The Puddle Flick

Isn’t it weird how sometimes, apropos of nothing, a random and seemingly inconsequential memory just pops into your head, with surprising clarity? That happened to me the other night. I’m sure it was at least partially triggered by having watched Mad Men earlier in the evening, what with all the smoking that goes on.

In the summer of 1982 I was 17 and had just finished my junior year of high school, the year in which I began my illustrious career as a juvenile delinquent. I failed two of my classes for the year and had to go to summer school to make them up. If you’ve never had to go to summer school, let me tell you, it bites. The only good part about it was that I could drive there: I was a newly-licensed driver and had inherited from my mom a red 1968 Volkswagen Beetle, which is a really great car to have as your first set of wheels. I loved that Bug, man. I could cruise for a week on two dollars worth of gas (of course, it was regular leaded gas and cost about 49 cents a gallon, but still), and park it anywhere, although the manual steering meant that parallel parking was a test of upper-body strength. I could even push it by myself if I had to, and sometimes I did. The dashboard had exactly two buttons on it, one for the lights and one for the wipers. It had an AM-only radio and a top speed of about 50 miles per hour. My favorite thing was the little triangular window in front of the regular window, which you could aim right at your face when cruising on a hot day. Like, for instance, on your way to summer school.

Awesomeness in vehicular form.

My first class of the day was English (yes, I’d failed English), and it was pretty much filled with other delinquents. The teacher had a “this is summer school, you don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here, let’s just get through this with a minimum of effort” kind of attitude, so it wasn’t too terrible. I constructed all of my vocabulary-test sentences using the names of bands or songs (I remember that one of the words was credence, which I turned into a sentence about Creedence Clearwater Revival, which for some reason impressed the teacher), and I wrote a book report on No One Here Gets Out Alive.

My second class was Analysis & Trigonometry. There were only four other students, and they were all taking it as an advanced course, to get a jump on their next year. In other words, they were there--in summer school--voluntarily. Like, on purpose. The part of me that remains an eternal adolescent still cannot wrap her head around that. So there I was, the sole delinquent in a class of math nerds who actually wanted to learn. The class was like, two and a half hours long, so the teacher would periodically give us ten-minute breaks, before which he’d always say, “We’re gonna take a break, so go outside, smoke a cigarette, whatever.” It struck me as odd, because there was no way those goody two-shoes mathies smoked. I, however, did.

I’d taken up the habit the previous summer, when I was visiting my grandparents in upstate New York along with my cousin B., who had already started smoking. After they’d turned in each night, B. and I would steal some of Nana’s cigarettes and a couple of Pop-Pop’s beers, and we’d walk up to a church at the end of their street, where we’d sit against the wall and smoke and drink, and talk about how exciting it was to be cartwheeling on the brink of independence. Not explicitly, of course, but that was the underlying theme.

I’ve always said there’s only one reason people start smoking, namely to be cool, although I’m sure that’s not really the only reason. For instance, there are places, cultures, or times when smoking is simply de rigueur, like the early-’60s advertising world of Mad Men. In my case, however, I started smoking because I desperately wanted to shed my image as a bookish nerd. I wanted to be cool. So I kept smoking when I got back home that summer, even though it’s not an easy habit to get in the swing of. Seriously, you have to really want to smoke, because it is so gnarly at first. But I really wanted to.

Coolness didn’t come from simply being a smoker, though. There’s a process involved in smoking, and every part of that process contributed to the amount of coolness conferred upon you. None of it was ever made express, of course. You just had to figure it out as you went along. Obviously, the brand of cigarettes you smoked was first on the list, but that wasn’t too difficult to suss out: pretty much everybody I knew smoked Marlboros. Marlboro Lights were also acceptable, but definitely carried fewer cool points. So I started smoking Marlboros, which was nice because my dad also smoked them, and I could steal a couple from him when I ran out. I started out buying the flip-top boxes because that’s what my dad bought (and I have to point out that a pack of cigarettes cost 85 cents at the time. Eighty-five cents! Change for your dollar! It seems crazy now that something that brings so much pleasure could cost so little), but quickly learned that soft packs were cooler. To open the pack in the coolest way, you would pull the red tab around and take off the top part of the cellophane, but leave the rest of the cellophane on so you could stick a book of matches in there. The top of the pack was foil with a band over the middle, and you’d unfold one side of the foil and then tear it off, leaving a hole big enough for maybe four cigarettes. To get one out, you’d put your index finger over most of the hole and do a quick flick of the wrist that, if performed correctly, caused a single cigarette to slide about halfway out. You’d then put the end of the cigarette in your mouth and smoothly pull the pack away.

Lighting a cigarette coolly was a bit more complex. Your choices for lighting were, in ascending order of coolness, cardboard matches, disposable lighters, wooden matches, and refillable metal lighters. There were exceptions, though—if, for instance, you were one of those people who could light a cardboard match not by plucking it from the book and using three or more fingers to hold and strike it, but by leaving it attached and folding it over so that the match head met the striking surface, then flicking it with just your thumb to light it, you were awarded substantial cool points. (I was not one of those people.)

Once the cigarette was lit--well, then things got really complicated. The different ways of holding a cigarette, putting it in your mouth, inhaling and exhaling, flicking the ashes, etc., all of which probably seem to a non-smoker fairly straightforward, are in fact so byzantine that to enumerate them and their attendant coolness points here is a greater task than I’ve set out to accomplish. Let’s move on to what’s actually relevant to this post, which is putting the cigarette out. Again, to the uninitiated it probably seems pretty simple: stub out the butt and walk away. And indeed, you could do that. But where do you stub it out? In an ashtray? Sure, if there’s one around, but if not, where? On the ground? Against a wall? On the bottom of your shoe? In your hand? I’m kidding on that last one, nobody does that in real life. But all of the other ones are viable options, and there are many others, all with varying degrees of coolness.

Do you see how overwhelming all of this can be? Most of the time, I went with the “throw it on the ground and crush it with your shoe” tactic. A classic, to be sure, and nothing to be frowned upon in those days when no one cared about the planet except Woodsy the Owl and the Crying Indian--but nothing special, either. I wanted something better. Something cooler. I wanted to execute The Flick. And I don’t mean just any flick, either. Anybody can do a basic flick: rest the butt on the pad of your thumb and hold it in place with the nail of your middle finger, then flick your finger forward and send the butt arcing through space. Easy, right? But with The Flick, there’s no arc, and that’s the key: The Flick sends your smoldering remnant of tobacco-y goodness rocketing into the Earth with the speed and truth of an arrow from the bow of a fucking Amazon, to explode in a shower of orange sparks. It is, in a word, cool.

Making it even cooler was the fact that the people I knew who regularly discarded their butts using The Flick executed the maneuver in a totally casual manner. They barely seemed to impart any energy into their Flicks, yet those tiny cylinders were launched as if they’d been Flicked by the Incredible Hulk. And they’d always start to turn away even as they were Flicking, as though they’d become so accustomed to successful Flickage that it wasn’t a big deal. “What’s that, a cigarette smashing into the pavement at 90 miles an hour and creating a mini Fourth of July display? Like I haven’t seen that a million times. Have they refilled the vending machine with Ho-Hos yet?”

A variant of The Flick was The Puddle Flick. A Puddle Flick was executed just like a regular Flick, but was even more impressive in that the Flicker had to hit a clear target, namely, a puddle or other nearby collection of water. Properly done, The Puddle Flick instantly extinguished your butt with a satisfying fssst, and carried the bonus of insulating you from the opprobrium of indignant hippies concerned by a burning stub left on the ground: “Hey man, you could totally set the grass on fire, man.” It was my burning--pun totally intended--desire to one day execute a perfect Puddle Flick. I practiced often, but could never quite get it down. I think I focused too much on imparting enough force to achieve the necessary velocity, and not enough on finger mechanics, to the detriment of the entire operation. Typically it seemed that most of the force was directed at my thumb. Either that or it was directed too far to one side of the butt, which just sent it spinning miserably to the ground a few inches from my feet.

OK, so here’s the actual memory I was talking about before this enormous digression: I was at summer school, in Analysis class, and the teacher called a break. The math nerds all stayed inside to like, do extra credit or something. I went out to cop a smoke. When I got outside, there was a dude with a boombox. I don’t know if he was listening to a tape or the radio, but I clearly remember that the song playing was “Mr. Crowley” by Ozzy Osbourne. There was also a chick sitting on the steps. They were both smoking, of course. I didn’t know either of them--something I forgot to mention back at the top is that my high school didn’t offer summer classes, so I was taking them at another school--but this chick was like, a perfect specimen of genus Newjerseyus, species burnoutus, subspecies metalheadus. She had the look that I totally coveted but could never hope to achieve: her dark hair was feathered, as was the norm, but like most burnout chicks, and in opposition to the general female populace, who styled and shellacked their ’dos to within a inch of their lives, the feathers hung lankly in her face. Her eyes were lined heavily in black, but the rest of her face was bare. She had the kind of full-lipped pout that always looked sexy when smoking. Purple feather earrings hung from her lobes. She was wearing a faded baseball jersey, white with periwinkle sleeves; soft, well-worn Levi’s with big holes in the knees; and black moccasin boots with fringe that, oh my god, I totally saw on sale at Nordstrom the other day! I can’t believe they’re back in style after all these years! Since she was sitting down I can’t be sure, but I’m willing to bet there was a bandanna, probably red, in her back pocket.

I sat on the other side of the stairs and smoked my cigarette. I probably exchanged burnout-style pleasantries with my compatriots, but I don’t actually remember if I did. What I remember is that when I was finished, I stood up and prepared to extinguish my cigarette butt. As I did so, I realized that there was a small puddle perhaps six or seven feet away from me. My mind started racing; I knew that this was a perfect opportunity to attempt a Puddle Flick. If I failed, I was subject to unspoken derision from Boombox Dude and Girl That I Very Much Wished I Could Be. But if I succeeded, here were two people who had never known me as that bookish nerd, and would forevermore recall me only as a totally cool person. I teed up the butt. Straining to appear as casual as possible, while secretly freaking out with every molecule in my body, I Flicked. As if loosed from the bow of Hippolyta herself, the tiny missile flew speedily and unerringly to its target. Fssst. A perfectly executed Puddle Flick. Tens all around, except from the Soviet judge, of course. So stunned was I by the sheer perfection I had achieved that I almost forgot to turn immediately and head back inside. But I did, and as I turned I caught the eye of Girl That I Very Much Wished I Could Be, and she gave me the subtlest of subtle nods, as though to say, “I, who am indeed very cool, acknowledge your similar coolness.” Looking back on it now, I think it may have been one of the finest moments of my life.

The Greatest Three Seconds of Silence in the Universe

I bought a turntable this weekend! I don't know what it says about my life, but this is easily the most exciting thing I've done in a while.

I've been meaning to buy one for a long time, and now and again I'd stop in at various secondhand electronics stores looking for a good used one, but I could never find one that wasn't outrageously expensive given its condition. Apparently the hipsters are digging vinyl now, which I guess is driving up the cost of "vintage" turntables. I finally figured that function mattered more than form, and decided to just buy a new one. You can now get turntables with USB connectors and audio-editing software for digitizing vinyl records, which I thought was a nifty idea, so I went for one of those.

Now, I haven't actually owned any vinyl in nearly 20 years. You may have heard the sad, sad tale of how my entire collection--well over 300 LPs--was stolen from my apartment when I lived in Camden, NJ in the late '80s, a psychic wound from which I'll never recover. Since vinyl was putatively moribund at the time, I switched to buying cassettes (possibly the worst medium ever concocted for transmitting sound) and eventually, with deep reluctance, CDs. (Over the years I've come to a grudging accord with CDs, but my experience of them will forever be colored by the first one I bought: 10,000 Maniacs' In My Tribe. I remember bemusedly staring at my speakers as I listened to it, trying to figure out what was wrong. It sounded airless and cold, like each band member had been hermetically sealed in plastic during recording. And that possibly the recording had been done on the space station from 2001.) But I've been looking forward to the day when I could start amassing a collection again.

I've read that some bands are now forgoing CDs altogether, and releasing their new material on vinyl along with a code that allows the buyer to download the record in digital form as well. May I say that I am kind of in love with this idea? It's absolutely the best of both worlds, and I plan to buy all my new music in that form if it's available. (May I also take a moment to delight, as others have, in the fact that it appears vinyl records will outlive CDs after all, and the sweet, sweet irony therein?) But for the time being, all I really want to do is haunt every record store in Portland and sort through the bins of used LPs.

In fact, after setting up my new turntable, I immediately made a beeline for Everyday Music, which, along with Music Millennium, is where I generally do most of my shopping. I had $20 in cash on me and I made a deal with myself not to spend more than that, but considering that the average cost of a used vinyl record seems to be about two to six dollars, I figured I could get five or six albums with that. I started flipping through the stacks, and instantly I was flooded with memories of the endless hours I'd spent doing the exact same thing as a teenager. Just the sensation in my hands as I held the upper corners of the records and flipped them forward one after another made me weirdly happy. Real records!

The first thing I came across that I wanted was the Allman Brothers Band's At Fillmore East. Ooooh, how long has it been since I've heard "Stormy Monday"? Gregg Allman can sing the blues like no other white dude, and his brother Duane was one of the few guitarists who could make a ten-minute jam seem too short. Alas, it was new and not used--and "audiophile quality" at that--and would have taken all of the money I had to spend. I was too excited about leaving with an armful of records, so I moved on.

I made it up to "H" before I reached my spending limit, and here's what I walked away with:

-The Association, Greatest Hits. I've recently become interested in baroque pop--in fact I'm listening to Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra as I write this--and someone recommended the Association as worth checking out. I know their big radio hits--"Cherish", "Never My Love", etc.--but I'm looking forward to digging a bit deeper into their catalog.

The Bangles, All Over the Place. This is one that I used to own. The tale of the Bangles is a sad but all-too-typical tale: this, their first album, was a flop, and after it flopped their record company gave them a makeover (by putting them in garish outfits that were hideous even by 1980s standards, which is really saying something), pushing Susanna Hoffs as the main focus onstage and onscreen, and "polishing" (read: crapping synthesizers all over) their sound. I hate everything the Bangles did post-makeover, but I love this record. It's a great hybrid of garage rock and jangle pop, and would be worth buying even if it only contained their dreamily sublime cover of Katrina and the Waves' "Going Down to Liverpool".

Blondie, Eat to the Beat. Another one from the old collection, and probably my favorite Blondie album. "Dreaming" is such an incredible pop song, and--speaking of dreamily sublime--"Shayla" still kills me every time I hear it. I'm so glad to have this album again.

Ellen Foley, Nightout. Foley was known, if she was known at all, as a musical foil to the likes of Meat Loaf and Ian Hunter rather than for her own work. I've never heard this record but I've always thought she had one of the most amazing voices in rock. More on that in a future post.

Heart, Dreamboat Annie. The Heart that I knew growing up was the '80s Heart, with their gross power ballads and videos that used camera tricks in a vain and sad attempt to hide Ann Wilson's weight. Classic rock radio played their earlier hits from the '70s, of course, but it was impossible to extricate that past from the then-present, and...well, long story short, I never liked Heart. Then one day, several years ago, I was at a vintage clothing store in Berkeley and I heard a beautiful song playing. I asked what it was, and turns out it was the title track to Dreamboat Annie, their 1976 debut. I've had a mental note ever since to pick it up when I got the chance. This was the record I put on when I got home, and I must say it makes a perfect accompaniment to an autumn afternoon in the Northwest.

I never realized how much I missed the ritual of putting on a vinyl record. Pulling the sleeve out of the cover, slipping the record out of the sleeve and balancing it with my thumb on the edge and fingers on the label, slipping it over the spindle....

And then, lifting the needle. Hearing it drop with that deeply satisfying ka-thunk, followed by the greatest three seconds of silence in the universe. The silence in which I wait, electric with anticipation, for my soul to be filled with real music once again.

Il était avec son chien.

Sixty-eight years ago on this date, a dog fell in a hole. In France. The dog's name was Robot.

You guys know that I'm a cat person, but it's a good thing Robot's master wasn't, since a cat would likely have noticed the hole and gone around it. But Robot, probably galumphing along after a rabbit or something, tongue trailing like Isadora Duncan's scarf, did not notice the hole. He plunged straight down and couldn't get out again.

To rescue the pup, Robot's master and his three friends clambered down into the hole, which turned out to be a cave, and a rather large one at that. It also turned out that les quatre garçons were not the first humans to have visited the cave. Some seventeen millennia prior, a number of highly skilled Cro-Magnon artists had covered its walls and ceiling with thousands of paintings of animals, for reasons that are still being debated.

The reasons, while they'd be nice to know, aren't important ultimately. What's important is that the Lascaux cave paintings are among the first expressions of the human spirit through the medium of art. They're also breathtakingly beautiful.

Horsie!

I've been fascinated by cave paintings ever since I took a two-semester survey of art history during my first year of college. (That course, by the way, remains one of my favorite educational investments. I love the fact that I can identify a Modigliani on sight, or point out the differences between Gothic and Romanesque architecture, or discuss the significance of the archaic smile. I love even more the fact that those things have actually come up in recent conversations.) When C.* and I went to France in 1996, one of the things I most wanted to do was see some actual cave paintings. Lascaux itself has long been closed to the general public, after it was discovered that the build-up of carbon monoxide from the exhalations of thousands of visitors was causing the paintings to fade. (And apparently there's a now a serious threat from fungi--see here. I haven't had time to peruse that site yet, but I definitely plan to. If there's anything we can do, we need to do it.) A replica cave was built down the road from the actual site, and it's supposed to be quite popular, but...if it ain't the real thing, I'm just not interested.

Anyway, I learned of another site near Les Eyzies (and if you're not in a random-link-following mood, the Les Eyzies tourist office would like you to know that it "proposes you to discover its local gastronomy" and "its lodgings of quality in hotels, campings and lodgings") that is not nearly as spectacular as Lascaux, but does offer the chance to view some actual Paleolithic paintings and carvings.

Well, to make a long story short, manipulating the French rail system to get where we wanted to go and do what we wanted to do in the time we had allotted proved too daunting a task. We ended up in a town about 10 km away from Les Eyzies called Sarlat. It has a gorgeous medieval center and great food (Southwest France being the truffle capital of the world, everything had shaved truffles on it--yum), and we stayed in the home of une très gentille dame who spoke no English, which meant I actually got to use my French.

The market square in Sarlat. Seriously.

On our one full day there, we decided to head out to the Dordogne River, some 5 km south, where we'd heard we could rent a canoe. We'd planned to just walk there, but once we got out on the road we realized how extraordinarily hot it was, and decided to hitch a ride instead. I remember almost nothing about the guy who picked us up or his car, because he proceeded to drive at such breakneck speeds that I was unable to unglue my eyes from the road that I was certain we were all about to be splattered upon. I do remember asking, in a vague attempt to engage him in conversation and perhaps get him to slow down, "Alors, est-ce qu'il fait toujours aussi chaud qu'il fait aujourd'hui?" or, roughly, "So, is it always this fucking hot?" His reply, in toto: "Non." Fortunately it was a short ride.

We got to the river in one piece, and got our canoe. There were several other parties who set out at the same time, but as everyone set their own pace we all drifted further from one another, and soon C. and I had the river to ourselves. The water was placid, the scenery was beautiful, the sky was cloudless, and the sun was...hot. I mentioned before that it was really hot, right? Well, now that it was midday and we were out on the water with no shade of any kind, it was really really hot. We started to talk about going for a dip in the river. But as the town where we'd started out fell behind, sheer cliffs began to rise on either side of us, and there was no longer any riverbank where we might beach our canoe. Also, we hadn't had the foresight to bring our bathing suits.

Not us, nor the actual spot. But you get the idea.

Then we rounded a bend, and saw a tiny half-moon of sand and gravel at the base of the cliffs on our right. Up ahead, as behind us, the river curved out of sight. We'd found our spot. We beached the boat, and quickly stripped off our clothes and plunged in. Can you believe that, until that point, I'd never been skinny-dipping before? And the sun was so hot, and that water was soooo deliciously cold, that even though I must've swum in scores of different rivers in my life, not to mention various other bodies of water, I can still remember how that particular water felt against my skin.

At first we were laughing and splashing around, as you do when you're naked in a river. But soon, for reasons neither of us did or could articulate, we fell silent. In fact, it seemed as if the whole world fell silent, except for the soft murmur of the river.

I looked up at the cliffs surrounding us and noticed for the first time that they were pockmarked with small caves. Was it possible, I wondered, that those caves had been used by the Paleolithic humans who'd flourished here so many thousands of years ago? Would they even have been able to reach them? How different was the landscape then, with Europe still emerging from an ice age? It didn't really matter. But for our canoe and our clothes, discarded behind us on the tiny beach, there was nothing of the modern world about. And we, naked under the summer sun, were no different than those who might have laughed and splashed there millennia before. I began to feel a presence in that gorge, as though the benevolent spirits of the long-vanished Magdalenians who had called this land home were looking down upon us from those ancient cliffs. Some of them could conceivably have been my ancestors, but even if they weren't they were my human sisters and brothers, connected to me across time by the same desires and curiosities we all experience. I feel like we generally imagine Paleolithic life to have been harsh, but the abstract of that Britannica article I just linked to indicates that the Magadalenians "lived a semisettled life surrounded by abundant food" and had leisure time in which to create their art, so the calm benevolence of their spirits doesn't seem strange.

It was an incredibly powerful and very real sensation, and I knew that we were both feeling it. We didn't speak for several minutes. We were spellbound.

Finally, the sound of voices from around the bend broke the spell. A canoe came into sight, its occupants chattering loudly. We crouched down to hide our bodies and, after the boat had passed, realized we'd better be getting on so we didn't arrive at the end of the course late and miss our ride back to the starting point.

I'd still like to get back and see the cave paintings at some point. But if I had to miss them, it was worth it for the experience I had on the river that day.


*From time to time there are people I need to talk about on this blog, but either I don't want to mention their names, or I worry that they might not want me to mention their names. So I've decided to do the coy initial thing.