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The Legend of Pop Hinks: A Legend

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

“Metaphors was as rare for me as things I can’t find anywhere.”—Pop Hinks.

Pop was describing a time when he was stretching, reaching, striving for an easy analogy, yet it eluded his thinking brain like a bird that had flown away from his grasp. It was a moment and a bird and Pop. Just those three things and they were themselves complete and entirely themselves.

The bird alighted and then flew away just past his gripping fingers, but it was still close enough for him to catch a thought about a moment in which he could envision, or so he said, a time when he caught that bird. A starling, he said it was.

Metaphors, analogies, similes could be similarly elusive but in a literal sense. “Slippy eels,” Pop Hinks took to calling them.

He was a blues player, one of the greatest slide guitarists on the north side of Kansas City, but the Kansas side, where there were no blues players. It was long a source of frustration for him that he regularly was ranked the third-greatest slide player even though he was the only one. He did not play with a slide, which may have presented most of his trouble.

Pop Hinks also played professional baseball in that far-long-ago era of the 1930s. He starred in a semipro league that was an imitation of the Negro Leagues, but one that starred white players only.

His baseball days were filled with long nights of transcendent sadness spent daydreaming on the bench about playing baseball, and sometimes his daydreams coincided with the game he was watching and not participating in. His blues nights were spent waiting in the backrooms of the seedless bars he did not play in, waiting eagerly to hear the one name he most wanted to hear called to the stage: his own. He never heard it and it was even more rarely called.

He could never find, not till his dying day, which has not yet come, he could never find the analogy that would match his baseball love with his blues love. One song, “A Grand-Slam,” he never played. Another, “The Walk Off,” was never requested. Yet another, “The One-Four-Five,” describing a little-seen play in which a pitcher fields a hit and inexplicably throws to an out-of-position second baseman who throws to third to catch a confused runner off base, was never written, although we debut it below.

It is difficult, Pop Hinks would say, to find a metaphor that covers all analogies, communicates something about real-life situations like love and baseball and the blues to fit most listeners. There are few walk-off homers in life or art or the blues. But if you asked him about those long-ago nights in Kansas City, he would shake his head and say, “I can take you there. But I’ll have to charge.”

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The Magnificent Glass Pelican (MGP) is a live half-hour radio comedy show that my friends and I have written, produced, and acted in for over two decades. Lately, it has been an improvised half-hour, produced by us and scripted live on-air. The current season is our 23rd consecutive or so.

Each Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. (tomorrow), the MGP half-hour is broadcast on 88.7 FM WFNP (“The Edge”) in the Rosendale-New Paltz, New York, area or is streaming live here: The MGP on WFNP. This is at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, and the broadcasts are not archived, so if you can check us out live tomorrow, thank you.

“Pop Hinks” was a monologue I wrote 15-20 years or so ago, when I had not yet started thinking. Sean Marrinan plays Pop Hinks, and that is Sean with the impressive beard on his face. John Burdick plays the guitar. I wrote the words.

“The One Four Five,” written by John Burdick:

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[Historical note: Before the Brooklyn Dodgers brought Jackie Robinson to the major leagues, white team owners maintained a ban on playing black baseball players, so the black community built a professional baseball league for itself. It was called the Negro Leagues and it existed from the late 1800s till the 1950s, when Major League baseball started integrating. I hate explaining jokes, but there might be readers who may not know this, who might think something called the Negro Leagues was a weird joke. In reality, it was not a joke, which is a sad fact for America. In the joke, which I have now killed utterly dead, I am picturing a world in which white America, upon seeing the success of the Negro Leagues, would create a baseball league to steal black America’s thunder, even while professional baseball was in fact all-white.]

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 21 asks, “The World Series starts tonight! In your own life, what would be the equivalent of a walk-off home run? (For the baseball-averse, that’s a last-minute, back-against-the-wall play that guarantees a dramatic victory.)”

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(Im)mortality

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

“The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” —G.K. Chesterton, “The Flag of the World.”

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The suicide is committing, from his or her terrible and terrifying and terrified point of view, genocide. Humanity-cide.

Martin Amis, in his memoir, “Experience,” paraphrases that quote and then contrasts it with a more nuanced and empathetic passage from Nabokov’s “The Eye”:

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I saw now […] how conventional were my former ideas on presuicidal preoccupations; a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one’s watch, since, together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny.

I am grateful that I am many years removed from any moments of despair in this life, but I remember that I was not going to leave a note because a note was an act of a living man and I was already not among the living. An impending suicide attempt tints every mundane act with an unholy glow, an outsider’s perspective that one briefly, ruefully, wishes one had had “in life.” The simplest acts also acquire sarcastic, rueful, air quotes: “This is the ‘last time’ I will have to fight with this stupid broken shoelace.” Any step in the dance of the living—eating a sandwich, say, or washing a fork—feels like a betrayal to the mission, which is a stifled soul-sickness and grants everything an omnipresent green calm.

It can last a split-second or it can last years, and a shorter period of time does not make it easier, and is just as exhausting perhaps; I pray that I am the only person in the world who has felt it, but I know that I am not. I would not be writing anything today if I was not many years removed from it. A writer, as Nabokov reminds us in “The Eye,” is hyper-alive. Maybe make that simply, alive.

The twinned quotations in “Experience” about the saddest reality (Amis has many twins in his work) come in a chapter about expanding love and family: a woman with whom he had an affair in the 1970s had a daughter but never told Amis and subsequently committed suicide when the daughter was two. He knew about his lover’s death but not the girl and finally met her when she was 18.

Their mutual discovery is that love is not a zero-sum game, in which a loss is always balanced by a gain, that love instead can only increase, well, that discovery is a hard-won insight, the sort that only comes from a deep, shared loss. (If a terrible loss leads to a worthwhile insight, doesn’t that imply all of life really is a sort of zero-sum game?—Pretend Editor.) Their families increased in size and complexity but not complications, and the missing woman is a part of it all.

Love can only increase. Unlike hate, which can be remedied and is somehow itself always a zero-sum proposition, once love is felt, it leaves a permanent mark on the landscape. Maybe it is the inner landscape.

All funerals are terrible, by definition, but some more so than others. A quarter-century ago, a co-worker of mine was shot and killed along with her mother by the father of her child, in front of the child. (It was an unobserved-by-CPS weekend custody handover. I hope people lost jobs over it.) A group of us went to the services and were greeted at the door by an older man who looked like he was allergic to suits; it looked like he had been consumed by this one all the way up to his neck and the suit was taking a rest before finishing him off. Two, twinned, coffins lay up front, closed from view, angled to fit in the small chapel.

I shook the man’s hand and he took my shoulder. His face was wet and unattended to by a handkerchief. Not knowing how to act or what to say to anyone, I solicitously asked who he was, assuming and hoping he was as distant as distant could be from the tragedy to ease my own sense of discomfort. “I am the father and the husband,” he replied with a “the” for each lost one and the beautiful expression of one who knew, not felt, knew that his dearest loves now loved him all the more completely from a different plane of existence.

I do not share that confidence, but I see its beauty.

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The above image from a Pinterest collection by Vanessa Longoria.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 20 asks, “At what age did you realize you were not immortal? How did you react to that discovery?”

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Inequality for No One

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

“The Mexicans here, they’re better than the ones in California. They’re polite here. I like our Mexicans: they work hard and don’t make me think about them.”

This was small talk, office talk. It always surprises me how quickly people get comfortable enough with me that they gush out their own prejudices, as if they think/assume I have similar sympathies. I had no idea what to say in reply to something that was no longer small talk, so I mumbled that I was suddenly hungry and was going to the lunch room, immediately. “Our Mexicans” was the only phrase in my head. It kept clanging around in there.

The conversation took place in our shared office cubicle in a factory in Iowa; four of us occupied the space and one joined me in the walk to the cafeteria.

“‘Our Mexicans?'” I repeated. “That’s a concept?” He said he was surprised, too. I suggested that maybe when we returned to the cubicle, I would ask her opinion about Iowa vs. California Jews or other groups of people. I did not.

(In the years since, I have heard “our black people” spoken. By an African-American man. Regional prejudice trumped the more traditional kind, and it got the expected laugh from the white people in the room.)

The speaker who had stunned me was a woman who had moved with her family from California to Iowa—on purpose—to escape from California’s California-ness (read: liberal politics and “awful regulations” on cars and guns) and prevent her young daughters from growing up in the Golden State. No jobs had turned up in Nebraska, which was her and her husband’s first choice, so Iowa it was. Both states are 97%-98% white in population.

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Every woman I know, including the one from California, has reported that she has experienced sexual harassment. Every woman walks through a different day than any man does: she is gauged and judged for her appearance. Young and old, woman are called tarts or teases, or a phrase like “she must have been a looker when she was younger” is used. I dated a woman who had been raped, except she was puzzled when I called it that; in her description she said the guy had “come on strong” and that she should have said “no” more forcefully. “Did you say ‘No’?” I asked. She had, and he had penetrated her. That is rape.

Several women friends have described unpleasant encounters in which anonymous men have exposed themselves; one woman found a man rubbing his open-zippered self against her on a crowded subway, another was given a private show while she was seated on a crowded bus.

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It is not a nature vs. nurture matter that many people seem to think in this progression of loyalties: Self > family > tribe/extended family > neighborhood > region > population type (color or creed) > interest group > nation. I am conscious that I have not included income, but maybe “interest group” covers that. Humans are tribal, but this is not something we are born with; it is taught. We teach each other to find and use power over others, or to act like we have it.

My family inculcated in my sister and me a sense that we all were pretty lucky, blessed even, to be middle-class and white in America of the 1960s and ’70s. And that luck, simple luck, is not something to brag about or wield like a privilege.

Oh, but I am a member of a minority, you see, many of them. I am the product of a “mixed” marriage, Jewish and Baptist. I am disabled, living with a rare neuromuscular disease. Perhaps some breaks can be given to me. Give me some breaks, universe! This thinking is attractive, insidiously so. I deserve something, something more than I have. Say it with me.

I am a part of the uncomplaining majority, which makes me a minority. Reward me now.

It is indeed insidious, and in my lifetime it has become sickeningly popular. Call it the appeal of the self-declared minority, or the privilege of being underprivileged. The majority, the lucky blessed majority, has appropriated the language, and what it thinks is the mindset, of being underprivileged or even a victim. The powerful majority population decided that enough has been asked of it over time and has started to regard each activist minority population demanding mere equality as another squeaky wheel that gets oil. If finding a way to be the squeaky wheel means getting more privileges and benefits, well, how could they be against being the squeaky wheel? It can be one more way to more power.

Justice and fairness are not equal, but they are just and fair. We should do all we can—I should do all I can—to increase those two things.

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Today is Blog Action Day. It is estimated that there are more than 250 million blogs published around the world and spread among many hosting companies, many of which are publicly traded. That is a lot of voices, and if they could be united for one day about something other than the universal appeal of cats, they could direct attention in some productive areas. Public attention is not as productive as action and changing minds, but it is better than no action at all.

Blog Action Day is an annual event that was started in 2007. A topic of activist concern is selected and announced in advance. This year’s topic is “inequality.”

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 16 asks, “Did you know today is Blog Action Day? Join bloggers from around the world and write a post about what inequality means to you. Have you ever encountered it in your daily life?

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