Sunday, September 7, 1997

When Princess Di Died (and everything else seemed to)

I feel terrible. The world was mourning Princess Diana last week, but I didn't have time.

No disrespect to Her former-Royal Highness, but I was battling crumbling technology.

"The dryer won't run," my wife told me Wednesday night as I listened to a panel of Legitimate Journalists distance themselves from paparazzi and the tabloids. She interrupted someone (was it Pat Buchanan?) to say, "I took a load of dry clothes out and refilled it and it wouldn't start again."

The door switch lever, I found, wasn't pressing against the door switch when the door was closed, and when I tried bending the lever forward it snapped off. Because I couldn't get a new lever until Thursday, I sat down in front of the television set to learn that the Royal Family didn't understand Diana's touch with the simple folk.

The mourners had been gathering at Buckingham Palace well into Thursday evening when my son Bobby found that my aging Volvo, which he had taken to school that day, wouldn't start. We had to have it towed to the Volvo mechanic (the mechanic decided to specialize in Volvos and Saabs, the receptionist told me on one of my visits, because they seemed to be more trouble-prone than other cars). As it turned out, the ground wire for the generator had broken and had to be replaced--at a princely price, I might add.

Because I teach a late class on Thursdays, I couldn't pick up the car or buy the part for the dryer. So while celebrities gushed to sympathetic TV interlocutors of their closeness to Diana and spat vitriol at the paparazzi, I spent the rest of my evening going at the top of the clothes dryer with screwdriver, pliers and expletives. Mirabile dictu, as the Royals are wont to say, I was able to get the top off and, even more marvelous to tell, found that it wouldn't take a rocket scientist or even a brain surgeon, as my friend Tom McGann is wont not to say, to replace the part.

The Princess With the Common Touch probably did that sort of thing around the palace, I thought, while Charles was on the telephone with that filthy Camilla.

On Friday morning I gave Bobby the keys to our other vehicle, the Grand Lemon, and he dropped me off at the garage. I picked up the Volvo according to plan. Then I was to get the dryer switch lever at a nearby appliance parts shop.

I had driven less than a mile when I heard a grinding of metal against metal, then a steady crunching. I turned back. Block--crunch--by block--crunch--I held my breath. Two blocks away from the garage the crunching stopped. Everything stopped. I walked the rest of the way.

The Volvo mechanic took me to my car in his Volvo (I think only Volvo mechanics can afford to have Volvos; what I don't understand is how they find the time to fix other people's cars). The V.M. pushed me back to the station, and there he was able to crank the generator by hand.

"That's not frozen," he said. "Must be the starter."

While he turned the key, an assistant jousted with the starter with a length of metal pipe. The starter responded with billowing smoke.

"You need a new starter," the V.M. said. "I have one I'll give you."

I sat down in the waiting room to read the August 4 issue of Time. I had barely gotten through the latest Princess Di gossip when the assistant told me the car was ready. As it turned out, the starter wasn't bad. Some of the wires had been shedding their insulation and had crossed, causing a short. The assistant V.M. had wrapped them in electrician's tape.

"See this?" the assistant said, peeling yellow insulation off a wire. It was the same yellow as the flag draping Princess Di's coffin. "See this?"

More flecks of yellow plastic fell onto the motor. "Volvos are notorious for this, he said. "And this is just on top. Those wires go all the way down there," and he pointed to a void where the umbilical of wires disappeared under the motor. "No telling how many wires down there are like this."

We both stared balefully at the wires. "Yessir, Volvos are notorious for this," he mused.

Comforted that I wasn't alone, I drove off. I bought the switch lever, or, rather, the switch assembly pack ("Oh, no, you can't buy just the lever." It comes in a package with a switch, screws, and two wire clips.) and installed it.

Later in the day, son Patrick borrowed the car, then picked me up at the university. All of the red warning lights on the dashboard were lit. They had gone on when he started the car, he told me.

Despite the problem, I drove to the television station to do the usual Friday night broadcast of "Informed Sources," though giving myself some extra time, and in the parking lot I checked under the hood. One of those bare wires had partially fused to the motor. I eased it off with a thumbnail.

"Please start," I prayed as I turned the key. The car started. The warning lights were out. Had Diana, who so loved the simple folk, interceded for me? Or her faithful assistant in performing good works for mankind, Mother Teresa, now with her in the Heavenly Kingdom?

Preparations for the program went well. We breezed through the rehearsal of the opening. Promptly at 7 the theme played.The opening animation came on the screen. The red lights on the camera flashed. "You're on," the director said.

I began to read the script on the Teleprompter in front of the lens: "Good evening. I'm Larry Lorenz."

The copy is supposed to scroll up as I read. It stopped dead.

I turned my eyes to the script in my hand and read. I looked up into the lens, down to the script and back to the lens again. The copy hadn't moved. I kept reading. I spoke the last line into the camera and began to introduce the panel. The copy scrolled in front of my eyes as if a Ritz Hotel security man were at the 'prompter controls.

"The computer froze," the director explained afterward. "You know those computers."

"Yes," I said. "They're notorious for that."

I went home to watch and listen as a British simple couple told how their friendship with Diana began when she visited their sick daughter and how she sustained it with frequent telephone calls (Of course! Charles and Di must each have had a private line so that she could express her love for the lame, the halt, the blind and her ne'er-do-well society lovers while Charles expressed his obscene desires to Camilla).

Saturday dawned.

"Good morning," I said to my wife.

"The toilet's broken," she replied.

So I was off to the hardware store to buy a new Fluidmaster 200A Toilet Tank Repair Valve. And while the rest of the waking world was watching The Funeral of a Princess, I was installing that. Or, as I had heard Di say so eloquently in a replay of one of her speeches, there I was "with my head down the loo."

They are all fixed now, the dryer, the car, the teleprompter and the toilet. And the fairy tale that was the life of Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, is over.

God save the TV set.

Friday, August 1, 1997

Adios, Fidel Velasquez

Fidel Velasquez, leader of Mexico's principal labor union for 53 years, died while I was in Mexico in the summer of 1997. He was 97.

His body lay in state at the union's headquarters on the plaza of the Monument to the Revolution from Saturday evening until Sunday noon. I went there on Sunday morning to see how the Mexican people say adios to one of their most famous public figures.

Photographs show the plaza jammed for political rallies, and authorities had expected hundreds, if not thousands, to gather there. Portable crowd barriers had made a maze of the plaza and the adjoining streets. Big men in dark suits with wires of radio receivers snaking out of their ears and into their coat collars stood around looking less menacing than self-conscious; police cars, marked and unmarked, drove in and out, stopping occasionally so that the officers inside could confer with their men on the street; a platoon of soldiers in battle gear sat in a transport truck parked on a side street behind the monument.

But the barriers and police and soldiers had few people to control. Only a relative handful of Don Fidel's rank-and-file were there, and most were auto workers from the local Chrysler plant who formed an honor guard, and it was said they had been bribed with new blue work uniforms and envelopes filled with pesos.

Most of the other people in the plaza, it seemed, were like me, onlookers, curious about what might happen. We shuffled around and looked at one another or at the technicians and cameramen for Televisa who were busy setting up their equipment. I saw no tears.

Four buses manuevered into parking spaces, two marked for the family and two for members of the CTM. A hearse arrived and backed up to the sidewalk in front of the building.

A correspondent for a U.S. newspaper spotted me as a fellow yanqui and we talked. She had been inside the CTM headquarters for the obsequies, she said. The president and most of the cabinet had been there, along with family and union leaders, and the president had given a eulogy of sorts. As he talked, a cat made its way through the crowd, toward the casket, she told me, and she had decided that, this being Mexico, the soul of Don Fidel had entered the cat and he was there for one last time. Nevertheless, someone scooped up el gato before it could brush against a presidential leg and threw it outside.

The president spoke of all that Don Fidel had done for the country--he had been a close adviser to the last nine presidents and a powerful voice in the Institutional Revolutionary Party. But the president, like so many of the prominent who were quoted in the newspapers, said little about what the one-time milkman had done for the obreros, the workers, of Mexico.

Some of the security men with the ear-plug radios moved barriers to allow the buses through to a side door. A couple of tv cameramen rushed to get pictures of people boarding the buses.

We heard clapping at the top of the stairs and pallbearers appeared with the casket--the funeral home's finest, a newspaper had quoted a family member as saying-- and began struggling it down the steep front stairs. A bouquet slid off and scattered on the steps. Some began to chant "Fee-del...Fee-del..." but the chant was half-hearted and trailed off like cheers at a football game that fail to excite a rally. No one cried.

The pallbearers lifted the casket into the hearse, the doors closed, and slowly the vehicle pulled away, followed by the buses. The crowd scattered. The men with the dark suits and the wires coming out of their ears unhooked the barriers and moved them in batches to the side of the street. Then they were gone too.

Sunday, June 1, 1997

The Co$t of Fame

I'll never do one of those "Do you know me?" commercials.

But as the host of a local tv talk show, I'm something of a minor league celebrity. At about the level of a utility infielder on a Class A baseball team, I'd say.

Occasionally I see 25-watts of recognition come across someone's face when I'm out for a walk, or a fellow shopper at Home Depot may come up to tell me how much he likes "Informed Sources" and stick out his hand just as I've grabbed a fistful of roofing nails from a bin. I've emceed the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, mingled at our Parks and Parkway Commission's annual "Feast with the Stars" and been the celebrity bartender on Media Night at the French Quarter saloon Molly's at the Market.

That's plenty for me. I don't think I'd want to be in the pinstripe class, with my face known by everyone who reads "People" or "Vanity Fair." I wouldn't want to spend my time posing for the kind of photos that would put me on their pages or even to be pestered for snapshots with ladies with blue hair every time I went out to one of the in spots I'd have to frequent to maintain my standing among the celebrated. I wouldn't want to be eating out and have people at the next table whispering and pointing, as my family and I did one night when we were seated next to Harry Connick Jr. and his family. And I certainly wouldn't want to be condemned to autographing ticket stubs or programs or scraps of used Kleenex or whatever else my panting fans would thrust at me.

Of course, I don't get the perks the major league celebs do: chauffeurs and limousines, and fawning maitre d's, complimentary champagne at every stop, and laugh-track-enhanced cheers for my appearances on Leno and Letterman. Things like that. Still, I get my share, minor league though they might be. From time to time I get special consideration that I would not get otherwise--a ticket to an event or extra-attentive service at the necktie counter. Or what happened today.

This morning, my 18-year-old son, Patrick, and I went to court in Hahnville, in St. Charles Parish, about 20 miles up river from New Orleans. A state trooper had stopped him a couple of weeks ago as he was driving himself and his girlfriend through the parish on I-10 after a party in Baton Rouge. The trooper's raider had clocked him at 83 miles an hour.

Why so fast? Patrick was afraid the car was running out of gas, he said, and he wanted to hurry to get to a filling station.

I don't suppose that rings true with you, does it? It didn't set the strings of the trooper's heart zinging either. The fine for speeding would be $185. And he didn't anticipate driving during that trip, or so he said, so he didn't have his license with him. That lapse would cost another $105. And God knows how much more to our automobile insurance would be.

Patrick and I got to the courthouse a few minutes before 10, the hour set on the ticket for his appearance. A good many others had chosen the last month to sin against traffic regulations in St. Charles Parish too, apparently. It took us three and half hours to get from the front door to the desk in Courtroom II where two assistant DAs were hearing confessions.

The female looked sympathetic. Maybe she would be motherly. The man was rumpled, seemed tired, and he had been working through the lunch hour.

"Pray to get the woman," I said to Patrick. A moment later the man picked up Patrick's ticket and we approached the bench.

He acknowledged Patrick and offered me his hand. "Hello," he said. "We've met. I'm Howie, Leslie Hill's husband." And while he listened to Patrick's explanation I remembered meeting him at WYES, the public television station. He was there to see "Informed Sources" one night when his wife, then a reporter for the NBC affiliate, was a panelist .

Talking to Patrick, he sounded like a genial used car salesman. "I can't kill this for you, but I can reduce it. Let's see what I can do here." He waved his pencil over the ticket, wiped away the driving-without-a-license charge and started subtracting miles until he got it down to 69 m.p.h., 14 miles over the speed limit. The total cost was $110. A mile faster and the fine would have been more than $150, and we would have had stain on our insurance record.

Only $110. I could see Patrick was relieved. It would not take him long to work his way out of indenture to his mother and me. Howie and I shook hands.

"Good to see you again," I said, and I damn well meant it too.

So that's what set me thinking about my minor celebrity and my satisfaction with it. However, the thought did cross my mind that, perhaps, were I a major league, People-cover celebrity, the DA would have fixed the ticket for me.

But that was only a fleeting thought. It was gone by the time I autographed a check for the sheriff of St. Charles Parish.