Personal Pieces posts

The other night I called to my wife from my office and asked her: “How does it feel to be married to a New York Times columnist?” When she looked confused (and maybe momentarily hopeful?), I showed her this:

“It's in a book,” I said, “so it's all true now.”

The book is “Mapping Smallville: Critical Essays on the Series and Its Characters,” and this essay, by Roger Almendarez, is called “Model Immigraton and Superman's Impossible Dream,” a title, and an essay, that feels like it needs an upgrade for our current nasty times.

Anyway, I did have an Op-Ed on the history of “Truth, Justice and the American Way” in The New York Times in June 2006. And that was that. But I appreciate the promotion, Roger. 

In fact ... Can I put this on my resumé now? “New York Times columnist”? Since it's been in a book? Doing so wouldn't be the truth but it's not far off from the American way.

I was working late the other night, occasionally distracted by the usual social-media suspects when I came across this on Twitter: one of my guys commenting on one of my other guys. 

Every day I come to this platform to say the same blessed things as this great heart, binding me in fellowship to every other sacred soul in our glorious human drama. And then some pratfalling fuckstumble tries to tell me what he really thinks and my words just end up different. https://t.co/LdlCtTpeV9

— David Simon (@AoDespair) January 8, 2019

I love that Simon called Miranda “this great heart.” I also love “pratfalling fuckstumble,” but that's par for Simon's course. The creator of “The Wire” is also the creator of the best epithets in social media. Or anywhere, really. He's a Mozart in the arena.

Anyway, I responded with the obvious: “We need you both.” I was kind of thinking “The Enemy Within,” the fifth episode of “Star Trek” TOS, when Kirk gets split in two—the kind that bleeds and the kind that cuts—and how each needed the other. Mostly I was thinking how both men are heroes to me. We need both to help keep us sane and interested and honest and engaged.

Very quickly I got this. 

So my year is done. I can't ask anything more of it. 

OK, maybe if our pratfalling president fuckstumbled his way out of office. I could dig that, too.

Trying to clean up my desktop this afternoon, I came across a spreadsheet labeled “NYR-2018” and wasn't sure what it was. 

I opened it up and went, “Oh, right: New Years Resolutions from last year.” It looked like this:

That's as much as I tabulated. Eight days. I kept doing this stuff, but the goal, the resolution, was to tabulate it in order to encourage myself to do it every day. At least situps and Chinese. Plus one of the three: running, walking, biking. But ... poof.

Some small comfort in case, on Day 5, you're already having trouble with your 2019 resolutions.  

Here's another tale of modern living. 

Last month I received several copies of the same letter from our mortgage company. It began:

Thank you for responding to our request for proof of a current hazard insurance policy on your property. Please note that your acccount has not been charged for any lender-placed hazard insurance.

Well, thank god for that. But wait: Who responded to whose request for what? I didn't respond to any request. I didn't even get a request.

There was a phone number to call. Do I call it? Was it a scam to get me to buy insurance? I wound up tossing it in that pile of stuff I should do something about one day but never do. But yesterday I received another such letter—my fourth—and said fuck it and called. 

This was not our original mortgage company, by the way. When we refinanced in 2016, we shopped around and went with a local bank. They had an office nearby in case we had questions. We could walk in. We could see people. But last year, less than a year after the refinance, the local bank sold our mortgage to an outfit in Irvine, Ca.: a loan management service. Sometimes they call themselves “debt collectors.” They often feel slightly off or cut-rate to me. I get the feeling there's just executives and drones and that's it—no middle people doing real work.

I also wonder what other services get to do this besides mortgage banks. Can a gym sell your membership to another gym? “No, sorry, you work out across town now. You work out in Irvine, Ca.” Can your bank sell your savings account to another bank? Why is it allowed with the most important thing you own?

Anyway, the phone call. That letter thanking me for responding to their request for proof of insurance? That was the request. They were asking for proof of insurance. Read it again. It's the worst ask I‘ve ever read.  

Oh, and guess why they wanted to know? Because, they said, our previous insurance policy had expired. Except it hadn’t. What they thought was our insurance company wasn‘t, and hadn’t been for years.

Meanwhile, the correct insurance company didn't respond to their subsequent request for information since they had a different mortgage lender on our policy. And not the local one either. The one before that. So I spent a long afternoon sorting shit out.

Lessons:

1. There's a lot of bad data floating around, like garbage orbiting the earth, that may one day cause havoc with everything.
2. Write clearer sentences.

I think the metadata on me floating around between corporations and their handers is screwed up in some fashion. Everyone I know says when you hit 50, when you immediately hit 50, you begin to get AARP magazine. Or you get some notice from AARP. They reel you in, in other words. I'm 55 (and a half) and I haven't gotten bupkis from them. I almost feel bad about it. 

I was hoping it was because I looked young, but today I got some spam snail-mail from Neptune Society that puts that to rest. Literally:

Dear Erik,

Time passes so quickly. Before you know it, a year has passed, then two. You start thinking about all those things you should do, but haven‘t. Take the time now to make an affordable, sensible choice. Cremation is dignified, inexpensive and has less impact on our environment. 

I’ve passed retirement and gone straight to death. 

No, honey, not Betty Page.

Last weekend I did something I hadn't done for six years—and before that, whoosh, decades. I attended a comic convention. Specifically, the Emerald City Comic Con 2018. ECCC to friends. 

Speaking of: I went stag, which is a bad way to go—although it does make it easier making it through crowds. It also helped that I wasn't in any hurry. Plus I'm still thin enough to—apologies, sorry, my bad—squeeze through when necessary.

My goal again was the comic resellers in the far back of the main room—the whole point of the comic convention when I was a kid, and now an afterthought. I‘ve been reading a book, “Take That, Adolf!” about WWII-era superheroes who, on their various covers, deck Hitler (Captain America) or choke him out (Cat-Man), and I was curious if there were more books about same, or, ideally, not exorbitant copies of originals. Not the popular ones, mind you (I’m a working man), but heroes who didn't last long: Uncle Sam, Steel Sterling, The Shield. How much does a Shock Gibson go for these days? I was curious. 

I remain curious. There was one table that laid out their Golden Age comics in easy-to-rifle-through fashion, even as I was extra careful in doing so. These things were almost as old as my father, after all; they had made it through so much just to get here. Some, shockingly, were affordable—i.e., less than $250. I kept thinking, “Hey, I could buy this!” And I kept having to rein in that thought. Because ... to what end? I don't collect. When I was young I had the desire but not the money; now I have the money but not the desire. Well, not an overwhelming desire, but there's something there. Just holding a copy of Action Comics #28 was thrilling. Just the smell of old comics took me back. It's my madeleine. 

At one point, thinking practically (i.e., relating it to my day job), I asked after copies of “Betty Bates, Lady at Law.” Ever since I found out about her, about 10 years ago, I‘ve been intrigued that she became a comic-book character at a time when women were, what, two percent of law school grads? And probably less of practicing lawyers? And probably less of comic-book characters? The guys at the Golden Age stand nodded and directed me to another seller, where, they said, they’d seen such a copy. But when I arrived, I didn't see any “Betty Bates”; I saw “Betty Page.” Had I been misunderstood? I asked again. And again, they thought I said “Betty Page.” When I clarified, they exchanged glances and eyed me dubiously, then looked her up in their comic-book catalog. Bupkis, as they'd suspected. I got a “Check yer facts, kid,” look, to which I nodded. I should‘ve checked my facts. She existed, she just never had her own comic. She was always part of “Hit” Comics. (And now a book is available that collects all over her old comics in one place; I might have to get it.)

It wasn’t a bad few hours. I checked out the wares, checked out the cosplay. On some level, these should be my people, fellow nerds, but I feel like an interloper now. This thing that used to be just skinny nerds and overweight resellers has been turned it into a party, a real party, and I'm late to it. I'm late to a party I left early.

DUN duh-nuh-nuh-nuh DUN DUN...

It was January 20, 2016, my birthday, and I was checking out social media, as we do, when I was distracted by a trending headline about director Spike Lee and #OscarsSoWhite. I kind of rolled my eyes. OK, what did he say now? Turns out Spike's thoughts on the controversy were similar to mine—that the lack of black artists up for awards is less an Academy problem than an industry problem. The roles needed to be there in the first place for the Academy to honor them. “We need to be in the room where it happens,” he said, and the writer helpfully added that this was an allusion to the new hit musical “Hamilton,” then even more helpfully included a link to a cast member singing that song on YouTube. 

Me: Oh right. That hip-hop musical about the first treasury secretary, with people of color playing the founding fathers. Sounds dreadful.

But I clicked on the link.

First viewing: “Hey, this is pretty good.” Second viewing: “Holy crap, this is good.” I searched for more on “Hamilton,” then came across a 2009 White House video of some guy rapping about Hamilton and was blown away again. That guy, it turned out, was Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created it all. Did iTunes have the Broadway soundtrack? It did! I listened to several songs before downloading the entire thing as a birthday present to myself. I figured, while I probably wouldn't listen to all the songs, there was enough there to make it at least a little bit worthwhile.

Well, I did listen to all of the songs. Over and over again. Ask my wife. For six months it was about all I listened to. I listened to it like I was running out of time. My world would never be the same. 

I searched for tickets to the Broadway show, too, but they didn't have anything for like a year. I probably should've tried harder. Then Miranda and other members of the original cast left the show in July. That door was closed now; it would never be open again. 

But two weekends ago, in Chicago, I finally got to see the show. 

My sister got tickets for her family and my wife made sure one of those was for me. So even though I'd just spent two and a half weeks in Europe, I packed up again and headed to Chicago.

I didn't expect to be blown away. It wasn't the original cast, it wasn't on Broadway, and I had the whole musical already in my head. What could they give me that I didn't already have? What could they tell me that I didn't already know? Mostly I was just interested in seeing how the tone of this one differed from the tone of the original. 

But I was blown away. After the show, my sister reposted on social media Joe Posnanski's great essay about seeing “Hamilton” on Broadway last year with his daughter, and it includes this graf:

The thing about seeing Hamilton RIGHT NOW at its peak moment is that even before it begins, the entire theater is filled with wonder. Every single person would rather be here than anywhere else in the world. As a sportswriter, I often feel that sort of energy at the biggest events, at the Masters or the Super Bowl or the Olympics, but it's even more pronounced in this theater. People look at each other with the same wide-eyed expression: “Can you believe we're here?”

That was the feeling in Chicago. The crowd was buzzing, smiling “I can't believe I'm here” smiles, and taking turns taking photos near the stage. As the house lights dimmed and the opening chords to the opening number played (DUN duh-nuh-nuh-nuh DUN DUN), unsuppressed squeals of delight were heard. And when Daniel Breaker as Burr asks “What's your name, man?” and Miguel Cervantes as Hamilton responds, “Alexander Hamilton,” the crowd burst into applause.

The talent on the stage was amazing. The dancers rocked. Alexander Gemignani took the familiar King George songs and made them funny again. He just owned the stage. He brought the house down multiple times and viewed us all with the disdain of an 18th century half-mad monarch. Loved Chris De'Sean Lee as Lafayette (less his Jefferson, which felt over-the-top), and Ari Afsar as Eliza. Meanwhile, the actress playing Angelica, Aubin Wise, has a combination of high cheekbones and dimples that seems decidedly unfair to the rest of us. You should get one or the other, not both. Plus she has the pipes. Get this: she was the understudy.

But I was particularly impressed by Breaker as Burr. Right from the start, right from the “Aaron Burr, Sir” song, you not only heard him singing but saw him acting. His reactions to this pestering kid seemed just right: putting Hamilton at a distance, then being won over by him (kinda sorta), then the rivalry and the seeming constant betrayal—until the big one during the election of 1800. Also the pain of realizing he was, and would always be, the villain in our history.

That's the thing that was surprising in Chicago: feeling the pain of being Aaron Burr. In the original, Miranda plays a sympathetic, sensitive Hamilton who wears his heart on his sleeve the way Miranda often does. He's all big sensitive eyes and overwhelming dramatic emotion. Cervantes' Hamilton is colder and more ruthless. It feels truer to the historical man but also less dramatic. We care less for Hamilton here, and more for Burr. I didn't cry when Hamilton's son died or when they sang “It's Quiet Uptown,” as I had done numerous time at home listening to the soundtrack; but I nearly teared up when Burr realizes the tragedy of his life. “Was I supposed to care so much about Aaron Burr?” my sister asked after the show. It was the play turned upside down. It makes me wonder what other variations there might be to this story that has lived with me for 18 months, and that I thought I knew so well.

• Days gone: 18
• Countries visited: 2. Three if you count the Charles de Gaulle Airport.
• Lonely Planet guidebooks brought: 2. But we really could've used one for the Charles de Gaulle Airport. 
• Minutes to make our connecting flight at CDG: 70
• Minutes by which we missed our connecting flight: 5
• Minutes subsequently spent at CDG: 480
• Museums visited in 18 days: 17
• Museums visited alongside field trips of howling school kids: 16
• Churches/kirkes/kerks entered: 20
• Towers climbed: 6
• Paintings by Dutch masters gazed at: 142
• Van Goghs seen: 69
• Canal tours taken: 1. Copenhagen.
• Visits to the Little Mermaid: 2. Once from the canal side. 
• Visits to Tivoli: 2. Once in the evening. 
• Visits to castles: 8
• Visits to Shakespearean castles: 1. Hamlet's, yo.
• Number of Yankee caps seen on the heads of Europeans who think “NY” is “like the rebel image”: 99
• Number who know the Yankees are the richest team in baseball: 0
• Polish Carlsberg workers with whom we debated whose country's president was the more embarrassing while sharing an outdoor table at a charming pizza place in the former meatpacking district of Copenhagen: 3
• Number of nodded concessions that, while the Polish president was an embarrassment, his idiocy didn't affect the world: 5
• Number of times I crossed the street in advance of looming bikes, cars or trams, or just before the light turned red, and Patricia missed the cue, and we wound up staring at each other from opposite sides of the street: 212
• Number of times we consulted Google Maps and then went in the wrong direction anyway: 53
• Times we visited Hope in Copenhagen for breakfast in our five mornings there: 2
• Mornings when we thought, “You know, we really should've just gone to Hope again”: 3
• Number of times in the morning I thought, “Wow, Danish people are really good-looking”: 4 
• Number of times in the late afternoon I thought, “OK, maybe not”: 4
• Number of times I was absolutely turned on by women in Amsterdam: 24
• Number of times this happened in the red light district: 0
• Number of scheduled cyling days on our bike-barge trip along the IJsselmeer in the Netherlands: 6
• Actual days spent biking due to weather: 3
• Number of times we had more trouble finding the boat in the new port than we did making the actual journey: 3
• Number of cyclists on the trip: 19
• Number of Pacific Northwesterners: 8
• Old-style windmills seen: 8
• Wind-energy turbines seen: 211
• Times I thought of Trump because of this: 211
• Pannekoeken eaten: 5
• Cappuccinos drunk: 27
• Frites: 8
• Netherlanders impressed that I pronounced “bedankt” with the “t” at the end: 15
• Number of tickets we tried to buy with credit cards/debit cards in train-station kiosks: 12
• Number of times the credit card/debit card was rejected: 12
• Number of times the cards were rejected elsewhere: 0
• Postcards sent: 36
• Postcards bought but never sent: 111
• Refrigerator magnets bought: 12
• Text messages warning us that we were about to exceed, or had already exceeded, or were hopelessly in excess of, our international data package: 4 
• Plane hours home: 9
• Money spent: TBA

Here's a story from last week about the difficulty of overcoming your true nature. Also about the idiocy of construction companies even in rural areas.

A week ago Sunday, Patricia and I were driving down to Rochester, Minn., for a Monday/Tuesday appointment at the Mayo Clinic. We were driving my mother's old SUV and as we left the Twin Cities it had about a quarter tank left. I'm a pretty risk-averse guy—whenever the tank gets below the quarter-mark I usually fill it up. But here, as we drove down 52 South, I only saw gas stations on the other side of the highway. I kept waiting for one on our side. I figured: I can handle this. I'll subsume my true nature for the sake of efficiency. 

And I kept waiting. And waiting. 

Soon it was just cornfields everywhere, and the gas gauge was nearing empty. So when the next exit offered “gas” I went for it. Again, it was on the other side of the freeway. Worse, the station wasn't even visible. I drove a bit. Nothing. Where was it? A mile ahead? Two? I said, “Screw this” and got back on 52 South.

Then the gas gauge light went on, which never happens to me.

It would soon be dark, and I didn't like the idea of running out of gas in the middle of nowhere. No matter what, I thought, I'll get gas at the next exit. 

That one looked promising. Near the town of Zumbrota, I could actually see the gas station, a SuperAmerica, on the other side of the highway. So we took the exit, drove over the bridge, and ... ran into an orange construction barrier. The road to the gas station was completely blocked. We could only go right or left: right was the exit ramp for 52 North, while left was the entrance ramp back onto 52 North. I shook my head. I looked around more carefully. The gas station was about 100 feet away but there was no way to get to it. It was that classic American dilemma: couldn't get there from here.

“Is this completely ...?”

“It is,” Patricia said.

I sighed. “Any thoughts?”

“Maybe try the other side of the freeway? There's a McDonald's there. Maybe there's something else, too?”

But there wasn't, so we returned to the construction sign, thinking we'd simply missed something. We hadn't. I parked next to the sign and got out. 

“I'll see if I can just buy a canister of gasoline,” I said. 

In the evening light, I walked down a steep hill full of spongy grass and into the SA. Two girls were chatting behind the counter.

“Did you know that the construction over there is blocking anyone from that side from entering this place?” I asked. They looked up, then craned their necks to the construction site. No, they didn't know. “So is there another way to get here?” I asked. The older girl mentioned driving further north about a mile and coming in from the eastern side, but I imagined myself getting hopelessly lost that way.

“So ... Do you have any canisters for sale?” 

The girl looked blank for a moment, then perked up, “Yes,” and led me to a wall where ... there was nothing. “Oh, I guess we don't. I guess we're out.” 

“Huh. How about one I could borrow?”

I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd said no, but she agreed. I thanked her, filled it up, carried it over the grassy hill to the car ... and couldn't figure out how to work it. The nozzle was made of plastic, and we figured you were supposed to pull back on it, twist it, and it would lock in place, allowing an opening for the gas to flow out. But it wouldn't lock into place. I actually had to hold it in place, and wound up spilling gas all over my hands. Even then it came out in a glurging trickle. Meanwhile, other cars kept driving up and looking as confused as we had by the construction signs. Patricia always gave them a shrug of commiseration.  

Eventually we filled up the tank—about a quarter full—and I returned the canister, asked for a bathroom to wash my hands, washed my hands about five times but couldn't get rid of them smell. I also gave the girl $10 for her trouble. But I'd learned my lesson. Never subsume your true nature for the sake of efficiency. It's never efficient. 

Last night I dreamed we were watching a TV show or movie about drug wars or gang wars, and the setting was a rival gang in Mexico or Colombia or somewhere else in Latin America. An attack was imminent, we knew that much; the gangmembers were without character, unknown to us. They were just there to be eliminated as an element of the plot. The attack began at night when one man, maybe sleeping on a wooden table, with a tent-like canvas behind him, popped his head up and was shot in the head through the canvas. He was the first. Then the bullets started whizzing and winging. They just kept coming, and the camera with them, deeper and deeper into the gang's headquarters, toward its nominal leader, and men kept falling. We never saw the attackers, we just heard and felt their bullets. It was like a million other cheap massacres I'd seen on screen but it began to hurt, watching it. Each bullet was like a bee sting, and there were a lot of bullets. “I'm tired of this,” I said. 

Then we were watching the aftermath of the attack. It was the next morning and authorities were carting the bullet-riddled bodies away and trying to clean up the mess left behind. Two men were labeled with first names but the last name was sort of the Spanish equivalent of John Doe. “Right,” I thought, “because how would they know who these guys were? How could they identify them?” That seemed like an entire investigative arm of the police I hadn't considered before. The men and women who try to figure out the names and lives of nondescript dead men.

That's me on the right later today. But hopefully better dressed and with less drama.

Wait, that's wrong, isn't it? He's dragging Elaine away from a wedding. Oh well, you get the idea.

Also, what other movie image to go with? “The Godfather”? He's going to abuse her, then one brother will beat him up while another will have him killed. “Diner”? That's about fear of marriage. “Romeo and Juliet”? Doesn't end well. So, this. Plus Dusty's one of my patron saints. 

I‘ll see you in my dreams. Or not. 

Last night I dreamed that “Hamilton” was touring and playing in Minneapolis, so P and I visited  the Twin Cities to see it. We hooked up with my old college roommate and his wife, who knew less about the musical but were game; they went along on my say-so.

The theater was crowded and chaotic. It felt like a movie theater in that the afternoon show was leaving as we were arriving. I ran into an old bookstore friend, who was dressed in an odd outfit (he’d always been odd), and he told me the touring show wasn't great. I kept thinking, “I don't want to know this.” It felt like spoilers.   

We were staying in a hotel above the theater, and I was in our room fixing a drink, and thinking of watching it all on TV, when I began to hear the opening strains of the overture from below: Dun de-de-de dun dun.... And I'm like, “Wait. TV??? We came all this way to see the play. I need to be down there.” But then I had to go to the bathroom. And then I couldn't find the key to our room. And then I couldn't fit the key into the door. The hallway was crowded and people were watching, and I seemed to be bending the key out of shape to try to get it to work (Freudians, have at), and all the while I kept thinking, “I'm missing it, I'm missing it...”

One of those awful anxiety dreams. Dreaming like I'm running out of time. 

I had another “Hamilton” dream about a month ago. In that one, Lin-Manuel Miranda himself gave me tix to the Broadway show. P and I were already in New York, and the tix were for six days in the future—on the other side of the New Year—so we had to rearrange our schedules to make it all work. That, too, became an anxiety dream about where to stay, where was our stuff, etc. 

In neither dream did I see the musical. So even in my dreams I don't get to see “Hamilton.”

I‘ve told this story before but not here. So one more time. 

In spring 2001, I was working on the first Xbox iteration of “NFL Fever,” a short-lived game that never could compete with “Madden NFL”—despite, I should add, our cover guy that year, Peyton Manning. One day he and his father, Archie, another football legend, arrived at RedWest in Redmond for a meet-and-greet with the team. Hell, I can even tell you the exact day: April 16. I know because that evening I went to Safeco Field to “greet” Alex Rodriguez on his first day back in Seattle after signing a $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers. That game was a proud moment for me. Before then, Mariners fans had always been rather polite with returning players. We’d always applauded them. Not A-Rod. We showered unrelenting abuse and paper money on the bastard for nine innings. It was the beginning of something new, for both us and him. 

Anyway, on the Microsoft campus, everyone on the team got their photo-op with our cover guy. Peyton stood in the cold and drizzle, polite, smiling, gracious, as each of us took our turn. Some folks, in their photos, had Peyton handing off to them, etc., but I was too shy for that. And all of us were too shy to ask for what we really wanted. 

Almost all of us. One upper-level mucky muck wasn‘t. When the photo session ended, standing 20-25 feet away, he clapped his hand, held them up, and said, “C’mon, toss it here.” Peyton did: a nice lob. Almost before it arrived, the mucky-muck was shaking his head. “No, no, no,” he said, and tossed the ball back. “I mean really throw it.”

A small smile passed over Peyton's face. 

I swear, the arm motion of the second throw was exactly the same: easy, smooth. He wasn't rearing back or anything. But the ball just shot out of his hand like a rocket and landed right in the guy's gut. I still remember the small satisfactory “oof” sound the mucky-muck made. But give the dude credit. He asked. He can say, “I caught two passes from Peyton Manning.” Me, I just got this picture. 

Well, one more thing. The football in question was mine, so later in the afternoon I had to chase Peyton down to get it back. “You want me to sign it?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. He got out his black marker but paused. He turned the ball around in his hands, reading. “What are all of these other signatures on it?” he asked. I didn't go into the whole permatemp situation at Microsoft; I merely said that I'd left the team last year and this was my going-away present back then, and everyone signed it with little messages like “Great working with you.” One line, from a guy named Jimbo, I still remember. I was the only non-gamer on our team, so whenever we had to do a group test for like “Motorcycle Madness,” I would always lose, but everyone would have to wait for me, with my handle “Withak” (as in “Erik with a k”), to finish. So on the football Jimbo wrote, “Withak, hurry up and finish!” which I thought was pretty funny. 

Anyway, on the football, Peyton, with another small smile, gave me his autograph then added, “Great working with you!” which I also thought was pretty funny.

I had that football for about 10 years. But I didn't try to protect it or anything. The opposite, really. My friend Gavin and I used to toss it around the Microsoft parking lot during (for him) smoke breaks. Eventually, it began to shed and a few years ago I just threw it away. NFL Fever? Microsoft tried three iterations before throwing away not only that title but the whole sports division of Microsoft Game Studios, including NBA Inside Drive and NHL Rivals. This week, it was Peyton Manning's turn. On Monday, he announced his retirement from professional football.

A-Rod endures.

I wrote this about 17 years ago, at the dawn of the Internet age, but I never sold it; I might not even have tried. I thought of it again when Playboy decided to stop featuring nude women in their magazines.

Recently I was surfing the Web for pictures of pretty girls when a name I hadn’t thought of in years popped into my head: Gig Gangel. She had been Playboy’s Miss January 1980. I remembered her not just for the usual anatomical reasons, nor for the happy coincidence of the four hard G’s in her name, but because she was the only playmate I ever pinned to my wall.

I was 16, living in an all-male household—the divorce had split us up along gender lines—and I already had posters of several booby actresses in my room (Cheryl Ladd, Lt. Uhura); so why not a naked one? Yet Gig lasted less than a week. One night my father brought home a date, a woman I’d never met, whose politeness I mistook, with the egotism of adolescence, for flirtation. Wasn’t I wearing a high school letter jacket? What woman could resist?

I was waiting for friends to pick me up so we could cruise around town and do our not much of anything, and for some reason my father wanted to show her my room. Because I was so neat? I forget. Anyway, they were halfway up the steps when I remembered Gig. I think I made some noise of protest but it was too late. The lights were flicked and there she hung. The next day, still mortified, I took Gig down, and, as the saying goes, we lost track of one another.

The Web gave us a chance to reunite. Typing Gig’s name into the search engine elicited a surprising number of sites—I thought her more obscure than that—but I immediately focused on the only one that didn’t sound like a perverted man panting. After several seconds, lo and behold, Gig began to download. It was her centerfold shot: a Bob Fosse fedora tilted seductively over one eye, red red lipstick, and a fishnet body suit. For the week she was on my wall I used to mentally trace the lines of that fishnet, which stretched to the point of bursting over her voluminous chest, and then slowly converged until the lines became indistinguishable and intermingled with whatever was going on below her waist. (Full disclosure: I had no idea what was going on below her waist.)

Gig: mid download

Manipulating the URL I discovered I could call up other centerfolds from my teen years, such as Candy Loving, the 25th anniversary playmate, and Lou Ann Fernald, Miss June 1979, playfully pouring a pitcher of water over herself, as girls do.

But I soon became less interested in the centerfolds than in the stat sheets accompanying them: Turn-Ons, Turn-Offs, Favorite Movies, Secret Dreams. These have long been a national joke (a big warm bed on a cold rainy night, etc.) but provoked interest now for cultural reasons. Generally, a playmate’s favorites include both high culture (to make the girls appear smart) and low culture (to make them appear fun), and the two don’t mix well after 20 years. Gig’s favorite movies, for example, were The Godfather and The End; and apparently when Liz Glazowski, April 1980, was finished with Harold Robbins, she immediately reached for Ernest Hemingway.

Overall, there wasn’t a lot of difference in these various likes/dislikes. One prefered autumn, the other spring; one blue eyes, the other brown. Most liked roses. No one cared much for crowds or traffic or hairy backs. The September ’79 playmate, Vicki McCarty, said she was tired of hearing about Ronald Reagan, so you get the feeling the ’80s were a bit of a drag for her. Well, not just her.

It was when I began reading the “Goals” and “Secret Dreams” of these girls, though, that the whole thing turned sadder than I’d anticipated. It was like flipping through an old yearbook and wondering whatever happened to this “Most Likely to Succeed” or that “Most Talented.” Did Sandra Joyce Cagle (February 1980) get to ride a hot air balloon cross-country? Did Henriette Allais (March 1980) learn to play the flute? Was Vicki Witt (August 1978) ever shipwrecked on a desert island with Lee Majors?

Most wanted to be famous actresses, of course, but a quick search through IMDb reveals that neither noun nor adjective took much hold. Rosanne Katon, Miss September 1978, was featured in The Swinging Cheerleaders and Motel Hell, and even managed to share scenes with future Oscar winner Tom Hanks in Bachelor Party; but then “Girl #3” roles began to go to younger playmates and her career fizzled.

Yet Ms. Katon is Meryl Streep compared with the other playmates. More common is the experience of Lee Ann Michelle (February 1979), Sylvie Garant (November 1979), and Liz Glazowski (April 1980). Each hoped to light up the silver screen; each appeared in not much. Garant wound up on two episodes of two Canadian TV shows, while Glazowski’s sole credit is a bit part (as “Liz”) in “The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood.” I find nothing on Michelle.

As for Gig, who wanted to be a famous singer? She did appear in the 1993 straight-to-video actioner “Killing Device,” opposite Alan Alda’s son Antony, and under the stage name (or married name?) “Gig Rauch.” But there’s nothing on her on iTunes.

In my youth, playmates seemed mythical beings; they generated such fantasies. Now I realize they're just another group of people for whom the world didn’t turn out as planned.

Some time ago a crazy dream came to me
I dreamt I was walkin' into World War III
— Bob Dylan, “Talkin' World War III Blues,” 1963

That was my dream last night. Not fun. 

I was in my apartment in San Diego (I live in Seattle, and have never been to San Diego). There were rumors about a possible nuclear attack, which I didn't believe. But in bed, I heard and then saw a giant mushroom cloud appearing over the Pacific shore; then another, then another. It was the end. My life was over; I would die. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the inferno and for whatever happened after that. Would I just cease? Would something else happen? I waited and wait and yet remained alive. But wouldn't that be worse? Wasn't that what John Hershey wrote in “Hiroshima”? Those who didn't die immediately, died from radiation a few days, or weeks, or months later, their skin peeling away? My skin felt warm but somehow I stayed alive. 

I went outside and joined a group of people wandering. People were hooking up—trying to get in one last bit of pleasure before the end. A woman on a streetcar was separated from a man running alongside it, and I helped him on board to unite them. 

I was with three younger people who were going to sit at a low table and eat Mexican food. It was in front of two big picture windows and didn't look safe if more bombs came, so I began to walk back to my apartment. I felt like I should let family know I was still alive. I felt like I should talk to them one last time, if this was the end. 

At a cavernous train station, I ran into Pres. Obama, who was on the phone and seemed to be fending off accusations; he seemed to be politicking. The train station was almost empty and he didn't have any security detail. Donald Trump was there, too, quiet and serious, and seemed more helpmate than rival. 

When I got home and to my cellphone again, it wouldn't work. Because it had been damaged or because the lines were jammed?