The Bookcase

My book collection was out of control, which meant I was out of control, but I found it easier to spend more money to fix a physical effect than to address its root behavior so fuck it, off I went in search of a Home Depot.

Me practicing my best Mel Brooks' "It's good to be the king" line from
  History of the World Part 1. And yeah, said bookshelf is behind me.

It was one of those home improvement projects that you cook up in a half-delirious phase between the fugue state of not remembering why you went into the kitchen to not being able to commit a sketch to paper for lack of your favorite Levenger pen with the Piper 1000 Ultra-Glide ink barrel.  Excuses, in other words.  Fancy-ass excuses.  And within these walls, as soon as thoughts became cogent and pronouncements were made about this project, the salvo of objections came in early and often: the history.

History has not been kind to home improvement projects in this house.  There was that time I got locked out of the garage and had to break in by crawling through the bathroom window.  People still make fun of that day, cruel, unforgiving people, but it happened many years ago, before cell phones were invented, and leaving the keys locked in the car meant baking one's skin in (where I live) 100-degree heat for the majority of the day, or walking to a convenience store and loitering in air conditioning for the next several hours like a pervert in search of a newsstand with the good stuff on the bottom shelf.  I'd really be stuck, at least until someone came back with the fucking car.  Getting locked out of a house meant being forced to walk the earth and eke out food and drink by any means necessary like in The Walking Dead, I'm not fucking kidding.  Anyway, the point is I had to fix that bathroom window and it still doesn't close properly.  The history, the horror.

The next challenge on my bookcase project was the prep work.  And here is the true secret of carpentry: it involves geometry.  It means measuring with some degree of exactitude.  I took exactly three semester hours of algebra in college and that was all I had to take and I ran like hell from anything that had numbers in it for the rest of my undergraduate studies.  Geometry, trigonometry?  Those were nowhere in sight, not even in high school, and purposely so.  So the handicaps here were set firm and set early in my young-ass life.

 A bookcase has to take into consideration the width of the shelves themselves; the space required for the height variance of trade cloth editions; the oversized aspect of coffee table books because the fucking things still have to be shelved somewhere since there is only ever one coffee table in a living room and you can't stack them forever like some Howard Hughes psychopath; will said bookcase have a toe guard or no toe guard and what the hell does a toe guard serve anyway; and so forth.  You don't just bowl up one day and say you're going to build a bookcase and take up hammer and nail.  You have to sketch the fucking thing out.

Behold the bookcase in its natural habitat...

The next challenge is the visit to the lumber yard.  Here you have to mix it up with hard-eyed, serious men.  Men with worn leather steel-toed boots and dirty jeans and terse, clipped vocabularies that cover a lot of ground with a single, "Yup."  To approach one is to risk exposure, to be revealed as the weekend enthusiast that never fully matured to craftsman or carpenter.  "You gonna use the 5/16 brights on that one, or you gonna go with wood screws?  You gonna need wood putty?"  How the fuck would I know?  So many questions!  So you have to go off on your own and figure out which length of wood board you need, what the fuck is yellow pine and why so many black knots and why is white pine so clean and so expensive Jesus fuck?

If you travel to the lumber yard by yourself, you will need to practice your pose.  Specifically, standing and observing the stacks of lumber as if lost in the deep art of calculations and estimates and not because you have no fucking clue what to buy.  Go up and look at the wood as if inspecting it for fissures or cracks or Kosher labeling, because every minute will be filled with the terror of being discovered.  Every nuance is judged, every verbal utterance is logged and remembered by the Home Depot employees who lurk close enough to note your actions, but far enough to not really be helpful.  Stare too long at the price displays and they will figure you out as nothing but a yellow-bellied novice.  Buying lumber by yourself is a harrowing experience that will require ice water in the veins and a steely determination to make your choices quickly before you betray your limited knowledge and get laughed at by the cashiers with a sneer and a low, cutting comment such as, "He'll be back when he finds out he needed sluiced boards."

However, if you travel to buy lumber with another person, specifically someone of the opposite sex, be prepared, conversely, to undergo a vetting of your knowledge of said project more thorough than CIA screening of potential agents of state-sponsored terrorism.  You will not be free to just buy at the pace of casual whim; every choice, from color and texture to height and width, will be scrutinized and require an oral defense as if your doctoral dissertation is on the line.  Leaving the lumber yard will carry the weight that you survived negotiations to rival peace talks at Helsinki, or the questioning of potential war crimes in The Hague.

The final challenge: the actual work.  Here you toil, again with hammer, again with nail, enduring blisters where blisters have no business being, and the petty barbs of neighbors who privately snicker that they wouldn't trust you to change a light bulb without damaging the wallpaper.  Here the matter cannot be bungled, as Tom Wolfe said about something else entirely.  Here you must drill and saw and chock and measure and drop boards on the ground and slam them into each other like a man possessed of the singular notion to finish the day's labors by the sweat of his brow.  The sheer noise and clatter that you make will signal to everyone that you are not just serious but, like, really serious.  And you will stand arms akimbo at the end of a long, hot day without pause from the heat and dust, and you will look around and think, Shit, all I finished was the frame?

And the inter-challenges will arise: the mundanities of life like trips to pick up kids from football practice or a faucet that sprouted a leak or the neighbor is calling the cops because you vandalized his trash cans again that morning, with malice aforethought.  So you won't get to dedicate the time to the project that you wanted and you won't make the progress that you wanted and this part is important because this is where 99 percent of the weekend amateur carpenters just throw up their hands and give up.  I can't tell you how many times I went back inside the house, plopped down in my favorite chair, felt the welcoming puff of 72-degree comfort cooling, and said, "Let me just finish this next level of Fallout 4 instead."  Embrace these self-induced respites, for they will keep you sane.

What's important is to remember that you've already spent a fuck-ton of money on building materials and even if you end up with a very expensive wooden ashtray, just make some use of your misguided and embryonic efforts.  Besides, the last thing you want is to not finish something so that ya girl go and dog you out when she with her friends, see?  (Apologies to Tupac).

So after failing to slaughter the mutated Deathclaw that roamed the village in Fallout 4, I put down my Xbox controller and went back outside.  I cleared a path for the raw bookshelf to be carried in without knocking down something important or breaking the glass on the sliding door, through which I would perhaps attempt to crawl through again just for old times' sake, just to be wistful, and then I wheeled it inside, shimmying it like I was a smartass warehouseman in Dire Strait's "Money for Nothin' " video.  And I was pretty proud of myself, until I realized I still had to stain the damned thing.

The finished product, i.e. dead trees holding
other dead trees...

Here, then, is where it all falls apart, from the pretty how-to books and video demonstrations to HGTV-propagated bullshit where people, calm, rational people in casual yet elegant weekend clothing from Kohls, carefully review their color selections and discuss their perspectives on cock-ass names such as baroque chocolate or warm sienna.  Because after all that work to put the fucking thing together, all I wanted to do was walk into the paint section and tell them, "I want something that's dark."  Which I did, only to hear them say, "Would you like to look at our color plates" and I scream "NO ASSHOLE I WANT SOMETHING THAT'S DARK!  THIS ENDS TONIGHT!"

So the angry clerk tossed me a can of Minwax inocuously, perhaps generically, called dark cherrywood and he nearly hit my head, but the Home Depot motherfuckers know when you're in a hurry and can do things that take you to within an inch of losing your life without calling the cops on them.  Then I got to my study, laid down some clear plastic covering on the floors and furniture like I was going to reboot the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and what roughly felt like 13 years later, I had a fully stained bookshelf.

I won't even tell you what I went through to get varnish on that thing.

Death of a Marine

This post is about a friend of mine who died last month.  It's part obituary, part backstory, part requiem, part soliloquy -- all rolled into one.  The obituary I read was nothing more than a brief snippet, altogether worthless of the life she led and the impact she had on others, myself included.

Photo courtesy Melissa M. Shafford

She was Melissa Mary Shafford, raised as a Navy brat from coast to coast until she and her family ended up in a "spit of a town" called Taft, Florida, and later to Sanford in Central Florida.  Back then, their home sat across the street from a lot where a traveling carnival parked its shit and took a long rest between tours.  She said her dad moved them all out of there after a major accident happened on that site and it became important to him that the entire family got the hell away.  Some of her treasured memories included getting dressed up as Batman and assorted superheroes along with her cousins in the back yard; her less favorable ones were generally while growing up in a household where any expression of emotion was seen as a sign of weakness.  She and her siblings weren't even allowed to cry during sad movies because the threat came from her father: "I'll give you something to cry about."  She told me once that what they grew up considering to be harsh treatment is viewed in modern parlance as a physically abusive environment.

Her relationship with her father seemed to be the most difficult experience for her; he belittled her constantly and made her feel like nothing she did was right.  It seemed to only motivate her to achieve the best grades in school, but she stopped considering her home a sanctuary.  Her formative years into adulthood didn't offer a better path necessarily, not at first.  While serving in the Marines, she was raped by another Marine who was drunk and got her pinned down on a bed.  She was too embarrassed to report the rape, but it took its toll on her mental well-being and she ended up with an early medical discharge a little over a year later.  Psychologists could possibly call it the defining moment of her life at that stage; I certainly would have.  She was subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder from that nightmare, but she chose to never confront her attacker.  When I asked her why she wouldn't, she said it had been so long ago, her memory was hazy on his identity, and she didn't want to spend time reliving the horror of something she had already worked hard to put behind her.  I knew better than to try to go near that land mine and try to disarm it all on my own.

By the time I met her, though, she had become a different person altogether: tough, articulate, and thoroughly incisive in her professional observations, such that I never would have guessed as to the trials of her early upbringing until she had confided them to me much later on.  She had no patience for bullshit or bullshitters and made it known early on.  It also made enemies for her, which she knew, accepted and embraced.  She knew when people were being genuine with her and she knew when it was mere sycophancy rearing its head, and she smacked down the latter with a crisply executed chop.  That's the kind of hard bitch she could be.

Which isn't to say she lacked empathy.  She was also one of the kindest people I knew, and it shone through in unexpected moments that you could only spot from an oblique angle.  Some of the people whose lives she touched sought her counsel and ended up in tears from the sudden, cathartic release of talking to her about their problems and listening to her advice.  She brought a clarity to the way she looked at the world and the people who lived in it with all their associated dysfunctions, manias and misguided motivations.  She was direct, and she was blunt.  One day we were speaking about a co-worker named Ron, and she said to me, "I'll tell you how I feel about Ron -- if he's laid up comatose in a hospital bed, I'll clean the shit out of his bedpan.  That's how I feel about Ron."

In terms of human companionship, love, romance, all that sappy shit, she never really had time for it.  She learned to put up walls at a very young age and not let anyone in, and her life didn't revolve around a man anymore, not when I knew her or since.  She suffered through a first marriage to an abusive husband and through a second failed marriage to the extent that her emotions consisted of only two expressions: happiness and anger.  If she had a love of her life, it possibly existed at one point for her Marine recruiter, who was married with kids and was not in a situation where he would leave his wife. "I know how to pick 'em," she would say about that.  She would also say that if he had ever shown up at her door, she would have left whoever she was with to be with him.  Knowing how sparingly she made such declarations, I know what she felt must have been true.

Photo courtesy Melissa M. Shafford

She was on her way to a top spot in our little corporation when her mother's diagnosis of cancer derailed everything for her.  The casualty of that horrifying knowledge also culminated with a series of professional attacks and check-mates that effectively guaranteed a hard fall down the career ladder she had worked hard to ascend, mile by bloody mile.  But the sad truth is that she left a place where the shit was hip-deep to a place where the shit was neck-deep.  She knew that would happen, too.  She fought it as best she could, with no help from anyone.  She soldiered on, in the end spending thousands in legal bills to a law firm that sucked her finances dry.  She did win her case against the government for failing to protect her from an environment of pervasive harassment, but she never lived to see any money actually awarded to her.  The illnesses and PTSD symptoms kicked in hard again, and there is only so much that a person can take when the human body and the human psyche gang up on you.

She was wired to handle the shit at work and the health issues, but Melissa never really recovered from the death of her mother in November 2011.  By then, she had moved across the country, taken a position of lesser responsibility and much lesser pay, endured the ostracism from her new co-workers and bosses, and even sacrificed her lunch hour to leave the workplace every day and care for her mother, with meals, with bath times, with everything that a human being who is preparing to exit this plane of existence ought to receive when diagnosed as terminal.  And when her mother passed on, there was a hissing void of empty space that her care and nurturing had once filled.  I think, looking back, that maybe, absent a significant presence in her life, she needed to be able to care about someone at least, someone she loved deeply and with all her heart, someone who protected her as best as possible and never wished her an ill thought.  When that is taken away, who knows what happens to an uprooted soul?

The last time I spoke to Melissa in person, she still had that hard edge about her, that clarity of considerable perspective, but I could also see cracks in the foundation where doubts and misery were creeping in.  Her family's issues had come full circle such that her father was busy re-imagining the life with her deceased mom as a June-and-Ward-Cleaver love story; her brother was fighting with a nightmarish ex-wife over child custody matters; and her sister was, disgracefully, reveling in Melissa's barely controlled descent after envying a meteoric rise.  Melissa was still the glue keeping that living dysfunction from slipping into more severe dysfunction.  Although I wouldn't have called it a downward spiral, since reality was not gut-punching her to the point that she was on her knees, the ground was still coming up fast for her.

I don't want to romanticize this part of it.  Even in the times when everything looked bleak for her, she found the time to reach out to me and pull me out of my own darkness, to pull me through tunnels and over rocky paths that eventually led to a place where I could catch my breath, look around, and feel the sun's rays sink into my skin again.  Of my own doing, I ran into a perfect storm of bullshit at that point in my life, and she kept me relatively sane, and my soul owed so much to her that I never came back to repay.  She was a far better friend to me than I ever was to her, but she never rebuked me for that; again, that's who she was.  A constant giver to those who she felt needed her more than she needed to help herself.

She lived alone and didn't venture out into public places anymore.  Her closest companions were the ones she loved dearly and stayed by her side through the worst of the storm: her dogs, Jack and Apache.

I don't know how she died.  I hear rumors and ignore them; they don't represent the person I knew, and I choose to remember her for the inspiration and friendship she gave to me and so many others.  I've met many people in life, and some of them, this world could do without.  Not Melissa.  The world is a lesser place without her.

Watch your six, Melissa.  Rest in peace, and semper fi.

Death In Situ: Writing Exercise

At one point in my tortured past I read virtually every how-to book about writing, including a lively tome from Brian Kiteley called The 3 A.M. Epiphany which was essentially a series of writing exercises designed to jump-start the engine of your creative mind.  I hate writing in first-person but one notable exercise involved writing in first-person and trying to tell a story through description while using the word "I" as little as possible.  What this exercise taught me was how minimal the difference between first- and third-person could be, if the narrative was handled a certain way.

It was an interesting, notable challenge, and I managed to write a very lengthy scene out of whole cloth for this one.  I drew on the memory of a long-lost spy story that was accidentally deleted from my old computer when I was in my early twenties, a tale involving an American spy named Eric Stanush.  That first story was lost to memory, and I never finished the suggested story that poked through from Kiteley's writing exercise, but the scene that grew out of it is below in full:

             When she reached the train station at Luxembourg City, all I knew about her optics and movement was what type of coat she was wearing and when her train would leave.  She had one of those shabby, puffy numbers that people tend to see on hippie twenty-something adventurers hiking across Switzerland, or permanently parking their lives in Amsterdam where they were turning on, tuning in and dropping out en masse.  Her hair was sandy blonde, straight, short and loose around her face.  But it was all about her face.  The face didn't line up with the clothes.

(Source: Wikimedia Commons, Informationsstand bannen an der Stater Gare, MMFE, CC BY SA 4.0)

             The eyebrows were thin and intelligent, the mouth was neither too small, too wide, too pursed, too judgmental or too gentle, it was fixed in a set of perfectly prepared mannerisms.  Her eyes moved with a considerate grace, the kind that implied she had sailed through life without serious worry or tragedy striking too close to her, or if it had, she had merely pushed through it and moved on.  Women with an inner strength were far more interesting.  She had an inner strength, but only if she had managed to push on.

            The tasking message had very little information about her name, and normally names are not very important except as labels, but her name had that extraordinary quality of leaping out into the world full-blown: September Mannheim.  Her name announced a hidden aristocracy, a bloodline of landed wealth that had been nurtured, tucked away in Puget Sound or upstate New York among the influential gentry of the eastern United States.  What kind of job did she have?  Photography?  Travel writing?  Something that didn’t require business attire but could remain respectable.  There was, in fact, very little information about her family, only what was necessary to accomplish the tasking.  It was difficult to imagine what she had done to arouse the interests of the intelligence apparatus.  But sometimes a contact as casual as bumping into a known terror financier at a busy airport would do the trick.  Secondary and terciary contacts was the term, and she was in one of those two categories now.

            She was paying for something at the ticket window, not the ticket itself but a separate transaction, maybe an upgrade to a bigger cabin on the train that would take her from Luxembourg to Dusseldorf across the winding escarpments of a land cold enough to make breathing painful when done outdoors long enough.  Her route would last approximately seven hours.  Again she had that pleasantly detached air in dealing with the clerk, who was a slightly hunched, very thin man in his mid-forties and evidently malnourished from being a miser, or being married to an uncaring wife, or possibly he was just too French.  It was clear that his day had been brightened simply by speaking to September.  He even seemed to joke with her, something he hadn’t done with any of the other customers over the past two hours before she had arrived.  She finally completed her business and withdrew with a smile that beamed at the clerk briefly, then subsided when she turned and pulled her leather and brass travel roller behind her.  There was a skipping sound coming from one of the wheels, indicating it was stuck or broken.

            She was evidently screening her potential seat carefully.  Didn’t want to be too close to the tall, nerdy Swede clicking on his laptop at the end of the row, but not too close to the overly romantic couple who were possibly Finnish, and definitely far away from the noisy Turkish family that traveled in no less than seven in the group, jabbering and jostling each other with squat frames, quick arm movements, and improper public scratching of body parts.  She finally settled on a relatively empty section in the middle of the third row, well enough away from the busy front section but not far enough to get stuck behind a crowd when her train came.

            And it was in that section where her most intriguing change occurred: her facial expression.  The niceties of personal interaction faded away, no more smile, no more welcoming gestures.  Her back and shoulders assumed a readied angle, her chin jutted into high alert, and her eyes darkened.  They were scanning now.  Looking for someone.  Someone who would be a problem.

            She knew I would be here.  She was looking for me.

           

*

            In the world of international espionage, very few encounters result in bloodshed or violence or multiple vehicles swooping down, raid-like, into a public space.  It’s more like playing chess, where the players move according to expected rules and leave little room for unchoreographed mayhem.  September tilted her head slightly and I raised my eyebrows, and in that moment, our first Hello passed without a word.

            I still had to determine how this turnabout had occurred, and why I was suddenly the objective of someone else’s tasking.  After seeing how much thought she had invested in seating herself, I left the London Times morning edition on my bench and walked over to sit next to her.  As I approached, she beamed her window-clerk charm at me in full shine.  It was quite an effect, and it told me that I was dealing with a top professional, not some honey-pot shake-and-baker straight off a two-week orientation for a one-off job.  She had done this before and was quite clear about doing it again.

            She said, “I was wondering if you’d made it.  The snow drifts are already shutting down some of the smaller roads.”

            The syntax of her words and the cadence of her diction were giving away nothing.  Where before I deduced Puget Sound and aristocracy, there was the low hiss of static.  Instead of a clear image of who she seemed to be, I was getting white noise.  So much in the community depended on knowing who you were dealing with that her overall vagueness was now making me nervous.  Was she physically fit?  Was she just a handler or an operator?  She was piled under that heavy coat, but her hands looked strong, and she wore a black watch that displayed 24-hour military time.  “I got here two hours ago,” was my reply.

            “Early bird gets the worm.  Or, I guess you thought you were getting a worm.  Surprise,” she said.

            “September Mannheim?”

            “Not really.”

            “Did you choose the name?”

            “I did, in fact!”

            The lilt of her words suggested mockery, which I suppose was deserved if I had been duped.  “So what’s the package?” I asked.

            The package was the parlance for the objective.  It could be a physical thing, a suitcase bomb or a stool sample from Putin.  More commonly, they were encrypted USB thumb drives with all kinds of data on them.  It sounded boring, but a couple of years ago some wiley Czech nationalists had started engineering their thumb drives with a dab of C-4.  If the decryption handshake didn’t occur as programmed, boom.  There went your head.

            She leaned in and said, “You’re the package.”

            I glanced at her.  She raised her eyebrows now, nodding.  “Sucks, right?”  She was changing again, this chameleon, now dropping into the head of a college junior studying abroad.  She was letting me know I would not figure her out.  She was good.

            But I had other problems now.  In our world, when a person becomes a package, it is either eliminated or taken into custody.  There were no police officers or other gendarmes at the station’s turnstiles or loitering outside, which were bad tidings.  It meant there would be no official grab, no government somewhere claiming a crime and making headlines and sending me home in a public furor.  It meant that if I was taken into custody, it was for rendition.  Completely under the table, totally black bag.  People in rendition just disappeared.  Some died.

           *          *          *

            I belonged to a CTU (counter-terrorist unit) of which the Company has many, but one with lesser credentials where my official US passport lists my real name: Eric Stanush.  In our trade, September – whatever her real name – was a couple of paygrades higher than me.  I knew this because I had figured out I was the package now, and that meant my handlers would never send someone after me who was limited to using their actual name.  She was a Tier 3 operative, the highest covert category that existed.

            What we are trained to do when a job goes sideways is very simple: get up and start walking.  Be cool, be calm, don’t panic.  But keep moving, the farther away, the better.  So I got up and made it as far as the front doors when I heard a “Sir!”  And my training has taught me better, it is supposed to, but I choked at the last moment.  Her voice called out and made me stop and turn around, a fish caught in her hook.

            “Is this your wallet?  I think you dropped it.”

            “No, thank you.”

             And that was all I could say without attracting more attention.  I walked quickly, but it was too late.

            Security clearances, contrary to Hollywood bullshit, don’t occur with a snap of the fingers.  Credit checks, recent associations, purchase histories, communication patterns, online transactions – it is all vetted and reviewed by specialized units.  It can take at least six months, usually longer.  The point being, everyone who was in our of work was already in the system, and that system could be accessed in a number of ways.  The photographic evidence was usually purged and all anyone saw were facts and figures.
           Which meant that the grab team or the kill team, whoever had been contracted to box me in, had just been signaled by September to go active.  They had not known who to look for until now.  A man sitting next to September and striking up a conversation could be anyone.  But her act of finding me and attempting to hand me pocket litter, be it a wallet, a set of keys, a map, was bona fide tradecraft that marked me.
           Meaning they were moving, moving without me seeing them.  The training kicked in: stay away from sudden corners, find the longest lines of sight and travel along them, look for storefront windows or parked cars, reflective surfaces that would let you see behind you without obvious turning.  And, in the process of evasion, try to find an ideal route to pull away and escape.
The main entrances and exits were likely covered, so that walking through those would be tantamount to dropping right into their box.  And this station was not near a city center, it was near the edge of an older part of the city.