American Life

In the spring of 1981, I committed what the entertainment press of that day regarded as an act of self-abuse: I bought a ticket and sat through Michael Cimino’s epic flop Heaven’s Gate, and then I went back for another viewing before the universally reviled film ended its one-week run at the local cinema. In the four decades since, I have abused myself in similar fashion four or five more times. Heaven’s Gate is a 200-minute-plus mess of beautiful incoherences and stupefying contradictions, its pattern set by a gorgeously preposterous prologue in which forty-something actors Kris Kristofferson and John Hurt waltz across the greensward as newly minted Harvard graduates, class of 1870.

Some of the more interesting political figures of our day — Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson — crossed the street to find new friends, but few in our history have ever switched teams with the dramatic flair of Karl Hess, the centenary of whose birth we will toast this May 25. Born in Washington, DC to a beautiful switchboard operator and a rakish Filipino millionaire, Karl Hess quit school at fifteen and embarked on a career that turned into an anti-career. He was a police reporter, a Newsweek editor, a corporate flack, a Republican ghostwriter, and, ultimately, Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter and traveling companion during the Arizona senator’s 1964 presidential candidacy.

In Ketchum, Idaho, heart of the skiing mecca of Sun Valley, my wife and I found ourselves on Picabo Street — the avenue leading to the Warm Springs ski lodge, that is, not the 1998 Olympic gold medalist in the women’s supergiant slalom. We walked past a “private residence club” denominated The Hemingways, which called to mind the author’s complaint that Sun Valley boosters were using him for public relations purposes. “I love Idaho,” Hemingway wrote Peter Viertel in 1948, but “when they are having pictures painted of you and hung in real estate promotion offices it is past time to blow.

Arlington, Virginia Wandering through suburban Washington, DC's National Airport — I always liked the libertarianish ex-congressman from South Carolina Mark Sanford for voting against renaming it Ronald Reagan Airport on the grounds that the nomenclatorial decision belonged to locals, not Congress — I was refused service when trying to buy a bagel. It wasn’t because of my race, gender or vaccination status; rather, the eatery in question, which had no cash registers, accepted orders only from smartphones. As I have never owned a cell phone of any kind, let alone a smartphone, I was outta luck. I couldn’t plead food insecurity, to borrow the silly euphemism of our day, for soon enough I would be dining on the nine almonds that constitute an airline repast.

If ever I write a sex farce — the demand so far has been muted — I need only head east 150 miles and detour back 150 years to the Oneida community, the utopian experiment in free love that thrived from 1848-80 before the colony’s unorthodox sexual arrangements led to its collapse — and, in a characteristically American turn of events, its road to riches. Headquartered in a sprawling mansion house — open today to visitors of all carnal habits — Oneida was a cerebral nineteenth-century soap opera awash in high-minded American radicalism and directed by the brilliant and charismatic megalomaniac John Humphrey Noyes. As a Yale Divinity School student, Noyes had declared himself free from sin: a perfected Christian.

Weeks have passed since I voted in the November election, and I'm still ticked off. You would be too if it happened to you. Once upon a time — that is, before 2022 — New York was one of the friendlier states toward third parties. Whether Green, Constitution, Socialist Workers, Libertarian or Communist, all were welcome on the ballot so long as they passed an easily surmountable petition threshold. This pro-participation access was called “democracy.

Detroit, Michigan A cowboy's work is never done, as Sonny Bono once croaked. (I interviewed Sonny shortly after he was elected to Congress in the Republican wave of 1994. He confirmed to me that Cher thought that the faces on Mount Rushmore were a natural formation.) Segueing from one Armenian American to another: when I lured my wife from the Chandleresque precincts of Southern California to the Edenic plains of New York’s Burned-Over District (“married an LA doll and brought her to this small town,” as John Mellencamp growled), she asked to visit two cities: Utica and Cleveland. Having made her dreams come true, as is my wont, I thought my work was done. But no.

For years I have read the likes of Raymond Chandler and John Fante and rewatched Chinatown in preparation for our occasional sojourns to Los Angeles (my wife is a native Angelena), but after the stupefaction induced by our last trip, I chose Charles Bukowski, the flophouse poet of hangovers, for our first post-Covid invasion. “Los Angeles is a Cross, and we all hang here, stupid little Christs,” wrote Bukowski in a 1967 letter. That line seems off to me, self-consciously poète maudit, but I always cut poets of place a break.

I have my flaws, but I do know how to treat a lady. Five years ago, for our thirtieth anniversary, I took my wife to a nineteenth-century mental hospital. (We didn’t check in.) This year, to celebrate her birthday, I showed her a traffic light — and as a lagniappe, we gandered at a clock, too. It’s not quite as quotidian as it sounds. Well, maybe it is, but now that I’ve got you on the line, let me tell you why we drove two hours to Syracuse, the Salt City, to inspect a pair of everyday sights. First, the light. In 1925 or thereabouts, the city of Syracuse installed a traffic signal with green on top and red on bottom in the Irish neighborhood of Tipperary Hill. This was done at the behest of an alderman surnamed Ryan. A proud Paddy politico, apparently.

If ever I pee on the grave of an American it will be that of Robert Moses, the highwayman whose roadbuilding and neighborhood-obliterating projects in New York City and New York State threw half a million people out of their homes, as Robert Caro estimated in his biographical masterpiece The Power Broker. To those who had the temerity to object to their ejection, the monster Moses hissed, “When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. I’m just going to keep right on building. You do the best you can to stop it.” So it was with teeth gnashing that I drove down Robert Moses Parkway in the city of Niagara Falls, New York, en route to the annual Armenian festival at St. Hagop Armenian Apostolic Church.

God damn this virus! It’s not so much that I mind the coughing — as a schoolboy I heard every mock-hacking variant of “Cough-Man” — as that Covid’s wretched timing caused me to miss Opening Day for baseball’s Muckdogs for the first time in decades, as well as the premiere of Brothers at Odds, a play about our town’s eccentric nineteenth-century Brisbane family, whose manse faces an uncertain future. I did catch the second performance of both play and ballclub, though, and I can report that greed, bigamy and utopian spider webs are as American as balks and catcher’s interference. Albert and George Brisbane, the titular siblings, were less Cain and Abel than Vain and Stable.

Who was the most right-wing member of the Beat Generation? The gentle Catholic-Buddhist Jack Kerouac, spontaneous-bop prosody prince of the Old Right, has the strongest claim. In 1952, shortly after finishing the novel that would be published five years later as On the Road, he argued for Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” for president, while his pal Allen Ginsberg was puffing up Cold Warrior and son of a robber baron Averell Harriman. (As usual in American politics, left was right and up was down, and those who see only blue and red were utterly befuddled.) But William S. Burroughs, gun fancier and cadaverous grandson of the adding-machine inventor, gave Saint Jack a run for it.

An epoch or so ago, when Joe Biden was just a lightweight quadragenarian blowhard, I spent my salad days (stretching over several years) in Washington, DC. Boy did I have fun, though eventually, as Exene Cervenka screamed, I had to get out! Get out! For a while I got back with some frequency, though my visits have been scarce ever since the parts of the city I lived in acquired their post-9/11 police-state trappings. Hell, my roommate and I used to toss around the football on the front lawn of the Capitol on a Saturday morning. I suppose we’d be shot on sight for doing that today. Edmund Wilson, choleric upstate New York man of letters, said as he approached the door marked Exit, “I have come to feel that this country, whether or not I live in it, is no longer any place for me.

I never could figure out that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. Am I one degree or two degrees removed from someone a friend or acquaintance of mine knows? Whatever, as kids a generation ago used to say. Through political eminences I have known, I suppose I’m semi-adjacent to various world rulers of yesteryear, but the challenge is to see how far back in time one can go. This is my best shot. When our daughter was one year old, she sat on the lap of my friend Henry W. Clune, the Rochester novelist who was then 105 years of age. Henry’s father grew up in a neighborhood whose luminaries included Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist orator who called the Flower City home from 1847 to 1872.

In my days as a budding political scientist — nipped, fortunately for the discipline, in the bud — I learned that party identification is frequently due to non-ideological, and to outsiders irrational, factors. I’m sure this is less true today, as corporate and social media herd us into Team Red and Team Blue cattle pens, but this knowledge offers comfort every biennium, when primary elections roll around and I wonder why the hell I remain a registered Democrat. The die was cast, I suppose, when as a tyke I discovered in my grandparents’ attic a “Peace, Preparedness, Prosperity” button promoting Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 reelection. (How was I to know that smug bastard lied?

Poor March. It has so few defenders. Yet annually, on the first day of the month, I stand in the snow or sleet or icy rain and recite William Cullen Bryant in hopeful placation: “Ah, passing few are they who speak/ Wild stormy month! in praise of thee.” Bryant went on to speak in measured praise of the third month not so much for its qualities, such as they are, as for the promise it contains of the eventual arrival of the fifth month. For me, though, unheralded March offers the spectatorial pleasure of basketball.

As a piss-poor Catholic I am about the last person who should express an opinion of the propriety of President Biden receiving Holy Communion, but as a native of the county whose nineteenth-century women’s college (Ingham University) employed the chancellor whose phrase “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” may have flipped the 1884 presidential election to Grover Cleveland — how’s that for a tenuous connection? — I feel it within my competence to say a word about anti-papism in American politics. I had a bibulous lunch with Senator Pat Moynihan, my long-ago boss, several months before his death in 2003. Over more Pinot Grigios than I can remember, Moynihan said that he was disturbed by rising anti-Catholicism in the Democratic Party.