My Life with Paul Newman

As a little girl growing up in the 1950s, Paul Newman, or the movie roles he played anyway, infused my understanding of what a man was. He was the romantic ideal, despite the fact he was usually quite a rogue. This turned out not to be a good thing.

I grew up outside of Manhattan, which even in the 1950s, had more broadcast channels than most places, and those channels, for lack of programming, showed movies, so I saw "Somebody Up There Likes Me," (1956) and "The Long Hot Summer," (1958) repeatedly before I was old enough to actually go to cinemas and see his classics like "Cool Hand Luke," (1967) (not a favorite because it is so grim and masculine), "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," (1969) (again, a great film but not a favorite because once you make that trip to the grim ending, you're reluctant to make it again). My last odd favorite was "Sometimes a Great Notion." (1971)

My favorite Newman persona was the bad boy who is ultimately redeemed by the long-suffering love of a good and pure woman, although all through my life, as I try to duplicate that scenario, it doesn't turn out the way it did in the movies. My first husband, who I met when I was 15, was the personification of rogue and actually resembled Paul Newman back then, and that relationship impacted and damaged my future permanently. And I followed it up with yet another bad choice, based on the Frank Sinatra movie model of rogue lover who is redeemed by the love of a good and pure woman.

Not.

Newman did one Hollywood stunt, abandoning the wife and family of his youth to fall in love with an actress, and he paid the karmic debt for it when his only son died of drug and alcohol abuse. And then he redeemed himself by staying in that second marriage, despite it being a union of two actors, until he died. My hyper-religious sister used to insist that the secret of their success was they were both gay and the marriage was only a sham cover. Possible, but probably not. They had daughters, but stranger things have happened, and they stayed way under the radar. Even Newman's long, long battle with cancer was kept quiet. It was a very dignified way to have a sucessful Hollywood career.

Still, those early movies put a warp on my tender sensibilities, but I won't hold it against him. And some ancient quote of his about the success of his marriage is worth recalling, something about why grab hamburger when you have steak at home.

I Tivoed Newman this morning to celebrate his passing with a wallow through past performances and found only one film scheduled anywhere this week, 1998's "Twilight." I've never seen it, so I'll try it.

My George Carlin Story

George Carlin will be in this story. Wait for it.

In the early 1990s, I began my decade in limbo, divorced, between careers, and marginally employed. I did some freelance writing and worked part-time at the gift shop in what was then the Radisson on Canal Street.

The man renting the space was from India. Maybe he didn’t know American employment law…or maybe he did…but he paid us once a month in cash. He did not deduct any taxes. I never received a W-2 or even a W-9. I made $5 an hour and worked a variety of shifts. Some days I opened the shop in the morning, some days I closed it at night. There was no one else there, so you had to lock the shop to run to the bathroom and eat your lunch behind the counter.

Because the shop owner was behind in paying the bill, the newspaper distributor cut us off. Most of the six months I worked there, we didn’t have any newspapers or magazines. Imagine a hotel gift shop with no newspapers or magazines. We had some toiletries, some overpriced jewelry, food snacks, cigarettes, an assortment of Virginia is for Lovers souvenirs and shirts, and a vast assortment of cheap, cheesy, made in Taiwan toys and doodads that had nothing to do with Virginia and were not things you would ever need. Needless to say, we didn’t sell many of them.

The Radisson was where entertainers playing the Carpenter Center stayed. (See, we’re getting to the point of this story now.) They would wait in the lobby for the limo to take them to the theater or back to the airport. Sometimes I would see someone recognizable, like Carrot Top, sitting on top of his trunks and suitcases.

I learned from my father during my first celebrity encounter (actor Richard Jaeckel, Imperial Hotel lobby, Tokyo) that you did not bother famous people. If they caught you looking at them, you just gave them a discreet wave and turned away.

So there I was in the gift shop when George Carlin walked in. I could see out the window the limo that would drive him the three blocks to the Landmark was already pulling up. Carlin was wearing street clothes. His unclean hair was pulled back in a severe pony tail and he reeked…and I mean knock-you-over reeked…of cigarettes, as if he had spent the last eight hours rolling in an ashtray. He bought two bottles of grapefruit juice and paid cash. (We didn’t take credit cards. A hotel gift shop that didn’t take credit cards!) He kept his eyes down during the entire transaction and never looked at me. I never acknowledged he was George Carlin, even though I was old enough to remember when he was the Hippy Dippy Weatherman on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

So I am surprised he made it to 71 when he must have been a major smoker.

After his first wife died, his HBO specials were singularly unfunny to me, as if he had lost part of himself. He didn’t seem that focused in his sarcasm anymore. He was more bitter than funny. Before the first wife died, one of his HBO specials did make me laugh a great deal (and it’s still funny to me). It was the one with the bit about “stuff,” how we accumulate so much stuff in life, and we have to have bigger places to keep our stuff. When we travel, we take just a portable portion of our stuff. Why isn’t this portion all the stuff we ever need? He tells a story about going to Hawaii for a long vacation, and determining how much of his stuff he needed to take. Then while on the big island, he was invited to spend several days on a smaller island and had to subdivide his stuff again into an even more essential bundle of stuff.

The way he told it was hilarious. Then he followed it up with another hilarious story about his cat, which liked to present himself butt first, right in his face, like “check out my ass!” I have eight cats and to this day, as they regularly present themselves to me butt first to check out their ass, I hear George Carlin’s voice in my head. So that is his everlasting gift to me.

The Ecstacy of Poison Ivy

I'm completing week two of my poison ivy attack. I know better. People often told me I had poison ivy growing on the fence, so I steered clear of it. Then my mother-in-law decided she wanted to pull it off the fence and she didn't think it was really poison ivy. We suggested she not bother, but she did anyway. After awhile, I felt bad watching her so boldly pull possible poison ivy off my fence, so I helped her bag it up.

A couple of days later, we both had poison ivy. Mine took a nasty turn, jumping from one forearm to the other, spreading up the hands and armpits, across my neck and a cheek, and over my torso. The sores are fierce. The first doctor took a moderate approach. A six-pack of Prednisone and over the counter Benadryl for sleep. Daily coatings of Benadryl gel and Ivarest. Nothing made the slightest difference. The rash marched relentlessly across my body, giving me a leprous appearance. I went to another doctor and demanded serious medicine. I got a shot and an ointment and some antihistamine samples. It may have stopped spreading now, but I look like a very diseased person.

When the blisters started popping, I acquired an unexpected delight. Now in the shower, the feel of hot water on my scarred skin produces the most pleasurable sensation. It is like a skin orgasm that maintains its vibrant height of ecstatic feeling as long as the water hits it. It is almost unbearably pleasurable. The pleasure is centered at the worst blisters, so I lift my forearms into the pulsating water and become deeply entranced in ecstacy.

Disappointment - Back by Popular Demand

I've written two pieces in the last 15 years that I hear about time and again. One was a rant on Santa Claus, the first big lie you tell your children, and the second was an essay on the value of disappointment. Although I wrote it about my experiences as a local community newspaper editor, I sent it to Style Weekly instead where it was published (I'm thinking circa 1999-2000), and the fact that I was writing for another paper is what eventually moved me to the head of the layoff list when the ax came down in 2001. Not to mention pissing my employers off by writing such a piece in the first place.

Anyway, someone just mentioned it again, so I am reprinting it here.

Bring Disappointment Back!

When I was the editor of the Mechanicsville Local, on any given week I reduced half the children in town to bitter tears, or so their parents and teachers would have me believe. I was the Grinch who stole childhood.

Maybe I didn’t run the elementary school six-week honor roll, which included all the names of children who managed to make at least a B average for one report card. Not straight A's as you might think. Isn't a B average what you would normally expect? How is this an honor?

Or maybe they’re all weeping and gnashing their teeth in disappointment because instead of a front page story with several photos of their latest school activity, I just ran one photo with a caption.

Or maybe I have profoundly scarred some little girl because we spelled her name Brittany, except it turns out to actually be Britany, or Britnee, or Brittanee, or Briteney, or Britknee, or Brit’ane. I think it’s the parents who can’t spell. I have plaques and certificates of merit, and even engraved Jefferson pewter cups with my name spelled all kinds of screwy ways on them and if I needed therapy every time this happened, I’d be in a straightjacket by now.

One time, thinking I was at least pleasing one child by running a photo of him with the first deer he had shot and killed, I learned I had variously ruined another child’s appetite, this one’s life, that one’s Christmas, and this other one’s pleasure in the movie “Bambi.” It was now necessary, because of me, for the parents to explain what “shot and killed” meant to children they claimed had no idea of the concept despite exposure to television, and who would be emotionally maimed by the realization that some people on this planet shoot and kill animals.

One irate schoolteacher, who thought her classes’ donation of pennies to a charity deserved more than a photo on an inside page, got into a screaming match with me on the phone over whether or not I thought children and charities were “worth it” or not, and if so, then why wasn’t it a bigger story? I told her it was worth the space it got, which caused her to call her husband, who regularly ran a small ad in the paper. He called his ad representative and threatened to pull his little ad unless the story was rerun, this time with the coverage it deserved.

So now I had the ad salesman coming down the hall to tell me I am jeopardizing his commission and his ability to put food on the table for his own little children, who will be crying bitterly and rubbing their empty tummies. Well, I’m sorry, but we can’t always get what we want, and like the Israeli government, I can’t give in to threats. Even if I was thinking of capitulating a little, now they’ve put me in a situation where I can’t give an inch because that would empower a bully.

That night I thought about the value system of a teacher who, when she doesn’t get what she wants, threatens other people until she does. Is that the value system I would want a teacher of my child to have? Is that what they teach children these days? If you don’t get want you feel you deserve, then make someone pay?

Apparently so, and that’s why the kids are taking guns to school and shooting everyone up.

The morning after all this happened, I saw repeated broadcasts of a news report that a parent who had ordered two game cartridges for his son from toysrus.com was only going to get one. The other was sold out, and instead of the cartridge, toysrus.com was sending him a $100 gift certificate, nearly three times the value of the game. A bonanza you say?

Oh no. The parent went on television to say with a grim face that his child “would not understand” only getting one game cartridge instead of two. They even showed a photo of the poor, deprived child. Call Save the Children now. Call Christian’s Children Fund! Because here is a pathetic child who is only getting one game cartridge and a $100 gift certificate. He is not getting everything he wants when he wants it! Oh, alas! Grab the gun and let’s go shoot up Toys R Us.

The irate parent who wanted to see the honor role printed in the paper said the child’s older siblings’ names had been in the paper when they made honor role, under a different editor, and if I did not carry on the tradition to honor her child, her child would be disappointed.

Oh my gosh. A disappointed child.

Life, I hate to break this news to you, is full of disappointment. It is full of pain and heartache and failure. People we love die. Jobs we want go to other people. Our enemies triumph. Our best efforts sometimes go for nothing. The one we love doesn’t love us back. The one we trusted betrays us. No one will ever have the money they think they need. Only one person can win the race, and everyone else is an also-ran. Someone will always be richer, smarter, prettier, more popular. Every stoplight we come to, someone will have a nicer, newer car. Life will continually suck in a myriad of ways.

And that’s what we need to prepare our children to face: disappointment. Instead, we try to build a buffer zone around them where their feelings will never be hurt and failure never darkens the light. If they cannot make A’s in school, we will reward them for C’s. If the neighborhood children have hundred dollar tennis shoes, we will buy them as well. If Pokemon is the price of self-esteem, then Pokemon it will be. They want cell phones and cars when they’re 16? Get them cell phones and cars! Use them both at the same time!

We shoot them out of the womb and right into daycare centers while we go out and earn money, and then to compensate for not being in their lives, we spend that money on them to keep them drugged up on material goods. We are the first pushers in their lives, getting them hooked on instant gratification as we run in circles, ensuring our child is never, ever disappointed by anyone or anything.

But we can’t protect them from everything and everyone, and eventually they hit a brick wall and the one thing we haven’t given them is the ability to handle disappointment, to deal with it, to suck it up and move on to something positive. Instead they just hit the wall startled and unprepared, and mommy can’t fix it this time. The real drug dealer will help them with their pain, and maybe taking a gun to school and eliminating some more pain will help, too.

So your child is disappointed? Good. Let them feel it, let them soak in the whole essence of disappointment, or else you’ll be teaching them to not feel anything.

Famous People

Ever run down the list of famous people you've seen? Mine isn't much, but it's very odd.

Margaret Chase Smith and Hubert Humphrey. Saw them in the Capitol when I was on a college field trip. I was pregnant. I bet most of you don't know who Margaret Chase Smith is.

Jackie Kennedy Onassis shopping in Bangkok, Thailand. She bought a statue of two hands and wrote a check for it. I watched her through the window, then she came out and walked to a chauffered car. Big sunglasses. Wrinkled short shift dress. Big car. She paid no attention to the people watching her.

The actor Richard Jaeckel in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. I didn't even know who he was. My father pointed him out and was very cool. He gave the guy a little wave and the guy gave him a little wave back. Jaeckel was in "The Dirty Dozen" and a movie I like, "Sometimes a Great Notion." Every time I see him on TV, I think about my father and him exchanging the discreet waves. They're both dead now.

Luci Baines Johnson Nugent getting out of a car in a parking lot. I was just walking by and there she was. I think she was in town campaigning for Chuck Robb. Her hair was tremendously black, high and teased, like a stripper or an Elvis-era Priscilla Presley. (What happened to that woman's face??!!)

I saw Mark Warner before he was governor of Virginia standing on line for the sky bucket ride at Busch Gardens. It was right in the middle of his campaign. He stood on line like everybody else. Didn't try to cut ahead. Didn't have any park people escorting him to the front. That's why I voted for him. I also saw him at a garden party in Hanover County. Hanover is very Republican, so there weren't many people at this party, but he gave a good speech anyway. I covered it for the Mechanicsville Local.

I saw Elliott Yamin, as did half of Richmond, at the James Center when he was competing in "American Idol," and they were filming his visit home for the finales.

And that's about it for my brushes with greatness.

I've been to very few concerts. I've seen Kiss, John Denver, and a pathetic Beach Boys who were very far from the original line-up. I've seen Van Halen, but since Gary Chirone was the singer, it doesn't count, although it was no doubt the last time Eddie looked halfway good. And the B52s and John Fogerty (my favorite). And Marilyn Manson at the Landmark. How could I forget that?

Update: Because I worked in the same building, I saw former Virginia governor Douglas Wilder a lot. And before the primaries began, I went to a Donald Trump rally at Richmond International Raceway because I thought he was actually going to go far in the 2016 election. He did.

My First Yard Sale

I lost my yard sale virginity last year. My block hosted a multi-family event, and I joined in, offering up my most useless belongings to strangers. Normally, I put my cast-offs on eBay and rid myself of them one at a time, but these were things that were too bulky to mail or had dubious if any value. I had been dreading a long day, held captive in my yard, but the time raced by because it turned out to be not so much a yard sale as a reality show.

The centerpieces of my sale were an old window air conditioner; a bread maker that took several hours to produce a hunk of bread that looked and tasted like a football; a huge, round “party” George Foreman grill that the previous owners of our house had wisely left behind; and the literal kitchen sink. We had recently replaced ours.

In addition, there were several tables of the usual suspects: purses I had grown tired of, clothes that made me look fat, vases that had no reason for being, novelty glassware, the chronic Christmas gifts of back and neck massagers of every shape and size, kitchen gadgets bought on a whim, and books and DVDs I would never read or watch again.

As my husband watched me price things, he made the usual husband noises. “I forgot we had that! If I knew we still had that, I’d be using it! Don’t sell that! That’s mine. I know I don’t use it, but I might one day.”

I turned a deaf ear to his protests, and was even more annoyed when his family called him on his cell, asking for a rundown of what I had out and putting dibs on things they wanted (for free!). A few items disappeared back into the house. But his biggest sacrifice was the big sale of the day. A set of speakers sold for $20.

I let go of a $40 George Foreman tabletop roaster for $5 after a woman declared her desperate need for it, and then refused to pay the $10 I was asking. I negotiated to $8. She still refused and I caved. Shame on me, but it was on my gotta-go short list, a purchase I regretted every time I saw it gathering dust in the cabinet. Better not to see it. And it was the only thing on the gotta-go short list that sold. Even at what I considered give-away prices, yard salers want to pay less. The 10 and 25 cent junk steadily moved, while anything priced at $10 or more, no matter what a great deal it was, was shunned. People would pick up the price tag and then drop it as if it burnt their fingers.

My most popular things turned out to be the purses, vases and novelty glassware. I don’t know why. Surely, everyone on Planet Earth has more than enough of them.

Only one purchase made sense. A small boy and his dad immediately pounced on a vase that was the size and shape of a softball. They bought it and drove away, without looking at any of the other sales on the block. I figured there was a Japanese fighting fish in their future, and this was the perfect bowl.

I felt bad about many of my other sales. There were a half-dozen mother-son teams where the son was retirement age and the mom nursing home age, and yard saling on Saturday morning was their together time. Old mom was allowed to buy whatever crazy thing she wanted, and these moms wanted some crazy things. I could picture their homes overflowing with purses, vases and novelty glassware, and it made me a little sad that my stuff was not going anywhere useful but was just joining a massive junk pile in someone else’s musty house.

Serious looking women, traveling alone so they could move faster, came early. So did the father-son teams who were buying to resell. The seniors came next and all knew each other. Their paths crossed every Saturday morning as they traveled the sales. They were most likely to buy things that had no practical purpose, although they did fight over my toilet paper holder shaped like a lighthouse.

During my breaks, when my husband took over to discourage sales, I checked out the neighbors. I took no money to avoid replacing my junk with their junk, but was sorely tempted by my one junk weakness: art. Most of the paintings in my house are rescued from the dump and other people’s trash. I would have bought the huge painting of a cat sitting on a sofa if it hadn’t been $5. To earn $5, I have to sell a boatload of novelty glassware. I want something for nothing, too.

In the end, we only moved about a fourth of what we put out. We still have the kitchen sink and that damn, giant, round George Foreman party grill. And yes, the bread maker. “Everyone is selling bread makers,” we were told all day long. We made $78. That’s $39 a piece, or $6 an hour. But I’m ready to do it again to watch the parade of human nature that yard sales attract and to imagine what the story is behind each purchase. It’s like a telenovela.

Oh, and I learned one useful thing: don’t sell candles at yard sales. My packets of unused birthday candles fused together in the sun into one big wax splat.

Around the World with Customer Service

Getting customer service these days is a trip around the world, and even though you never leave your home, you still need a big bottle of Kaopectate after visiting dozens of exotic foreign locales by phone.

It was a simple computer hardware problem that required little detective work. My toner cartridge was leaking toner. A quick trip to the office supplies store for a new cartridge fixed the problem. But it also left me angry because the defective cartridge had been in use only three months and I normally got a year of service out of them. They cost $103. I figured Hewlett-Packard, the maker of the cartridge, owed me at least $73.

Hewlett Packard has designed their site so it doesn’t provide a customer service phone number or even an email address unless you complete forms identifying the product you use. There was no area to complain about toner cartridges and when I entered my 10-year-old laser printer ID, I discovered because the printer was no longer made, they no longer answered questions about it.

I found a newer printer model that used the same cartridge, entered that one, and got a phone number for technical support. It was a man in India.

He transferred me to the parts department where I spoke to a man in Mexico. He told me to call India. I said, “I did already and they sent me to you. All I need is a Return Merchandise Authorization number to exchange this defective toner cartridge.”

“No, they’re the ones who should take care of this,” he insisted. “If they don’t, ask to speak to a supervisor.” Apparently HP Mexico has it in for HP India and is used to them transferring calls. He transferred me back to technical support in India. The next person in technical support had the annoying habit of speaking his first sentence in a loud, clear voice and then mumbling the rest in a whisper. What? What?

I finally convinced him to shout every thing he had to say to me, and what he had to say was since my printer was no longer made, I would have to pay a fee to speak to someone in technical support.

But it’s not a problem with the printer, I insisted. The printer works fine. It is the toner cartridge I bought several months ago, which you still make because I bought a new one just like it today.

The tech support guy read the script to me again in his mumbling voice. Because my printer was no longer made, I would have to pay a fee for technical support.

It’s not the printer! The printer works fine! It’s the toner cartridge! I don’t need technical support! I know what’s wrong with the toner cartridge! It leaks toner! I want my money back!

He read me the script again.

I interrupted him, remembering Mexico’s advice. “Let me speak to your supervisor.”

I wasn’t sure, after a brief interlude of soothing music, that it wasn’t the same guy back on the line just pretending to be the supervisor. They sounded just alike, except this guy didn’t mumble. He at least finally understood my issue was with the toner cartridge. He gave me a phone number for Customer Satisfaction. Customer Satisfaction is in Costa Rica.

Meline, an Hispanic sounding woman who answered my call, had such a logical explanation, I couldn’t argue. “No one is here for me to ask what to do.”

You can’t do anything? You work in Customer Satisfaction, but can’t do anything?

“No, I have to ask someone.”

When will someone be back?

This was Friday night, and all the someones who could actually solve a problem, or authorize this Customer Satisfaction woman to open a case file for me had left for the day. Then the powerless Meline, who was now in charge of my satisfaction by virtue of having answered the phone, said the people who could authorize her to do something wouldn’t be back until Monday, and she was off Monday, so it would be Tuesday before she could call me back.

Apparently at HP Costa Rica, they are fully staffed all weekend with people who are not allowed to do anything.

Meline gave me her phone number and on the appointed day, when I called back, I got her voice mail. I called HP Costa Rica’s main number instead and got Tomas, who said Jorge was the king of all toner cartridge problems for HP Costa Rica. After being on hold through 15 minutes of excruciating elevator music waiting for Jorge, Tomas came back on the line and said I’d have to leave a message on Meline’s voice mail after all because she was researching my problem and had more work to do on it. How long does it take to research a leaky toner cartridge? Apparently Costa Rica must have talked about me all weekend for Jorge to know I had already called and talked to Meline.

A few days later, Meline called and asked for my address so she could send me a replacement toner cartridge. And it arrived! Well, that was easy…not. Yet I’m surprised that for once in my life, I actually got customer satisfaction, even though it took a worldwide journey through a series of linguistic hurdles, sort of like “The Amazing Race,” only by phone.