Moses = Moses?

As I was plodding through Rober Caro's The Power Broker yesterday morning, I wondered whether Caro will eventually pluck the low-hanging-fruit and make the pun I am anxiously awaiting-- will he compare urban planner Robert Moses, who parted the neighborhoods of New York City to make way for superhighways (including the Cross Bronx Expressway) to the Biblical Moses-- who parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could get to the Promised Land-- if he does make the pun I'll be satisfied and my expectations will be fulfilled, but I'll also be disappointed-- because Caro is such a classy writer and this is such an obvious and rather stupid pun (Robert Moses implemented his projects by learning the ins-and-outs of political bureaucracy, soft power, and acting without permission-- and not asking for forgiveness either!-- while Moses was the recipient of an Omnipotent Miracle from an All Powerful Lord) plus puns are the lowest form of humor . . . I've got 950 pages to go, so the much awaited resolution to this sentence won't be happening for a while. 

A (Photographic) Xmas Miracle

Christmas morning, I remembered that months ago I had bought one of those mini-phone-tripods and never opened the box . . . so I gave myself a Christmas present that was entirely symbolic of the holiday-- I opened some random shit I ordered online in the summer and literally forgot about because we live in the land of plenty (I bought the tripod because I had an idea for a series of TikTok videos but I never really got started on them because . . . well, that's an insane thing to get started on) and when I opened the mini-tripod box, I found that not only did I get the mini-tripod, but I also got a mini-remote . . . so that we didn't have to do the phone-timer photo thing-- which is a random nightmare and rarely produces a good picture-- but instead I could trigger the phone-camera by Bluetooth-- a fucking Xmas miracle if there ever was one-- and so I was able to take these pictures and also be in the picture-- and I'm going to declare that these photos are probably my greatest photographic accomplishments in a lifetime of not really accomplishing very much photographically.

The Boys Do Good Stuff

A couple of pleasant holiday moments:

1) I picked up Alex from Rutgers yesterday-- he survived his engineering exams but in regards to them, he said, "That was the hardest thing I've done in my entire life" but then we blew off some steam playing hoops at the Piscataway Y-- last night we just shot around and this morning we kicked some butt playing three-on-three . . . despite my sore calf muscle . . . I shot from outside and let Alex handle the athletic stuff;

2) while Ian can't play basketball with us until he undergoes his ankle surgery-- a fact which makes all of us very annoyed and sad-- he still made a clutch play last night . . . he's now working on the production end at Birnn Chocolate, a venerable candy factory on the north side of town, and my wife and I put in a couple of gift orders for some dark-chocolate raspberry jellies, as they are unequivocally the best around-- but they were all out . . . Ian said maybe they were going to make some today but you can't go to Birnn on the day before a holiday-- the line is too long-- but then when he got home from work last night, red-cheeked from biking in the cold, he plopped down three boxes on the counter . . . he made the jellies himself-- obviously he knows how to do that now-- he poured out the jelly onto a sheet, used some giant cutter than makes the jelly into little rectangles, and then dipped the individual jelly rectangles into the dark chocolate . . . a Christmas miracle!

Good Students = Actually Having to Teach

My College Writing students are hard-working and wonderful this year, which-- on the one hand is a good thing-- but on the other hand, it means that during these last days before the essay is due, they ask me a lot of questions on how to synthesize these disparate non-fiction texts we read ("The Myth of the Ant Queen" by Steven Johnson, "The Critic and the Thought Leader" by Anand Giridharadas and "Always Be Optimizing" by Jia Tolentino) and they have me look at a lot of thesis statements and topic sentences, and so by the end of the day, my brain is swimming in ants and emergence and self-organizing systems and million-ball billiards tables and new feminism and ever-increasing beauty standards and increasing plutocratic influence and shrieking daemonic mini-programs and the costs of evolutionary solutions and the convergence of MarketWorld and decentralized ant dynamics and the polluted miracle of Industrial Revolution Manchester and the dystopian potential of the cyborg and the juxtaposition of a hundred other strange concepts and while I am wholeheartedly behind the Rutgers model of non-fiction synthesis-- of making children aware of these big contemporary ideas and having them grapple with the terminology and concepts of the post-modern world (even though Rutgers seems to be abandoning the model they created and dumbing down the course because kids have lost their minds since COVID and the cell-phone revolution) I still miss teaching books while I like the abstract and conceptual conversations we have about this stuff-- and the connections we make to reality-- the top-down and bottom-up power dynamics really applies to what is happening with abortion right now, etc.-- it will be nice to switch over to something like Twelfth Night.

Blame it On SantaCon?

Approximately three years ago, in February of 2020, we went into the city for my friend Connell's 50th birthday-- we went to Turntable Chicken Jazz and sat in a low-ceilinged room and ate Korean fried chicken and drank beer and then sang karaoke in a small crowded private room in a Koreatown fifth floor karaoke bar-- several weeks later, the world shut down and it was a miracle that we all didn't get COVID from this trip to the city . . . but perhaps some of us did-- and Connell reenacted this trip last night for his wife Lynn's fiftieth and the city seemed more crowded, chaotic, noisy and crazy than usual-- the train ride was slow and crowded, Penn Station was absolutely nuts, the streets were packed, as were the bars and restaurants, our Uber ride home was through bumper-to-bumper traffic. . . we should have just waited for the train, although we did get to witness an altercation from our slow-moving cab: a young guy on foot  kicked or bumped or did something to a parked Tesla and an older guy, a big older dude, got out of the car and started beating up the younger guy and pinned him to the ground and I think he was strangling him when a bystander broke it up-- and as we inched away, the peroxide blond wife was yelling at this young guy as well, for doing something to their car-- my friends blamed this ubiquitous insanity on "SantaCon," which pulls in a weird, drunkenly stumbling holiday crowd into the mix but I think quite a bit of the perceived chaos is because I am getting old.

Snakes in the Rite-Aid?

Alexander Plumbing came to the rescue this morning-- on FaceTime-- we had some work done Wednesday afternoon to stop the leak in our tankless water heater and the plumber also showed me how to rinse off the magnet filter that removes the iron sediment from our water-- but this morning our forced hot-water radiators were cold and winter weather is headed our way and I couldn't figure out the issue-- the hot water was on and the heating pumps were pumping; I bled the radiators but there was no air in them, just cold water-- it was a mystery so my wife gave it a shot and texted the guy who was at our house yesterday and though it was Thanksgiving, he called us back and took a moment to have her FaceTime the various valves around the tankless heater and he guessed-- correctly-- that he forgot to switch both dials back to green that surrounded the filter-- so it was a quick and easy fix and a Thanksgiving miracle that we have both heat and hot water (and no leaks) for the holiday weekend; I then went to play pickleball while my wife prepared several Thanksgiving dishes and when I got home, my wife assigned me one simple Thanksgiving chore-- go get a good bottle of wine to bring to Jim and LouAnne's place (my brother's inlaws) so I went to the Rite-Aid, found a good bottle of wine, and while I was paying I noticed that the young lady behind the register had a serious case of the hiccups and I was tempted to go into my whole "hey, hold still, hold very still, there's a spider in your hair" routine-- which always works on my high school students (and scares the shit out of them) but there were people in line so I went with something more economical and said, "Hey there's a big snake behind you!" which didn't make much sense inside a Rite-Aid-- the only things behind her were cigarettes, vapes, chewing tobacco, and little airplane bottles of liquor . . . so my ploy didn't work and she said said she wasn't scared at all, not even . . . hiccup . . . a little bit.

My Wife Goes Cruising For Vengeance

Today was "Garage Sale Day" in Highland Park and my wife wanted nothing to do with it-- we had some junk in the storage area but she just wanted to put it out to the curb and let people have it for free, but I insisted on setting up a few tables and I said I would stay out there for a bit and run the sale and then I would put out a "Take What You Like, Pay What You Can" box . . . and as my wife predicted, my tolerance for sitting outside minding the sale did not last very long-- I would make a terrible shopkeeper-- and after 30 minutes I came inside and told her I was putting a box outside and heading to the gym; she laughed at my capriciousness but an hour later, when I got back from the gym, I noticed that our outdoor chairs were missing-- the ones that sit beside the little table in front of the house-- one of the chairs had been pulled out as a stand for the "Pay What You Can" box but the other chair was hidden behind the ping-pong table (and obviously not for sale) and when I told Catherine this she was very pissed off because she really liked those chairs (which she got for free years ago-- someone was giving them away-- with a matching table) and she laid into me for not staying outside and minding the sale so I went to the Ring camera and figured out who took the chairs-- it was an Asian lady driving a white Lexus . . . it was hysterical, you could see her snooping around behind the ping-pong table and grabbing the other chair-- and I said to my wife, "If you're so pissed off, go for a ride and maybe you'll find the lady" and she told me that was stupid and she had a lot of work to do-- but then five minutes later she got into the car and went cruising for venegance, she set off in the same direction as the Lexus-- which our neighbor's told us had NY plates-- and lo and behold! miracle of all miracles!-- she spotted the white Lexus with NY plates on Woodbridge Avenue and confronted the lady-- who apologized and gave the chairs back (and she didn't even put anything in the box!) and then Catherine returned triumphant, and out neighbor John pronounced her a neighborhood hero, AND I ended up making nearly fifty bucks in the "Pay What You Can" box . . . which really should have been a metal can.

Happy Boink-Day?

If hardcore pro-life folks seriously believe that life begins at conception-- the moment when that one special sperm plunges into an enormous (relatively speaking) looming orb of an ovum, sparking the miracle of meiosis-- then they should start measuring their age differently; in the conception-begins-life camp, instead of celebrating your birthday, you should observe the day you were conceived-- and, consequently, these folks should consider themselves approximately nine months older than their current age-- of course, you can't call this new holiday a birthday-- so I humbly suggest "Boink-day" . . . although Boink-day applies more to parents than progeny, plus no one wants to think about their parents doing THAT . . . even if it did lead to your birth-- and while we're discussing this verboten subject, if you really drill down into what happened on your "birth" day, I regret to inform you that it involved your mother's (stretched out) vagina, and that's not something most people want to think about when they're blowing out candles and cutting a slice of cake

gecs!

Last night, my wife and I, my son Alex, and his girlfriend Eva made a foray into the heart of Brooklyn-- to the Avant Gardner concert/warehouse/event space in Bushwick-- to see 100 gecs . . . because of the awful weather, we drove in and we hit some traffic on the way there (and we took a route through Staten Island I've never driven-- kind of nuts in the rain, especially because there were these DOT trucks with crazy flashing lights, sirens, and hypnotic symbols that were weirder and more stimulating than the light show at the concert . . . I need to contact someone about these fucking things) but we made it, parked in a strange little lot with an entertaining old and slow-moving attendant-- Mr. Green-- who my wife had a long conversation with in his little attendant shack while the rest of us stood in the rain-- apparently Mr. Green has nine kids and usually one of them runs the lot at night but she was sick so he was doing it-- and then we walked through some sort of warehouse district to the venue and there was a fair bit of line waiting and pat-downs and a futuristic bracelet that you linked to your credit card so you could get beers and such without using cash; the interior of the warehouse was expansive and gritty-- exposed beams and boards and brick-- and the crowd was a wide-ranging, gender-fluid whimsically dressed and pierced group-- very fun to people watch-- but the opening band: Machine Girl . . . two dudes who play insanely loud industrial punk rock (it doesn't sound like that on Spotify!) was a bit beyond my noise tolerance (luckily we brought some earplugs) and then the gecs came on and pretty much played every good song from their first two albums, plus a few others-- their songs are short so they crammed them all in, at an even faster pace than the recorded versions-- I was a bit disappointed in the fact that they rarely played guitars (a couple times) and used a lot of loops and computer recordings but my son pointed out that their sounds are so weird that if they tried to reproduce them live it would get muddy and sound awful-- and they did sound crisp and clear and really fun and fantastic and Laura Les put on quite a show, between her insanely autotuned singing and her silly banter, while Dylan Brady wore his giant wizard hat and played keyboards and weird synth drums and synched computer parts and occasionally sang-- we didn't get out of there until midnight, but the ride home was much faster than the ride there . . . a good night and probably something that won't happen very often: we went to see a band in a really hip space that both my son, my wife, me, and my son's girlfriend all enjoyed-- quite the miracle.

NCAA Weirdness Has Selected New Jersey

Rutgers doesn't make March Madness but Princeton and FDU move on . . . a New Jersey minor miracle (after a St. Peters major miracle last year).

Holy Mother of Peanut Butter and Chocolate Miracle!

The College Writing Crew was embroiled in another meeting about the state of the Rutgers Expository Writing Course . . .  which will now by called College Writing because they are removing the Expository element . . . because it's racist?-- so we are thinking the changes Rutgers is making might be informed by documents like the NCTE Position Statement on Writing Instruction in School-- you should really browse through this very "woke" document to get a feel for what the fuck is going on in education . . . apparently writing is used as a "gatekeeping device," which contributes to inequity-- and so "writing instruction" should not focus on "the writing" and we should not "assess and evaluate" this writing-- but instead we should focus on the writers themselves AND if we are teaching kids logic and "reason, order and control, and directness of language" then we are being "Eurocentric" and "white" and we should instead promote "dialect that expresses their family and community identity, the idiolect that expresses their unique personal identity" and "multimodal" projects-- holy shit-- I thought documents like these were the product of super-liberal think tanks or something but they are obviously being adopted by more mainstream institutions . . . this is the kind of softball that keeps people like Jordan Peterson batting a thousand and turns well-meaning commonsensical folks in Republicans-- wild and weird stuff-- and not only is this insane because kids don't need to reflect on their identities any more than they already do-- but it's also going to promote the status quo because rich white parents are going to get their white kids tutored in the "Eurocentric" values of logic and reason and direct language-- and learning to write well which IS a difficult task-- that's why it's a gatekeeping task-- it's hard!-- and while kids do engage in lots of other kinds of writing-- Instagram posts and texts and Snapchat streaks-- that doesn't mean that they are academic writers-- just as we are ALL physicists . . . we can catch balls and accurately judge how objects will fall and understand how to drive a car at high speeds-- but that doesn't mean we should all be able to pass a college physics course . . . anyway, while we were discussing all this and figuring out the best course of action for next year, I sort of lost the thread of the meeting and said, "I wish I had a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup" and Stacey said, "I've got a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup!" and I was like WTF! and she pulled a two pack out of her bag and said, "A kid gave me this before Winter Break, is that okay?" and I said, "Yeah!" and we ate them and they were still totally delicious.

Miracle at the Wawa

Yet another sentence set at the Wawa-- and NOT at the Starbucks, I might add . . . there are ZERO sentences on this blog set at Starbucks because I've never been inside a Starbucks . . . I refuse to spend that much money for coffee and-- if I followed Cunningham's orders-- this Miracle at the Wawa might not have happened at all because she wanted me to pick her up some kind of crazy sugary barely caffeinated drink at Starbucks (she's pregnant and not drinking coffee) but I told her I wasn't going to Starbucks and I would pick her up anything she wanted as long as it was at the Wawa and we had an interesting debate/discussion  in front of her AP Lang. class and then I drove to the Wawa to get a sandwich and to pick up a very complicated coffee order for Stacey; I ordered my sandwich on the little touchscreen and then I built Stacey's drink, which consisted of half a 20 oz. cup of some frothy extreme caffeine Mocha Wake Up out of a big multi-multi-nozzled machine, then 1/3 cup of dark roast from the regular coffee urn, and then a dollop of Irish Creme coffee creamer . . . and then I got in line and while I was standing there, holding her giant complex coffee drink, the little cardboard band that keeps you from burning your hand broke and her 20 oz. coffee slid through the broken band and fell and-- without even thinking-- I dropped my hand two feet down, lightning fast, fucking lightning fast and I caught the cup-- and did not spill a drop-- I caught the cup with exactly the right amount of force so that it fell no farther but I didn't crush it-- it was a fucking miracle-- and-- Testify!-- the guy behind me in line saw the whole thing and he was like, "That was amazing" and I said, "Yeah, that would have been a big mess" and I was very glad that someone Witnessed this Miracle and I am certainly a Blessed Figure on this Earth.

It's a Miracle . . . Now Shut Up and Do Your Work

We were brainstorming topics for an informational presentation in my Public Speaking class and some boys wanted to do a speech about how "Helen Keller isn't real" and I was like "what?" and they  told me they just didn't buy it-- how could someone who couldn't see or hear write books and I told them the one thing I remembered about Helen Keller-- that the teacher poured some water on her hand and spelled out "water" and they were like "what about 'the'? how did she learn the word 'the'?" and I was like, "I don't know! go do some research" and this class is split in two by the lunch period, so I brought this up in the English Office and Cunningham was like "yeah! how did she do all that? how could she learn all those words?" and I was like "you need to go sit with the stupid boys in my Public Speaking class" and Cunningham was like "how could she learn all the words?" and I said, "they put stuff in her hand and spelled it" but now I was starting to doubt myself because that sounded absurd . . . and she was like "how did she learn abstract concepts?" and I said, "you pour water over her hand and spell 'water' for a couple days, and then one day you pour hot water on her hand and spell 'betrayal'" and then I spent the rest of my lunch period researching Helen Keller and apparently her teacher spelled millions of words on her hand, and she used a braille typewriter, and she felt cheeks and mouths and lips for vibrations to learn what words sounded like and there were always doubters of her abilities but she repeatedly proved them wrong and rode a bike and flew a plane and went to college . . . and I'm not exactly sure how she did all this, but I'm pretty sure she is real-- but I'm still hard-pressed to explain how it all happened.

Mean Streets and Not-So-Mean Streets

I couldn't find my car keys this morning but we solved the mystery-- Ian left them in the car door last night . . . and the van was parked on the street-- a street where cars are occasionally broken into-- so it was something of a miracle that the car was trashed, stolen, taken for a joy ride, or something worse . . . but we don't live on streets as mean as those I detail in the new episode of We Defy Augury: Ghettoside vs. Murderbot . . . check it out, it's my best one yet.

Things are Confusing and Complicated

I listen to Sam Harris and find him smart and logical . . . and I also listen to (some) Joe Rogan podcasts, and he seems to have a pretty low bar when it comes to vetting his guests-- and in a recent Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris discusses why he won't invite Bret Weinstein on to talk about covid vaccines and ivermectin-- because Weinstein touted ivermectin on Rogan's podcast-- Vox has a nice article explaining the "dubious" rise of the drug as a miracle treatment . . . and apparently the drug is probably NOT a miracle treatment, but it may have some modest effects . . . and while I'm taking everything Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying say on the podcast with a grain of salt, they are against masks in school-- because kids are mainly going to be fine-- and I would love it if we all the had the choice to take off our masks in school-- though that might not be the best course of action, but I do agree with them heartily about the fact that we should NOT be married to our ideas, not equate science with political teams, and that people on the left should not describe the unvaccinated as impure or disease-ridden-- first of all because some of these people have natural immunity from already having the virus and second of all because that is a really dangerous path to go down and I don't think there's any way back.

Heat Related Memory Loss Miracle!

Folks reported they were on my face yesterday when I left the workshop, but I searched the car and the house and everywhere else high and low and my new Zenni specs were nowhere to be found-- until I checked the pocket of the sports bag and there they were! but why there? Why . . .

Tennis Notes/Sibling Notes

My boys had a tough match today-- they were playing Wardlaw Hartridge, an undefeated private school with a very good team, but it was a match that they had an outside shot of winning-- very outside-- and Alex (at second singles) was up 5-2 in the first set against a kid who was a better player than him and Ian (at first singles) was playing one of the better players in the county . . . and Ian was down 3-1 but hanging in and Alex took a look at the other matches and told Ian that he "had to win"-- because they play next to each other-- and Ian and Alex started bickering and there may have been some profanity . . . which the kid Ian was playing thought was directed at him . . . but it was directed Alex-- so then there was an awkward stoppage while all this was sorted out and it did not help Alex or Ian-- Alex ended up squandering his lead and losing his set in a tiebreaker . . . Ian lost the first set but then came around and led most of the second set before losing 7-5-- I was really proud of him for making it a match, and both my kids learned a valuable lesson; tennis is an individual sport and you can't be concerned about what's going on next to you . . . you've just got to focus on your match and see how it all turns out once you're done (they get another shot at this team on Monday, it would take a miracle, but maybe they'll figure it out and win).

Nobody Put a Shed in the Corner (Except Dave)

I started banging nails at 8 AM this morning-- my wife thought I was pushing it and might upset the neighbors-- but I knew I had a long day ahead of me and needed to get started; eight-and-a-half-hours later, there's definitely something shed-like growing in the corner of my yard-- here are some highlights and lowlights of the shed building process:

I got lots of help painting, mainly from Catherine-- but Alex and Ian painted some parts as well;

a shed kit from Lowes contains A LOT of parts-- so use screws at the start, instead of nails, because you are going to screw up-- I attached a 91-inch beam to the top of a frame and couldn't figure out what was wrong-- until I realized it supposed to be the 92 and a half inch beam and that's why the frame wasn't square; Catherine and I also put a wall in upside down-- you'd think it wouldn't make a difference but it does sp we had to flip it;

we found some old shingles in the crawlspace-- which saved us $150 dollars-- but I should warn you: shingles are very heavy and they were quite difficult to carry out of a four-foot basement crawl space-- I definitely got my squats and deadlifts in today;

I had to borrow some wasp spray from my neighbor because I am trying to squeeze this shed into a corner-- my backyard is small enough-- and there's a family of giant bumblebees that must have lived under where I excavated and they are very territorial and want to kill me . . . and they are crafty and mobile foes and tough to battle when you're on a ladder or squeezed between a fence and a shed wall . . . the lesson here is don't build a shed in a corner if you can avoid it-- putting on the roof is going to be precarious;

a shed frame is like a miniature house frame;

we were lucky to have a lovely dry day to paint;

plastic pavers filled with pea gravel are a miracle;

I'm hoping, weather permitting, to finish this thing in the next few days-- but I've never shingled a roof, so if I roll off and break my neck, I just wanted to tell you all it's been real.

Daylight Saving Time: Catastrophe and Miracle

Yesterday, I was running late-- of course-- because we had just sprung ahead for fucking Daylight Saving Time and though I was bleary-eyed, I still noticed (possibly because it was dark) that ALL the interior lights were on in my van-- and they had certainly been on all night; luckily, the battery was okay and the car started but I couldn't get the lights to turn off, even when I was driving; my son had borrowed the car the day previous and he was the last to drive it so he had obviously done something egregious, but I didn't have time to run in the house and wake him up and ask him, so I called my wife (waking her up, as she was taking a day off) and told her to get Alex on the phone; Alex denied pressing any buttons and while all I could say was "THINK!"-- because I was driving down Route 18 with a bunch of other over-tired drivers-- but my wife actually thought for a moment and told Alex to go down to the computer and search how to shut the lights off on a 2008 Toyota Sienna; miraculously, he figured out what he had done . . . there is a weird button with three settings behind the steering wheel: OFF/DOOR/ON; this button toggles the interior lights from always off to turn-on-when-doors-are-open to always on . . . and he had somehow hit this button-- this button that no one has ever pressed in the history of driving-- and permanently turned the interior lights on (why this button exists confounds me, it is as equally unexplainable as the existence of Daylight Saving Time . . . which may be headed the way of the dinosaurs . . . which would make me very happy, almost as happy as when I put a piece of duct-tape over this idiotic button so that no teenager can ever press it again).

Deacon King Kong: Read It!

Deacon King Kong is the 51st book I read this year-- 2020 was good for something-- and it is the best piece of fiction I've run into in a long while; I'm not going to write a long review-- just read the thing-- but I will post up my Kindle notes . . . my favorite sentences from this fever dream that's exploded from James McBride's brain-- a fictionalized account of the Brooklyn housing project in which he grew up . . . the year is 1969 and it's all going down in this book, which is about urban decay and revitalization, baseball, drugs, race, language and tall tales . . . it is so much fun, even when it gets dark-- and there's some romance and a mystery to keep the plot cooking . . . the book begins with Sportcoat-- the old drunk church deacon, walking up to a young heroin dealer (who he coached as a child) and shooting him in the ear . . . but really the book begins with the mystery of the free cheese:

“Look who’s talking. The cheese thief!” That last crack stung him. For years, the New York City Housing Authority, a Highlight hotbed of grift, graft, games, payola bums, deadbeat dads, payoff racketeers, and old-time political appointees who lorded over the Cause Houses and every other one of New York’s forty-five housing projects with arrogant inefficiency, had inexplicably belched forth a phenomenal gem of a gift to the Cause Houses: free cheese. 

and then there's some backstory on Sportcoat:

When he was slapped to life back in Possum Point, South Carolina, seventy-one years before, the midwife who delivered him watched in horror as a bird flew through an open window and fluttered over the baby’s head, then flew out again, a bad sign. She announced, “He’s gonna be an idiot,” 

At age three, when a young local pastor came by to bless the baby, the child barfed green matter all over the pastor’s clean white shirt. The pastor announced, “He’s got the devil’s understanding,” and departed for Chicago, where he quit the gospel Highlight and became a blues singer named Tampa Red and recorded the monster hit song “Devil’s Understanding,” before dying in anonymity flat broke and crawling into history, immortalized in music studies and rock-and-roll college courses the world over, idolized by white writers and music intellectuals for his classic blues hit that was the bedrock of the forty-million-dollar Gospel Stam Music Publishing empire, from which neither he nor Sportcoat ever received a dime. 

At age five, Baby Sportcoat crawled to a mirror and spit at his reflection, a call sign to the devil, and as a result didn’t grow back teeth until he was nine. 

Sportcoat was a walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle, and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen, in addition to serving as coach and founder of the All-Cause Boys Baseball Team. 

and then-- in contrast to old school Sportcoat-- you've got the corrupted youth:

you've got the Clemens was the New Breed of colored in the Cause. Deems wasn’t some poor colored boy from down south or Puerto Rico or Barbados who arrived in New York with empty pockets and a Bible and a dream. He wasn’t humbled by a life of slinging cotton in North Carolina, or hauling sugarcane in San Juan. None of the old ways meant a penny to him. He was a child of Cause, young, smart, and making money hand over fist slinging dope at a level never before seen in the Cause Houses. 

and the requisite Italian mobsters . . . this is Brooklyn in the late '60s:

Everything you are, everything you will be in this cruel world, depends on your word. A man who cannot keep his word, Guido said, is worthless. 

and various kind of crime:

“A warrant ain’t nothing, Sausage,” Sportcoat said. “The police gives ’em out all over. Rufus over at the Watch Houses got a warrant on him too. Back in South Carolina.”  

“He does?” Sausage brightened immediately. “For what?” 

“He stole a cat from the circus, except it wasn’t no cat. It got big, whatever it was, so he shot it.” 

Where’s the box?” “The church got plenty money.” “You mean the box in the church?” “No, honey. It’s in God’s hands. In the palm of His hand, actually.” “Where’s it at, woman?!” 

“You ought to trade your ears in for some bananas,” she said, irritated now. 

and superstition:

His wife put a nag on him, see, like Hettie done to you.” 

“How you know Hettie done it?” 

“It don’t matter who done it. You got to break it. Uncle Gus broke his by taking a churchyard snail and soaking it in vinegar for seven days. You could try that.” 

“That’s the Alabama way of breaking mojos,” Sportcoat said. “That’s old. In South Carolina, you put a fork under your pillow and some buckets water around your kitchen. That’ll drive any witch off.” 

“Naw,” Sausage said. “Roll a hound’s tooth in cornmeal and wear it about your neck.” 

“Naw. Walk up a hill with your hands behind your head.”  

“Stick your hand in a jar of maple syrup.” 

“Sprinkle seed corn and butter bean hulls outside the door.” 

“Step backward over a pole ten times.” 

“Swallow three pebbles . . .” 

They were off like that for several minutes, each topping the other with his list of ways to keep witches out, talking mojo as the modern life of the world’s greatest metropolis bustled about them. 

“Never turn your head to the side while a horse is passing . . .” 

“Drop a dead mouse on a red rag.” 

“Give your sweetheart an umbrella on a Thursday.” 

“Blow on a mirror and walk it around a tree ten times . . .” 

They had reached the remedy of putting a gas lamp in every window of every second house on the fourth Thursday of every month when the generator, as if on its own, roared up wildly, sputtered miserably, coughed, and died. 

and there's a shooter in the vein of The Wire's Brother Mouzone:

He wanted to say, “He’s a killer and I don’t want him near you.” But he had no idea what her reaction would be. He didn’t even know what Harold Dean looked like. He had no information other than an FBI report with no Highlight photo, only the vaguest description that he was a Negro who was “armed and extremely dangerous.” 

and a romance between an Irish cop and an African-American church sister:

“I’ll be happy,” he said, more to the ground than to her, “to come back and bring what news I can.” 

“I’ll be waiting,” Sister Gee said. But she might as well have been speaking to the wind. 

the dark side of the drugs: 

Men who made their girlfriends do horrible things, servicing four or five or eight men a night, who made their women do push-ups over piles of dogshit for a hit of heroin until, exhausted, the girls dropped into the shit so the men could get a laugh. 

and, finally, a clash of values that is epic and poetic:

"I’m in the last Octobers of life, boy. I ain’t got many more Aprils left. It’s a right end for an old drunk like me, and a right end for you too that you die as a good boy, strong and handsome and smart, like I remembers you. Best pitcher in the world. Boy who could pitch his way outta the shithole we all has to live in. Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That’s a good dream. That’s a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can’t remember ’em no more.” 

He released Deems and flung him back against the bed so hard Deems’s head hit Highlight the headboard and he nearly passed out again. “Don’t ever come near me again,” Sportcoat said. “If you do, I’ll deaden you where you stand.”