Mark Helprin, �Winter�s Tale�
Taking suggestions of favorite books from significant others is always a risky endeavor. My crazy ex-girlfriend would not shut up about Geek Love, going so far as to name the rat I bought her for Valentine�s Day (I know, I�m such a romantic) Olivia, after the main character. So I read it and while I thought it was an all right book, I couldn�t help but notice it was simply a reworking of the hardboiled Mafia family novel, except it involved circus freaks instead of Italians, complete with the femme fatale being an albino psychic, and the Mafia don who rises to power was a dwarf with flippers.
She didn�t appreciate my comments. Then came the recommendation from the Red Hot Punk Rock Goddess, who inisted that I read Marlo Morgan�s Mutant Message From Down Under. Whoo. What an awful, awful book, filled with the ramblings of a pretentious twat who comes across as condescending (and even a little racist) when she marvels about how peaceful and simple her Australian Outback guides live (and indeed, are, according to her.)
And then there�s this book, given to me by the girl I gave the Oxford English Dictionary set.
She got the better deal.
I put off reading this for a long, long, long time. Everything about this book screamed that I wouldn�t like it, from the front cover with the horse flying over New York highlighted by constellations, to the description on the back. When the descriptive paragraph (not the reviews from critics, mind you, but simply the written summary of what lay inside) has both the words �Fabulous� and �Glorious�, well... it�s kinda obvious that it�s a chick book, don�t you think?
Since I�m finally getting close to reaching the end of this project, the book got its day in court. Or days, if you want to be picky. And if you�re being picky, you should really be saying weeks, �cause it took three to get through this massive paperback, where everything is described to every tedious.... I mean, fabulous and glorious detail.
And man, for a guy, Helprin can sure write girly. Horses and stars and handsome thieves with hearts of gold. Things get more and more precious as the story slowly unfolds, and meanwhile, I�m muttering that all we need are some fairies, and we�ll have a goddamn Saturday morning cartoon.
The Fairies show up on page 238.
You have to give the author something, and that�s the fact that he certainly thinks about his descriptive passages about the background. There is serious effort and thought to make sure the reader has a picture-perfect image of what he describes, rather than letting us use any of our own imagination. Some people just think and work that way.
Hell, I think I do it to an extent. I have a good eye for noticing something unusual among seas of neutrality in terms of cityscape, or even people.
That�s what I was doing this afternoon when I picked my father up to take him out to a cheap movie. Traffic was bad, as it often is around his home, and I noticed an �island beater� � a car that spent most of its existence near the ocean edge, having the steel battered and eaten away from the salt in the air. Old, sun bleached, duct tape fraying around the edges seemed to hold the entire back cab in place, and it wasn�t doing a particularly good job of it.
This car passed as I was pulling out of a parking lot and I later viewed it from the left, which afforded me a gander from both sides. Rust-poked holes in the body creeped from behind the duct tape making it look like a race for solidity. I caught a look at the driver, and it wasn�t some aging hippie or burned-out surfer, he was just a standard middle-aged man who probably didn�t want to simply toss away a vehicle just because it wasn�t pretty anymore.
And so I started comparing his car with other vehicles on the road. There�s a definite differentiation among the classes here in Hawaii, after you take out the rental car factor from the tourists. Those people usually rent European two-seater convertibles. The locals drive the cars with the rust and faded colors and mismatched doors from scavenging through auto wrecking yards. And then there�s the other brand of local; the affluent, those who have figured out a way to rise above the low wages and corrosive elements. Their cars are usually too clean, too big, and too ostentatious.
My car, a four door 1997 Chevrolet Cavalier, is one of the few that seem to hit the elusive middle ground. It looks like a �mom car� and in fact, I did buy it from my mom (though I still owe her money on it). I don�t mind. I�ve had beaters before, and this car works as good camouflage. I�m stopped by police for enough stupid shit, so at least this way I�m not drawing their attention.
Built with more plastic than steel, I don�t have to worry about the rust factor. It�s a nice looking car, but it has a small-to-medium sized but still noticeable dent in the back end of the driver side. It was this element that convinced me to ship the car over from the mainland, rather than try to sell a nine-year-old car with body damage, since the value would ensure the only vehicle I could obtain here after selling it would look like the duct-taped wonder mobile. So now it�s here with me, and that one blemish on the back, as far as I�m concerned, gives me street credibility
Later that evening I drove to work and the car/class factor became more apparent. The nightclub I work at is on the top story, directly above two other businesses. Two people with a beat-up jeep run the first, a hosted Laundromat. Next to it is a Pho restaurant which does decent business. They have the compact four door Mazda. My boss, who sells Newcastle�s at five dollars a pop, has a SUV that�s approximately five months old.
It�s amazing how you can find lessons in economic disparity in a parking lot.
I parked my car firmly in the middle of the economic ladder. After the bar closed and I emptied all the recycle bins, I went outside to throw away the night�s collection of empty bottles, cigarette butts, and wasted hopeful dreams. As I threw the bags over the railing into the bins below, I could see one of those island beaters, a huge pickup truck complete with rust spots, various dents, and a broken headlight parked underneath the club at a rakish 45-degree angle.
All right, so that wasn�t the first thing I noticed. The first thing I noticed was the eight cop cars, all with their lights flashing. Then I noticed the truck.
After that, I noticed that rakish 45-degree angle of that truck culminated directly into the side of my car.
