Happy Birthday, Danger Man

Today is my friend Steven's birthday, a man I've known since college years. We met in a record shop in Georgetown, standing in the same aisle. He started asking me about an album that was in the cutout bin. Did I know anything about it? I did. He was just getting ready that weekend to become a dj on a local college radio station, and we sat that afternoon in his basement apartment, making up a songlist for the three hours he would be on the air. He still has that notebook of that show and other shows.

Steven told me everything back then. Everything. More than I wanted to know. He used to call me his "priest" with a vow of silence on his love life, much like Seinfeld's "vault." With my elephant memory, I do dredge up a story or two now to needle him with on the telephone. He laughs and says, "Now, now. That wild youth is staid responsibility. Back in our college days, he always wore this old beat-up brown leather coat with a leather belt. He made women laugh, and trust me, laughter goes far with women.

He had spent part of his youth living in Lahore, Pakistan and he wore a Sikh bracelet (still does, never takes it off.) and he had this whole childhood thing about "Danger Man." It had been a British drama show in the sixties, Steve grew up in Pakistan with an international group of children that brought odd ideas and expressions into their play. I know one inside joke he played out with his Sarajevo born friend, Sven, was "dangermen" (said heavily accented.) They used the expression a lot acting out all these childish dramas and over time it became an insider joke.

It seemed like Steve always needed to be outside the norm. He idolized Henry Miller's tramp existence in Paris: the poverty, the womanizing, the liberation from being pigeonholed. He ran wild. There was a tuck shop across the street from the campus, run by an older couple, and I remember Steve going in there once and stealing a snack bag of peanuts. The old lady approached him and said, "I saw what you did," and he punched his finger in the pocket of his jacket, like he had a gun, and he said, "You see this? You report this, and I will come back and get you." It sounds crazy repeating this now, but there was this whole persona of being politicially uncorrect and "not hip" about Steve because he was somehow beyond hip: an outlaw. He snuck into the women's dorm and created a lock down with security guards chasing him on every floor. He got away. Let others listen to the Grateful Dead. He could discourse for hours on the Ultimate Spinach's "Hip Death Goddess" or a rare "B" side of a Joe Meek production only released in the U.K.

For years he would do a "Pak" accent and carry on these dialogues about "berry good" and pretending to be an immigrant doofus in D.C. I decided to go back to this youth when I made his birthday card. I chose a colored paper quite literally the color of rich golden brown curry powder. On the front I printing out in Algerian font "¿Who Is...?" and then a cut out of the opening screen of Danger Man (a great black and white shot with the Capitol in it.) Inside was a picture of an old protesting Pak man being carried through the streets of Lahore with his glasses opaquely glaring in the sun and his raised fist, and opposite I wrote, "Carry on Danger Man....or Be Carried." The envelope was the same paper, and on the back I had a spy silouette as a seal.

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Baby ______

Today is my birthday. The Winter Solstice. When people tease "the shortest day of the year," I riposte "the longest night." For the first 21 years of my life, I didn't have a name, legally. I'll tell the story the way my deceased mother told me, and like all children, I would always ask for the story of my birth. Do we ever tire hearing it?

I was born in Washington, D.C. during a blizzard. Was it truly a blizzard, and not just a snow storm? I don't know. I was always told "blizzard." My parents had taken my name very seriously, even to the point my mother (in a very old-fashioned sensibility) wanted me to have a "pretty" monogram. Early on they thought about naming me after my paternal grandfather, Jesse. I was to be Jessica. I am glad they dropped the idea, not that I didn't love my grandfather, but I don't think the name would suit me. Who knows, maybe if it was mine, I would have accepted it.

At the time of my birth, it was the rule (And still might be. I don't know.) that babies stayed in the nursery, not in their mother's room. Because there was a blizzard, because it was Christmas, for whatever reason, the maternity ward was not crowded, and I was allowed to remain in the room with my mother, and she found great comfort in this. I always liked the image of us in the room together in a snow storm.

In my family, we always celebrated birthdays with a special dinner, and we always seemed to want the same thing year after year. My mother was born during the time of strawberries, and she had told me that growing up there was always strawberry shortcake for her birthday. At some time in my early twenties, I started making sure we always had some type of strawberry cake for her. My father always wanted beef, and he loved banana pudding like you see on the box of vanilla wafers. He also loved fresh grated coconut cake, and he was in charge of cracking the coconut and grating it. For my brother, it was my mother's lasagna. Since we would normally do turkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas, my mother liked doing New York strip steaks for my birthday, and she loved serving peaches she had frozen from summer as part of the dessert.

Not my feets. Mine were smaller. Another no name baby.

So it went. When my 21st birthday approached, my mother asked what I would like to do to mark the event, and I said, "I want us to go to D.C. Vital Records and record my birth." Can you imagine trying to establish your legal name when you have no written proof of a legal name? I teased my mother, and upset her, when I said that I could choose any name that I like. "You wouldn't keep the names that I gave you," she plaintively asked?

Many a time I have wondered about this namelessness and how it has affected my personality. It's a rip in the weave of things. We live and die by documents. Try getting a passport with no name. Try burying someone without a death certificate. Seeing that blank hurt for the longest time, because there was something just so fundamentally careless about it. Birth and death are marked by the proper documentation and gravitas of the moment. We are a nation of paper.

This morning, a friend, knowing this story, was calling me "Baby X" and "Baby ______," as in "What is Baby X going to do for her birthday?" Baby _____ went outside and took a picture of a polar sun in a clouded sky while listening to ice crystals hit dead leaves. Baby X continued to write her Christmas cards that needed letters. Little Miss No Name received calls and well wishes from friends far away. She is about to finally decorate for her long delayed Christmas.

After I have dinner tonight, I will light a candle and make a wish. My mother always told me that she could never view my birthday as just "my day," because in truth it was a day we had shared together. She would say, "We will always be bound by that moment." I'll think about our city covered in swirling snow and remember the day and my mother. We remain bound, Mama.

Cocktail Of The Week: The Nevermore

Today is Edgar Allan Poe's birthday. What is little remembered about Poe is his birthday, but we all associate death with his name: died on the streets of Baltimore, tell tale hearts, tubercular wife, Annabelle Lee, kingdoms by the sea, and of course, ravens. What could be more appropriate than a black cocktail to toast this day:

Quoth the Raven, "I'll have anything but Old Crow"

The Nevermore Cocktail

1 3/4 ounce Blavod Black Vodka
3/4 ounce Kaluha Coffee Liqueur
Black Coffee Ice Cubes

Shake and pour into a chilled highball glass using coffee ice cubes. Stir with beak.

I had visited a bar, taking props with me for a photograph of the drink, including pictures of Poe and his gravesite in Baltimore. After I left the bar, I had errands to run, including a trip to a local Giant grocery store. I decided to leave Poe there, scattering his image throughout the store:

"Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana," ~~Bill Gates


Same Old ....



Serenity Now

"It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence,we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream"

~~Edgar Allan Poe