Love Your Mother

I got lucky in the parent lottery. My mother was an artist and a dreamer; my father was an Army lawyer and practical. I inherited the best of both of their personalities, along with my mother's blue eyes and my father's crack memory. My parents gave me the kind of love that sustains you your whole life and that's good because I was still young when they died and I miss them still.

Two things I inhereited from my parents have significantly shaped my adult life. They both loved to read and they both loved good food. I grew up in a house surrounded by books--my mother loved mysteries; my father mostly read history and other non-fiction.

They encouraged me to read anything and everything. Once, when I was 13, I loaned a book I'd read, something by Max Schulman, to a school friend. Her mother showed up at our door, furious that I had loaned her daughter such trash, demanding to talk to my mother, who didn't censor what I read and didn't really understand the other woman's outrage. Max Schulman was the man who invented Dobie Gillis and though I no longer remember what the offensive book in question was, even at 12 I thought the woman was making a mountain out of a molehill.

My mother taught me to cook and when I moved to Los Angeles, I continued to use the recipes she'd taught me--Southern comfort foods like mac and cheese, exotic meals she'd picked up in her reading, like the Pakistani kima (curried meat and peas), favorites from friends, like a pizza sauce recipe that has won me raves at parties over the years.

It's Mother's Day this weekend. To celebrate, I offer you the recipe for my mother's favorite chocolate cake.

Happy Mother's Day.

Food for Thought

Did you ever read the book Stone Soup? It's about a hungry village that combines their resources to make a soup to feed everyone when all they thought they had was stones for the cooking pot. I always think of that book when the annual NALC Food Drive comes around.

The NALC (National Association of Letter Carriers) makes it painless to participate. All you have to do is leave out a non-perishable food item--it's nice if you put it in a bag--and it'll get picked up and combined with donations from people all along your mail route. Even if all you can spare is a can of tuna (68 cents at my local supermarket and I live in an expensive city), it adds up.

The Food Drive will take place this Saturday, May 8th. Last year the Drive collected a record 73.4 million pounds of food. The Food Drive is a real world example of the power of community. This economy has left a lot of people hungry. Some of them are our neighbors. For more information about this year's drive, go here.

Dude Looks like a Lady

Here's my entry into Patti Abbott's Sweet Dreams Challenge. Here's what we were given--Eurythmics Sweet Dreams is playing in a restaurant of some kind when a red-headed woman wearing an electric blue dress walks in. Under 1000 words.

Check out her blog to see the other entries which will be posted Monday, May 3, 2010. If you don't know her blog, you should.

Let me know what you think of Dude--

Dude Looks Like a Lady

I was deep into my second plate of Chilaquiles Verdes, hoping the cheese and fried tortillas would soak up some of the alcohol in my stomach before I had to go on duty. I hadn’t had much sleep and I’d been up early to run some errands and I was in a foul mood to start with so the 80s music pumping at ear-bleed levels didn’t help.

I wasn’t the only one who winced when Sweet Dreams replaced Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. With its throbbing backbeat and Annie Lennox’s orgiastic wailing, the song was a musical root canal exposing every nerve in my head. I signaled Yadira to refill my coffee as Annie whispered, “Hold your head up” and drained it almost before she’d turned away.

The headache was kicking my ass. I was thinking about getting a Red Bull to go when Zelda came through the door.

Staggered was more like it. Her long red wig was askew, revealing about three inches of smooth, shaven skull. It looked like she’d been scalped. “Oh my god,” shouted the assclown in the corner booth, shrinking back as far away as possible. Frozen by the sight of the blood soaking her electric blue dress.

Blue was Zelda’s favorite color because it brought out the color of her eyes. “I’m a Technicolor woman in a black and white world,” she’d told me once, and it just about broke my heart.

I keyed my radio and called for a bus but by the looks of her, Zelda would be dead before the ambulance arrived. As I moved toward her I saw the busboy take a picture with his phone. I grabbed the phone and stomped on it. Crushed that plastic clamshell like an oversized roach. The kid said something to me in Spanish that made Yadira gasp. I told him in English to get back in the kitchen or I’d do the same thing to his scrawny illegal ass. He understood that and stood aside, pouting. I’d spoiled his chance to make points with his FaceBook friends by posting the picture.

Yadira gave me her apron and I balled it up and stuffed it into the hole in Zelda’s gut, putting pressure on it to stop the bleeding. “You’re hurting her,” the guy in the corner booth said. “You’re making it worse.”

What is it with civilians? Seriously. This guy hadn’t even bothered to dial 911 and now he’s telling me what to do? Like he’s a doctor and not a bottom-feeder lawyer who has to scrounge for court-appointed cases. I’ve seen him hanging around the court house in Van Nuys, mooching cigarettes from pissed-off potential jurors taking a smoke break after hours of waiting around to see if they’re going to get called.

“You’re hurting her,” the guy said again because lawyers never know when to keep their mouths shut. I stood up and walked over to his booth. Crowded him a little as I leaned in to him. “Shut up,” I suggested.

I’m a big guy and in uniform, I rarely have to ask twice. The guy looked like he was going to make me ask twice, so I knocked everything off his table—dishes, napkins, paper placemats, the little pitcher of maple syrup for his pancakes. He got wide-eyed then and he shut up quick. Yadira moved to clean it all up. “Leave it,” I growled and she backed away. I could tell I was scaring her.

I went back to see how Zelda was doing. Not good. She was barely conscious. I could hear the siren of the approaching ambulance but knew it would arrive too late. I told Zelda to hold on. I’m not sure she heard me.

Zelda.

She was a sweet lost soul wobbling through life in size 14 four-inch heels. She’d been born Bobby Zelda but reversed the order of her name as she worked on reversing her gender. She was in the final stages of pre-op, trying to raise money for her last operation one blow job at a time. If she’d gone to Vegas she could have been pulling down $200 a pop minus whatever cut her pimp took, but she didn’t want to leave her mother.

I gave her money sometimes and we both pretended it wasn’t charity. A girl like Zelda can be an asset to a cop. These street girls see everything. I told her to be careful. Some things you see can get you killed.

Zelda was a good girl but she should never have been in that alley this morning. She never should have seen me taking that money. I’d warned her what could happen if she saw the wrong thing. I’d told her. But she hadn’t listened. She had just laughed, with no concern for self-preservation at all. It was a self-esteem thing. She didn’t have much.

I had thought she was dead in the alley. I made sure she was by the time the ambulance arrived. Yadira was weeping as the EMTs took Zelda away.

Everyone was starting to mill around when the detectives arrived. They found the murder weapon wrapped in a napkin on the floor by the corner booth. Right where I’d left it when I’d swept everything off the table.

The lawyer was wide-eyed as he saw the knife and said the first thing that came into his head, which was… “I didn’t kill it.” Everyone in the room gasped. He fumbled around for something more PC to say but the damage was done.

That’s lawyers for you. Never know when to keep their mouths shut.

I gave my statement to the detective and managed to make it to work in time for roll call, the chilaquiles sitting in my stomach like a ticking cheese bomb. After work, I’d go by and say hello to Zelda’s mother. See if she needed anything. It was the least I could do.

The Blog is Back

Yes, April is the cruelest month. And March wasn't much better. But it is May now and that's enough said about that.

If you have an Amazon wishlist, I suggest you put Kevin Brook's iBoy on it. It won't be published until July but it's worth the wait. It's a gritty story that manages to be completely credible while basically giving us the origin story of a modern superhero. Brook's writing is smart and gritty and surprising and the book itself is something special.

I got an advance look at the book because one of my clients was looking at it as a potential film property. I love my job.

Submissions for the first issue of Dark Valentine have closed. I am very, very happy with the range and quality of stories submitted. Our art director, Joanne Renaud, has found some superb artists and the artwork will be fantastic.

Spellcheck is our friend!

Is it just me? Am I really the only person who thinks it matters if you spell words correctly as well as use them correctly? Is it too much to ask that when a screenwriter sets his story in Iran, he knows how to spell "Ayatollah Khomeini?" Apparently, the answer is yes, it is too much to ask. And apparently, I am the only person on my creative team who thinks it's odd that someone who expects to be paid for his work would approximate the spelling thus: "Iatola Komani."

In truth, I've long since given up hope that people will use "its" and "it's" correctly. I no longer cringe when people spell automobile brakes as "breaks." I don't flinch when I see "gauge" written as "gage." Those silent letters are tricky. (Although no one ever seems to spell "knife" as "nif.")

Sometimes it's enough to e-mail my fellow grammar-snarkers with examples of egregious spelling and other errors: pre-Madonna for "primadonna," for example, or my current favorite, "They were pail as ghost's." It's not often you see that many mistakes in just five words.

It's not as if I'm a perfect speller. I cannot spell "inaugural" to save my life. I used to misspell millennium until the millennium when I finally got it through my head that it was 2 Ls and 2 Ms.

But that is what Spellcheck is for.

Am I the only one who thinks this matters?

Gone, Baby Gone

I live in a small part of Los Angeles called Valley Village. It's not Beverly Hills, but it's not a slum either. On the east we're bounded by Studio City, home of CBS TV, a number of upscale super markets and a lot of actors and screenwriters. Roddy McDowall was a neighbor when I lived in Studio City; so was Earl Holliman of Police Woman and many Disney movies. (Earl loves animals and knew the name of every dog in the 'hood, including mine, but he couldn't remember a human's name to save his life.)

On the east side of Valley Village is North Hollywood, which is styling itself NoHo these days. It's an area that's coming back, as they say. It's where you'll find Universal Studios and the best Pakistani restaurant in town. It's also where you'll find the police station that handles crime in Valley Village, which is too small to have its own PD.

Three cars are stolen every day in Valley Village, which is one of 29 different cities that make up the patchwork quilt that is Los Angeles County. If your car is stolen, you have to go to the NHPD to make your report; they won't take it over the phone. I know this because my car was stolen in June of last year.

My car was stolen out of a security parking lot accessible with a clicker and through a locked door. After my car was stolen, my landlords installed security cameras, which made everyone feel a bit more ssecure.

Until this morning, when we discovered the car I bought to replace the one that was stolen was itself stolen at 3:42 in the morning. The thieves were caught on camera. A man and a woman. I'd say they were husband and wife or otherwise together because of body language. It was weird watching the security tapes. Their faces were very clear on the tapes. They either didn't know or didn't care that they were being recorded. How many times have we seen that scene on television or in a movie? How many times have I written that scene myself? It's not the same.

What makes it worse is knowing the thieves came in the front door of the apartment building. Where did they get the key? What makes it worse is finding out that another car was stolen from the lot last month but no one told the tenants. What makes it worse is knowing that car is gone, baby gone.

Sigh.

So Many Books, So Few Credits

I discovered paperback book swap last year and think it's the best invention since movable type. My original idea was that using pbs would be a way to attain book stasis in my house--for every book purchased, one would be posted on the site and the number of books crowding my shelves would not increase. It was a good idea and it's mostly worked. The problem is that whenever I log on to the site to post new books or to claim a credit for a book I've sent someone else, the welcome page automatically throws up a selection of books I might be interested in.

I am always interested in these books. Old books by authors I know, new books by authors I've never heard of, translations of foreign thrillers...the list is pretty long. So long in fact that I now have 23 books on my "wish" list (one of which hasn't been posted since 2005) and 1525 on my "reminder" list. I have one available credit. Somehow the math does NOT add up.

I highly recommend pbs for anyone who wants to trade books. You get several free credits just for signing up. Yes, you have to pay postage on the books you ship out, but it's almost always less than you'd pay for a used book unless you buy all your books from yard sales. Most of the books I've gotten are in pristine condition--even re-giftable. They also have hardbacks.

They also have the review and social networking features you get on Good Reads. Some of my friends swear by Book Mooch, which is optimized for several different languages.

Right now there are four books on their way to me and five I've sent on their way. I have that one credit. And thousands and thousands of books I can "spend" it on. I feel rich.