What Joan calls with a slight edge my “empire,” and I more accurately
call my “library” or “the press room” is an ample book-walled space, about
thirty feet square, that does not even try to disguise it origins as a
garage. There are two doors at its
southeast corner. One opens into
the kitchen and beyond that into the “real” house, the other into the laundry
room; both the kitchen and the laundry are our own major renovations of about
a decade ago. I never was one of
those hermetically sealed scholars, and I usually keep those doors open. I like feeling in touch with the real
life of the domestic establishment.
So I have become accustomed to kitchen sounds from one doorway, and from
the other the deep-throated pulsings of the washing machine, and the
higher-pitched swish of the spin dryer.
Except that not infrequently the dryer’s swish is interrupted by
randomly spaced, atonal metallic clatter.
I then get up from my great thoughts, walk over to the dryer, stop its
motion temporarily, and remove from among the half-dried undies a quarter, well
circulated at high speed, or maybe a couple of hot pennies. This is an experience that puts flesh
on the bones of the concept of the “coin wash”.
This
phenomenon, naturally, reminds me that about ten days ago Anna Gunn published
an odd op-ed essay in the NYT.
Ms. Gunn is a television star, currently famous for her major role as Skyler
White in the blockbuster serial Breaking Bad. This is an artistic work of considerable genius about a
cancer-stricken high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, Walter White,
whose response to the adversity of cancer is to become the methamphetamine kingpin of the Sun Belt. The bluish crystals of his manufacture
are apparently to die for, and quite a few people do. Talk about “better things for better living through
chemistry.” Yes, I know…I didn’t
believe it either until earlier in the summer I binged my way through all the
early episodes free on Netflix.
Just believe me, it’s brilliant.
Think “Portrait of Dorian Gray” by way of Doctor Faustus or All the
King’s Men.
Anna
Gunn’s fictional character, the chemist’s wife, is one of very few people who
know about her husband’s mind-boggling criminality, and certainly the only one
to call him on it—which she does sometimes vehemently, but also
intermittently. In her op-ed
essay, Ms. Gunn reports her astonishment at the discovery that thousands of
viewers of Breaking Bad hate Skyler
White, and that the hatred for her fictional persona sometimes seems to extend
to her factual person.
vox populi
Ms.
Gunn’s animadversions on this phenomenon might well win her a high grade in a
Women’s Studies course, but I don’t find them very convincing. The consistent aim of American popular
culture, after all, is to demolish whatever thin barriers may still separate
fantasy from reality, and Breaking Bad
seems to have achieved this goal early on. The online “hate boards” that alarm her are actually
monuments to her remarkable powers as an actress. She brilliantly simulates a forceful and complex woman
thrown into a grotesque situation in which her stress not infrequently surfaces.
If Ms. Gunn can land a comparable gig in a series about Joan of Arc, Florence
Nightingale, or Little Orphan Annie, she’ll be overwhelmed by “love boards.”
But
the truth is that Skyler White is by no means unequivocally lovable. Her own hands are not clean, even if her car is. For Skyler,
too, can find piles of money a turn-on. In Breaking Bad she has intermittently cooperated with her
husband’s plan to set her up in a car-washing business that can help rehabilitate
the sordid C-notes distantly deriving from the pawned plunder or welfare checks
of meth addicts all over the Land of Enchantment and beyond. (It is typical of the cerebral wit of
the people who write the show that the vehicle for criminal money laundering
should be a Car Wash!)
The Whites in marital conference: ablution without absolution
Say
what you will about Walter White.
I’ll grant you that he is a ruthless gangster, a fraud, a liar, and a killer,
and that the use of the product of his manufacture may be harmful to your
teeth. But cut the man a little
slack. It is no easy thing being
married to a money launderer.
Believe me, I know. For the
spin-dried dimes are only the beginning.
Hundred dollar bills are not as common in my corner of New Jersey as
they appear to be in Albuquerque, but I not infrequently find a desiccated
single plastered against the dryer drum, along with the occasional plastic card
(credit, subway, driver’s license, whatever). Fortunately these tend not to crumble into confetti, to show
up as white specks among the meth-blue fibers on the lint screen, as
irreplaceable bibliographic notes and used Kleenex tissues are wont to do.
Perhaps
only a man can understand the function of a shirt pocket, which since time
memorial has found its station on the left breast. There are dozens of quotidian chores, many of which must be
done in a hurry, that practically guarantee that at any moment in the day there
is a forty percent chance there will be some legal tender in a shirt
pocket. Joan takes the
view—superficially plausible--that I should empty my pockets more carefully,
when all the while the real problem is the too frequent lavation of garments
that could easily get by for three or four weeks on their own. Or perhaps the solution is a pocketless T-shirt?
