Joshua Bell Gay. Or Married. Or Straight

Joshua Bell Gay. Why are so many of you obsessed with this, this Joshua Bell Gay? I write a blog entry over a year ago about this talented fiddler with the phrase, “tell Wife you’re gay, even though you’re not” and a year later, this entry still gets plenty hits from people Googling “Joshua bell gay.”

From the U.S., Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America. Why? Are you gay and want to know if he’s available? Are you a woman who wants to marry Joshua Bell? Are you a jealous husband who wants to crush your spouse’s hopes forever of divorcing you and running off with Mr. Bell and his “Strad”?

I don't know if Joshua Bell is gay, and I don't care. You won’t find the answer to your query here. Despite all the many new “viewers” Bookfraud has gotten from people doing a search with the phrase “joshua bell gay,” there is no information here on this. Or “Joshua bell straight,” either.

The most frequent search term that lands people here is not “bookfraud brilliant or “great writer" or “why hasn't bookfraud been published and gotten millions of dollars?" It's you-know-what. It's not “Tchaikovsky gay” or “Horowitz gay,” even though I've written about these two musical geniuses, and who were certainly homosexual.

In fact, nobody Googles “Itzhak Perlman gay” or “Sarah Chang gay” or “Jascha Heifetz gay” or “Paganini gay.” What gives?

Also, there seems to be a lot of people who are looking for Padma Lakshmi's picture. There must be a lack of photographs for Ms. Lakshmi, whose tenuous connection to this space is that she is bethrothed to Salman Rushdie, perhaps the greatest writer in English these days. OK, here she is, with Salman, again proving that despite all the death threats, he's the luckiest man in the world:

A lot of people visited this space after my entry on the Cubs was posted on a few baseball blogs (though, given the number of comments, you wouldn’t have known it). Long after the interest over the Cubs fades, though, you’ll get people who will come via searching the Internet for “Joshua Bell Gay.”

Please let me know why you're doing this. You know who you are. Not that there's anything wrong.

Mr. Irrelevant

Phone rings, at about 7 p.m. It’s one of Wife’s friends.

“Hey Bookfraud, just checking in to see how Wife is doing,” the friend says. “See how she’s feeling.”

I say that Wife is feeling as well as can be expected, given she’s going to give birth in a week or two. She’s in the bathroom, can’t talk.

“Great! Just have her give me a call.”

Phone rings again, at about 7:30. We’re eating dinner and let the voicemail pick up. “Hi! It’s Wife’s Friend Number 2! How are you guys? You must be so excited now! I just wanted to check in and see how Wife is doing? Is there anything I can do to help? Anyway, give me a call! Bye!”

Phone rings again, at about 7:45. Fully knowing what is coming, I hand the receiver to Wife. “Oh, hi!” she says to Friend Number 3. “Things are fine! We’re getting pretty excited. Me? I’m feeling fine.”

And so it goes as we hurdle towards our final day as a married, childless couple. The phone rings (and rings and rings), and it inevitably will be someone asking about Wife. Her friends, her family; my friends, my family. They don’t ask, “Hey, Bookfraud, how are you doing?” They don’t ask, “Hey Bookfraud, are you feeling OK?” And they don’t say, “Bookfraud, are you sick of everybody ignoring you? Just wait. It’s going to get a hell of a lot worse.”

I know what they are saying. For though I am capable of great acts of self-delusion — it’s what keeps me writing — I am not blind to the fact that from now until the baby is born and several weeks afterwards, I am just an appendage, a barrier to be overcome. Everyone cares about the woman carrying the baby, for it is she who ultimately holds the hopes and desires of everyone around her; i.e. grandparents to be.


Lewis: doesn't look like a carrot

Nobody really cares about the baby seeder. My job is essentially done and the worthiness for the rest of my life depends upon my performance as a provider, father, and fellow who just doesn’t get in the way.

My cousin, who has two children of his own, put it well when he said that my mother and my in-laws will suddenly have a Whole Lotta Love for this infant, who, as he put it, is substitute for the infant stolen from them when I grew up.

Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and several other amazing tomes of non-fiction, wrote how once his wife (Tabitha Soren, the former MTV talking head) entered the hospital in labor, his job was, essentially, to get the hell out of the way. No matter how many times he told dear Tabs that she could do this, the pain was going away, or that she could make it through this, the world of nurses and doctors and relatives treated him like an elevator operator.

He was there, helping people get on their way, but he really wasn’t necessary:

[U]p until the moment the child is born, the husband in the delivery room is in an odd predicament. He's been admitted to the scene of the crisis but given no serious purpose. He's the Frenchman after the war resolution has passed.

Or, as he also put it, the father in the delivery room is an actor searching for a role — the “carrot in the school play.”

I would extend this metaphor to the weeks leading up to the “glorious event” (as one of my co-workers put it). I might as well be in Sierra Leone or Indonesia. It’s not that people don’t care about my perilous mental or physical health, but really, they don’t care. It’s all about Mama.

My own family is of the same mindset. My mother: “How’s Wife feeling?” My brother, “How’s Wife feeling?” My sister, “How’s Wife feeling?”


Endgame

If you are a parent or perceptive in the least, the joke is on me — and Wife. For, although Wife will still get plenty of sympathy I the coming months over her recovery, breast feeding duties, and days when she is alone in charge of Baby’s care, soon, that sympathy will fade. People’s concern will center on the child. Forever. This is not going to change unless I get sick and die. From now on, every friend and family member’s concern will be on Baby, Infant, Toddler, Child, Adolescent, Teenager, College Student, Adult Son of Bookfraud.

The only thing that’s going to matter is if we have the wherewithal to support Child. The only thing that’s going to matter is if we have the wisdom to choose the right schools for Child, if we get him to take piano lessons early enough, and if I can teach him to hit a curveball. Tell me when it gets better.

Altered States

I was fully prepared to devote an entry to a topic utterly revolting, infantile, and repulsive, but I thought, ah, what the hell, let's try something different.

It has been a well-repeated (if not proven) factoid that the longer a couple is together, the more they look alike. This is probably why Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock are now Splitsville, though I not know if Pam dumped him because she worried about morphing into her husband one day, or if Kid Rock had nightmares that enormous mountains of silicone would one day form on his chest.

Also, if one does tend to look like their partner over time, I imagine that all the 22-yearold Russian supermodels with 80-year-old millionaire boyfriends are headed for a bad ending, though Viagra has already made their pretty lives pretty miserable.

If Wife started looking like me, but I would not leave her, although our sex life would be kaput, for I might start thinking I was making love to myself, and you shouldn’t make love to someone you hate.

Although our physical appearances are in no threat of converging, of late our creative states are similar, and sadly for the worst. I’m uninspired, she’s uninspired, and this makes for a lot of bad writing. Wife is in the desperate race to finish her novel before she gives birth in a few months, and I am in the desperate race to figure out what to do with my novel before I die, which may happen any day between now and 2060.

It’s not just that we’re unhappy with our respective output; it’s that we’re just not feeling the urge to create. Nothing I read is inspiring me, ditto for Wife, and about the only thing that moves either of us is music. Which we don’t compose.


Required reading

(Wife can write circles around yours truly. For her, a slump means her writing is merely excellent; for me, merely excrement.)

This lack of creativity can come across in other unpleasant manifestations. Wife is angry at me for some supposed household infractions, including (but not limited to) lack of initiative in cleaning, cooking, conducting “research” for forthcoming baby, and other imagined and real offenses that all have to do with domesticity.

I can get rather pissy at Wife for her getting pissy at me, and the cycle of love-anger-love begins anew. Much of this anguish concerns the onset of Wife’s pregnancy, and the natural fears that motherhood will extinguish her career — if I don’t help out, she’ll be swamped and depressed, unable to ever write again.*

By all accounts of friends who have experienced the miracle of birth, writing fiction does not exactly take precedence when Junior is projectile vomiting while soiling through several thousand diapers a day. A parent’s free time is when baby is napping, and if you are lucky, you’ll be napping as well. When it comes to writing, the first six months — well, fuggitaboutit.

It is this certainty that should make both Wife and I writing fiends instead of neurotic masses of indecisive chum. Of course, we’ll get back into the swing of things, perhaps before retirement age.

Already, well before my child is born, I am envisioning a fatherly talk I’ll have with my son (ultrasound confirmed it’s a wiener). Such a talk often entails bromides on telling the truth, never getting into cars with strangers, or the unfathomable mysteries of sex, which, to be honest, I probably should not talk about, lest I ruin the kid’s sex life forever.

In any case, I will be direct, and loving, and fair: “Son, the world is full of great possibility. There is so much to learn, to see, to do. Don’t let anyone say you can’t do something, and always believe in yourself. Always follow your heart — you can be a doctor, a musician, an artist, a scientist. Whatever you want, you can achieve, just as you put your mind to it.

But for God’s sakes, don’t become a fucking narcissistic neurotic writer like your old man. Please? I don’t want to kick your ass over this. Thank you. You’re a good son.”

*(This is where the disgusting part was supposed to be. I was going to write about my newfound spirit of assistance in the household arts to help Wife through this difficult stretch. Borrowing from an infamous Saturday Night Live skit from the 1970s that never made it to air, I was going to write about a great new dish that I could cook following the birth of our child. Of course, I speak of placenta. Placenta burgers, placenta stroganoff, placenta Wellington.


It’s what's for dinner

And if you just can’t make it with placenta, you have to use what that SNL parody was selling: Placenta Helper! (“Wow, Mom, that’s great placenta!” “Oh, son, it’s not just placenta – it’s Placenta Helper!” “Can we have it again tomorrow?” “No, silly – you’ll have to wait for another brother or sister first!”)

What’s more disturbing is that there are people who actually keep and cook their placenta. Let’s eat!)

Up With Food, Down With Foodies

Like most any man crashing into middle age, yours truly could afford to shed a few pounds, especially considering that my knees and back are slowly disintegrating into a fine powder-like substance one associates with ground chalk.

Of course, I want to be in good health when Wife gives birth next year, so it would pay for me to lose weight. As an exacting, thorough researcher, I have discovered the following fool-proof, scientifically proven, guaranteed-not-to-fail weight-loss techniques: the Palm Beach Diet, the Akins Diet, the Ultra Lipo Lean diet, the Laze Diet System, the Phat Predator diet, the Loose the Bums Diet, and, my favorite, something called “Zumba by Beto,” which has the distinction of sounding like the name of an Orc in the Slavic-language version of “The Lord of the Rings.”

I imagine that in this pantheon of diets is the idea that if one expends more calories than one consumes, weight will indeed be lost. The simple plan for me would be to lay off the nightly six-packs of Schlitz Special Reserve.

Research apparently posits that low-calorie diets will help prolong life, with some adherents to this philosophy eating 1,500 calories a day, though most people on such limited nourishment are so weak that they can’t think of anything except their next meal, have stopped paying attention to the world at large, and will be hit by a bus.

(And if it turns out tomorrow morning that the bad guys keep control of Congress, I’ll put on 10 pounds this week, cashing in my Dunkin’ Donuts gift certificates.)


She never went to Taco Taco Taco Bell

Diet plans generally do not inspire great literature—Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” aside—but food and drink does, all the way back to Eve pulling that damn apple off the tree, continuing through that first Roman who said “in vino veritas,” through Rabelais, that fine master of excess, and so on.

But “food writing”—non-fiction about the “art of eating” and other such swill—that’s another rodeo altogether. I’ve always thought that food and wine reviewing must be one of the hardest of all critical pursuits. You can only describe how something tastes in so many ways until fresh adjectives become scarcer than truffles; I would get stuck after “hot and spicy,” “spicy like,” and “spicy spice.”

I imagine there are great sentences in describing the joys of food, but while I love to eat and drink, I am no connoisseur of food and wine writing. If something tastes good, I like it, if it tastes bad, I hate it, and no amount of verbal bullying is going to make me enjoy olive paste or curried tomato chutney.

There was a time when I met in succession several comely women who said they wanted to quit their professional job and become a food writer, “like M.F.K. Fisher,” who wrote several memorable tomes on food. I hadn’t read the estimable Ms. Fisher, but this “I wanna write like M.F.K.” mania, which seemed to have peaked in the early 1990s, was replaced with “I wanna write a screenplay” craze, then “I wanna write children’s books,” and finally “I wanna write a blog (and get a book deal),” all of which were elaborate ways of saying “I wanna do anything but spend one more fucking day as a lawyer.”

One detects the faintest whiff of superiority in such types, especially those who declare themselves “foodies.” Not only does the word make no sense, it is one of the Five Worst Words of All Time, and anyone describing themselves a “foodie” to my face is in grave danger of having their lunch money forcibly removed from their person.


Foodie-like snobbery+wine=raging alcoholic

Calling oneself a “foodie” probably means, “I really enjoy food, much more than others, to the point of obsession.” I guess that makes a lover of Bach or Black Flag a “musicie,” and, if obsession is the standard, by nature the male half of the human race are “fuckies.” Me, I’m a “musicie fuckie readie writie sportsie combat-robotie,”* and in a few months, “daddyie.”

Which brings us back to the whole diet thing. To be fair, as Wife grows into round tumescence, I should probably hop on the Lose LBS Express. Still, my weight is probably the least of my worries. There’s baby crap to buy, wills to write, insurance to consider. There’s birthing classes to take and many more trips to the doctor. And many books on parenthood to read, hopefully none authored by an unhappy lawyer in dear need of a career change.

*After the original posting, I remembered another one: "tittie."