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Hirth from Earth

10/7/2020

My pal Hirth died five years ago today. I don't think he'll mind if I bring that up. Whatever I did, he was down with it; whatever he did, I was down with him.

You may feel destined to meet some people. Others you pursue methodically because you’re looking for them. I met my companion on the road of life that way. I’d heard about her and her theater company. I went to see them. She and the theater knocked me out. I joined. We worked together. We merged, clashed, bonded, fell in love, and stayed that way. On purpose.

I met my second mentor — in sequence, not by degree of influence —at the “Los Angeles Times Festival of Books” when he sat on a literary panel with a couple of other authors. Novelist and essayist John Rechy sat on the dais behind the table in dyed orange hair and a muscle shirt. He was funny, honest, as hard-edged and as articulate as his torso. Oh, and I’d read his iconic novel, City of Night, back when it occupied everyone’s brick-and-board bookshelves. When I heard he ran a workshop, I ran after it, jumped aboard, and studied with him for seven years.

Other people you meet because you’re on the scene, and the scene happens to be larger and more inclusive than your experience allowed for. These people seem to appear by happenstance, but you really met them because you musta been in the right place and it musta been the right time. Sure, Dr John’s similar tune “Right Place, Wrong Time,” is full of confounded gris gris and grief, conflict and fatalism, but, if anybody has the aché to put me in the right place at the right time, it’s Dr. John, the Night Tripper. And I bring Dr. John into the conversation, because the man I met in the winter of 1989 just happened to be the Dr. John of the guitar, the prince of Boyle Heights.

Our theater company was performing a show with music called “Scenes from the Abortion Wars” at a big benefit for the Feminist Majority when they were lobbying Congress to approve the first morning-after pill, called mifepristone, or RU-486. The Germans had first developed this wonder drug and now it’s on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. RU-486 had a pretty exciting launch. The Germans ran afoul of European pro-lifers and passed the drug off to the bon vivant French who saw its value. Of course, there’s nothing bon vivant about being involuntarily pregnant, and American anti-abortionists were hell-bent to stop its manufacture and sale here in the land of the free. The Abortion Wars had been joined and the Feminist Majority stood on the front lines.

We had just set up in the theater, done a sound check, and I had cadged a tunafish hero off the craft table. I was looking for a place to get off my feet and scarf the sandwich before showtime. Two tables over, a guy was sitting with a big Gibson hollow-body on his lap, noodling. He was dressed in a light blue gabardine suit, comfortable shoes, and a matching, light-blue pork pie hat, turned up at the front. Up closer, I picked up on a thin beard and wire-rimmed spectacles on slightly bulging eyes. As a guitar player, even his warm-up noodling sounded fast, lyrical, and tight. It was love at first sight.

I struck up a conversation. He was part of the event lineup. He had been asked to play a few tunes before the show, and now he was warming up with a light jazzy feel to his left hand, finger picking not country, more r&b, more New Orleans. There he was, Hirth from Earth Martinez, the Dr. John of the guitar. He had a warm, raspy voice, not from smoking, just from who he was. We talked briefly about the guitar, how it had been stolen out of his car when he was unloading equipment at night in the alley behind his Boyle Heights pad. But the knucklehead who stole the Gibson tried to pawn it in a local shop and everybody knew Hirth’s guitar so, it was back in his lap before he could ask around.

Hirth understated this twist of fortune with a shrug, as if to say there are no coincidences. Hirth had been well-connected in the neighborhood since birth. He personified Boyle Heights, an embattled but sequestered LA ‘hood, half Jewish (since the early 1900s) and half-Chicano (since the 1950s and ‘60s). Hirth’s old man was a Chicano labor organizer. His Jewish mother was a teacher. Brooklyn Avenue became Cesar Chavez Boulevard, but the neighborhood stuck together to overcome differences and keep out the developers and fast food chains. Through it all — with a few ragged exceptions — everybody got along just fine.

Hirth and I swapped numbers at the outdoor tables that day and soon after, I got a chance to work with him. We had started a cabaret downtown in an experimental black box attached to the Los Angeles Theater Center. The cabaret featured performers on the scene back then, vaudeville nouveau performance artists, egotistical mansplaining singer songwriters, people from the Theater Center labs, avant garde loonies, comediennes. It was my job to glue the chaotic polyglot together with a band.

It’s hard to find good theater musicians. They have to be versatile — play in a bunch of styles, be willing to start and stop in rehearsals. Music has straightforward organizers — chords, tempo, structure. Just point three fingers down, say 16-bar, half-time, funky, and the rhythm section can vamp in E-flat from here to eternity. We needed musicians who could play any tune in any key, but also, they had to put up with actors. Musicians are used to walking into a gig, setting up, playing, breaking down, getting paid, and leaving. Actors and the theater take a more serpentine route to performance. I won’t belabor the point.

Hirth loved it all. His patience with rehearsals was terrific, no actor weirdness phased him, and he had a great sense of humor. I loved playing music with Hirth. He made anything rock, or swing, depending. He’d try playing anything with notes and invariably pulled it off. We also began playing commercial gigs together — hotels, little clubs. We played a steady gig on Sunday afternoons at the Farmers Market, and we began hanging out week days in Boyle Heights.
Traveling through Boyle Heights with Hirth was like going home. Every restaurant we settled into, he knew the whole family who fed us their favorite dishes. Every music store we walked into, Hirth knew the musical history of all the store guys, and boy did they know him. Everybody loved this quiet, laid back hipster who sang in a hip sotto voce, breathy but right in tune. His original tunes were whimsical, inside jobs, full of wit, longing, and self-deprecating reflection. Think Bob Dorough, Mose Allison, Dave Frishberg, beatific wise guys who had followed the music forever, wherever it took them. Hirth could get away with a beret, a stevedore’s cap, a fedora, or a stingy brim; he always had a lid on. And if he used hip language you knew he was putting you on.

Hirth started playing in Mariachi bands in the neighborhood when he was 14. At Hollywood High, he attended under a performer’s certificate, which allowed him to take off from school for gigs. And such gigs — he played in salsa joints and on recording gigs. He wrote tunes for other artists and recorded his own music when he could. We were locked in, sympatico. Whatever I did, he was down with it; whatever he did, I was down with him.

Hirth died a five years ago. His departure left a big, sad permanent hole in the sole of my scuffed-up soul/ a big, sad permanent hole in the sole of my scuffed-up soul.
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Outside Agitators — resistance in another time*

8/15/2020

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MADISON, WI, October, 1967 — We arrived at the campus on a Friday afternoon. An SDS kid met us at the gate with a permit and led us along the walkways to the theater. A city motorcycle cop showed up. The kid showed him our permit. The cop gave us a dirty look and left.

“City cops around a lot?” the director asked the SDS kid.

“We been on the streets a lot this fall,” the kid said. “Dow chemical gave the university big grants last year.”

“For what?” we asked.

“To make napalm stickier.”

“Stickier?”

“Yeah, so it sticks to the skin better and for longer. While it’s burning. That’s the trick, see? To make it stickier and hotter. Like phosphorous.”

“You know a lot about it,” we said.

“We all do,” the kid said. "Teach-ins, all that good shit."

We pulled the van up to the loading dock and went inside. It was a good theater, proscenium, with a sprung stage floor. A techie met us. He started talking to our techie, bragging about the great new light grid and stage, framed by the proscenium.

We had a routine for unloading and setting up, and it was the first that the students saw of our road company, very together, very boisterous, invading the academic sanctum. We pulled the two uprights and the crossbeam off the top of the truck, shouldered them through the backstage loading dock and laid them down upstage.

Next came our outdoor stage platforms, stacked to the side. We set the pylons and the two-by-six support beams onstage where our funky little stage-upon-a-stage would sit best, lined up under the light grid. Next came the platforms, two actors on each, laid onto the frame. Wedges jammed the platforms tight together. We bolted the cross bar to the two uprights and lashed the curtain onto the crossbeam.

The curtain, crude canvas, split in the middle for grand entrances, was painted with a two-dimensional village in shallow perspective, no naturalism anywhere. Above that, we stretched a banner — “San Francisco Mime Troupe — Engagement, Commitment, and Fresh Air” carried by a snarling, toothy gothic griffin. When assembled, we lifted the whole rig upright with a big cheer and tied it off to stage weights and cleats. Outdoors, we’d just drive stakes into the ground.

I walked up to the back of the theater for a look. Our stage looked small, incongruous, the perfect effect against the grandiose theater that surrounded it. The drop curtain was laughable. It destroyed any pretense of proscenium, any expectations of a normal night at the theater. That was a good thing.

We did some lazzi, stock commedia physical sequences, practicing falls and leaps on the floor, short physical bits. By now, we had the show down. Although it changed every night in its tempo, details, and audience response, the show, “L’Amant Militaire,” the military lover, had congealed into a funky ballet, at once orchestrated and improvisational. Within limits, you could change beats, insert ad libs if you didn’t break the rhythm. If you ad libbed and blew it, you’d hear about it. A good ad lib works well, but only when it’s linked to the scene’s overall context. There would be no question when it worked, because the audience would explode. Or we could do joke-jokes, laugh catchers where we’d throw in a reference to a hit tune or a San Francisco band, or an irksome professor on campus or insert some mention of dope or a popular villain like General Westmoreland — we called him General Waste More Land — the commander in charge of the 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. Sex was built into the characters, their relationships, the movement. It was a very bawdy, very sexy play.

Once the stage was lit and the techies were off the grid above us, we ran a speed through, very fast, very fun, stretching and twisting, keeping on cue but whipping through it. This was a time of invention. The best work came out of these light, quick run-throughs. Then we’d go to eat, usually at some student commons, or a restaurant with the organizers, all of them SDS members.

The plan was to use the show as a rallying point for the organized protests that were unfolding on every campus, often based on the battle against Dow Chemical, Hewlett-Packard, the napalm brewers and the cluster bomb makers, cruel corporations. And ROTC. Rot Cee. Reserve Officers Training Corps. More ninety-day wonders came out of ROTC than anywhere else, the scared or arrogant lieutenants who commanded the platoons in battle, often leading with their dicks instead of their heads. College kids getting their young troops killed. So SDS’s idea was to get the military recruiters off the campus. We talked strategy and politics with the SDSers, but there was very little ideology to discuss; we were all on the same page.

After we ate, a few of us set off to the radio station to promote the show. So far on this tour, the SDS organizers had their shit together to dovetail the shows into whatever student action was planned for the campus that weekend. By design, we would act as a spark plug to fire up the students with laughter and thought provocation. Every moment felt like a teaching moment, but we didn’t see it as a top-down thing. We conducted ourselves like guerrilla fighters. We knew why we were there, and we understood and respected the students and their circumstances. Ours were hit-and-run tactics, but the students had laid the groundwork for what was about to happen, and they would take the consequences after we had gone.

Showtime! We walked onstage. Unlike proscenium shows, the set was designed to break the fourth wall that stands between actors and their audiences. The audience had piled into the classy theater, dark wood panels, well-kept theater seats, a rich green. By contrast to the formality of the room, the students mixed preppies in chinos and sport jackets with bushy-haired freaks in jeans and ragged tops, long dresses and black pipe stem pants.

The kids were jazzed. SDS had done a remarkable job of getting them organized and prepared for what would come tomorrow. The students were incredibly savvy about the war and the role the universities played in keeping the war machine going. No dupes here. They radiated energy and noise and they filled the staid hall to overflowing.

Onstage, we formed our warmup circle, lots of spontaneous smiles and eyes. We were on! The commedia had not yet begun, but we were singing beside the stage. This gleeful breaking of expectations gave the warmup a naturally raucous, lascivious style and I loved preparing. Students ricocheted off the walls. They danced in the seats. All we had was a recorder, a tambourine, and five sets of hands to accompany our voices but the audience joined with whistles and shouts.

The audience loved the show and left the theater clapping and chanting. They flowed around the campus cops who weren’t prepared for a rowdy, post-show mob that clamored across campus toward the chem building, where the university was conducting napalm experiments. Everybody danced and cheered and shouted around the chem building entrance, a big crowd, but no one tried to assault the doors. This was no unruly mob. That’s what The Man liked to call these protestors, as if they were a large infesting insect. Shortly, “the mob” broke, groups and couples heading in different directions. Tomorrow would be a big day.

The next morning, we showed up at the SDS office, our rendezvous point. Everyone hit the mark on time. This was guerrilla theater: We had learned our coordinates and kept our ammunition dry.

The Chancellor had refused to discuss demands written up by students. Because the university had chosen war research funding over their mission to educate the young citizens of Wisconsin, the students had decided to occupy the chem building where the napalm research was going on. We would provide a drum and bugle corps to march the protesters into the building. We had a snare drum, a trumpet, we had tambourines and whistles. We marched across campus as students poured out of the dorms and reached critical mass at the foot of the granite stairway that led majestically up to the heavy double doors of the administration building.

Two young women draped a hand-painted graphic of a clenched fist over a podium liberated from a lecture hall. An scruffy kid dressed in jeans, a faded blue work shirt, and a sheepskin jacket stepped up. A long-haired student set a microphone down in front of him. An extension cord trailed out of the back of a Fender guitar amp and slithered up the steps to a window in the chem lab.

“We all know why we’re here,” he began. Feedback whined. He cringed, looked at the microphone, tapped it. Leaned aside. The kid adjusted the volume. “It’s not just because we posted flyers and handed out leaflets about this action today.”

Cheers.

“Okay, we’re on,” the speaker said, grinning. “Sure that was helpful, but we all know that the chem building is no longer a place of science. It’s a munitions lab. And the bosses of this supposedly sheltered academic community, they no longer represent our well-being. Now they collaborate with war mongers. They take money from the war corps and tap the brain power of who? Of us! They hold out diplomas like carrots in front of mules and tell us “do the work. Do THIS work. Use your hard-earned knowledge, your love for science to fulfill our government research grants. And the people who come to work each day, dressed like academics, like our benign, beloved betters. They use the standards of academia to pressure us — yeah, that’s right — ‘pressure us’ into making the napalm burn hotter, make the cluster bombs tear more flesh.”

The crowd boo’d. It was clear that they — students and organizers — had been meeting frequently. The crowd stood attentive, knowing they wanted to hear what this guy had to say. I felt the unity, all these kids understanding the power behind the words, the concepts becoming real, a matter of life and death, even for them.

“And they all know — like I know. Like you know. That those nice people, so many so friendly, so sincere in their efforts to help us.”

The crowd groaned with sarcasm.

The speaker stopped them. “No! No!” he shouted. “They’re sincere. Sincere in their intent to keep the wheels turning here at the university. But now, the wheels have reversed direction. They are no longer about academia, the gift of education, the treasures of knowledge. Now the wheels turn as gears of the military-industrial complex.”

The speaker paused. He looked out over the crowd. No one moved. None had left. He crouched over the microphone, lowering his voice. “They’re keeping a list, brothers and sisters. A list of those of us who may stumble, even for a moment. Those of us who may — for whatever reason — not be at the top of our academic game. And that list goes to the warmongers.”

Boos.

“That list goes to the selective service. That list goes to the draft boards. To those who decide who will go and who will stay. To those who can tear us from the halls of the university and drop us in the barracks and in the rice paddies and deep in the blinding jungle. Yeah, the big wheel keeps on turning, brothers and sisters. And the halls of ivy — that once crooned the harmonies of student life — now glisten with blood and burn with fire.

“They want us, these men at the induction center. The sergeants and the doctors. Waiting to stamp our asses like pieces of meat. G.I. G.I. Government issue. We are no longer the issue of our parents. We are no longer the issue of our hopes and dreams.

"But there comes a time when we must turn this university away from its dark new identity as a factory of death. A time when we must stop the manipulation of our hearts and minds and bodies from the place we were born to become both the murdered and the murderers. While they make money off our successes and our failures.

The crowd began a chant. The chant began to move, in tempo, like a single organism. We picked up the tempo on drums and bells began to march behind the great prowling animal that took direction and danced across the campus to the chem building.

One two three four
We won’t fight your dirty war

Mao Tse Tung And Uncle Ho
Dow chemical has got to go.

We pulled on our band uniforms and formed up at the back of the crowd as we had done so many times in the parks of San Francisco. But this time, we weren’t passing the hat, fleecing the audience for spare change and joints. We were playing the students into a building to sit on the floor in peaceful resistance, where they would sing. But we were no pied pipers.

“Stay outside,” the director told us. “Don’t go in.”

“But we can’t just march them in there and then leave.”

“Oh yeah?” the director asked. “And what happens if they get busted while we’re in there?”

“Then we get busted.”

“And then what?”

“No show.”

“That’s right.”

“So we drive all the way to Madison, our mission barely begun.”

“And we end up here in jail.

The director laughed. “Some guerrilla action.”

During this exchange, the students knew what to do. Someone had crawled in a window in the chem building. She shoved open the front door. Chanting, the students had rolled into the building. We could see them hunkering down in the front corridors. The doors slammed shut.
Minutes later, phalanxes of cops appeared from around the corners of nearby buildings. They were outfitted in coveralls and helmets, gas masks strapped to their legs, gloves, heavy boots, and long night sticks. Really long night sticks. We retreated to the pedestal of a statue of Abraham. He had been adorned with a gas mask.

Inside, the students jammed the doors with baseball bats thrust under the push bars. Chains rattled through the door handles. They had come equipped.

A bullhorn blared from the police phalanx. The speaker, without identifying himself, declared the students as an unlawful assembly and ordered them to disperse.

Mao Tse Tung and Uncle Ho
Dow chemical has got to go!

Another police bullhorn announcement.

More cheering and singing from inside the building.

A shattering sound. Broken glass cut through our drum and bugle tattoo. Unable to force the doors, Madison’s eager, newly equipped tac squad broke through the glass at the entrance.

The dull thud of tear gas. The pigs shot canisters directly into the narrow confines of the chem building hallways.

People began to scream, their cries muffled but intense behind the doors and the shouts of the pigs. They began to drag students out of the chem building by the first available limb. Tear gas splintered the clear autumn air with glass shards. They clubbed, kicked, and dragged students toward two large black vans, super-sized paddy wagons.

Shaking off the shock of the attack, the students rallied and counterattacked. They swarmed around the paddy wagons and prevented the pigs from closing the doors. They began rocking the vehicles and someone punctured the tires on both vans. Fire broke out under first one, then the other of the vehicles. The pigs flung open the doors and the students leapt out, only to be forced to run a gauntlet of pigs and their night sticks.

For a moment, the scene froze. The cops seemed to come to their senses. Students, beaten and bloody, collapsed on the grass. Only the coughing persisted, as the students convulsed from the tear gas that began to drift away over the autumn-still campus.

Horrified by the carnage, the Chancellor banished the city pigs. They dragged their crippled paddy wagons off campus and abandoned the territory to the university cops, who walked around the campus in tense little knots looking very outnumbered.

The afternoon sun cast weird shadows and an eerie quiet descended. The campus looked like a battlefield. The walkways and grass, the open quads were white with leaflets, a jacket, a lone sneaker, posters on sticks, half of them broken. Stunned students sat back to back on the lawn, holding their heads. A table had been set up to sign people up for legal aid. A group with medical skills walked along a cloistered corridor of wounded, kneeling, bandaging head wounds, a broken arm, a swollen ankle. By sundown, we retreated to the theater where a second battle was forming up.

After the tac squad retreat, the Chancellor tried to prevent our show from happening. The students regrouped, massing around the theater doors, demanding that the show must go on. We met with SDS at the upturned student union. We wanted to do the show, but we didn’t want to instigate another battle. Although they would have marched into the chem building anyway, we felt guilty, as if we had ushered these kids to their doom. But the occupation of the chem building had been planned far in advance to coincide with the visit from Dow chemical’s recruiters. They were nowhere to be seen.

That night, the show couldn’t have been sharper. The audience radiated anger and sarcasm, they vibrated with clear thinking and focused action. The laughs came up like punches, not aimed at us, but at the powers that had brought us to this point, in a Wisconsin theater after a day filled with fury.

Afterwards, people stayed around the theater and talked. There had been rumor of a curfew, but who would enforce it? The administration and the campus cops stayed out of sight. Neither had bargained for the pummeling the students took in their occupation of the hall. The city cops would not have permission to return. They’d tried out their new gear, got their kicks beating the shit out of the kids. They had proven the obscenity of violence, gang-banging cops, red-faced white guys in dark blue coveralls, anonymous, shielding their badges from the filth they had perpetrated. The Man had developed an appetite for violence with his fear but that night, he went hungry.

*

A hand shook me awake from an exhausted sleep. “Come on man. We gotta blow town. The cops are looking for us. They’re callin’ us outside agitators on the morning news. They want to pin what happened here on us.”

I dressed quickly in the morning cold. We stole out of the off-campus house we had occupied, started the unmarked white van —no signs, no flowers, nothing to distinguish it from a thousand other white delivery vans. We fled eastward, outside agitators avoiding the pigs, sneaking away at dawn in an unmarked white van and three marginally reliable cars. No fatigue, just coffee and nicotine excitement, only the road and the music on the a.m. radio winding us south and east toward Chicago and on to the rebellion still bubbling in Detroit.

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Published originally in Retrospect, Protests

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Five Years in Three Acts

8/6/2020

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My alma mater asked me what I’d been doing for the past five years. It occurred to me that I’d performed in three discrete acts over the last half-decade. I don't yet know the title of the play.

Act One: After receiving an MFA from an intriguing new hybrid program for television, film, and theater at Cal State LA, I began to teach writing at this second alma mater. I’ve loved it. Los Angeles’ Cal State campus looks and feels like a planetary crossroads and sounds like a tower of Babel. The students here are savvy, worldly, and remarkably focused. Many are the first in their families to attend university, and they pursue the work with grit, energy, and determination. I’m grateful for the new window on the world they afford me.

Act Two: The Trump tragedy and the battle against autocracy. Reeling from the shock of the election, I continued to teach, launched into my third novel [here’s an excerpt] and undertook an energetic program to lose weight and rebuild my body. All the above-mentioned projects I would categorize as survival responses to aging and the threatened collapse of state, culture and my mind. I hasten to add that the mind thing is not through attrition, but from rage, rage at ugly stupidity and inJustice. Fortunately, the horror in Washington seems to be sparking a powerful groundswell of demand for social and economic justice and the exercise of human, animal, and planetary rights.

Act Three: The Covid reality and the irrefutable message from the earth mother. In the words of Willy Loman’s wife, Linda, “attention must be paid.” In the words of playwright and better poet, Bertolt Brecht, “change the world; it needs it.” I’m working on both fronts. Stay safe, stay sane, and, as Congressman John Lewis suggests, “get into good trouble.”

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Covidream 2.1*

7/30/2020

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I’ve been having vivid dreams since the day that normal died. I wake up having dreamed a life of time and a universe of travel, sweat-soaked, curled in a fetal position, short hours from when I last registered reality. But already, I have oversimplified our pandemic world.

Nothing was “normal” before the virus developed a mind of its own. Before our new zoonotic leader took over, we had lived under the stunning ugliness of a monster and his winged monkeys in a nation that had lost its mind. And the above mentioned “reality” clings to the surface of consciousness the way I cling to a micro awareness generated by a book or movie on the inside of an aeronautic tube when I am knifing through thin air 33,000 feet above the earth’s surface.

These dreams are often quite beautiful in their scope, scale, and clarity. I wouldn’t define them as nightmares. They’re set in vast and complex technoscapes populated by swarms of humans. Although the humans are often adversarial, they never kidnap or harm me. Maybe the best way to describe these techno scenarios is to overlap an Amazon distribution warehouse and the streets of Portland, Oregon during the time of Trump terror, where history fails to lend perspective to the painfully sharp pivot we balance on, not knowing whether we will rise or even which way we might fall.

My most recent Covidream begins at a seashore. I stand at the back of a gypsy truck in which I roamed from commune to commune fifty years ago. The rear of the truck had been a camper and a comfortable one at that. In my dream, the back was filled with a stacked assortment of coats — hearty outdoor jackets, navy peacoats, Pendleton lumber shirts, denim jackets, Carhart workman’s coats and, oddly, several edgy leather pieces appropriate for male or female.

Several friends from my past stood around the truck, trying on coats, commenting on appearances, laughing. One by one, they left, thanking me for their new outerwear and leaving me alone with my father.

Now this is, in itself, extraordinary. My father has been dead for longer than he lived, and he rarely appears in my dreams. But now we sat on the tailgate of my truck watching the surf break offshore and talking about the corona virus — how it has risen from the imbalances we have created on the planet; how it possesses an ability to strategize, to travel, to change, to adapt.

We talked of its chimeric qualities and mysterious behavior, how it first seemed to attach to the respiratory system until it began to appear in the fringe areas of the human body, where blood danced with oxygen or shed its toxins in the liver and kidneys, in the capillaries of the cerebral cortex, the eyeballs, any place where the tiny tributaries of our vascular system ended in narrow backwaters where the covid protein could anchor and embrace human cells.

We tried to reconfigure the corona virus, to invest it with a vitality that might include vengeance. Wasn’t it possible, given the discovery of macro organisms — did you know, for example, that a grove of aspens is not a series of individual trees, but one large creature? That the entire floor of a forest is connected across distance and species by a network of mycelia that allow the forest to talk to itself? Isn’t the virus floating down the Amazon the way ants launch leaves to cross a stream? Isn’t it possible that the virus is one great creature, sent by the planet to rid itself of human scum?

We weren’t the first people to imagine this possibility, my father and me. A group of Yoruba priestesses are currently approaching the earth mother to argue that there are plenty of good humans on the planet and that she can easily distinguish between the good people and the pricks. Couldn’t she order the virus to spare the good people and take the bastards?

My father, always empirical was skeptical, and I had to admit that so far, the priests hadn’t been able to contact the earth mother’s sister, Ogun. Ogun was known to be quite impulsive, egotistical and self-righteous; she often took holidays from her caretaking duties and her generous capacity for compassion. The priests allowed as how Ogun might not currently be taking calls.

Now, please understand. Neither my father nor I are fond of subscribing to a bum-trip worldview. That would hardly be dialectical, and both my old man and I subscribed to the belief that opposites seek equilibrium, that thesis and antithesis generate synthesis, and that science does reveal great beauty in the universe. Our covid speculation had saddened us both.

I decided I would go for a run along the shoreline to restore my balance while my father relaxed in the back of the truck where he would smoke his pipe and recall his days as a merchant sailor.

So, after donning my mask, I set off for a run along the shore, only to come up against a wire mesh fence of the kind usually erected to keep deer out of a country garden or to corral a mean-spirited urban mastiff or pit bull.

Behind the fence, thousands of swimmers and sunbathers frolicked in the breaking waves or basked in tiny bathing suits. No one wore a mask. Everyone seemed to enjoy interacting in the most intimate ways with each other. I was disturbed, but I continued on my way, although my mask did attract attention.

Beyond the private beach lay a labyrinth of boathouses, restaurants, bars, spas, and other facilities, all designed to expedite pleasurable interaction. I dodged in and out of these rooms and hallways, always finding a path that led me parallel to the beach, hoping to find a deserted stretch of the shoreline that wasn’t fenced off for profit.

I came to a massive breakwater, where bathers were soaking and playing with their children in the shallow water. It reminded me of the shallows of the lake we were forbidden to swim in during the height of the polio epidemics that would descend upon New England in August. It seemed dangerous to me, this lazy crowd in the warm, shallow water, but when I tried to approach the bathers, they turned a deaf ear to my ministrations or told me to buzz off and take my mask with me. Several of the bathers took up quacking at me, I suppose because my mask made me look like a duck.

A woman approached me, very sweet and gentle, like one of those kids in school who would befriend a kid who was being bullied. She was as generous of body as of soul, both barely contained by her bikini. She had five children with her and added that she was pregnant with twins. She asked me if that meant she was a septuagenarian. I told her “no” but did tell her that she had one famous precursor, the woman in Dorothea Lange’s pictures of the Great Depression. We spoke for a few moments about the possibility that she and Dorothea’s careworn mother of seven were doppelgangers, but the surf was breaking steeply on the shore and the blue water had turned to steel.

I bid the pregnant woman a socially distanced goodbye and turned back. I recollected a time when my friend Roger and I had left my father behind on the beach while we explored the lake in a small motorboat that my father had generously helped me resuscitate and paint. He had been very sad when I returned to shore. I didn’t want to repeat that kind of abandonment. I began to work my way back up the beach, overcoming all “private beach” and “no trespassing” signs I encountered. The sun had begun to move toward the western horizon and the shoreline, the restaurants and bars, the yacht basins looked alike.

Unmasked people surrounded me, inviting me onto this yacht or into that restaurant and bar, daring me to unmask and “show my pretty face.” The journey began to take on a repetitive, nightmarish quality as I searched in vain for the landmarks that had marked the beginning of my shoreline run hours earlier.

Finally, I saw a familiar stretch of barricading wire fence. There was the familiar outline of my truck. I lurched up the beach, shouting my father’s name and apologies. I arrived at the truck as the lower lip of the sun touched the horizon. My father was nowhere to be found. Before I allowed myself to grasp that I had lost my father once again, I awoke with a familiar mixture of covid emotions, sadness and gratitude, eager to accept the waking reality I had so recently left behind, my partner and two cats asleep beside me.

* Originally published in Retrospect, Pandemic Summer

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On Editing — Before the fact

1/25/2018

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You probably don’t think about editors when you first sit down to write. You’re driven by the strength of an idea, you’re in love with words and eager to see them pour from your keyboard or pencil tip. You may be immobilized, intimidated by a blank page or screen. Either way, you begin to write your story or make your claim and you may realize that you already have an editor — perhaps more than one — perching on your shoulder.

The more you write, the better you’ll get to know these editors. They’ll bark at you, coo at the grace of your prose, haunt you with questions, call you an idiot or a genius. Whoever they are, regardless of your doubts and dreams, you will want to shape them, train them to work for you because — before you submit your work to an editor — you will want to edit yourself.

Whether we’re writing fact, fiction, memoir, or poetry, we’re not looking for a thoughtful fellow with a bowtie, a pipe and leather patches on his tweed-jacketed elbows. Not yet. First, we’re talking about recruiting ourselves as editors, to win our editorial voice over as an ally. The plan? To develop our work as fully as possible before we turn it over to outside eyes.

To best estimate what we need to self-edit, let’s walk around the desk and sit in the editor’s chair. Editors exercise their skills in three areas. First, they scan the long lines of your work, its themes, content, and structure. They ask “what claim do you want to make? What story do you want to tell?” This long-line overview is particularly important in fiction, where writers must define their own format, structure and style. Along the way, don’t waste time with “I want to write in the style of…” Chances are, the author you wish to emulate did not start out with “a style.” Just tell your story. A writing style comes with time and should be dictated by content, not adulation.

Second, bow-tie editors review the lines of your prose, including syntax. What is syntax? Syntax has to do with the way you choose and arrange your narrative, “getting the words right,” as Hemingway put it. Syntax can have rhythm and tone, just like music. Tone in writing is carried by your narrative voice, the way you tell your tale. To self-edit your narrative voice, including syntax and tone, consider developing an awareness of your audience. As you narrate your story or support your claim, you will want to bring your audience with you.

When we write, especially at the beginning, we tend to write for ourselves. We have an idea — vague or clear — of what we’re trying to say, we’ve been thinking about it, we “get it.” But does your audience get it? You’ve been tossing your story around in your head for days, weeks, months. Your audience is reading your words for the first time. Out of consideration for your readers, scan your work for clarity and simplicity. Do I need all those “due to the fact that[s]…” or “To tell you the truth[s]…”? Do I need all these adjectives and adverbs? Sure, some of them add color or essential focus to a description but too many can cloud the picture. You don’t need them. You are the author, i.e., an authority. Have faith in your core narrative and the power of your ideas.

Have your self-editor check for logic, too. Writing is a linear form. Therefore, sequence is a big deal. Do your sentences unfold sequentially, with strong transitions between images, actions, ideas? Stop here, get some distance and ask once again — am I bringing the reader along with me? Clarity, simplicity, and logical sequence will help keep them turning the pages.

As you work, your tone will begin to emerge. By tone, I mean that sense of how your writing would sound. In fact, a great way to gain distance from your work is to read it aloud, or have others read it to you. Listen. You’ll be looking for your work to fall somewhere between two extremes — conversational and lofty. Conversational tone often sounds as if you’re talking across the table from a friend who knows you well, having a glass or two of wine. It’s chatty, full of starts and stops, slang, and “… do you know what I mean[s]?” It’s you thinking out loud. If you’ve ever transcribed a conversation, you’ll know that spontaneous chatter reads like gibberish. “Ahs” and “ums” and “do you know what I mean[s]?” are fine in conversation, but on the page, even dialog needs to be shaped.

The other tonal extreme is the lofty tone. It’s usually the result of authors being anxious or uncertain of their credibility, so they fill the narrative with big words, often incorrectly used, flowery adjectives and adverbs, long-winded introductory phrases. Try to find a middle ground, a thoughtful, personable balance between the two poles of lofty and conversational tone. In time, this balance becomes your narrative voice and your self-editor will recognize when you’re being authentic and when you are not.

Finally, your self-editor will want to check punctuation, grammar, typos. Don’t neglect this stage. Details do count. Nothing will flag writing as amateur as too many commas, sentence fragments or run-on sentences, using “its” when you mean “it’s,” writing “1” instead of “one,” describing an African American man, rather than African-American man. Don’t leave this work for the editor. Don’t expect them to pick these things up. Of course they will, once you get your work to them, but before that, you want to make sure that you have edited your own work as thoroughly as you possibly can on every level.

Now set your work aside. If you can, let it sit for a night, a week, a month. Get up from your desk, stand on your head, run around the block, get a friend to read your work, or simply change type fonts — anything to give yourself a different perspective on your work. Then, go back, and do it all again. Writing is rewriting and rewriting requires editing. The more you edit before the fact, the more control you will gain over your creative process.

More on writing...
Lying, thieving writers — reflections on liars and the art of literary theft

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Trump, Haiti, and tremendo aché

1/13/2018

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Macbeth, Lafayette Theater NYC, 1936

Intruder Trump’s recent shit-for-brains remarks about AIDS in Haiti and his dismissal of ‘shithole’ African nations prompted me to revisit a little-known tale that periodically circulates through the international theater community.

In 1936, an ambitious young Orson Welles conceived a radical version of Shakespeare's ghostly M-cbeth. Welles auditioned and hired an all-black cast and set the jinxed and bedeviled play in a fictional 18th-century nation, modeled on Haiti. Integral to the production was a troupe of Haitian voudon drummers and singers.

Welles and his producer John Houseman mounted the controversial production at the Lafayette Theater in NYC with full support of the WPA and the Federal Theater Project. The voudon production received critical acclaim despite its radical, re-contextualized interpretation of Scottish witchery.

One critic, however panned the vulnerable production mercilessly, revealing his racist bias. That night, M-cbeth's Haitian drummers remained in the darkened, post-show theater, singing, dancing, and chanting until dawn. Shortly thereafter, the critic was found dead in bed without a mark on him.

Many cultures consider coincidence as a random phenomenon. Other cultures perceive authentic, other-worldly connections between coexisting people, places, and events and often act upon these more subtle constructs.

From one perspective the Haitians and the critic had no causal connection. From another perspective, the midnight dance in the Lafayette theater and the critic's death were linked through aché, a mystical life force that permeates the Universe. Without aché, no life could exist.

With this feces-slinging Bonobo despoiling our spirits from a defiled White House, I'm driven to recall the powerful coincidence that vibrated between the critic and the Haitian musicians of Welles’ M-cbeth.

Maybe those who today possess tremendo aché today will commune with the voudon performers of Welles’ M-cbeth. Together, they could sing, dance, and drum out a response to Trump’s racist obscenities.

With the power of good spirit, such a powerful gathering might bring aché to this President, for he — not AIDS — now hosts the world’s most dangerous, deadly, and despicable disease.

Red light, baleful eye — Trump encased, Marine One

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Recollections: Rocked in Time

12/10/2017

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The boy rocked in time to the music, rump bouncing against the back of a ruptured easy chair. He pushed a mouth harp across tiny teeth, accompanying a blues singer over the pops and scratches of a fast-revolving 78-rpm record. The harmonica’s discordant moan caught the rhythm, modality, and feel of the music and bounced it back to singer and guitar. The boy wore a striped jersey, baggy blue corduroys, and brown oxfords. Soft-rounded cheeks, nose, and chin glowed beneath a bowl-cut thatch of dark hair. Brown eyes revealed amazement and delight, as yet unscarred by any perceptions of what might follow.

As he played, the boy stared into the album propped open against the bookcase. A Negro man in a white shirt stood in the ruins of a burnt-out prairie home, his back to the viewer, the carved neck and body of a guitar strapped over his belly. Charred planks and timbers reached toward the night sky. They reminded the boy of witch fingers.

The only structure left standing in the painting was a scorched brick chimney. On the mantelpiece, a clock stood intact save for the heat-shattered glass face. Across a sea of prairie grass, a passenger train shone silver in the moonlight, windows radiating warmth into a dark night. In the foreground the man embraced a guitar, black strap diagonally bisecting a white-shirted back. The lonely man, the dark night, the unreachable warmth and movement of the train all cried loneliness, abandonment, and missed chances. Desolation was lost on the boy. He was four years old and was busy making music with the man in the picture.

*

Months earlier, the boy’s family had moved into a federal housing project in an ancient Boston neighborhood. Red-bricked, thick-walled, and sensible, the apartments stood in ordered contrast to the crumbling wood-framed dwellings that surrounded the projects. The boy’s new home hunkered at the foot of a rounded hill where colonial citizens once withstood redcoat assaults. Now, its sacrosanct bronze plaques, statues, and cannons suffered attack from a burgeoning phalanx of post-war families. In good weather, hordes of kids swarmed up the hillside and onto the obsolete battlefield, its ancient solemnity disarmed by freshly laid footpaths, sand boxes, pipe-framed swings, park benches, and water fountains with spigots that the boy could reach without being lifted by his mother.

Inside the projects, blue steel railings bracketed the stairways and blue fire doors protected each apartment. Everything was shiny and new and there was a cared-for air to the place. A man in green coveralls, Patrick sewn onto one breast pocket in red thread, kept the hallway floors polished and smelling of wax. Patrick had a dent in his balding head. “A war wound,” the boy’s father called it.

There were plenty of kids around, even after they dragged the boy’s big sister off to first grade. The boy took charge of the situation whenever she left. He had his mom to himself and Billy O’Brien and the two Guerrier kids would come up and play. The boy owned an indestructible set of building blocks; he and the other boys built forts or stacked the blocks end-to-end in big, wobbling piles until they clattered to the floor.

*

The boy finished shredding the tobacco from the white paper cylinders nested in a pack of his father’s Pall Malls and crawled onto a chair to claim the second pack off the bureau. From his elevated position, he could see his father standing on the sidewalk below, foot perched on a black sedan bumper. The boy’s father worked as an engineer at an electronics company in Boston. During the war, he had helped develop underwater listening devices for the navy. A scientist, yes, but he prided himself on political prowess and his working-class sensibilities. During the Depression, he had joined the American Communist Party out of hope, out of desire, and in response to a call for justice in a troubled world.

After World War II, his left-wing fervor unabated, he loved talking politics to the people who lived in the projects. Now, he was doing just that, chattering at a big man with red hair. To the boy, the man’s red head looked small and his shoes looked big, the way they do in the funny papers.

The red-haired man nodded his small head.

His father took his foot off the car bumper. He gave the red-haired man a slap on the back.

The red-haired man laughed and stuck his thumb in the air.

The boy’s father laughed and stuck his thumb in the air, too. Then he walked away.

The red-haired man stopped laughing. He looked at the boy’s father, then looked up at the sky and rapidly touched his forehead, heart, and each shoulder.

The boy’s friend, Joey Guerrier, made the same sign when he got scared. “Keeps the devil away,” he said. The boy didn’t know from the devil. His family didn’t nail crucifixes to the bedroom walls or hang honey-toned portraits of Jesus in the living room. Nobody used the word “evil” at home, he didn’t grapple with devils and sins, and when asked, he had explained that god was the first part of “goddamn.” But now, when the red-haired man touched himself, an imaginary shadow passed over the boy, making him shiver. The tall man had just made the devil-go-home sign at his father and his father didn’t even know about it.

*

That night, the kitchen bulged with visitors. They leaned against counters or crowded around the table, drinking beer and drinking wine and talking about the world over platefuls of spaghetti and salad. Afterward they smoked cigarettes and stubbed out the butts in the leftover juices on their dinner plates. Ladies came as well. They smelled delicious and wore trousers or dresses covered with splashy flowers. They smoked and drank and talked right along with the men, but the boy was mostly fascinated by the big fellows in tall, pleated pants and suspenders, the men who wore hats in the house, the men who had dark whiskers and spoke with foreign accents.

The boy’s sister liked to hover in the kitchen when people came to visit. She was already seven. She would sit the men’s laps and listen to the conversation, her wide-open eyes moving from one speaker to another.

While he watched his sister, the boy’s mother told the visitors about the shredded cigarettes. “He loves to take things apart,” she explained as if he was not there.

“And records,” the boy’s father said. “Give that boy a Rachmaninoff concerto and I swear…he will reduce it to fragments, better’n any critic I ever read.”

The men laughed. The ladies sucked in their breaths. “Oh John, give the boy a break,” one said.

Sitting on a big man’s lap, the boy’s sister shook her finger at him. “Bad, bad,” she minced. “Naughty, naughty boy.” Then she kissed the top of his head the way a grownup would.

“You’re just a kid, too,” the boy said and drifted away from the ensuing laughter. The cigarette smoke made him cough. He took shelter in the living room, a favorite place, warmed by clanking radiators and illuminated by the light of shaded lamps, crammed with books and records in shelves. Paintings, photos, and sketches covered the walls.

His mother stepped into the living room and stood by the door, hands folded at her lap. “I’m sorry I told people about the cigarettes.” She turned on the phonograph. “But you made a big mess.” The boy looked up at her; she was very pretty.

“It was just between you and me,” she coo’d. “I shouldn’t have said anything.” She handed him the harmonica and kissed him. “Pick a record.”

The boy pulled chose the one with the Negro man and the train. He handed it to his mother. “No broken ones.”

“No more broken ones,” his mother repeated. “Good.” She placed the fragile graphite disc on the turntable. “There,” she said and set the needle in the groove. “Josh White sings the blues. Just right for a man with a harmonica.” She lifted him onto the easy chair, kissed him and rejoined the clamor in the kitchen.

The record played itself out in four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Conversation, thick with voices, continued in the kitchen. Its task complete, the phonograph needle hissed in the final record groove, putting out its own ragged syncopation. His mother did not reappear. The boy kept playing, bending the tune to his mind.

*

After the last visitor had said goodnight, after the kitchen was cleaned, after the family turned out the lights and all had fallen asleep, a wicked racket shattered the boy’s dream. Men pounded fists on the front door, the blows echoing hollow in the apartment. Slurred voices pierced the fire door.

“Open up in there, yuh god-damned communist.”

“Get yer fuckin’ commie ass out here, yuh friggin’ red bastad.”

The boy heard his mother’s voice, worried tones, ends of phrases floating upward.

“Mom…” the boy’s sister called out, fear in her voice. “What’s happening?”

“It’s nothing, dear,” his mother called down the hallway. “Go back to sleep.” Her voice shook a little.

“Go on home now.” His father’s voice sounded low and smooth, as if he was reading the funny papers to the boy and his sister. “You had your party. We all like to tie one on once in a while.”

“Come on out. Show yer face, yuh friggin’ commie coward.” The voice sounded angry, frustrated. More pounding, louder.

“Go on home,” his father warned. “You won’t want to remember this tomorrow.”

Laughter. “Remember this, ya friggin’ anarchist.” A pause, a giggle. “Piss on you.”

“Yeah. Piss on you, ya friggin’ fuckin’ anarchist.” Rumbles of laughter rolled away outside. Silence crept back into the apartment.

The boy crouched under the blankets, listening to his sister’s quick, shallow breathing. Who were these men? Why did they pound on the door? Were they his father’s friends? The red-haired man who made the devil-go-home sign — was he there, too? Why were they so angry? What were those names they shouted? What happened if the door broke?

He heard the urgent hiss and murmur of his parents’ voices. His father climbed out of bed and walked down the hallway. He rattled the doorknob and relocked the deadbolt. The footsteps padded back to the bedroom.

No one came to see the boy and his sister. Nothing relieved the blackness of the chamber. Eyes wide open, he lay awake, heart pounding.

*

Months later, a fleet of zeppelins passed over the projects. Relics of the war, they flew in formation on some indecipherable maneuver. Their slow-moving shadows crept across the bare trees and the snow-patched ground. Steady, fanlike, the whirring of propellers fluttered, the beating wings of a swarm of mechanical insects. Their bloated carcasses floated low in the sky, shutting out the sunhe boy covered his eyes and ears and ran for his mother’s legs. She laughed sweetly and embraced him, uttering words of comfort. He took no comfort from the shelter of her body. No comfort in her words. No comfort at all.

That night, the boy stood against the back of the armchair and peered at the Negro main on the album cover. He heard the wind that rippled the long grass. He heard the sound of the train clacking across the prairie. He felt the dark blue night surround the man in the picture and separate him from the warm train, the clacking, clattering train that pulled its passengers to safety.

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Memoir: A Father and Son Reunion

11/28/2017

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Humidity hung in the New York air like wet laundry, rendering the city blurred and misty. Summer trees drooped green and heavy and red-brick facades shimmered out of focus in the background. I felt as if sweat was falling into my eyes, the salt blinding me. In reality, I sat in air-conditioned comfort in a fern bar at 81st Street and Amsterdam Avenue halfway through a lunch of white wine, French bread, and salmon.

While I chatted with my partner, a shock of recognition kicked at my chest: today marked the anniversary of my old man’s death.

On this day, decades earlier, he had thrown one end of a quarter-inch rope (he would have called it “a line”) over a pipe suspended from the ceiling of his cluttered Boston laboratory, knotted a noose into the other end, dropped it over his head, and stepped off his worktable. He never said goodbye: no note, nothing.

Now, my old man was dying again, this time inside me, his consciousness slipping down a nightmare slope into the unexplored water of an imagined River Styx. Desperation raced through my system like adrenaline and my gut recoiled from the sharp kicks of his long-dead homunculus.

His life force pressed against my heart and lungs as it gasped for breath, fighting against the choice it had made. The dance progressed in paroxysms and I felt a strong pulse of regret in the blind, violent attempt it made to save itself. Slowly, the bucking in my organs weakened, subsided, then stilled, the body still warm, the spirit lingering, not wanting to go.

“Not a good way to die,” the spirit gasped with a familiar irony. I lost the signal. It was gone, leaving me alone opposite my partner in a fern bar at 81st and Amsterdam. I had reunited with the unrequited spirit of my father.

Tears fell on the back of my wrist and onto the cool, pink flesh of the salmon, sacrificed on a bed of greens. I dropped the fork from my shaking hand. “Either the fish is bad, or I’m about to keel over,” I told my partner. “I just felt my old man die… again.”

We left money on the table and walked outside into the pressurized mist of the underground day. Her compassion embraced me, but I could still feel my old man inside. “Look at what this guy decided to do,” I said. “What if …?”
“But you won’t.” She took my arm. “Let’s go to the museum.”

Inside the black rock of the crosstown tunnel, a creature barked once, loud, close at hand. A shadow roared past in darkness, moving ahead of us toward the wet green light of trees hanging over the tunnel’s mouth.

“It’s just Anubis, the gatekeeper of the afterlife,” my partner assured me.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “But that was still not a good way to die.”

We walked in tunnel darkness and I returned to my reunion, rerunning it, determined to find a solution, to ease the pain. “But I get to live,” I said out loud. “I get to go on and experience all this.”

We emerged from the tunnel into the rich, green light of Central Park. When we reached the museum, I sat on the smooth, green slats of a bench and sucked in the people, walking pretty, graceful, and alive under the shelter of trees.

Streets, trees, people, dogs, cars, cabs radiated light along Fifth Avenue, survivors, reaping the benefits of the program, talking with one another, reaching out to strangers and finding common ground in place, imagery, sentient existence. The moment felt unique, an opportunity to experience life, the unique arrangement of people, the words they spoke, the blare of taxi horns.

I was ready to accept it, this moment, not angry, sitting alone. I urged my partner to visit the museum. I wanted to sit on the bench and write. Passersby revealed their secrets to my eyes, my practiced eyes, experienced with viewing, out in the world, alive.

My old man had died long ago. I suffered his loss but survived to taste the rich broth of all things terrestrial, each precious object throwing off its own unique light, the patterns spiraling, morphing in front of me like a kaleidoscope.

My partner walked back down the green-tree corridor from the museum, carrying a shopping bag full of art books. She dropped the bag on the bench and sat down beside me.

“Survival,” she said. “Now that’s the key to the benefits program.”

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Too Many Books — Stalked by madness in the time of Trump*

11/14/2017

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elephant celebes, max ernst, 1921

The bistro fell quiet in the lazy interim between lunch and the happy hour. A bartender took time to wash glasses. Laughter burst from the kitchen, a ball game buzzed on the TV. Sitting in the cool, semi-darkness, the author had time and space to contemplate his bewilderment. Before the great robbery, the author had wielded his writing for decades, a modern David, slinging word stones. In the past, he'd gotten his licks in, drawn blood, celebrated the marches through the meadows. Why not now?

A guy sitting at the end of the bar morphed into a hawk. Perched on his strategically placed bar stool, the guy's hair molted into a hawk's sweptback feathers. His bright eyes leapt from person to person as if he was looking for prey. At any moment he might spread his wings, swoop across the room and land on a cheeseburger or the tender shoulder of a tank-topped damsel.

The author looked away. Take a deep breath, he muttered. Act natural. He ordered another beer. From his perch, the hawk darted a black-eyed glance at the author. He could feel talons sink into his own neck.

The birdlike apparition made the author feel woozy. He swallowed the last of the draft, paid up, and left without waiting for change.

Back on the avenue, he cruised past a line of kids waiting to file inside an improv club. Five bucks a show, fifty minutes of raunchy laughter, grab a stack of three-buck sushi to go from the joint next door and tear off into the Saturday night. Kids have all the fun. The author remembered youthful misery and corrected: No, kids do not have all the fun.

The author edged past the comedy queue snaking along the sidewalk. Elephant trunks, tails, and other fleshy appendages mushroomed out of young faces and torsos. A slim, bearded kid turned simian. The features on a grinning, red-faced boy melted into a pig snout. Maybe it's the heat, he thought, but the air was perfect.

One transmogrifying hawk he could understand but — as when the second airplane flew into the second tower — similar events unfolding in sequence demand analysis. First the hawk, now the rows of kids sporting rhino horns and elephant trunks? No. There are no coincidences. Bob Dylan wisecracked in his ear. "There's something happening here, but you don't know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones…"

Leaving the grotesque crowd behind, the author fled down the sidewalk to familiar territory, a used book and record store. No one else was taking notice of hawks on bar stools or elephants in a ticket line. Why am I seeing this way? Who's doing this to me?

He felt as he had decades earlier in a San Francisco park, when a small man with a wispy beard had slipped a little white pill into his performer's hat. "You'll like this," the man had said. After the show, the author had proceeded to Haight Street's Straight Theater to commune with Janis Joplin. He had danced in a great circle with all the others. He, Janis, the spinning galaxy of his brothers and sisters, all had become family under the influence of the ecstatic little pill. But today, there had been no pill.

The author pushed through the bookstore doors and proceeded straight to the vinyl rack full of old albums. Neil Young, Martha and the Vandellas, Creedence Clearwater, Lightnin' Hopkins and Jimi Hendrix stared up at him from worn record covers — his music, his rebellion, his reason to write. But the world is very different from what it was then. Current circumstances smothered any notion of writing about the past.

Nobody must suspect I'm freaking out, the author thought, struggling to measure his paranoia. Weird. Usually disorders run along genetic lines. His old man had suffered from deadly depression, but the author's current state was surreal, not depressed. Still, there are no coincidences. So who — or what — had dispatched that barroom hawk to drive the author into this bizarre wilderness?

Stabilized by the vinyl and his clever ruse as a browser, the author dared lift his head. Long, straight lines of bookshelves curved along walls, warped under the weight of their payload — books, books, thousands of books. Books, all shapes and sizes, thicknesses, books written, rewritten, published, and reviewed or not. Books from the millennia, books from now.

Books.

Hardcover tomes leaned against paperbacks in undulating rows of titles, authors, words, so many words, so much effort… for what?

Too many books.

For five thousand years, authorial voices have flowed through fingers to sand, stone, paper, keyboard. They been collected, revised, proofread and corrected, published, purchased, read, stacked to gather dust on brick-and-board shelves, thrown into cardboard boxes, and brought to this book store to languish or illuminate.

Why would he want to contribute his fragile work to this painful bookseller's ritual, stained by hope and frustration? Yeah, the idea that he'd never write again did cross his mind but this stalemate extended beyond the cliché of writer's block. Over the years, through prolific and empty times, he had changed. His back, shoulders, and knees ached. His writing now embraced deeper realms. Had his psyche and spirit grown stiff along with his knees? Who knew? Despite his growing alarm, despite his savvy politicized take, despite his efforts to sound the alarm, the world had undergone a paradigm shift.

*Excerpted from a work in progress

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A Modest Proposal* — To alleviate stress caused by the threat of nuclear war

11/3/2017

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For over seventy years, citizens of the world have struggled to accommodate the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Regardless of how imminent or distant the threat may seem, fiery images of an H-bomb endgame glow radiant in our hearts, minds, and sinews.

We’ve all heard the nuclear news: After decades of proliferation, an escalating atomic firefight could incinerate us within seconds.

The atomic era’s brief but impactful history has drawn humanity into an existential freak out. In response, we’ve constructed all manner of defenses to insulate ourselves against the terror of The Bomb.

We’ve been told that those who control nuclear weapons systems have developed elaborate fail-safe mechanisms to prevent a nuclear “mistake.” We’ve woven our own byzantine web of bomb-bred gallows humor. We’ve laughed at our plight, shrugged our shoulders, and mumbled “to hell with it.” A lucky few resolve to live for today and forget about tomorrow. Over time, many of us, aided by the end of the Cold War and media denial, have allowed nuclear fears to fade… until now.

Today, the specter of thermonuclear devastation has raised its ugly heads. No, that’s not a typo. The doomsday scenario has doubled down. Two nuke-wielding leaders currently prance across the world stage, lending a macabre significance to the phrase “two heads are better than one.”

The two heads are screwed into the necks of two bumptious males licensed to commit bilateral nuclear annihilation. Both Leaders have terrible haircuts, odd sartorial preferences, and an inclination toward cruelty. Both are impulsive, reactive, unpredictable, and — despite the power they wield — tightly wrapped in dangerously thin skins. Together, they have resurrected our terror of nuclear holocaust.

Consider our plight. Thugs have already kidnapped our government, creating all manner of waste, destruction, sadness and disgust. Now the public is expected to accommodate two nuke-wielding lunatics. To alleviate this near-intolerable anxiety, I propose that we encourage Our Leader be the first to drop The Big One.

Of course, it’s possible that encouraging such an act could result in uncontrolled retaliation. According to a new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), nine nations — the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — possess approximately 16,300 nuclear weapons. The above mentioned, preemptive gambit might spread to other nuke-wielding nations.

Therefore, I’d like to add another element to my proposal. Rather than risk retaliation and planet-wide extinction, I propose that Our Leader should ignore the threats of his counterpart and bomb one of his own cities...now.

A preemptive, self-inflicted nuclear attack would remove any element of surprise from Our Leader’s Asian counterpart. Such an attack would eliminate all possible hit-and-miss missile mishaps and ensure that we didn’t give the other guy a chance to sucker punch Our Leader and his citizenry.

On a more sophisticated level, a national genocide by Our Leader might partially alleviate the hostility he bears toward the American people, whom he profoundly mistrusts and hates. Accordingly, he might experience a newfound sense of benevolence.

Before we dismiss my proposal out of hand, consider the consequences of a unilateral domestic nuclear attack. The most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, Russia’s 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, would only destroy a single city. Chances are the weapons thrown by Our Leader would be much smaller.

A 20-megaton weapon would ignite a fireball with a radius of just 260 meters, only the size of a few football fields. Yes, it would create a deep crater, fatal nuclear radiation would embrace a 12-mile radius, and the resulting fireball would inflict third-degree burns to creatures in a larger area.

However, if detonated over lower Manhattan, a 20-megaton device would kill only about 600,000 people and the fallout would barely reach central Connecticut.

Perhaps a less populous area of our nation might provide a wiser target for our Leader’s domestic outburst. Instead of targeting Manhattan, why not nuke Kansas City or any other mid-sized American metropolis? Better yet, why not drop The Big One on a rural area, for example the state of Nebraska. Yes, the loss would be difficult to absorb in the short run, but after only a few decades, life could resume in all but the most devastated areas.

Imagine the relief: It’s often more practical to confront a reality than to wallow in theoretical fears. The survivors of a self-inflicted nuclear attack would adjust and find resourceful ways to go on living, knowing first-hand that the scope and scale of a nuclear blast was limited, in contrast to the relentless and continuing contemplation of such madness before the fact.

Finally, even if Our Leader failed to find his lust satiated by attacking his own nation he could be impeached for treason and executed for war crimes and that, dear reader, would put an end to this misery.

In closing, I wish to underscore the sincerity of my intent. I am not involved financially in any aspect of nuclear technology for war or for peace. I have no affiliations with contractors, large or small, that might profit from sealing off the irradiated areas of a nuclear blast. And, to the best of my knowledge, I have no enemies residing in Kansas City or Nebraska. I make this modest proposal only in the interests of the greater good.

*Based on Jonathan Swift's satirical essay (1729).

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A Modest Proposal* — To alleviate stress caused by the threat of nuclear war

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American Postcards: growing up absurd in the land of the free
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