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Abe Opincar and the Reader
He poured out his heart
Opincar wrote of marriage to – and divorce from – feminist writer Cynthia Heimel.
Abe Opincar wrote for the Reader for nearly 25 years, and is the author of Fried Butter: A Food Memoir.
Among Opincar's notable stories are:
My psychiatrist is dead; all falls apart
- Such are the conceits of first-world living — they follow you. A late-night call from San Diego slips through a satellite onto the shore of a beleaguered nation with the news of my psychiatrist’s death. (February 4, 1988)
Tijuana mi amor: intimate scenes of city love
- Each story is a discrete memory. You see a time and a place, and for a while it was everything you knew. Irrevocably. Beyond measure. Zona Norte hasn’t changed. It is still the wild side. Desperate; sure of itself. Dark-skinned guys from the interior still come here for one last sinful evening before crossing to the other side. They are short and dark, more Indian than anything. (Feb. 25, 1988)
Turn your back on the city, and look the other direction. You know that barren stretch of ground that runs west from the bridge.Love and smoke
- Don’t flatter yourself. My life is not an open book. "You don’t learn this from no fuckin’ book. Don’t need no education for it,’’ says Jerome. You don’t. You really don’t." (November 10, 1988)
Four of us walk toward Market. Outside Los Panchos Taco Shop at Ninth Avenue, forty men and a dozen women mill around the street and parking lot. A stream of men — one by one — approach me. I explain: Jerome, not I, is looking to buy.White on white
- He is handsome — square jaw, even features, blond hair brushed in the blunt, semi-pointy cut preferred by surfers. And his voice carries a pronounced Southern California quality as well: slightly nasal, issued from the back of the throat. He is composed. He smiles readily. Laughs. A smooth and accomplished performer for a young man twenty years old. (Nov. 10, 1988)
Tom and John Metzger. "I got hit in school because I was Tom Metzger’s son and ... that hurts, you know, it hurts you."I'm Morgan, he's Cronkite
- This past August, while San Diegans tanned and party delegates decided our nation's fate, a paper was delivered to 300 sweaty, sausage-chomping academics at the Second Polish-American Semiotics Colloquium held in Atlantic City. The paper, entitled “Buttocks of Iron, Thighs of Marble, Feet of Clay — Sign, System, and Function,” changed forever the way many Americans would think of San Diego. (Dec. 22, 1988)
Careful lest the public forget how very close they are, Morgan has chronicled his Master’s every move, thought, and desire. They have even sailed together, as Morgan ofttimes has reminded us.Christmas day in Tijuana with Mother Teresa's priests
- Christmas morning. East of downtown Tijuana, along a swamp behind the Otay central bus station. An hour past first light. Roosters crow. Dogs bark. Rain, an inch of which fell last night, still falls, falls now into deep, churning mud. Two men, ankle deep in that mud, ragged clothes colored by mud, look up at the sky and then down. (Jan. 26, 1989)
John Steinbeck was my father
- John Steinbeck IV, John Steinbeck's son moved to La Jolla 18 months ago. In 1970, during a winter and spring offensive in Laos, John was holed up during the monsoon in an old French hotel in Vientiane, and again read The Grapes of Wrath. "By that time I was writing. I saw the nuts and bolts of his writing. That was a impressive to me as the historical value of the book, and what the book did to America." (March 30, 1989)
John Steinbeck, father of John Steinbeck IV. "My brother and I, we talked with him a lot about things, languages and history and cultures and customs. We traveled around the world with him."Torture in TJ
- "They apprehended me of work and handcuffed me They took me in on old grey van with, I think, blue license plates—maybe I didn't see them well. the inside of the van was really scratched up, and there was a mattress in back. And they started to kick me in the stomach and climbed on top of me and slapped me hard, twice. (June 14, 1990)
“[Now] I can’t sleep at night. I just start to think about how they shocked me, and I can’t sleep.I was Susan Sontag's San Diego escort and I was sorry
- This was my question: How does being Southern Californian affect artists and thinkers? I set out to find people with whom I could discuss my notion that a recognizable artistic regionalism had at last emerged from Southern California. I made lists. I made phone calls. And it was perhaps the sin of pride, or of over-reaching ambition, that caused me to make my fatal mistake: I wanted to speak with someone truly famous. Someone whose words might lend glamour to my not entirely original or interesting idea. (Dec. 17, 1992)
San Diego, Texas
- Our namesake lies due west of Corpus Christi, past flat miles of sorghum, wheat and cotton fields, and towns with shops smelling of blood that, for pennies per pounds, will butcher the deer you shot. (January 27, 1994)
Rodolfo Curiel shares something strangely in common with other prominent San Diegans — he lived in San Diego, California. Curiel was a linebacker for Serra High School's team in the late '80s, and his picture hangs on the "Wall of Fame" in the Round Table Pizza in Tierrasanta.Ted Geisel, his first and second wives, Neil Morgan, and the Jewish question
- The 21st of March in this nation’s finest city
- An unrepentant Nixonite did something rather pretty.
- The giant book he published in consort with his wife
- Detailed a children’s author’s obscure and privileged life.
- The Nixonite was Morgan; his close friend, Dr. Seuss.
- Their friendship rendered Morgan a little bit obtuse.
- (May 18, 1995)
In Morgan's life of Dr. Seuss what mysteries remain/ That must have put their friendship under terrible strain.Comedian in the mist
- Jennifer at the San Diego Zoo's media relations office adopted a strident tone. "Well, if you can't tell me exactly what Mr. Sedaris will be writing — I mean, if you can't give me a clear idea of exactly what he's going to do, then I'm afraid we can't help you." (Nov. 24, 1999)
Stephen Facciola. Fifteen hundred books stand in tall tidy stacks throughout Facciola’s Vista home. Useful Plants of Ghana; A Guide to Mangoes in Florida; Traditional Bulgarian Cooking; Vegetables of the Dutch East Indies; Lost Crops of Africa; Medicinal Plants of Vietnam...Cornucopia: Stephen Facciola's edible world
- “You’re eating bug excrement.” Stephen Facciola and I are standing in the parking lot of a Middle Eastern grocery in disheartening Anaheim. The streets are eight lanes wide. The blocks, a mile long. (Nov. 22, 2000)
The Bride Wore Black Linen
(Opincar marries writer Cynthia Heimel- I can locate our Hour Farthest from God as being on the AstroTurf patio of the Little Chapel of the Bells. Cynthia had been expressing what I considered an eccentric fascination with the elusive Charlotte Richards.
- I dragged her out onto the patio. It was very hot. There were homeless people on the sidewalk screaming and urinating on themselves and pestering us for cigarettes. The dog was panting. I knew I had to act fast.
- By Abe Opincar, Oct. 10, 1996
Plus Opincar under the pen name Max Nash wrote a seriers called Tip of My Tongue:
No Mexican food without epazote
When I finish cutting back my epazote, I can’t get the smell off my hands. It reminds me of a friend who, while living in rural Mexico, once purged herself of hookworm by every day eating an epazote-and-papaya-seed paste. Ascaridol is deep in my skin. If I have worms in my gut, they must be, I think, nervous. What is he up to with that stuff?
By Max Nash, June 14, 2001 Read full article
When times are hard, I still make her stuffed grape leaves.Grape leaves and the Gulf War
The week 150,000 Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, Leah’s father in Melbourne was diagnosed with cancer. I almost felt relieved when I went with Marc and Leah to the airport Security was tight. A lot of plainclothesmen in bulky Israeli sportscoats stood around the lobby. They carried briefcases we all knew contained Uzis. It wasn’t a time for long goodbyes.
By Max Nash, Feb. 3, 2000 Read full article
The hen’s buttery smell filled the kitchen.A roasting hen and divorce
“He monopolized my time on my honeymoon” is what my wife told Star and Bob, our marriage counselors, by way of expressing her past and present dissatisfactions. I sat there and wondered about my wife’s use of the possessive, “my honeymoon.” But what did I know?
By Max Nash, May 4, 2000 Read full article
A corn tortilla is no Twinkie.The fat boy and his tortilla
As a proactive measure she enrolled me in a diet program called TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly). Members who either gained or failed to lose weight were obliged to stand before their weekly meeting and sing the Pig Song. There are, of course, “experts” who might suggest that humiliating a fat and high-strung child wasn’t the best way to help him lose weight.
By Max Nash, July 13, 2000 Read full article
The Marrams always kept a sausage or two tucked away in a kitchen cupboard.Jews, Christians, and the pig
My friend’s sister as a teenager began to complain that her nose was large, that her hair was kinky. She started reading books by Christian author C.S. Lewis. She saved her allowance to have her hair straightened. One evening my friend and his mother went to a movie. When they returned, they heard Handel’s “Messiah” blaring from their home.
By Max Nash, July 27, 2000 Read full article
Avocado needed something acid, like lime, or tomato, to cut its richness.The gruesome heritage of the avocado
While they would have appreciated the spirit of the Super Bowl, the Aztecs might have wondered why the winning team didn’t sacrifice at least one of the losing players. The Aztec diet wasn’t limited to tortilla chips and avocado sauce. The Aztecs loved turkey, duck, tomatoes, and plump hairless dogs with floppy jowls.
By Max Nash, Feb. 1, 2001 Read full article
Opincar authored a column from Paris for the Reader in the late 80s- early 90s (not online) and took over the HeLLA column from Adam Parfrey.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Abe Opincar and the Reader
He poured out his heart
Abe Opincar and the Reader
He poured out his heart
Opincar wrote of marriage to – and divorce from – feminist writer Cynthia Heimel.
Abe Opincar wrote for the Reader for nearly 25 years, and is the author of Fried Butter: A Food Memoir.
Among Opincar's notable stories are:
My psychiatrist is dead; all falls apart
- Such are the conceits of first-world living — they follow you. A late-night call from San Diego slips through a satellite onto the shore of a beleaguered nation with the news of my psychiatrist’s death. (February 4, 1988)
Tijuana mi amor: intimate scenes of city love
- Each story is a discrete memory. You see a time and a place, and for a while it was everything you knew. Irrevocably. Beyond measure. Zona Norte hasn’t changed. It is still the wild side. Desperate; sure of itself. Dark-skinned guys from the interior still come here for one last sinful evening before crossing to the other side. They are short and dark, more Indian than anything. (Feb. 25, 1988)
Turn your back on the city, and look the other direction. You know that barren stretch of ground that runs west from the bridge.Love and smoke
- Don’t flatter yourself. My life is not an open book. "You don’t learn this from no fuckin’ book. Don’t need no education for it,’’ says Jerome. You don’t. You really don’t." (November 10, 1988)
Four of us walk toward Market. Outside Los Panchos Taco Shop at Ninth Avenue, forty men and a dozen women mill around the street and parking lot. A stream of men — one by one — approach me. I explain: Jerome, not I, is looking to buy.White on white
- He is handsome — square jaw, even features, blond hair brushed in the blunt, semi-pointy cut preferred by surfers. And his voice carries a pronounced Southern California quality as well: slightly nasal, issued from the back of the throat. He is composed. He smiles readily. Laughs. A smooth and accomplished performer for a young man twenty years old. (Nov. 10, 1988)
Tom and John Metzger. "I got hit in school because I was Tom Metzger’s son and ... that hurts, you know, it hurts you."I'm Morgan, he's Cronkite
- This past August, while San Diegans tanned and party delegates decided our nation's fate, a paper was delivered to 300 sweaty, sausage-chomping academics at the Second Polish-American Semiotics Colloquium held in Atlantic City. The paper, entitled “Buttocks of Iron, Thighs of Marble, Feet of Clay — Sign, System, and Function,” changed forever the way many Americans would think of San Diego. (Dec. 22, 1988)
Careful lest the public forget how very close they are, Morgan has chronicled his Master’s every move, thought, and desire. They have even sailed together, as Morgan ofttimes has reminded us.Christmas day in Tijuana with Mother Teresa's priests
- Christmas morning. East of downtown Tijuana, along a swamp behind the Otay central bus station. An hour past first light. Roosters crow. Dogs bark. Rain, an inch of which fell last night, still falls, falls now into deep, churning mud. Two men, ankle deep in that mud, ragged clothes colored by mud, look up at the sky and then down. (Jan. 26, 1989)
John Steinbeck was my father
- John Steinbeck IV, John Steinbeck's son moved to La Jolla 18 months ago. In 1970, during a winter and spring offensive in Laos, John was holed up during the monsoon in an old French hotel in Vientiane, and again read The Grapes of Wrath. "By that time I was writing. I saw the nuts and bolts of his writing. That was a impressive to me as the historical value of the book, and what the book did to America." (March 30, 1989)
John Steinbeck, father of John Steinbeck IV. "My brother and I, we talked with him a lot about things, languages and history and cultures and customs. We traveled around the world with him."Torture in TJ
- "They apprehended me of work and handcuffed me They took me in on old grey van with, I think, blue license plates—maybe I didn't see them well. the inside of the van was really scratched up, and there was a mattress in back. And they started to kick me in the stomach and climbed on top of me and slapped me hard, twice. (June 14, 1990)
“[Now] I can’t sleep at night. I just start to think about how they shocked me, and I can’t sleep.I was Susan Sontag's San Diego escort and I was sorry
- This was my question: How does being Southern Californian affect artists and thinkers? I set out to find people with whom I could discuss my notion that a recognizable artistic regionalism had at last emerged from Southern California. I made lists. I made phone calls. And it was perhaps the sin of pride, or of over-reaching ambition, that caused me to make my fatal mistake: I wanted to speak with someone truly famous. Someone whose words might lend glamour to my not entirely original or interesting idea. (Dec. 17, 1992)
San Diego, Texas
- Our namesake lies due west of Corpus Christi, past flat miles of sorghum, wheat and cotton fields, and towns with shops smelling of blood that, for pennies per pounds, will butcher the deer you shot. (January 27, 1994)
Rodolfo Curiel shares something strangely in common with other prominent San Diegans — he lived in San Diego, California. Curiel was a linebacker for Serra High School's team in the late '80s, and his picture hangs on the "Wall of Fame" in the Round Table Pizza in Tierrasanta.Ted Geisel, his first and second wives, Neil Morgan, and the Jewish question
- The 21st of March in this nation’s finest city
- An unrepentant Nixonite did something rather pretty.
- The giant book he published in consort with his wife
- Detailed a children’s author’s obscure and privileged life.
- The Nixonite was Morgan; his close friend, Dr. Seuss.
- Their friendship rendered Morgan a little bit obtuse.
- (May 18, 1995)
In Morgan's life of Dr. Seuss what mysteries remain/ That must have put their friendship under terrible strain.Comedian in the mist
- Jennifer at the San Diego Zoo's media relations office adopted a strident tone. "Well, if you can't tell me exactly what Mr. Sedaris will be writing — I mean, if you can't give me a clear idea of exactly what he's going to do, then I'm afraid we can't help you." (Nov. 24, 1999)
Stephen Facciola. Fifteen hundred books stand in tall tidy stacks throughout Facciola’s Vista home. Useful Plants of Ghana; A Guide to Mangoes in Florida; Traditional Bulgarian Cooking; Vegetables of the Dutch East Indies; Lost Crops of Africa; Medicinal Plants of Vietnam...Cornucopia: Stephen Facciola's edible world
- “You’re eating bug excrement.” Stephen Facciola and I are standing in the parking lot of a Middle Eastern grocery in disheartening Anaheim. The streets are eight lanes wide. The blocks, a mile long. (Nov. 22, 2000)
The Bride Wore Black Linen
(Opincar marries writer Cynthia Heimel- I can locate our Hour Farthest from God as being on the AstroTurf patio of the Little Chapel of the Bells. Cynthia had been expressing what I considered an eccentric fascination with the elusive Charlotte Richards.
- I dragged her out onto the patio. It was very hot. There were homeless people on the sidewalk screaming and urinating on themselves and pestering us for cigarettes. The dog was panting. I knew I had to act fast.
- By Abe Opincar, Oct. 10, 1996
Plus Opincar under the pen name Max Nash wrote a seriers called Tip of My Tongue:
No Mexican food without epazote
When I finish cutting back my epazote, I can’t get the smell off my hands. It reminds me of a friend who, while living in rural Mexico, once purged herself of hookworm by every day eating an epazote-and-papaya-seed paste. Ascaridol is deep in my skin. If I have worms in my gut, they must be, I think, nervous. What is he up to with that stuff?
By Max Nash, June 14, 2001 Read full article
When times are hard, I still make her stuffed grape leaves.Grape leaves and the Gulf War
The week 150,000 Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, Leah’s father in Melbourne was diagnosed with cancer. I almost felt relieved when I went with Marc and Leah to the airport Security was tight. A lot of plainclothesmen in bulky Israeli sportscoats stood around the lobby. They carried briefcases we all knew contained Uzis. It wasn’t a time for long goodbyes.
By Max Nash, Feb. 3, 2000 Read full article
The hen’s buttery smell filled the kitchen.A roasting hen and divorce
“He monopolized my time on my honeymoon” is what my wife told Star and Bob, our marriage counselors, by way of expressing her past and present dissatisfactions. I sat there and wondered about my wife’s use of the possessive, “my honeymoon.” But what did I know?
By Max Nash, May 4, 2000 Read full article
A corn tortilla is no Twinkie.The fat boy and his tortilla
As a proactive measure she enrolled me in a diet program called TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly). Members who either gained or failed to lose weight were obliged to stand before their weekly meeting and sing the Pig Song. There are, of course, “experts” who might suggest that humiliating a fat and high-strung child wasn’t the best way to help him lose weight.
By Max Nash, July 13, 2000 Read full article
The Marrams always kept a sausage or two tucked away in a kitchen cupboard.Jews, Christians, and the pig
My friend’s sister as a teenager began to complain that her nose was large, that her hair was kinky. She started reading books by Christian author C.S. Lewis. She saved her allowance to have her hair straightened. One evening my friend and his mother went to a movie. When they returned, they heard Handel’s “Messiah” blaring from their home.
By Max Nash, July 27, 2000 Read full article
Avocado needed something acid, like lime, or tomato, to cut its richness.The gruesome heritage of the avocado
While they would have appreciated the spirit of the Super Bowl, the Aztecs might have wondered why the winning team didn’t sacrifice at least one of the losing players. The Aztec diet wasn’t limited to tortilla chips and avocado sauce. The Aztecs loved turkey, duck, tomatoes, and plump hairless dogs with floppy jowls.
By Max Nash, Feb. 1, 2001 Read full article
Opincar authored a column from Paris for the Reader in the late 80s- early 90s (not online) and took over the HeLLA column from Adam Parfrey.