Ahead of My Time

My E*Book Didn't Click

2012-01-03T13:01:00.003+03:00

I never intended to write a bestseller. During my wife's pregnancy, I kept a journal in which I recorded our fears, hopes and concerns -- all written to our unborn child. Several years later, I realized the thousands of words I had scribbled might make a fine gift. I would edit them down, bind them and present a book to Nina in time for our fifth anniversary. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that other readers, particularly first-time expectant parents, might find the account as compelling as I did. Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions and the What to Expect series sold millions. Maybe my book could, too.

Nina was considerably less enthusiastic. She didn't want strangers reading about how she had been rolled off to the operating room for an abortion after we had been told our embryo was "nonviable" -- only to learn, moments before the procedure, that a critical lab test had been misinterpreted. But when I hinted that, if the book sold well, I might feel comfortable springing for the marquis-cut diamond engagement ring she's always wanted, she relented. I wrapped up copies of the manuscript and committed their fate to the postal service. Thus began my journey from cellulose and traditional publishing to the silicon frontier.

Within a few weeks, the rejection letters started to trickle in. One agent wrote, "You take the story beyond the merely personal," while another commented, "Its contents felt a bit too personal." And yet another said it was difficult to sell books by fathers. (No doubt what Bill Cosby was told.) About this time Salon, the online magazine, published an excerpt from the book. A few days later, I called my editor at Salon to find out how many people had "clicked through."

Forty thousand, I was told to my complete astonishment. My mental calculator began churning -- if 1 percent of those people were to buy my book, then tell 50 of their friends, and 1 percent of those friends bought it -- and pretty soon I was spending my afternoons chatting it up with Oprah.

It was while these sugarplums danced in my head that I first heard of eMatter.com and experienced a literary harmonic convergence. With eMatter, I could list my book on the web and buyers could download it electronically. I could set my own price, $6.95, and eMatter would pay me a handsome 50 percent royalty. I formatted my manuscript as instructed and uploaded it to eMatter.

Two weeks later, my book had sold exactly one copy.

Undeterred, I sent out an e-mail announcement to several hundred friends and former colleagues, plus several dozen people I hardly knew, and waited for word to reach Oprah.

She didn't get in touch, but lots of other people did. They had tried to buy my book but couldn't find it. Or found it but couldn't download it. Or downloaded it but couldn't open it. Some hadn't read the fine print that said eMatter's software did not yet work with Apple or UNIX systems. Soon I was in much closer touch with the technical staff at eMatter than with my nascent readership.

With new glitches turning up almost daily, I was completely surprised when I found How to Have a Baby at No. 8 on eMatter's bestseller list. I called a friend to tell him the good news.

"How do they calculate bestsellers?" he asked. "Hourly, daily, weekly?" I e-mailed eMatter. "Daily," the answer came back. In other words, my No. 8 bestseller was No. 8 for a day. That day.

Two months later, eMatter selected How to Have a Baby as its "editor's pick." My book then captured the top spot on eMatter's recommended list. Still, sales stagnated. A mention of eMatter in the New York Times didn't blip my book at all. Two five-star reviews did nothing. It dropped to No. 11.

Still, I had great hopes for the following month. EMatter, now called MightyWords, was running large ads in national newspapers and publications like the New Yorker. My book was featured on MightyWords' parenting page along with "an exclusive interview with author Robert L. Strauss." Also three feature stories of mine were to run in quick succession in the San Francisco Examiner Magazine, each with a blurb for the book. I expected to sell several hundred copies. Then Stephen King stole my thunder.

When King released Riding the Bullet over the web, he cause parts of the Internet to freeze as hundreds of thousands attempted to download his book. The same month, my book had been mentioned three times in one of the country's most widely read newspapers.

I sold one copy.

More than ever, I was determined to get How to Have a Baby to No. 1. I not only wanted to unseat Solo Explorations in Male Masturbation by Will Stark; I wanted to surpass Nine Things to Know About Permission Marketing on the Net by Seth Godin, the marketing guru and a graduate school classmate. Seth was a born go-getter who'd already sold his company to Yahoo! for $60 million. His wife, no doubt, already had her ring.

Frenzied by this rediscovered sense of competition, I sent a new e-mail to everyone whose address had ever slipped into my computer. All those endlessly forwarded Internet jokes? I'd been hoarding the recipients' e-mail addresses for weeks, including those of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm.

The responses came fast and furious. More than a few went something like, "I don't know who you are, but you're a jerk for invading my privacy and wasting my time." This is how I discovered an Internet rule of thumb. For every profane, irate message I received, I sold a book. The ratio was exactly one to one.

Still, seven days later, Seth's book was No. 3 and mine was No. 23. Soon, it sank beneath the horizon, never to reappear.

A year to the day after I gave Nina the original copy of How to Have a Baby, I received my first royalty check.

"How much is it for?" she asked.

"One hundred four dollars and 25 cents," I told her.

"Oh, that'll get me a ring," she said. "From a vending machine."

According to the anniversary list we use, our 75th will be "diamond." I have asked her to be patient.

The very next day I received an e-mail from my brother-in-law. Did I know about Xlibris.com? he asked. They publish real books, on paper, one at a time, on demand. They list their titles with Amazon. All I had to do was upload my manuscript. Within days I received galleys for proofing. Xlibris had prepared the layout and a very attractive four-color cover, and gotten me an ISBN number. For free. Incredible.

The timing couldn't have been better. I had another feature coming out in the Examiner Magazine. My editor again agreed to blurb my book. Certainly if people could buy How to Have a Baby in paperback, that would make all the difference. Sure. Maybe. Someday.

Until then, I'll have to live with what I've learned from my plunge into the world of digital self-publishing. That readers are not yet confusing me with Stephen King. That while people might love to read things on the net for free, they rarely "click through" when asked to pay. I've come to understand that maybe writing should be left to writers and publishing to publishers. And why publicists go to self-humiliating lengths to get a client on Oprah or Charlie Rose.

I originally called the book To My Child Unborn. When readers told me that was too serious, I changed titles. Now, having sold all of 43 copies, I think maybe that first title was right. As I said, I never intended to write a bestseller.

A version of this story first appeared in the September/October 2000 edition of Stanford magazine.

Mis à jour

2011-08-26T00:34:00.002+03:00

It was another one of those endless meetings. That it was in French only made it more insufferable. As my francophone colleagues blathered on, I made sure to make empathetic eye contact and nod my head appreciatively—even though at least half the conversation was as indecipherable to me as if it had been in a language spoken only by an undiscovered Amazonian tribe. Nevertheless, I was sure that my practiced bobble-heading would convince everyone that I was not only fully absorbed in the discussion but worth whatever outlandish consulting fee I was charging. That was until someone mentioned mis à jour.

Mis à jour, mis à jour what the hell does mis à jour mean? Soup du jour throws me for no loops, but about mis à jour—suddenly the main item on the menu of discussion—I had no idea.

"Don't you agree, RO-bear, that the mis à jour should be our top priority?" the boss asked.

"Oui, oui. Bien sûr," I said, while casually trying to look up mis à jour on my mobile phone French-English dictionary, which appeared to have been last updated shortly before Robespierre was led to the guillotine.

When I think of the attributes that have led to whatever success I may have had, pretending to know what I'm talking about figures very high on the list. The times I have only just escaped must number in the hundreds. I'm still astounded that no one has ever looked me dead in the eye and said, "You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?"

Faking it was also a key ingredient in my premarital social life. Arriving at Stanford nearly 30 years ago, I quickly scoped out my grad school classmates and invited one of the cutest over for a home-cooked dinner. Not only was she just adorable, but she was witty and smart, having studied math before going to work on Wall Street where—she told me—she used to make models.

Despite having an undergraduate degree in economics, I had no idea why models were needed on Wall Street. As a child, I had been a complete flop at them, forever gumming up my fingers and the little plastic pieces of whatever tank or aircraft carrier I was trying to assemble. As for applying the cellophane-like decals—there I was completely hopeless.

She, however, had been building models to Wall Street's satisfaction and, though we had only just met, already I could see her assembling complicated plastic replicas of multi-engine World War II bombers with our enthralled son. Or, rather, our twin sons. It was love.

Months later, in an introductory finance class, I realized to my great disappointment that the models she knew how to build had as their ingredients dry facts and figures gleaned from SEC filings and not from the boxes of the Revell company.

Still, it was while at Stanford that I set my personal record—21 months—for pretending I knew what people were talking about when I had absolutely no idea. Much like mis à jour, the term that I didn't understand seemed to be fundamental to modern business practices and well established in everyone else's vocabulary.

It's been said there's nothing stupid about a question except not asking it. Experience has taught me otherwise. Indeed, asking about this particular mot inconnu seemed to me akin to asking where the sun rose—and would certainly have had the admissions office reassessing my status.

Whenever a professor or classmate mentioned it, my hand did not bolt up to ask what they were talking about. In those days before the Internet, my research led nowhere. Maps were as clueless as I was. Asking a librarian for help would have presented me with the same acute embarrassment I had felt as a teenager asking a pharmacist for condoms.

Of course, just as I eventually learned what mis à jour means, I now know where to find Silicon Valley. After all, it's right there on Google Earth.

A version of this story first appeared in the July/August 2011 edition of Stanford magazine.

City Slickers

2011-08-08T20:55:00.006+03:00

Life in the city wasn't working for us. The dream apartment we had searched months to find turned out to be next door to a group of heavy metal grunge rockers we soon got to know as the Subterraneans. All night the walls of our bedroom throbbed, not with the rhythms of our young marriage, but with the penetrating drone of electric bass.

Outside, the city was no more welcoming. The despair and impotence we felt over graffiti marred buildings and busses was compounded by gray winter rains and streets filled with the homeless.

When our car was broken into and ransacked for the third time, no one seemed to sympathize with our distress. It was the price of city living, we were told, one we could expect to pay regularly.

“I don't want to live like this,” Nina said as we waited for the smashed car window to be replaced. It was a sentiment I had heard from many friends who felt trapped in white collar jobs they didn't enjoy and upwardly mobile life styles they found unfulfilling.

“Well, what do you want?” I asked her.

She looked at me, tears welling in her eyes. “I don't know,” she said. Frustrated and angry, she swirled her arms around to indicate everything that surrounded us. The noise, the crime, the congestion and the grime. “I just know I don't want to live like this.”

That night the Subterraneans were particularly loud. Neither of us could fall asleep. We had pounded on the wall, rang their bell, left notes on their doorstep but all to no effect. “I can't stand this,” Nina said throwing back the covers. She stalked out of the room.

I heard the plink of the television going on followed by the rapid fire surfing of channels.

“C'mere,” she called.

“What is it?” I asked. She didn't answer but as I walked down the hallway I recognized the unmistakable Hungarian-Hollywood accent of one of the Gabor sisters. On television, Eva was modeling some new fashion for Eddie Arnold. “Oliver dahlink. Vhat do you zink?” she asked.

Nina pointed her finger at the television. “Green Acres!” she said. “That's where I want to be.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, half asleep. We were newlyweds, still able to perplex each other several times a day.

Nina shook her palms at me, frustrated that I didn't catch on right away. “Are you satisfied with how we're living?” she asked, her hands trembling. “Are you happy?”

It was too late to try to begin such an unsettling discussion. We had talked many times about leaving California, at least urban California, but we didn't know where to go. Or what work we would do. Both of us are city kids. Nina is a native San Franciscan. Trips to the country were strictly matters of passing through rural areas to get to a city on the other side. Yet the longer we were “home,” the more despondent we were about being here.

We knew others had abandoned the city for quiet towns in the Sierra foothills or in Oregon or Washington State. Our problem was that every place we considered seemed less appealing than the Bay Area. If we were unhappy here, we felt we'd only be miserable someplace else.

City life wasn't all bad. There were beautiful days when we visited museums and parks, went to concerts, or watched obscure movies and plays found only in the great cities. But more of our time was spent locking doors, stuck in traffic, walking defensively, battling neighbors for parking, avoiding eye contact with passers-by, and feeling angry over the lack of civility and common respect that seemed to define everyday encounters. Drop by drop, our excitement for city living was draining away.

Before our marriage, Nina had worked at a homeless social services agency for seven years. I'd worked as a consultant with dozens of non-profit organizations. We knew that we didn't have to give up on society, but we also knew the personal cost of actively working for its improvement. All we wanted was to spend our first year together building the bonds of our marriage, planning our future, and extending the honeymoon.

But in the city, the magic between us was dwindling. Each time we discussed starting a family one of us would ask, “Why would we want to bring up a kid here?” We could never find a satisfying answer.

Back on the tube Eddie Arnold was screwing up his face with his trademark “Oh come on” look over something Eva had just said. I gave Nina the same pained look, not knowing how to escape the urban trap that seemed to be shrinking around us.

“So what do you want to do?” I asked her. She bounced up and gave me a hug, all smiles. “Farm living is the life for me,” she sang out.

“But we don't know a thing about farming,” I said, trying to humor her.

“Didn't you tell me you were interested in agriculture as a kid?” Nina answered. Before I could say anything, she was leafing through my childhood scrapbooks.

“See, right here,” she said, jabbing her finger at a yellowing scrap of paper. “Occupational plan, first choice – Agriculture!” She was pointing to the Ohio Vocational Interest Survey I had taken as a ninth grader in 1971. “Ninety-fifth percentile,” Nina noted. “Don't you see? You were born to be a farmer.”

What my wife didn't know was when I took the test I was more interested in roto-tilling my parents' environmentally incorrect lawn than I was in planting anything.

Nina took my OVIS results as some type of genetic proof that I am a direct descendant of Mr. Green Jeans. “The reason you're unhappy is you've been denying your destiny,” she told me. Satisfied that she had found the answers to our urban woes, Nina began leafing through back issues of Martha Stewart Living, apparently to better prepare us for a life on the land.

I didn't think either one of us could survive in the country, that after a few days in a small town we'd be pining for the craziness of city living that we claimed had been driving us crazy. But Nina was insistent. She wanted to give farm living a try.

I called my friend Cynthia at the California Farm Bureau in Sacramento. The Farm Bureau represented 70,000 farmers and ranchers across the state. I figured one of them might be willing to help us out.

I explained to Cynthia that we felt increasingly alienated in the city and wanted to take care of someone's farm for a few days, maybe a week. “You want to take care of a farm?” she said.

“That's right,” I told her, nodding confidently to Nina. I felt like hooking my thumbs in my overalls except that I was still in my bathrobe at 11 AM.

“Well, I know someone who has an ant farm you could take care of,” she said before bursting out with a guffaw worthy of Mister Ed.

“No, I'm serious,” I told her. “We want to, you know, live on a farm for a few days and then be left in charge. So we can get an idea of what it would be like.”

Cynthia explained that no sane farmer would ever let two concrete pounders like us take over. Maybe she could help us find someone who might let us work on a farm for a few days.

“What kind of farm are you looking for?” she asked.

We hadn't thought that far yet. I put the phone down. “What kind of farm are we looking for?” I asked Nina.

We talked for a few minutes. We decided livestock was out. Although we're both meat eaters, we felt squeamish about raising crops we might have to kill. Fruits, vegetables and flowers seemed passive and boring. “I don't know,” I told Cynthia. “What do you recommend?”

“What about llamas?” she asked. “I know some llama farmers.” I relayed her suggestion to Nina.

“They spit, don't they?” Nina said.

“No llamas,” I told Cynthia.

“All right. How about ostriches? I know a pretty neat ostrich farmer who might let you help out.”

“How about ostriches?” I asked Nina. “No,” she said. “I had a bad experience once with a rooster.” I thought about this for a moment, then decided the rooster incident was something I didn't need to know more about.

“Poultry is out,” I told Cynthia.

“Well, there's sheep and goats,” she said.

“How about sheep or goats?” I asked Nina.

“You and sheep?” Nina said. “I don't think so. But goats, goats sound good.”

Cynthia gave me the numbers of a few members of the California Dairy Goat Association, a group I had not encountered in Safeway. I started calling around, explaining that we were a newlywed couple trying to get out of the city and that we wanted to help run a farm.

“You wanna do what?” they all said. “Let me get back to you.” Eventually I was referred to a place on the Santa Cruz coast.

“You want to work for me?” Nancy Gaffney of the Sea Stars Goat Cheese Farm asked. “For free?”

“Yes,” I told her. “We want to come and learn about farm living.”

“Well, come on down. I'll put you to work,” she said in a way that made me wonder what we might be getting into.

I gave Nina the thumbs up. “We're in,” I told her.

Over dinner that night, Nina produced a small tub of goat cheese. As she slowly spread it around her cracker, I noted a lessening in her enthusiasm for farming.

“I was just thinking, you know, that maybe we should visit the farm before we really go to work there,” she said.

We arranged to meet Nancy on a Monday morning. Just driving out of the city and along the Santa Cruz coast relieved some of my pent-up anxiety. The road was empty. The fields on the bluffs above the ocean had recently been tilled. Even in the car, we could smell the richness of the earth in the fields' nut-brown furrows, something we never sensed in the city. Once we got close, it wasn't difficult to pick out Sea Stars. It was the place with 70 goats all pressed up against the fence trying to catch a whiff of the strangers.

A slender woman with wind-whipped hair and steel blue eyes came out. “So you're the honeymooners,” Nancy said.

I explained to her that we had actually been married for nearly a year and, if things worked out, we'd be spending our first anniversary on the farm. “Well,” Nancy said, “We're still calling you the honeymooners.”

Still the frenetic urbanites, we'd only scheduled enough time to make sure we liked Nancy and that she was okay with us. We followed her around as she supervised work already underway.

Nancy explained to two farm hands what she wanted done with a certain pile of compost.

“See,” she said, “this stuff (the compost) is still too hot for the garden.” The workers were Spanish speakers from the neighboring Brussels sprout farm. To clarify her point, Nancy plunged her hands into the fresh compost and held up some of the decomposing manure. “You see, it's too hot for the garden. Demasiado caliente,” she said.

Apparently Martha Stewart handles her compost differently than Nancy because Nina found this hands-on demonstration absolutely riveting. “You see,” I whispered to her, “This is what organic farming is all about.”

“It's organic all right,” Nina said as she headed for the car.

By the time we left Sea Stars I was thinking that maybe our time on the farm wouldn't be too bad. Nancy seemed amused and excited by the prospect of having us around. The farm itself was beautiful, an odd shaped acre squeezed between the coast highway and the bluffs above the ocean. The goats were as friendly as puppies and cuter than stuffed animals. Nina was surprisingly quiet on the way home.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“We're going to need some of those tall rubber boots,” she said. “And gloves. I want lots of gloves.”

Nancy told us to bring clothes that we didn't care about. We pulled out every piece of clothing we owned.

Nina packed a pair of Playtex gloves, then went to the kitchen for two more. I packed long underwear. “Where do you think we're going?” she asked.

“What if I have to go outside and round up the flock in the cold?” I asked her.

“Herd,” she said disdainfully. “Goats come in herds. Poultry come in flocks. Believe me. I know.”

Undaunted, I packed the long underwear.

“Since when do you know what it's like on a farm?” I asked.

“I don't,” she answered. “And I'm sure if I did, I wouldn't be going.”

I didn't remind her whose idea this had been in the first place.

On our way to the farm, we stopped at a hardware store for gloves and rubber boots. Nina took a pair of supple leather gloves from the shelf. “These are the kind Martha recommends for garden work,” she said. I looked at the label.

“I don't know. Do you think it's a good idea to show up wearing goatskin?” I asked. She changed them for a less fashionable pair of cloth work gloves.

That evening we stopped for dinner at a Mexican restaurant on the north side of Santa Cruz. “Look!” Nina said, “They have birria on the menu. That's barbecued goat meat.” I stared at her until she recognized her faux pas. Horrified, she threw her hands over her mouth as though she had let out the family's dirtiest secret. We ordered chicken.

We arrived at the farm at 6:58 the next morning. A bright faced woman we had not met before asked, “Are you the honeymooners?” I threw Nina a glance and stifled her before she could say something like, “Yeah, that's right. I'm Alice and this is Ralph. Where's Norton?” That kind of quip might have worked in the city, but now we were in the country. Nancy was doing us a favor. I wanted to ruffle as few feathers as possible.

“Yup,” I said. "That's us.” We told her about our interest in leaving the city.

“I think what you're doing is great,” Lisa said, welcoming us as though we were old friends. “But are you sure you want to wear that?” she said. She was talking about our carefully selected clothes.

Evidently white, no matter how old and worn, is not the best color for goat work. We explained that our recent color analysis revealed that white wasn't a good color for either of us. We figured farming was a good way to thin our wardrobe.

While Lisa was absorbing the logic of our fashion statement Nancy appeared, coffee in hand. “Morning,” she said. She looked us over. “Are you sure you want to wear that?” she asked. We explained our reasoning again. “Okay,” Nancy said. She put us in Lisa's charge for the morning.

Pippi Longstocking would have felt right at home at Sea Stars. The farm is a collection of ramshackle structures made of weathered wood painted in purples and violet. Geraniums, fuchsias, calla lilies, and nasturtium grew everywhere. Tall, conical, purple “towers of jewels” lined the road, their pointy tops bent under the weight of new buds. Like Nancy, Sea Stars seemed to have a 1960s, “small is beautiful” wonderment about it.

The farm was brimming with new life. Nancy's samoyed had had puppies. The cat had had kittens. Forty baby goats had been born in the past two months. Altogether there was a lot of yelping, mewing, scampering, barking and frolicking going on.

In a small pasture the lone billy goat grazed with his harem of yearlings. The baby goats were kept in a different area. Pregnant does were in still another part of the farm. The milk goats had their own plot. A meandering series of fences and gates kept everyone happily segregated. Only the cat wandered wherever she wanted. Her litter stayed in the office.

Our first task was to round up the goats for milking. Most were already waiting. Lisa ran behind the few stragglers, clapping her hands. She lost her footing and did a Pete Rose style head first slide in the slick grass.

As she got up and wiped off her hands without a second thought, Nina and I both realized that a farm is a farm whether it's goats or cows or chickens. There's a lot of by-product involved with the production of goat cheese. It's not all curds and whey. “Glad I brought those gloves,” Nina said to me.

Once we had the goats corralled, it was time to feed the babies. We poured warm goat milk into four “milkbars,” plastic buckets rimmed with nipples, and headed back outside.

The instant we entered their pen, the babies vied for every nipple. They chased after us on hind legs. They jumped on our backs. They jumped on each other. They jumped on top of the milkbars. Finally, most found their way to a nipple. Soon they settled down to feeding. The farm filled with slurping, suckling noises.

“Omigod, they're so cute,” Nina said. She looked at me. “I'm so glad you made me do this.” Any doubts we had about being on the farm were melting away.

A few babies hadn't quite gotten the sucking habit down. Lisa told us to direct mouths to nipples.

I reached down to pick up a kid. What I thought was animal turned out to be fluff and air. She couldn't have weighed ten pounds. She sucked air until I put her before an empty nipple.

By then the pen was in pandemonium, a slurping, jostling mayhem. The babies nursed so vigorously the milkbars nearly toppled over. And then it was done. In a minute they had drained every drop.

Ten yards away, in another enclosure, six very young baby goats watched our every move. They knew they were next.

I opened the gate and Nina entered with their milkbar. They followed at her heels waiting for breakfast. A small chocolate brown goat, that looked just like a stuffed animal come to life, took a few swallows and then walked away.

“This one's not eating,” Nina said.

Lisa picked it up. “What the matter Spontaneity?” she asked.

Nancy had named this year's babies after positive virtues. The goats that were clamoring over us had names like Serenity, Nobility, Peace, Harmony, Joy and Love. We tried to feed Spontaneity with a bottle, but she wouldn't take it. “We'll try again later,” Lisa said.

Not far away 30 alpine goats with full udders waited for us. We walked through them to get to the milking pen, which was a confusion of oddly shaped kettles, metal levers and weights on pulleys. The whole thing looked as though it had been designed by the combined madness of Rube Goldberg and Dr. Seuss. The gaggle of air lines and hoses that made up the automatic milking system sputtered and wheezed as an old vacuum pump chugged in the background. We let in the first four goats.

Before we could hook them up to the machinery, we had to get them started by hand. Lisa explained that the key to milking is a good pinch in which the top of the teat is clamped between the thumb and the base of the index finger, much the way one holds chopsticks. With the clamp in place, the other fingers press down and force the milk out.

I made a thorough study of the udder before me. The two teats hung down like the distended thumb and pinkie of a rubber glove filled with water. I stretched out my hands and cracked my knuckles, a concert pianist about to give a great performance.

I put my hands on the teats. I pinched. I clamped. I squeezed. Nothing. Then I felt the milk squirt the wrong way, upstream, back into the udder. The goat began to fidget and kick at my hands. Neither Nina nor I could express a drop. After three minutes, I wanted to run my hands over my face in frustration like Curly might have in a “Three Stooges on the Farm” episode. “Pinch harder,” Lisa advised. I did.

“That's a great pinch,” Lisa said as though I had just learned the secret of throwing a curve ball. A fine stream of warm milk shot down my shirt.

Once all four goats were primed, we hooked them up and let the machine take over. The milk surged through clear plastic hoses into two over-sized stainless steel kettles.

Once the machines got what they could, we had to finish the milking by hand. Lisa's practiced pinch and squeeze brought forth thick streams of milk. Her pail rang out with the “zing-zang” of liquid against metal. Helpless, Nina and I looked at each other in frustration. We were only getting dribs and drabs.

“Pinch, pull, press. Pinch, pull, press,” I said to myself trying to find a beat. Goat by goat I began to get the hang of it. Done properly, I could feel the entire teat drain, then fill the instant I released my pinch. Every now and then I got it just right and the milk would shoot into the pail with the satisfying beat of a metronome.

When both kettles were full we took a break. Nina was massaging her forearms. “What time is it?” she asked. “I'm ready for lunch.” I looked at my watch.

“Nine-thirty,” I told her.

“I'm sure you're kidding,” she said. But I wasn't. And we'd milked only half the herd.

In a large dairy the milk flows directly from the animal to a cooling system, but in a small operation like Nancy's much was left to hand. Lisa opened the drain plugs on the kettles. Two-inch thick streams of warm, pure milk flowed into waiting buckets.

Careful not to slip on any by-product, I carried the two buckets and their seventy pounds of milk inside. Lisa prepped the cooling unit with a large paper filter. All I had to do was pour.

I raised a bucket high, slowly moving it toward the huge funnel. Only I didn't raise it high enough. The bottom bumped against the side of the cooler. Milk, the milk that had taken us ninety minutes to collect and the goats all night to produce, sloshed over the top of the bucket and down the cooling tank onto the concrete floor. Nina looked at me stricken. I lost at least a gallon. And each milking only produced 14 to 16 gallons. Lisa took the bucket and showed me how to pour without losing a drop. “No sense crying over spilled milk,” I heard her say. But that's just what I felt like doing.

It took us an hour to finish the rest of the herd. We found ourselves talking to them as though they were humans. “Come on honey. Quit fooling around. All right sweetie,” we said, trying to coax them quickly in and out of the milking stations. Each goat seemed to have a personality. Lisa spoke to them by name. We just stroked them and tried to seem at ease.

When the last goat was milked it was time to clean up. While Nina and Lisa washed the equipment, I took a broom and shovel and began cleaning the concrete corral where the goats had waited.

It was the first time I had been alone since work began. With the compressor off, with the goats fed and milked, the farm was quiet. In the distance, I could see the surf building on the ocean. Farm living might not be so bad I found myself thinking. Then I turned to the task before me.

Animal feed often comes in a pelletized form and the goats deliver pellets in return. Their abundant droppings, smooth and spherical, range in size from individual pearls to grape-like clusters. After a morning of waiting, the once neat scat had been trampled to a gooey green slime dusted with goat hair. I heard Nina mutter, “Don't you think they could be taught to go in the corner?” I put the thick blade of the shovel to the concrete and began scraping.

Although an ocean breeze was blowing, the air filled with the fermenting scent of half digested alfalfa blended with urea. I carried away shovelful after shovelful.

Weeks earlier I had attended the 10th reunion of my Stanford University Business School class. Around the swimming pool of a classmate's Atherton summer estate, I listened as my former classmates discussed promotions, start-ups, initial public offerings, and other forms of high finance wheeling and dealing.

Hearing them discuss the difficulty of juggling careers, family, and personal interests, my mind began racing with questions about the type of life I wanted for Nina and me. The sixty-hour work weeks my classmates were lamenting just didn't seem to leave much time for anything other than work. After ten years, I wanted a change from independent management consulting for non-profit organizations and small businesses. I wondered what kind of career would give us the time we wanted for us and the income we needed to get by.

I went to see a career counselor. She listened to my experience, gave me a vocational interest questionnaire, and told me to come back in a week.

Perhaps I should have told her about my OVIS results because now I was at the other end of a shovel full of heavy, oozing, animal waste. Maybe it was therapeutic for Eddie Arnold. I was no longer sure if farming was for me.

“Hey Nina!” I called out to Nina, “Don't you think you should give this a try?” Not wanting to back down from a dare, she sneered at me, took the shovel, and scooped a load. Just then Nancy came out.

“So, what do you think of farming?” she asked. Nina emptied her shovel into the compost barrel.

“It's a lot like marriage,” Nina said.

After lunch we began “tubbing” cheese. Suzanne, a neighbor who works part-time, showed us how to fill five-ounce plastic containers with a serving spoon. She explained the importance of neither over or under filling them. Any air pockets or spillage would lead to premature molding and shortened shelf life.

After forty minutes neither one of us had filled a tub properly. Each time we tried to put on a lid, cheese would sneak up into the rim and down the outside. All we had to show for our work were a dozen tubs that needed to be emptied and sanitized.

As a consultant, my expertise had been in helping small businesses operate more efficiently. Unable to “tub” five ounces of cheese, I began thinking about ways to re-engineer Sea Stars.

The MBA side of my brain began redesigning and mechanizing the whole farm. I had visions of hundreds of containers whizzing by each second as Sea Stars threatened the market share of Kraft's Philadelphia brand cream cheese. For a moment, I felt like the Tim Robbin's character in the movie The Player who cynically suggests at a brain-storming meeting that if Hollywood executives could only get rid of directors, actors, and writers making movies would be a snap. I began to think likewise, that if I could just eliminate the manual labor, the tubs, the goats and their by-product, there'd be nothing to farming or making cheese.

Eventually I got the hang of tubbing, but not before my wrists burned with what I was sure was carpal tunnel syndrome. I began filling tubs faster and faster to see how far ahead of Nina I could get. Suzanne, the youngest looking mother of five I had ever seen, watched me with bemusement. “Hey Robert,” she said. “Take it easy. Remember, it's just about cheese.” Obviously Suzanne didn't have an MBA.

After four hours Nina and I had packed 35 pounds of cheese, one hundred little tubs that would sell for $3.50 each. Before we got to the farm, Nina had complained about how expensive goat cheese was. Now with our forearms, wrists, backs and necks aching, she said, “You know, $3.50 is starting to look like a bargain.” The next day Nancy came in to help with tubbing. We watched in awe as she packed the same amount of cheese in under 30 minutes.

By 5 PM, we had put in a ten-hour day. I felt that if we really wanted to be farmers we should stay for the evening milking. Nancy told us we'd done enough for our first day. Besides it was our first anniversary. “Have you been down to the beach?” she asked.

The beach was a tiny one, squeezed in between a small break in the ocean bluffs and the Brussels sprout fields. We watched the late afternoon surf. In the distance we could see a few sailboats on Monterey Bay. “What do you think?” I asked Nina. “Do you think you could do this?”

“I don't know,” she answered. I didn't know either but what I had expected to be a slapstick fiasco was beginning to look like a real life style option. As the day had gone on, I found myself occasionally walking in my rubber boots with a cowboy swagger. During quiet moments I stood with my arms akimbo and proudly looked out over the herd and the farm as though they were my own.

That evening we unwrapped the last piece of our wedding cake. Nina told me not to expect much, that after a year in the freezer, it might have picked up a few odd smells. “So have we,” I told her. The cake was delicious. We poured two glasses of champagne, drank half and collapsed.

Tuesday morning the first alarm went off at 4:55 AM. Reaching for it I realized every muscle and tendon in my body had shrunk by half. I was one dull ache. I could barely move. The back-up alarm went off at 5. We were still in bed when the alarm on my watch went off at 5:05.

“I hate her,” Nina groaned as we finally got out of bed.

“Who?” I wondered out loud.

“Martha Stewart,” Nina said. “She never said anything about getting up at this ungodly hour.”

Our second day of milking, supervised by Ana, an eighteen-year old community college student, went more smoothly. With the exception of one skittish and stubborn old goat named Paulette, we were able to get the herd done in under two hours.

In the babies' pen, things weren't as good. Spontaneity was still not eating. She suckled Nina's finger up to the third knuckle but wouldn't take the bottle. “She's a little hot,” Nancy said, feeling her nose. While Nancy went for some aspirin, Val, another friend and part-time employee, put Spontaneity across her lap and look a rectal temperature just as one would do with a human baby. Nina stroked the little kid's coat trying to comfort her.

“Come on girl,” Nina said. “You're going to be okay. You've got to get better.”

Later that day I joined Nina in the dairy where she was busy making “Van Goats” and “Monets.” These are round cheese torts decorated with edible flowers such as bachelor buttons, calendula petals, and Johnny jump-ups for which Sea Stars has become well-known. Meanwhile, Skeeter, Nancy's one full-time employee, showed me how to “flip” cheese.

“What type of cheese is this?” I asked as I looked at the soft white curds in the pasteurizer. Skeeter gave me a gaze a drill sergeant would have admired.

“Goat cheese!” she said. “What did you think it was?”

For the next two hours, I gently placed the wet cheese into a bucket lined with cloth sacks. Each sack weighed 40 pounds. After hanging twenty of them over a bathtub where the whey drained, my back and arms felt I as though I had spent the afternoon at 48 Hour Nautilus. Nancy had told me earlier that people, admiring her trim, strong figure, often ask if she “works out.”

“No,” she told me she tells them, “I work.” A few more days on the farm and I figured I could drop my gym membership.

We took a break and went to see Spontaneity. She didn't look sick to us, but she wouldn't take the bottle. Nancy called the vet. “I'm so worried about Spontaneity,” Nina said as though she were the goat's mother.

By the end of our second day, we were so exhausted that when Nancy asked if we wanted to go sailing after work, I thought she must have been joking. She wasn't. Sailing was the one luxury she allowed herself.

The wind on Monterey Bay was lighter than the blustery gusts at the farm. As we lolled over small waves on a boat that belonged to another of Nancy's friends, the concerns of the city seemed very far away. I felt as though I had run a long, long race. The sun warmed all my soreness away. Milking goats in the morning, sailing in the afternoon. Certainly there were many less satisfying ways to live. The anxiety I often felt about whether I was keeping up with business school classmates was as far away as my worries about parking or crime or what the Subterraneans were doing.

One of the best things about working on the farm was eating huge quantities of whatever I wanted. Wednesday morning I sat down to an enormous farm breakfast of eggs, bacon, two pork chops, hash brown potatoes, toast and coffee. I figured it was what a real farmer would eat. Nina, too, was eating with two-fisted gusto. She reached across the table and speared one of my chops with her fork.

“I can't wait till we get to work,” she said.

“Why's that?” I asked her, wondering if this new zest for manual labor was for real. She picked up my coffee cup and swigged a mouthful.

“Cause I'm beginning to smell myself,” she said. We'd been wearing the same clothes for the last two days.

That morning I set up the milking pen by myself. I was no longer fighting my sore body or the routine. As I hooked up each piece of the system, I wondered if this was the life for me. My normal aches and pains had been satisfyingly replaced by ones that I felt I had earned. I did much of the milking myself. As I quickly shunted the goats in and out of the milking pens, I sensed the rhythm of farm life becoming my own. Although the work was unrelenting, there was an easy pace that was much more soothing than the jumbled up staccato distractions of the city.

By noon, things were in high gear as we got ready for the Santa Cruz Farmers Market and a UPS shipment. Four of us worked in the tiny Sea Stars office surrounded by phones, fax, freezers, a cooler full of cheese that advertised “Chilled Wines and Champagne,” a computer, two printers, supplies and, under the dining table that serves as a desk, the latest litter of kittens. The walls were covered with blue and red ribbons awarded to Sea Stars at the annual judging of the American Cheese Society.

While Nina worked on invoicing, Nancy and Val took phone orders and I packed shipments. Nina was so exhausted that she nodded off in her chair. We'd already put in a full day and were headed for at least five hours more.

Before we left for the market in Santa Cruz, Val brought Spontaneity into the office. Nancy prepared a syringe. This was a last ditch effort. At $30 a vial, Nancy couldn't afford to keep pumping medicine into her no matter how cute Spontaneity was. As the needle slid into Spontaneity's neck, she cried out, a long, scared wail that sounded just like a human baby's.

Driving down the coast to Santa Cruz, I told Nina, “I want to sell everything.” We had five coolers full of cheese that we had made and there was no way we were going to bring any back to the farm. Selling out would be my way of showing Nancy she had made a good decision when she let us come work for her.

My determination to sell out was redoubled by the eclectic crowd that shops at the farmers market in Santa Cruz. Barefoot kids reeking with patchouli oil and draped in Gypsy gear mingle with straight-laced academic and high-tech types and graying hippies. Some shoppers came up and smacked down their money. “I love your cheese,” they said, needing no sales persuasion. Others looked at Nina and me suspiciously when we suggested, “Try some goat cheese today?”

Those were the customers I wanted to get. “Don't like it,” some said. “Ever try it?” I asked. Many never had.

I put samples in their hands. They took small nibbles and then larger bites. “Hey, that's not bad,” they said. “Honey, try this.”

Unlike other things I'd sold in the past, I felt no hesitation promoting the cheese. It was nutritious, tasty, and artistic. The goats were treated well and the work environment at Sea Stars was pleasant and easy-going. During one afternoon, Nina and I were able to convert a dozen skeptics. With each sale I felt real pride. Maybe we could make it a way of life.

Nina, Lisa, and I were busy all afternoon, making change, offering samples, and thanking everyone who came by as though it were our own business. “We're going to sell out,” I told Nina.

One young woman returned to the stand repeatedly. She picked up the cheese, looked at it, and put it back. She looked at the Monets with a desire that seemed to border on lust. But she never bought. Finally she said, “I can't. I was hooked on this stuff all last year. I've got to stop myself.” She threw up her hands with the drama of a diva and marched off.

It was hard to be positive when people just sampled with no intention of buying. We had worked so hard. The cheese was so good. The goats were so loving. How could people not buy our cheese? Every person who walked past felt like a personal rejection.

By five o'clock the crowd was thinning. We still had a few tubs left in our coolers. A young man wearing paisley pants and a crocheted vest walked up. I told myself I would close the sale no matter what. He asked all kinds of questions about the edible flowers used in the “Monets.” I told him what I knew. Then he walked away without buying. I called after him. “What about some cheese today?”

“No man,” he said. “I just wanted to know what the flowers were, you know man, so I could eat 'em out on the highway.” Nina rolled her eyes.

“Santa Cruz,” she said.

As we packed up another fellow came by and asked if we wanted to buy a “Speak Happiness” bumper sticker for a dollar. I wanted to tell him what I had done the last few days to make a dollar's worth of cheese but instead I just said, “No thanks.”

As Lisa and Nina broke down the stand, I counted the money. We netted just under $300. It didn't seem like enough but Val told us it was the best day so far this year. “Maybe I should hire you guys,” Nancy said. It was a tempting offer, but what Nancy could pay us would barely cover the rent on our apartment. I wondered if we could make ends meet as farm owners. Being a farm employee would probably mean a change in our standard of living that we hadn't begun to contemplate.

At the end of our 13-hour day, we were starving. We decided on a Thai restaurant for dinner. At the front door I looked at Nina's filthy pants. We hadn't changed clothes since six that morning.

“Do you know what you look like?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “but you've got hoof prints all over your back.” We asked the hostess if she would seat us as we were.

“Why not?” she said reflecting Santa Cruz's easy ways. In the city, neither of us would ever go out dressed the way we were. Wednesday night we wore our filthy clothes like merit badges.

Over dinner, we discussed how realistic it would be to take up farming. For certain, we wouldn't be able to fall backwards into it as Nancy had. Back in 1976 she was living in the Sierra while finishing college. A roommate asked her to watch his goat for a few weeks. The goat had kids, the roommate never came back, and suddenly Nancy was a goat farmer. All the goats at Sea Stars are descended from “Fanny the Goat,” as Nancy calls the inherited matriarch of her herd.

But that was nearly twenty years ago. Today it would cost tens of thousands of dollars and more hard physical work than either of us had ever done to build up a small operation like Nancy's. And it wouldn't be like buying a franchise fast food joint. There was no guarantee of success.

Thursday was our last day. By now both of us were enjoying the work. We were no longer concerned about by-product or even noticed the smell of the goats. In any case the nearby fields had been fertilized with chicken manure. That smell was so acrid I could feel it burn my sinuses. “Just imagine what ostrich manure smells like,” Nina said.

Although we had both approached the farm with reservations, neither of us was ready to leave. The “goaties,” as Nancy called them, were more like puppies to us than mere farm animals. We had gotten to know many of them by name.

In the babies' pen, things were improving. Spontaneity was on the mend. The injection seemed to have worked. She attacked the milkbar with the other kids and then joined them in butting heads. On our last day, I had only one ambition. I was going to get some milk out of Paulette.

Paulette had different ideas. The machine got nothing from her. She kicked the pail and wouldn't let me milk her by hand. Nancy had told me there was little profit in the farm. I concluded goats like Paulette were the problem. She was eating $2 of feed a day and not doing her part. I figured she was an old goat that probably should be put down.

“How old is Paulette?” I asked Nancy after the milking was done.

“Four,” she answered to my surprise. Alpine goats often live to be 15 years old.

Nancy explained that Paulette hadn't been bottle-fed and, as a result, was skittish around people. She kept Paulette because she had belonged to a friend, Paul, who had died. At business school, despite classes in “Ethics and Business” and “Business and the Community,” the justification for every decision eventually boiled down to the bottom line. Thinking about Paulette, I realized that if I ran a farm, the rational decision, as I had been taught in graduate school, wouldn't always be the easy one.

As we got ready to leave, Nancy's friend Rick showed up. “How about a reike treatment?” Nancy asked. She and Rick had been swapping cheese for massage for some time. We didn't want to leave. Much less than a free massage would have kept us. “Sure,” we both answered.

Rick's hands were warm, very warm. As he let them rest on my forehead I felt the final residue of urban life drain away. An hour later, when I got up from the table, my mind was completely at ease even as I sensed the soreness in every muscle.

As we got into our car, fog was just beginning to creep back onto the coast. Nancy and Suzanne stood in the road, waving us good-bye. The goaties crowded up against the fence. They watched us pull away.

For the first several miles we were very quiet. Farming for a few days had been wonderful. Could we do if for a living? Three hundred sixty-five days a year? I wasn't sure. Nina is 38 years old. I'm 39. Farm work was not a 90-minute work-out at the gym. Much better than before we understood it was a physically and mentally demanding life that was as constant and unrelenting as anything the city or the white collar world had to offer. And we didn't have Nancy's worries about raising two teenage sons, making a payroll, or keeping 70 goats healthy and productive.

Yet the farm offered an immediate sense of achievement that I rarely sensed in my life as a consultant. Often I'd worked on projects for weeks and months that in the end were shelved or fell through bureaucratic cracks or yielded no tangible results. In contrast, on the farm, we had completed an entire cycle in just four days, producing, packaging and selling a product we had made, were proud of and enjoyed ourselves. It was this immediacy that I found so deeply satisfying.

I loved the closed circle of the farm. We milked the goats, they gave us the cheese. We took the whey and fed it back to them. I watched this recycling program and realized it was much more a miracle of nature than my putting out the newspaper or empty cans and bottles for curbside collection.

More importantly, we sensed we had become part of a community, a community of people and animals. We had connected in a way we almost never felt in the city. We worked outside in a place where the litter was strictly biodegradable. We spoke and worked with neighbors. The air did feel cleaner, the sun did feel warmer, we did feel safer and healthier, and we felt as close to one another as we ever had.

When the alarm went off the next morning neither one of us leapt out of bed. We were home, but we were homesick for the farm. “I miss the goaties,” Nina said to me. I did as well. The city just didn't have the texture or the natural rhythm of the farm. Plus, I didn't know what I could do that would give me the same sense of accomplishment I had felt working with the animals.

I went to the gym. Early in the morning people were waiting in line to get on the Stairmaster. I thought to myself that if ever there were a metaphor for all that's wrong with modern living, the Stairmaster must be it. Climbing and getting nowhere. Sweating and producing nothing. I got my thirty minutes of cardio and went home wishing the gym offered wood chopping instead of “step” classes. At least I'd have something to show for my effort.

At the apartment, there was a message from Nancy on the answering machine. “Hey you guys,” Nancy said, “Got up this morning and everyone realized we really miss you down here. Spontaneity's better. She says, 'Baaaaaaah.'”

Nina came in the room as I listened to message. Nancy's voice made us realize we were home, but in the wrong place. “Come see us anytime,” Nancy said.

At last I looked at Nina. “Well, what do you think?” I asked. “Could you do it?”

“I don't know,” she answered. “It was great, but I still don't know.” She looked out the window at the ships on the Bay. “How about you?”

I didn't know then and I still don't know now. On the farm I felt as though all my senses were rekindled, that my head and body worked together. In the city, they often felt like separate beings competing with each other. But still the fact was that we were city kids who liked having a coffee shop on the corner. There seemed to be no easy way to compare the two life styles we were contemplating.

“I don't know either,” I told Nina as I headed toward the door. I couldn't think about it right then. I'd left the car in a tow-away zone. I had to go look for parking.

A version of this story first appeared as the cover story of the July 9, 1995 edition of West, the Sunday magazine of the San Jose Mercury News.

Fortune Told

2011-03-01T14:34:00.006+03:00

If you're like me, you watched some terrible films and wondered, “How did a movie like that get made?” You left the theater angry with the filmmakers, feeling they not only stole your money but wasted two hours of your life. Though the only thing you know about movie-making is what you learned on the Universal Studios tour, you can't resist thinking, “I could do something better than that junk.” It was this type of thinking that got me into the movie-making business.

Initially, I hoped to succeed as a screenwriter. But after five years of trying, all I had to show was a growing stack of “Thank you, but no thank you” rejection letters.

I knuckled down one last time and wrote a romantic thriller set in Africa. In letters to agents and producers I told them my script was like “The Killing Fields... but with a better love story.”

Through the friend of a friend, the script was put in the hands of Danny Glover. After months of waiting, his secretary called on a Friday afternoon. “Robert,” she said, “are you going to be home this weekend? Danny likes your script. He wants to talk.”

In an instant, I was on the phone with my mother telling her about the celebrity who wanted to discuss my script. I spent all weekend waiting by the phone. I'm still waiting.

A junior executive at a small studio said he would read my script. A month later I heard from his assistant. In a pseudo-English accent (no doubt cultivated at a third rate junior college) she told me, “We're passing.”

“Why?” I asked.

“To be honest,” she said, “I thought it was...” and here there came a long pause and, I imagine, some nail filing, “...mundane and banal.”

Two weeks later, her boss was fired. He went on to executive produce Dumb and Dumber.

Perhaps I should have accepted his assistant's reading as the final blow to my cinematic aspirations. Yet a year later I found myself flogging the same script at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. As I waited to register, a woman joined me in line. It took a few seconds to place her. Justine Bateman. Mallory. Michael J. Fox's dim-witted sister from the television sit-com Family Ties.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said as I rummaged through my briefcase, “but I have a script that's perfect for you.”

“Uh-huhn,” she said, avoiding eye contact.

“I have it right here. It's an adventure romance, takes place in Africa,” I continued as she began edging away. “It's got everything. Political intrigue. Violence. Inter-racial sex.”

She scrawled a phone number on a scrap of paper. “Call my manager,” she said. She couldn't get away fast enough.

I stood there, frozen, script in hand, as Justine Bateman, Mallory for heaven's sake, raced away from me. A small crowd had watched this scene. “Pathetic,” I thought I heard people say.

I had reached bottom.

“I've got to do my own movie,” I told my screenwriters circle. “I just can't keep making a fool of myself.”

“Good idea,” they said.

So I bought “how-to” books. I took courses. I volunteered on low-budget films as a PA, or production assistant, ground floor on the filmmaking totem pole.

As a PA, my responsibilities included driving to the camera supply house, holding back curious pedestrians and traffic during shooting, and getting coffee, cigarettes and pizza for people fifteen years my junior.

Doing these truly banal and mundane tasks made me realize that filmmaking was vastly more complicated than I ever imagined. The Universal Studios tour had given me no idea the attention to detail that was necessary simply to get an image on film. On top of that, it was all supposed to make sense, look good, and be entertaining.

Many television shows cost million dollars per episode. The average Hollywood film runs into tens of millions. At the time a year in film school cost $30,000. As a struggling writer, I had $5,000 to spend on my project. I hoped the resulting film would open the doors that my scripts had not.

I was told that the key to minimizing expense was to limit the number of locations and actors. With that advice in mind, I wrote a script. A man and a woman on a first date. Dark suspicions surface when they read the unusual fortunes in their cookies at the end of a Chinese meal. I called the script Fortune Tell.

It had three speaking parts; the man, the woman, and the restaurant owner. It required only one location; a Chinese restaurant. It was just five pages long. Written in standard Hollywood format, those five pages would roughly translate to five minutes of screen time. Five pages, five minutes, five thousand dollars.

In my living room, I videotaped a reading of the script. I showed it to my “Introductory Filmmaking” class at San Francisco State Extension. My classmates laughed aloud. I thought I had written a chilling, dark, film noir thriller.

“What are you talking about?” they said. “This is a comedy.”

“Okay, fine,” I said, determined to go ahead. “It's a comedy.”

Quickly I became overwhelmed with the details of pre-production. There was crew selection, casting, locations, permits, releases, insurance, equipment rental, film purchases, set decoration, catering, contracts, and script revisions. It was more than I could handle. I needed help.

I hired one of my instructors, Debbie, as production manager and assistant director.

Before I knew it, she had hired a DP (cinematographer), gaffer (lighting), key grip (heavy lifting), and sound man. They, in turn, hired their assistants, a wild bunch of punk rockers who would make the crowd at a Dead concert look like a convention of IBM salesmen by comparison.

They were all part of the Bay Area independent filmmaking scene in which hundreds of young, wannabe moviemakers are willing to work for next to nothing to get into “the business.”

Paying the absolute minimum possible, I was now on the line for a crew of twenty people and over $2,000 in salaries.

Meanwhile Dave, my hyperactive, chain smoking DP, was arranging for equipment.

Motion picture cameras are astonishingly expensive. A good 16mm camera, such as the one we planned to use, can cost $200,000. For a 35mm camera, the more sophisticated workhorses of Hollywood, double that.

Because cameras are so expensive, low budget productions often join together to rent equipment. Dave, my DP, arranged to shoot four short films back-to-back for 11 straight, 18-hour days. My share would be $800. I was now in for $3000 and not a frame of film had been exposed.

Meanwhile, Debbie, the assistant director, and I figured out the order in which the scenes would be filmed. Even though our “shot list” had no excess, even though I had confidence in my crew, I was still nervous. If Fortune Tell didn't get done in one day I would have to pay everyone for another day. My budget would double. I called Alex, a storyboard artist.

Storyboards are cartoon-like illustrations that give an idea of what the film will look like – before the camera starts rolling. Some directors have one done for each scene. Others don't bother with them.

For my five-minute movie, I had Alex do 153 drawings.

At last, nearly everything was ready. The shoot was set for one month away. Two problems remained. One, I didn't have a location. Two, I didn’t have any actors.

I called casting agents and asked if they represented any actors who would be interested in my low-budget short. Head shots, the 8 x 10 glossy photographs that are the calling cards of acting talent, flooded in. Actors, I realized, are even more desperate for work than writers. I asked 30 people to audition.

In a frigid room in San Francisco's Fort Mason Center, I watched young, talented, ambitious actors read my words. One woman was so good looking, I hardly noticed her performance. I found myself transfixed by this smashing starlet. Then I felt the stare of my fiancée who had made a special point of attending the auditions. I escorted the redhead to the door.

“Thank you very much,” I told her coldly. “I'll get back to you. Next!”

In fact, she had been perfect, just what I was looking for. Her agent told me not to hire her. “Why?” I asked, “You sent her to me.”

“She's too good-looking,” the agent said. “You've got a short film. You want people watching your movie, not the actors.”

Eventually I hired two talented actors, both attractive but not so unusually good-looking as to stun an audience into mindless gawking.

Meanwhile, I discovered I had a very big problem; finding a location. Most Chinese restaurants stay open seven days a week, many 14 or more hours a day. I drove to every Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Nepalese and Bhutanese restaurant in the Bay Area. “Not interested,” they all said. The allure of having the name of their restaurant in the credits of my film changed no minds.

With just days to go, I was frantic, unable to sleep. My $3000 was gone and I was about to be ruined. If my shoot fell through, so would the other three in the equipment rental. One of those was a music video for Rancid. At the time, Rancid had not yet made it big. What I knew was that I didn't want anyone or anything called Rancid angry with me. I put out an APB for a Chinese restaurant.

A friend introduced me to Chun and Mei, the owners of Yan's Kitchen, a small Hunan restaurant near the Transamerica Pyramid. Hungry for publicity, they agreed to let me use their place.

They had no idea what they were getting into.

On the day of the shoot, I arrived at Yan's Kitchen at 7 AM. At 8 the phone rang. It was Debbie. The crew had worked until 3 AM the night before. They couldn't get to the restaurant until 10:30. “Don't worry,” she said, anticipating my imminent mental collapse, “We'll get it done.”

Three hours later the crew began ripping Chun and Mei's restaurant apart.

The grips carried the furnishings outside to make room for equipment. They turned daytime into night by hanging black tarps over the windows.

Two grips held ropes wrapped around the gaffer's waist as he tapped the building's main power lines, by-passing any circuits we might overload. In case he did something wrong, the grips would yank him away before untransformed current turned him to toast.

Watching this I stopped regretting the $470 I had spent on workers compensation insurance for my one-day shoot.

As the crew readied the set there was little for me to do. The sound man set up his tape machine behind a drape like the Wizard of Oz. The camera was mounted on a rolling stand known as a dolly. The DP and the gaffer adjusted the lights, and then adjusted them some more, and then adjusted them again.

When all was finally ready, a friend of the DP showed up with a second camera. Now, instead of shooting only one actor at a time, we could film both the man and the woman simultaneously. This, Dave said, would save lots of time. Except that the lights had to be re-adjusted. Another hour crawled by.

At one o'clock, six hours after I had arrived, we were ready.

“Places everyone,” Debbie said to the 30 people I had hired for the day. As the director, I assumed that I would call most of the shots. But on the set Debbie was the field marshall. My role was to decide whether or not I liked the performances.

“Quiet on the set,” Debbie yelled, beginning the motion picture countdown I had heard a thousand times before. “QUIET!!!”

“Sound!” she hollered.

From behind his curtain, the sound man yelled back, “Sound speed.” His equipment was recording.

“Camera,” Debbie yelled.

“Rolling,” Dave hollered from behind the camera.

Allen, the bandanna-headed, multiple ear-ringed second assistant cameraman stepped in front of the camera. “And marker,” he said as he snapped the black and white slate.

“Annnnnnnnnd ACTION!” Debbie yelled.

Before I could absorb that my movie was finally underway, Dave, the DP, was yelling “Cut, cut, cut.” Something had gone wrong. And so it went for the next 13 hours as we captured as many goofs as good shots.

Sometimes the camera would “dolly” too far and reveal a production assistant smoking in the background. Buses went by and drowned out the actors’ lines. We forgot to turn the telephone off. Someone called for Chinese take-out, ruining another shot.

Throughout the day it was a race against time. Around midnight, we were running out of film and energy. We did a few scenes outside the restaurant and then aimed our puny lights on the Transamerica Pyramid. I hoped it would make a beautiful opening or “establishing” shot for the film. It was the last thing we filmed.

“That's a wrap,” I said. Within an hour the crew had put the restaurant back together and left to start on Rancid's music video.

I have climbed some very high mountains and bicycled across the continent. I’ve completed open water ocean swims and run a marathon. Nothing compares to the exhaustion I felt after 20 hours on the set. That night I hallucinated for several hours wondering how and if my film would come out.

The camera could have malfunctioned. The film might have been no good. There was no telling until it came back from the lab.

Two days later, I gathered with the crew to watch the “dailies,” the low cost, first print of Fortune Tell. The image looked good, great in fact. The tension I'd been feeling for weeks began to drain away.

“Hey look!” someone said. “There's a boom shadow.” The shadow of the microphone was visible in every shot. My heart fell. A boom shadow is one of the most basic filmmaking errors.

“Don't worry,” Debbie told me. “No one will see it.”

Maybe. But it wasn't her money and reputation on the line.

To get Fortune Tell in the can, I had spent months writing, planning, fretting, rehearsing, fretting, reviewing, casting, fretting, and finally filming. I had spent $5600, more than my original budget for the entire project. I had taken on the tasks of writing, editing, producing and directing for three reasons; one, I wanted to learn as much as I could, two; I wanted to show all the jerks in Hollywood what a huge talent they had overlooked, and, three; I was cheap.

As I began to edit the film into a “rough cut,” I discovered to my astonishment that we had failed altogether to film a scene on the day of the shoot. Without it, I didn't know if the film would make any sense. Going back to “pick up” the shot would have cost thousands. I became so despondent I would have dropped the whole thing except for the money already spent.

To better understand the film-making process my instructors suggested I edit Fortune Tell myself. A professional could have finished the job in a week. It took me months. And months.

Often, to get the pacing right, I would take out small pieces of film, sometimes just two or three frames. Keeping track of all these “outs” took as much or more time than editing the film itself.

Later, when I wanted to change a scene again, I had to go back into the reels of “outs,” find the sections of film and sound I wanted, cut them out and tape them in place. I spent hours and hours and hours working over tiny fractions of a second of film. I pleaded with Nina, my fiancée who had since become my wife, to help out. She did. Once. She had no patience for the pre-digitized world of film editing.

As I continued to edit and mutilate the working copy of my film, there were countless other details still to be taken care of. Peter Whitehead, an avant-garde musician, agreed to write and perform the score for Fortune Tell. When I heard his music, performed on a toy piano, cello, spinning bicycle spokes, and a few hand-made instruments, I thought it was all wrong. Distraught, I looked at Nina for commiseration.

“It's great!” she said. “So much better than that corny saxophone you wanted.”

Even as the film neared completion, the list of things to be done seemed to grow ever longer. I needed titles. To have the words Fortune and Tell appear over the Transamerica Pyramid cost me $600.

To get the sound right, so that all the voices, background sounds, and music blended together ran another $1000. All for a movie that would eventually be just six minutes and eighteen seconds long.

All along, it was difficult for me to know what was good enough. When the budget broke the $10,000 barrier and with my VISA bills mounting, I knew Fortune Tell was as close to good enough as it ever would get.

I took everything to the lab. There, technicians balanced the film's color so that the actors' skin always had the same hue. They wed the sound to the film. They told me to come back in a week to view the “first answer print,” the print that would answer whether or not my film worked.

A week later, I pushed a button in the lab's small screening room and told the projectionist to roll it. The lights went down. Peter's music filled the room. The Transamerica Pyramid faded in on the screen. I watched Fortune Tell, in its completed form, for the first time. I had been working on it, in spurts and starts, for more than 22 months.

It wasn't perfect, but it was good. How good I wasn't sure. Whether it would catch Hollywood's attention I couldn't know. I sent videotape copies to festivals. My wife and I left for an extensive overseas trip.

Nina told me to prepare for total rejection. The top film festivals get thousands of submissions for a few dozen slots. And getting into a festival, any festival, was no assurance that Hollywood would stand up and notice.

After two months on the road, I called to see if there was any news.

“Oh, there is,” my mother-in-law said from halfway around the world. “Aspen, Denver and San Francisco all want your film. It's so exciting.”

Two weeks later, on opening night at the Aspen Film Festival in Colorado, I took my seat in the sold-out orchestra of a beautiful, gold rush era theater. Fortune Tell had been paired with another dark comedy, To Die For, the hit by director Gus Van Sant.

Before the lights went down, I must have gotten out of my seat a dozen times. I went to the bathroom. I went to the drinking fountain. I went back to the bathroom. Before returning to my seat I paused at the back of the packed hall. I turned to the person next to me, perhaps planning to make a little nerve-soothing chit-chat, only to see that, like quite a few others, Martina Navratilova would be standing when my film began.

“Feel my heart,” I said to my wife as I finally took my seat. No audience had ever seen my film. All I could hear was the pounding in my chest.

Before I knew it, the audience was applauding, applauding wildly. My six-minute eighteen-second baby was over and they had loved it. Nicole Kidman was on-screen. To Die For had begun.

It was only later that night that I realized Fortune Tell had succeeded. My film noir thriller had people laughing so loudly that half the jokes had been drowned out. The expense, the agonizing, the self-doubt all faded away.

Making Fortune Tell was the hardest thing I have ever done. I spent two physically and mentally exhausting years working on something that lasts just six minutes. The short has since played all over the United States, in Europe, in airplanes, on television, in theaters and now on the Internet. And in Hollywood they still don’t return my calls.

So, would I do it again? Sure. You bet. Though it’s now been years since I last sat in a theater and waited for my film to begin, I can still hear the audience.

A version of this story first appeared in the January 28, 1996, edition of West, the Sunday magazine of the San Jose Mercury News.

In addition to debuting at the Aspen Film Festival, Fortune Tell played at festivals around the world including New Directors/New Films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (paired with Stanley Tucci's debut feature, Big Night), Manheim/Heidelberg, The British Short Film Festival, Palm Springs, Taos, and many others. It has also been shown on multiple PBS stations, the BBC, Canal+, and as part of in-flight programming.

Click here to view Fortune Tell on YouTube.

The Really Big Screen

2010-10-11T06:10:00.002+03:00

It was never as good as we will remember it to be. The features were typically second rate, the sound lousy and the screens dirty. Someone was forever slamming a car door on the way to the bathroom or concession stand. Late arrivals swept their headlights across the screen wiping out the picture altogether. Horns blared as the intertwined limbs of awkward adolescents got caught up with steering wheels and dashboards. Thinking back, I can't remember much about any of the movies I saw. Still, I am going to miss the drive-in.

My wife and I rediscovered the drive-in after our daughter was born. At first we took her to those few regular theaters that allow infants. But even there, with her fast asleep in my arms, other patrons cast disapproving looks our way. “I thought this theater had a no infant policy,” a woman said to us at a matinee of Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You. “Evidently not,” my wife snapped back as we took our seats.

When our daughter turned five months old, she began yapping at the characters on the screen. Our family days at the movies were over, at least for a while. Tickets, parking, and a baby-sitter made a night at the movies a fifty-dollar affair. Without dinner. There just weren't any pictures we wanted to see that badly.

“Let's go to the drive-in,” my wife suggested. That afternoon we drove to the southern edge of San Francisco, to the Geneva Drive-In, to reconnoiter the area, not wanting to get lost near the Cow Palace at night. Even with the sun shining the Geneva looked like a run-down, dangerous dump and was that much gloomier and ominous at night. An old grandstand was on the verge of collapse. The four huge screens didn't seem much sturdier. The stanchions that once held the speakers had been battered so many times by night-time movie goers and day-time flea market patrons that they looked like the teetering crosses of a ghost town cemetery. Still, we became something like regulars.

Simply seeing the screen at the Geneva entailed regularly starting the engine to run the defroster. Even with a clear windshield we still wound up occasionally watching a movie through streaming fog that raced toward the Bay and tormented San Francisco Giants fans at nearby Candlestick Park. The sound, channeled through the radio, came across as though broadcast from the other side of the planet. It wasn't the best way to watch a movie. But then going to the drive-in was never really about going to the movies anyway.

As a kid growing up in the Northeast my widowed mother took my brothers and me to the drive-in fairly often. We even went in the winter as a way of escaping the incipient cabin-fever that slowly built during the long, dark, cold days. I don't recall a single movie I saw with my family, yet those were magical nights.

What could have been more exciting to a six-year old than going out, at night, in the middle of winter, wearing pajamas with feet, to see a movie through falling snow? It was the height of surrealism. (Of course, I wasn't at the drive-in in Fontland, Ontario, when a tornado swept through the theater, blowing the screen to smithereens while Twister was playing. Talk about special effects.)

My mother gave up on the drive-in about the time we all became more interested in what was going on in the cars on either side of ours than on the screen in front of us. “Mom, what are they doing over there?” one of us was sure to ask. She would concoct some vague answer in the Ozzie and Harriet, Donna Reed style of the day. “But why would they want to do that?” one of my almost adolescent brothers was sure to ask.

Twenty years later I knew the answer when the woman I was dating suggested we go to the drive-in. She was a big gal who drove her pick-up like a cowboy. We bounded into the drive-in, she backed into a space, got out a cooler, and unrolled a mattress. The Richard Gere remake of Breathless, said to be one of the worst movies ever made, was playing. I wouldn't know. A couple hours later the second feature was over and it was time to go. Neither one of us saw a frame of either movie.

One might think that with more and more pick-ups and SUVs running around, a drive-in renaissance might be in the offing. But rocketing real estate prices, cable and satellite TV, the VCR, and the demise of teenage virginity and the automobile bench seat have all but killed the drive-in. Thirty years ago there were more than 220 in California alone. That number has dwindled into the low forties and continues to head downward.

Not surprisingly the Geneva closed for good in 1998. Despite the miserable weather and facilities, we had good times at there. I'm sure that when Ben Stiller opened the door for Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary every theater in America rolled with laughter. But it couldn't have been the same as watching cars bounce up and down as people howled and smashed their dashboards over the same joke at the drive-in.

One drizzly night at the Geneva an armed guard chased a gang of young men right past our fogged-over windshield as we tried to watch Tomorrow Never Dies.

“Wow,” my wife said after our hearts stopped racing. “You won't see that at the Coronet,” one of San Francisco’s few remaining single screen movie palaces.

Another mildewy evening we went to see Bullworth in which Warren Beatty plays a senator up for reelection. During one scene Beatty winds up in an after-hours club, dancing with Halle Berrie, and rapping “Yo baby, yo baby, yo baby.” From the back seat, our then eighteen-month old daughter, who we thought asleep, joined in in her tiny, high pitched voice. “Yo baby. Yo baby. Yo baby.” For the rest of the evening any time it grew quiet she would start up again. “Yo baby. Yo baby. Yo baby.” We have never laughed louder at the movies.

Some time ago I stumbled across what must have been a great party. Inside one of the piers at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, professional organizers had 30 or 40 convertibles parked before a large movie screen. Someone – someone very rich – was going to have a birthday party with a drive-in movie theme. The convertibles were all new. The sound and the projection were sure to be state of the art. No doubt the catering was fabulous. Under cover, there'd be no fog or rain or snow. But I wondered if they could really capture the essence of the drive-in. The awkward walk to the concession stand past cars full of necking strangers. The anticipation of maybe “getting someplace” with one's own date. The juvenile delinquent delight of sneaking friends into the show inside the trunk. The impossible juggling act of trying to watch the movie, comfort the baby and eat popcorn all at the same time. There was probably none of that. Now, in the Bay Area, there are people so rich they can spend thousands to recreate a drive-in even as the real thing disappears. It seems almost undemocratic.

It was about the same time that we last went to the Burlingame, the only San Francisco area drive-in still standing and scheduled for imminent demolition. Our car bottomed out several times as we negotiated the flooded aisles. A naked hot dog suggestively jumped into a waiting bun in the trailer for the concession stand, which commanded us to “Celebrate the Drive-In.” As instructed, we turned our parking lights on and soon a young man appeared out of the thin rain to take our order for pizza and popcorn. On screen, Buzz and Woody ranted their way through Toy Story Two. The anemic sound that came in over the radio was half static. There were exactly three other cars watching the show. We wouldn't have to answer any embarrassing questions that night.

“It's not very romantic,” I said to my wife as the window-wipers beat back and forth, the defroster blasted, and our daughter complained that she couldn't see a thing.

“Let me tell you what's romantic,” my wife said before leaning over to kiss me.

Like I said, I'm going to miss the drive-in.

A version of this story originally appeared in the March 19, 2000 edition of the San Francisco Sunday Examiner Magazine.

The Marabou Shrug

2010-08-09T12:04:00.008+03:00

I couldn't fall asleep last night. No matter how many times I went over it in my mind, I couldn't remember what I had done with the marabou shrug - and that's what kept me from falling asleep.

Just a few months earlier, like most people I suppose, I had no idea what a marabou shrug was or that one would soon come into my possession. Now that it is gone, its whereabouts have bedeviled me and filled me with guilt.

Trying to remember what I had done with it wasn't like trying to remember the lyrics of a song - or where I was the first time I smelled a smell that I had just smelled again after many years of not smelling it. It wasn't ticking through the dusty leaves of my mental Rolodex trying to bring up some long forgotten fact. The marabou shrug had come and gone recently. I had held it and then let it go. My impetuosity made me sad. I felt I had to get it back. But, of course, I couldn't get it back if I couldn't remember what I had done with it.

What was I thinking? A marabou shrug. Where would I ever find another one? And even if I did, it wouldn't be the one I had gotten rid of. And that was the only one that mattered.

I found it in a small, flat box tucked away on a shelf in her closet. The closet that was her original closet. After my brothers and I grew up and moved away, all of our closets became her closets. And then when Dad died, his closet became hers as well. But I found the box in what was her original closet, the one two rows deep with hangers. The one I can remember hiding in as a child, looking up at the belts and the scarves and the blouses while making fortresses from all her boxes of shoes.

The box I found the marabou shrug in was the type fine clothing stores used to send men's shirts home in, protected by a few sheaves of white tissue paper. A box that was almost guaranteed to make some sort of crinkling sound when opened. This was, of course, before the advent of plastic wrap.

Though the box was tucked away just next to the closet door, I doubt it had been touched, or even opened, since she moved in. That was 51 years ago. Embossed in gold on the top of the box was "Garfinkels, Chicago." Written just next to that, in pencil, in my mother's unmistakable hand, was "Marabou Shrug."

There was never any mistaking my mother's handwriting. It's been exactly the same for seventy years, maybe longer. Full of grand swirls and tiny loops, it's entirely feminine but somehow in no way frilly. Every letter was always precisely the same, whether written in the 1930s or in the 1990s. It's so uncannily consistent, it could have been a font. The typographer could have called it "Betty." I don't know why, but her capital G, the first letter of her maiden name, always reminded me of a treble clef while not looking anything like a treble clef but more like the prow of one of Columbus' ships. How did she come up with this style, unlike anything anyone was ever taught in school? She must have first spent weeks devising it and then many more practicing it over and over and over again. I asked her not long ago where the "Betty" font had come from.

"I don't know," she said.

This is the problem with not asking questions until a parent approaches her tenth decade, everything starts to fade.

"Marabou Shrug?" I wondered to myself during the brief moment between the time I found the box and the time I opened it. "What is a Marabou Shrug?"

As expected, inside the box were the layers of crinkly tissue paper now gone yellow with age. And inside them, folded as neatly as my mother's handwriting was always exact, was what? A bunch of feathers. I reached in and with two hands gently lifted up a tiny piece of clothing, smaller and shorter than the vests toreadors wear. Lined with white satin, the outside was nothing but long, white feathers stitched to the backing by the thick end of their quills.

"Oh, that's my marabou shrug," my mother said as though she had been looking for it yesterday.

"A marabou shrug," she said wistfully, as though only to herself. "Can you imagine anyone wearing one today?"

We were on day number two of going through my mother's clothes. On day one we had worked our way to the back of her closet and dealt with blouses, skirts, coats and dresses. We were about to open a second front and begin the attack on her shoes.

Mom had moved out of her house, the house I grew up in and the house she had spent 51 years in, three months earlier. She didn't go far. Just a mile or so up the street to an independent living facility called The Oaks at Menorah Park which was a new addition to what used to be called The Jewish Home for the Aged. My brothers helped her make the initial move from house to home. At the time, she took with her only those clothes she thought she would need immediately, following our advice to leave everything else at the house, taking what more she needed as she got established in her new place.

That turned out to be about twelve linear feet of clothing. Left behind, in the old house, the rest of her clothes lined another perhaps 20, maybe 30, feet.

There was her original closet with the two long crossbars for hangers plus the double shelves and the stacks of shoes that we had mainly gone through already. There was Dad's closet, much smaller, but still enough to have accommodated his several suits and dozens of wing-collar powder-blue dress shirts. There was my brothers' closet, about the same size. Then there was my closet which she had appropriated right after I left for college. Those were the closets on the second floor.

In the basement, there was another closet, that one filled with winter clothes and orphaned zip-in liners from old coats that had been given away years ago. Then there was the front hall closet, no longer accommodating the outerwear of guests, who were less and less frequent, but given over to Mom's rain coats, winter coats, various rubbery things with which to protect shoes, umbrellas, more scarves, more shawls, a few hats that hadn't been worn in years (Did my mother ever wear a beret?), a pair of crutches, a bamboo cane - the type a vaudevillian might have used in a soft-shoe act, and a plastic bag filled with those small, fold-up, plastic hair protectors that expand from the size of a credit card to that of a small geodesic dome.

And then there was the faux-cedar closet in the attic, a three bar walk-in that held the whites in winter and the wools in summer as well as outfits with sequins, boxes from B. Altman's, Lord & Taylor's, Marshall Field's, and all the now long gone department stores of my Syracuse youth; Dey Bros., Flah's, Addis's, Sibley's and even Madame Netter's, the milliner. Nearly all of Mom's outfits in the attic were protected by the flimsy plastic sheaths used by dry cleaners, many of which still had the receipts, from the 1960s and the 1970s, stapled on. In absolute ready-to-wear condition was her first lieutenant's uniform from the Second World War, complete with matching cap protector and wet-weather cape, from when she served in the Navy.

What caused Mom to hang on to all these things she would never wear again? Nostalgia? Depression-era mentality? I don't know. But unlike most women, my mother's size never varied more than a percent or two from the 115 pounds she carried on her 5' 5" frame since adolescence - so purging her closets to accommodate the ups and downs of weight gain and loss was something she never had to do.

Taken altogether her wardrobe was a like an uncurated collection that stretched from the 1930s to the 21st century and across all four floors of her home. Its arc connected nearly all the points of fashion in the last 70 years, from the natural fabrics of her youth, to the first synthetics of the fifties to the 1970s ne plus ultra of Halston's Ultra-Suede, which some day historians, together with the first moon landing, may identify as the apogee of the American Era, after which it was all downhill.

In among the hundreds of items of clothing - the dresses, belts, blouses, slacks, suits, sashes, Bermudas, flats, pumps, mules, and heels - we didn't find anything terribly outlandish. Mom's was a wardrobe defined by a childhood of going to the movies during the 1930s and by her first job out of the University of Chicago, at Warner Bros in Chicago, with everything closely tailored for the educated career girl with a svelte figure.

Mom liked bright colors - daisy yellow, farmhouse red, golf course green, glaring winter white and wore them all well. For years, the carpet in her living room was the color of a fairway in spring. Sometimes I thought she selected her clothes to go with that carpet.

After three days of trying on and taking off clothes, Mom was completely exhausted. She didn't really want to go through every item. She wanted to take every item with her. But that wasn't possible. Her apartment at The Oaks is probably 8 or 900 square feet. Her house was 2,200. And she had a full basement and a full attic. I'm sure her house had more space for storage than her apartment at The Oaks has total space.

For my part, I wanted her to try on every item and approve its retention or deaccession. In fact, I insisted on it. Weeks or months later, when I was certain she would ask, "Where's my Burberry jacket?" I wanted to be able to say, "Mom, remember, it had gotten too big for you. We agreed to get rid of it." Of course, the clothes weren't growing. Mom was shrinking. And now that she had been gently nudged out of her house, I didn't want her thinking that we were unilaterally getting rid of still more of her things.

Trying on the clothes wasn't only tiring for Mom but for all of us. For the keepers, I put up a portable rolling rack. The items that were stained, didn't fit, or eternally out of fashion went on her bed to be donated or sold.

"But I want it," Mom would plead over the tenth, fifteenth and twentieth white blouse that I had put in the donate pile.

"Mom, it's got a stain. See? And the collar is starting to fray."

"But I need it."

"Mom, you don't need it," I would say. "You have six others just like it."

I don't know exactly when it started to happen, but sometime in the past decade my mother started to buy multiples of the same item. I understood this with shoes. She wears a 10 AAAA, a "canoe" in the trade, and if the shoes fits, and you like it, you'd better buy several pairs.

But why three and four pairs of the same lace-up walking shoes? Why four, five and six of the same LeSportsac purses? Why thirty or forty white turtlenecks, all with zippers custom sewn into the back of the neck so that she could take them on and off without mussing her hair?

"What can I say?" she once told one of my brothers. "I love beautiful clothes. I always have."

But the multiples weren't of beautiful clothes. They were of everyday items. I'm going to attribute it to the Depression and the same sense of childhood loss that always had a freezer in the basement full of bread - "Just in case" - as she would say. I think she never lost the fear that one day you could have everything and the next day you could wind up with nothing.

Early on during the winnowing, we struck a bargain; Mom could keep not more than two of any of one item.

She was not happy about this.

"Robert, I need it."

"Mom, your closets at The Oaks are almost full already."

"But I need it. I want it. Please."

"Mom, we've just put two aside here and there are already two in your apartment."

"But I like it."

"I know you do, Mom. Someone else will, too."

Somehow I wish I had been more ruthless with my mother years earlier. Now, with her tired and elderly and struggling to remember things, it just didn't seem right. Her pleas made me feel like an involuntary sadist. Her clothes were one of the few obvious things that still gave her pleasure - and I was forcing her to forego even that. It had to be done, I told myself, though now, in reflection, I'm not entirely sure why.

We had Mom try on wonderfully tailored pantsuits that I couldn't remember seeing her ever wear but that Barbara Stanwyck or Katherine Hepburn could have worn straight on to the set. Some of the slacks were so long I wondered how much Mom had shrunk over the years or if maybe once she had been taller than 5' 5".

Lately Mom's been struggling to keep her weight between 95 and 100. Despite the drop of 15 or more pounds, she couldn't fit into her Navy uniform. It was too tight. "I want it anyway," she said. I didn't argue. My mother's service in the military represents, I think, one of her proudest achievements and one of the happiest times of her life. Her uniform went on the keeper rack.

For the scarves and the shawls, she sat on the edge of her old bed and nodded yes or no as Nina and I held them up for her to inspect. There wasn't one that she didn't want. They were small. They wouldn't take up much space. We didn't argue and took 50 or 60 of them out to The Oaks.

After Mom finished trying everything on, we loaded the car with the keepers and drove them out to The Oaks where we rearranged her closets - winter clothes here, summer clothes there, "nostalgia" clothes on the shelves above the racks or in zippered plastic, portable, hanging wardrobes.

Back at her old place, I went on-line and posted two ads on Craigslist/Syracuse. The first read:

Large collection of stylish, classic women's clothing from 1940 - 1995. Casual to formal to evening wear.

The second read:

Large assortment of women's shoes in sizes 9 and 10 AAA to AAAAA. Heels to mules to pumps to flats from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Both concluded with

Call Robert at (315) 436-5496 to arrange an appointment.

I waited a week. I didn't get one call. This in a world in which t-shirts, exposed midriffs, and "no-wrinkle" clothes that contain not one warp nor one weft of natural fiber represent fashion.

I got out the Yellow Pages and called the one vintage store left in Syracuse. It's owned by the girlfriend of the son of a long-term family friend. She was always out. She was always busy. I left message after message and couldn't reach her. I even called her common-law mother-in-law to ask for help. Finally, after intimating that the Salvation Army would be getting everything, she came by the house with an assistant.

They quickly let their fingers do the walking, picking out a suit here, a blouse there while flicking past 90% of what I had assumed was vintage and collectible. Quickly we realized that they weren't about to take everything as I had hoped. Or even very much at all. After half an hour of watching them overlook what I assumed were classics, I found myself selling THEM, trying to convince THEM that the things they were skipping past were indeed worth taking, the selections of a woman with a good figure and the good taste to match, someone who knew how to carry classic lines and colors while never broaching the avant garde.

Yes, it's wonderful, they would tell me. But it's not what people are buying. It won't sell. A few years ago, sure. A couple of years from now, maybe. But not right now. The shop is full. Sorry, we can't carry inventory that won't sell.

What about these? I pleaded, You've got to take these. A 1950s clutch covered in a unicorn-motif brocade with three-inch high heels to match. Can't. Won't sell. Plus who wears a 10AAAAA? What about this, an alligator bag with the clasp made from the baby alligator's head? Look, the sales tag is still inside. And the receipt. She bought it in The Bahamas. 1948. Nope. Sorry. No one's going out with that today. But it's got the matching compact inside, I insisted. Nope. Can't do it. They don't make stuff like that anymore. But it won't sell.

After two hours of rummaging through the things that had taken us three days to cull, they settled on just half a rack. They found the little back-of-the-head pin-on hat made of bright red parrot feathers that no one has worn since Jackie Kennedy left the White House irresistible. They took the lambskin stole, the one with the missing mink collar. That one was a bit tough to let go. I vaguely recall that it had been passed down from a grandmother. Someone had had "Betty" hand-embroidered into the lining.

"Does $210 sound about right?" the girlfriend of the son of the family friend asked while getting out her checkbook.

My God, I thought, some of those outfits cost more than that 20 - 30 years ago.

"I know," she said. "But they might stay on the rack for another five years. They might never sell. I'll wind up giving them away."

I took the check.

The next buyers we contacted were a mother and daughter team. They were more interested. We told them what we had. "Thirties, forties, fifties. Things in the box. Some of it never worn. Things with the tags still on them." They came right over.

Just as quickly as the first couple of buyers, they quickly flicked through the racks. They agreed that Mom had had wonderful taste. We just can't sell it they said over and over again, shaking their heads and moving on to the next hanger.

"It comes to $119. Will that be all right?" the daughter asked.

After Mom had culled her collection, after two dealers had gone through it, we were still left with 15 feet of clothes and boxes and boxes of shoes. What do we do now, I asked the mother-daughter team. I just didn't think we had reached the point where the Salvation Army was the only remaining option.

Did you call so and so, another dealer, they asked. I had - and she hadn't returned my call.

The daughter got on her cell and began to sell the third dealer who I could tell must have been just as overstocked as everyone else. Finally the daughter pulled out all the stops regarding the remnants of Mom's wardrobe. "It's very Talbot's," the daughter said over her cell. "It's very Anne Klein-ish."

The third dealer came over that evening.

"I wish you had called me six months ago," she said. But now, she explained, she was stuck in between seasons, too late for summer and too early for Christmas. She couldn't afford to take much and have it just sit on the racks.

"It comes to $85. Will that be okay?"

And what does one say to that? No? Those clothes cost thousands of dollars. Nineteen fifties dollars, nineteen sixties and seventies and eighties dollars. That outfit cost two hundred dollars when gas was selling for twenty-six cents a gallon?

No, that's not what we said. We wanted it to be done. We took the check.

The following morning Nina and I loaded my mother's car. A late-model Impala, smaller than full-size cars of old, but still with comfortable seating for six. Layer upon layer of clothes, all on hangers, many still in bags from the dry cleaners, went into the truck until it was so full the lid bounced when I tried to slam it shut. Then we filled the back seat from floor to ceiling. Dozens of pairs of shoes, all in their original boxes, filled the foot wells. Nina got in the front seat and I piled her lap so high that I couldn't see out the side window nor she out the front.

The Salvation Army in Syracuse is a wonder. A vast, K-Mart like building with glaring fluorescent lighting over what must be several thousand feet of racks. It's down on Erie Boulevard, one of America's ugliest streets. It's less than a mile away from Mom's house, at the bottom of the very steep Seeley Avenue hill. We were there in six minutes.

I supposed I expected the receiving clerk to be awed by this car full of impeccably maintained clothes. But he wasn't. Several other cars that had been just as full as ours were pulling away while still others were lining up behind.

A lot has been written by economists and others about the multi-trillion dollar windfall that Baby Boomers will inherit in the next 15 years from The Greatest Generation. I wonder if anyone has calculated the trillions of tons of stuff they will also be inheriting - and what on Earth they are going to do with it all.

Mom said she was thrilled that someone had finally helped her go through all her stuff. But I'm not so sure. Things had given her meaning, whether she used them or not. And now the things were gone.

With Nina leading the charge, we finally braced ourselves and entered the large basement room where my dad had tossed his eclectic collection of antique and modern toys, old typewriters, Edison phonographs, medical quackery, antique radios and radio tubes, his mother's household furniture and all the stuff that had once filled his office and labs at the university. I don't know if he ever truly planned to get around to it, but he died 21 years ago without ever going through anything. Since then, it all sat there, dozens and dozens of corroding batteries attesting to the benign neglect. My mother always said she wanted to deal with the basement room, but that she didn't know where to start. With Nina it was like a chapter out of "Get Things Done." She started in the far corner and over three full days worked her way to the other side of the room. The room that had once been difficult to enter was now barren.

In six weeks of ten and twelve hour days, we completely emptied the house it had taken my mother more than 50 years to fill. I still have a hard time believing it.

We donated dozens of items to the university. Hundreds more were taken away by an auctioneering house. Every Tuesday night for six weeks I dragged up to 16 garbage cans of stuff out to the curb to be thrown away. In Syracuse, every household is limited to two cans a week, so for a month and a half I parceled out our excess up and down the block in front of the households that weren't using their quota.

It was amazing how much stuff there was to be thrown away; carpet remnants, plastic hangers, metal hangers, shredded bank statements and bags and bags of cancelled checks. Out of the thousands of old checks, one fell out of the stack, like the sought after card in a magic trick. The check was made out by my Dad to Henry Cramer, the dentist, long retired, who still lived directly across the street. It was for $75 and dated 1948. I took it over to Dr. Cramer, now 89, and we both wondered why anyone had hung on to a check for nearly 60 years.

Someone directed us to Mr. Gilbert, the local ironmonger who came by with his son and hauled the chest freezer Mom had brought to Syracuse from Chicago in 1954 out of the basement. It had been broken for years and she used it to store light bulbs. He also dragged out the extra range Mom had also brought from Chicago, and which still worked but hadn't been used since a particularly large Thanksgiving dinner sometime in the 1960s. And later he came back again to take the large, broken upright freezer that stank terribly after someone had turned it off but left the door closed. How he makes any money from hauling this stuff away for free and then breaking it up for recycling, I have no idea. But he saved us the $500 others wanted to take it all away.

An "end lots" man came by to take stuff the auctioneer didn't want and the Salvation Army wouldn't take. He filled up his rusting Econo-Van twice and gave us $40. We heard he sells the stuff at weekend flea markets.

Someone else agreed to take all the old radios and phonographs and auction them for us on eBay.

The 61-year old daughter of the dentist across the street bought my brothers' childhood bunk beds and dressers. She now lives in Florida but wanted them for the three-bedroom home she recently bought in Syracuse for $37,000 so she could have a place to stay when she visits her father.

And every day for weeks I put stuff out on the curb - mattresses, broken furniture, an Encyclopaedia Britannica - that no one would buy and that no one would take. In the grand tradition, all day long passing cars would slow and sometimes stop, their owners getting out to grab a rusted lawn chair with broken weaving or the three-legged wing chair that sat unrepaired in the attic for at least 45 years.

And still we had a couple dozen bankers boxes filled with memorabilia and photos to take to The Oaks where we stacked them on the racks above Mom's clothes in the closets.

But among the thousands of items that once filled my mother's house, it was the clothes that were the most emotional. At the Salvation Army, the clerk, Nina and I began carrying armfuls inside where we found ourselves at the base of an immense mound that rose nearly to the ceiling of a large warehouse type building.

"We got a little behind at Christmas," the clerk told us.

It was late July.

With no ceremony whatsoever, the receiving clerk started throwing the clothes up as high as he could onto the mound. At the far end, other Salvation Army workers were prying clothes loose and sorting them out into the saleable and the not.

Nina and I looked at each other with disbelief. All those years of buying. All the fittings and the tailoring. The dry cleaning. The pressing and preserving. And now, like a doll discarded by a child, the clerk was simply tossing Mom's cherished clothes willy-nilly among old jeans, t-shirts, soiled winter clothes, mismatched shoes, crushed hats, random pieces of underwear and who knows what.

We stood there with our arms full.

Then we began to toss.

Like the tails of kites, the items in dry cleaning bags fluttered to the top of the heap and then slid right back to the bottom where they came to a stop in a jellyroll like lump of plastic.

It took the three of us four or five trips to the car to unload it completely. As I heaved the last item onto the pile, I thought of the final scene in "Citizen Kane," when Rosebud gets tossed into the incinerator. Meaningless to the worker, it was the kernel of Kane's psyche - as perhaps my mother's wardrobe was to her - and both wound up in a pile of rubble of no value or meaning to anyone else.

Now, several months later, it seems to me that I had pleaded with the various clothes dealers to take the marabou shrug, but that none of them wanted it. Who could fit in it? they had wondered. Who would wear it. Maybe one of the dealers did take it. I don't remember it floating up and then settling back down on the heap of castoffs at the Salvation Army.

And now that it's gone, probably forever, I want it back. And that's why I couldn't sleep last night.

In my mind's eye, I see a photograph of my mother wearing the marabou shrug when she was a Wave in the Navy, stationed in San Francisco, where she had the possibility of a dozen dates every night with sailors and soldiers on shore leave. The photo is a big 8 by 10 in black and white taken with a Speed Graphic like Weegee used and the loud "pop" of a disposable flash bulb.

In the photo, Mom is smiling broadly, men in uniform on either side of her, as they make their way into The Top of the Mark, or The Starlight Ballroom, or The Tonga Room, or Bimbo's 365, which was then at 365 Market Street and not down on lower Columbus Avenue as it is today. In the photo, Mom's posture is great. She's slender and pretty and happy. She's not made up much, a little lipstick maybe. But she didn't need to be made up because she's wearing the marabou shrug and so make-up would have been gilding the lily, as she might have said about someone else. The marabou shrug follows her shape so closely it's as though they were her feathers and not those of some poor and rather ugly and awkward African stork. With her head high and shoulders back, the marabou shrug holds her form in such a way that every man in the place must have wanted to be the one to help her slip it off and onto the back of a cocktail chair.

Four months have passed since we cleaned out Mom's house and she's probably not remembering all the things that she once had. She's probably forgotten about the marabou shrug. But I haven't. I'd like to get it back. Maybe it's on the racks at that vintage store in Syracuse.

But if it isn't, I'd like to think that somewhere in Syracuse, there is a 16 or 17 or 18 year-old high-school girl with a slender figure who stands about 5' 5" and who's thinking about her prom, imaging how wonderful her bare arms will feel as they slip along the satin lining of the marabou shrug. And that when the time comes, she will gently yet firmly pull it onto her shoulders where it will settle in a way that will lift her spirits and the heart beats of all the young men who see her. She is going to go out feeling wonderful.

I hope that she wears the marabou shrug with pride and bearing, and that it stays in her closet, and with her children, for a long, long time.

I wrote this story in December 2007. My mother died yesterday. She was 92.

Love in an Upper Berth

2010-06-04T14:57:00.002+03:00

My wife was insistent. She wanted to see penguins, in the wild. It didn’t matter that we live twenty minutes from a zoo. She wanted to see them in their native habitat. So, together with our ten month old daughter Allegra, we traveled to Chile, to the Straits of Magellan, to see pingüinos.

Fifteen hours after leaving San Francisco, we landed in Santiago. Chile is a ridiculously long, narrow country stretched between the Andes and the sea. We had flown more than 6,000 miles. Los pengüinos were still 2,000 miles away.

To reach the penguins it would have been easiest to take another flight from Santiago to the very bottom of the hemisphere, to Punta Arenas, the largest, southernmost city in the world. But there was a rumor that the state owned passenger train that runs south from the Chilean capital was about to be discontinued. It would take us only 600 miles, to the city of Temuco, less than half the distance we needed to go but this was a chance we might not have again. The line that once ran to the north of the country had slid off the rails more than a decade earlier.

“Let go to the station,” I said to my wife. “If they have tickets, we’ll take the train.”

The Estación Central in Santiago is an old wrought iron barn with six tracks. On one stood a steam engine. The overall look of the place made me unsure whether it was a museum piece or something that actually still puffed its way somewhere.

Tickets were available for that evening’s sleeper. Seventy five dollars secured a deluxe bedroom. We climbed aboard.

The dank smell of aged mildew filled the Pullman car. The rich, dark woods and green, velour, nail-head upholstery conjured up Agatha Christie. A porter showed us our room.

The edges of the two facing seats were worn down into a thin jade while the backs had somehow retained their original emerald color. The carpet was threadbare, the double framed windows cracked and yellowed. The lamp fixtures appeared as though designed shortly after the domestication of electricity.

The train jolted out of Santiago at 8 p.m., exactly on schedule. Through our open bedroom door, across the narrow corridor, and out through the windows on the far side of the train, we watched the distant ridge of the Andes turn orange, then gold, then rose and finally disappear in a cloak of violet and darkness.

Our daughter stood on the edge of the seat, her head draped out the rattling window like a Labrador. A waiter appeared to ask what time we would like to be seated in the dining car. He poured us two pisco sours, the margaritas of Chile. Quite quickly our sense of balance and the sway of the train became one.

There was one other couple in the long dining car. Lace curtains, etched fixtures, and the parquet floor hinted at the art moderne elegance now retained only by the tuxedoed staff. We ordered roast beef and more pisco sours. Our soup sloshed back and forth as the waiter made a great show of presenting the wine. He swayed like a violinist, assuring us this was the only way not to spill. We ate slowly and quietly, handing off Allegra to the waiter, the chefs and the other couple. Unlike American restaurants where a young child is likely to be greeted with sneers, on the train and in every restaurant in Chile, our daughter was swept up by strangers who were happy to play with her as we ate. For desert, the waiter brought us coffee and flan. Outside a world entirely black passed by at 50 miles per hour.

Back in our room, I lay down with our daughter in the cozy bed that had been made up from the two seats. My wife clambered into the upper berth. Allegra wasn’t sure what to make of this bed that lurched, jerked, and slid from side to side and back and forth. She burrowed her way into the nape of my neck, her breath tickling my skin like the gentle puffs of a tropical breeze. Soon, she was deep asleep.

Silently finding my way in the darkness, I stepped on the sink and hoisted myself into the upper berth.

“What are you doing?” my wife hissed.

“What do you mean, what am I doing?” I said. “I’m coming to visit you. I’m your husband.”

“And what about our daughter?” she said in a way that suggested I had forgotten the child sleeping below us.

“She’ll be fine,” I said. “She’s dead asleep.”

“No, no, no. Get back down there. Right now. She could fall on the floor. She could fall out the window!”

“She’s not going to fall out the window,” I said. “She’s fine. And the window is closed.”

I attempted to pull my wife close. She pushed me away. I nearly tumbled to the floor six feet below.

“What are you doing?! She’s perfectly safe. Relax. Do you know what a room like this would cost on Amtrak?”

“Even Amtrak doesn’t have rooms like this,” she said.

Rebuffed, I climbed back down. In the few seconds I had been gone, our daughter had taken over the entire twin bed. She lay there, fast asleep, warm and slightly damp, like a huge mound of dough left to rise, showing no inclination to move.

“We’re supposed to be on vacation,” I seethed.

“Go to sleep,” came the response from above.

An opportunity for romance was slipping away. The train rolled on.

I teetered on the sliver of mattress left by our little girl, unable to sleep. Counting penguins didn’t help.

“But we’ve never had a bedroom on a train before,” I said.

“Make a note,” my wife said. “Now GO-TO-SLEEP.”

I rolled up the blanket and tucked it in around Allegra. She had only just begun crawling. Short of a derailment, she was not going anywhere.

Quietly I stepped on the seat, then the sink and launched myself back into the upper berth. I slipped under the thick, heavy, Ferrocarriles del Estado de Chile comforter.

“What are you doing?” my wife asked.

“What do you think I’m doing?” I said. “I’m your husband.”

“Is that so,” she said coyly as she put her arms around me.

At 8 a.m., twelve hours and six hundred miles after departing Santiago we arrived in Temuco, the gateway to Chile’s stunning lake district and the end of the line. The train had long been in the station when the porter awoke us. The night, punctuated by the train’s motion, had passed in an instant. The penguins, however, were still 1,400 miles away.

Days later, after eight hours on busses, a two-hour flight, and a 90-minute trip in a mini-van, we arrived at the penguin colony, las pingüineras, 30 minutes before dusk. The landscape along the Straits of Magellan was completely unforgiving. It’s a bleak, storm swept place where the outline of Tierra del Fuego forms the horizon. Our small mini-van shook from the constant buffeting of the wind. I wrapped Allegra in three layers of clothing, put her in a baby sling, zipped both of us inside my jacket, and stepped out into the 50-mile per hour wind. Instantly, she began shrieking and would not stop. She had traveled for more than a week, to the very bottom of our hemisphere, to the 53rd parallel, without complaint. But of this wind she was having none.

Watching our ordeal, the park rangers invited her to stay behind in their small, warm, wooden hut. Allegra, who a moment before could not be comforted, was thrilled. We had come to the end of the earth to show her penguins in the wild, but now we plunged into the wind without her, walking the final mile out to the penguin colony by ourselves.

There, 50 small Magellan penguins waddled back and forth from the sea to their hutches. While the wind exfoliated our faces, the penguins seemed to be having a gas, rolling in the surf, playing follow the leader in their little black and white penguin lines. Within minutes we were absolutely freezing. Meanwhile, our ten month old was blissfully happy, eating cookies next to a warm fire with four attentive park rangers.

“It would have been easier to go to the zoo!” I yelled to Nina over the wind.

“What?” my wife yelled back.

“The zoo,” I shouted. “We could have gone to the zoo!”

She put her lips up to my ear.

“There’s no train at the zoo,” she whispered just above the wind.

We spent 30 minutes watching the penguins then turned to leave, our faces coarse and dry from the wind and cold. It would be a long trip home. More than 8,000 miles. But we knew a fine night of sleep waited for us on the train back to Santiago.

A version of this story first appeared in the October 4, 1998 edition of the Sunday Chicago Tribune.

Cutting Teeth - In Queensland

2010-04-22T07:24:00.002+03:00

There’s a lot of things that will kill you in the far northeastern corner of Australia known as tropical north Queensland. The Australians who live there never tire of telling visitors about the many hazards present in their state, famed as home to the Great Barrier Reef. It’s as though once you’ve made the 15 hour trip from California the locals inadvertently intend that you should never leave your hotel room.

Despite its perils, Queensland does have something for everyone. There’s the famed Australian Outback -- millions of acres of barely inhabited nothingness. There’s the Reef, with its thousands of islands and countless dive spots. There’s the tropical rainforest which cascades down to the very edge of the ocean. And there’s the beach, hundreds of miles of brilliant white sand, utterly unpeopled and unspoiled. Aside from snow-capped mountains, Queensland has every possible setting a tourist might want. And every one of them has something sure to kill you.

Steel fencing encloses vast stretches of beach to keep them safe from the great whites that prowl off-shore. During Queensland’s early spring and summer, a second, inner net is dragged out to keep the swimming areas clear of box jellyfish or “stingers” as the locals call them. One well meaning Queenslander told me that should I get stung I’d have 90 seconds to get back to shore, find some vinegar, and splash it on the stingers. This would neutralize their deadly toxins. Fortunately, he explained, there are bottles of vinegar left out at all public beaches. Unfortunately, if I didn’t make it in time, I’d begin to lose consciousness and death would quickly follow.

Of course, he reminded me, that while deranged and racing panic stricken from the surf, I should try not to attract the attention of any of Queensland’s thousands of enormous crocodiles that regularly drag inattentive bathers to gruesome and bloody submarine deaths. And don’t get them started about scorpions, spiders, deadly rainforest plants, or Queensland’s famed and endangered cassowary bird, which, unlike its relatives the ostrich and emu, is aggressive and can kick a grown man 20 feet through the air, splitting his chest open in the process.

I’m a reasonably adventurous traveler. I’ve bungee jumped. I’ve stepped out of a perfectly good airplane 15,000 feet above the ground. In one 12 month stretch I visited four different countries all claiming to be the world’s most destitute. I even rent an apartment in San Francisco. There’s not much that scares me. But this constant confrontation with nature’s deadly side gave me the idea that boldly probing Queensland’s many wonders might result in more adventure than I wanted.

After a few stunning dives on the Reef and with “stinger” season about to begin I decided that the dry Outback might be a bit less hazardous than the wet and wild coast.

Ha! I was told by each and every Queenslander. Had I never heard of the taipan, the brown snake, the death adder, or the tiger snake? Didn’t I know that Australia was home to 8 of the 10 deadliest snakes in the world? No, it’s 18 of the world’s 20 most deadly snakes another well intended, proud and chauvinistic Aussie informed me with the same zeal New Yorkers once used when bragging about the crime problem in their city. (Just so I shouldn’t miss the point, during my visit one of the local papers reported that fatal snake attacks had risen 600% in 1998 alone.)

Well then, maybe just a daytime bush walk in the Outback, I suggested. Fine, I was told. Just be careful of the black spear grass, an innocent looking plant with a seed that catches on one’s socks and then slowly corkscrews its way into one’s ankles where the body’s natural humidity causes it to germinate. The well meaning man who guided me through the eerie lava tubes of the Undara National Park told me that occasionally very nasty infections result, with a plant eventually erupting on the other side of one’s leg. Clearly this was something I wanted to avoid because bringing live plants back from Australia would violate USDA and Customs Department regulations.

Having survived the Reef, rainforest, and outback, I was ready to see more of Queensland’s non-fatal side. What about a farm stay? I asked of the tourism people. “Well, ah, okay,” they said.

Nearly all Americans come to Queensland to dive the Reef. My request for a home on the range experience had them ruffling through their brochures.

“What kind of farm?” they asked.

“How about an alpaca farm?” I said.

“Al-what-a?” the woman said.

If nothing else, the Australians are persistent and not long after I was headed toward the Willow Park Alpaca Stud and Albion Farm Stay, home to a herd, rather “mob,” of fuzzy, funny-looking, and, most importantly, non-venomous alpacas. The worse they could do was gob some spit at you, I was told. Non-venomous spit.

I didn’t know much about alpacas. A few years earlier I had seen a mob of them in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. Their fur was the king of all fibers I learned, more prized than cashmere or pashmina. Alpacas and an alpaca farm, I thought, might be the way out of my confined, urban apartment existence and to a long held back-to-the-land fantasy that once had me and my wife working on a goat farm. But unlike goats or cows, alpacas didn’t require milking twice a day. Aside from an annual shearing, they pretty much took care of themselves.

Driving through the Australian countryside, I passed towns with names that only Fred Flintstone could have conjured up. Towns like Biddaddaba. The welcoming sign for the city of Warwick informed me that I was passing through a “tidy town.” Albion was not far away. I began to daydream about my future as one of America’s great alpaca barons, rocking away on the porch of my alpaca Ponderosa, contemplating the fortunes of my mob with my feet up. Far away from the perils of sharks, and stingers, and spear grass, and crocodiles, I began to relax and enjoy Queensland’s gently rolling farm land.

My daydream came to an end at a small rural junction outside of Warwick where a sign pointed to the town of Albion. But a few minutes down the road I had more than covered the distance with no sign of a town. After turning around, I quickly arrived at Willow Park Stud, realizing that in rural Australia you don’t have to be as big as a town or village to have your own road sign. You can just be a house or a farm. Albion and Willow Park were one and the same.

Forty furry, long necked, absolutely goofy looking alpacas stood quietly clustered together in the large paddock. A few had been shorn and their odd, camelid features must have inspired George Lucas and his production designers when they first imagined some of the creatures that inhabit the world of Star Wars. Out strode Harry Liaubon, who together with wife Jen, owns Willow Park and has been in the alpaca business for 10 years.

Harry, with his stiff gray mustache, head of perfectly silver hair, and a broad, gap-tooth smile, looked more the retired Buckingham Palace guard than alpaca tycoon. On the “barbie” he had a six inch thick, butterflied leg of lamb that easily weighed 10 pounds.

“Do you have other guests?” I asked Harry who easily juggled cigarette, beer, and grill tools while swatting at the flies that should be Australia’s national bird.

“No Robby,” he said. “Just the three of us. It’ll cook down. You’ll see. No worries.”

“Australia,” I thought. “Big country. Big food.”

Over dinner Harry and Jen gave me a brief tutorial on alpacas. They’re a high plains animal from the Andes whose wool was once coveted for royal garments. Now they provide the yarn for the finest of woolen goods. An alpaca sweater at Neiman-Marcus, for example, can go for $500 or more.

At Albion, Harry and Jen raised the more common huacaya with its coat of puff-ball wool as well as suris whose wool hangs in long, tightly curled locks like the tassels of a flapper’s dress.

“Just feel this Robby,” Jen said. I plunged my hands in a large bag of alpaca fiber. Until someone begins weaving feathers or baby’s hair it will have no challengers.

I told Harry and Jen that I had come to Albion for a hands on experience. I wanted to know if alpacas were in my future. They shouldn’t coddle me. “Right,” Harry said, “No worries Robby. We can cut some teeth tomorrow.”

That sounded good -- until the next morning when I learned that Harry really meant cutting teeth -- alpaca teeth. For an alpaca, life at Willow Park is the gravy train. Without having to forage among the rocky plains of the Andean altiplano their teeth grow indefinitely, like beavers or woodchucks without wood to chuck.

“Problem is” Harry explained, “that when the machos (males) are battling for mates they tend to bite each others’ testicles. So we need to cut their teeth.” I briefly put myself in the male alpaca’s place. Have my teeth cut with a garden shears or have my testicles bitten by a romantic rival. It was a choice that made me want to forget about dating altogether.

Like goats, alpacas are gregarious animals. They like company. Trying to separate one from the mob is like trying to split a drop of mercury. Jen, Harry, the dog, and I eventually penned half a dozen animals in a small corral and then went after our intended, long toothed quarry, a pure, all-white suri named “Whitewater.” Chasing the quick, fuzzy, jumpy animals on wet grass pebbled with slippery alpaca droppings was the kind of activity guaranteed to appear on a “stupidest home videos” program. I, of course, had brought only one pair of pants.

Once we had Whitewater in his own corral, it was time for a bit of dental hygiene. But first, of course, we had to get a hold of him. Harry, 59, strong and wiry, demonstrated, walking slowly behind Whitewater before grabbing a fistful of wool under the neck while going for a headlock with his other arm. “Right,” he said freeing the animal, “Now you try it Robby.”

In my still semi-presentable pants, I cautiously approached Whitewater from behind as Harry had done. We stood about the same height, 5’7”. Harry told me the larger machos weigh about 180 pounds so Whitewater had me by 40 pounds. “I can do this,” I told myself.

With the animal in reach, I lunged. But my hands found nothing to grab. The first 6 inches of an unshorn alpaca is utter fluff. While I tried to reach deeper, Whitewater saw his chance and landed a crushing, backwards upper cut of the foreleg to my ribcage. As I struggled to hold on (and get my breath back), Harry quickly pried open Whitewater’s mouth to take a look at his testicle tearing teeth. “No,” he said, “this one can wait. But let’s give’m a pedicure since you’re so cozy and all.” Harry quickly clutched Whitewater’s feet and snipped off the overgrown, claw-like hooves with the same garden shears he would have used on Whitewater’s teeth.

Over lunch, Harry and Jen explained the economics of alpaca ranching. In Australia, an alpaca can live for 20 years while producing 7 to 11 pounds of wool each year. The wool sells for about $20 a pound so a good producer might earn a few hundred dollars annually. Yet a highly prized female or hembra can sell for $50,000 or more. Although I have an MBA from a prestigious business school, I couldn’t quite figure out the bottom line in this.

“Well, you see,” Jen said, “nowadays the business is in the breeding, not the wool.”

“You’re lucky if the wool pays for the feed,” Harry added.

Evidently, for years alpaca farming has been a coming thing. There are said to be only 10,000 alpacas outside South America, and ranchers have been waiting for the animal’s day to arrive. Meanwhile, long term alpaca breeders like Harry and Jen, he a retired automotive engineer, she a retired oncology nurse, have become well-to-do beyond their dreams. It all started because Jen saw an alpaca for sale that was so cute she couldn’t resist it.

“You’re looking at three quarters of a million out there Robby,” Harry said to me as we quietly rocked on the porch of his 40 acre Ponderosa.

“Really?” I said, amazed that so few animals could be so valuable.

“Course, I don’t mean to big note myself,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Big note myself?” he said. “Oh, I don’t mean to wave the flag is all” he added as a way of explanation before taking a drag on his cigarette and a pull on his beer.

Australians possess a bewildering multitude of peculiar expressions. It’s as though, separated from the rest of the world, the English language has evolved much in the same way Australia’s fauna has, resulting in expressions as unusual as the koala or platypus. Harry was simply trying to explain that he didn’t mean to boast about his and Jen’s success. These two unassuming alpaca farmers had become wealthy on an animal that costs far more to buy than it can ever recover with its fleece. I realized I could afford to become an alpaca rancher just about the same time I could afford to buy a home in San Francisco.

A few years ago Harry and Jen’s mob numbered 160. That was when they ranched near Melbourne. They moved north in search of peace and quiet. Rural Queensland is a quiet, slow moving place. Something like agricultural America 30 or 40 years ago. And in this vast quiet, Albion was very quiet. Not much more sound than the occasional bleating of a sheep or the wind rustling through the eucalyptus.

With my fantasies of an alpaca empire dashed, I resolved to learn what I could in the time I had left at Albion. With the animals so expensive, why, I wondered, wasn’t there more artificial insemination, which might bring the price down to where I could start out with an itsy-bitsy mob of 2 or 3 animals.

“Can’t do it Robby,” Harry began. “They’ve spent millions researching it. You see, the macho’s a dribbling ejaculator. You just can’t get enough of the stuff.”

“Well, I suppose you could try to catch some of it -- you know -- afterwards,” Jen said before going on to describe a process that could only interest an alpaca breeder or, possibly, a member of Ken Starr’s staff.

“And you see,” Jen added, “the hembra, well, she’s an opportunistic ovulator. You can’t really know when she might be ready.”

“She needs that warm and fuzzy feeling,” Harry said, before she’ll release an egg. Apparently a turkey baster just isn’t what fires a female alpaca’s libido.

For several days Harry and Jen had been anxiously awaiting the arrival of a baby alpaca or cria. Every couple of hours we went out to a small corral to see if Tammy, the pregnant hembra, had “unpacked.” I was scheduled to leave that afternoon but decided to stay another night, hoping to witness the cria’s birth. Jen said there was nothing cuter than a new born alpaca. I didn’t doubt it.

Over dinner that evening Harry and Jen confided to me that what they most like about alpaca farming are the clear nights when they go out into the paddock, hand in hand, lay down beneath the stars, and listen to the alpacas. “They make this delightful murmuring sound,” Jen explained.

Tammy didn’t unpack while I was at Albion but during my last night I did walk out into the paddock. Fires glowed along the dark horizon where farmers were burning their fields. The night sky was black and filled with unfamiliar stars. Huddled together against the slight chill, the mob lay quietly murmuring, their soft rumblings like a chorus of small brooks cascading through a mossy forest. Maybe I never would be able to afford an alpaca ranch of my own. But I had found a wonderful place in Queensland - a place where there was nothing to kill me but the quiet.

A version of this story originally appeared in the September 12, 1999 edition of the San Francisco Sunday Examiner Magazine.

The Ceremony of One Chip

2010-04-07T07:11:00.002+03:00

The old stone dining room at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 12 miles inland from Big Sur, was filled to capacity and busy with conversation. The moment Edward Espe Brown entered, draped in the robes of a Zen priest, the quiet chitchat stopped. Author of vegetarian classics such as The Tassajara Bread Book, Tassajara Cooking and co-author (with Deborah Madison) of The Greens Cookbook, Ed was about to give an evening lecture, one of the three I would hear while participating in his workshop, "Cooking as a Spiritual Practice."

I had gone to Tassajara hoping to overcome my performance anxiety in the kitchen which, for years, has made every dinner party, every entertaining occasion, something to fear and dread rather than enjoy. In his workshop, Ed concentrated on the very basics. We tasted salt. We tasted pepper. We sharpened knives. We meditated.

At Tassajara, snuggled deep into the rugged Santa Lucia Mountains, there were no carbonated beverages, no meat, no junk food. We ate beautifully prepared vegetarian meals. We thought about food at its most elemental in our attempt to appreciate more deeply the joy and pleasure it can give.

Although Ed is highly regarded as a chef, it seemed at Tassajara he was more respected for his knowledge of dharma than of food. The room remained quiet as he settled into his chair, adjusted his robes and pulled the microphone close. I didn't expect instantaneous enlightenment from Ed's lecture but was hoping for something thought-provoking and profound. After what seemed like a very long time, he finally said, "I really don't have much to say this evening," and chuckled to himself.

The room grew quiet and solemnity had re-established itself when Ed reached down and began fidgeting with something in his bag. Although I couldn't see what it was, the crinkly sound was unmistakable. Ed had a bag of potato chips.

"Tonight we're going to perform the ceremony of eating just one chip," he announced.

Something, however, was already amiss. Someone had gotten into Ed's nine-ounce bag of Lay's, and he wasn't sure if there would be enough chips for the 100 or so people crowded in the room.

That problem appeared to be solved when several closely shorn Zen students raised their hands and asked the master what to do if they didn't want to eat even one chip. "Then you will celebrate the ceremony of not eating one chip," Ed answered. "In Zen," he noted, "the eating of one potato chip and the not eating of one potato chip are kind of the same thing."

When the bag finally came our way, the Zen student next to me rummaged around the bottom and found the tiniest shard, which he placed on the end of his finger as though he and the chip were auditioning for an Intel ad. My other neighbor dropped his chip. It broke in two. He looked at it, mortified. This was, after all, the ceremony of eating one chip and not two.

Ed instructed us how to approach our chips. Foremost was concentration. We were to "collect your mind. Attune your mind to the chip. Pay attention to the chip."

We were to use all our senses, our fingers, our eyes as well as our taste buds. He reminded us to be aware of our ears because "there will be some crunching going on." And we were to be mindful, meaning that we needed to be fully aware of what we were about to do.

Usually it is only foods that we don't care to eat or are repelled by that we give such close attention. I'm sure that I had never before been mindful of even one of the thousands of chips I have eaten. I took a good long look at my chip.

It was shaped like a girl's tongue caught in mid-giggle, a cute squiggle with a thin corona of gold running around its blond edge. I smelled it, and my nose filled with the familiar scent of grease and starch. I ran my tongue over its rough surface and sensed its salty effervescence. There seemed to be a lot of un-Zen like giggling going on as people inspected their own chips.

When we were finally told to eat our chips, there was a crunch more than worthy of one of Jay Leno's old Doritos television ads that used to shake the television screen. After digestion had begun, Ed asked people how the experience had been for them.

Some commented on the salty aftertaste. One person said just holding the single chip and waiting to eat it had made him very nervous about the whole enterprise. Others noted how the fingers and the mouth worked so well together. Several people were still working on the residue caught between their teeth. The conscientious objectors said they were surprised by the loudness of the crunch. A lone dissenter didn't quite get the point of the exercise, commenting, "But chips are meant to be eaten quickly and absentmindedly."

Ed told us that chips are perfect for what they are but because, like so many things in life, we take them for granted, we don't have a sense of them - no matter how many we have eaten. The whole notion, he explained, was to take the time, to have a careful awareness of whatever we are doing, or eating, or cooking, and not assume that we already know all that there is to know. Not even about the simple, guilty pleasure of a single potato chip.

After carefully observing a chip for the first time and fully experiencing its salty, greasy, pulpy "Buddha nature," Ed told us he was able to walk away from potato chips for several years.

"But now," he said, "I'm thinking they're pretty good again."

Me too.

A version of this story first appeared in the October 26, 1997 edition of the San Francisco Sunday Chronicle Magazine.

Hotel Paradiso-o

2010-03-23T08:00:00.004+03:00

It was late. Too late to go back to Tokyo. Our guidebook had no information at all about Shin-Fuji, a small town between Osaka and Tokyo. From the railway station platform there was only one obvious place to stay, a five-story building a few blocks away. The sign on top advertised "Hotel -- 6,000 Yen."

When we arrived, there was no one at the front desk. There was no front desk -- just photos of the rooms along one wall. Two were illuminated, the rest were dark. We didn't know what to do. There was no one to ask. After four months of honeymoon travel on the road in Asia we were weary. We didn't have the energy to figure out another baffling cross-cultural situation.

A side door opened and an older man and a younger woman came in, all smiles and giddy. Unlike us, they had no luggage and seemed to know the routine. The man quickly withdrew a key from a cubbyhole. The adjacent photo instantly went dark. Tittering, the couple disappeared into the elevator.

"What do we do?" my wife said. "There's only one room left."

Before I could answer she was over at the wall. Gingerly, as though extracting the detonator from a bomb, she drew the last key from its slot. Tiny lights embedded in the floor began to flicker, outlining a path down the corridor. From around a corner the glow of a larger light pulsed. We moved cautiously ahead, as though caught in a tractor beam. We looked around. There was no one.

I had no idea what to expect. Even on our budget of $200 a day the astounding cost of everything in Japan had limited us to sex-segregated guesthouses and youth hostels. Now, without having checked in, without having spoken to anyone, without having left an imprint of our Visa card, we were about to enter a hotel room. I opened the door.

"Look at this!" Nina said. This room was huge, as big as a typical American hotel room and much bigger than any other place we had stayed in Japan. We exchanged our street shoes for the "house" slippers that waited on the threshold. The larger pair had a groom in a tuxedo embossed on the rubber toe piece. Nina's had a bride in white.

"They must know we're newlyweds," she said, leaping onto the bed. She held up the condoms and the origami lovebirds that had been left on the pillow. "They've thought of everything."

I opened the room service menu. There was no sushi on this menu. But there were a lot of things that looked like sushi. The most outlandish was adorned with small nubs and a collar that resembled an anemone from a Jacques Cousteau special. Apparently it cost 13,000 yen, batteries not included. I reflected on what had happened so far. The May-December couple with no luggage, no front desk, condoms on the pillow, and the very special room service menu. I knew we had stumbled onto something truly unusual. We had checked into our first Japanese love hotel.

We had heard about love hotels. "Abec hoteru," our guidebook called them -- discreet, fantasy getaways the Japanese use for afternoon and evening assignations. We had even looked for some, but, assuming they would resemble the tawdry, no-tell motels that line America's secondary thoroughfares, we were unable to find any. Now, without speaking to a person, without seeing a single employee, we were in one.

The room was replete with electronic gadgets straight out of Hugh Hefner's bedroom. There were remotes for everything: the lights, the 440 channels of music, the air-conditioning, the television, the bed.

"What are you doing?" Nina said. She had changed into a "yukata," one of the razor-crisp robes that came with the room.

"Hang on a second," I told her. "I've got to check this stuff out. I mean come on, I'm a guy."

"If you don't stop right now," she said, "I'm taking a shower."

I could feel the tension rising between us, but I couldn't help myself. The room was like Mission Control in Houston. Given what the menu had to offer, I had to find out what was on cable.

"I'll be there in a second," I told her.

"Some love hotel," she muttered and stalked out.

I toyed with everything. The fridge was a little automat, stocked with sushi and sandwiches just waiting for my 100-yen coins. There was a karaoke machine with dual mikes. The accompanying songbook was the size of the Manhattan directory and had every song of Elton John and Andrew Lloyd Webber, plus thousands of Japanese favorites. In one corner there was a small weight-lifting machine.

"What exactly do the Japanese do in these places?" I wondered.

A curious pneumatic tube system, the kind once used for billing in old-fashioned department stores, snaked out of the wall. I turned on the television. A man was binding up a woman in Saran Wrap. Clearly this was no Motel 6.

"C'mere, c'mere, c'mere," Nina cried from the bathroom. "Read these." She handed me a basket full of complimentary toiletries. On the tiny bag that held a "Hair Band," I read the caption. It seemed familiar, but I couldn't place it: "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together. I've got some real estate here in my bag."

"'I've got some real estate here in my bag.' What is that supposed to mean?" I said.

Nina raced back to the bed. "Oh my God," she said, "that's from 'America.' Simon and Garfunkel were here."

I followed her back to bed, ready to resume the romance that had dwindled over the last few days as we pinched pennies on everything.

"What's that?" she said.

"What's what?"

"That," she said, pointing to the far wall where a red digital clock was pulsing with the seconds. It read "0:42." We looked at each other. The clock changed to "0:41." It was ticking down.

Suddenly the playfulness that had been building between us was gone. "What do you think this room costs?" Nina said.

"I don't know. The sign said 6,000 yen."

"Right," she said, "but do you think that's for an hour or all night?" I felt my chest constrict, and it wasn't from what I'd seen on the television.

We had already seen a $70 cantaloupe and a $100 mushroom for sale and had heard about bars where beer costs $300 a bottle. Before I could complete the thought Nina said, "What if it's 6,000 yen an hour?!" It was a great room, but we didn't have $600 to spend for one night. I began to panic. I picked up the phone. A woman answered.

"Hello, do you speak English?" I asked. At first I thought she said, "What do you think of our sushi?" but then I realized she was speaking Japanese. "How much does this room cost?" I asked anyway, wondering how one counts above 1,000 in Japanese.

Nina handed me a brochure from the Japan National Tourist Organization. It had all the standard questions and answers needed by tourists written in both English and Japanese. The tourist, me, is supposed to point to the questions and the happy-to-assist Japanese person is supposed to point to the correct answer. It works less well on the telephone.

I opened to the hotel section and said, "Kono heya wa ikura desu ka?" which, according to the book, means, "How much is this room?" This unleashed an immediate answer I didn't understand at all, except that it sounded like "$1,200 or whatever you have left -- whichever is more." Sweat began beading on my forehead.

By now my bride was laughing hysterically. My mind strayed from the raison d'être of love hotels and began to focus on the Japanese penal system. "Maybe we should leave now," I suggested.

"Are you crazy?" Nina said. "It's after midnight. We're going to sleep. I don't care what it costs."

"Right," I thought. "This is why the groom's family pays for the honeymoon." As I put my head down, I saw traveler's checks flying out of my wallet. The digital clock clicked down to "0:08."

"What's that?" Nina said. Someone was knocking at the door. The digital clock pulsed "0:00." In the hallway a dissolute Japanese woman waited. The minute she saw me she began speaking rapidly in Japanese. When she finished I patted myself on the chest with both hands the way Indians used to do in old Westerns and said, "English." Evidently she was unable to pick up the language from this gesture and took off again in Japanese. Somewhere in her stream of words an island rose above the torrent. "Check-out-o" I thought I heard her say.

"Check-out-o?" I asked.

"Check-out-o," she insisted.

Now the picture began to clear. The clock had ticked down. Our time was up. I had heard a "kerplunk" in the pneumatic tube. When I hadn't put in my money this woman was sent out to collect.

"No check-out-o," I said. I put my hands to the side of my head like the woman in the Singapore Airlines ad and repeated, "No check-out-o. Sleep-o."

She started up again in Japanese. I gestured for the woman to come inside the room. She threw her hands up in front of her face and waved them back and forth as though trying to stop a runaway train. She wasn't coming in. Even love hotels have rules.

From the bed Nina called, "Try the book." I retrieved the pamphlet, hoping it might work better face to face than it had over the phone.

In the pamphlet I pointed to "How much does this room cost?" She wrote 6,000¥ on her palm. Still, I didn't know if that was per hour, for two hours, for the time we had been there, or what. With book, pen, and a rudimentary written language that consisted of these symbols -- ¥ -- ? --> -- together with the hours of the day written in the 24-hour clock of the military, I was able to figure out that our first two hours cost 6,000 yen and the rest of the night would be another 6,000 yen. I paid her the money. I wasn't ready for the challenge of the pneumatic tube.

"Only 6,000 yen for midnight to 10 a.m.," Nina said. "That's not bad."

It's true we had been spending nearly that amount to stay in separate bunkrooms with Korean schoolkids on vacation. If love hotels were all like the "Dear Hotel," it looked like the reasonable and romantic way to see Japan.

The next day we were off to Nikko, an alpine town north of Tokyo famous for its temples and natural beauty. "To hell with natural beauty," Nina said. "We've got plenty in California. Let's find another love hotel."

Although well known to the Japanese, the locations of love hotels are not mentioned in guidebooks. After quickly seeing the sights of Nikko, we went to tourist information. An older, genteel Japanese woman stood at the desk.

"You ask her," I said to Nina.

"I'm not asking her," Nina said. "She's like a grandmother."

As we glared at each other, the lady asked in perfect English, "May I help you?"

I looked at this lovely woman who was waiting patiently. I couldn't do it. What would she think of Americans if I asked her about an abec hoteru? I gathered my courage. At last I asked, "Is there a bank anywhere near here?"

The clerk at the bank was a young man who also spoke English. After we changed money I gestured that he should come closer. From inches away I whispered, "Can you tell me if there is an abec hoteru around here?"

"Abec hoteru?" he restated at full voice, apparently not constrained by any prudish American convention regarding places for sexual trysts. "Just moment please." He then turned to a female teller and began a conversation in Japanese that sounded something like Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" routine, with abec hoteru running the bases. After much discussion that involved the entire staff of the bank as well as the use of several maps, he directed us to a hotel up the street. When we got there a dozen elderly women were getting off tour buses and checking in. Something had gotten lost in the translation.

"What should we do?" Nina asked.

To get to Nikko we had changed trains in Utsunomiya, a small junction town. The bullet train had sped past a bright neon sign for "The James Dean Hotel." It had to be what we were looking for.

"Let's go back to the James Dean," I suggested.

By the time we returned to Utsunomiya it was already past 10 p.m. Nina suggested taking a taxi, but the flag-fall was 600 yen and every mile was about that much again. Getting to the James Dean could cost a fortune. Besides, it seemed to me the hotel was near the station. I figured we could walk. As we learned an hour later, it's difficult to judge distances while on a train going 180 miles per hour.

Pulling our suitcases behind us, we were soon trudging down narrow roads on the outskirts of town. I could see the neon glow on the far horizon. Like desperate gamblers low on gas it drew us on like the distant lights of Las Vegas. We were walking through rice fields and around agricultural warehouses. The roads were empty. But the lights were getting closer. So was an odd, rhythmic sound.

Thhhh-kwack! We heard. Thhh-kwack! Thhh-kwack! We turned a corner. In front of a convenience store a man and a woman were hitting golf balls tied to an elastic cord. Thhhh-kwack! The ball took off, fell to the ground and snapped back to the tee.

We stopped and watched them. They stopped and watched us -- two gaijin pulling suitcases in the middle of nowhere at midnight. And we thought they were strange. We continued on. They watched us leave. Thhh-kwack!

We were absolutely beat when we got to the James Dean. It was in an enclave of love hotels. Next door was the Passion, a metallic, futuristic castle. Down the street was the Chalet, an ersatz Tudor building with turrets worthy of Rapunzel's affection. Each had individual parking spaces for each room. The couple pulls in, closes a curtain behind the car and goes directly inside without being seen by anyone. We circumnavigated the building. All the garage curtains were drawn closed. We had shortchanged the historical wonders of Nikko. We had walked for more than an hour. And now, at midnight, on a Thursday, the James Dean was full.

We wheeled our bags across the street to the Cosmo Part II. Each of us and each of our bags tripped the electronic sensor at the gate. No doubt wondering how four cars could pull in at the same time, the proprietor, an old man in slippers with a cordless phone, shuffled out. From my experience the night before I was now nearly fluent in love hotel Japanese.

"Check-in-o," I said.

"Hai, check-in-o," the old man responded. He then asked, "Rest-o?"

I shook my head no and said, "Stay-o."

"Rest-o" is the word for the two-hour tryst enjoyed morning, noon and night by seemingly every person in Utsunomiya and the rest of Japan. "Stay-o," which runs overnight, begins only when most lovers have gone home to spouses or parents. If one can wait around, a stay-o costs much less than a traditional hotel and comes with more exciting fixtures.

The proprietor showed us a graphic display of the rooms. We chose the "disco" room. Our stay-o in rural Utsunomiya would cost 6,000 yen.

"It's better than last night," Nina said. The room was twice as spacious as our room at the Dear. Not only did it have everything the Dear had, but it had a sauna, a large selection of adult video tapes and, directly above the bed, the pièce de résistance, the item I had wanted above my bed ever since junior high, a rotating mirrored ball. I started surfing the music system in search of "Disco Inferno."

The phone rang. I picked it up. I heard the old man's voice. "Front-o," he said.

"What do you think he wants?" I asked Nina. I went downstairs.

At the foot of the stairs was a small trap door, the kind used by milkmen for home delivery. The old man's arms were jutting through, a small Coca-Cola bottle in each hand.

"For you," he said in English. "For American friend." It was the most touching thing anyone had done for us in Japan.

After we finished with the bath and the sauna we were ready for bed. "Do you want to see what's on TV?" Nina said softly, raising her eyebrows in a coy, newlywed kind of way. We had never watched any adult anything before. "It could be educational."

I clicked the set on. Evidently the Japanese have a thing for fresh foods because again a man was sealing a woman up with plastic wrap.

"Oh my God. I can't watch this," Nina said. "Turn it off. No, don't turn it off. No, I've got to watch this."

We watched until the woman looked like she would stay fresh until at least tomorrow. The man began to undress. As the camera dropped to follow the action, the anatomically correct, precisely outlined parts of the image became blurred, digitally scrambled. This didn't conceal the faces of the actors but only the areas most people are interested in seeing when watching these films.

The sexual encounter that followed was like watching two pulsing, swirling lava flows merging with one another. Everything was rendered in a wild paisley.

"What is this?" Nina asked. "Are they trying to protect us from something? We're in a love hotel."

"Yes, we are," I said, turning on the rotating mirrored ball above the bed. Little ovals of reflected light spun around the room. I drew her near.

"Wait a minute," she interrupted. "Don't you think you should ... you know, sing some karaoke? Or do some weight lifting? That machine is going to waste." Laughing, she added, "Oh, I don't understand this country at all."

The next morning, before leaving, I put 200 yen in the karaoke machine and crooned my own rendition of "You're Just Too Good to Be True." Nina woke up just in time to see me hop on the weight machine for a quick twenty reps. I then brewed two cups of complimentary coffee. Fully pumped up, I pulled the karaoke mike into bed. Nina looked at me and said, "I think it's time for us to leave."

By the time we returned to Tokyo, we were expert love hotel spotters. Near railroad stations they seemed to comprise entire blocks. They dotted residential neighborhoods. How could we have overlooked places with names, English names, like the Happy Heart Hotel, the Once Around, the Sweet Night Inn? Even the Japanese neon signs took on a certain stimulating familiarity. We became fluent in identifying the essential characteristics of love hotels: the wild architecture, the wilder names, the continuous streams of cars and pedestrians, and, always, the sign out front with the prices.

After four months of honeymoon travel by plane, train, car, boat, and motorcycle, it was now time to head home. Ours had been an amazing journey where each day contained an element of the surreal. We had hoped to go on to Europe, but time and budget prevented that. So, in lieu of Paris, we spent our last night in Tokyo at Le Chic where all the little sayings on the toiletries were in French. We used the room to its fullest. No gizmo was left untouched. When we were finally exhausted, when we had taken advantage of everything Le Chic had to offer, I dimmed the lights and tucked Nina in. I put a few coins in the karaoke machine and softly began singing Chansons d'Amour. Paris had nothing more to offer.

A version of this story originally appeared in West, the Sunday magazine of the San Jose Mercury News, in June 1995. It has since been published in many magazines, newspapers and anthologies (and plagiarized repeatedly).