LIVE FROM THE HILLS: Strange Days Indeed

All week and into the weekend, for seven days and seven nights, the news did not stop coming.

The phone kept ringing in my apartment even after I’d unplugged it from the wall. The din of fireworks ripped through my back alley and a hysterical screaming filled Beacon Street into the early morning.

Up in Allston, Glenville Avenue was lined with confused lunatics who yelled and brawled with anything that moved.

A man named Malden interrupted Gin ‘ Tonic Night at the Bayou with a long-distance phone call from England. He offered some drunken rantings on the situation there, breathed heavily for a minute, and then the phone went dead.

“Click,” said the phone. Then the fierce wailing of a fire alarm filled the air and men were banging on the door with axes.

Indeed. It was an exciting week for the news business.

First off, there was old Dubya, swaggering around the DMZ between North and South Korea, muttering about evil. It was his first trip to the area, and he marked the occasion with some welcoming words. “We’re peaceful people,” he said. “We have no intention of invading North Korea.”

That’s good, I thought.

“The axes that were used to slaughter two U.S. soldiers are in the peace museum,” he said to himself, apparently caught unaware on film. “No wonder I think they’re evil.”

Neither of the two soldiers with him responded. Did he say “axis?”

And why in the hell has our president suddenly begun yammering to himself in the middle of a DMZ? Back in 1993, Clinton called it the scariest place on Earth, and coming from him, that should’ve meant something. Slick Willie was far too acquainted with dangerous and precipitous situations to blow something as trivial as Korea out of proportion. Clinton was the brass-knuckles boy from Arkansas, don’t forget, and some say he played a meaner saxophone than Stan Getz.

Back to Korea: NK leader Kim Jongil didn’t respond to Bush’s murderous words, and Jongil’s people busied themselves with burning flags and hand-drawn portraits of Ronald Reagan.

The only thing more embarrassingly out-of-date than portraits of the Gipper would be, of course, Bush’s dramatic identification of another Axis of Evil. Why not something better? The Axis Nightclub of Evil? How about the Axel Rose of Evil? Too many logistical problems, I’d assume — Axel’s probably somewhere in South America, downing a bottle of local sugarhouse brandy, sobbing out words we’ve never heard into the nervous laps of village women. And who could blame him? The truth is a jagged pill.

After Bush identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the three most dangerous countries in the world, he began a firewalk that hasn’t let up yet; even former presidents have criticized his tactics. “I think it will take years before we can repair the damage done by that statement,” said Jimmy Carter.

ESPN was even rife with online debate. A relatively unknown Colorado-based writer named Thompson suggested that the entire Bush family be boiled in vats of poisonous oil.

The growing madness loomed elsewhere, too; 300 bodies were found in Georgia, stacked in piles, dumped in lakes, buried a foot below the fodder. And there was Ray Brent Marsh, operator of a crematory, behind bars.

In perhaps equally disturbing news, two rape suits against Mike Tyson were dropped in Las Vegas. “It was simply unclear whether the sexual interaction between each of the two alleged victims and Mr. Tyson was consensual or forced,” prosecutors wrote to the police. Hence the necessity of a trial.

They shot Danny Pearl somewhere in the Middle East. Conspiracy buffs jabbered about a terrorist plot to blow up the Liberty Bell. Chuck Jones, the man who brought us Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, died of heart problems on the coast of California.

Here in Boston, an organization entitled the Restoration Project, which runs programs for adults with head injuries and mental illness, got state permission to search a suburban pond for the piano of Babe Ruth. The piano has been submerged for nearly a century now, and with the help of some volunteers and a high-tech sonar scanner, the group intends to restore the piano, play it and, consequently, annul the Curse of the Bambino.

There are strange days ahead, you can feel them. The news is compelling and the news is brutal. Some of it leaves you empty, like when Michael Moore told Jon Stewart on the Daily Show Enron was in cahoots with the Taliban. I felt like I’d just downed a bottle a beer, only to find a cigarette butt in the bottom.

All this craziness reminds me of a man named King Solomon I was once knew. He was from Ethiopia. He had survived wars there, and he had the scars to prove it. He was a funny man, and one who had the sense — a dangerous one, too. He would swallow lit joints at parties and call you aside to show you “a trick.”

I’d give him a quarter, and he’d roll up his sleeves, revealing a darkened wound mark on his underarm. He took the quarter and rubbed it there, closing his eyes and being very silent. I watched the quarter being rubbed further and further into his arm until it disappeared.

Then he’d hold his hands up high, looking seriously, and ask me to inspect his limbs for the coin. Once I was completely satisfied, he’d tell me where it was: on my shoulder, near my neck. Then he would laugh and slide off to get a drink.

“How’d you do that?” I once asked him. “That was some good magic.”

“No magic,” he said. “Is voodoo.”

The world works in mysterious ways. Sometimes you need to make news, sometimes it makes enough itself. Those are the dangerous days, and years, when the gears grind unto themselves and trouble starts stalking the planet. You hear Black Sabbath down in the middle of the alley at night, and you recognize faces on the street, in the papers, in your dreams. It seems like some eerie magic — some foolhardy concoction of perceptual illusion and top-hats — but it isn’t. It’s pure and straight voodoo — dolls and pins — and we’re all cursed now.