a brief family history and the last piece of advice I  ever got from  Grandma:


THE DEPARTURE DATE ON THE STEAMSHIP  TICKET WAS CLEAR...

IT WAS ON THE 9TH DAY OF MAY IN 1879, AND MAY WAS ONE OF the best times for crossing the North Atlantic from Bremen, Germany to Baltimore, Maryland; the winter storms had passed and the hurricanes were yet to come.  The family ticket had cost 309 marks, nearly half-a-year's wages for the usual  worker.  It was a family which included the parents, Carl and Wilhelmina, and two children, Albert and Emma.  The idea of coming to America which had first grabbed the heart of Carl were due to several factors:  A failure of will to get a proper education, the need to earn a living, and the lack of special skills on the part of Carl to be able to do so, as well as the news of other Pomeranians departing boat load after boat load to America and particularly Wisconsin, where they had found a climate and geography similar to the homeland. 


  Carl had become afraid of committing himself to a life of prolonged poverty, he wanted only to be a proud man making his way in the world.  So he went to work devising a plan to make his dreams come true.  He began saving money and it had taken him almost 7 years to do so.  The steamship they boarded was named The Ohio, which had been built by  Norddeutscher Lloyd and first launched in 1868 and had made its landing in Baltimore on the 8th day of April in 1879, with Carl and his family aboard. What they found in America did not produce a series of uninterrupted amazement's.  The German immigration into Central Wisconsin had started in 1836 when an expedition from Milwaukee set out to establish a settlement in what would become Atalan Township.  By the time Carl and his family had arrived, a railroad had been built and Carl had been able to talk himself into a job.  He became a section boss on a crew from a town called Johnson Creek.


  When Carl and his family had arrived in Baltimore, his son Albert was 7 years of age.  His name at birth was: Albert Johann Gottlieb Daugs.  Little is known about him from the time he arrived until he was married.  He most likely attended school in the one room schoolhouse in Johnson Creek, which in the 1880s, was reported to have had 35 children in all of the grades.  It was the center of worship as well as a place for community affairs, and it is likely that this is where he first men a young girl  by the name of Helena Johanna Wilhelmina Fredika  Schumacker, who had happened to be there visiting relatives.  They would be married on the 11th day of October in 1894.  They were both 23 years old at the time, and by then Albert had graduated from Wartburg College in Dubuque, Iowa in 1891 and was about to graduate from Wartburg Seminary...


  ...And Albert and Helena happened to be my Grandfather and Grandmother.


  Albert was ordained as a Lutheran Minister at Johnson Creek, where he taught himself English and typing; while Helena taught beginner music, and organ and piano.  They eventually moved to Monona, Iowa in 1918, where their 11 children continued the habit of catching sparrows sparrows in barns for food.  And I must admit that I have often wince at the thought of that.  Albert had hurled himself into the work of a minister - and in those days, that was the life that apparently went with it.  Albert died on the 14th day of February in 1939.  I was then 3 years of age, and recall only that I once sat on his lap and that he had the aroma of tobacco on his shirt.  As for my Grandmother Helena: we would visit her each and every summer at the house my dad's brother Palmer owned in Monona, and she was destined to become the love of my young life, both as a grandmother as well as mentor. 


  The place was truly a paradise.  There was an old barn up on a hill which was used to store hay, and close by there was always a straw pile.  I could watch my uncle Palmer cutting and stacking and thrashing grain, with all of his neighbors coming to help, and the shed between the lower barn and house was always filled with drying walnut lumber which was great fun to smell.  There was also a large orchard on a hill north of the main house, which was filled with many varieties of apples.  The main barn was the largest in the area of that portion of Iowa, and the milking  of cows became a regular pre-dawn routine routine for my summer visits, as the smoke from a brick smoke house drifted in the morning air.  The smoke house itself was  about 12 feet by 12 feet.  The finest aromas, however, came in the spring and early summer with  hams and bacon and sausage, and when the maple was boiling down down to make maple syrup. 


  The ice box in the main house  was a work of art built right into the wall which Grandma used to cool milk and cream.  She would always fill a bowl with strawberries and cream, invite me out to sit in the morning sun beneath a Mulberry tree, and I came to understand that this routine event served a larger purpose. 


  Her words were wonderful: she told me that I must have the modest ambition in my life to understand the world and how I fit into it.  To always want to learn more about a person, a place, an event, or an idea.  To know the music of life itself and insisted that as I grew older, I would pass what I'd learned to others, to my children and grandchildren and friends and neighbors, because I wanted them to hear my music too.  She told me to forever remember the houses I had inhabited, the people I loved, my own large stupidities and small triumphs, and if I did all of that: I would be as happy as she was.


  The last time I saw her was in the spring of 1958. 


  I had graduated from college and was about to go off to the seminary to become a minister like my Grandfather had been;  and, once again, Grandma and I sat together beneath the shade of the Mulberry tree.  Me with a bowl of strawberries and cream in my hands; while I watched that wondrous smile of hers etched across her face.  The smile then rapidly vanished.  She asked me if I was aware that my Grandfather had kicked my Dad out of the house for having made a girl pregnant, and I replied that I was aware of that.  She then said that had been the worst mistake that my Grandfather had ever made and it had  taken her along time to forgive him, but that my Dad had learned the lesson which she had taught him -  that of forgiving my Grandfather first. 


  It became quiet for a time.  I finished my strawberries.  I  Looked up at her.  Once again, there was now was a small hint of a smile and I was completely unprepared for the corker that came next, when she said: 


  Dick, there is something that you need to know. Almost  every Daugs' male that I have ever known has had one major and somewhat disgusting problem when they were young men.  So I asked, What was that, Grandma?  And she replied:  It always seemed to me that whenever they saw an attractive woman, they were somehow unable to keep their penis in their pants.  I want you to promise me that you will try to keep zipped-up at least until you are ordained, can do that for me?


  It was a promise that I kept, although I did not know what to say to her...


  ...So, I remained silent and spooned the remainder of the of the cream from the bottom of my bowl, and gave a small affirmative nod...

a cowboy to remember:


HE IS SEATED IN A BLUE STRETCH LIMOUSINE,...

ITS PLATES AND CURVES GLISTENING IN THE SUN of late afternoon.  The limousine moves in a stately way down a curving tree-lined path and slowly comes to a stop at  the steps of a luxurious and well-appointed estate, where he steps out of the limousine, blinks in the bright sunshine, glances  at the two men in obviously expensive dark suits standing at the top of the steps, smiles at the attractive woman in an equally expensive red dress who stands to the right of the men, patting the infant she cradles in her hands on top of its head.  Then he steps into the huge Phaeton mobile home that is parked on the shoulder of the driveway, where I have been sitting waiting for him, as I hear an outside voice yell, Cut!  And he says, Sorry to keep you waiting.  It's the fifth time we've shot the scene.   The last thing I thought I would ever do is play a grandfather in a high-priced suit pretending to be rich.   I asssume that you're the guy who is going to interview me?  I reply, Yes, sir, I am.  He pulls a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and reaches into his pant pocket for a gold-plated Zippo lighter and says, Mind if we go outside?  I need a smoke.


  And when we do, everyone had had been standing on the porch had vanished and I now see busy extras, grips, and electricians moving about on the porch where the infant and woman and men in suits had once stood, all of whom were a part of every movie or commercial shooting location.  He takes a drag on his cigarette and says, May I ask why we are doing this interview?  I haven't done much of anything since I was on 'F Troop.'   I reply, The owner of the newspaper has been a big fan of yours since he was a kid and and saw you when you were with Republic Pictures in the 'Three Mesquiteers' series.  He smiles, That was one hell of a long time ago.  And what about you?  I reply, After 'The Three Mesquiteers,' I think the first A-list movie was when you did 'Island in the Sky' with John Wayne and then in the 'Sugarfoot Series' with Will Hutchins.  He laughs.  The last thing I heard about Will was that he's now living in Long Island.  He was a really nice guy.


  He's at least  79 or 80, and looks in good shape, given what he has done to his body over the years, the stunt work, falling off horses on cue, a broken arm in the thirties, a broken leg in the forties, horseplay with long dead actors who were his friends, men  like Yakima Canutt, a close friend of his who had recently died, and Tom Mix and Chill Wills.  He's about 6 feet tall and thin with a suntanned face filled with wrinkles, but he doesn't look old.  He is wearing a black shirt and tan slacks and puts the cigarette t0 his mouth again, takes a puff, and blows out the smoke.  The face is an imaginary western hero's delight: large peering eyes that alternately frighten you and make you somehow feel safe, a face made for expression with an aquiline nose and good cheekbones.


  His name at birth was Robert Adrian Bradbury, he was born in January of 1907 in Portland, Oregon to a vaudeville family who settled in Hollywood in 1910.  His father, Robert Bradbury, soon found work in the movies, first as an actor, later as a director.  In 1920, he hired his son, Robert  and his twin brother Bill as juvenile leads in an adventure movies titled The Adventures of Bob and Bill.  Robert's career began to take off for good in 1927, when he was hired by Film Booking Company to star in a series of westerns.  Renamed, Bob Steele, he soon began to make a name for himself.   I was never a first-rate actor, he says, but I managed to  have a pretty good career throughout the '20s and '30s and '40s in B-westerns for every minor film studio in Hollywood, including Monogram and Republic.  Which isn't bad for a guy who can't really act.  I was lucky though, when my career as a cowboy hero began to decline, I landed supporting roles in Howard Hawkes' 'The Big Sleep' and John Wayne, who was an old pal of mine from our days when we both worked for Monogram, hired me to do 'The Big Sky' and 'Rio Bravo' and 'Rio Lobo.'


  It was true, he had been lucky.  But when he had first exploded on the screen all those years ago,  he wasn't just another western hero.  He was our western hero.  He wasn't just a Tom Mix or Hoot Gibson or Hopalong Cassidy or Roy Rogers or Gene Autry, he was the Bob Steele,  the original cowboy who swaggered into saloons filled with gorgeous women and steely-eyed men to have a final shoot-out with ogre's and villains, then go over to the bar to have a final drink before he rode off leaving the beautiful heroine who adored him with tears filling her eyes, as he disappeared into the sunset, off to save another town from an almost certain death and equally utter destruction.


  He said that one of the most favorite movie sets that he had ever been associated with was when he was shooting the movie Of Mice and Men in 1938, mostly due to the fact that he enjoyed being around both Burgess Meredith and Noah Beery Jr. when they weren't busy fleeing from the angry citizens the fictional town called Weed, but was less than fond of Lon Chaney Jr. because he was always complaining that he was being belittled by almost every studio he had worked for for not being as talented as his father had been.  So, he and Meredith and Beery would sneak of to a bar whenever they saw Chaney coming their way.  That's true of almost all movie sets, he said, there always seems to be one prick in the crowd.  And Lon just happened to be one of them.  He went on to say, The actress that I liked the least was a woman by the name of Agnes Moorhead, who I worked with in 1959 shooting an episode called 'In Memorium' in a western series  'The Rebel,' starring Nick Adams.  It wasn't that she was an evil person, or anything like that.  She just reminded me of every teacher that had frightened me when I was a child.  A real authority figure.  On the set, the two of them were a match-made-in hell.  He was drug addicted and she didn't seem to like anyone all that much.


  His face immediately lit-up, however, when he began to talk about a woman named Virginia Nash Tatem, who had been his wife since 1939. The heart of our enduring marriage, he said, is that she has always made me feel as if we were still on our honeymoon.  I never expected anything from Hollywood.  I had no idea of becoming a big star, having a career, I was a kid, I was having a lot of fun, and they were paying me $250 a week during the Depression.  Life wasn't bad. I'd gone through two brief marriages with women named Alice and Louise, but when I met Virginia, my life was forever changed.  I love the woman as much today as I did the first time I ever laid eyes on her.  The only real trouble I have these days is that most of my friends are dead.  He shakes his head, and then his face slowly brightens again.  But I still have her.


  More than anyone else, the friend he seems to miss the most is John Wayne.  He recalls one evening when Wayne was bragging  what a great athlete he had been back when he had been playing college football for USC.  One thing led to another and Steele said, I bet I can knock you your ass!  And Wayne replied, You probably could if you weren't such a little runt.  But of  you did, who'd be buying you your next round of drinks?  Wayne, of course, was instantly recognized wherever we went.  So when we were both out on street together and someone spotted him  we'd run as fast as we could into the nearest saloon or bar, the loser would have to pay the bar tab for the rest of the night.  Win or lose, John always ended-up paying the tab with a great big grin on his face.  When he died in June of '79, I lost a really fine friend and an equally good man.


  He says that he plays a lot of golf and reads these days.  I don't read much fiction, he says.    My life in this business has been devoted to fiction.  I prefer history with the lives and adventures of real men and women on the pages.  I ask him what advice he would give to those who want to go out to Hollywood to act in motion pictures. He replies, Work at everything.  Wait on tables until you get a break, and when you do, even if it isn't what you actually wanted, do it anyway.    Become the lighting guy, cater the food,   the stage manager, the carpenter, in order to learn the business  That's the main thing.     He then gives me a wink and a smile.  Then pray to God that you get lucky.  As for me, he says, staring at the smoke from the cigarette, All I want is what I've already had. To have someone around who still remembers me...


  ...He would die after a bout with emphysema shortly after that, on December 21st of 1988, in Burbank, California...


  ...And as we now approach the year of 2014...


  ...Bob Steele remains very much alive in my memory and probably always will until the day that I die...  

 how my friend louie jr. got a name change and a bright future through a famous friend named frank:


HIS FATHER'S NAME WAS LOUIS ALONZO PASCO, WHO WAS SOMETIMES KNOWN AS...

LOUIE "THE DOME," A MAN REPUTED TO HAVE BEEN A GRADUATE NOT ONLY OF Joliet prison, but also the man who  had ducked World War II by doing a crazy act for the draft board, which labeled him as "a rather inept constitutional psychopath."  


  He also happened to be the father of my best friend, Louie Jr., who had become star-struck with a singer by the name of Frank Sinatra,  and Sinatra just happened to be an old acquaintance of his father Louie "The Dome," who had never been fond of "The Dome" moniker, which had been given when he went completely bald at the age of 15 and was still  living in Hoboken, New Jersey; so one day he announced that henceforth, even if he had yet to become a father, he insisted that everyone refer to him simply as Louie Sr.  And a father Louie Sr. soon became.  It was a father-and-son relationship that was severely tested when Louie Jr. asked Louie Sr. if he could get tickets for a special engagement at a joint called Villa Venice northwest of Chicago, where Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. were preforming to honor the birthday another friend of Louie Sr.  who happened to own  the place, a fellow by the name of Salvatore Giancana. 


  All of this was very confusing to me when Louie Jr. informed me that he would like me to accompany him to the Chicago show, if he could get his father to buy the tickets and fund the airfare for the entire trip.  So I went home and asked my Dad if that would be OK.  He said, I don't know Mister Pasco other than seeing him at an occasional PTA meeting. Let me go have a talk with him.  And when the crunch came two-weeks later, my Dad said, Do you know what Mister Pasco does for a living, Son?  I replied, No, Sir, I don't. And my Dad said, The man's a full-fledged  gangster.  So I replied, I guess that means that I don't get to go, right?  Needless to say, Louie Jr. was somewhat disappointed when I brought him the bad news.  As was I.  Apparently, it was on that very day that Louie Sr. was informed that he had been indicted and charged by the Nevada Gaming Control Board, who were about to revoke his license for crossing the border into Colorado and setting-up an illegal gambling casino in a town called Telluride which, up until that time, had only been known for its culture, heritage, and spectacular scenic beauty. 


  And when Louie Jr. was informed of the bad news, he gave a slight shrug and said to me,  I don't know why, but Dad's always been attracted to gangsters.  He likes them.  He thinks they are funny.  They seem to like him too.  I guess that means that our Sinatra trip is not going to happen.  A prediction which turned out to be true,  since Louie Sr. was also informed the very next day that he also was going to be under a grand jury's investigation that was based in part on evidence introduced at his future trial by none other than the infamous gangster Sam Giancana, who was attempting to save his own skin when he testified that Louie Sr. and other individuals had received monies illegally from other friends of his who happened to reside in Havana, Cuba.


  On the following Friday, at ten minutes after noon, Louie Sr. took his hat, his coat, knowing that his account was now frozen and he could not extract any money from his bank, he pulled out his wallet and looked into it, saw that it was almost empty, that it contained only money enough to get him where he wanted to go, returned the wallet to his pant pocket, took a pen and a piece of paper, wrote a brief note to his wife, left the house, went into the garage, revved up his vintage blue Buick Roadster, and began his journey to Niagara Falls, where he was about to enter Canada via the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, with the intention of vanishing forever.  But for a man on the lamb,  Louie Sr. had one odd quirk: He would end-up writing a daily letter to his son about where he was and what he had been up to.  


  Later that afternoon at about 4 o'clock, his wife Mae read the note from Louie Sr., saw that he had taken most of the family pictures, and reached the conclusion that he was never coming back, so she took a job as a ticket taker at the Bluebird Theater on Colfax Avenue.   Louie Jr. hung around on Detroit Street after finishing his day at East High School until Mae got off work at midnight, they then took the bus east on Colfax Avenue to Kearney Street, and walked home. 


  It was then that Louie Jr. took the proverbial Bull by the Horns.  He went into his parent's bedroom about a month after Louie Sr. had made his final departure, opened the dresser drawer which once had belonged to his father, dug through what paperwork that was left, extracted a small piece of paper with a woman's name and telephone number on it, dialed the number and waited like the star-struck kid that he actually was for her to pick-up the phone. She happened to be the singer Phyllis McGuire of the McGuire Sisters, and her friendship with Frank Sinatra was well known.  Louie Jr. told her who he was, she replied that she knew his father, and he explained that he was in a bit of a predicament, telling her that his father had gone off to Canada, leaving his mother and himself devoid of money.  A check from Sinatra would arrive in the mail two weeks later.


  Meanwhile, Louie Sr. was living in a rather seedy area of Toronto on Queen Street and getting $30 a week as a backup barkeep at The Black Hoof Bar on Dundas Street West; making ends meet by selling candy bars on the side.  He settled at last in the third-floor-right apartment on Dufferin Street, sharing his two-room and bath with a guy by the name of "Lefty" O'Shay from South Chicago, who happened to be on the lamb, as well.   "Lefty" had avoided the clutches of law enforcement in November of 1957, when he had been in attendance at a Mob conference in Appalachian, New York which had been surrounded by cops, and "Lefty" had flown-the-coop as fast as his feet and car could carry him.  The friendship between them grew, due to the fact that they were both wanted men, and had to depend upon one another for comfort and friendship.  For a long time, Louie Sr. and "Lefty" ruminated about how the two of them could make a little more money, and came up with what they both thought was a really nifty idea. 


  And while Louie Sr. and "Lefty" O'Shay were busy putting the final touches together on their plan to acquire quick-and-easy money; with the money provided by Frank Sinatra, Mae had purchased a beautiful Spanish-style home in the 900 block of Monaco Parkway, which one of the most beautiful areas of East Denver; Louie Jr. now had his college education fully funded, and he would later say that his reaching out to Phyllis McGuire on a whim had been one of the most instrumental changes of his entire life.   He was fascinated that a man who had spent time with men like Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, would take time to even notice him, much less send him money.  So he wrote Sinatra a thank you note in longhand.


  It was at about the same time as his son was writing a note to Frank Sinatra, that Louie Sr. and "Lefty" finalized their plan to rob either the branch of The Bank of Toronto located on Dufferin Street or Loblaws Grocery Store on Lower Jarvis Street.  The first thing they did was hustle down to a gun shop on Dundas Street West to buy a really cheap handgun.  The gun shop was tucked inside of a barbershop behind the barber's chair, and was hidden by a curtain.  It happened to be owned by another criminal they both knew by the name of Tuck Henry.  Tuck had fled to Canada at the end of World War Two on the day prior to the onset of his Court Martial for getting caught having a threesome with both a general's wife and his daughter, his only defense being that he was a tough, tender guy, who liked glamorous women and that most glamorous women seemed to be fond of him too.  After purchasing a so-called Saturday Night Special from Tuck, Louie Sr. asked Tuck if he'd like to tag-along for the bank heist or the grocery store heist whenever he and "Lefty" had decided which one of the two would be the easiest to pull-off, and Tuck replied, Sure would.  But could we make it on a Monday?  It's the only day my barber shop is closed.


  It was about a month after Louie Jr. had written his thank you note to Sinatra that he found himself inside of a cab after having landed at La Guardia Airport, heading through the rain toward  a seedy time warp of a saloon at the Eighth Avenue end of 52nd Street in New York City.   He told me that the long, dark bar was packed with college students from NYU and Columbia University;  of all the Sinatra groupies, they were the most energetic.  A maitre d'  in a shiny tuxedo stood beside a red vewlvet rope that separated the back from the college kids in the front, and he smiled when he saw Louie Jr. coming his way:  I'd know ya' anywhere, Kid.  You look like you're Daddy, except you got hair.  Mr. Sinatra is expecting you.  Louie Jr. said he was nervous, his eyes moving past the empty tables  in the left-hand corner against the wall.  A man looked up from a booth and smiled at him. Hey, Kid, I'm Jilly Rizzo, I own this dump, he said, coming around the table with his right hand out.  Louie Jr. mentioned to me that Jilly had one glass eye and that he wasn't certain whether Jilly was looking directly at him, that his eye had kind of a blurry look. Hey, Frank, he said ,  Louie  "The Dome's" boy is here.


  Grab a seat, Kid!  Sinatra said brightly, half rising from the booth and shaking hands.  Eat, drink, and be merry.  It's on my dime, so order anything you want. Louie Jr. told me that Sinatra's blue eyes were the true focal point of Sinatra's face, and he felt like was able to peer  all the way through them, and that the eyes had told him that he was fond of his father Louie "The Dome" because the two-of-them seemed to be similar in nature, and as the night rolled-on and Sinatra talked more, he saw that both men's eyes could either be filled at one moment with laughter or could become as opaque as cold-rolled steel.  Louie Jr. said that the other men in the room were eating chop suey and watching a Jets game on a TV set; that Sinatra had introduced him to a comic named Pat Henry and Roone Arledge of ABC, a few other men and some young women.  Sinatra was with a buxom blond model in a black dress.  He didn't introduce her, so she got up and left. 


  It was then that Sinatra lit a Marlboro and sipped vodka.  His eyes locked on Louie Jr. and he said, Let's talk about your future, Kid.  OK?  If you are willing to do what I am about to ask you to do, the first thing I would want you to do is legally change your name.  Present company excluded, but even when the two of us were growing up in Hoboken, your Dad was never the brightest Kid on the block, maybe I'm doing this because he's dumb-as-an-ox but he's always been a good friend, and he's has gotten himself in a bit of a bind...


  On that same evening, while Louie Jr. was still in New York sitting at a table with Frank Sinatra, I walked through the front door of our house on Jasmine Street and saw my Dad reading The Rocky Mountain News as he sat on the living room sofa, while my Mom was in the kitchen fixing dinner. Dad looked up and said, Do you remember your friend Louie's father, Son?  There's an article about him in the newspaper.  It seems that he and a couple of other men attempted to rob a grocery store at gunpoint in Toronto, Canada, and when Mister Pasco told the female clerk that he was holding her up, she smacked the pistol out of his hand with a half-eaten banana and the Security Guard stopped them as the three of them attempted to run out the door.  All  three of them are apparently wanted criminals and they are going to be extradited back to the States in order to stand trial for the crimes they committed here.


  And so for more than an hour, on this rainy night in New York, Louie Jr. and Frank Sinatra sat in the back of a chauffeured-driven limousine and drove around the empty streets and Sinatra talked about Louie Jr.'s future.  It wasn't an interview or anything like that, Louie Jr. told me when he got back to Denver; Sinatra just wanted to talk.  The town has changed, Sinatra told Louie Jr.  When I first came across that river, this was the greatest city in the whole goddamned world, he said, but it's like a busted-down hooker now.  Which is why you got to go to college here and settle-back and get to know the town.  That's what it's all about.  You get to know the town you live-in, you get to know who in the hell you actually are.  Are you up for that, Kid?  After a while, the limousine pulled up in front of the Waldorf Astoria, where Sinatra had an apartment.  He told the driver to take Louie Jr. back to the Plaza Hotel, where he had gotten him a room.  We'll touch-base in the morning over brunch at the Oak Room, he said, and got out, walking fast, his head down, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat.  And Louie Jr. told me that he remembered thinking that he looked extremely lonely for a man that was a legend.


  Louie Jr. would go on to obtain a college degree at NYU in communications, move his mother to the City of New York, and become gainfully employed as a sportscaster for Roone Arledge at ABC, under a new name, of course...


  ...While his father, Louie Sr. idled away his remaining Earthly days in a New York Public Corrections Facility up in Attica, New York, making license plates with "Lefty" O'Shay and and Tuck Henry at his side...

the red-headed woman who happened to be the finest Nun I have ever met:


A LIGHT DRIZZLE FELL THROUGH THE DAY...

CLOUDS MOVED SLOWLY THROUGH THE SKY.  An empty hearse from the Chausee Funeral Home came down the road making a test-run along Hahn Street for the future burials at the cemetery up on the hill, as I stood watching it slowly moving back-and-forth in the  strange chill of morning, certain that before it was over the funeral home would  have a lot more customers.


  Including people that I had known and loved.


  If you had been in an airplane on the day before that particular day, it would have looked like the same old  plains of central Colorado at the base of the Front Range; the green placid rectangles running off to the east and west, some toward the Black Forest, as if the earth were celebrating the arrival of spring; with farm houses and small hills and cattle decorating its face; morning mists lacing the low hills.  It was late May in 1964 that I had arrived in this serene setting.  


  But on this particular morning in early June, I only saw standing water in the streets and the skeletons of small buildings that had been washed away by torrents of falling rain.  I was the pastor of Saint Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church in the town of Calhan, Colorado who was now looking at a countryside of farms reduced to rubble; great gaping holes along the streets filled with remnants of rain; plywood and tin covering shattered windows; and people in mourning the loss of relatives who only the night before had giggling children and women cooking supper in homes that felt safe and warm.  


  Then the rains came.


  Now 13 of them were missing and presumed dead.


  And the tedious search had begun to see if there were more. 


  Throughout the night, men and women and children hauled huge sandbags to serve as barricades against gaping holes, chairs and tables at the local diner had been set inside, and everyone was fighting against the gusts of wind and the torrents of the still falling rain.  Women had been extraordinary in preparing food in church kitchens around the town; as were the children, who brought the food wearing galoshes and raincoats to those who were filling the bags full of sand.  Across the street under the protection of the diner's front porch , a knot of older men were brewing hot coffee on a camp stove and filling paper cups full for those standing in line awaiting something hot to fill their stomachs before they returned to the filling of the bags. 


  But the women on the sandbag line were firebrands, led by a red-haired, tight-lipped young woman who gripped the filled bags and tossed them with both hands into the gaping holes of the streets, and flipping back her hair against the drizzle of rain, as she said in an obvious Irish brogue: Have at it, Ladies!  We may wear skirts, but we're as good as any man here! 


  She happened to be a Nun by the name of Sister Mary Louise from Saint Micheal's Catholic Church.  She talked about the need of speed, that God would not allow rain to drive people out of their homes, "and that only can happen if we allow it to happen.  So let's not go out without a fight.  I doubt if God cares all that much for lazy losers!" She then looked directly up at me and said:  Don't just stand there lookin' at me,  Lutheran Preacher or not, lend me a hand!  I don't care if you are not a Catholic because I'm sure there may be sinners in my family too..." 


  So we worked side-by-side throughout the rest of the night; and as we filled sandbags, she talked about growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, that her name was once Mary Louise Murphy, of the first and only boyfriend she ever had who she eventually dumped, about being bored in an accounting class at Creighton University, and eventually coming to the conclusion that becoming a nun was her cup-of-tea, not only because she was Irish, but because the mere thought of it totally filled her with insane joy.  She smiled and said, My Father always said: When you find something that you love, walk through the door and go for it.  Which was exactly what I did...


  We continued to fill bags and when the dawn eventually came, she asked if I would mind listening to her prayer and when I said, Not at all, we both bowed our heads and she began to pray:  We have friends, dear Lord.  They are lost and we want nothing to happen to them.  We want them to come back with their minds and bodies safe and sound.  We don't want anything to happen to them because the loss of a friend or family is like a stab in the heart.  Amen. 


  I was thinking of her words of prayer as I watched the empty hearse making test-runs up and down Hahn Street in the chill of that  morning, when I spotted her slowly trudging through the mud and up the lavender-colored hill in my direction, her red-hair dancing as she walked, a smile etched firmly on her lips; she said when she got up to me: Our prayer has been answered.  All 13 of them are safe and sound, just like we asked.  They had taken refuge in the Kosley family barn.  Perhaps I misjudged you Lutherans, it looks as if God answers your prayers too. 


  She gave me a wink...
 
 ...A hug...


  ...And a smile...


  ...As she added: Thank you for praying with me, Pastor.  I appreciated it.  Oh - I almost forgot - another thing I've been thinking about is asking God if He wouldn't mind giving me a whirl at the Sahara Desert on my next assignment, or at least someplace where there isn't any  water for miles-and-miles around, except for an oasis or two, of course.  Even Nuns need to bathe and brush their teeth, you know...

on long walks in late afternoon:


THERE I WAS ON WEST 44TH STREET ON A TUESDAY AFTERNOON...

PLUMP WITH SPRING.  OUT ON THE SIDEWALKS WERE THE USUAL  folks out for a stroll, young men and women holding hands, older folks taking a walk, an elated young man with a brand-new VCR from 47th Street Photo, a messenger from a commecial-art studio, rushing to pick up photostats, moving along the street and not seeing the man who, because of the way he walked, may have been going to consult his back doctor.  Each day, the citizens of the street would pass one another and never connect.   On that particular Tuesday, I happened to take a glance out of my apartment window at the famous Actor's Studio, which lay directly across the street; and there was Al Pacino talking with Paul Newman, while Shelly Winters sat on a step smoking a cigarette, as Fay Dunaway hailed a cab; and those who happened to be walking by took no notice, all of them inhabiting separate worlds and going their separate ways.  I was far too old to be surprised, but not too old to be intrigued. 


  Sometimes I would wander the City of New York without plan or destination.  More than once, I found myself on West End Avenue, staring up at old pre-war buildings, and wonder how I had arrived there because that had not been a part of my plan when I set out for an afternoon walk.  The West End was like all vertical neighborhoods, the obvious symbols of the vertical city, with their penthouses snug and distant at the apex.  And I would try to imagine the lives lived within there walls.  Who is the guy with white hair and jaunty manner standing at the seventh-floor window?  His hands behind his back.  He looks down into the avenue, but occasionally his mouth moves to a grin.  Two floors above, there are 5 windows so filthy that that the glass resembles a membrane.  I conjure up an atmosphere of retreat and withdrawal, some final decision to avoid all further disappointments, to move until the end through loveless rooms full of shrouded furniture, dusty books, and old newspapers.  Those apartments are part of the city, and therefore dense and layered and always filled with wonder.  


  That very density is always changing, those layers shifting, as soon as you think that you have figured out the city in which you walk, have located poles and its center of gravity, the city sshifts again.  A restaurant that was suddenly hot only last year; a year later it's for sale. A city is simply too large, too dynamic, too infinitely various and mysterious; which is exactly why it needs to be walked.  I once lived in a California city called Livermore, where one could see the Centennial Light Bulb which has burned since 1901, and traveled to the Lawerence Livermore Lab's Dicovery Center, filled full of marvelous displays of science and technology; taken a road-bike ride through the rolling hills of the wine country.  All cities, both large and small, express themselves in a variety of ways.  All inhabitants of every city can marvel at their amazing surroundings, if they only take the time to do so.


  When I was younger, I used to wonder why so many middle-aged and older folks were always talking about old neighborhoods, about places gone and buried, and among the old New Yorkers, about Ebbets Field and Birdland, the Cedar Tavern and the old Paramount.  The reason was probably simple:  In those places, they were happy.  Sentimentality is almost always a form of resentment.  And now that I too have grown old, I understand.  But in a very important way, this is terribly sad.  By retreating from the new, we cut ourselves off from the throbbing engine of the present.  And revitalization could well begin with a simple afternoon walk.  We can go out on the streets to where the sky has not yet been blocked from our view, to see the emotional tides of our city, and there they are, they are there too...they are everywhere.  They certainly cannot be found by staying home.

the champion of champions:


BEFORE HE DIED ON NOVEMBER 4TH IN 1985...

YOU HAD TO PASS A SMALL CANDY STAND TO get to the door of the Grammercy Gym on East 14th Street. The door was heavy, with painted zinc nailed across its face and a misspelled sign saying "Gramacy Gym," and when you opened the door, you saw a badly lit stairway, climbing into the darkness.  There was a another door on the landing, and a lot of tough New York kids would reach the landing and find themselves unable to open the second door.  They'd go back down the stairs, try to look cool as they bought a soda at the candy stand, then hurry home.  Many others opened the second door.  And when they did, they entered the tough, hard, and disciplined school of a man by the name of Cus D'Amato.


  Cus, who had died at the age of 77 after a long struggle with pneumonia, was one of the best teachers of prizefighters who ever lived.   He was tough, intelligent, almost Victorian in his belief that work and self-denial and fierce concentration made prizefighters great.  For years, he had lived alone in the office of the gym, accompanied only by a huge boxer dog named Champ.   There were books on the shelves, he loved the Civil War and essays on strategy and tactics, and he almost never read novels.  He had a gun somewhere and a small black and white TV set and a pay phone on the wall.  After Floyd Patterson became champion in 1956, Cus took an apartment over a coffee shop on 53rd Street and Broadway and bought some elegantly tailored clothes and a homburg; but the folks who were closest to him, always thought that his idea of paradise was that room and the cot in the office of Grammercy Gym.  


  One of those closest to Cus was a man by the name of Kevin Rooney, a former prizefighter and the trainer of heavyweight champion Mike Tyson.  He was giving me a tour of the famous Grammercy Gym as a precursor to my writing an article about Cus for a small publication out in East Hampton.  The first thing I want you to know about Cus, he said, is is that he is the best guy I ever met - bar none.  The worst was Don King,  'cause he urged Mike Tyson to break from Cus and go to him, and Tyson's career went into the toilet after that.  King is a prick.  Cus was an angel.  Cus used to say that you can't want too many things, but the things you do want, you have to know what you're doing in order to get them. I guess that's why he never got married, Rooney said, Cus used to say that if he wanted a woman, he'd have to want the things she wants, and that he never wanted to have a big TV, or a new couch...


  All who knew Cus had similar stories to tell, old prizefighters and new neighbors and those who knew him slightly:  Of how he wanted his fighters to be champions, to have money and glory; that he truly didn't seem to want much for himself.  A neighbor of his told of how a bum had made his way from the White Rose bar across the street; Cus gave him a dollar; the next day 5 bums showed up, and the day after that, almost 40.  Cus dispensed singles and then said, That's it, that's all!  You want to come back here, bring trunks!  He was a sucker for old fighters.  Once when Cus had little money left due to having filed bankruptcy in 1971, Ezzard Charles came around to see him; the great light-heavyweight and former heavyweight champion was a broken man, confined to a wheelchair; he needed a thousand, and Cus borrowed the money, gave it to the old champion, and never heard from Charles again.


  He cherished great fighters - Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Sandy Saddler, Willie Pepe, Tommy Loughran - but sometimes, late at night, sitting over coffee, he'd talk about the fighter that didn't exist: the perfect fighter, the masterpiece.  The one who had everything: heart, skill, movement, intelligence, creativity.  Toward the end, he he thought perhaps he had the perfect heavyweight at last in young Michael Tyson.  He's strong, he's brave, he's in condition, Cus said.  I have no doubt he'll be a champion...


  ...And when Tyson deserted him and went with Don King, Kevin Rooney said to him, He was a champion because you are, Cus.  Rooney said that Cus asked him, What do you mean?  And Rooney replied,  True Champions have heart, Cus.  Mike doesn't.

thoughts that led up to a christmas morning breakfast with a man who had a split-screen in his head and loved strawberry shortcake:


THIS  ALL BEGAN AT ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING ON CHRISTMAS EVE...
WITH A COLD WIND BLOWING FROM THE RIVER.  I WAS COMING OUT OF an all-night deli near  Hell's Kitchen with some coffee and a copy of The Daily News.  On the corner an older white man in a grimy down jacket was poking around in a garbage can.  There was a large brown plastic bag beside him on the sidewalk.  He found a piece of bagel and an empty Diet Pepsi can.  He slipped the bagel into  the pocket of his jacket.  The can went in the plastic bag.  He peered at me from above a mask of thick wiry beard.  Then he spit at me.  Whatcha lookin' at? he said.  Never seen no homeless person before? Then he was off, talking to himself as he loped toward the Hudson River; carrying a bag of cans and a half-eaten bagel.  A hostile man with a split-screen in his head.  


  In those days, there were other signs of barbarism along the streets of New York too: scared lumpy streets that might have a steel plate covering it, fear and tension in the subways; and the continuing scandal of housing.  Shelter is one of the most elemental human needs but in New York, now largely beyond the means of many people.  Some ended up homeless.  Others settled for less than they needed.  What was extraordinary was that the general population hadn't risen in outrage.


  It was December of 1987 and a closeted gay man by the name of Ed Koch had been the Mayor of New York since 1978.  He was very popular with the citizens of New York, but the administration of poor Ed had become the most corrupt since Jimmy Walker, but not a single figure had risen from the general political muck to challenge him.  For the last decade, our politicians in the city had cheated, lied, and plundered the town; and now a few of them were on the way to the pen. 


  The most hostile environment within the city itself was on the West Side in a place known as Hell's Kitchen, an area into which I moved in 1992, after it had been cleaned-up and given a new name: Clinton Place.  Back then, many young blacks and whites seemed to be spoiling for a fight; to some extent this need to strike back was understandable; but the racism was then between the black and the Irish over  criminal territory, with certain politicians taking a piece-of-the-action; not the racism that we know today.  The virus of confrontation had come about when Irish gangs lost power to the influx into the area of black gangs.  They began by hurling a catalogue of insults and injuries, which quickly  escalated into gunfire and execution.  


  Squalor  and killing was, of course, not only a part of Hell's Kitchen.  It had eased its way uptown to the great museums and theaters as the social disparity grew.  Women were on the prowl along Madison Avenue, or 57th Street, for the privilege of sleeping over subway grates.  Down on Wall Street several high-rollers seemed high, either on cocaine or the platinum roar of the stock market.   In the evenings in Manhattan, you could often pass people who looked like drawings of George Grotsz, who once drew caricature drawings of Berlin life in the 1920's: suddenly ferociously rich, consuming food, wine, art, real estate, companies , neighborhoods.  They were all appetite and no mind.  The city had now become one of the rich versus the poor.  And the poor were losing at a rather rapid rate.


  Every year, another fragment of grace or style or craft was obliterated from New York, to be replaced by brutally functional or the commercially coarse.  Vandalism grew.  Morons with spray cans chose brainless signatures in order to mar the loveliest old carved stone.  There were corporate scandals, too, political saboteurs, and vandals with elaborate aesthetic theories.  They never rested, and when they did strike, their energy was  ferocious.  And yet, beauty persisted - scattered across the city, the beauty of nature, and of things made by men and women.  There was a beauty above as people hurried through city streets.  Now there was the Landmark Preservation Commission, the Municipal Art Society, and other groups did splendid work to preserve what remained of the past, but already lost, and everywhere there were valuable and beautiful creations under threat.


  It was on Christmas Day morning when I spotted the man with the split-screen in his head again.  In the bitter cold of that winter's day, the collar of his grimy brown jacket was pulled up over his neck to protect him against the wind, he peered into a garbage can, hunting for food, talked to himself, and rubbed his bare hands together in order to give them some warmth.  Every other person who scurried by in the falling snow seemed not to notice him, or were avoiding him on purpose.  I wandered around for a moment-or-two,  then decided to approach him.  I asked him if I could buy him breakfast.  He glared at me in silence.  I repeated the question.  Without a word, he gave an affirmative nod.  In one of the eateries along Tenth Avenue, we went inside and he ordered scrambled eggs and bacon and sourdough toast, along with a side-order of french fries and a cup of black coffee.  When he had finished downing the food as rapidly as he could put his fork up to his mouth, I asked him if he would like anything else. 


  You think they got any strawberry shortcake? he replied. My momma used ta' make me an' my sister strawberry shortcake when I was a kid.  They didn't have none o' that stuff when I wus in the nuthouse. Used ta' be a prizefighter, ya'  know.  Welterweight. He gave a small shake of his head, Got too many hits on th' ol' noggin' an' that's when I got bats-in-th'-belfry an' sent to th' nuthouse.  They kicked me out 'cause it was overcrowded, an' th' State said I wasn't nutty enough to stay, he said, with a small grin.  But when  I asked him how he became homeless, the grin turned to a sneer.  Nobody wants nobody like me hangin' around 'em an' there ain't nothin' I can do about that, 'cause I got no other place ta' go..." 


  I watched in silence as he ate his strawberry shortcake, and when we returned to the street, he thanked me, then loped up to the corner and disappeared from view, and I somehow knew that I would never see him again...


  ...But for all of that sadness and sense of loss it was good to know that I had given him a brief moment of warmth in the otherwise very cold world of the streets of New York,and my only wish was that I could have done it again.

young voices from the ghetto:


HE BECAME ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS GENERALS IN RECENT AMERICAN HISTORY,...

THANKS TO THE CRISP POISE AND TOUGH INTELLIGENCE HE DISPLAYED ON TV during the 11 months of Operation Desert Shield/Storm, and on one rainy morning in the spring of 1991, I watched him step briskly from a limousine into a tight cocoon of security men and high school officials, wearing his new celebrity lightly.  He was home at last to Morris High School in the South Bronx.  He had been gone for 37 years and was proving that, for at least a morning, you can go home again.  As a crowd of onlookers gathered to take a look at him, he shook his head in an ironic way, and went it.  He was there to give a speech and my  friend Francine Waxmann and I, both professors of writing at Interboro Institute in midtown Manhattan, were there to listen to him. 


  It was then that one of the young black men in the crowd by the name of Roderick said, I seen him on TV.  That man's whiter than George fuckin' Bush!  Talks real pretty!  Th' guy's got everything he wants, college boy, all that shit.   Another joined in, then a third and a fourth, and soon the familiar rap was flowing.  They'd drawn the wrong hand in life; they were poor and black; or poor and Hispanic, or poor and luckless, and therefore never had a chance in a World They Never Made.  They had been locked up by cops, beaten by their mothers or fathers or flunked out or sneered at by racist schoolteachers, abused by mean Army sergeants or heartless welfare investigators or cruel bosses.  Francine and  I stood for a moment  listening to the old familiar litany.  It was one that the both of us had heard each and every day in one form or another from a similar cadre of Interboro students who were Pell Grant recipients from ghettos like the one Colin Powell had grown-up in, and some had already begun the all-encompassing American whine of  minority victimisation.


  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was impressive.  The core of his 20 minute speech, delivered in a gymnasium with a broken roof, was made of platitudes:  Stay in school.  Get a diploma.  Don't take drugs, because that is stupid.  Much of these bromides were given renewed power power because he now spoke with authority of a successful man.  He was a black man who had come from Kelly Street, down at the bottom of the broken tundra of the South Bronx, one of the worst slums under the American flag.  He then delivered  what was certainly the morning's most important message: If you're black, if you're Puerto Rican or Hispanic, be proud of that.  But don't let it become a problem.  Let it become somebody else's problem.   


  I'm not sure when - or more important - why -on our taxi ride back to Interboro to teach our afternoon classes, Francine and I came up with the idea.  Neither one of us pretended to have the answers to the cosmic questions of how a generation of children like the ones we taught, whose parents had once worshipped in the church of self-reliance, now had children who were growing-up in the vast grip of whining, so we decided to combine our writing classes in order to find a few answers.  Our students were going to write essays about their lives in the ghetto and read them aloud in class.


  And over the next six-weeks, that is exactly what they did with exactitude and candor. 


  The Young Voices from the Ghetto gave valid argument that no words, no pictures, no movies could ever express, of lives lived on the level of nightmare, of energy consumed by the furies of being among the underclass, of wasted youth  filled  with the self-inflicted wounds of human tragedy, of lives wasted by being too busy blaming others to look into their own hearts.  They had once wanted respect without accomplishment, and were damaged by the premise that they would never be able to live extraordinary lives.  And yet...


  ...And yet, it somehow began to evolve over the six-weeks that lay ahead...


  ...Each one of them began to give hope that collecting a college education which they were now receiving would perhaps, one day, change all of that, by putting a moratorium on their own self-pity.  All of them were aware that they needed less Freud and more Gandhi in their lives, less adolescent whining and more stoic maturity, less weeping and gnashing of teeth and more bawdy horselaughs in the face of adversity.  They wanted only to be free of the world of shaping their ideology through victimisation.  It was if they had been there to hear Colin Powell speak about the living of lives, whether black or white or Latino, male or female, of every class and religion, and had heard his words when he said: Be proud, live life in your own skin, and whatever is bothering you, hey man: Make it someone else's problem.


  Which was exactly what they were now attempting to do...


  ...And little did they know how proud of them that Francine and I were...


  ...But we hoped that they could see it in both our smiles and in our laughing eyes... 

'nt

a review of 2013 and the hope for a better future:

THIS IS A PIECE ABOUT CERTAIN ASPECTS OF...

AMERICAN SOCIETY AS IT EVOLVED IN THE YEAR  now coming to its end, and our need to recognize some uncomfortable truths.  First of all: through0ut the year I began to recognize racism as it exists now, not as it did back when I was a young man and  had the opportunity of marching with Martin Luther King in the streets of the  south.  The time has come to identify and condemn white racism and separate the race hustlers from those seriously concerned about the lives and safety of all individuals, black or white against the recent rash of white policemen using lethal force  killing unarmed  black men by use of a choke hold on Eric Gardner or the gunning-down of two unarmed youngsters Michael Brown and Tamar Rice, and find a way to move in the year ahead beyond habits of complaint and blame to the creation of enduring solutions, to lay our weapons aside for awhile, and seek a way to return to the confident exuberant style of America that once believed we could have racial justice and happiness too.

  Out there in the wider world there were other problems, as well.  True to the principles of conflict, an often bewildering variety of social and political factions - both at home and abroad - bartered one another for position and victory for, as the jargon goes "dominance."  Born from an especially brutal al Qaeda faction, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) began terrorizing swaths of Syria and Iraq with the public, cold-blooded execution of Westerners.  While in Syria, Bashor al-Assad, the Syrian strongman and President and General Secretary of the Ba'th Party continued to torture and slaughter his fellow citizens, exercising tyranny in Syria to sustain the rule of his minority party.  It will take a Community of Nations to rid the World of men like this, and we must begin  now.  

  On the home front, there was the ever-present junior United States Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz; who continued to remind us of a Republican United States Senator from the State of Wisconsin by the name of Joseph McCarthy, both of whom who are unworthy of ever being termed as Statesman, their purpose was the unraveling process of fragmentation and dis unification on the battlefield of boast, pretension, and ostentation, not service to the country.   In order to return Statesmen to political office, we must stop and think before we go and vote.  Otherwise, we will get exactly what we have asked for, harlequins instead of heroes, buffoons and braggarts instead of steadfast stewards of true leadership.  

  The unraveling process continued with disheartening recent revelations about the Central Intelligence Agency and the miss use of their so-called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques by misleading the public, Congress, and even members of the Executive Branch with regard to depriving prisoners of sleep, rectal feeding, and water boarding.  This burst forth on the national scene shortly after the National Football League had to deal with the problem of domestic violence when a Baltimore Ravens running back by the name of Ray Rice was caught on video punching his then-fiance, now-wife, Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City casino hallway and then dragging her unconscious body into an elevator. 


  With the bursting forth of these two events we have, once again, let ourselves down and settled for less than we ought to be.  The ferocious logic of men like Dick Cheney not only led us into a war based upon lies which slaughtered thousands of innocent people, it also polluted the notion of  justice for all through the use of torture and bastardized what America stands for by lack of a fair trial, wherein those who may have been innocent were deemed guilty without proof of guilt.  The solution to the problem of Dick Cheney is a rather simple one:  whenever you see his old and stale face voicing the vision of his America on your television channel, stop for a moment or two, then switch your remote to seek  out a voice who actually is worth listening to.


  As for Ray Rice, he represents the Dumb Ox theory of what he thinks real-men ought to be.  If you don't like what your domestic partner did or had to say, then with icy dispatch, deal with the problem by beating her unconscious.  And then, if you happen you lose your job for what you have done, the money, fame, and all of that - cry like the baby that you actually are and beg forgiveness from the one you say you love, then hope for the best.  To paraphrase the words of William Shakespeare: A coward by any other name is still a coward.  And that is exactly what Ray Rice has turned out to be.  Men like Rice ought to be forever erased from our collective memory by simply tossing them into jail, where they really belong  until they are deemed worthy of release.


  In the year that lays ahead, perhaps we need to learn how to stop shouting and learn how to listen. It is time to take a stance and ostracize the swine who multiply through division; to begin to honor good taste, hard work, and all those men and women who cherish human decency. ..


  ...Otherwise, next year will turn out to be much the same as this one was...


  ...And that thought alone is a god damned shame...

remembering Mike's war:


SOMETIMES, IN ODD PLACES,...

IT STILL CAME BACK TO HIM.  I have seen Mike  walking on a summer beach, stepping around oiled bodies, hearing the steady growl of the sea.  Suddenly, from over the horizon, he believes that he hears the phwuk-phwuk-phwuk of the rotor blades and for an instant he prepares to fall in the sand.  The imaginary chopper moves by, he still remains looking upward, his mind stained with old images. Or he is walking down a city street, heading toward the theater, or a parking lot or an appointment.  A door opens, an odor drifts from a restaurant; it's ngoc nam sauce, surely, and yes, the sign tells him that its a Vietnamese restaurant, and he hurries on, pursued by a ghost. 


  The ghost of Vietnam.


  Twenty-nine years have passed since North Vietnamese T - 54 tanks rolled down Thong Nhut Boulevard in Saigon to breach the gates of the presidential palace and the war came to an end.  Across those twenty-nine years, a sort of institutionalized amnesia became the order of the day, as if by tribal consent we had decided as Americans to deal with Vietnam by forgetting about it.  Vietnam belonged parents, wives, lovers, and children of the 58,022 dead, to maimed men hidden away in veterans hospitals, to the bearded young men you could see from time to time in any American town, with a leg gone as permanently as his youth.  Vietnam? we seemed to be saying, that was another country, man.


  But not for Mike.


  His ghosts were always with him.


  One afternoon about twenty-years after Mike's war had come to an end, he and I were sitting on a park bench, looking at the beauty of the trees and the grass and the lake.   He said that he missed the beauty of Vietnam, that there were bottle-green hills there with blackbirds flying over them, moving slowly beneath the clouds.  They looked like doves, he said, and he laughed at the obvious symbolism and moved on.  He told me how difficult it was to explain to those who had not been in a war how beautiful napalm can look, scudding in orange flames across a dark hillside.  Seen from a helicopter, the natural green beauty of Vietnam was forever underlined by man-made damage; those blue an brown rain-filled pools had been made by B52s; about the ghastly dead forests made skeletal by Agent Orange.  In the night, he said, you could hear a wind with its own language, its own sound; that was Vietnam too.
  


  I was surprised when he said he wanted to go back.  For a day, a month, an hour.  He wanted to see Vietnam when its beauty did not hold potential death.  He wanted to know what had ever happened to a whore named Li, whose husband died fighting for the VC, the woman who had lived in a blue room and never smiled.  What do women like her remember about all those clumsy young Americans who arrived to throw seed into flesh before rising to hurl metal at hills and butcher people?  He wonders what has become of the old French cemetery in Da Nang, where he said that you could see the stones sinking into the dark earth?


  The last time I saw Mike, I asked how he was doing.  He replied, "The ghosts still whisper.  Vietnam, they say.  Vietnam, Vietnam."

give my regards to Broadway:


I STILL FEEL A SMALL ATREMBLE OF A LOVER'S EXCITEMENT...
WHENEVER I IMAGINE MYSELF GETTING OFF OF AN AIRPLANE in the city that I once knew so well.  I recall that very first moment among its citizens: the buzz of the streets, the  intangible compound of vendors, folks in a hurry, taxis blasting horns, strangers talking in vowels in languages I could not understand, peddlers of knockoff Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton handbags; and, of course, the tabloid newspapers and fine restaurants and magical theaters.  That mysterious mixture is why so much of this city called Manhattan is personal to me.  It is a magical place to be, a crossroads, combining God, politics, commerce, sin, and spectacle with its own music, its own special sense of hope, anguish, and loss.  

  Underneath the great quickening of the present city was a plan which began in 1811 and was called the Commissioner's Plan.  As imagined by the planners, the future city called the City of Manhattan would rise from a simple grid of avenues and streets.  Each of the 12 avenues, running south to north, would be 100 feet wide, stretching from about today's Houston Street to the distant  end of the island, at what would be 155th street.  Each street would be 100 feet wide.  At the time the plan was drawn, most of that land was made of farms, stubborn hills, racing streams, isolated mansions, and stands of trees that had survived the Revolution.  Hills were leveled.  Ponds and swamps would be filled or drained.  The grid would rule.  Each of those streets and avenues would carry only numbers, rather than names.  There would be no names of any individual, which were dismissed as examples of human vanity.    Beauty and convenience was the plan, that was the Knickerbocker vision of the future. 


  Over the decades, changes came.  After the Civil War, the real estate people began a new kind of building, exclusively for offices, truly tall buildings came, through technological advances, many were higher than 6 stories, but they had no way to carry workers from the street to their offices, or to provide them with light.  One major solution would come in the 1880s with the development of electrical power by Thomas Alva Edison.  The first electric-powered Otis elevator was installed 3 years later, and The New York City Subway opened on the 27th day of October in 1904.  I would arrive on the same exact day 82 years after that in 1986, and departed 2 years prior to tumbling of The Twin Towers,  on the 11th day of July in 1999.  Over those 13 years, I felt as if I were in a wonderland. For me, the place where this was most true was Broadway.   


  Broadway exists as a concrete place and as an idea.  It is the only major Manhattan avenue that moves diagonally across the Island, from the center to the west.  It is the only one that moves us through time from the 17th century to the present.  A place physical, touchable, it stretches the length of Manhattan from the Battery to the Harlem River, just short of 13 miles and moves 4 more miles into the Bronx and as far into Westchester as Sleepy Hallow, a final destination that would have delighted Washington Irving, making it the longest street on the Island.  I have walked much of the avenue in Manhattan block by block, and certain parts of it live vividly in me.  It is filled with images of Damon Runyon and Edgar Allen Poe and Jack Dempsey and Mark Twain...


  ...There is the Broadway block on the Upper East Side where the Thalia movie house once stood at 95th,  where the movies of Fellini and Begrman and Karosawa were once shown.    It drew students and faculty from Columbia University, from the Village and from far away as Brooklyn and New Jersey.  There was a coffee shop nearby where knots of people sat after the movies, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and arguing about the movie they had just seen.  Other Broadway blocks were a mushy blur of shops and food markets and take-out stores.  They offered cuisine of the New York alloy; sushi and pizza and tacos, or delights from India and Thailand and China.  On parts of Broadway, in the mornings and at dusk, hundreds of people walk dogs.  Across the afternoons nannies push baby carriages past the latest outposts of Starbucks.  Kids rush on crowded sidewalks, everywhere there are dense lines of truck delivering groceries to Gristede's or Pathmark, packages from UPS and Fed Ex and the US Postal Services while the officers from the traffic division lay tickets on illegally parked cars.


  Broadway swells with every variety of urban swagger.  You see the swagger in the old downtown financial district, where men in conservative suits and overcoats talk toward offices or clubs, or lunch at India House in Hanover Square.  The swagger appears around City Hall where men and women with agendas hurry out of taxis or limousines and pass policemen on permanent alert against terrorists and skip up the stairs to meet with the mayor.   You see it beyond Chambers Street, among almost eight thousand employees work in the federal building and women with the confident stride of those who have attained permanent employment.  And then there are the young people who are now filling the empty lofts; artists, lawyers,  designers, computer people.  Even in the wake of the dot-com collapse, when you saw SUVs every weekend being loaded up with computers, they have attained the Broadway swagger.  They have survived the season of adversity.  They've learned that life here will never be easy,  that there will be no long runs of success upon success, that impermanence is part of the deal.  Sometimes New York knocks you down.  It also teaches you, by example, how to get up.  All of that is part of the Broadway swagger.


  As the grand avenue pushes up through Soho and into Union Square and Times Square and Columbus Circle and through the Upper West Side into Harlem and beyond, through the Broadway of theaters and musicals, haunted by images of Damon Runyon, each of these Broadways is shaped by the neighborhoods through which it passes.  Some are centers of retail shopping, or transportation, or entertainment.  Others are residential.  Many are too mixed for narrow labels.  All, in mysterious ways, are meshed in my head...


  ...And I can sometimes close my eyes and think that I can see the ghost of Broadway Danny Rose coming toward me from the direction of the Carnegie Deli, rushing from nowhere, carrying life...


  ...And for that I will forever remain thankful...