Yeah — and Another Thing!

Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!
I’ve grown accustomed to their taste.
They almost make the day begin.
I’ve grown accustomed to the swoon that
I get each day at noon.
Their chokes, their snags,
Their burps, their gags
Are second nature to me now;
Like breathing out and breathing in.
I was serenely independent and content before we met;
Surely I could always be that way again –
And yet
I’ve grown accustomed to their look;
Accustomed to their price;
Accustomed to their taste.

(Thanks to Simon Turnbull for the shot and Alan Jay Lerner for the words.)

Death wears athletic shoes and thick white socks over her black nylons. Her white lab coat is knee-length. She may be a little on the heavy side, though like most of the staff here, she moves energetically. You wouldn’t see her often, but if you hung around a big hospital for a month, you’re bound to see Death disappearing into an elevator, or around a corner and through one of those electronic card reader doors that don’t even say “Staff Only”.

She doesn’t have much direct interaction with the patients; her job is mostly administrative, and like all of us, she has to work with what she’s got.

The religious folks are not generally a problem. Whatever happens seems to make perfect sense. “We’re in His hands,” they say. However, there seem to be more and more patients who are genuinely aggrieved that their behavior doesn’t earn any credits. For example, she recently found an uptick in the number of fresh food enthusiasts who think they know how it all works and are ready with their pleas of carrot juice and locally grown tomatoes. Naturally, she doesn’t have time to listen to all this — that’s for the nursing staff — but she often feels a little pressure at the monthly meetings to soften up the numbers and to take an approach that’s “More aligned with the hospital’s message to the community.” This is how one of the directors put it. Some of the physicians who were at that meeting shifted in their seats and one looked at the ceiling, but it was up to Death to go over it again gently but firmly.

“I fully understand the popular appeal of a process that is more behavior-based, but we’re not conducting a marketing campaign for low-fat cereal or jogging shoes. This is a question of genetics because, as we all know, behaviors do not transcend generations.”

“Well,” said the director, “we’re in the midst of a very important fund-raiser and I was hoping we might get just a little support for … for the kind of success criteria that our better-off donors inevitably expect. Just a couple of cases that we could feature in our TV campaign.”

The room was silent. “With respect”, said Death,”this is the path that leads directly to differentiation among religious affiliations, among body mass categories within the standard deviations, an on to favoring, say swimming over team sports — and ultimately who knows what ‘lifestyle’ fad. We simply cannot award behavior beyond the usual two or three percent, and even that has to be carefully randomized.”

“I appreciate your explanation,” said the director as he gathered his notepad and glasses, “and I suppose,” he paused for a pointed smile, “you’ll always have a job here.”

The most depressing thing about the whole antiques, memorabilia, junk-shop, flea-market phenomena is that it may never end. Not only will all the fetishes of your own era be piled up to be picked over in detached amusement, so will those of our children. Already The Incredibles are hanging out near the back of a vast collection we surveyed today. They’re only three!

There were books and magazines of course, consisting mostly of nostalgic tributes to eras of aviation, the auto industry and military equipment. A long shelf of Playboy Magazines suggested a useful examination. I was tempted to look for the mid-1960s issue that was miss-delivered to our house. We lived at 109 Clifton Road, while the subscriber lived at 109 Clifton Avenue. I did manage to roll it out of its paper cover — and back in — before it was pointedly resubmitted to the mailman. Thank you Canada Post!

Nothing else even beckoned in that acre of junk and I began to wonder how much it weighed and what it would eventually cost to bury it when someone thought of a more profitable use for the building.

But I could be wrong again. We were waiting for the well-known and well-regarded Bemis Gallery to open. Actually it’s the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. This is one of those warehouse renos with huge, white spaces. The outside has been cleaned up with a glass and steel “treatment” and the stair rails are orange. It all looked pretty good. Except for the artwork. I appreciate that when you’re investing in new artists, you have to be ready for a few bumps and some dry spells. But I was surprised that many of the objects displayed in the gallery could have been purchased up the street at the junk store. In fact, they would have had more interest if that had been the case. Presentation is everything, it seems, and rather than being roughly categorized and piled, these were handsomely mounted on white, rectangular projections from the walls. They were labeled in a fussy Haettenschweiler typeface in medium gray. But they were still pink rose vases, ceramic piggy banks, Las Vegas ashtrays and petit-point images of palominos.

A teacher of mine once told me that there is no content, there is only style, and I’m beginning to see what he meant.

This is the parable of the unlucky truck driver. I’ll call him “Felix” but you’ll know what I mean in a moment.

As we progress through this transplant process we pick up details like lint on a velvet jacket. You’d think these would be details the way details ought to be. But no, these are the ones that the Devil likes. For example, I learned a few weeks ago that, after a totally successful transplant — should that be my case — I will never eat sushi again. “It’s a completely new immune system.” Naively, I had assumed that I might benefit from the same immune system my brother developed over his 50-odd years of exposure to well, a lot worse than sushi. But no, we’re starting from stem cells. They’re called that for a reason. They’ve never even heard of sushi.

When she began to tell Felix’s story, I just knew it would not have a good ending. My doctor’s eyes got a little damp and she pursed her lips. Felix had been a lanky, likable truck driver who rolled through his lymphoma treatment pretty much they way I’m doing. No serious side-effects, no graft-versus-host, no crazy cells. After the usual treatment he got the OK and went back to work.

“But you know the way truck drivers put their arms up on the open window in the summertime?” my doctor asked. “Well he was driving like that. Now he’d followed the rules in every other way. He wore his hat, he wore his long-sleeve shirt. But the top of his left hand was exposed. He just didn’t put his sunscreen on that day.”

“And … how bad was it?” I asked.

She shook her head gently and looked down, “It was terrible. We lost him within a few days.”

“Killed by a sunburn?” I was incredulous. All the years I have been threatened for not putting on sunscreen, even going all the way back to long days on the water in a sailboat, I have never imagined it could strike me dead more-or-less on the spot.

“Well, not directly, but the sunburn set off a graft-versus-host attack and it just took over. We weren’t able to save him.”

Felix has made quite an impression on me and I am beginning to edit my self-image. Having avoided hats most of my life, only recently donning a baseball cap, I’m now thinking I’d look a lot more like Harrison Ford than I already do if I chose one of those dashing fedoras.

Yes, this is Omaha, Nebraska, but can you buy yourself a pair of Luccheses? Or a white Stetson?

“There’s only one western store left, and you’re in it.” I checked later and in fact there are two, but the other one isn’t Wulf Bros and wasn’t established in 1921. By that year, there must have been a good supply of greenhorns with enough spare cash to dress up in the style of the locals. It would have been just long enough for people to forget that cowboys were laborers and the ones who owned the cattle dressed like the nineteenth-century gentlemen they were. Who else had the cash?

But the cowboy — and the cowgirl — live on at Wulf’s. There you can find the Lucchesse boots in every pattern from rattler to highland thistle arabesque. The hats are stiff and white (no bad guys here), and the shirts are real purdy. In fact you wouldn’t see patterns and colors like these on a man outside a retro gay bar.

Upstairs is where they keep the saddles’n'tack and where signed photos of the various rodeo winners are pinned, taped and hung on the rafters. It’s difficult to tell what year you’re looking at. They’re all clean-cut, the cowgirls are blond, the boys have good teeth and they’re wearing the clothes that you could have bought on the first floor. Only the quality of the print, color or black-and-white, and occasionally the age of hand-shaking?? movie star suggest history.

I don’t want to exaggerate the expanse of the porch that flanks Potter’s House on two side, but with an open bar and a hot evening, you could fill it with 300 of your close friends. I swept it clean this morning using a two-foot push broom. We don’t have to do anything here at the House, except put our dishes in the dishwasher, but the sun was shining and the porch was covered in winter dirt.

A push broom looks like a pretty good idea, and if you are sweeping a gymnasium or the aisles of a grocery store, I can tell you, it is. But if you’re sweeping a porch, however large, that wraps around a Victorian mansion and offers curves and pilasters, then you spend more time pulling than you do pushing. It wasn’t designed for that. First, the bristles form a curved bottom. No matter how hard you try, they’re not going to get into the corner edge against the vertical. Second, the ends of the broom are two big to sweep nicely into the nooks, let alone the crannies. Dirt isn’t stupid. It knows where to hide.

The worst of the dirt was the salt crust that had accumulated since last November. Really it needed a scraper and a hose, but I was doing this for exercise, so I kept brushing until I worked it down to a fine salt dust that stuck to the terra cotta tiles like thick chalk. It was heavy work for a sick guy and I enjoyed it, thinking that it was one of those good deeds that go unnoticed but are important nevertheless.

I was mistaken. The very next day, as we walked down the driveway, I was taken aback. There in the corner of the porch — possibly the corner where I had worked the hardest, just by the maid’s entrance — stood a three-foot Blessed Virgin Mary. She was serene in her blue and white robes as she gazed downwards. Her palms were turned outward as if to say, “Cast thine eyes upon these tiles, for virtuously are they swept.”

We live only a couple of blocks from the richest man on the planet. I can see his place from here. It’s on the top floor of an office building, which happens to be owned by what may be the largest, privately-held company in the world, but is at least a “Goliath”.

Warren Buffet used to live in an Omaha suburb called Dundee in a house in which many of us might reasonably imagine ourselves. It’s on the pricey end for Omaha now, but Buffett had been sitting on it since 1958. The need for richest-man-in-the-world security was answered only a few years ago when Buffett was avoiding the Dot.com bubble, but the lurking presence of men in black driving Crown Vics annoyed the neighbors so Buffett modestly moved to an apartment where you’d hardly notice him.

Kiewit’s Corporate headquarters is a recent building with a solid dignity, but clearly meant for a full work-week. It’s a mile west of Omaha’s few downtown towers, but next-door to Mutual of Omaha. There’s nothing else on the street that suggests immense wealth; in fact, the stretch looks beaten down and scrubbed by the traffic that is clearly more interested in the shopping malls of West Omaha. There is a dry-cleaner, a couple of cheap pizza lunch places and, well, nothing else that’s memorable. I wonder whether this is the place that Warren Buffett would have imagined when he was only six years old and busy purchasing 6-packs of Coca Cola for twenty five cents, which he resold for a nickel a bottle.

The Rose is an “atmospheric” theater, meaning that when you walk through its front entrance you feel as if you have arrived in some other place. It’s a Spanish or Italian place because the sky above you is blue over the crenelated walls that surround you, and the floor tiles are ornate and bright. Arched passages lead to the theater itself where day will change to night and the sky will twinkle with ten thousand, or perhaps as many as three hundred and twenty pulsing stars. It’s as frankly childish and magical as Disneyland, Las Vegas and Busch Gardens Europe, but built for Omahans who had only ten cents, two hours and a church that would permit them to see vaudeville.

Movies arrived with the Great Depression and things unwound gradually toward the 1970s — the decade of suburban revenge — when the owners of “Astro Cinema” had covered the warm stone walls, the naked Italian statuary and the murals with heavy, muffling mustard curtains. And he stars no longer shone. Even a bowling alley down the center aisle could not save it. After a few years of accounting anguish, the hapless owner gave up the building to limit their liability by selling it to Rose Blumkin. She knew that it had a future but didn’t know what it was.

Cohen and Charla Phillips, whose parents live with us here at Potter’s House, arranged a tour of the Rose with Stan Kiepke, who manages the building. Cohen is a film-maker with a taste for movies more than four times his age. His interest, of course, was in the possibility of silent film shows at the Rose. But as we toured the ornate lobby, balconies, and the main floor, it was clear that the Rose is dedicated to its current role as a theater for kids and teenagers. “Clowns and Other Fools” will be playing shortly on the proscenium stage. It follows “Puss in Boots”. Busloads of school kids fill the seats now and it seems as if almost everyone of school age in eastern Nebraska will have a chance to sit under the stars and dream of somewhere far away — just like Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando.

See the Rose Theater in pan-o-rama!

Watch Cohen Phillips’ Chaplin tribute on Blip.tv.

Learn about Phillips Films.

It doesn’t take much to amuse us. Feeling as if we are sneaking away from summer camp to buy beer and cigarettes in the village, we wish the other inmates a pleasant day and take the car without asking. The drive along Dodge Street in Omaha is just a daily grind passed the strip malls and the franchise retailers for everyone but us. We are here to enjoy the ride and we watch eagerly for each new example of Staples, Pottery Barn, Borders, Kinkos, and all the lesser lights of the national consumer landscape. Our designation is no where but the end of the day, when I will need to get back to the camp, Potter’s House, for evening pills, but we are willing to get there via almost any route.

Costco looms across the expressway and beyond two acres of empty parking lot. We feel immediately at home — it has all the same slightly unpredictable stuff, and laid out in a mirror image of its Des Moines sibling. We admire the showcase of diamond rings, but we choose only four items: an almost ripe papaya, a block of old cheese, cereal with no sugar, and three cartons of good quality milk, because you can’t buy just one. These look lonely at the bottom of our cart. The cashier asks, with more sincerity than usual, “Did you find everything you need?”

There’s been a rumor of Whole Foods, but it seems the directions were too vague. Then is appears, but only beyond the expressway, around a loop and off to the left on the spur or a highway that is trying to suck our Volvo toward the Really Big Shopping Mall. In a breathless last second, we pull hard to the left and slide safely into the Whole Foods parking lot among shiny cars of the current decade.

Whole Foods is better than a lakeside summer town for sopping up an afternoon. The produce section is an artwork of Mondrian vegetable color fields, the health food section (which is kept well separated, as in all really up-to-date stores, from the unhealth food section), is packed with jewel-like consumables made of nothing more than fruit pulp. We linger over the fish and seafood that looks, for all it’s strong color, as if it really should be here west of Omaha where the buffalo roamed. We graze for lunch among the food islands — they form an archipelago off the northern shore, west of Dairy — each one with its own ethnic … whiff. There are restaurant tables by the window, overlooking the parking lot and we choose one near a group of attractive mid-day, late-stage teenage boys. They are dressed darkly and have lots of hair. They put their expensive hiking boots on the table, but it doesn’t matter because they haven’t been hiking. They pass their laptop around and make plans — to start a band, a blog, a political party, a school for the ignorant and oppressed, a fair-minded business? I catch only the occasional phrase, but it all sounds so promising and I want to join them. They pull their collars up and their hoods over their heads and leave. I watch them drive away in a beautiful Cadillac Escalade. That’s when we notice that almost everyone at Whole Foods is thin. And white.

Over a strong coffee, because now we can’t just leave, I read the claim that “This Whole Foods store is powered by 100% wind energy.” It says so in natural brown letters on one of those “And this I believe” testimonial works of corporate graphical wall art. As there are no windmills evident on the roof or even in the parking region, I am surprised and I ask the cashier what it could mean. The claim becomes nuanced; it has to do with “… corporate support for renewable energy and that sort of thing. I don’t think,” he says with a wry smile, “there’s like any windmill or anything up there. ‘Cause, like, there’s a power grid and I guess the company, you know, puts money into windmill power.” We agree cordially because we know we’ve found our tribal home.

Few of you, I hope, are old enough to remember the gas station architecture of the 1920s. I remember it only because a couple of examples survived into the late 1960s in Toronto. These were fairy cottages with steeply-pitched red-tile roofs, a mock tower and white stucco walls. They may all have been owned by the same oil company, but by the time I came along, they could barely pump enough gas to keep the floor tiles in the office free of black grease.

There’s one just down the street from us here in Omaha. An architect would correct me, but I’d call the style Roadside Tudor Cottage. It shares all of the features of the ones I knew, except for the stucco-and-brick exterior with a few diagonals in brown. This one used to have four repair bays and a central entrance under a peaked gable with symmetrical, flanking towers. The towers retain their Carcassonne-style coneheads, but the bays doors are now gone, replaced by picture windows for a vegetarian restaurant. The picture is not pretty; you look out over a couple of parking lots, but the food is great and the service is vegetarian friendly.

The older customers have gray ponytails and they talk about their gut and politics. The younger ones are rail-thin, have dyed their hair black and wear toques with skulls and cross bones. I don’t know what they talk about because they don’t talk.

A few years ago I had to compliment a chef for his wonderful tomato soup. Flattered, he shared his technique: “You just roast the shit out of them tomatoes!” he said. His arms were tattooed. Apparently the folks in the kitchen at McFoster’s Natural Kind Caf?? (it’s where they used to store the tires) have smoked the shit out of their tomatoes and have added a couple of other wonderful things — garlic is in there for sure — to achieve my current highest possible rating for tomato soup. On Saturday, we went for lunch and had a bowl of McFoster’s Smoked Tomato Soup. And Saturday evening, we went back and had another.