NOTE: This is kinda long, which is why I split the blog posts up into 4 parts. But if you want to read the whole thing at once (it’s 20 pages), you can download the PDF via this link or grab it from Smashwords.com (free) for any kind of e-reader by clicking on this link. You can also listen to the whole thing via the MP3 player above, or the YouTube player below.
- Frank
((((((ONE))))))
If they played it in the movies, it’d be different. I’d be more handsome, for one thing. Probably a rugged sort of handsome that lets you—the viewer—in on the secret that while I certainly know how to handle a firearm, I also pet the neighbor’s puppy whenever the opportunity presents itself.
The other thing about it would be the lighting. The Handsomer Me would be exiting the bar—Ivy’s on Greenwich—and the bar itself would be lit, dressed, and edited with warm colors, rich and vibrant and alluring. Contrasting this would be how they made the street into which I was walking look: stark, color-bled, and bleak, like a noir comic book scene portraying the tragic, heart-rending death of a beautiful woman that propels the hero into unimaginably heroic action. And Handsomer Me would be right in the middle, in slow-motion probably, nattily dressed in black and white, but lit and edited so that the fabrics looked reassuring nonetheless.
That’s how they’d do it in the movies. You The Viewer wouldn’t be able to feel the cold in my fingers, wouldn’t be able to see the regret in my mind of forgetting my gloves again, nor could you feel the warmth that the residue of seven glasses of wine were providing inside of me at that camera-perfect, chiaroscuro moment.
In non-movie time, it was December of 2010 when I was stepping out from the glow of Ivy’s and into the street freeze. The pervading topic among “the smart crowd” in America at that time, the “buzz,” was the ObamaCare legislation. I was an ardent Obama Democrat then, and before leaving Ivy’s I’d gotten enmeshed in a debate with a friend, “Alex” (not his real name), about it. I put forth the theory that everyone has a natural-born right to healthcare, and single payer (with that payer being the federal government) was far superior to the insurance-company-payer model we had in place in America. Alex countered that ObamaCare was unconstitutional and would lead us further down a slippery slope into total technocrat tyranny. Armed with all that wine in my belly and a bit of natural smugness borne from a liberal arts education, I had dutifully parroted the arguments provided for me by the mainstream media during the discussion, thinking Alex’s argument was rather quaint and perhaps a little racist. I felt quite comfortable that I’d clearly won the argument, and that everything was well on its way to becoming awesome in America.
Leaving the bar—black Alfani overcoat, black slacks, black Kenneth Cole Reaction square-toes, black Fred Perry zip-up sweater, white tie, white Van Heusen button-down collar—the winter cold pierced my defenses spiked with needles of wind, a unique New York City freeze that rattled your bones and made you long for places like Miami, or Los Angeles, or even Hell itself just so long as you could escape the shearing attack of New York City Weather. The wine, however, was providing me with an internal furnace which kept every part of me toasty, save for my ungloved fingers. I snugly pocketed them when I turned a corner and saw something massively important that I completely dismissed at the time. Funny how life does that sort of thing.
A simple thing, really, as all portals tend to be—a poster stuck to some temporary wooden construction wall with one corner, the right bottom corner, flapping in the chill-wind. It was one of those DHS “See Something, Say Something” posters, but someone had taken a red marker and written something across it in large, urgent letters. The urgent letters said, “Snitches Get Stitches!!!”
A part of the movie 1984 flashed through my endrunkened mind, and then it immediately vanished. I jogged down the subway steps, went home, and didn’t think much more of it or the argument I’d had in the bar until a long time afterward.
In movie-visual parlance, calendar pages flew off into oblivion, and the Obama presidency marched on. It soon became clear that, except for the healthcare issue, President Obama was betraying everything Candidate Obama said he would do. I began wondering: why had he continued the Bush tax cuts for the rich? Why hadn’t he closed Guantanamo Bay, even though he signed an executive order saying that he would? Why hadn’t he ended the Afghanistan war? Why did he have Kaddafi and 40,000 mostly black Libyans killed? Why did he kill an American citizen without a trial? Why was he allowing his Attorney General to ship guns into Mexico so they could be used by Mexican gangs to kill their competitors who DIDN’T launder their money through the international banks who contributed millions to Obama’s campaign? These questions and a bunch of others kept running through my mind. It didn’t make any sense for him to turn his back on his base like this. We all wanted change from George W. Bush because, as Democrats, we saw everything Son-of-a-Bush did as evidence that Republicans were pure evil, puppets of the global mega-corporations. We Dems thought all we had to do was get our candidate in there—a Democrat, a person of the people!—and everything would turn around. Obama’s historic election, we thought, would instantly transform the world into a nirvanic space full of peace and love and understanding. Except that it didn’t.
If anything, things had gotten worse. Much worse. And I couldn’t quite figure out why. In movie terms, the American landscape was becoming more like Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” than Aaron Sorkin’s “American President.”
*
Part 2 will post on 1/9/11.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:20 — 22.7MB)
About the Author/Narrator: Frank Marcopolos began writing as a kid in the evenings after summer days of competing–always unsuccessfully–against the older neighborhood kids (the evil “teenagers”) in the P.S. 207 schoolyard. After long, hot days of sporting failures, he discovered that by writing stories, his fictional heroes (almost always coincidentally named “Frank”) could always end up saving the day from the taller, menacing forces arrayed against them. He usually composed these stories by flashlight as he wrote in a black-and-white Mead notebook while seated on a shelf in his bedroom closet.
