That Would Be Me (dot net)

Many years ago I got into the habit of answering the ubiquitous question, “How are you?” by saying, “Dandy, how are you?” Most people just smiled and said they were fine. I was working in a law office in Los Angeles at this time and there was one lawyer who worked there, a junior partner, tall, smart, proper, very straight and very New England reserved. When I answered his salutation with my usual, “dandy, how are you?” he looked at me for a brief moment then said, “Foppish,” and sauntered down the hall with the bearing of a man who was very secure in his intellectual prowess and dry wit. I still admire him after all these years.

I rarely say “dandy” anymore, although I’m not sure why. I have found recently that I answer that question with the word “fabulous.” A friend once said to me that he could tell how good I really was doing by how long I stretched out the first syllable. “Only two ‘A’s today?” he’d say. If it were a one “A” fabulous, it was merely a good day. A five “A” fabulous would likely send one into convulsions of ecstacy. I think I usually hover around three.

I like the word fabulous. Okay, yes, it sounds really gay, but so the hell what. And they called Frank Sinatra fabulous and no one would ever consider calling him gay. I dare you to say you’re fabulous and, at least for the few moments you’re saying it, not actually feel fabulous. It’s impossible. The vibrational tones of that particular combination of letters won’t let you. I challenged one of the tellers at the bank I go to to try it. The next time I was at her window, I asked if she had. She said she’d tried it once and it didn’t work. I said to try it one more time. The next visit I was at a different window. That teller asked me how I was and I simply said “Fine.” The first teller called over three windows to say, “well, I’m fabulous!” She smiled and so did I. She was, indeed, fabulous. It works, I tell you.

More people should say they were fabulous. The more they say it, the more fabulous they’d be. President Bush should say it. If he were fabulous he might not be so inclined to incite war and strife all over the place. Andy Rooney should say it. At least momentarily he wouldn’t be so grumpy. It probably wouldn’t last with him, but we can all savor moments.  We should start a movement. The Be Fabulous Movement.  “How are you? You’re fabulous, of course!” It would be the only acceptable answer.

I think it’s a dandy idea.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

“You are now officially an old lady,” he said to me when he saw the pothos cuttings in a vase on my kitchen windowsill. That was five or six years ago. I told him the pothos needed trimming and it was a waste to just throw the cuttings out. He shook his head sadly. They are still there. Pothos like to grow long tendrils and look sickly odd if you don’t trim them back. If you do trim them back, the plants can become full, lush and bountiful. I liked my plants lush, so I trimmed the pothos and put the cuttings in water to root.  Sometimes I then replant them. It doesn’t make me an old lady.

Steve is a guy. He loves sports and women and action movies. And grilling steaks on a raging barbeque fire. He also loves cooking a delicate spaghetti sauce, but that is how straight Italian men behave. I’m also Italian and love making a good sauce, but prefer a Scandinavian tear-jerker to an action movie and date men. When I date. Which isn’t often. (I tell people that, if being gay means you sleep with men, I’m not gay anymore. It usually gets a laugh.)

So it was with a bit of glee that I chuckled when Steve called me a few moments ago and asked if I wanted the cuttings from his pothos. They were already rooted, he said, and there wasn’t any room for them in his pot.

I reminded him of his previous response to cuttings. He said that must have been someone else. I love inconsistencies in people. It’s part of what makes good writing interesting. It’s part of what makes people interesting. As famously gay Walt Whitman once famously said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

But the main point is that Steve is now officially an old lady.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

Yes, I’m verbose.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

It didn’t take the movie The Italian Job for me start coveting a Mini Cooper. The first time I saw one, I decided it would be my very next car. I was then driving a black 1988 Nissan Sentra, a wholly practical, dependable, sensible, staid box of a car. I loved my Sentra, who I named Sebastian, but had ridden him hard and long for almost 20 years with only spotty maintenance and care. It is a miracle (and testament to Nipponese technology) that the poor thing had lasted as long as it did, but it had gotten to the point where everything was bent, corroded or falling off. I held up the driver’s seat with a big plastic crate in the back seat. Really. Without the crate, I would have had to drive in the luge position.

Once I became aware of them, I started noticing Minis everywhere. It was funky, odd, more in keeping with how I was beginning to see myself. I set my sights on a red Mini and began to save. Then I saw a review of the new convertible which said, “they’re so cute you want to pinch the fender.” I went onto the Mini web site and “built” my own, personal car - convertible, bright orange (a new color for them, then, even more funky then the red I’d planned on), with white wheels and bonnet stripes and lots of internal customization.

Of course I’d never been in a convertible, much less driven one, and didn’t want to spend all that money and decide a month later that I hated the thing. I found a car rental place that had one on it’s lot. It was even the same color I wanted, bright orange. No bonnet stripes, but that was completely beside the point. I rented it for a week. Two minutes off the lot, I knew I had to have that car.

Sebastian was well past the need for retirement and I finally had the money, so I had a friend drive me down to the Mini dealership. They had one on the lot that was very close to exactly what I wanted. The rag top color was wrong and it had a few extras I wasn’t interested in, but it was the end of the month and they wanted to get their stats up so I was able to negotiate them down to a very nice price, insisted they make a couple of modifications and wrote a check for the down payment.

A week later another friend drove me back to the dealership. There, in the showroom, was my car. Bright orange with a black top, white bonnet stripes, white wheels and white mirror covers. It was delightful. The salesmen were standing around it admiring the white mirror caps saying I wasn’t crazy after all. I walked around it, got the “new owner” talk, named it Nigel, put the top down and happily drove it away. The only time after that that the top is up is when it’s raining, freezing or the car is parked.

A year later I took a cross-country trip in Nigel. On the way back, I stopped in St. George, Utah, a fair sized town on the far western end of Utah’s stretch of Highway 70. I was sitting in the car writing down the mileage in my little notebook, but the door was open. A thin, older fellow in worn jeans and a dim white tee shirt looked over my way and said, “What the hell is that?” “A Mini Cooper,” I informed him. He shook his head and said, “I’d rather be shot dead than be seen in something like that.” He was smiling, but I didn’t believe it.

What an extreme reaction, I thought, and considered asking if he wanted a test drive. “It’s a cool car,” I said, completely unruffled, returning his smile. He looked in and studied the dash board. He seemed fascinated and slightly repulsed, like just looking might somehow make his feminine side bubble to the surface. “Does it really go 150 miles an hour?” he asked after seeing the speedometer. I let him know that it did indeed, that they raced them in England where they were made. He shook his head and said, “It’s just wrong, somehow,” and walked away. He had the same crooked smile the whole time, as if to say, “I really don’t like your kind, but this is a bright, public place and I can’t get away with stomping you.”

What a hoot. If I hadn’t already loved my little car I did then. It makes small minded people uncomfortable. It would really be poetic if I then sang sixties folk songs for the next twenty miles. I didn’t, of course, but my heart cockles were warm.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

One two three four five
He thinks he’s written a poem
Instead, it’s just words

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

As a young boy in the remote New Jersey town called Flatbrookville, I hated peas, those grey-green orbs piled on my dinner plate threatening to roll over into the mashed potatoes (a favorite) and pollute Grandma’s wonderful pot roast.  They smushed on my tongue into a slimy mess that tasted unnatural with an undercurrent of vaguely chemical sweetness.  And heaven defend us when they appeared surreptitiously in an otherwise wonderful beef stew, nestling among the carrots.

I was not a picky eater.  Both my mother and grandmother were wonderful cooks and I liked almost everything they made, except fish (more to do with small bones than flavor), Brussel sprouts (everything wrong with a cabbage, condensed) and, of course, peas.  I ate everything put before me, I was, generally, a well behaved child.  I have fond memories of most meals: pasta with summer sauce, home-made ravioli stuffed with spinach and cheese or luscious Italian sausage filling, corned beef, venison, al olio, pasta con pesto.  The simple mention of these staples make me salivate.

But occasionally my dinner plate was offended by peas.

One morning when I was, perhaps, eight or nine, I “lost” my breakfast and had to stay home from school.  My mother had planed at day trip to visit our Aunt Lou, a two hour drive in each direction.  The other kids were in school and Grandma had the business to run, so I went along for the visit.  Shortly after we got there, it became obvious that I didn’t have a typical flu and Aunt Lou insisted we visit her doctor.

It was acute, gangrenous appendicitis.  I was rushed to the hospital and prepped for emergency surgery.  I was told that my appendix actually burst in the doctor’s hand as he removed it.  I’d been twenty minutes away from major complications or even death.  But I was kid from a large Italian family and all I knew was that I was getting individual attention from doctors, nurses, and even my mother and Aunt Lou.  It all seemed a fair trade.  

A day or so later I was lying in bed, one vestigial organ lighter, when the doctors started me back up on solid food.  The vegetable in my first dinner was peas.  But they were unlike any pea I had ever encountered.  They were bright green, almost shiny, a pat of butter was melting on top of the small pile, its edges taking on the contours of these tiny marvels.  I tasted one.  No smush!  No slime.  It actually popped when I bit down on it.  And the sweetness.  The wonderful sweetness.  I pondered this for some time, then finally asked my mother.

“Well, they were probably frozen,” she said.

Frozen.  We didn’t get frozen vegetables at home.  We either got fresh (corn or green beans from a neighbor’s garden) or canned.  It was a different time.  Even my Italian grandmother used canned vegetables.

I haven’t allowed canned vegetables in my house since I moved out on my own.  And peas are still my favorite meal-time treat.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

Spy Magazine, that wonderful satirical magazine that slowly started losing subscribers as it slowly devolved into a bitch fest, had a great feature called “Logrolling In Our Time” which presented two members of American intelligentsia giving favorable, often glowing critiques of each other on their respective pulpits. It was surprising how many pairs of mutual admirers they could find to keep the feature fed for as many issues as they did. This is a different kind of logrolling, more in line with birling, where a lumberjack perches on a log in the water and spins it with his feet in order to keep his balance. This is an essay inspired by a movie based on a book about a man who wrote a book about a real life event. It is, therefore, at least five times removed from anything that could possibly be considered important to anyone. And so I roll the log.

The movie, of course, is Infamous, which I finally saw last night on cable, about Truman Capote writing his masterpiece (and artistic swan song) In Cold Blood. In this movie Sandra Bullock proves she can really act, disappearing completely into her role. I don’t know if she accurately portrayed Harper Lee, I’ve never met, seen or watched video of the diminutive writer, but Bullock convinced me, at the very least, that she was someone other than Sandra Bullock. It is also a movie in which Daniel James Bond Craig plays one of at least two conflicted gay men he has portrayed on-screen. This essay, you may have guessed, is not about them. The log continues to spin under my feet.

It is, moreover, not about why we are as fascinated by the masterful In Cold Blood as we are by Capote, the silly, pretentious little gossip who wrote it. So fascinated that, within a year, there were two movies made about him creating it. (And there was a movie based on the “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. And there was the Broadway play, called Tru, about Truman’s last years, as he faded into obscurity after bitterly betraying his high society friends by telling all their tales in one of the few books he was able to write after finishing In Cold Blood. And the television special based on the play. It’s not about those, either.) I think the reasons we are fascinated by him and by it, even though he and it seem on opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, are really one thing: Voyeurism. We are a nation of voyeurs. We love getting inside the minds of criminals, watching them plan and execute their crimes. And then we love watching them be caught and punished for the crimes. We also love a gossip. And we surely love watching a gossip crumble and die. We love watching. And I love watching us watch. I’m a voyeur of voyeurs. Even though I’ve never read the book In Cold Blood. But, as you may have surmised, this essay is about none of that. I almost lost my balance for a moment, there.

So what, exactly, is this essay about? It started with a description of how a defunct magazine feature relates to a movie based on a book about a man who wrote a book about a real life event, then moved into a condemnation (or celebration, perhaps) of voyeurism and a confession of talking about something I don’t know anything about. It is about the random connections our spinning minds make, connecting immediate input with data stored so long ago its accuracy might be questioned, and thinking, in the moment the connections occur and coalesce in our conscious minds, that we have discovered or realized something brilliant that others will be moved or intrigued to read or hear. I have just plunged into the icy water and the log is now spinning on its own, quite out of my reach.

It’s not about anything, ultimately. It is logrolling. There is a website that sells a tee shirt that says, “More people have read this shirt than your blog”. I think I’ll buy that shirt. It makes me laugh every time I think about it.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I’m tempted to start this post with a fart or nose picking joke. You see, I have been told by many people who should know that my humor is too intelligent and I want to get along.

Hello, my name is Geoff and I’m a recovering intellectual. It all began in grade school when I started reading Shakespeare in secret. I started small, Twelfth Night was all I could handle. Eventually, of course, I moved up to Love’s Labour’s Lost, then on to Julius Caesar and Hamlet. By junior high, I was up to two or three monologues a week. By my senior year in high school I was mainlining Buckminster Fuller.

It came to a head about two years ago. They found me wandering around the West Side of Los Angeles. I was listening to Joni Mitchell on my headset, muttering passages from the Bhagavad-Gita. I was clutching a Thesaurus and had a copy of Jung’s treatise on male archetypes in my back pocket.

I was incarcerated. They only let me out when I agreed to enter the program. Now, thanks to my sponsor and my Higher Power, I have been clean and stupid for six months.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“

There is a dentist who has an office just under ours in the building where we have our office. He has a late model BMW. Not even a particularly nice late model BMW. Whenever he drives it to work, he spends several minutes putting a custom fitted cloth covering over it. The covering has snug little mittens for the side-view mirrors and a little plastic window for the licence plate. I wonder. Does the cost of this cover and the time it takes to put on and take off every day really make up for not having to take the silly car to the car wash every few weeks?

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“

I recently moved from a little guest house that I’d been living in for fifteen years to a two bedroom house with a great, rustic, overgrown back yard complete with brick patio covered with wood trellising, a quaint seventies type rock fountain and a kidney shaped pool. Just to the side of the patio is a raised area that could be used as a garden and on the other side is a tiny little pond. The pond had originally been built with a small wooden foot bridge over it. Very quaint.

For some odd reason, the previous tenant decided to fill both the raised garden and the pond with sand and had removed the foot bridge from the pond. The landlady said she’d wanted to make the place look like Tahiti. I thought it just made it look silly, so I made an agreement with the landlady that I’d remove the sand and refill the pond with water if she had the foot bridge replaced.

Two weeks ago I finally got around to begin digging the sand out of the pond. Not sure what to do with the sand once it wasn’t in the pond, I figured I’d just put it in the black trash bin that the city provides for each house in Los Angeles. After a short while, I got tired and my back began to ache, so I gave up for the weekend. The trash bin was only about a quarter full of sand. I get tired very quickly these days, it seems. I guess I am fifty-one after all. I wheeled the bin out front for trash collection day and all was well with the world.

This week, I decided it might be best to just hire a day worker to dig the rest of the sand out. I brought the trash bin out back and in very short order the young fellow had filled it to the brim. I helped him drag it out front for collection day and got out big lawn bags for the rest of the sand. He filled about five or six of them, smartly about a quarter full each so they could be picked up with out bursting. I told him to leave those in the back and I’d decide what to do with them later. He was done with the entire task in about an hour and a half. Clearly, he is younger then I.

While dragging the trash bin out front, I thought it may be way too full and therefor way too heavy. I had a vision of the big forked arm that lifts the trash bins up to empty into the top of the garbage trucks straining, and possibly even breaking, from the weight and strain of it. I considered calling the trash department and telling them there was a bin full of sand and getting their recommendations on disposing of it. I also considered taking some of the sand out so it wouldn’t be too heavy. I didn’t do any of these things.

Driving home from the office last Friday sometime after eight p.m. I wondered what I would encounter. Pulling up to my driveway, what I encountered was the black trash bin tipped on it’s side, sand pouring out of it, one wheel broken off and the lid snapped off and laying in the street. I tried to lift the bin up so I could at least drag it from the curb, but it was way too heavy. I briefly considered just leaving it there and going in to get a stiff drink. Of course, it was kind of hanging over into my neighbor’s driveway, so I couldn’t do that. I thought about just shoveling the sand onto the parking strip so I could lift the bin, but then what would I do with the sand. Again, the whole neighbor thing. I’m new in the neighborhood and want to reveal myself more subtly than that.

Finally, I called my writing partner Steve, who came over and helped me scoop sand out into more lawn bags until the bin was light enough to lift to an upright position and drag up my driveway. (Good old Steve.) We also scooped and swept most of the sand from the parking strip and my neighbor’s driveway. I wonder if they or any of the other neighbors were watching all this. I wonder if they were amused.

Now I have five or so garden trash bags full of sand in the back yard, perhaps ten bags full of sand at the side of my driveway, a broken, city supplied trash bin still a quarter filled with sand at the side of my driveway and I haven’t even begun to remove the sand from the little garden area in back.

And the pond still isn’t a pond. I haven’t put any water in it, yet, because the bottom of it is cracked.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“