Mallory's Camera

Find myself wishing desperately this afternoon for some wise friend to whom I might turn for analysis and counsel...

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Yesterday, l'il Jeremy and I were summarily herded into the inner sanctum that is Reverend Cal's personal office. No voodoo masks or shrunken heads in evidence, but the man himself in a lugubrious grey suit and shades more than made up for it.

Reverend Cal wanted to talk to us about the future of the VISTA project. This made me very nervous. Essentially there is no future of the VISTA project unless Albany signs off on it. And Reverend Cal had not yet spoken with Albany. Some might call this a mere procedural point, but I find that when I'm working in a professional capacity, procedure is very important to me.

First Reverend Cal wanted to brief us on the History of Developmental Disability.

This took about an hour.

Our VISTA project has nothing to do with developmental disability, incidently. We run -- or ran until approximately one week ago -- a youth group for kids from Poughkeepsie's urban ghetto.

Next Reverend Cal wanted to thank us for our contributions to the cause and tell us what amazingly productive and creative little worker bees we are.

This was amusing. Basically, I've spent the past six weeks perfecting my skills at Bejeweled on the office computer. Longtime readers may remember that I love playing Bejeweled so much that I actually incorporated it into my novel Saturday Night in the Sky as a plot point: Maximon, the Last of the Mayan gods, uses Bejeweled as a divination technique.

More recently, Bejeweled was the proximal source of a social faux pas when I suggested to a man I was dating that he might benefit from installing Bejeweled on his home computer.

The guy had informed me upfront that he suffered from OCD.

I had a hard time believing that. "But you seem so normal," I said. "Well, I mean -- not like normal normal. And not like there's anything wrong with being normal -- or with having OCD --"

He laughed. "Not to worry. I have it well under control."

Except that practically every night, he ended up at the Empire City Casino adjoining the Yonkers Racetrack playing video poker.

"There's a lot of skill involved in playing video poker," he told me earnestly, the second time he dragged me there. "People don't realize how much skill's involved."

Well, okay. Maybe I look like I want to invest in oceanside property in Arizona.

Thing that drove me nuts, though, was that he was dropping a lot of money on this game. At least several hundred dollars a night. That was several hundred dollars he could have spent buying me long-stemmed roses, expensive dinners and small, tasteful gifts of jewelry instead of fucking me, taking me to the $18 all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet and allowing me to watch him play video poker.

After the third time, I remarked idly on the drive home, "You know, what you really like about video poker? It evokes that perfect fugue state for you."

"What do you mean?"

"You like the perfect way that all those colored lights line up and those notes chime. But see, you could get exactly the same psychic charge if you installed one of those tile-swapping games on your home computer. They use that same basic strategy of escalating lights and chimes. And that way, you could placate your OCD urges but you wouldn't have to lose any money --"

"I do not play video poker because I have OCD!" he said. His teeth may have been clenched. I would have had to have been looking at him to make sure. "My OCD is under control! I play video poker because it's a highly skilled game that requires real strategy and attention to detail, and anyway last week, I won a pot worth four hundred dollars --"

"Right," I said. "But how many dollars did you feed into the machine before you won it? And how much did you lose tonight?"

This was the last time we went out.

But I digress. Back to Reverend Cal's office.

"So I looked over your business plan," he said. "Remarkable work. Well, okay. I didn't have time to read it. I scanned it. Thing is, Pollyanna doesn't have 20 Gs to throw into the startup pot for your smoothie carts --"

Of course, the business plan didn't say anything about getting 20 Gs from Pollyanna. Our plan was to do a Kickstarter campaign for the startup money.

I thought of pointing this out to Reverend Cal. Just to irritate him.

I didn't.

"So unfortunately that's not going to work. And unfortunately, we can't support the youth group anymore -- what was it called?"

"Shaping Empowered Teens," said l'il Jeremy. "SET."

"Like 'Ready, Set, Go!'" I pointed out helpfully. "Or as we liked to say, 'Ready, Set, Grow!'"

Reverend Cal ignored me. "But we understand we have a responsibility to you VISTA volunteers. You're living the truth of Brother Martin Luther King's call to giving through volunteering. And I am working on another project --"

Reverend Cal's other project turns out to be a healthful beverage packed with powerful phytochemical antioxidants and anthocyanins, and bottled by -- the developmentally disabled!!! No shit, Sherlock. Hey! You can pay them them even less than you have to pay those North Korean factory workers!

It was all I could do to keep myself from bursting into hysterical laughter.

Right! Because Dr. Cal's Digestive Snake Oil is totally in line with the VISTA mission to fight poverty in America.

In fact, you gotta wonder about a governmental agency that would give a grant to someone like Reverend Cal in the first place.

"What do you think?" asked Reverend Cal. His pupils couldn't really have turned into tiny bats rotating in vats of scab-colored jello, could they? No. Clearly I was hallucinating.

"Well! Uh. Sounds like a fascinating project," I said.

"Sure does!" said l'il Jeremy.

"Of course, you'll need to run it by the VISTA office in Albany --"

We each shook Reverend Cal's scaly hand, and then the meeting was officially over.

"Well," l'il Jeremy said. "That killed 45 minutes. Only another six hours to get through."

"Oh, I'm not sticking around here," I said. "I'm going home."

"You are?"

"Well, yeah. Reverend Cal just essentially reneged on the terms of the grant that's been funding us here. It's not in my best interests to stick around unless Albany clarifies our position --"

"Or doesn't clarify our position --"

"A girl can dream --"

"Plus, it's not exactly as though there's anything for us to do here --"

"What? Putting Reverend Cal's Joy Juice on 7-Eleven's refrigerated beverage rack right next to Pepsi Cola doesn't appeal?"

"Can't say that it does," said Jeremy.

"I mean, my kid wants me to help him with his law school application statement of purpose. But I can do that at home, right? And how long will that take me anyway? Five minutes? Dear Harvard Law School, As the oldest son of a Jewish mother, only three professions are open to me: medicine, accounting and the law. I don't want to be a doctor or an accountant. Please accept me --"

"What about Bejeweled?" Jeremy asked. He was grinning. "You are so close to breaking that 250,000 mark --"

"Fuck Bejeweled," I said. "Fuck Pollyanna. Fuck VISTA."

"Amen, sister," Jeremy said. "I'm leaving too. And you know what? I ain't coming back."

Dispiriting conversation with Max a couple of days ago. He cannot find a job. This is a kid who's brilliant, accomplished and who graduated with honors from Stanford University.

I'm tempted to blame this on the fact that he's living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Except a little bit of research reveals that the official unemployment rate in the San Francisco Bay Area is down to 6%. Higher than that for his demographic cohort, I'm imagining, the cohort with the unfortunate Marvel comix nickname, the Millennials.

For whatever reason, Max decided to put off law school applications for a year. I think he's waffling. I don't necessarily blame him. Worst case scenario: He graduates from law school with $100,000 worth of debt and he still can't find a job. Or he can find a job, because with his grades and LSAT scores, he can get into a top-ten school. But it's a job with one of those big, unscrupulous Lockhart & Gardener type firms where he's expected to toil 80 hours a week if he wants to pay off those school loans, and he might as well shoot himself.

I don't quite understand why he decided to put off the law school application process, but I suspect in his own mind he's not sure he wants to be a lawyer.

"So don't be a lawyer," I said to him on the phone. "Get a teaching credential. I think you'd be a brilliant teacher. Thing is, honey, you gotta do something --"

"Mom. Chill. I know I have to do something."

But does he?

When he was visiting me in Ithaca a couple of years ago, he picked a very deliberate fight with me. "I think it's entirely your fault that I'm unable to commit to stuff," he said.

I was flabbergasted.

"Well, you kept pounding it into my head that I should never make any decisions that were -- 'irretrievable,' I believe, is the word that you used."

I thought this accusation very unjust.

"Max," I said, "I meant irretrievable in the context of your adolescence. Like you shouldn't get some 17 year old girl whose parents don't believe in abortions -- which is 99% of the parents in Monterey County -- pregnant. And you shouldn't be busted with half an ounce of pot -- even if the local authorities don't prosecute -- because you'll never be eligible for a federally insured school loan. That kind of thing. I didn't mean you should never commit yourself to anything."

I'm fairly sure that Max's job woes are at least in part due to geography. The Bay Area has always sucked as far as undifferentiated jobs go -- there are just too many people competing for them. But Max is not going to leave the Bay Area. He was born and raised in Northern California and is in a serious relationship with a woman who was born and raised in Northern California. Liza did her Yale stint plus one additional year freezing in New Haven and then she went Home. I doubt she's gonna live anywhere outside California again. And Max is in love with Liza.

You either love California, or you can't wait to leave.

Out of all the RLS posse, I would have thought Nathan the most unlikely to leave California, but he's the one a decade later whom I don't think is ever going back. Not even after he inherits the impressive ________ mansion. I think when John and Celeste die, Nathan will sell the house, invest in secure municipal bonds and hightail it back to the East Coast ASAP.

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Jeremy and I have become close pals to the extent that it's possible for a 61 year old white woman to become close pals with a 25 year old African American man. We duck out at lunchtime and go for long riverside strolls together during which we talk about our hopes and fears. Jeremy isn't particularly optimistic about his future either. He's doing the VISTA thing because he didn't want to spend the rest of his life as a busboy at Appleby's.

"It's so tough for your generation," I say. "You know, the incredibly high taxes you're gonna be paying for the rest of your life are not gonna buy you one fucking thing. You'll merely be paying interest on loans from the Chinese that went to pay for my generation's entitlements."

Jeremy laughs. "We'll default," he says. "We'll host the flash mob revolution! And don't worry, Patrizia. When we're cornering Boomers in the streets and herding them into the reeducation camps, I'll hide you in my root cellar."

"You don't have a root cellar," I point out.

"Well, there is that," he agrees. "Maybe you should be worried."

I just loved Philly. The past integrated with the present; the 19th century townhouses cheek and jowl with the 21st century skyscrapers. And all the spectacular murals! It's a terrific place.

The AmeriCorps VISTA training was… interesting. I suspect much of my LJ for the next year at least is going to have to be Friends-Only because joining AmeriCorps VISTA turns out to be exactly like joining the military – I am now a sworn upholder and defender of the Constitution. I am necessarily going to have to be extremely circumspect in the things I say in public forums. I know I have some readers who aren't on LJ. If you want to keep reading you'll have to get LJ accounts and Friend me.

It was distinctly odd being the token Old Person in a group of 26 year olds. Happens that more than most Old People, I blend pretty well into groups of 26 year olds – not as an authority figure, but as one of the clone – so I got along pretty well with them. Like, "Wow! Get down, Patrizia! You've got the moves!" when we were all dancing together. Right, honey, I thought. And I've been having them moves since before you were a minor irritation in yo' Daddy's epididymis.

One of the more interesting things at the training was observing the split between the privileged kids who'd gone to great colleges and the kids who'd pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Extra credit if you can guess the skin tones of those two groups! Duh – it's not hard.

VISTA's ostensible mission is to end poverty, although like all organizations – government and otherwise – its real purpose is to perpetuate the organization's existence. The kids who'd gone to great schools knew about poverty, of course, as a sociological concept. They talked a lot about it during the orientation. But the kids who'd come up the mean way mostly kept their mouths shut.

There was a huge amount of social interaction among the kids of the first group. Kids in the second group tended not to socialize, not even with each other.

One of the most daunting things about my upcoming assignment, of course, is how I – as an elderly white female – am going to relate to a target demograpic of mostly black and Hispanic teenagers who are just going to be counting down the days till they can drop out of high school. I mean, what do I tell them: Stay in school so you can end up like moi, an overeducated, old white woman teetering precariously on the edge of the financial abyss and prone to acute episodes of existential despair? I'm hardly a role model.

I am absolutely terrific at programmatic type stuff, though. I can formulate action plans and write grants like nobody's business. So at least I can position the program to be dynamic in years to come.



The high point of the trip was meeting Dan and his wife Connie. Dan is actually my father's half-brother. Parenthetically, one of the reasons I stay on Facebook is because of the DiLucchios on Facebook. I figure they're all related to me – it's not a particularly common last name, right? Who knows, I may need a kidney donation some day. Twin whammies of my own peculiar upbringing and the extremely dysfunctional paternal line are such that it was not until I was well into middle age that I began putting the DiLucchio family jigsaw together.

Anyway, Dan is the product of my paternal grandfather's final marriage. We are actually close in age. He's a terrific guy, and his wife is similarly terrific. We talked at great length about the DiLucchio family's Mob connections. (They survive even unto the present generation if we include the career arc of one of my half-brothers.)

I had a really good time with him, and got to eat some terrific Mexican food.
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