THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT (5 page)

On his talk show
Hardball
, Chris Matthews chuckled. “Let’s talk about Al Gore and have some fun. We’ve gone from the serious part of the program, now here’s the hilarious part. Al Gore keeps taking a little bit of truth and building it up into this epochal role in history.”

Joanne sighs. “It just makes me sad that the wise-guy attitude seems to dominate the press right now. That’s what I pick up on. Not to pick on Chris Matthews, but he spent two nights having a blast with this story about Love Canal. Getting a big chuckle out of ‘Dan Quayle may not be able to spell
potato
but now Al Gore’s going to claim he invented it.’ Well, maybe where Chris works that seems like a funny thing to say, but where I work, it didn’t seem that funny. Where I work, pretending to be hiding behind desks with kids, afraid that Klebold and Harris are outside my door, it didn’t seem that funny. And I’m not saying our candidates should be untested, unquestioned, uncriticized. What I am saying, if that’s all we do, and if all we do is make fun of them, then we’re losing something too, I think.”

Ashley tells me, “I feel like some reporters are just saying what [the candidates] did wrong.” When I ask the sixteen-year-old what we lose when the press omits descriptions of how a candidate might actually make a good president, she answers, “I think we miss out on every reason to vote for them,”

At Concord High School, a politician actually spoke inspiringly and connected with the audience. Which, to me, is news. But no reporter reported this. And in fact these kinds of moments are routinely overlooked by the press. They’re barely part of our national political discourse. But why? For one thing, so much political speech is lies, spin, and misrepresentation, it’s understandable that journalists report these inspiring moments skeptically, if at all. And, beyond that, the way most of the press works is pretty much as you suspect; representatives of the news media carry around story lines of the candidates in their heads, and reporters light up when reality randomly corroborates these pictures.

One of the great mysteries of modern politics is which story lines get told and which get ignored. And, in the primary season, that story line is still up for grabs. John McCain’s story line—hero—threatened to become “hypocrite” in light of his helping a major donor with the FCC. Not long after George W. Bush flunked a foreign policy pop quiz, his name tag at the correspondents’ dinner was destined to read, “Hello, my name is Dunderhead.” Gore’s story line—that he’s a bore—is spiced up by this secondary story line: that he’s a braggart, that he takes credit for ridiculous things, for inventing the Internet and for being the real-life Oliver of
Love Story.
So of course the Love Canal misunderstanding screamed to reporters because it brought this particular fuzzy snapshot of Gore into sharper focus.

It is telling that both the reporter for the
Times
and the one for the Post heard the exact same word incorrectly, almost as if that was what they wanted to hear. Joanne McGlynn says that this is a seductive impulse for both reporters and voters. She says, “This editor for
U.S. News & World Report
called and said that; this was after he admitted that he was sorry they had published a misquote. He told me a story about George Bush, Sr., running for president in 1992. And I remember the story myself that George Bush went into a supermarket and was stunned to find a scanner. I guess he was used to old cash registers and made a comment that showed he was surprised to see a scanner. What this gentleman from
U.S. News & World Report
told me was, actually, the pool reporter got that story wrong, that it was actually some kind of
new
scanner that Bush remarked on. But that comment then became the iconic moment for Bush being out of touch with Middle America. And that was it. I think that might have hurt Bush big time, Now, it turned out—if this man from
U.S. News & World Report
is right—not to be accurate. Now, if it wasn’t accurate, was it not true? I mean, was Bush out of touch with Middle America? It’s the same thing going back to Gore: Does Gore take credit? It makes me question. And I have to say, I am going to keep my eyes open in a way I hadn’t before, particularly when things automatically fit my mind-set. I’m going to be a little careful. It didn’t surprise me that maybe President Bush didn’t know about a scanner. But if he did, it’s too bad that got out there. It’s not fair.”

I looked at Joanne McGlynn’s syllabus for her media studies course, the one she handed out at the beginning of the year, stating the goals of the class. By the end of the year, she hoped her students would be better able to challenge everything from novels to newscasts, that they would come to identify just who is telling a story and how that person’s point of view affects the story being told. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this lesson has been learned. In fact, just recently, a student came up to McGlynn and told her something all teachers dream of hearing. The girl told the teacher that she was listening to the radio, singing along with her favorite song, and halfway through the sing-along she stopped and asked herself, “What am I singing? What do these words mean? What are they trying to tell me?” And then, this young citizen of the republic jokingly complained, “I can’t even turn on the radio without thinking anymore.”

A
long with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship. So when my friends Joel and Stephen and I play hooky from our jobs in the middle of the afternoon to play Pop-A-Shot in a room full of children, I like to think we are not procrastinators; we are patriots pursuing happiness.

Pop-A-Shot is not a video game. It involves shooting real, if miniature, basketballs for forty seconds. It’s embarrassing how giddy the three of us get when it’s our turn to put money into the machine. (Often, we have to stand behind some six-year-old girl who bogarts the game and whose father keeps dropping in quarters even though the kid makes only about 4 points if she’s lucky and we are forced to glare at the back of her pigtailed head, waiting just long enough to start questioning our adulthood and how by the time our parents were our age they were beholden to mortgages and PTA meetings and here we are, stuck in an episode of
Friends.)

Finally it’s my turn. A wave of balls slide toward me and I shoot, making my first basket. I’m good at this. I’m not great. The machine I usually play on has a high score of 72, and my highest score is 56. But considering that I am five foot four, that I used to get C’s in gym, and that I campaigned for Dukakis, the fact that I am capable of scoring 56 points in forty seconds is a source of no small amount of pride. Plus, even though these modern men won’t admit it, it really bugs Joel and Steve to get topped by a girl.

There are two reasons I can shoot a basketball: black-eyed peas and Uncle Hoy. I was a forward on my elementary school team. This was in Oklahoma, back when girls played half-court basketball, which meant I never crossed over to the other team’s side, which meant all I ever had to do was shoot, a bonus considering that I cannot run, pass, or dribble. Blessed with one solitary athletic skill, I was going to make the most of it. I shot baskets in the backyard every night after dinner. We lived out in the country, and my backboard was nailed to an oak tree that grew on top of a hill. If I missed a shot, the ball would roll downhill into the drainage ditch for the kitchen sink, a muddy rivulet flecked with corn and black-eyed peas. So if the ball bounced willy-nilly off the rim, I had to run after it, retrieve it from the gross black-eyed pea mud, then hose it off. So I learned not to miss.

My mother’s brother, Hoy, was a girls’ basketball coach. Once he saw I had a knack for shooting, he used to drill me on free throws, standing under the hoop at my grandmother’s house, where he himself learned to play. And Hoy, who was also a math teacher—he had gone to college on a dual math-basketball scholarship—revered the geometrical arc of the swish. Hoy hated the backboard, and thought players who used it to make anything other than layups lacked elegance. And so, if I made a free throw that bounced off the backboard before gliding through the basket, he’d yell, “Doesn’t count.” Sometimes, trash-talking at Pop-A-Shot, I bark that at Joel and Stephen when they score their messy bank shots. “Doesn’t count!” The electronic scoreboard, unfortunately, makes no distinction for grace and beauty.

I watch the NBA. I lived in Chicago during the heyday of the Bulls. And I have noticed that in, as I like to call it, the moving-around-basketball, the players spend the whole game trying to shoot. There’s all that wasted running and throwing and falling down on cameramen in between baskets. But Pop-A-Shot is basketball concentrate. I’ve made 56 points in forty seconds. Michael Jordan never did that. When Michael Jordan would make even 40 points in a game it was the lead in the eleven o’clock news. It takes a couple of hours to play a moving-around-basketball game. Pop-A-Shot distills this down to less than a minute. It is the crack cocaine of basketball. I can make twenty-eight baskets at a rate of less than two seconds per.

Joel, an excellent shot, also appreciates this about Pop-A-Shot. He likes the way it feels, but he’s embarrassed by how it sounds stupid when he describes it to other people, (He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy.) Joel plays in a fairly serious adult basketball league in New York. One night, he left Stephen and me in the arcade and rushed off to a—this hurt my feelings—“real” game. That night, he missed a foul shot by two feet and made the mistake of admitting to the other players that his arms were tired from throwing miniature balls at a shortened hoop all afternoon. They laughed and laughed. “In the second overtime,” Joel told me, “when the opposing team fouled me with four seconds left and gave me the opportunity to shoot from the line for the game, they looked mighty smug as they took their positions along the key. Oh, Pop-A-Shot guy, I could hear them thinking to their smug selves. Hell never make a foul shot. He plays baby games. Wa-wa-wa, little Pop-A-Shot baby, would you like a zwieback biscuit? But you know what? I made those shots, and those sons of bitches had to wipe their smug grins off their smug faces and go home thinking that maybe Pop-A-Shot wasn’t just a baby game after all.”

I think Pop-A-Shot’s a baby game. That’s why I love it. Unlike the game of basketball itself, Pop-A-Shot has no standard socially redeeming value whatsoever. Pop-A-Shot is not about teamwork or getting along or working together. Pop-A-Shot is not about getting exercise or fresh air. It takes place in fluorescent-lit bowling alleys or darkened bars. It costs money. At the end of a game, one does not swig Gatorade. One sips bourbon or margaritas or munches cupcakes. Unless one is playing the Super Shot version at the ESPN Zone in Times Square, in which case, one orders the greatest appetizer ever invented on this continent—a plate of cheeseburgers.

In other words, Pop-A-Shot has no point at all. And that, for me, is the point. My life is full of points—the deadlines and bills and recycling and phone calls. I have come to appreciate, to depend on, this one dumb-ass little passion. Because every time a basketball slides off my fingertips and drops perfectly, flawlessly, into that hole, well, swish, happiness found.

N
oticing an Audubon ornithological engraving in the hall of a stranger’s apartment, I found myself humming the opening bars of Nirvana’s “Lithium” and craving a burrito. Audubon’s birds take me back to a specific time and place—not the eastern backwoods of the 1820s but San Francisco when I was twenty-four. As a teen beatnik, I had dreamed of growing up and joining some Bay Area subculture. I just imagined my subculture would have a little more razzle-dazzle than the demimonde of antiquarian prints and maps. But managing a gallery owned by a notorious dealer named Graham Arader was the only job I could get, and I was grateful for it. Before he hired me, I had been temping for months, spending entire days inserting plastic tabs into file folders or begging the Chinese callers to the Chinese television station to please speak English as the Chinese receptionist is taking a personal day.

It occurs to me now how preposterous it was that a girl who lived on a foldout couch in her married friends’ living room for a year was having a say in the decoration of swank Pacific Heights mansions. At the Arader Gallery, I hung gigantic Audubon pelicans and delicate little eighteenth-century prints of lilies and roses on the wall, wrote gushy letters to collectors about four-hundred-year-old maps of North America, and helped the sales staff try to peddle chromolithographs of the Grand Canyon to walk-ins. I boned up on natural history, discovering that the Carolina parakeet Audubon painted is now extinct, and that once upon a time there were buffalo in Poland. Some days I felt like a contestant in a cartography game show, as I rushed to research a map in three minutes if a salesperson had a live one. For shipping, I learned how to construct a cardboard box of any shape and size. I answered the phone. I fetched coffee. I made sure we didn’t run out of Bubble Wrap. At the end of the day, I would set the gallery’s alarm, put very loud grunge music on my Walkman, take the slow bus home, and pull another graduate school rejection letter out of the mailbox. Then my friends and I would drink some bottle of wine they learned about on their doomed Napa honeymoon until it was time for me to unfold my crummy foldout couch. They would be divorced by the end of the year, and it occurs to me now that having an interloper camped out on their sofa for thirteen lucky months could not have helped.

I was miserable, but I had been miserable before. All three years of junior high school spring to mind. But I had never had the privilege of unhappiness in Happy Valley. California is about the good life. So a bad life there seems so much worse than a bad life anywhere else. Quality is an obsession there— good food, good wine, good movies, music, weather, cars. Those sound like the right things to shoot for, but the never-ending quality quest is a lot of pressure when you’re uncertain and disorganized and, not least, broker than broke. Some afternoons a person just wants to rent
Die Hard
, close the curtains, and have Cheerios for lunch.

I remember how at home I felt, the first time I left. The gallery sent me east to learn from the master at Graham Arader’s Pennsylvania headquarters. Getting off the plane from San Francisco at the Philadelphia airport, I was taken aback. I realized I had been living under quarantine in some euthanized, J. Crew catalog parallel universe of healthy good looks. Because, in Philadelphia, I was pleasantly surprised to see old people, average people, even ugly people, ambling around in dumb T-shirts and home perms. And if that wasn’t relief enough, the weather was terrible and the coffee was dreck. The nice thing about Philadelphia is that no one has moved there to find the good life for over two hundred years. I went home to California feeling like the prettiest, most upbeat over-achiever in the world.

For as long as I can remember, one thing that has always lifted my spirits is research. (In San Francisco, that sentence is supposed to end on the words “sailing,” “gay sex,” or “driving down to Carmel for the weekend.”) I find looking things up consoling. And of all the collections I had to research in my job at the gallery, I became enamored of a period in European cartography in which California was depicted as an island. The gallery had quite a few of these maps, published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Paris, London, and Amsterdam. I hung them so I could see them from my desk. The idea of California as an island was a lie and a myth, but from where I was sitting, it seemed true enough. The gallery’s girl Friday, I was stranded on it. There might as well have been a little red arrow pointing at every one of those Californias next to the words “You Are Here.”

The consensus on what happened with the California-as-an-island maps was that Dutch pirates seized a Spanish boat containing an erroneous map or journal describing California as an island and in 1622 Dutch map publishers started to update their charts accordingly. Then the Londoner Henry Briggs jumped on the bandwagon in 1625. Though two of the great Dutch publishers, Jodocus Hondius and Willem Blaeu, refused to buy into the fad, the error was reprinted in many European maps well into the next century. California is an island, for example, on the map illustrating Daniel Defoe’s sequel to
Robinson Crusoe
in 1719. It was a Jesuit, Father Eusebio Kino, who set out to put an end to the rumor, which makes sense considering the missionaries were the biggest victims of the false information, dragging boats they didn’t need halfway to Cleveland. Kino made a map in 1701 confirming that California was attached to the mainland, and the mistake was fixed for good in 1747, when Ferdinand VI of Spain issued a royal decree proclaiming, “California is not an island.”

Clients always wanted to talk about the California maps. Maybe it was because we were in California or maybe it was because the maps were so mysterious or because everyone likes to point out how stupid people used to be. Or maybe they were dying to make one of the fourteen San Andreas Fault “not an island … yet!” jokes I heard every week.

Even though the salespeople and I would chat up the California maps with customers all the time, every day, I don’t recall that we ever sold a single one. Which makes sense considering that of Graham Arader’s five galleries around the country, we made the least money, and don’t think the boss didn’t notice. We were the worst map sales force of all time working for the greatest map salesman in history.

Arader was the kind of fascinating boss about whom employees gossip with a mix of adulation and dread—one of those go, go, go guys whose ambition you could admire while at the same time hoping you weren’t the one who answered the phone when he called. Under my breath I called him the Grahamarader, because I thought of him as an action-movie killing machine, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies.

It makes sense to me now that Graham’s life’s work involves the buying and selling of maps and natural histories from the Age of Discovery, when ambitious, even godlike men lit out to see and document and tame the flora and fauna of the New World. Graham’s beginnings in the early 19705 sound so American, so go-west-young-man. The guy was dealing maps out of his dorm room at Yale. His mother ruined his first big sale. Chagrined, he recalls, “What happened was, I’d been working the whole summer buying maps of Penobscot Bay for Thomas Watson, who was then the chairman and chief operating officer of IBM. He had never met me. I had met him by phone. I went ahead and found all these fabulous maps that showed Penobscot Bay. So at the end of the summer I’d amassed this really incredible collection. I was living with my parents at the time. I was twenty-three years old. And when Mr. Watson called, not knowing who he was or why he was calling, my mother said, ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to use the children’s phone/ Mr. Watson hung up and didn’t talk to me again for two years.”

My favorite legend about the Grahamarader, one printed in
The New Yorker
, so presumably it may even be true, is that Graham once desired a map owned by a friend. Graham begged the man for it. Graham told the man that he needed the map, that he loved this map so much he wanted to hang it over his bed, that it would be the first thing that he saw when he got up in the morning and the last thing he saw when he went to sleep at night, that he wanted to conceive his children under it. The friend was so touched he sold the map to the Grahamarader, who promptly called the friend the very next day bragging that he’d sold it, and for a tidy profit at that.

Map dealers, I came to learn, are not like that. As a group, they tend to be polite, bookish, and don’t inspire comparisons to Schwarzenegger or any other mythic pop figure. Graham is the map dealers’ Michael Milken, their Elvis Presley. In financial terms, he put antiquarian maps on the map. And he popularized them like no one ever had through sheer charisma. “The antiquarian map market before Graham Arader,” says Graham, “was a fairly sophisticated market. The people who collected had in-depth knowledge and understanding, I guess the effect that I had is that I brought map collecting to a lot more people who perhaps in the beginning were not as sophisticated. And the prices have gone up and I get blamed a lot.”

In other words, he functions as the messiah of the map biz, or its Antichrist, depending on your point of view. The entire industry can be divided
B.A.,
Before Arader, when many historical maps sold for a few hundred dollars, and
A.A.,
after Arader, when the same maps began commanding tens of thousands of dollars.

One by-product of Graham’s excitement and salesmanship is hyperbole. He carries around a small but well-used toolbox of superlatives, which he hammers into everything, words like
Fabulous!
and
Greatest!
and his favorite,
Best!
I think he formed the hyperbole habit by saying things like “John James Audubon is simply the finest bird painter who ever lived!” Perusing his catalogs, one learns that the engravings based on the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer’s
Travels in the Interior of North America
are “the most detailed study of the Plains Indians ever produced”; that George Catlin’s Indian lithographs are “one of the finest portrayals of Plains Indian life ever created”; and that Currier and Ives were responsible for “the most popular and highly regarded lithographs of quintessentially American scenes ever produced.” Maybe Graham always talked like that. Somehow, I can picture a five-year-old Graham telling his mother, “Mom, these are absolutely the greatest oatmeal scotchies ever baked in North America!”

Graham Arader sells history. He’s a passionate historian. He probably knows as much about the history of cartography as any academic on the planet. It’s what he does with all the information in his head that always astonished me. Graham’s inventory encompasses the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Think about those dates. Think about the story being told in European and American maps of that era. Dutch maps of South Africa. French maps of New France. It is not just one story but two—a great adventure of nation building and the promise of the New World, but also one of theft and warfare and genocide. Guess which one of those stories sells maps?

Watching him sell something is fun. It is exciting. It is patriotically inspiring. He showed me a map of America, cooing, “This … map … tells the story of Manifest Dessssssssssssstiny!” And I’m thinking, Yeah! Manifest Destiny! Wow! What a country! Then I catch myself, remembering, Oh yeah, Manifest Destiny. In fact, once, at the San Francisco gallery, a client walked in looking for Manifest Destiny memorabilia. I opened a drawer and pulled out a print copied from John Gast’s famous painting
American Progress.
In that picture, Columbia, the barely dressed mythological female representation of America, floats west over the prairie, stringing telegraph wire as a train, stagecoach, and various settlers also head to the Pacific beneath her. The man couldn’t have been more pleased, swooning over the little covered wagon, the little farmer plowing, the Brooklyn Bridge near the eastern edge, the quivering Indians looking over their shoulders in fear. He was smiling as I took his credit card, told me he was going to hang it over his breakfast table. Personally, I wouldn’t want to look at those shivering Indians as I munched my corn flakes. Why wake up to original sin? The only picture I can see from my breakfast table is a strategically placed snapshot of my baby nephew taking a nap with a puppy.

In his Manhattan gallery, I once watched Graham show a sixteenth-century book to one his favorite clients. The book was filled with beautiful engravings depicting the natives of the English colonies. “So this was the beginning,” Graham says. “This volume was from the voyage that John White took in 1585, and it was published in Frankfurt in 1590, and it really is the first image that Europeans had of the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws.” He turns a page, pointing. “That’s how they had smoked alligator and lizard. Here’s how they caught the deer. Look at that. That’s cool.”

And it is cool. It’s a lovely book. It is exciting to see the first image of the Cherokees. But the other voice in my head keeps saying, “Trail of Tears, Trail of Tears, Trail of Tears.” There’s something aesthetically pleasing about trading one engraving—an old map—for another—American money. What could be more perfect than someone paying for that book with all the Cherokees with a big fat roll of twenty-dollar bills, exchanging the graven images of Andrew Jackson, Mr. Trail of Tears himself, for the story of the tribe he sought to destroy?

The hardest part about working around all those ambiguous American artifacts was biting my tongue. I would be showing a client an early map of South Carolina, and he would be looking for his hometown or talking about color and out loud I would say, “Hmm, delightful,” but my brain would be droning, “Slave state.” I couldn’t believe someone would want to hang that on his wall, though now that I think about it, the man probably looks at that map all the time and the only thing it reminds him of is how he really should call his mom.