I'm Not Herbert Lom

But, these days, I look like him.

Of course, I don't look like him, really. I look more like Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfuss, the character he made famous in the "Pink Panther" films, being tortured into madness by the ineptitude of Peter Sellers' Inspector Jacques Clouseau. Clouseau's rampant and limitless bumbling, paired with his inexplicable and accidental good luck at solving the most complex heist cases, grated on Lom's character, who developed a tell-tale eye twitch whenever in the presence of Clouseau, or even just when his name was mentioned.

"CLOUSEAU!" a psychiatrist yells at the supposedly-healed Dreyfuss during a session at a mental hospital-- to assess Dreyfuss's response. The patient reacts with perfect calm and ease. Until, less than 10 minutes later, he has several unfortunate encounters with a pond because of his nemesis, the moustachioed and impossible to understand Clouseau.

It would seem that Lom's character Dreyfuss and I are kindred spirits, as I have developed a twitch under my left eye. It first appeared perhaps a year ago, stuck around for a few days, and went away-- whatever little muscle it was, I guess, no longer felt the need to assert itself and make its presence known so insistently. This time, though, it has come back with a passion. The twitch re-emerged early in June and it's been hanging around pretty consistently. Sometimes it's a quick pulsation, going up and down with great energy and verve, other times it's slow and faint. No matter the rate or force, I've got to tell you, it's fucking annoying.

And I feel kind of silly writing about it, because it seems like it's the kind of thing one might choose to write about if one were grasping at straws for something to write about, and if that's what it seems like to you, that's because that's true. I was rather stuck, actually, for a topic today, and I felt like asking someone for advice-- a friend or a wife or whatever-- but then I usually end up not using that person's suggested topic, and that probably makes them feel like monkey vom, and it makes me feel guilty for soliciting an idea that I'm most likely just going to shitcan anyway.

But I suppose you're supposed to write about what's on your mind, and what's on my mind most frequently is breasts, but I wasn't really in the mood to write about breasts, although I did recently have an illuminating conversation about breasts a couple days ago-- maybe that's why I don't feel the need to write about them-- and so I thought I would go to a topic that really can't help but be on my radar, and that's this ceaseless twitching below my left eye.

I wonder what people think when they talk to me for any length of time. If they're making any reasonable attempt at eye-contact, they've got to notice it. It must be very unsettling to look at. Most people are probably too polite to say anything about it. Anyway, what would they say?

"Jesus, how about that nasty-ass twitch you've got there, fella! What's the matter-- your eye have Parkinsons?"

I'm not terribly polite, at least, not with people I know well. A friend of mine is pregnant and I haven't seen her in a few months. She's going to pop next week. Anyway, I saw her for the first time in months last weekend and she is so fucking pregnant it's not even funny. And she's growing out-- straight out. It looks like her baby is wearing a hoop-skirt, for Christ's sake. She was wearing a size 2-XL t-shirt. And she was trying to talk to me and my eyes kept going, quite unabashedly, I might add, to her belly.

"I'm sorry, Amy," I said, "I'm just not even listening to you-- I can't stop staring at your fucking belly!"

Which, in a way, was probably a good thing, because she probably didn't notice my eye-twitch that way.

I'm thinking of naming my twitch "Herbert" after Herbert Lom. Since we found out that we're having twins, we've been talking a lot about names. Everything's a name thing now. We were watching Michael Palin's "The Missionary" last night, and one of the actor's names is Denholm Elliott.

"What about 'Denholm'?" I said to my wife.

"That's funny," she said to me. And I presume it wasn't about the movie. In reading up about Denholm Elliott for this post (yeah, I do research. Sort of.) I learned that he was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, and died of AIDS-related tuberculosis in 1992. That made me sad. Herbert Lom, however, who was born five years before Denholm Elliott, is still living, apparently. Lom is ninety-four, if you can believe that. I don't think Mrs. Apron will let me name the kid "Herbert" either.

Lom, originally from Prague, was born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru.

Now that's something to twitch about.

I'll Probably Never See "Citizen Kane"

My wife is currently struggling with the concept of being human, and forgiving herself for being so.

Oftentimes, I'm pretty reasonably comfortable with my humanity, my flaws and my foibles, my acne and my wrinkles, my blunders and my anxieties. Sometimes, though, I just can't seem to shake the fact that, when it all boils down to gravy, I just don't measure up.

Measure up to what, of course, the question becomes. To whose standards? To what level? To whose ideal?

Probably my own, though I think society bears some of the blame here. I love blaming society. It makes me sound so, I don't know, Proustian.

???

I'm deeply flawed. I say racist and offensive things. I'm often insensitive and pernicious, I'm all over four-letter words like they're my best friends or chicks I want to fuck.

(See?)

I'm a hypocrite and a charlatan and a faker and a dirty old man and a complainer and a dreamer and an insipid coward and a concealer and a crybaby.

And I've never seen "Citizen Kane." And I probably never will.

Why?

I don't know. I'm just not that into black-and-white films. The only black-and-white stuff on film that I really love are "3 Stooges" shorts, and I only really like the ones with Curly. Shemp I never really got into very much, Joe Besser is just a wimpy, gay stereotype, and Curly Joe DeRita was, well, a fourth-rate Curly impersonator, and not a very good one at that.

Oh, and I love "Dr. Strangelove," of course. I think it's illegal to call yourself a Peter Sellers Freak without loving that movie. Plus, it was James Earl Jones's first on-screen role. I mean, it's a piece of history in so many ways.

But "Citizen Kane"? I don't know-- just doesn't interest me. Sure, I've seen clips. And I've heard about sticking the fucking camera in a hole in the ground a hundred times. And I know it's, like, #1 on the AFI Most Important Contributions to Cinematic Whatever of All Times.

I know.

But, it's just something about it. "Rosebud." Whatever. That style of acting, it's just so... representational. So affected. So... uninteresting. And Orson Welles is probably going to come back from the grave and give me a nipple-twist for saying this but, like, in the grand scheme of things, who gives a shit if I've never seen "Citizen Kane"? It makes me an imperfect connoisseur of the film medium, for sure.

I'll admit that. It does. So does never seeing, "Gone with the Wind." Or "Inherit the Wind." Or "A Mighty Wind." Basically, all those windy movies I've kind of just skipped over for whatever reason. I don't know, I'm sure a cunning psychologist could come up with something pretty enticing about that.

Can I really say, "I love movies" without ever having seen "Citizen Kane," arguably one of the most influential movies ever made? I don't know. I get away with saying "I love Mark Twain" without ever having read much of his novel writing.

Does that make me something of a cheat? Does it make my enthusiasm for a subject matter somewhat hollow?

Or, does it make me human?

I don't know. But, either way, I'll probably never see "Citizen Kane." Why? Because, truth be told, I'd rather pop in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" and laugh my ass off as Peter Sellers destroys his own apartment trying to engage Burt Kwouk in yet another Cato/Clouseau battle royale any day.

And that, if anything, makes me about as human as I can be.

The Party

"The Party" is the title of a 1968 movie starring Peter Sellers in the pre-political-correctness role of Indian actor Hrundi V. Bakshi, who plays the sitar, is extremely polite and clumsy and, oh yeah, wears swaths of dark brown body makeup. In the film, Hrundi is mistakenly invited to a swank Hollywood bash where feeds a parakeet "birdy num-num," a runaway elephant gets a bubble-bath, and the police are summoned.

This blog post does not refer to that party, but, rather my sister and her new husband's party, celebrating their marriage and the birth of my nephew-- both events happening at approximately the same moment.

This festive do took place on Saturday evening and, miraculously, my wife and I were able to attend, in the one moment of our lives that was not consumed by a "Pirates" rehearsal. My mother, whose neuroses are reaching new and teetering heights with the appearance of her first grandchild, hired a Registered Nurse at some ungodly hourly rate to babysit the child while we all went off to the party to enjoy ourselves.

Or, did we?

My wife and I drove my mother and my other sister to the party, which was held at a nice-ish restaurant. We had the second floor to ourselves. I pulled our car up to a sign that said "STOP: WAIT FOR VALET." No valet was there, so we waited. The man who eventually showed up knocking on the driver's side window and almost giving me apoplexy was not a valet, but a valet-in-training: my father.

"Mummy! Leave the keys in here! Go in-- have fun! I'll take care of this!"

"Where's the fucking valet?" I asked, knowing he was paying for one.

"Sveetie! Don't worry, you worry all the time. Leave the car with me," he cooed, stroking my cheek in that patronizing way of his as three other cars lined up behind mine.

"You going to take care of all these sonsofbitches, too?" I asked, pointing to a white SUV that, whoops, contained my 85-year-old step grandmother.

"Sure!" he cried.

Sure. Why not? He's the Bionic-Jew. He can park your cars, grill the hors d'oeuvres, uncork the bubbly, and clean up afterwards without breaking a sweat.

Oh, yeah, and he's also really good at yelling at everybody behind the scenes while maintaining an unflappable facade. He could have been Head Maitre d' at the Four Seasons. You know, if he wasn't Israeli.

I was very interested in consuming heavy quantities of succulent-looking hors d'oeuvres (yes, they were probably made by my father in between scrubbing the lavatories and applying fondant to the cake) but I was monopolized by a totally bizarre woman with stringy brown hair who introduced herself to me as the woman who "used to make me peanut butter sandwiches."

For a millisecond, I was scared to death that I had just met my real mother.

Fortunately, she was the mother of my first friend, who lived a few doors down from us back in the old days. She had a daughter who was my sister's age, and they played together, and I played with her son until they moved away when I was around six years old. The daughter came bounding in later, proudly displaying her gigantic new husband and her gigantic new breasts, which were careening out of her black lacy top.

"What the hell was that nutcase from our street doing with her tits on display like some Victorian prostitute?"

"She just bought them-- her mother has a new set, too," my mother told me on the phone the next day.

The silicone might have been flowing freely at this shindig, but the mixed drinks were not-- unless you paid for them, that is. This was a huge bone of contention for my brother-in-law's mother, whose family, um, likes their alcohol wet and constant-- through an IV drip, if possible. I was shocked that my parents, both teetotallers and tightwads, even sprung for free beer and wine at the bar. My father was all prepared to make an apologetic speech about the situation to everyone when my oldest sister convinced him to shut the fuck up, which is not an easy feat to accomplish.

Believe me, I've tried.

As for my side of the family, I was fortunate enough to be seated next to my alcoholic aunt, who was already H.O.A. (Hammered On Arrival) so paying for mixed drinks didn't seem to bother her very much. I have no doubt that she had a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a funnel in her purse anyway. She's the one who rather infamously prepared for my dry wedding by dressing in a sari and consuming some unknown, fetid liquid out of a hip-flask in the bathroom.

My thoroughly inebriated aunt hissed and slurred into my right ear for two-and-a-half hours straight, and the topics of conversation roamed haphazardly from her opinion of my long-deceased grandmother ("Biggest snob in the world! When she was diagnosed with lymphoma, she decided she wanted a mink. Your fucking grandfather bought her a mink AND a chinchilla!"), her taste in music, ("I've got Emilie Autumn on my iPod-- she's a punk violinist. Suicidal. A goddamn genius. She was institutionalized several times so she had a lot of time to practice violin."), and her thoughts on male sexuality, ("Your sister should be on top of that handsome young kid at the table behind us. After 18, their semen gets all fucked up.")

I don't want to seem like an exaggerator when I say that she talked to just me for two-and-a-half hours straight-- she graced others with her presence and charming perspicacity as well, forcing my family to make apologies for indelicacies other than just the cash bar debacle.

Maybe I would have had a better time with a different seating arrangement, but I don't think so. The party was celebrating a dubious marriage and a kid who was being babysat by a nurse, harkening back to the way my parents rolled back in the old days, when my mother had a nurse for the first six weeks at home after each of us was born. I suppose, in that and other respects, some things never change. My aunt is always inappropriate. My parents are always apologizing. I never get to eat as much as I want. The best boobs are always fake. And the one thing people really care about is whether or not the drinks are on the house.