Cinemorphosis

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  • Arm-Wrestling My Way into Belonging

    Arm-Wrestling My Way into Belonging

    Last night, I had a dream so vivid it might as well have come with a recruitment brochure. Word had spread—apparently my reputation as the guy who could teach college football players to write sentences that didn’t cause nosebleeds had reached mythical status. Somewhere in South Carolina, perched on a beach with the casual arrogance of a luxury condo, a university decided they needed me. Urgently.

    Some guy—I don’t remember his name, only that he had the calm urgency of a cult recruiter—convinced me to hop on a bus. The ride took five seconds. Not metaphorically. Five actual seconds. Blink and boom: there I was, standing on a beach so perfect it made the California coast look like an overhyped sandbox.

    The air was humid but in a sensual, Southern Gothic sort of way. The kind of air that makes you forgive mosquitoes and contemplate linen pants. The sun was melting into the Atlantic like it had nowhere better to be. I was home, or something like it.

    Coaches greeted me like I’d just been drafted into sainthood. Players clapped me on the back and called me “Coach,” which I didn’t correct because, frankly, it felt good. Then came the arm wrestling. One by one, I took them down like some middle-aged Hercules hopped up on tenure and protein powder. Elbow to the table, bicep to the heavens. I wasn’t just respected—I was essential.

    It wasn’t about strength. It was about belonging. Every laugh, every handshake, every ridiculous display of masculine absurdity made me feel needed in a way that was almost embarrassing. I wasn’t just part of the team. I was the team.

    I wanted to call my wife back in California, to tell her we were moving. I had found the Promised Land, and it came with free gym access and a faculty parking permit. But the joyous noise around me was too loud. The players were hooting, the coaches were laughing, and the ocean kept slapping the shore like it had something to prove. I’d call her later, I told myself.

    Then I woke up.

    The ceiling fan was rattling. My desire for dark roast coffee was pressing. And I was back in the real world, where my inbox was probably filled with late assignments and vague threats from the IT department.

    Still, the dream stuck with me. Not because of the location, or the humidity, or the freakish arm strength—but because of the feeling. That feeling of being wanted. Of being part of something. Of mattering.

    There is no substitute for that. None.

  • The Beatle Who Wasn’t

    The Beatle Who Wasn’t

    You once had an apartment poolside acquaintance named Julian French. He was a man whose entire existence felt like a tribute act to Paul McCartney. He wasn’t the kind of character you could invent—he was too perfectly strange. In his late thirties, Julian looked so uncannily like the legendary Beatle that you would’ve sworn he moonlighted as a McCartney impersonator in some dingy Las Vegas lounge, crooning “Hey Jude” to an audience of comatose tourists. He had the nose, the mouth, the chin, and those same droopy, heartbreak-hardened eyes that suggested he’d been personally betrayed by Yoko Ono.

    And of course, he rocked the signature McCartney hair: a feathered mullet straight out of 1978, perfectly sculpted despite the furnace-blast of the desert heat.

    But let’s be honest—Julian was no rock god. He was a bit shorter, a bit pudgier, and his face bore the battle scars of a thousand acne skirmishes. Still, he clung to his resemblance with the desperation of a man dangling from a cliff, convinced that if he just held on long enough, someone might mistake him for greatness.

    You watched his act unfold with tragic precision. He’d slip into a club in his shiny black “Beatles jacket,” lean on the bar with a half-cocked grin that shouted, Yes, I know I look like Paul McCartney—let’s get this over with. And right on cue, some buzzed woman would meander over, eyes twinkling, and say, “Has anyone ever told you…?”

    Julian pretended to be flattered. He feigned surprise. He summoned just enough fake humility to get her number, or at least a kiss. But you could see it in his eyes: his soul had left the building long ago. The routine bored him senseless, but it was all he had. The face did the lifting. The brand did the talking. The man behind it all? Checked out.

    Eventually, Julian let you in on a secret that was more absurd than scandalous: his real name was Michael Barley. That’s right. The name “Julian French” was a purchase—a paid rebranding, like he was a knockoff cologne trying to pass for Chanel. And he wasn’t done. Armed with his new persona and a fake British accent he’d been workshopping in the mirror, he flew off to London, convinced the UK would welcome their long-lost Beatle doppelgänger with open arms.

    It did not.

    London was unmoved. Employers declined. Clubs ignored him. Reality bit hard, and Julian—or rather, Michael—slunk back to Bakersfield with a bruised ego and zero prospects.

    But it got worse. He didn’t just return to a humdrum apartment—he returned to a trailer home attached to an elementary school, where his dad worked as the janitor by day and a locksmith by night. Julian was mortified. The trailer wasn’t the problem, not really. The terror was deeper: time had begun to wear down his greatest asset. The puffiness in his face, the softening jawline, the slow betrayal of age—each was a crack in the illusion. His McCartney mystique was melting under the desert sun.

    So he moved out. Got a job at a local car dealership. Tried to hang on to the myth a little longer.

    By the time you met him, “Julian French” was a weathered parody of himself, still speaking in that phony accent, still scanning faces for a flicker of recognition. You could see him straining to believe it might all work again—that the right woman, the right lighting, the right moment would resurrect the Beatle magic. But he knew. You both knew. He was becoming the man who used to look like someone famous.

    Time, like a harsh stage light, didn’t just expose the lie. It mocked it.

  • The News Anchor of the Shallow End

    The News Anchor of the Shallow End

    A poolside pestilence—you knew him as Roland Beavers. He was the kind of poolside companion nightmares were made of. Picture it: a pudgy man in his early thirties with dishwasher-blond hair clinging lifelessly to a scalp that looked perpetually annoyed at its assignment. His physique was more Pillsbury than gladiator, his chin having taken early retirement sometime around 1996. And yet, this proud specimen insisted on strutting around the pool in lava-red terry cloth trunks so tragically undersized they clung to his hips like terrified hikers on a cliffside. The stretch marks? They splayed across his skin like graffiti sprayed by a disgruntled street artist.

    Naturally, Roland had an explanation at the ready for anyone who dared lock eyes with him long enough to hear it. Those stretch marks? Not from powdered donuts, perish the thought. No, they were the battle scars of a world-class daredevil—his words—earned from leaping off the cliffs of Acapulco. You could practically hear the collective eye-roll from the pool regulars every time he launched into one of his airbrushed tales of aerial glory.

    But Roland’s true calling wasn’t daredevilry—it was unsolicited poolside broadcasting. Armed with a crumpled newspaper, he’d take up his post like an aging news anchor, providing loud, unfiltered commentary on every blurb and headline, under the delusion that everyone within earshot was waiting with bated breath for his take on gas prices and tabloid divorces. His “audience,” meanwhile, muttered oaths under their breath, praying he’d take up knitting—somewhere indoors, ideally underground.

    You watched his social cluelessness peak during innocent pool games—playful couples tossing a football or frisbee back and forth. For Roland, this wasn’t just casual recreation to be observed; it was a direct invitation. He’d launch himself into the water with the grace of a bowling ball dropped from a rooftop, crashing into their game like a forgotten uncle showing up drunk at a family reunion. The couples would pause, stunned, then shuffle off with expressions reserved for people who talk during movies.

    And heaven help the women just trying to sunbathe in peace. Roland, ever the gallant poolside creep, took it upon himself to offer his “services” to any woman within spraying distance. Whether it was spritzing their backs with water or offering to rub in sunscreen, Roland never missed an opportunity to “help”—oblivious to the fact that his mere presence was enough to derail an entire afternoon of tanning and tranquility.

    These long, unwanted days at the pool weren’t just for his entertainment—they were an extension of the strange domestic theatre unfolding upstairs. His mother, Nadine, loomed over the scene from their apartment balcony, a woman built like she could bench-press a Buick, her muu-muu rippling in the desert breeze like a circus tent threatening lift-off. With her hair wound into curls so tight they looked ready to spring off and attack, she’d bark orders with the authority of a drill sergeant with a megaphone.

    “Slather on more sunscreen, Roland!” she’d bellow, veins throbbing in her neck like they were sending an SOS in Morse code. “Get inside and eat something! You’re wasting away!” This, despite the fact that Roland had a good 40 pounds he could have “wasted away” without anyone shedding a tear.

    You’d think all this doting and nagging might eventually motivate Roland to get a job—maybe contribute something to society, or at the very least give the rest of you a break. But no. Roland and Nadine were comfortably buffered by the settlement from a lawsuit tied to Roland’s brief, disastrous stint at flight school in San Diego. Apparently, his dorm mates decided his face needed some rearranging, and after a skull fracture and several court dates, Roland walked away with a broken head and a windfall large enough to fund his permanent poolside residency.

    So there he was—your unwanted mascot in red trunks—coasting through life on lawsuit money and his mother’s militant affections, interrupting your peaceful afternoons with unsolicited news updates and delusions of former glory. Thanks to the faded glory of his imaginary daredevil days and a bottomless box of Chardonnay, Roland Beavers remained the persistent echo of everything you were trying to escape.

  • The Man Who Refused to Unpack

    The Man Who Refused to Unpack

    Chief among your apartment acquaintances in the godforsaken desert was Leonard Skeazy, an attorney from Santa Monica who had been lured out to this sun-scorched outpost by a fat signing bonus and a monogrammed office chair, yet couldn’t shake the gnawing resentment of having been exiled to what he considered a cultural wasteland. Leonard treated “style” not as a preference but as a full-blown religion. He wore custom-made Speedos purchased at a boutique in Santa Monica—yes, he actually made return trips to the city just to replace them when the pool’s chlorine dulled the jewel tones of his sacred spandex.

    With his long, curly hair and eerie, borderline-glasslike blue eyes, Leonard looked like a lounge singer who never graduated from the Holiday Inn circuit. He was a man of eccentric habits and hygiene choices that defied both logic and cologne. Despite being well into his thirties, he clung to the bachelor fantasy of meeting “the right girl,” though his criteria seemed more fitting for a dating pool in Cannes than in a desert town where a GED qualified you as a local intellectual.

    Leonard could be found most afternoons sprawled poolside, his skin glistening like a buttered croissant under the sun, blasting Kenny G from his battered boombox as if smooth jazz were some pheromonal weapon. His breath often carried the unmistakable bouquet of last night’s Chardonnay, perfectly matched by his habit of sneaking sips from boxes of white wine stashed like contraband in the fridge.

    Curiosity—and let’s be honest, a lack of better options—led you to visit Leonard’s apartment one day. It was a bachelor pad in the bleakest sense. Despite his high income, his apartment felt like a holding cell with Wi-Fi. The living room featured a single couch, a TV perched on cinder blocks, and—because tragedy loves detail—an ironing board, which he used religiously to press his endless collection of gaudy silk ties. The walls were as blank as his emotional availability, barren beige expanses that caught the flicker of the TV and projected ghostly shadows over the serpentine lines of his slithering tie rack.

    Then there was the bedroom. No dresser. No closet system. Just three open suitcases that served as a rotating archive of silk shirts, vintage cologne, and desperation. It was as if he’d never truly unpacked—a subconscious protest against the idea that he’d actually settled in this armpit of a town. The fridge, naturally, was a tundra of emptiness save for—you guessed it—more boxes of white wine. This was a man who had chased the scent of money straight into the middle of nowhere, only to insist he hadn’t actually arrived.

    Leonard was a ghost haunting his own life. A man who treated his presence in this town like an extended layover, still clinging to the fantasy that he’d be boarding a first-class escape back to the coastal glamour of a life he probably never really had. You couldn’t help but wonder: what kind of man gets seduced by a fat paycheck only to spend his days in self-imposed purgatory, where the only things thriving are his excuses and his growing graveyard of faded Speedos?

    You supposed it was easier for Leonard to pretend he was just “passing through” than to admit that he was, in fact, a permanent exhibit in this forgotten museum of stalled ambition—a relic draped in silk and denial, clinging to the illusion of a life that had long since evaporated.

  • Desert Paradise for the Chronically Disenchanted

    Desert Paradise for the Chronically Disenchanted

    Fresh off the bus from the bustling Bay Area, you found yourself marooned in Hobcallow—a sun-bleached corner of California that could only be generously described as a town. With zero friends and even fewer social obligations, you embraced your solitude like a monk taking a vow of silence. Your one-bedroom apartment became your sanctuary—no roommates, no forced small talk, just you and the sweet luxury of never having to negotiate chores or TV channels.

    Your companions? A stack of CDs featuring Morrissey, The Smiths, and other bands that sounded like group therapy sessions set to a minor key. The soundtrack was perfect as you labored over your novel Hercu-Dome, your dystopian magnum opus in which society punished the overweight with Orwellian fervor for failing to meet state-mandated body standards.

    When you weren’t writing, you plinked away on your Yamaha ebony upright, conjuring self-indulgent sonatas that only the most pretentious muses could appreciate. You didn’t read music so much as let it ooze out of you—luscious chords here, shameless glissandos there—while imagining some ethereal goddess materializing in your living room to stroke your ego as you struck a soulful pose.

    Compared to the misery of your college days in the Bay Area, your Hobcallow digs felt like a five-star resort. Back then, you hadn’t been living so much as squatting in a glorified crawlspace. That room had a gaping hole in the wall, perfectly positioned at bed level, letting in gusts of cold air so vengeful it felt like the Bay’s fog had developed a personal vendetta against you. Sleeping wasn’t rest—it was combat. You huddled under layers like you were gearing up for an Everest summit—jacket, hat, and gloves included, if the wind got particularly sassy.

    Your diet back then was a tragicomedy in three acts: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Cheerios were the lead performer, while bean-and-cheese burritos played the understudy when you felt adventurous. These “burritos” were little more than refried sludge folded into tortillas with all the flexibility of a sheet of drywall. The cheese? The kind that refused to melt out of pure spite, clinging to the tortilla like it was serving a life sentence. Each bite reminded you that you weren’t starving—but you were nowhere near thriving either.

    Your transportation situation was another chapter in your tale of woe. You drove a ten-year-old Toyota Tercel that was less car and more haunted maraca. Every time you touched the brakes, the thing let out a tortured groan, like it wanted to die with dignity. Navigating the Bay Area hills required a white-knuckled grip and a whispered prayer that the Tercel wouldn’t roll backward into a bus full of nuns and cyclists. Fixing it became a twisted game of financial Russian roulette: either repair the brakes or buy groceries. One of you had to suffer.

    Money? Scarcer than warmth in that arctic excuse for a room. Every broken item—of which there were many—demanded a patch job involving duct tape, superstition, and whatever scraps you could scavenge. Gathering enough quarters for the laundromat felt like winning a regional lottery. “Luxury” meant adding an extra spoonful of salsa to your burrito—living on the edge by upgrading the spice level in a meal otherwise soaked in depression.

    Looking back, it was a miracle you escaped that purgatory with your sanity—or whatever passed for it. That drafty hellhole taught you resilience, sure, but more than anything, it taught you to laugh at the sheer absurdity of trying to survive in a city that demanded gold while you were scraping together lint and hope.

    So there you were, newly settled in this desert hideaway, craving a hint of the luxury you’d never known. On weekends, you tanned your lean, 195-pound frame beside The Springs’ apartment pool—a so-called “luxury” pool that only deserved the title because the sign said so. Real friendships didn’t blossom there—friendships were messy and overrated—but you collected a small cluster of “acquaintances,” a bizarre cast of characters who could only exist in this sun-scorched limbo.

    You weren’t thriving, but at least you weren’t freezing or chewing on cardboard disguised as food. And in a place like Hobcallow, that was as close to paradise as you were ever going to get.

  • The Brain Flex Delusion

    The Brain Flex Delusion

    In the early 1980s, you funded your college education by working at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, just down the hill from the posh Claremont Hotel on Ashby Avenue. Every one of your coworkers was grotesquely overeducated for a retail gig. They held advanced degrees in literature, linguistics, anthropology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, and musicology. They read Flaubert in the original French and sneered at anyone who relied on English translations. They believed that submitting to the control of an institution or corporation that micromanaged their time and minds was a spiritual death sentence. Instead, they sold fine wines and imported beers with an attitude that hovered somewhere between snark and superiority.

    They all cultivated a highly refined elitism, radiated contempt for the customers—and, more broadly, the human race—and shared a belief that irony was the only sane response to this absurd planet. Their motto? “Service with a smirk.”

    Not especially wealthy or muscular, your coworkers prided themselves on their Big Brains. Their verbal dexterity, their intellectual firepower, their ability to quote Adorno while comparing two bottles of Beaujolais for a confused customer—that was their muscle flex. They taught you that there was such a thing as Intellectual Gains, and that those gains could be just as dramatic and awe-inspiring as Sergio Oliva’s “Myth Pose.”

    Wanting your Brain Flex to catch up with your biceps, you started reading voraciously and obsessively. You studied their cadence, their inflections, the casual way they’d launch into side-by-side comparisons of wine varietals while citing Camus or dropping a Nietzschean aphorism with the same ease others quoted movie lines.

    During slow shifts, you huddled with them behind the cash registers and debated Nietzsche’s eternal return, Wagner’s bombast, and Kafka’s deadpan horror. The job offered no challenge, but it allowed you to indulge the delusion that you were smarter than most of the world. Whatever you lacked in income, you made up for in bottomless self-regard. But the longer you stayed, the clearer it became: if you remained among these brilliant misfits much longer, you might never become employable again.

    You wanted to be part of their tribe. Even though you were close to completing your master’s degree in English, you never felt at home in academia. You didn’t read the assigned texts. You read what you wanted. You couldn’t sit still in class. You fidgeted, brooded, obsessed over everything from romantic doom to post-class traffic to the low-protein status of your fridge. You found yourself more anxious in the university than anywhere else. You hated the buildings, the architecture, the odor of institutional bleach. When people asked what you majored in, you told them, only half-joking, that you were majoring in “Get the Hell Out.”

    But in the wine shop, you were a professional slacker. You belonged. There, in the cathedral of cabernets and rieslings, your sarcasm was currency, your irony a badge of honor. You could see yourself doing it forever: dodging rent hikes, skipping dental coverage, surviving on occasional antibiotics and a diet of spiritual smugness. Sure, the paycheck was garbage, but your soul—your weird, overcooked, wine-soaked soul—was intact.

    You were in your mid-twenties, content to spend the rest of your life chucking Nerf footballs down aisles lined with Chianti and Beaujolais while quoting Borges, Moravia, and Unamuno.

    And then, in the late summer of 1987, your comfort zone got drop-kicked. You became the Accidental Professor.

    It happened when your friend Mike Elizalde’s father, Felix Elizalde—a high-ranking administrator at Merritt College—called in a favor. He needed someone, anyone, to teach a Bridge Program at Skyline High School. None of the real English professors would budge. Desperate, he turned to you.

    “But Mr. Elizalde, I don’t know anything about teaching. I don’t even have a credential,” you said.

    “No problem,” the chancellor of community colleges replied. And then you heard it—his dot matrix printer spitting out a California Community College Teaching Credential like some bureaucratic birth certificate.

    You stared at the document the way Luke Skywalker must’ve stared at his first lightsaber.

    Of course, the credential didn’t turn you into a real professor. That truth hit hard one afternoon while you were still at the wine shop, pouring Braren Pauli merlot for a professor from Cal Berkeley. You confessed your dread to him—your anxiety about starting a teaching job with zero experience, no clue what you were doing.

    With his mane of gray lion’s hair and scholar’s beard, the professor took a sip, looked you over, and said: “Being a professor is the same as being a carpenter. You bring your materials to the classroom and build structures with your students. Sometimes they don’t want to be there. They’ll resist. Their silence will feel hostile. You’ll feel like you’re talking to yourself. A part of you will die inside. That’s when professionalism kicks in. Through sheer ego and professionalism, you push through the resistance and build the damn house.”

    Thirty-five years later, you wished you could tell him you never forgot his advice—but you wouldn’t tell him about the times you drove home after those icy lectures, collapsed on your bed in the fetal position, and cried yourself to sleep.

    He had been right. The classroom wasn’t always going to love you. You had to show up prepared and exude confidence, even when the students sat disinterested, distracted by relationship drama, hunger, money problems, family conflict—forces beyond your control.

    You learned the brutal truth: being a teacher meant accepting their disengagement without making it about you. If you were going to survive, you had to remember—it was their classroom, not yours.

    Eventually, you understood that being a good instructor went beyond building metaphorical houses. You had to cut the Self out of the equation. You had to stop needing to be loved and start trying to be useful. You had to shift from the narcissistic slacker with a book of Borges in one hand and a wine opener in the other, to someone capable of service.

    Had Felix Elizalde not booted you into teaching in 1987, you might still be at Jackson’s, tossing wine snobbery like Molotov cocktails and cultivating your own smugness like a bonsai tree. You might have played the role of the brilliant-but-doomed clerk until the day you died.

    People love to talk about the self-made man, but you knew better. Your life had been shaped by good timing, dumb luck, and the generosity of others. Had those external factors not shown up, your genius might have curdled into long-term mediocrity.

    Only with time did you realize: success isn’t just hard work. It’s also who kicks you in the ass and when.

  • Love in the Time of Warm Beer

    Love in the Time of Warm Beer

    In 1984, while you were still in college, your grandfather—a card-carrying Marxist who frequented Russia and Cuba and claimed to have befriended Fidel Castro—decided to pay your way for a Soviet-sponsored “Sputnik Peace Tour.” He wanted you to see the Soviet Union through his rose-colored glasses. Maybe, just maybe, you’d come home singing the Soviet anthem with a crimson flag tattoo stretched across your 52-inch chest.

    You joined a group of about a dozen college students from across the country, a few professors from Arkansas and Tennessee, and a Soviet-appointed tour guide named Natasha. The plan was to travel mostly by train—from Moscow to Kyiv, Odessa, Novgorod, Leningrad, and back to Moscow.

    To prep you for the two-week summer adventure, your grandfather handed you a copy of Mike Davidow’s Cities Without Crisis: The Soviet Union Through the Eyes of an American. According to Davidow, the USSR was a society in bloom—happy children with “rose-colored cheeks” played in utopian cities unblemished by the chaos and violence of capitalist America.

    Out of gratitude, you gave the book a fair chance. But by the halfway point, the propaganda wore you down. It was a slog—repetitive, dull, and deaf to irony. You ditched Davidow for A Clockwork Orange, a dystopian acid bath from Anthony Burgess that, had your grandfather caught you reading it, would’ve gotten you labeled a reactionary.

    You carried that subversive novel on the Aeroflot flight from New York to Moscow. That’s when Jerry Gold—a fellow tourist and law student at Brown—noticed it and leaned in with a warning: “They’ll probably confiscate that at the airport,” he said. “They’ll mark you as a troublemaker and keep tags on you. Look over your shoulder. And if anyone offers you good money for your jeans, it’s probably KGB. Black-market trading will land you in prison.”

    You laughed nervously, but the real threat onboard was not the KGB—it was the in-flight food. Small foil-wrapped cheeses, off-color cold cuts, wilted lettuce, and soggy carrot slices—all served by demure flight attendants in drab uniforms. The Aeroflot menu was a direct contradiction to Davidow’s utopia. A lack of good food was a crisis, and pretending otherwise was its own crisis.

    Jerry, peeling the foil off his sad cheese triangle, folded his industrial-grade napkin and pocketed it. “This might be the only toilet paper you get on this trip,” he advised.

    “That’s disgusting.”

    “You ever used an Eastern European toilet?”

    You hadn’t.

    “A hole in the ground. Deep knee bend. Free Jack LaLanne workout. Things can be primitive.”

    You asked why, with all his doom-saying, he’d signed up.

    “College credit. Exotic street cred. How many Americans get to say they’ve been to the USSR?” He bit his cheese like it was a dare. “What about you?”

    “My grandfather wants to convert me. He’s a communist.”

    “So he sent you to paradise.” Jerry pinched a cold cut and gave it a good stare.

    “The food’s not a winning argument,” you said. “Neither is the lack of toilet paper.”

    Jerry smirked. “In the Soviet Union, if you see a line, you stand in it. It means something’s for sale.”

    A week later, you stood sweating in a Kyiv market watching babushkas queue for wrinkled, fly-covered chickens. You thought, Cities without crisis? Bullshit. Sixty-two miles away sat Chernobyl. Two years later, the reactor would blow. Cities without crisis indeed.

    But in 1984, as you encountered shortages, queues, and squat toilets, one detail stirred something close to admiration: classical music playing everywhere—train stations, parks, museums. Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Prokofiev streamed from speakers like sonic incense. Was it cultural enrichment or state-sponsored propaganda—a rebuke to Western vulgarity? You wanted to believe it was the former. Your grandfather would’ve insisted it was.

    No one confiscated your Burgess novel at the airport, but the following day, at the Moscow Zoo, you saw a silverback gorilla pounding his chest while a Rachmaninoff piano piece played. Then she appeared: a stunning woman in an elegant black dress, black hat, and pearls. She smiled and told you, “You look very Russian.”

    She wasn’t wrong. Your mother’s family hailed from Belarus and Poland. Even your fellow tourists said you looked native. She added, “Russian men are strong. You are weightlifter, yes?”

    You were. Before bodybuilding, you’d competed in Olympic weightlifting and idolized Vasily Alekseyev.

    “Russian women love strong men,” she purred.

    You blushed and beamed. Then Natasha grabbed your arm and marched you behind some bushes. She said the woman was probably KGB. A honey trap. Kompromat. Whatever the game was, Natasha wanted it shut down.

    But you couldn’t stop thinking about her. You had been awkward and monkish in college, more comfortable with piano, Nietzsche, and protein powder than dating. Now you felt unshackled, lusty, hungry for connection. Natasha had ruined your chance—or so you believed.

    The next morning, you found a grand piano in the lobby of the Moscow Olympic Hotel. You played a sad piece you’d composed. Your fellow tourists gathered, impressed. Truth was, you were a sloppy pianist who overcompensated with melodrama. But you had flair.

    At a nearby table, Soviet military officers drank warm beer. The Commander—tall, square-jawed, festooned in medals—watched you. Then you saw her again: the woman from the zoo, standing by the piano. Before you could approach her, the Commander locked eyes with her, leered, and sent her fleeing.

    He turned to you and mimicked your piano-playing with theatrical finger waggles. His men laughed. He invited you to his table, poured you warm beer, and barked, “Drink!”

    Three times he commanded. You complied. It was the price of being a charlatan. A dandy. A fraud. Russians trained their children in piano. You were a ham with no chops. He knew. They all knew.

    When you got back to your room and twisted the sink’s cold-water knob, the entire unit came off the wall and slashed your chest. You bled, cursed, and lifted your shirt the rest of the day to show off your injury as proof that Russia itself was trying to kill you.

    The Commander popped up again—on the train to Novgorod. He laughed when he saw you. Jerry speculated he was keeping tabs on you. CIA paranoia, or just Soviet protocol?

    You weren’t sure. But by the time you arrived in Novgorod, you had a fever. Natasha insisted on a doctor. Soon, a stunning, no-nonsense woman in a white coat examined you, declared it a cold, and ordered you to drop your pants for a Soviet “remedy.”

    The shot felt like hot tar. Your fellow tourists watched, delighted.

    At a barn lecture the next day, the Commander showed up again, reinforcing that you were always being watched. Jerry managed to prank him with a piece of hay, brushing his neck like a mosquito. The Commander slapped himself silly. Your group stifled laughter. You limped away, your ass sore, your ego tattered.

    Later, at a toy factory near the forest, you saw buses of children arriving. When you asked Natasha if they were starting a shift, she had them shooed away. One boy even got a boot to the backside. You had glimpsed a truth they didn’t want captured.

    That night, North Korean kids in uniforms got the best dinner service at the hotel. You and your group got leftovers, like stray dogs. You were done with Novgorod. You needed Leningrad.

    The next evening, you were sitting in a Leningrad discotheque, still nursing a sore ass, and talking to a cute Finnish girl named Tula. It turned out you had a lot in common. You were both in your early twenties. You both shared a passion for Russian literature and the music of Rachmaninoff. As you conversed under the glittering gold disco ball, the Bee Gees’ “Too Much Heaven” blared across the club. Through your mutual confessions, it became clear that neither of you had any real romantic experience. Tula was short, diminutive, bespectacled, and elfin, with short sandy blond hair. At one point, she said, “I will never marry. I have, what do you say in English? Melancholy. Yes, I have melancholy. You know this word?”

    “Yes, I was no stranger to melancholy,” you said.

    “I am so much like that,” she told you.

    “That explains your love of Rachmaninoff,” you said.

    She clasped her hands and almost became teary-eyed. “How I love Rachmaninoff. Just utter his name, and I will break down weeping.”

    You thought you were a depressive, but in the presence of Tula, you had the perkiness of Richard Simmons leading an aerobics class.

    She asked what you were doing in Russia. You explained that your grandfather was a card-carrying communist, a friend of Fidel Castro, and a supporter of the Soviet Union. He used a shortwave radio in his San Pedro house to communicate with Soviet sailors on nearby ships and submarines. He visited Cuba whenever he could, bringing medical supplies that were in demand. One of his friends, a Hollywood writer, had lived in exile in Nicaragua after being arrested in France by Interpol for driving a Peugeot station wagon filled with illegal weapons. Your grandfather had wanted you to fall in love with the Soviet Union and become a champion of its utopian vision, so he paid for you to go on a peace tour.

    Had you fallen in love with Russia the way your grandfather had hoped? Not really. So far, you had been approached at the Moscow Zoo by a striking woman in black and pearls—whom Natasha, your tour guide, claimed was a KGB agent trying to frame you for soliciting a prostitute. You had been washing your hands at the newly built Olympic Hotel in Moscow when the sink fell out of the wall and gashed your torso. You’d caught a fever in Novgorod, prompting a beautiful, stern-faced doctor to give you a shot in the ass. You’d been approached by young men on the subway asking if you wanted to sell your American jeans—just as Jerry Gold had warned—most likely a KGB setup for black-market entrapment. And everywhere you went—hotels, trains, restaurants—grim chamber music poured from loudspeakers, as if the Soviet authorities were saying, “Try not to be too happy while you’re here.”

    Tula listened to your long-winded tale for a couple of hours, wide-eyed, touching your shoulder. “I need to see you again,” she said.

    You agreed to meet the next day at the Peterhof Royal Palace by the Samson Fountain. The place was enormous—a garden the size of multiple football fields, full of gold statues and fountains shooting jets of water into the air. You and Tula sat on the hot concrete steps in the near-ninety-degree heat, flanked by golden naked statues posed around a spectacle known as the Grand Cascade. She wore a short white dress. Eventually, the heat got to you both, and you decided to get ice cream.

    On your way to the ice cream bar, a gypsy suddenly tried to hand you a baby—like a quarterback executing a handoff. Before the infant could land in your arms, a Russian police officer swooped in, seized the baby, returned it to the gypsy, and shouted at her. You thought for sure she’d be arrested, but the officer merely berated her. She shriveled under the scolding and slinked away with the child.

    You returned to Tula with the ice cream and recounted the bizarre scene.

    She nodded. “Things like that happen all the time here.”

    “But what was I supposed to do with the baby?”

    “Perhaps adopt it? Buy it? Save it from a life of misery? There is so much tragedy here.”

    “So I was supposed to fly back to the States with a baby? Go through customs and everything?”

    “I know. It’s crazy.”

    “I don’t think I could be a parent. I don’t have the hardwiring for it.”

    “Me either. I’m too sad to be a parent. Sadness is a full-time job that leaves me with little energy for much else.”

    She finished her ice cream and smiled at you, then said, “You and I are like two kindred spirits meeting each other in this strange world.”

    “It’s hotter than hell out here,” you said.

    “So will you marry someday?”

    You shrugged. “I doubt anyone will take me.”

    “Don’t be so hard on yourself. If I were the marrying type, I would come to America and spend my life with you. We could live in California and be sad together. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

    And oddly, it did sound lovely—living in shared sadness with Tula, marinating in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, discussing the existential torment of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. What other kind of life was there?

    She stood up and said she had to catch her plane back to Finland. She gave you a chaste kiss on the cheek.

    “I really hope you find happiness. You are such an outstanding person.”

    “Outstanding?” you repeated, unable to hide your skepticism. The word struck you as hollow—like describing a house beside train tracks as “charming.” You echoed the adjective with a trace of sarcasm and said goodbye. You never saw her again, but you never forgot the vanilla ice cream—it remained the best you’d ever tasted.

    Nine months later, you were back in your Bay Area routine of working out, playing piano, and slogging through college assignments. You were living with your mother, standing beside the loquat tree in your front yard, holding a letter with a Finnish return address. Mexican parrots shrieked from a neighbor’s dogwood tree. It was a warm May. You walked under the porch light and opened the envelope.

    Dear Jeff,
    So much has happened since I met you. I took your recommendation and read A Confederacy of Dunces. I laughed my ass off, but the book was so sad. I keep the book on my shelf and always think of you when I see it. You won’t believe this. I’m getting married! I have you to thank for this. I never thought I was the marrying type, but those two days I spent with you in Russia changed me. When I got back to Finland, I was restless, I thought about you constantly, and even at one time I had this mad idea that I should arrange to visit you, but a high school friend Oliver came into my life, and we began seeing each other, not as friends but as lovers. I have you to thank for this. Meeting you awakened a part of my soul that I had never known before. I hope that you don’t forsake love, as I had planned to do, that you too will find someone special in your life. You deserve it. You are an amazing man!
    Love Always,
    Tula

    You stood there, staring at the letter, listening to the parrots cackling in the distance.

    So that was your role—you were the guy who helped a sweet-souled depressive fall in love. Not with you. You weren’t the recipient of her love. You were the lighter fluid, the spark, the kindling that got her fire started. You’d made a difference.

    You went inside, sat at your ebony Yamaha upright, and played something sad. You tried to imagine Tula as your audience, but her image was pushed out by the Russian Commander. You could see him sneering.

    “You are a charlatan,” he said in your mind. “An American charlatan in Russia. You must always be put in your place. You must drink warm beer until you puke your guts out. Only then can you redeem your vain self.”

    Over the years, the Commander had become a constant voice in your head—a reminder that you were pretentious, fraudulent, self-regarding. And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe you needed him. He was the unexpected gift of a trip designed to make you a Communist but instead taught you to keep your inner ham in check.

    Because an American charlatan in Russia was still a charlatan everywhere else.

  • Bahama Dreams

    Bahama Dreams

    You had been the worst college student ever. But to understand the full catastrophe, you had to start at the beginning.

    It was fall 1979. You were seventeen, riding high as an Olympic weightlifting champion and competitive bodybuilder. You had dreams of going big—Mr. Universe, Mr. Olympia—and then opening your own gym in the Bahamas. It all made perfect sense: a beautiful body, a tropical environment, and zero obligation to wear clothes beyond Speedos. Regular clothing gave you claustrophobia. You wanted to slather your shaved body in tanning oil and live free, unburdened by sleeves or pant legs.

    When you shared your paradise plan with your recently-divorced mother, she gave you her signature eye-roll. “Don’t be a nincompoop. You can’t isolate yourself from the world on some tropical island.”

    “Don’t worry,” you’d reply, dead serious. “I’ll be well connected. I’ll invite Frank Zane, Tom Platz, Robbie Robinson, Kalman Szkalak, Danny Padilla, Ron Teufel, Pete Grymkowski, and Rudy Hermosillo. We’ll hang out, drink pineapple protein shakes, and talk about how bodybuilding transformed our lives.”

    “They’re not your friends. They’re models in your stupid magazines,” she’d say. “I’m not an idiot.”

    Contrary to the meathead stereotype, you had earned straight As in high school. But your high school had been so dumbed down that a 4.0 GPA was about as meaningful as a participation ribbon. You had taken classes like “Money Matters,” where you learned to balance a checkbook and write rudimentary budgets. Your education had all the intellectual heft of a marshmallow.

    Another class, “Popular Lit,” required you to read three library books and submit one-page book reports. That was the semester. Your teacher, a ghost in a wool coat, spent her days reading tabloids and clipping her nails while you and your classmates pretended to read. She looked more like a sleep-deprived fortune teller than an educator.

    It was clear no one was preparing you for intellectual greatness. They were prepping you to stay out of prison and flip burgers with dignity. College wasn’t even part of your plan. Bodybuilding glory was. Still, you begrudgingly agreed to attend the local university to avoid being kicked out of the house and forced into the brutal world of full-time work.

    Despite your disdain for higher education, you saw signs of your future greatness. You had the body. You had the connections—like the time you trained with NFL legend John Matuszak, aka “the Tooz,” at The Weight Room in Hayward. Matuszak, nearly seven feet tall, was a force of nature. You two would bench press to England Dan and belt out love songs between reps.

    You also befriended fitness store owner Joe Corsi, a vampiric former bodybuilder in a sleeveless jumpsuit who told you with conviction that you were destined for greatness. You envisioned a Weider-style sponsorship complete with daily deliveries of steaks and supplements.

    College was supposed to be a brief detour. A holding pattern. A cover story.

    You failed miserably.

    You couldn’t stand your professors. You envied them—envied their tailored clothes, their African safaris, their artisanal puttanesca recipes. You resented their polished lectures and their effortless confidence. Your Ethics professor, a philandering dean with a toupee that behaved like a terrified woodland creature, became your personal nemesis.

    The university deemed you too hopeless for regular freshman composition. You were placed in Bonehead English, then demoted further into Pre-Bonehead, a class so embarrassing it was held in the basement next to the boiler room. Maintenance men would peer inside and snicker like you were part of a secret leper colony.

    Worse still, you may have just been stupid. When a neighbor’s Siberian Husky licked your lips, you panicked and called into KGO Talk Radio to ask if you could contract AIDS from a dog. You weren’t even dating anyone, yet you had managed to develop a highly specific form of neurotic celibacy.

    Your mother overheard the broadcast.

    “You need to cool it, buster,” she said.

    You agreed. You couldn’t believe you’d made it this far in life.

    You tried every major—Criminal Justice, Sociology, Psychology, History, Oceanography, Accounting. Each one drove you deeper into despair. You couldn’t stomach the language, the jargon, the self-congratulatory tone of academia. You dropped classes. You failed others. The university put you on academic probation and handed you your soul on a stick.

    You hit bottom.

    You considered alternatives: tech school, piano moving, garbage collection. The gym guy nicknamed “The Garbologist” said he could get you in with the sanitation department.

    You told your father. Over steaks on his patio, you made your case. You needed a job with good hours and gym time. Sanitation had potential.

    “You can’t be a garbage man,” your father said.

    “Why not?”

    “You’re too vain.”

    That stopped you cold. He was right.

    From that moment, you had an epiphany: You hated those classes because they were poorly written. What you craved was great writing. You became an English major. You also realized your fidgety nature required self-directed study. You bought your first grammar handbook and taught yourself the mechanics of language like it was the Rosetta Stone.

    You saw grammar as proof that the universe had structure. That your scattered life might be wrangled into order. Nietzsche once wrote, “We are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Now you understood what he meant. Grammar was your God. Grammar was your salvation.

    You improved your grades. You got hired by the university’s Tutoring Center. Then they asked you to teach. The same institution that had nearly kicked you out now trusted you to educate others.

    That’s how you began your journey—from the worst college student ever… to the worst college professor alive.

  • How to Pick Up Girls and Get Stung by Reality

    How to Pick Up Girls and Get Stung by Reality

    The 70s were a carnival of ostentation and fakery. You strutted through junior high dances in Angels Flight bell-bottoms, paisley Dacron shirts, platform shoes, and pukka shell necklaces. In summer, you bared your tanned chest in fishnet tank tops and more gold chains than a Vegas lounge singer. Instead of building character, you sculpted a persona: muscular, flamboyant, visually arresting.

    Even your face had to match your aesthetic. Inspired by the Cosmopolitan magazine’s “Bachelor of the Month,” you fixated on cheekbones and jawlines. Compared to Robert Conrad or Jan-Michael Vincent, you came up short. So you sucked in your cheeks—first occasionally, then obsessively—until you learned to speak while biting the inside of your face. You’d come home with raw, bleeding cheeks. You’d walk through school with puffed lats and exaggerated posture, only to be mocked by your classmates.

    You were the punchline of a sitcom, a caricature of yourself.

    This was the decade of the Mock Apple Pie—Ritz Crackers masquerading as apples. Authenticity took a back seat. Fakery got shotgun.

    Perhaps the high priest of this philosophy was a man you called Frank Reeves.

    It was the summer of 1977. You were spending every Saturday at Cull Canyon Lake, slathered in Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil—zero SPF, all banana-scented seduction. And every weekend, there he was: Frank Reeves. Late twenties. Owner of a black 1976 Camaro with white racing stripes. Wavy brown hair, manicured mustache, deep tan, blue Speedos, white puka shells, and a gold chain glistening over his chest hair. He carried a Playboy cooler, a boombox, and a Frisbee, and he reeled in women like it was a sport.

    You noticed that he always said the same things in the same order. Every Saturday, it was: “Paid my uncle five hundred for that paint job… Dad owns clothing stores… Helped him manage since high school… Waiting on a Hollywood callback… Own my own house in Parsons Estates.” He said “Parsons Estates” like it was a holy incantation.

    Frank Reeves wasn’t just a cliché. He was a walking, Speedo-clad composite of How to Pick Up Girls!—Eric Weber’s infamous book of manipulation. You recognized his lines. You knew the script. He embodied the Playboy ideal: cosmopolitan, cocky, a god in his own eyes. And every Saturday, a new woman bought the lie.

    You watched him work, all while reading your parents’ paperback version of The Happy Hooker on your beach towel. Then came the bee sting. A shriek. A girl gasped. “You stepped on a bee!”

    Reeves tried to laugh it off, but his swollen foot looked like a smoked ham. Sweat poured down his chest. He collapsed, hyperventilating. Paramedics came. He was in anaphylactic shock.

    You never found out if he survived. But the image stuck: a man all pose, no substance. A fake warrior devoted to a fake gospel. And like all fakes, he was eventually undone by something real—a bee, of all things. A tiny truth with a stinger.

  • Barbells and Boundaries

    Barbells and Boundaries

    Late one Saturday afternoon, you were marooned in your bedroom, held hostage by the epic saga playing out in your kitchen. Paul Bergdorf, a plumber with the emotional subtlety of a freight train, had been battling the kitchen sink since morning. His oversized toolbox had exploded across the linoleum floor like a mechanical crime scene. Every few minutes, you heard a grunt or a thud, the sounds of a man locked in mortal combat with ancient pipes.

    Your mom strolled into your room with a face that mixed gratitude with a romantic optimism that always smelled like a warning.
    “It’s so nice of him to do this,” she said.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” you asked.
    “He’s not charging me.”
    “Of course he is.”
    “No, he’s a friend.”
    “He’s not your friend, Mom. You just met him.”
    “His name is Paul Bergdorf. One of my girlfriends introduced me to him.”
    “This isn’t going to end well.”
    “Keep your voice down.”

    Right then, Bergdorf bellowed from the kitchen, proudly declaring that the sink had been fixed. Your mom hurried away. You stayed in your room, knocking out reverse barbell curls while watching through the sliding glass door that connected your room to the atrium. Beyond that was the kitchen, where Bergdorf stood like a sweaty gladiator, wiping his greasy mitts on a rag. He looked like a bloated baby trying to cosplay as a man: massive belly, oil-streaked jeans, beat-up boots, and that tragic attempt at a combover. His blue eyes were permanently glazed, his nose red and bulbous like a squashed tomato, and the house now reeked of his sweat mingled with low-grade cologne.

    He turned the faucet on, then off, proudly displaying his handiwork. “Now before I go,” he said, puffing out his chest, “I just want to say—I may not be the best-looking guy around, but I can grill a damn good steak. I’m talking big, thick, juicy slabs of meat. How about joining me next weekend for a barbecue?”

    “That’s very nice, but no thanks,” your mom said, her tone firm.

    Your forearms burned from the 50 reverse curls, but you kept going, switching to wrist curls as if preparing for battle.

    “I’ll get us some prime steaks,” he pressed on. “You won’t believe how tender they’ll be.”

    “Thanks again, but I’m busy.”

    “All I ask is one chance to serve up the most delicious barbecued steak you’ve ever had.”

    “No, really. I’m not available.”

    “Just pick any weekend,” he insisted, “and I’ll deliver a steak you’ll never forget.”

    Your forearms were bulging. That was it. You dropped the barbell, stormed down the hall, past the dining room, and burst into the kitchen like a SWAT team with a moral objection.

    “How many times does she have to say no?” you demanded.

    “Hey, let’s cool it,” Bergdorf replied, raising his hands. “I was just asking your mom out. I fixed the sink. It’s the least I could do.”

    “If you want to volunteer your plumbing skills, great. But fixing a drain doesn’t entitle you to date privileges.”

    “I just wanted to make her a steak!”

    “Okay, we get it. You’re a steak wizard. Good for you. Now pack up your tools and get the hell out.”

    You towered over him, finger pointed at the front door like an Old Testament angel. Bergdorf glared, shoved his tools into the truck, slammed the door, and roared off, trailing a plume of driveway dust behind him.

    Your mom just stood there, stunned.
    “You scared him away,” she said.
    “Next time, let’s just pay the plumber.”