HE BEGAN WRITING HIS NOVEL IN 1936...
AND FINISHED THE FINAL DRAFT eight-years later, when he was 35.  As a writer, what has always fascinated me about the man is this: He finished almost nothing for the remainder of his life, certainly no other major novel. He was by his own account an alcoholic, often fell into delirium tremens, sometimes collapsing into charity wards. He was by most accounts the sort of a drunk who would pass a certain point and become a disgusting bore, was a horrible husband to both of his wives, but about one thing he was convinced, he had created a masterpiece.  

   When the book at last was published in 1947, Malcom Lowry's Under the Volcano,  met with virtually unanimous critical praise. The critics marveled at its classical structure, its dense, layered texture, its feeling for history, its use of symbols and myth, and its powerful examination of an alcoholic's descent into damnation. There was also the legend of Lowry, the man. He was a throwback to the romantic tradition of the artist consumed by his art to the point of his own self-destruction.  Stories of his drunken escapades were common knowledge in most literary circles; he was no isolated inhabitant of an academic ivory tower; he was down there carousing with the bandits and groveling with the cockroaches on the floor of the cantina, passing through paradise on the way to his self-made inferno.  

   The novel was not a popular success, selling only 30 thousand copies in its first 10 years of existence, which, of course, helped feed the legend; nothing reinforces romantic agony better than the feeling of being almost completely ignored.  And later the legend was made whole by the sleazy facts of Lowry's demise.  Eight years after Volcano's publication, Lowry and his wife, Margerie, were finally back home in England, residing in a cottage in Sussex.  But home brought no peace; in 1955 and 1956, he was committed to two different London hospitals for psychiatric treatment, in an attempt to bring a halt to his alcoholism.  By this time, Lowry had failed three times to commit suicide, twice to kill his wife.  

   On June 26th of 1957, he had another clash with Margerie and threatened to kill her.  She ran to a neighbor's house and spent the night.  Lowry was found the following morning in his bedroom, a plate of dinner scattered on the floor, along with an almost empty gin bottle and a broken bottle of sodium amytal.  He'd swallowed more than 20 tablets. At the end of Under the Volcano, a major character's dying words are: "Christ, what a dingy way to die."  He was buried in the appropriately named town of Ripe.  

   Before he fell headlong into death's dark ocean, Lowry himself longed to write the screen version of his own novel.  It never happened.  And I often think that there was a possibility that he may have asked himself: 'If only I had...'  'And what if...? Considering that Under the Volcano is now eleventh on the list as one of the of best English-language novels written in the twentieth-century.

   It was finally made into a film in 1984.  The director of the movie was the seventy-seven years old, John Houston, five times married, director of thirty-eight motion pictures, actor in dozens more, storyteller, poker player, horseman, long-ago prizefighter, legend. When asked why he chose to direct the film, Houston's smiled: "There are certain men who accept fate stoically, knowing that for them it is too late to change or compromise; in an odd way, Lowry was one of them.  The novel is one of the best of our generation, surely.  There are those who put it on the same plane as Ulysses and Waste Land and The Magic Mountain.   The problem was that he was in such a fret, a true emotional ice-jam, he would not allow himself to even contemplate more masterpieces, to see the truly excellent writer he actually was. And that is genuinely tragic."

THE COLLECTIVE PUBLIC FACES WILL BE...
MADE UP OF THE USUAL SUSPECTS: Rick Perry and Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum and the ever-mustached John Bolton - these yahoo crusaders will once again be loudly pounding the drums of freedom, trembling with disgust at the terrifying thought that anyone would dare to oppose them.  All of them will be gathered in Houston, Texas in May of next year for the 142nd Annual Meeting of the National Rifle Association.   

  Their steel faces and inflamed eyes, their tearful and apocalyptic solutions to American freedom: more pistols and rifles and automatic weaponry. Led by Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the organization, a man who once described federal agents as, "Jack-booted government thugs, who wear Nazi bucket helments and black storm trooper uniforms," they are desperate for a new enemy.  

  They have found one, and as usual, it is other Americans with some degree of sanity and self-respect and human-decency, those who remember the day when a man named Adam Lanza entered the Sandy Hook Elementry School in Newtown, Connecticut on the 14th day of December in 2012 with an automatic weapon in his hand,  and cut down 26 innocent people, 20 of whom were first-graders; as well as the many more who followed in the year since that godawful incident.  

  Basically, LaPierre is a professional lobbyist.  That is to say that, like a priest, a theologian or a romantic revolutionary, he is exclusively dedicated to the service of gun manufacturers.  LaPierre's gun-toting vision is not limited to the inarguable formulas for the respect of others lives, complete legal  and political equality and full opportunity for those opposed to his stance.  Like most megalomaniacs he doesn't want opposition.  He wants to overthrow the entire system of those who simply want background checks.  During the past decade, when the country shifted to the left and millions of Americans rejected the harder ideologies of the NRA, LaPierre labored on with revolutionary zeal.

   That zeal was shaped by the social upheavals when the Tea Party, with no positive program, arrived upon the scene. Men and women and children with an almost religious embrace of "The Second Amendment," found both both a focus and an engine for LaPierre.  PaPierre's basic formulation was simple:  "President Obama is trying to take your guns away." 

  But for all LaPierre's passion and occasional brilliance, even some gun-toting folk who applaud his zeal find some of his vision indefensible. He dismisses them all, firm in his belief that he has discovered the truth.  His common enemy is that vague concept: background checks.  LaPierre's basic legal theory is that gun discrimination is a form of governmental intrusion of "the right to bear arms."  He then instituted what he called "The School Shield Program," which would allow every school in America to have an armed police presence.  And he has had some limited success.  

  But the NRA never surrenders.  They have gathered various mountebanks from the religious right, have written articles, given interviews and held public hearings, vetoed political descent behind voters who kicked opponents out of office, and put a halt to any Congressional point of view.  Back in 2000, LaPierre said that Bill Clinton tolerated a certain amount of gun violence to score points for gun control and for his party, to which his spokesman, John Lockhart, replied, "...this is really sick rhetoric and should be reputed by anyone who hears it." 

  That is the heart of this grim little crusade.  LaPierre has grander plans for us all.  Like the wonderful folks who brought us Prohibition, he wants he and his allies to impose their vision and their rules on the entire country, the furious, fear-driven shoot-'em-up visions to become the law of the land.

   Surely, that requires a sane response from the rest of us.  In the sad and bitter world of Wayne LaPierre, there is no wide understanding of a species capable of living life without being armed-to-the-teeth, of forgiving our endless desire to have another solution, whatever that solution may turn out to be. And I hope that my grandchildren will never forced to live in his fearful new world.     

I AM IN THAT CURIOUS STRETCH OF LIFE WHERE I AM NO LONGER YOUNG...

AND NOT OLD ENOUGH TO BECOME A CORPSE.  Having arrived in that curious zone where I am now decades past being pubescent and not yet bereft of life, I would be a fraud if I said I had no regrets. I have committed my share of absurdities, was a somewhat deplorable husband, tried to be a flawless father but made many mistakes, and the jury is still out as to whether I am or am not a good grandfather.  Down through the years, I have treated some women badly and failed others; through idleness or imbibing in work, I also allowed some fine friendships to deteriorate.  As you tumble into old age, however, you somehow learn to forgive yourself. You acquire a sense of proportion about your own relative misbehavior. The damage of the past is done; there is nothing you can do to avoid it or repair it.   Popeye was dead on when he said, "I yam what I yam an' that's all I yam."

  If I regret anything, it is the loss of the illusions of my youth. This is a familiar process, of course, better men than I have acquired the same sorrowful knowledge. It is difficult to explain to the young the potent excitement that attended the election of John F. Kennedy or the pounding hole his death blew through this country.  More impossible still to tell them that there actually was a time, when I was young, that Americans thought change could be effected through politics; and that my two grandchildren still cannot believe that there was once a world without television or the internet and that I had once lived in it.     

  It was 30 years ago when I first took note suddenly in the window of a store that there was a chunky middle-aged stranger looking back at me.  At the same time, white hairs mysteriously sprouted from my scalp.  The hard, invincible body I thought I possessed when I was young was forever gone.  I once worked 70 hours straight without sleep, belting down coffee, smoking too many cigarettes.  I now take afternoon naps, sleep less, rise before dawn, have become aware that hair seems magically to bud forth from my nose and spring from my ears on an almost weekly basis, I urinate more often than I once did, and I now avoid whenever possible the brittle chatter of cocktail parties, due to a minor loss of hearing.

   And yet, sometimes I wake up in the morning and in the moments between sleep and true consciousness, I am once again in my college dormitory when I was 20, full of possibilities and dreams, with my whole life spread out before me.  When I realize that I am 77 and no longer that confused romantic boy, I am filled with an amazing sense of sadness, and give a moment's though to my past sins, both mortal and venial.

  The up-beat side to all of this, however, is that in a few more months, they'll be playing the first games of another season of baseball, and I will be able to see a fresh new rookie try to hit a curve ball, exactly like I tried to do so many years ago. The snow will melt, lakes will make churning sounds, the trees will become noisy with birds, and my hope is that I won't be a carcass in a casket listening to folks looking down at me and saying, "My goodness, the cosmetologist certainly did a good job on him.  Now that he's finally checked out, he looks better  as a cadaver than he did when he was still full of piss and vinegar..."

I WALKED DOWN A CORRIDOR...
TO A SERIES OF DESKS where I was asked to pay first and be tested later.   All of this was new to me, and oddly strange; it was like a chophouse demanding payment before serving me food.  At every step of this process, money came first.  There was a cynical assumption behind each and every contact in this unfamiliar world: All of you are deadbeat parasites, and I was amazed by the fact that nobody else in the surgery center waiting room seemed to be neither shocked nor stunned by being called a rip-off artist.  

 So I paid to have my blood pressure taken.  I was then asked to breathe into a machine and to pay in advance for the anesthesia.  I had now begun my private tour into the bizarre and secluded domain of the pay as you go diseased and debilitated.  

 I am one of those fortunate human beings who are almost never physically sick.  Over the previous 60 years, I had been in a hospital only twice as a patient: for the repair of a broken nose and for a bout with mononucleosis.  As a former Lutheran minister, of course, I'd been in dozens of hospitals, tending to the ill, serving emergency-room death watches, comforting family, all of which were part of my craft, but not my life.  And even though it was only a minor procedure, I found myself filled with a sense of dread.  I was on a gurney. I gazed up, seeing faces distorted by my point of view and by anesthetic.  The doctor entered my eye. In a minute or two, one eye of the cataract surgery was completed.  One down and one to go.

 Late that night, alone in that drowsy fog prior to falling asleep, I began to think about the eye surgeon, who had yet to charge me a penny.  Hell, this goddamned thing is probably going to cost me an Arm and a Leg, no matter how much insurance coverage I have!  It seemed absurd, even outrageous, that I had to be thinking about the almighty dollar when it came to the salvation of my own health, God bless America.

 I then began thinking about folks who are truly ailing. Maybe something had gone wrong on the operating table, some stupid failure of their body or the doctor's skill; it had happened to people I knew.  Even with the Affordable Care Act, those with chronic deceases still have to pay insurance.  I began to think about the people I would miss if my life ended: my son and daughter, my granddaughter and grandson and my friends.  Their faces moved in and out of my mind; I spoke to some of them and hugged others.  Then I saw and heard some of those other people, places, and things that made my life a life.  I thought about never again being able to see the the light spilling above the valleys of Colorado like it had done when I was young, of never again having the ability to read Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain and Elmore Leonard, or ever again seeing another World Series. And what about all the words I hadn't written or said to the people I really cared about, people I didn't see much...

 ...Only because I happened to reside in the one industrial country in the entire world that did not have a universal health care system?

50 YEARS HAVE COME AND GONE...

SINCE THAT FATEFUL DAY IN DALLAS. Documentaries and docudramas have been made.  We've watched the Zapruder film over and over again.  We've read cheap fiction about the assassination of our President and boondoggle theories of conspiracy after conspiracy; until the consensus finally came to be that he was  killed by a lone punk with a mail-order gun that sold for $12.78.  

     The punk was liquidated on TV two days later.

      In the end, nothing was resolved.  

      If there was a conspiracy, the potters got away with it.  

    At the same time, other narratives have helped to debase the metal of the man: smarmy memoirs of women who said that they slept with him and others who said they did and did not. There was endless retailing of the gossip about his alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe, complete with half-baked theories about the origins Don Juan complex, saying that he was revolting against his mother's rigid Catholicism or imitating his dad's own philandering.  

   Two other events helped eclipse the memory of Jack Kennedy.  One was the rise of Robert Kennedy.  In his own brief time on the public stage, Robert understood that Jack's caution had prevented him from fully using the powers of the Presidency.  If Jack was a man of the fifties, the later Robert Kennedy was a man of the sixties, that vehement and disturbed era that started with the assassination in Dallas and did not truly end until Richard Nixon's departure from the White House in 1974.  The murder of Robert Kennedy in 1968 played a part in the revision of the Kennedy legend.  In a quite different way, the process was completed by  the incident in Chappaquiddick.  

     In the years that followed, the country grew tired and decided to be free of the endless tragedy of the Kennedy's.  

    And after Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, it was no accident that once we had been entranced by a president who looked like a movie star, then the next step would be to find a movie star that looked like a president,  which we did, and he gave us us trickle-down economics, allowing the affluent to become filthy rich and the poor to go bankrupt.  Then came "The Oreo Cookie Syndrome," where Bill Clinton found himself sandwiched between the George Herman Walker Bush and his boy, George W., who gave us an unnecessary war built upon fairy tale fibs, leaving 4 thousand of our military dead and thousands of innocent Iraqis slain.  And now we have Obama, our first African-American President, who has given us The Affordable Care Act and a promise of hope, a commitment still on hold, due to Republican obstinacy and opposition.

   Years later, long after the murder in Dallas and the Vietnam war, after Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had been killed,  after Woodstock and Watergate - after all had changed from the world I knew in 1963, I still miss Jack Kennedy, in spite of his obvious flaws.  

     I can hear his voice still coming to me, insisting that the world must be challenged and life itself embraced.    

      He remains in memory as a man of wit, irony, courage: all combined with the way he honored artists and writers and musicians, inviting them to the White House for splendid dinners, insisting that Robert Frost read a poem at the inauguration.  He enjoyed Ian Fleming's books about James Bond; and brought James Baldwin and Pablo Casals to the White House. 

    Not many writers have felt comfortable in the White House in all the years since...

NONE OF US WANT TO BE BEATEN OR KILLED...

BECAUSE OF THE COLOR OF OUR SKIN.  It's despicable when  whites do it to blacks; it is equally disgusting when blacks do it to whites, and the single most damaging change in the last few years here in America is the racism - black and white - unleashed since the day that a black man was elected as the President of the United States. What is extraordinary is that the general population hasn't risen in outrage.  

 A major reason for this passivity in the face of torment is the deepening cynicism and fatalism of most Americans.  For the last decade, our politicians have cheated, lied, plundered and become more and more corrupt; and in the larger cities like Chicago and Detroit anti-white hostility has grown more rapidly than at any time since the months following the murder of Martin Luther King.  Seldom has the level of social disparity been as drastic as it is today. Many young blacks and Latinos  seem to be spoiling for a fight; to some extent this need to strike back is understandable; but the level of racism isn't lowered by such collisions.  

 One one hand, the ferociously rich eat their way through our culture, consuming food, wine, art, real estate, companies, stores, entire neighborhoods.  They are all appetite and no soul.  The squalor of others seems not to bother them, the sight of the homeless neither disturbs them nor do they seem to care about it.  It is as if they are saying, "Hey, man, there's nothing I can do about that.  After all, it's not my fault that those people are the way they are."

 Every year, another fragment of grace or style or craft is obliterated, to be replace by the brutally functional or the commercially coarse. Sacking and smashing has become a way of life, perpetrated by political pillagers, who never rest, and when they strike, their energy is brutal.  Food Stamps and Social Security come under attack, the rights of women are defamed and disparaged, voting rights are ground down and civil rights devoured, immigration is dismissed as a fruitless fool's errand, while the working poor are demonized by the refusal of some in the political establishment to raise the minimum-wage. The steady grinding force of menace has become commonplace.

 That enervating sense of menace isn't mere paranoia.  We live here, where the bullets are killing children.  A young man is attacked and killed by a pack of kids looking for a black man to kill.  A tourist is stabbed to death in a subway while defending his mother because they are white. A street-smart Latino is approached by a panhandler demanding money, who jams a knife into his heart and kills him. Headlines, as usual, scream for a couple of days. But there is no outrage.  

 The rich, of course, continue to live well-defended lives.  But for millions of others, there is never any relief from the dailiness of  the menace of being mugged or the risk of a predator hiding just around the corner, strangers kill shoppers in malls and men and women are slaughtered in cinemas; we buy thousands of door locks and alarms and attack dogs, go to karate classes and apply to legally carry guns; but nobody feels safe.  If all of this is by now familiar, there seems no way to turn it around with the oratory of optimism.  

 It seems as if the humiliating sideshow of the poor will continue to slide deeper into decay, the middle class will flee our cities in greater numbers, drugs and crime and despair and illiteracy and disease will continue to rise, the division between black and white America will widen, the rich will become richer; and nobody in Washington who can do something about it seem to care - that is the horror of all horrors.

 The hypocrisy is that they are now more interested in their own re-election than they are in the the salvation of the American Dream. 

 Perhaps it would be best if these macho men with syrupy platitudes be voted out of office and replaced by men and women who have a sense of human decency and desire that all Americans can live the rest of their lives with a modicum of grace; who cannot and will not be coerced by immoral men and women who only want to reduce all discourse to the most primitive level.

We need to elect people who know that E pluribus unum was not intended to be a giant mockery...

THE RADIO CHATTERERS ON THE RIGHT...

CONTINUE TO RELEASE THEIR FEROCIOUS BARRAGES, attacking the President for everything he does and every word he speaks and where it was that he was actually born, in spite of certifiable evidence to the contrary. The Republicans, who cheered the "Affordable Care Act" when Governor Romney enacted it in Massachusetts, have suddenly developed wings of opposition and attack, dismissing the newest version as "Obama Care," and calling the President anti-American Marxist nut job; while journalists and reporters tend to dance around the fact that many folks on the Right are plain-ol'-racists, not facing the verifiable truth or implications of disaster with the venomous tone of those on the Right. The Washington  press corps are not cheerleaders, of course; they must maintain a certain objectivity. Few of them, however, like to face the question, "Why can't you tell it like it actually is?"

 The slashing, lacerating use of language came into the discourse with The Tea Party, in a tone which is sometimes apocalyptic and always judgmental, and its essential component is always an insult. They deride women.  They detest Muslims.  They disdain labor. They despise anyone with another viewpoint.  

 These days, the Washington press corps seem to wear a self-absorbed sneer themselves, as they have slowly morphed into becoming pundits, leaving journalism somewhere back there in the dust. They guffaw at any expression of idealism. They look for gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies.  They doubt the veracity of National Security and question the IRS and at others for not being transparent enough. They fill columns with the assumption being that everyone has a dirty little secret, with the exception of themselves, of course; and one's duty is to pretend to make sad sounds and sniff it out, then do nothing at all about it, other than to masquerade as objective journalists, that is...

 ...And lost in this malignant process is the art of attempting to understand the viewpoint of the opposition and the practice of art of give-and-take.  Give us the whole loaf or nothing is now the way we govern.  God is on our side  They are always wrong.  We are always right.  We can make you feel better.  We can make you happy.  We promise not to tell you that the world is complicated.  If it weren't for them, your life would be perfect.  So allow us to do all of the thinking for you. 

 Thus, we have now become a nation which indicts the other side for being too liberal or too conservative, too soft or too callous, too indifferent to public opinion or too afraid of consensus and too dim-witted to know the difference...

 How sad for us all. 

IT WAS BREATHTAKING...

AND I WAS BOWLED OVER BY THAT, due to the fact that it was exactly the sort of a place a couple of decades ago I would have despised anybody for going to.  

 One of the great things about getting a little bit of pocket money to spend is that you can do all those things that you used to eat your heart out about when you watched other folks doing it and detested them for it: sitting around in an exquisite restaurant wearing sunglasses that cost what you used to earn in a month, ordering up flamboyant indulgences like  a dab of Beluga Caviar, being pampered hand and foot by - and get this, this is a very important and significant part of what happens to you in an East Hampton restaurant - staff who treats you as if you were rich and famous, whether you actually are or not - they truly and sincerely want you, not just any old guy sitting around in a sun hat and glasses, but you personally, to feel that there is nothing in this best of all possible worlds that you have come to for you to concern yourself about anything in any way at all.  We don't even dislike you for being as loaded as we think you are. 

 The home I was staying in was extremely pleasant, incidentally.  I'm sure you are anxious to know what it was like, since you may or may not be able to afford to go there on your own.  It was not what one would call enormous but it was very comfortable and sunny and tastefully decorated in pastels softened by the addition of gypsum.  My favorite item was the balcony that overlooked a bit of the ocean because it had an awning that automatically raised and lowered depending upon where the sun stood in the sky.  I thought that this was very funny.  I would sit and laugh and laugh and laugh and have another shot or two of Glenlivet Scotch and then laugh some more.

 We now come to another rather embarrassing part of the story about which I have so far been extremely silent.  I was in the Hampton's on money that I hadn't actually earned. Nor had I stolen it.   I simply inherited it and I hope very much that you will forgive me for having said that you may or may not be able to go there on your own, because I couldn't afford it either, and I promise I won't mention it again.  

 Allow me to be aboveboard, there's nothing harder than being a ludicrous impostor with a devil-may-care attitude pretending to be something that they are not. It's desperate stuff, yet one of the most blissful joys of doing it is to be able to pull-it-off, even for just a little bit; although the unfinishedness of it is that your bankroll will eventually peter-out.  

 So I asked myself, what difference does that make?   There have been  idle ne'er-do-wells who had no problem passing themselves off as something that they were not since the days of the female pirate Anne Bonney back in the 1700's, an Irish lass who cross-dressed and disguised herself as a male in order to team-up with her lover, Jack Rackham, and had a hell of a time pillaging Spanish treasure ships off Cuba and Hispaniola until the British Navy captured her along with her lover.  He was hanged.  She was pregnant and no record of her execution has ever been found.  Rumor had it that she eventually became a tavern owner in the south of England, where she regaled the locals with the tales of her exploits.   

 Maybe that is why I enjoyed it as much as I did, by virtue of the fact that I was having a hell of a time, too.  I was now in a world which compared to a pre-fall Eden, an entire innocent and benign Paradise of the well-to-do, never burdening myself with the task of justifying the fact that I did not actually belong in such a heady crowd; and thus remained inextinguishably happy.  

 I was, after all, at the pinnacle of one of the most sublime moments of my life.  Not because I was mingling with the those folks who had it made, but because I was in a place of magnificent and stunning beauty in the atmosphere of what nature can do, where you could find the stars and the sea, both intermixed in the realms of pure, creative artistry.  Not a bad place at all for a man with limited means to find himself...even for a little bit...

BEFORE I BELLY FLOP INTO THE MIND SLUDGE...

I AM ATTEMPTING CLARIFY, I think I ought to give fair warning that my upper story wit has been a bit far-out of late, so if I  occasionally do go off on something that seems to be utterly foolish and completely meaningless, my hope is that you will forgive me...

 ...For example, my first thought upon awakening this morning was trying to recall the overnight dream I had about casting the perfect people for roles in my version of the American Revolution, which I would call "The Little Boycott That Was." My Cast would include: Adam West, the original Batman on television, as General George Washington, Senator Ted Cruz as Benedict Arnold, and  Dick Cheney or Glen Beck as a cross-dressing Betsy Ross. With a guest cameo appearance by Sophia Loren as the mentally-cracked grandmother "Liberty Belle," a completely fictional character, of course, but one who would undoubtedly add a little pizazz to an otherwise well-known tale.

 I then gave thought about the fact that I was standing on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and was not at all upset by that.  Curiously enough, my mind instantaneously began to ask me what I would do if I were the Pope lounging around in the Vatican nibbling on peanut butter and saltines, when I decided that I would temporarily give up the papal crown to go scuba diving in Australia, out beyond the Great Barrier Reef to the wonderful clarity of the Coral Sea - and then stop off for a burger at a McDonald's on the way home; and after arriving back in Rome, as I stood in front of the usual big Easter Sunday crowd gathered to hear me speak, began to make fun of Jesus.

  As I washed the breakfast dishes, I gave pause to ask why it is that out of sand we make glass, from glass we make lenses, from lenses we make telescopes - and with those thoughts in mind, I suddenly wondered what had become of my eyeglasses?  It turned out I was still wearing them and had nothing to worry about; and I thought about the possibility that there may be billions of universes, and there were a whole lot of other guys somewhere out in the vast solar system who were puzzled about where they had left there glasses, too.  I rather loved that notion, and began to chuckle...

 ...All other sorts of entities began rapidly running through my mind as I dried my dishes.  I became aware that I was unaware of other possibilities out there in the universe, like the fifty-fifty chance of being able to order a simple apple pie a la mode in another far-off galaxy, or if they have the simple things like tables, chairs, rocks, and so on, along with cats and cows and silicon chips.  

 Let my try to illustrate what I mean.  This is very speculative; I'm really going out on a limb here, because it's something I know nothing about whatsoever, so I think of this more as a thought experiment rather than I real explanation of something.  What exactly is fungus, for instance?  What does it mean if fungus is dimorphic?  Does it apply only to mold and mildew or other things like earwax and nasal hair? To figure something like that out when you don't really have a clue - I began to think about an awful lot of other things I was also unsure about, as I'm certain a lot of other people do, because there is this theory and that theory, this bit of information and that bit of information about almost everything; and you really don't know what to make of any of them, since they seem to zip past you in a flash.

 Before we go on, allow me back up for a moment and talk about God.  I would argue that if there is an actual God, and we should probably bear in mind that there could be, why not allow Him-or Her to worry about all of this stuff and feel free not to think about anything at all?  I do find it curious, however, that if God does actually exist, why He-or-She did not invent the computer sooner so that the folks who wrote the Bible didn't have to waste so much time sitting around in sand inside a darkened cave without any underwear on and having to scratch away at themselves in a frenzy to relieve the itch until it caused a rash, or scribbling stuff down on papyrus and parchment and ruining their eyes because of a lack of electricity?  No wonder there are so many agnostics and atheists.

 Nevertheless, it occurs to me that if you think some of the above is utter nonsense and wish to disregard any of it or all of it or even the smallest portion of it, I am quite OK with that.  I do, however, beg your forgiveness, in that I did not realize that it was already 10 o'clock in the morning and time for my afternoon nap, and apologize that I cannot share my afternoon thoughts  with you until I, once again, awaken...

WHY I HAVE FRETTED FOR YEARS...

ABOUT BEING A GRUMPY TRAVELER and just don't relax and have a drink is mostly due to the fact that I have never seemed to be up-to-snuff when it came to taking a pleasure trip of any sort, particularly a long one.  First of all, there are many folks who are much better at reading guide books than I am.  I often read them on the way back from where I have been and am astonished when I find out what I have missed.

 My wish has always been that I could be the adventurous sort of a man James Bond always seemed to be, one who was able to spend an inordinate amount of time on a glamorous gleaming golden boat surrounded by two bikini-clad women who graciously ushered me aboard, then pampered me and waited on me  hand and foot, one offering me a glass of champagne while the other bent in front of me while giving me a robust and yet gentle loin massage.

 That, however, has never seemed to be the case.  There was an island I once visited briefly.  It was a pretty atrocious place.  The island itself was charming.  The resort built on it was not. It was a perfect example of what not to do to a beautiful subtropical island, which is to cover it with hideous high-rise junk architecture, and sell beer and picture postcards of how beautiful it used to be before all the postcard shops arrived.  I had ended up there on a fluke, exhausted and disappointed.  The brochure was splattered with words like "international" and "superb" and "sophisticated," and what that meant is that they had Mariachi music pumped out of the palm trees and themed fancy-dress parties every night. 

 By day I would sit at a table by the pool, slowly sipping on tequila and listening to conversations at nearby tables which seemed mostly to be about who and where somebody had gotten mugged along about dusk on the evening before.  I usually spent the evening at a table by myself getting stonkered and listening to conversations nearby and retired woozily to my room in order to pump out the remains of the alcohol I had recently downed, while other folks were rampaging half-naked through the night in whatever costume the theme of the evening was.  

 On one occasion I happened to talk to a German couple on the beach late one afternoon in between the smallish squalls of rain and wind and blowing sand. They lived on a pig farm 80 miles east of Dusseldorf , where all they ever heard, they said, was the squealing of little piglets sloshing about in the mud.   I said that must be rather boring. They said that it was, and added that they loved the Mariachi music which was still pumping through the palm trees in spite of the wind and rain and sand, because it had a real bounce to it.  They then happened to take note of the fact that I not only had vomit stains on my shirt but my fly was also unzipped. After that the conversation quickly petered out.

 It was then and there that I realized there was a huge difference in the adventurer I wanted to become and the sloth that I actually was.  I suddenly felt like an extremely idiotic American whom everyone one would loath and deride and point at and make fun of, a hopeless joke of a man...

 ...The huge great thing is that my load has recently somewhat eased-up, in that I seldom venture out these days. There is an occasional trek to the neighborhood grocery now-and-again, of course, but I now find myself addicted to watching the Travel Channel and old James Bond movies on TV, which saves not only time and money, but the rawness of being derided and mocked by folks I hardly even know in languages I barely understand.   

I SHOULD SAY RIGHT-OFF-THE BAT...

THAT DOWN THROUGH THE YEARS I have grown less than enamored about having any real or imagined  relationship with any animal whatsoever.  I did not want to feed them, give them a bed, groom them, find kennels for them when I go off on a vacation, or arrange for some neighbor to shoot at them when they annoy me.  I did not, in short, ever want to own one ever again.  On the other hand, I now find myself in a rather awkward position, in that I do now have a somewhat recent and clandestine relationship with two dogs.  And as a consequence I think that I may be changing my mind. 

 The dogs live with my Son and his girlfriend.  They reside in Sacramento, California, which is an odd place for a dog, or indeed, anyone else, to live; since it happens to be in the State of California.  If you have ever visited or spent time in California, then let me say this: the odds are that you might be becoming an addle brained eccentric.  I can't bother to explain why I say that, in that I, too, now happen to be a resident of California; so the best thing for me to do is just leave well-enough-alone, other than mention that many of the Californians that I have seen thus far seem to enjoy a morning run, jog, or gentle stroll in order to live a healthier lifestyle, which a former New Yorker like myself never ever began to think about, and I found it more than a bit off-base that they would want to take their dogs on the jog with them, in that I seriously doubt whether the dogs give a hoot-in-hell about their own health or how well-toned their owners happen to be.

  The names of the two dogs are Loki and Moe.  Moe is the real classic of the two, obviously a mix between a schnauzer and dachshund, who turned out to be rather good-looking. Loki is vaguely sort of a hound sort of thing with some other breed like a pit-bull tossed-in as an after thought, a little like a poorly mixed salad which did not turn-out all that well. They seemed to be so deliriously pleased to see me when I first met them that the two of them jumped upward with all four legs simultaneously.  Once the jump was completely done, they would sniff and lick one another on the heinie, then attempt to do the same thing to my face.  My advice: Do not ever allow a dog to get close enough to your face to give it a lick after you know where their tongue has recently been.

 The way in which Moe would signify every morning that she was aware of my presence was was to allow me to see her scratch her ear with her paw.  This was also the way she let me to know that she was ready for a long and pleasant morning walk around the backyard, it was also her way to signify that she wanted to be allowed back into the house, and the method by which she would signify that she was ready to eat. It was, in short, her way of life.  A Morse Code of sorts in a simplified form.  I began to feel that I knew her well enough to admit to myself that she was either a brilliant dog or I was a somewhat birdbrained man.  Either way, it seemed to work out well for the both of us.

 Loki, on the other hand, seemed to be fond of taking a lick or two at my crotch whenever I chose to sit down in a chair.  She was extraordinarily good-natured and long-suffering about this whenever I would shoo her away, but every now and then would get monumentally fed up, and would execute an about-turn with her ears flapping, go to a corner of the room where she eyed me, gave me an extremely disappointed look and gently start gnawing her own left rear foot as if she were bored with me anyway.

 Further depths to their thinking were revealed when my Son's girlfriend Ginny told me not to even attempt to throw a ball for Loki or Moe to chase, that the two of them would just sit there and watch stony-faced as the ball went upward and then downward, and at last dribbled along the grass to a halt. They just hung out all day, every day. They would moon around at my feet and keep nudging at my elbow and rest their chins on my lap and gaze  mournfully up at me in the hope that I would see a reason to give them a pat-or-two so that they could continue to ignore me.

 In the evening Loki and Moe would be fed, watered, and trot off to bed for the night.  Which seemed to me to be a fine arrangement, because I got all the pleasure of their company, which was beginning to become immense, without having any responsibility for them.  And it continued to be a fine arrangement till the day when Ginny and my Son moved to another house and left me to care for Loki and Moe by myself until I, too, made the move.  

 It was a couple of weeks after that when Loki turned up bright and early in the morning ready and eager to ignore me on her own.  No Moe.  Moe was not with her.  I was startled. I had no way of knowing what had happened to Moe and no way of finding out, because she wasn't mine.

 "Has she been run over by a car?  Is she lying somewhere, bleeding on the street?" I asked Loki.  Loki looked restless and worried, too, but seemed unable to give me an answer.  I put on my shoes and hurried out with Loki trailing along after me.  Eventually, I realized that Loki wasn't looking for Moe at all, that she was only taking a sniff-or-two at other dog's turds that were strewn-about on the grass like she was Captain Ahab chasing a whale, so I returned to the house, and Loki sat at my feet and moped.  All I could do was sit and worry in silence.  That night, I slept badly.  

 And in the morning Moe was back.  She looked sly.  It looked to me as if she may have been out attempting to rob a bank.  I knew that she had been up to something. We went out for a walk.  I was embarrassed, frankly.  I actually wanted to know where she had been, what she had been up to while she was gone, and why she refused to tell me where she went?  In other words, I had missed having her around. 

  It was a few days later when I had to tell them that the three of us were about to move into the new house.  I tried to explain this to the dogs, to prepare them for it, but they seemed to be in denial.  They began to keep their distance, became tremendously interested in listening to anyone else's voice other than mine.  They began to ignore me, and I felt odd about that.  The only time the two of them seemed happy was when Ginny popped-in for a visit.  

 I knew right-then-and-there that sooner-or-later I would have get a dog of my own, and for some odd reason that really pleased me...  

ANYBODY WHO KNOWS ME...

WILL KNOW WHAT A BIG THRILL IT IS FOR ME to have a chat with my readers.  What is actually taking place here is that you are about to trail along with me as I battle my way to the conclusion of what you may or may not think is an inconsequential cock-and-bull story, so allow me to begin by stating that that some portions of what follows may be slightly out-of-focus, due to the alcoholic stupor I was in when many of these adventures were taking place. This also may be a complete fib, in fact. I ought to have said, "Were a guesstimate of what I thought might be taking place." First of all, you must realize that it is a very difficult and grueling and lonely business to write down everything you once did while you were boozed up unless you really, really, really want to do it... 

 ...So I will begin by saying that I once loved Scotch in every way.  I loved the way it looked in the bottle, that rich golden color; adored the names on the labels arranged on the shelf behind the bar - Johnnie Walker Black Label and Glennfiddich and Glenlivet Nadurra; and was stuck on the particularly smoky, peaty aromas of the single malts. In fact the only thing I didn't like about Scotch is that if I took the merest sip of the stuff it would befriend me and encourage me to drink more of it, and I would then begin to jaunt about in a very peculiar and somewhat offish manner, caroming into people and knocking over bar stools and howling at myself in the bar's restroom mirror; therefore, I knew I had to force myself to learn how to drink other intoxicants, because barking at oneself in a mirror would also cause me to say to my mirror image in a loud voice, "What in the hell are you barking at, you freakish oaf?"  It would then take me about two-hours to figure out that I was talking to myself, and that I must immediately go forth and find the world's most boring drink, one which I could sip with no ill effects whatsoever...

  ...I soon gave a shot at sipping Margaritas, but they also made me do some far-out and freakish things.  Whenever I had a few of them I would awaken in the morning with a jittery sense of apprehension as to where it was that I may or may not have left my pants and underwear; and the astonishing thing about that was when I happened to look down, I seemed to be still wearing them both.  If my pants and underwear were still on, not only had I been on an injudicious binge, I had apparently failed to chalk-up a score with an itinerant female who was not only down on her luck, but desperate for love from any guy who happened to be reeling toward her along the dimly-lit street in the middle of Hell's Kitchen at three o'clock in the morning.  

 So I immediately took-a-turn at downing Stolichnaya vodka, in light of the fact that most of my fellow New Yorkers did so, and they were very smart and sophisticated and New Yorky, but, most important of all, it made me look as though I had couth, too; although I occasionally conversed in a rather rambling fashion when under the influence and generally found myself eventually talking only to myself, wondering why everyone else seemed to be sneaking off elsewhere at the very moment I began my usual blathering discourse on the comparative philosophies of Sophocles and Plato.

 I then took-another-turn at a Bloody Mary or two, but only ever had them at brunch on a Sunday morning.  I have no explanation for this, because it never occurred to me to have a Bloody Mary in the normal course of any other day, but put me in a restaurant on the Sabbath and I made for the Stoli and tomato juice like a nymphomaniac on the hunt for a one-legged man.

 Much to my surprise, I then found myself having to beat the bushes for hangover cures, compounding my futility by making resolutions that I would never ever drink anything again and having them fail, relatively speaking, about one-hundred percent of the time.    

  Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression "much to my surprise" to be incredibly useful?  It allows me to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining who your source of authority actually is.  It's great.  It makes me look  adroit and agile, something every boozed-up lush I have ever known has always wanted to be.

  I had slowly begun to realize that the brain actually is affected by alcohol. But there are different gradations to the effect, and therein lies the rub. The brain organizes its memories like a kind of hologram, to retrieve an image, you have to re-create the exact conditions in which it was captured. In the case of a hologram its the lighting, in the case of the brain it is, or can be, the amount of alcohol sloshing around in it at any given time.  And that is what is known as a conundrum.  I have found that these conundrums are completely beyond the reach of an abnormal, intoxicated mind. 

 Which is why, after some ill-advised evening out, I would seemingly be the only person in the entire room who was completely unaware of some boringly idiotic remark I made to someone whose feelings I cared about deeply, or even just a little bit.  It may be weeks, months, or, in my case, exactly a year later that the occasion suddenly returned to my consciousness with a sickening brain-bonk and I began to realize why people I once knew and loved had been avoiding me or meeting my eyes with a glassy stare for so long, which often led me to say "Holy Christ" to myself in a loud voice and reaching for a stiff drink, which would, of course, lead me to the next point of inebriation, where I would cause fresh shocks to those around me and guiltily embarrass myself further by having some complete stranger come up to me, slapping me in the face over something I said, or giving me a swift kick to the groin over something I was about to say.

 So what is the answer to this terrible, self-perpetuating problem? 

 Well, obviously, rigorous self-discipline.  A monastic adherence to a regime of long walks, regular workouts, early nights, early mornings, and probably some kind of tomato juice or something. The thing we are most going to want on New Year's Day, and be desperately trying to remember how to make, is a good hangover cure, just in case you happen to fall-off-the-wagon again.  The major problem is, we can never remember them when we need them, or even know where to find them. And the reason we can never remember them when we need them is that we heard about them when we didn't actually need them, which isn't any help, for the reasons outlined above. 

 I have found that nauseating images involving egg yolks and Tabasco sauce swill through my brain, and I am not really in any fit state to organize my thoughts, which is why my hangover cure is never effective, and that I somehow need to organize my brain while there is still time; which would be prior to my doing something else stupid, like settling for noxious cheap wine, which would make me feel as if I were a rat on a sinking ship.  I still have yet to work out how this happens.

 So, Dear reader, I have enjoyed this little chat, but must apologize to you, in that I have no answer to any of the above...and will get back to you as soon as I do... 

AMONG THE INNUMERABLE RAMIFICATIONS...

OF THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE is bigotry, which instantaneously resurfaced at the very moment an African-American was elected as our President and brought forth the age-old prejudices and long-held Jim Crowism; both of which were once thought of as dead-and-forever-buried; we were again thrown back into those years when an Emmett Till could be murdered in Mississippi for the atrocious atrocity of whistling at a white girl. Our infinite capacity for absurdity and the enraged disease of hostile animosity ejected rapidly; the belief that we could love our country and justice, too, quietly dehydrated into the squalor of the sordid past, as the featherbrained folk with decaying minds covered their own miseries by blaming them on the Underclass.

  For years I had chosen to ignore the existence of a permanent Underclass, dismissing it as the fevered dream of neoconservatives and the apostate liberals; there were too many signs of genuine racial progress in this country, and I was certain that what Langston Hughes called "a dream deferred" could not be deferred forever; that immediately changed the instant Obama became our President, and the fierce negative power of prejudice reared-up, hardened and condensed; the bitterness of bygone years was conveniently re instituted.

   Instead of retreating back to the ferocious subculture and into the cliches of glib racialism, let me give a few facts about how the Underclass came to be a permanent Underclass, not with reports of whites using force to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods, a resurgent Klan in some places, of white cops too quick to arrest, abuse, or shoot down black suspects; but the fact that racism continues to be real in the United States; only a fool would deny it. 
   
 Almost 40 percent of all black American families are now living below the federal poverty line, in New York City it is estimated that 70 percent of black youths never finish high school, in at a time when even a high school diploma is barely sufficient to function in the job market.  The national infant-mortality rate is 60 percent higher among blacks than among whites.   The living face even greater hazards.  One third of the black population in the city of Chicago between the ages of 5 and 19 are victims of homicide, and nationally the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of 16 and 44 is murder.  Not smallpox.  Not tuberculosis. Not influenza.  Not one of the ancient plagues of earth.  Murder.

  What goes on here?  

 When I was young and growing up in the city of Denver, this simply didn't happen.  If a young man got a young woman pregnant, her father, brothers, or uncles would come knocking at the door. Today, in the urban wilderness of the Underclass, too many young black men apparently think nothing of getting a woman pregnant and then moving on, leaving the children's care, feeding, clothing, and housing in the indifferent hands of the paternalistic state. Some feel that young black males are compensating for feeling so inferior in the larger society; that men like this are predestined to become who it is that they have become - insisting that human beings are prisoners of history and not its makers - which has been refuted by the stirring history of black Americans themselves, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. and many millions in between. To insist that only black Americans are permanent prisoners of the past, unable to shape their own lives, is itself a form of racism. 

  Common sense alone tells me that if that had been true, then the trauma would have affected all blacks; obviously it hasn't. Fear of the Underclass is about class not race.  This has much president in American history; at various times in our big cities, the middle class often felt threatened by the crime and moral disorder of the Jews, the Irish, and the Italian poor.  There are three elements of the current catastrophe that were not present in previous generations: drugs, television, and welfare; to the point that when we walk down a street at night, we follow the pattern of peering over our shoulders, always alert to danger; if a group of young Black men is seen, we cross the street or reverse direction.

   Not too many years ago, I had the opportunity to teach a writing class at a two-year college in the City of New York.  My classes were filled with Pell Grant students who had come into Manhattan by subway from places like Harlem and the South Bronx, noted only for being the birthplace of the hip-hop culture and utter despair; because they were eager to learn; youngsters who had never heard of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, or Ralph Ellison, to mention only a few extraordinary black writers. They didn't know that Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple. They had never heard of Max Roach or Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker. They knew nothing about Aesop's fables or the Old Testament or the tales of the Greek gods. Many white kids were equally as ignorant, but most of them did not have to fight their way out of the Underclass.

   The first thing I came to understand was one terrible truth: for the black Underclass, life in the United States was infinitely worse than I had ever imagined.  For them, King, Malcolm, and the rest had died in vain.  Unlike newly arrived Koreans, Pakistanis, Cubans, Haitians - all of whom seemed to move to the top in many professions; for these kids, who had forefathers who were once nothing more than mere chattel, the black Underclass seemed incapable of progress.

  And because they lived in the ghetto, they wanted role models that weren't crack dealers, pimps, stickup men.  They desired the restoration of genuine pride and lost dignity.  They wished to be a Duke Ellington walking along on Lenox Avenue or an Art Tatum getting out of a new car in front of Minton's; to speak like Adam Clayton Powell once did, or be as hip as Miles Davis or as elegant as Sugar Ray Robinson or Muhammad Ali. They knew that the time to begin was now; that they did have a chance to escape those "dead-end" jobs and make something of their lives; to repair the holes of the human spirit with hope for the future.  

  In the end, they taught me more than I could ever teach them.

  About life.  

  About myself.

  About racism.

  About the world they wished to bolt out of.

HAD I NOT BEEN BORN ME...

THE BACKUP PLAN I WISH I HAD would be to have been able to arrive here on Earth on earth 9 years earlier than I did; become a guy who grew to manhood with a receding hairline, wore hats to hide his partial baldness; donned gloves in his performances, because he thought he had hideous hands; was a song-and-dance man; had a romantic attraction to death; found it impossible to practice the fine are of fidelity, in that there were too many beautiful women in his world with their grace and style and intelligence and mystery to live up to the demand of monogamy; most were dancers and actresses; and in the world where he worked they were the women he met. 

 He appreciated other things too: jazz; nightclubs; vaudeville jokes, the New York Mets; Fred Astaire; children; boxing and football and air hockey; New York Post headlines; his daughter; his cat; and, of course, cooking good food and bringing it to perfection; and while he was in the kitchen, inside of his head, he was creating songs like Steam Heat and Big Spender and Bye Bye Blackbird. 

 His rehearsal hall was up on the 11th floor of 850 Seventh Avenue at 56th Street, around the corner from the Carnegie Deli, where he'd have lunch almost every day with friends, mostly writers like Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, trading trading lines, drinking coffee, smoking tons of cigarettes; then go back and look down at the sleazy hamlet he liked to call his own, the one square mile of earth he cared for more than any other, with all the glitter and neon; and watch folks out for a stroll, thinking that every one of them must have some kind of story to tell, harder and meaner and more exciting than the fairy-tale Broadway of Damon Runyon.  He once said, "I see a hooker on the corner, and I can only think there's some kind of story there. I mean, she was once six years old."  

 Quite simply, he wanted to be the best at what he did.

 He arrived on the 23rd day of June in 1927, born in Chicago, Illinois, the second youngest of six children, moved to the City of New York with the ambition of being the next Fred Astaire.  In the '50s and the '60s; when he was between women; he was usually engulfed by a bleakly romantic sense of loss; no male friends were as important as women or the possibility of love.  He then met one woman, and was swept away; one who combined humor, vulnerability, toughness, and sensuality, in shows he designed, choreographed, and directed; one of which was called Damn Yankees.  

 Her name was Gwen Verdon and his name was Bob Fosse. 

 They married, then separated in the  1970's, mostly due to his obvious flaws constant infidelities, but never divorced; and she would forever remain at the center of his soul as his inspiration for every venture after that, from Sweet Charity to Chicago, where she helped him develop and crystallize a jazz dance style that was immediately recognizable, exuding a stylized cynical sexuality of turned-in knees, sideways shuffles, rolled shoulders, and jazz hands.   Even though it is impossible to separate the two of them, he was also a fine director of other women.  Liza Minnelli and Anne Reinking did their best work for him; he was the first one to recognize that Jessica Lange could be a superb actress when he saw her in the movie King Kong and would eventually cast her as the Angel of Death in All That Jazz, which was appropriate for Fosse, who else could have imagined death as a bewitching  women, one who could invite him into her loving arms when his time came to die?

 Fosse was 47 years old in 1974, when he had his first ferocious heart attack, was in critical condition in bed, trapped  in a ganglia of tubes and wires. He was competitive, and cared, perhaps too much, about the way he stood in relation to other directors; and because he worked so hard, and because he knew how much pain was involved in the making of a show or a movie, Fosse generally despised critics, believing that their sensibilities were blunted, so much so, that he thought of them as unable to respond to amazing theatrical moments; that they were responsible for the failure of his movie Star 80, which was about the death of the former Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratton; and said, "Maybe all they want is shit.  Maybe it's over for people like me."  

 He was still working at the end; trying to choose between a movie about Walter Winchell, a movie version of Chicago, or something completely new, based upon his experiences in the Second World War.  He had gone to war and was a 17-year-old sailor working in an entertainment unit in the South Pacific; was with the first Americans to enter Japan at the end of the war and remained horrified at the scale of destruction in Tokyo and the stupid brutal way so many American soldiers treated the Japanese, particularly the women, and would one day say, "That was the first time I was really ashamed to be an American."  The contrast between the idealism of fighting the war and the morally corrosive realities of victory was a splendid setup for a Fosse movie, but he was uneasy about it, "That world is gone, that music, the way people were...Most of the country wouldn't know what I was talking about."

 He closed out of town on the 23rd day of September in 1987 at the age of 60.  Gwen Verdon was with him when he lay down for the final time on the grass of a small park in Washington D.C. after suffering another attack to his heart; was sent to the George Washington University Hospital; gave his final goodbye with her by his side; they had both had been there to see a revival of Sweet Charity at the National Theater.  His ashes were then taken by his wife and daughter to Quogue, New York, where they were scattered into the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, with the two of them watching, as his remains were gently swept out to sea.
      
 Toying with the notion of his own death, he had created a semi-autobiographical film, All That Jazz, about a womanizing, drug-addicted, choreographer-director; which was, in reality, not so much about his attraction to death, but the impossibility of fidelity; and it became his masterpiece, winning the  Palm d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980; he also garnered an Academy Award as Best Director for his second film Cabaret over Francis Ford Coppala for The Godfather; captured two Tony Awards for Pippin and Sweet Charity; and polished-off one Emmy Award for Liza with a Z...  

 Not a bad track record a balding guy who didn't like his hands all that much...  

IN THE CROSS-CUTTING OF MEMORY...

I LEARNED EARLY ON that there were many things about the written word which dazzled me.  I would read in parked cars while riding with my parents, in my back yard when I finished mowing the lawn, inside a tent when I went camping, in those jagged hours between dawn and getting up for the day and eating breakfast and going to school.  I was enamoured by Frank Yerby, and African-American historical novelist, who wrote The Foxes of Harrow when I as ten-years old, and The Golden Hawk when I was twelve;  the Italian/English novelist, Raphael Sabitini, who penned memorable epics filled with adventure and romance,  with titles like Scaramouche and Captain Blood, when I was fourteen; as well as Graham M. Dean, who delighted my mind with novels of lesser note, like Herb Kent, West Point Cadet and Slim Evans and His Horse Lightening when I turned fifteen; and became completely absorbed by a writer born in North Dakota when I reached sixteen; a man whose daughter asked him one day, "Daddy, why do you write so fast?" And he answered, "Because I want to see how the story turns out!"  His name was Louis L'Amour and he wrote about Hopalong Cassidy and a family named the Sacketts and Son of a Wanted Man and The Broken Gun, and other great adventure stories of the wild-wild west. Other than playing the game of baseball, the written word knocked my socks off...

   ...So the older I got, the more I read, and the more I read, the more bounteous my mind became, humbled by the writings of Ulysses and The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men and Fahrenheit 451, with names like Jane Austin and Harper Lee and Mark Twain and Charlotte Bronte and Miguel De Cervantes and Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; and I then became hooked with the reading of contemporary stories by Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Coe and John Cheever; as well as journalists like Murray Kempton and Jimmy Cannon and Robert Ruark and Westbrook Pegler; I carefully read every word that Jimmy Breslin wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, hoping that one day I, too, could write like that.  In the best of all possible worlds, of course, this would have continued on forever. 

   And then they came, ennobled at first, even informative, folk like Edward R. Murrow and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite and Frank McGee, who began to appear on our televisions sets, updating us on what was happening in the nation and around the world, and we Americans put our books aside to give them a look and a listen.  

   It took awhile before the others began to bob-up like dead fish in a polluted sea, several decades, as a matter of fact; the yahoo crusaders, wonks and dweebs full of superficial snark, informing us that they were fair and balanced, that we were not smart enough to understand the truth of what was happening around us.  The power of mass media had now arrived in the form of bully tyrants like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity; telling us that they had the fixins' to fix everything, with heart-stopping reality about what the future may hold if we made the wrong choices. On the flip side, we were then urged to lean forward by the hot air specialists over at MS NBC, with the always grouchy Chris Matthews and ever giddy Rachael Maddow, beseeching us to smother the personal chaos that O'Reilly and Hannity were spouting, to subordinate it, erase it, because they wanted to douse us their own interpretation of straight stuff.  Obviously, in spite of the specifics, this great glob of bum steered information from either side consumed us.    

   So we allowed our reading habits to diminish and watched the buffoons on the tube more frequently, newspapers vanished, bookstores became filled with commissars of opinion instead of literature full of adventure and love and daring thoughts, and long-form investigative journalism began to disappear.  In this bleak house, nothing else mattered except being right and dismissing anyone one the other side.  Not laughter. Not love. Certainly not the simple pleasure of reading a book on a summer's afternoon. 

   There was no longer room in this dark vision for an Emily Dickinson or Jack London or John Steinbeck on the list of best-sellers; that was now reserved for the likes of Glen Beck and Ann Coulter and Donald Trump.  The written word was now devoid of fantasy or magic, no awe in the presence of human beauty, no desire for spiritual union.  We read nothing of decent husbands and loving mothers, of families that have triumphed over poverty, of those with intelligent hearts and pride in tact.

   Yet, there remained folks out there, in the millions, who wished to read something other than this fiercely correct world of rules and anathemas; those who liked to dance at the midnight hour, or listen to the blues, or feel the awe of just having a full-out heart-busting good time; who were never attuned to an airless, sunless world with out joy or wonder or fantasy or enchantment.  

   In the end, however, every tyrant fails, and perhaps that means we can all get around to switching off the tube and return to reading finely-spun classics again; or just spend a dandy afternoon with Louie L'Amour, by flipping through The Cherokee Trail or The Comstock Load...