, to be free of that ready, instinctive compulsion to regard an active, populous spirit world would be refreshing. To have never felt beholden to a god, a prophet and that guy behind the screen every Sunday would be liberating. But those childhood memories are also responsible for the warm feelings I still get at Christmas time, for the anticipation for Christmas day, when it seems as though the world goes quiet; for the warmth I feel when I hear the songs - reverent or secular (one has to admit, whether a believer or not, that the concept of the nativity of Jesus Christ has inspired some great songs!); for the comfort of the closeness of family and the anticipation of the great food and lively conversation in their proximity.

I guess it's pointless to wish for the things I'll never have, or to be what I can't be, for they're things done that can't be undone. Not without a frontal lobotomy, anyway. And, now that I think of it, I guess I've had the best of both worlds; to a kid - the kid I was - the magic, the fantasy, is real. With age, reason ruled out, and I'd hate to imagine myself a slave to that kind of doctrine, but, with a head still full of those magic moments, looking back has a magic all its own.



*

Joint Ownership

I get pretty tired of the people who cry foul about how "we" are taking Christ out of Christmas. Nobody is taking Christ out of Christmas. He's right there where he has always been all along. It's the first two thirds of the damn word!

Nobody is taking Christ out of Christmas. If you haven't noticed by now, here in this melting pot society we call the United States of America, there are more religions than just the Christian ones, and more than just the Christian religions that happen to have high holy days that fall during this time of year. And you know something? Those celebrations are not called "Christmas!" The Jews have Hanukkah, for instance. The pagans — should you happen to consider paganism a religion (I don't) — hold special relevance for the winter solstice, which happens a couple days before Christmas. Every. Frikkin. Year. I'm no expert, but I'm sure there are other groups who observe something special at this time of year, too.

So when collective society at this time of year gushes with "Happy Holidays!" they ... we ... are not taking Christ out of Christmas. We're taking Christ out of Hanukkah, out of the solstice, out of the grand sauce festival of the fellowship of the flying spaghetti monster... wherever Christ is not observed or cherished or wanted. This time of year is not owned by Christians, so don't get so bent out of shape when I don't want Christ to be a part of my celebration, yet I want to honor or respect you — and everyone else who is celebrating something at this time of year — by gushing, "Happy Holidays!"

Just as you wouldn't want me to come to a Christmas party at your church and scream "Praise be to Richard Dawkins!" no Jew is going to be too crazy with you crashing his family's Hanukkah observance and shouting "Jesus is the reason for the season!"

Understand that when your local TV station runs a station ID that reads and blurts, "Happy Holidays!" you and your savior are included respectfully along with everyone else whose religion or belief system finds these days to be something special.

Celebrate Christ in your home and your church, let everyone else celebrate in their own way in their own place, and just shut up already about the generic public acknowledgment of "everyone's" reverence for this time of year!

In Bidness!

Well, Stuff Enterprises, LLC, is off and running, and earning a buck. It's not any time soon on the Forbes 100 list, but I'm paying the rent...so far. I don't know that there is a businessperson anywhere who can truly say he's done it all himself, because when it comes to all the crap involved in setting up a business legally, a businessperson would just give up and hold a cup on a street corner for a daily meal.

My savior has been Chris, the accountant-cum-HR-cum-taxes whiz at my former employer. She has helped me cross the I's and dot the T's and had me sign the forms that the state and Fed need in order to properly get their claws on my earnings.

It was on her advice that I shifted my personal status from independent contractor to employee. Of Stuff Enterprises, LLC. The company I own. So, yes, I am the owner and president of the company. And I am the sole employee of the company! The reason behind this setup is to protect myself from any potential lawsuits that may arise as a result of my operation of the taxi. Should that happen, the company is the legal target, and any damages or seizure of assets is exacted upon the company, and not me, personally. As an independent contractor leasing the taxi from my company, I would still be individually liable in the event of any legal action. So I exercised my Employer Identification Number and became a job creator! Though, admittedly, the hiring process involved an unfair amount of favoritism....

As a tax deadline loomed in October, Chris called me in to finalize and sign some paperwork. And she said to bring my checkbook...which sounded ominous.

I arrived, and she explained a few things, and gave me some forms to sign, among them an IRS form authorizing the service to withdraw a fixed amount monthly as payroll tax, based on a salary that I'm paying myself.

I'M PAYING MYSELF A SALARY!

I asked her if this IRS fixed amount was the amount for which I needed to write the check, and she said that it was not, and that it was going to be withdrawn electronically from my business checking account.

She also advised me to consider changing my company from a Limited Liability Company to an S Corporation — which I did not know I was eligible to do — in an effort to save a little on taxes annually. We're going to wait on that decision until the new year.

Then she presented me with another form, and pointed to the amount on that sheet as the amount I needed to write on the check — an amount which, for this month, anyway, was anything but ominous.

"This form is the Unemployment Insurance form. As an employer, you have to provide this for your employees. As an employer, should you close the doors on Stuff Enterprises and go out of business, as an employee you can collect unemployment."

The spoon in her coffee cup rattled when my chin hit the desk. In the freaky world of entrepreneurial endeavor, I am no longer unemployed. And while I am self-employed, I am no longer self-employed.

My next question for Chris is to wonder if Stuff Enterprises, LLC, can have a summer work slowdown and subsequent layoff for, say, a month or two....

I also want to remove the name "Stuff Enterprises" from the taxi business, as I also operate — in principle, anyway — a video production company. I want Stuff Enterprises to be the parent company of the others, so I need a new name for the taxi operation. My favorite, because it actually sounds like my family name — Gasbarro — is "Casbah Row Transport Company," though I fear it may mislead one to think I'm Algerian.

Of course, I could call it "Casbah Row Airport Passengery," and go by "CRAP" for short.

OR, I could take suggestions. From you. Serious ideas accepted, too!

November's Urge ~ November Surge?

This author has been very extremely remiss with this blog, and with reading others' blogs. However, judging by the number of blogs in my "Better Blogs Than Mine" that have gone dark, I am not alone in this.

I can blame any number of factors in my life right now for the word blight, but they all come back to me, eventually. The taxi job, of course, takes up a lot of my time. Where I had originally thought that I could use all of the down time in the car for writing, I soon realized that working nights — and the down time that came with it — translated to slow financial death: I wasn't making any money. So I switched to days and began to enjoy the busyness that shift brings... and my writing suffered.

I also leapt back into theatre — with a vengeance, to my exhaustion — and every last moment of potentially free time was taken up.

This past summer I purchased my own taxi with the hopes that lightening my burden of the steep weekly lease payment would also free up some of my time. Of course, I have been in hiatus from theatre work since the spring due to the impending move in the fall, so that free time was fleeting at best. But ownership of my taxi, in conjunction with my move into a lower monthly rent, has made it possible for me to function entirely without leaning on my retirement IRA for supplemental cash, as I had been doing since shortly after I lost my job in 2009...IF I work the hours of an indentured servant.

I always lament at how far behind the curve I am with movies, so I have renewed my slog through my Netflix queue, another activity that sucks my time away from writing.

And I will do no more than mention "Words With Friends."

My photo blog even died a lonely death. I would link to it, but what's the point? It hasn't seen a contribution since July, and nothing short of a monumental effort (for which I have no time, surprise, surprise!) can resuscitate it.

So I can do nothing more than promise to try (how's that for evasive?) to write more in future. Perhaps there will be a real, serious New Year's resolution involved. The shame of it is that I call myself a writer, yet every opportunity I have to write I have filled with other activities. And sorry, Tony, the discovery during "Words With Friends" that "BICE" is actually a word does not count as writing.

Expensive Lesson

I smelled coolant. Then I saw just a very light puff of steam vapor coming from under the hood. My taxi was vacant, and I was right next to a Ford dealer, so I figured I would have them at least diagnose the problem and decide from there what to do.

It was Monday, after 5:00pm, and all of their mechanics had gone home for the day. I couldn't find a spot from where the vapor was escaping, and it wasn't coming out with pressure, so I chanced it on the road to the nearest Pep Boys, and was told the same thing: mechanics went home. It was too late in the day for me to go to Golf Mill Auto Center, where I have been taking the taxi for maintenance, and I was afraid I wouldn't make it the 15 miles or so to get there anyway. I was out of options, so I headed home. The steam stopped, but I still occasionally smelled coolant.

The next morning I started the taxi, drove it for a while, and checked things out. No vapor and only occasional whiffs of coolant. I made a note to myself to take it in to Golf Mill to have it looked at. Business was exceptional this week, so I continued to put it off. Then, Thursday afternoon, after taking the daytime off and planning to shift to nights for the weekend, I walked out to the car, ready to work, and saw that a large puddle of liquid had formed beneath the car and had oozed down the slight slope of the parking lot at my apartment complex. I dipped my finger in the liquid, believing it was motor oil. It didn't smell like motor oil...or anything I could identify. In a bit of a panic, I drove the car to the nearest garage, a local chain called Casey Automotive. I had taken a car to one of their other locations before; wasn't impressed with their work, and was even less impressed with their rates. But I'm even less comfortable with Pep Boys, so to Casey it was.

They told me it was a head gasket, and that it would be a minimum of $1800! I probably wouldn't get it back until Monday. It was not one of my better moments, and I did a mild internal freak-out. And I said, "Do it." I never even asked for a written estimate, nor did they offer me one! But they did give me a ride home.

Friday I went to the taxi office to take care of some other business, and I mentioned in passing to one of the guys from whom I had bought the taxi about its current status. When he asked me what they were charging, his eyeballs fell out of his head. He told me that Golf Mill would do it for way less. He even called them, and they said they could do it for around $500. Then he relayed their question: "Which side?"

I didn't have an answer, for the guy at Casey never told me. The guy at the taxi office said that for a hundred-dollar tow I could have saved a bunch of money! Part of me wishes he had never told me that, or that I had never mentioned it. Suddenly I had a headache!

After several minutes alone in my personal vehicle I became very angry, not only at the guys at Casey, but at myself for not thinking things through and at least calling Golf Mill myself to see what they would charge.

Second opinion, you fucking moron!

But my anger grew. Casey had been working on my car for about five and a half hours at this point. I felt... I knew I was being taken advantage of, knew I was being ripped off. I went back to Casey and talked to the manager(?). He took me to the car. Half the engine was sitting on the floor! I asked him on which side the head gasket leak was. He said, "It doesn't matter, we do both sides. He has both heads off, now, and it's only a half-hour more labor...."

But if they only needed to do one side, it would only be half the labor they had done, since they would only have had to remove the one head. I called Golf Mill Auto myself and told them the situation. They told me that, at this point, it would cost me less for them (Golf Mill) to put in a used engine than for Casey to do the whole job! I asked him if I should have Casey stop the work and tow it to Golf Mill. He said, "YES!"

I told the manager at Casey to stop the work and put all the parts in the trunk of the car, paid them for the labor to that point (about $600) and I called the number that Golf Mill gave me for the tow truck.

The mechanics at Golf Mill were all visibly stunned at what Casey had done to the engine. They all agreed that, even if they had to replace both head gaskets, they never would have needed to remove the front components of the engine, such as the timing chain and gears! They all looked at me with pity and, it seemed, mild disgust. What an idiot they must think I am.

So, for the labor alone, it would still cost me more, at this point, for Golf Mill to replace the gaskets and put everything back together than to just replace the engine with a used one. All told, I'll still wind up paying about $1800 for this repair. I keep trying to console myself with having denied Casey automotive the whole chunk of change they were going to charge me and instead giving it to Golf Mill, who I know aren't trying to rip me off.

So, lesson learned: don't panic. Ask questions. Trust the guys you trust, and do everything in your power to let them work on your car. Idiot.

Second lesson: Casey Automotive is a scheister operation. Tell everyone you can reach not to take their cars to them. They may repair your car, but you're paying not only too much for the work, but possibly for work you don't even need done!

Now I just want to cry!

Baby Step or Giant Leap? (OR... Yup, This Is What I'm Doing)

Above is a photo taken today of me with my taxi. Take careful note of the prior sentence. Focus specifically on the phrase "me with my taxi." My taxi. My taxi.

In an effort to reduce day-to-day expenses and increase my daily headaches, I decided to eliminate the middleman (one of them, anyway, as I'm learning) and stop paying him a lease, and have bought my own taxi.

Yes, I wrote that correctly. Bought.

Shortly after I was laid off from my salaried job I formed a limited liability company, Stuff Enterprises, as a way to protect myself from possible litigation that might arise from operating as a freelance video production god (litigation that might arise simply from use of the term "video production god," frinstance), but since no real work came from that, Stuff Enterprises, LLC, was more of a limp, lackluster company than anything else. As the idea to own a taxi came along primarily as a way to take more of the money I get from the passengers and keep it in my pocket, ownership revealed itself to me also as an avenue to greater flexibility to do the things I want to do when the opportunity arises to do them, as well as the freedom to relax just a little and not have to work so freakin hard to put a decent meal in front of me.

And so, Stuff Enterprises, LLC, is now in the transportation business. Does this make me a tycoon?





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