Thomas F. Cook

And I’m guessing you’d have to add to Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Anna Gunn to the “creator’s” list, because I don’t think this show would have achieved the same greatness as it did without them. You maybe could have had a different person as his wife, but part of what they all achieved was something that was earned through time. In her case, it came to be the ability to be one of the most unjustifiably hated actors on the show. But we’ll get to that because I’m rewatching it, and as I go through it, I want to make some observations that I didn’t notice the first time around.

I didn’t watch it when it ran. I don’t think I’ve watched any series during its run, except maybe Seinfeld, and when I started watching that I had already missed 3 years of it.

Speaking of which, Seinfeld is almost where you have to start, because both Bryan Cranston and Anna Gunn hard roles on that show. Cranston was a dentist — and was he always the same dentist, because sometimes he seemed like he was a different dentist? Anna Gunn was one of Jerry’s many many dates who he believed, because of George, was secretly dating his cousin Jeffrey, from the parks department. The cousin who seemed to have this fantastic and varied career of whatever Uncle Leo, presumably his father, wanted to throw in Jerry’s face, like his performance in The Mikado, presented by The Parks Department.

Anyway, before I get lost in Seinfeld absurdity, Breaking Bad is a term that Jesse Pinkman, Walter White’s former chemistry student, uses to help us understand what the pilot/series is about. “You want to break bad?” means, “go from being a good person to a bad person.” I’m not sure if it was a real term when they used it, but Jesse, who understandably confused by his former chemistry teacher telling him he wants to cook methamphetamine, asks him why. And in the first two episodes Walter doesn’t explain that he has inoperable lung cancer. It’s treatable with chemo and radiation, but it’s essentially stage 3 or 4 and all they can do is shrink it and give him time.

First important note. This show was filmed before Obama was president and he and Nancy Pelosi, plus a majority of democrats, created Obamacare. He would never have “broken bad” had Walter had any kind of health care coverage that would cover cancer treatment. It didn’t then, and he also only had about 7,000 in savings — another plight that is still with us: most people have very little savings. His only choice, which I think is clear after the 5th episode, is to become a drug dealer, because chemistry is what he knows.

Second important note. Although their roles were still teacher and student — kind of a relationship that doesn’t really change no matter how old you get — there is a critically important moment in the 2nd episode where Jesse and Walter flip a coin. The coin toss is to see which person is going to get rid of the mostly melted body of Emilio and the more gruesome task of killing the gangster they have chained by the neck in the basement. Walt, in this sense, loses the task and has to kill the gangster.

Even though he has technically already killed one person, Emilio, by causing an explosion of poison gas in their mobile meth lab, that killing was done out of desperation and when Walter was about to be killed himself. It was not a cold blooded killing and, in fact, when they thought both Emilion and “Krazy 8” were dead, he, Walter, wasn’t spending too much time pondering his level of guilt.

In the 3rd episode, they take to their tasks. Jesse does his part by pulling up Emilio’s body into the bathtub and filling it with acid. (The tub later develops an enormous hole, dissolves the floor underneath, and the entire mess of body and guns come crashing through to the next floor. Some of that mess leaks through to the basement where Krazy 8 is being held prisoner.)

Walt, however, almost gives in to his human empathetic impulse to let Krazy 8 go, until he realizes that Krazy 8 still intends to kill him, and then he grabs the bicycle lock that’s latched around the guy’s neck and pulls until he is dead.

Though their relationship may have been defined by the teacher/student dynamic, this coin toss determined Walter White’s fate to become a killer and a murderer. I don’t know what his “body count” will be by the end of the series, but by episode 3, it’s already 2. Jesse is not a killer, and it’ll be interesting to see if he ever kills in the series, because I actually can’t remember him killing anyone, while I do remember Walter White impassively watching Jesse’s girlfriend die from choking, I think it was, as well as his killing an entire cartel through some Odysseus like trick, and then a kind random, kill everyone scene at the end of the series.

Breaking Bad is a series about going from good to evil, but so far — six episodes into this rewatching — it is a “breaking bad” brought about by the necessity of providing for his family after his death, as well as paying for cancer treatment in an era when no one had access to adequate health insurance. [We still don’t, but we’re much further along, and I think we forget how many stories have been told that have something to do with our lack of options regarding health.]

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I’ll add more thoughts as I go along with the series.

It doesn’t seem possible when I feel still quite young that I could be thinking about how I will approach the latter part of my life. Or time, if those are the same thing. Personally, I think gravity and time are the same thing and life is just an accident of time and matter, but, here we are — thinking.

But I think one thing that might make me happy and give me a sense of fulfillment in spite of not having had much success is to go over all that I have written and either rewrite it or pull it into a unifying oneness. I’ve been thinking about this because I am trying to write a story about someone I knew who killed himself by self-immolation. And although you can’t actually come up with a satisfying answer — there’s a kind of Joan of Arc question behind the whole act — one thing I realized is that if you look at David’s career, much of it was dedicated to responsibility and holding people accountable when they refuse to act responsibly. He applied this belief — which you could almost say was a belief in adults — to sheriffs, lawmakers, lawyers, judges, corporate profiteers, and plain old average citizens. He believed, in all his work, that adults had to be responsible. So he, during the time I knew him, worked tirelessly on behalf of youth and was the Youth Director for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, (now known as simply Lambda Legal.) His focus wasn’t really on youth, in a sense. His focus was on the adults who are supposed to protect, nuture, defend, and teach the youth.

When he switched from gay civil rights to environmentalism, that focus on responsibility did not change at all. He still worked with young people, but in this case, his focus on creating and living in a healthy environment was ultimately directed at the people who create an unhealthy environment. And when Trump and his minions started to destroy environmental regulations as soon as they got into office the first time around, that’s when David took his own life. That’s when he sacrificed himself, and tried, somewhat hopelessly and naively, to make his death a symbolic act.

Anyway, that is, so far, what I’ve managed to glean from my reading, my attempts to retrace his steps, and so on. For me, since I’ve spent most of my life pursuing the craft and art of writing, I think it would help me to feel that I’ve fully explained myself — for much of my work is, looking at it from the advantage of many years, incomprehensible. Most of my plays are utterly ridiculous — sometimes privileged and almost always offensive in one way or another. The very most offensive play I wrote was a one act which I threw out with the bathwater, as they say. But it was extremely funny. No one could read it without being offended and I think I probably had the worst feedback with that play.

But we will see. It’s an awful lot of work to write five novels and not rewrite them at the time. And I always wanted to make it to six, like Aldo Busi once wrote (that he wanted to write six novels and then stop).

Ultimately, I was interested in David because I am interested, right now, in trying to understand people who live incomprehensible lives, or do incomprehensible things. And this is for the purely selfish reason that I’d like people to understand me and not… I guess “wonder” about what I spent my life doing.

Regarding Busi: He is a hard reader to find in English. I’ve only managed to find two books in English: Sodomies in Eleven Point and The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman. The rest are in Italian and I think he made most of his career in translation, so there is also his translation of The Decameron. I don’t know if he ever wrote the six novels he talked about. (It turns out, from his Wikipedia page, that he wrote seven, and I think none of them are translated into English except the Pantyhose Salesman novel.) The Sodomies book he doesn’t consider a novel but it had one of the most beautiful and sudden endings I’ve ever read. The book is full of sex, drugs, male violence including rape, and language so dense you sometimes need a dictionary to read a sentence. But when I got to the end, I totally understood it and I almost broke into tears.

On its own, the ending sounds almost meaningless. But after the long and torturous journey he took us on, it was extraordinarily simple and beautiful.

“Look at the moon,” he says to his mother. He was staring at the full moon from her kitchen window while she cooked him some supper. She looks out the window and says, simply, “But what if it isn’t there?”

That’s not a word. I just made it up. One of the most important lessons of writing fiction, whether in a novel, short story, screenplay or play, is the word “active.” The characters, especially the main character, must be active.

The simple breakdown is that we aren’t interested in the man sitting at a bar talking about everything he didn’t accomplish. We are interested in the man who tried. Whether he succeeded or not is irrelevant. When you go a little deeper into our interest in other people, it often begins, at least in story telling, with characters who have some nagging doubt. In other words — I’m using someone else’s words here — “We are not interested in whether a character drinks his coffee with milk or sugar, or reads the newspaper, or buys an apple in the morning. We are interested in those aspects of his daily experience that he may have doubts about being able to value.”

In some stories we often aren’t sure who the main character is, because it has a great deal of “ensemble” about it. But these are usually stories about a place. Right now I’m thinking of three Los Angeles movies, “Magnolia,” “Crash,” and “Little Miss Sunshine.” (The last is a more of a road trip that ends up in Los Angeles.) In “Magnolia” there are a few characters (well many, actually) that stand out to me — I’ll just name the actors: Tom Cruise, Jason Robards, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Melora Walters, Philip Baker Hall. But the link between all of them is, more or less, the Tom Cruise character. He also has the furthest to go, emotionally, between the start of the movie and the end. His journey is reflected on almost all the other people in the different stories. They are all versions of his. Crash was a turd dressed up as a debutante so I won’t bother with that. And with “Little Miss Sunshine,” it is not Frank, the brother whose attempted suicide opens the show, nor Wayne, the self-imposed mute who wants to go to flight school, nor even Olive, whose desire to be in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant is what the story is all about. It’s Richard, the father of Olive, the husband of Cheryl, brother in law of Frank, step father of Wayne, and son of “Dad” or “Grandpa.” He is the one trying to sell his self help system, and not succeeding. He is the one who decides that they will all drive to California to take Olive to the LMS pageant. And he makes the greatest change. By the end of the film he has embraced his “loserdom,” joining all the others. Wayne, also, goes through a very dramatic change when he discovers he’s colorblind is now a “loser” like the rest of his family, but he doesn’t drive the action. In a very literal sense, Richard is the driver of the run down VW bus, and he is the driver of the story.

All of this is to say that you “figure out” who the main character is by deciding who is the most active in both a physical and emotional sense. Because often, that action is also what drives the story. And at the very essence of a story is the question, “Why are you telling this to me, now, at this moment in time.” And because of that — because of our impatience in a sense, we don’t tell the story about Hansel and Gretel at home, having a nice supper, going to bed, falling asleep and having sweet dreams. We tell the story about a famine, and a woodcutter with a wife who insists he take the children to the woods and let them fend for themselves, and the children who stumble upon a house made of gingerbread and candy, and a witch inside who, (with logic that only works in stupid fairy tells), is starving and wants to eat the children. But the boy isn’t fat enough, so the witch feeds him (again, why doesn’t she feed herself) to fatten him up, but he uses a bone to pretend he’s still too thin. Ultimately, the children push the witch into an oven or cauldron, burn her alive, escape with the help of a swan, and are reunited with the father, while their hateful mother has died of some unknown reason.

That is the difference between an active character and a passive character. In this story, the passive character is actually the father. The villain is the same person in different forms: the mother “IRL” and the witch in the gingerbread house. The active character is actually Hansel, not Gretel. Gretel is unfortunately imprisoned in the basement and Hansel is the most active: earlier in the story, he had saved some white pebbles to mark his way back home; he cleverly uses a bone to fool the witch into thinking he isn’t ready to eat, etc.

Anyway, I am actually working, even though it may not look like it, because I have an enormous of thinking to do about this particular story. It’s based on someone I once knew, informally — in fact if he were alive today he probably wouldn’t remember me — who burned himself to death in Prospect Park as a protest against fossil fuels. He was an activist — a civil rights attorney and later an environmental activist — who decided to end his life early. As far as I can tell, he did not tell his partner or the rest of his family, or his mentee, or any friends he may have had. I have been thinking about this constantly because a) I realized that it’s never going to be possible to come up with a definitive answer of why he did this and whether or not he was “depressed” or otherwise mentally anguished; and b) I have a friend who is currently going through the dying process as I’ve come to call it — (I’m borrowing the phrase from the movie “Arrival,” which is what the aliens, who can see both the future and the past, call it.) My friend is dying passively. She is letting it happen to her. She has mostly given up on all the things that kept her engaged while alive, which was primarily television, the phone and her dog. (Her dog had to be put down, but only because she hadn’t done it herself and it was in a dreadful state — riddled with tumors, etc.) She gets up as late as they let her. Sometimes they make her do some physical therapy. She eats. She sits in her room. She goes back to bed. I think they give her some sponge baths now and then. They help her with the bathroom. She has no interest in life and she has “given up” you could say, living. There is no one who could bring her back. Sometimes she finds some energy in being angry at people. And I don’t think she’s happy at all, but I also don’t think she’s depressed. She is waiting.

David was distressed during the first Trump administration when they immediately started destroying the environmental protections that we had worked for so many decades to put into place. He was already tired, physically, from the enormous strain that running a “hot composting” center put on his body, as well as his time. I believe he had also just suffered an injury in his back. A hot compost requires watering — daily I believe — and he had the watering system behind a lock, which only he had a key to. Before he burned himself, he had given the key to his mentee, and had repeated the schedule. These were some of the signs that he had made up his mind to destroy himself. But I think, besides being distressed, he was not in a depressed state. I think he probably saw the writing on the walls of where this country was going, with Trump and with the forces that created him, and because he was an activist — always had been an activist — he took action in a way that an “older” guy like himself could do.

I’ve come to the conclusion that he probably went with a great deal of hope in his heart. It may have been delusional. But I recently saw a movie that Steven Spielberg made called “Disclosure Day,” and the climactic moment of that movie is when the entire world stops what they’re doing and watches their phones to see “The truth” that aliens are living on our planet. That is utterly naive, to think that people would stop playing their games, working, running around etc., and believe what they were seeing was real. Half the world would immediately call it A.I., another quarter would call it liberal conspiracy. Why would they believe these video recordings when we just saw the same recording in the movie theatre but don’t immediately think, “Oh that must be actual footage Spielberg found.” In other words, why is “Disclosure Day” a fictional movie? That is Spielberg’s naivete showing, in much the same way that Woody Allen’s New York movies don’t look anything like New York.

David may have been as naive about the impact of his action or the reverberations. Perhaps he went to his death thinking that his sacrifice would alter the course of history. But as was tragically made clear, it just ended up with a bunch of people on Facebook calling him a liberal idiot, or sympathizing with the enormous pain he must have been in, and with calls to contact a local suicide prevention hotline, and trigger warnings.

But he was an activist and he was active. That is something that I keep returning to — probably because I have so many doubts about whether or not I am active or passive. I tend to think that I’m more passive — and generally I’ve tried to defend passivity wherever I can — because it is so looked down upon. And you can even flip passivity onto its head and, in a convoluted way, like Martin Luther King, turn passivity into action. “Actively passive,” I think is the term.

But its central to living, I think. And story-telling. A passive creature cannot survive. This is why people like my 89 year old friend who are going through the dying process start playing a waiting game. They do not wish to kill themselves. They may be afraid of it. Maybe they don’t believe in it. Maybe they still enjoy a little bit about being alive. But they also can’t be active anymore, in whatever way that was for them.

In a way, no one is actually passive if they are alive. but when it comes to stories, we look for the active moments — the small, sometimes very small, moments in our lives when are in pursuit, or trying to save ourselves, or save the world, or, in David’s case, call attention to the something.

Just thoughts. Never thought a short story would cause this much thinking.

Sometimes I’ll read something by a well-known, lauded author and have absolutely no idea what he or she is talking about. I just finished an old review by John Updike of an Alan Hollinghurst novel. I couldn’t tell if it was a good review or a bad review. But I think it was mostly a complaining review: that because Hollingurst’s novel was mainly about homosexual males, it was dull. This was the last line of his review.

Perhaps the male homosexual, uncushioned as he is by society’s circumambient encouragements to breed, feels the isolated, disquieted human condition with a special bleakness: he must take it straight.

I don’t know what “he must take it straight” means, in this context. Or was he just trying to be clever by using the word straight and got away with a meaningless clause? The gist of the review was that he, Updike, couldn’t relate to a bunch of gay guys that didn’t have to worry about such things as children (Updike calls it breeding), marriage, and family. The sentence would make more sense if it didn’t have the “he must take it straight” attached. “Perhaps gays feel the human condition with a special bleakness.” Perhaps we do. I don’t think we do, but it’s a possibility and I could consider it in the same way that people in a cult might claim to be happier than people who are not. Maybe they are.

But then you have to look at the assumption he makes: “uncushioned as he is,” and “by society’s circumambient encouragements to breed.” He assumes that the pressure society puts on people to marry and have children is a cushion rather than some sort of Iron Maiden. This, to me, is absolute lunacy. But it does express the feelings of many people — perhaps a majority of people — who prefer to live under systems of control: they know what they can do and can’t do. They know the limits. They know what they can get away with. They know what to pursue and what not to bother with. They know the world will treat them well if they have 2 1/2 children.

If this is what he talking about, then taking it straight must mean “taking life’s bleakness” without any mixers or dilutions, as in a drink. A straight whisky, for example, as opposed to “neat” or “on the rocks” or “with a twist.”

I think this is a good example of why English literature studies decided to reject “Dead White Men” or in other cases, the “Straight white male.” Updike’s inability to relate to a bunch of gays who aren’t concerned with heterosexual lives implies that all things must relate, somehow, to the straight white man. Like if it doesn’t interest a straight white guy, then it’s not worth publishing. I realize this is a terrible simplification, and all based on a review of a forgotten book. But it’s kind of exemplary of the difficulty we, all of us, have in finding interest in cultures outside our own. It’s well documented and even if you did your own friend-survey you’d probably find a couple or maybe even a handful of women who read novels, but no men. And if any of your men friends do read, they will probably read non-fiction books about wars, science, technology, history. Religious people will read about their own religion — (which is the wrong thing to do. If you’re interested in spirituality, you should read about other people’s religions.). But if you ask men, “Are they interested in women’s stories,” they will probably say no. But if you ask women, they will say they are interested in both women’s and men’s stories. Women propelled one of the most popular gay novels into the upper ranks, “A Little Life,” and also, recently, “Heated Rivalary.” The former I couldn’t stand and almost pulped my copy of it. The latter I haven’t read and probably won’t. But it isn’t men making these books into huge successes.

Straight white men have always been interested in straight white men. Shakespeare, our first and probably the only writer absolutely necessary, other than, perhaps, Homer, actually did show an interest in both male and female lives, as well as other races and religions. But he had to write “on the down low” in some sense. He was writing under a totalitarian government, so there is no contemporary criticism of his own era. Every single play of his takes place in another country, or in another time. But he also gave life to more female characters that remain alive today in our consciousness: more than Virginia Woolf or Aphra Behn or his own contemporary Christopher Marlowe. Think of Lady MacBeth, Cleopatra, Juliet, Ophelia, Beatrice, or Claudia. I’m probably missing some. They are all women (and one girl) in their own right. We can think of them as their own personalities — not as appendages to men.

But for the most part, straight white men have written about straight white men. And Updike is the same. When confronted with a lifestyle he could not stomach or conceive, he complained about it. Condemned it as particularly bleak. (And this, despite his own life, being an absolute mess of serial infidelity and chaos).

The review is from 1999 so it’s now ancient history already. But actually, it was in the 80s when people started to question the “dead white men” aspect of literature studies. In a way, he was still stuck in the 60s when he was forced to read and review this novel.

The book, by the way, was “The Spell,” which I didn’t read and might have disliked as much as Updike did. I read “The Swimming Pool Library,” and thought it was terrific. But “In the Line of Beauty,” I couldn’t even read 10 pages. Hollinghurst has always been a little hit or miss for me.

I was walking down the street and passed the playground of a public school. The teachers had apparently told all the children to line up, with the boy at one end of the line and the girls at the other. As I walked down the sidewalk, I noticed that many of the boys were doing muscle man type poses — flexing their tiny muscles. Then, when I reached the girls end of the line, the girls were all hugging each other.