The Siren Song of the MBA

I was in debt, living with my parents in New Jersey, and I needed a job.

In the help-wanted section, I saw that the NYC Department of Corrections was hiring a Statistician. To be working for the city, that’s not bad. In an office, I would think. I had taken some advanced statistics, knew enough about the software. Doesn’t matter, I didn’t get the job.

Or any others, week after week, going into months.

I finally got an offer: Reporter on the Education beat with The Montclair Times, my hometown paper, for $24k/year, full-time. But I couldn’t afford to take it. Student loans.

Four years earlier, on April Fools’ Day, 1996, I had quit my job as a database programmer.

I wanted to get an MBA, and I came up with all sorts of reasons as to why it was a good idea. To learn about the business behind the technology. To rebrand myself beyond being just a database programmer. To get a higher-paying job. To learn what I wouldn’t be able to learn easily on my own, like how the financial markets really work, or how to network, or how to prepare for a job interview.

But at a fundamental level, it was an escape from a job that was no longer fulfilling. It was an escape from the commuter bus to Port Authority Bus Terminal. It was an escape from a city in which I hadn’t yet found my place.

And it was an escape with a destination: Japan.

The plan:

  1. GET AN MBA
  2. LEARN JAPANESE
  3. ?
  4. PROFIT!!!

At the beginning, everything went according to plan.

I had a high GMAT score, a good story about working with entrepreneurs, and solid recommendations to back it up. Those factors outweighed my mediocre undergrad GPA.

It came down to three finalists: Carnegie Mellon, Thunderbird, and Vanderbilt.

Carnegie Mellon was my alma mater. It was nice of them to accept me, but I wasn’t going back. I barely made it through the first time around.

Vanderbilt was a solid choice in every respect. Strong reputation, well-regarded academics, and an intimate scale. Beautiful campus, affordable city, close to nature. And a partial scholarship.

Thunderbird had the best vibes. I had driven from New Jersey to Phoenix, by way of Pittsburgh, Columbus, Raleigh, Nashville, New Orleans, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, and Tucson. I liked the people, the campus, and the strange desert climate. I had a good feeling about the place. The school was offering a Master in International Management (MIM) combining business, language, and area studies. I would have been around people with similar interests to my own.

Then I got into the Cornell Summer Japanese FALCON program, an eight-week intensive introduction to the spoken language. I spoke on the phone with the head of the program, Professor Robert Sukle. We talked about my future. I told him about Thunderbird. Sukle-sensei said that if I wanted to learn Japanese and learn it well, it would take more than a part-time commitment. To be precise, it would take a full year: the Summer program plus the Fall and Spring semesters as a Japanese FALCON.

Sukle-sensei made a good point. At Thunderbird, I would only learn the basics of Japanese. Also, I hadn’t studied business as an undergraduate, and so most of my two-year schedule at Thunderbird would be filled with required classes. By comparison, the traditional MBA curriculum of Vanderbilt would let me specialize, and if I couldn’t decide on a speciality, I could pursue a double concentration. And the price was right.

Instead of Thunderbird’s all-in-one, two-year bundle that closely matched my interests, I chose to assemble an à la carte education spanning business, language, and area studies. Vanderbilt (1996-1998) for an MBA; Cornell (Summer 1996, Full-year 1998-1999) for Japanese; and eventually, Harvard Extension School (2003-2012) for Foreign Literature and Culture. I learned more doing it my way, but it would have been easier to go with the bundle.

I also might have stayed in Arizona for a much better reason.

In Tucson, I took a meeting at the University of Arizona, following up on my response to an RFP found on a user group mailing list. A team was seeking to improve health outcomes by putting laptops in ambulances. With the data collected, they wanted to optimize ambulance fleet deployments across the great expanses of the state. As a certified developer in the database software they were using, I could have jumped right in, helping people who save lives.

But I turned down the opportunity. I had a four-point plan and I wasn’t stopping for ambulances. In retrospect, I’m sorry about that. I could have made myself useful. And by being adjacent to a major university, who knows what might have come from that?

I drove back East. After a pleasant summer learning basic Japanese at Cornell, I went to Vanderbilt, where I got what I paid for, a well-rounded business education. I concentrated in finance and accounting, and had an internship working in ventures and alliances for MCI Communications in Washington, D.C. Upon graduation, I had two job offers in hand, one for $75k with a Colorado telecom company and another for $44k with an airline in Phoenix.

The telecom job was a pig in a poke. I don’t remember learning anything about the company or even interviewing, and so it must have been one of those situations where you check a form to submit your resume to a bunch of companies. I’ll assume they were impressed by my tech background, telecom internship, and coursework in regulatory policy and antitrust law. Or the simpler explanation, that someone at the company owed the placement office a favor.

The airline job was statistical yield management, figuring out how to fill airplanes, how many seats to overbook, and where to send the planes. I gave Phoenix another visit, but this time it didn’t feel right for me. I liked that the airline job would let me fly free on any empty flight and imagined spending weekends exploring the West. And then I concluded that the prospect of free flights was no way to choose a career.

I went with a third option: To finish the full-year Japanese FALCON program at Cornell. If I didn’t do it then, I never would. I had been granted a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from the US Department of Education. And I liked the idea of studying just one topic for an entire year.

By mid-1999, the first two parts of my plan were complete. I had an MBA from a Top 30 business school, and I spoke passable Japanese, far from fluent and years from literate, but enough to get an interview with a Japanese telecom firm. They flew me out for second round of interviews in Tokyo. I wrote about this elsewhere (see Tokyo Nice), and let’s just say it didn’t pan out.

In Tokyo, I worked as a freelance writer and quickly ran out of money. Although I had partial scholarships for the MBA and the year of Japanese, I had borrowed for the rest, including three years’ living expenses and accrued interest from deferrals. I wasn’t making enough as a freelance writer to support myself in Tokyo, let alone make a dent in the loans.

I returned to New Jersey and moved back in with my parents. I had talked a good game with the four-point plan, but my father was out of patience. I had to get a job and no longer had the luxury of being picky about it.

It was a difficult time. I was losing confidence in myself. I might have gone back to Nashville to throw myself on the mercy of the placement office, but I was too proud to do that. And so I started answering newspaper ads, anything that might fit the profile of a 30-year-old former programmer with some Japanese and a low-miles MBA.

Eventually, it was my family who came through for me. A close cousin had been working for a trade publisher, Miller Freeman, that had recently acquired CMP Media. In 2000, at the tail end of the tech bubble, the company was still hiring and paying bonuses for referrals. Win-win-win.

I interviewed for the job of Associate Editor with Bank Systems & Technology, a B2B publication for senior-level bank executives. I went in and said, “I can do the job and I want the job.” I got the job, making twice the salary of a hometown reporter.

My expensive education finally got put to work. It turns out that I had become fluent in a language after all – the language of business and finance.

The 5 Whys

Doshite nihongo o benkyo-saretan desu ka?
どうして日本語を勉強されたのですか。
Why are you studying Japanese?

It all started in 1995 with a lightly used copy of Japanese for Busy People and a Kanji workbook, gifts from a good friend who had briefly attempted, and then abandoned, the project of learning Japanese. I became fascinated by the dual syllabaries, the ideographic characters, the ancient culture embodied in every sentence. It was unlike anything I had ever tried to learn before. And so, during my commute to Manhattan, I began to study the Japanese language in earnest. While I have made some modest progress over the ensuing years, I still have a long way to go. Gambarimasu!

Doshite nihongo o benkyo-saretan desu ka?
どうして日本語を勉強されたのですか。
Why are you studying Japanese?

Didn’t I just answer that question? Like I told you, it was an intellectual attraction. Why does it have to be anything more than that? There’s nothing more to tell. Okay, you want me to explain? Look, I don’t know where the attraction started. I liked monster movies as a kid . ゴジラ！Isn’t that how most people get into Japanese, from movies and fashion and anime? Except back then, they’d only show the monster movies once a year around Thanksgiving. And we had the Shogun television miniseries and comic book ninjas, Wolverine and his Japanese girlfriend saying <LOGAN-SAN>. Japan was part of the culture, and I just took it to the next level.

Doshite nihongo o benkyo-saretan desu ka?
どうして日本語を勉強されたのですか。
Why are you studying Japanese?

So you’re not going to let it go, are you? I know how this works. You’ll just keep asking the same question over and over again until I break down and tell you the truth. Frankly, I don’t care if you know. It’s just a bit awkward, that’s all, awkward for you, not me, I’m cool with it.

Okay, it wasn’t all James Clavell and comic books. I heard all sorts of things about Japan growing up.

Here’s one of my father’s stories:

It’s October 1941. We went to Hawaii. We stopped at every one of the Hawaiian Islands. Hawaii, Kauai, Lanai, Molokai, Niihau, Maui, Oahu. Molokai was the leper colony. They made a movie about Father Damian there, he lived with the lepers for 40 years, then he caught leprosy and died. Anyway, all the islands used to have whorehouses. Mostly, they were Japanese girls, they had Japanese farmers all over the islands. It was two dollars a shot, and I used to visit them all.

Except for Molokai. I skipped the leper colony.

We went back to San Francisco, and then I made a second trip.

I’m in Honolulu. I meet my friend George Soloff, who’s in the Navy. We buy a bottle of whiskey and we go to Waikiki Beach. I get drunk, fall asleep on the beach, and wake up 15 minutes before the ship is due to leave. I’m sick, I throw up. I grab a taxi and get to the ship. They’re picking up the gangway, but I get aboard. It was seconds that made the difference. The date was December 1st, 1941. Had I missed the ship, I would have been hanging around Pearl Harbor six days later.

We were a day out of San Francisco when we got news that Pearl Harbor was attacked.

And then after the war:

Japan had geisha girls. They weren’t whores, they were just companions. They would just sit and pass the wine glasses, and they’d work on the fish and cut the steaks for you.

I saw the devastation we had done to Japan. I didn’t see Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but I saw Yokohama. My God, what we did to those Japanese. I said to myself — you fuck with the United States, boy, we had to build the ships, we had to build the planes, we had to train the soldiers, we sent them to different countries all over the fucking world, and we kicked your ass. But you know what? We’re not the kind of ruler that takes over and enslaves the country. We gave them food, we brought them money so they could get back on their feet.

I also remember bringing weekies, a set of seven underpants of different colors, each labeled with a different day of the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. For a set of weekies, you could get laid for two weeks.

All that’s from the book, LEON: A LIFE. I’ve been told that it’s unusual to hear about the brothels. Usually, it’s glossed over in mariners’ biographies and autobiographies, but I’m glad my father was honest about it.

Can you blame me for taking an interest?

Doshite nihongo o benkyo-saretan desu ka?
どうして日本語を勉強されたのですか。
Why are you studying Japanese?

Okay, I guess I see your point. Through these questions, or better yet the repeated question, we’re starting to get somewhere.

We’ve established an intellectual interest in Japanese and the cultural influence of Japan, but those could apply to all sorts of people who never take up Japanese studies. My father’s influence was also a factor, but that didn’t guide my siblings towards the language. There must be something else.

The simplest explanation is usually the best. That means sex.

Back in high school, I was interested in a girl. She liked me well enough but not like that, and I was too short for her. For more than a year, I tried to make headway. Nothing. And then one night I go out with her and her folks, her parents liked me, we go out to a Japanese restaurant and it’s the first time I try sushi and we tasted sake and later that evening I make my move and it’s not a complete rebuff, not at all, although I should have known better than to try and it never happens again.

That association between an unrequited first love and Japanese cuisine may explain what was to ensue in my Japanese language learning, an extraordinarily outsized effort toward an unattainable goal culminating in a momentary and fleeting taste of success followed by eventual acceptance that it wasn’t to be.

Doshite nihongo o benkyo-saretan desu ka?
どうして日本語を勉強されたのですか。
Why are you studying Japanese?

This isn’t in the book, but my father would tell this joke:

I asked one of the whores: “What are you doing with the money you’re making?”
She replied: “Buying real estate in Tokyo.”

It’s not a very good joke, and I don’t like it. But I’m telling it now because it says something about economic anxiety toward Japan. In the 1980s, Japan became an economic powerhouse. The US dollar lost strength against the yen. Prestige assets were being snapped up in the US. At the peak of Japan’s real estate boom, the Imperial Palace was said to be worth more than the state of California. Thus the demeaning and sordid joke imputing unsavory sources of well-earned Japanese wealth. ごめんあさい。

My father was a survivor of the Great Depression and World War II. He had the highs of being an American abroad with an ascendant dollar during the postwar era, and the lows of trying to sell stocks and bonds during the market downturn of the Vietnam War era. He struggled to find employment later in life, and this led him to become a house-husband raising three kids.

With that upbringing, I inherited a sense of unease about America’s economic future in an increasingly competitive world. It didn’t pan out exactly as anticipated or as quickly, but there’s no question that such unease was, and is, warranted.

I started learning Japanese because in it I saw the future, what we now call “The Asian Century.”

But it was much more concrete than that. For those last few months of my employment as a database programmer, I drove around in a leased Nissan Pathfinder. This was my first experience driving a Japanese car, and it was a beauty. I liked the engineering, the lines, the design, the aesthetic. How did they do it so well?

I remember driving around in the Pathfinder, the audio for Japanese for Busy People in the tape deck, thinking: “I have to learn this language.”

My final answer: I’m studying Japanese for business.

How to Get Ahead in Advertising

Competitrack had racks of VHS machines set up to record the top broadcast and cable channels in dozens of US cities. Someone would swap in new tapes and box up the old ones for shipment to New York. The team of TV “coders” would receive the tapes and scan through each one to find and identify all of the ads within our tracking universe. Whenever they found a new ad, competing ad agencies would want to see it ASAP, and the standard practice was to send a videotape via bicycle messenger.

In 1995, I built a “QuickView” service for digital video transmission. First, we’d digitize the video. Then, we’d transfer the files to a dedicated computer at the client site using separate point-to-point transfer solutions for Mac (Apple Remote Access) and PC (Norton PCAnywhere). Finally, we’d ping the client computer to launch a desktop application that would sound an alert and play the locally stored QuickTime video. Several moving parts, but it worked fine.

The result was that within minutes of an initial airing, ad agencies and their lawyers could review competitors’ new creatives, down to the fine print. It was a big hit, especially on Super Bowl Sunday.

But it wouldn’t be long until the service would be made obsolete by the Internet. I started reading about the Internet. I figured we needed one of our own.

I called Sun Microsystems:

“Hi, I’m calling to request brochures for your server hardware.”

“Sorry, we don’t have any brochures.”

“How can I find out about your products?”

“All the information you need is on the Internet.”

“But we don’t have an Internet. That’s why I’m calling you!”

The technology had moved on. I was way behind the curve. I had lost my edge.

What I needed was a mentor. It’s important to have an ongoing dialogue with an industry expert who can guide you towards what you should be learning next.

The good news was that the company had just hired an experienced IT professional who had worked in the advertising business. He was put in charge of the three-person department.

The bad news was that I was an entitled hotshot with a fragile ego. I didn’t want to work for anyone except the boss. I wasn’t ready to be managed. That’s to say, I was unmanageable.

It didn’t go well. I started planning my exit strategy.

I wanted to find similar work that would give me more responsibility, more autonomy, and more money. And my plan was to get some kind of certification.

We had been experimenting with Oracle, but we were a long way from deployment. I wasn’t ready to pass the certification exam to put myself out there as an Oracle expert.

Our company was using Novell NetWare. I read the manuals cover-to-cover with the thought of getting certified as a Novell Network Engineer. But the new boss wasn’t interested in paying for certification. After reading those manuals, I didn’t want to pay for it either.

On my own nickel, I did get certified in the legacy software that we had been using. That was a waste of time and money. I had been hoping to move on from that outdated technology. Instead, I solidified my connection to it.

My mistake, or rather, one of my mistakes, perhaps somewhere among the top five mistakes within this post alone, was thinking that certification would do anything for my career. Telling the QuickView story would have been a better place to start.

Stories can get you a job.

Millionaire

At 25, I didn’t realize how wealthy I was, or how free. I had a good job and no debt, living in Manhattan at the beginning of a tech boom.

My hometown banker told me I had over $6,000 in cash.

“What do you want to do with it?”
“Well, I may need that money next year for business school.”
“How about a Certificate of Deposit at 4.5%?”
“Sure, sounds good to me.”

I’m not a huge fan of counterfactual history, which is why I’m not going to put myself through the trauma of finding out what that $6,000 would have done had I invested in Apple stock. It might have happened. It was 1995 and I was a big fan of Apple. I even had an eWorld account. And one of my colleagues, an even bigger Apple fan, had an Apple Newton and bought shares in the company. The idea was definitely in my head.

Okay, it’s $1.1 million.

All I needed to do was buy-and-hold. And keep working.

A recruiter from JP Morgan found me. We met at a café. She said I was a perfect fit for an IT job paying $55,000, 10 percent more than what I was earning at the time. I countered $80,000. No deal.

I had serious reservations about working on Wall Street, which meant I’d have to wear a suit, commute to Lower Manhattan, and become enmeshed in the work-hard, play-hard culture of a big-city bank. I was trying to take it easy and keep my balance. Unless there was a big bump in salary, I was ready to stay with the job where I could dress casually and show up on my own schedule.

I was working for a mom-and-pop company, engrossed in an intense database migration and other Very Important Projects. I hadn’t yet become disillusioned with my job. That would happen soon enough.

In counterfactual history or the multiverse, there’s an Ivan who happily accepted the JPMorgan offer. He made himself invaluable to the bank, making full use of all the in-house training resources to become an expert in some area or another, augmented by a company-sponsored business degree. Today, he manages a data center in Jersey City.

But would it really have happened like that, such a smooth career path uninterrupted by metamorphosis or destiny?

In the days following September 11, I thought I saw my own name in the obituaries. It was a near match: Ian Schneider, 45. Brooklyn native, like my father. Little League coach in the New Jersey suburbs, not far from where I grew up. Left behind his wife and three young kids and a twin brother and his mother. Worked over half his life at the same company. No relation. I won’t forget him.

IVAN: A HALF-LIFE

Over the last two months, I’ve written over 40 blog posts. A good start, but it’s time for a pivot.

The original idea was 40 chapters, one series of blog posts corresponding to each of the Open Yale Courses, drawing on journals and unpublished manuscripts from the past nine years.

But I’m going to press “pause” on the My Yale Years project, put away my journals, and focus on the best thing to come out of this writing experiment – the memoirs of a perpetual student.

I first thought about a memoir after publishing LEON: A LIFE, the stories of my father from his early years during the Great Depression, his wartime experiences during World War II, his 23-year career as a ship’s officer in the U.S. Merchant Marine, and how he met my mother. We published the book in May 2019, just eighteen months before he crossed the bar at 98 years of age.

Leon H Schneider (1922-2020)

My father spent much of his childhood working for nickels and playing craps at the Brooklyn railyards. He dropped out of school, hitchhiked around the country, and rode the rails. He got a job in the boiler room of an oil tanker that left Pearl Harbor just six days before the attack, and then on a troop ship to Australia. In the Caribbean, he survived being torpedoed twice by U-Boats. He wrote a story about it for LIFE magazine, got into Kings Point Merchant Marine Academy, and became an officer. He worked with the War Shipping Administration in London during the Blitz, and experienced Germany, Italy, and Japan after the war. It’s a story of romance and excitement, from Argentina to Yugoslavia.

“Caribbean Sinkings,” by Leon Schneider
LIFE magazine, August 24, 1942

That’s a hard act to follow.

I grew up in suburban New Jersey. After college, I was a database programmer. I went back to school for an MBA and stayed in school to learn a language. My next job was as an editor with a banking trade magazine. I moved to the Boston office and attended night school at Harvard. Then, I moved out West and started my own business. I met my wonderful wife in Seattle, and we’ll be married for ten years this July. Happily ever after. The end.

How does that merit a memoir?

Where’s the daily struggle for existence? Where’s the adventure? Where’s the war? Where’s the drama on the high seas?

If that’s what you want, read LEON: A LIFE.

LEON: A LIFE
Old Convincer Publishing, 2019

Mine is a different kind of story, a peripatetic life of the mind.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve managed a writing and custom publishing business with clients including some of the largest names in financial technology and consulting, along with a handful of innovative technology startups. Mine has been a profitable, yet highly seasonal, business shaped by budget cycles and conference schedules. The work arrives in waves, and I make good use of the troughs.

Following are the highlights of what I’ve done over the past decade:

  • Learned to draw and paint. With no prior experience, I took about a dozen classes at Gage Academy of Art, mostly in drawing. During the pandemic year, I set up a painting and sculpture studio in the garage and joined a part-time still-life painting atelier taught over Zoom.
  • Studied languages. I can hold a basic conversation in Japanese, read books in Spanish, and make my way as a traveler in French and Italian. I brushed up on Czech learned during a Prague summer. I learned some Bosnian in preparation for a trip postponed by the pandemic. I’ve leyned Biblical Hebrew in front of the congregation. Someday, I’d like to read Kafka in German, curse in Yiddish, and take up the classics in Greek.
  • And more languages. With a subscription to O’Reilly, I’ve kept up with trends in software architecture and tried my hand at R, Java, Python, Neo4J, PowerShell, and JavaScript/TypeScript.
  • Played live music. I’ve performed klezmer ukulele, acoustic punk, and jazz guitar. I’ve also learned enough piano to have fun with a synth keyboard, synth software, virtual drums, and various effects routed through digital audio workstation Ableton Live.
  • Combed the library stacks. I’ve had my academic work on Cervantes published in an academic journal, and I was reviewer-at-large for a Seattle book review site.
  • Online lectures. I’ve watched and done the reading for dozens of online courses, including over 30 from Open Yale Courses (all but finance and the hard sciences) and many others from Coursera, EdX, and MIT OpenCourseWare.

It’s been a fruitful decade, with infinite thanks to my kind, patient, loving, and supportive spouse.

Through memoir, here’s what I hope to accomplish:

  1. To share my current passions with the people I’ve known in the past.
  2. To share my past experiences with the people I know now.
  3. To find partners for creative projects and business ventures.
  4. To explain my résumé to anyone thinking about hiring me.
  5. To share my personal history as an exemplary model for younger generations. Or a cautionary tale. It’s way too early to say.
  6. To figure out what I’ve learned, and I won’t know until I write it all down.

This is going to be an adventure. I’m glad you’re here.

Wipe-away with solvent

The Hollow Rod

This is a story about how St. Nicholas became Santa Claus.

It’s not the “real” story about an ad campaign by the Coca-Cola Company, which may have happened just like they say, but who knows? Who invented the Coca-Cola Company? Why should they have all the fun?

My invention is an entirely different story, and it’s entirely plausible, at least in the sense that it’s not about magic, but rather law and religion and crime and deduction. It’s essentially a murder mystery told mostly through the back-and-forth dialogue of two witty detectives. And since this story takes place at some unspecified time and place in the Middle Ages, it almost goes without saying that the two detectives are anti-Semitic in word and deed. Now that I’ve said it, it won’t go without saying, and you can consider it said.

But I made all up, everything except the three different versions of the Hollow Rod story. Oh, and the main characters, Montalbano and (Don) Matteo, are fictional detectives from Italian television shows. That year, we had been binge-watching MHz Networks using our digital TV antenna. I hope it’s kosher for me to use these names for this story, because it’s nothing if not satire, but if not, it’ll be easy enough to change their names to Del Montebanana and Don Mattelo.

The year was 2016. I was making my way through the Open Yale Courses catalog and had just finished going through my ninth course: European Civilization, 1648-1945. But my thoughts kept returning to the first two classes I had watched: Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. (This was before I wrote my Humanities journal article, “The Search for Dog in Cervantes.”)

I had been researching the theory that Cervantes (1547-1616) had been of Jewish ancestry, which, if true, is something his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents would have kept hidden since the Expulsion of 1492. In my research, I came across a mention of Sancho Panza showing great wisdom and perspicacity in resolving a dispute between borrower and lender (Don Quixote, II.XLV), and the story itself was a retelling of an episode from either the Babylonian Talmud (3rd to 6th c.) or The Golden Legend (Aurea Legenda) compiled by Jacobus de Voragine (1275). No doubt, Cervantes consulted one of these two sources, and since there’s no way to tell which one, I thought it would be productive to study and reflect upon all three versions.

The shortest version of the story is from the Talmud:

A man with a monetary claim upon his neighbour once came before Raba, demanding of the debtor, ‘Come and pay me.’ ‘I have repaid you,’ pleaded he. ‘If so,’ said Raba to him, ‘go and swear to him that you have repaid.’ Thereupon he went and brought a [hollow] cane, placed the money therein, and came before the Court, walking and leaning on it. [Before swearing] he said to the plaintiff: ‘Hold the cane in your hand’. He then took a scroll of the Law and swore that he had repaid him all that he [the creditor] held in his hand. The creditor thereupon broke the cane in his rage and the money poured out on the ground; it was thus seen that he had [literally] sworn to the truth.

Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Nedarim Folio 25a

Let’s play that back slowly. And to do that, I rewrote the episode in the form of a play. You can act it out in your head, or make paper figures or hand puppets, or hire a troupe of actors, whatever helps you to picture the scene.

THE HOLLOW ROD

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

BORROWER, the Christian
LENDER, the Jew
RABBI / JUDGE
MONTALBANO
MATTEO
San. NICOLÁS

Act I, Scene I. Lender and Borrower are before the Rabbi.
LENDER
Repay me!

BORROWER
I have already repaid you.

RABBI
(To Borrower) Let us go, that you may swear to him upon the Law that you have repaid.

Act I, Scene II. A court.
Enter Rabbi, Lender and Borrower, who walks with the assistance of a cane.

RABBI (holding the Law)
Swear to him, upon the Law, that you have repaid.

BORROWER
I will swear. [To Lender] Hold my cane.
Lender takes the cane.
I swear upon the Law that I have repaid him.

LENDER
Raaaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!!! (He breaks the cane, and the money pours out on the ground.)

RABBI
(Aside) Listen up. The point of this story is that you’re not allowed to swear an oath according to your own private definitions of the relevant terms.

Let’s say someone swears an oath: “If I did not see on this road as many as departed from Egypt, may all the fruit in the world be forbidden me.”

If, while on the road, that person had seen an ant farm, and if the teeming insect hordes were as numerous as the 600 Israelite families who left Egypt during the Exodus, would that fulfill the terms of the oath?

One who swears does not swear in his own sense, thinking of “ants.”

One who swears, swears in our sense. We’re thinking “people,” not “ants.”

It’s the same with the hollow cane. Get it?

OK, now it’s time for the Medieval version. It’s the same story with a few new twists, because this time, instead of the ruse being discovered at court, the borrower gets away with it, but not for long.

There was a man that had borrowed of a Jew a sum of money, and sware upon the altar of S. Nicholas that he would render and pay it again as soon as he might, and gave none other pledge. And this man held this money so long, that the Jew demanded and asked his money, and he said that he had paid him. Then the Jew made him to come tofore the law in judgment, and the oath was given to the debtor. And he brought with him an hollow staff, in which he had put the money in gold, and he leant upon the staff. And when he should make his oath and swear, he delivered his staff to the Jew to keep and hold whilst he should swear, and then sware that he had delivered to him more than he ought to him. And when he had made the oath, he demanded his staff again of the Jew, and he nothing knowing of his malice delivered it to him. Then this deceiver went his way, and anon after, him list sore to sleep, and laid him in the way, and a cart with four wheels came with great force and slew him, and brake the staff with gold that it spread abroad. And when the Jew heard this, he came thither sore moved, and saw the fraud, and many said to him that he should take to him the gold; and he refused it, saying, But if he that was dead were not raised again to life by the merits of S. Nicholas, he would not receive it, and if he came again to life, he would receive baptism and become Christian. Then he that was dead arose, and the Jew was christened.

Medieval Sourcebook: The Golden Legend: St. Nicholas

We now return to the puppet show, already in progress.

Act II, Scene I. An altar of St. Nicholas.
BORROWER
Jew, I wish to borrow a sum of money from you.

LENDER
This we can arrange. What is my pledge?

BORROWER
I give no other pledge but this:

BORROWER (turns to the altar of St. Nicholas)
St. Nicholas, I swear to you that should the Jew lend me the money, I will render and pay my debt to him as soon as I might, and as I am a Christian, I need give no other pledge.

LENDER
What can I say? Okay, it’s a loan.

Act II, Scene II. A court.
Enter BORROWER, carrying staff; LENDER, JUDGE.

LENDER
You have held my money so long that you are an old man leaning upon a staff, and as you swore to St. Nicholas that you would repay me as soon as you might, we must now come to accounts. I demand to be repaid.

BORROWER
(to LENDER) I swore to St. Nicholas that I would repay you as soon as I might, and I have repaid you.

JUDGE
Swear now before the Court, on this Holy Object, that you have repaid him.

BORROWER
(He hands Lender the staff and places his hand on the holy object.) I swear on this Holy Object that I have delivered to him more than I owed. Now return my staff to me! (He takes back the staff and exits.)

Act II, Scene III. A roadway at dawn.
Enter MONTALBANO and MATTEO

MONTALBANO
Fresh air, a tonic to our health, Matteo! After being cooped within the fetid air of court and its hapless and quarrelsome citizens hectoring each other to exhaustion, there is nothing better for the finest officers in the kingdom than to spend our days in the pastoral outdoors.

MATTEO
Such unworthy civic entertainment as we have in these times. The public claims to love justice, but they clamor to court only to satiate themselves on tales of thievery and bloodshed.

MONTALBANO
Hark, what ails that man lying in the roadway! Either he’s the ugliest, misshapen wretch in creation, or those are cart-tracks freshly impressed upon his face.

MATTEO
(He inspects the BORROWER’s body.) Dead. Deep impressions on the skull, neck, torso and pelvis. Injuries consistent with the wheels of a four-wheeled, horse-drawn cart.

MONTALBANO
Here are the tracks. The cart didn’t stop. The driver would have suspected a trap, a gang of robbers in the shadows.

MATTEO
Is not this unfortunate the very man who we heard in court today swearing that he repaid the Jew?

MONTALBANO
The man himself! And he left us a generous bequest as a reward for discovering his body. Here’s his staff, and here’s the gold that was hidden inside of the staff.

MATTEO
Why then, this is the gold owed to the Jew, is it not?

MONTALBANO
And we will repay the Jew with our silent thanks as we spend the gold.

MATTEO
Recall this – at the exact point where this dead man made his oath, he gave his staff to the Jew for just long enough to say, under oath, “I delivered to him more than I owed.” And then he regained the staff.

MONTALBANO
And because God doesn’t like overcooked oaths, he sends down from the heavens a pillar of smote. A clever turn of phrase, is it not?
Man lies down on a pillow of straw,
A fortune of gold in a hollow of rod.
Our Lord in heaven sends a pillar of smote,
A cart crushing bones in a billow of smoke.
God loves us for our verses, and to show his gratitude, He kills this guy in our path, and now the gold is right here. Why are we standing around?

MATTEO
We must call for the Jew.

MONTALBANO
Wait, you want to take this gold and…

MATTEO
…call for the Jew, yes.

MONTALBANO
So we’re going to take these very small nuggets, these highly valuable, entirely untraceable pieces of precious metal scattered here all over the roadway, and we’re going to collect all these pieces, put them into a nice little pile and then…

MATTEO
…call for the Jew, yes.

MONTALBANO
There’s nobody else here, right? Just us and the dead guy and the gold.

MATTEO
It’s just us.

MONTALBANO
What’s your angle?

MATTEO
What do you mean?

MONTALBANO
OK, I get it. We get the Jew to come here to look at the gold, we kill the Jew, then we take the Jew’s purse and the gold. Just one problem with that plan.

MATTEO
That’s not my plan.

MONTALBANO
Wait, are you asking me to go fetch the Jew? What do I look like, the village idiot, leaving you alone with the gold?

MATTEO
We are friends and partners in all we do, are we not?

MONTALBANO
Some friend. The minute I turn my back, you’re off buying a title, Don Matteo, forgetting poor Montalbano.

MATTEO
That’s not my plan either.

MONTALBANO
Okay, fine. I got a great idea. You want the Jew, you go get the Jew.

MATTEO
Ah, my friend, you intend to do that which you accuse me of plotting, and as you are my friend, I will not allow you to submit to base instincts for precious metals. Do you not see? By taking the gold for ourselves, we would lose even greater fortune.

MONTALBANO
Enlighten me.

MATTEO
Recall – the dead man swore to St. Nicholas that he would repay the Jew. Then, in front of the court, he swore that he did repay – and technically, he did repay.

MONTALBANO
This we have established. As far as the law’s concerned, the Jew was repaid. And so according to the law, this money belongs to the dead guy free and clear. Now, it seems to me that God doesn’t like lawyers and smart guys, so God says, “You know what, smart guy? You’re dead.” God hates him; loves us. God kills him; gives us gold. “Thank you, God, for this good fortune,” and let’s move it along already.

MATTEO
Indulging you for a moment, does not this man’s family deserve consideration?

MONTALBANO
They deserve nothing. They already got paid the first time when he borrowed from the Jew. Why do they deserve a windfall more than we do? Were they in court with the old man? Does he even have a family? The poor guy couldn’t even get home by himself. He had nobody looking out for him, not a single son or daughter to accompany him, to say, ”Long day, huh, Pop? You know what? Let’s stop for a meal or maybe put up at the inn for the night.” I would hope that if I get to be a ripe old age and for whatever reason I got dragged into court by some Jew, one of the kids would come along to give me a hand.

MATTEO
Maybe he did stop at an inn, and such was his fatal error.

MONTALBANO
Even more reason to blame the absent sons. “Hey Dad, I see you’re tired, but you know what? Let’s not go to the inn. I know you don’t like inns, they’re smelly and dangerous, and we’ll both end up passing out drunk with the whores and once again waking up with empty pockets. Plus, we don’t want someone stealing that nice staff of yours that I saw you messing around with in the barn, now I don’t know what you put in there, but you’ve been fiddling your staff more than I fiddle mine. Anyway, if you want to sleep rough, maybe we avoid the middle of the roadway on top of the tracks made by the horse-drawn carts?”

MATTEO
Now, what events led to this broken old man? He walks home from court along the same road he took to get to court. He tires during the journey.

MONTALBANO
“How exhilarating to deceive a Jew! And so exhausting! I’ll just take a nap right here.”

MATTEO
Look at this area, he brushed the stones away. Takes his shoes off, lines them up nice and neat. He folds over and lays down a blanket – fatally so –over the cart tracks. And here’s a straw pillow. He goes to sleep and doesn’t even hear the horses coming.

MONTALBANO
Maybe he drank the Jew’s money one flask at a time, and then after the victory in court, celebrated some more.

MATTEO
Yes, he may well have been a drinker, but when carrying a small fortune in gold? What was the reputation of the dead man?

MONTALBANO
If his hollow staff is any indication, a hollow character.

MATTEO
What kind of man borrows without surety from a Jew?

MONTALBANO
A desperate man, lacking resources of his own, without family willing to stake him. Someone with debts.

MATTEO
Desperate. And what manner of moneylender gives without surety to a desperate man?

MONTALBANO
An idiot? How about a wealthy idiot? Inheritance spawns idiocy.

MATTEO
Or a soft touch. Did he believe the man’s sincerity in his oath to St. Nicholas? A man professes his belief in St. Nicholas, swearing an oath on St. Nicholas. The second man, a Jew, does not believe in St. Nicholas, but believes in the first man. He says, “I do not believe what he believes, but I believe that he believes.” He believed himself to be a judge of character, and he believed he’d be repaid.

MONTALBANO
Or maybe the Jew was as desperate as the borrower. Two desperados, making a deal. Maybe the borrower had something on him, a threat over his head that only recently disappeared. Maybe they were exchanging stolen goods. The Jew steals some precious heirlooms and entrusts them to the man to carry out of the country for sale. The man has nothing to pledge in return for the stolen items, but what choice does the Jew have?

“I’ll pay you when I get paid,” says the man. And then he takes his time. Neither of them can reveal the other but they bicker and argue.

“Where’s my money?”

“You’re going to have to be patient, I can’t move the heirloom just yet.”

“Where’s my money?”

“It’s not the right time, you’re going to have to wait.”

“Where’s my money?”

“Glad we’re having this conversation. I sold the heirloom, but it turns out I needed the money for an emergency.”

“You said you’re going to pay me as soon as you could.”

“And I will, I swore on St. Nicholas, do you have any idea what that means to me? Are you saying that my oath was insincere?”

“Calm down, you’re sincere, you’re sincere.”

“I don’t know. It sounds to me that you’re implying that I’m a liar and a thief. And why stop there, right? if you think I’m a liar and a thief, I’d have no problem killing someone, right? After all, if I’m going to get on the wrong side of St. Nick, killing doesn’t matter, right? Is that the kind of person you think I am?”

“Of course not, of course not, you’re on the good side of St. Nicholas. Don’t get upset. Just get the money as soon as you can.”

“Don’t push me.”

“I’m not pushing.”

“You’re not pushing. Let me make something clear. This thing goes wrong with you and me, you know what happens, right? I know where the heirloom is. You don’t know. I know. And you ought to know that if the heirloom turns up, you, personally, are implicated up to your thick Jew beard in this thing.”

“Oy, who’s pushing who?”

MATTEO
And then the Jew initiated a lawsuit? To what end? For the futility of suing a blackmailer? To drag a thief in front of a judge and make him swear an oath? Would a blackmailer have any difficulty swearing a false oath? Why do you sue someone who’s not going to pay, other than to damage that person’s reputation? And for a Jew to sue a prominent person well-regarded in the community, such a fool would be in mortal danger for making a false accusation.

MONTALBANO
Equally dangerous for a true accusation.

MATTEO
For the Jew to stand in front of the court and say, “One of us is a liar, and it is he,” that other would have to be a man with an even lower reputation than a Jew. And so the court appearance was futility itself on two levels – the Jew could neither get the man to pay, nor damage a reputation that was already beyond repair. Why, then, this recourse to a lawsuit?

MONTALBANO
For entertainment? Because he knows we enjoy watching bearded guys in skullcaps boiling with impotent Hebraic rage?

MATTEO
What if the Jew just wanted his man in town? The summons pulls him away from home, away from the countryside where he lives, and into the city, where lives the Jew.

MONTALBANO
Are you suggesting… murder?

MATTEO
And why not? Is God so vigilant that even one who cheats a Jew must pay the price of death?

MONTALBANO
The Jew gets our tired traveler into town and has him killed, making it look like an accident. There’s just this: What about the gold? Who kills someone and leaves treasure near his body?

MATTEO
Suppose we found this body without the gold. The man walks out of court into the public square with his obligations to his debtor fully and fraudulently discharged. He turns up dead the next morning. What would you say to that?

MONTALBANO
Arrest the Jew.

MATTEO
But here we are, same situation, except now there’s gold. We both saw the old man hand off the staff to the Jew, swear an oath, and then take it back. And now we find gold inside the staff. Which leads us to believe what?

MONTALBANO
That God struck the old man dead for being a smart guy in court.

MATTEO
A good alibi for the Jew.

MONTALBANO
“Wasn’t me, goyim, it was God did it.” How did it go down?

MATTEO
Quiet, man, I’m thinking. Get me a stick.

MONTALBANO
What am I, your dog? (MONTALBANO fetches a stick.)

MATTEO
Thank you. No, but you’re as loused as one. Before we jump to a hasty conclusion, let us examine the possibilities. (In the dirt, he draws a square and divides it into quadrants.) The dead man repaid or he did not. He was a believer or he was not. Four possibilities. Sometimes I think you can describe all of creation using nothing but binary divisions of this sort.

MONTALBANO
Let the quadrants be quick.

MATTEO
Now, our initial assumptions were here in this first quadrant – he never repaid, and he was not a believer.

MONTALBANO
And yet here is gold.

MATTEO
Here is gold. If he is not a believer who holds oaths as sacred, why go through the charade of foisting a staff of gold upon your creditor? No, if he does not believe, he would have known nothing of the gold inside the staff. Which would mean the gold was placed inside by another. Tell me, use your investigator’s imagination. How might the Jew have engineered not only the staff-stuffing of the gold, but the precise circumstances of the oath?

MONTALBANO
Jew sees him limping around and says “OK, he’s got a staff in his right hand. He can’t swear an oath while holding a staff. And so I’ll make sure that during the oath, I’m the one holding the staff.”

MATTEO
But by what Jewish sorcery does he manage to lay hold of the staff during the oath? The old man might have easily switched it to his left hand or set it aside.

MONTALBANO
The Jew stood right next to him. The old man’s not thinking about the staff, he’s convincing himself of the truth of the lie he’s about to tell. The judge says, “Swear.” And before the old man makes a conscious choice about what to do with the staff, the Jew lays his hand on it. And underneath all the robes, who can really tell which of the two initiated the hand-off? It looked like the man handed the staff to the Jew, but maybe it was the other way around. What can the man do? Improvise an angry scene? “Get your hands off my staff!” Makes him look petty and grasping. No, he gives up the staff.

MATTEO
What if the man had replied instead, “Look at the grasping Jew, he would even lay hands not only upon more of my money, but on my very staff!” A highly risky strategy, to rely upon a certain improvisation of another.

MONTALBANO
Maybe it wasn’t premeditated. Maybe the Jew’s also improvising. He knows the guy’s a cheat, and there’s nothing he can do about it except this limp lawsuit. He prays, “God, give me the means to kill this man.”

And then, lo and behold, the old man hands him a cane during the oath. “Am I this man’s valet?” And yet the Jew holds the cane, what’s he going to do, throw the old man’s cane to the ground? But he’s furious. He has to watch with his own eyes this man here swear to high heaven that he repaid the debt, and he knows it’s a lie. “You know what I’d like to do with this staff? I’d like to take a carving knife, see? And cut jagged little splinters out of it, so that when I shove it…”

MATTEO
A torture itself, hearing you imagining imagined tortures. Your speculation, do continue.

MONTALBANO
And then it comes to him. The Jew says to himself, “Wouldn’t it be a perfect evasion of an oath were this staff filled with gold?” Now, he’s inspired. Now, he improvises. He wanted to kill the man before, but he didn’t know how. Now he has an idea, a legalistic, hair-splitting, Jewish-at-the-core idea, an idea only a Talmudic scholar would invent. The old man finishes his oath and takes back his entirely ordinary staff. He figures he’s done with the whole business and starts walking home. He feels safe. Everyone saw him in court. If an accident happens, everyone suspects the Jew. And so he’s careless. The Jew follows him, knocks out the old man, throws him in the cart, drives out of town and sets the scene here on the road. Breaks into a full gallop over the unconscious body, leaving us to believe that God struck the old man down as divine retribution.

MATTEO
Excellent, excellent. But why spend so much gold on revenge?

MONTALBANO
It’s not about the money anymore. Maybe it’s not a lot of money for the Jew, maybe it’s nothing to him. And what’s gold compared to reputation? Now he can keep his enforcers idle. “Look what happened to the last man who didn’t pay me. God struck him dead. So pay me.” Even better, maybe the Jew thinks to have his money back.

MATTEO
We discovered this tableau, and what was your first thought upon seeing the gold on the roadway?

MONTALBANO
My first thought, my present thought, one and the same: To take the gold, every last piece. At first, just for the found wealth. And now, even sweeter, to burn the Jew. He thought the gold would exonerate him – so for justice’s sake let’s take the gold.

MATTEO
Is it justice, now? At the side of every rationalization, there is justice. A plan you imagine depends upon the public discovery of hidden gold inside of a staff. A questionable plan given that the first person to come upon the scene might quietly and discreetly sweep up the gold for himself. Now, what if the Jew was not the painter of this tableau?

MONTALBANO
You think someone else left the gold on the dead man?

MATTEO
He borrowed from the Jew, he borrowed from others. Another creditor hears in court that the Jew has been paid ahead of him. He approaches the old man after the hearing:

“So, you paid the Jew first?”

“No, no, I didn’t really pay him.”

“That’s not what I heard in court. You swore that you paid!”

“I lied, that wasn’t true.”

“You lied in court, under oath, and I’m supposed to believe you now?”

“You have to believe me, I would never make you wait behind the Jew to get paid.”

The creditor sees his opportunity. He figures he’s never going to collect, so he strikes down the old man. One killing, two bodies: With the murder, he puts the Jew under the gravest suspicion, and the Jew is arrested, tortured and killed. He allows a debtor to avoid payment through death, but eliminates a competitor in the moneylending trade.

MONTALBANO
Why would he leave the gold to exonerate the Jew?

MATTEO
You’re right, he wouldn’t. If he was killed by a creditor, there would be no gold here unless the creditor knew nothing of it. We are now in the next quadrant, where the man was a believer who knew about the gold.

MONTALBANO
Oh, are we in your second quadrant already? I was hoping we could spent more time in the first quadrant, subdividing it into further quadrants and quadrants beyond that to infinity, because as you know I am a man of infinite patience and fortitude, my lot in life to tallow the wheels of your plodding, mechanical mind. Think of it: we can have quadrants to divine the mind of the old man, the Jew, the judge, the other creditors, St. Nicholas, and even the mind of the hollow staff and the gold. Perhaps the gold itself decided to secret itself inside the hollow staff, just for a laugh.

MATTEO
Would you proceed differently?

MONTALBANO
Heavens, no! Quadrants, quadrants, and more quadrants!

MATTEO
Let’s suppose that the dead man believed he could swindle the Jew while still maintaining his faith to St. Nicholas. But if you are enough of a believer to go through such trouble, how could you not grasp that such sophistry would fail to escape God’s justice?

MONTALBANO
Not everybody’s as much a learned theologian as yourself.

MATTEO
Let’s follow this theological thread. By the law of man, the Jew has been repaid; and yet under the law of God, the Jew has not been repaid. Paid and unpaid, these cannot both be true at the same time, for the law of man operates by the law of God. Until the Jew is here, in person, to receive the gold from the hand of the dead man risen, we exist in a state of duality – justice and injustice contained within the same broken vessel.

MONTALBANO
Oh, I think I follow you. It’s like when you put a cat in a sealed box together with two dead rats, one poisoned and the other not, and an ordinary cat only has an appetite for one rat at a time. If the cat eats the poisoned rat, it dies; and if it eats the other rat, it lives. And so until you open the box, you don’t know whether it’s a dead cat or a live cat in there. In a sense, the cat is both living and dead at the same time. Really makes you think.

MATTEO
You need a hobby.

MONTALBANO
What can I say? I’m a dog person.

MATTEO
Here lies an unlearned theologian, as you suggest. But why, if he were so unlearned, would he risk so much gold – and his soul – on the knife-edge of logic? There’s a better answer – that he martyred himself.

MONTALBANO
The Martyr of the Cart.

MATTEO
He ponders the duality of the law of man and the law of God and endeavors to test a proposition, the proposition that St. Nicholas is real. He stakes his own soul and the reputation of St. Nicholas on a loan, and then defaults intentionally. He pulls the staff trick at court to satisfy the law of man. And then he shows up here for the second act, putting himself in the path of the cart. As a believer, he trusts that St. Nicholas will allow him to make good on his oath.

MONTALBANO
What’s in it for St. Nicholas?

MATTEO
What gift can you offer a saint? Only the soul of a man. What will happen when the Jew hears of this?

MONTALBANO
He’ll take the gold?

MATTEO
If he takes the gold, we’ll arrest him for murder.

MONTALBANO
And if he leaves the gold and backs away?

MATTEO
Then we arrest him for murder. Or we give him a third choice: To profess the veracity of a miracle that St. Nicholas will soon make, a special trip to Purgatory to bring the man back to life to make personal amends for this misdeed. It would be a true miracle, would it not? A sinner raised from the dead, a patient lender paid what he is owed, and one brought to the true faith. And the beautiful part is that the Jew need be the only witness to this miracle.

But if he chooses either of the first or second choices, then we will be compelled to start asking pointed questions about the very suspicious circumstances of this man’s death.

Act III, Scene I. MONTALBANO and MATTEO stand as witnesses. Enter LENDER, who stands by the BORROWER’s body.

MONTALBANO (to LENDER)
We’ll turn our backs, Jew, and you wait right there for St. Nicholas. I’m sure if you wait long enough, and pray hard enough – you do know how to pray hard, right? You pray like you’ve never prayed before. Now I’m not going to tell you how to pray, but if you prayed in our language, it wouldn’t hurt. Good for you, good for all of us, if you can ask St. Nick what exactly what you want him to do, which by chance is what we want him to do. You just want the dead guy to be really sorry for tricking you and you want him to hand over your money, just like that.

MATTEO
And everyone in Christendom will be overjoyed to hear about the wonderful experience you are about to have.

MONTALBANO
Now don’t forget the details. Keep good track of the details, that’s important. What does this St. Nicholas look like? Young or old? Does he have a beard or is a clean-shaven fellow? What’s he wearing, is he dressed for our sunny weather or is he all bundled up? Where does he live? What kind of cart does he have and what manner of beast pulls it? Is he pleasant, like me? What? What’s funny? Oh, I’m downright jolly, make no mistake about it. We’re counting on you to make this convincing. Make it interesting, you clever fellow, we want people to remember St. Nicholas.

LENDER nods his head and stands by the body.

Act III, Scene 2.

Enter San. NICOLÁS in full regalia, handing out candy canes to the audience.

FIN

At this instant there came into court two old men, one carrying a cane by way of a walking-stick, and the one who had no stick said, “Senor, some time ago I lent this good man ten gold-crowns in gold to gratify him and do him a service, on the condition that he was to return them to me whenever I should ask for them. A long time passed before I asked for them, for I would not put him to any greater straits to return them than he was in when I lent them to him; but thinking he was growing careless about payment I asked for them once and several times; and not only will he not give them back, but he denies that he owes them, and says I never lent him any such crowns; or if I did, that he repaid them; and I have no witnesses either of the loan, or the payment, for he never paid me; I want your worship to put him to his oath, and if he swears he returned them to me I forgive him the debt here and before God.”

“What say you to this, good old man, you with the stick?” said Sancho.

To which the old man replied, “I admit, senor, that he lent them to me; but let your worship lower your staff, and as he leaves it to my oath, I’ll swear that I gave them back, and paid him really and truly.

The governor lowered the staff, and as he did so the old man who had the stick handed it to the other old man to hold for him while he swore, as if he found it in his way; and then laid his hand on the cross of the staff, saying that it was true the ten crowns that were demanded of him had been lent him; but that he had with his own hand given them back into the hand of the other, and that he, not recollecting it, was always asking for them.

Seeing this the great governor asked the creditor what answer he had to make to what his opponent said. He said that no doubt his debtor had told the truth, for he believed him to be an honest man and a good Christian, and he himself must have forgotten when and how he had given him back the crowns; and that from that time forth he would make no further demand upon him.

The debtor took his stick again, and bowing his head left the court. Observing this, and how, without another word, he made off, and observing too the resignation of the plaintiff, Sancho buried his head in his bosom and remained for a short space in deep thought, with the forefinger of his right hand on his brow and nose; then he raised his head and bade them call back the old man with the stick, for he had already taken his departure. They brought him back, and as soon as Sancho saw him he said, “Honest man, give me that stick, for I want it.”

“Willingly,” said the old man; “here it is senor,” and he put it into his hand.

Sancho took it and, handing it to the other old man, said to him, “Go, and God be with you; for now you are paid.”

“I, senor!” returned the old man; “why, is this cane worth ten gold-crowns?”

“Yes,” said the governor, “or if not I am the greatest dolt in the world; now you will see whether I have got the headpiece to govern a whole kingdom;” and he ordered the cane to be broken in two, there, in the presence of all. It was done, and in the middle of it they found ten gold-crowns. All were filled with amazement, and looked upon their governor as another Solomon. They asked him how he had come to the conclusion that the ten crowns were in the cane; he replied, that observing how the old man who swore gave the stick to his opponent while he was taking the oath, and swore that he had really and truly given him the crowns, and how as soon as he had done swearing he asked for the stick again, it came into his head that the sum demanded must be inside it; and from this he said it might be seen that God sometimes guides those who govern in their judgments, even though they may be fools; besides he had himself heard the curate of his village mention just such another case, and he had so good a memory, that if it was not that he forgot everything he wished to remember, there would not be such a memory in all the island. To conclude, the old men went off, one crestfallen, and the other in high contentment, all who were present were astonished, and he who was recording the words, deeds, and movements of Sancho could not make up his mind whether he was to look upon him and set him down as a fool or as a man of sense.

Don Quixote, Volume II, CHAPTER XLV.

Alpha versions

In 1970, the year of my birth, my father was a Merrill Lynch stockbroker by day and a waterfront security guard by night. In the mid-1980s, he saw that I had some talent with computers. Maybe I could learn the markets and make it big on Wall Street. It also would have been fine if I had turned out to be the next Bill Gates.

Dad asked me for a stock pick. His favorite strategy was to buy out-of-the-money call options that would pay off if the stock went up. I found a story in the Business section of the New York Times about Western Union (NYSE: WU). Since Western Union had been sending money over the wires for so long, I figured it would lead the way in sending money over computer networks. Instead, the company went bankrupt. Dad never asked me to pick stocks again.

I learned how to program computers, but my main activity was hanging out on BBSes and IRL with other computer users in my local calling area. When I was 16, I met up with Doc, a graduate of a Caribbean medical school who got into the database business while trying to pass his licensure exam. He was an excellent salesman, a competent programmer, and a good guy, very generous with his time. I spent an entire summer working in the basement of an actual video store trying to write software to run video stores. That was beyond my capabilities, but I was very good at technical documentation and picking apart other people’s code. I liked reading the manuals.

After college, I was living at home recovering from my Carnegie Mellon experience. I went back to working for Doc, but not for long. My father wanted me to get a regular job. I found one through the Classified section of the New York Times. A company was looking for someone who knew the quirky Macintosh database software that I had learned working with Doc. I got the job, and it paid well with good benefits.

But Doc wasn’t happy, saying I had poached his prospect. He had gone after that company’s business, but they weren’t interested in hiring a consultant and never did business with him. I had no idea about any prior contact when I answered the classified ad. Doc might have caused me some legal headaches out of spite based on some papers I may have signed while heavily medicated, but like I said, Doc was a good guy. He let it go without lawyering up. But we were done.

Competitrack was founded in 1987 just before Black Monday. Bob was working for Chemical Bank gathering data on which competitors’ ads were being placed in which New York newspapers and magazines. After doing this thankless task for a while, he realized that he had the seed for a startup business. He hired a staff to track advertising in print and on television, wrote a database to capture the details, and then generated customized reports for ad agencies representing every competitor in an industry. Bob built the company on one of the few relational database management systems you could find on the Mac at that time, and in 1993, he hired two programmers – me and Dave – to work on the code.

We spent about a year learning and optimizing the legacy database, which had the fatal flaw of being built using a proprietary data format with no APIs or other external hooks. If you wanted to work with the data, you had to write code in the proprietary database application. Or, you could export the data into a separate file, and even on the fastest Macs, the import-export process was very slow.

The second year, I worked mainly on ancillary solutions not directly tied to the legacy code. I built an engine for estimating the cost of advertising campaigns. I figured out, without the benefit of documentation or search engines, how to read Nielsen data from EBCDIC-format mainframe reel-to-reel tapes. And I designed and rolled out parallel Mac- and PC-based video transmission services allowing us to send digital recordings of television advertisements to ad agencies, and this was well before video sharing was commonplace, around the time of the Netscape IPO.

The third year, the company brought in someone more experienced to run the IT department. Even while keeping the legacy software updated with new feature requests, we tried to rebuild the legacy system using an Oracle back-end database. This would free the company forever from our dead-end legacy software, but it was the classic dilemma of having to rebuild an engine while still flying the plane.

I built a new system, but management didn’t want to bet the company that I could bring the alpha version to a production-ready state. The project was put on ice indefinitely, or at least until they could bring on more resources. This was a major disappointment. I was hoping to upgrade my skills by getting out of the legacy trap and had believed Oracle to be the bridge for whatever I wanted to do next, whether it was another job or starting my own company.

Then, I had to give up my Bleecker Street apartment, which was being sold. Feeling uncertain about my prospects at the company and beyond that, my future as a programmer, I moved back to New Jersey to live with my parents and plan my next move.

Chameleon

Greta, my younger sister, studied abroad for a semester in Grenoble. That June we met up in Paris and traveled by train around France trying different mixtures of ham, cheese, and bread.

Our destination was the Basque country, Le Pays basque, where we had a place to stay thanks to close friends of Aunt Florence who gave us the keys to an apartment and a large jar of duck confit. We’d go to the beach, listen to «Snup Duggie Dug» on the radio, and then pick up some groceries to accompany the duck.

We did a day trip to San Sebastián, Spain, but it was raining and we couldn’t go to the beach, and so we went to a restaurant.

I ordered the beefsteak for two smothered in mushrooms, but my Spanish wasn’t that good. The waiter didn’t understand. And so I drew a picture of a cow, with little mushrooms around the cow, and I said, “Por favor, para dos.”

“¡Sí Señor!” The waiter rushes out the door.

Where’s this schmuck going? Here’s the restaurant, there’s the kitchen, why is he going into the street?

Five minutes later, he comes back with two tickets for the bullfights and an umbrella.

Okay, yeah, that’s one of my father’s jokes. What are you, one of your mother’s?

YouTube player

“I have three kids,” Dad would say. “One of each.”

My older brother Eric, my younger sister Greta, and me. We heard my father’s jokes so often that we assigned each one its own number. Eric walks down the stairs and says, “Hey Ivan, two-hundred-and-sixty-two!” I reply: “You don’t know how to tell a joke.”

We left the Basque country on a train to Lyon, where my sister was to disembark to gather her things in Grenoble and fly home. I was to continue for a solo weekend in Paris.

It was an overnight train. Sometime in the middle of the night, Greta’s ears perked up at an announcement. She went over to the conductor.

«C’est le train pour Lyon?»
«Lyon? Non! C’est le train pour Rome!»

While we were asleep, our train had stopped. The railcars for Lyon were disconnected from the railcars for Rome. The two smaller trains went their separate ways, and we were on the wrong train. To retrace our tracks, we had to sleep on the floor of a rural train station and then figure out multiple early-morning transfers.

I was very impressed with Greta’s conversational abilities in French. Not only did she hear that we were heading in the wrong direction, but she was able to set things right.

Meanwhile, I was still working on basic greetings.

I still hadn’t learned much about French culture. All I knew was that a handful of American celebrities were widely admired in France: Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Snoop Dogg, Jim Morrison.

And it turns out that they also knew about Frank Sinatra. One night on the Atlantic Coast, Greta and I were in a restaurant with an outdoor courtyard, not many people around, just a few tables. Someone had a guitar. I borrowed it for one song: “Strangers in the Night.” The French love their ham and cheese, and so I hammed it up with a large helping of cheese. But for some reason it didn’t come across as cheesy. I watched as one couple began holding hands. They stared into each other’s eyes. They had a tender, romantic moment brought on by my performance.

What’s happening here? At the Jersey Shore, a Sinatra serenade would be all irony and cliché and cynicism, but at the other side of the same ocean, that same song was exoticism, mystery, and romance. Perhaps this was the secret of Jerry Lewis in France, that no amount of ham and cheese is too much ham and cheese. I did one song and that was it. I had never done that kind of tableside serenade before and haven’t done it since.

I wonder: What would happen if some French kid were to start crooning Charles Aznavour songs on the boardwalk at Wildwood?

When we were growing up, there was always some yard-sale guitar sitting around, nothing fancy and I don’t ever remember changing the strings, but still I learned how to play some chords and noodle along with the radio.

The first instrument I ever bought with my own money was a Yamaha steel-string guitar purchased midway through my second year at Carnegie Mellon. I started practicing in my room at the fraternity house. Joey D, who played the drums, heard me singing an off-the-cuff song over parallel Maj-7 chords, and suggested that I break out the guitar during a party. He said I’d get lots of action.

I tried it that weekend, just sitting in the living room strumming and caterwauling that very same song from earlier in the week. But after 10:01 on a Saturday night, I became completely invisible, or worse, entirely visible but giving off the odd, discordant vibes of a crooner at a disco. That was the end of the experiment.

These are the lyrics, in their entirety:

Love, love, love
From the heavens above
Won’t you stay with me awhile
I want to hold you in my arms, child.
Girl you KNOOOW I love you
And that I’m feeling blue
Waiiitin’
Anticipaaaaatin’
Love, love, love (repeat)

That’s some Jim Morrison-level poetry right there.

True story: The reason I joined a fraternity, maybe not the only reason but the deciding factor, what made it seem like cosmic fate rather than a rational decision, was that I was rushed by a senior named James Morrison. I was a huge fan of the Doors. I knew every word of every one of their albums, even Other Voices and An American Prayer. But not Full Circle, just because I’m a fan doesn’t mean I’m obsessed, okay? So Jamie M was more Apollonian than Dionysian like Jim M, and Jamie M was training to become a Navy officer, more like Jim M’s father, Rear Admiral George Morrison. That means in our brotherhood lineage, I was the Jim M, you dig?

Before long, I ended up walking around wearing a leather jacket, carrying a guitar, and writing bad poetry, just like Jim M in the early days, except that I had the charisma of Jim M floating in a Paris bathtub.

Hey, wait a minute, what am I doing in Pittsburgh? This train was supposed to be going to Paris. It’s all starting to get Proustian, isn’t it? I’ve never read Proust, but I have a pretty good idea of how it works since I wrote my master’s thesis using the narratological constructs of Gérard Genette, literary theorist of structuralism and author of Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, a treatise that describes a syntax for moving through Proustian time, across voices, shifting moods. Fous-moi, now I gotta read Proust? Yeah, in French, no less.

We had a little ditty that we’d sing when we wanted someone to CHUG a beer, and if you change just one word, you get this:

PROUST motherf’r
PROUST motherf’r
PROUST PROUST PROUST PROUST

Our fraternity’s unofficial motto: “Do it for the story.”

And now: “Do it for the blog.”

Greta knows all the Doors lyrics too. We could have a full conversation like this:

“The monk bought lunch.”
“Yeah, he bought a little.”
“Yes he did.”
“Yow!”
“This is the best part of the trip, this is the trip, the best part, I really like.”
“What he say?”

In France, we’d walk around saying, I can’t remember why, maybe we were imitating someone, maybe we just liked saying it:

«Tout de suite!»
«Maintenant!»

And now it’s time to get to the point. Tout de suite, maintenant.

Greta disembarked in Lyon and I continued to Paris. Headlong toward the long-imagined destination of my years-long pilgrimage. Rushing toward the climax of my archetypal journey. Anticipating resurrection and rebirth within my cherished idea of France.

And so, on that pleasant Sunday in June, I went to Père Lachaise Cemetery in search of Jim Morrison’s grave. You find it by following the helpful graffiti spraypainted on other gravestones, the wayfinding a product of tricksters and stoners, a labyrinth leading to the Tomb of the Lizard King. I paid my respects.

Outside the cemetery, I came across an outdoor gathering, a crowd of people playing bocce and eating and drinking. They had a magnificent spread on a few tables. I was rather hungry after my excursion. And so I turned into a chameleon and sauntered over, nodded at some folks, said «Bonjour, comment ça va?», and loaded up with lamb chops and other hors d’oeuvres. I found myself part of a gathering of the neighborhood chefs, enjoying themselves on a Sunday summer afternoon.

Ahh, Paris.

Next time, I’ll visit Proust and bring a guitar.

My French Aunts

Both aunts on my father’s side spoke excellent French. This was quite an accomplishment for two Brooklyn girls from a poor Jewish family.

Aunt Florence (1920-2009) went to Hunter College. She married a Merchant Marine engineer who joined the U.S. State Department after the war. They were posted in France, Germany, Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, and elsewhere. Their six children were born in six countries. Her French was exquisite.

Florence and Leon (2004)

Aunt Sonia (b. 1934) was the baby of the family. Florence took on the responsibility for much of her upbringing and education. This eased the burdens on their Yiddish-speaking immigrant mother, my Grandma Mary (1892-1980), who had lost most of her hearing in childhood.

My father, Leon, the middle child, worked all throughout his childhood. You can read all about that in LEON: A LIFE, available in print and eBook from Amazon and other online booksellers.

But Sonia never had to work as a kid. She just focused on studying, and she was glad for that. “My main thing in life is to study hard,” said Sonia. “I don’t know where I got that, but that was my main thing, I had to study hard. And I did, and it worked.”

Sonia and Leon (2019)

The day after my nephew Nathan’s bar-mitzvah (and it was a wonderful bar-mitzvah, he did so much better than I did which isn’t a high hurdle, but no joke, it was the best performance of a bar-mitzvah kid that I’ve ever seen, he’s got a sharp memory and amazing musical talent, so keep an eye out for Nathan), we took my father to visit Aunt Sonia at a memory-care facility and her late husband, Walter Figer.

Sonia and Walter had met at a party, and it was love at first sight. Walter was a Navy engineer who worked with Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, “Father of the Nuclear Navy,” and then in the private sector. They had three children and lived in a beautiful home in South Carolina.

My father hadn’t seen his younger sister in 24 years, ever since Sonia had stopped flying on airplanes, or going on long drives, or attending family parties.

But back in 1952, Sonia flew on airplanes. Under Florence’s guidance and tutelage, she studied for a year at the Sorbonne.

Aunt Sonia told us about her time in Paris:

When I was there, it was not the right time. I can’t explain it. But I was there, so I figured I’m going to study. So I studied and studied, but I was just very lonely.

I was only 18, and very lonely. But I figured I was there, so I did my best, which was always very good, because that’s the way I am. It’s hard to explain, but I was never the right age, the right circumstances, the right this and the right that. I learned, but it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy at all.

Where did you live?

In a dorm on the Left Bank. It was really dreary. You picture France, oh the glory of France, but France, it was so lonely. I was always there, you know, I was only 18, so I was mixed up. I didn’t know why I was there, but since I was there, I studied hard, and I really learned it. But it was very lonely.

And then I came back to Brooklyn College. It was always that year that threw me off. Because all my friends were graduating, and I had to wait. I was always off by six months, that’s it. I realize now that it’s a silly thing to control you, but I just wanted to be like a regular girl, just graduate with my friends. So now I realize it’s silly, that it’s silly, but then, it seemed very important.

And then you taught French?

Yes, at different schools. They had to learn it to pass.

Without grades and things like that, they would thrive. And that was my favorite teaching of all, when they were not learning just to pass and get credits and move on, when they really wanted to learn. We had a ball, it was wonderful. It was my favorite teaching when they didn’t have to have grades. They just wanted to learn, and boy, did they want to learn.

Aunt Sonia never returned to France.

Doctor Strange’s Neighborhood

For two years I rented an apartment in Greenwich Village behind a novelty t-shirt shop on Bleecker Street, located just next to the purported address of the Marvel Comics multiverse explorer Doctor Strange. The apartment was on the ground floor. I could unlock the metal window gate of the large back window to climb outside into the garden.

One night after Letterman, I took the garbage to the curb but forgot my keys. I couldn’t get back in through the building’s front door. Even if I could, the door to my apartment had locked itself behind me.

And even though I lived in the Village on Bleecker Street, party central, a café on every corner, one bar after the next, I didn’t know anybody in the neighborhood. Nor did I know anybody in the building except for my neighbor, Dean the actor, who would stay out late until who knows when, maybe I could remember which bars he liked. But it could be a long wait and I had work in the morning.

In a city of skyscrapers, I rarely left the surface. From my ground floor apartment, I would ride the subway to a basement laundry room in an Upper West Side apartment building, where I had a job as a database programmer for the national operations center of an intelligence service with operatives in every major U.S. city. I could tell you more, but then I’d have to kill you with boredom.

So it’s quarter to one and I’m stuck outside and there’s nobody I can think to call, especially for calling collect because I didn’t bring any money with me, just garbage.

My friend Joe lived about 20 blocks away. When I first moved to New York, thinking that I had moved into the Situation Comedy Universe where neighbors pop in to exchange witty banter, I dropped by Joe’s place one night unannounced. He told me not to do that again.

I could call my folks in New Jersey, but no, I was trying to be an independent adult and it was too soon to call for a rescue. I had to figure it out by myself.

Why didn’t I know more people in the neighborhood or in the city?

I learned all sorts of things at college, but not how to make friends. Joining a fraternity as an 18-year-old gave me a turnkey social life, and most of my on-campus years were within that circle. Although we would open our doors and our taps to the women of Pittsburgh’s many fine colleges and universities, I didn’t make any new friends that way. Making friends wasn’t the point, drunken sex was the point. I was better at drinking than dancing, and better at passing out than hooking up. But at least I had somewhere to be and somewhere to go, and our gang of bold and boisterous and brilliant boys had many exciting adventures.

There was a price. Within a year of joining the Greek system, I lost my genius astronomer girlfriend from high school and the respect of my more independent-minded friends; within two years, I was overweight, odorous, and slovenly; within three years, suffering from a psychological rupture; and by senior year, unmoored from reality, culminating in a manic episode during finals week. I missed graduation due to another commitment, an involuntary one. But my timing was good. I earned a diploma.

I’m resilient. One year after college, I had a good-paying job and an apartment in the city. I didn’t want to jeopardize my footing by getting caught up in bar scenes. I just wanted to work and stay out of trouble.

Sure, I’d go out with my old friends, anyone who wanted to have a weekend in the city could crash at my place, I had plenty of room. I knew a bunch of sculptors working at a foundry in Trenton. They would often spend the weekend, and we’d hit the bars, galleries, and CBGBs. And then they’d go back to the kilns, and me to my subterranean world.

Dave from work was friendly and welcoming. We were hired as programmers at the same time. He was more of a Mac addict than me, maybe even more than Joe, and one time the three of us went out for lunch and talked about computers. Dave was also into musical theater, and a few months in, Dave told me he was gay.

“I was wondering how long it would take you to figure it out,” said Joe.

Figure it out? I didn’t figure anything out. Dave told me. That’s how I knew.

Dave invited me out with his friends at Club USA, a packed dance floor with a drag performer covering the Beastie Boys: “You gotta FIGHT! For your RIGHT! To be QUEER!!”

I was a bit envious of Dave. He had a community and they looked out for each other. I didn’t have anything like that, at least not since the disguised homoeroticism of fraternity life. And I was too clueless, insecure, and embarrassed to be a better friend to Dave by being an ally in the fight against discrimination, against bigotry, and against the epidemic that took his husband and so many of his friends. Had I been more open, the city may have felt more like home.

Note to multiverse self: The next time you join a college fraternity, make sure they fully support LGBTQIA+ acceptance and equal rights.

Out on the street, I remembered that the back window of my apartment was still open. I had been outside earlier that summer night and hadn’t yet locked the gate. Which means all I needed to do was go into someone’s apartment, out their back window onto the fire escape, and then down into the garden.

I hung around by the door and got lucky. A flight attendant lived on the top floor. She was just arriving home with her carry-on luggage and boyfriend in tow. I explained my situation to the couple. They were suspicious at first, but it turns out I can be very charming and convincing when I’m trying to get someone into bed, especially when that someone is myself and the bed is my own. The guy threatened to kill me if I was lying, and he had a gun, and yeah sure okay. They let me in.

Not long after, for no reason in particular, I thought it would be a good idea to create a new identity and leave the country. And to do that, you need to learn a language, and I picked French.

At the French Alliance/Alliance Française on E 59th, I learned some greetings, the alphabet, and how to conjugate. I used my discount to the FI/AF film series to soak in the culture.

I took a vacation and flew to Paris.