Out of My Mind (15 page)

Where do all the murderers come from? I don't know any. You can't pick up a newspaper or watch a news broadcast without having the details of a murder in your face. I don't ever remember a time when there were so many nasty crimes:

After killing his grandfather and a woman friend at home in Minnesota, a sixteen-year-old boy went to his school, where he killed five students, a teacher and a security guard. Then the boy killed himself.

In Wichita, Kan., Dennis Rader was arrested and charged as the so-called BTK killer. Rader was accused of picking victims at random, binding them, torturing them and then killing at least ten of them.

In California, Scott Peterson was convicted of killing his pregnant wife, Laci, and dumping her body, along with the unborn infant, into San Francisco Bay. At the trial, Laci's brother, Brent Rocha, said he'd bought a gun with which to kill Scott but decided he'd rather see him go through the agony of being found guilty and executed.

A previously convicted forty-six-year-old sex offender, John Evander Couey, is said to have confessed to kidnapping nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford, raping and killing her in Homosassa, Fla. Couey allegedly told four people that he had killed the girl but they didn't report him to police.

Brian Nichols was being taken into a court in Atlanta to be tried for rape. Authorities allege Nichols grabbed the gun of a deputy and shot her in the face, then shot and killed the judge, Rowland Barnes. As Nichols ran from the courtroom, he allegedly killed another deputy, hit a reporter with his gun and took the reporter's car.

In Chicago, an unemployed electrician who had unsuccessfully sued just about everyone, killed the husband and mother of a judge who dismissed one of his lawsuits.

I don't know whether there are more bad people, or whether newspapers are just covering more murders, but you can't escape them.

I hear people saying, “There's so much bad news that I don't read the newspapers anymore,” or “I never watch television news.” Well, real-life crime gets my attention. I find these stories interesting and educational. It's not just the crimes but the consideration of the motives of the people who committed them. Ten years ago, I was fascinated by the details of the O. J. Simpson trial. It was interesting because it proved you can get away with murder. The not guilty verdict in the case charging Robert Blake with murdering his wife confirmed that opinion for me. Reading the paper alone, I do not have to be fair and unbiased.

Half of these murders were committed by people with some kind of mental disorder. If someone murders another person and then takes his
own life, chances are the murderer was not really sane. (Fewer than 10 percent of murders in the United States last year were committed by women.) In reading about crime, I'm harder on the chairman of the board of a company who steals $200 million than I am on a sixteen-year-old boy who grew up in a dysfunctional family and ends up a sick kid who murders his classmates. The chairman thought it all out and decided to be dishonest. The boy was, in part, a victim.

There's no way to tell whether our murder rate is lower now, in 2006, than it was in 1706. Statistics indicate the murder rate has gone down recently but you wouldn't think so. In the United States last year, there were approximately 16,000 murders. In Japan, there were about 1,500 murders. Great Britain had about the same number as Japan. Are we kidding ourselves when we think we're the most civilized nation on earth?

When world leaders met in Scotland for the G-8 Summit, several years ago they decided to double the amount of money they're giving to desperately poor African countries.

President Bush did not approve of the increase and neither do I, but for a different reason. Most aid money goes for food, clothing and housing. I'd like to see more of it spent on reducing the number of Africans we're trying to feed. Their biggest problem is not a shortage of food, but a proliferation of people.

The annual birthrate in the U.S. is 14 per 1,000 adults. France, Belgium, Norway and Great Britain have birthrates around 12 per thousand. Scotland is 11 per thousand. Last year, Russia was 9.8 per thousand.

I didn't know the rate for African countries until I looked it up. In Nigeria, a country of 130 million people, the birthrate is 40 per 1,000. In Zambia, it's 41 per 1,000. Ghana is practically progressive at a mere 24
per 1,000. The birthrate in Africa is a disgrace, and birth control information and condoms should be handed out before the food.

The rest of the world feels sorry for Africans and has a genuine desire to help. In 1985, a lot of popular musicians got together for the Live Aid concert. It raised millions of dollars “to stamp out African poverty.” It was a noble effort, but you could hardly say it “stamped out poverty in Africa.”

Too many Africans are behaving as if they don't know or don't care what produces babies. They ought to be told with literature accompanying every pound of food we give them. Unfortunately, some of the organizations trying to win Africans to their own cause oppose birth control in any form.

The African states are often called “developing nations,” but they are not developing. Many Africans are poorly educated and are having more children than they can feed or take care of. Children are often considered an asset in poor countries. They go to work at an early age and contribute to supporting their parents. The average African family has more than five children, and a lot of them have fifteen.

The organizations doing good work in Africa are divided on birth control. President Bush has decided to cut off our contributions to the United Nations Population Fund because of his opposition to birth control.

God is quoted in Genesis as having said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” Were the Lord to look around our planet today and see the problems in Africa, I think He'd revise that and say, “Enough already!”

There are things about your life it seems as though you ought to remember but cannot. I spent four years in the Army but don't recall much about Army food. This comes to me now because when I see pictures of U.S. soldiers, I wonder what they have to eat.

In almost a year with the 17th Field Artillery Battalion before I was reassigned to the Army newspaper, the
Stars and Stripes,
I must have eaten close to 1,000 meals and I don't remember a single one of them. It's probably because the food was forgettable.

I remember being seated at the end of a table in a mess hall one day when other soldiers were in line with their trays, waiting to get to the steam table where the food was laid out. No matter what they were serving, they always gave you either coffee, tea or cocoa for a hot drink. You filled your pint-sized canteen cup with whatever it was that day. One of the men standing in line looked down into the cup of the soldier sitting next to me and asked, “What do they have today—coffee, tea or cocoa?”

My friend looked down into his cup, which was almost empty, then looked up at the questioner and said, “I don't know. They didn't say.”

And that's the way the food was, too. One dish tasted pretty much like another.

After I was shipped to England and transferred to the newspaper, I no longer ate Army food on a regular basis. I got what was known as “per diem.” It amounted to about $30 a week and with that I paid for my rent in a London apartment and food. I often ate in an Indian or Chinese restaurant because I preferred what they served to British food. An average meal cost me the equivalent of about $1.35.

Because I regularly visited the air bases outside London to report on what the 8th Air Force had bombed that day, I often saved money by eating in the mess hall at the base. As a correspondent, I ate in the officers' mess even though I was a sergeant. The food was much better than in the enlisted men's mess hall.

After the D-Day invasion, I ate the food provided by the First Army press camp. It was like the food in the officers' mess. However, we had one creative mess sergeant who often swapped Army staples like sugar, flour, bacon and, of course, cigarettes, with local farmers in Normandy, for fresh eggs, milk, cream and vegetables.

When I was up front with soldiers fighting the war, I ate what they ate. The food they got depended on how intense the fighting was. If things were relatively quiet, the company mess sergeant could set up a mobile kitchen and do some basic cooking in huge pots over propane stoves with what was the best Army field ration, called the ten-in-one. It was a heavy carton of food about 20-inches-by–12-inches-by-6 inches. I forget whether it was meant to feed ten men for one day, or one man for ten days but it had good stuff in it.

If an infantry division was at the front, with the enemy behind hedgerows 100 yards across an open field, they ate K-rations. Each heavily waxed container was about the size of a Cracker Jack box, if I remember correctly, and contained a small can of hash, tuna fish or a portion of some dense, cooked egg mixture. There were a couple of graham biscuits, several envelopes of sugar, powdered coffee or lemonade and a fruit bar. The packages differed. Sometimes they had cheese, a chocolate bar that wouldn't melt, bouillon cubes, matches, four cigarettes and toilet paper. They always contained chewing gum because the K-ration was packaged by Wrigley.

Call me disloyal, say I'm unpatriotic, charge me with being a turncoat: I feel about the French the way we all feel about difficult members of our family: They are infuriating but we love them anyway.

Following are some notes I made—mostly about French food:

Whatever else you think about the French, they are incomparably better with food than the people of any other country. They enjoy it
more. They savor each morsel and make an event of the simplest meal. Americans gulp it down on the run.

At noon, you see people everywhere walking home in France for lunch with long sticks of crusty bread under their arms. French bread is so much better than ours we should be ashamed of ourselves for eating Wonder Bread.

Their cheese and their fruit are served soft and ripe. Too often our fruit is green and our cheese hard.

We ate in Alain Ducasse's restaurant in the Plaza Athénée Hotel, considered by some to be the best restaurant in the world. It was a wonderful experience.

Wine costs more in a restaurant where the waiter leaves it on its side in one of those wine servers than it does if he stands the bottle in the middle of your table. A French waiter puts less wine in a glass than a waiter does in a New York restaurant so a bottle seems to last longer.

Several restaurants we ate in served both sweet and salted butter. That's classy.

The charm of truffles escapes me.

Dinner in any good restaurant in Paris costs almost twice as much as it would in New York. I don't know how Parisians afford to live in Paris. Everything costs more. I priced men's shirts in a store on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore and they were 120 Euros each. One Euro, the money system that has replaced francs and other European currency, cost $1.19 when we were there. I didn't buy a shirt.

I went to the French Open one day. Out back, I had an ice cream bar for $6.00.

Ice cream is the only food better here than in France. Theirs is more like frozen custard.

One restaurant served “Curdled ewe milk, caramel-parfait honey ice cream.” Vanilla will be fine, thanks.

I wanted to see the prices of basic groceries like sugar, flour, meat and vegetables so I asked the people at the desk in the hotel where I could find a supermarket nearby. The two men looked at each other and shook their heads. There are no supermarkets in Paris. To some extent,
this is true of New York, too. The markets in the suburbs are much more super than those in the city. New Yorkers, like Parisians, often shop at the little store around the corner on their block.

I made dinner reservations for 8 P.M. every night and we were always the first ones in the restaurant. They gradually filled up by 10 P.M. I don't understand what time people get up and go to work if they don't finish dinner until midnight.

French food is better than French plumbing—but I don't want to go into the details.

Restaurants include a tip on the check for “service”—usually 18 percent. It makes it easier for those of us who are never sure how much to tip. I think that's almost everyone.

I am alternately charmed and infuriated by the French, but I like to go to a foreign country once in a while to make sure I still like it better here. I only go to countries I've been to before and I spent a year of my life in France during World War II. You don't get over spending a year in France when you were twenty-three.

Few writers who've written a book can resist going into a bookstore to see where they have it displayed. Usually the author finds it hidden away in the back of the store where no one's going to find it. I always thought some store manager decided which books to put in the window and in the front of the store, and was disappointed to learn that publishers pay bookstores to display a book in a prominent position.

There were dozens of diet books in one store I visited, and a short distance away there must have been 100 cookbooks.
The Joy of Cooking
and
Fanny Farmer
are still going strong. It's ironic that the bestselling books anywhere are No. 1, cookbooks—books on eating—and No. 2, diet books—books on not eating.

I was surprised to see they're still selling the Atkins and Pritikin diet books and Dr. Herman Tarnower's Scarsdale diet book. The first Atkins book was publishing in 1972. Since then, millions of copies have been sold. He allows a lot of fats but few carbohydrates. Pritikin advises eating a lot of carbohydrates.