Mallory's Camera

My husband has an unnatural preoccupation with Dakota Fanning.

His idea of a really good movie would be one in which Haley Joel Osment pops up on one corner of the screen piping, "I see dead people!" while Dakota Fanning pops up on another, piping, "I see aliens!" Then they beat each other to death like sock puppets.

With this in mind, last night I rented something called Hide and Seek for him.

Hide and Seek may be the most mediocre movie ever made. I found it utterly enthralling during those intermittent moments I managed to stay awake. There's something about mediocrity that's fascinating. Bad is transcendent. Good, ditto. But mediocre is kind of like Michelangelo's Prisoners In the Stone. You think to yourself: okay, at some point there was a screenwriter who for some reason thought this was a good idea. Maybe the kid needed braces. Maybe the wife needed boob job. Maybe he was reading himself down from a cocaine crash and stumbled across John Collier. The reasons are not important, what's important is that he lived and worked in close enough proximity to the Guys With Briefcases Filled With Cash to get one of them to listen. And then that guy thought it was a good idea. ("Except can the Beasley. Name the evil demon, 'Charlie.' And throw in some guys in bunny suits giving blow jobs. Subliminal flashes. You know. Arty.") And then Vito Corleone thought it was a good idea – not the old dumpy Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) but the young buff Vito Corleone (Robert DeNiro) except that the young buff Vito Corleone is now old and dumpy and suffering from prostate cancer and – wow. Your head could start spinning 360 degrees except that would be the wrong movie.

Hide and Seek was the conclusion to what otherwise was a relaxing, solitary day. I remembered I have children and mailed them both gift packages – a five pound bucket of Red Vines to Robin at the Montour Falls 4-H camp; various Trader Joe candy assortments plus Harold & Kumar Do White Castle to Max at Deep Springs. (Now that is a good movie.)

Then I went to the library and checked out biographies of D.H. Lawrence and T.E. Lawrence, conveniently located adjacent to one another on the Dewey Decimal aisles. The point is arguable, I suppose, but to my mind T.E. Lawrence's personal psychopathology has had more influence on the 21st century than any other maniac around since by lavishing preference on Shiite over Sunni, Lawrence can be said to have institutionalized Arab tribal bickering. (Yes, Hitler had more influence. But he is so last century.)

FUN FACT: Did you know that in his declining years, T.E. Lawrence actually paid someone to come to his house to flagellate him on a weekly basis? David Lean left that part out of the movie!

D.H. Lawrence was one of my favorite writers when I was in my late teens and early twenties though I haven't been able to read him in years. I had an occasion to quote from one of his poems the other day – "not me, but the wind that blows through me" – and so he's taken up residence in my brain again. What I liked about him when I was young, of course, is exactly what I dislike about him now: a certain Messianic resonance, the sons of God serviced by the daughters of Man, underscored by that annoying Old Testament lilt to his prose: "And yada yada yada yada, and yada yada yada yada, so yada yad." Now. The Old Testament had to rely on the overuse of the definite article because italics had not yet been invented: repetition was their only tool for emphasis. With D.H. Lawrence, it's just an irritating stylistic tic. I may need to reread Sons & Lovers for Max's sake, though, just to bone up on the lifestyles of domineering mothers.

Then it was time to take the dogs on their beach outing.

Monterey has had very strange weather this week – it's been sunny. It's also been 105 degrees in the Central Valley, which means by rights it should be very foggy here – and indeed, a hundred feet outside the city limits, it is foggy (and when I say foggy, I mean dense, swirling, sinister mists.) Unfortunately the prevalence of sun lured everyone to the local beaches, which means the dogs & I could not find parking. So I had to drive all the way to Marina to let them run, to the State Park of the Damned. The waves were fifty feet tall and thunderous; the beaches were littered with the skeletons of dead seals and manta rays. It was freezing cold and hideous. I shivered in a heavy down jacket reading about T.E. Lawrence's chivalric obsessions. Aqaba! Aqaba!

I warmed up by coming home and cleaning the kitchen for 3 hours.

This coming week, it's off to Portland on Tuesday for more mall negotiations and (I hope) assignations with Lucius and dear Mark.

Pissy week. My big mitzvah: rescuing a cormorant.

Unless it's raining buckets, I always take the dogs to the beach when I stagger home from Bartleby, Inc. I feel sorry for them, cooped up in the house all day, and of course, it doesn't take a PhD in psychology to understand that I'm projecting here and the animal I'm really feeling sorry for is myself.

So the dogs and I were walking in a light drizzle along the ocean's edge and it was one of those low tides where the horizon seems to merge seamlessly into the horizon. I was getting rather tired of throwing sticks for Milo. I don't throw very well (having been phobic as a child about all sports that required hand/eye coordination) and he is insatiable. I was thinking about the Pope – an intelligent man, and an athlete, and narcissistic enough in his youth to have starred in stage plays. How did he end up becoming a priest? Did he really believe in God? How can an intelligent man believe in God, any God, let alone a God whose sexual turn-on's include long white nightgowns and Immaculate Conception? A great mystery. I kicked the sand.

An even greater mystery: where the hell had the dogs disappeared to?

That one was more easily solved. They were standing on a dune about fifty feet away near what appeared to be a small penguin. Xena was growling menacingly. Milo was in pre-lunge crouch. The bird wanted to get away but it couldn't seem to open its wings so it was trying to run, or to be more precise, waddle quickly. It wasn't going to succeed unless I did the deus ex machina thing.

Poor thing.

"Get out of there, Milo," I snarled, the Bad Dog voice, and Milo looked crestfallen. It's just my nature, he might have been saying. I threw a stick as hard as I could and the Pope must have been waving "Hi!" from heaven because the damn thing flew forty feet and off the dogs bounded.

How the fuck did a penguin end up on Del Monte beach? Did it escape from the Aquarium, tiptoe out the back door when the staff was preoccupied with letting the Great White Shark free?

"What's the matter little birdie?" I crooned.

The bird cocked its head and studied me with its beady black eyes, backed nervously off. It was probably chock full of mutating viruses, just aching to break out in full antigenic shift boogie in my blood stream.

Ran the dogs back to the car. begged a cardboard box and a plastic milk carton from a nearby store, trapped the bird.

Called the ASPCA. Was herded through a dozen voice mail loops before finally hooking up with the wild life rescue folk.

"It's a penguin," I said. "A small penguin. I don't know how it got here, but that's obviously what it is because it can't fly, and –"

The man laughed. "It's probably a cormorant with a broken wing. I can be there in half an hour. Can you stay with it?"

The rain was really coming down now but it only took the guy ten minutes to get there. He was not what I expected. No flannel shirt, no scraggley Jesus hair. As clipped and gray and clean-shaven as Ken Lay on a day when Enron shares were trading at 80.

We did the hostage exchange and that was that.

I didn't feel particularly virtuous. I felt kind of stupid orchestrating my human powers of empathy and projection. Did Animal Control really have the resources to nurse this little animal back to health? Nature, cruel in tooth and claw. One way or another, the cormorant was probably going to die – ripped apart by dogs on the sand dunes or humanely put to sleep by Animal Control. Or maybe it would just go into shock and shut down by itself. Realistically speaking, there had never been anything I could truly do for this little creature.

But that didn't mean I didn't have to try.

We're temporarily without children.

And this would be a Good Thing except that the children are the first line of defense in the constant offensive that is Dog Care.

Dogs need to walk. Dogs need to eat. Dogs like to be tossed objects that they can chase and then they want to be praised extravagantly for retrieving said objects even though this is obviously a sucker's game. Dogs, in other words, are High Maintenance. Which is why I've always preferred cats. Cats have no personalities or character traits beyond those you project on to them. Let's say you're too busy to project anything at all. Then cats are perfectly content to live their lives without being anthropomorphized.

Yesterday was a bad day almost from the get-go. Ben woke me up around five AM with a high-pitched scream. He'd had a nightmare: Milo, sitting on the couch, panting and grinning, surrounded by several thousand dollars worth of shredded cash. In the dream, Milo had gotten in a bank deposit bag. In real life, Milo has gotten into every cushion of my late mother's couch, her matching white chair, Robin's mattress and most recently my only good pair of boots. The dog has dental issues.

Ben went back to sleep but once I'm awake, I'm awake. Thus I repaired to my office to play wack-a-mole with my ever-growing stack of bills. My office is actually the front porch of this house which at some latish point in its construction cycle was roofed and turned into a semi-functional room. The room has no door separating it from the rest of the house so while I sit at my desk frantically pursuing vendors on the phone or tallying up long lists of COGs, I am still fair target for every human and animal in the house. Milo corners the cat underneath the fax machine. A little later, Ben wanders into the doorway to tell me he has solved the problem of terrorists on planes.

“What you do is fly pigs,” he says.

“Huh?”

“Well, see, any Muslim who dies in the proximity of a pig goes straight to hell. So they're not gonna blow up a plane with pork on it.”

“Do not pass Go, do not collect seventy-two virgins,” I said.

“So what do you think? Should I write Donald Rumsfield?”

“The plan has a certain elegance,” I allow. “I like it!”

What I don't like is this charge for $9.99 on one of my credit cards which after two phone calls and a couple of dead end web searches I trace back to SONY online entertainment. Apparently Robin signed up for one of those thirty day Everquest free trials. And then neglected to cancel the subscription when the meter started to run.

The odd thing, though, is that Robin does not own Everquest.

Identity theft? Or is it possible in some moment of supreme absent-mindedness while Robin was nattering away at me -

“And then Mr. Bailey gave us a math test and my pencil wasn't very sharp so I asked him if I could get up and use the pencil sharpener, and Mommy do you mind if I raid your vicodin stash, download Daddy's little hoard of Internet porn and borrow one of your credit cards so I can hang out in an Internet chat room and lie about my age to other geeks who are not only lying about their age but also their gender?”

“Uh huh, uh huh. Sure, honey. Whatever you like. Only Mommy's kind of busy now.”

- that I actually gave him permission to use the card?

Whatever. The important thing now was to make sure it didn't happen again.

So then I was on the phone for literally two hours trying to get the credit card company to block the fucking charge. “You have to go through the company that placed the charge,” they told me.

“I can't do that,” I said. “The phone number they give out feeds you into an endless voicemail loop with no options for human customer service. And, by the way - how is the weather in Darjeeling this afternoon?”

Finally I gave up. I'll pay the fucking charge, I'll cancel the fucking credit card, I thought grimly. It isn't as though I don't get twenty offers for new credit cards in my mailbox every fucking day.

Something fell on my foot. A ball.

Milo.

Beach time for doggies.

Generally it's Max who takes the dogs to the beach for their hour a day of running wild, running free. But it's actually a chore I enjoy very much. I just never have the time to do it. But Max is up in Berkeley for a couple of days playing tour guide for the ever-compliant and drop-dead beautiful Maya. “I want to show her where I spent my childhood,” he tells me portentously and I forbear to point out that at 17, many people - including the fine legislators behind the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 - would consider that his childhood is ongoing. No matter. Max was very sweet actually. He spent two whole days cooking food to take up with them - “so we won't have to spend money in restaurants” - and looking up directions to the Tilden Park merry-go-round on Mapquest. I didn't have the heart to tell him that eating in restaurants would probably have been cheaper.

(I wonder whether he intends to take Maya to the Long's on 51st Street, the scene of one of his more famous childhood tantrums - the one where I realized that Linda Blair's 360 degree head spin in The Exorcist was not a special effect at all but something screaming two year olds do on a regular basis.)

Beautiful day on the beach. Damp waterline sand catching the blue reflection from the sky. We tromped two miles down and two miles back. Milo saved numerous sticks from near drowning. Xena barked imperiously at many larger dogs.

Then when we got back to the car I realized I'd lost my car keys.

I will spare the reader the gruesome details of searching for said keys, the ordeal of marching both dogs on their leashes three miles through middling to heavy traffic back to our house. Suffice it to say, that if Mao Tse Tung had led an army of canines… Seriously, I thought I might have permanently damaged Xena. Short-legged Jack Russell terriers are not designed for eleven mile hikes.

On the plus side I got a lot of exercise. And a lot of sun! Today I'm fairly glowing.