Well, even though our buddy Joe is dead, we just can’t get enough of him.

The La Cuadra editorial board (a.k.a. Mike, John and a bottle of Mezcal) decided to run one of those essays in this issue. Maybe reading this will encourage a few of our readers to pick up any of Joe’s three remarkable books. Along with Waltzing, Joe also published Deer Hunting with Jesus — Dispatches. From America’s Class War, Broadway Press, 2008, and Rainbow Pie — A Redneck Memoir, Scribe Publications, 2011.

For readers who’ve come to know Joe through La Cuadra, well, here’s another little treat for you.

Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball is currently available for Kindle through Amazon and in paperback if you happen to be in a bookstore in Australia.

Let it be known: we’re offering a free bottle of Ilegal Mezcal to whomever first brings a copy of the book down to Café No Sé. Together we’ll raise a glass to our absent friend.

This essay was written in the Spring of 2005.

Raise your glass to the hard working people

Let’s drink to the uncounted heads

Let’s think of the wavering millions

Who need leaders but get gamblers instead

Salt of the Earth, The Rolling Stones

I stopped into Larry’s Gas ’n Grubs for my regular morning commuter coffee mug refill and lo and be damned! There was my hirsute 300-pound friend Poot working at the counter. I said, “What the hell are you doing ringing up my coffee at this crap stand? You’re supposed to be a welder, fat boy!”

It turns out that Poot, who’d lost his job with a metal fabricator, took on a little private contracting work. However, he couldn’t afford to get his contractor’s license and was busted for working without one. And got thrown in jail for it too. Somehow I would have thought it was a lesser offense than that.

Now he is on jail work release to work at Larry’s Gas ’n Grubs, an area 6-location chain of convenience stores that regularly hires work release labor at super cheap rates. By court order Poot must work there at least until August and pay the great state of Virginia a big chunk of his wages for the privilege. This represents nothing less than chattel slavery under the local judicial system, impressments of the same sort as have always been practiced on blacks and poor whites here in the slave states. Throw them in jail, and then farm them out on work release to local industry and businesses in cahoots politically with local law officials and courts. In fact, in a new twist on the game, the masters of our little Virginia banana republic brought in a huge regional jail. It is now a provider of cheap local work release labor, even as the taxpayers foot the bill for housing and feeding the jailbirds, and the jailbirds seldom return to their hometowns up nawth, choosing instead to shack up with the fetching local wenches. You Yankees have no idea what Bush’s election has kicked off in the American South. Our congenital penchant for punishment and press gang labor has ushered in a new era of prison building unseen since the days of Uncle Joe Stalin. Down here we know what to do with uncooperative folks like the hapless Pootie and the dope fiends our prison industry imports in from seven other states: Lock ’em the fuck up and make a profit on ’em. Rehabilitation, Republican style.

But getting back to Poot. When crap happens to working people, it’s usually a domino line of crap. It is bad enough that Poot lost his apartment when he landed in the hoosegow, and will have to find a new one in August, along with a new job, unless he decides to starve to death by remaining at Gas ’n Grubs. He also lost his truck along the way. I am almost willing to bet that his life will never recover from this setback. Meanwhile, something even worse has come of this run-in with American penology’s gulag system of white trash labor: By court order Poot cannot set foot in Burt’s Tavern until August. He may not survive such a blow.

That was a week ago. Now it’s Friday and there’s nothing stopping me from making the usual ass of myself at Burt’s, with or without my fat hairy friend. Aaaaannd of course there he sits over in the corner of the bar! Stupid me. I should have known no court order could keep that 300-pounds of redneck sin out of a tavern. So there sits Poot explaining to Nance Kelly his talent for hooking up with the wrong woman. For the record, the wrong kind of woman is any woman: 1) whose name does not match the one on your marriage certificate, 2) who is middle aged and taking both progesterone AND thorazine or 3) speaks in tongues at church. Whatever the case, Poot has a snowball’s chance in the Sahara of ever hooking up with Nance. Poot’s “Drink until you want me” approach is not going to work on her.

Nance is 32, hillbilly cute, and raising two kids with the help of her mom. She drives a “deep reach” machine on the loading dock at the local Rubbermaid plant. For the benefit of you patricians out there, a deep reach is a kind of forklift that can reach 30 feet up and into stacks of pallets. They are usually driven by men, which makes Nance a “women’s libber” by working class labor standards. Active in her fundamentalist church, she does not drink and seldom dates, yet strangely enough she comes in here occasionally and sips on cokes (I don’t even want to know the psychology underlying that little game). Her coworkers call her “Termite” because of her stature, but we old farts in the back booth call her “Magnum Muff,” and when she parks that tush of hers on a barstool, well, we old geezers at Burt’s are reduced to humble wonder. Quite a few young ones too, I would suspect. But we are supposed to talk politics in these columns, aren’t we? (sigh)

Politically, Nance is anti-union, anti-abortion and vaguely aware of N.O.W. (National Organization of Women), which registers in her mind as “A bunch of lesbians out on the West Coast.” Nance is a Republican much as a fish is a creature of the ocean. Because of her caste in America (lower working class, Southern, high school educated, semi-fundamentalist Christian), she does not know a single registered Democrat. We’ve discussed it and neither of us could think of a Democrat she personally knew. “I know you,” she offered. “That doesn’t count,” I replied, “because I am a godless commie.” But the point is that for many working class Americans it is possible not to know a single person of liberal persuasion in daily life — which must seem inconceivable to urban and metropolitan Americans. A night in any tavern in this town shows why this is possible. Can you spell American C-L-A-S-S system?

Guatemala unfurls from the fractured landscape of my memory in a vast expanse of broken glass and Christmas lights, cobblestones, coke-covered mirrors and sex.

Mike, my friend, my editor, my drinking companion. I remember him in quotes and flashes. On Mother’s Day, wandering out of the piña colada sunshine and into the bar and, I find him sitting at one of the front tables nursing a beer and watching motes of dust dance in the white light streaming through the open door.

“Hey man,” I say, or something like that, and I take a seat across the table from him, knowing I don’t have to bother asking for a beer. One will show up in front of me. He doesn’t say anything, just nods and tips his beer at me. I smile. “Did you call your mom yet?”

“Yeah,” he says, “I called her a bitch.” And we both burst out laughing. We laughed for a long time. It is one of the more offensive things either of us has ever uttered, and we always vied for the lead. One thing we shared was an fundamental inability to pass up the opportunity to crack stupid.

When one or both of us awoke with a throbbing hangover, feeling as though a menagerie of barnyard animals had emptied their waste directly into our brains we would meet to commiserate. He always told me “Remember, it’s like my father said. You don’t want to overdo it too much. The point is to be able to drink for the rest of our lives.” Then we’d laugh and have a cigarette. Mike casually pulling a pack of Marb Reds from the front pocket of a button up shirt, distended around his generous beer gut, offering me one, lighting it for me. Then he’d inhale his own and pause before exhaling tendrils of smoke up around his eyes, and into his short, grey hair.

John owned Café No Sé. The bar we all called home. He also owned the juice bar across the street. And the bookstore next door. He also had a defunct theater company and a successful mezcal business. He started this magazine.

He’s over 50. I don’t think he sleeps.

I occasionally arrived at work, exhausted from the previous evening’s extravagancies, to stand reeling behind the bar, unable to talk comprehensibly, let alone serve drinks. John would walk in and say something like “You look tired,” at which I would nod my dumb assent.

“Why don’t you take a shot of mezcal?” he would suggest.

At first I thought it odd for an employer to recommend Hair of the Dog as a cure for his employee’s hangover, particularly while said employee was on shift. I eventually came to realize he viewed mezcal as a magical panacea that could cure everything from headaches to pancreatic cancer to general malaise with efficiency and absolute effectiveness. Agave based spirits were, to him, a gift from the heavens. Employment at the bar practically required one to drink during their shifts. Or perhaps it was just me. I think John noticed a causal relationship between my mezcal consumption and my alacrity, and therefore encouraged a certain amount of drinking in order to maintain the best bartending services available. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing. He certainly didn’t discourage drinking, at least not until the end when I had clearly lost control. In fact, he normally didn’t expressly encourage it, either. Unless he was drinking, too. Or it was a really good night. Then sometimes he would pull a bottle down off the shelf and wade through the crowd, pouring shots down people’s throats.

My favorite times with John were always after closing. Just a few close friends sitting around until four or five in the morning, discussing labor politics in Guatemala, or the hypocritical nature of Central American Catholicism, or pussy, or the novels of William Faulkner.

Once we sat for a long time in the back bar, just him and me, sitting on one side of the room and trying to put out a candle on the other side of the room by throwing shot glasses at it. We ran out of glasses, but we never did get that candle out.

I can remember almost no quotes from John now. It seems strange. I can hear his voice — the timbre, the cadence — his laugh sputtering up to become a series of quick “Ah ah ah’s,” like a cartoon vampire. But I don’t remember much of what he actually said. The phrase that most stands out is “It was beautiful,” spouted thick-lipped and dreamy, with far away eyes. He usually employed it in reference to incredible displays of intoxication. The day after I broke up with a long term girlfriend, the woman I had followed to Guatemala in the first place, I staggered into the bar in the early afternoon to find John sitting in the office.

“How you feeling?” he asked.

I think I muttered something monosyllabic.

“Man, you were on a tear last night. You smashed a bunch of glasses, swore at some customers, then punched Steve in the face.” He smiled at me, enjoying my obvious chagrin. And then that boyish twinkle came into his eye and he let out a long breath.

“It was beautiful.”

And I knew he meant it.

Mer arrived two or three times a year on a flight from San Francisco to sit in the bar with us and have filthy conversations. She’s in her 40’s, short grey hair, jeans and tee-shirts, a self described “diesel dike.” She and I would sit in the corner of the bar with Mike and John and whoever else was around, talking shit about everything and everyone until eventually the conversation disintegrated into a serious of sexually explicit non-sequiturs designed to shame the shameless. “One day Mer, one day!” I’d slur at her, “I’m gonna turn you straight for a night, and I’m just gonna RUIN you!”

“Fuck off!” She’d reply. “I’ve got a giant strap-on at home and I’ll bend your ass over!”

And so on into the night.

Everyone liked Mer. Honest to a fault, always willing to help, never took shit off of anybody. She was incredible.

I

The tiny room I lived in, in the large Soho loft, was like something out of Being John Malcovitch. It had been haphazardly pieced together by previous tenants years ago who must have been a family of traveling gnomes with gyroscopic bodies. There were no right angles; in fact there were only very wrong angles.

Nothing fit.

I was trapped in a trapezoid and rooming in a rhombus; I was squashed in a square seen through a prism by a man with a cataract. But the geometrical terms make it seem like there was method behind the design. There was not.

The makeshift floor was of thin plywood and sagged and creaked over the beams. The hundred-year-old tin ceiling dipped so low on one side that I had to crouch. Yellowed paint flaked from it like vicious lichen, and the atomized eczema of the old, once-industrial building hovered toxically in the band of late-morning light that reluctantly pierced the grimed window panes.

It was a starving artist’s garret with none of the romance. It was more Kafka than Goethe, more Celine than Balzac.

But, hell, it was a room, the rent was paid for the month, and the rat that had just waddled its grey belly by the door was smaller than the other two that scurried by only seconds earlier.

It was summertime in New York and  hotter than the beach in hell. We were living five floors above a place called The Gourmet Garage, which by day sold overpriced produce, cheeses, meats, and an abundance of prepared foods to both long-standing locals and the throng of professionals who had recently infested what once had been artists’ lofts, and prior to that, factories..

That wasn’t the only infestation. By night this very Gourmet Garage was teeming with rats. It had been this way for weeks. The entire place was one giant Habitrail with rats of all sizes crawling over the beautifully merchandised fruits and vegetables from around the world.

They licked the meat-slicer behind the counter and gnawed the chimay, brie, and camembert in the open display refrigerators. They danced and defecated on the danbo, peed on the ptarmigan, shat on the stilton and dragged their tails over the tilsit. Yellow curved teeth and pink pustulant tongues sampled all there was to sample in this giant gourmet deli.

We had informed the owners that this was taking place but they ignored us, were rude in fact, and told us it was none of our business. Now their rat problem had become ours.

I lay there on the futon on the floor and wondered if there had been recent cases of the bubonic plague in New York. I wondered if I was breathing in dried rat feces. Surely they were living in a nest above the tin ceiling above my room. Of that there was no doubt. At night I heard them clawing against the tin. It made it difficult having female company in my little room for the night. I slept with one eye open for fear my face might be gnawed off. I pondered these horrors. I pondered the rat that had recently come up through the toilette and . . .

Then Shauna, the woman I rented my room from, yelled my name. I was wrenched from my rat reverie. I put down the classifieds which I had been futilely and faintheartedly scanning for work.

Shauna ran a freelance casting agency specializing in the impossible jobs, the ones where the time-frame for the job was yesterday, or the budget was paltry, or the mission preposterous. Her jobs had been keeping me alive the last six months.

I threw on some clothes, looked both ways for rats, passed through the door and bounded down the flight of uneven stairs to the open, spacious part of the loft.

“What gives?”

“We’ve got a good one,” she said. Shauna was lying on the floor. Her legs were splayed and she wore dirty, ripped dark green leggings.

In front of her was a cup of coffee, scattered Polaroid photographs, contracts, colored pencils, high-lighters, a carrot, a pack of clove cigarettes, tarot cards, a box of tampons, ten disposable cameras, and her Rolodex. This was how she worked. Desks were for common mortals. They were the ball and chain of bureaucrats. She was an artist, a producer, a fortune teller. She was Madam Sosostris, Gertrude Stein and Cecil B. Demille all rolled into one.

“Do tell,” I said.

“You’ll just love it,” she said. “It’s just the craziest. It’s a job for NIKE and Foot Locker.

“How much?” I asked.

“I can pay you $90 a day for 9 days, then we’ll see after that.”

I quickly did the calculation, ecstatic that I was going to be able to pay next month’s rent. “Seven-hundred-and-twenty dollars,” I said.

She looked at me over her glasses. “$810, she said.

“Wow, that’s even better,” I said.

Fuck. I needed some money.

My stomach growled. “Fuck you, stomach,” I said.

I went to the kitchen. There was the end of a piece of Italian bread on the counter. The cockroaches and mice did not even want it. It was as hard as a rock. It was the only thing to eat. I drank three glasses of brownish tap water and ate the bread. My stomach growled again. I pulled up my t-shirt and looked at it. The hair on my indented white belly looked like a mass of spider legs.

I had not worked for a blissful month and had not been worried because I was scheduled to have a good paying gig on a movie shoot as a production assistant. I had timed my pauperism to the millisecond, knowing I’d be completely penniless the day the new job started. But then one of the lead actors dropped out and filming had been put on hold indefinitely. That was over two weeks ago.

Now I needed work badly, but was caught in one of those downward, gasping spirals of slow-death cause and effect. I had no money because I was not working. I had no food because I had no money. I had no energy because I had been eating almost nothing for days. I did not look for work because I had no energy. I could not call anyone and inquire about work because the phone had been cut off. Add to that I had no real skills that the workplace was screaming for. A real Horatio Alger success story.

My mama would have been proud.

I needed Divine Intervention. It came. The buzzer to the apartment buzzed.

“It’s Karim.”

“Come on up,” I said.

I opened the door for him.

“You look like shit,” he said.

“Nice to see you, too,” I said.

Karim always looked perfect. He was a young Swiss artist with a Persian father. He lived off a stipend provided by the Swiss Government and supplemented his income with random part-time jobs that miraculously flowed to him through the art world. He was dashingly handsome in a casual, threadbare European way. He had blue black hair and olive skin. He was Byronesque in his brooding and as deep as a dime. He loved chocolate, croissants, and cigarettes. Women swooned for him at first blush.

He was also a terribly dull conversationalist, and loathed work. That was the quality I admired most in him.

His art project, which the Swiss government was paying for, consisted of gray pencil lines on a note pad. Every day Karim would make geometric drawings of straight lines on a little 3 x 5 note pad. He’d usually draw them while in bed. He’d make 3 or 4 of them a day and tear them from the pad.

He was to have an exhibition of his work at the Swiss Embassy in NY in a few months where his entire little note pad opus would be taped to a wall. TAPED! This was art. He called them Meditations in #2 Pencil. The Swiss Government was paying him to do this shit. God, I wished I was an artist.

What a gorgeous con.

“I just quit a job,” Karim said.

“Really,” I said. The longest I ever knew him to hold a job was six days.

“Yes, it was interfering with my art,” he said.

He reached in his shoulder bag and took out a piece of chocolate. He broke me off a piece. I put it in my mouth. It was dark, expensive, divine. It tasted like Persian jewels in a Swiss bank account. The spider-leg hairs on my belly danced. My toes tingled

“I told the owner you could take over for me. He seemed relieved because he had no one else.”

“What is it? When does it start? I’ll do it.”

“Today,” he said. “You’ll be moving paintings from museums to restorers, from galleries to art warehouses, from private collectors to auction houses. Yesterday I moved a DeKooning and a Klimt.”

“Really? Wow. A Klimt, cool,” I said. “What’s it pay?”

“$110 in cash per day, off the books,” he said. “The owner’s name is Tim DeLong.”

Karim continued to give me the background. Tim apparently was getting his Ph.D. in Art History at Columbia. He had been getting it for the last 12 years. He had a nervous breakdown writing his thesis and did not entirely recover. He lacked in social skills and was prone to violent outbursts. He was obsessive. He was a perfectionist who worshiped art, artists, and the snobbier end of its social milieu. This little niche he had created for himself: the transportation and temporary storage of fine art, got him close to his Gods.

Karim handed me a folded piece of paper with directions. “You should be there now,” he said.

He gave me another piece of chocolate. He had to get back to his artwork, he said. I thanked him and raced upstairs, showered, shaved and put on an almost clean white button-down shirt. I dashed out the door to the street. The heat hit me like the wet tongue of a giant, rabid dog.

I clawed my way across town toward the address on the paper:  7th Street, East Village, between B and C, only Blue door. I found it. The paint was peeling from the door. There was no buzzer. I knocked. The door opened and a large head with greasy hair appeared. “I’m a friend of Karim,” I said.

He lurched around the doorjamb and stooped over to look at me. “You’re late,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and he grudgingly invited me in.

I was standing in a dingy room made very narrow by racks for paintings of all sizes. Some were wrapped in bubble wrap. Others had zippered sleeves around them. Others were uncovered. A fluorescent light gave everything a sallow hue.

“Do you have a valid driver’s license?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you know anything about art?”

“A little. I go to museums a lot.”

“Who is your favorite artist?”

“Ahhm…”

“Quick, tell me!!!”

“Ah, Egon Schiele,” I said.

“Your second favorite!”

“Ahh, I like Francis Bacon.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“Tell me who you think is a complete phony.”

“I hate Jasper Johns,” I said.

“At least you’re not a complete idiot,” he said.

I was close to telling him to fuck off, but I needed the money. I bit my tongue.

“Read this,” he handed me a legal pad with a bulleted list of do’s and don’ts.

Before I could finish, he handed me a clipboard.

“Here is the route,” he said. All the paintings you have to move can be handled by one person. I’m going to demonstrate how you pick up a painting.”  He showed me. Then he demonstrated how you put a painting down. He inhaled as he picked up the painting and exhaled as he put it down. I wondered if that was part of the process, if I should inhale and exhale. He showed me the papers each client was to sign.

“Here’s your walkie-talkie. Check in after each pick-up. Keep it on at all times in case there is a change of plans.”

“Ok,” I said.

“Come with me.”

There’s a strong case to be made

“We’re not here to save the country from itself, just to get the job done.”

My traveling companion snapped those words at me as we worked to “smooth out” some auto paper “irregularities” at the border. Upon hearing them, I had to stop and reflect, even though in the past I’ve bribed my way from Syria to China, surely lesser nations morally. Maybe we ‘holier-than-thou’ foreigners casting aspersions in Guatemala, and innumerable places like it, are missing the point on bribery.

Before moving to define the issue in depth, I’d like to dismiss a silly argument that always seems to crop up at the beginning of an otherwise serious debate: “How dare you be so hypocritical as to discuss corruption elsewhere when your own country (the United States) is corrupt?”  Of course the United States is corrupt; all nations are. Just because Transparency International concludes that the Scandinavian countries are “clean” doesn’t mean that they are free from corruption, it just means that T.I. hasn’t yet figured out how they are corrupt and how to factor that kind of corruption into the rankings. If there are 215 countries, there are 215 corrupt countries, Q.E.D. Rounding out the top of T.I.’s “clean” list are Sweden, Norway, and more recently Iceland, all of whom in recent history have experienced total banking system collapses, and we defy you to show us a financial system blowup that wasn’t catalyzed by some particularly effective grease somewhere in the system, usually at the top (see Sachs, Goldman, et. al. under the “Current Events” heading in your favorite news source).

In the U.S. there is officially almost no corruption, unless you happen to be anywhere in Illinois, or Louisiana, or California’s 50th congressional district (also known as whitebread San Diego), or the Puritan state of Rhode Island, or happen to know one of the 14,000 registered federal lobbyists (U.S. Senate alone), or one of the 6,000 U.S. corporations employing lobbyists. But the point is this: on any given trip to the local Department of Motor Vehicles, it is highly unlikely that someone will approach you in line and say something to the effect of “You know, there is a much quicker way to get this done, if you’ll just follow me into the parking lot.” Your correspondent’s personal experience stuffing envelopes with $500 each to get an occupancy certificate in Baltimore notwithstanding, there remains very little official corruption of what we’ll call the “petty” kind, as opposed to the embedded and apparently socially and ethically acceptable “institutional” kind, in the United States.

Maybe there should be more.

Before professing your knee-jerk distaste for petty corruption, ask yourself this basic question: “Would I rather go through an official process that lasts up to two days but costs little or nothing, or pay an expediter $50 to turn it into a 20-minute seamless exercise in efficiency, with the same result?” In Guatemala we have that choice, but in the U.S. and other parts of the civilized, western world we do not. We are forced to take a number and stand in line for three days while the large woman behind the counter paints her nails and discusses her loveless life. Social utility. And we all know that Guatemala is a country with vast difference of degrees of wealth. If Robin Hood could understand the social utility of wealth redistribution, why can’t we?  In the case of a few well earned Pesos or Quetzales pressed into the palm of an obliging public servant, officially subsisting on the grandiose wage of $300 per month, it’s simple redistribution according to the will of the first-person distributor – rather than the whims of a politically fickle central government.

In the United States, speaking of ‘holier-than-thous,’ foreign corporate practices are governed by spurious enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, as snickering corporate executives refer to it. Written (probably during those wondrous, morally unambiguous and nationally disastrous Jimmy Carter years) to try, by beginning at home, to regulate the moral behavior of the world’s corporations. And because of that act we were just stung again, this time by those wily French with a bid to snake, successfully, General Electric out of a nuclear reactor contract in the notoriously uncorrupt Philippines. But the FCPA triggers a boring annual lecture by an otherwise incompetent corporate lawyer once a year to parse “Pay them to do what they should anyway, but don’t pay them to do what they shouldn’t.” In case the bottom feeders who inhabit corporate lawyers’ slots can’t figure that one out, some clear thinker — or maybe my kind of wag — when the FCPA was written, even referred in the written legislation to “grease payments.”

With all the current hand-wringing about the national economy in that august and incorruptible body called the United States Congress, maybe it’s time we adjust our Western attitudes toward corruption of the petty kind. Talk about export-led growth: “Hey China, how about a couple of new American-built (non-weaponized) nuclear reactors at $10 billion each?  Just walk with us out to the parking lot and we’ll slip a couple of spare F-16s in your pocket.” Let’s see the haughty French “outbid” us on that deal. Economic utility.

Should we bribe in Guatemala? Well, my border critic got the “job” done, and we made our Mexican hotel in time for the NCAA basketball final (possibly the best ever), re-crossing the border the next day with suspicious celerity, despite the customs officer’s initially Heller-esque protestations that by our passports we were already in Guatemala, so we couldn’t possibly be coming back. Talk about social utility of the very highest order.

But I still have this lingering Calvinistic notion that I am one step closer to Hell.

Guatemalans call their mayors and Congressmen “diez porcientistas” or “ten percenters”, charging 10% on anything with numbers attached that passes within signaling distance of their fiefdoms. There’s a trend, when their duly elected officials get too close to the trough, not to re-elect “veinte porcientistas” or twenty percenters, so the process is self-regulating. This phenomenon also guts the argument that goes “Well, the Maya did it,” since the Maya used base 20, and there is no known glyph showing anyone losing his head over receiving 21% instead of just losing the ball game.

Our car example may have had no wider consequences save that we got to enjoy every second of a particularly good NCAA final, and the tip jar at our favorite border crossing had a little less air in it, but there are also strong social and economic utility arguments in favor of petty bribes. Let’s examine the case of rice. Rice in Guatemala is about US$1.25 a kilo. Rice in Mexico is about $.80 a kilo. It is illegal to import Mexican rice into Guatemala. Is it therefore corrupt to bribe a Guatemalan official to look the other way when a container 20,000 kilos of Mexican rice “avoids” customs on its way across a man-made totally artificial line on a map to beleaguered consumers? I say “No!” The guy looking the other way may have a new 42 inch flat screen TV, but the stretched Guatemalan households at the container’s destination will save $5,000. Corrupt? Or just possibly a moral decision? I say it  provides immediate economic utility of the most beneficial kind — direct to the consumer. And national social utility. This logically airtight argument extends to gasoline, eggs, Coca Cola, Colgate and all those other items so essential to our lives here in Guatemala, especially beer. Beck’s and Heineken cheaper than Gallo?  Now there’s an area that could use a little large-scale cross-border grease.

What exactly is a bribe, anyway? When Caterpillar slips an Illinois congressperson an envelope full of cash to vote to keep out French (those wily French again) construction machinery, is that a bribe?  Or is it precisely what he was elected to do?  Henry Kissinger is adamant that nations do have interests, which, not just coincidentally, is why they are called national interests. Even a lawyer might accidentally grasp that one. Actually Kissinger, perhaps the most practical person ever to have been Secretary of State, is just articulating a mammoth worldwide argument for the primacy of the social utility of grease.

“To bribe or not to bribe?”

Even Shakespeare apparently totally missed the point when he wrote in Julius Caesar, “Shall we now contaminate our fingers with base bribes?”

Come on, Will baby, lighten up and join us at the Mexican border.

I’ve had some jobs in my day.

It always happened like this. I needed some money so I found some way to make it. The thought of a career never really was my thing. Being something – a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief just didn’t ring true. The sense of permanence, grown-up-dom, self-importance, and lack of adventure always had me taking whatever would have me. More often than not this strategy left me broke and desperate and wondering where I would lay my head for the night. Looking back it was not a strategy or a conscious decision at all. I think it just comes down to wiring. I was not wired for the other way. Maybe it was the books I read at an early age… who knows.

Here are the jobs I’ve held in more or less chronological order from  the age of 7 on: I sold seeds from door to door in suburbia, then Christmas and Easter cards, I delivered newspapers, I mowed lawns, I raked leaves, I stuffed envelopes, I built lobsterpots for fisherman, I picked peas on a farm, I taught tennis, I sold marijuana by the joint, ounce, ¼ pound and pound, I worked alongside a bee farmer, then helped train birddogs, and by mistake almost poisoned horses…

I worked in an old folks home, I worked as a night guard in a library, I worked in a copy shop, I framed houses, I painted houses, I tore down houses, I’ve waited tables…

I’ve sold Christmas trees on the sidewalks of NY, I telemarketed shitty magazines from a warehouse in Jersey City, I drove an ice-cream truck in Michigan, I bounced for a brief spell in a bar in Birmingham, I drove a beer truck in Virginia, I worked as a shill in an auction house in Atlanta, Georgia, I taught Latin in a private high school in Mississippi, I opened an illegal bar on top of a convent in Rome….

I’ve  worked construction on a high-rise, I’ve sniveled as a stock broker, I gave blood whenever and wherever they were paying for it, I’ve tutored attention deficit teenagers and written theses for lazy grad students. I’ve scribbled ad copy for Cinemax pseudo porn and styled an urban-rooftop-wet-dream for the Home and Garden Television Channel. I’ve dot-commed with dipshits, transported precious paintings from gallery to restorer to collector, I’ve sold antiques…

I’ve exported furniture from Mexico and overseen the making of hand bags in a state prison…

I’ve helped put together famous boy bands,  I’ve done castings for movies, television, commercials and print, I’ve done location scouting and acting, I’ve opened a bar, a bookstore and a café in Guatemala. I’ve smuggled booze…

I could go on. But the beautiful part of all that, especially in the mid-later years, is that when I was not doing THAT, I was lazing about, reading, bopping into museums, catching a bus to another town, scribbling in a journal, strolling the streets  of a city, looking in windows, going to movies, waking up in another country…

In the breaks between having some money and having none, I’d often go to a used bookstore and buy a handful of books by one author and go on a focused reading binge. Graham Greene I read this way, Bruce Chatwin, Balzac, Shaw, Faulkner, Maugham, Bukowski, Dashiel Hammet, Mickey Spillane, James M. Caine, Celine, Chomsky, Paul Bowles, all filled these glorious  and episodic sabbaticals. (When people would ask what I do, I’d say just that, I’m on a sabbatical, as though I had just taken a brief leave from a teaching position at a prestigious university.)

For some strange reason during these sabbaticals I’d often take to collecting broken chairs that had been discarded in the street. I felt a kinship to them. They were a bit rocky, interesting in an off kilter way and in need of ass. I’d take them home, and with a little glue and sandpaper and paint, I’d fix them up and give them as gifts. Where others would bring a bottle of wine to a party, I’d show up with a slightly cattywampus chair and get an odd look as I passed through the door. It got to the point that briefly I held the moniker, The Chairman.

Illustrations by Juan Pablo Canale Banus

The pain ripped through my chest like a dozen steak-knives, snapping me over at the waist, leaving me staring and grimacing at the floor. I was on a PATH train headed back into the city after a night of house sitting in Hoboken.

Well, this is it, I thought, I’m going to die right here. Fuckin’ typical–dropping dead on a train from Jersey, my pockets empty except for one token, carrying a bag full of dirty clothes and a copy of Jack Black’s “You Can’t Win.” Ain’t it the truth?

I was coming off of four of the ugliest days I’ve suffered through in a long time, staring hard and hopeless into the fifth. It all started sometime in the middle of the night the Thursday before. I was lying in bed, my eyes wide in the darkness, sleep as obscene and foolish a notion as God, when the phone rang. Now, on principle, I never answer the phone after ten, because it’s either bad news or someone I don’t want to talk to. Unfortunately, I’ve given a few people the okay to call me whenever, so I crawled out of bed and went to listen to who it was.

It was Laura, my estranged wife, calling from her new apartment in Harlem. She sounded bad–you learn to recognize these things over time–so I picked up. She was in a state alright–some guy she had been seeing suddenly wasn’t dealing with her anymore, wasn’t taking her calls, was leaving his home phone off the hook. Both of us figured we knew what was going on.

“Look,” I told her, pinching the bridge of my nose, “why don’t you come down here, we can talk about it.”

“Can we order a pizza?”

“Sure, we can order a pizza.” With that, she was on her way. Laura and I were still very friendly, and I’d seen her through the worst of times before, so this was no big deal. So I figured. Of course I also figured that the world was going to end in August of 1985.

Two hours later, pizza ordered, beer opened, smokes lit, we got down to business. Laura’s beau, Chris, you see, worked at the same research lab she did. So did Chris’s wife. It was a pretty sticky situation from the get-go.

It started a few months back, when Laura moved out of the apartment and into the lab, while she looked for a place of her own. Chris would stop and ask her how she was doing. She’d tell him. The conversations grew longer. They’d go out for coffee or drinks. In Laura’s eyes, it all seemed very innocent. Then one night she called and told me that he was pretty hooked.

“He just sits there and stares at me,” she said.

“What about his wife and kids? I mean, this could get ugly.”

“He says that he’s bored at home–that when he walks in the door, he just shuts himself off. He says his wife doesn’t understand him.”

“He actually said that?”

“Uh-huh. He says that he can really talk to me, and that he’s never met anyone like me before.”

“He actually said that, too?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, my dear–those are the oldest goddamn lines in the book.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Over the weeks, Chris got a little more ardent, while Laura kept holding him off. It was just a good friendship, she figured. I kept following the action from a distance, not having any love life of my own to worry about. Then this Chris character came out and told Laura that he loved her, and wanted to leave his wife for her.

“Yikes!” I said.

Thing is, after all these weeks living alone in a lab after having stepped away from an unhappy marriage, Laura was pretty vulnerable to anyone who’d be nice to her–and as a result, had started to reciprocate his affections.

“So, do you love him?” I asked.

“I could, I suppose.”

A week later, I had no doubt that she did. Still, when he asked her to go to Canada with him for a week, she turned him down. That’s when he stopped talking. The one time she did get him on the phone, he promised he’d call once he got to Canada and explain everything.

“I don’t know what happened,” she told me. “And what’s more, I don’t know what’s going to happen–does it mean I can’t go to the lab anymore? Does it mean I can’t finish my research? He says he’s going to call me, but that’s two days away–two days of not knowing what to think.”

Which meant two unbearable days of panic and paranoia.

“Look, how’s this,” I suggested, “I’ll call him at the lab tomorrow and find out what the hell the story is.”

“He’ll never talk to you.”

“Hey, are you forgetting that I’m a professional journalist? It’s my job to get people who don’t want to talk to talk.”

“He’s not going to talk to you.”

“He’ll talk to me.”

At ten the next morning, I had him on the phone.

“Hey, Chris, Jim Knipfel here–you know, Laura’s husband?”

“Oh…….hi.”

“Tell me, Chris, uhhhh, what the hell’s going on?”

“Whaddyou mean?”

I rolled my eyes and lit a smoke. “Jesus, no time for that now–you know damn well what I mean. Laura’s here and she’s a mess, and I’m not going to wait until you get out of the country to find out what the story is.”

There was a bit of silence on the other end.

“Okay, let’s play it this way,” I stopped myself before calling him “Sugarlips,” “I’ll ask you two yes-or-no questions, then let you go, okay?”

“Okay.”

“When you call Laura from Toronto, which I’m quite certain you’re going to do, are you going to tell her that you can’t see her anymore?”

“More or less. There was a big blow-up at home a few nights ago–”

“Not my problem, Chris, and not one of my questions. Question number two: Will this in any way affect her work at the lab?”

“Absolutely not.”

Unlike most smokers

Neither one of my folks smoked, either. In fact, whenever the subject came up, my dad always told the delightful story about his first experience with tobacco. Seems he’d gotten his hands on some chaw when he was 10, and snuck out behind the barn to find out for himself what the fuss was all about. Of course, while he was huddling back there, chewin’ and spittin’, my grandpa came around the corner with a friend of his and caught him, just as nature intended.

“Pretty good, eh?” my grandpa’s friend asked my dad.

“Yeah, it’s great!” my dad answered.

“You know what you do with it now?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Ya swallow it.”

Well, my dad ended up in bed for the next two weeks, sick as he had ever been, ever would be, and never touched tobacco again, in any form.

Myself, I waited until I was 19, well aware of all the dangers, all the warnings, anxious to engage death in a slow and painful tango. Actually, slow suicide wasn’t why I started, but it’s certainly why I continue today. I didn’t even start with cigarettes. Instead, I began with cigars. Big, cheap, nasty-as-nasty-gets Phillie Titans. And I started, simply enough, because I was a bad man. Smoking fat, foul cigars in cramped public places seemed an easy and evil form of entertainment.

It was so simple to be walking down the street, cigar clamped tightly between my teeth, and just on a whim pop into a high-end sweater shop. I’d only be in there for a minute or two before the (always) dim employees figured out what was going on. They’d ask me to leave, which I did without argument, feigning ignorance (“I’m so sorry – I forgot all about it – I just wasn’t thinking”) – but my presence would be remembered there for days afterwards.

I’d bring a box of five Titans into a local hipster/arty coffee shop frequented by skinny white kids in turtlenecks and berets and pretend to read and drink coffee while frantically puffing away. It always insured that no one would sit next to me, but the bohemian hepcats were too cowardly to ask me to stop. That was a weekly bit of good fun until the complaints mounted and the management at Steep & Brew posted the “No Pipes, No Cigars” sign on their front door. I took that sign as a great moral victory, though I don’t know why.

I discovered another neat little obnoxious cigar trick while it was raining. I was waiting in a doorway for Grinch to show one night, watching all these people traipse by with their umbrellas, when I started experimenting. I found that if you time it just right, you can blow a puff of foul, acrid Titan smoke so that it will settle underneath the canopy of an umbrella, hang there, and travel along with the umbrella-user for several blocks.

Oh, the fun I had!

Before long, I found that I was chain-smoking Titans. By the third one, I could feel what seemed to be a golf ball-sized knot of hot tar sitting just behind my breastbone. It was a good feeling, a good pain. I figured I was onto something.

Unfortunately, the problem with cigars is this – especially in these days of the anti-smoking crusaders – you need a good half-hour chunk of time in order to properly enjoy a cigar. When I was in school, I had that kind of schedule, but not anymore. My day is now cut up into tiny little segments, and I can’t take a half-hour break to go smoke a bad cigar at someone else’s expense.

For awhile in Minneapolis, I tried some little monsters called Dutch Treats. Even more rancid than Titans they were, but they were cigarette-sized and came in three delightful flavors (leather, tangerine and raccoon, as I remember). Better still, they were sold in two-packs for 99 cents. That’s 40 little hate-sticks for less than a dollar! And even better yet, you didn’t have to ask for them the way you had to ask for regular cigarettes – they could be found in the tobacco aisle of my local Snyder’s drugstore, which made stealing them not just easy, but almost obligatory. Best of all, nobody – not even the most smoke-desperate homeless psychos – would ever bum one off me once they found out what they were.

As I walked toward my regular pillar to wait, I passed a young Japanese couple. He was on the payphone, while she wandered in what seemed to be aimless circles around him.

I paid them little mind, took my spot, and stared at the ground. The air was awfully thick down there. After a few minutes of staring at the ground and making occasional pointless glances in the general direction of my watch, I noticed that the Japanese girl was on the move. Her boyfriend was still talking to someone on the phone, but her wanderings were now taking her down toward the far end of the platform. She was swinging her head to the left and right as she walked, as if looking for something.

“Miss?” a middle-aged woman shouted after her. In her slacks and Polo shirt, she looked like she was on her way to “casual day” at the office. “Miss?!”

The young woman stopped and turned around. “Yeah?” she shouted back.

“Are you looking for your bag?” the older woman asked. They were still some 30 yards away from each other, so they had to yell past me. “Did you leave it down here at this end?”

“Yes! Do you have it?” The girl was jogging back toward her now, smiling, clearly relieved.

But as she drew closer, the middle aged woman told her that the bag was no longer there, that the police had come and taken it away.

“What?” The girl froze in her steps.

“The police took it.”

“Ahh!” the girl cried. “But – but can I… where can… Ahh! Frank!”

Then she bolted up the stairs, emitting a small, panicked grunt with each step. I watched her go. Where exactly she planned to start looking up there, I couldn’t really say. Her boyfriend continued talking to whoever he was talking to for a few minutes longer. He seemed more annoyed by all the shouting than anything else. Then he hung up and headed toward the stairs to follow her. He didn’t seem nearly as excited as her. Perhaps he just didn’t care.

It seems the proverbial unattended bag, threat to us all, had struck again.

Jesus Christ.

It was only then beginning to dawn on me that the train was late. No, it was worse than that. Since I’d been down there, no trains – neither uptown nor down – had come through the station. Not a one. And now I knew why. They were either holding them one station away or rerouting them until they knew for sure that the danger had passed, and that the Japanese chick’s bag wasn’t loaded with TNT or anthrax or cow dung. It also occurred to me that even though they were keeping the trains a safe distance away, they seemed to have no problem at all with letting the rest of us wait down there on the very same platform where that potential bag full of death was found.

Not that I was concerned about anything like that – I just found it interesting. Another facet of the MTA’s cut and run policy for handling emergencies.

Now consider for a moment the two major forces at work on the platform that morning: On the one hand you have someone so desperate, so intent on being a Good Citizen and getting a pat on the head from the cops that he or she was all too willing to drop a dime on a neighbor. Or in this case on an unattended purple Hello Kitty knapsack whose owner, in all likelihood, was nearby.

(I can’t say for sure, by the way, that it was a purple Hello Kitty knapsack – but I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if it were.)

And on the other hand there’s Ms. Oblivious over there. I realize it was still mighty early – not even 6 a.m. yet – and that not all of us are quite together yet at that hour, but my God. How out of it do you have to be to not only leave your bag on a New York subway platform and wander away, but to not even notice when the cops show up, scrutinize and securing the bag, and take it away? I’m amazed she’s remembered to breathe for this long.

I don’t like the fact that we’re told every time we turn around that we’re supposed to be all jittery about forgotten bags. I consider it useless and dangerous and unnecessary. But we are told that, and people are awfully susceptible. Given that, putting a bag down and wandering away is just plain stupid, and she deserves to have her iPod taken away and stomped on for it. But on the other hand, people who can turn stoolie so fucking easily just sadden me, and cut one more chunk out of my meager faith in humanity.

In a struggle between the criminally witless and those people who can’t ever seem to mind their own goddamn business, who wins? Not me, that’s for sure – I was the one who had to wait an extra half hour for the train that morning on account of their foolishness.

Assholes, both of them.

Later that afternoon, I found myself standing on a different subway platform. It was warm down there, too. It was warm all over.

When the train finally arrived and pulled to a stop, I began heading toward an open set of doors. The conductor was hanging out of his window scanning up and down the train.

As I passed him, I heard him mumble something. Figuring he was just mumbling to himself, I ignored it and kept walking.

“Excuse me?” I heard him say. “Sir?”

Still not sure he was talking to me, I stopped and turned. Then I walked back to him.

“That’s a hot car,” he told me. “This one over here’s got air.”

I looked back where I’d been headed initially, and saw the people lined up to get in. Man, they were going to be an annoyed, stinky bunch before too long…

I thanked the conductor, not exactly sure why he’d chosen to let me in on this, and stepped into the air-conditioned car.

I suppose it was a kind of snitching, sure, a sharing of privileged information. But at least this time the intent was decent.

Jim Knipfel is a free lance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of the memoir, Quitting the Nairobi Trio, the Novel, The Buzzing and several other works. His new novel, Unplugging Philco (Simon & Schuster) hit the streets on April 14th of this year. His weekly column, Slackjaw, can be read at www.electronpress.com

Maybe this happens to everybody

Sometimes I step outside the front door of my apartment, and suddenly find myself very confused by the world.

I’m not talking about large-scale issues. I’m not thinking “why do men fight wars?” or “Why don’t people realize that new technologies are accelerating our loss of humanity?” None of that shit. It’s much more basic than that. I mean the world itself – the physical things around me – seem strange and confounding.

Buildings seem to loom at strange angles. Human faces seem to be not just identical, but monstrous and twisted. Voices sound like gibberish. Even walking seems like a strange thing and suddenly requires conscious effort. One leg, then the other.

It’s akin to a mild acid trip, but it’s not the result of drugs or alcohol (that’s a whole different story). It just happens sometimes, usually in the morning. Most of the time things are simple – I shut the brain off almost completely and just go about my business by reflex. Those other times, though, boy. I need to concentrate real, real hard to get where I’m going.

I’ve mentioned things like this before, I think, but it really hit me again this morning. I was out running my usual Saturday errands, and people and walls and fences appeared out of nowhere in front of me. A man in a car stopped and asked for directions to the hospital, and I had to make him repeat the question three times before I could parse things out and point him in what I believe was the right direction. I should’ve known from the start what he wanted – people in this neighborhood only and always want directions to the hospital.

I walked into the grocery store and froze. I knew I was supposed to be there and knew what general principles were involved in “buying groceries.” I knew the process, but still it seemed like nothing I had ever experienced before. All those products, all those packages – the colors and the white noise. It was almost overwhelming. Thank god the store wasn’t crowded at that hour, or I might have turned around at that moment and fled. Instead I grabbed a basket and moved down the aisles, grabbing this and that while everything seemed to flow around me. Thank god the grocery store was big enough that I could cover myself okay. If I’d been in a narrow and cramped bodega, I would’ve been lost.

As I waited in the checkout line, my eyes scanned the magazine covers, and I could find no discernible, qualitative difference between Time, Women’s World, TV Guide, the crossword magazines and The Weekly World News.

“Humans Are Evolving Back Into Apes!,” the Weekly World News headline screamed.

Well, yeah, I thought. It seemed so obvious. I figured everyone knew that already.

Then the woman at the register was asking something of me – demanding, even.

What does she want? I thought, and said “Hmm?”

“Twenty, three, forty.” she said, and it took me perhaps a little too long to figure out what she meant by that odd string of numbers. I looked behind me, hoping there would be someone there to help me out, but I was alone.

Finally, slowly, the old internalized ways took hold again, and I reached for my wallet.

“I understand,” I told her.

Once outside in the warm gray drizzle again, I became aware of what was happening. It didn’t change the fact that everything seemed weird and wrong, but at least I was able to take that step back now and think.Yes, things seem weird from a safer and saner vantage point. I was able to recognize that the problem was one of perception and nothing else. Things were as I’d always remembered them – I was merely perceiving them off-kilter.

It was kind of like the time I woke up in a hospital in Minneapolis after a long drug-induced hallucination and thought, “Oh, I’m completely insane” – only to realize that being able to make that observation meant I wasn’t insane at all.

In this case it didn’t help dispel the crazy perceptions themselves, but I stopped worrying about them. I had a better sense of what needed to be done, even if the streets and storefronts and people around me seemed like a landscape from some distant, outlandish planet.

I got home without too much incident and put the various groceries where they belonged (I think – I guess I’ll find out later). Then I talked to my girlfriend, Morgan, which brought things back around again. What’s more, in my apartment everything seemed familiar and comfortable once again. I knew where I was and what things did.

Part of the problem, I think, was the fact that it was early, that I hadn’t yet had enough coffee, and that my brain was still waking up. Things hadn’t quite snapped into place yet, so the perceptions of a fluid and changing world simply flooded in willy-nilly, without the brain yet able to register things like “perspective” or “depth perception.”

It’s funny how the body wakes up in stages during the first hour or two of the day. Not just the brain, but things like digestion, coordination, the respiratory system. At least with me that’s the way it works. Brain comes last.

I poured myself another mug of cold coffee and downed it, then lit the morning’s eighth cigarette. Yes, things were starting to come around. A glance out the front window a few minutes later revealed that things seemed normal again. Still frightening, still strange, but at least recognizably so.

Meanwhile, I set myself the task of trying not to think about what schizophrenics, alien abductees, or Philip K. Dick might have to say about the morning’s grocery run.