Nighthawks: Sure It's Crap, but it's MY Crap

A young (uncredited) Rutger Hauer and a bearded Sly on the soundtrack album cover.  What more could you want?

When I was 17 years old, my girlfriend and I went to the movies and saw an unheralded cop drama called "Nighthawks."  Like all boys of my generation, Sly Stallone, as much as I would goof on him, was an undeniable hero, due to the enormous impact of "Rocky" in 1976 and "Rocky II" a couple of years later.  We allowed Sly his flops ("F.I.S.T." and "Paradise Alley") after the first Rocky, and this was bound to be his post "Rocky II" schlock.  

But I'll be damned if Maria and I didn't absolutely love this movie.  What wasn't to love, after all?  You had young, sexy Rutger Hauer playing international terrorist and man-about-town Heymar "Wulfgar" Reinhardt, and young, sexy Persis Khambatta as his evil minion, Shaka Holland.  You had a bearded Stallone as misunderstood Vietnam vet with "57 registered kills"-turned-misunderstood New York undercover cop specializing in "decoy" detail, Deke DaSilva.  You had the Bionic Fucking Woman, Lindsay Wagner, for God's sake!  And, oh yeah, Billy.  Dee.  Williams.

We ate it up.  We wrote each other love notes in high school and signed them "Love, Wulfgar," and "Love, Shaka."  This was our flick.

Normally, my 5 a.m. routine is to wake up, let the dogs out, put some coffee on the stove and turn on the local news, toggling back and forth to Sportscenter.  As it would happen, I woke up this morning and turned on the set, and there, of all things, was "Nighthawks." The wife and kids were sleeping in late, and getting them up wasn't a priority.  So, I watched.  

Rutger Hauer is still riveting.  I realize, now, that he is really what gives "Nighthawks" the energy it has.  The scenes without Hauer feel like an airless room.  The script is "flawed," to put it kindly.  The great international terrorist makes mistake after mistake, and is far too easily located by Deke.  And the image of Stallone taking off the Lindsay Wagner wig at the end, is just too fucking funny.  

Now.  

Back then it was nothing short of awe-inspiring.  

I'm not calling for a sequel, or wanting to start a fan club.  The world has changed since 1981.  Terrorism is not something to be romanticized as it sort of was back then.  Images of buildings exploding on Wall Street and Picadilly bring very real reminders of loss and pain.  At the end of the day, as they say, "Nighthawks" is, quite simply, a good old-fashioned "B Movie."  But it was a lot of fun watching it this morning, thinking back on a youth that was better than I deserved, and giggling ever so slightly at the guilty pleasure of a crappy movie I once loved.  

Beach Memories and Swimming Pool Dreams

We spent the Fourth of July quietly at home. Like my father before me, this is my preferred way to be. For reasons I may or may not choose to discuss in a future post, the fireworks that were banned this year, due to dangerous drought conditions, were not missed by me one bit.

The night before, I had grilled some burgers and sausage that J picked up at Central Market, so we did plenty of good, old, American-style eating this holiday weekend – probably too much. Yesterday I took the boys to the Shadowglen pool for a good three hours, while J stayed at home relaxing for a bit, before preparing us a delicious dinner of stewed turkey thighs in a peach sauce, with an amazing corn, cilantro, mango, jicama salad. Good summer fare.

While she cooked, we made the best of our pool time. We saw a girl standing on her father’s shoulders, balancing, so of course we had to follow suit. This was great fun for the lads, as I became a human diving platform for them. They took turns standing up, balancing and then diving off my shoulders, doing front and back flips (and more than a few belly and back flops) into the water.

As always, my time with my sons brought back wonderful memories from my own childhood, of playing with my younger brother and my father in various pools and ocean beaches.

The two pools I can remember us visiting are Rocky Ledge, in the hills of North White Plains, in the Quarry Heights section, and the Greenburg Town pool. Both were places where my brother and I could run around pretty safely. Our father wasn’t normally with us there; my mother would take us and then find a shady spot where she would invariably open a book, light up a smoke and relax.

The kind of father-son time I enjoy with Diego and Jackson came, back then, in the form of beach vacations. My parents met on a beach – Water Island Beach on Fire Island, to be exact --, and would periodically return to the Atlantic, their offspring, and dog, in tow. My brother and I spent long days body surfing and otherwise frolicking in those waves and on those beaches.

One of my regrets about where we live is that we’re so far from the Atlantic beaches of my youth. We’ll get back there someday, and man will it be fun for these boys. And for me, it will be nothing less than a beautiful reconnection to my past.

Motorcycle Rallies: Annual Reminders of a Road Not Taken

There’s a pen and ink self-portrait I did in one of my earliest journals, the summer after my freshman year, at age 18. In it, I have a long mane of hair, swept back (by the wind, I suppose), a bushy beard, and there’s a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. I’m wearing a leather jacket, and there’s a helmet under my arm. The helmet has lightning bolts on either side.

Now in reality I can count on one hand the times I’ve even been on a motorcycle. There was the time Russ Fiducia, our neighbor, gave me a ride on the back of his enormous Honda – the bike on which he would be killed in a crash on the Hutchinson River Parkway not much later. And I also have a foggy recollection of a mini bike to which my brother and I had some passing access – in Michigan maybe? I can’t recall.

And that’s it.

Yet there is still this call of the road that hits me when the Republic of Texas (RoT) Rally rolls into town in June. (The Central Texas HOG rally is this weekend -- a much smaller version, it's what got me thinking along these lines.) This call is not even real, in that it could ever be answered. My mother, even in death, brings out the newspaper clippings of horrible deaths suffered by motorcyclists, at no fault of their own. And those who know me well know I’m a coward at heart. That many cc’s of horsepower (or whatever – I don’t know much about internal combustion engines, either) would scare the shit out of me, I’m sure.

So where does this “call of the wild” come from? I can certainly point to two early influences right off the bat: Evel Knievel and Arthur Fonzarelli, on the wildly popular sitcom, Happy Days. In my youth, both captured my imagination. Every so often ABC’s Wide World of Sports would feature one of Knievel’s stunts. He became larger than life by virtue of how many cars he could jump over and how many bones he broke. My friends and I routinely set up ramps and jumps for our bikes, emulating him.

And then there was the Fonz. Any boy living in 1970’s America was enamored of the Fonz, unless they were raised in a Skinner box or something. He was the personification of cool – possessing the power to magically turn on both juke boxes and bobby-soxers, with a snap of his fingers or a flick of his wrist. Like 1950’s icons Marlon Brando and James Dean, the Fonz rode a motorcycle. During the opening credits, you could see Henry Winkler, the actor playing Fonzie, pull up unsteadily on a motorcycle.

I’m not sure if it was because of Winkler’s reticence, but they didn’t really play up the biker angle, initially. But then came Season Four and an episode called “Fonzie Loves Pinky,” in which the Fonz meets his match in a tough-talking, pink-wearing, pink-motorcycle-riding mama by the name of Pinky Tuscadero.

I fell immediately, helplessly, head-over-heels in love with her. I wonder now if this hadn’t been a brilliant move on the part of the producers of the show – as their core demographic reached puberty, they provided us with a heterosexual surrogate for the one we’d been in love with since the beginning.

There was a moment, in my late 30’s when I went through a brief crisis. My father had just died, leaving me an orphan. I was single and not sure I’d ever find the Love of My Life, with whom I’d eventually settle down and have kids. Visiting a friend in DC, we walked down Constitution Avenue and suddenly the largest parade of motorcycles I’d ever seen – Rolling Thunder, as it turned out – rolled past, deafening us.

“Sometimes I think I’d like to just buy a motorcycle and leave everything behind,” I said.

“Why don’t you?” she asked.

“I should.” I smiled, and we went back to watching the bikers, their shiny machines glimmering loudly in the late May sunlight. I think we both knew it would never happen, but I enjoyed thinking back on my pen and ink caricature and imagining what that life might have been like.

Mary Carolyn Runyan Fuchs, (Would Have Been) 80 Years Old Today

Today is the date on which my mother was born, back in 1931. On the other two significant May birthdays in my immediate family – Jackson’s on the 7^th, and Diego’s on the 16^th – I discussed their birth stories. Both were first-hand accounts, with varying degrees of accuracy, but, generally speaking, both were the truth. I was not around for my late mother’s birth, obviously, but I thought it would make for an interesting exercise to write the story anyway…

Just two days after Memorial Day, and it is already feeling like August in Little Rock. I am grateful to have been transferred, a few months ago, to an office job that requires no travel and comes with an electric fan that cuts the heat some.

I believe the transfer may have been Mr. _______’s doing; he is one of the railroad’s Vice Presidents, and runs the Little Rock regional office. Mr. ________ is a kind, church-going man, and when I mentioned to him in passing that Hazel was in a family way a few months back, he became very interested, making a point to tell me the story of his first-born, a son named James, whose acquaintance I have made. He will be attending West Point in the fall and Mr. _________ is very proud, and rightly so.

Less than a month later, I received the letter offering me my current position of Assistant to the Director of Human Resources at the Rock Island Railroad’s Little Rock office. The day I was unpacking my things at my new desk, Mr. __________ happened to be meeting with the Director. He greeted me warmly, congratulating me on my new post, before I thought I detected a little wink, as if to say, “Glad I could do this for you, Herman.”

This morning I receive a telephone call before I can even take my hat off. It is from the maternity ward at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Hazel is doing well, and the baby should be arriving soon.

I head on down there as fast as my old Model T will take me, which is not very fast. I find my way to the maternity ward and am met by a colored nurse who pats my shoulder in a reassuring manner and lets me know everything is going “just as it ought to be.”

The seats nearest the electric fan have all been taken; they’re filled by nervous-looking men of around my age and general appearance. They nod at me, as I hang my hat and jacket. I have managed to sweat through my shirt. To cool off, I fan myself with an abandoned copy of the Gazette. I try reading a story about the new invention of something called a wind tunnel, which will allow scientists to test aircraft on the ground. I am interested – having been a navy man during the Great War – but I find it difficult to concentrate under the present set of circumstances.

I am napping when the same nurse calls my name. She leads me through a door I hadn’t noticed before, and down a bright corridor. We stand before a window and look at a room full of newborns in bassinets.

“Can you guess which one is yours?” she smiles.

“I don’t believe I can,” I answer in a way that makes her laugh so loud the babies seem to hear it through the glass of the window.

She points to one of the cribs, and I see my little girl, Mary Carolyn, for the first time. She is a thing of beauty – pink and sparkling clean. I close my eyes and thank the Lord for His blessing. Then I tap the glass, attempting to get Mary’s attention, all the while trying to imagine how much my world has been changed.

"Tainted Gloves" or "Kiss My Asterisk": How the Cheaters Killed My Love of Baseball

The other night, while watching playoff basketball with a friend, we got onto the topic of baseball players. He, like many people, is a great admirer of Manny Ramirez, one of the most talented right-handed hitters ever to play the game.

When I mentioned as much, my friend’s voice dropped. “Yeah, too bad he’s tainted.”

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 15 years, he was referring to “juicing,” or the use of performance enhancing drugs, such as anabolic steroids. Since the mid-to-late 1980’s such use has been scrutinized closely in baseball. There are all kinds of theories as to why men have taken to “cheating” – from economics to peer pressure to “keeping up with the Joneses.”

My first awareness of steroids in baseball came in 1989, when I first saw Lenny Dykstra, one of my favorite Mets from the scrappy, dominant 1986 World Champion squad, in a Philadelphia Phillies uniform. He didn’t look like the same guy. Okay, so he’d been working out, but something just wasn’t right.

Then came the “Bash Brothers” in Oakland -- Canseco and McGwire. Both were big men, but their muscles ballooned almost comically in the time they were teammates. By this time, if you didn’t smell a rat, there was something wrong with you.

But there were two events in contemporary major league baseball – both of which involved the long ball, the homerun, once the most basic display of unbridled power in the sport. First there was the cartoonish back and forth of McGwire and Sammy Sosa, as they surpassed Roger Maris’s single-season homerun record in a tit-for-tat battle that boosted baseball’s ratings and made fawning sycophants of once-respected sports commentators.

And of course the coup de gras was when Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s total homerun record with number 756 in August of 2007. He has since been indicted for perjury and has had an asterisk branded onto his record-setting baseball that sits in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

As a father of two boys, all of this makes me think back to my own childhood. I remember watching the news as a ten year old that Hank Aaron, one of my favorite players, had beaten Babe Ruth’s lifetime record for home runs, by hitting his 715th. My brother and I had a fairly extensive baseball card collection . Our team was the Mets, of course, but we loved looking at all the men on those cards, reading their statistics on the back, while chewing on gum so stale it tasted like cardboard. There was no greater joy than sprawling on the floor and looking at our cards, trading for doubles and triples. Our father endorsed our enthusiasm with his own, telling us tales of his own favorites from the Brooklyn Dodgers, Pee Wee Reese, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson.

Today, thanks to all the doping and asterisks, I will find it hard to encourage the kind of love of the game my brother and I, and our father before us, had. Thanks to the poor judgment of a number of men, the game itself has been tainted. Don’t get me wrong; I know the men I looked up to were by no means perfect. But they reached their milestones, set their records and did their jobs on the strength they had, not the strength they acquired by shooting foreign substances into their veins.

Nostalgia Tripping With Dear Old Friends

As usual, I’m my nostalgic self, only more so, of course, on this trip to my home state and home city. J and I have seen family and friends. There’s no way for us to see everyone in the course of a week, and my sinus issues knocked out a couple of prime opportunities with some very special people in my life.

Today I got to have lunch with my old pal Jem. I met him at his office building, just north of Astor Place. It was a fitting spot; many of our youthful indiscretions occurred within a ten block radius of that location.

After the handshake/hug, Jem started listing lunch possibilities, but I had one place on the top of my list.

“Is the Yaffa Café still in business?” I asked.

His eyes curled up and he smiled that big smile of his. “I knew you were going to say that,” he said.

We made our way east on 8^th Street, all the while looking around to see what was still open from the days when we were kids. The Continental Club on 3^rd Avenue was still there, and Jem noted that it was surrounded by six ATM machines, something you couldn’t find except at one bank on the corner of First Avenue and Avenue A, back in the day.

As we reminisced, I was pleased to see the Holiday Bar was also still operating. It was – and still looks to be – a no-nonsense dive bar. My favorite kind.

Crossing First Avenue, we were both pleased to see that the Yaffa Café, a regular haunt of ours in the late 80’s and early 90’s, was, in fact, still there, still open 24 hours, and, as we entered, we saw that it was virtually unchanged. Jem had the same thing he used to have when we were young(er) – the Yaffa salad. I ordered us some hummus and pita to start with and then went for the turkey burger. This was the place where I first experienced a turkey burger, and it tasted exactly the same as I remember it tasting then.

We filled each other in on our lives – our children, our siblings, our jobs, and what we’ve been reading. The familiarity of this friend, with whom I connected so immediately on an autumn evening playing guitars in our Syracuse dormitory, came right back, with no awkwardness, no stumbling.

I grew not only nostalgic, but also a little self-pitying. In Austin, I have some budding friendships, but nothing so familiar as this. They say that you leave your family at a certain age, and that your friends become your family at that point. This is certainly true of my bond with Jem. He is like a brother to me. It’s not a fair comparison, I know. We’ve only been in Austin for three years, and that first musical (that’s being kind) meeting between me and Jem happened thirty years ago this coming September.

J and I met with more recent, but equally dear friends, for dinner tonight, when we visited the new home of our former next-door neighbors, the Savinskys. We created a strong connection during our time as new parents in the Park Vanderbilt apartments from 2002 to 2008. Our friendship was, and is, based on laughter, conversation, our children, and good meals.

Both Yan and Olga emigrated from the former Soviet Union, from Ukraine and Russia, respectively, and they always make a point to feed us a generous spread of delicacies from their homeland. Tonight, in their lovely seaside condominium, with the view of Manhattan and Brighton Beaches, was no exception. As with Jem, the chemistry of our friendship slipped right back into place. We ate, drank, and laughed, as our boys played loudly with their old friend, Misha upstairs. We were all sorry to say goodbye.

J and I believe in our Austin experiment, and we’re both willing to see it through. I think this visit is making both of us a little melancholy, though, as we are reminded of all these wonderful, beloved people we have left behind.

Life Underground: The NYC Subway Revisited

Over the past couple of days, J and I have made a couple of trips on the subway – one to meet up with my sister Jessica and my nephew Levi, who’s finishing up his first year at Julliard, and the other to have dinner with friends in Chelsea.

I’d forgotten a few little details that immediately came back into evidence. One is “track work.” Particularly up in the elevated sections of the number 2 train line in the Bronx, where we are staying, there seems perpetually to be track work going on. Track work as in, “Ladies and gentlemen, please plan ahead. Midday, late nights and weekends, please expect delays, due to regularly scheduled track work. We thank you for your patience.”

These words are spoken (and have been being spoken for the past ten years or so) by a recorded voice, in perfect diction. I guess the incomprehensible sound of actual human voices became too unbearable, so they replaced it with the nice man’s voice. He also says things like, “Ladies and gentlemen, please be careful of the gap between the train and the platform” and “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

The Giant Track Rats are something else I hadn’t thought of in quite some time. As we waited to transfer to the 2 train at 96^th Street, I proposed a game to J. “Let’s play, ‘Spot the Giant Track Rat.’ Whoever sees one first wins a prize." Sure enough, once the tracks were clear, J. won the game, spotting a GTR making off with what looked like a giant bag of popcorn someone had dropped on to the tracks. Despite being the "winner," J's face paled a bit. "That's disgusting," she said.

I couldn't disagree.

And that’s the other big thing I had forgotten: the gastronomy of the New York City Subway system. Almost every train car, at any time of the day or night has someone eating something. And I’m not just talking about someone sneaking a Snickers bar here and there. I am talking about full-on meals, washed down by giant cans of green tea or Budweiser tall boys poorly disguised in brown paper bags. Someone should do a cookbook based on a survey of favorite subway meals. I think it would be a pretty interesting international menu.

At first, I was a little mortified being back on the “iron horse,” as a friend used to call it. Once I was in my 30’s and moved out of Manhattan to Brooklyn, the subway lost its glamor. And once J. hooked her wagon to my star, and we started making offspring, we bought a car and said “Deuces” to the NYC Public Transit System.

But tonight I did sort of sit back at one point and look around at the dirty floors, and up at the ads for “Torn Earlobe” and Erectile Dysfunction treatments with a measure of nostalgia, and when I caught my reflection in the darkened glass of the window inside the tunnel, I saw that even though the man looking back at me was balder, fatter, and grayer than the one who used to look back, when this was my daily mode of getting from here to there, he was smiling, much as he did way back then.

From the Vault: "KGSR and Me"

February 3, 2009

Recently I’ve been aware of how important music is at this particular moment in my life. I suppose it always has been; however, it's been my tendency to remark on its significance after the fact. I’m one of those members of my generation who fills his iPod with songs from the past, dredging up memories of spiky haircuts, girls in legwarmers and sweaty, flailing college students on beer-sticky dance floors from years gone by.

Or, in the more distant past, if I hear anything that was in the top 40 between 1973 and 1977, I’m transported back to Rocky Ledge, a local swimming club, hidden away in the hills of North White Plains, where my brother and I spent our summers swimming, looking at girls and listening to people like Paul McCartney and Wings, War, Rod Stewart, Earth Wind and Fire, Frampton and the Bee Gees being piped constantly through loud speakers around the grounds.

So now here I am in this new place, this new city so well known for its music, and I’ve been introduced to KGSR, a station that does its best to honor Austin – not only musically, but by making sure to profile people in the community who do good works, in the areas of charity, education and the arts.

And every day, between the hours of 7 and 8 in the morning and then, after work, between 5 and 6, I turn on the car radio and listen to GSR’s programming. (Yes, I admit to sometimes switching over to Bob-FM during commercials, for the aforementioned fix of 70’s and 80’s one sometimes gets to hear there.) I’ll also occasionally dial up kgsr.com on my office computer when I’m anchored there with a lot to write. I never complain about the songs they tend to repeat, this due to the realization I mentioned at the start of this entry; these are the songs that will evoke this special time in my life in the years to come: “Real Love” by Lucinda Williams, “Sister Lost Soul” and “Always a Friend” by Alejandro Escovedo, “Love Song” by Sara Bareilles, “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz, “Strange Overtones” by David Byrne and Brian Eno, lots of Lyle Lovett, some Dixie Chicks, a smidgen of Johnny Cash, and the occasional Willie Nelson, of course.

This list is incomplete. But I know that wherever life takes me in the future, the moment I hear any of these songs, I’ll be driving down I-35 from Pflugerville to Austin, pulling into my numbered parking space at Austin High, pointing out the longhorn statues walking across the roof of the car dealership to my kids, or wondering why the hell all those birds descend upon the La Frontera Shopping Center every evening at dusk…

My Dishwasher Turns Out To Be A Time Machine

There's a phenomenon I've been dealing with for the past several years now, and it's something I wonder if others experience. It's happening frequently enough now that it's a little frightening, frankly.



Every time that I do the dishes (which is often, beacause Jeanette loves to cook and hates to wash dishes), I am transported to my past. As I get into the automatic machinations of rinse, place on rack, rinse, place on rack, I get these little memory flashes -- snippets of Bushwick, Brooklyn and my drive over to Bushwick High, where I worked briefly in 2006 with several small high schools housed in that building. I immediately recall the sense of excitement I had in that building, and how promising it felt there. Yes, this was a neighborhood in flux, for sure; you could feel the gentrification pushing in, running parallel to the elevated subway line, the brand new red brick condos displacing the dispossessed. But there, in that building that felt too small for the gangly, play-fighting adolescents who peopled its hallways (had it once been an elementary school, for much smaller children?), there was a palpable sense of pride and enthusiasm. These young people were succeeding in a building that had previously been known for failure for so many years. I often had that feeling when I worked for New Visions, in many buildings; now, for some reason, when I do dishes, I am transported back there.

I also shoot over to Madrid, Spain sometimes, while scouring and scrubbing. Usually it's my final summer there, 1989, after Susan and I had split up and I was "on my own" there, for the first time, really. I had some "adventures" that summer, some of which I review as I finish pouring the Cascade into the soap compartment. Mostly, it's the walking I remember from that time -- down cobbled streets, into antique cafes with ornate tin ceilings, or brightly lit restaurants where they greet you with "Hola!" and you answer "Una cerveza, por favor!"

Like I said, I'm not sure why this time travel happens; maybe you can help me explain it. Perhaps it's one of those Oliver Saks-type neurological phenomena, like the guy who bumped his head and woke up able to speak Swedish, even though he'd never heard the language spoken. Not even once.

Or maybe I'm just bored....