Blog

Doctor Sunshine — a 20th-century disaster

5/4/2022

Roe v. Wade lay years in the future. Abortions were illegal, dangerous, and hard to find. I had seen several high-school friends fall victim to the medieval assumption that if you knocked her up, you should marry her. It was worse for her. If she got knocked up, her life as she knew it, or dreamt it, or planned it, was over. The road narrowed. Secretarial school went out the window. Home economics was all she’d need.

Neither Lucky nor I were saddled by that catechism, but we had no money to pay for a visit to Doctor Sunshine, a bona fide doctor on a prescient mission. Lucky was on the outs with her domineering father, her mother didn’t breathe without the old man’s consent, so the burden fell on us or, more accurately, on me.

How do you reconcile affection, maybe love, with jeopardy, desolation, and the sense that everything is ending? You don’t. You feel as if you’re covered in a myopic goo like the August humidity outside. Add a trashed domicile, a pressing need for $400 in cash, a felonious trip across state lines, and a heart-wrenching procedure that should have been Lucky’s civil right, and you got personal and political hijinks.

But people knew people who knew a guy, and we found ourselves in the lobby of the Copley Square Hotel, talking to a well-dressed gentleman. Through metaphor, simile, and unfinished sentences, the gentleman suggested he might be able to help.

Thomas Wolfe wrote that “you can’t go home again.” However, the family doctor and his wife had become a sponsor of sorts for me and my sister when my father died, and the household had dissolved. I called upon them for a loan and drove back home, Thomas Wolfe be damned.

The good doctor hadn’t arrived home yet, so I sat with his daughter. She was a freshman at Wellesley and was enchanted with her new boyfriend. I listened to her chirp young-love clichés; she read my ennui as a lack of understanding.

“You just haven’t been in love yet,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, too freaked out to become indignant.

When the doctor arrived, his wife joined us and sent the daughter away. The three of us huddled over coffee at the kitchen table. They asked me about Lucky. My downcast stammering convinced them that Lucky and I deserved a break. They wrote me a check and gave me a hug. Entitlement. I returned to the Copley Square Hotel, cash in hand. There was no receipt.

A week passed. Precious biological time was ticking, doubt laced our bodies with adrenaline, and the well-dressed gentleman had our money. Panicked, Lucky and I returned to the hotel unannounced, raising the ire of our liaison. There had been a delay. He would contact us.

The call came with time, place, and instructions. I don’t remember much about the trip. There was a train out of North Station, silence between Lucky and me. I remember the yellow wallpaper on the waiting-room walls in the farmhouse where Doctor Sunshine performed his procedure. There must have been a return trip to Boston. Lucky sat side by side in silence, watching the landscape tick by, numb, confused by the loss of an embryo that would have become a baby, a little kid, then a teenager and a grownup. What would that person become, be like, the living outcome of an angry fuck? Would that make a difference? What would Lucky and I become? Would we stay together?

I shuddered, not at the prospect of being with Lucky, but at the awful inevitability of birth and life and destiny. If the tiny speck grew into a person, who would he or she be? Would he or she be anything like me? Or Lucky? Or both of us. Would the child live to grow into an adult? Die? Travel, fight a war, have sex, make other children, become a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a bum? What if we gave birth to a murderer, a Hitler?

I felt a weight, the speculative reckoning of 70 years or more of human existence. We had ended all that with a grim decision. There was no way to rest with our choice. We couldn’t stand it, not together. Lucky moved back to New York. I put the apartment back together again. Late September descended into a smoky Indian summer silence and a haze of raked and burnt oak, elm, and maple leaves. I embarked on my final year at the university, recollecting the smell of eucalyptus in the parks of San Francisco.

# # #

0 Comments

The Crash

3/1/2021

0 Comments

One spring, my old man and I built a soap box racer. This was no jalopy, but a bona fide racing machine, constructed according to official specifications for the National Soap Box Derby, held each year in Akron, Ohio. My entry sported regulation wheels and an innovative brake system specially designed by my old man. Although I enjoyed building this racer with my father, I could sense that my old man had another agenda: He had something to prove.

My mother had grown tired of living with workers in the projects of Jamaica Plain, an ancient Boston neighborhood. She wanted a front porch and her own mailbox. As it turned out, an old buddy from my father’s maritime past was bulldozing some acres of the New England woods to build an electronics factory thirty miles to the north and west of Boston. Since my old man was a self-taught electrical engineer, a gyro gearloose, an inventor and he was pals with the factory owner, a job waited for him once the factory was built.

That’s how my parents, my sister and I moved to the this rural Massachusetts town before rural Massachusetts was called suburbia. Warrington, Massachusetts boasted a population of 5,000 citizens, a pretty place teeming with cows and apples, tractors and farmers, hay-bailers, cider mills, and mechanics.

The FBI called ahead. They wanted the citizens of Warrington to know that a family of Communists had infiltrated the township.

The gentleman who took the call from the FBI was Chairman of the Warrington Board of Selectmen who presided over the town’s quarterly town meeting. He was also a lawyer, the patriarch of a long-reigning, aristocratic family in Warrington with connections to the better banks of Boston and to the gold-domed statehouse of the Commonwealth. On Saturday morning he came to pay us a visit—just thought he’d drop by to say “hello,” get acquainted.

After a pleasant chat full of anecdotes regarding the town’s history this Chairman of the Board of Selectmen told us in no uncertain terms that he didn’t “give a good goldarn what shape or color or political persuasion you folks subscribe to, nobody from Washington, D.C. or anywhere else for that matter…” was going to tell him what to think about his neighbors. Just so long as they abided by common sense, decency, and the statutes of the town charter, we were welcome in Warrington, Massachusetts. And, by the way, he’d love to see us all down at the First Unitarian Church on King Street, Sundays at eleven a.m. “Give you an opportunity to meet some damned fine people in town, here,” he said.

Soon after, we all were invited to a big white farmhouse overlooking Bear Hill Pond. It was summer and school was out. The two families ate lunch and watched the McCarthy hearings on the tiny, blue screen of a brand-new Zenith television set over at the Channing family farm.

Time was lopsided for a New England dairy farmer. Wilbur Channing was up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows and get the morning chores over with before he drove a morning milk route for Herpy’s Dairy. By early afternoon, his work was done until it was time for evening milking. Mary Channing was a farmer’s wife for the 1950s: She helped with the chores, could drive a tractor and clear fouled twine out of the hay baler, kept the huge, rambling old farmhouse tidy and functioning, was active at the church and with the PTA, and paid a lot of attention to her husband, her kids, and her kids’ friends. Unless there was hay to get in, or a piece of machinery or a fence to repair, mid-days were easy, anarchistic times for them. Hence the lunchtime gatherings around the television set.
The Channings ate lunch as if feasts were an everyday occurrence. Later, I learned they were an everyday occurrence: Huge meals, even at lunch, spread out like a stop-action marvel of plenty on the great, round kitchen table. Mary frequently jumped up from her chair to fetch more mashed potatoes and rolls, green peas and squash, all grown in their own garden.

The Channings wanted us to know that they, too, thought it was a damned shame, all this witch hunting in the name of communism and the Iron Curtain. Weren’t the Russians our friends. They were allies during the war? “Why are we now supposed to drop everything, all the friendship and shared sacrifice and all that, and turn ‘em into enemies?” Mary asked in her broad New England accent. “Just doesn’t make sense,” she concluded, as if this was the first time ever that things hadn’t made sense.

Regardless of the support we received from townsfolk like the Channings, my old man was determined to show the farmers, plumbers, and mechanics of Warrington that he wasn’t just some citified, egghead, socialist thinker. Nossir, he was salt of the earth, too. Most of his friends back in Boston were either foreigners, immigrants, or working-class stiffs. Mixed in with the doctors and scientists, the researchers he worked with, were radio and telegraph operators and union organizers and typesetters and merchant seamen—who had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s when it looked like internationalism and labor unions were going to make things okey-doke for the working man and his family.

Despite his brainy reputation, my old man worked with his hands in Boston-based university hospitals, fabricating instruments that would measure minute electronic pulses in a hamster’s cheek pouch and creating timers that could trigger a strobe to capture an object in motion at just the right millisecond. At work in his shop (he called it a “lab”) he rolled up the sleeves of his blue oxford-cloth shirts and wore bow ties that would not get caught in the rotating chuck of a lathe, drill press, or milling machine. He considered himself to be a worker just the same as the farmers and mechanics in Warrington. So, when he put my soapbox racer together, he made damned sure it was a well- and cleverly built showcase for his mechanical prowess.

Beyond its beautiful, red, official-sized, regulation-issue wheels, this buggy-to-beat-all featured a sturdy plywood and Douglas fir frame covered in tempered masonite. We erected a stubborn post of oak to serve as a front frame member and we contoured hard-to-find, state-of-the-art aluminum tubing into an airplane-style steering wheel. At school, I surreptitiously compared notes with several other kids who were building racers. According to my calculations, nobody had such a machine as mine.

Night after night, the racer took shape under the warm cone of light that separated our work area from the dark recesses of the coal bin and the furnace room. My old man taught me as we worked. I learned how to guide a bucking saber saw along a pattern scribed onto a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. He learned how to mix the fine, dry powder of composite resin glue with water in just the right proportions and how to spread the thick, animal-smelling paste over both surfaces before we screwed the masonite skin onto its supporting frame members. I learned how to use a brace and bit to drill the clearance holes for the carriage bolts that would clamp the axle to the floorboard.

At the end of a night’s work, before we shut out the light, we would stand back from the cluttered workbench and admire our progress. I loved to inhale the incense created by our handiwork. Pitch from the plywood and doug fir, vaporized by the friction of drill bits, saw blades, and sandpaper, merged with the fishy odor of the glue pot and the molasses sweetness of my old man’s Pall Malls.
We got down to the final touches, the brakes and the steering gear. Here, we ran into “a few bugs,” as my old man described them. We couldn’t get tension in the cable and pulley steering system, and my father’s specially designed brake wouldn’t always snap back into the “off” position.

While we were trying to work the “bugs” out of this final construction phase, my old man began to lose interest in the soap box racer. Something was happening outside the world we had created in the basement, something big and ominous and unreal, something that took place out there, where soldiers marched on the frozen Korean earth, where men in suits and glasses sat at tables covered with papers and spoke into microphones, and where bathing beauties lined up for inspection by car salesmen.

My old man knew two people who were in prison, in Sing Sing of all places. Sing Sing. It really existed. It wasn’t a movie penitentiary; Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney didn’t spit and snarl through these bars. Sing Sing was a real place, and the people my father knew were real people, a man and a woman with two kids my age.

They were supposed to be spies. Supposedly, they had given secrets about the atomic bomb to the Russians, at least that’s what the newspapers said. The kids at school said they were commies, traitors and that they were going to “get the chair,” both of them, the husband and the wife. I talked back, the way kids do, armed only with the fragments of information he could salvage from my parents’ conversations.

“They didn’t do anything,” I argued. “It’s the government.”

“They’re traitors.”

“We’re just trying to scare people about Russia, so we can make more bombs.”

Paul Delamater, a gangly kid with gigantic red ears and a pink-and-black acetate shirt spread his arms wide and open-throated, mimicked the sound of a dive-bomber, with the accuracy and attention to detail that little boys commit to the sounds of war. “They’re commie spies. The FBI caught ‘em and put ‘em in jail.”

“We shouldn’t be blowing up atomic bombs anyway,” I said. “They make poison.”

“Give ‘em the chair,” another patriot advised, underscoring his conviction with the sound of high voltage coursing through flesh, another little-boy favorite.

I was hopelessly outnumbered. It was like arguing the merits of the Yankees in a Brooklyn school yard, only there, the resemblance stopped. It seemed as if the whole world hated and feared these people and they were going to die. Besides, I carried an unrealized, instinctual conviction that, if I tipped his hand, if I spoke out too loudly, something terrible might happen to me and my family.

At home, my old man couldn’t stop talking about these people, the Rosenbergs. First he got real crabby and wrote a lot of letters. Then he went to meetings in Boston after work and didn’t come home all night. My mother got mad at that and asked him a lot of urgent whispered questions about where he had spent the night.

My old man got very sad. He would lie on the couch after work with his hand over his forehead until it was time to go to bed. I knew better than to bother him at a time like this, but I was getting anxious. Race day was approaching, and they still hadn’t worked out the snags in my car.
Back then, I couldn’t have made the connection, but deep down inside, I’m sure I understood that these people in Sing Sing, this husband and wife, this mother and father who were going to get the chair, they probably thought, talked, and acted a lot like my parents when they had lived in the city, served spaghetti and salad and beer to folks who didn’t shave and had foreign accents, listened to music and drank beer and sang.

In fact, the Sing Sing criminals could have been my parents, but no one was copping to it. There was no explanation, no comfort offered, no distinctions made. No one told my or my sister that we would be safe. The evidence at hand bred jeopardy like bacteria in a petri dish: my old man laid out on the couch in some kind of quiet agony, and my mother, cooking and chatting and straightening up, covering up the shadows, acting as if everything was okay. I couldn’t get my old man down into the basement to work on the car. Race day was scheduled for the first week of May and they still had to fix the brakes and the steering.
* * *
The soap box derby race course was laid out on Water Tower Hill, the steepest, straightest piece of road in town. In New England, it is no easy feat to find a quarter-mile stretch of road that runs in a straight line, uphill, downhill, or on level ground. Most of the roads in town were paved-over carriage roads or farming and hunting trails that followed the path of least resistance through the rolling woodlands and pastures. But the town was growing. With the growth came a demand for more water. A few years before, they had erected a water tower on the highest hill on the poor side of town. In order to build the tower, the public works department had cut a road straight up the hill for the trucks that would carry the big, curved sheets of steel to their point of assembly.

One day, I climbed on my bike and headed up Water Tower Hill. I wanted to see what it was going to be like to run his newly built soap box racer down that grade. My friends and I had all been up Water Tower Hill with their bikes, but we couldn’t use it to get over the hill to the lake, so it wasn’t a heavily-traveled kid route. I could pedal two-thirds of the way up, but the top third was too steep. I couldn’t keep enough momentum going, even when I stood on the pedals and cut back and forth across the road. I had to walk, pushing my bike beside me. I wondered how the construction trucks, carrying those huge metal plates for the water tower, had made it up that steep hill.

At the top of Water Tower Hill I turned and looked down the road that would become the track on race day. I was out of breath; my heart pounded in my chest and ears. The road fell away quickly and narrowed into a thin ribbon that played itself out across the pasture below. I stood there alone for a long time, daring myself to take the plunge. What if I skidded on the gravel? Like all kids who lived on bikes, I could easily recall how it felt to pick sand and gravel out of scraped and bloody elbows and knees. But I had to practice for the race, didn’t I? So I would be ready for the real thing.

I decided to let fate take its hand: The next time a crow cawed, I would shove off down the precipitous slope. The next time a cloud passed in front of the sun, I would do it. The next time...
“Chicken,” I muttered to myself. I knew that would do it. I couldn’t stand being chicken. Resigned to his fate, I pointed the spindly front wheel of my bicycle downhill and took the plunge.

The bike quickly gathered speed on the first pitch. The wind in my ears rose from a flutter to a whistle to a howl. The scenery began to blur and my arms ached with the effort it took to keep the front wheel pointed precisely downhill. One wobble on this gravel and it would be all over. The wind roared in my ears like thunder and buffeted at my chest. I flew down the final pitch and blasted past the muddy foundations and roughed-out framing of the new tract homes being put up on the pastureland at the foot of the hill. Tears whipped back from my eyes. The howl of the wind began to die down and I let himself relax. I didn’t have to pedal once, all the way to the main road.

When I stopped at the intersection, my arms and legs felt as if they were going to fall off, and a funny buzzing nattered in my ears. The taunting voice had disappeared. I had proven I was no chicken, that’s for sure. I promised I would never coast down Water Tower Hill again, at least not on two wheels. In my own sturdy, four-wheel race car, well, that would be different.

Back home, however, my old man was still caught up in the plight of those two supposed Communist spies, the Rosenbergs. I couldn’t understand what they had done wrong—if they had done anything wrong—and, according to his father and his father’s friends, a case against the couple had been built up in court by cowardly and crazy people—turncoat “friends” of the Rosenbergs who would say anything to stay off McCarthy’s blacklist, or to please “the authorities,” whoever they were. The Rosenbergs were about to be executed any day now. It all seemed crazy and weird to me, but very far away. I wanted my old man to stop being so upset about the whole thing and help me finish my soapbox racer before it was too late.

I decided that on Saturday I would try a different ploy to coax my father off the couch and out of his sadness. So after they’d all gone to the grocery store and done a few errands, my old man took his customary horizontal position on the couch.

I sat on the arm. “Hey, Pop,” I said, all casual-like. “I’m going downstairs and workin’ on some of the stuff the car needs. See ya.” I plunged down the basement steps, turned on the shop light, and began making noise with hammers, drills, and sanders. I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn’t care. I wanted to see what my old man would do. If he’d help me finish or not. I wanted to get that car ready by race day. Besides, to get the subject off the commies and the electric chair, I’d been bragging to the other kids for weeks about how cool my racer was. I’d never live it down.

My plan succeeded: Depressed though he might be, my old man wouldn’t let the brainchild of his genius slip through his hands. Down the stairs he came, brusque and grumbling but, in that one Saturday, we fixed the steering, cut and mounted a slab of tire tread onto the foot of the oh-so-clever brake mechanism my father had devised, and painted the car’s fuselage a bright fire-engine red.

After my old man went back upstairs, I opened a can of yellow enamel and hand-wrote his name just below the rim of the cockpit, the way I had seen it done on the soap box racers that had made it to Akron, Ohio for the Nationals. The yellow lettering ran onto the still-wet red enamel, but I wiped each letter with infinite care, tidying them back with a turpentine-soaked rag.
*
Half the town must have turned out on race day. At least all the guys my age and their dads were on hand to check out each other’s cars or to feel dumb and out of it because they hadn’t built a racer. I felt very important as we unloaded the bright red machine from the trunk of my parents’ Henry J., a lemon of a car that the Kaiser automobile company had come out with the year before. It was supposed to be a people’s car, a practical, no-frills, down-to-earth vehicle for the working guy, but, in reality, the car was a piece of junk that began to overheat and fall apart about a month after my old man brought it home. It was embarrassing to own one. But there we were, and I had one of the best-built soap box racers on Water Tower Hill, so the heck with the Henry J.

Each entrant had to measure and weigh his vehicle in front of the authorities to make sure it fell within the official Soap Box Derby regulations for size and weight. As we jockeyed the racer onto the scale, my old man got busy wisecracking to the other dads about how good the car was. I couldn’t tell if he pulled too hard, or if I stumbled on the edge of the scale but I plunged forward and smashed my nose on the car’s plywood backrest.

My nose stung right between the eyes. I yanked my end of the racer off the scales, but my nose stung and I felt half-blind. How was I going to see my way down the hill? I was terrified, but I kept the pain and fear to myself as we loaded the racer into the back of Johnny Contadini’s dad’s plumbing truck and whined slowly up Water Tower Hill in first gear.

My old man asked how “we” were doing. I said “good,” but I couldn’t see what “we” had to do with it: I was going to take the plunge down Water Tower Hill, not him.

A quartet of dads hefted the racer down from the truck and rolled it to the starting line for a practice run. I had borrowed a football helmet from my next door neighbor, Franny (for Francis Xavier) Carpenter. I pulled on the helmet and a pair of leather gloves my mom had bought me specially for the race, but I still felt shaky and blinded from the fall on weight scale.

But the top of the hill and the starting line was crawling with kids and their dads and I wasn’t going to let anybody see how scared I was. I wiggled down into the confines of the cockpit. The car was pointed straight down Water Tower Hill with two burly adults holding onto the rear axle. The race marshal nodded and dropped a green flag, the two burly men let go on my practice run.

The racer began to roar down the steep opening pitch on its hard, rubber-rimmed wheels. The car bounced over the asphalt, but I kept it on the course. After all, I had made it straight down Water Tower Hill on two wheels, hadn’t I? I knew he could make it easy on four, even if my nose was banged up and …

Snap!

In the midst of the rattling roar, the steering cable tore away from the right side of the front axle and came whipping back across my helmet. The steering went loose in my hands and I became a passenger. The car took a hard left off the road, leapt a ditch, plunged through a thicket of underbrush, and smacked into a telephone pole.

I remember sitting in the cockpit, listening to the silence. I may have hit his head on the steering wheel, but I couldn’t recall a blow. I heard men’s voices far away.

A lady’s voice said “Oh my god, oh my god.”

I pushed myself up out of the car and crawled through the underbrush onto the asphalt. Everybody was staring at me. I felt my face redden with embarrassment.

My father arrived out of breath. He grabbed my shoulders, looked at me, wide-eyed. “Are you okay?”

I turned around and went back to my racer. Silently, I pushed through the men and boys that surrounded my car and picked up the loose end of the steering cable.

My father crawled through the underbrush, looked me up and down, turned me around, and dusted me off. “Look at that,” he said to the other men, pointing to the front of the car. “Not a scratch.”

I coiled up the cable, stuffed it into the cockpit and began to drag the soap box back onto the road. My old man joined me.

One of the burly men slapped me on the back of my helmet and said “attaboy.”

I heard cheering and applause as more faceless men pulled my racer back up the hill. As I re-tied the cable to the steering bracket, my old man explained to the assembled males that this was rudder-control cable for airplanes, the real thing. It hadn’t broken, you see, it had just come loose from the turnbuckle.

The practice session was over. Race time. One car after another rolled away from the line and disappeared over the crest of the hill only to reappear long moments later, played out at the bottom of the hill. Most of the cars were raggedy little things with wobbly wheels, but they all made it safely down the hill in one swoop.

I sat on my car, not speaking until it was my turn to race.

My father sat down beside me on the car and looked into my eyes. “You sure you want to go through with this?” he asked.

“If you don’t know, how am I supposed to?” I felt angry, betrayed, alone. Before my old man could answer, I climbed into the racer, settled myself into the seat and pushed against the brakes until my feet burned. “If my brake cable snaps. . .” I didn’t allow himself to finish the sentence. If something busts this time, I thought, what happens? What if I’m going even faster, near the bottom of the hill?

The questions raced through my head. I felt as if another person inside me raised my hand in the air and—for the second time—the burly men pushed me to the start line. The flag dropped, the burly men let go, and Water Tower Hill began to pull me forward. The rising sound of the wind formed a tube separating me from the people and the foliage on the roadside blurring them into elongated splashes of color as I gathered momentum. I felt alone and safe with nothing but the sound of my car and the rattling vibration of the car at speed. The telephone pole hung over me, frozen for an instant in stop-action against the sky and then I was past it. Free and on my own, I could see the finish line, far away but crystal clear.

I was in charge. I felt strong, excited. My body strained forward, urging my car down the course. I whipped out onto the flats past the newborn suburban homes and flashed across the finish line.
*
I came in second, just behind Johnny Contadini. Johnny’s dad had slipped a flywheel from an old Chevy underneath the seat of his kid’s racer before the little bastard flew down the hill. The added weight gave Johnny the momentum he needed to rattle into first place. Two weeks later, Johnny Contadini and his dad went on as local champs to the Soap Box Derby Nationals in Akron, Ohio. Johnny finished 137th and I stacked my racer on its nose out of the way at the back of our garage.

Two weeks later, on a Sunday, the Rosenbergs were electrocuted at Sing Sing. They said that Ethel Rosenberg didn’t die right away. They had to give her two or three extra jolts of high voltage to kill her.

My old man never got the job at his friend’s factory. Their first contracts were to build servo motors for the U.S. government. He couldn’t get a security clearance for government work because he had been a communist back in the 1930s. He had to look for work back in Boston, which was fine with him, because that’s where all his friends were. He never did land a steady job. Instead, a made a living through his scientist friends who tacked him on as incident in their research budgets. He got us through, but I had learned something fundamental. Alone in my car, no one could touch me. I was in control of my life, of my heart, my feelings and my direction home. I never forgot that.
# # #

0 Comments

Hirth from Earth

10/7/2020

1 Comment

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.
# # #

1 Comment

Outside Agitators — resistance in another time*

8/15/2020

0 Comments

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.

# # #

Published originally in Retrospect, Protests

0 Comments

Five Years in Three Acts

8/6/2020

4 Comments

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.”

4 Comments

Covidream 2.1*

7/30/2020

0 Comments

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

0 Comments

On Editing — Before the fact

1/25/2018

0 Comments

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

0 Comments

Trump, Haiti, and tremendo aché

1/13/2018

0 Comments

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

0 Comments

Recollections: Rocked in Time

12/10/2017

3 Comments

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.

3 Comments

Memoir: A Father and Son Reunion

11/28/2017

0 Comments

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.”

0 Comments

<<Previous

Doctor Sunshine — a 20th-century disaster

The Crash

Hirth from Earth

Outside Agitators — resistance in another time*

Five Years in Three Acts

Covidream 2.1*

On Editing — Before the fact

Trump, Haiti, and tremendo aché

Recollections: Rocked in Time

Memoir: A Father and Son Reunion

The author of this blog...

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

Doctor Sunshine

Covidream 2.1

Outside Agitators

The Crash

Archives

American Postcards: growing up absurd in the land of the freeDoctor SunshineCovidream 2.1Outside AgitatorsThe CrashArchives

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

Doctor Sunshine

Covidream 2.1

Outside Agitators

The Crash

Archives