The first month after I had joined Bell Press, Gordon Christopher, the President, called me to his office and handed me airline tickets for a conference in Pittsburgh. I was expected to convince Benno Heilbronn, a Nobel-laureate physics pioneer, to put his name atop the masthead of an embryonic academic journal. Gordon didn’t wanted Heilbronn to edit Particle Accelerator Quarterly, he only wanted Heilbronn’s name there and was willing to pay $10,000 a year for it. The journal was going to a handful of universities—because this was rare and knotty technical knowledge, my company had felt it was fair for a four-issue subscription to cost $15,000. It cost a few thousand dollars to print and mail the issues, so Bell was aiming to make $75,000 a year on only five subscriptions. They had almost 200 journals set up with those kinds of ridiculous subscription rates. The Journal of Vacuum Physics—eighty-five libraries at $8,000 per year; The Journal of Neuralphysical Electrodynamics—thirteen subscriptions at $11,000 a pop. These journals paid the bills for the book division. And the science-center librarians fell in line; the campus research teams knew they would be up shit creek if they missed scholastic developments. If that meant the slashed-budget library had to forgo a new copier or three work-study students, so be it. And Bell annually increased the rate by ten percent; we had them all by the balls. Keisha, my lunchmate from accounting who had secretively lined up another job, gave me the lowdown when I bitched to her about Will’s considering a major PR job offer at a tobacco company. Even so, I failed to ride off into the sunset on my high horse: I kept my mouth shut and didn’t leave Hades on Third Avenue for two more years. Will never took the cigarette job, God bless his sanctified soul.
“It would be an honor to have you listed,” I’d said to Heilbronn. “You’re the inspiration to so many young physicists.” I followed that up with more sticky-sweet praise.
He kept switching topics from my flattery to physic theories. He was amazed that I double-majored in physics and film/television.
“But you really know the theories?” he pressed, ignoring the contract still unsigned by the water glass. While I wasn’t ever going to get a medal draped around my neck in Stockholm, I could hold my own with sound bites.
To hawk the new journal, I had worn a low-cut dress to lunch—which Heilbronn wasn’t ignoring as he ascertained how much I knew about alternative universes. (My boss had confided in a barely-shy-of-a-sexual-harassment voice that the seventy-five-year-old physics star was a notorious chest man.) Heilbronn was a firm believer in what is called the Many Worlds Interpretation, an idea first put forth in the 1950s. In every situation, the choices you face offer roads into infinite universes. Every universe that can exist, the theory goes, does exist.
“Perhaps,” Heilbronn said, “in a distant era, mankind will laugh at theories like isolating alternative universes and harnessing cosmic strings for time travel—like we scoff at chariots holding up the world.” I copied his poetic words in my confidence-prop notebook. Heilbronn turned his head ninety degrees to read his words on the page, and smiled at me.
“In another universe, Rachel, I’d sign that contract and not worry about screwing over the libraries. Listen, sweetheart, I’m a righteous old man with arthritis and a bit of fame, and I’m not going to sign that paper. I have to wake up every morning as a righteous old man with arthritis and a bit of fame. But that’s the world I accept to be true. I get up, look in the mirror, and seem to think I was there before.”
I thought Heilbronn remarkable. But when I had told this story to Colin, early on in our friendship, before we ever rubbed toiletries on each other’s body parts, he’d said, “Yeah, but how come the righteous bastard didn’t tell you not to waste your humiliating pitch before lunch? I’d say he wanted a longer peek at those New York knockers.” At that, he’d leaned over the Safeway shopping cart to leer down my shirt, and I retaliated with a grab at his crotch.
That night I dreamed Alternate Universe #87239: I’d carelessly left the handcuff key ring near the floor by the chair. Stuart eyed it when he woke up, and released himself. He’d filched Frank’s wallet out of a pocket of my brother’s bad-ass seventies-style quilted leather jacket draped over a chair. We attempted to track Stuart down through the seediest streets of New York, with an obligatory stop at Clinton Street, the area where Frank had taken Stuart for his final score. No one remembered Stuart crawling back to the site, but one of the dealers asked Frank if he wanted his regular nose candy, and it now made sense how he knew to take Stuart down there in the first place. The dealer’s question would taint my respect for Frank for many years to come. But Stuart the drug addict, that fuck of a puck, had disappeared into the night. Over time my whole foray to Australia was erased, like a stray mark on a sheet of Corrasable typing paper, and with it my memories of a far-off mysterious place brimming with glorious horrors and marvels. Like Alice and Dorothy, I moved on. I married an architect and lived by the sea.
But in the universe I accepted to be real (because the next day I knew I was there before), the reason Frank knew about the methadone clinic on East Broadway, and Clinton Street’s menu of goodies, is because he was and always will be the self-appointed King of Things I Know That You Don’t Know. And Stuart was still an illiterate heroin addict chained to the King’s bed. I’d left the key ring on the floor, but Stuart didn’t see anyone or anything when he’d woken up except Lucifer and his horned buddies. There’s a gun under the mattress, quick—rewind and shoot the bored girl waiting for something to happen.
When Frank and I raced to see why Janet had screamed, we saw behind the sheet a feverish, shivering, terrified young man, gnawing his cheeks, choking on chocolate pâté vomit. My one comfort as I think back to that horrifying afternoon, is that Sy Cooper, my Cinema in the Age of Television professor, would have loved this universe. Sy would have had his other class (Frieda’s Tuesday video-production seminar) re-create it with the slow 360-degree pan. Instead of callow mafioso dons-in-training, however, the filmgoer would see three cocky kids of privilege, the sort of kids who studied Film Noir’s and Cinema Verite’s shadows and angles, shocked out of their cocooned, referenced existence.
Janet had crouched on the floor; the two of us were paralyzed, deer in headlights. Frank’s olive complexion, from the Ganelli side of the family, looked greener. He recovered quickest (of course) and found rubber gloves by the sink with which to clear Stuart’s face and throat of his possibly HIV-infected, fudge-colored vomit. I cleaned the floor near the bed with a squeegee mop and rinsed it out by the shower stall. The mop was propped up in a bucket of dirty water for a month afterward, a cat-o’-nine stalk emerging from the millpond.
“You’re going to pull through this, man,” Frank said. He didn’t look so sure. Stuart was oblivious with withdrawal. Janet looked like she wanted to go home. She asked Frank if he thought it was okay to unchain Stuart. Frank nodded. We knew he wasn’t going anywhere, and he was in enough pain.
I answered the ringing phone. Was it the Chinese food delivery guy, lost? It was my mother. Shit!
“Rachel? Didn’t I call Frank? I’m getting ditzy these days. Better start looking into those nursing homes—”
“Not yet Mom, you did dial Frank. I’m hanging out with him this afternoon.” Mom called over to Dad. “He’s eating an orange on the porch. I have to send you and Frank a box. The honeybells from Spike’s Grove are beautiful this year—here he comes—I have your daughter on the phone—can you believe it, Joe? The kids are ‘hanging out.’” She got back on the phone. “That’s great, honey. You two have had such rotten years. Family is important. But it’s funny, Frank and Brice used to torture you, remember? Sticking bits of Slim Jim beef jerky in your after-school doughnuts. Those two were quite the brats. But you used to get your revenge. You’d bite your arm and say Frank did it.”
“You knew?” I forced a little laugh, acknowledging with a tilt of my head the note Frank had slipped under my nose: “Don’t Tell Her.”
“I’m a woman. We have to stick together sometimes. Men are fucks.”
“Thanks, belatedly.”
“Anytime,” she said, lowering her voice. “Do me a favor and don’t tell Daddy that I sent you that extra $200. You’re okay for money, right?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
“Good.” Her normal speaking voice resumed. “You’re still sending your résumé out? Why don’t you swallow your pride and call Bell Press?”
“I really don’t want to work there again, Mom.”
“Well you should be able to get a meaningful job when you put your mind to it. You always have. You’re going to have to start paying the maintenance soon, kiddo. I’d be a bad mother if I didn’t cut off the charity before you get lazy. Three more months, right?”
“Yep. A deal’s a deal.”
“Let’s talk before Daddy and I leave for France. I’m letting Frank know which bank has the safe deposit box—in case anything bad happens—you’d forget.”
“Don’t talk like that.” In the background, Stuart was spewing again.
“Better to be safe. When you’re a mom you’ll understand. Can you put Frank on? Daddy and I haven’t heard from him for ages.”
Six hours later, Frank made us pancakes from an all-in-one mix, while Janet held Stuart’s hand. Janet had led him to the bathroom; he had peed in the shower, the toilet too small a target. He looked a millishade better, but in no condition to be left alone. Frank had been right after all; we had to take turns working and sleeping, like Grandpa Ganelli and the men of his immigrant mettle had.
“To earn money to send for their wives,” Aunt Virginia once explained, “three men would sign one lease and sleep in eight hour shifts.” The previous time she’d babysat for me and Frank, she’d told us about the buckets of tomato skins Grandpa had fed hogs back in Italy.
I stared at Frank’s cutlery as he ate his stack of Aunt Jemimas. His fork and knife had once been part of our everyday dinner set. There were black bas-relief circles on their stems, a stainless design to accompany our childhood 1970s orange-and-tan wallpaper. When Frank was done eating, he put on the radio, pricking three holes at a time into the empty blue Styrofoam plate with his fork. The weak-signaled, cutting-edge station WFMU in East Orange, New Jersey, was static hell to listen to; Frank’s loft was less than a mile from the World Trade Center’s master antenna. I tuned the radio to ninety-seven, which I knew would come in loud and clear. The only reason either one of us listened to mainstream radio was for its nonthreatening distraction from crisis. The New York market is too big for the alternative music we otherwise craved.
“In New York, it’s more lucrative to be number four in the baby-boom market than number one for the post–Baby Boomers,” a station sales executive had explained to me during my summer internship interview. Tony Fedele, the program director, wanted me to meet the whole staff; he was excited to have attracted such an overqualified candidate, the current president of a major university’s school union, to fetch sandwiches for DJs. I even got to meet the infamous shock jock Howard Stern at the sister station across the hall, and he commented on-air that the new intern by the other elevator bank looked like Valerie Bertinelli, but with better bazoombies, and Gary his sidekick hummed the theme song from her old sitcom, One Day at a Time. The Adult Contemporary station had a clear-as-a-bell signal. It was owned by one of the Big Three networks, who probably acquired the license soon after Marconi put in his patent. The chief engineer said the two mega-stations could reach Florida under the right weather conditions.
I listened in the loft as Frank and Janet compared their assessments of Stuart’s condition. The station played the same Mommas and Poppas song that had been in rotation the night I bid adieu to my internship and DJ-lover.
Stuart shat on the sheets. He’d been constipated since the night after I met him at Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop. Janet and I rolled him over to change his linen. She put on the rubber gloves and wiped his ass with a dishrag.
“I’ll do that, Janet,” I said. “You’re going a hell of a ways beyond the call of duty.”
“It’s not a problem.” I loved her and her loyalty so much that I wanted to kill her. Janet had to go home to feed her pets, and I hugged her.
“I’ll never judge you again.”
“Rachel, you’ll be judging me until you die. But it’s okay. I know I pass muster.” I had to hand it to her for that comment. She was getting down the New York stance.
I hated this all-in-one-pancake-mix world and told it so under my breath. Frank had passed out on a pile of pillows near his stereo. I took one of Frank’s travel books from the bookcase that he carried off the street with a friend—The Lonely Planet Guide to Chile. I ran my finger down the string bean-y map in the front. Frieda once told me about a cultural story she’d been commissioned to produce for a Latino TV show, a freelance video assignment she’d gotten via her Argentinean step-aunt.
In Santiago a folksinger’s arm was cut off during the 1974 military coup, in the middle of a stadium of his fans. The legend goes that he defiantly went back on stage after the soldiers did that, and played guitar with one arm. Then the fuckers shot him.
Frank had been to Chile once, and I went to see if he had a tape or CD by that guy on his rack. Victor something. Of course he did: Victor Jara. I listened to a song called “El Niño Yuntero,” which the notes said means “child of the yoke.” It was eerie and soothing. Was Stuart catching my eye? No, he was grimacing into space. The two of us were exhausted.
I sunk into Frank’s ten-dollar Salvation Army beanbag thinking about Sy Cooper, the month he learned he was going to be fired, the month he told me and Janet to harden our souls. Sy Cooper’s favorite director was Mike Leigh who wasn’t so well known then. It was hard for Leigh to attract a widespread audience for his relentless films about the underbelly of the U.K. While his characters are always no-hopers, Leigh never condemns them or puts them on a pedestal. There are bastards in the lower classes, and there are near saints. The hilarious scumbags are more interesting though. Sy revered Leigh, although not as much as he worshiped Scorcese. Sy was a minor ex-Beat who sold a few of his experimental eight-millimeter films of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to the Museum of Modern Art. He was also an alcoholic.
After Sy Cooper was turned down for tenure, he decided to inflict a mini–Mike Leigh fest on my poor sucker of a class—three films sated with unsympathetic characters: Nuts in May, Death, and Hard Labour. To top off his ad hoc half-semester-long examination of Leigh’s oeuvre of misery, Sy coupled The Man with the Golden Arm, the don’t-use-heroin Frank Sinatra movie, with John Huston’s Fat City, a dirge of a film about a boxer who’s the toy of bad fortune. But for the last class, his píece-de-resistance: he screened Shoah, the harrowing nine-hour subtitled French documentary on the Holocaust, which we were required to sit through.
Janet and I sat next to each other during the film. Janet hunched over the desk in her Henri Grethel sweater, ready to puke at the next mention of a skeletal child. I touched her knee under my desk. “I’m going down with you,” I wrote on the corner of my spiral notebook.
“You’re not going to believe this, one of my grandparents was a Nazi, isn’t that terrible?” Janet scribbled back in tight letters. I blinked theatrically. Was the all-American blood diluted?
“Were either of your Italian grandparents Fascists?” she whispered hopefully.
“In Brooklyn? Probably about the Dodgers,” I said, not quite truthfully and loud enough for Sy to hear. The biggest family scandal had happened at my parents’ wedding when my tipsy Grandma Chaika called Grandma Rosa’s visiting cousin, Sergio, a murderer. According to my mother, my grandmas didn’t speak to each other for five years.
I swear I saw a glint in Sy’s eye when he sat down next to us in one of the many dropped-out student’s seats and said, “Toughen up now, girls, or you’ll be eaten alive.” He was fired that summer for not adhering to the departmentally approved class outline. The establishment might say he wasn’t teaching his students, but Janet and I knew that semester that we were witnessing his swan song.
I needed to toughen up. My ex-flatmate was a long way from recovery, but I had to go to work. I had twenty dollars left.
When Frank woke up, he took over as watchdog. I went downstairs to the corner of Bowery and Grand in search of cheap eats. I bought one-dollar bags of food from Chinese street stalls: broccoli, skinny purple eggplants, six hard-tofu slices, and a fish, species unknown.
I walked home to the apartment to water Mom’s succulents, an emotional break from the loft drama. There were bills for the phone and my student loan payments, and a no-more-excuses jury notice with which I had to contend with in two weeks time. Thank God my parents were picking up the maintenance for another few months.
I played the one message: “Hi, girl, it’s Veemah. I’m back again. I had to sit in on a new show in London.”
Veemah and I had been the only two incoming freshman girls out of five thousand who’d checked both Physics and Media on our college roommate compatibility forms. I was envious of her vision; from the time she was fifteen she knew that she wanted to develop new planetarium shows. “I hear from Miss Frieda that you have a sexy houseguest from Australia. We’re going to smoke you out if you don’t call soon to fill us in.”
I left a message. I knew she wouldn’t be home. “Hi, Veemah, it’s Frieda. I have a big mouth, and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Call me.”
I had to be back at the loft in an hour. I ate humble pie and called Temp Solution again.
“Rachel Ganelli?—Oh sure—you’re still available for temping? I was sure by now you would have secured a full-time job with all that professional experience. Well, I have one job for thirteen an hour, there’s no word-processing involved, but if you didn’t want that school job—”
Okay, bitch, let’s move this along. “Oh no, Selena. I’ll take what you have. I’m in a bind for money. What does it entail?”
“Well, we don’t send many people over there. You have to be ready to deal with it.”
I didn’t care what the job was. Broke is broke.
“It’s a publishing group, but they have, well, pornographic magazines.” When I didn’t say anything she proceeded as if each word was being strung on jewelry wire. “They need a receptionist. The work isn’t hard, but the last person we sent thought that the job was so demeaning that she walked by lunchtime. We haven’t felt that there was someone adequately hardskinned to send over. I wouldn’t have them as a client if I had a choice, but the owner’s our vice president’s cousin, and well, the work is yours for the asking.”
“Is this Playboy?”
“You should be so lucky,” Selena said almost sweetly.
Porno pics I can deal with—as long as I didn’t have to venture out in that cafeteria hairnet.
I was supposed to work at Taitler Inc. for a week, until their receptionist returned from vacation. I made sure I wore the closest thing I had to a potato sack. The office was in a regular midtown glass tower on Madison Avenue, a leftover thousand feet of office space that the law firm on the floor hadn’t yet gobbled up. There was no sign on the door that said TITS INSIDE. Just a plain brown plaque. I was told to ask for Greta, who turned out to be the office manager. A coiffed woman I’d mistake on a bus for a Park Avenue trophy wife.
“Have you been informed by your agency of the type of operation we are in?” Greta asked. She didn’t want a repeat of the suffragette scene from the previous week.
“Yes, don’t worry.” I tried to look nonchalant. “I’m a regular sex shop customer,” I said, which, considering my recent purchase with Janet, was mildly true. Greta looked at me for a second like I was a flasher. She showed me the key for the restroom in the desk drawer, demonstrated the straightforward phone system, and gave me a list of the employees and the fake names they used on the job. Harry Dershowitz was “Moe Turner.” Sherri Ng was “Wendy Hurtz.”
“You might get heavy-breathing calls,” Greta warned, “but don’t worry, it’s horny teenagers who think there must be a naked woman on the other end of our subscription line.” She handed me an assortment of Taitler Inc.’s magazines—in case adult bookstores called with orders. I looked them over while waiting for the aroused teen brigade to ring. The publications were, in a word, smut. A mag for every special interest perversion, a concept not unlike Bell Press’s extremely specialized science journals.
For men obsessed with big butts, there was a periodical called Cr-ASS; women were still giving the standard blow-jobs and getting laid, but each photo was set up so that their behinds took up half the page. There was Black Lesbo Pussy, and Shaved Pussy. I gasped when I saw Incest World. One spread featured a bald middle-age man, with a nose discolored by either skin cancer or alcohol consumption, licking out a young girl’s vagina. I swear I saw him in the office heading toward the water fountain, a fortyish penny-loafered man who later introduced himself as the owner of the company.
“You’re doing a great job,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many girls can fuck up reception.” I’d gone low before, but this was touching the core of the earth.
Instead of calling the FBI Child Porn taskforce, I calculated thirteen by thirty-five hours, thirty-seven point five if I took a half-hour lunch for the week, and grit my teeth. The money wasn’t great, but I had Stuart to support for at least a little while. It wasn’t fair to ask Frank to lay out money.
An assistant art director I recognized from Bell Press (a dim and tan-in-February bull who had once asked me if Ganelli was a Swedish name) appeared in the late afternoon to drop off freelance mechanicals. We pretended not to know each other.
Nine hours had elapsed back at the ranch; when I returned Stuart was sitting up. “Well, hi,” I said, surprised. He had showered, too. I had interrupted Stuart and Frank in an instructional game of two-up, an Australian coin-tossing game that World War I soldiers, the diggers, had played to pass time. I guess Stuart thought an American quarter was an okay substitution. Frank had ordered another pizza.
“Hi,” Stuart said, embarrassed. He was scratching himself on the arm.
I rested my butt near where they were sitting. Stuart still smelled metallic from withdrawal, with an extra whiff of apple pectin shampoo. “I didn’t expect to see you up yet. What have you been talking about?”
“I told Frank about me dog Sylvester.”
Stuart had a dog named Sylvester? In our two years as flatmates, he told me three intimate facts: an almost boastful claim that his father was killed in Vietnam picking up a dead baby stuffed with a grenade (which I didn’t believe); his heroin-teeth acknowledgment; and that he’d do anything for Melissa, the girlfriend who’d started him on the downward spiral. It wasn’t the time for jealousy again, but did everyone always have to fall in love with Frank’s charm?
“I was about to tell Stu about your turtle,” Frank said, flipping the quarter—obviously not a good flip since Stuart took a handful of Frank’s jelly bean pile.
I tried to mimic Frank’s easy style. It sounded forced. “Frank convinced me that turtles like merry-go-rounds and got me to leave Mertle on our turntable for hours. He died of dizziness, I think. My mother found my dead turtle spinning round and round.”
Mom had made Frank explain to me that he had done a bad thing and that he was trying to fool me. She tried to follow the Quaker discipline model at our school—no corporal punishment, unlike Colin’s Catholic school with its ruler-wielding nuns.
(“They hit you for anything,” he’d once said, tying up the kitchen garbage—Stuart had long abandoned his job responsibilities. “Sister Patricia once slapped my wrist for my tic acting up.”)
When my Grandma Rosa insisted I go to Sunday school if I was going to go to Hebrew School, Mom made sure she found a class taught by a retired divinity professor who was too riddled with arthritis to hit us. Quakers want to be sure that their kids understand what they did wrong; Frank and I learned early on a good bullshit story could get us out of anything.
“I loved that turtle,” I said, and Stuart offered a sympathetic smile.
“But not as much as Brice loved Cookie,” Frank added.
“A fuzzy yellow chick my friend Brice took home from school when I was nine.”
I hadn’t thought of this in years.
“Cookie was hatched in our classroom incubator,” Frank continued. “Everyone got to take a chick home for a few days, but Brice refused to bring his bird back. His divorced mother indulged him, and let Cookie grow into a chicken in their apartment. Cookie shit on everything and pecked holes in their couch until one of Brice’s aunts made his mom send it away to a farm upstate.”
“Did Brice see Cookie again?” Stuart asked, a three year old distracted from a bleeding knee.
“I don’t think so. Anyway, chickens make lousy pets,” Frank finished. “There’s a reason you break their necks and fry them.”
Stuart laughed out loud. His whole face lit up; he could have been a cousin from Odessa, who emigrated the previous week into our kooky, capitalist family. Frank and I knew this story cold, even though years had passed since one of us had retold it. Stuart came from a childhood without narrative. He was taking sanctuary in ours.
“So, hey,” Frank said, “how’s the new temp job?”
“Okay. It’s a magazine company.” I sat down on the mattress. I smiled at Stuart. Maybe he wasn’t such a sore on humanity. “You can come back to my apartment tomorrow, and I’ll help you look for work. We’ll put our brains together, okay?”
“Jesus, Rachel,” Frank said, “Stu’s barely back from the dead. Getting over the need for the Man is hard shit.”
A need for the Man? Stu? Please. “I’m saying it’s okay if you want to move back into the apartment. I took a job this week. You don’t have to worry about money for a week or so. You can watch TV or something. And Frank has a shower stall, I have a bath.”
“Whatever,” Stuart said. I gave Stuart an uncomfortable “you survived” hug and left them alone for a few minutes while I chilled out by the radio.
No one had moved the dial since Frank last turned it on. It was the top of the hour. Richard, the ingredient-reading DJ I’d bonked during my internship summer, played the station ID audio cart. He announced the time and the weather. Then he popped in the contest cart from the promotions department. Oh, sloppy, Richard. I could hear him putting in the cart.
The promo featured Richard’s voice over an old INXS hit, “What You Need.”
“Give us watcha need, watcha need,” cooed lead singer Michael Hutchence.
“I know watcha need,” Richard said, “two tickets to Madison Square Garden for the June sixteenth Foster’s Down Under Tour featuring INXS. Opening act is the Tall Poppies, who’ll perform their hot new hit ‘Gnome.’ Listen for your chance to win.” A second of Phillip’s chorus kicked in, “Like a Gnome I’m contorted. I’m a Gnome”—, and then the climax of the promo, a final “watcha need!”
I clenched the armrest of my chair in disbelief.
Richard went back live to the mic. “On your mark, listeners, the ninety-seventh caller gets a stuffed koala from the Steiff Toys World Heritage animal collection, and a chance to enter our grand prize drawing. Five grand prize winners and their guests will be driven to the INXS concert in a stretch limo, and escorted to their front row seats. Up next is Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, with one of my favorites, ‘Young Girl.’”
I heard Frank asking Stuart about the best pizza slice in Melbourne. They had not heard a word of the promo. I kept my mouth shut about this sudden development, a new concept for a Ganelli. I shut off the radio and put up the kettle. I looked for the bible Aunt Virginia gave me for Communion but settled on Frank’s new copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide. I put my finger on Citizen Kane. Let the wild Indians storm the cabin; I had strength in my heart. Frank moved past turtles and chicks, and was on to describing his first two-wheeler to Stuart. I was not having fun.