Hard-Won Lessons From the Big, Bad City

Tags

biographical, country club plaza, humor, johnson county, kansas, kansas city, liquor stores, mazda mx-6, westport

Four years as an apartment dweller in the area between Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza and the Westport bar district taught me many valuable life lessons. I learned, for instance, that slicing my Missouri license plate tags with a razor blade would often dissuade someone from stealing them. I learned that giving spare change to the panhandler in front of the Plaza Barnes & Noble was preferable to him screaming expletives at me all the way down the street. I learned that the enchanting women who frequented Nichols Lunch around one in the morning were, more often than not, cross-dressers from the nearby Missy B’s dance club.

One Friday night in March 1996, I learned a little something about trespassing on personal property, as well as the fear and helplessness some Kansas suburbanites feel when they cross into that vast heart of darkness known as The Missouri Side.

I was out that night with a girl I was seeing at the time. She was one of those hipster Midtown types: she lived in a crumbling, century-old house, wore dark, slinky outfits, smoked incessantly and spent every Thursday night heckling the Irish folk singer at Harling’s. In my 26-year-old mind, she was the epitome of urban cool, and I spent the better part of four months thinking of little else but her. Francine was her name.

We rode through the Plaza in Francine’s black Mazda MX-6, on our way to channel some spirits with a ouija board in a friend’s darkened Hyde Park mansion. Her best friend, Ruth, was in the back seat with Francine’s dog, a poodle/terrier mix named Trauma. The dog was ugly, but in an endearing way. Kind of like Walter Matthau.

“You know what would go well with some old spirits?” Francine asked as she pulled into the parking lot of Westport Liquors. “Some spirits.”

Ruth and I laughed. This was the kind of cool quip we all thought was hilarious in the mid-1990s.

Francine and Ruth strolled into the store to buy a bottle of white zin and some smokes. I agreed to keep the dog company in the car. After ten minutes or so, I was getting restless. So was Trauma. She climbed all over the car and me, getting hair and slobber on my new black jeans.

I clicked on Trauma’s leash and took her out to get some air. The dog instantly escaped my grasp and rushed into the liquor store as a customer was exiting. I spent the next several minutes chasing Trauma through the aisles with a squeaky toy until I finally cornered her in the malt liquor section. Francine and Ruth had bumped into a friend and were busy talking about an upcoming Urge Overkill show in Lawrence. They were trying hard not to notice me scampering after Francine’s dog.

Feeling ignored and put upon, I trudged back to the car with Trauma in my arms and plopped into the passenger seat. The dog seemed to relax as I cradled her in my lap and rubbed her neck. I even cracked the door open so we could take in some cool spring air. She really was a sweet dog. I didn’t mind the hair and slobber so much anymore.

I watched a 40ish couple leave the store with a bottle of wine. Even from a distance, they had suburban Johnson County, Kansas, written all over them. The woman was dressed in a dark fur coat, and the man donned a turtle neck under an expensive-looking black leather jacket. Both wore expressions like they expected to be jumped by a gang of knife-wielding lunatics at any moment.

The couple walked into the breach between Francine’s car and a Subaru two spaces away, and froze in their tracks. The woman put a leather-gloved hand over her mouth, and the man clutched his wine bottle as if to brain someone with it.

“Oh God!” the woman said. “There’s man inside our car!”

I turned around to see what the commotion was about but only saw some old guy pushing a shopping cart down Westport Road. The Johnson County couple swung open my passenger door and stared at me and Trauma with open-mouthed horror.

“And he’s got a dog with him!” the woman cried.

“What do you want?” the man asked, pointing his bottle in my direction.

I gulped hard before responding in a civil tone.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “This car belongs to my friend, Francine. She’ll be out of the store in a moment.”

“Are you out of your freaking mind?” the woman said. “This is our car.”

I glanced around and noticed a photo on the console of a toddler wearing a University of Kansas sweatshirt. There was a baby seat in back and a silver Nissan logo on the dash. It began to dawn on me that perhaps this wasn’t Francine’s car.

“Officer!” the woman shouted, waving down a police car that was pulling through the parking lot. “Help!”

“Oh boy,” I said under my breath.

“You stay right here,” the man ordered.

The policeman walked up to the car with a weary look of too many late-night shifts in Midtown Kansas City.

“Can I help you folks?”

“We came out of the store and found this… vagrant sleeping in our car,” the woman said, “with his filthy dog.”

Trauma snarled at this remark. Not now, girl, I thought.

The officer peered into the car, blinding me with his flashlight.

“He doesn’t look much like a vagrant, ma’am.”

“I think I can explain,” I said. “I thought this was my friend’s car because, well, it’s black, kind of sporty-looking and is, uh, a Japanese import, like my friend’s car…”

The policeman and the couple stared blankly.

“What’s going on here?” a familiar voice asked.

It was Francine and Ruth, just in time. They apparently decided to skip the white zin, going instead with two six-packs of Amstel Light.

“Stephen, what are you doing in these nice people’s car?” Ruth asked.

“I don’t know,” I said in all truthfulness.

Francine folded her arms and slowly shook her head, as if this was the latest in a long string of embarrassments I’d caused her.

“You’ll have to excuse my baby brother,” she said. “He’s a little slow.”

Taking my hand, she led me and Trauma three spaces down to where the black MX-6 sat. I mouthed, “I’m sorry,” to the couple, who watched us pull out of the parking lot, Trauma barking fiercely through an open window.

Francine and Ruth, being true friends, never let me live this down. But the incident taught me a couple of lessons that, like knowing how to parallel park, served me well in the city. One lesson was that suburbanites are easily spooked, and will use any available force to protect what is theirs. Another was that people should always lock their cars when visiting an inner city liquor store at night.

Finally, I learned that the design differences between the 1994 Mazda MX-6 and the Nissan 240SX of the same era, while subtle, are worth remembering.

Photo courtesy of www.joedaly.net.

Some Very Bad People Out There

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behavior, book, martha stout, psychology, science, sociopaths, the sociopath next door

A while back, I read The Sociopath Next Door, by a Harvard psychologist named Martha Stout. I found the book to be both chilling and fascinating, and I’ve thought quite a bit about it since. According to Stout, as many as one in every 25 of us is a sociopath, described in the simplest terms as a person who has no conscience. Unlike what you see in the movies, most sociopaths are not violent predators or criminal masterminds. Some are very smart, and some are not so smart. Like the rest of us, they are motivated by different things. The sociopath could be a power-hungry corporate executive, he could be a guy who can’t hold a job and watches TV all day, or he could be that crabby neighbor who screams at the kids for walking on his lawn. Some sociopaths are better at masking their true natures and intentions than others of their ilk.

Stout asserts that sociopaths do share some common traits. Many of them have addictive personalities, most of them do not live very long, and all of them create drama, mayhem and heartbreak for those of us who are burdened with a conscience. In my years, I’ve crossed paths with two or three people whom I believe are sociopaths. I feel extremely fortunate that none of those people have ruined my life.

One point the author makes over and over again is that sociopaths cannot be reformed. A combination of nature and nurture makes these people hard-wired for evil. Nothing can be done to give them compassion or a moral compass. As a Christian, I have been taught to believe that all of us were made in God’s image, and that there is good in every person. As I have grown older and gained more experience, however, I have begun to wonder if Stout isn’t right. Maybe some people are just no good and beyond saving?

What do you think? Know any sociopaths? What effect have they had on your life?

Let’s Go to the Movies!

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bambi, disney, dreamworks, escape to witch mountain, movies, parenthood, turbo

Last night, our three-year-old son went to the movie theater for the first time. He saw Turbo, the new DreamWorks picture about a snail who has an insatiable need for speed. I’m proud to report that our son sat through the entire two-hour movie, and was so inspired by Turbo’s story that he raced his cousin to the bathroom right after the closing credits.

I am trying to remember the first movie I ever saw in a theater (which would have been my first movie anywhere, those being the days before home video). I think it was either Bambi, which I watched with my parents at a theater in Columbus, Ga., or Escape From Witch Mountain, which my mom took me to see in our hometown of LaGrange. I remember leaving Witch Mountain a little early, just as a helicopter with the bad guys landed upside down on the mountain. Maybe it was more than I could handle. Regardless of which movie was the first, I achieved this milestone in 1975, when I was four years old. It was the beginning of regular trips to the theater to watch a whole slew of Disney movies, from Pinocchio to Snow White to the less-memorable Shaggy D.A. and The Cat From Outer Space.

Do you remember your first trip to the movies as a kid? What movie was it? What year was it?

Image courtesy of DreamWorks.

Very Early Praise for My Book

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a plot for pridemore, alarie tennille, fiction, hallmark cards, mercer university press, missouri, review, southern fiction

My novel, A Plot for Pridemore, is scheduled to be published next year by Mercer University Press. With that in mind, I’ve asked a few people I know to read my manuscript and, if they feel inclined, write a few kind words that I can include on the book jacket and in promotional materials.

Below is a review by Alarie Tennille, a friend and former colleague of mine at Hallmark Cards. Alarie was a prolific writer at Hallmark for many years–there’s a good chance that, at some point, you have read her work in a Hallmark greeting card or book. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals over the years, and she recently published a collection, Spiraling into Control.

I couldn’t be more thrilled with what Alarie wrote about A Plot for Pridemore. Her review makes me want to read the book again, and I’ve read it about a hundred times already:

Get ready for a madcap romp, not at all what you’d expect from a trip to Pridemore, Missouri. Roth has the Southern storyteller’s knack for creating quirky but believable characters who will charm and alarm you and keep you glued to your chair. The action is so quickly paced, risky, and hilarious that it is easy to picture A Plot for Pridemore on the movie screen.

Ever since Highway 54 was redirected in 1991, eighty-eight-year-old Mayor Roe Tolliver has been watching his town’s “long, slow crawl to oblivion.” Shops on Main Street are boarded up. Only one decent restaurant remains. The Cub Scouts’ annual pinewood derby
is the biggest action in town, but that’s all about to change.

The mayor has most of the city council in his back pocket, which is a good thing. He needs a lot of help pulling off his ambitious and dangerous scheme to focus world attention on his tiny town. Even his fifty years in power might not be enough to sway his four partners in crime. When he unveils the plot, they “stared at him as if he’d announced that Horton Hears a Who held the key to the cosmos.” What could possibly go wrong, except EVERYTHING? Let us count the ways…

Hardy? Hardly.

Tags

horticulture, humor, kansas city, mexican petunia, plants, southern living, summer

This is a photo of our Mexican petunias. We bought the plants three years ago, expecting them to be tough sons of bitches capable of weathering the hot, humid summer months of Kansas City. When I hear the name “Mexican petunia,” I imagine a stubborn, hardy bush defiantly blooming its purple flowers on the cracked desert floor or in the middle of a concrete median along a Tijuana boulevard. I imagine something like the plant described in this Southern Living article.

Yet, here are our proud Mexican petunias, wilting in the full sun of an 81 degree day.

“Those plants look sad,” my 3-year-old son says as we drive up to the house, where the petunias droop like a pair of sad-sack sentries.

“They do, don’t they?” I reply. My wife or I will get out the garden hose and water them down, a part of our daily routine during the summer. If there’s a 90-plus degree in the forecast, I’ll drag the plants into the garage for a while to give them a break from the heat. And I will stare down at them with the pitying look of man who has invested in a thoroughbred colt that’s too scared to come out of the stable.

In a week or two, those purple flowers will bloom and all will be forgiven. Maybe we’ll even have some nice, spring-like weather, and the petunias will perk up the way they did that day we brought them home from the nursery. They seemed so happy back then.

Chlorine Dreams

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fiction, lifeguard, pool, romance, satire, sexy, steamy, summer, swimming

It was 11 o’clock and already pushing 90 degrees when Trudy arrived at the Whitehaven Estates Aquatics Center, dropped her three-year-old son into the shallow end of the pool and settled into a recliner that was within chatting distance of her favorite lifeguard.

“Good morning, Todd,” she said when she caught his eye.

“Good morning, Mrs. Connor.”

Trudy winced. After everything she and Todd had been through together, she had hoped he would finally drop this courtesy title shit. It made her feel every single one of her 36 years whenever he said it.

“Looks like it’s gonna to be another scorcher,” Todd said, his eyes fixed on the gaggle of kids, parents and teenagers that populated the Olympic-sized Whitehaven pool.

“Tell me about it,” Trudy said, shedding her cover-up to reveal the bikini she recently purchased from JCrew.com. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this heat.”

She pulled sunblock from her beach bag and began slowly applying it, working her hands all the way from her upper thighs to her ankles until she noticed the lifeguard stealing a glance.

“What SPF is that?” Todd asked.

“Fifteen.”

“With your light skin, you really should go with 30 or higher, Mrs. Connor. You can never have too much protection.”

She laughed. “Oh, Todd. You are so right about that!”

This was Todd Baylor’s first summer working the pool, and already the housewives of Whitehaven had taken to calling him, “Todd the Bod.” He was a little old for a lifeguard, probably in his late 20s, which didn’t say much for his ambition or career prospects. But, physically, he was more than all there. His sun-bleached hair, his bronzed, chiseled frame, the way he pressed a whistle between his full lips and let out a quick, confident little tweet. He was a man who was in firm control of his pool.

“Hey!” As if on cue, Todd leaned out of his chair and pointed at some urchin who was scrambling around the water slide. “STOP RUNNING!”

Then he blew his whistle. Trudy sighed.

The two of them had struck up a friendship over the summer. And last Saturday, Trudy decided to take things to the next level. Not saddled with watching her three-year-old for the day, she headed down to the pool and waited for Todd to call an adult swim. A few minutes later, she wandered out to the parking lot where she found the lifeguard sitting in his weathered Ford Explorer, playing Angry Birds and smoking a cigarette. He seemed startled to see her.

“Please don’t tell anyone, Mrs. Connor.”

“I would never do such a thing, Todd,” she said as she climbed into the passenger seat. “And you can call me Trudy from now on.”

“Where is Mr. Connor?”

“An insurance seminar in Sarasota,” she said, pressing her body against his and moving in for a kiss, “and he’s going to be gone all week.”

They hadn’t talked since that brief, groping encounter, which didn’t last as long as Trudy had hoped due to the 10-minute restriction on adult swims at Whitehaven. But now here she was, a mere five feet away from Todd the Bod, and she intended to learn why he hadn’t called the cell phone number she had carefully tucked in the pocket of his swimming trunks.

“Mrs. Conner?” Todd maintained his eagle-eyed stare over the pool, but he had moved his chair a little closer to Trudy’s recliner.

“Yes, Todd.”

“I, uhm, wanna apologize – Hey! NO EATING IN THE POOL! – I wanna apologize about what happened the other day.”

Trudy squirted more sunblock into her hand and rubbed it under her shoulder straps. “It’s really no big deal, Todd.”

The lifeguard leaned in close enough to whisper.

“It’s just that, well, Mrs. Connor. You’re so damn pretty. And we’ve only got three weeks left this summer.”

Trudy lowered her sunglasses so that she could get a good look at the bronze, aquatic god sitting next to her. She heard her three-year-old from the pool, screaming about getting a snack or something.

“You still have the phone number I gave you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Call me when the pool closes tonight,” Trudy said, “and I’ll meet you in the pump house.”

Image courtesy of http://www.shape.com.

A Window into History

Tags

fais island, gettysburg, history, july 4th, patriotic, west point, world war II

The July 4 holiday and this week’s 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg has me thinking about my family’s own history of military service. My father served in Vietnam, and my grandfather was in the Pacific Theater in World War II. Both graduated from West Point. I never enlisted in the military, but I have always been extremely proud of my family’s West Point ties and am grateful that Dad and Grandad never winced (at least not in front of me) when I opted to major in journalism at Mizzou instead of joining the Long Grey Line.

As a kid, I loved listening to my grandfather’s stories about the war in the Pacific. That is a credit to his brand of storytelling, because Grandad saw no combat and, as far as I know, never had to dodge bullets from an oncoming Japanese Zero. For much of the war, he commanded an antiaircraft battalion. By the time he was shipped out, the U.S. had established air superiority over much of the Pacific and had little need for antiaircraft protection. Most of Grandad’s stories about the war were wry, humorous tales about bouncing from base to base and, later, island to island, usually after most of the fighting was over.

My favorite was his account, told with a slightly ironic glint in his eye, of the December 1944 Liberation of Fais Island, a tiny speck on the map near the Caroline Islands. Don’t be alarmed if you never heard of Fais Island in your study of World War II history. As Grandad describes in his memoirs, it was a small operation:

In December, after the lagoon at Ulithi had been free of any enemy presence, a Japanese submarine managed to enter the anchorage but fortunately did only minor damage. This immediately pointed suspicion to a small phosphate island about 60 miles east of Ulithi, which aerial reconnaissance indicated might have a small Japanese radio station. Further close-in offshore observation located a small native population, and from them we learned that there was a small detachment of Japanese there. This island was called Fais… about which very little was known, other than it had been an active phosphate mine like so many of the other small islands of the Caroline Group.

In order to remove any possible threat to the security of the anchorage at Ulithi, a small detachment from the 81st Division… landed on the island without opposition and, after securing the safety of the natives by collecting them in a small area near the beach, began the search for the Japanese. None were discovered on the first day, but on the second day, they disclosed their position by opening fire from a well-concealed cave. One prisoner was taken but the other died in the cave. Two others were found in another part of the island, but they had committed suicide… as it turned out, a radio station was found and destroyed, but it is not known whether it had ever been used for Japanese military intelligence.

The natives were happy to be free of the restrictions imposed by the Japanese on their fishing privileges and freedom of movement on the island. After a small ceremony celebrating the liberation of the island with speeches and native dancing, and the donation of many “K” and “C” rations, which the natives liked, the small task force departed.

During patriotic holidays, we recall those crucial turning points in our country’s history like Gettysburg and Normandy and Iwo Jima. But, for every famous battle, there have been hundreds of mostly forgotten operations that also contributed to the war effort. Some of them, like Fais Island, were almost bloodless.

My grandfather died in 1999 at the age 96. I often think about sitting at the candlelit dinner table in his home, hanging on every single word as he told stories about the war, most of them involving troop movements or training exercises. They might have been short on action, but those stories, told with Grandad’s droll delivery, were for me a window into history. I am smiling right now just thinking about them.