As a kid I remember hearing the story of Noah and his ark and I believed every word of it. But as an adult, I am beginning to have some misgivings about this tale, mainly because I have developed the ability to think.

To begin with, I have a problem with what they called his boat. Why an ark? There are a lot of different names for boats. You can call it a ship, a vessel, a cruiser, a destroyer, a carrier, a dinghy, or a craft. His boat probably most resembles a houseboat, or since it carried animals, maybe we should be calling it a barnboat. So why an ark? But this is just semantics. Let's get to the real meat of the story.

According to Genesis, God began to regret making man. I was always taught that God knew everything, so how could He make a mistake? It also says in Genesis that God said that man's "lifetime shall be one hunded and twenty years." Can you imagine what that would do to social security?

Anyway God decided to destroy everything he created, man and beast, crawling creature and bird of the air. But he found favor in Noah. How did He decide that Noah was less evil than, say, a worm?

Then let's take the ark. God instructed Noah to make it three hundred cubits long and fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. Let's translate that into English. A cubit was about a foot and a half. So in a boat which was 450 feet long and 75 feet wide and 45 feet high, he was to cram two of every animal on earth into it. That's smaller than a football stadium.

I looked on the internet and found 36 different breeds of wild cats listed. And among domestic cats, God knows how many breeds exist. Dogs are another story. Imagine how many different types of dogs one finds on this Earth. And birds! Wow, can you imagine how much space it would take just to house a male and female of each species of bird? When you add reptiles and insects and other mammals, can you imagine the numbers? How could you possibly fit all of those into a football stadium? And what about fish? God wanted to destroy everything. Is a flood an effective way to destroy fish?

Here's another problem. God instructed Noah to load two of every type of animal. So what did the lions and other predators eat? If there were only two wildebeast on board, how long could the lions live on them? And if they ate them, how would that species continue? Two worms wouldn't have even been an appetizer for the two birds.

Gathering those animals wouldn't have been easy. Since this was close to the beginning of man's time on Earth, the ark was probably built in Africa or the Middle East, right? Well, how did the polar bears get on board? And the penguins? Did they swim the Atlantic Ocean to get to the ark? And if they could swim the Atlantic Ocean, why would they be afraid of a silly little flood?

Then let's talk about the flood itself. Genesis claims that the flood was the result of 40 days and 40 nights of rain. If that could cause a flood, you'd think Eugene, Oregon would have a similar flood every year. And this was no tiny flood. According to Genesis it covered all of the earth, and rose fifteen cubits above the highest mountain tops. Mount Everest reaches 8,850 meters. Add 15 cubits to this and translate it to feet and it comes to 26,595 feet. That's a lot of water. If you were in San Bernardino and swam to the top you'd get the bends.

Like I said, that's a LOT of water. I have a question for you. Where did all that water go when the flood ended? If it evaporated into the air, we'd have had a lot of cloud cover and a lot more rain, and probably a lot more floods. It doesn't just disappear, so where did it go? If it sank into the ground we'd have quicksand from the U.S. to China.

In chapter 8 of Genesis it says, "Then God remembered Noah, and all the wild animals and all the cattle that were with him in the ark." If God had instructed him to build this ark and load every living creature into it, and then created a flood to destroy everything else, how could he have even temporarily forgotten about Noah and the ark? Now He remembers?

Genesis also writes a confusing timeline. It says the flood lasted 40 days and that the water rose for 150 days. Does this mean it went on for 190 days total? Then it says in the seventh month on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark rested on the mountains of Aratat. If they are counting from the day the flood started, and there are an average of 30 days in a month, that comes to a total of 227 days. Then it says the waters receded until the tenth month. So that's 300 days. We still don't have a clue as to how long this flood actually lasted.

If I live to be a hundred and twenty years old, I probably still won't understand how this story could have actually happened.



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In your average family, there are a couple of coming of age moments, usually revolving around a bar/bat mitzvah, a confirmation, graduation, sweet sixteen or having your first legal drink with your parents. In my family, there were three of these moments: your bar mitzvah, the first time you could lay a bet legally at the track and when you could legally gamble with the Old Man at a casino.

My younger brothers and I had been going to the track to with the Old Man ever since we could walk. He'd come home almost every night with a tip and asked who wanted to go watch the trotters with him. But before we turned eighteen, what could you do with my brothers and me? We couldn't walk up to a window and place a bet, even with the Old Man standing next to us and there were only so many times one of Dad's friends could teach us the loan sharking business or how to throw barboot. So, to keep us occupied, he taught us how to tout.

Touting, more an art form than a straight up street hustle relies on the personality as much the actual game. Here's how it works: say you have a ten horse race, you tell ten different marks which horse is going to win. When the race is over, you find the mark you gave the winner to and remind him you gave him the information on the winner. He throws you a couple of bucks and you start the process over with the next race.

"The key to this is remembering which guy you told the winner to," the Old Man told us. "If you talk to one of the schmucks you gave a loser to, you get no money. He lets everyone in earshot know what a lousy tout you are and the hustle is shot for a couple of races until the faces change over."

My father pushed me into touting when I was 12. At the time I thought these guys were throwing a few bucks my way because I was Aron's kid and the whole thing was cute; a pudgy, pimply boy telling degenerate gamblers which horse was going to win. It's another one of those things that made me embarrassed by my immigrant father.

I forgot all about touting as a concept or practice until one day in the late fall of 1991. My girlfriend at the time couldn't seem to pick between me and her college boyfriend. One day, it was me, the next day him. I was just out of NYU, just beginning to freelance, chronically broke and subsisting in the joys of the quickly disappearing downtown bohemia. He was a law student at Penn. Hillary came back one day and told me how the other guy, Rick, was taking her to fancy dinners and Broadway shows.

Needless to say, the prospect over losing my girlfriend to a wanna-be member of that venal profession was troubling. Actually, it over took my mind. Here she was that one girl that I was so in love with that, to this day, I can still the breakup (we all have one like that) and she's going to leave me for a shyster at hack?

"Nice thought," my friend Harry said to me. "But how are you going to get enough cash to take anywhere but the local McDonald's?"

That was the very point I had been debating. I knew I could have called the Old Man and gotten a bit of cash but our relationship at that point was rocky at best. If Dad said the sky was blue, I told him it was really cerulean. Plus, Hillary was Jewish and the Old Man had a special dislike of Jewish women. Mother told me it was due to his lack of education and he felt they would judge him as ignorant. Of course, I could just hear him scream "What she feels entitled? She wants a nice Jewish display of affection? Buy her a cup of coffee and a cheeseburger. Tell her that's a good meal in Detroit."

NBD (The National Bank of Dad) wasn't going to be a help with this one.

I was in a frenzy of neurotic energy trying to come up with a solution. Then it occurred to me, as I walked by an OTB on Park Ave. South and East 24th Street, I could tout.

I took Harry with me, handing him a racing form and told him to act like he'd been there before. I touted for two races and got lucky. One of the marks I fed a horse to, a 30-1 shot, won. His return on his action was nearly $2,500 and he threw me $400. After an hour and a half, I had a bit over $700. I grabbed a suitably impressed Harry and we walked down to his Lower East Side apartment.

I gave him $100. He asked me why. "For being my shill," I told him. He seemed to understand.

Later that week, I took Hillary to Smith and Wollensky for dinner. It was all steak and red wine and I was properly thanked for a few days. I didn't hear about the newbie shyster until she found out at her Christmas party how I made the money to take her out to dinner. She was not happy. As a matter of fact, she was rather shocked by my hustle. By the spring of 1992, I was out of the picture.

That was the last time I touted for dinner.

Back in July, Harry came over to drink some red wine with me as I recovered from shoulder surgery. There was a marathon of Hogan's Heroes on TV Land and there is only so much of the Swans any cognizant human being can listen to before the boom and crunch become a migraine. In the opening of one episode, Col. Klink explains to Hogan how he once lost money to a lousy tout. We both laughed.

"You are many things in this world but you were a very good tout," he said.

The Old Man would be proud.

I grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in the Zola System, my father's philosophy of life. He taught my brothers and me the basic life skills: how to run a street hustle, perpetrate a con or recognize when you were being hustled or conned; information we needed so we could feed our families if another Hitler came to power. My father Aron Zola was a Romanian Jew, a holocaust survivor, a black marketeer, a gun runner, a successful entrepreneur, a true citizen of Detroit. When I was 18, I rebelled against the Zola System and moved to New York City. I was fascinated with cultural heroes - Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and the aesthetic bohemian artist lifestyle that, in my naivete, I thought they lived. Now I see they were working their own hustles on the public, just like the Old Man. Even the Manhattan dating scene runs on the Zola System. To paraphrase Mark Twain, now that the Old Man is dead, I'm shocked how much he learned.



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Just think how much money you could save by sleeping in a tree! There would, of course, be some difficulties. Because of the difficulties other consequences could occur.

The first of these difficulties that comes to my mind is
a lack of bathroom facilities. If it didn't rain or the tree was not near a body of water, body cleansing would be a real problem and, if working, your employer would not appreciate your personal cleanliness habits (assuming your employer is not aware of your living conditions). You could even lose your job!

The next convenience which would be missing is electricity. No alarm clock to wake you; no coffee maker to get you going; only a battery operated shaver; poor lighting at best; no hot water. Yes, there are battery operated appliances but they do not have the longevity or reliability of piped in electricity.

Your closet to hang your clothes would be a small tree limb that the crook of the hangar would fit over. That presents another problem . . when it rains your clothes would get wet and it's time consuming attempting to put on wet clothes, especially in a tree. Drawers? The only ones you would have would be the ones you put on your body. Tree bark, twigs and leaves make for itchy underwear. Your shoes might be full when you are ready to put them on.

You would have plenty of neighbors; squirrels, birds, maybe a coon or a bear. Might even have a conversation with a bat as you are drifting off to sleep. In some locales, a snake might slither over you during the night or the howl of coyotes and other critters may cause insomnia.

There is a possibility you may have to share your quarters with bees and they are pretty aggressive . .don't want to be disturbed lest they sting. Ants like trees too.

Most trees do not follow the contour of the human body. To stretch out in a sleeping position would probably be impossible. You may end up having to seek the services of a chiropractor with ailments such as bad back and crooks in the neck.

Items like milk, ingredients for salad, fresh meat would not be included in your diet because of a lack of refrigeration. Besides, fresh meat would definitely draw critters to your home. Well, you could include fresh meat in your diet if you are willing to eat it raw. Of course this has complications like salmonella, etc. Warm beer would give you a better buzz! More buck for your money! Forget frozen items.

Most women would not be impressed with your Tarzan-like living conditions. The lack of the "couch in front of the TV" to do a little snuggling would be a turn off. Serving warm beer or mixed drinks would also not be welcomed. Believe me when I say, unless she was super nature oriented, she would not consider a live-in arrangement. If you prefer to stay single this would be an ideal way to do it.

Every time you would leave your home would mean climbing down and arriving, would mean climbing up. A result from this would be soiled and ripped clothing so you might have to increase your clothing budget accordingly. Another consequence could be a fall which could send you to the hospital. More often in darkness, there could be a critter waiting at the base of the tree for you.

In closing, I would not want to sleep in a tree. Climbing a tree to sing would be OK or just for fun, although dangerous, but sleeping, never! Give me all the conveniences of my man-built home! I am happy living just the way I am!

Norine Peardon, August 30, 2008




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