A Work History

     At almost every one of my past jobs, I’ve encountered people who are ignorant of or, at best, loosely grasp aspects of employment I take for granted. For instance: Show up to your job on time. Most of the time, at least. And: Do your job. Do it for however long you’re on the clock. Obviously.

On the first day of one job I misjudged how long it’d take me to get there and arrived very late. A coworker said: “Don’t worry, I do that all the time.” I thought: You show up twenty minutes late all the time? He turned out to be the man assigned to train me. A detail: I rarely saw him simply smile. Often he studied a face for a moment, then smiled, slowly. At one point he left the room and another coworker, a great fan of American Idol, never missed an episode, once yelled at me to move so he could get out the door sooner to catch American Idol, turned to me, scratching his balls, and said: “Sometimes he disappears and no one knows where to find him.” (What's worse, a goblin appeared.) The man assigned to train me often took out his phone, stared at it, pressed buttons and stared, put it up to his ear, and I believe I once found him in the darkness of an obscure corner singing softly into it. He was friendly enough but eventually there was an upsurge in tension between us, caused by my confusion about his role: for days he’d been walking me through a job that, as I understood it, was his too, only he never did much. When I asked him about it to decide how to distribute the work fairly, he became agitated. “This is your job!” (So what’s your job? Freelance dishwashing advisor?) The manager heard him raise his voice from the next room and pulled me aside to see what was wrong. I asked her and she carefully explained: I wasn’t working with him. He was training me to replace him. He was transferred to another job in the same restaurant the next day, maybe. But apparently it wasn’t by choice and he didn’t like it. I was hunched over the sink, attacking a sheet pan with food scorched onto it someone demanded right away, a dishwashing machine operating noisily that would soon have to be reloaded to my right, a shelf filled with dirty dishes that would have to be cleared of food and organized and cleaned and dried and placed somewhere in the kitchen to make room for the next wave of dirty dishes to my left, moving at top speed, as one typically must as a dishwasher. In a steamy, windowless room that’s never entirely free of this rotten/wet funk. High-stress, low-paid, filthy work I’d discourage anyone from doing unless there are no other options and funds are dwindling. And I doubt I need to tell anyone who does not to do it long term—which would please management too, as a manager of another restaurant once admitted to me, because then there’s no obligation to pay that person more. He added that he loves immigrant employees because they’ll take whatever they can get, crowd together in an apartment to save on rent, “they don’t care!” The underbelly not highlighted often on one of your jolly food porno shows, though the restaurant would fall into chaos without the tireless exertions of a capable dishwasher. Surely one of the shittiest of the shit jobs. And the man who trained me (so to speak), standing around in my area, dressed in his new uniform, looked in my direction longingly and said: “I wish I were washing dishes.” Soon after the manager euphemistically informed me that he’d been fired.

Don’t show up to your job high. Or don’t get high at work. One would think. But there are those who get away with it. I’ve never understood why one would get high and do anything like go to work. Even if you’re one of those who has mastered the art of smoking weed, insisting that you’re perfectly functional and putting no one in danger, seems like a waste of a high (and a waste of money) to me. I once worked with a woman who smoked weed on her break and came back reeking of it, in a narrow, poorly ventilated space where people spend their whole shifts toiling around each other. The manager, a soft-spoken, gentle man, pointedly asked this coworker to instruct me on how to use the keypad for clocking in and out. She struggled to focus but got through it, as the manager looked on, sadly. (He left to find a new line of work not long after. She left within weeks, I think.) But he didn’t fire her then and there because at least she didn’t blow smoke in his face. The sturdier rule, based on experience, would be: Don’t get high on site. At another job, I never learned the name of a guy who got fired on his first day for smoking weed in a poorly ventilated bathroom other people use. He went through the trouble of looking for a job…interviewing for that job…training for that job…and couldn’t wait for his break to smoke weed.

A recommendation: Leave your toys at home. Employers are more concerned about company property than employee property, so it’s best to bring inexpensive, replaceable things in case of theft. But break time is the employee’s time and some understandably, if unknowingly, take the risk for the sake of their own relaxation and sanity. A rule: Remember to put your toys away. I worked for a semester at a copy place with, incidentally, the worst, most flagrantly rude customer service I’ve ever witnessed, people ready to exchange money for what the business offers treated as if they were beating on a bedroom door, requesting personal favors at 2 a.m. Once, as I hurried from one place to another to help someone, I tripped. A coworker had to be held back by her fellow pricks because she was about to fight me? She’d been charging her Gameboy and left the wire strung in the aisle behind the front counter, a high traffic area. I could have seriously hurt myself tripping on her toy at my job and she was angry with me. I didn’t apologize and my one regret in the field of copy machine operations is that her Gameboy didn’t go soaring across the room, into the wall, and blow up. (I will, however, apologize to Nintendo.)

And a related note: I once had a coworker who would leave his skateboard on top of the prep table during his shift. For readers unfamiliar with the layout of a restaurant kitchen, “prep” is short for “preparation.” A prep table is where your food is prepared. Enjoy your meal.

Make sure you have the equipment necessary for the job you’re hiring someone to do. By the time I applied for a job at one restaurant, I’d learned to ask the manager at the interview. She responded: Of course. As if it were a strange question. I should have persisted. I should have written a list. But I made sure to keep in mind her offhand remark that they’d been having trouble keeping dishwashers around, except one, an elderly man she quietly suggested was senile. On my first day she gave me the tour. First of all, another detail: this restaurant had the most disgusting employee bathroom I’ve ever seen. Opening the door, one was hit with an overpowering stench of toilet and, because it doubled as an open storage locker, the inside of a shoe. Near the entrance, in front of the sink, a pool of standing water one could hardly step around. And trash everywhere. I’ve been in bus station bathrooms in major cities that looked pristine by comparison. The tour continued and I was shown to the sink area. It was all standard, if slightly neglected, similar to the bathroom. And as I got started, I asked for the most basic piece of equipment after a sponge and soap, a pair of dish gloves. Not the kind for home cleaning but restaurant dish gloves—gloves that stretch to the elbow, that are thick enough to prevent cuts and abrasions otherwise unavoidable as one handles utensils and scrubs aggressively in hot water all day. The manager had no idea what I meant. She groped around and grabbed one thick leather glove used for pulling trays from the oven. That wouldn’t do, even if she were able to find the other. Then she settled on a combination of a cut glove, like a mitten with a plastic skin, and a loose disposable glove that came from a box of a hundred, both used for food prep, both wrist-length. I played along. Within the hour the disposable gloves had torn and the cut gloves underneath were discolored and sopping with crud. I knew where this was going and left before the end of the shift. The manager was stunned, whining, racking her brains for an explanation for yet another defection. The fact that she needed one told me what I needed to know about the job. The other employees seemed to see it coming. “There he goes,” one said plaintively as I walked out.

If you choose to make a coworker’s high-stress, low-paid job harder than it already is, by neglecting your responsibilities or idly flapping your gums or karate kicking near his or her head, prepare for that person to devise and execute a plan to make your job harder. And you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. I once worked at a restaurant where certain employees didn’t clear dishes of leftover food and neatly stack them, as they were supposed to, instead abandoning bins full of dishes, wordlessly leaving me to do their jobs. The manager chose not to enforce the rule. So rather than cleaning one type of utensil or plate all at once, permitting the coworker to take the rack used for loading them into the dishwashing machine, quickly go to one area of the kitchen and put them all away at once, I began, at no additional cost of effort, cleaning everything individually: One big plate, one medium plate, one small plate, one cup, one sauce container, and so on, for every single rack. To put them away, one was forced to do a circuit of the kitchen, every single time. Most took the hint and started doing their jobs correctly. A few others didn’t while grousing and sniffing about this heartless extra burden. Both outcomes were satisfactory.

And then there’s the person who inspired this piece. I knew she would be a problem from the first words out of her mouth: She was looking forward to “chilling” at the job. And she had just been hired as assistant manager, no less. I thought: Here we go. Anyone whose chief concern at a job is relaxing is a guaranteed headache, especially if he or she has authority. This person will never do the job properly, will complain about doing something approaching a proper job, and will be utterly useless should more serious action be required (for instance: settling a work-related issue). Then she said that her main ambition was to create a comfortable break room. I nodded uncomfortably. She took a quick disliking to me.

Near the end of our first full work day, she saw me with a broom in my hand and asked what I was doing. I said: “Cleaning up.” She said: “No, no, we’re going to be here tomorrow. You don’t need to do that.” I thought: Well, the store is open seven days a week. So by your logic, we’ll never clean. (Also, probably: Damn! I’m always right.) Instead I appealed to a higher authority: “The manager says to clean so that’s what I’m going to do.” She hesitantly accepted this, a leery expression on her face, not entirely convinced of the purpose of my task. In fact, she never figured out sweeping. I’ll put it this way, like our training videos: You see a pile of dirt on the floor. You have a dustpan and a broom. What do you do? (a) Use the broom to sweep the dirt into the dustpan. Then empty the dustpan into the trash. Finally, put the broom and dustpan away. (b) Forget the dustpan. Use the broom to sweep the dirt to a corner of the room. (c) Use the broom to sweep the dirt into the dustpan and put them away, leaving the dustpan filled with dirt. (d) Leave the dirt where it is. The floor will only get dirty again.

I saw this woman select every letter, at one time or another, except (a). She even (e) mopped without sweeping, leaving the mophead sooty and dotted with packing material. (And leaving the mop in the bucket instead of hanging it up on the wall clasps above the floor sink to let it drip dry. In the clasps were the brooms.)

Her approach to chilling at work, it turned out, wasn’t innovative, selective, and surreptitious but brazenly classical: long stretches of doing nothing. And there’s always something to do. During one shift, I made my way up and down the cleaning supply/auto supply/pest control aisle, filling the shelves from overstock and organizing, when I wasn’t pausing to perform cashier duties. She stood around an aisle or two over chatting with a couple of customers. That took up two hours. Then family members of hers showed up and she hung out with them in another aisle for about half an hour. Then she stood around behind the counter. That comes to about half my shift. Against store policy, she used the cash register to ring up her own purchases. (A verbal exchange, just for fun: I told her I was going on break. She said no. Mishearing her, I said, “You’re welcome.” When I realized my mistake, I proceeded to the break room.) And, before I could finish cleaning the store, she turned off the lights. It was 10:15 pm and she wanted to go home.

I wasn’t too sure whether the manager cared one way or another or even guessed what she was up to. Though I’d been quite clear about what kind of employee she was before, justice at work isn’t inevitable and sometimes, to avoid going through the trouble of hiring someone new, management will be highly lenient, making everyone else’s job worse. (Another work history could be written about those who somehow manage to keep these jobs despite everything, whose continued employment becomes deeply offensive.) But he was paying more attention than I realized, as I noticed him one day carefully sifting through old footage from the security cameras. At my next shift, in response to his written note about cleaning the entire store, I reported that I can’t clean with the lights turned off and suggested that he train his AM on elementary store upkeep. I’d purged my words of all sarcasm and derision. Let the facts, mildly listed, speak for themselves, I decided. But at the mention of her name, he scoffed and said he’d deal with her.

Then the next shift came and I learned that she’d quit. Distraught, I said: “     .” I took a register to count in the back. There, I found a written report on the desk, out in the open. Placing the cash register next to it, I couldn’t help but notice it was a warning for this now former employee…. Perhaps she quit in heated protest at being held accountable just for not doing her job. Or perhaps she realized this job, like most any one intends to keep, doesn’t provide the same comforts of reclining at home except with a paycheck thrown in and left out of disappointment to search for one that does.

The appearance of simplicity at the jobs I’ve done is deceptive. Depends on who’s doing it. I’ve never seen one that couldn’t be made arduous.

Joan is Okay

Not to return to the “creative” writing classroom but I’ve been prompted to review the basics and ask myself how a writer overcomes the limitations of first-person perspective. To start with: Form, concept, plot, language.

The form of Weike Wang’s second novel Joan is Okay (2022) is the least exciting of them all: the non-form, the diaristic. Joan, a doctor, narrates mostly in the present but roams anywhere in time, whenever. There's no special concept, it's a novel principally about an ordinary individual in an ordinary setting, played straight. There’s not even a secret plot to uncover in these pages, unless one believes we’re always living one out by virtue of existing (…perhaps but the writer has to pull thread from skein, then). The novel never reaches medium temperature, all conflict resolved quietly, politely. The language is spare and at times decidedly bland: “Home could be many things. It could be both a comfort and a pain.” Joan admits that she isn’t “literary” and she has no peculiar speech of her own.

Comedy is another option. And Joan is Okay is a comic novel, I suppose. I hesitate because Wang’s success rate or efficiency, laughwise, is middling: “I hated this. Hated the sense that I got from Fang that there was some magical beanstalk I had to climb. Nothing good comes from climbing beanstalks, didn’t he know that? There are giants up there.” She puts her surrogate child, a robot vacuum, in timeout. She jokes weakly about the connection between “wellness” and “Loch Ness.” Joan claims she doesn’t watch sitcoms while starring in one. And that’s when the comedy, such as it is, doesn’t evaporate for passages of tepid drama or information.

(The most frequently mentioned artistic medium, in fact, is television. One can easily see this novel adapted and rendered obsolete by a series intended for comfort viewing. The button for the show: A woman in scrubs and white coat, with slightly tousled hair, eyes raised in mock frustration. Five or so people surround her, hugging her, beaming for the camera.)

Initially I compared it to a book published in English to acclaim not so long ago, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman: Another slim first-person comic novel about a single woman whose life is work, told in spare language. But Murata’s novel is high efficiency, has concentrated comedic force (mania for a shit job) contrasted with and enhanced by the dark force of a character gradually taken to the edge (mania for a shit job at the cost of one’s humanity). Joan’s job, on the other hand, isn’t all that amusing and there’s no tension to it: she excels at it, it moors and revitalizes her rather than burns her out, she receives due recognition, she’s well paid and lives comfortably in New York, her colleagues like her fine and the feeling is mutual, and few people would blame her for losing herself in such a job. Her family guilt-trips her but she’s financially independent, occupies one of the most respected positions in society (though she notes the rise in anti-Asian violence), and clearly lives how she wants to, so there’s never any threat that it could truly shake her. She has no interest in the work of a doctor who philosophizes about death because she doesn’t see what the big deal is in death.

The last option is raw detail. So the reader is left with the outline of Joan’s life: bilingual daughter of Chinese immigrants, an itinerant early life, an Ivy League education, a successful, fulfilling career in medicine, solitude by choice, a death in the family. This is the part of the novel with the most potential but in the space of just over 200 pages, it can’t focus long on any one thing. As a result, it’s scattered. And I don’t have anything against fiction that’s ripped from the headlines. A memorable novel simply turns recent news into history. Wang, however, isn’t so fully immersed in the present that external events are integral to the novel. Her life on the frontline happens to intersect with the spread of COVID-19.

I’ll forgo the cheap gag and say instead that fiction like Joan is Okay has a low ceiling.

Rachel Kushner: Better Than Good

Only a select few can write books one delays eating and sleeping for. Rachel Kushner is another familiar name I’m just catching up with and I’m pleased to close out 2022 with a book of hers I found quite difficult to pull myself away from, a collection of essays from across her publishing career, which form a sort of fragmented memoir, called The Hard Crowd (2021).  

She covers a lot of ground, within her best essays and from one to the next. And not as someone on assignment, formal and impersonal, but with the energy and freedom granted by going wherever curiosity or memory leads, combined with the intimacy of the I-voice. The first is about an exceptional experience: Kushner's life in San Francisco, CA as a motorcycle enthusiast and an illegal race she participates in that could have killed her but thankfully only tore her up. It’s far-reaching yet compressed personal history. It’s an adventure tale. It’s an insider’s account that gripped me even though I’m almost hostile to the subject (dangerous to more than just the motorcyclist, especially the way her friends rode). And it’s a tribute to the dead.  

The second essay is also about an exceptional, though very different, experience: life among the second-class citizens of Israel, the Palestinians, in the Shuafat Refugee Camp of East Jerusalem. Years have passed and Kushner is now a writer. She doesn’t know much about the intractable conflict, so she tours the area alongside a good man with a good name, Baha Nababta. Her presence is novel and the kids love Nababta, a community organizer who’s dedicated his life to improving the camp however he can. They begin to gather around and shadow the pair, turning the tour into a little parade. “Hello America!” one kid shouts. In a barbershop, another kid flexes his arm for Kushner. His muscle is described as a “baby potato.” Such heartwarming scenes are followed by devastating scenes that are routine for them, in a place neglected by the authorities unless they need to inflict pain, a place without access to health care or education, without safe roads or housing, turned lawless.  

One, two: Thrills at 130 mph and funereal pace. Danger by choice and danger (and misery) one is born into, with hardly a chance to escape. Both a tribute to the dead, in different registers. 

She had me. I’d bet that most anyone who reads those two pieces, “Girl on a Bike” and “We Are Orphans Here,” unless you’re a self-pitying ex-boyfriend with a cringeworthy pet phrase in the former case, or barred by hate and ignorance in the latter, will have to read the book until the end. And from there I began to ask myself if she could meet the standard set by the best essayists. For instance: Does she have the power to make anything she wants to talk about interesting?  

Not quite. Kushner has the style. She isn’t flashy, she isn’t remarkably playful or weird. She’s never less than limpid and dexterous, knows the value of a splash of color rather than a torrent. I can count on one hand how many verbal missteps I found in the entire book, all minor, no need to say another word about them. Every essay has sentences to savor, a beguiling rhythm to get into. But it isn’t enough to overcome the jargon and esoteric information in certain spots. I’ve found it’s one of the most difficult balancing acts: The expert, or someone writing about an obsession, doesn’t necessarily want to stop and explain for anyone who doesn't know what he or she does. It interrupts the flow and, over time, it could get tiresome for the writer, as though one is permanently stuck in an introductory mode. Avoid it, however, and the general reader may find it inaccessible, no matter how nice the presentation. Now the essay is only for other stamp collectors. When Kushner writes at length about cars, she brings me down, because I don’t particularly care about cars and the essay doesn’t give me enough of a reason to care. This is a series of sentences as they appear in “Flying Cars”: 

There’s a 1965 Mercury Marauder. I always like those. Even if the lines are a little square, the fastback makes up for it, but it’s a car that has to have sport rims or forget it.  

Why is 1965 the chicane through which all American car design went from curvy to boxy? 

Nineteen sixty-eight was another chicane, which led to puffy quarter panels, and even outright blimpage. 

Same as when she writes about Jeff Koons, which is her at her most dry, removed, and slightly pedantic. After reading it, I formed no opinion about his work whatsoever. (And I know I’m capable of taking an interest in the visual arts: Peter Schjeldahl, for example, can guide me into his obsessions and convince me to care and without necessarily writing as though for someone who’s never stepped foot in a gallery.) Read individually, this could be a problem. Kushner gets away with some expert-level pieces because, again, those sentences, and they’re tucked in the middle. In any case, as she explains in her closing essay, she doesn’t mind being bored by your story. From which I gather: she’s willing to risk boring you.  

In one memorable instance, Kushner demonstrates that she can write a good introductory piece if she so chooses. “Is Prison Necessary?” profiles Ruth Wilson Gilmore, an activist and professor at UC Berkeley who specializes in what would surely be a widely controversial subject if more people knew about it: prison abolition. I arrived with some prior reading experience and interest in the prison system. Kushner walks the reader through the subject, heated reactions, and responses to those (inevitable) reactions. What if the prison system, for all the cost, for all the suffering and environmental damage it causes, doesn’t make us any safer? The piece asks readers to consider an alternative. (And it points out that prison originally was the reform. Doesn’t mean society has exhausted its options and can’t keep evolving.) I wasn’t entirely swayed – Gilmore wrote an acclaimed book on her work that’s too complex to summarize – but it managed to make me usefully embarrassed at times. She challenges misconceptions about the number of low-level drug offenders that are locked up in the US and the exaggerated problem of for-profit prisons, and I realize some of my opinions on the matter have been received. I will cease to spread them and locate Gilmore’s book. 

I don’t have a copy handy but I believe it’s in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound that a stranger insists on helping Zuckerman with his health issues as thanks for his depiction of New Jersey. Now I understand the impulse when I think about Kushner’s essays on San Francisco. In “Not with the Band,” she recounts her experiences working as a bartender in the city’s most famous music venues. This writer on work and music: no risk of boring me. A couple of things about it. I must mention the best opening to a set I’ve heard of. It happens at the Fillmore. A great band requests to have Barry White’s “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little Bit More Baby” play just before coming on. (I can practically hear my brother Miguel in the crowd say: “oh shiiit!”) If you don’t know this song, and you’re cool enough to enjoy sexy 70s grooves, play it. First the drummer comes onstage. He sits behind the kit and starts tapping his hi-hat to the song’s beat. “One by one the musicians came onstage and joined in. In a sharkskin suit and white shoes, Nick Cave took the microphone, and the transition from Barry White to the Bad Seeds was complete.” Can't be topped. Second: Kushner is invited to a bar that hosts PJ Harvey. Even though she’s just played a sold-out show at the Warfield, the musician takes the stage and proceeds to play for the whole night. “This impressed me. The message I took from it was: to be truly good at something is the very highest joy. And by inference, I understood this: to merely witness greatness is a distant cousin, or even not related at all.” Afterward she leaves and begins her life in pursuit of a career in writing. End of essay. I was surprised, surprised at my surprise, and vaguely disappointed. Considering the passel of depressive great artists throughout history (not to mention “good” artists), “joy” in one’s skill or talent, if it is indeed a wonderful feeling, must be thought of only in a narrow and possibly ephemeral sense. But, fine, I don’t see the use of arguing with such a personal belief. That second part, though: Isn’t witnessing greatness a legitimate precondition to developing a standard for it? Kushner presents PJ Harvey as an image. Where’s the appreciation of the music? One’s own greatness need not be paramount. In fact, become too consumed with it and one risks missing out – and worse, no closer to greatness, in any sense. Freud says that for some, aesthetic experience is comparable to erotic experience. As I write this, I listen to Isaac Hayes’s “Joy, Pt 1.” 

Rachel Kushner is better than good. And her appreciation is expressed elsewhere, such as in pieces on other writers: Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector. (I’ll give the last another try.) One reason I’ll be buying The Hard Crowd and revisiting it is an essay about her breakthrough novel The Flamethrowers, once I’m through reading it. And for those of you who, like me, consider Kushner a writer to watch: She has two more on the way.

Studies in Ridonculousness: Evel Knievel is Jesus, Apparently

My studies in ridonculousness continue with Viva Knievel! (1977), a film starring a man once famed for daring motorcycle feats and sustaining severe injuries when they went awry. Watching movies like this is also daring, in a way. Not all terrible movies are good. Some are bad: baffling, inept, and, crucially, no fun, making them a complete waste of time. And some are just as baffling and inept but less than no fun, more bizarre, disturbing, and, depending on how long one cares to endure them, insanemaking. All fans of the ridonculous movie experience have a moment of crisis in which, holding their heads, they ask themselves: What am I doing with my life? I don’t want to waste my time. And I’d prefer not to lobotomize myself sitting through every minute of the absolute worst of the worst movies ever made. But it’s not always easy to tell which route the terrible movie will take from the start. My answer is to spend less of my life watching, imposing a time limit. Five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. If I’m bored or frightened, if I’m feeling pain in the forehead region I didn’t have when I started it, I shut it off and try my best to forget. Minutes are an acceptable loss! for the chance of discovering properly ridonculous cinema. 

A note on the word “ridonculous.” You won’t find it in Merriam-Webster's dictionary. Yet. For now I look to a website I don’t visit often, the Urban Dictionary, which relies on postings by users and a voting system. The posting with the most votes is from 2004 by 755coop3: “Functionally similar to the word ‘ridiculous,’ this word is often used in its place for extra emphasis. Example: There's a ridonculous amount of cheddar cheese stuck in the printer.” (Not a secret posting of mine.) But no provenance or noun form is provided. Scroll further down and doof0000, in another entry, informs readers that Roald Dahl uses the word “redunculus” in a children’s book called The BFG, published in 1982. I’m not sure where I picked it up from. A family friend? I didn’t realize the term went back as far as 1982, well before I started using it and meditating upon it (and before I was born). No joke, I thought it was my neologism! Anyway, ridonculousness, as a concept, is mutant ridiculousness: Take a rainbow afro wig. A banana hammock. A bazooka. Several blocks of cheddar cheese. Throw them into a vat of toxic waste. Season with a pinch or brick of cocaine, if you like. And stand back. Ridonculous. One can imagine or casually observe or trip on the sidewalk and into the ridiculous any day of the week. The ridonculous is unimaginable until someone (usually unwittingly) creates it or becomes it. In the former case, it’s an action movie based around a fusion of gymnastics and martial arts no one asked for called Gymkata. In the latter, it’s the living embodiment of ridonculousness, Vanilla Ice.  (Who also starred in one movie: Cool as Ice. In a word: Ridonculous.) 

Well, I finished Viva Knievel! And it didn’t even take five minutes to determine that I would. The movie shows promise from scene one: Knievel, in the leather jumpsuit-clad, winged haircut role of himself, sneaks into an orphanage at night to deliver toys to children. His presence causes one kid to throw off his crutches and walk unassisted. As the movie progresses, Knievel is never once found to do wrong. (From the Viva Knievel! theme song: “He’s a motorcycle bird/who is never coming down.”) He lives cleanly. He’s loyal to a fault. He won’t be cheated in business. He’s passionately anti-drug, turning the movie into half-PSA. So wholesome. During a dramatic scene, he’s accused by one character, almost incoherently, of having a flaw: caring too much for a vulnerable child. Viva Knievel! is feature-length promotion for Evel Knievel, modern day Jesus.

 

He has his enemies. The plot involves career sabotage, drug smuggling, murder, and blah, let’s discuss some satisfying absurdities. 

A photojournalist arrives to take pictures of Knievel in the event of a crash. She insists on being addressed not as miss but ms. [mizz]. Knievel rancorously says: “Oh, you’re one of them.” He means a feminist. After the label further defines her as antagonistic and shrill, her political views are never mentioned again. Once she’s done with her assignment, she plans on heading to South America to document a revolution. “Aw, they’re always having revolutions down there!” says Knievel. But the feminist gets caught up in Knievel’s exploits and, by the end, the movie simply assumes she’s fallen in love (and perhaps given up her career, renounced feminism, and converted to the Knievel religion).   

One of Knievel’s main acolytes in the movie is a child, the son of his assistant. I mock his lines thusly: Gee, Mr. Knievel! You’re the best, Mr. Knievel! Golly, Mr. Knievel! And with a pouty face for awards consideration: Say it ain’t so, Mr. Knievel. (Sowwy, “Evel.”) 

After Knievel is injured in a crash (and drama is abruptly and fleetingly introduced with the sudden announcement of his retirement), he’s taken to the hospital, where he lies in bed. This scene best sums up the quality of his acting: he can’t even lie in bed resting convincingly.

  

In a movie with much to do about drugs, there had to be a drug freakout. It’s performed by a name I recognize from movies I can’t stand: Gene Kelly.  

The dullest aspect of the movie by far, ironically, is the reason it exists in the first place: the messiah’s stunts. Since he’s limited to jumping over things, the filmmakers include a lot more buildup than (meager) payoff. The movie ends with Knievel finally sticking the landing. Unwittingly true. 

With fairly catchy theme song: “Viva, Viva Knievel/Viva, Viva K-nie-vel!”