And May He Rest in Peace Amongst Many Gays, Blacks, & Foreigners

When I read on Saturday that Jesse Helms had died, my first reaction was, He was still alive? I must have gotten him mixed up with Strom Thurmond or some other long-irrelevant, recently-buried asshole.

After seeing the headline, my second reaction was this:

I knew Helms was notorious for his staunch conservatism, but I didn’t know a whole lot more than that. Most of us, including yours truly, have very little sense of how policy is actually made in Washington. We judge our legislators from the sidelines, and usually from the cheap seats. We go by what we see in the news: the small minority of bills that make headlines, the sound bites Jon Stewart pulls and then mocks. We hear that some Republican senator from Oklahoma has sponsored a bill approving more oil-drilling in Alaska and we think, Fuckin’ Republicans -- they’re all earth-wrecking pricks.

In reality, of course, it’s much more complicated than that. Having read "inside the Beltway" books like Washington, by Meg Greenfield, I've gradually taken on a more measured stance. A lot goes on behind the scenes, and most of it is not sophomoric bickering. When Politicians from opposing parties claim they are friends who just happen to "respectfully disagree" on many issues, my impression is that, more often than not, they are telling the truth, even in this era of bitter partisan politics.

Put aside the fact that they’re more ambitious -- and, eventually, more corrupt -- than the rest of us, and politicians are just like everyone else. That is to say, they are multidimensional, complex, flawed but generally well-meaning people. Check out former targets-of-Democratic-scorn in less malevolent settings -- Bob Dole on Letterman, Newt Gingrich with Ali G -- and you'll see on display the qualities that got them elected in the first place . Even Robert McNamara comes off reasonably well -- not as a hawkish ideologue, but as a reflective intellectual with his heart (yes, heart) in the right place -- in Errol Morris's phenomenal documentary Fog of War.

It follows, then, that maybe there was more to Jesse Helms after all. Maybe he was reflective. Maybe he had a heart.

Maybe not. I read his obituary in the Times, and here was my third reaction:

What a dickhead.

I could be compassionate and liberal-minded and say that nothing is ever so simple. Nothing is black and white. But "black-and-white" pretty much sums up Helms’s own limited thinking (in more ways than one), so why not apply those same standards to him now? Ultimately the guy was a backwards-thinking, intolerant bigot, and that is how he should be remembered. I read about his career and was reminded of everything Helms stood for and fought for, and I was able to put aside my humanism and drop the benefit of the doubt I had briefly given him.

America would be better off without people like him, and so will the afterlife -- wherever his happens to be.

And in other news, equally worthy of the Times:

"Pringles, Never a Chip, Found to Be No Potato Snack, Either."

Revival of the Fittest

When I was living abroad, my friend Ed told me about a bar trick that so transcended the standard scope of run-of-the-(gin-)mill bar stunts that it could easily be upgraded in the Pantheon of Trickery to “Legitimate Magic Trick.” I was skeptical at first -- Ed’s tales tended towards the hyperbolic -- but he swore he’d seen the trick turned twice himself, first-hand, and with his own two eyes.

Here is what you do:

Step 1. Think like a Boy Scout: Be prepared.
Setting: A bar or pub where houseflies may be found (see below -- “Materials Needed”). Usually this will be a bar with an outdoor seating section or patio, but a sufficiently shady dive bar may also suffice.
Materials Needed: housefly (alive), glass of water, coaster (optional), spoon (optional), 2 TB table salt

Step 2. Catch a fly without injuring it. The best way to do this is to wait until the fly alights on the interior rim of your water glass or beer mug, then trap it inside with a coaster. You can also use the palm of your hand. If the fly prefers to buzz around rather than alight on drinking utensils, you can try the ancient Chinese cupped-palm clapping method to trap the fly.
(Warning: Do not use chopsticks. Man who catch fly with chopsticks can do anything -- except this trick… for fly likely end up kaput.)
(N.B. Although this is the first real step in the trick, it may be the most difficult, involving as it does agility and adeptness to secure the fly, and even more skillfulness to do so in a harmless fashion.)

Step 3. Knock out the fly. With the fly trapped between the water and coaster, pick up the glass and shake vigorously. Slosh the fly around until it becomes sufficiently disoriented.
(Using beer instead of water may augment the disorientation process, though the effects of alcohol on insects have not been thoroughly researched.)

Step 4. Drown the fly. Once unconscious, the fly should soon become waterlogged and sink slowly but steadily to the bottom of the glass. If it does not, you may abet the sinking process with a spoon (or, God bless you, your finger). The fly now appears drowned and dead.

Step 5. But wait.

Step 6. Wait some more. It is unknown how long you can actually wait without killing the fly, but some spectators have claimed to have witnessed comas as long as twenty or thirty minutes.* It is a bit like sex in this respect: the longer you can hold out, the more dramatic the climax.

Step 7. Play it up. With the fly long since drowned and “dead” at the bottom of the glass, bet any and all dubious witnesses that you can bring it back to life. Gather a crowd around, even those who missed the first half of the trick. Throw twenties on the bar to show you’re for real. Smile at the ladies. Wink at them if you’re the type of guy who can pull off a wink. Then tell everyone to prepare to be astonished.

Step 8. Revive and astonish. To bring the fly back to life, simply pour all contents of the glass -- water and “dead” fly -- onto the bar, counter, or table. Pour two tablespoons of table salt on the fly, forming a miniature salt mine/gravesite. After several minutes, the fly will miraculously crawl out of the salt pile, no longer dead, and soar away as spirited as ever. The crowd will cheer. The guys will slap your back and congratulate you. The chicks will kiss you. You will be a hero. Fame and glory will follow.

Sound apocryphal? My friends and I thought so too, so we decided to find out for ourselves, and we ended up getting more excitement than we could have hoped for.

I thought the first real step, catching the fly, would cause us the biggest problems. For one thing, flies do not routinely alight on the inner rims of water glasses. How many opportunities would we have? For another thing, flies are fast little fuckers. It’s not like we invented the fly swatter because wads of Kleenex were doing the trick. Nevertheless, my friend JC trapped the first fly that landed on his glass under his coaster. He sloshed the fly under tow and pushed it down with his straw. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should admit that we were never able to keep the fly fully submerged. Whenever we pushed him under, he kept floating back to the top. But he was definitely unconscious -- he was completely motionless the whole time -- so I don’t think our experiment’s results should be dismissed as partial or inadequate.) With the fly floating upside-down between chunks of ice, we put the glass aside and finished our breakfast.

About a half-hour later, after we’d paid the bill and had our table cleared, we resumed the experiment. We dumped the contents of the glass -- water, ice, and “dead” fly -- onto the table. (Lest you think us ugly Americans, I should point out that this was an outdoor café.) We covered the little guy with salt and waited, then waited some more. Sure enough, within four or five minutes the fly stirred beneath its briny grave, like a phoenix rising from its ashes (I know what that looks like, incidentally, because we’d performed that particular revival trick several months earlier). The clumped grains of salt at the top of the pile began to slide away, down the side of the mini-volcano. A tired wing emerged, then the other, and then a pair of antennae and a quadruplet of bug eyes. He surveyed us exasperatedly, then rolled his four eyes -- perhaps this wasn’t the first time a group of scientifically-minded diners had done this to him.

And then, the real surprise. An ant, alerted by the Homo-sapienic “Ooh!”s and “Ahh!”s from above, crawled onto the table and scuttled towards the fly. He sniffed once or twice, then ran back under the table. A second or two later -- it couldn’t have been more than three -- the ant returned, accompanied by about two hundred of his closest buddies. In a veritable insect blitzkrieg, they charged at the fly from all directions to execute the dramatic coup de grâce.

As we all know, there’s nothing like an entire entomological infantry brigade literally nipping at your heels to encourage a little hustle. Our new friend, who, to that point, had been taking his sweet time with his reversal of being temporarily dead, suddenly snapped to life. Vibrating like a dog shaking itself dry, the little guy flapped the remaining salt from his wings and took to the skies, lending credence to his species’s common name and leaving an army of disgruntled predators with nothing for breakfast but a soggy heap of sodium chloride.

My friends and I cheered in astonishment. The guys slapped each others’ backs. The girls kissed the boys. We were heroes. We soon became famous throughout Southeast Asia.

The fly, meanwhile, died several days later, having a two-week lifespan and all. That made us sad, but we later heard he died in his sleep a happy bug, reminiscing about his two victories over certain death and surrounded by his 271 children and grandchildren.


* Devoted readers of this blog -- both of you (hi Mom & Dad!) -- will recall that the fly isn't the only common household pest with the ability to hold its breath a freakishly long time (see "Big, Black, & Nasty" -- 10/14/06). On a related note, I'm not sure what it is with me and sadistic abuse of insects. I swear I wasn't one of those kids who hung out on the driveway roasting ants with a magnifying glass.

Big, Black, & Nasty

Supposedly the cockroach is the second-oldest extant species on earth, behind only the horseshoe crab. It first appeared over 280 million years ago, during the Carboniferous era. Then, four months ago, it appeared in my bathtub.

I’m not particularly squeamish -- growing up, I used to catch spiders with a tennis ball can and release them into the suburban wild. But cockroaches are a whole other can of carrots. They really bother me. And this one wasn’t your garden variety Manhattan roach -- you know, the one you find next to your shoes in the closet of your East Village walkup. Those are basically just enlarged beetles. This was a Bangkok roach -- the tropics, man -- and it was huge. Really fuckin’ big. The size of an offensive lineman’s thumb. And against the polished white glaze of the tub, it somehow looked even bigger, even blacker, even nastier. That’s what I named him: Big, Black, & Nasty.

Big, Black, & Nasty sat there and waved his antennae around in little ellipses, clearly awaiting my response. I wanted to kill him -- Thai Buddhism had not yet fully ensconced itself into my essence -- but I wasn’t about to go the route of the shoe or the rolled-up newspaper. I couldn’t bear the thought of the ensuing crunch. I could just hear it: crunch!!! I also couldn’t bear the thought of the ensuing cleanup. I had to shower later that night, and doing so whilst standing in the remnant bits of cockroach parts was another image I couldn’t bear. Indeed, there were many points related to the smashing of -- and resultantly smashed -- Big, Black, & Nasty that I couldn’t bear.

Using a tennis ball can was also out of the question. For one thing, I didn’t want to put my hands that close to Big, Black, & Nasty. For another, cockroaches are faster, if not craftier, than spiders, and he likely would have dodged the can. And besides, I didn’t own any tennis balls at the time, and so I didn’t have any tennis ball cans anyway. So that was out.

Therefore, I decided to drown Big, Black, & Nasty. I figured that if I could just douse him long enough, he’d eventually drown, or at least lose the will to live, and I’d be able to force his legs and antennae and other extremities down the drain. After enough showers, I assumed, the rest of his body -- his head and torso (or thorax, if you want to be all technical about it) -- would eventually just sort of disintegrate into smaller parts and melt away, and I wouldn’t have to deal with cleanups or audible crunches or anything.

If you’re guessing at this point that this plan was not going to work, then you are smarter than I am, and I resent you for that. I was actually getting sort of excited about my scheme, partly because I would no longer have a two-inch-long cockroach in my bathtub afterwards, but also because the drowning plan allowed me to take advantage of the detachability of the removable shower head and the massage spray setting, both of which had gone unused theretofore. But as you already know and I did not, roaches are feisty little fuckers, and when I aimed at Big, Black, & Nasty and unleashed hell’s fury -- the greatest water pressure a developing country’s plumbing technology can offer -- the little fucker fought like a tippled Irishman. He started scrambling up the walls of the tub as if his life depended on it (when, in fact, it didn’t -- as you and he knew and I didn’t), his little two-kneed legs pistoning at about 4,000 rpm. With each dash he made up the walls, a stream of water was there to meet him and send him back down. He went left, I went left; he went right, I went right.

Soon, though, I had him pinned in the drain. He was helpless and no longer flailing about, so powerful was the stream of water pounding him from above. Unfortunately -- unfortunate, at least, in this case of extermination efficacy being the most crucial criterion -- I had one of those drains with several little gaps instead of one with a single hole big enough to fit, say, a drowning cockroach. So rather than flowing neatly down the drain and meeting his eventual doom in the ghastly entrails of the ignominious Thai drainage system, Big, Black, & Nasty instead had his body wedged halfway down one of the holes, his torso hanging there, vertical, like in those cartoons of fat guys getting stuck in their toilet seats.

I continued assailing him for another 10-15 seconds or so before stopping the flow and assessing the damage. Big, Black, & Nasty appeared to be a beaten bug. His legs had also been forced down into the drain, and his antennae no longer jutted out tall and proud, at attention. Instead they swayed sadly back and forth, like tree branches in a light wind, as if to say, “I surrender. These are the best simulacra of white flags I can render as a mere cockroach. Humans are clearly the superior species, and furthermore, I am your bitch.”

Of course, if I’d known better, I would have recognized Big, Black, & Nasty’s gesture not as a sign of capitulation but rather as a wily stratagem. He was actually telling me: “In truth, I am neither bushed nor battered. I am just putting on this pathetic show in the hopes that you, foolish human that you are, will falsely assume I am finished and will thereafter leave the bathroom and continue on with your meaningless existence... while I, Big, Black, & Brilliant, crawl happily back from whence I came.”

Well, I was not about to be outsmarted by an invertebrate, much less an arthropodic blattodea, so I waited the clever bugger (as it were) out. Sure enough, after a minute or so, Big, Black, & Nasty, foolish insect that he was, crept back out. “Back for more, eh?” I said to him, and then let loose another torrent. Big, Black, & Nasty immediately reverted back to Scared Shitless Insect mode, clambering up any wall he could find. I couldn’t believe it. It was as if he was surprised by my actions, even though I’d been trying to kill him throughout the duration of our relationship. I mean, what did he think I was going to do at that point? Call a truce, pick him up, and take him on as a pet?

________

It’s been said that if or when a nuclear holocaust annihilates life on earth, only two life forms will remain: cockroaches, and Keith Richards. Well, I don’t know who said this, but whoever did must have been joking, because there’s no way Keith Richards could survive a nuclear blast. A cockroach, on the other hand -- that, I now believe. If my little confrontation with Big, Black, & Nasty taught me anything (aside from how not to kill a cockroach, I mean), it taught me that we should treat other species -- big and small, nasty and pleasant alike -- with empathy and respect, if not mercy. (It also taught me to never give up, but that’s sort of cliché.) At some point in our fracas, I developed a real admiration for Blattella asahinai, a creature that has thrived on this planet for approximately 279 million years longer than we human beings have. It was an esteem bordering on kinship, I’d say, and one I’d never experienced with a lesser life form.

It was at this contemplative point that I unleashed my coup de grâce. Having once again trapped Big, Black, & Nasty in one of the drain’s gaps, I pushed the shower head within inches of him and really let him have it. It was the entomological equivalent of being trapped underwater beneath Niagara Falls. (I’d like to see Keith Richards survive that.) (I mean it. I really would.) And yet, unbelievably, the little shit persisted. I furrowed my brow into a scowl and screamed, “Die, fucker!” (Luckily my Thai neighbors weren’t bothered; in Thai, “die, fucker” means “now we eat rice.”). But Big, Black, & Nasty either did not listen or did not understand, or perhaps he couldn’t hear me, what with 100 pounds-per-cubic-inch of water pressure battering his ear canals. Whatever the case, he did not obey; he pressed on, Darwinist instincts in his primordial protocerebrum and Gloria Gaynor in his heart. How was this possible? How could he take such punishment? Even if the force of the spray didn’t do him in, wouldn’t he at least have drowned by now? (I later read that a cockroach can hold its breath for up to 40 minutes. This information, I don’t doubt, would have been useful before I decided on the drowning plan.)

I continued the assault, but by this point I was in pain myself. I just wanted the carnage to end, to put the poor guy, who had so earned my respect, out of his misery. I squinted in empathic agony and turned my head away as I fired, and it was at this moment -- and not three minutes earlier, when I embarked on this ridiculous, elaborate plot instead of just squishing the thing, or in eighth grade, when I stood at the side of the gym trembling in fear instead of asking Ashley Barnett to dance -- that I realized I was an enormous pussy. I was a pussy, and Big, Black, & Nasty was a valiant soldier who deserved to die a soldier’s death, quick and proud. I lay down my arms and peered down, hoping to find the Captain expired. And indeed, praise Buddha, it appeared he was. Big, Black, & Nasty was stuck upright in the drain, just as before, but this time he was not moving even a little.

Still, after the last near-death experience, one couldn’t be sure, and so I remained vigilant, eyes aimed intently downward, shower head in my hand at the ready. I was so sure he would suddenly pop back out, alive again, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and scare the living badingo out of me. Unlike Glenn Close and most moviegoers, however, Big, Black, & Nasty had no desire to kill Michael Douglas, and thus had no reason to continue living. After two more minutes of suspenseful quiet, still breathing heavily and sweating profusely, I dropped my weapon and declared victory. I saluted my vanquished foe and returned to my room, happy that I was a human and not an insect that had inadvertently wandered into the territory of a clearly superior enemy.

________

The next morning, when I walked into the bathroom, I was surprised to discover that Big, Black, & Nasty had survived after all (something you, of course, knew all along, but only because I told you, so don’t act all smart). Not only was Big, Black, & Nasty not dead, but he had escaped. And not only had he escaped, but he had left a path of -- I shit you not -- blood tracing his exact escape route! Yes, cockroaches bleed, and they bleed red, just like us (Keith Richards excepted). Splotches of blood the size of quarters trailed out away from the drain. As for Big, Black, & Nasty? Nowhere to be seen.

________

And as for me? Well, I didn’t sleep well after that, I can tell you that much. Every time I crawled into bed, I could just see Big, Black, & Nasty scuttling about, those menacing little eyes, those antennae waving around, slowly, threateningly, in that way of his. Once I even swore I heard the pitter-patter of those barbed little legs on the bathtub tile, as if to simply taunt me. I moved into a new apartment three weeks later, and three months after that I was chased out of Bangkok entirely, but that was by an insanely jealous Thai husband, not a cockroach. (But that’s a story for another day.)

I may be 10,000 miles away, but I can picture him now, frolicking amidst the innards of that drainage system, plotting his revenge, and swearing to his little cockroach friends: “I don’t care if I have to wait another 280 million years... The next time Homunculus J. Reilly comes to Bangkok, I’ll be waiting. Oh yes, I’ll be waiting, and I’m gonna get that son of a bitch, if it’s the last thing I do.”

Well, let it be known: I have a message for him, too. Now hear this, Big, Black, & Nasty, you smug little shit, and hear it well: Careful what you wish for, cause I’ll be ready, and next time it won’t be a fuckin’ shower head. So bring it on, smart guy. Bring it on.