It tastes like someone poured heaven into your mouth. And then kissed your hot tongue.
July 31, 2009
Our friend Steve busted his cherry yesterday and I was there to witness the momentous occasion.
Before you get all sweaty, I am not talking about sex. I am, in fact, talking about something far more important than sex — coffee.
And by coffee I mean Starbucks. And by that I mean the best coffee on Planet Man, as opposed to the hot, brown water served up on other, less sophisticated worlds.
Steve was a fortysomething virgin when we crossed the threshold of the Napier Starbucks. I found that fact both intriguing and disturbing. This, after all, is a man who possesses a lengthy and fascinating CV: ex-Army, spent several years eating reindeer jerky while living in Norway where he learned to speak several Scandinavian languages, immigrated to New Zealand, became an IT dude, grew bored with that and now works for Customs, where he hunts down illegals, both human and pharmaceutical.
Steve knows coffee. After all, this is a man who owns a $2,500 Isomac Millennium, a technological marvel that does everything but transport the green beans out of South America. Given a burro, it might just do that as well.
Steve could charge good money for the liquid manna that flows from that machine’s grouphead and yet . . . And yet he had never set foot in a Starbucks, the Mecca, the Valhalla, the Promised Land of all things caffeine.
Until yesterday, that is. And I sat right there beside him, nursing my tall mug of filtered coffee, while he sipped a tall black. And smiled.
Another convert!
Well — maybe. Somehow I think Steve went home today and hugged his Isomac and then turned it on and moonwalked around his kitchen as black gold brewed in the machine’s chromed guts and all thoughts of Starbucks hissed away like so much spent steam.
The thing is, other than the brief overview above, I don’t know that much about Steve. He’s more Viking Woman’s friend than mine. They met when Steve was an IT guru in the same hospital where Viking Woman worked. They met one day when she came storming into the building’s sub-basement demanding why her office’s Internet connection had been cut off.
“Because you did a search for ‘oral sex’,” Steve said.
“I work in Sexual Health,” Viking Woman said. “That wasn’t a search; that was research.”
“OK, fine,” said Steve.
“Wanna go for a coffee,” said Viking Woman.
Or something like that.
The thing is this: the three of us bonded over coffee.
Twenty years ago that wouldn’t have happened. Before Starbucks launched its goal of world domination, coffee was something you saw sitting in a stained glass carafe in a greasy-spoon cafe, fit not for drinking but rather for paving your driveway.
I didn’t touch the stuff until I met Viking Woman. She was in sales at the time and it was not uncommon for her to down 40 cups of the elixir — every day. Which would explain why she tended to bounce around rooms screaming, “Let’s go!!”
(Editor’s Note: Viking Woman is now on a cleansing regimen, which includes eliminating caffeine from her diet. That headache? It’s real now. And, oh yeah, “go” has been replaced by “go away.”)
We dated at the Starbucks in Peninsula Village, gazing through the mist issuing from our cups, kissing bagel crumbs from each other’s lips. Coffee tasted like love in those days.
I guess, in a way, it still does.
Except now I drink mine while wrapped in my housecoat, hunched over a computer in the spare room, while Viking Woman sips hers between layers of makeup as she dons her Woman Warpaint before blowing air kisses at the back of me as she heads out the door to work.
Some days, after she’s gone and the caffeine hasn’t quite flushed sleep from my system, I close my eyes and take a hot slurp of coffee. It tastes of new relationships and shy glances and holding hands and the shivery quiver of anticipation. It tastes of past lives and promises made and vows kept.
It tastes of all the bright todays and brilliant tomorrows.
Right there in my mouth.
In his new biography of former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, Wellington journalist Dennis Welch notes that Kiwis “don’t understand humour.”
Whew! For a minute there I thought there was something wrong with me.
Humour, of course, is subjective. What tickles one person’s funny bone doesn’t necessarily turn someone else’s crank. My children, for instance, practically pee themselves at the mere thought of their father falling down. Me, not so much.
I like to think I laugh easily but I also appreciate a dollop of wit with my funny business. I’m not big on moronic, pie-in-the-face antics but a good double entendre always gets my juices flowing. As it were.
I consider the writers of Two and a Half Men to be masters of the double entendre, even if they do at times stray into the pie-faced territory of the single entendre.
And then I read this in the July 2 issue of the New Zealand Herald’s TimeOut section:
“We’ve yet to meet a single person who will admit to watching Two and a Half Men, yet every week it tops the country’s ratings for the 18-39 market . . . Who are these people and why are you watching this rubbish?”
No one puts their bylines on these kinds of editorial blurts, so I wasn’t sure where to target my wrath. And then I read Welch’s comment and realized, hey, the writer is a Kiwi.
And they just don’t get it.
An Aussie falling down? Hee-larry-ous. Someone talking about eating a woman’s carpet? Huh?
Actually, it goes deeper than that. The writer is a * trumpet fanfare * critic for a TV section. The writer — drumroll, please — needs to be “critical.” And by that I mean controversial. And by that I mean, “hey, look at me!”
I worked for three years with Famous Players, a Canadian theatre chain. I was a syndicated movie reviewer for 15 years. I’ve met a lot of “critics.” I liked very few of them.
You see, these people — all black bo-ho with their berets and messenger bags and French cigarettes and tight pants and pointy shoes (I am not making this shit up) — feel the urge to rise above the great uneducated masses.
For instance, if you love the same film millions of movie fans are going ga-ga over, then you are just one more voice in the chorus of approval. No one will remember your review because you are simply agreeing with everyone else.
However, should your review rip a movie to shreds (ideally because it can’t hold a projector bulb to the work of some 19th century Russian director), then people will be talking about your comments. They might very well want to string you up with a length of celluloid from Twilight, but at least you will have accomplished your goal — people talked about you. And by you, I mean the narcissitic wanker part of you.
Example:
In 1988, we were all eagerly awaiting the release of Willow, Ron Howard’s followup to such successes as Splash, Coccon and Gung Ho. And then Michael Walsh, writing in Vancouver’s The Province newspaper, slagged it. We in the industry were gutted. It’s Ron Howard, for chrissakes, Michael. You just kicked Opie in the balls.
That’s right: the day the review appeared, everyone was nattering on about Michael Walsh. They weren’t talking about Willow. (The fact that, when it came right down to it, Michael was correct about this movie didn’t save him from, soon after, being shifted out of the paper’s Entertainment section and into a copy editor’s desk, where he would be less likely to piss off movie distributors who paid millions in ad revenue for their product.)
It’s right there in Critics for Dummies (or should that be the other way around?): be outrageous and people will turn their attention to you. They may be calling you a “dumb f**k,” but, hey, that’s the price you pay for the spotlight.
The problem is, after awhile readers grow bored by this premeditated buffoonery. A reviewer who is predictable becomes a reviewer who is ignored.
Katherine Monk, she of the Vancouver Sun, falls into that category. Ms. Monk appears to have one rule when writing about a movie: The more vaginas, the higher the rating. For every penis on the screen, take away one star. A movie like The Women? Thirty stars! Out of five!
As a reviewer, I had two rules:
1) Don’t bore me
and
b) If your movie is longer than 2 1/2 hours, you owe my bladder a family-size bag of M&Ms. The good kind. And by good kind I mean peanut.
There’s nothing funny about wetting oneself in a theatre. Unless it’s an Aussie doing it. In that case, even the no-name nincompoop at TimeOut would be roaring.
I was thisclose to packing it in. To placing my MacBook in a sack of rocks and dropping it off the wharf at the Ahuriri Marina.
I had once taken joy in writing. Hell, I’d once made my living by writing, in the glory days before newspapers started hemorrhaging money and journalists.
These days, I sit my unemployed ass down in front of my computer and question the wisdom of wasting good electricity on bad ideas.
As a novelist, I’d hit a wall. A huge, hard, intimidating expanse that impeded any forward momentum.
Having grown weary of banging my head against the closed doors behind which black-hearted literary agents sit snickering, I’d edited my book, Brown Girls, for the umpteenth time and posted it on Smashwords, where it is available for sale in several different ebook formats (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1937).
There it sat, glory shining from every polished word, on the Smashwords home page. For about three seconds. Until the next 7,000 wannabe authors did the exact same thing as me — posting their deathless prose, submitting their mailing address and then sinking into the nearest chair with a view of the mailbox to await the arrival of the postman bearing a huge sack of royalty cheques.
In the meantime, to garner more attention (because writers are expected to not only supply their own PR drums but to bang them as well), I joined the Authonomy website (authonomy.com), which, to date, has turned out to be nothing more than the slush pile for HarperCollins (and, yes, I am now naming names after being discreet in Publish or Die! Part 8). The site is basically a popularity contest where the best way to move up the rankings is to play nice with others and hope they reciprocate. And where every Forum features one more writer admitting they have two chances of actually being published by HR: zero and none.
At one writer’s suggestion, I also joined youwriteon.com, which is more of a blind taste test — the samples you are asked to review are generated randomly and you have no idea who is going to be looking at your work, so you can’t cajole them into saying something nice. That all sounds a bit fairer except . . . except to date I have handed in six reviews and have only received one in return.
That’s the bad thing about being between jobs — everyone assumes you have plenty of time to waste.
What I should be doing with that time — rather than trying to say something (anything!) positive about the drivel I’ve encountered at both review sites — is writing. I’m about a third of the way finished with the sequel to Brown Girls. I’ve got at least four other books percolating in my brain. I have a completed novel from 12 years ago that is begging to be dusted off and loved again.
And then I hit that wall. That great, soul-sucking vortex of frustration where you could search in vain forever for a single crumb of encouragement.
Smashwords certainly wasn’t supplying it — I posted Brown Girls on May 17. To date, I have sold one (1) copy. I have earned $4.69. Yes, that is in US funds. Yes, that is $7.24 NZ. No, I do not feel any better.
The darkness was nearly complete. I was closing my MacBook and eying the stones in our yard.
And then . . .
And then a young lady calling herself newtowritinggirl happened.
We’re not exactly strangers, her and I. She is, in fact, the owner of the only ebook copy of Brown Girls ever sold. But buying something and liking it can be two different things.
Fortunately for my ego — and my MacBook and any sea critters in Ahuriri Harbour — newtowritinggirl appears to have enjoyed her adventures with Jack Nolan and Nurse Heather and Maina.
She sent this comment to my blog page: “I read it. I loved it. I will rave about it to anyone that listens!”
She posted this entry on her own blog (newtowritinggirl.wordpress.com):
The book was Brown Girls by John Wesley Ireland. I read a review of it at Workinggirlreviews and had to read it from this. I don’t know if it was the setting of the novel, the plot or the review, but I knew I had to read it. Smashwords give you the first 20% free, a very good idea – especially in this case. Ireland couldn’t have timed it better if he tried. The last page of the 20% left you on a cliff hanger. I had to buy it to find out more. HAD TO. I’m very glad I did, it was great. I’ll do a full review of it when I have a little more time.
Today I am feeling better about life. Today, I am friends again with my computer. Today, I want to return to the Cook Islands, or Gisborne or New York state or Greece or B.C. — to wherever my next book is set.
Today, I am a writer again.
Thanks, newtowritinggirl. Thanks for the puff of oxygen you breathed onto the dying embers of my creativity.
Should we ever meet, dinner’s on me. Anything you want.
Just as long as it doesn’t cost any more than $4.69 US.
The truth about saving face.
July 7, 2009
The man, the stranger, he reaches across the counter to point at your face.
“I can help you with that,” he says.
You’ve just filled this guy’s gas tank. Each gallon cost him 49.9 cents. That’s because it’s 1969 and Canada is still a year away from going metric. A year away from screwing up a lot of things you studied in school. A year away from instituting a measuring system that, based solely on number values, means you are somehow lighter. Taller. Longer.
You’re working at Brookswood Shell. That’s what the owner calls it. You call it Brookswood Hell. It’s your first real job because seven years of picking strawberries will never show up on your employment applications. As if every blistering day you scrabbled on your knees in the dirt, every rotten berry that exploded between your fingers, every bird’s nest, every garter snake, every ripe, red missile that thwaked! into your back — none of that ever happened.
The owner of Brookswood Shell understands car engines and brake lines and carburators and spark plugs. He does not understand people. He does not understand you.
He cannot comprehend how a 16-year-old kid does not know how to drive, why a kid would rather spend his time perusing hockey magazines instead of cruising Fraser Highway between the A&W and the Dog and Suds.
On Sunday mornings, when it’s your turn to open the garage, he greets you at the door to his house wearing only his underwear. He shoves the keys into your hand while doing little to control the family dog — a German Shepherd thick with muscle and hate — which eyes your crotch and bares its fangs. Like it’s had scrotum before and has developed a taste for it.
The owner heaves a tire iron in your direction one afternoon after someone — most likely you — failed to properly tighten the wheel nuts and so the tire nearly fell off while the vehicle was being driven.
The tire iron bounces once on the painted concrete floor before skidding into your boot. Your feelings are hurt more than your foot, but you never forget that incident. You remember it, in fact, every time you use the key to open the pop machine on a hot, dusty evening and help yourself to its chilled contents.
The man, the stranger, is pointing to your acne. He’s indicating your zits.
“I can help you with that,” he says. And then tells you about the wonders of washing your face with Phisoderm.
You’ve fought the pimples for years. Ate your mother’s raisins for their iron, only to be told off for snacking on her baking supplies. You slathered your face with skin-tone Clearasil, which makes you look like you’ve just dipped your head in mud. One night, your community football coach shows up to collect your equipment and you have to quickly scrub the goo off lest anyone think you’re wearing makeup when all you want is for the red menace to go away.
So you try Phisoderm. And it works. Because taking care of your face is the most important key to maintaining a good complexion.
Your face, after all, is the first thing people see. It’s your calling card. A shiny pink resume. It’s a CV with eyes, nose and mouth.
It’s your first impression.
And it’s all you got, baby.
Your hair? It disappears one strand at a time and you don’t even notice until one day you’re looking at an old photo and the thought comes that you haven’t had to worry about a straight part for years.
Your waistline? You try on jeans you swear fit just last summer and suddenly you’re sucking it all in and struggling with the button and cursing the dryer because you just know all that hot, tumbling air is specifically designed to shrink clothes.
But your face? It stares back at you every single day without fail. Sometimes, when the light is right, you catch a glimpse of a younger person who looks vaguely familiar. Someone who still possesses cheekbones and dimples, someone whose features have not shifted and sagged with age and snacking.
You need to protect that face. Preserve it.
And so you try them all: Melaleuca, Nutrimetics, Body Shop, Avon, Jan Marini, EmerginC, Circadia.
Cleanse, tone, day cream. Cleanse, tone, night cream.
Every day. For years. Even as you acquire more face because you have less hair.
And in that great sweeping expanse — that field of skin that now stretches from the bottom of your chin to well past your ears — there is not a single blemish to be found. No blocked pores. No blackheads. No whiteheads.
Because, during a long, dry summer way back in 69, you took a stranger’s advice.
Thanks, mister.
