A Work of Art That Is So Very Wrong

In my fight against COVID-19, I consulted my regular doctor, but I also had a secret weapon. I consulted an acupuncturist.

I had been going to Dr. Wu for several years, and he had punctured my skin many, many times. Not once did I leak. Because of our relationship, he allowed me to text him with my symptoms, and he responded with herbal prescriptions and advice. Every morning, I would wake up and text him what was ailing me.

“Temperature 102.7, SPO2 90, 12 hours of sleep,” I would text.

“Sleep as long as you can,” Dr. Wu wrote back. “Use Tylenol for that high fever, and if it gets above 103 or the SPO2 gets much below 90, go to the ER.”

And then he would text back with advice that helped, trust me, helped quite a bit.

Of course, traditional Chinese medicine works on a different system. It’s ancient wisdom that goes back millennia. They take your pulse, which can be categorized in any of 30 different ways: slow, floating, wiry, thready, surging, and the like. They look at your tongue in a much more detailed way than Western doctors do.

And, I hesitate to mention, they also look at your feces. If you think about it, it makes sense that one’s health could be detected on the formation of one’s effluent, although Western medicine seems to pay that little mind. The gastrointestinal system’s end product is effluent. As the product passes through the body, it is formed by many organs, fluids, processes, and in fact, all aspects of one’s health. Viruses affect effluent, too, as does anxiety, foods, and medical conditions. Western doctors never ask about your shit, but the good Chinese practitioner considers the look of our feculence to be essential information.

Thus, I started taking photographs of my lovely creations on my cell phone, and on Dr. Wu’s recommendation, texting those photos to him.

Of course, there is a protocol involved in the transmission of such lurid photos. You don’t just wake up at 7 am and forward the good doctor one of your productions unannounced. It’s not a good image to see before breakfast. Thus, you have to pave the way.

“SPO2 93, temperature 100.7, 12 hours of sleep,” I texted one day, “and can I forward a photo of my latest three BMs?”

“Sure,” he texted back.

A few minutes after I sent it, Dr. Wu would give me an evaluation. If I were still an infant deep in the Poopy Stage of Development, my self-esteem would hang on his praise. But I’m a grown-up, dammit, I can drive and write checks and make poor decisions, and when he came through with a “Much improved,” I texted back with a happy emoji, and perhaps, if I’m honest, not just because I was improving, either; I’m proud of all my creations.

But think about this. You’re making two or three masterpieces every day, taking a photograph of each one. Once you have that battalion of photos on your phone, it creates a quandary. One day, for example, I wanted to text a photo of myself to a friend to show that my weight loss hadn’t been scary. It was a good smiling photo. But when I pressed ATTACH PHOTO, there were all these photos of my other gastrointestinal artwork.

Oh my God, what if I press the wrong button?! I thought. What if I send an ugly photo to my 83-year-old cousin Ruth rather than the photo of me?

“What is the meaning of this?!” Ruth would ask in horror over the phone. “Is this what your…type thinks of as funny? Oh my goodness gracious, your late father would be terribly ashamed of you!”

Worse yet, I dreaded sending an ugly photo to a prospective magic-show client, someone who had asked for a magician who could perform Zoom magic for their corporate sales meeting.

“Attached, as promised, are photos of my magic show in action,” I would write.

They might report me, although to whom is unclear to me. The Poopy Police? It seems like doing something like that should be illegal, but I just can’t put my finger on which silly statute it would violate.

A few days ago, Dr. Wu offered a bit of insight into how to read your ghastly sequeliae.

“The thinner the BMs are, the unhealthier you are,” he said. “In general, you’re looking for well formed.”

“Do you mean like sculpture, like in the shape of a Degas ballerina?”

“It looks like your sense of humor is back to normal,” Dr. Wu wrote back. “You’re getting better.”

A Look That’s Inexplicable Except to Those Who Have Seen It

Never been in the hospital. Exercise every day. Don’t think about death. Don’t even like the word, death death death, ugh. I don’t want to mention how chronologically close I am to death, but suffice it to say that I remember the insult to food that was Velveeta, and yes, I ate it and loved it.

But when I was stricken by COVID-19 last December 22, the prospect of death suddenly became real. I was laying in bed, my temperature vacillating between 100 and 103, gulping Tylenol to lower my temp, staring into space, thinking, “Is this how people die?” At that point, 375,000 Americans had already died of it.

Sitting in the ER, feverish and weak, on Day 11.

Once you start thinking about the final blackout, I mean in a real way, suddenly, pathways open up in your mind that you never knew existed, like an undiscovered country. I began walking those pathways. People were telling me to watch a lot of Netflix, but often, TV was too intense for me. I preferred to watch nothing except the afternoon light gently playing off my ceiling and walls. Every so often, I heard a truck drive by outside. Extreme boredom was the dominant sensation in the room.

One day, my mind meandered to who would be happy if I died. C. immediately came to mind. She has always been mortally jealous of whatever I’ve done. Years ago, she was a perky brunette chick with modest ambitions. The last time I saw her, which was about 10 years ago at a party, I hugged her. It was a peace offering. She just stood there, arms lowered, like How long do I have to hold my breath? At my funeral, she stood over my coffin and thought, Long overdue. That’s what I saw in my fevered daydream, along with bugs that I knew weren’t there.

In the middle of the night, I would wake up, my mouth completely dried out like a rice cake, my shirt drenched in sweat. Still happens, because even at Day 32, I’m not quite well yet. At bedtime, I still have to lay out two dry shirts to change into, sequentially, during the night. And two dry pillowcases, too.

Caine came to mind. He would be happy to hear about my death, too, delighted, in fact. In 7th grade, I went over to his house to listen to a horror album by a strange man named Arch Oboler whom Caine absolutely loved. Caine was a misfit who hated his platinum-blonde mother. Before leading me downstairs, he called out to her.

“I’ll be downstairs, slut!” he said.

There was a room down there with a record player, and a record named Lights Out.

“For maximum effect, you have to listen to it with the lights out,” he said, and suddenly the room got dark, curtains pulled shut.

The record was quite spooky, I must confess. It was about a monster who turned people inside out, with organs on the outside of their body.

After that edgy experience, I shied away from Caine.

But as with many old classmates, we kept in touch even into adulthood. Caine moved to Provo, fathered a couple dozen brats, and became an Emmy-winning film editor and right-wing conspiracist. I should have known, with his 7th-grade obsession with fantasy. I visited him once in college, then occasionally kept in touch with him through the years, as classmates do.

Years later, Caine proudly proclaimed his love of Glenn Beck, who, if you’ll recall, was the opportunistic precursor to Q, which is to say, the biggest liar in the room. I asked Caine why he watched Beck, and he looked me straight in the eyes and said, with a belligerent smugness, “Because I have kids.”

In so many ways, Caine turned out to be a rotten adult. He’s lied to me many times over the years, sometimes on Facebook, and I’ve called him on it often, which has annoyed him mightily. In his eyes, that’s been my major sin. I’ve contradicted his anti-masker lies, his Trump-doesn’t-lie lies, and his hateful anti-liberal lies. I’ve become a kind of libtard nemesis in his life, and we no longer talk. He can’t handle the truth.

Yeah, Caine would say a silent Hallelujah for the death of another damned snowflake who’s fallen off the voter rolls.

I was feverish with COVID-19 for 13 days, and while I lay there in bed, my mind meandered through a limited terrain. Sometimes I had delusions, such as the time when I looked at my arms and saw them as black and withered and was worried that they would drop off. I knew it was a delusion, but it slipped into my mind like an earworm from a sci-fi movie.

Claire was worried about me. The most disconcerting thing to her was that I wasn’t cracking any jokes. That really scared her. She didn’t know this person without humor.

Claire was fixing my meals and bringing them upstairs on a tray. She was doing the laundry, getting the mail, and running the house in all ways.

“Do you think you should isolate from me?” I asked on the second night while we were laying in bed.

“No.”

I thought about her answer. I wondered whether she was being unassertive or fatalistic or even irresponsible. I thought about the prospect of her death, and what my responsibilities were. The next morning, Claire fixed me some grits with canned peach bits and honey on top. I ate as much as I could, which was about four bites, and then pushed it aside. Food was disgusting to me. Claire picked up the tray and started to leave the bedroom.

“Are you sure you don’t want to sleep in another room?” I asked. “So you don’t catch it?”

Claire looked at me, and in the look in her eyes, I saw something that you might call commitment, although it was not just that, it was more like a decision that her heart had made years ago and was part of everything she did, the way she held herself and the way she looked at you and the way she smiled, although that seems inadequate and perhaps it’s simply inexplicable except to those who have seen that look in their own spouse’s eyes.

“No,” she said firmly. “I’ll sleep here.”

There are many things to half-think about when your mind is wandering aimlessly in that COVID fog, and many delusions and half-baked conclusions, but about this one thing I was clear. Looking into her eyes that day, I knew that she was someone who would be devastated if I died, and who intended not to let that happen.

Standing in Their Virus Cloud, Breathing In

I was careful. Some called me paranoid. In the beginning of the pandemic, we spent a half-hour wiping down groceries with a Clorox solution. We wiped down every new Amazon package. We shopped only once every three weeks. We stayed inside almost all the time. Whenever we went outside, we wore masks. Our neighbor Jose shot us looks, like, Whatever. We kept up on the latest research regarding transmission. We railed on Facebook against anti-maskers.

But on December 22, I came down with my first symptom, a temperature that woke me up in the middle of the night, caused me to stick a thermometer into my mouth, and alarmed me–102.7. By the New Year, I had a COVID-19 diagnosis. By January 5, I had lost 30 pounds. It just takes one mistake.

People want to know how I got it, if only to assuage their fear that they might catch it. In my case, it was probably takeout. Given our extremely limited opportunities for contagion, I’m pretty sure that was it.

I had just performed a Zoom magic show for an hour. It was a lovely show, and my energy soared, as it always does when I perform. After a show, my appetite always flares. I get this surge of confidence, even invincibility, while I perform my miracles and people are smacking their heads and raving, and I get a sense that there are no limits. It’s ice cream time!

“Let’s get Thai takeout,” I said to Claire.

“Oh, that sounds great.”

So I called in an order, and 20 minutes later, I was at the restaurant.

I suppose I should have called from the parking lot and asked them to bring the order out to me. But I didn’t. The way I saw it, I would just pop in, pick it up, and pop out. Takeout is a very low risk, I thought.

But inside the restaurant, there was a line. A couple of twentysomething guys were ahead of me ordering. One of them, a guy who looked like an idiot who wasn’t and would never be good at anything, even sports, wore his mask below his nose. The Thai waitress behind the counter said nothing about it.

“He’s an imbecile,” I thought. “But chances are he doesn’t have the virus.”

I was distancing, too. There were footprints on the floor placed six feet apart, and we each stood on our own footprints. The twentysomethings chatted and chatted. It must have taken them five minutes. Finally, finally, they left and I stepped up into the spot that they had just stood in. Right into their virus cloud. I was wearing a mask, but no mask is 100%. After two minutes of standing in that cloud, I left with my bags of food.

On Day 28, I was still severely short of breath.

It was a fantastic meal, oh man, yellow curry with chicken on rice, plus pad thai, oh God. But the disease that I got from that brief visit made me the sickest I had been in my life. I lost weight in a way you don’t want to lose weight. I can’t catch my breath. Turns out I wasn’t paranoid, Jose. It was a risk that I really shouldn’t have taken.

Will I Ever Be Able to Breathe Deeply Again?

I’m pretty strong, damn it. This may be the first time I’ve said that absurd phrase out loud, but hey, if you bicycle up hills for nearly an hour every day for 30 years, you’re going to end up strong like bull.

When you have COVID-19, however, as I have for the past 26 days, that strength suddenly disappears. In the first two weeks of my beloved COVID journey, walking up and down stairs was precarious. I grabbed for walls to steady myself. Brushing my teeth was a supreme effort that left me gasping for air. I wanted to write on my blog, but I couldn’t even focus for a paragraph’s length.

Day after day, I spent 98% of my time in bed. But yesterday, on Day 25, I took my first walk outside. Mind you, just a month ago, I was walking an hourlong route on my rest days from cycling, booking it, pushing the envelope for my lungs, but yesterday, it was a whole other body bag. I stepped out into the daylight and let the 84-degree sun soak my face. I couldn’t suppress a smile. I started walking, trying to make it as leisurely as possible. I wasn’t ambitious, because ambitious ain’t where it’s at with the stricken. About 100 yards out, I turned around, then walked the 100 yards back. When I got back to my front door, I was gasping and coughing. My muscles remembered how to do the work, but my lungs were a mess.

I’m no longer strong, damn it.

My fitness has earned me a great life. At age 25, I began writing for Shape magazine, and then Self and American Health and Fitness and many others, and took to heart everything that those fitness experts told me.

It’s the only body you will ever have, one expert told me.

Aerobic exercise is a miracle drug, said another.

Pre-COVID, such an innocent time, I looked forward every day to my Killer Hill. When I dragged myself up that 7-minute homicidal topography every afternoon, and then up and down various lesser hills through the rest of the ride, it occurred to me that my strength is not a superhero kind of strength where Thor’s hammer swings and the world shakes; instead, it’s a steady, easy strength. I have a great grip. I have great blood flow. My numbers are perfect. I don’t have to worry about lifting things or climbing stairs, that’s all. Life is easy.

I’ve earned that life. I’ve never had a problem with the usual aging villains–high blood pressure, cholesterol, obesity, all those things that age you prematurely. Other idiots my age look old. They’re fighting all sorts of maladies, and it makes me remember something that one of those experts told me all those years ago.

Most of the things that people generally think of as the normal aging process are simply the result of lack of exercise, he said. Aches and pains, wrinkled and crepey skin, shortness of breath.

So I have followed the exercise way of life, and it has made me hardy and strong. I hardly know my doctor. I like it that way. Stay away from me, jerk, I don’t want what you’re selling.

But COVID-19 doesn’t respect no boundaries. During the first two weeks of my illness, I lost 30 pounds. That’s right, 30 pounds in two weeks. Examining it more closely, I have come to realize how I lost that weight. I was laying in bed with a fever that swung wildly between 100 and 103 degrees. It hurt to move, so I just laid there immobile, staring at nothing, thinking about as little as possible. When it came time for meals, I knew I had to eat, but the food seemed disgusting to me. I would eat three spoonfuls of yogurt and push aside the rest.

My body would say, Not enough calories coming in; gotta throw some fat weight overboard.

Then my body would say, He’s not moving, so he obviously doesn’t need that muscle weight; throw some of that overboard, too.

Pretty soon, I was looking a little scary.

At Day 26, I am making steady progress towards health, but I have fears. A CBS report says that 90% of COVID-19 patients end up with lung scarring. What the hell does that mean? I worked hard for those lungs, dammit!

On Facebook COVID recovery groups, they talk about getting blood clots while you’re recovering. What?! How do you dodge that bullet? Is there an anti-blood clot diet?

And will I ever be able to breathe deeply again?

Musings of a COVID-19 patient, part 2

I’m more than three weeks into a COVID-19 infection, and many would say that I’m on the mend. But consider this. I’ve lost 30 pounds. I walk down to the kitchen and back up to the bedroom and I’m panting like crazy. I spend 98% of my time in bed. And when I take a deep breath, I start coughing uncontrollably.

If you think, “Hey, if I catch it, I’ll just get over it,” think again. Doctors say that 90% of COVID-19 patients end up with severe and permanent scarring on their lungs.

In the first week, I would stare at the ceiling and think, “Am I going to die from this? Who will get my mountain bike?”

In the second week, I would try not to move. Or talk. Or think. I just wanted my fever to go away.

When mealtime came, the idea of eating was disgusting to me. I would eat something because I knew I had to, but it was very little, like two spoonfuls of yogurt. That must be when I began losing massive amounts of weight.

By the third week, the fever broke. I thought that maybe healing was just around the corner. But it wasn’t. I was getting better, but only incrementally. I would sleep twelve hours per night and hope for the best. I would wake up in the middle of the night with my mouth entirely dried out, like rice cakes. I would let my partner Claire fix meals, keep track of my medication, do laundry, and the like, while I laid around like some spoiled redneck.

Now, at Day 24, I wonder what I won’t be able to do again. I wonder about exercise. I wonder about lingering lung problems. And I wonder how long this albatross is going to be hanging around my neck.

The Man with the Forever Fever

Starting three days before Christmas, my life changed and I became all about the COVID-19 fever. Lying in bed, there was nothing else on my mind except fever. One night, it gets up to 102.7; another night, 102.9. The bedside table had thermometers, oximeters, and other medical detritus. I thought about nothing else. Even television was a bother. Even food. I was the man who was fighting a fever and achiness and couldn’t bring himself to do much else, including eat, move, or think.

For the first week, I thought that there was no way that it could be coronavirus-19, that I must have caught a regular flu. I had been so careful. Then seven days in, I received my test results, and they were positive for COVID-19.

I laid in bed and stared at those test results blankly. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. This wasn’t how I saw myself. I didn’t want to die this way. I had so many more things to do on this Earth.

One thing that struck me about having COVID-19 is that there’s nobody there to make decisions for you. I’m sure President Loser had lots of people sweating it out and figuring out exactly what to do next, but if you’re not a resident of the Orange Loser’s Oval Office, you have to figure out how long is too long to have a fever? If you go too long with a fever, does your transformer burn out or something? Which doctor do you see next? You have to make these decisions, and all while in the midst of cloudy thinking.

Somebody called me on the phone.

“How are you?”

“I’ve had this fever for nine days now,” I said, and then I started trying to describe about the other symptoms, but couldn’t finish the sentence.

“I have cloudy thinking,” I’d say to them so that they wouldn’t expect me to finish my thoughts. Then I’d hand the phone off to Claire and she would finish the conversation.

On the 10th day, I had a phone conversation with a very wise and generous physician from Chicago, Dr. R.

“I’m worried about how people die from this,” I said. “What does that look like?”

Dr. R. recommended that I get a chest X-ray to see what was happening with my lungs. So at 6:30 pm, I went down to the local emergency room and spent five hours there. The waiting was hellish. Finally, a doctor saw me. He asked me some questions, looked at my numbers, and then smiled.

“You’re doing a lot better than most men half your age,” he said. “Your numbers are quite respectable, and if you were going to take a turn for the worse, it would’ve been a couple days ago. I don’t expect to see you in here again.”

You don’t want to be here, in the emergency room, during this difficult time.

It was a signal moment. The doctor sent me home with prescription antibiotics and cough syrup. I crawled into the car at 11:30 pm and drove us home, my hands shaky. By the time I dropped into bed, I was having horrible chills, but at least the doctor didn’t expect to see me in the ER again. I had hope.

Two days later, my fever broke. It changed everything. I still have a ways to go before I’m fully well, and I’m still spending most of my time in bed. I still have a lack of interest in things, although that’s returning somewhat. But suddenly, I wasn’t just the man with the forever fever. I was the man who was on the mend.

Krazypants About Masks

We just had a confrontation with a neighbor in our condo complex. He told my partner Claire that I wasn’t a real man. He said he’d beat me up.

It’s a weird time. A couple weeks ago, we had an incident in the laundry room. Gerard’s wife Marta was in the laundry room, and Claire walked in. She should not have walked in, because it’s close quarters. However, she was wearing a mask and Marta was not. An hour later, when the load in the dryer was done, I went to collect it and found Marta collecting her own laundry, again without a mask. I waited politely outside until she was done, and when she was gone, I entered, wearing my mask.

Afterwards, I thought about it. It wasn’t right to go maskless into the laundry room, we decided. When a person doesn’t wear a mask, she spews globules from her lungs into the air, and according to the CDC, it can hang there for up to three hours. And if we enter, we can inhale it and be infected.

So we wrote an email to Gerard. We asked them politely to wear masks in the laundry room. We mentioned my 90-year-old mother, who has several comorbidities. Claire even went back over the email to make sure it was 100% polite.

We heard nothing back. Two days later, I was down at my garage when I saw Marta walking towards the laundry room again. And once again, she was maskless.

“Really?!” I said from a distance of about 70 feet.

Marta turned.

“What?!” she said.

“Mask,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said, and continued into the laundry room.

Later, Gerard blew his top. He said that my verbal request insulted his wife. He refused to wear a mask. Said I was paranoid. Said I wasn’t a real man. Said that he was forbidding me speaking to either his wife or his two children. Said he was going to beat me up.

This guy is the president of our Homeowners Association.

When Claire came home and told me about the threat of physical violence, I called the police. When someone threatens violence, you have to let them know that there will be consequences. So an officer showed up in a mask and took our report.

I’m waiting to see what happens. This shit is krazypants.

What I Know About the Uberpartisan New York Post

I’ve read of the recent sad journalism at the New York Post accusing Joe Biden of corruption. Several Post reporters refused to put their name on the article because they doubted the sources’ authenticity. Finally, they found someone to author it, a young woman who has published no previous articles with the Post, but had worked for the Sean Hannity Show for four years.

The “proof” in the article was a laptop that was supposedly left at a Delaware computer-repair shop, and then handed over by the owner to Rudy Giuliani. Remember that American intelligence has revealed that Giuliani has recently met twice with Andriy Derkach, whom Trump’s own Treasury Department has sanctioned for acting as a Russian agent and interfering in the 2020 election.

Also curious is that a computer-store owner would contact a Republican operative and hand over someone else’s property. If you owned a computer store, would you look through the contents of a customer’s computer? Would you contact a partisan hack whom American intelligence has accused of consorting with Russian spies? If so, I’m not going to bring my computer to your store, because you have absolutely no sense of boundaries.

This story in the Post has led other right-wing media to claim that the laptop’s hard drive contained 25,000 images of Hunter Biden “torturing and raping children under age 10 in China….” Politifact has solidly refuted this claim, but the rumors have spread across right-wing media like a plague.

Looking at the outlines of this story, American intelligence officials have been alarmed, and 50 of them have signed a letter claiming that the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” It just reeks of right-wing fantasy, of which there are so many these days.

So why would the New York Post publish crap like this?

Well, I have more perspective on this question than many others. In 1999, I had an encounter with the Post that told me everything I need to know about them.

Twenty-one years ago, I had just published my first book, Be a Street Magician: A How-To Guide (Aha! Press, 1998). I was excited to promote the hell out of it, and I did. I spent nine months on the road promoting the book, lecturing to magic clubs, appearing at bookstores, being interviewed on television and radio, and the like. It was a blast.

That summer, I rented a flat in New York for a full month, and immediately spotted a great opportunity to promote the book: the New York print media. After all, New York City has arguably the best street performing in the world. There’s Washington Square Park, the Theatre District, South Street Seaport, and the like, all venues filled with talented young people pulling in massive audiences. The density of the New York population results in lots of cash dropped into those buskers’ hats.

The pitch would be simple. The author of Be a Street Magician was making a monthlong stay in the best street-performing city in the world! He would comment on all the great busking talent that residents could see in the city for free.

I pitched the Times and the Daily News, but they both turned me down. But when I pitched the Post, I got a nibble.

“I think my boss is up for the story,” an editor told me over the phone. “But to do this kind of story, we’d have to tie it to a celebrity, somebody you could get a quote from about street performing. Could you do that?”

“Sure,” I said.

I was thinking of a couple of celebrities whom I had bumped into in 1983. I had been visiting New York and staying with my friend Jon, sleeping on a mattress on his kitchen floor. One Saturday, we were strolling along Broadway when we came across two buskers playing a street festival. One was a portly juggler, and the other was a short, quiet magician. They called themselves Penn & Teller.

Sixteen years later, Penn & Teller had become television stars, with famous appearances on “David Letterman,” “Hollywood Squares,” and many other shows, although they hadn’t yet clinched their regular gig in Vegas at the Rio Hotel & Casino. So I called around and located Penn & Teller’s manager. I told him what I wanted, and he said he’d try to get back to me with a quote. Within 24 hours, he had. He gave me the most fabulous quote about busking that I could imagine. It went something like this.

“If you can perform in the middle of the street, with crowds who are on their way to somewhere else, in 100-degree heat or pouring rain, and stop those people, make them watch you, make them fascinated even in spite of crying kids, smart-aleck teenagers, and dozens of other unforeseen obstacles, then you might have what it takes to perform on the street.”

I was happy. I had my quote. I had my article.

I called my editor, dictated the quote to him, and waited for the call from a reporter.

Instead, a day later, I got a call from the editor.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “My editor said no.”

“Why?”

“I’m sorry, but this newspaper is really dead-set against liberals. And Penn Gillette is a major Democratic party guy. My editor said he wouldn’t ever publish anything that mentioned the guy.”

I hung up the phone and scratched my head. It was weird to be asked for a quote from a celebrity, any celebrity, and then rejected because they didn’t like who the quote was from. Even more curiously, I’ve since discovered that Penn isn’t a raging liberal, after all, but instead, a libertarian, or in his own words, “an anarcho-capitalist.” And most curiously of all, I didn’t understand why my article about busking would be rejected because of the politics of someone commenting in my article. Busking has nothing to do with liberal or conservative politics. It’s just talented people doing magic in a park or street corner. (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, May 24, 2003)

The article never happened. But in the intervening years, I’ve begun to question everything that the New York Post publishes. They seem rabid and uberpartisan. I don’t trust a thing they publish.

The Responsibility to Smile

When your mother has a stroke before age 70, you want to protect her. I tried to help out at the time, but she didn’t fully trust me. Going through a rough childhood, she’s always had trust issues. But when she reached 88, she had to let me in. She needed help. And when I looked closely at her relationships, I realized that one of her longtime friends was actually a small-time con artist.

Mom met Frederick when she was 60 years old and Frederick was 35. He touted himself as a real-estate agent, but was actually more of a handyman. A few years after they met, Frederick sold her a condo that the owner wanted to get rid of quickly, and within a year, she had fixed it up and turned it around for a $100,000 profit. She made out okay.

For years, Mom thought of Frederick as a kind of patron saint. He would fix things in her rental condos for the lowest price. He would make small repairs on her home. He would ask her counsel about his love life. They would talk for hours on the phone and at his home. Talking, however, was always the price you had to pay with Frederick. He was a nonstop talker, and the words that poured out of his mouth were always a word salad making little sense. Talking to Frederick, you might be on the hook for an hour or more. The hope was that if you waited long enough, you might come away from the conversation with some nugget of information that was concrete and clear, like how to repair a bathtub or whether it was time to buy or sell.

When Mom got into her eighties, however, I began monitoring her money more closely. I began to suspect that Frederick might be taking advantage of her. Everything became clear when we paid Frederick $3,000 to renovate our bathroom. We had been planning to do the renovation for a long time, but it didn’t become urgent until a high school friend started planning a visit that would involve a couple days’ stay at our house. We joked that Jeff’s visit to California was costing us $3,000, and it was kind of true, although not literally.

So we gave Frederick a firm deadline of February 17 to renovate the bathroom. That gave Frederick nearly two months to finish, and he assured us that the bathroom would be ready in time for the visit. But as the deadline approached, Frederick procrastinated more and more. He would work for a while and then he would talk ceaselessly, making very little sense, but still, smiling amiably, saddling us with the responsibility to smile, as well. Then there were excuses. He needed to go to Home Depot to buy this, to buy that. Before we knew it, the deadline was nearly upon us.

A week before Jeff’s trip, he called us and let us know that he had decided to stay at Beth’s house on the beach in Laguna, and I was relieved. When I hung up, though, I decided not to tell Frederick. I just wanted to see what he would do. I wanted to see if he would honor the deadline.

As the deadline approached, Frederick made himself scarce. When he showed up, he made not comment on it at all. He blew right through the deadline.

Then something happened that clinched it for me: Frederick tried to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge, and actually did—in a manner of speaking.

In addition to the renovation, Claire wanted a new bathtub installed.

“It’ll cost extra,” he told her.

“That’s fine,” Claire said. “I’ll pay for it.”

And so Frederick and Claire went to Home Depot to pick out a new tub. It was an interesting trip, because my mother had tipped us off that Frederick had a crush on Claire. He also seemed rather competitive with me, she said. It didn’t threaten me, though. I couldn’t imagine Frederick and Claire coming to any sort of détente.

At Home Depot, Claire chose a lovely Maui style bathtub, paid for it herself, and was excited about having it installed. Frederick was to transport the bathtub in his own truck and install it the next day. Once it was installed, however, Claire looked at it more closely. She spotted a scratch in it that looked familiar. She looked more closely.

“I know that scratch,” she thought.

It was exactly the same scratch that had been in the old bathtub. Frederick had removed the old bathtub, painted it, and then reinstalled it into our bathroom.

Claire was infuriated, but she didn’t tell us about it. Her reasons were curious. First of all, she’s the type of woman who avoids confrontation. She didn’t want to have the inevitable showdown with Frederick. She didn’t want to accuse him of anything. Furthermore, she didn’t want to wait for him to remove the bathtub again and have to wait days, possibly weeks, for him to install a new one. She found it easier to just take the insult.

Two years down the road, Claire told me what happened.

“Wait, you’re saying that…he sold us back our own bathtub?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And you know this because…”

“Because of the scratch.”

“It was in the same exact same spot as the old bathtub.”

“Right.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“Because I just wanted to be done with it.”

Word eventually got back to my mother, who had originally recommended Frederick. When she had heard Claire’s story, she asked about it again, astonished. Finally, she asked Frederick about it.

“Yes, of course, I installed a used bathtub,” Frederick said. “She paid for a used bathtub.”

“But she shopped for it with you at Home Depot,” Mom said.

“No she didn’t.”

“She has the check that she used to pay for it. She showed it to me.”

“I don’t think so,” Frederick said. “I don’t remember.”

What Frederick was doing qualifies as gaslighting. It left Mom confused and irritated. Mom turned to Claire for more proof, and Claire went back and excavated her old notes. She had kept detailed notes on the bathtub, proving that yes, she did pay for a new bathtub, not a used one, and that no, he hadn’t promised a used bathtub. We wouldn’t have paid for that, anyway.

My mother had argued with us several times that Frederick wasn’t a con artist.

“I’m taking advantage of him,” she said. “I get lots of free stuff from him.”

Over a period of months, however, we caught him in other lies and cheats, large and small. Eventually, it became clear that Frederick had been taking advantage of Mom in ways small and large for several years, and that if she continued using him in the future, that he would take advantage of her any chance he got. After this bathtub cheat, however, Mom seemed to shrink from him thoroughly. I’ll have to keep a watch on it, though. These con artists have a way of coming back to their old marks. They especially like those who have reached the age of 90, and can’t fend for themselves.

Choosing Love

People sometimes ask what my religious affiliation is. I tell them to mind their own damned business. Well, mentally I tell them that. In the moment, I tell them some version of this explanation: I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.

Today, I realized that there’s a better and simpler explanation to how I feel about this. I believe in love.

There are lots of songs about this, some sentimental, some laughable, some great, but I don’t mean love in a sentimental way. I mean to use the term love in a descriptive way. I believe that loving is the best and surest path to everything. Fill your life with people whom you love. Show love to as many people as you can. Act with love towards strangers. Use love as a reason to act morally. Use love as a reason to act ethically. Follow the path of love to reach forgiveness. Extend love to achieve social justice. Extend love to the world’s have-nots. Let love shine through in your smile. Let love fill your voice. Let love fill your actions. Let love fill your heart. Greet the world with love.

And here’s the important part. Where religion diverges from the philosophy of love, I diverge from religion. I choose love over ritual, love over self-righteousness, love over Bible verses, love over doctrinal differences, love over sectarianism, love over legalism. Love defeats religion any day.