Gangsters & New Yorker Cartoons
When I was a kid, my parents subscribed to the New Yorker magazine.
I loved the New Yorker, especially because when the new edition arrived, my dad would lay in bed with me, and we’d read the cartoons together.
At first, he had to explain to me why they were funny.
“You see Adam, this is funny because in real life dogs don’t wear suits or drink martinis in restaurants, and they don’t eat their food off fancy plates with a knife and fork, and they wouldn’t tell the waiter to take back their dry food because it was overcooked. The whole thing is silly,” he’d explain.
I loved the fiction section of the New Yorker as well.
I’ve always been a sucker for short stories.
Life is such a mishmash.
I lived in a tough neighborhood growing up.
My next-door neighbor for the first 12 years of my life was a Mexican gang member.
He wasn’t a bad neighbor.
He was quiet.
I knew he was a gang member because 2 or 3 days a week, every week, he’d have 10 or 15 other gang members in his front yard working on cars.
They’d park junked cars on his front lawn, drink beer from brown paper bags, smoke joints, and listen to old doo-wop music turned up loud on one of the car speakers.
Most of those guys were bald, muscular, and tattooed.
They wore khaki shorts and tank tops.
My neighbor had long black hair that he pulled back into a ponytail.
He always wore a white T-shirt, blue jean shorts, white Adidas with black stripes, and white tube socks pulled up to his knees.
It wasn’t just their appearance that gave them away as gang members.
It was also the fact that they sold drugs in the alley across the street from our house.
That, and the guns.
A long thin driveway ran between our house and the neighbor’s house.
At the end of the driveway, we had a garage.
My dad mounted a basketball hoop on the garage for me, and I spent many afternoons in the driveway shooting hoops.
In San Diego, there is sun all the time and I could shoot hoops every day if I wanted to.
A wooden fence ran alongside the driveway.
Most of the fence was backed by the neighbor’s house.
He had a single-story home painted maroon.
Towards the end of the driveway, where our garage was, the neighbor’s house ended, and I could see over the fence into his backyard.
It was a small backyard that wasn’t well kept.
The grass was long and there were weeds everywhere.
Sometimes when I was shooting, my ball would go over the fence.
I tried to be careful, but you can’t always control how the ball bounces off the rim.
When the ball went over, I walked to the neighbor’s house to ask if he could get the ball for me.
If there were a bunch of gangsters working in the front yard, I walked through their gathering.
I smelled the weed smoke and heard the soft, slow, old music they listened to.
My neighbor liked to sit quietly on his front porch steps drinking beer.
He didn’t work on the cars.
He just provided the lawn.
“What’s up little man?” he’d say.
“My ball went over the fence. I’m sorry,” I’d say.
“Hey, it’s no problem.”
Then he’d yell into the house to his girlfriend.
I think it was his girlfriend.
Maybe they were married.
I don’t know.
“Hey! The little boy next door shot his ball into the backyard! Can you go back and throw it over for him?!”
Then I’d hear a woman’s voice from in the house.
“Ok! I’m going now!” she’d yell.
“She’s going now,” he’d say to me.
“Thank you,” I’d say.
“It’s no problem at all little man.”
One afternoon, I shot my ball into the neighbor’s yard, but nobody was there when I went to the front of his house.
I knocked on the front door.
No answer.
I waited and knocked again.
Nothing.
I walked back down the driveway to our garage.
In those days, my friends and I loved to climb to the top of our garage.
We’d open the garage door as far as it could be opened.
It wasn’t an automatic garage door.
We pulled it by a metal handle and then pushed it up from underneath until it stuck straight out.
From the roof, we jumped onto the garage door and surfed it down, jumping off onto the ground just before the door slammed shut.
After your turn, you opened the garage door again to leave it ready for the next person.
Then you climbed the roof and got in line to wait for your next go-round.
Up on the roof one day, I saw that I could easily climb down the other side, into my neighbor’s yard.
I stored that knowledge in case I needed to get my ball when my neighbor wasn’t home.
Now it was time to put my stored knowledge to good use.
I climbed up our side of the garage and down into my neighbor’s yard.
My basketball was in a tall thicket of brown grass just underneath a window.
I picked up the ball and threw it over the fence.
As I darted toward my garage to climb back over, I heard my neighbor call out behind me.
“Hey little man!” he yelled.
I stopped and turned around.
He stood on the grass on the far side of his house, in his underwear and a white T-shirt, barefoot, with his long black hair hanging down.
He had a black pistol in his hand, down by the side of his leg.
“You scared me. I was in there sleeping. I thought you were a robber. Don’t come into my yard like that anymore without asking. It’s dangerous,” he said.
“I won’t. I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s ok little man. Just be more careful next time.”
He turned to go back inside.
I climbed over the garage and went back to shooting hoops.
Life is nuanced.
Nothing is straightforward.
There is no single narrative.
At night I looked at and analyzed cartoons with my loving father while lying in bed, or I read the latest New Yorker short stories until I fell asleep.
During the day, I saw my gang member neighbor.
Here is what got me thinking along these lines.
I stumbled across a phenomenal collection of short stories in the used bookstore near my house.
The collection is called African Stories.
The author is Doris Lessing.
I’d never heard of Doris Lessing before, but now she is one of my all-time favorite authors.
I love this book of short stories.
I especially love the introduction, in which Lessing presents an extremely salient observation.
Lessing is South African, and she came of age during apartheid.
She grew to be very anti-apartheid, and many of her stories examine the utter inhumanity and injustice of that system.
However, as an author, she didn’t want to spend her entire career writing about injustice.
Because injustice wasn’t the only story to tell.
She points out that there were also beautiful, funny, romantic, and heartwarming stories to tell about the South Africa of her youth.
She wanted to create a complete panorama.
When she wrote about themes other than apartheid, critics panned her for ignoring harsh realities.
Her point is that even amid harsh realities, there is also beauty, and you aren’t being honest if you don’t acknowledge specks of light in the darkness.
Viktor Frankl makes a similar point in his book Man’s Search For Meaning.
He said that even in Nazi concentration camps, the prisoners took a moment to enjoy a lovely sunset after a grueling day of work or chuckle together while lying in bed and making fun of their prison guards before drifting off to sleep.
Beauty is what allows you to endure pain and suffering.
It helps pull you through.
You talk about ugly because you want to find ways to eliminate it.
You talk about beauty because you hope to propagate it.
Both are necessary.
Thank you so much for your time today.
I hope that you have a truly blessed day.
Adam
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