In My Book

When it comes to gun control, we've all had our fill of invidious comparisons contrasting America unfavorably to other nations. Why, it is asked, are our statistics so alarming? Why don't we examine different systems and scan the globe for alternative policies? But the composition of our vast citizenry, our geographical size, and innumerable historical factors prompt me to wonder, "Does it really matter what they're doing in Bhutan?"

The United States is noted for its workplace slayings. Bhutan is not. Nor is Bhutan known for an overwhelming number of workplaces. Until recently, we had a low unemployment rate relative to the rest of the world and our workplaces were bustling. More employees means more employees slain. In addition, the scale of our franchises demands armed personnel. Stores in Bhutan do not have the security needs of a Gymboree in midtown Manhattan or a Toys R Us at the junction of several major highways. Unlike their counterparts in Bhutan, our abortion clinics, public libraries, and water parks cry out for protection.

Strictly speaking, it it possible to claim that we produce more violent pornography featuring gunplay than does Portugal. The reality is Portugal does not have a lucrative, multi-billion-dollar pornography industry. We do. We produce most of the world's pornography, some of which is violent. Part of our violent pornography involves firearms; the bulk of it, however, does not.

Our neighbors to the North, the Inuit, with their furry jackets and winning smiles, are often depicted as a peaceful population. But theirs is not a society of self-expression: indeed I believe they possess no word for "depression." We Americans commonly use guns to give free rein to a gamut of emotions: unhappiness, resentment, discontent, despair, distress, misery, sorrow, abandonment, seething rage, mournfulness, and dejection. It therefore makes little sense to compare a disgruntled employee in Napier, Illinois, who takes the lives of his former colleagues to his Inuit peer who is apt to remain silent inside his igloo or other ice structure even during the half-hour of daylight available to him.

Like the Inuit, we are a community of hunters. They use clubs; we rifles or (in the case of inebriated hunters) semi-automatic weaponry. However, to those who have witnessed the Inuit bludgeoning harp seal pups to death, our methods come to seem very like euthanasia.

Now our Italian friends do hunt with rifles and have fewer fatalities on their soil than we. But Italians hunt cinghiale (wild boar) and, judging by the scarcity of this dish on menus even there, aren't all that successful at it. So while there is an upside in Italy (fewer human fatalities), there is a concomitant downside (fewer wildlife fatalities).

In places of worship, the number of deaths in America again exceeds that in Italy. The reason is twofold: first, Italians have forfeited their right to bear arms in a church, synagogue, or mosque and second, the Italian churchgoing cohort is comprised primarily of elderly ladies clad in black. Most Americans felled during religious services are hardy men, middle-aged or younger.

Regrettably, American educational institutions see their share of carnage (at the elementary, secondary, and university level). Despite metal detectors, guns find their way into the classroom. There are fewer guns in Austrian classrooms (just as there are fewer guns, students, and classrooms in Austria), but it is only fair to observe that we have recently witnessed the second instance of an Austrian imprisoning family or neighbors for decades in an underground bunker. For a tiny country, this is a troubling trend.

You simply cannot liken apples to oranges. To claim that there are 29,569 fatal gunshot wounds in America each year as opposed to five in New Zealand is to ignore vital facts. The number of firearms sold in the United States each year dwarfs the figure in New Zealand. Further, care must be taken to ensure that multiple gunshot wounds aren't overcounted. If a six-year-old brings an automatic weapon to school and riddles a classmate with bullets, has that youngster been shot eighteen times? Not in my book.

Family Tableaux

Last August, our family had just completed a grueling ten-day journey through Andalusia (a region known as the frying pan of Spain) when I found myself in Madrid's Plaza Mayor, staring at the back of my teenaged daughter's head and thinking evil thoughts. Tabitha had just informed me how much she regretted giving up her summer job (dishwasher at Papa Gino's in Falmouth, Massachusetts) to join her younger brother and parents on this European odyssey. "Why you ungrateful wretch," I thought, "I wish you were back in Falmouth. Or worse, Granada."

Dodging the usual array of talentless, poncho-clad Andean flautists, Chinese refugees drawing tourists' names in the shape of a dragon with rainbow-colored sponges, and Vietnamese folding palm leaves into insects, Tabitha and I happened upon the latest Faneuil Hall-type export, a phenomenon now sweeping through European capitals like the bubonic plague:a suited man mid-stride, necktie permanently aflutter thanks to hidden length of wire, briefcase raised, running to catch his nonexistent train. "Look," said Tabitha contemptuously, "his facial muscles are moving."

We returned to our cramped hotel room to find my wife, Frances, and son, Rusty, staring at the blades of our slow-moving ceiling fan. "It's like time-lapse photography," said Frances, gesturing upward. I issued an invitation: "Who would like to visit El Escorial?" Groans all around. "I never thought I'd miss mowing lawns," said Rusty. "Or Papa Gino's," chimed in Tabitha. "You want to work?" I barked. "Fine. We'll start tomorrow."

The next morning the four of us were up early to get a prime space in Plaza Mayor. Ignoring the threats of a fire-eating midget who claimed we were in his zone, our family embarked on what was to become the most lucrative period of our lives. Standing still as statues, we assumed positions which came readily to us after seventeen days of travelling together. Tabitha adopted the same sullen pout she normally donned each morning when discovering a large glass of fresh-squeezed juice was not included in our vacation budget. Rusty's angry scowl ("Why won't you buy me an Eminem CD for 24 euro?") and my wife's expression of utter exasperation ("Oh, buy him the CD for God's sake: I can't stand this anymore") complemented the look that graces my countenance when waiting in a European "line" to purchase stamps.

There we stood: four deeply unhappy budget travellers heartily sick of each other in a hot Mediterranean country. Within 30 minutes, crowds began to gather. "Look," an excited Scottish adolescent observed to his parents, "It's us." "No," demurred his father, "We haven't reached that stage yet." "George," corrected his wife, "you reached that stage in Barcelona." Coins began to rain into Rusty's upturned baseball cap which we'd placed on the ground in front of us.

By noon, Frances was ecstatic: "Oh my God, we need a bigger hat." And it was true: we were the hit of the square. Other performers began to whine that we lacked permits, but the tourists couldn't get enough of our family tableaux. We cancelled our train tickets to Portugal and established a surefire repertory: bewildered family consulting a map, family disputing a hotel bill, family disputing a restaurant check, and, of course, our greatest crowd-pleaser, family disputing itself. Rusty would ape pulling Tabitha's hair, my wife would turn her back to me, and I would point an angry finger and look apoplectic. Visitors went wild: "You've been there," they shouted, "Tell it like it is." Our performance truly resonated: some audience members sobbed and clutched each other. A feature in "El Pais" compared our routine to a rebirthing experience.

Soon certain foreign families were spending all their time in Madrid watching us: we were their vacation! As our coffers grew full, it was like "The Wizard of Oz": Tabitha got her juice, Rusty got his CD, my wife got air-conditioning and I got our own room and, consequently, sex in air-conditioning.

The tipping point arrived on the 23rd of August (the day the "tardy commuter" statue finally abandoned his post in a huff) when we unveiled "Matador." Rusty flared his nostrils (something he does with annoying frequency anyway) and got on all fours like a charging bull. Tabitha waved an ugly red cape she'd bought in Seville in a (successful) attempt to enrage me, and Frances and I brandished swords which we later sold to the midget who was doing a slow trade on the periphery of our crowd. People began to scalp spots with good sightlines of us and we raked in more than 1,100 euro that day.

As the start of school loomed, we held a conference. "Look," I said, "we can do this right, get a tent, hire guards, charge admission and consider franchising our act throughout Europe and Asia or we can return to a ranch-style house in an overpriced suburban enclave with disappointing schools and a circle of friends who bore us." The vote was unanimous to remain in Madrid. "I didn't realize my work ethic was so strong," announced Rusty. "It's because we don't have to talk," said Tabitha. "No," said her brother, "it's because we don't have to talk to each other.

The Rules In This House

I can't recall when I first offered you money not to do something. I believe it was in the mid-1970s at a Friendly's Restaurant north of Boston. You had consumed a bowl of chicken vegetable soup, a Clamwich, and a side order of onion rings when you announced you wanted a Jim Dandy Sundae (four scoops of ice cream, hot fudge sauce, bananas, and assorted toppings). Repulsed, I suggested you order a Banana Royale (three scoops of ice cream) or, better yet, give a moment's thought to those less fortunate than yourself. You refused.

The hardest part of parenting is accepting that your child is not, and may never be, the person you are. When I was growing up in rural Ohio in the 1950s, I was not a greedy, self-obsessed, intolerant boy inclined to mimic the mannerisms, speech patterns, and facial tics of my elders. It would not have occurred to me, at the age of twelve, to snatch and toss a teacher's wig into a Dumpster. I had neither been caught shoplifting nor been found rearranging the letters on a synagogue message board to read: "Oy masturbation."

So I suppose my impulse at Friendly's that rainy afternoon was the result of years of disappointment and frustration coupled with panic that you would grow fatter. I noted that a Jim Dandy cost $2.65 (to give you some idea of your gluttony and my desperation, its inflation-adjusted price today would be $14.80) and offered you $1.32 not to order one. You countered that you would "go hungry" for $1.33 and we vacated our booth (though not before I had obtained exact change at the register and you held the coins in your fist).

On the ride home, I mulled over our relationship which, since the day you were circumcised, had been one long, downhill slide. I had recently begun to treasure the first two years of your life, when you could not speak. The ensuing decade had been a steadily escalating series of calls from counselors, coaches, and teachers.

What kind of a boy spends Sunday afternoon sharpening the edge of a birthday card from his uncle in order to slice through a neighbor's garden hose? Why would you entreat your cousin to swallow marbles, a frog, or wood? As you approached adolescence, I feared for your older siblings and dreamt one night that the rear window of the family station wagon would someday read: "Swarthmore," "Dartmouth," "Rikers."

Over the years, you and I developed a private pact which might be termed bribery. I preferred to see it as a sanity-saving measure that, no matter how costly, was a bargain compared to the alternative. I paid you 50 cents for every hour of TV you did not watch (up to a maximum of 20 hours, and, as your bedtime grew later, 22 hours per day). I shelled out 15 dollars each week you failed to expose yourself in the library, schoolbus, or other public setting (with a three-dollar retainer for not doing so to Daphne Coulthard).

I paid you nine dollars a week for not devouring the entire contents of the cake house each afternoon and for not leaving crushed, crumbled Fudgetown cookies in the back seat of the car. I parted with an additional four dollars to ensure you kept your feet off the coffee table, television, bedroom walls, and sister. You were remunerated handsomely for not scattering your laundry throughout the house and for not neglecting to use Q-tips, toothpaste, hand soap, shampoo, deodorant, and toilet paper.

You have received cash for not whinnying like a horse or barking like a seal during dinner or while in church. You have also benefitted monetarily from not gesticulating wildly, hurling objects, and howling in a crazed way when confronted with homework.

In the late 1970s, I was earning a handsome $85,000 salary, 40 percent of which was spent on you. This despite the fact that you were unable to gain admittance to an expensive private school, had no costly equestrian or nautical hobbies, and seldom left the house. Which has been its own monetary drain over the decades as I have paid you not to paint, graffiti, or otherwise deface, flood, or set fire to your room.

You have also received funds not to join the KKK, the Shining Path, or Al-Qaeda. You have been compensated not to have a sex change, not to wed a man in Massachusetts or Hawaii, not to marry Daphne Coulthard, not to drive your mother's car off a cliff or into a swamp, into a pedestrian, or through the bow window of the living room. You have taken large sums not to abuse cocaine, methamphetamines, neuroenhancers, chewing tobacco, NyQil, or heroin.

Notwithstanding enormous payments to lower the volume of your stereo, to not construct a skateboard ramp using your dresser and wardrobe, and to refrain from using said ramp, we hear ominous rumblings from above, particularly during meal times. As you are presently 47 and we below live on a fixed income, I ask you once again to honor our agreement and to respect the rules in this house.

Many Happy Returns

Dear Doug,

I'm placing this note on your side of the basin as a reminder that twenty-five years ago we entered the state penitentiary at Port-au-Prince. Happy Anniversary! I raise our shared drinking gourd to you!

Occupying a 2- x 3-meter cell with you for the past quarter-century has certainly been one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I feel I have come to know you well. Extremely well. I am familiar with your SAT scores (lower than mine), your high school class rank (higher than mine), your less than wholesome relationship with your boyhood neighbor in suburban Maryland, and above all, I've come to realize how deeply you value time alone.

Initially, upon entering prison, you were cold, refusing to answer my most basic questions or even to acknowledge me. I thought you held me responsible for our not spending Spring Break 1984 in Fort Lauderdale, but then remembered that that was your decision. Possibly you resented my suggesting we smoke marijuana that afternoon in Jacmel. I can only reiterate now what I told you then: I was woefully unaware of the severity of Haitian drug laws.

After a frosty four years, you gradually began to warm to me and no longer spurned my offers to shield you with the "curtain" when you defecated. In many ways, you are an ideal cellmate. I've grown to admire the dainty manner in which you eat your millet, the care you take to polish our basin, and the way you never forget Halloween (though you are curiously reluctant to celebrate Independence Day and insist on tearing down the red, white, and blue streamers with which I festoon the bars of our cell).

I've learned to live with your morning grumpiness just as you've tried (unsuccessfully) to hide your agitation while I attempt to master the harmonica. I've confided to you my dream of someday owning a chain of hearing aid stores in a state with no or low income tax while you've wondered if the small mineral hammer your brother smuggled to you will penetrate the prison walls (it won't).

The night you were gang-raped was a low point. In retrospect, I was unwise to voice to Jean-Louis and his friends the racial theories Charles Murray explicated in his seminal work, "The Bell Curve." For many months afterward (seventeen), you kept me at a distance. I felt your cold stare on me and knew not what to do. I was at sea, Doug, unmoored and adrift. During this period you expressed a wish to be transferred to a Russian prison "where the tubercular rate would be higher." My observation that, given your struggles with Creole, you would surely find Cyrillic a challenge, fell on deaf ears. Ultimately, you emerged from your shell. I'll never know if the gingham tablecloth I fashioned from a pair of pajamas did the trick, but I like to think so.

Of course, we have regrets. Though with the worsening economy and the current college admissions craze (applications up 14% this year at Yale and private college counselors charging $600 per hour), perhaps it's best that we neither reside in the United States nor have children.

Occasionally, I still sense a sullen anger in you, particularly on Wednesday afternoons preceding latrine duty, and I must tell you that this is counterproductive. Our lawyer shares my sentiments and is aware of your impatience when he explains that the wheels of Haitian justice turn slowly.

On this special day, let's not dwell on what troubles us, but look at the upside of our incarceration and treasure what we have: three square meals a day (except on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and during periods of social unrest), a brand-new tarp stuffed with farm-fresh straw, one of the best climates in the Northern hemisphere, a complimentary subscription to "Granta" courtesy of the prison librarian, and, most of all, each other.

In Which I Introduce Myself

Cynthia Ozick has discussed those writers to whom fame comes early. Roth, Mailer, and Salinger were all fortunate to make their marks while still young, and Ozick confesses to a bitter envy. I pity her that as I was lucky enough to see my words in print at the tender age of 23.

Like Updike, my burdens (he suffered from psoriasis; I from dandruff, eczema, halitosis, and myopia) spurred me to reach for the stars. While my college classmates enrolled in bank trainee programs or attended law school, I roamed Greenwich Village, often sleeping in doorways or (on better streets) atop parked cars. Thirsting to process the world around me, grappling to make sense of all in my orbit, I attended writers' workshops through the Learning Annex, where my rugged looks served me well. I wore an old Navajo turquoise bolo to class and became known as a wine connoisseur in Learning Annex course H63 ("How to Become a Wine Connoisseur for Less than $165).

I began a series of affairs with women who had attended NYU, had spacious apartments below 14th Street, or both. One day, I neglected to lock the apartment door of my then girlfriend Francine (Tisch School; 9th Street). Everything was stolen with the exception of a salad spinner and a short story I was working on ("Tuscan Moisture"). It was then that I saw my first work published in the "Village Voice." "Lost," it read, "Entire Contents of 136 West 9th Street #4D. Reward Offered. Phone (212) 476-3829. Also, I miss you, Francine. Please call (212) 966-1347."

I don't write for status, fame, or money. I'm not out to "prove" anything with what I write today any more than I was trying to establish something with that piece I published in the "Voice" many years ago. I just wanted Francine's clothing and furniture back. I just wanted Francine back. And I found a way to achieve both while paying for only one ad.

The Irish writer John Banville (whom I consider a good friend although we've never met) recently shared the following thought with me (via the Spring 2009 "Paris Review"): "art is like sex: when you're doing it nothing else matters." And he's right. When I'm at my upturned orange crate with pen in hand, nothing counts but the work. Not my name in a huge font splashed across the front of the "New York Review of Books," appearances on panels, at literary festivals, and (God help me) on television. The jealousy of friends, neighbors, colleagues, and relatives, the worldwide exposure and concomitant praise, the weathered cottage at the end of a windblown lane in the most sought-after part of the Vineyard: it all melts away. I write to express what's in me. It must come out.