Substituting Mother

Chapter 2 – Substituting Mother

            Tony Giambone’s mother died when he was seven years old and it was her departure that became for him the single most significant event in his life, the one from which he never entirely recovered, and the emotional basis for almost every decision he made thereafter. Her loss governed everything, from something as basic as the manner in which he parted his hair (down the middle), to his belief in God (complicated, ecumenical, logically inconsistent), the women to whom he was attracted (stubborn, independent, callous, employed), to the kind of whiskey he drank (Jack Daniels, but settling for less if someone else was buying).

None of these traits was in any respect closely related to his mother herself who, from what anyone was prepared to say about her, was simple, saintly and loving – by all accounts a loyal, fertile wife and devoted mother. Whether this was true is irrelevant, especially so when a person’s death is particularly anguished, ennobled by a physically wasting and terminal disease. Such were the circumstances of the death of Giambone’s mother from cancer. Like a harbinger of his future or a symbolic edict of fate, it was the memory of her cold hand in his that he was unable to relinquish when she finally died.

Giambone’s father drove him and the other children to the hospital. If he knew she was close to death, his father didn’t say. He had kept the kids away from her for weeks. Nothing prepared Giambone for what he saw when his father ushered them into the desolate hospital room where his mother lay. She was gray. Her hair was brittle and dissolute on the pillow. She weakly turned her head to greet them through eyes that were distant, sunken and scared. A year before, Giambone thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Now with her life wound down to a trickle, she was haggard and old, as though she’d died already and only awoke to say one last goodbye. She was 28.

The dread of death struck him hard at the sight of her weak form. His younger brothers and sisters cried. His mother and father cried. Giambone did not. He felt confused and sick. He was angry at his mother. Why was she doing this to him, he thought. He was seven. He didn’t know death. Didn’t she know he loved her?

“Come here, little Daddy,” she told him. It was the name she called him because she depended on him when their father was away. He was the oldest. He helped her with the other children. He was her lover.

He resisted. She was hideous, his once beautiful mother, his mother/lover.

“Go to your mother, Tony,” his father ordered.

And he moved near her. She took his hand. It was cold and limp and he wanted to run, and to scold her for losing her beauty. For betraying him for death.

“Take care of the children, little Daddy. My strong little Daddy,” she said wanly, struggling to smile.

He said nothing. He wished she would let him go. He was ashamed of her condition. He nodded his head and stepped back from the bed. He refused to cry. A little Daddy didn’t cry. He was a man. A strong man. Her man. Why was she torturing him with her wasting disease? He was relieved when they put her in the ground.

The early loss of his mother afflicted Giambone with a lifelong sadness, a temperament that harbored strong feelings of defeat and an aggrieved sense that the world was antagonistic. There was a special kind of self-centeredness in his belief that the world was designed especially to foil his dreams. It was foreign to Giambone to ever consider that he might be responsible for his constant failures in life.

This doleful and fatalistic disposition had something to do with Giambone’s vulnerable age at the time of his mother’s death, yet largely it was a product of the dark umbrage of a ritualistic and medieval Roman Catholicism that brooded over his childhood. The two were, in fact, closely related in his mind and the minds of his entire large family, extending from his immigrant Italian grandparents, to his taciturn father, his seven brothers and sisters, and the oppressive number of aunts, uncles and cousins surrounding him in the Midwestern steel town where he was raised. People around him generally saw things the way they were handed down. Any joy in life was transient. Most living was suffering. True happiness was postponed until the next life, when the same body with which one was born would rise from its grave in moldy stupefaction to live in eternity with God, his son Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Blessed Virgin, and the entire communion of saints. God caused Giambone’s mother to suffer and he relieved her suffering by allowing her to die. The reasons for this were beyond men’s comprehension. To ask why, to question, was insolent. Faith in God’s wisdom was what was required of his faithful. Death, loss and sorrow are the lot of all men in the world. It is faith alone that will sustain the living through suffering and bring them eventually to eternal happiness in God’s love.

The death of Giambone’s mother was part of God’s plan. Once she was buried, Giambone’s father rarely again brought up the subject of his dead wife. His children were given no explanations other than it was God’s intention that she die. Shortly afterwards, Giambone’s father remarried, taking as his new wife the nanny whom he’d hired to watch over his motherless children. This, too, was God’s plan. It was also very convenient. Not only was Giambone’s father relieved of the sole care of his children, but he also acquired a new and young repository for the cultivation of several more. Tony and his three brothers could also be said to have profited from their father’s practical decision to take a new wife, as could the young bride. Their new mother, at 22 and practically a child herself, introduced the brothers by turn to the deep mysteries of female sexuality, via her own voluptuous and Polish body, as soon as each of them reached puberty, or somewhere thereabouts.

“It’s a mother’s duty to teach her sons about sex,” she told him when she found him masturbating in her bathroom.

He was 12 years old and she terrified him. Everything about her was large and corpulent, fecund and moist.

“Don’t tell Pop,” was all he could manage to say.

“Your father wouldn’t understand,” she said, and he thought there was a trace of malice in her voice.

She knelt down in front of him. She put her hands on his and gently pulled them away from his waist, letting the pants drop to his ankles. His penis was still erect. She gently touched it and licked the head. She raised her sweater when he began to groan and aimed his semen over the tops of her big pink breasts, buoyant and full in her black bra.

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

“I love it,” she said with maternal solace.

She pulled the sweater down and over her breasts, then left him alone in the bathroom with his confusion and guilt. She didn’t even clean herself. It was years again before he masturbated. Every time it happened he was disgusted by her afterwards, but he never refused her when she climbed in his bed.

Their new stepmother’s overweening concern, the ambitious undertaking of her role as a budding parent, simultaneously endeared and repelled the brothers’ affections for the woman for the rest of their lives, but to varying degrees. Giambone’s brother Dario, popularly known as Jack, the future icon of rock ‘n’ roll, never did succumb to his stepmother’s ministrations and ritual guidance into manhood. This was a sore point between them for years to come, and was the inspiration for several Top 10 hits written by Jack in which he not so delicately sang about the trials of adolescence and the schemes of wily mothers.

Tony was more ambivalent about the whole affair, but it left some deep scars. Where it is enough for most people to have to reconcile themselves to the trauma of one mother in a lifetime, Giambone was forced to confront the legacy of two, one who abandoned him and another who took his virginity. It was not long after these central events in his life occurred, around the time he entered the ninth grade, that Giambone discovered how effectively alcohol aided him in sorting all of this out.

It was not Giambone’s lugubrious nature that people discerned when they met him for the first time. Rather, as though he were a polio victim ashamed of his withered limb and driven to extremes to conceal his deformity, Giambone excelled at portraying himself as a pragmatic and challenging iconoclast who lived on his wits and philosophical insights, someone who was always eager to challenge the status quo and the trite assumptions of the common man. Giambone loved to argue, and there was nothing about which he didn’t have an opinion. If he found himself lacking one on any particular subject, he quickly acquired a point of view and exercised it vehemently. He hated to be wrong. He feared uncertainty. It was better to act as though he knew something than to undergo the duress and anxiety of seeming ignorant or uninformed in the eyes of others. The more he disagreed with someone, the greater his sense of being alive and secure.

This was a necessary stance for Giambone to take because he lived with perpetual self-doubt. This self-doubt was acutely painful to him, and he went to great lengths to dull the pain, to overpower and quiet it. Disputation was an anodyne and masked the insistent suspicion he had that he was either no good or a failure. And when there was no one with whom he could argue, there was whiskey to inspire his inner eloquence, the sound of which lulled him into a kind of stupor of superiority. The combined punch of both proved him invincible, leaving him with as sure a grasp on the nature of reality as Demosthenes, Xeno, Epicurus, Lao Tsu and all the ancient philosophers with whom he felt himself to be in equal company, if not quite their modern avatar. If the perfect circle of drinking buddies could be realized, these men would comprise its exclusive membership, with Giambone as their principal acolyte and cupbearer.

The misfortune of being raised Catholic by a father who was aloof and brooked little dissent had groomed Giambone to recognize paternal hierarchies as the natural order. He was as much dependent on booze as he was on the recorded wisdom of acclaimed sages, at least the ones who were still in print. This made him especially vulnerable to cults and cult figures while he was in his twenties, when the rules that forbade the drinking of alcohol in such brotherhoods, covens, conclaves, churches, yeshivas, ashrams and seminaries of various metaphysical persuasions, still had more power than his urge to disobey their proscriptions. Eventually, he found fault with all of them. There was bound to be a conflict between his need to obey and his need to drink. Drinking never conflicted with his longing to transcend the mundane and behold the true nature of reality. Giambone found that Bacchus was as sage as any of the others and actually served as kind of a gloss to the ancient texts he loved to peruse while sipping his beloved Jack Daniels. Giambone’s life became a series of symposia in which he entertained in his mind the great minds of Eastern and Western philosophy, posing questions, raptly listening to and absorbing their replies, making sure that his glass was always full, assuring that all the voices were kept lively and the flow of their thoughts went unimpeded.

He had a long-running debate with Gandhi, whose life of self-restraint and sacrifice intrigued and appalled him.

“But you had a wife,” Giambone said, somewhat incredulous. “You mean you just stopped fucking her like that?”

“She had no objection,” replied the G man.

“That’s inhuman.” Giambone admired Gandhi but felt he was odd and obsessive and a borderline bulimic.

“I admit,” the skinny mahatma explained, “the elimination of carnal relationship with one’s wife seemed then a strange thing.”

“Whaddya mean ‘then,’” Giambone asked, taking a long sip of Jack.

“I only mean to say that I had great difficulty in making the final resolve. I had not the necessary strength. How was I to control my passions?”

“I don’t believe they need to be controlled, at least not in the extreme way you’re talking about. A life without sex seems like a joyless life, if you ask me. Can I get you a drink?”

“No thanks. And I heartily disagree. There is no limit to the possibilities of renunciation. It is the highest goal. For me, it was always a matter of consolation and joy. Every day revealed a fresh beauty in it.”

“Dude. Sex is essential, and joyful. A man well fucked is a man whose mind is at rest.”

“Mind is at the root of all sensuality. The mind is even more difficult to curb than the wind. Nevertheless, the existence of God within makes even control of the mind possible. It is the highest goal.”

Gandhi irritated Giambone when he talked about sex and God, or a vegetarian diet. He wished he stuck to politics.

“You always gotta bring God into it,” he told him. “Any time you talk about sex, here comes God right up its ass. You’re as bad as Jonathan Edwards. I gotta go, man. Lucretius just came in. He won’t turn down a drink, or blanch when he hears the word semen. Ciao, Babu.”

“Namasti,” bade the G man.

His love of philosophical speculation was not the type that feels at home in an institutional setting like a university, despite its reputation for fostering binge drinkers. Giambone tried college for a semester or two and found the atmosphere constricting. For one thing, papers had to be written and submitted by a set date, an extremely difficult task for people whose native intelligence doesn’t thrive under such constraints. In the spectrum of multiple intelligences and diverse learning styles, Giambone’s genius might be characterized as temporal-adverse and critically aformational. Plainly speaking, he was a lousy student. He was incapable of discourse on any subject in a rationally cogent fashion, one that employed the classical components of a sound argument – i.e., introduction, exposition, evidence, refutation, and conclusion – the rules of inventio espoused by Quintilian, Cicero, or any number of Greek/Roman heavyweights in loose fitting garments whom he sought to emulate. He galled and frustrated the punctilious nuns who had labored to teach him the principles of composition in elementary school. By the eighth grade Giambone was reaching conclusions in his book reports and term papers by bluntly stating that they were self-evident, or that they’d come to him in a dream or a vision.

“On what authority do you come by your claim that Old Yeller was abused as a puppy,” Sister Mary Francis wanted to know.

“By the numerological reduction of his name,” Giambone told her while his classmates groaned. “It signifies a childhood trauma related to issues of fear, violence and abandonment. Old Yeller is essentially a tragic figure,” something Giambone had determined while browsing in the metaphysical section at the Toil and Trouble bookstore on the Saturday before his paper was due.

As for meeting deadlines, this was an impossibility. He simply didn’t recognize a space-time continuum, at least not the usual 24/7 construct. He was Xeno’s unwitting postulant. It was rare when he knew what day it was; the precise hour was an even deeper abstraction. It was either light or dark, warm or cold. These he could distinguish. Whether it was December 19 or January 19, this was a subtlety lost on him.

Better than anyone, however, Giambone understood the essence of his ideas, and he was always prepared to argue them. But his defense of those ideas was more a vehement display of his allegiance to them as articles of faith rather than any formal demonstration of their infallibility. In his passionate attempts to elucidate the truth, what was most important to him was not his ability to convince others, but rather to persuade himself of a reason to continue living. In this he was not unlike a missionary who, without potential converts, is deprived of his own self-worth and in possession of an obsolete vocation. To save himself from the hell of self-doubt, he takes to preaching to the moon, the stars, the birds and the sea. But, perhaps more importantly, argument was the only viable and safe way for Giambone to experience intimacy with another human being. It had always been difficult for him to secure them for significant lengths of time. Few people had the stamina. But it got easier when his brother became a star. People were suddenly more inclined to listen. He noticed the change but didn’t seem to care much about the reason why, the calculation involved. The longer they listened to Giambone the more their chance of meeting Jack was magnified.

Just like anyone who is born a cripple and learns to compensate for his deficiency, Giambone was long accustomed to his. One could say that he was so thoroughly familiar with it that he was no longer aware it was a handicap. So it never seemed to bother Giambone if he was out of work. With so much time given over to the exploration of man’s origins and the meaning of existence, he always found it difficult to dedicate his energy to the kind of labor that actually paid in dollars. He never found a job he liked. When he was forced to go to work – usually out of desperation – it was never for long stretches. He was content if the rent was paid and he had a little money left for whiskey, rolling tobacco, some pasta and a few vegetables for a meal now and again (he fancied himself a bit of an Italian chef). Cooking did soothe him. It meant home and hearth, potent symbols of stability, comfort, and love, the things he longed for. By mimicking a ritual of the home, he could better pretend that he had never lost one or needed one to regain.

He had in fact picked up a few marketable skills along the way, gathered from a succession of odd jobs he had taken over the years – some carpentry and painting, a little plumbing and electricity. Usually he was able to find work using the rudimentary knowledge of these trades in one way or another, through friends he had in the film or music business, industries to which he’d been introduced because of his brother Jack’s influence in Hollywood and New York. Early on he’d supported himself as a piano tuner, even training at a special school for that trade. Eventually, though, he lost interest in it, as he did with every job. He found it impossible to work for more than two to three months at a time. Either he was fired for being argumentative, or he was laid off, or he was injured – forced to nurse himself back to health with disability pay, whiskey breakfasts and the collected works of Carl Jung. He was depressed by the amount of energy it took to stay alive by the usual means, by having a profession. If he could find a way to keep breathing and avoid labor he was a happy man. As many women had learned, he was one of those people about whom others are certain will become successful, and who frustrates all of their attempts to foster that success. He simply lacked the drive to pursue it.

They were hard to identify, but occasionally he considered some enterprise or avenue for his natural talents. There was much confusion in him about what those talents might be. From pride, he refused to ask Jack for help with any of these. Jack could have subsidized a South American army with his money, but he also had few illusions about Tony’s capabilities for squandering his cash. So, predictably, such entrepreneurial plans never got beyond the conceptual stage. It was as though all Giambone were really meant to do in life was to dream, to be a wise man, a teacher, a sage, the kind in whose presence disciples travel great distances to sit and inhale his every random utterance as sustenance itself. What he really craved was attention; a return to the honorary place once accorded him as the oldest child in his family. It was as though he were incapable of moving beyond the quiet grief, the innate sadness that had always lain close to the surface of practical affairs. Or because he felt defeated by the larger-than-life accomplishments of both his superstar brother and his industrious father, a man who’d been a well-paid engineer for General Motors, who had successfully invested in real estate and then became, late in life, a prosperous vineyard owner. If he had been born with organizational ability like them, Giambone might have founded his own religion. Instead, he was born with the zeal to always be in the right, but without the confidence to persuade himself and others his position was unequivocally true. In American terms, this was his real handicap, not his drinking, but his lack of ambition and self-confidence. All the problems he had with drink were a symptom of this American failure, and the deep and intractable sorrow he carried from a loss he could never overturn.

Yet for all his resistance to the world, Giambone outwardly despaired over the circumstances of his life only once. He knew he was born more fortunate than many. And he was never of that temperament where suicide is seen to offer a practical method for solving personal problems. But he was terribly ill-suited to modern life. Emotionally he wanted to be taken care of. He had never finished with being mothered; never reached the point on his own where it became a natural next step to separate from her. There was a palpable neediness about him, one that he did his best to hide beneath an authoritative and opinionated persona. He yearned to be loved in a certain manner, one that he didn’t consciously design but which always turned out the same way, in which a woman took care not only of his sexual needs but, more importantly, all his worldly concerns, as a mother does for a child.

If a woman could not be found to perform this role for him, then the state became his mother, or the hospital where he spent much time after one strange injury after another. People who knew him best wondered if these maladies weren’t unconsciously self-inflicted, macabre stratagems to land himself in hospitals where he could be fussed over by nurses and doctors, where people would visit him, where he could be the center of attention, as is anyone in a hospital bed with captive visitors.

One year he broke his leg while rounding first base in a harmless slow pitch softball game. Another year, a driver in a parked car flung his door open just as Giambone rode by on his bicycle. The top corner of the door impaled his chest and punctured his heart, leaving him bed-ridden for several months. In another incident, while painting a wall beneath a window in which there was an air conditioner, the cooling unit, with no provocation whatsoever, slipped out of its casing and onto his head, fracturing his skull. That, too, laid him up for months and was one of the happiest periods of his life. He had a regular disability check and he lived with a woman. She was a Hollywood costume designer. She owned her own house in Silver Lake and was in love with Giambone, mostly because he was the brother of Jack Giambone, a megastar whose face was more recognized around the world than the president’s, a huge pop figure she was privileged see at all the Giambone family functions and the industry events to which she and Giambone were invited. She had taken care of all his needs and never asked for a cent. After a while she didn’t even ask him to fuck her. She had what she wanted, access to celebrity. This was fine with Giambone. He was too drunk most of the time to get it up. He sat in the woman’s garden all day by the koi pond, smoking Drum cigarette tobacco, sipping Jack Daniels and reading books like “A Course in Miracles,” and “Way of the Shaman,” nursing his broken head, and contemplating the light as it shifted and lit the rhododendrons, bougainvillea and palms.

“How’s your head,” she asked him every day when she returned from work.

“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s this goddamned city around it that’s sick,” he’d tell her, only half joking.

A lot of people said the reason Giambone drank in the first place was because of Jack, because Giambone couldn’t endure his younger brother’s superstardom; that Jack’s success, his renown and his riches, were the source of great envy for Tony. People said that Jack intimidated Tony by his astounding fortune in life, and that this explained Tony’s need – some said obsession – to cope with his diminutive stature in comparison to his brother’s on every level of measurement, or at least the ones that made any difference, the ones by which most people were measured in America – by their wealth, the physical assets they accumulated, or their face and name recognition.

There was some truth to this. Tony, like most people, whether they admitted it or not, was in awe, even astounded, by the trajectory of his brother’s ascent into the pantheon of American popular gods. This was not unusual. It was human nature to feel some form of reverence for the ones elevated above the common herd, whether by talent or intelligence or hard work, and often by none of those qualities, by something as trite as a pretty face. Giambone did envy his brother. Jack had more money than one person would ever need to realize 99.9% of human aspirations. He was envious because he understood how illogical are the forces that raise one man and bear down on another. Giambone could admit that his brother had talent, and especially drive, but he always felt that what Jack had reaped was far beyond and disproportionate to what his character deserved, or that any man deserved. And it was particularly disturbing because Giambone was the eldest of his siblings. The pride that comes with that special place, especially in an Italian family, finds it hard to abdicate its princely status to a younger brother.

“I’ve got the perfect job for you, Ton,” Jack told him when he opened his new restaurant on Melrose, a trendy tapas joint done up in primary colors, with a hot new chef installed in the kitchen and the largest selection in the city of Italian wines by the glass. Jack was always alert for new business ventures where he could sink his wealth, and it was always part of his business plan to employ as many of his family as possible, diminishing the chance they might exploit his success with a long string of loan requests.

 “Will I actually be required to work,” Giambone asked.

He didn’t like the idea that Jack thought he knew what was best for him; that Jack presumed to know what Giambone was “perfectly” suited for in the world. Giambone found himself being more arch with Jack since he’d hit the big time, using sarcasm as a defensive posture in their discussions. This was especially true whenever those discussions implied Jack’s superior earning power and increased social status. Giambone could always use the money, but then he would be working for his baby brother.

“All you need to do is be yourself,” Jack told him, “unless you find that too great a burden.”

Jack said this with a laugh, but it irritated him when anyone, and especially Tony, didn’t treat him with deference. Even before he was famous he had a reputation amongst family members for a sense of entitlement. From early childhood, he was convinced that he was destined for greatness of some sort, never troubling too much about how it was realized; it was a vague condition more or less equivalent to notoriety. When fame and money did finally materialize, it was merely vindication for what he’d always known, and it further encouraged his aristocratic sensibilities. He struggled sometimes to keep them in check, if only to obtain his aims, but he never could defeat the prepossessing notion he had of his singular capacity to inspire awe in whosever company he found himself.

“How much does it pay,” Giambone asked him.

“Don’t you wanna know what the job is first? Besides, have I ever given you reason to doubt my generosity when it comes to compensation for services rendered?”

“Why do you talk like that, Jack?”

“Like what?”

“Services rendered. You sound like a fuckin’ corporate twithead, man. Services rendered. I don’t render no services, Jack. Last time I checked we were living in a republic.”

“Jesus, Tony; don’t be an asshole. I’m offerin’ you a job here and you’re bustin’ my chops as usual. Get off your high horse, for fuck sake.”

“That’s better. Now you’re talkin’ like the Jack I know; not some asshole accountant with a clipboard and pocket protector.”

“Christ, Ton; everything is an ordeal with you. Nothin’s simple. I’m tryin’ to do you a favor here.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. What’s the job?”

“Maitre d’. You’re perfect for it.

“Maitre d’? In the restaurant?”

“No. In fucking Dodger Stadium. Of course the restaurant. You’re perfect for it. You love people. People love you. You can wear nice clothes. Act like the boss. Walk around and greet folks, ask them how they’re doing. Get them situated.”

“Act like the boss?”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“But not be the boss, right?”

“Well, I mean, in a way. You’d keep the wait staff in line, the bus boys, et cetera.”

“But not the real boss?”

“Well, Ton. There’s a manager. And my partners.”

“So, really, it’s like a glorified hostess.”

“No, Tony. You’re the maitre d’.”

“What the fuck does a maitre d’ do?”

“You greet people and get them situated.”

“That’s a fuckin’ hostess, Jack. I gotta stand at the front door all night and meet all your friends and groupies, all of ‘em lookin’ for you somewhere in the crowd, hearin’ them say all night, ‘Oh, so you’re Jack’s brother? That’s great. Will you get my wife’s coat?’ Fuck that, Jack. I’m not a fuckin’ hostess.”

“Well, then what the fuck are you then, Ton, if you’re not a hostess? What the fuck good are you to anyone, huh?”

“Fuck you, Jack.”

“Shit. Why the hell do I bother with you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Never mind. Forget about it. But you drive me crazy sometimes, Tony. What the hell you gonna do?”

Giambone was never sure about the answer to that question. He just didn’t have it inside him, the spark that was necessary to succeed like Jack. Giambone’s unacknowledged sorrow, a sorrow that may have been there before the loss of his mother, was so gripping, so insistent and incapable of being relieved, that it stole his vitality. It left him hung up inside the somber emotion, as though he were a prisoner of it, like it was a drug, one that forced him to always consider the darker things in life, the underbelly, captivating him, enslaving him to the shape and flutter of his own reflections, a drug that reduced the normal drive of a man, so that the effort needed to go beyond the narcotic effect of sorrow itself was too huge. If a man were put in a bare room, with a window on one wall that framed the sun and a broad blue sky, and on another wall there was a television streaming endless programs, will that man climb out the window? Will he stay in the room and watch the images on the TV screen as they gel and combust ad infinitum? Which choice is real? Which merits attention? To which does a man devote his life? Giambone chose to stay in the room and watch the interplay of photons and pixels. Jack climbed out the window.

All of this was true about Giambone and all of this affected the way he saw Jack, the way he reacted to him. But it didn’t explain why he drank. The drink helped insulate himself from the hard admissions one needs to make to be able to construct something in life, and Giambone was not willing to do that. He was not meant to create, only to observe and comment, to himself or to anyone within earshot who would listen. But Giambone never felt the need to get out of his seat to make those comments, and that was the difference, the big difference between himself, people like him, and the people who get things done.

Carson and Giambone essentially agreed that this was the difference between them, too. Giambone never tired of telling Carson how much he admired him. Carson’s ability to feed and clothe a family and remain steadily employed year after year, these were attributes that Giambone thought valiant, the product of Herculean effort, none of which he had the motivation to muster. He said he was awed by Carson’s reliability and stamina. Carson knew what this meant; that Giambone was intimidated by him, as he was by any man’s success in the world. Giambone was born in an age and a culture that did not value men of contemplation. Giambone considered himself to be that kind of man, although among his many acquaintances there was hardly one person he knew who approved of it. Having few people around who valued the one thing he was good at, he was necessarily insecure about being so chronically in possession of something that no one held dear. Like a career. By an accident of birth, Giambone had been born in America and not India, where beggars are honored, and the lifelong pursuit of transcending the material world is respected as a viable and worthy profession. Most Americans would point to this as sufficient cause for India’s intractable poverty, for its suspicion of progress, and its outright embrace of the principle of decay. On the other hand, most Indians chuckle as they watch caffein-fortified Americans rev and spin their wheels all the way to the grave. The Indians would be the first to say that they could benefit from indoor plumbing but, after all, what’s the hurry? They’ve been squatting over holes in the ground for several millenia. Still, as much as transcendence appealed to him, Giambone very much liked flush toilets, and warm showers, and most any luxury that came his way. He was too sensual to become an ascetic, wandering the countryside begging for alms. Yet this is exactly what happened.