A nice surprise on the kitchen counter, this morning, from my roommate Jennifer.
We talk about “Platonic” relationships, a lot, but sometimes forget the connotation: “Ideal.” In a Platonic relationship, neither party really needs anything of the other, and chooses the association for its own sake. Little or no diplomacy is required, whereas with more “serious” relationships, sooner or later, both sides have to set up embassies and start thinking like ambassadors.
On Friday, I finished a book. It’s a tragically rare occurrence, these days. Even more unusually, it was a novel—Richard Matheson’s The Beardless Warriors, an autobiographical bildungsroman set among U.S. infantryman fighting the Second World War in Europe.
The main character, Hackermeyer, is one of several “beardless” teenage soldiers in an infantry squad under thirty-something Sergeant Cooley, who becomes, inevitably, a father figure to the “kids” that fight and die under his command. “Hack,” whose own family background is abusive and neglectful, forms a very close bond with Sergeant Cooley, and essentially the novel is about Hack finally coming to understand love and familial belonging against the horrific backdrop of war. It’s a cliché, now, though I don’t really know enough about the genre to say whether that arc was quite so tired when The Beardless Warriors was originally published.
Cliché or no, it works for me, and I did enjoy the book. While reading, I assumed that it was Matheson’s first novel, and that he’d written it shortly after coming back from his own tour in Europe, sometime in the late ’40s. Though that may well be the case, The Beardless Warriors was not actually published until 1960. But, in any case, it reads like a first novel, to me. The prose, pacing, and dialogue are often clunky, though there are undoubtedly some very effective—almost brilliant—moments.
As an example of the former, here’s an especially clumsy paragraph from near the end of the book, during the climatic assault on Saarbach:
Hackermeyer started shooting as Guthrie and Tremont ran around the rubble heap and into the square, picking up impetus as they ran. He noticed that Tremont kept his eyes on Guthrie. The moment Guthrie buckled his knees and fell, Tremont did the same. Guthrie started firing at the building; Tremont lay shivering in the snow.
Here’s how I would edit/rewrite it:
Hack started shooting as Guthrie and Tremont bolted into the square, picking up speed as they ran. Tremont followed Guthrie’s lead, falling and covering when he did. But when Guthrie opened fire on the building, Tremont just lay there, shivering in the snow.
Some of these edits could be boiled down to stylistic differences, but I don’t think there’s any denying that some of Matheson’s original prose is just sloppy. He favors a “brutalistic,” vaguely Hemingwayesque style, but that doesn’t justify awkward, inefficient, wordy phrases like “He noticed Tremont kept his eyes on Guthrie.” The entire novel is told from Hackermeyer’s POV, after all, so “He noticed” is pretty much always going to be unnecessary verbiage. It’s no more necessary to mention Hack’s “noticing” Tremont keeping his eyes on Guthrie than it is later, in the same paragraph, to say “he noticed Guthrie started firing at the building” or, “he noticed that Tremont lay shivering in the snow.”
Here’s another paragraph, from the same scene, that could’ve benefited from some attentive editing:
Shells exploded all around. They rocked the earth and detonated Schu mines, jetted murky clouds of mud into the snow-filled air. Razor-edged cleavers of shrapnel shot in all directions, walls of concussion slammed against them. Hackermeyer trembled, helpless, cleaving to the mud as if gravity had lost its hold and he resisted being sucked into the sky. Thought was gone again. He was a mindless clump of flesh and bone, welded to the floundering earth.
My version:
Shells exploded all around. They rocked the earth, detonating buried landmines and blasting jets of mud into the freezing air. Razor-edged shrapnel cleavers shrieked in all directions. Walls of concussion slammed against them. Hack trembled, helpless, clinging to the ground as if the sky were an abyss into which he might fall. Thought and mind were gone, again, and he was just a clump of quivering flesh, welded to the floundering earth.
Again, stylistic choices. But consider, particularly, Matheson’s evocative but awkwardly-phrases simile: “Hackermeyer trembled, helpless, cleaving to the mud as if gravity had lost its hold and he resisted being sucked into the sky.” First, the homonym verb “cleaving” coming right on the heels of the noun “cleaver” (just used to describe the flying shrapnel), is repetitious, as is the reappearance of “mud,” which is both the object to which Hackermeyer clings and the substance “jetted” into the air two sentences before. Then there’s the mess at the end: “as if gravity had lost its hold and he resisted being sucked into the sky.” It is a nice image, but there has to be a more eloquent way of expressing it.
I also marked some passages that I liked. This exchange between Hackermeyer and “sad clown” squad-mate Guthrie actually works pretty well, for me, unlike much of Guthrie’s humor, which tends to fall flat (though very often, in fairness, it is supposed to):
“You’ve heard about our good Sergeant Wadley>” said Guthrie.
“Was he killed?”
“No such luck,” said Guthrie. “He ran off.”
“When?”
“Yesterday during Nazi artillery practice.”
Hackermeyer frowned. “How come?”
“He was alarmed,” said Guthrie. “Threw down his gear and scooted off like Chicken Little. Claimed the sky was falling down.”
He was alarmed. Comic understatement for the win. Here’s another good Guthrie moment:
Machine-gun fire started ripping close above and Hackermeyer scrabbled for the nearest shell hole. MacFarland followed.
“What the hell is happening?” raged MacFarland.
Hackermeyer started to reply when a body came crashing down on top of them.
“Sorry, men!” said Guthrie, scrambling off them. He saluted with his left hand, his face contorted, smeared with mud. “It is a good war, men, a true war!”
“Go screw yourself!” MacFarland shouted at him.
“It is an ill-advised project, father!” Guthrie shouted back.
During the assault on Saarbach, Hackermeyer and his squad fight their way past a statue of Christ on the Cross that had earlier been identified to them, during operational planning, as a tactical landmark. In fact, Matheson does not belabor the symbol of Christ crucified amongst the desolation and horror of war, which is all for the best, as far as I am concerned, because it is not exactly subtle. The image only stuck in my mind because it reminded me of an essentially identical scene in Samuel Fuller’s 1980 movie The Big Red One, which is also an autobiographical story of infantry combat in WWII Europe. In Fuller’s movie, the crucifixion image is rather overplayed, I think, but at least visually it is quite striking: The wood of Christ’s face is bleached, weathered, and cracked, and is covered with crawling red ants. Matheson also explicitly mentions the “weather-worn face and body on the cross,” and I was led to wonder if A) the similar imagery is purely coincidental B) the crucifix in The Big Red One was borrowed, consciously or not, from Matheson’s chronologically earler work, or C) both Matheson and Fuller independently encountered a weatherbeaten statue of Christ crucified while they were actually on the ground, in combat, in Europe, and the experience made such an impression on each of them that it later, independently, found its way into each man’s art. Case (C), of course, is the most interesting, and if I had time for idle scholarship I think it’d be fun to try to run down an answer. Did they both see the same statue? Is it still standing?
Anyway. I’m going on to read more Matheson, I think. The same friend who recommended The Beardless Warriors just loaned me her copy of Matheson’s short story collection Duel. Will be interesting to compare.
The first car I remember my parents owning was a 1977 Chevrolet station wagon—blue, with fake wood paneling on the sides. A few months after buying the car, Dad reports, something within the passenger-side rear compartment wall, near the spare tire stowage, began to rattle. Soon, the noise irritated him enough that he disassembled the interior paneling to find and silence it.
Which is where he discovered this tool, a hand awl, presumably lost or abandoned there by an upholstery installer on the assembly line. Dad, who has never been a big fan of organized labor, at least once advocated the latter theory, i.e. that the awl was abandoned in the car, on purpose, by a worker exploiting union regs to the effect that he or she could not be required to work unless provided with the correct tool. Being considerably more liberal, I am prepared to give that long-ago UAW member the benefit of the doubt and believe it was walled up by accident.
Dad put the awl in the top drawer of his toolbox and it’s lived there ever since, though the car it came in is now thirty years gone. It’s heavy, solid, and quite well made, with a turned aluminum handle and replaceable pommel- and tip-fittings. I used it just today.
My Dad, who has been an electrical engineer for 40-odd years, likes to tell this apocryphal story about Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the famous German-American engineer who, in the early days of General Electric, was a pioneer in the development of alternating current technologies, specifically power transmission and A/C electric motors:
Late in Steinmetz’ life, he was called in to consult on a vibration problem in a newly-installed piece of large, rotating machinery at a major factory. Steinmetz—who was afflicted with dwarfism, hunchback, and hip dysplasia, and stood only 4’3″ tall—looked over the blueprints for the machinery, examined it, took measurements, scratched figures.
“Bring me a drill,” he said, eventually, “with a one-inch bit.”
So tooled, he climbed up on a large electric motor, located just the right spot, and drilled a single hole in the casing.
“That,” he said, “should fix it.”
And, of course, it did. The machinery turned smoothly, everyone shook the great man’s hand, and he departed.
Weeks later, the management received a bill for $10,000. Steinmetz died in 1923; using that year as a base and adjusting for inflation gives just over $125,000 in 2010 dollars—a princely sum for a few hours’ work. Chagrined, the company responded with a respectful request for an itemized invoice. To which, the story goes, they received the following reply:
Drilling hole in motor casing: $2.00
Knowing where to drill hole: $9,998.00
TOTAL: $10,000.00
I graduated from Richardson High School in 1994. Graduating with me that year was Joseph Belasco, who went by Joe or Joey, though I think he’d grown to dislike the latter by the time we were seniors. I remember him appearing at Westwood Junior High when we were in eighth grade, having moved or transferred from some distant place. From then until the Richardson Independent School District was done with us, Joe and I were peers. Not friends, but peers.
Senior year, ’94, we were both National Merit semifinalists. There were nine semifinalists, altogether, and though sharing that distinction did not overcome our natural, teenage cliqueishness, there was a bond. We shared many of the same advanced placement classes, notably Cindy Whitenight’s Literature and Creative Writing. In one of them—Creative Writing, I think—we were tasked to bring in a favorite piece of another writer’s prose to read aloud.
Joe chose a passage from Dennis Leary’s then-popular book No Cure For Cancer. This is it:
On my brother’s tenth birthday—I was six—we had a little birthday party. Just me, my brother, and my mom. And a chocolate cake. And little birthday hats. Singing the birthday song. “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!”
My dad was putting paneling in the living room during the ten minutes we weren’t in there. He was working with a circular saw. So this was the sound effect we heard come echoing down the hallway during the birthday song: “Happy birthday to you. Happy birth–”Zzzazow zzzazow zzzzzazazazow zzzzzazazow THA-THINK
And my dad comes waltzìng gingerly into the kitchen with his thumb hanging off at the bone. We’re sitting there in our paper hats with chocolate cake in front of us—our faces frozen in fear. I’m thinking, “Wow. Dad’s thumb is hanging off. Look at all that blood. Look at the bones. He’s probably gonna start crying any second now.”
And this is what my father says—his thumb is literally hanging by a thread of a bone, there’s blood everywhere, and he says—and I quote, “We got any tape around here? I need to tape this baby up.” My mother snapped. She starts screaming, “I’ll drive you to the hospital! Call the hospital! Tell them we’re coming! Ahhhh!” But he wouldn’t let my mother drive him to the hospital. That was too much of a threat to his masculinity—to be seen in a car driven by a woman. So he taped up his thumb with black electrical tape and drove himself—mínus one thumb—to the hospital. Never blinked an eye. He was humming as he taped it up in front of us.
We’re sitting at the table—paper hats, chocolate cake, blood, bits of bone. I looked at my brother and said, “Hey, pal. Forget about crying. Crying is over. We’re never going to be able to cry about anything ever, okay?” Our authority figure is a man who could sever his own head with a chainsaw, and he’d staple-gun it back on: PUN-CHIT! PUN-CHIT PUN-CHIT PUN-CHIT! “Fuckin’ head came off!”
Joe died at the end of 1996, around the time of my twenty-first birthday. Close friends reported an accident involving heroin. I don’t know as much as I should about him, either his life or his death, but I know that he read these words aloud to his friends, and his peers, sometime in the spring of 1994, and made all of us laugh together.
Clippings from my files suggest an observable trend: The more miserable my life, the more likely I am to take it out on the local newspaper editors. These two date from the same year. I was just starting grad school, and probably should’ve been making black sludge into brown sludge on a flash chromatography column, somewhere, instead of inveighing against sexist language (above) and neoconservative foreign policy (below). But there’s no doubt which was more enjoyable.
In case that question has been keeping you up at night, as it has me.
Quite seriously, now, because this is literally a matter of life and death for your entire family: I find this object interesting from an aesthetic perspective.
At first glance, of course, it’s easy to lump brushes that look like mushrooms together with tape dispensers that look like elephants, fireplace lighters that look like giant matchsticks, pocket knives that look like spaceships, and similar “looks-like” product designs that are at best “cute” and at worst anti-functional or even dangerous. In the past, I have referred to such products as “pseudomorphs,” mostly because “stuff what looks like other stuff, what it ain’t” is unwieldy and not as impressive. But that’s basically the idea. I dislike decoration for its own sake, especially in utilitarian objects, and find going out of the way to make a tool look like some object from nature, for instance, to be especially frivolous.
However, this “mushroom brush” is an interesting exception, a rare example of functional pseudomorphism. Consider: As any mycophile will tell you, fresh mushrooms (especially exotic varieties) should not be washed, in order to best preserve their flavors. To remove dirt and other debris before preparation, brushing is the preferred method, and to keep things hygienic one should dedicate a brush to the purpose. You do not, after all, want to clean mushrooms with the same brush you use to scrub dishes or clean under your fingernails.
And to avoid confusing your mushroom brush with these other, lesser, nastier brushes, it should be distinctive, somehow. You could label it, of course, perhaps with the words “mushroom brush,” but then you’re reduced to written language, which only works when everyone is literate in the same one. But what about children, illiterate adults, and/or the French? What about your potential mushroom-brush customers in all those other, lesser, nastier countries of the non-English-speaking world? You can add a bunch of labels in a bunch of languages to every brush, or you can sell a bunch of differently-labelled brushes in a bunch of differently-labelled countries, or you can do away with using words altogether and just make the brush, itself, look like a mushroom, and thus unambiguously identify its function.
In other words, mushroom brushes that look like mushrooms are functionally superior to those that do not. Even a mushroom brush that is labelled with a picture of a mushroom is not as good, because, while that picture-label could conceivably be overlooked by a person in a hurry to find a brush to clean the toilet (as one so often is), no one is going to attempt to use a brush that actually looks like a mushroom without noticing the fact.
Whew. I think I might be able to sleep, now.
And if, tomorrow morning, when I reach for my mushroom-shaped mushroom brush to tenderly waft away the clinging flakes of loam from my daily pound of breakfast morels, I should take the tiniest bit of childish pleasure in the fact that my brush looks like something what-it-ain’t, well…I guess that might be OK, too.
He’s in his early seventies, and that thing in his hands is a modified weed-whacker.
Back story: Mom and Dad decided, recently, to polish the Saltillo tile floor in their home, and Dad bought a floor polishing machine off Craigslist, for that purpose, for a song. The guy who sold it had been using it to grind concrete floors smooth, but it came with “soft” buffers, and Dad had no problem putting them on and getting them up and running.
Dad uses the machine to buff the floors.
And discovers, to his great annoyance, that some previous owner of the house had sealed the floors without cleaning them, first. The polisher will cut through the sealant on the tile, but the dark grime in the grout, between the tiles, is sealed in and will not come off with cleaners or mechanical buffing.
The grout, he decides, will have to be abraded away, where it’s dirty, and replaced.
He buys a cheap electric trimmer—at Harbor Freight, I think—and replaces the line reel with a wire brush, supposedly made from brass and unequivocally purchased at Harbor Freight.
Using this contraption, he discovers A) the brush is too hard and tends to erode the surface of adjacent tiles, as well as the surface of the grout, and B) every so often, it gives off sparks. Which brass does not do. He holds a magnet up to it and, whaddya know, click, it sticks. The brush is steel plated with brass.
He replaces the fake-brass brush with a special nylon brush he’s found online and ordered through the mail. And it works: The dirty grout is ground away, but the adjacent tile is not marred.
And that’s a picture of him, up top, abrading away the grout between the Saltillo tiles on the floor of the home he shares with my mother, using a tool improvised from an electric weed whacker and a special-purpose nylon brush. In his early seventies.
I do love him so.
AKA the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:
He was a gambler down on his luck; she was a hooker with a heart of gold—solid gold, in fact, which made her corpse (now nestled awkwardly between the spare tire and overstuffed suitcase in the trunk of his ’83 Impala) some 80 lbs heavier than was natural, and was, at this moment, among the foremost of his problems.