Golf Dreams and Tiger Woods

Drink up for charity

November 11, 2008 | Filed under: News

Charity begins at home, so goes the adage. But I wrote a story in the New York Times today that argues that throwing a party for a cause is the way to go. Given these tough times, it’s no wonder: stay at home and ponder the sick state of the economy, or run out to a bar? Not a tough choice. One of the guys I interviewed, Jonathan Horowitz, co-owner of the Tasting Room in Houston, decided to help the Red Cross one beer at a time. What else, in the wake of Hurricane Ike, would someone without power and a tree in their house want to do but have a drink, happy that a dollar was going to charity and happier still that he, well, had a drink? Likewise, Brian Mak rallied his friends to the party philanthropy cause with: “Let’s not drink our money away. Let’s drink our money away and donate some of it to a charitable organization.” In these tough times, it’s as good of a cri de coeur as any. 

Housing crisis

October 22, 2008 | Filed under: News

The first long magazine piece I’ve written ran in the October issue of Conde Nast Portfolio. My story focused on Bradley Birkenfeld and his role in a scandal that has engulfed UBS. It was a lot of work but I was proud of it in the end. Then a couple of weeks of my life disappeared with the latest - and last - round of repairs to our house. It was the worst one so far, the first instance of really overstepping and getting hit with a mammoth bill. (Who knew a half dozen pine trees could cost so much?) So in a moment of recession-fearing belt tightening my wife and I stayed in on Friday, and I finally got around to reading the rest of the October issue.

What I read was heartening: Michael Lewis, my hero, recently found himself fighting a losing battle against a house that was always going to win. The story of renting the mansion of his dreams in New Orleans is billed as a parable of the subprime crisis, and it is in the sense that all of us want more, particularly when it comes to a home. Overreaching can lay us low and it almost does to him. There was wonderful metaphor midway through the story, the lure of the rabbit hole as it were: “Three weeks later, I noticed a door near the master-bedroom suite that I hadn’t seen before; it was like a magical door that someone had carved into the wall while I slept. What could it be? I opened it to find…another huge dressing room! Inside, I could have fit every stitch of clothing I owned, three times over. It seemed weird to just leave it empty, but I didn’t have anything left to put in it, so I closed the door and pretended the room wasn’t there. But the thought occurred: Maybe I need more clothes.” 

And maybe we needed more trees? Of course not! We wanted them. But I felt consoled. If my hero, the author of such brilliant books as Liar’s Poker and Moneyball could get seduced when he was smart enough to know better, then it was okay. He walked away from the mansion; I look away from that tiny hole in the tree that let’s me see the edge of my neighbor’s god-awful above-ground pool…

The Joke

October 14, 2008 | Filed under: News

I am as fascinated by high-profiled hypocrisy as anyone I know. When Eliot Spitzer was disgraced by his low-life high-jinks, I was absolutely gleeful. It couldn’t have happened to a more self-righteous, hectoring guy! I felt repulsed when the news came out that John Edwards had been screwing around on his wife.  Most of that revulsion came from the fact that his wife is dying of cancer but a good bit of nausea flowed from his Clinton-like choice. 

But we live in the age of hypocrisy. A.I.G. celebrates its $85 billion government bailout by throwing a $400,000 party for its top earners and then asks for another $37 billion - which it receives! Robert Steel, chief executive of Wachovia, scuttles his bank on a raft of bad lending and expansion but gets a lifeline from Citigroup - albeit one that wiped out most of the bank’s equity. A week later Wells Fargo, which had dropped out of the initial bidding, comes back with an offer that guarantees some $225 million in golden parachutes for senior Wachovia executives. Of course, he goes with them!  

But there was a tidbit in today’s paper that struck even my cynical heart as too much. Milan Kundera was a Communist Party informant. The novelist who wrote so passionately about individuals living without fear of having their every action monitored allegedly told the Czech secret police about a man he suspected of being a spy. On that information, the man served 14 years hard labor, after narrowly escaping the death penalty. Kundera has denied it and hopefully his denial is honest.

An apologist could explain this away by saying he was a young, college student and haven’t we all done things then that we regretted later. Gunter Grass, the German Nobel laureate, got himself out of a similar pickle - being in the Waffen S.S. as a blue-eyed boy - by admitting it before anyone could out him.  

Yet if what has been alleged about Kundera is true, it’s far worse than any hypocrisy a politician or financier could indulge in. A Florida Democrat paying a mistress $121,000 in hush money doesn’t matter even though he won his seat from a Republican philanderer: he doesn’t matter in his state, except to supporters looking to collect on favors; he doesn’t matter in Congress, really; and he definitely doesn’t matter to the wider world. He’s insignificant to everyone but his wife and kids, who could quickly learn to get along without him. Kundera, on the other hand, matters immensely. He has connected with millions of people through his books. He’s been held up as an paladin of virtue in the face of totalitarian absurdity. In turn, he has accepted his place among those moral men and women who have risked so much to be heard. If it turns out he once was a Communist informant and now will admit to it, civilization has been dealt a serious blow.

Bellovian bluster

September 12, 2008 | Filed under: News

My favorite quote from any Saul Bellow novel is: “It’s a policy of mine not to argue with irrational people.” It’s from The Actual, a novella he wrote near the end of his life after he had traded the knock-’em-down rigor of Chicago for whatever twee Boston meant to him. By that point, he was on wife number five, and perhaps four divorces had informed that line. It’s genius nonetheless: we all want to argue with people we think are buffoons, who just don’t get it, who are so interminably boorish that they make us want to scream. I have a friend whose physicist brother is so anti-George Bush that he has changed his email to “impeechtheantichrist@” and decamped to New Zealand. For what? George Bush believes what he believes and some outraged scientist isn’t going to sway him. So, Bush goes on being the decider and this poor fellow is living out the 43rd president’s term among sheep.

Of course, like most things in life it’s easier to subscribe to Bellow in theory than in practice. Whenever I recalled that quote in the past, I did so pridefully: I’m not going to descend into the muck and mire with that cretin; I’m going to stay above that. And I did. But I did because whatever the issue was it didn’t matter. George Bush has been a bad president; I can’t do anything about that other than to vote for someone else.

But then the issue started to matter and what did I do? I spoke to the irrational people. Actually, I screamed at them, that, that gaggle of morons! The issue? My wife and I train guide dogs for charity and these people don’t like it. Since my wife owns a condo in their little association in southwest Florida they want to have a say over where we bring these dogs. The Federal government has a say, too, but we as volunteer trainers fall into the gray area between disabled people who are protected and pet owners who would have to comply with the condo’s no pet policy. Our dogs aren’t pets but we’re not blind. Hence the clash of civilized (us) and uncivilized (all of them, naturally). Add to this a bit of hauteur on my part: dear people, this is a 12-unit condo complex in the sunniest part of the sunniest state - do behave! 

The whole thing started absurdly. A fat old man came tearing out of the boat dock, screaming and sputtering at my wife. This was our second visit and I had let my New York guard down. He was yelling something about us having dogs, which was obvious and, we thought, known by the board president. (Turns out he has a shaky memory after a certain hour of the night.) So I did the chivalrous thing and stepped between this sweaty tub and my wife. He yelled. I tried not to. No dogs allowed! No, sir, the rule is no pets; these are service dogs. No dogs! Right, but, you see, sir, these are service dogs… You’re not blind! Then I yelled. 

It’s only gotten worse. We were accused of running a business out of the condo we visit 50 days a year (I count the days now and calculate the cost, a bad idea). At Christmas, the property manager snuck around the outside of our condo and took pictures through the sliding glass door - even though we’ve never tried to hide the dogs we train. One of the owners’ daughters screamed at my wife because the dog scared her son (wimp!) only to rush to her parents’ condo to shush her yapping dachshund. There are many more instances but I’ve reacted the same way throughout: I’ve made it worse. I did try to reason with these people but it turns out they’re all bullies or cowards so that didn’t work. (They’re also all from the election battleground states of Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania, which worries me more.) When reason didn’t work, I tried to ignore them, like I thought Saul Bellow would have done. But I’ve read Saul Bellow and I’m not Saul Bellow: I yelled more. Then I called them bad names. Then I called an attorney. And a judge. And some policemen. And, well, it’s all ballooned  from there.

Today we found out that we’re going to court to give more of our money to the wiley and slow-talking attorneys who feed off of these condo wars. Naturally, I believe ours is a rational man and we look at his hourly rate as a necessary evil: we’d rather be spending these escalating sums on anything else, nice dinners, vacations with rational people, donations to our charity for Christsake! As you might guess, I think their attorney is man without scruples, an ill-informed, over-charging lay-about who cares nothing for charitable acts and is running up the bills so he can buy a bigger boat (which is what every year-round Floridian wants after they have the Mercedes they want). In my calculus, he is the most rational of the irrational people. Why our occasional neighbors are acting as foolishly as they are I do not know. That’s what irrational people do, I guess. And that is all the more reason to practice Bellow!